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Richard Stayskal: The Missed Scan, and the First Breach in the Feres Doctrine

Richard Stayskal took a sniper's bullet through the lung in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2004, and lived. Thirteen years later, at Womack Army Medical Center at Fort Bragg, a CT scan taken to clear him for Army dive school showed a tumor in the upper right lobe of his lung — by his sworn testimony, more than 1.5 centimeters across. No one told him it was there. He was cleared for dive school, sent to the emergency room twice with worsening symptoms, and discharged with pneumonia while, his records later showed, a second look at that same January scan had noted a possible mass and advised a biopsy he was never told about. A civilian pulmonologist diagnosed stage 3A lung cancer in June 2017; by January 2018 it had spread through his body and was terminal. When Stayskal tried to hold the institution accountable, he found that a 1950 Supreme Court decision — Feres v. United States — barred him — as it bars every service member — from suing the government for malpractice at all. So he went to Congress, and in December 2019 a law bearing his name opened the first crack in Feres in seventy years.

The service and the promise

Stayskal’s service record is documented in his own congressional testimony and in the family biography maintained by Operation FINALLY HOME, the nonprofit that later built his family a home. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2001 and served four years as a machine gunner and scout sniper. In Ramadi, Iraq, in 2004, he was critically wounded by insurgent sniper fire — a round through his left lung — and honorably discharged from the Marines in 2005 with a Purple Heart.

He re-enlisted in the Army in 2006, was selected for the Special Forces Qualification Course, and earned the Green Beret as a weapons sergeant. He served with the 10th Special Forces Group at Fort Carson and later at Fort Bragg, deploying multiple times in the global war on terrorism. His decorations, per the Operation FINALLY HOME biography, include the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, and the Army Commendation Medal; by the spring of 2019 he was in his seventeenth year of service and had been selected for the Warrant Officer Course.

The promise underneath a record like that is specific: a soldier who must take his medical care from the institution — who cannot choose his hospital — is owed, at minimum, that the institution will read his scans honestly and tell him what they show. The CT scan at the center of this page existed only because of that arrangement: his old gunshot wound made it mandatory before the Combat Dive Qualification Course. The institution ordered the test, read the test, and cleared him. It did not tell him what the test had found.

What happened

The timeline below is Stayskal’s own, given under oath on April 30, 2019, and corroborated by the FOX 46 Charlotte investigation that first reported his case in 2018.

In January 2017, the dive-school CT was done at Womack Army Medical Center, and Stayskal was cleared. “Until about 6 months later,” he testified, “I found out that a Womack Army doctor failed to identify an abnormally (over 1.5 centimeter) large tumor located in the upper right lobe of my lung.” He went to dive school. Around the end of March 2017 he began having difficulty breathing; by April he was wheezing, coughing, unable to lie flat without feeling he was suffocating, and coughing up blood.

He sought help at Womack, repeatedly. On his first emergency visit, he testified, a nurse discounted his symptoms because of his age and his job; an ER doctor called it probably walking pneumonia, gave him breathing treatments, and sent him home. A week later — May 22, 2017 — he was back, losing his vision and barely conscious; he passed out in the waiting area and was revived with a sternum rub, and was discharged again with “potential walking pneumonia” and prednisone.

What he was not told is what the FOX 46 investigation later documented from his medical files: on that May visit, Womack doctors re-examined the January CT, noted a “possible mediastinal mass,” and recommended a “transbronchial biopsy.” Stayskal’s own summary to Congress was the same: the finding “was actually seen on the first scans, and nobody ever told me. They never followed up.” When he then tried to see an on-post pulmonologist, he was told new patients were not a priority and to wait at least a month: “I just kept getting told, ‘Sir, new patients are not a priority.’”

Only after his commander went to the hospital and demanded he be seen or released off-post was he cleared to see a civilian pulmonologist, who moved in days: more scans, a breathing test, a biopsy. “When I awoke,” Stayskal testified, “I was woken up to my wife crying and learning that I had, at the time, stage 3A lung cancer.” The tumor had doubled — 2.8 by 2.2 centimeters — in the six months since the January scan nobody had acted on. The civilian doctor’s first question, as Stayskal recounted it, was: “Why weren’t you seen in January? There is clearly a mass there.” An independent radiologist retained by his attorney, Dr. Louis Leskosky, told the FOX 46 investigation the finding was “completely obvious” and that, testifying in court, he would call it “a case of gross malpractice.”

Stayskal underwent chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery to remove his upper right lobe. Around Christmas 2017 the symptoms returned; a PET scan in January 2018 showed the cancer had metastasized — to lymph nodes in his neck, his spleen, his liver, his spine, his right hip, and his ilium crest. “Beginning on January 22, 2018,” he testified, “I was diagnosed stage 4, terminal.” He went with his chain of command to the officer in charge at Womack to ask how it had happened. The answer he reported to Congress was: “Things do happen.” There was, he said, “no real answer” after that.

Then he hit the legal wall. In Feres v. United States, 340 U.S. 135 (1950), the Supreme Court consolidated three cases — a barracks-fire death, a death attributed to negligent Army medical care, and a soldier in whose stomach surgeons later found an Army towel — and held, in the sentence that has governed ever since, that “the Government is not liable under the Federal Tort Claims Act for injuries to servicemen where the injuries arise out of or are in the course of activity incident to service.” The Federal Tort Claims Act of 1946 had opened the courthouse to citizens injured by federal employees; Feres read service members back out of it. Later cases supplied the rationales — the distinctly federal character of the soldier-government relationship, the no-fault veterans’ benefits system Congress had already provided, and military discipline — as the Congressional Research Service summarized them in its 2021 legal sidebar. However a civilian in the Womack waiting room might have fared with the same missed scan, Stayskal, because he was a soldier, had no claim a court could hear. By the New York Times’ account, he contacted more than a dozen lawyers; all turned him down because of Feres. The Tampa attorney who finally took the case, Natalie Khawam, has said she concluded they “had a better chance of changing the law than winning in court.”

What the institution did afterward

What happened next was not the institution correcting itself; it was the Stayskals — Richard and Megan, who traveled to Washington throughout 2018 and 2019 — and Khawam carrying the case to Congress. Megan’s position, stated at the time, was precise about what they were and were not asking: “We aren’t trying to abolish the Feres Doctrine, we know that it serves a purpose as far as wartime goes. But at home, our servicemen and women deserve full rights.”

On April 30, 2019, Rep. Jackie Speier of California, who chaired the Subcommittee on Military Personnel, convened the hearing titled “Feres Doctrine — A Policy in Need of Reform?” Stayskal, audibly short of breath, was its first witness. “The failure of the military doctor’s gross negligence and the failure to detect my cancer when it was first noted on the CT scan done on me in January of 2017 is a mistake that allowed an aggressive tumor to double in size and rob me and my family of my life without any recourse due to a 1950s Supreme Court court case that created the Feres doctrine,” he told the subcommittee. “I want to say that this does affect me, obviously, but my children are definitely the true victims, along with my wife.”

The same day, Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina — Stayskal’s own congressman — introduced the Sergeant First Class Richard Stayskal Military Medical Accountability Act of 2019, with Speier, Jamie Raskin, Guy Reschenthaler, Ted Lieu, Markwayne Mullin, and Charlie Crist as bipartisan co-sponsors. Speier carried the broader version of the idea — an amendment to the Federal Tort Claims Act that would have let service members actually sue in federal court — and her amendment was included in the House-passed defense bill.

The court-access version did not survive the Senate. The opposition’s argument, as Sen. Lindsey Graham put it at the time, was the benefits bargain: “You get disability, you get benefits… and you’re not able to sue.” What emerged instead was a compromise — claims handled not in federal court but through a Defense Department administrative process.

On December 20, 2019, President Trump signed the FY2020 National Defense Authorization Act, Public Law 116-92. Its Section 731, the SFC Richard Stayskal Medical Accountability Act, added 10 U.S.C. § 2733a, “Medical malpractice claims by members of the uniformed services.” For the first time since Feres, a service member harmed by malpractice in a military hospital had somewhere to file. But the channel Congress built is administrative, not judicial, and its mechanics — set out in the statute and in the regulation at 32 C.F.R. Part 45 — define its limits:

Stayskal filed the first claim under his own law at 12:01 a.m. on January 1, 2020, the first moment the law allowed, with Khawam beside him; contemporaneous reporting put his claim at $5 million.

Where it stands now

The machinery Congress ordered in December 2019 took a year and a half to exist. The Defense Department did not publish its implementing regulation until June 17, 2021, and did not finalize it until August 26, 2022. In April 2022, more than two years after he filed, he was still waiting for an answer. “I think they hope I die,” he said. By October 2022 the services had received 448 claims seeking more than $4 billion and had approved 11 — about 2 percent.

His own answer came in March 2023, more than three years after filing, and it was a denial. According to Khawam, the Army admitted that it had “breached the standard of care” but concluded that the six-month delay had not affected the outcome — the cancer’s course would have been the same had the scan been read correctly in January 2017. “How is that possible?” Khawam said. “It’s cancer.” The Washington Post reported that the Army had separately signaled it would pay him $600,000 — then the maximum for pain and suffering under the system’s rules — through a discretionary funding authority; he refused it. (Accounts differ on the amount: $2 million in Military.com’s telling; the Post reported separate $20 million claims by Stayskal and his wife, both denied. The denial and the admitted breach are not in dispute.) At a Capitol press conference on March 29, 2023, Stayskal, audibly winded, called the denial “a blatant act of betrayal, not only to myself, but every service member out there,” and said: “I will give every breath I have for them.” Sen. Mullin supplied the phrase that has followed the program since: “The fox is guarding the henhouse.” Hudson, at the same event, addressed the Department directly: “To the DoD: you need to fix this. And if you don’t fix this, Congress is going to fix it. Period.”

Stayskal appealed. The appeal was denied as well, and by May 2024 the family’s position, as Megan stated it to Military.com, was the end of the road the statute builds: with the appeal denied, he had no additional recourse — no court exists to take the question to. “We hope that the legislation helps other families now and in the future,” she said. The family, she said, was “moving on.”

In June 2024, Military.com reported the services’ own numbers for the program’s first four-plus years: 597 claims received and 20 approved — roughly 3 percent. The Army had received 258 claims, approved 12, and paid $3.3 million in total; the Navy had received 188, approved 3, and paid $950,000; the Air Force had received 151, approved 5, and paid $75,325. Of the Army’s approved money, roughly $2 million went to a single family — a soldier diagnosed with stage IV rectal cancer after his treatment facility denied multiple requested colonoscopies. The Department’s fiscal 2023 report to Congress, via InvestigateTV (November 2024), counted 141 claims processed that year, of which 10 were settled. Against those figures stand two genuine improvements. In October 2023 the Department raised the cap on non-economic damages — pain, suffering, loss of enjoyment of life — from $600,000 to $750,000, economic damages remaining uncapped. And on May 10, 2024, the Department published a final rule (89 Fed. Reg. 40382) ending the practice of offsetting non-economic awards by the VA disability compensation and DoD payments a claimant receives; offsets now apply to economic damages only, and pending claims are decided under the new method. The Fiscal Year 2024 NDAA (§ 713, December 22, 2023) wrote new protections into § 2733a itself: a denied claimant must now receive detailed reasoning, the expert reports behind the denial, and the (board-certified) experts’ qualifications; the Department must report annually to Congress through 2028.

None of it reopens a courtroom. On February 24, 2025, the Supreme Court denied review in Carter v. United States, declining — again — to reconsider Feres itself. Justice Thomas, dissenting from the denial, called the doctrine an “atextual exception” the Court created, and wrote: “As I have said before, we should fix the mess that we have made.” Until either the Court or Congress does, a denied Stayskal Act claimant’s file closes inside the same department whose hospital caused the harm.

Stayskal himself was promoted to Master Sergeant and medically retired in 2022. The most recent reliable reporting on the family is Megan’s May 2024 account: her husband living with stage 4 lung cancer, on daily medication, his claim and appeal both denied, the family moving on. No later reliable public update on his health appears in the reporting reviewed for this page through October 2026, and this page states nothing beyond that dated record. 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

He made his case out loud, on the record, in the hearing room. Five films: the full 2019 hearing, the television account of the missed scan, Rep. Speier’s House-floor tribute, a plain-language explainer of the doctrine, and the homecoming his community built while the Pentagon was still deciding his claim.

The testimony. The full April 30, 2019 hearing of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel — Stayskal, audibly wheezing, is the first witness, followed by other affected families and legal experts on both sides of the doctrine. (U.S. House Armed Services Committee.)

The missed scan. WUSA9's September 2019 account of the January 2017 CT, the mass no one told him about, and the precedent standing between a Green Beret and a courtroom. (WUSA9.)

On the House floor. Rep. Jackie Speier, who chaired his hearing, honors Stayskal on the House floor, September 2019, as the bill bearing his name moved through Congress. (Jackie Speier.)

The doctrine, explained. A plain-language walk-through of what Feres is, where it came from, and how the 2020 act changed the ground under it. (Shapiro, Washburn & Sharp.)

The homecoming. Operation FINALLY HOME surprises the Stayskal family with a mortgage-free home, December 2020 — a year after the law was signed, while its namesake's own claim still sat undecided. (Operation FINALLY HOME.)

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.