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Agent Orange
Rocky Raab
Member Posts: 14,429 ✭✭✭✭
They've just added more diseases to the presumptive cause list. I posted it down in the Military Forum.
I may be a bit crazy - but I didn't drive myself.
Comments
My next door neighbor died from agent orange issues a few years ago . He actually loaded out the planes that did the spraying .
My neighbor handled it here in the states, He is trying to get some help, but his request falls on deaf ears because he didnt work with it overseas? Seems unreal, but that what he tells me.
My step brother Jim died from being sprayed 3 different times with AO. His lungs turned to leather and he slowly suffocated. It's sad when the country you are fighting for kills so many of it's own soldiers.
His brother Mike lost an eye over there too from shrapnel.
Joe
AO was used in Korea to control vegetation along the DMZ. It was tested (aerial spraying) at Eglin AFB in Florida, and at Ft Gordon GA, 1967. Former Game Warden at Ft. Gordon danced the dance with his VA claim for disability, until he showed that he had been ISSUED AO to control vegetation around some of the lakes at Ft. Gordon. Disability granted.
I was doing my Reserve duty as the Chief of Media Relations at Eglin AFB when the 60 Minutes crew came to do a big "expose" on Agent Orange. I escorted them to the place where it had been stored and loaded, and where a lot of it had been spilled. It was by then a bare sand patch. After they'd been there setting up for a hour or so, the cameraman asked me where the worst contamination had been. I pointed down and said "You're ankle deep in it." He almost levitated.
I laughed at him, but it isn't so damn funny now that I'm coming down with symptoms.
If you haven't already, start your claim now for exposure. After wrestling with the VA for years, using the DAV as the agency to herd the claim through the process I gave up and took matters into my own hands for my late husband's claim. The best advice I can give you is to file everything through ebenefits, https://www.ebenefits.va.gov/ebenefits/homepage . Filing this way the VA can't continually bombard you with correspondence claiming they didn't receive the required paperwork. You will have proof it was submitted, date and type. I even took pictures of paperwork with my cellphone, converted them to .pdf and submitted them. We had doctors e-mail us records and we were able to submit these as well. The best thing was that we were able to go into the healthcare side and pull records from VA hospital visits that documented claim back-up.
After going into the DAV office after my husband passed away to get them to file for survivor benefits for me I finally understood what had been the issue. All they did was take the information, type it into the online forms and submit it. They didn't do anything extraordinary that the average joe couldn't do if he/she was computer literate. I took myself out of the office, went home that night, completed the paperwork online and was successful on the first try. I had full survivor benefits two weeks after my husband passed away.
They didn't do any digging, or attempt to find missing information the VA said they had not received when we were fighting for his benefits. They just forwarded what we had hard copies of from old active duty medical records. If the VA contacted them saying they needed more information they asked us to get it and send it to them (DAV) so they could send it to the VA. Not impressed.
One of my longtime neighbors and a family friend (when I was a teenager) died of brain cancer back around 91 or 92. He was a Marine.......real quiet guy.......worked at the VA with my stepdad. He got exposed to AO over there. I don't know if his family filed for compensation. I am sure they did though.
He was a really cool gun guy.......had some pristine Garands........I mean pristine ...he had three sons around my age who I am sure are taking good care of his stuff. One of his sons also became a Marine and was stationed in Cuba for awhile. Haven't seen those guys for a while.