I know. That title sounds pretty onerous but it was a wise piece of advice in the 60’s that carries over into the litigation world. Meet Roger the chef. Roger enlisted in June of 1964 just in time to enjoy a year’s vacation in Sunny Southeast Asia. As most know, being a cook doesn’t mean you’ll never have to pick up your 16 and defend your base. Nevertheless, Roger did manage to avoid becoming a full time Eleven Bravo in everything but name only. Roger lives down near Biloxi, MS and has for a long time. He came to me because he’d hit the wall. No matter what he did, VA thwarted him. Stir in Multiple Sclerosis and you got me hooked like a smallmouth with a Mepps No. 2 through his lip. Read on.

Roger lived a good life and worked hard. Then, in 1989, he began to come down with MS. VA said it wasn’t on the Agent Orange list and to get lost. What he did have was a shit ton of other diseases that were on the list so it made sense to every one of his doctors except the VA’s Benefits Administration doctors. Long about 2019, Roger’s Chronic kidney disease  (CKD) which wasn’t on the AO list either, began to go south- most likely due to nasty DMII and tons of peripheral neuropathy. By now, Roger was stove up pretty bad from the MS and had gotten his wheelchair driver’s license. Sure enough he had the Diabetes but VA said No way that CKD has anything to do with DM II. It’s caused by HTN and McDonald’s. Claim denied.

Roger found me back in 2023 and after I did a LRRP on his claims file in VBMS, I constructed a perfect horseshoe ambush to draw them Raters into. Allow me to explain. In all my years of doing this, I’ve spotted VA’s technique to prolong a claim out a few years. Yeah. You’ll win sometime in the future but not this year, bubba. We’re in the delay and deny mode. Here’s how it begins. You go down to them chuckleheads at the DAV or AmLeg and they file something longer than a 18-wheeler and claim you for everything but your funny bone. Here, Roger filed for CKD and DM II and a bunch of other things. A big-ass bunch of other things including IHD. VA denied the CKD first, because… well, because they can. Shoot. That’s Duh!101 dude. Then they granted the DMII and IHD due to Agent Orange. He refiled for the CKD due to DMII as a secondary and they promptly 86’d it and said no- it was HTN.

First thing was Roger needed more $. He needed to get into R1 pronto but VA kept short-sheeting his bed. His house need a SAH grant. He needed an automobile grant. His wife needed a&a, too. God Bless Mednick Associates. They built a rock solid IMO and we finally prevailed at the Board the next year on his MS. Now, I had to do some sweeping up. I tried to go for the Loss of use as well as the Barry bumps but that pancaked for lack of a true diagnosis of loss of use. I was pretty confident- maybe too confident. I’d snagged the A&A for the IHD but they weren’t granting any more Ls or even Barry Bumps.  This time I was going for a second a&a.

So, while I’d been reconnoitering his efolder, I spotted that CKD≠DMII and devised the perfect ambush. I just knew if I filed him for the CKD again along with the HTN, they’d just deny the CKD and then grant the HTN under the PACT act. These bozos are very predictable.  So I did the HTN and got the grant about a week later. A Zero % of course but I planned on that. Next, I filed a supplemental for the CKD as a secondary to the HTN and used VES’s very own DBQ and medical opinion from 2019 for my IMO. I wish you all could have watched their gears grind to a halt. It was textbook shit or go blind. After about a month, with nothing for it, they had to grant. I mean, they’re the ones who opened their fat yaps and blamed it on the HTN, not me.

So Rog pulled an 80% out of that and then it was off to the SMC races. I started pumping  claims  into the chamber and held the release down while racking that slide back and forth and shot that magazine dry. You know what that does. It’s like poking a hole in one of them big wasp nests hanging off the barn. Every Tom Dick and Harry came flying out of the Jackson RO and formed up shoulder to shoulder. I’d gotten into a little bugtussle with them back in ’18 and almost got thrown out on my ear. I doubt they’ve forgotten that. Here I’d put the triple whammy on them and they were gonna show me. I’d hit them with Loss of use of both uppers and lowers as well as a double aid and attendance for the CKD and the MS. Holy shit Batman. I reckon they put every GS 14 swingin’ dick they had on this. The VBMS Notes section read like a Coach’s convention.

So they decided to just outright cheat. They started manufacturing VA regulations out of whole cloth. I mean, what could they do? They walked into this like babes in the woods. That’s why I chose the title about enfilading fire. You throw out the bait and they take it. Then they just run into the evidence they built. We called M 60s Pigs not because they were heavy or a bitch to keep working. They positively inhaled ammunition. In today’s parlance, it’s a .308 calibre and you can cut trees down with them. Used to be when the gooks heard that chainsaw fire up, they all kept their heads down. No banzai charges or excessive shows of valor.

The interesting thing you’ll note in the BVA decision is the whole big argument about “one a&a to a customer” was blatantly ignored.  The BVA hierarchy can’t have their Board Members calling the Secretary and his worker bees ignorant ladies of the night and raised by wolves.  Instead, the VLJ put on his blinders and focused myopically on the wheelchair thus ignoring decades of SMC precedence and §4.63 to declare he was wheelchair-bound thus proving beyond doubt that he had loss of use. This should be a teaching moment for all of you in this predicament. The correct cite is Hime v. McDonald, 28 Vet.App. 1, 7 n.1 (2016) . You can actually use BVA decisions to illustrate a point of law.

Here’s the reading list.

redacted RD 9.15.2025

Redacted 10182 filed 9.25.2025

Redacted BVA R1 11.6.25

I’m waiting on the Jackson 5 down in Mississippi to screw this up in their rating decision and only grant the O. Right now, they have all their coaches on deck pondering that SMC O and not knowing how to convert it to R1.  All they know is the SMC Ratings calculator doesn’t work after SMC M. But what does this say about the VLJ? Why didn’t he complete the SMC formula and take it to §3.350(h) an it’s natural conclusion? My guess, and it’s pure conjecture mind you, is he’s a former Marine JAG and he ate the crayon before he finished coloring in the decision…

Life is good. So is Elk meat. A happy Veterans Day was had by all. I passed on Applebee’s again for the free meal. They don’t have single malt scotch in their bar. The rain has been heavy and in copious quantities so the folks in California have been choosing other states to emigrate to. Boy howdy if them chowderheads ever discover we don’t have forest fires and power outages every afternoon, we’re gonna get flat overrun. Too bad it’s against the law to set up a horseshoe perimeter at the border on I-5 and place Pigs on both flanks of the Bridge…

P.S. LRRP humor from Ed.