Rep. Bob Filner (D-Calif.), the new chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, speaks with enthusiasm for any and all initiatives that might help veterans improve their quality of life.

But Filner is seen as such a partisan, and his rhetoric can be so imprecise, that some veterans' advocates wonder what this firebrand will achieve as chairman.

He supports the Democrats' entire "GI Bill of Rights for the 21st Century," which includes a $3 billion increase in VA health spending to cut wait times for patients and to expand access to more categories of veteran; an end to the ban on concurrent receipt of military retirement and VA disability compensation for the remaining 400,000 military retirees with disabilities; an end to the offset in survivor benefits for widows who also receive VA Dependency and Indemnity Compensation; a boost in Montgomery GI Bill benefits to cover full college tuition, room and board.

"Most of these things have already been part of our platform so it's hard to backpedal," Filner said. But he cautioned that Democrats also promised to restore budget discipline, so gains for veterans will have to be phased in over several years. His first priority is education benefit reform, he said.

Filner, 64, is particularly interested in addressing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among returning veterans. He said "several hundred" veterans of the Iraq war have committed suicide. Asked if that figure was based on VA statistics, he said, "We're having trouble getting the suicide stuff. (VA officials) just don't want to even admit this is going on. I have seen differing figures but it looks to me like there have been several hundred. And ... 98 percent of them could have been prevented if people had recognized the situation."

For example, Filner said, he heard from a female Army captain whose husband, also in service, "exhibited all the classic signs" of PTSD when he returned from Iraq. Yet he killed himself before his illness was diagnosed.

"They didn't know what it was. They went through marriage counseling, and nobody said, 'How about PTSD?' " Filner said.

Educating families is one step, he said. "There must be a million children of recently deployed, now-deployed, will-be-deployed troops, and they ought to know what PTSD is, so that if Dad comes home, Mom comes home, and they slap around the other one, the kid could say, 'Daddy, you have PTSD. You better get to a clinic.' But then there have got to be resources to do it."

A VA spokesman said the department is not ignoring suicides. In fact it is conducting a scientific study of all causes of death in that population. Dr. Ira R. Katz, who leads the study, said in a June 2006 paper on suicide prevention that veterans of current wars might face greater risks of suicide. One factor is the higher incidence of head trauma and brain injury from roadside bombs.