Jenkins Looking over some of the paperwork from the VA relating to his exposure to and

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  In the VA’s first denial, officials told him he was turned down because he didn’t complain of cancer before he left Vietnam and furthermore, in their eyes, he had never been in Vietnam because he was in the Navy aboard ships. “But they didn’t even know about Agent Orange until 1972,” he said.
  

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  Jenkins reapplied in 2014. This time, the response came back that he should have applied for benefits in 2011 and that he was being denied because his cancer was in remission. “It (VA literature) doesn’t say anything about remission or being cured,” he said. “There’s no cap or time limit on a benefit.”
  
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  There were some signs of movement amid the dysfunction, however. Jenkins was seen by a physician’s assistant for a physical and an assessment in 2015; he believes it was due to a tsunami of bad press in which the VA was swimming.
  
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  Even that had its moments. After what he says was a cursory exam, Jenkins was granted a small disability benefit for the neuropathy in his feet — a result of the cancer and treatment — but not for the cancer itself or the heart trouble. He uses a cane to help get around sometimes. “I have difficulty breathing sometimes, and I sound like a freight train if I walk for long,” he said.
  
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  Because he is who he is, Jenkins persisted. He started writing to his representatives in Congress, Rep. Virginia Foxx and Sen. Thom Tillis. And he appealed once again.
  
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  An appeals board in Washington finally acknowledged in a letter dated Feb. 29, 2016, that his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was service connected and that it was presumed to have been caused by exposure to Agent Orange. And a separate claim that Jenkins said he didn’t seek for melanoma was added to his file.
  
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  There was one problem, though. The appeals board remanded his case back to the regional office here for a rating determination about the cancer. A month later, in a letter dated March 31, 2016, he had his answer: a 0% disability rating for the cancer and no bump in his benefit.
  

His disability rating — a VA score used to determine the level of benefits afforded to a veteran — for neuropathy would remain at 40 percent, just over $600 a month. Its basic position seems to be that he’s not disabled enough to merit the higher rating. And that ticks Jenkins off, too. “I’m tired of being made out to be a liar and a malingerer,” he said. Kori Mabe, an assistant public affairs specialist in the Winston-Salem regional VA office, said 27 JAN she couldn’t comment specifically on Jenkins’ case without his signed authorization, which is now in the pipeline. But she did call Jenkins Saturday morning to assure him that his file would be reviewed by a retired Air Force officer who works at the VA regional office straight away. Nevertheless, Jenkins said that he will continue to press his case. “My whole thing is, I have to fight this because there are boys now (younger veterans of recent wars) who don’t have the wherewithal to fight these decisions. I do.” [Source: Winston-Salem Journal |Scott Sexton | Jan 29, 2017 ++]

| January 26, 2017 ++]