VA Fails Another C-123 Veteran's Claim

Veteran's VA Experience

Not again!

But yes, VA has screwed yet another C-123 claim beyond all recognition. In this case, an aeromedical evacuation technician from Pittsburgh's 33rd AES died while his claim was in process, so his widow continued the application.

It took quite a bit of detective work, but enough documentation was uncovered to establish the veteran's AFSC, his unit, and flying status with the 33rd during the years the C-123 was in service at Pittsburgh. I had the opportunity to provide a supporting statement, the VA Form 41-2138 to explain enough of the facts that the claim should have succeeded.

But that was not to be. For some reason, the regional claims office disregarded all the veteran's supporting documentation and also disregarded my own input, calling it "unqualified lay input."

We were lucky in this case to get support from the National Veterans Legal Services Project, and they rebuilt the claim for submission to the Board of Veterans Appeals. Once again, VA pretended everything in the claim was inadequate to satisfy their critical eye. BVA denied the widow's claim on two reasons. The judge wrote that the veteran was assigned to the 33rd AES, but VA forms explaining the C-123 program only specified the 911th AES.

Somehow, it got past these "experts" that the 33rd is the same as the 911th! Some years after the C-123 era, the squadron's name was updated to the 911th.

The other thing that got past the "experts" was the veteran's AFSC of 90210 and 90250. VA's various C-123 publications failed to list enlisted aeromedical evacuation technicians' AFSCs, and had only flight nurses listed. Ordinarily this isn't a problem because all C-123 claims are supposed to be processed by the VA St. Paul office where experts can drill down to the real facts.

Unfortunately, this claim drifted to some other regional office and there, was denied, and then prepared for resubmission the the Board of Veterans Appeals. The BVA also denied, and we found about it by reading the monthly BVA decision summaries.

The BVA errors were obvious and fatal to the claim. It was wrongly denied, for the two reasons named above. The last few days we've tried to alert every contact we know at VA to see if reason can prevail, to get the claim reconsidered without having to await the next higher level of appeal, the US Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims.

Will it work? There's a chance, and we've succeeded before when VA's mistakes were so glaring. NVLSP has continued their involvement and won't let this go unchallenged. We sure could use help from Pennsylvania's legislators to pressure VA to reconsider the denied claim and to update the publications that caused these problems.

Stay tuned!