How the VA Can Help Us NOW!

He said it all last year. When commenting on the addition of heart disease to the AO-presumtive illnesses list, VA Secretary Shinseki explained why he acted in his ruling, despite the impact on the VA's budget and number of patients likely to seek care for what might be illnesses normally coming about with age. He explained that tests have shown greater numbers of the disease among AO-exposed veterans, and the law was clear about his obligation:

The Agent Orange saga also holds a lesson for handling current benefits, he said. “The most important lesson I have learned from this process is that we must track the exposures of our service members to toxic chemicals and the environment earlier,” he said. “Such tracking does not get easier or less complicated as time passes.”

Now is the time for Secretary Shinseki to look over our evidence of Air Force testing of the contamination found in the C-123K/UC-123K fleet. "Heavily contamianted" came back the reports done twenty, thirty years and more after the last spray missions. Air Force tests on Air Force airplanes, Air Force records showing our Air Force missions as Air Force crews...asking for service connection for Agent Orange exposure seems the least we could ask of the Department of Veterans Affairs!


Please write your congressional representatives, as well as presidents of whatever veterans organizations you support, and ask that they bring to the VA a sense of urgency in helping us, and in helping Secretary Shinseki "we must track the exposures of our service members to toxic chemicals and the environment earlier." Now is late enough, but it is all that we can ask.