Dale Karst is finally cancer-free.
The 77-year-old Raymore resident served back-to-back tours in Vietnam for the U.S Air Force, but Karst said the battle for his health has been the toughest one yet.
“There's only a couple of times in my life I thought I was about to die,” he said. One was during the Battle of Saigon in 1968. The other “was a couple of months ago when I was fighting this cancer.”
The clashes Karst fought overseas and the ones he faced back home are actually linked. Exposure to the chemical defoliant Agent Orange while deployed contributed directly to his diabetes and throat cancer, first diagnosed in May. Karst also has post-traumatic stress disorder.
Even though Karst is now cancer-free, he still faces hurdles. Speaking is a laborious, slow, and deliberate process, and every few minutes he has to pause to take a drink because his salivary glands don’t quite work anymore. That’s from several rounds of radiation. Karst must eat through a feeding tube and, for the rest of his life, will need to do throat exercises daily.
“I'm trying to get to a point someday where I'll be able to get rid of this pain in my throat and be able to speak like a normal human being,” he said.
But even getting to this point would have been difficult to afford if it weren’t for the help Karst got from service officers with the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Last year, these trained experts helped recover about $14.6 billion in compensatory awards for veterans nationwide.
“I can’t say enough good things about the Veteran Service Officers,” Karst said. “I probably wouldn’t be alive without their help.”
Service officers help file between 80 and 100 claims locally each year, according to Ron Cherry, associate director of the National Veterans Service Department of the Kansas City VFW.
Disability compensation is an earned benefit for veterans who sustain injuries or illnesses during service. Eligibility for these Veterans Affairs benefits requires a veteran to prove a connection between the health issue and their service, otherwise known as a nexus. Benefits start at $180 dollars a month and max out at about $4,000 a month, depending on the severity.
In Karst’s case, Cherry and colleagues helped push his disability from the bottom of the scale all the way to the top. The change means treatment costs won’t hinder other areas of his life.
“It can be a very confusing claims system if you don't know all the paperwork you need, the follow-up process, if you don't know your time limits, or the necessary codes and regulations,” Cherry said.
Those hurdles can lead to delays or hesitancy from veterans to even get their claims going. Some think it will be a costly process, Cherry said, and others just don’t know about this avenue.
“We’re kind of the middleman for veterans as far as helping file paperwork, meet deadlines, or navigate the system when they can’t,” Cherry said.
VA data from 2023 suggests veterans who access their benefits are at lower risk of dying by suicide.
On average, the claims process might take anywhere from six months to a year when working with a Veterans Service Officer. Once the VA has reviewed everything, they provide a ruling on the extent of the disability, after which veterans can appeal. An appeal can take anywhere from a year to, in one case Cherry is currently working on, seven years.
It can be a laborious process, but Cherry stressed that he and his colleagues do the work for free. He warned some law firms will charge veterans for the service.
These for-profit consultants, often called “claim sharks,” charge thousands to help file claims — an illegal venture without proper VA accreditation, but there is no criminal penalty for violating the law.
“We don't feel that veterans should need to pay others to obtain the benefit that they're already entitled to,” Cherry said.
