What are your thoughts on 'burn pits?'

CH (MAJ) William Beaver — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 20:16:14 -0400

What are YOUR thoughts on 'burn pits' downrange?

Response by CPT Zachary Brooks made Apr 22 at 2015 8:16 PM

CPT Zachary Brooks — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 20:16:46 -0400

Waste of money and resources, but damn fun to watch!

Response by SSG Gerhard S. made May 16 at 2015 8:55 PM

SSG Gerhard S. — Sat, 16 May 2015 20:55:32 -0400

Clearly there are obvious, and developing health issues, but often, there is little other choice but to burn some waste, particularly of the contaminated variety.

Response by SP6 Samuel Hargis made Aug 24 at 2022 10:49 PM

SP6 Samuel Hargis — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 22:49:45 -0400

We use burn p it to destroy medical refuge in Honduras between May 1987 to Oct 1987. It was necessary in order to keep civilian population out of contaminated waste which we had at the hospital there

Response by SSgt Michael Grafmuller made Sep 19 at 2022 9:07 PM

SSgt Michael Grafmuller — Mon, 19 Sep 2022 21:07:56 -0400

By n pits were an irresponsible and lazy method for f controlling waste without regard for human life, we all knew burning tires and batteries in jet fuel was a bad idea but so many other things were burned and without even locating the pits as far away from the most populated areas of the large bases. The burn pit issue is proof that we were numbers. Now years later they do not truely care. This falls in line with the military practice of discouraging disclosure of combat stresses resulting in PTSD issues going untreated allowing them to become much worse then finding reasons to discipline troops for comments or verbal outbursts resulting from not addressing and downplaying issues. Luckily VA has ways to still provide benefits, unfortunately they hide the existence of the insanity exception of ne’er title 38 of the code of federal regulations section 3.354 and wrongly deny it initially and on the first several levels of review. This needs to be advertised to veterans and VA employees must be properly retrained to automatically and correctly apply the insanity exception to all possible periods of service not otherwise qualified for benefits. The other problem is many VA employees, especially those deciding disability benefits do not realize that every reenlistment counts as an honorable discharge and those who served a full honorable term should get benefits and those who served honorable for part of an enlistment should qualify for benefits under the insanity exception. Va needs to automatically recognize honorable enlistments by re-enlistment even when something goes wrong. There needs to be a point for officers that made 10 years honorable before problems as they have no reenlistment protection. The VA fails to make every effort to to give the veteran the benefit of any doubt and apply law beneficial to veterans.

The veteran service organizations also provide absolutely no assistance to veterans who need their help the most, they have no idea how to help with the insanity exception and I have helped numerous vets get benefits with dishonorable and bad conduct discharges resulting from being failed by their branch of service when I hey needed help.