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 Vallarta Living | Veteran Affairs | March 2006 
One Hundred Forty Years Later and Counting
 David Lord - PVNN
| | Maj. Tammy Duckworth testifies during a Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee hearing in Washington, March 17, 2005. Duckworth, an Iraq war veteran who lost both legs in the conflict held a slim lead on Wednesday in her bid to run for Congress as a Democrat in a district held by Republicans for 32 years. (Chip Somodevilla/Reuters) |
This last week, Congressman Lane Evans of Illinois, Ranking Democrat on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, and Congresswoman Shelley Berkley of Nevada introduced a bill (H.R. 4914) in Washington, DC that would permit veterans to hire an attorney when they disagree with a benefits claims decision of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
Currently, veterans are not allowed to hire an attorney until the end of the administrative appeals process, specifically, after the Board of Veterans Appeals has rendered a decision.
The restriction on attorney representation dates from the Civil War era, 1865 when concern for attorneys preying on sick and disabled veterans resulted in legislation which limited the fee attorneys could charge to $10.00, so One Hundred Forty Years later, veterans are still prohibited from hiring an attorney to appeal an initial VA decision.
Russian Veterans of the Vietnam War aid U.S.A. in the search for M.I.A.S from Vietnam War
We now know that of the 18,000 Soviet Citizens that were in Vietnam during the war, some 13,000 were military service members who served the North Vietnamese Army with their surface-to-air missiles, radar, electronic equipment, and advisers to instruct them in their use.
We were fighting not only the North Vietnamese but both the Russian and Chinese Military in a secret alliance between those three Communist Nations and their Armed Forces. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. and Russia established the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIAs (USRJC) to be a forum through which both nations seek to determine the fate of missing personnel from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and other venues of the Cold War.
The Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office works with the USRJC and has Russian-speaking personnel working in the former Soviet Union to support the mission. This is a huge aid to recover our troops and airmen. Flashback...
Although we now know that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident which escalated the Vietnam War was fabricated to a huge degree by the National Security Agency using selected communication intercepts, and then gave the misleading testimony before Congress about the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and got the go ahead to continue the War.
(The Old Dogs at N.S.A. don’t learn new tricks, as we see today in Iraq)
Their testimony has now been discredited by files obtained in 2005 from those Russian Vietnam Veterans in meetings with the Vietnam Veterans of America. Actual recordings of North Vietnamese vessel to vessel radio communications turned over by the Russian Veterans dispel the testimony given by the N.S.A. before Congress over forty years ago.
Had President Kennedy not been assassinated in 1963 he would have ended the war early on, after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba he had little confidence in the Military’s decisions. The result of N.S.A. testimony was that during the Vietnam War, U.S. aircrews dropped over SEVEN MILLION TONS of bombs on targets in Indochina, more than THREE TIMES the tonnage dropped in an area that is 1/1000th the area of operations of W.W.ll
To date, 600 U.S. servicemen associated with aircraft “downings” have been accounted for. The total of 1,789 military personnel remain missing; 1033 of the remaining unaccounted-for are casualties of the air war and the Russians have knowledge about these M.I.A.’s because they shot them down.
Disability Discharge is Disaster for Career Military.
The Senate’s top Democrat, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. has forced the Defense Department to break with a longtime policy established by Congress in 1898 requiring a dollar-for-dollar reduction in military retired pay when also receiving veterans’ disability compensation.
"We have made some process over the last few years but, as everyone knows, we still have work to do," Reid said as he introduced the Combat-Related Special Compensation Act of 2006. Reid’s bill, S 2385, addresses people who served fewer than 20 years in the military because they retired because of disability.
Under current law, only those with at least 20 years’ service are eligible to receive retired pay and disability compensation without offset. Reid said his new proposal “will take care of soldiers who had hoped to make the military a career but were discharged prematurely for an injury sustained in combat and forced to retired medically before attaining 20 years of service.
The Pentagon has opposed most concurrent receipt proposals but The Military Officers Association of America quickly endorsed Reid’s bill. In a statement issued Thursday, retired Navy Vice Admiral Norbert Ryan, the association’s president, said, “A military retiree who spent at least 20 years in uniform and who has any combat-incurred disability no longer suffers under the unfair policy banning concurrent receipt.
But a service member who suffers a 100-percent disabling combat injury and is forced into medical retirement with 19 years and 11 months of service can still lose his entire retired pay.
 David Lord served in Vietnam as combat Marine for 1st Battalion 26th Marines, during which time he was severely wounded. He received the Purple Heart and the Presidential Unit Citation for his actions during the war in Vietnam. In Mexico, David now represents all veterans south of the U.S. border all the way to Panama, before the V.A. and the Board of Veterans Appeals. David Lord provides service to veterans at no fee. Veterans are welcome to drop in and discuss claims/benefits to which they are entitled by law at his office located at Bayside Properties, 160 Francisca Rodriguez, tel.: 223-4424, call him at home 299-5367, on his cell: 044 (322) 205-1323, or email him at mophmx@@yahoo.com or david.lord@yahoo.com.
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