The PACT Act is one of the biggest expansions of VA benefits in decades. That sounds dramatic, because it is. For a long time, veterans exposed to burn pits, toxic dust, and other environmental hazards were stuck proving the unprovable. The PACT Act finally admits the obvious. Breathing garbage smoke and chemical soup for months or years tends to wreck human bodies. If you served in certain places, during certain periods, and now you’re dealing with specific conditions, the VA is no longer supposed to make you jump through flaming hoops to prove causation. That’s the whole point. Let’s talk about what the PACT Act actually does, who it helps, and how to file a claim without accidentally kneecapping yourself.
The VA boils PTSD down to three questions. Did something traumatic happen during service? Do you have a current diagnosis that meets VA standards? Is there a link between that trauma and your current symptoms? If the answer to all three is yes, you’ve got a real claim. Everything else is secondary.
Most veterans hear about disability ratings as a numbers game. Ten percent here, thirty percent there, stack them together, and eventually you land wherever the VA’s mysterious math sends you. For a lot of veterans, that system breaks down when real life shows up. That’s where TDIU comes in. TDIU stands for Total Disability based on Individual Unemployability. It’s the VA’s way of saying this: even if your combined rating isn’t 100 percent, your service connected conditions keep you from holding substantially gainful employment, so we’re going to pay you at the 100 percent rate anyway. That sentence matters more than it looks like it should.
