“You Don’t Look Disabled” – The Myth of Veteran’s Disability Compensation
by Shane Murphy, TrackMySymptoms
July 1989, Orlando Florida. United States Navy Boot camp. The kind of heat that hits you like a wall the second you step outside.
The Navy flew weather flags to tell Company Commanders when conditions were too dangerous to work recruits outside. Red flag meant light activity only. Black flag meant stop entirely. The flags existed for a reason – heat stroke, heat exhaustion, and in extreme cases, death.
Let me tell you. The Company Commanders didn’t give a damn about the flags.
One day I made the mistake of pissing one of them off. So he took me outside to “cycle” me – a Navy boot camp tradition involving a sustained, brutal session of physical exercise designed to break you down. He worked me until I passed out completely. I woke up in a literal pool of sweat, face down on the verge of heat stroke.
I was lucky. I got hydrated and just went on with the nonsense. Several recruits from my company weren’t. They were medically separated before we ever graduated. Their military careers ended in Orlando. They never saw a ship, a deployment, or a war zone.
Here’s my question: do those veterans deserve compensation?
The answer should be obvious. But based on what I see in veteran communities every single day, it isn’t.
The Problem Nobody Wants to Acknowledge
There’s a reality in veteran communities that we don’t talk about enough because it’s uncomfortable. Veterans policing other veterans. Deciding who “deserves” their rating. Questioning whether a fellow service member’s disabilities are real based on where they served, what their job was, or whether they can walk without a limp.
There’s a term for veterans who sell out their brothers and sisters. Blue Falcons. And the disability claims version of the Blue Falcon is alive and well in every veteran subreddit, Facebook group, and VFW post in America.
The logic usually goes something like this: combat veterans with visible injuries are the “real” disabled veterans. Everyone else – the support personnel, the technicians, the people who never deployed to a war zone – are somehow gaming the system. Taking money that belongs to someone more deserving.
I’ve been on the receiving end of this more than once. I’m a 100% Permanent and Total rated veteran. But you know what? I never saw combat. I spent my Navy career in the submarine force, watching dials and managing nuclear propulsion systems. I’m a nerd who kept nuclear submarines moving. Today, I park in disabled spaces with my Disabled Veteran plate and if you just look at me, by most accounts, I look perfectly fine.
I’ve actually been confronted about it more than once. It used to piss me off. But now I mostly feel sorry for the people doing it. Because I think I understand what’s actually driving it.
What the VA Actually Rates (And Why It Matters)
Here’s the thing these gatekeepers are flat out missing. And it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what the VA disability system was actually designed to do.
The VA doesn’t rate sacrifice. It doesn’t rate heroism. It doesn’t rate how hard your deployment was or whether your job title sounds impressive enough to justify a disability rating.
The VA rates damage.
You joined the military as a whole person – 100% capacity, documented at entry. While you were serving, something broke. It doesn’t matter whether it broke in Fallujah or in Orlando in July. It doesn’t matter whether it broke under enemy fire or under a Company Commander who didn’t give a damn about weather flags. It doesn’t matter whether the damage is visible on an X-ray or invisible in the way your nervous system fires.
If your military service broke something, you’re owed compensation for that damage. It’s in the contract you signed when you joined up. Full stop.
A submariner who developed MS from years of disrupted sleep cycles, radiation exposure, and the sustained physiological stress of operating in a metal tube under the ocean isn’t stealing from a combat veteran. They’re both being compensated for what service cost them. Different costs. Equally real.
The VA’s own data on fraud is telling. Confirmed fraud in the VA disability system represents less than 1/100th of 1% of all claims. Set your emotions aside for a moment and think about that. Less than one in ten thousand.
The epidemic of gaming and abuse that the gatekeepers are so certain exists? The data says it’s essentially a myth. How people feel about other people’s disabilities don’t overcome facts.
Invisible Disabilities Are Real Disabilities
Let me be direct.
PTSD is a real disability. It doesn’t show up on a CAT Scan or in a range of motion test.
Tinnitus is a real disability. There’s no blood test for it.
Traumatic brain injury is a real disability. Its effects are often invisible to everyone except the person living with them and the people who love them.
Chronic pain, cognitive impairment, neurological conditions, autoimmune disorders triggered by service. These are real disabilities that produce real functional limitations that genuinely prevent people from working, maintaining relationships, and living the lives they planned.
The fact that the can’t be seen doesn’t make them less real. Sure, it makes them harder to prove. And the difficulty of proving invisible disabilities is exactly why so many veterans with legitimate claims end up underrated or denied.
The Real Problem Nobody’s Addressing
Here’s where I want to challenge the gatekeepers directly – not to attack them, but because I think most of them are missing something important about their own situation.
A lot of the anger I see directed at other veterans’ ratings comes from veterans who are themselves underrated. They did real things. They sustained real damage. And they’re getting 50% or 60% for conditions that should have them at 80% or 90%.
That’s genuinely frustrating. It should make you angry.
But point your anger in the right direction.
The veteran in the parking lot with the disabled plate didn’t underrate you. The claims shark who charged you $8,000 and filed a mediocre claim didn’t help. The C&P examiner who had 20 minutes with you and wrote a superficial report didn’t serve you well. The system that never explained what “contemporaneous evidence” means or how to document functional limitations didn’t set you up for success.
The problem isn’t that other veterans are getting too much. The problem is that you’re almost certainly not be getting enough, and nobody ever taught you how to fix it.
The VA doesn’t automatically track your worsening condition. It doesn’t send you a letter saying “Hey, your symptoms have progressed, here’s an increase.”
This is up to you, and only you! You have to build the case yourself. You have to document functional impact over time. You have to show what your conditions prevent you from doing – not just what you have, but what it costs you every single day.
Many veterans never learn this. They file their claim, get a rating, hope for the best – then get pissed when it’s not what they feel they deserve. They see other veterans – the ones who documented properly, who built their case like a legal argument – get higher ratings, and they assume something unfair is happening.
Something unfair IS happening. But it’s not what they think.
What We Owe Each Other
Those recruits who got medically separated at boot camp in Orlando – the ones whose careers ended before they began because the system they trusted broke their bodies – deserve every dollar of compensation the VA owes them.
The submariner with Multiple Sclerosis deserves it. The Air Force logistics specialist with chronic back pain deserves it. The Army admin clerk with PTSD from MST deserves it. The Navy machinist with neurological damage deserves it.
Every single one of us signed the same contract. We all put ourselves under the authority of a system that could break us in ways we didn’t anticipate and couldn’t predict. We all agreed to accept that risk in service to something larger than ourselves.
The least we can do, the absolute minimum, is stop tearing each other down over it.
The veteran community has real enemies. Predatory claims companies extracting money from people who were already owed compensation. A system so confusing that most claimants don’t understand their own rights. Politicians who wrap themselves in the flag while cutting the benefits of the people who earned them.
Fellow veterans are not the enemy. The underrated veteran directing his frustration at a disabled parking space is fighting the wrong battle.
Figure out how to build your own case. Document your functional limitations. Learn how the system actually works. Get the rating you deserve.
And then help the veteran next to you do the same.
We’re all in this together. Every one of us.
Shane is a 100% P&T disabled veteran with MS and the founder of TrackMySymptoms – a symptom tracking application designed specifically for VA and SSDI disability claims. He was approved for SSDI in less than 5 months. trackmysymptoms.org