Thank you Mr. Chairman, for allowing us to make a brief appearance in writing for the record, and to speak on some of the breakthrough bills which appear on your docket today. Our remarks will be directed to HR 5954 which provides a long awaited justice to our military brothers of the Project 112 ship tests during the Cold War Era, and also to HR 3795 for the veterans of the Gulf War.

I am the lead activist for the Fort McClellan Veterans Stakeholders Group. We formed this group in 2003 to advance our own pursuits for legislation and justice inside the VA disability system. We are mostly medical and disability patients who have served at Fort McClellan, Alabama from 1955 to 1978. We hold the Cold War Service Medals issued under the Clinton administration from years past. We do consider ourselves to be chemical exposure victims from our service at the base, and we can speak in verification about the ordeal the current VA disability system poses to any new and incoming Veterans who identify themselves as known or suspected exposure cases, regardless of the source.

We applaud, endorse, and support the victories which are represented in your bills today by HR 5954 and HR 3795. Those exposure groups have worked long and hard along side our own group, to receive this day of justice in their names. The tests of Project 112 and it's loosely related counterpart, more commonly referred to out here in our Veterans arena as the Edgewood tests, were in some ways a freak of the times. We can only wonder what the military authorities were all thinking when they subjected these brave volunteers to various forces of contamination and then walked away without providing them with adequate follow-up reviews for medical tracking or to give them prioritized disability standing in the VA medical system.

For our Gulf War counterparts, they too have been put through an ordeal that was prolonged, unnecessary, and preventable if only the VA had a working "rapid response" system in place to activate temporary support services while their Presumptive statuses were pending.

The simple fact that it requires an act of congress to rescue verified contamination medical patients inside the current structure of the VA disability system, speaks volumes about the ordeal that so many of us have been put through.

While we are relieved, happy, and gratified that HR 5954 has finally arrived for our military brothers of Project 112, we caution that the rest of the Edgewood test population still should be addressed by separate legislation, and when that happens, our group will then exert a vested interest in that outcome too.

Fort McClellan, Alabama from the years 1955 to 1978, also represents a freak of the times, and poses a new and unique situation to this legislating body of Congress. It is a situation which has never before been seen in the history of veterans disability claims. During the same and simultaneous time span of years, Fort McClellan was not only a part of the Edgewood series of open air chemical tests on the grounds of the base itself, but also, the same base was surrounded by a massive, PCB contamination zone by the nearby Monsanto chemical factory of it's day in our recreation district of downtown Anniston, Alabama. The PCB zone contaminated the air, the water, and the soil of much of the surrounding region leading up to the base, even though to days reports from the Environmental Protection Agency only addresses the modern day concerns and tests of the water and soil.

The rate of spew from the broken Monsanto air stacks, based on our computations made from the original notes of the Monsanto pollution engineers back in the day, amounted to over 2,000 tons per month released into the air back in the day. Then in addition to that, the EPA has estimated the cloud cover from that spew to have an extended overhead smog life of 10 days in lingering. This is to say that the thousands of pounds of PCB's that spewed into the air on anyone day, also remained overhead in that same region for yet another 10 days in lingering before  releasing and dispersing out into the general atmosphere away from the geographic location. Then this overhead lingering was added into by yet more spew.

Simultaneously, and without the knowledge of the nearby Monsanto disaster that was in the works, persons assigned to the Edgewood Cold War Era tests at Fort McClellan were conducting open air chemical tests on the base itself. These tests were done with inadequate attention applied to the protection of those volunteers who were actually in the tests, and with no protection whatsoever to those of us who were at other locations on the base and not involved in the tests. This was the time of the Vietnam War training maneuvers, which included Pentagon-mandated gashouse training which involved the removal of face masks inside of active (CN) and (CS) gas discharges so that we could be war certified in completion of our boot camp training.

We have contended that anyone of these exposure sources, or any combination of them in the hereafter, may be the causation of our modern day disabilities and diseases. We may actually be the very first known medical population to enter the military and VA system to declare ourselves as a "bystander" exposure population since we never the cause of either of these contamination scenarios.

So you can see here the similarity of concerns and experiences that we bring to the legislative table when offering up our support and sympathy to our Project 112 military brothers and our counterparts of men and women from the Gulf War.

The VA has been unresponsive to all of these exposure populations up until today, so it brings us a great sense of hope and celebration today to see with our own eyes, this day of victory and justice which is embodied in your bills of HR 5954 and HR 3795.

The Department of Veterans Affairs should undergo massive reorganization to position themselves for the future to serve and support all hazardous exposure military veterans, regardless of the source of their exposure. The current VA system is broken beyond repair and sadly, there is not even a showing of interest in repairing it whenever we have approached Washington VA officials for resolve.

The VA uses deprivation of services as the first course of action whenever they are approached by a new population of veterans who are suspecting themselves to be hazardous exposure medical patients. Without intervening legislation from Congress, their mistake will not likely be fixed. The VA has no understanding at all of the meaning of "emergency response.” They will stand around in a spirit of inaction and delay, and literally allow veterans to die or have their hands forced into suicide from the prolonged suffering they endure, rather than to eat the embarrassments of correction and apology for their bureaucratic mistakes.

At the Fort McClellan contamination zone, the veterans who served there are medically matched to the nearby civilian population, and yet even with this stunning development to our advantage, the VA holds onto their delay practices, their deprivation of services, and their no assistance to our service group as medical patients.

In some ways, Project 112 and the related Edgewood tests are a symbol of what is also wrong at the VA. All of these matters are an outcome of excessive proofing requirements gone amuck. There reaches a point in most rational acts, where relentless questioning, unending verifying, and proofing above and beyond the norms of medical scenarios, (and the relentless demanding of the same), crosses a line beyond the normal limits of proper reason and travels straight over into a dark side where most of us would never go. There are people in this world who will spend all of their days questioning life itself: but that does not mean that the rest of us all have to go along for the ride.

The VA requires individual medical patients to shed themselves of their hospital standing, and become mini-agencies in their own name to prove up, answer up, comply up, and provide the tonage of science, medical, classified, unclassified, military, unmilitary, hospital and even childhood documents just to prove that which every other rational American in this country can blatantly see with their own eyes as true. We say, that this all has to stop, in the name of saving the lives of Veterans. Proofing of disease and disability, at the level of extremes, excessiveness, and over the top - even when the same logical conclusion is as plain as day to everyone else who reviews a veterans case, is causing the premature deaths of our veterans and it is causing them to die with no service connected benefits in place at all.

Lack of information, concealment of information, and especially the absence of official NOTIFICATION to Veterans who may have been exposed to hazardous sources, wreaks havoc throughout the entire chain of process in both the VA and the Social Security systems. Veterans are first not officially notified of their exposure circumstances, and then are also burdened with elaborate and complicated "nexus theories" to succeed either in their individual disability claims or their pursuits for patient class recognition, which is known in the VA system as Presumptive Service Connected statusing.

Official notification to Veterans who have come into contact with any potential contamination source during their military service, must be integrated into all legislation and policy changes at the VA because it is crucial information that we have to pass along to our caregivers. It is vital deciding information that a practicing physician weighs upon during the moment of diagnosis for these veterans. So notification must be treated equal in importance to all other features of rescuing hazardous exposure veterans at the VA.

The VSO's do complicate this ordeal situation even further for us.

Instead of taking on the system to force the VA to reorganize themselves into an "emergency response" program to intake and serve these exposure veterans, the VSO's force veterans to endure years of process to comply with the wholly malpracticed systems which the VA currently has in place.

I have fired VSO's one by one in my own case for this very reason. Furthermore, VSO's only provide case-in-a-box assistance for claims.

Claims which are far more complicated, and not as cut and dried as the run of the mill, case-in-a-box, which are presented to them, are simply refused assistance by the VSO's due to complexity and their inability to either comprehend the details of the case, or their inability to construct fast and simple workarounds to the barriers put up by the VA. Also, if they do accept the case for VSO handling the veterans are subordinated to unqualified and incompetent case people who are in over their heads and don't know it. In the end, these exposure cases in some cases, not always, remain unassisted by VSO's.

We have repeatedly gone out to VSO's to obtain help for our Fort McClellan advocacies only to have the door slammed in our faces with either a wall of silence, (much like what the VA does), or a lousy "thank you for sharing" letter to facilitate the VA's agenda of delay until death. I am almost 60 years old and mobility impaired with muscular disease and yet even identifying myself with that, VSO's have sided with the nonsense processes of the VA and not with the us.

We consider ourselves to be holding matching and textbook disease patterns to be commonly recognized markers held in all other chemical exposure populations. But it is only the VA who stands around spinning its wheels on process and burdening us with delay.

Among the list of those refusing to help us as VSO's includes DAV, American Legion (Albany & Washington DC), VFW, the WAC Veterans Association, Vietnam Veterans of America (the Womens Committee)  the National Veterans Legal Services Corp. and the Veterans Pro Bono Consortium. Among those who have refused assisting us at the VA includes Dr. Mark Brown, Irene Trowell-Harris, the Center for Women Veterans, Comp & Pen, and the VA Secretary's Office himself. At the Dept. of Defense, the Office of Health Deployment sent us directly to the VA and would not talk to us any further after passing us to VA hands.

Among other things, the VA is also forces medical patients to "incorporate" as non-profit incorporations just so they can obtain legislative or medical recognition as a patient group class. We say for the record that we are opposed to such practices and insist here before you today, that these larger systemic issues of the VA be mandatorily halted in the future. To say to a body of medical patients that their only hope of advancing medical assistance is to form a corporation and become a company is just plain nonsense and is contrary to the treatment advisory of licensed medical practitioners.

The Veterans Disability Benefits Commission of 2007, in their report to Congress in Chapter 5, has found in our favor as medical patients and has found against the practices of the VA. In combination with the Institute of Medicine and the Center for Naval Analysis, they have concluded that the Fort McClellan Veterans, whether involved in Edgewood tests or by their exposures to the Monsanto PCB contamination, should receive their day of legislative justice along with our counterparts represented in the bills before you today. They have also concluded that the VA's current process for Presumptive Service Connected statusing, should be wholly revised and undergo massive correction. Our Stakeholders Group did participate in the VDBC hearings and we gave our endorsements to these findings and conclusions when those topics came up for a floor vote by them. We implore upon you now to please change the VA presumptive system

There are 2 simple questions to be answered in all of this as I present it to you today:

How much is "enough" for VA medical patients to have to endure without any assistance or services?

And also,

Why do individual medical cases have to endure excessive and over the top proofing requirements in exposure scenarios when the Dept. of Justice has already litigated cleanups on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency for the nearby civilian population?

These are fair questions to know and I bring them to you today in the name of our Stakeholders Group.

I am not the U.S. Department of Susan R. Frasier, so why is the VA treating me as if I am well-funded, fully staffed, and mobilized government agency without any health impairments?

The Duty To Assist clause in the 38 CFR is also a complete disaster for us. All it does is allow the VA to obtain documents which actually verifies our cases, (without us ever seeing those documents first), and then gives the VA (not the veteran) the litigating advantage to turn around and use those documents against us to further deny the cases. In other words, if there is a mistake in the papers which the VA retrieved, then the individual medical patient is blamed for that mistake.

In my own case, VARO Manhatten has sought to blame me personally for the fact that the Monsanto contamination zone in Alabama was never made publicly known until the late 1990's. It is very much a matter of record that I was denied my 36 year old disability backlogged case because the Army failed to show in my hospital records that I was exposed at the Monsanto chemical zone, even though I had sent alternate information proving to the VA that the contamination was in the air during my army service.

All of official Washington appears to be unanimous in their voices that the VA systems of now are in dire need of change and correction. The VA has possessed the VDBC Commission report to Congress since October of 2007, and they have possessed Chapter 5 specifically since January 8, 2008 when I hand delivered it to the VA Secretary's Office in Washington. And yet here we are 5 months later with no assistance and no change and no legislation from the VA Secretary to this very minute.

Congress must look at the VA claims system with new eyes as if you are riding in a helicopter overhead to see the big picture.

In medical environments, there reaches a point where excessive and unnecessary process must be set aside in the name of good medicine and fair justice.

The proofing and evidencing requirements that we are burdened with as medical patients in the VA are extreme, excessive, over the top, and used only for purposes of delay and the causation of our premature deaths. It is done to literally stress and strain a genuinely sick veteran straight into his or her early grave with upset, despair, and relentless continuation in the scourge of poverty. These are inhumane practices which are done for the purpose of gaining legal advantage in a VA-sponsored disability litigation environment, and we call for its swift and decisive end. No other hazardous exposure veteran should have to endure what all of us have been forced to endure at the hands of the VA.

We send our love, our celebration, and our salutes, to our military brothers of Project 112 and to our counterparts of the Gulf War era. Their ordeal and odyssey is now over and not a minute too soon either. We share in their important victory.

We thank this Congress today, and to all who contributed to the development of HR 5954 and HR 3795 for the wisdom and rescue that both of these bills hold. We ask that you include "notification to veterans" in bills such as these in the future, to mandatorily require the VA to issue a letter and make an appropriate outreach effort to advise effected veterans that they have served in a potential contamination area. This notification is vital to the family information of those medical patients who are affected by contamination scenarios.

And we call upon Congress to continue it's important work on these matters of intervention, correction, and emergency for all other remaining hazardous exposure patient groups, including the Fort McClellan Veterans, who remain hopelessly trapped in a VA system that is broken, uncaring, and unserving to all who identify themselves as potential new exposure cases.

Also Signed in Support, The Following Members of our group:

Carolyn Tyler - Wisconsin
Kathy Warren-Miller - Texas
Sandra Ashley - Washington,
John Snodgrass - Alabama
Nancie Smith - Florida
Ellen O'Neill - Ohio
Carolyn Arnold - Ohio
John Kamps - Texas
Janie Lehman - Pennsylvania
William Brawley - North Carolina
Wanda Seay - California
Nancy Gower - Indiana

The remaining members of our group wish to remain anonymous.