How Many Veterans Died Waiting For the VA?

Aug. 29, 2014 - PRLog -- The current focus on the VA is actually a distraction from the VA’s worst problems, which exist in the Compensation Division. If investigative news teams ever get wind of those problems, they’ll certainly have a full-time job reporting amazing stories of anti-veteran attitudes and adversarial confrontations. The current focus is on veterans who were accepted into the VA system, many with service-connected injuries and diseases. And reportedly they have been waiting for many months or into years for treatment. As bad as that is, it doesn’t hold a candle to the magnitude of atrocity that has befallen Blue Water Navy Vietnam veterans. And the VA is proclaiming that the "wait time" caused no veteran deaths!

In 2002, the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA/VA) Compensation Division rescinded the health care and compensation benefits of certain Vietnam veterans. Full benefits for herbicide poisoning were granted to all Vietnam veterans who served within the Theater of Combat by the Agent Orange Act of 1991. Since the date of that rescission, more than 30,000 Navy and Fleet Marine veterans who served offshore Vietnam during that War have died. The Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Association, currently challenging the VA for re-instatement of their benefits, estimates that as many as 15,000 of those veterans died from Agent Orange/dioxin-related complications.

In February, 2002, 11 years after the unanimous passage of the Agent Orange Act, the VA redefined a “Vietnam veteran” as someone who “must have actually served on land within the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) to qualify for the presumption of exposure to herbicides.” The most infamous herbicide, Agent Orange, contained dioxin which the VA acknowledges causes several types of cancers, Parkinson’s disease, ischemic heart disease, and other serious illnesses.

“Without those basic benefits,” says John Paul Rossie, Executive Director of the Association, “we estimate that the majority of those 15,000 veterans probably died in debt from having to pay for treatment of their own service-connected war injuries. Many of those veterans might have had their lives prolonged to a significant degree if they had been given the medical treatment automatically provided to all other veterans of the Vietnam War. They would certainly have died under more honorable conditions.”

“We consider these 15,000 Blue Water Navy veterans to have been on a waiting list for the approval of their benefits since 2002,” says Rossie, “and the VA has left them to die as surely as if they had put a gun to their heads. These men not only endured the social stigma our country placed on their service in Vietnam, but they were kicked to the curb a second time when the VA excluded them from acknowledgment of their service-connected injuries, and left them to die in the gutter. Of all the sins of Vietnam that this country is guilty of, this one is the most disgraceful and inhumane. I find it deeply disturbing how the role of herbicides in Vietnam has been downplayed and written out of the history of that conflict. I think it’s time for some correction of the history books regarding the devastation that our chemical warfare program caused.”