On Wednesday morning Dukes County veterans agent Jo Ann Murphy took a phone call from a World War II veteran to thank her for an unusual errand.

Ms. Murphy had delivered him bread-and-butter pickles, his favorite, more than six months ago.

“Everytime I saw him I’d say, ‘Did you try them?’ and he’d say, ‘No, I’m saving them.’ He just called me to say he finally opened them,” she said, laughing.

Jo Ann Murphy. — Mark Alan Lovewell

It is this kind of daily interaction with the Island’s community of over 300 veterans that Ms. Murphy says makes her job so rewarding.

Ms. Murphy, herself a veteran of the Women’s Army Corps and the former commander of the American Legion in Vineyard Haven, has been tending to the needs of Island veterans for over a decade. At the start of her tenure she received her charge at a training conference from then secretary of veterans’ services in Boston, Tom Kelly.

“He was a medal of honor recipient who had half of his face blown off in Vietnam,” she said. “He said your job is to take care of every veterans’ needs no matter if they’re alive or dead.”

As a result Ms. Murphy says that she travels with a trowel in her car in case she passes veterans’ graves in need of weeding. She said that on Thursday she planned to replace a number of neglected flags scattered among Island cemeteries. Nationally, World War II veterans are dying at a rate of 1,800 a day, a fact that is reflected on-Island. Ms. Murphy says that she had a burial to attend last week and another this Saturday.

But with the passing of an older generation of warriors there is a new class to take their place after America’s past decade at war.

“It hasn’t been easy for them,” she said of the soldiers returning to the Vineyard from Iraq and Afghanistan. “We’re finding that a lot of them have [post-traumatic stress disorder]. They think they’re okay until they come home. We’re lucky here in that anybody who comes in I can refer to [counselor] Tom Bennett at community services. They might not think they need something but the chances are they do.”

Ms. Murphy says that the incidence of soldiers requiring help is higher than in past conflicts.

“In Vietnam you could be at a base that wasn’t under attack, whereas everybody over there now seems to be under attack.”

But, Ms. Murphy says, the state of Massachusetts is unusually generous to its veterans, with yearly annuities and bonuses for service. Particularly helpful has been a state program known as Chapter 115. For several Island veterans and their widows it has served as an economic lifeline.

“I have a lot of widows,” she said. “Their income is so low they’re trying to live off of Social Security and what this does is brings their income up to the poverty level.”

Other benefits are administered through the Department of Veterans Affairs and it is Ms. Murphy’s job to navigate the agency’s ever-shifting bureaucratic landscape. Recently, the department added three new medical conditions related to exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange for which veterans can file disability claims.

“Most likely if you were in Vietnam you were exposed to Agent Orange,” she said.

But Ms. Murphy’s latest battle has been returning primary care to the Island for veterans and restoring health services that have vanished after a contract between the hospital and the VA lapsed several years ago. The issue was the focus of a meeting at the American Legion in Vineyard Haven on Wednesday. Ms. Murphy described the hurdles many veterans on the Island face in receiving care.

“If you need a hearing aid you need to get approval from Hyannis to see a primary care doctor so that your primary care doctor can put in a request for you to have a hearing test at the VA in Providence,” she said. “It’s very convoluted. All special requests have to go through the Hyannis clinic. The woman who handles them there is on vacation right now and they didn’t bring anybody in to cover for her so everybodys’ requests are sitting on a desk. That’s a big problem.”

But Ms. Murphy says she is far from alone in supporting the Island’s veteran community. A $5,000 donation from AMVETS a decade ago has spawned a care package program that has taken on a life of its own. This summer she sent out 25 cases of Girl Scout cookies to Iraq and Afghanistan and is never short of supplies to ship abroad.

“Someone just donated six cases of Colgate, so I need to get rid of those,” she said laughing. “I haven’t paid for a thing. All the money to buy all the supplies, all the money to ship all the packages has come from donations from people on Martha’s Vineyard.”

She says the Oak Bluffs School is currently collecting candy to send overseas, in addition to their yearly thank you letter campaign to disabled veterans all across the country.

“I usually send a lot of those cards to VA hospitals and I get the most wonderful letters back from them all the time saying ‘thank you for thinking of our veterans,’” she said. “It means a lot to them. They get this card saying thank you for your service from some kid they don’t even know.”

Ms. Murphy says there are two Vineyarders serving in Afghanistan right now that she knows about.

“There have to be more,” she said. “Hopefully someone will read this and say, ‘Oh I have a nephew overseas,’ because I’d love to send them a package.”

When asked whether the general public appreciates the sacrifices made by veterans Ms. Murphy doesn’t hesitate.

“People on Martha’s Vineyard do.”