BETRAYED BY THE VA Thomas Alan Bowman Sr. asked his country for help. He got silence. Sign the demand →
Dear Doug Collins

Clay Hunt: A Hundred Percent, Five Weeks Too Late

Clay Hunt did everything the system says a veteran in trouble is supposed to do. He reported his symptoms. He kept his appointments where he could get them. He used VA — and only VA — for his care, in Los Angeles, then Grand Junction, Colorado, then Houston. He appealed the 30 percent disability rating that did not match the condition keeping him from holding a job, and he waited while VA, by his mother's account to Congress, lost his files. On March 31, 2011, at twenty-eight, he died by suicide in Houston, two weeks after finally seeing a psychiatrist there and telling his mother he could not go back. Five weeks after his death — eighteen months after he filed the appeal — VA granted it, rating his post-traumatic stress at 100 percent. This page is the record of his service, of what VA did and did not do while he was alive to ask, and of the statute his parents carried through Congress in his name.

The service and the promise

Clay Hunt enlisted in the Marine Corps in May 2005 and served in the infantry, according to the statement his mother, Susan Selke, later gave the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. In January 2007 he deployed to Iraq’s Anbar Province, close to Fallujah. Shortly after arriving, Selke testified, he was shot through the wrist by a sniper’s bullet that barely missed his head. The Associated Press’s April 2011 profile adds the sequence around the wound: a month earlier he had watched a fellow Marine, shot in the throat, die after being placed on a helicopter — a scene Hunt himself wrote played “on repeat in my head nearly every day, and most nights as well.” He earned the Purple Heart for the Iraq wound.

He did not leave the service. After recuperating at Twentynine Palms, California — where, Selke testified, he began experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress, including panic attacks, and was diagnosed with PTS later in 2007 — he attended and graduated from the Marine Corps Scout Sniper School in March 2008. A few weeks after graduation he deployed again, this time to southern Afghanistan, as a scout sniper with the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines. The battalion’s 2008 Helmand deployment was, in the New York Times’s later reporting, among the hardest any Marine battalion took in that war: spread across isolated outposts, it suffered more casualties than any other Marine battalion of its deployment, and in the years after it came home at least thirteen of its roughly 1,200 Marines died by suicide — Clay Hunt among them, and the death, the Times reported, that shook the battalion most. Selke’s testimony is sparer: on the second deployment, as on the first, her son “witnessed and experienced the loss of several fellow Marines.” He returned in October 2008 and was honorably discharged in April 2009, a corporal, with, in his mother’s words, “numerous awards,” the Purple Heart among them.

What he did next is part of the service record, because he treated it that way. He enrolled at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, starred in a public service campaign for transitioning veterans, and rode long-distance events with wounded veterans. When the January 2010 earthquake devastated Haiti, he found his way on his own to Port-au-Prince to join Team Rubicon, the disaster-relief organization his best friend and fellow 2/7 sniper Jake Wood had co-founded — arriving, in Wood’s account, in the middle of the night because the team looked like it needed help — and he went again to Chile after its earthquake. At the signing of the law that bears his name, Wood recalled Hunt’s answer, in Afghanistan, to why he was there: “I’m here for you, Jake.” The promise ran the other way as well. A Marine wounded in the country’s service who then asks the veterans’ system — openly, with a diagnosis already on paper — for the care that system exists to provide is supposed to be the easiest case the institution ever handles. The record shows what he got instead.

What happened

VA’s first judgment of Clay Hunt’s condition is a number. After his separation, Selke testified, VA rated his PTS at 30 percent, with two smaller ratings for other health issues. When he found that the PTS kept him from maintaining a steady job, he appealed the 30 percent. He was met, his mother told the committee, “with significant bureaucratic barriers, including the VA losing his files.” The appeal would take eighteen months to decide. He did not live to see the decision.

His medical care ran on a parallel track, in three cities, and his mother’s testimony — given to the House committee on July 10, 2014, and repeated in substance to the Senate committee that November — is the documentary spine of it: Hunt used VA exclusively, and she reconstructed the path facility by facility.

In Los Angeles, where he lived immediately after separation, he received care at the VA medical center there. “Clay constantly voiced concerns about the care he was receiving,” Selke testified, “both in terms of the challenges he faced with scheduling appointments as well as the treatment he received for his PTSD, which consisted solely of medication. He received counseling only as far as a brief discussion regarding whether the medication he was prescribed was working or not. If it was not, he would be given a new medication.” His own summary, quoted by his mother to both committees, was: “I’m a guinea pig for drugs. They’ll put me on one thing, I’ll have side effects, and then they put me on something else.” Delayed GI Bill payments, she testified, aggravated the same symptoms, and he carried credit-card debt while he waited for education money VA owed him. His frustration was on record while he was still alive: in a line from 2010 that has followed his case ever since, he asked how he could track a pizza delivery on his phone while VA could not find his claim for four months.

In late 2010 he moved briefly to Grand Junction, Colorado, where he also used the VA, and then home to Houston to be closer to family. There the continuity broke. “The Houston VA would not refill prescriptions Clay had received from the Grand Junction VA,” Selke testified, “because they said that prescriptions were not transferable and a new assessment would have to be done before his medications could be re-prescribed.” Later testimony filled in the pharmacy side of the same wall: the brand-name medication that had worked for him was not stocked at Houston — the pharmacy carried generics, and the drug would have to be mailed to him — for a class of medication his mother told lawmakers cannot simply be stopped cold while a veteran waits for the mail.

The wait for the new assessment is also in her testimony, with dates. “Clay only had two appointments in January and February of 2011, and neither was with a psychiatrist. It wasn’t until March 15th that Clay was finally able to see a psychiatrist at the Houston VA medical center.” She went to that center herself after his death, to retrieve his records, and testified to what she found: large crowds, no one at the information desk, and having to flag down a nurse for directions. “I cannot imagine how anyone dealing with mental health injuries like PTS could successfully access care in such a stressful setting.”

After the March 15 appointment, he called her on the drive home. “Mom, I can’t go back there. The VA is way too stressful and not a place I can go. I’ll have to find a Vet Center or something.” Two weeks later, on March 31, 2011, Clay Hunt died by suicide. He was twenty-eight. Five weeks after that — eighteen months after he filed — VA decided his appeal: his PTS was rated 100 percent.

No public finding by VA or its inspector general adjudicating the care he individually received has been located for this page. What exists is his mother’s testimony, on the committee record in two chambers, unrebutted in its specifics — the lost files, the medication-only treatment, the non-transferable prescriptions, two non-psychiatrist appointments in two months, a psychiatrist on March 15, a death on March 31, and a 100 percent rating five weeks after that. Her conclusion is the sentence his case is filed under: “Despite his proactive and open approach to seeking care to address his injuries, the VA system did not adequately address his needs.”

What the institution did afterward

The institution that answered for Clay Hunt’s care was, in the end, Congress — because his parents made it answer. Susan Selke and her husband Richard — Clay’s stepfather; his father, Stacy Hunt, stood with the family through the same campaign — carried his record into the hearing rooms with Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the organization Clay himself had lobbied with in life. On July 10, 2014, Susan Selke testified before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, at the hearing on mental health care access and suicide prevention at which Chairman Jeff Miller introduced the first bill bearing Clay’s name. On November 19, 2014, she testified again, before the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, at its hearing titled “Mental Health and Suicide Among Veterans.” Senator Jerry Moran said on the Senate floor that her account — her belief that VA’s bureaucracy was “the straw that broke the camel’s back” — was among the most compelling testimony he had heard on the committee. Her closing ask, in the House, was not compensation or discipline. It was this: “Not one more veteran should have to go through what Clay went through with the VA after returning home from war. Not one more parent should have to testify before a congressional committee to compel the VA to fulfill its responsibilities to those who served and sacrificed.”

The bill moved, then stopped, then moved again — and the stop is part of the record. The Act (H.R. 5059) passed the House unanimously on December 9, 2014. In the Senate it was blocked from a vote by a single retiring senator, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who argued it duplicated existing VA programs and was not paid for. IAVA’s petition — delivered to Majority Leader Harry Reid on December 4, 2014 with more than 59,000 signatures — kept running and passed 136,000 names. Susan Selke’s response was grief, stated plainly: “I am grieving thinking of those young men and women who will be delayed receiving help because of this inaction.”

Reintroduced as H.R. 203, the Act passed the House 403 to 0 on January 12, 2015, and the Senate 99 to 0 on February 3, 2015. On February 12, 2015, President Obama signed it in the East Room as Public Law 114-2, with Susan and Richard Selke on the stage and Jake Wood introducing him. “He suffered physical injuries that healed, and he suffered invisible wounds that stayed with him,” the President said. “By all accounts he was selfless, and he was brave.” His message to veterans still in Hunt’s position: “If you are hurting, you are not forgotten. You are not alone. America is here for you.”

What the Act mandated was narrower than its name suggests, and this page keeps it to what the statute says. It has eight sections. Section 2 requires an independent entity to conduct annual evaluations of VA’s mental health care and suicide prevention programs, the first by the end of fiscal year 2018. Section 3 requires a centralized website on VA mental health services — the one-stop resource Hunt’s generation had to assemble for itself. Section 4 requires a three-year pilot repaying the education loans of at least ten psychiatrists, or final-year residents, for two or more years of VA service. Section 5 requires a three-year pilot, in at least five VA regional networks, of community outreach and peer support for transitioning veterans. Section 6 authorizes collaboration with nonprofit mental health organizations, under a Director of Suicide Prevention Coordination. Section 7 extends, by one year, enhanced enrollment for certain combat veterans. Section 8 prohibits new appropriations — the provision that shaped everything after. CBO estimated implementation at $24 million over 2015–2020, all to be found inside VA’s existing budget.

Implementation, as IAVA tracked it in its third-quarter fiscal 2017 update, was slow in exactly the places the no-new-money design predicted. The Section 2 evaluations were still in pilot data collection two and a half years after enactment, with “no outcomes to report on to date.” The website had been folded into a broader VA service locator. The loan-repayment program had been slowed by funding challenges, with first payouts planned for January 2018. The peer-support pilots were running at five locations, set to end in January 2019. Section 7, alone, had a countable result: nearly 1,200 combat veterans who had missed enrollment had gained access to care. The first required evaluation reached Congress in late 2018; when the Air Force Times reported on it in March 2019, VA had not posted it publicly — “VA doesn’t typically release congressionally mandated reports outside of the committees that request them,” its spokesman said — and it gave most VA mental health programs positive marks, in the same years the suicide count itself was not falling.

No later Congress reauthorized the Clay Hunt Act as a standalone law, and its pilots expired on their three-year terms. What followed was a second generation of named statutes built on its frame: the Commander John Scott Hannon Veterans Mental Health Care Improvement Act (Public Law 116-171, October 17, 2020), adding community grants and workforce provisions, and the Veterans COMPACT Act (Public Law 116-214, December 2020), which authorized emergent suicide care without requiring payment — the front-door guarantee whose absence runs through Hunt’s own record.

Where it stands now

The fairest measure of the Clay Hunt Act is the one it wrote for itself: VA’s own annual accounting of veteran suicide, published with a lag and attributed here to the report that issued each figure.

In the debate that produced the Act, the governing number was VA’s estimate, drawn from its 2012 suicide data report, that 22 veterans died by suicide each day — the figure Susan Selke carried into the hearing rooms and IAVA put on its petition. VA’s method has changed since, and its later reports are not a clean like-for-like series against the 22. On the current series, VA’s 2024 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report (released December 19, 2024; data through 2022) counted 6,407 veteran suicides in 2022, an average of 17.6 per day — seven per day among veterans who had received VA care in 2021 or 2022, 10.6 per day among veterans who had not. VA’s 2026 report (released September 30, 2026; data through 2024) counted 6,488 suicides in 2024, 17.7 per day. Its sharpest finding is about who the system reaches: 62 percent of the veterans who died in 2024 had not received VA health care in the year they died or the year before, and from 2023 to 2024 the suicide rate fell 4.8 percent among veterans enrolled in VA care while rising 3.7 percent among veterans not enrolled. Clay Hunt was enrolled, asked, and kept asking — he sits in the smaller, harder column of the department’s own table — but the larger column is the one his law’s outreach and enrollment provisions were aimed at, and on VA’s own figures it is still where most of the deaths are.

The individual account remains open in a specific way. No VA or inspector-general finding on the care Clay Hunt himself received — the lost files, the medication-only treatment, the prescriptions Houston would not refill, the two months without a psychiatrist — has been published, and no individual accountability appears in the public record. His appeal was granted, at the level he had sought, five weeks after it could no longer help him; the record shows no later VA review of why it took eighteen months. What his case produced was prospective: a statute, an evaluation requirement, and a family that still attaches his name to the proposition his mother put to the House in 2014 — that the measure of the system is whether the next veteran who asks the way Clay asked gets a different answer. If you or a veteran you know is in crisis, the Veterans Crisis Line is available around the clock: dial 988 and press 1, or text 838255.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

Clay Hunt’s case was told on the record four ways: by CBS’s 60 Minutes, with his family, his fellow Marines, and Hunt himself on camera in Haiti; by the veterans who carried his name into the Senate in petition form in December 2014; by the President who signed his law in February 2015; and by Team Rubicon, telling its own founding story. Four films, in that order.

The case itself. Byron Pitts reports the *60 Minutes* segment of March 3, 2013 — Clay Hunt in his own footage from Haiti, his parents, and Jake Wood. (CBS News.)

The petition. Veteran Kristopher Goldsmith delivers IAVA's Clay Hunt Act petition — more than 59,000 signatures — to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's office, December 2014. (IAVAVids.)

The signing. President Obama signs the Act in the East Room, February 12, 2015 — introduced by Jake Wood, with Susan and Richard Selke on stage. (The Obama White House.)

The service after service. Team Rubicon tells its founding story — the eight veterans who went to Haiti after the January 2010 earthquake, the mission Clay Hunt traveled through the night to join. (Team Rubicon.)

Sources

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.