51ºÚÁÏ

It’s August 1966. War is raging in Vietnam.

Alexander is a 18-year-old high school dropout in Sullivan, Mo. It was a shoe factory town back then. Alexander remembers fondly taking lunch to his grandfather, who worked as a night watchman at one of the factories.

“I loved riding the rickety elevator to the second floor.�

As other young men were trying to avoid the draft, Alexander volunteered. When he wasn’t working, he was hanging around with a bad crowd. This was his way out.

He became a combat engineer near the front lines, clearing brush that had been treated and burned with Agent Orange, building roads and bridges along near Pleiku, and occasionally sitting on those bridges with a 50-caliber machine gun, told to shoot anything that moves.

His right eye became seriously infected, and he faced numerous surgeries where they literally scraped the infection off and reinserted his eye into its socket. Eventually he was flown to Denver for more surgery, and then back to Fort Leonard Wood to recover.

In October 1967, Alexander received a three-day leave. He headed home, just an hour or so down Interstate 44, and ended up with the crowd he had joined the war effort to escape.

They drank some whiskey, and Alexander, he says, passed out in the back seat of the car. The young men were arrested after robbing a concession stand at Meramec Caverns. They took some beer — Budweiser and Schlitz — some cigarettes, candy bars, hot dogs and buns.

Alexander, who says he was asleep the entire time, was charged with two felonies for stealing items with a value less than $100. He was scared and naïve. He remembers being told he could be locked up for a decade. He pleaded guilty to felony burglary and was sent to prison for two years. While there, the Army discharged him under “conditions less than honorable.�

He ended up back in Sullivan, where he still lives today, with his wife, Betty, in low-income housing for seniors, just off Main Street.

“I love this little town,� he says.

He’s done odd jobs, working at a shoe factory, driving a trash truck, working at an overhead garage door company.

“I really liked that one,� he says.

He’s been married and divorced and remarried. Two of his three daughters don’t talk to him much. He’s been unemployed for long stretches. He and his wife of 31 years live on disability checks and food stamps.

“It ruined my life,� Alexander says of his burglary conviction. “I could have been whatever I wanted to be. Instead, I was nothing.�

He’s 70 now, and on oxygen nearly 24 hours a day. He has lung disease. In place of his right eye is a nonworking prosthetic.

Alexander is a disabled American veteran, but to the federal government, he’s a convict who doesn’t deserve medical benefits.

Greg Kelly hopes to change that. The Clayton attorney heard of Alexander through Jerry Marks, a psychologist who was treating Alexander for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Marks couldn’t believe that a disabled Vietnam veteran couldn’t get any medical services from the Veterans Administration. He looked up the old court records and the case just didn’t make sense to him.

Kelly agreed.

“It’s crazy what happened to him,� Kelly says.

Working pro bono, Kelly set out to right 50 years of wrongs. In August, the first domino fell.

A Franklin County judge issued an order expunging Alexander’s burglary conviction from 1967.

That means it no longer exists, which in turn means that the reasons cited by the Army for discharging Alexander are no longer valid.

Kelly has now applied with the to have Alexander’s military record corrected.

If that happens, he should become eligible for the Veterans Administration health benefits he’s never had.

“We have the facts and the law in our favor,� Kelly says. “What we don’t necessarily have is time.�

Alexander doesn’t move from his couch much. Besides the oxygen tubes constantly wrapped around his face and connected to a machine in the kitchen, he has diabetes and constant swelling in his feet.

He’s grateful for the help of Kelly and Marks, and now hopes that one of Missouri’s two senators, either Democrat Claire McCaskill or Republican Roy Blunt, will intercede on his behalf to get the review board to expedite a process that sometimes takes a year or longer.

“It would mean the world for me,� Alexander says. “That’s what I’ve been working for 50 years to try to get done. ... I don’t know if I’ve got another year in me or not.�