Welcome to the Record
DearDougCollins.com exists because every private channel was tried first.
The Bowman family sent the emails, filed the casework, called the hotlines, and collected the case numbers — Senate casework, the White House VA Hotline, AskVA, the patient advocates, an acknowledgment from the Secretary’s own Office of Client Relations promising that VHA leadership would follow up. What came back was acknowledgment, redirection, and silence. The one thing that ever actually moved — a dying veteran’s admission to a VA nursing home — moved because of a chance face-to-face meeting with one decent man, not because of any channel the VA operates.
So the letters went public. This site publishes open letters to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, the documented cases behind them, and a running count of how long each letter goes unanswered. It criticizes a cabinet secretary’s job performance in his official capacity, on a documented record — and it gives every family carrying the same weight a place to put their case next to this one.
These dispatches are where that record grows between letters: a case update, a new page for one of the betrayed, a hard look at the system underneath, a milestone in the count of silent days.
How the record is kept
- Primary documents first. Dates, case numbers, and the VA’s own records carry the stories. Allegations are attributed to whoever made them.
- Consent controls publication. Families choose: their name, anonymous, or record-only. Nothing publishes beyond the choice made.
- Identifiers are withheld. No Social Security numbers, VA file or member IDs, medical record numbers, or full dates of birth appear on this site.
- Corrections are part of the record. If something here is wrong, it gets fixed in the open — that discipline is the whole difference between this site and a rumor.
The site was founded by Thomas Bowman, Jr., of Port Orange, Florida — son, Durable Power of Attorney agent, Health Care Surrogate, and registered VA Family Caregiver of Thomas Alan Bowman, Sr., the veteran in the founding case. He is not a veteran; he is one of the thousands of family caretakers the VA’s system quietly runs on.
Start with the founding case, read Letter No. 1, and meet the people this site keeps the account for.
Filed under Dispatches — the running log of DearDougCollins.com.