This C-123 Veteran's Agent Orange Essays: Five Years of Honest writing

Honesty and accuracy throughout. Right there is the distinction between VA and us. They mislead, manipulated, prevaricated. VA "Lacked candor."

That is how I characterize our long effort to earn VA benefits. It took 1515 days before VA approved my Agent Orange exposure claim for cancers and heart disease. I was already 100% service-connected disabled from the Gulf War and medically retired, so my Agent Orange illnesses became the “poster-child” C-123 Veterans Association test case. VA rules wouldn’t let me manage anyone else’s claim so I focused on mine and Paul Bailey’s...his claim was purely Agent Orange issues, and we wanted just this little variety in two amazingly identical claims.*

The objective: Work one case through the VA system, do the research, get scientific and government support, resolve problems and make all our eligible aircrews and maintenance folks (or survivors) able to submit VA disability claims for fair consideration. We did not seek “presumptive eligibility,” although that advantageous status was eventually granted by Secretary McDonald on June 18, 2015.

For 1515 days, I wrote. It sometimes felt like both day and night, I wrote. With no budget to do much else, I wrote. The blog alone eventually ran to seven volumes. I wrote and wrote and wrote. When I wasn't writing I did research for the next piece I'd write.

A website, a daily blog. Briefs, letters, proposals, VA 41-2138 statements, PowerPoint presentations, handouts, essays, press releases, YouTube videos, general correspondence. I kept writing. I wrote things like these essays and other papers.

Today is has been 2220 days since starting this campaign and I look back on complete honesty, consistently accurate writing. Nearly everything I wrote is still available to evaluate. I wrote expecting to be challenged; perhaps even in court so I tried very hard for accuracy. I certainly was an assertive advocate and that was wholly proper.

What wasn't at all proper was 1515 days of VA push-back. VA was antagonistic, unfair and not completely accurate in their resistance...sometimes plain deceptive. In the end, though, it didn’t seem to matter how much material I uncovered, nor how smart I was digging out and honestly writing about the truth, the only thing that mattered was VA denying us for four years, dismissing all the facts by insisting VA had an unspecified “overwhelming preponderance of evidence” against us, based on their imaginary “scientific study.”