The new Director of Veterans' Services for Central Hampshire County, Daniel Nye, and his predecessor, Steven Connor — who is retiring after 22 years in the role — have a history.
"It didn't click immediately when I started working here," Nye said, who has been a Veterans Services Officer (VSO) in the Northampton office since 2022.
They have a mutual connection through Nye's uncle, a Vietnam vet, who Connor has known since Nye was seven-years-old.
"Steve was the clown at our family picnics when I was a kid. And so there's a picture of me with Steve in his clown costume," Nye said. "I've been joking that stepping into this role, that I don't only have big shoes to fill, I have clown shoes to fill."
Over the last generation, the work of city and town VSOs in Massachusetts has expanded. In Central Hampshire County, Nye credits Connor for creating a framework of much needed services.
When Connor first became director in 2004, then Northampton Mayor Clare Higgins instructed him to do more — starting with assisting the city's homeless veterans.
At the time Connor said, many veterans agents, as they were called, didn't know about Massachusetts's safety net program for veterans.
"I remember we had a guy from [one of the city's public housing complexes] and he had come in saying, 'well, I don't think I'm eligible for anything, but somebody told me to come here,'" Connor said.
The veteran was on a fixed income. He didn't have very much money Connor said, "and By the time he left, I told him he was going to get about $700- something a month. And he was like, 'what?'."
An outreach challenge
The number of veterans Connor and Nye say they work with has dramatically multiplied over the years, that's even with the Northeast's dwindling veterans population.
But, it's still a big challenge getting vets into the office.
“We had a whole campaign that was ‘Know Your VSO’ and there were cards, there were billboards,” Nye said,
It didn't net much response. So Nye said the default to make this work is, in military terms, the force multipliers.
"Something you do or people you work with that can amplify your impact,” he said, like Councils on Aging, medical offices, community groups — anybody who knows a veteran, has a veteran in their family, is a surviving spouse of a veteran.
While connecting vets to health care is at the top of the list of what Nye and other staff will continue to do, the VSO's work still includes important ceremonial moments like community lunches and parade. VSOs also help veterans find work, determine what state and federal benefits and services they qualify for — whether that's additional income, federal or state health care.
“We cover 14 communities, about 70% of Hampshire County,” Nye said, which is somewhere between about 4,500 to 5,000 veterans.
More than half of those are Vietnam veterans. But in a post-draft era, Nye said it’s a shifting population.
“Kind of across the board, you're just seeing a steady decline in the veteran population," Nye said.
Hampshire County is home to about 20 World War II veterans he said — two of them are 104 years old (they regularly attend veterans lunches in Hadley). The Korean veterans are all in their 90s.
“My generation, what we call GWOT –Global War on Terrorism generation. It’s probably about maybe a third of it," Nye said.
Nye is an Officer in the U.S. Army Reserve and Army National Guard, and he served in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2012.
A requirement to become a VSO director is to be a veteran; Connor was in the U.S. Navy in the late 1970s.
Illness and the Veterans Administration
Vietnam veterans in particular are increasingly becoming ill, Connor said.
“They’re getting those ailments that they’ve been hearing about forever – ischemic heart disease, diabetes, different cancers that are all presumptive from their service due to Agent Orange or other toxins they were exposed to,” Connor said.
It used to be the office would do a little health care paperwork, Connor said, about a dozen claims at a time. Now it's close to 100 claims.
"You have to be trained... be accredited," Connor said. "We are accredited by the state [and] the VA accredits us in two different ways,” Connor said.
Nye described it as a disconnected, tiered structure.
“You have local veterans services offices, and we do the state benefits, but we assist with federal benefits [with a lot of red tape], and we serve as a landing pad for just about any type of assistance,” Nye said.
And the rules keep changing
When Connor started as the VSO director in 2004, he said the federal government had veterans in priority groups for benefits.
Then the federal priority groups changed and some veterans were no longer eligible for benefits — Korean War veterans like Connor's father who was retiring with plans to get health care through the VA.
"All of a sudden, they're not eligible and they were angry. They were told it was always going to be here for us and it wasn't,” Connor said. Eight years later, half of that same veterans group qualified.
In Mass., working for the veteran - through the municipality
When you go to war or you go into the military, it changes you Connor said. Then you leave that environment and suddenly you're back home, and some veterans are at a loss with the lack of structure the military had provided.
But the veteran community is not monolithic Nye said. Each experience is different. He found "a solid articulation of the experience" in Sebastian Junger’s book "Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging."
Still, as the population declines, veterans are feeling more isolated.
Organizations like the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFWs) are disappearing, Nye and Connor said, and it’s a handful of of veterans who are in their 70s trying to hold it together.
“There's about ten active people [ at the American Legion in Haydenville, Mass.] who do most of the work there, and they're mostly Vietnam era veterans," Nye said. "They keep [saying to me] ‘well, your generation just doesn't want to get involved…’"
There's not that many of us, Nye pointed out.
“The older veterans... if there's a parade or there's a ceremony, they're going to show up,” Connor said, “and so they're easier to reach. It's the ones that are returning home that have families.”
Which is leading Connor to his next thing, post retirement, and it's not really a new thing.
Eleven years ago, with the Diocese of the Episcopal Church of Western Mass., Connor started a free lunch. For the church it was a way to minister to veterans.
“We started it at the World War II Club [in Northampton], and it started with just a few guys in the beginning, and within months we had 60, 70 guys showing up,” Connor said.
Now the free lunch is in 18 locations around New England, Conor said, and he plans to spend time volunteering to get the free lunch going in other communities.
“We created it to create connection,” Connor said. “A lot of the people who come donate towards it, they give money to keep it going."
Connor said his job has been to tend to the well-being of veterans and their families, and he then pointed to Nye and said “and he's going to take the helm and go forward.”
