A Few From Colorado

Check out Meghan Murphy at the Greeley Tribune.

The Good Word: From a distance, K.J. Tencza looks a little bit punk rock, a little bit hippie. He wears long khaki shorts, grungy Saucony sneakers, and he has a head full of dreadlocks.

Look closer.

His T-shirt says, 'XXXchurch.com, The #1 Christian Porn site.' His right forearm sports a colorful portrayal of the Garden of Eden. On his elbow, a web, a symbol of entrapment in sin. On his tricep, Christ on the cross being crucified. Below that, the flames of hell. And tucked next to his breast, the angelic blue face of Jesus looking down from heaven.

When Tencza first speaks, his words don't flow smoothly. He stutters, which sometimes is more like a grinding, teeth-gnashing halt.

Listen attentively.

"The church is the heart of Christ that Jesus has a crush on ... but how people view it on the outside ... they almost view it as a whore. ... I see a bride in a veil standing on a street corner. People drive by and honk at her, cars splash her, her mascara runs."

The Long War: Ret. Major G. Phil Shovar is a pack rat. His Greeley home is littered with trinkets, collectibles and magazines he intends to read. Amidst the chaos is an old Army helmet, a picturesque painting of the Navy ship he served on, and almost 1,000 pages of documents on his veteran benefits.

Shovar spent 24 years as a soldier. As a nurse In Vietnam, he triaged dying soldiers during the horrific Tet offensive. But his longest battle has been with the Veterans Benefits Administration and the U.S. Army. For almost three decades, his copy machine has been his greatest weapon against a bureaucracy that denied his disabilities time and again.

Now Shovar is dying. He has stage three terminal cancer, acknowledged finally by the Veterans Administration in December as a permanent, service-connected disability. War also left him with diabetes, hearing loss, hypertension and post traumatic stress disorder. Yet it took him almost 30 years to force the government to admit these facts and pay for them.