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.
#1: Vicomte13 To: Charles_Byrd (#0)
I was a pilot, and spendtbetween 4 and 8 hours everyday in the cockpit, sitting 6 feet under two roaring jet engines and a loud gearbox. We wore earplugs. BUT we had to hear the radios.. SO, we wore earplugs to muffle the sound of the engines, but then we had to turn up the radios so that we could hear them in our helmets THROUGH the earplugs, which made them earsplittingly loud.
Of course, therefore, I have a significant hearing loss.
And if the person talking to me is saying something annoying, my hearing gets even worse.
Go figure.
Vicomte13 posted on 2023-10-08 10:45:52 Reply Private Reply