Founding Story
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The VA approved my dying father's mobility equipment. Four months later, nothing.
This is the first Brown Water Veterans video: a family's account of delayed equipment, unanswered calls, care gaps, and the burden placed on veterans and caregivers when basic support does not arrive.
Watch the videoVideo
Veterans deserve better.
Watch directly on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4DBDOu1do0
Why This Page Exists
My father is a Vietnam-era Navy veteran with a Brown Water Navy exposure history. He served this country for 10 years. Decades later, our family is still fighting for basic support: mobility equipment, medication help, dental care, transportation support, home care, and answers.
This project will document stories like his, organize resources, and build tools that help veterans and families record what happened in a way that is clear, useful, and safe to share.
Resource Starting Points
Open the full VA resources pageBrown Water Veterans is an advocacy, organization, and storytelling project. It is not legal, medical, or benefits advice.
The documented record
What the documents say — and only what they say.
This project's founding sailor is Thomas Alan Bowman Sr., Radioman Second Class, United States Navy, 1960–1970 — a man who volunteered twice. His DD-214 records his last duty station as USS ARIKARA (ATF-98), a fleet ocean tug, and an honorable discharge on February 10, 1970.
His final deployment is documented in the VA's own hand. His Agent Orange Registry examination of September 12, 2019 records — in the VA's words — “Exposure Periods: 12/69 to 2/70,” “anchored in Denang harbor. Involved in salvage operations off shore.” And VA's own Agent Orange ships list names ARIKARA twice — including “docked to piers at Da Nang from September to December 1969.” The VA mailed him the old harbor exclusion in August 2019, then granted his diabetes “associated with herbicide exposure” in January 2020 and the presumptive cancers at 100% in 2022–23.
Where that service sits under the law — brown water, blue water, or the harbor seam between them — is set out on the classification page, on the verified line: what the record shows, what the family holds as his account, and what would settle it. The full account of what the VA did with the rest of his life is kept at DearDougCollins.com — including his own account of a radioman's exposures, the solvents, the transmitters, and the asbestos, published there in full: The Radioman.
Tell your story
Have you been betrayed by the VA?
This record grows one documented story at a time. If the VA failed you or someone you love, your account belongs on it — under your name, anonymously, or held in the record only. You choose, and your choice is honored exactly as given.