I was going to write one of those gooshy National Holiday articles about how wonderful America has become in the last five or so months but hell, everyone knows that unless you’ve been holding your breath and are turning blue in the face. Our sacred homeland is now secure on the southern border and we’re vacuuming up America’s carpet (figuratively, of course) after a long pause of neglected housekeeping. Meanwhile Uncle VA has been up to their usual mischief. Of course, that will never change without us finding new ways to skin the cat.
Towards that end, I’ve developed some nouveau techniques on the SMC subject. Unfortunately, every time I reveal them here, it seems VA reinvents the law and finds a way to defeat me and my client. The only way I stay ahead of them is to continue to reinvent the wheel and get one step ahead of them again. Which brings us to my boy Danny ( name changed to confuse VA). VA thought they could fix Danny’s wagon the way I filed this.
This began when Danny showed up last spring and said his attorney had kinda hit the wall, said he was 100% + SMC S and there wasn’t a whole lot more he could do. Well, shoot. As we all know, a SMC S is just a SMC L waiting to be born. Especially when your 100% schedular rating is for the nastiest combo of them all- Bent Brain syndrome with a heapin’ helpin’ of TBI on the side. Or worse, vice versa…
The Navy gave him a MEB for the problem and he marched smartly over to Denis the Menace and asked for his promised guarantee he received when he raised his right hand. Denis hemmed and hawed a spell and sent him over the Walter Reed for some extra strength Brain superglue but they were fresh out of anything strong enough.
Seems the Danster had caught a chunk of 1/2 inch rebar in the noggin when he was 4 and VA was desperately trying to escape the inevitable TBI claim just waiting to happen. But we have a law that says if the Navy takes you, then you must be good to go. Dan was accepted as excellent and served ten years until he disintegrated. Nobody could find any records showing he’d had headaches, anosmia or loss of executive functions (apraxia) from 1992 to 2016 so that came up as a dry hole.
VA doesn’t give up easy. If you have a dearth of records, you just go get a pliable VA-contract doctor, offer him enough pieces of silver and bingo- instant medical opinion saying he never had a diagnosis of TBI and if he did, it was when he got clobbered with that chunk of rebar. He just hid it to get into the Navy. Everybody knows Vets are Welfare Queens. Right?
He finally won the combo of TBI and PTSD. VA wrote up the code sheet here with DC 8045 in front of the 9411 for PTSD indicating the predominant disability was the TBI. But when they upped the TBI/PTSD from 70 to 100% in July ’24, a strange thing happened. The TBI became a secondary of the PTSD and the DC 8045 evaporated. I didn’t catch on to it initially because the code sheet still says PTSD w/ insomnia disorder and Traumatic Brain injury. But always remember. If VA does something that looks innocent, move your wallet to a front pocket and watch out.
Sure as shit, along comes Alex and files him solely for the PTSD. VA initially said “No!” and thought we’d put our tail between our legs and walk away. I wanted to go straight to the BVA but Dan says -what the hey, let’s try a HLR. We did and I dumpster-dived the c file and came up with all the dirt saying his noggin had more charcoal in it that a brand new bag of Kingsford™ briquets. Besides, the narrative even stated “Dude, you need a&a.”
So Miss HLR grants the a&a but sure enough, that missing DC 8045 suddenly came to life and fenced us out of any hope of SMC at the T rate. Back to the drawing board. Denis the Menace also gave us more ammo when he first denied because he proposed incompetency while denying the a&a. That just added more napalm to the future a&a/ SMC T campfire.
So here we are-July 3rd. We’re getting ready for the festivities tomorrow and chillin’ the brewskis. I just finished Danny boy’s legal brief and I’m kinda proud of this one. I actually kept it down to sixteen pages-no small feat for me. We’ll probably be hearing from the Board about next spring or so on the outcome but again- I’m not worried. I’m still batting a thousand on SMC. I speak of it (SMC Claims) analogously as like fishing with hand grenades- but then I know because I have fished the upper reaches of the mighty Mea Kong with M 26s in my youth and know whereof I speak.
I hope you all have a loud, bright, noisy celebration of our Nation’s 249th Birthday and I look forward to next year’s even more. We can still buy the good four-stage mortars up here in the United Soviet Socialist Republic of Washington- and even if we can’t, we can always vote with our feet and go over to an Indigenous American Reservation and buy even better stuff cheaper. We have more reservations up here than you can shake a stick at and probably about as many casinos as Reno.
asknod
Bethanie Spangenberg
kcraveiro
robinhoodesqvetsatty
Wesley McCauley
Veterans Claims Help 
Wes, I’ve 86’d her about 10 times. She gets around the spam filter by reregistering under a new moniker. Looks like the ST. Pete VAMC needs to up her dosage on Paxil or double down with Thorazine. Thought I’d just watch and let her bloviate. As she stated, her family is the laughingstock of the world. For once, we can agree….
Ludicrous. Wonderfull? We are being governed by racists who only care about the “upper class”. You must be smoking the good stuff.
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See? I told you they turn blue in the face. Karen’s the poster child of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Seems a Veteran like her would be proud of her country but noooooooooooooo. We’re all entitled racist white boys.
I gotta hand it to Donald. That renaming of all the old Army bases with similar names was a stroke of genius. Now if they’d just put the statues back up, I could die happy.
Damn straight I smoke the high test shit. It’s called Patriotism.
VLJ Cryan? Didn’t know she was a subscriber.
Cool. You are hysterical. Trump is the poster child for derrangement. He has dine nithing goid with his ptroject 2025. The both of you need help for your anger issues. He proves it with his disjointed speech, and you with your writing. I love my country, and the 4 generations of my family (including me) who have served it. We are now the laughingstock of the world. Putin must be very proud of his protegee.
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