Can You Receive VA Disability Benefits With a OTH Discharge?

Veterans often reach out to us with an OTH discharge, which stands for other than honorable. Other than honorable discharges are often given to service members if they get in trouble or do not meet expectations for retention during their military service. This could constitute a misdemeanor. Perhaps someone served in a deployment zone and afterwards they started to use drugs and alcohol to self-medicate their symptoms. Unfortunately, if there’s a positive drug test, the military will oftentimes discharge them and give them an OTH discharge, which compromises their ability to receive essential benefits like the ones administered by the VA that are really important for their reintegration into civilian life. I often find that those cases are the ones I love because the veteran has the most to gain. Oftentimes, they have spun their wheels trying to reach out for a representative who doesn’t understand the complex or nuanced rules surrounding entitlement to VA disability compensation when someone has a less than honorable discharge. Those are the cases we’re great at. We’ll work with you to develop lay evidence, meaning your own personal story, so that we can fill the pieces of the puzzle together and complete this picture so that the VA understands that there were extenuating or mitigating circumstances behind the behavior that led to your OTH discharge. It’s oftentimes the thing that feels like making something out of nothing. You’re working with folks who often deserve it, and they’re usually the ones that have the hardest time establishing their eligibility for VA disability compensation.