SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — The U.S. Veterans Administration must honor the terms of a 1991 settlement and pay retroactive benefits to thousands of Navy veterans who served on ships off Vietnam’s coast for Agent Orange-related health problems, a federal judge ruled Thursday.
“It makes a huge difference to veterans and their families,”
plaintiffs’ attorney Stephen Kinnaird of the firm Paul Hastings said in a phone
interview.
The VA had argued that despite a recent law and court ruling
entitling so-called Blue Water Navy vets to benefits, it never intended to
include them in a deal it signed three decades ago. In that consent decree, the
VA vowed to automatically reconsider past denials of benefits for conditions
that it later found were tied to Agent Orange and to grant retroactive
benefits.
Used ubiquitously by the U.S. military to clear forested
areas in Vietnam, the toxic contaminant dioxin in Agent Orange has been linked
to a slew of health problems, including leukemia, lymphoma, throat cancer and
many other diseases.
A few months before the consent decree was signed in 1991,
Congress passed the Agent Orange Act, which requires the VA to assume all
veterans who “served in the Republic of Vietnam” from 1962 to 1975 were exposed
to Agent Orange.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge William Alsup rejected
arguments that the settlement was never meant to include Blue Water Vietnam
Navy vets who served on ships in Vietnam’s territorial waters but never set
foot on the country’s soil or entered its inland waterways.
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