RickyO

Why am I seeing different ratings for PTSD here? My total rating, including Tinitus (thanks to multiple explosions) and shrapnel wound, AND PTSD is 60%. Yet, if I'm reading this correctly, there are some here who have been granted 70% for PTSD alone. I don't get it. Employment was mentioned in a few posts, but considering I haven't been significantly employed, or under-employed for a number of years, I would think that might weigh in my favor.

That's not my goal. My goal is to get back to work. My goal also is to get this totally screwed up VA to understand they are suppose to be helping the Vet, not putting up arcane reasons why he or she 'might' fail. 30 years, and nothing's changed. The VA is still the Veterans worst enemy.

Okay, I'm new at this. What is an IU and a TDIU?

Anyone have one? I've had it with these bureaucrats the VA hires. Especially the non-Veterans, who have know clue what we are talking about. The one they assigned me isn't a Vet, understands VA double-speak, but has absolutely no common sense. I sent my complaint to the Director's office in Washington, and they forwarded it back to the idiots. I was Infantry in Vietnam, wounded, and did my job. This is what I took shrapnel for. I need a good lawyer who has some experience fighting the VA. p.s. Here's how they see us. I've heard this more than once from VA staff: "You get a disability for a scar." My response: Yea bitch, I have a scar. I also spent 6 months before that, sleeping in rice paddies, being sucked dry by leeches, in monsoon rains and wet for months at a time, with crotch of my fatiques rotted out, with puss oozing from sores on my feet, wondering when the next round of sniper fire would come in, looking for trip wires and false bottom pits with pungie stakes, and really not caring much about tomorrow because I wasn't sure I would make it out of today. But you're right, it's only a scar; one that occurred when shrapnel ripped through my skin, through the muscle, and came to rest somewhere in side. This why someone was wiping your ass when you were 18 months old, and would have no memory of it all." By the way, I'm 60% disabled, have been out of work for years and am trying to resurrect myself in the job market. I've gone ahead with training, going thousands in debt, and while the VA sees me as unworthy, four local agencies have been able to pitch a few dollars here and there. Screw the VA. I'm setting every recruit I meet straight. If they are going into the service for the benefits, rethink it.