Brannan is a force of keeping her family together.

-This is an evaluative claim. The claim is stating that the only thing keeping the family intact is the efforts of Brannan, which may not be 100% true.

She sleeps a maximum of five hours a night, keeps herself going with fast food and energy drinks, gets Katie to and from school and to tap dance and art, where Katie produces some startlingly impressive canvases, bright swirling shapes bisected by and intersected with other swaths of color, bold, intricate.

-This is an evaluative claim. This is stating the issues that Brannan goes through when dealing with her child. The way the child’s painting is talked about makes the claim sound less serious.

That’s typical parent stuff, but Brannan also keeps Caleb on his regimen of 12 pills—antidepressants, anti-anxiety, sleep aids, pain meds, nerve meds, stomach meds—plus weekly therapy, and sometimes weekly physical therapy for a cartilage-lacking knee and the several disintegrating disks in his spine, products of the degenerative joint disease lots of guys are coming back with maybe from enduring all the bomb blasts, and speech therapy for the TBI, and continuing tests for a cyst in his chest and his 48-percent-functional lungs.

-This is a categorical claim. The claim focuses heavily on the amount of medicine Caleb has to take because of the symptoms of PTSD, as well as the weekly therapy, sometimes more than others, and other health issues.

-This is an evaluative claim. There is a line in the claim talking about a lot of the men coming back and suffering a degenerative joint disease and sort of speculating the cause by saying it may be bomb blasts. Also the fact that it is mentioned as he returns with less than half of his lungs being functional and TBI (traumatic brain injury).

She used the skills she learned as an assistant to a state Supreme Court justice and running a small newspaper to navigate Caleb’s maze of paperwork with the VA, and the paperwork for the bankruptcy they had to declare while they were waiting years for his disability benefits to come through.

This is an ethical claim. The tone at the end of the claim basically shows that they feel as if they were not treated correctly when they “were waiting years” for the disability benefits to come through, and this was not their fault.

She also works for the VA now, essentially, having been—after a good deal more complicated paperwork, visits, and assessments—enrolled in its new caregiver program, which can pay spouses or other family members of disabled vets who have to take care of them full time, in Brannan’s case $400 a week.

This is an ethical claim. This is stating that even to get the help families need, much more paperwork and other related things are needed. This line was added in between saying that they had joined the caregiver program showing that it seems tedious how much work they have to put in to try to help their family.