I think I got these from here somewhere, but my memory comes and goes so. I appologize if I'm double posting. Or they may have come from Burn-Pits 360.com
Basically it boils down to I think they are amazed that we lived long enough to need VA benefits.
Hahaha....
Sounds like this is the old, "Delay, Deny, We hope you die" game that has been going on for at least a century.
NO JOKE!
My great-great Grandfather was a Union Army/Enlisted Rank Soldier who lost an eye in a Civil War battle. It took the US government almost 60 years to compensate him for the loss of his eye - and he was in his 80's when he started to get $10.00 a month. And NO retro compensation, either. Not only that, but when he got honorably discharged early because he lost his eye in a battle, he had to walk home from the battle site (in the South) all the way back to his little family farm in Kentucky. Somehow, he managed to avoid death from infection/detection. But HOLY COW!
Many of the disabled Civil War Vets were already dead by the time the US Government began compensation. But my great-great Grandfather got paid for almost 20 years until he died at the grand old age of 104. He must have been one tough old bird to live that long.
I can only imagine just how hard it must have been on his wife and kids to make due trying to run a farm without help or aid or care for all those many years after that war was over. And this may have been one of many reasons why Great-Great Grandfather & his wife, along with one of his Sons and his Son's pregnant wife, relocated by wagon train from Kentucky to California in the 1880's. That's a story for another day, but I will write that the Son's wife did give birth along the trail to my Grandfather, a man who lived to age 91 - and the man who told me all these stories before he died.
Years later, after my Father died, I did find this Great-Great Grandfather's discharge certificate and award letter for compensation in my Father's collection of family papers, along with a family Bible that was printed in Philadelphia in 1810, and, a uniform jacket that appears to be from the Civil War period. So I'm pretty sure and confident my Grandfather's recollections to me were pretty accurate and without embellishment.
V/R,
nwlivewire