All the recent headlines about a $6 billion settlement over military earplugs through America’s largest domestic tort case in history caught my attention for two personal reasons. First, though I am not among the 240,000 people seeking compensation in this lawsuit, I did serve in the Army with an artillery unit stationed in Germany and suffered permanent hearing loss. While that was during the Vietnam War and before the invention of the Iraq and Afghanistan War-era “Combat Arms Earplugs” in question, I know the pain of this injury. Moreover, since the Veterans Administration (VA) denied my disability claim since I couldn’t produce old medical records, the sting of uncompensated injuries remains quite real.
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