Pegi Scarlett had just returned from her husband’s grave this past Memorial Day — the first since his death — when, on a whim, she decided to search online whether other Vietnam vets had died of the same aggressive brain cancer.

With a few keystrokes, she found a Facebook group with a couple hundred widows like herself, whose veteran husbands had died of glioblastoma.

She also found an intriguing article: A widow in Missouri had fought for almost eight years before convincing the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs that she was entitled to benefits for her husband’s fatal brain cancer because of his exposure to the toxic defoliant Agent Orange.

“Shocked is probably the word,” Scarlett said, describing her reaction to what she found. “Story after story after story.”

Many Vietnam veterans are battling the VA to compensate them for a growing list of ailments they believe are caused by their exposure to Agent Orange.

But because of the seriousness of glioblastoma multiforme — which is often fatal within months — widows are the ones left to fight.

“There’s not a lot of people who fully understand what we’ve all gone through,” said Scarlett, who is now one of the leaders of the Facebook group, where women trade stories and help each other build their cases for benefits. Scarlett, who lives outside Sacramento, brought an important skillset.

As a certified tumor registrar, the 64-year-old spends her days searching through patients’ medical records, logging details about their lives and cancer diagnoses to help the state of California look for patterns.

Now, in her off hours, she gathers information about veterans who’ve died of glioblastoma, hoping to persuade the VA it should provide benefits to their widows. They believe dioxin, a contaminant of Agent Orange, caused their husbands’ cancers.

VA data shows that more than 500 Vietnam-era veterans have been diagnosed with glioblastoma at VA health facilities since 2000. That doesn’t include the unknown number diagnosed at private facilities.

But brain cancer isn’t included on the VA’s list of diseases presumed to be connected to Agent Orange exposure.

Instead, widows must navigate a complicated claims and appeals process to show the cancer was “at least as likely as not” linked to the chemicals.

Proving exposure and harm is difficult for veterans; it’s perhaps even more challenging for widows, many of whom don’t have full command of their husbands’ service histories and have never had to deal directly with the VA bureaucracy.

The way the VA works, every benefits appeal is fought anew as if no others preceded it. So just because one widow succeeds, that doesn’t mean others will.

“How can they approve one claim and deny another one with the same information?” Scarlett said. “There’s no rhyme or reason.”

Cases can drag out for six, eight, 10 years. One New York widow filed a claim in 1993, a month or two after her husband died of brain cancer. It’s still pending. The VA did not answer questions about its handling of glioblastoma claims for this story.

Despite the obstacles, some widows have found a way to win. While the VA cites studies that don’t show an association between brain cancer and Agent Orange, the widows have found other studies that do, as well as a 1990 report written by Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., the commander of naval forces in Vietnam who authorized the spraying and later chronicled its harmful effects.

If a widow is able to convince the VA her husband died from an illness caused by his military service, she is eligible for thousands of dollars each year in survivor benefits. Because the compensation is retroactive to when the initial claim was filed, some widows stand to receive tens of thousands of dollars, or more, upon winning their cases.

That’s proven challenging for most.

Since 2009, the Board of Veterans’ Appeals has issued more than 100 decisions in cases in which widows have appealed benefits denials related to their husbands’ brain cancer, according to a ProPublica analysis of board decisions. About two dozen have won.

Laurel Holt, 65, was one of them. She had to sell her house and borrow money from relatives after her husband, Kenneth, died in September 2011, after a 19-month struggle with glioblastoma.

In Vietnam, Kenneth Holt had sprayed Agent Orange from inside an Army helicopter. His uniform was routinely soaked in the toxin, he’d told her.

She won her appeal this July, nearly five years after his death, and has become a leader of the widows support group on Facebook, assisting three dozen women file claims and appeals.

“It’s a horrendous illness and death, for the wife, too, because she’s right in there in the thick of it with her husband,” Holt said. “And nobody should have to turn around after that and have to fight another battle. No widow should have to do that on her own.”

If a veteran can prove he served in Vietnam and has one of 14 conditions linked to Agent Orange, including diabetes, ischemic heart disease and some other types of cancers, he is automatically eligible for VA benefits.

Since brain cancer isn’t on the list, the onus falls to recently diagnosed vets or their widows to prove their conditions are linked to their exposure.

This often involves having a doctor write a letter to the VA asserting a possible connection and attaching some scientific support.

One veteran’s widow submitted a letter from a prominent epidemiologist who works for the New York State Department of Health. Another turned in a letter from a neuro-oncologist at the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke University.

She wrote that Agent Orange was a “significant factor in causing, contributing to, or aggravating brain tumors in Vietnam veterans.”

Some say the VA’s default position is to reject claims for conditions not on the agency’s presumptive list. “They’re still supposed to consider each case on an individual basis. That’s not what happens,” said Rory Riley-Topping, a consultant and former staff director for the House VA Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs. “You end up in that hamster wheel.”

The wait for a hearing before the Board of Veterans’ Appeals is growing ever longer. In the 2015 fiscal year, the board held 12,738 hearings; the number of veterans waiting for a hearing topped 81,000. The number of hearings has gone up slightly since fiscal year 2009, but the waiting list has doubled.

Among those whose cases have been heard, a growing number of widows have found support from judges in the past few years.

“The weight of the evidence supports a finding that the veteran’s exposure to herbicides in service contributed substantially to the development of his fatal brain cancer,” wrote one judge in September 2014.

Another wrote in March 2015: “There is support in the evidence for the (widow’s) contention that there is a link between Agent Orange and brain tumors.” (Source: ProPublica and The Virginian-Pilot | Charles Ornstein &Mike Hixenbaugh | December 28, 2016)

By Thomas Crisp

Contributing Columnist

Thomas Crisp is a retired military officer from Whitmire.