Here we go again with those carefully parsed “tactical herbicide” cases as opposed to good old fashioned “nuclear herbicides”. Thus, our good buddy Vet from Fort Fumble in St. Pete’s, with the help of about 4 or 5 buddy letters, finally gets his foot in the door  with AO or its distant, innocuous cousin. Remember, we cannot be so bold as to admit we used the real McCoy at Clark or Subic Bay. We can’t even admit we used anything stronger than Roundup or Blue for fear of pissing off the The Philippine Government. Even though nothing of substance grows at Clark to this day and kids all have three eyes and no ears, there will be no admissions of AO usage there or we’ll have a major Superfund fiasco in our lap. Not that we don’t already but that currently is a voluntary effort with no admission of guilt. There’s a big difference. It’s similar to vA’s Joint Motion for Remand. No guilt. No admission of such and a mere voluntary expedition to find out if the Vet was exposed or screwed.

Here we have a very complete, well-ordered example of “at least as likely as not” without a tacit admission of usage. Nevertheless, we can add this to the Guam, Okinawa and Korea “could have” file. Each case is done on a facts of the matter basis with no blanket “Yeah, we used a lot of it.” Thus Vet A gets it and Vet B cannot use Vet A’s BVA decision. Or can he? If you can prove you were working where this gentleman was or on one of the ships mentioned, it’s fairly good odds to say you will get SC for DM2. You simply bogart his information. vA calls it plagiarism but we prefer to think of it as being “similarly situated”.