I wouldn’t be surprised if the Undersecretary for vA Apologies doesn’t come out with the new Logo. No flies on Fox News.

FAIR AND BALANCED

YOU REPORT

WE DECIDE

 According to the poohboahs, every claim is viewed in the light most favorable to the Veteran. What more do they want or need? A good question. vA sees their rules and regulations as being extremely liberal and slanted toward Vets. Well, okay, but liberal as opposed to what exactly?

War is messy. We’ve had Vets we helped here who had transfusions- myself included- that there are no records of. vA will ignore much in order to deny you. A thru and thru GSW is mighty hard to fake. It’s a signature scar. Often that is not enough to win with if you don’t have a PH or a CIB. I’ve read BvA decisions where they denied HCV because there was no mention in the SMRs of sharing of razors or toothbrushes. Imagine a mortician with a dead cadaver and his exposure risks in 1970. Nope. No risk there. He wasn’t a medical worker and his MOS was Graves and Registration. No risks or reported needle sticks in the SMRs so he lost. You lose because there is no contemporary evidence in a decidedly brief military medical record of your adventures for several years. If you were TDY or deployed to places that weren’t on regular maps, your medrecs didn’t reflect all that happened.

Nevertheless, the fair and balanced way to do this is, in vA’s eyes,  by the record to keep everyone honest. One ploy I love is to have a BvA hearing and pull down your pants or shirt to expose the mega scar for the VLJ. A military tattoo or a contemporary one “looks” old by its very nature. Just because you don’t have a nexus for it doesn’t make it evaporate. Many learn what they need to win very late in the ratings game and are forced to play catch up. This gives many a chance at a remand and an opportunity to obtain what they lack ( the nexus).

As for fair and balanced, lay testimony is looked at like, well, just that. vA views your recollections like an adult listening to the ramblings of a five year old with ADD-very imaginative but hardly truthful. They aspire to rebut it by the extreme passage of time on your memory and further by finding something minuscule to point to proving you are purposefully stretching the truth and the facts. This sets the stage for the denial. How in good faith, granting every benefit of the doubt, can they in good conscience grant the claim when your recollections and the records don’t support it?

vA is not allowed to openly treat you as a hostile witness. In truth, the whole adjudication process is based on exactly that.  Working strictly toward a negative outcome, they carefully construct a scenario that corrupts everything you say occurred. In order to make it all above board, they phrase it in glowing terms. “Dear Joe-Thank you for your service to America. Unfortunately, we were unable to do this. If you had some real evidence you got group haircuts in service documented by STRs showing they put the razor back in the blue juice behind the barber on the shelf in between ‘dos, then perhaps we can change our decision. Your buddy letters from John Sixpack and Tommy Twotones were very convincing but no one can recall that far back. Dude, that was like 40 years ago. Tommy, on the one hand, swears it happened in Germany whereas John said he recalled it in Basic at Ft. Hood. While we sincerely believe you case has merit, we are unable to grant in spite of the benefit of the doubt”.

Always keep this in mind when you get down in the trenches with vA.

Now serving Number 25 (from 2006)?