The Passion of Anthony Principi

nless you're among the 218,000 employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs, you probably haven't seen the film Our Turn to Serve. The low-budget indie short isn't available at your local Blockbuster, nor was it nominated for an Academy Award. There's no sex and the violence all takes place before the film begins. Nevertheless, with a $20,000 budget, the producers of Our Turn managed to pull off something no high-priced Hollywood executive would ever have attempted-a moving documentary about bureaucrats and soldiers that both inspires and instructs.

The film opens with a monologue by a gray-suited Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony Principi, who praises VA employees for their work and admonishes them to live up to their responsibilities to soldiers injured in Iraq and Afghanistan. The film then segues into a documentary that chronicles the lives of several injured soldiers. There are no professional actors in it, only vulnerable individuals propelled by extraordinary adversity and motivation, and their grief and expectations are palpable. The film ends with two VA undersecretaries reminding employees of the critical roles they play in helping injured soldiers adjust to civilian life.

The 23-minute film is an unusual, and unusually effective, management tool. After VA officials showed Our Turn at a Defense health care conference in Washington in January, more than a few members of the audience were seen dabbing their eyes.

Nobody watching would doubt the seriousness of Principi's directive: "I am confident that you understand that a young man or woman who turns to us after returning from a war defines our core mission. That is why I am dismayed when I hear one of them describe a runaround when they ask VA for help, or others who say that VA service was delayed because they couldn't show a DD-214-their discharge papers. Yes, I want VA to operate with businesslike precision. But when it comes to human beings hurt in our country's cause on the battlefield, there can be no answer but 'yes' when they come to us for care."

The impetus for Our Turn was a number of negative news stories late last summer about soldiers wounded in combat who encountered red tape when they sought treatment in VA hospitals upon their return to the United States. Although VA officials found that the department's employees were not to blame for the problems cited, that seemed beside the point to Principi. He immediately created a "seamless transition" working group to ensure that military personnel wounded in combat did not fall into the bureaucratic netherworld that exists between the Defense Department and the VA.

Over the next several months, more than 100,000 troops will return from service in Iraq. Thousands of those are expected to seek care at VA hospitals. In paper-intensive bureaucracies like Defense and Veterans Affairs, the record-keeping challenges promise to be enormous.

Chris Scheer, director of media products at VA, was part of Principi's transition working group. The secretary's concern, says Scheer, "was that our employees, our clerks that are seeing these people when they walk in the door, have to be sensitive to the fact that these are combat veterans. They may not have all the right paperwork, but we can sort that out later." In an agency where paperwork is an art form, such thinking is anathema, and requires some re-education.

Scheer sketched out a plan for a video to be distributed agencywide and took it to the production team at the VA's broadcast center. "My plan was basically a lot of talking heads shaking their fingers at people," he says. Executive producer Brad Winchester and line producer Ann Ramsey had another idea. "They decided that the best people to tell this story were the veterans themselves. They were right," Scheer says.

Winchester and Ramsey worked the phones in an effort to find someone who could do a professional video on a shoestring budget. They approached Gail Pennybacker of Washington's ABC7, an award-winning reporter who had covered the war in Iraq. She agreed to do the video on a pro bono basis, as long as it was done as a news piece, and not merely a promotional vehicle for the VA. "We couldn't have been happier with the result," says Scheer.