Single Judge Application; acoustic trauma; Reeves v. Shinseki, 682 F.3d 988, 998-99 (Fed. Cir. 2012); In cases where noise exposure has been conceded, the Board must still determine whether a veteran is entitled to the combat presumption afforded under section 1154(b), because a failure to do so results in an analysis that “conflates the question of whether [a veteran] was exposed to acoustic trauma with the issue of whether he suffered permanent hearing loss while on active duty.”; Reeves v. Shinseki, 682 F.3d 988, 998-99 (Fed. Cir. 2012). In Reeves, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Federal Circuit) concluded that “although the record contained evidence of the cause of [the veteran’s] disability–acoustic trauma mortar blasts . . . –he still had the right to invoke the section 1154(b) presumption in order to show that he incurred the disability itself while in service.” Id. at 999 (emphasis in original); - Veterans VA Disability Claim Community