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Dear Doug Collins

The Manker Class: The Marine the Navy Board Denied, and the Thousands It Had to Reconsider

Tyson Manker was, by the Marine Corps' own evaluations, an excellent Marine: infantry, first of his peers promoted to corporal, squad leader in the lead fighting force of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, in a battalion whose performance under fire earned the Presidential Unit Citation. His post-deployment health assessment documented the classic signs — nightmares, hypervigilance, anxiety — and exposure to nearly every trauma the form listed. No treatment followed. What followed, within months, was an other-than-honorable discharge for smoking marijuana once, weeks before his four-year enlistment would have ended. The discharge cost him the GI Bill, his benefits, and his standing. When he finally asked the Naval Discharge Review Board to correct it, the board denied him — as it denied, by the Yale Law School clinic's count, eighty-five percent of the veterans who asked. So Manker did the one thing the board's process had no form for: he sued the Secretary of the Navy on behalf of every Navy and Marine Corps veteran in his position, and won a settlement that made the board reconsider thousands of its own denials. This page is the record of that discharge, that denial rate, and that settlement.

The service and the promise

Manker enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1999, at eighteen, from South Jacksonville, Illinois, and served as an infantryman. In 2003 he deployed to Iraq as part of the lead U.S. fighting force in Operation Iraqi Freedom, with the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines. The accounts collected in his later litigation and in reporting on it describe a combat tour of the hardest kind: hidden explosives, repeated concussive blasts as a mortar gunner, dead and dismembered fighters and civilians, a close friend who died by an accidental self-inflicted gunshot. His battalion’s performance in Baghdad and Karbala earned it the Presidential Unit Citation for “extraordinary heroism in action against an armed enemy.” Manker himself, by his account in his 2021 Army Times essay, was “a third-year standout Marine with high marks, the first junior marine of my peers to be promoted to non-commissioned officer,” put in charge of his own squad during the invasion. His final two evaluations, the Chicago Sun-Times reported, rated him “excellent” in proficiency and conduct.

The promise, for a Marine like Manker, has two halves. The first is the one made at enlistment: serve honorably, and the country stands behind you afterward — health care for what the service did to you, education benefits you earned, a discharge paper that says what your service actually was. The second is the safety valve Congress built for when the first half fails: the discharge review boards. Congress created the Naval Discharge Review Board to re-examine discharges after veterans return to civilian life and correct the ones that were unjust or harsh — the institution’s own mechanism for admitting that a characterization of service, issued in the fog and speed of a wartime separation, got a man wrong. Manker’s case is the record of both halves failing: the board that existed to correct the error defended the error instead, at scale, until a federal court settlement made it stop.

What happened

Manker’s symptoms began in Iraq and were written down by the Marines themselves. The complaint in his later lawsuit, summarized in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, records that he developed nightmares, hypervigilance, mood swings, and anxiety, with symptoms of PTSD and traumatic brain injury documented on his Postdeployment Health Assessment form. The New York Times’ account describes what that form contained: exposure “to nearly every type of trauma listed, including seeing dead civilians and Marines, killing enemy fighters and civilians, and experiencing nightmares and hyper vigilance.” By his account, there was no follow-up. He returned to the United States in September 2003.

One night before taking a month of leave, Manker smoked marijuana with two junior Marines. After he returned to base, he was charged non-judicially with use or possession of a controlled substance and failure to prevent subordinates from using methamphetamine and marijuana. By his account, his own urinalysis came back clean, a fellow Marine’s test did not, and he confessed during a lengthy NCIS interrogation in which he was told he faced fifty years at Fort Leavenworth if he did not cooperate. He has said his medical assessment showed no substance dependence and recommended his trauma be addressed. No help came. In December 2003, months before his enlistment was to end, he was discharged under other-than-honorable conditions — “bad paper,” in veterans’ shorthand — and, by the reporting, demoted and fined on his way out.

The consequences were mechanical, set by the characterization rather than the service record behind it. The discharge stripped him of the GI Bill and the Illinois Veterans Grant, his signing bonus, service-connected injury compensation, and eligibility for VA health care. In the spring of 2004, a private social worker diagnosed him with PTSD and referred him to his local VA center. The complaint records what happened when he called: “Sorry, we don’t help OTH vets.” What followed, by his own repeated account, was years unmoored — drugs and alcohol, suicidal thoughts, work in motorcycle repair in Texas, where he survived a near-fatal stabbing in Austin. He has described that night as the one that shook him out of the haze. He went home to Illinois, put himself through community college and then the University of Illinois, graduating magna cum laude, and then through law school at Western Michigan University — all of it on student loans, because the education benefit his service was supposed to carry did not exist for a man with his discharge. He became a licensed attorney and a business law professor. Then he went back for the paper.

In June 2016, acting on his own behalf, Manker applied to the NDRB for an upgrade to honorable and a change in his narrative reason for separation. The application was denied anyway. The Associated Press, reporting that December on veterans seeking pardons, described the board’s reasoning as Manker relayed it: the board did not dispute his PTSD, but concluded there was no evidence he had smoked marijuana because of his trauma. That reasoning — concede the wound, sever it from the conduct, deny the upgrade — was, the lawsuit he filed next would allege, the board’s standard product. The numbers assembled from Defense Department records released under the Freedom of Information Act bore the allegation out in comparative terms: since 2016, the Naval Discharge Review Board had granted discharge upgrades in about fifteen percent of cases in which PTSD was cited as a contributing factor, while the Army’s board granted forty-five percent and the Air Force’s thirty-seven percent of comparable cases. The Yale clinic’s broader count was starker: the NDRB denied eighty-five percent of all the applications it received. The government’s own auditors had already documented the population those denials were landing on: the Government Accountability Office reported in 2017 that sixty-two percent of the service members separated for misconduct in fiscal years 2011 through 2015 had been diagnosed, within the two years before separation, with PTSD, traumatic brain injury, or other conditions that could be associated with misconduct.

What the institution did afterward

The standard had been announced two years before his application. On September 3, 2014, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel directed the military’s correction boards to give “liberal consideration” to upgrade petitions claiming PTSD — to fully and carefully consider every petition, treat records describing PTSD symptoms as potential mitigation for the misconduct behind a discharge, and give special weight to a VA determination connecting the condition to service. The memo was policy, not law. Congress then did what Congress does when it means it: on December 23, 2016, the Fairness for Veterans provision of the Fiscal Year 2017 NDAA wrote the standard into statute at 10 U.S.C. § 1553(d). In August 2017, Under Secretary Anthony Kurta’s clarifying guidance made explicit that the standard applied to the discharge review boards as well, extended it to mental health conditions generally and to military sexual trauma and harassment, and set out four questions for a board: whether the veteran had a condition or experience that may excuse or mitigate the discharge; whether it existed during service; whether it actually excuses or mitigates; and whether it outweighs the discharge.

On paper, by the end of 2017, a veteran in Manker’s position had a memo, a statute, and clarifying guidance all pointing the same way. The NDRB’s grant rate barely moved. The institution’s answer to its own announced standard was to keep deciding as it had decided — and to do so, the lawsuit alleged, without explaining what a veteran would have to show to prevail.

On March 2, 2018, Manker and the National Veterans Council for Legal Redress filed a nationwide class action in the District of Connecticut, Manker v. Spencer, No. 3:18-cv-00372, against the Secretary of the Navy, represented by Yale Law School’s Veterans Legal Services Clinic and Jenner & Block LLP. The complaint alleged that the board had rejected the overwhelming majority of applications based on credible claims of service-connected PTSD without applying the standards Congress and the Defense Department had set, that its unexplained denials violated the Administrative Procedure Act, and that the pattern deprived applicants of Fifth Amendment due process — in the plaintiffs’ framing, an unwritten policy against granting upgrades operating behind a stated policy in favor of them. The Navy denied the allegations, then and in settling later; they were never adjudicated, and this page states them as what they are.

The court let the case be what the plaintiffs said it was. On November 15, 2018, Senior Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. certified the class: Iraq- and Afghanistan-era veterans — service between October 7, 2001 and the present — discharged from the Navy, Navy Reserve, Marine Corps, or Marine Corps Reserve with general or other-than-honorable characterizations (bad-conduct and dishonorable excluded), not upgraded to honorable by the NDRB, with diagnoses of PTSD, traumatic brain injury, or related conditions, or records documenting symptoms of them at discharge attributable to service. “It is a national disgrace,” Manker said at the filing. “By taking this action with the courts we intend to restore the rule of law along with honor for thousands of patriots who were treated so poorly by the nation they served.” On November 7, 2019, Haight denied the Navy’s motion to dismiss, ordered discovery, and directed the Navy to reconsider the upgrade applications of Manker himself and of John Doe, the unnamed veteran member of the organizational plaintiff.

The case settled. The parties filed their agreement on September 16, 2021; the court granted preliminary approval on October 12, 2021; a fairness hearing followed on December 16, 2021, held by video teleconference — the same technology the settlement was about to make ordinary for the veterans it covered. On February 15, 2022, the court granted final approval, Judge Haight calling the settlement “an impressive example of the manner in which a class action can be made the vehicle for doing substantial justice and advancing the rule of law.” Manker’s own discharge was upgraded to honorable in connection with the settlement — the outcome the Sun-Times reported as the deal was struck, and that later court filings in his own subsequent litigation confirm. “I’m thankful that I can hang an honorable discharge on my wall,” he told the Sun-Times, “and that, when I die, there will be a flag folded in my honor.”

What the settlement required was structural, and is best stated in the Navy’s own words: its October 12, 2021 press release announced agreement “to review the discharges of thousands of Veterans affected by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), military sexual trauma (MST), and other behavioral or mental health conditions,” and to change its procedures for future applicants. Specifically: the NDRB would automatically reconsider its “special cases” — applications containing a diagnosis, allegation, or evidence of those conditions — decided between March 2, 2012 and the settlement’s effective date, February 15, 2022, in which the veteran had not received a full upgrade to honorable, with notice to each veteran and sixty days to submit additional evidence. Veterans whose adverse decisions fell earlier, between October 7, 2001 and March 2, 2012, received expanded rights to apply again under the newer law and guidance — those whose discharges were by then more than fifteen years old routed to the Board for Correction of Naval Records, because the review board’s statutory authority runs out at fifteen years. Going forward, the Navy agreed to video-teleconference hearings from a veteran’s home or chosen location instead of a trip to Washington; annual training for board members and staff; updated decision protocols, including standardized application of the Kurta questions; decisional documents explaining in detail any decision short of a full upgrade; acknowledgment letters telling new applicants how to find free legal representation and medical evaluation; and an online submission and tracking system. Upgrades were expressly not guaranteed; every case would still be decided individually. The Navy settled while denying the allegations — a commitment to a process, not a confession.

The settlement was the Navy’s version of a remedy the same clinic had already extracted from the Army: on April 26, 2021, a federal court granted final approval to the settlement in the Army class action brought by veterans Steve Kennedy and Alicia Carson, requiring re-review of thousands of previously denied post-9/11 cases. A third case, against the Air Force, was filed in September 2021 and remained in litigation as the Navy settlement closed. Branch by branch, the same fact pattern produced the same result: left to itself, a board’s announced standard and its actual decisions could diverge for years, and only a class action closed the gap.

Where it stands now

As of October 2026, the Manker machinery exists and is running, with the limits written into it on the day it was approved.

The automatic reconsiderations were carried out — later federal court records show the board deciding Manker reconsideration cases by 2023, including at least one it denied again. That is the settlement working exactly as written: a guaranteed second look under the right standard, with notice, a chance to add evidence, and reasons owed in writing — not a guaranteed result.

The wider system remains, on the government’s own audit, uneven. In July 2025 the GAO reported (GAO-25-107354) that the boards had applied liberal consideration to more than 21,000 cases closed between January 2018 and March 2024, with grant rates ranging from eighteen to forty-nine percent depending on the board. GAO found inconsistent weight given to VA service-connection determinations and to applicants’ testimony about sexual harassment or assault, inconsistently explained decisions, and about forty-three percent of required decisional documents missing from the department’s online reading room. The standard Manker sued to enforce is law. Its administration, a decade after the Hagel memo, is still a lottery of which board a veteran draws.

The class boundaries also stand where they were drawn. The settlement reaches Navy and Marine Corps veterans of the era ending February 15, 2022, with general or other-than-honorable discharges; it does not reach bad-conduct or dishonorable discharges, or the other services, each of which required its own lawsuit. A veteran in the 2001–2012 group holds a right to reapply, not a review already in motion. And a veteran the Navy’s records cannot find, or who does not answer the notice, keeps the paper he has. Separately, VA’s amended character-of-discharge regulation took effect June 25, 2024, expanding benefits eligibility for some other-than-honorable veterans through a “compelling circumstances exception.” It decides benefits only; it does not change the discharge itself. The paper still says what it says until a service board changes it — which is the whole of Manker’s point.

Manker himself has kept working the seam his case opened: a practicing Illinois attorney, author of the VA Handbook for Veterans and Advocates (2020), and founder of Lincoln’s Promise, a nonprofit providing free legal services to veterans with PTSD seeking discharge upgrades. His statement of the principle, in his November 2021 Army Times essay, takes its title from Lincoln’s second inaugural: the work of ending a war includes the promise “to care for [all] who have borne the battle.” 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

Manker’s fight was waged mostly in court filings and print — the camera record of his specific case is thin, and this wall does not pretend otherwise. Three films carry the context: the explainer that defined “bad paper” for the public, a law clinic’s restoration of another veteran’s honor, and the legal-aid training on the upgrade process his settlement reformed.

The term, defined. Swords to Plowshares and Brave New Films explain what a "bad paper" discharge is and what it costs the veteran who carries one — the category Manker's 2003 discharge put him in. (Swords to Plowshares.)

An honor restored. UNC School of Law's Military and Veterans Law Clinic tells the story of John Spencer, a Vietnam veteran separated with an other-than-honorable discharge for minor infractions, whose honor — and Purple Heart — an upgrade fight restored fifty-one years later: the individual version of the work the Yale clinic did for Manker's class. (UNC School of Law.)

How an upgrade is won. Community Legal Services of Mid-Florida's training on the discharge-upgrade process — the boards, the forms, the evidence, and the liberal-consideration standards the Manker settlement forced the NDRB to actually apply. (Community Legal Services.)

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.