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Comment by le-mark | Hacker News Reader

I know a guy who retired from the Air Force and got 100% disability that included tinnitus, ptsd, and something about his joints. This person was an aircraft maintainer and never saw combat, although he was deployed a few times. The lady evaluating his case really hooked him up, he brags bout it all the time. He gets retirement and disability.

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There are reddits, discords, and even companies that assist vets in working the system. many of whom never got close to deployment and were never combat arms. If you're persistent you'll get paid. As a combat vet it makes me sick.

Good friend and former colleague has 100% disability and coarsely brags about it.

He has no combat deployments. He has a home gym, rolls BJJ 6 days a week. Has a government (tax payer) paid Bachelor’s and Master’s in Comp. Sci. and makes 6-figures working as a civilian DOD employee.

So I’m not sure in what meaningful sense of the term he’s “100% disabled” but he’s enjoying his salary so good for him?

Both this and the earlier post emphasize the lack of combat deployments in the examples. I should think disability would cover any service-related injury.

It does, I’m just emphasizing the lack of material injury. Spending 25 years in the military in an administrative office role and going “my hearing is less good, I have carpal tunnel, I have sleep problems” now give me $4,000 seems rather off when you’re otherwise a completely healthy normal human being.

After all, it’s not as if normal people in normal society lack these conditions as they age. Connecting them to the service is spurious and often fraudulent. By all means, let’s take care of the folks with serious physical and mental injury that cannot provide for themselves, but let’s be real our system is heavily gamed and abused.

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