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Dear Doug Collins

Kris Goldsmith: Bad Paper, and the Twelve-Year Fight to Undo It

Kristofer "Kris" Goldsmith did the job the Army gave him in Iraq: he photographed the dead. Torture victims, mutilated corpses, a mass grave in Sadr City — documented at nineteen years old, for identification, by a forward observer with a camera. He came home with nightmares the Army diagnosed as everything except what VA doctors would name two months after it discharged him: severe post-traumatic stress disorder. In May 2007, the night before he was to fly back to Iraq, he tried to end his life. The Army's documented response was to write him up for missing his flight and put him out with a general discharge whose narrative reason read, in the words on his paperwork, "Misconduct: Serious Offense." This page is the record of that discharge, of the twelve years it took him to undo it, and of the laws that changed because he would not stop telling the story in hearing rooms.

The service and the promise

Goldsmith graduated from Mepham High School on Long Island in 2003 and enlisted in the Army as a forward observer, trained to direct artillery fire, according to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s office, which later took up his case. He deployed to Iraq in 2005 with the Army’s Third Infantry Division, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom III. His primary duties, Gillibrand’s office records, were focused on intelligence reporting from the field — and those duties included the photo documentation of victims of torture found by his unit in a mass grave. Columbia University’s School of General Studies, where he later graduated in 2020, describes the same assignment in plainer terms: documenting everything his platoon did with a notepad and camera, “from mundane patrols to the worst parts of war: mass graves, mutilated corpses, and more.” He was nineteen. He rose to sergeant quickly — by the accounts collected since, a strong soldier with a superb record before his symptoms began.

The promise, for a soldier like Goldsmith, is not abstract. The Army assigns the duties, including the duties no nineteen-year-old is built for, and in return the institution stands behind the soldier when the assignment leaves damage — it diagnoses honestly, treats what it can, and separates the soldier, if it must, in a way that reflects the service rather than only the symptoms. The record shows the opposite sequence: the damage was documented by the Army’s own clinicians under other names, the crisis was treated as a crime, and the paperwork converted a medical collapse into a character verdict that followed him for twelve years.

What happened

When Goldsmith sought mental health treatment while still on active duty, he was diagnosed — again, by the account in Gillibrand’s Senate record — with chronic depression, personality disorder, and adjustment disorder. Those diagnoses mattered, and not only clinically. Personality and adjustment disorders were treated by the services as conditions that predated service, carrying neither disability compensation nor the presumption that the Army’s war had done the damage. Post-traumatic stress disorder was not the diagnosis he was given in uniform.

In 2007 he learned he would be sent back. Multiple accounts record that he was under stop-loss orders, his enlistment extended, with a second deployment to Iraq imminent. On the night before he was to ship out in May 2007, at Fort Stewart, Georgia, he overdosed on prescription pills and alcohol. The New York Times, in Dave Philipps’s reporting of February 19, 2016, records where he was found: passed out in a grove of trees at Fort Stewart that had been planted to honor soldiers killed in combat, discovered there by his platoon. In his own repeated account, he woke handcuffed to a gurney, and spent time in a psychiatric ward.

What happened next is the center of this page, and it is documented, not alleged. Philipps reported it in a single sentence in 2016: “Instead of screening Mr. Goldsmith for posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, records show that the Army wrote him up for missing his flight, then forced him out of the military with a less-than-honorable discharge.” The characterization was a general discharge — under honorable conditions in form, but general all the same — and the narrative reason for separation on his paperwork, as Gillibrand’s office quotes it, was “Misconduct: Serious Offense.” Other accounts of the proceeding record two Article 15 nonjudicial punishments, one for malingering — in effect, for faking illness — and one for missing movement. He has said his request for a court-martial, where he would have had a formal defense, was denied. By August 2007, by the Herald-Tribune’s later account, he was out.

The consequences were mechanical, and set by the characterization, not by his service record. A general discharge made him ineligible for the Post-9/11 GI Bill — the college benefit he had planned his future on. He has described in interviews how the “misconduct” narrative also cost him unemployment benefits in the collapsing economy of 2008, barred him from membership in most veterans service organizations, and made his service record read, on a résumé, like a criminal history. Two months after his discharge — the timeline in Gillibrand’s Senate materials — VA doctors gave him the diagnosis the Army had not: severe PTSD. Because his discharge was general rather than other-than-honorable, he qualified for VA health care, a distinction Army Times noted in 2020, and he has credited that care with keeping him alive. What he did not have was the honorable discharge, the education benefit, or a veteran’s standing in the eyes of the institutions built for veterans.

He appealed. Gillibrand’s office records two applications to the Army Discharge Review Board, denied both times — and that at one hearing the board called as its expert on his mental health file a physician with no background in mental health. By February 2016 the Times counted further appeals, denied as well; Goldsmith told Military Times in 2018 that he had experienced denial three times in a decade, and that a denial is itself traumatic for a veteran with PTSD. One of those denials, Military.com later reported, arrived on the anniversary of the suicide attempt that had caused the discharge.

What the institution did afterward

Goldsmith’s answer to the denials was to make his case the vehicle for other people’s. He became, while still a student at Nassau Community College and president of its student veterans organization, the public example in a legislative campaign. Gillibrand’s office states directly that she introduced her Military Mental Health Review Board Improvement Act in April 2014 after hearing from him. The provision — requiring that the boards reviewing discharges and corrections include a mental health professional, the very thing his own hearing had lacked — passed as part of the Fiscal Year 2015 National Defense Authorization Act in December 2014. “Justice is finally within reach for the countless veterans who, like me, have been inappropriately discharged,” Goldsmith said in Gillibrand’s release at the time. It was the first law his case helped move. It was not the last.

The larger doctrine changed in stages, and the stages should be kept separate, because advocates fought for each one separately. In September 2014, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel issued guidance directing the correction boards to give “liberal consideration” to upgrade petitions where PTSD might have contributed to the misconduct behind a discharge. That was a memo — policy, reversible by any later administration. In 2016, Goldsmith was among the veterans pressing Congress to make it law, appearing at a September 13, 2016 press conference for the Fairness for Veterans Act as an Army veteran discharged after a suicide attempt and stripped of his GI Bill. On December 23, 2016, President Obama signed the Fiscal Year 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, Public Law 114-328. Its Section 535 — the Fairness for Veterans provision authored by Senator Gary Peters, with Gillibrand among its sponsors — codified the Hagel principles: discharge review boards must review the medical evidence presented and review the case with liberal consideration that PTSD or traumatic brain injury potentially contributed to the circumstances of the discharge. The standard now sits in statute, at 10 U.S.C. § 1553(d), and the Peters provision extended it to PTSD and TBI related to military sexual trauma. A standard that had existed at a secretary’s pleasure was now one a board could be held to.

Care moved on a parallel track, and here too the distinction between policy and law is the story. In March 2017, VA Secretary David Shulkin announced — and in June 2017 formalized, effective July 5, 2017 — that VA medical centers would offer emergency mental health care, for an initial period of up to ninety days, to former service members with other-than-honorable discharges. It was the first initiative of its kind aimed at that population, and Goldsmith, by then an assistant director for policy at Vietnam Veterans of America and the founder of High Ground Veterans Advocacy, welcomed it publicly. But it was ninety days, and it was a secretary’s policy. In March 2018, Congress wrote the commitment into law. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018 carried provisions — championed, Army Times reported, by Representatives Mike Coffman and Beto O’Rourke and Senators Brian Schatz, Chris Murphy, and Jon Tester — creating what is now 38 U.S.C. § 1720I: VA must furnish an initial mental health assessment, and the care required to treat it, to former service members discharged under conditions other than honorable (excluding dishonorable discharges and discharges by court-martial) who served more than one hundred cumulative days and deployed to a combat theater or contingency operation — or who were victims of sexual assault or harassment in service. No ninety-day expiration. Goldsmith called the reforms “a major shift towards justice for those veterans who have for so long been denied it.” VVA officials, in the same reporting, estimated as many as 300,000 veterans nationwide might have been improperly dismissed — an estimate for the improperly dismissed, across eras, worth keeping distinct from the other figure in this record: the roughly 318,000 post-9/11 veterans, about thirteen percent of that generation, whom senators cited from a National Journal investigation in 2016 as having separated with less-than-honorable discharges of every kind.

The government’s own auditors confirmed the underlying pattern while these laws were being fought for. The Government Accountability Office reported in May 2017 (GAO-17-260) that 62 percent of the 91,764 service members separated for misconduct in fiscal years 2011 through 2015 — 57,141 people — had been diagnosed within the two years before separation with PTSD, traumatic brain injury, or other conditions that could be associated with misconduct, and that 13,283 of them received an “other than honorable” characterization making them potentially ineligible for VA health benefits. GAO also found the services’ screening policies inconsistent with Defense Department policy. The pipeline the laws addressed was not anecdote. It was the department’s own data.

Goldsmith’s own paper took longest. In 2019 — twelve years after his separation — the Army upgraded his discharge to fully honorable, Military.com reported in January 2021, following, in its words, “a years-long struggle and multiple denials.” By his account, reported from his 2020 testimony, he did not learn of the upgrade for about half a year, because the notice was sent to his childhood home. In July 2020 he testified before the House Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs, at the hearing titled “Stuck in Red Paper: How VA’s Regulatory Policies Prevent Bad Paper Veterans from Accessing Critical Benefits,” and proposed a remedy aimed at the front door rather than the appeal: a filing procedure created specifically for veterans with less-than-honorable discharges, so that veterans would know there is a specific process for them instead of being discouraged from filing at all. “The VA already has the statutory authority to care for veterans with bad paper,” he told the subcommittee, in Army Times’s account. “So I beg of you: do something big.” The committee’s leadership put the population he spoke for at 500,000 veterans then left out of the VA system.

Where it stands now

As of October 2026, the legal architecture Goldsmith’s generation of advocates built is real, and it is incomplete in a specific, documented way: almost everything in it still depends on the veteran coming forward, one case at a time.

What has been added since his upgrade is incremental in the same pattern. In a settlement agreed on November 17, 2020, in the class action brought by veterans Steve Kennedy and Alicia Carson, the Army agreed to re-review more than 3,500 discharge cases — a defined set of previously denied post-9/11 applications, not the whole population — and to let veterans participate by phone or video rather than traveling to Washington. Goldsmith welcomed it on exactly those terms: the video conferencing, he said, “should have happened a long time ago.” And on June 25, 2024, VA’s amended character-of-discharge regulation took effect, expanding access for some former service members with other-than-honorable discharges: it eliminated an old regulatory bar, created a “compelling circumstances exception,” and opened the door for previously denied veterans to reapply. VA’s determination decides benefits eligibility only. It does not change the discharge itself; the paper still says what it says until a service board changes it.

Against that, the gaps are the ones Goldsmith has named for a decade. There is no automatic or proactive review of post-9/11 less-than-honorable discharges as a class — the no-application-needed review the Defense Department completed in 2024 for “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” cases has no equivalent for bad-paper veterans whose misconduct records may trace to undiagnosed PTSD or TBI. Each veteran must learn that an appeal exists, assemble records, and apply, against boards that historically denied the overwhelming majority of applicants — a process Goldsmith has described as itself traumatic when it ends in denial. And eligibility without outreach has repeatedly proved to be a promise on paper: NPR reported in October 2018 that only 115 people had taken up the emergency mental-health program Shulkin had launched the year before, a failure VVA’s leadership attributed to the department not reaching the veterans the program existed for. Goldsmith’s summary of the system, given to Congress in 2020, has not been answered by any later development this page can cite: “There are major systemic flaws that allow patriots like me to serve and sacrifice for this country, only to be discarded like trash.”

Goldsmith himself went on from VVA — where he served as chief investigator and associate director for policy and government affairs — to found and lead later veterans’ organizations, and he graduated from Columbia University in 2020, on the education the GI Bill denial had once put out of reach, the upgrade having come the year before. 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

Goldsmith’s case was made in public, in his own voice, over more than a decade — as a young soldier testifying about Iraq in 2008, as a petitioner for suicide-prevention legislation in 2014, and as the witness Congress called in 2020 to explain what its own regulatory paper does to veterans. Five films: the 2020 testimony, the two 2008 recordings, the Clay Hunt petition, and the explainer his fellow advocates use to define the term his discharge taught the country.

The testimony. Goldsmith tells the House Veterans' Affairs subcommittee his own bad-paper story, July 2020 — the "Stuck in Red Paper" hearing he had waited, by his account, thirteen years for. (Committee on Veterans Affairs' Democrats.)

The young sergeant, 2008. Goldsmith testifies about his Iraq service with the 3rd Infantry Division — the duties, including photographing the dead, that preceded his discharge fight. (BushVersusTruth, posting the 2008 testimony.)

Breakdown of the military. Iraq Veterans Against the War's 2008 recording of Goldsmith speaking, in the first part of two, within a year of his separation. (IVAWtube.)

The petition. Goldsmith delivers IAVA's petition for the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act, December 2014 — the month the first law his own case inspired was enacted. (IAVAVids.)

The term, defined. Swords to Plowshares, the veterans' legal-aid organization, explains what a "bad paper" discharge is and what it costs the veteran who carries one. (Swords to Plowshares.)

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.