I certainly know of what you speak about being in areas where you are completely your own and off the farm. The reason I mention it was the attorney that I worked with back in the day of dealing with this, was up against government legal beagles that had data about our unit's position, detailed with reference coordinates, time and dates, and so much more. I kept a journal that was updated daily as I processed and tried to cope and understand what I was in the middle of. But my notes from that journal were not "legal tender" in the argument. When TAD to a ROK marine unit that was short medical staff, we crossed the line into places that our government (who sent us there) was saying we never were. THey denied we were in another non-combatant involved nation for decades after the war. There turned out to be so mush BS and grey area, that I just dropped it after awhile, since I was not actively ill at the time, but only wanted to get on the list in case I developed some crap in the future.

In my own case HPV16 was positively identified in the tissue sample, so for me OC was not part of my military history.... just the nightmares.

When I came back to the world, I was in San Francisco with a writer who had spent some time with our unit while I was really short. We were walking down in Haight-Ashbury (the world was way different in those days), and there was a blind guy selling stuff to get by, on one of the street corners. He had a sign around his neck which read "My days are darker than your nights" After dropping a couple of bucks in is jar, I bent over and said softly to him, buddy, you have no f*&^ing clue how dark my nights are..... The writer laughed and said that was such a good line that he would use it in the future.

There are times when Nam seems the full 40 years ago, and others when it seems like yesterday.