What did your disability rating change?
Nobody we interviewed calls it a windfall. Ten Veterans on the exam, the wait and the odd guilt of being told yes.
By Vegas Veteran Voices,
These are Veterans’ own accounts, not benefits or legal advice. Vegas Veteran Voices does not file or advise on claims. Written November 2026.
The doctor asked him what the ringing sounds like. “Cheeks” Aguillon, a U.S. Army Veteran and former chaplain assistant who now serves on the Vegas Veteran Voices board, told him: high-pitched, comes and goes, and sometimes a pop, after which his hearing drops out and creeps back. The doctor thought about it.
“He goes, ‘I’m [going to] put down that you have [tinnitus] only because I can’t prove that you don’t.’”
Aguillon’s reply, in full: “Cool. Thanks.”
That is roughly the emotional register of every rating story we have. Not gratitude, not rage. A long look at a person behind a desk. In interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit, ten Veterans talked about being rated by VA. We went in expecting to hear what the number changed. Mostly we heard what it was like to be measured.
The exam
Aguillon is rated at 70 percent. In the field with a route clearance unit, he says, a big piece of equipment was dropped on his leg. He can recite the letter that came back about it.
“This is evidence in your favor. Treatment of condition while in service, not service related.”
He calls that sentence his favorite.
The part that stayed with him was the appointment about PTSD, which is his word for it. As a chaplain assistant he had worked something like 18 memorial ceremonies. He had watched a shooting from a guard tower. He counts four events in his service that changed how he reacts to things, and he sat down across from a psychologist to go through them. He got through two.
“And I was like, I’m not even done. There’s way more stuff than that. And he goes, ‘No, I think I got you.’”
It went his way. He does not tell it as a win. He tells it as the time he finally started saying it out loud and the meeting ended. His summary of the whole experience is four words long: “VA is the VA.”
Chelsey Gray, a U.S. Marine Corps Veteran and parachute rigger, describes the opposite appointment. Nobody cut her off. Nobody said much of anything.
“They don’t ask you any questions. They just let you talk. And I’m like, ‘You’re supposed to be discovering about me. Why aren’t you asking me questions about myself?’”
One Veteran stopped mid-story, one left talking into the quiet. Neither describes being heard.
The wait
Delvin Bourn, a U.S. Army Veteran, 82nd Airborne paratrooper and Gulf War Veteran, got sick years after he served. A neurologist hammered on his knees and elbows and got nothing back, then told him his career was over. He was three months behind on everything when somebody rear-ended his truck, and the insurance money went straight to the mortgage.
“I took that money and I paid the three months on my house because I was just about ready to lose my house.”
That was 2014. Then came the claim.
“It took them about another 18 months for them to get me to 100%. So I was living on 900 bucks.”
Along the way a doctor told him she could see the condition but could not tie it to his service. Bourn happened to have a letter the government had once mailed his unit, saying they had been in a chemical plume in Iraq. He had kept it for no reason he can explain.
“I said, ‘I better keep this. This looks important.’ So I said, ‘Will this help you?’ She goes, ‘You’re connected.’”
That is his story, and we are not offering it as a method. What we notice is the tone. Eighteen months on $900 and his word for the ending is “sweet.” Then, a breath later, the part he is still turning over: you get hurt, and nobody tells you in what order anything happens, or how you are supposed to live in the meantime.
When yours goes fine
Now the opposite experience. Joe “Doc” Worley, a U.S. Navy corpsman who holds a Bronze Star with valor and a Purple Heart, was wounded by a roadside bomb in 2004. Nobody asked him to prove much.
“Going through the process is a lot easier when you’re above knee amputee and you’re scarred up the way that I am.”
You would expect relief. That is not what he reports.
“Weirdly, that doesn’t give me peace.”
What bothers him is everyone whose injury does not show. He says people who served and came back hurt, without a thing they can point at, have a much harder road than he did, and that the experience depends on where you are: “every VA is an island.” He knows people who were done in two months and people on walkers who are still at it. His own went smoothly, and he has a picture for the institution anyway.
“In a lot of ways, the VA is like a guy that owes you money who wants to pay you back, but you got to catch him walking around.”
So Bourn waited a year and a half, Worley barely waited, and both of them are describing the same thing: it goes easier when the damage is visible or already written down, and that fact sits badly even with the people it helped.
“Do I deserve to be here?”
AJ Kehl, a U.S. Air Force Veteran with more than 22 years of service and a career firefighter, did not know where to start.
“When you go to do your disability claim, I found that you need help. I didn’t know what to do exactly.”
He asked around. Peers first, then Veterans Service Officers, and he came away with a better opinion of them than he expected: “They’re there to help you, man.” Hear it at 42:23
Gray tried the same free help and tells it differently. She says she got to 90 percent “after waiting for years,” Hear it at 38:04 and she kept the paper.
“I have a whole giant folder of all the rejection letters, all the things, for six years actually.”
Her verdict on those years: “all the free VSO stuff was not doing what they needed to do for me.” Hear it at 35:21 Same kind of free help, two Veterans, two accounts. We report both and rank neither.
For Kehl, the harder thing he describes is not paperwork. It is the feeling of being in the wrong line. He first names it talking about a treatment program he attended, Shields and Stripes.
“That imposter syndrome is real though. I felt that at Shields and Stripes. You go in and, yeah, you have your own trauma, but do I deserve to be here?”
Then he says the quiet part, the one a lot of Veterans carry into any conversation about a rating:
“Don’t be the tough guy and be like, ‘Oh, I don’t deserve it because so and so in the Marines is in a foxhole.’”
An Air Force fire chief, measuring himself against a Marine he has invented for the purpose. Every branch does this. The Marine in the foxhole is doing it too, about somebody else.
A few seconds later in that interview the same doubt gets a number on it.
“I would see people get 100% and I would think, okay, yeah, I have some stuff, but is it really worthy of 100%?”
We have a Marine infantryman on tape to confirm it. Travis Jewell, a Marine Corps Veteran and mortarman with 1/6 who now makes military comedy skits, says a civilian had to tell him to get checked out before he left. His back and knees were shot and his first question was whether that was even a thing.
“That was my mindset. I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t need help. Oh, I don’t need to make a claim. I’m good.’ I’m strong. I’m big man. I’m infantry man.”
Gray does the same arithmetic out loud, in the middle of listing what jumping as a parachute rigger did to her spine, hips and knees.
“I know there’s more people that have experienced even worse things than me, like limbs and all these horrible things.”
A breath later she says she is in pain all the time. The Veteran in that sentence is Worley, more or less, and he is the one who cannot make peace with how easy his was.
Jo MT, a 20 year Air Force bomb loader who is now a stand-up comedian, is rated at 100 percent: his neck, his back and, he says, his psyche. He has no patience for the guilt and comes at it from the top of the seniority ladder.
“I served for 20 years. I don’t look down at somebody who served for four and got their back broken.”
“The piece of the pie doesn’t shorten for anybody else just because you got your piece.”
He is also a comic, so the part he will actually brag about is his license plate, which he says gets him free street parking in Las Vegas. We have not checked the parking rules and that is not the point. The point is that the one guest who is entirely at peace with his number is the one who can make a room laugh about it.
So that is the disagreement, and it is not really about benefits. Kehl had to talk himself into believing he belonged. Jewell had to be talked into it by somebody else. Gray fought six years for hers and still stops to say others had it worse. Jo MT never doubted it and thinks the doubt is a mistake. Worley had no reason to doubt and feels uneasy precisely because it was easy.
What it changed
Here is the honest answer from our tapes: less than the question assumes.
Ross D. Bryant, a U.S. Army Veteran who leads UNLV Military and Veteran Services, has heard the argument that a Veteran who can hold a job has no business with a high rating. He answers with his own life.
“I’m at 80%. I still have a job and I’m still working and I’m still mentally having a sense of purpose helping other vets.”
Bobi Pike-Oates, a retired Air Force Senior Master Sergeant, mentions hers in passing, on the way to another point: “I’m 50% disabled, but I still do my medical care out at Nellis.” Hear it at 54:38 Same base, same routine.
For Bourn it changed whether he kept the house. For Jo MT it is what he lives on. Gray says that without hers she could not do the work she does now. For Bryant and Pike-Oates it changed almost nothing you could see from outside. Nobody describes it as the day everything got better. Nobody describes it as money for nothing, either. What they describe is closer to a debt being acknowledged by someone slow.
And nobody claims to understand the machine. In one of our earliest episodes, Tom “Ghost” Martin, a Marine Corps Veteran of Desert Storm who says he has been at this for 15 years, put it this way: “I’m a gnat on the ass of a big bull and that big bull is our VA system.” Hear it at 13:24
We will admit something. We have never once asked a guest, on camera, “What did you feel the day it came through?” We are going to start.
Where to go from here
If you have a question about the rules, we are the wrong people. VA says the services of an accredited Veterans Service Organization representative are always free. These are places that exist and what each one is. A listing is not an endorsement.
- Veterans Service Officers, Nevada Department of Veterans Services. State Veterans Service Officers, accredited by VA, who work on VA claims with Veterans and families at no cost. The Las Vegas team sits inside the VA hospital in North Las Vegas. (702) 224-6025 ext. 46025.
- VA, get help from an accredited representative. VA’s own search for accredited attorneys, claims agents and Veterans Service Organization representatives anywhere in the country.
- VA, how to file a disability claim. The official page on the process, kept current by the people who run it.
If you are a Veteran in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, call 988 and press 1, or text 838255. The Veterans Crisis Line is free and confidential, 24 hours a day.
Go hear them say it
Every quote above links to the second it was said. Start with Aguillon’s exam or Worley’s guy who owes you money. More places to turn in Southern Nevada are at Veteran resources in Las Vegas.
Stories quoted in this article
- Cheeks on Set: From Barracks to Behind the Camera
- Something Wasn’t Right | Delvin Bourn (US Army Veteran)
- Every Veteran Is On Their Own After the Uniform. Doc and the MIC Founder Prove That's a Lie.
- Every Marine Calls It a Brotherhood. She's Finally Saying What Hers Did. / Chelsey Gray
- Every Lance Corporal Is Thinking It. Travis Jewell Says It. (@jewell_jits)
- Redefining Veteran Healing w/ Shields and Stripes | AJ KEHL
- Comedy, MREs, and the Cost of Military Life w/ Jo MT
- Most Veterans Don’t Know Their Education Benefits, The Man Who’s Helped 9,000 Claim Them
- She Paved The Way For Women In The Air Force | Bobi Pike-Oates | US Military
- "GHOST" // From Warfighter to Local Legend: The Untold Story of Ghost & the Leatherneck Club (recorded before Vegas Veteran Voices became a nonprofit)