In the span of just a few weeks, Marc McCabe traveled this summer to Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, California, and Texas. But the 74-year-old wasn’t on an epic retirement trip.
As a pro bono veterans advocate, he was searching for Vietnam veterans and surviving family members who may be eligible for disability compensation.
McCabe, a former combat corpsman attached to Marine Corps units during the Vietnam War, has survived two bouts of cancer himself. He has been a veteran’s advocate for two decades, but his job has gotten a lot busier thanks to a spate of new legislation that has expanded benefits for millions of veterans exposed to toxic chemicals in war.
Technically, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs should be the ones notifying veterans when they may be eligible for new benefits—but McCabe says they often don’t.
“They’re leaving them behind,” he says.
And the Department of Veterans Affairs’ very own Office of Inspector General agrees. In an unsparing report this summer, the watchdog estimated that VA has failed to inform up to 87,000 Vietnam war veterans and their survivors that they may now qualify for retroactive compensation benefits because of exposure to toxic herbicides such as Agent Orange.
If that sounds like a startling number, consider this: Those overlooked veterans and their families could be entitled to more than $844 million, the report said.
“There are millions of dollars at stake that…
