Rockville Centre veteran turns to community for help

Nick Martinez Jr. grew up in Rockville Centre, attended South Side High School and was a member of the Cyclones wrestling team.

When he graduated in 1989 at age 18, Martinez was recruited by the U.S. Marine Corps. He trained at the military recruitment depot on Parris Island in South Carolina, and his platoon was deployed to the Middle East.

It was a very different time, with the Cold War with the Soviet Union coming to an end and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait leading the U.S. and its allies into combat for the first time since Vietnam.

Martinez served for five years and was honorably discharged in 1994, but was injured in combat, and returned home with a problem that would go undiagnosed for more than 20 years. Doctors discovered that he had damaged his spine, and in February 2006 he underwent fusion surgery. The procedure involved removing fragments of bone and placing three rods and several screws in his spine.

Since it was a wartime injury, he filed a claim with the Department of Veterans Affairs but was informed that his benefits would not cover it.

“They basically denied it,” Martinez said. “They said, ‘It’s a Social Security disability issue because you’re a civilian now. If that happened during the time that you were in the service, it had to be proven at that time.’”

Although his disability coverage helped with a portion of the cost, Martinez ended up paying for most of the procedure — which was not entirely successful and left him unable to do physical labor and earn a living wage.

Now 52, Martinez relies on his monthly disability benefit checks to help him pay for rent, food and medical expenses. For the past three months, however, he has not received a check. It took him several attempts to reach Veterans Affairs about his payments before he received a letter detailing how “delays in printing and mailing correspondence due to supply chain and staff shortages” were responsible for the delay.

Asked if he feels that the government is mistreating veterans, Martinez responded with an emphatic “Yes.”

“Definitely,” he added. “I used to hesitate before answering that because so many guys have it worse than me. I didn’t want to talk bad about the Marine Corps because that’s our brotherhood, but in the end, they’re not the guys that I served with who are doing this to me.”

Martinez’s story is not uncommon. According to a report in The Washington Post in 2019, Veterans Affairs staffers have routinely misapplied laws, misread military records, and rejected evidence that veterans have used to apply for treatment.

Martinez said that his records have often been misplaced or mistaken for those of others with similar names and that he was denied coverage for a necessary surgical procedure.

“I go back beyond the 9/11 servicemen,” he said, referring to those who were deployed to Iraq after the 2001 attacks. “So to them, I’m like a relic, and that’s definitely the problem.”

He later moved back in with his father, in the same apartment where he grew up. His father had worked for the Village of Rockville Centre for 30 years as a senior motorized sweeper before he retired.

“That was the last time I remembered him as my father,” Martinez said. Two years after he retired in 2015, his father suffered a stroke and was diagnosed with diabetes. As a result of his weakened immune system, diabetes eventually caused sepsis in a portion of his body, and in 2018 his leg was amputated to stop the condition from spreading.

“Now I got to take care of all the bills,” Martinez said. “I got to take care of his medication. I got to take care of him physically, as well as the financial side of it.”

Martinez and his wife, Candice, were married in 2007, and had two children, Elias, now 21, and Thalia-Ali, 19. They divorced in 2020. To make matters worse, during the pandemic, Martinez was diagnosed with Stage 1 cancer, which he said had spread to his brain from his spinal fluid.

“That’s hard for me to talk about,” he said. “I’ve been dealing with that for two years, but I’m doing good. I’m battling it.”

Since he receives disability benefits, Martinez cannot work, even though he feels that he needs to do something more to make money. His monthly check has helped him handle day-to-day expenses — but there has been no check for three months, due to a computer glitch when he changed his address.

Michael Davey, the South Side High School wrestling coach who trained Martinez when he was a teenager, said that after hearing about what had happened to him, he launched a GoFundMe campaign to help raise money to help Martinez with his expenses.

“I consider all of my wrestlers as part of my family,” Davey said. “Once you’re part of the family, we take care of you any way we can.”

Davey launched the GoFundMe effort earlier this month. According to the page, the money will hopefully help Martinez buy a car, so he can try to make some extra money doing non-labor-intensive activities like ridesharing. It would also allow him to drive to the VA hospital in St. Albans, Queens, where he is being treated, without having to rely on public transportation.

Go to TinyURL.com/USMCMartinez for more information about the campaign.