VA Disability Benefits for Gulf War Veterans: My VA Benefits Series, #3

By Rick Blair

From August 2, 1990 to July 31 1991, more than 650,000 U.S. military personnel took part in The Gulf War to liberate Kuwait.  While successful in that campaign, the US has continued to deploy military personal to the Middle East to fight against terrorism.  To date, the Government Accountability Office has stated that over one million servicemembers have served in Southwest Asia since 1990, and those numbers will continue to rise as we fight the Global War on Terrorism.  

Tragically, about one third of our Gulf War Veterans are experiencing Medically Unexplained Illnesses, manifesting as a cluster of medically unexplained chronic symptoms that can include fatigue, headaches, joint pain, indigestion, insomnia, dizziness, respiratory disorders, memory problems, and more. 

Since the return of many Gulf War Veterans in the early 1990s, the VA, DoD and other organizations have continuously been evaluating the health effects of Gulf War service during Operations Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Iraqi Freedom and New Dawn.  And while the VA has slowly acknowledged disabilities in what has become known as Gulf War Illness, they have routinely denied the majority of disability claims or not consistently applied fair ratings across the Regional Offices. 

According to a Government Accountability Office report in 2017, the VA denies more than 80 percent of veterans' claims for benefits for Gulf War-associated illnesses -- an approval rating three times lower than all other types of claims.  During a period from 2010-2015, it was determined that the VA approved only 17 percent of Gulf War Illness claims.

My name is Rick Blair and I served nearly 27 years in the U.S. Air Force and then another 10 years in my "second career" as a Veterans Service Officer (VSO.) Now for my third and hopefully final "career," I plan on taking it easy and writing books to continue my advocacy for Veterans, because the knowledge I gained during those 10 years as a VSO, I believe, is far too important NOT to continuing sharing with other disabled Veterans.
As a VSO, I spent four years advocating for Veterans benefits at the St Petersburg VA Regional Office, another four and a half years working with patients at the James H. Haley VA Medical Center in Tampa, and then the last year and a half providing community-based advocacy for our Veterans in and around Sumter County Florida. As a result of this experience, I not only became familiar with VA law and the VA disability claims and appeals processes, I learned the procedural matrixes the VA decision makers utilize to adjudicated disability claims.
As I assessed the numerous books out there that discuss Gulf War related disabilities, but I could not find much specific information on what your VA benefits and entitlements are or how to develop a strategy for submitting a claim specifically for those benefits. This is the third book in the "My VA Benefits" series. Much of this information is available on the VA's website, but in my opinion, it is not well organized, which makes it extremely difficult to connect the dots. I purposely formatted this book in a way that I hope you find logical and consistent so you can determine which information is specifically relevant and which information you can skim through. 
My second book in the "My VA Benefits" series is similar to this book, in that it addresses VA presumptive disabilities for our Vietnam era Veterans due to Agent Orange exposure. However, the first book in the "My VA Benefits" series is titled "VA Disability Claim Approved!" which addresses how to craft a compelling NEXUS letter that the VA can't deny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rick Blair
• Release date: Nov 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393496021

Book preview

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