Agent Orange - C-123K Aircrew & Maintainers - VA now honors our Agent Orange claims!

Our group needs help from a Colorado resident C-123 veteran! Please contact us!

Also, I could use some help here, especially from Ranch Hand vets. Please...no disagreement about consultants or the AF Study or anything...just whether or not folks who flew the Provider after Vietnam should be considered eligible for service connection for Agent Orange illnesses. They approach VA with a stack of evidence past any reasonable "as likely to as not" threshold, yet it may be felt scientifically questionable by some.

They have assurances from a wide range of legal experts, including several in the Congress, who say the law is clear regarding military herbicide exposures, and that under that law, using the scientists' evaluation of the exposure claims, the claims for service connection should be granted. 

Isn't the scope of the C-123 argument reasonable and fact-based? Doesn't a legal and scientific argument lean in favor of a veteran submitting significant persuasive unpaid, volunteered legal opinion and expert scientific evidence? Isn't there some point when Ranch Hand vets, who know the most and who have the most background in this whole mess can t say, "the case seems reasonably well-founded....past 50/50." 

We need more influential veterans to give us a hand in this rather than remain on the sidelines, watching VA build their wall, point-by-point, against anything we find to help our claims. We need more VA folks to help us understand where we can make our case more effectively, on legal, moral, scientific grounds.

Talking to VA people over the years, they themselves can't believe claims have been rejected on the basis of harmless TCDD. They can't believe the ATSDR findings were ordered ignored by C&P... ignored by VA because ATSDR isn't a military organization and JSRRC was ordered to evacuate only military archival documents, not expert scientific interpretations of those source documents. 

VA uses whatever means to dispute or ignore every truth.

Last week my new VA oncologist couldn't believe my prostate cancer claim was denied because my AF Form 5s, flight order and other evidence of flying Patches, evaluated by both the NIH and the ATSDR to have exposed me to enough TCDD to increase my risk of cancer 200-fold, was denied with VA explaining in the denial that TCDD is harmless. Speaking with an ethicist, she thought I was mistakenly summarizing the VA's actions redefining exposure. Another VA ethicist said, if true, this history sounds more criminal than ethical in its details. 

My first VA oncologist, a medical school professor, acknowledged TCDD and cancer researcher with significant peer-reviewed work establishing that Agent Orange exposed veterans have twice the rate of highly aggressive prostate cancers, asked me why his physician's opinion letter was disregarded on my claim. As were all the other physicians' findings, including senior medical officers of the US Public Health Service. He explained that the VA doesn't operate that way, and I must be mistaken.

This is why entries on this forum are usually crammed with hotlinks to source documents...we're not making any of this up!