Betrayed, Not Forgotten

The black flag that flies over every VA facility carries four words: You are not forgotten. It is not a decoration. It is a promise — an accounting covenant, the country's standing vow that it will keep the account for its own, no matter how long it takes or what the account shows.

This section keeps that account for a harder class of cases: the men and women who were not lost to the enemy, but to their own institutions — left on a mountaintop in the record as surely as on the ground, their medals lost in a drawer, their names denied by the very bureaucracies built to honor them. Every page here is built the way the rest of this site is built: from documents — official citations, court records, inspector-general and service investigations, statutes, and the institutions’ own words. Where the record is contested, the page says so. Where a family carried the fight, the family’s name is on the page too, because in case after case, the family was the accounting department.

The first page

MSgt John A. Chapman — the man who fought alone, and the fight that never ended. An Air Force combat controller left for dead on Takur Ghar in 2002 who fought on alone for an hour — on film — while his institution took sixteen years to say so, and its museum, in 2025, still would not give him an exhibit. His sister has now carried his record for more than two decades. His is the flagship page because his case has everything this section exists to document: the sacrifice, the evidence, the institutional resistance, and the family that refused to stop.

The Fallen

This wall is a dedication before it is a list.

Some of the names on it died with medals that arrived fifty years late. Some died with no medal at all. Some were executed by their own Army and exonerated a century later; some were poisoned slowly by water their own base provided; some were sent home as “contractors” in coffins their families paid to ship. And some of the names are not individuals but units — and behind every unit’s name stand the names no page could carry: the 320 who died in the Port Chicago explosion, before the survivors were court-martialed for refusing to repeat the work; the 879 sailors of USS Indianapolis who never came home; the 38 WASP who died flying for a country that did not call them veterans.

Honor here is not rationed by decoration. A name stands on this wall because the record carries it — a citation, a court record, an inspector-general’s or a service’s own investigation, a statute — and because somebody, usually a family, refused to let the account close. Where a page is still being verified, the name waits. The documented roster holds 73 cases; the wall grows only as fast as the documents allow, and that is deliberate. A wall that guesses honors no one.

The wall also stands behind a living man. This site exists because Thomas Alan Bowman, Sr. — ten years in the United States Navy, rated 100% service-connected, now in hospice in Daytona Beach — was promised that when he could no longer stand on his own, his country would stand behind him. The names below were made the same promise, in other centuries and other wars. Read them the way their families read them: not as history, but as accounts still open.

The Honor List

Ten names, ranked by a simple test: a documented wrong, a real sacrifice, and a fight somebody carried. All ten pages are published, in this order. Below the list, the whole roll — the ten included — is shelved in halls, by the conflict in which each wrong originated.

1. MSgt John A. Chapman (USAF) — Died alone on Takur Ghar after being left for dead; fought an hour on film. The institution took 16 years to say so, and its museum still won’t. (Page published.)
2. SFC Alwyn C. Cashe (Army) — Ran into a burning Bradley three times to pull his men out; died of his burns. His sister Kasinal fought 16 years; Congress had to waive the legal time limit for his Medal of Honor (2021). (Page published.)
3. SPC Vanessa Guillén (Army) — Murdered at Fort Hood by a fellow soldier while the command failed her family’s pleas; the Army’s own review documented the rot. Her mother and sisters forced the I Am Vanessa Guillén Act. (Page published.)
4. Sgt Rafael Peralta (USMC) — Fell on a grenade to save his Marines — an act his own Navy Cross citation describes — yet three Secretaries of Defense refused the Medal of Honor. His mother Rosa refused the lesser medal for years. (Page published.)
5. Sgt Henry Johnson (Army) — Fought off a German raider party in WWI, wounded 21 times, saving his fellow sentry. Came home to Jim Crow silence; Medal of Honor in 2015 — 97 years later. This section’s “finally accounted” exhibit: the one they finally got right, and the proof that accounting can arrive even a century late. (Page published.)
6. CPT William D. Swenson (Army) — Ran into fire repeatedly at Ganjgal to recover the fallen, American and Afghan. The Army admitted it LOST his Medal of Honor packet; he waited years while the paperwork was “misplaced.” (Page published.)
7. The Port Chicago 256 (USN) — After the 1944 explosion that killed 320, Black sailors who refused to return to the same unsafe loading were convicted of mutiny. Fully exonerated by the Secretary of the Navy on July 17, 2024 — eighty years on. (Page published.)
8. CPT Le Roy Torres (Army Reserve) — Lungs destroyed by burn pits in Iraq; Texas DPS refused to hold his job, and the state fought him all the way to the Supreme Court — and lost (2022). His wife Rosie built Burn Pits 360 out of their kitchen-table fight. (Page published.)
9. Elaine Harmon & the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) — 38 WASP died in service in WWII and were treated as civilians; families paid to ship their daughters home. Harmon’s daughter and grandchildren won back their Arlington honors by law in 2016. (Page published.)
10. Mike Partain (Camp Lejeune, born on base) — One of the poisoned: male breast cancer from the base’s contaminated water. Carried the fight for Lejeune’s families for decades, to the Camp Lejeune Justice Act of 2022. (Page published.)

The halls

The ten above were the founding list, not the whole account. The documented record holds far more names — every one graded against the same bar: a documented wrong, a real sacrifice, and a fight somebody carried, anchored in citations, court records, investigations, or statutes. These pages are published in batches as each one is verified against its documents.

The roll is shelved by conflict — by where the wrong originated, not by the year the account was settled, which is often generations later. A man exposed in one war and vindicated in another century is filed where he was wronged. Where the fight itself was fought at home — in Congress, in the courts, in the VA’s own waiting rooms — the page is cross-referenced under The Fights at Home. One name, one hall; cross-references are marked where they stand.

World War I

• Sgt Henry Johnson (Army) — Fought off a German raider party in 1918, wounded 21 times, saving his fellow sentry. Came home to Jim Crow silence; Medal of Honor in 2015 — 97 years later, the one they finally got right.
• Freddie Stowers (Army) — Killed leading the assault on Côte 188 on September 28, 1918, and recommended for the Medal of Honor — a recommendation the Army misplaced and never processed. The Army’s own review found it in 1990; his sisters received the medal on April 24, 1991.
• William Shemin (Army) — Three rescues across the Vesle River in August 1918 earned him the Distinguished Service Cross instead of the Medal of Honor his commander recommended. His daughter’s fifteen-year campaign won the WWI review law that carried his case; the medal came on June 2, 2015 — in the same ceremony as Henry Johnson’s.
• The Houston 110 — 3rd Battalion, 24th Infantry (Army) — After Houston police beat and arrested Black soldiers, 118 were tried in the largest murder trial in U.S. history, 110 convicted, and 19 executed with no appeal. On November 13, 2023, the Secretary of the Army set aside all 110 convictions and corrected the records to honorable — 106 years later.
• The Hello Girls — Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit (Army) — 223 bilingual women sworn in, uniformed, ranked, and put under military discipline to run the AEF’s telephones in France — then told on return they had been civilian contractors, and denied status, discharges, and benefits for 60 years. Veteran status came in 1977; the Congressional Gold Medal was signed into law in December 2024.

World War II

• The Shaw Seven (Army) — Of 432 WWII Medals of Honor, none went to any of the more than one million Black servicemen. An Army-commissioned Shaw University study found the cases the wartime Army had passed over; President Clinton awarded seven Medals of Honor on January 13, 1997 — Vernon Baker the only man alive to receive his. Three names on the study’s list were never upgraded.
• The 22 — Asian American WWII soldiers, incl. Daniel K. Inouye (Army) — The 100th Battalion and 442nd RCT were among the most decorated units in American history while Japanese American families sat in internment camps; their Distinguished Service Crosses were never upgraded in wartime. A congressionally ordered review produced 22 Medals of Honor on June 21, 2000.
• The Valor Review 24 (Army) — Twenty-four soldiers — seven of WWII, nine of Korea, eight of Vietnam — did the deeds the Medal of Honor exists for and received the Distinguished Service Cross instead, along lines of race, ethnicity, and faith. A review of 602 files took twelve years; the medals came on March 18, 2014, three men living. Filed here, where the review began; cross-referenced in the Korea and Vietnam halls.
• Garlin M. Conner (Army) — At Houssen in January 1945 his commander sent a Distinguished Service Cross instead of the Medal of Honor, expressly so Conner could go home wearing an award. The Board rejected the upgrade in 1997 and 2000; his widow sued, and the medal came on June 26, 2018.
• The Port Chicago 256 (USN) — After the 1944 explosion that killed 320, Black sailors who refused to return to the same unsafe loading were convicted of mutiny. Fully exonerated by the Secretary of the Navy on July 17, 2024 — eighty years on.
• Elaine Harmon & the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) — 38 WASP died in service in WWII and were treated as civilians; families paid to ship their daughters home. Harmon’s daughter and grandchildren won back their Arlington honors by law in 2016.
• The Filipino Veterans (U.S. Army / Philippine Commonwealth Army) — Some 260,000 Filipinos were called into U.S. service in 1941 with promised veteran benefits and citizenship; the Rescission Acts of 1946 declared their service not active U.S. service and stripped both. One-time payments came in 2009 and a Congressional Gold Medal in 2017; full parity has never been restored and is still being sought in Congress.
• Freeman Field — the 477th Bombardment Group (Army Air Forces) — Black officers barred from the white officers’ club in violation of Army regulations; in April 1945, 101 officers were arrested and Lt. Roger C. Terry was convicted of “jostling,” fined, and dishonorably discharged. On August 12, 1995, the Air Force set Terry’s conviction aside and began removing the reprimands — for the officers who asked.
• USS Indianapolis and Capt. Charles B. McVay III (Navy) — The only U.S. Navy captain court-martialed for losing his ship to enemy action — convicted of hazarding his ship by not zigzagging, though the submarine commander who sank her testified zigzagging would not have mattered. McVay took his own life in 1968 under decades of blame mail; Congress declared him exonerated in 2000 and the Navy entered it in his record in 2001.
• The WWII Merchant Mariners (Merchant Marine) — Civilian mariners who sailed the combat zones — roughly one in twenty-six was killed — were promised GI Bill treatment, excluded from it, and denied veteran status for 43 years, until a federal court ruled the denial unlawful in 1987. Status came on January 19, 1988; the education benefits had already expired and were never made good.
• The Nisei Soldiers — 100th Battalion, 442nd RCT, and Military Intelligence Service (Army) — Japanese American soldiers who volunteered and were drafted from behind the barbed wire of their own government’s incarceration camps became the most decorated units of their size in Army history, while their wartime valor awards sat downgraded. A congressionally directed review produced 22 Medals of Honor on June 21, 2000; the nation had apologized in statute in 1988.
• The Atomic Veterans (U.S. armed forces, 1945–62) — Some 200,000 or more troops were ordered to witness atmospheric nuclear tests or to occupy Hiroshima and Nagasaki — then bound by secrecy oaths that kept them from telling even their VA doctors why they were sick. Congress apologized and paid compensation in 1990 and the secrecy laws were repealed in 1996; the program has lapsed, been revived, and been left unfinished again — with Guam’s downwinders and the Enewetak cleanup crews still outside it.
• The Mustard Gas Test Subjects (Army & Navy, 1942–45) — More than 60,000 servicemen were used as human subjects in secret tests of mustard gas and Lewisite — at least 4,000 of them in full-body chamber and field exposures — sworn to secrecy under threat of prison, the tests left off their service records, no follow-up care provided. When the reckoning finally came, the VA attempted to reach only 610 of the roughly 4,000 full-body subjects it had promised to find — and most of the men were already dead.
• Arthur “Bud” Kelder (Army) — A dental assistant from Chicago who survived the Bataan Death March and died at Cabanatuan in November 1942, buried with thirteen others in Common Grave 717. The Army told his parents in 1950 he was non-recoverable; his cousin sued twice, the grave’s Unknowns were exhumed in 2014, and Kelder was the first of them brought home — opening the Cabanatuan Project still identifying the camp’s dead.
• The USS Arizona Unknowns (USN / USMC) — Eighty-six men recovered from the Arizona after Pearl Harbor lay nameless in the Punchbowl for more than eight decades while the Navy and DPAA declined to disinter them. Kevin Kline — grandnephew of one of the lost — built Operation 85 and did the family DNA outreach himself; on April 23, 2026, DPAA announced the threshold had been met, and disinterment of all 86 begins December 7, 2026.

Korea

• Tibor Rubin (Army) — A Holocaust survivor whose first sergeant, by his comrades’ sworn affidavits, discarded his Medal of Honor paperwork and fed him the most dangerous missions. The affidavits and a mandated review carried the case anyway; the medal came on September 23, 2005.
• Chaplain Emil J. Kapaun (Army) — The chaplain of Unsan and the prison camps, whose 1951 Distinguished Service Cross understated him for sixty years, by his fellow POWs’ account. Upgraded April 11, 2013; in 2021 the accounting reached even his remains, identified among the Punchbowl Unknowns and brought home to Kansas.
• Ralph Puckett Jr. (Army) — Fifty-one Rangers on Hill 205 in November 1950; his upgrade packet was denied in 2007 and again on appeal in 2009. A historian carried the case for eighteen years — Puckett kept asking him to stop — and the medal came on May 21, 2021, when he was 94.
• The Borinqueneers — 65th Infantry Regiment (Army) — Puerto Rico’s segregated regiment, convicted in the largest mass courts-martial of the Korean War after command, language, and leadership failures not of their making. Their sentences were pardoned and remitted in 1953–54 and a Congressional Gold Medal came in 2016 — but the convictions were pardoned, never formally cleared.
• Cross-reference: The Valor Review 24 — nine of the twenty-four served in Korea. Filed under World War II.

Vietnam

• Paris D. Davis (Army, Special Forces) — One of the first Black Green Beret officers, nominated for the Medal of Honor for Bong Son in 1965 — and his paperwork disappeared, twice. The medal arrived on March 3, 2023. No official explanation of who lost either packet, or why, has ever been produced.

• John L. Canley (USMC) — Took command at Hue when his commander fell and carried wounded Marines under fire; his upgrade was rejected ten times, per his advocate, never on the merits and always on procedure. The medal came on October 17, 2018, fifty years after Tet.

• Alfred V. Rascon (Army) — A medic who shielded two men from grenades in 1966 and never knew he had been recommended for the Medal of Honor — the paperwork went astray, and a Silver Star stood in its place. His platoon mates found the loss at a reunion in 1993; the medal came on February 8, 2000.

• Leslie H. Sabo Jr. (Army) — Killed in Cambodia on May 10, 1970, shielding a wounded man with his own body and silencing a bunker with a grenade. His Medal of Honor packet was never processed, and his family was told he died by sniper fire on guard duty; a fellow veteran found the packet at the National Archives in 1999, and the medal came on May 16, 2012 — 42 years late.

• Mike Partain (Camp Lejeune, born on base) — Born at the base hospital in January 1968, into water the Marine Corps had contaminated: male breast cancer at 39, from a cluster he documented himself, past 125 men. He carried the Lejeune families’ fight to the Camp Lejeune Justice Act of 2022. Filed here, where the exposure happened; the fight is cross-referenced under The Fights at Home.

• Cross-reference: The Valor Review 24 — eight of the twenty-four served in Vietnam. Filed under World War II.

• The C-123 Reservists (Air Force Reserve) — After Operation Ranch Hand ended, the spray planes came home to the United States and Reserve flight, medical, and ground crews worked inside them for another decade, with the dioxin still in the airframes. The Institute of Medicine concluded in January 2015 that those crews were exposed; the VA’s rule of June 19, 2015 finally presumed their exposure — and paid nothing retroactive.

• The Nehmer Class (Agent Orange claimants) — In 1985 the VA recognized exactly one Agent Orange disease — chloracne — and denied nearly every other claim under a causation standard Congress never authorized. In Nehmer v. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, a federal court voided that regulation and every denial issued under it; the 1991 consent decree still requires the VA to find the previously denied claims on its own, re-decide them, and pay benefits back to the date of the original claim — more than $4.6 billion in retroactive benefits, by the class counsel’s accounting.

• Alfred Procopio Jr. (USN) — A sailor who served in Vietnam’s territorial sea aboard USS Intrepid in 1966 and never set foot ashore, denied Agent Orange benefits for over a decade under the VA’s foot-on-land rule. His appeal, Procopio v. Wilkie (Fed. Cir. 2019, en banc), held the statute unambiguous, overruled Haas, and moved the legal shoreline twelve nautical miles out to sea; Congress codified the ruling in the Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Act of 2019, and the Nehmer decree later carried its retroactive reach to the denials of the Haas years.

• Conley Monk Jr. (USMC) — A Marine who served in Vietnam in 1969 and was pushed out with an undesirable discharge in 1970 — then fought on three fronts for five decades: his own upgrade (granted as a general discharge under honorable conditions in June 2015), the 2017 Federal Circuit ruling in Monk v. Shulkin confirming the veterans court’s authority to certify class actions, and Monk v. United States, still pending, where the VA’s own FOIA-released data showed Black veterans’ benefits denied at higher rates.

• Michael Blassie (USAF) — An A-37 pilot shot down over An Loc in May 1972 whose remains — recovered with his identification card and flight gear — were stripped of his name by a 1978 laboratory analysis and interred in 1984 as the Vietnam Unknown. Advocacy and a CBS investigation forced the exhumation; mitochondrial DNA named him on June 30, 1998, and the Vietnam crypt at Arlington has stood empty since.

• Rocky Versace (Army) — A West Point captain executed by the Viet Cong on September 26, 1965, after twenty-three months defying his captors in irons and an isolation cage. The Medal of Honor recommended in 1969 was downgraded after an eyewitness statement disappeared from the file; school friends, classmates, and a Cleveland postal worker who had never met him rebuilt the record, and the medal came on July 8, 2002 — thirty-seven years after his death.

• Janey Ensminger (Camp Lejeune, died at nine) — Conceived at Camp Lejeune in 1975 in base housing served by contaminated water; dead of leukemia at nine in 1985. Her father, MSgt Jerry Ensminger, learned the truth from a television report in 1997 and spent three decades forcing an answer — the 2012 law bears her name, and his suit for her death remains unresolved as of October 2026.

Cold War & Between the Wars

The years the taxonomy forgets: weapons tests under secrecy oaths, training grounds, garrisons between the named wars — and the cases older than the frame itself. What they share is the in-between: no declared war to file the loss under, and an institution that preferred it that way.

• Mary Edwards Walker (Army, Civil War) — The only woman ever awarded the Medal of Honor — and one of 911 recipients struck from the Roll in 1917 when a review board applied new “actual combat” rules. She refused to return the medal and wore it until she died; President Carter restored it on June 10, 1977. Her war, the Civil War, predates this hall’s frame; she is filed in the in-between, where the taxonomy puts what the named wars left out.

• The Brownsville 167 — 25th Infantry (Army, 1906) — After a shooting the town blamed on Black soldiers their officers attested were in barracks, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered all 167 men discharged without honor — no trial, no hearing, no pensions. The Army exonerated them in 1972; exactly one man was still alive to receive Congress’s payment.

• The Bonus Army — Bonus Expeditionary Force (WWI veterans, 1932) — Jobless veterans holding bonus certificates not redeemable until 1945 marched on Washington in 1932 — and the U.S. Army, under Gen. MacArthur with infantry, cavalry, and tanks, drove them out and burned their camps. Congress overrode a presidential veto in January 1936 and paid the bonuses nine years early; no one was ever called to account for the clearing. WWI’s men, filed where the wrong was done to them: between the wars.

• The Enewetak Cleanup Veterans (1977–80) — From 1977 to 1980, some 6,000 servicemembers were sent to Enewetak Atoll to clean up the fallout of 43 nuclear tests — scraping contaminated soil, hauling debris, and entombing it under the concrete dome on Runit Island. For four decades afterward, the VA and the Defense Department’s nuclear agency maintained they had encountered only low levels of radiation and were not radiation-exposed veterans at all. The PACT Act of 2022 finally made their cancers presumptive — but they remain excluded from the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.

• The Edgewood Test Subjects (Army Chemical Corps, 1955–75) — For twenty years the Army Chemical Corps ran classified human experiments at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, exposing about 7,000 soldier volunteers to more than 250 chemicals — nerve agents, mustard, LSD, BZ — under secrecy oaths backed by court-martial, oaths that kept them from doctors and from the VA for decades. Courts pried the record open in stages — notice in 2013, Army medical care in 2017, discharge-date benefits in 2023 — and the bill that would codify that last ruling for everyone is still waiting in the Senate.

• Victor B. Skaar (USAF) — A member of the team that collected urine samples from the Palomares cleanup crews in 1966 — samples the Air Force discarded as “unreasonably high” — who spent fifty years fighting the replacement dose math that denied the cleanup veterans as a class. His appeal became the first class action ever certified in an individual case at the veterans court; the Federal Circuit dismantled the class on jurisdiction alone, and the Justice Department conceded that the PACT Act presumption he helped win does not cover him. At 89, he is still litigating.

• Operation Fouled Anchor (U.S. Coast Guard Academy) — For nearly two decades the Coast Guard failed to act on, and never disclosed, reports of sexual assault at its Academy in New London — 102 reported incidents involving 43 identified individuals, in the service’s own later accounting, only five of them reported to investigators at the time. The reckoning arrived in 2023–25: a Commandant’s acknowledgment, Senate and House investigations, and statutory reform written into law on December 18, 2025.

• Ruth Moore (USN) — A Navy veteran assaulted while serving in the Azores in 1987, whose VA claim for the resulting trauma was denied for more than two decades — in a case where her own MST coordinator’s review documented that her records had been partially expunged. Her 2012 congressional testimony carried the Ruth Moore Act; her own fight closed with a 2014 ruling of clear and unmistakable error and more than $405,000 in back pay.

Gulf War

• The Gulf War Illness Claimants (Desert Shield / Desert Storm, 1990–91) — Of nearly 697,000 Americans who served in the Gulf War, the government’s own estimates put between 175,000 and 250,000 home with a chronic multi-symptom illness medicine could not name — and the VA denied Gulf War illness claims at three times the rate of other claims even after Congress wrote a presumption into law in 1994. The diagnostic code for the illness finally arrived on October 1, 2025 — thirty-four years after the war ended.

• Paula Coughlin and Tailhook ‘91 (USN) — A Navy lieutenant and admiral’s aide assaulted in the gauntlet at the 1991 Tailhook convention, who named it when the institution preferred silence — and was investigated, doubted, and driven out for it. Her case forced the largest scandal reckoning in naval aviation’s history: 140 officers forwarded for discipline and 35 flag officers referred separately, and no one ever charged with sexual assault. Her own fight ended in a civil verdict, reduced on appeal to a $5.2 million final award.

• The 1994 Black Hawk Crews (Army / USAF / coalition) — On April 14, 1994, two Air Force F-15s shot down two Army Black Hawks over northern Iraq, killing all 26 aboard. The GAO found the Air Force accident board’s report omitted the pilots’ duty to report and misstated who could have stopped the engagement; fourteen officers were investigated, one was acquitted at court-martial, and no one was convicted — and the foreign families were paid $100,000 each while the American families received nothing equivalent.

Iraq & Afghanistan

• MSgt John A. Chapman (USAF) — Died alone on Takur Ghar after being left for dead; fought an hour on film. The institution took 16 years to say so, and its museum still won’t.

• SFC Alwyn C. Cashe (Army) — Ran into a burning Bradley three times to pull his men out; died of his burns. His sister Kasinal fought 16 years; Congress had to waive the legal time limit for his Medal of Honor (2021).

• Sgt Rafael Peralta (USMC) — Fell on a grenade to save his Marines — an act his own Navy Cross citation describes — yet three Secretaries of Defense refused the Medal of Honor. His mother Rosa refused the lesser medal for years.

• CPT William D. Swenson (Army) — Ran into fire repeatedly at Ganjgal to recover the fallen, American and Afghan. The Army admitted it LOST his Medal of Honor packet; he waited years while the paperwork was “misplaced.”

• CPT Le Roy Torres (Army Reserve) — Lungs destroyed by burn pits at Balad, Iraq; Texas DPS refused to hold his job, and the state fought him all the way to the Supreme Court — and lost (2022). His wife Rosie built Burn Pits 360 out of their kitchen-table fight. Filed here, where the exposure happened; the court fight is cross-referenced under The Fights at Home.

• The Qarmat Ali Veterans (National Guard, Iraq, 2003) — In the spring and summer of 2003, National Guard soldiers from Oregon, Indiana, West Virginia, and South Carolina guarded contractors restoring the Qarmat Ali water treatment plant in Iraq, on ground contaminated with sodium dichromate — a source of the carcinogen hexavalent chromium. An Oregon jury awarded twelve of them $85.2 million in 2012; the verdict was vacated on jurisdictional grounds in 2015, the re-filed Texas case was dismissed in 2017, and VA benefits for the exposure remain a matter of individual proof, with no presumption.

• The K2 Veterans (Karshi-Khanabad, Uzbekistan, 2001–05) — At least 15,777 servicemembers, by the Stronghold Freedom Foundation’s count, passed through K2 — a former Soviet air base whose own Army surveys documented jet fuel in the soil, depleted uranium by the tent city, and compounds in the air. The burn-pit law of 2022 covered part of what followed; the K2-specific accounting — a finished undiagnosed-illness rule, the mandated Defense study, the full record — is still open.

• SFC Heath Robinson (Ohio Army National Guard) — A combat medic in Kosovo and Iraq who came home and, a decade later, was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease and stage 4 lung cancer. The VA denied part of his coverage on the ground that he had not proved the connection to his burn-pit exposure. He died on May 6, 2020, at 39 — and two years later the largest toxic-exposure law in VA history, the PACT Act, was signed with his name on it, his widow and daughter beside the President.

• SPC Jon Town (Army) — Knocked unconscious by a rocket in Ramadi in October 2004 and awarded a Purple Heart — then separated in September 2006 under Chapter 5-13 for a pre-existing “personality disorder”: no medical board, no disability pay, and a bill for more than $3,000 of his re-enlistment bonus. The VA ruled in June 2007 that he was 100 percent disabled and wounded in combat. The Army never has.

• SGT Kris Goldsmith (Army) — A forward observer who photographed torture victims and mass graves in Iraq in 2005 at nineteen, came home with undiagnosed PTSD, and in 2007, the night before he was to redeploy, survived a suicide attempt. The Army separated him with a general discharge whose paperwork read “Misconduct: Serious Offense.” He spent twelve years getting it upgraded to honorable — and helped change the law for the veterans behind him.

• Pat Tillman (Army) — The most famous enlistment of the post-9/11 wars, killed by his own platoon in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004 — while the Army, knowing within days, let his family and the country believe for five weeks that he had died fighting the enemy, and wrote a Silver Star citation on the story it knew was false. Seven investigations later, the family’s questions about who knew, and when, remain formally unanswered.

• The Manker Class (USMC / all services) — Iraq veteran Timothy Manker, and thousands like him, carried less-than-honorable discharges issued for conduct that was itself a symptom of untreated PTSD — locked out of VA care by the paperwork of their own injuries. The settlement in Manker v. Del Toro, finally approved on February 15, 2022, forced the Navy to re-review a generation of those discharges under the standards the services had resisted for a decade.

• Clay Hunt (USMC) — A Marine scout sniper who came home from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD, fought the VA for care and a correct disability rating, and died by suicide on March 31, 2011, while his appeal sat undecided. His parents’ fight put his name on the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act of 2015 — a statute whose pilot programs have since expired, carried forward only by successor laws.

• Daniel Somers (Army / California National Guard) — A soldier who ran more than 400 combat missions in Iraq and came home with traumatic brain injury and PTSD. His June 10, 2013 suicide note, published by his family, indicted the war and the VA that had turned him away in crisis in the same breath. Three laws now carry his name — the third as §101 of the Veterans COMPACT Act of 2020 — and whether the VA’s mandated support-network pilot was ever actually run is, as of 2026, publicly undocumented.

• Jeffrey Lucey (USMC Reserve) — A convoy driver in the 2003 invasion who came home hallucinating and planning his own death. The Northampton VA admitted him involuntarily on May 28, 2004, discharged him on June 1 with alcohol diagnoses, and on June 5 turned him away — by the account his family’s lawsuit pressed and the VA inspector general later supported, without a psychiatrist ever examining him. He hanged himself seventeen days later, at twenty-three; the government’s $350,000 settlement admitted no responsibility.

• Jason Simcakoski (USMC) — A Marine who died at thirty-five in the Tomah VA’s psychiatric unit on August 30, 2014, of mixed drug toxicity, after taking thirteen prescribed medications in twenty-four hours — at a facility veterans called “Candy Land,” whose inspector general inspection had been closed unpublished months before he died. The reckoning produced a $2.3 million settlement, a permanently surrendered license, and the law that bears his name.

The Fights at Home

Some wars have no theater. The wrong was done by the institution itself, on home ground — and the fight was carried in Congress, in the courts, and in the VA’s own waiting rooms.

• SPC Vanessa Guillén (Army) — Murdered at Fort Hood by a fellow soldier while the command failed her family’s pleas; the Army’s own review documented the rot. Her mother and sisters forced the I Am Vanessa Guillén Act. There was no theater in her case: the institution was the theater.
• Cross-referenced here: Mike Partain (filed under Vietnam — the exposure) and Le Roy Torres (filed under Iraq & Afghanistan — the exposure). Their vindications were won at home, in statute and in the Supreme Court.
• Margaret Witt (USAF / Air Force Reserve) — A decorated flight nurse outed by an anonymous tip and discharged under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” — whose lawsuit produced the Witt standard, the most demanding test the policy ever faced, and helped make repeal unavoidable. Her discharge was made effective October 1, 2007; she settled in 2011 with her retirement, and the policy itself was repealed that September.
• The MAVNI Recruits (Army) — Some 10,400 immigrant soldiers recruited on an explicit promise — serve honorably, become citizens — whose program was frozen in 2016 and whose naturalizations then stalled on the government’s own paperwork: 1,693 honorable-service certifications granted as of April 7, 2020, by the government’s own court filing, while recruits waited years in limbo and 502 were discharged in a single year. The class actions — Kirwa, Nio, Calixto — ended in injunctions and a court-approved settlement; for many, the promise was kept years late or not at all.
• Richard Stayskal (Army) — A Green Beret whose growing lung tumor sat recorded but unreported in a 2017 Womack Army Medical Center scan — barred by the Feres doctrine from any remedy, he testified to Congress and gave his name to §731 of the FY2020 NDAA, the first administrative breach in Feres. His own claim under his own law was denied in 2023; he has received nothing.
• The Widow’s Tax (all services) — For decades, surviving spouses watched the government subtract their Dependency and Indemnity Compensation dollar-for-dollar from the annuity their spouse’s service had earned — an offset costing the average survivor some $11,000 a year, across roughly 65,000 widows and widowers. Section 622 of the FY2020 NDAA ended it in phases; the offset’s last day was January 1, 2023.
• Brandon Caserta (USN) — A twenty-one-year-old sailor at HSC-28 Norfolk whose command investigation found his lead petty officer’s belligerence was likely a significant contributing factor in his death by suicide on June 25, 2018. No one was punished; the Navy promoted him only after he died. His parents carried his notes to Congress, and the Brandon Act made his name the trigger for a self-initiated mental health referral across the armed forces — implemented late by every service.
• The Holyoke Soldiers’ Home Residents (Massachusetts) — In March 2020 the home merged its two dementia units into a single 25-bed unit mixing COVID-positive and symptom-free veterans; at least 76 residents died in eleven weeks. The Pearlstein report, a settlement of about $58 million, and a governance law followed — but the only criminal case ended in March 2024 with continuances without a finding: no convictions, no jail.
• The New Jersey Veterans Memorial Homes (Menlo Park & Paramus) — State-run veterans homes where the Justice Department reconstructed 101 and 89 probable COVID deaths in the first wave — and concluded the true toll was likely higher and unknowable from the homes’ own records. A 2023 CRIPA findings letter and an October 2024 federal consent decree put both homes under an independent monitor, whose first-year report found substantial compliance in only some of the decree’s care areas.
• The Fort Hood Victims (Army) — Thirteen killed and thirty-one wounded by gunfire on November 5, 2009 — reported by the Defense Department as “workplace violence” for more than five years, which kept the dead and wounded ineligible for the Purple Heart. Congress rewrote the rule in the FY2015 NDAA and the medals came on April 10, 2015; the combat-related determinations underneath them are still being fought case by case.
• Barry Coates (Army) — A VA patient whose chart said “may need colonoscopy” across January, March, and May of 2011 while no one ordered the test; scoped at last through his own persistent cancellation calls, he was diagnosed with stage IV colorectal cancer, already in his lung and liver. His sworn testimony of April 9, 2014 — given with a round of chemotherapy postponed so he could appear — became the face of the VA wait-time scandal. He died on January 23, 2016, at 46; his widow put the same accountability question to a President.

Did we forget someone?

Is there a hero who has not been mentioned here? A name you carried the way these families carried theirs — with a citation, a court record, an investigation, a paper trail the institution would rather forget? This list is an accounting, and accountings are supposed to be complete. Nominate them — the same intake the founding case uses, evaluated the same way: documents first, consent controlling, nothing published that the record cannot carry.

Carry a case like these?

This section grows the same way the founding case did: a family with documents and a refusal to quit. If you are carrying a documented case — a citation, a court record, an investigation, a paper trail the institution would rather forget — tell us the story. Pages are built from the record, in the open, with the family’s consent controlling publication, exactly as on the rest of this site.