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Dear Doug Collins

Daniel Somers: A Letter to His Family, and the Six Years the System Kept Him Waiting

Daniel Somers was an intelligence soldier. In Baghdad he ran more than four hundred combat missions from the turret of a Humvee and interrogated insurgent suspects; in Mosul he ran an intelligence center for Joint Special Operations Command. The work was classified, and when he came home in 2007 with post-traumatic stress disorder, a traumatic brain injury and pain that never let up, the secrecy followed him into the treatment rooms of the Phoenix VA — where, by his parents' account, he could not safely do the group therapy he was offered, could not get the individual care he asked for, and once, in crisis, was told there was no bed for him. On June 10, 2013, six years after he came home, Sergeant Somers died by suicide at thirty. He left his family a letter. They published it, and then they went to work: this page is the record of his service, of the six years that followed it, and of the three laws that now carry his name.

The service and the promise

Daniel Somers was born on January 14, 1983, the son of Howard Somers, a physician who practiced urology in Phoenix for twenty-six years, and Jean Somers, a paralegal who managed her husband’s practice. In 2001 he married Angeline Roth — Angel — his high school sweetheart. He enlisted in the California Army National Guard in 2003.

His first tour ran from 2004 to 2005 in Baghdad, where he served on a Tactical Human Intelligence Team with Task Force Lightning. The biographical sketch his family later released with his letter describes the work plainly: he ran more than 400 combat missions as a machine gunner in the turret of a Humvee, interviewed Iraqis ranging from concerned citizens to community leaders and government officials, and interrogated dozens of insurgent and terrorist suspects. He had celebrated his twenty-first birthday at Fort Hood before deploying, and the tour lasted thirteen months.

Between tours he qualified to study Arabic at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, a fifteen-month course; his parents’ published account includes his graduation there in June 2006. That same month, his parents wrote, his Guard unit assigned him to a position with the defense contractor L-3 Communications in Washington, D.C., and about six months later, when L-3 needed someone in Iraq for analysis work, he volunteered. His second tour, in 2006 and 2007, took him to Mosul, where he worked with Joint Special Operations Command through his former unit and ran the Northern Iraq Intelligence Center. His official role was senior analyst for the Levant. He came home in the fall of 2007.

The promise made to a soldier like Somers has a specific shape, because his service had a specific condition: much of it was classified. He could not describe what he had done, or what had been done around him, in an open room. An institution that assigns classified work owes the people who do it a form of care that fits that condition — treatment that does not require a man to choose between getting help and keeping the secrets he was ordered to keep. What the record shows, instead, is a soldier who fell first through a seam between two bureaucracies, and then through the one-size structure of the care he was finally offered.

What happened

The first failure was jurisdictional, and it is documented in his parents’ own account. When Somers came home in the fall of 2007 and sought treatment, Howard and Jean Somers wrote in The New York Times, the Phoenix VA refused him: his Guard unit was still in ready-reserve status, so he was “not yet officially a veteran.” The local Defense Department facility turned him away from the other direction — he was not on active duty. He belonged, on paper, to neither system.

When he was finally deemed eligible, he began treatment at the Phoenix VA in February 2008. He was diagnosed there with post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury; his disability rating was set at 40 percent. The fuller list of what he carried, as reported by CNN and The Washington Post from his records and his family, included fibromyalgia and a multi-system illness his parents called Gulf War syndrome, with chronic pain throughout. By the end of 2008, his parents wrote, frustrated by long waits and by the turnover of the providers assigned to him, he sought treatment outside the VA at his own expense, and he repeatedly tried to re-enter VA care afterward, meeting persistent access problems each time.

One barrier was built into the treatment itself. Because his Iraq work was classified, Somers balked at group therapy, afraid he might reveal classified information; he asked the Phoenix VA for individual care instead. As Inside Tucson Business later reported the case, after two years with no resolution he was still waiting. In October 2011 he wrote to the VA directly, describing worsening symptoms — nightly panic attacks, auditory hallucinations — and wrote, in The Washington Post’s quotation of the letter, that his situation “drives me to consider suicide very seriously on a daily basis.”

His parents have also testified to a crisis episode that this page carries as their testimony, because that is what it is: no VA finding confirming it appears in the public record. Howard Somers told the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs that when Daniel, in crisis, sought admission, he was told there were no psychiatric beds available and “no beds in the emergency department”; that he lay down on the floor in a corner, crying; and that no effort was made to transfer him to another facility. Jean Somers has testified that his first attempt to access VA care was turned away, that admission for psychiatric evaluation came four months later, that follow-up was extremely slow, and that consistent care took about two years to assemble. The family does not present these as allegations against individuals. They present them as the system working exactly as it was built — and Daniel Somers spent, in his father’s words to the committee, “six futile, tragic years” inside it.

On June 10, 2013, in Phoenix, Daniel Somers died by suicide. He was thirty years old. He left a letter to his family, dated that day, which opens: “I am sorry that it has come to this.” His wife and family gave permission to publish it, and Gawker published it on June 22, 2013, under that opening line as its title. It was read by millions. The letter is not a rant; it is an accounting — of pain that medicine could not dull, of a mind he described as a wasteland, and of a system that, in his telling, abandoned him and blocked the outside help his family tried to arrange. One sentence of it stands for the whole: “I really have been trying to hang on, for more than a decade now.” Three weeks after his death, The Washington Post reported, the Phoenix VA notified his widow that his claim for full disability benefits had been approved — retroactively to 2008. The system that could not treat him in time had, in the end, agreed he had been fully disabled all along.

What the institution did afterward

What the institution did afterward was done, in the main, by his parents. Howard and Jean Somers authorized the release of their son’s records, and on August 23, 2013, The Washington Post’s Steve Vogel published the result, calling Daniel’s case “a case study in how federal agencies continue to fail veterans.” Howard Somers put the family’s question in one line: “If your system is so difficult to get into, how the hell are you going to prevent suicides?” In October 2013 the Somerses were in Washington for a VA round table on veteran suicide, where, as Cronkite News reported, they handed VA Secretary Eric Shinseki a copy of their “white paper” of recommendations — a document Jean Somers described as a brief synopsis of “the major stumbling blocks that Daniel had.”

On November 11, 2013 — Veterans Day — The New York Times published their letter “On Losing a Veteran Son to a Broken System.” It laid out the roadblocks in order, and it proposed structural answers: that VA triage and prioritize care by severity of condition and suicide risk, and that VA medical centers refocus as centers of excellence for service-connected injuries, with routine care contracted to community providers. It closed with the sentence that became the family’s mission statement: “we must do better.”

In January 2014 they founded Operation Engage America, announced that May and launched on June 7, 2014, with resource fairs in San Diego, California, and Des Moines, Iowa; it later grew to seven cities. Its premise came straight out of their own experience: they had been parents of a married veteran, shut out of the dialogue about his care, unable to learn what help existed. Operation Engage America set out to connect service members, veterans, first responders and their loved ones to local resources for PTSD, traumatic brain injury and the transition home — and to build the support network around the veteran that the family had never been given.

On July 10, 2014, Howard and Jean Somers testified before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, at a hearing titled “Service should not lead to suicide: Access to VA’s Mental Health Care,” alongside Susan and Richard Selke, whose son Clay Hunt had died in 2011. Jean Somers described the family’s nineteen-page report on systemic issues at the VA, written, she said, “to improve access to first-rate health care at the VA, to make the VA accountable to veterans it was created to serve.” Representative Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, in whose state Daniel had lived and died, later called him “the original whistle-blower of the Phoenix VA.” In January 2016 the Somerses spoke at VA’s own summit on preventing veteran suicide, where, VA News reported, they repeated the call they had made in print two years earlier: “We must insist on a refocus on VA health care to become a center of excellence for war related injuries.” On July 23, 2019, Senator Sinema paid tribute to Sergeant Somers in her maiden speech in the Senate.

Three federal laws now carry his name — the roster of his case usually names only the last of them.

The first is the Sgt. Daniel Somers Classified Veterans Access to Care Act, aimed at the barrier Daniel himself hit: it ensures that veterans whose service was classified or sensitive can receive VA mental health care in an appropriate setting, may self-identify as such, and that VA staff receive guidance on treating them. Sinema introduced it in the House in October 2013 and reintroduced it in 2015, and stated on the House floor in 2017 that after more than three years of work with Howard and Jean it “is now law.” Representative Scott Peters of California, the Somerses’ own congressman after their move to the San Diego area, records the same passage from his side: he helped pass the bill ensuring that veterans who cannot participate in group therapy because of classified missions get the individual care they need.

The second is the Sgt. Daniel Somers Network of Support Act, Peters’s bill for the Defense Department: it directs DoD, working with the American Red Cross, to collect from new service members the names of the loved ones in their network of support and to give those people information about military life, benefits and services — so that no family starts, as the Somerses did, outside the information loop. It was included in the Fiscal Year 2020 National Defense Authorization Act and, in Peters’s office’s words, “became law at the end of 2019.”

The third is the Sergeant Daniel Somers Veterans Network of Support Act of 2019, Sinema’s Senate bill (S. 2864), which carries the same idea into the VA. It was enacted on December 5, 2020, as Section 101 of the Veterans COMPACT Act, Public Law 116-214. Section 101 requires VA to carry out a two-year pilot program on information sharing: service members who are transitioning out, before they separate, are to be encouraged to designate up to ten persons to receive information about the VA assistance and benefits available to them; the designated persons must be offered, within thirty days, the option to elect to receive it; and the information is to be disseminated regularly. “The fact that VA will now have to share information with our Veterans’ family members and loved ones regarding its programs and benefits will be of incalculable assistance,” Howard and Jean Somers said when it passed. “If this policy had been available to us and our son… we feel that his tragic outcome might very well have been averted.”

Where it stands now

As of October 2026, all three laws are on the books. What cannot be documented — and this page will not pretend otherwise — is the VA pilot’s life after enactment. Section 101 required VA to commence the pilot within one year of December 5, 2020, and to run it for not less than two years, with an evaluation built into the statute. Multiple searches of VA announcements, congressional releases and Congressional Research Service reporting turn up no public record of the pilot’s launch, of how many transitioning service members designated loved ones under it, or of the evaluation the statute calls for. The Classified Veterans Access to Care provisions likewise carry no public usage accounting this page can cite. The laws exist; their footprints, in the public record, are close to invisible.

One neighboring change deserves a clear label so it is not mis-credited. Section 201 of the same COMPACT Act — a different provision, from a different bill — created VA’s emergent suicide care benefit, under which, since January 17, 2023, veterans in acute suicidal crisis can receive emergency care at VA or in the community at no cost, whether or not they are enrolled. That is the door that, by his parents’ testimony, was closed to Daniel Somers. It exists now. It does not bear his name, and his name’s own pilot remains, on the public record, unaccounted for.

Howard and Jean Somers have kept working — through Operation Engage America, through testimony, and through interviews like their 2020 appearance on the Military Times podcast Seeking the Military Suicide Solution, whose introduction states their case in a sentence: Daniel “suffered for nearly a decade with Post Traumatic Stress, Traumatic Brain Injuries, and Gulf War Syndrome subsequent to serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom,” and “[h]is condition was exacerbated by his experiences with the Phoenix VA Mental Health Department.” 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

Daniel Somers’s case was made in public by the two people who knew it first. In the film below — made in September 2014 by Representative Kyrsten Sinema, in whose Arizona district he had lived — Howard and Jean Somers tell it themselves: the honest, happy-go-lucky kid with the encyclopedic memory; the traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress he came home with; and the day at the Phoenix VA when, in their account, Daniel said he was thinking of suicide and was told there were no beds, no referral, nowhere for him to go. It is the family’s testimony in their own voices, and it is the seed of everything in the ledger above.

The parents, in their own words. Howard and Jean Somers describe Daniel — "we lost our encyclopedia when we lost Daniel" — and recount, as they would later testify to Congress, the day he asked the Phoenix VA for help in crisis and was told no beds were available. (Office of Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, September 2014; transcript archived at Iowa State University's Archives of Women's Political Communication.)

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.