Dear Doug Collins

Doug Collins

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The 12th Secretary. Confirmed Feb 5, 2025. Everything on this site is addressed to him — this page tracks what he says, on camera, in his own words.

Paul R. Lawrence

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The No. 2. Confirmed Mar 28, 2025. Former benefits chief (2018–21) — he chairs the searches for the two under-secretary jobs still unfilled.

John Figueroa

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Runs the VA health system as an acting official since Jul 9, 2026. The confirmed man in this job quit inside seven months.

Margarita Devlin

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The benefits chief’s chair has been empty since Jan 2025. Devlin, the career principal deputy, has performed the duties since May 15, 2025.

Sam Brown

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The one confirmed chief who has lasted. West Point, wounded in Kandahar, confirmed Jul 31, 2025. Runs the national cemeteries.

Curt Cashour

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Secretary’s top advisor since Feb 2026 — the second man to hold the job in this administration. A career communications operative and Iraq veteran.

Quinn Slaven

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The department’s voice to the press since Apr 2026. The name on VA’s statements — including its October 2026 responses on staffing and the EHR contract.

Dr. Lisa M. Arfons

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Runs community care — the office that owns whether an authorized consult ever gets scheduled. Acting since Apr 22, 2026.

Dr. Colleen M. Richardson

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Runs the caregiver programs — the office that enrolled Tom Bowman in the unpaid tier and never approved a single support he requested in writing.

Cheryl L. Mason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Confirmed Jul 31, 2025. The Bowman OIG complaint of Oct 15, 2026 sits in her office. She spent Jan–Aug 2025 as Collins’s senior advisor.

Review of Accuracy of Claims Processors’ Disability Evaluation Decisions for Painful Scars

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 25-03303-266 · October 21, 2026 · Office of Audits and Evaluations

What the OIG found

OIG reviewed whether the Veterans Benefits Administration accurately decided disability claims involving service-connected painful scars, sampling two sets of decisions completed between June 1, 2024, and May 31, 2025: those granting service connection and those increasing ratings for previously service-connected painful scars. From those samples, OIG estimated that 38 percent of the decisions, about 17,900 cases, contained at least one error, and that at least 920 errors caused roughly $5.6 million in overpayments that will keep accruing until corrected. The errors stemmed from claims processors not consistently following the regulatory requirements for deciding whether a scar is painful, including relying on subjective reports of pain without objective examination evidence; from VBA systems not consistently flagging pyramiding, where the same disability manifestations are evaluated under multiple diagnostic codes; and from previously service-connected scars that later became painful not receiving a separate evaluation under the painful scar diagnostic code. A follow-up sample of 30 decisions from January 2026 showed a similar 43 percent error rate. OIG made three recommendations to improve decision accuracy under the VA Schedule for Rating Disabilities, and VBA concurred with all three.

Healthcare Facility Inspection of the VA Phoenix Health Care System in Arizona

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 26-00041-05 · October 19, 2026 · Office of Healthcare Inspections

What the OIG found

The OIG conducted a focused inspection of care at the VA Phoenix Health Care System in Arizona, evaluating culture, environment of care, patient safety, integrated veteran care, and the veteran-centered safety net. A single issue required correction, in the patient safety domain. The OIG made one recommendation: that the Chief of Staff and the Associate Director for Patient Care Services develop written service-level workflows defining staff members’ roles in communicating test results to patients, as required by VHA Directive 1088(1).

Welcome to the Record

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why this site exists, who publishes it, and how the record is kept — the first dispatch, adapted from the site’s founding statement.

Healthcare Facility Inspection of the VA Nebraska-Western Iowa Health Care System in Omaha

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 25-00239-196 · October 9, 2026 · Office of Healthcare Inspections

What the OIG found

OIG conducted a focused Healthcare Facility Inspection of the Omaha system, evaluating care across five domains: culture, environment of care, patient safety, integrated veteran care, and the veteran-centered safety net. The inspection produced four recommendations in two domains. In environment of care, inspectors found problems with patient care area cleanliness and biohazard management, a Legionella prevention assessment that did not include the Papillion community living center, and pharmaceutical waste disposal practices. In patient safety, the facility lacked service-level workflows spelling out staff roles for communicating test results to patients and providers. OIG directed the facility Director and Chief of Staff to fix the cleanliness, biohazard, Legionella, and waste-disposal issues and to create the missing test-result communication workflows.

Healthcare Facility Inspection of the VA North Texas Health Care System in Dallas

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 26-00055-01 · October 8, 2026 · Office of Healthcare Inspections

What the OIG found

OIG conducted a focused Healthcare Facility Inspection of the Dallas system, the highest-complexity type of facility, examining care delivery and patient safety across five domains: culture, environment of care, patient safety, integrated veteran care, and the veteran-centered safety net. Inspectors looked at everything from employee and veteran experience and the cleanliness and safety of patient care areas to test-result communication processes, staffing, access to primary and community care, and support programs for vulnerable veterans. The inspection did not reveal issues in any of the five domains that warranted recommendations for corrective action. OIG made zero recommendations and closed the report on October 8, 2026.

Review of Roll-up Findings on Discharge Instructions and Risk-Benefit Discussions from Inspections of VA Inpatient Mental Health Care

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 26-01435-02 · October 8, 2026 · Office of Healthcare Inspections

What the OIG found

The OIG combined what it had found across 10 inspections of VA inpatient mental health care carried out between January 2024 and August 2025, and the same failures kept recurring from system to system. Discharge instructions were frequently written in technical terminology and medical abbreviations that can leave a veteran unsure where to go, what a medication is for, or what happens next — raising the risk of missed appointments, medication errors, and broken continuity of care. The inspectors also found widespread failure to document the required risk-benefit discussions before starting veterans on new medications, which means there is little assurance patients were given the information needed to make informed decisions. Individual facilities made local fixes — revised templates, clearer clinic names, staff education — but because the deficiencies were so consistent, the OIG concluded this is a system-wide problem needing national oversight, and made three recommendations to the Under Secretary for Health. VHA responded with an action plan.

Healthcare Facility Inspection of the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System in Pennsylvania

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 26-00047-288 · October 6, 2026 · Office of Healthcare Inspections

What the OIG found

OIG inspected the Pittsburgh system from March 24 through 26, 2026, reviewing a highest-complexity facility that provided direct care to about 93,000 patients in fiscal year 2025 across five domains: culture, environment of care, patient safety, integrated veteran care, and the veteran-centered safety net. All four recommendations came from environment of care, where inspectors found dust on patient care surfaces and supply shelves, portable medical equipment overdue for inspection and testing, unsecured power strips and stretched electrical cords, and employees who could not explain proper pharmaceutical waste disposal procedures. No recommendations arose in the other four domains, including the review of test-result communication and of primary and community care access. OIG recommended the Director ensure patient care areas and storerooms are kept clean, equipment is inspected and tested, pharmaceutical waste containers are provided and staff trained on their use, and power strips and cords are secured to fire and electrical codes.

Healthcare Facility Inspection of the VA Columbia Missouri Healthcare System

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 26-00046-284 · October 5, 2026 · Office of Healthcare Inspections

What the OIG found

OIG inspected the Columbia, Missouri system from February 10 through 12, 2026, with updates in April and July 2026, reviewing a high-complexity facility that provided direct care to about 44,000 patients in fiscal year 2025 across five domains: culture, environment of care, patient safety, integrated veteran care, and the veteran-centered safety net. The only finding came in environment of care, where inspectors observed dusty equipment and surfaces in several clinical areas that did not comply with VHA’s Comprehensive Environment of Care Program directive. Reviews of culture, test-result communication and other patient safety processes, staffing and access in primary and community care, and safety-net programs for vulnerable veterans produced no recommendations. OIG made a single recommendation that facility leaders take appropriate action so staff maintain a safe and clean environment, and facility and network leaders concurred with an acceptable action plan.

Healthcare Facility Inspection of the VA Maine Healthcare System in Augusta

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 25-00244-289 · October 5, 2026 · Office of Healthcare Inspections

What the OIG found

OIG inspected the Maine system in Augusta from July 29 through 31, 2025, with follow-up contacts in January and July 2026, reviewing a mid-high-complexity facility that provided direct care to more than 44,000 veterans in fiscal year 2025 across five domains: culture, environment of care, patient safety, integrated veteran care, and the veteran-centered safety net. Both recommendations came from patient safety and concerned test results: the facility’s test result communication policy did not align with VHA Directive 1088(1), it lacked service-level workflows explaining staff responsibilities in notifying patients, and its acting Chief of Staff and Associate Director for Patient and Nursing Services had not developed improvement actions after learning that providers were not communicating test results within required time frames. No recommendations arose in the other four domains. OIG recommended the Chief of Staff and nursing executive create the missing workflows, update the policy to match the directive, and act on external peer review data to improve how providers communicate test results to patients.

Healthcare Facility Inspection of the VA Finger Lakes Healthcare System in Bath, New York

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 26-00059-221 · October 2, 2026 · Office of Healthcare Inspections

What the OIG found

OIG inspected the Finger Lakes system in Bath, New York from May 5 through 7, 2026, reviewing a low-complexity facility that provided direct care to 33,076 patients in fiscal year 2025 across five domains: culture, environment of care, patient safety, integrated veteran care, and the veteran-centered safety net. All three recommendations came from environment of care, where inspectors found multiple safety and compliance issues, some of them repeat findings: crosswalks without detectable warning surfaces, rainwater pooled on floors, missing biohazard signs, blocked or confusing exit routes, inconsistent temperature and humidity monitoring in medication rooms, inaccessible sinks in soiled utility rooms, dusty sprinkler heads, doors that did not latch, and expired supplies stored outside standard supply rooms. Staff corrected many issues during the inspection or had improvement projects underway, and no recommendations arose in the other four domains. OIG recommended the Director complete a safety risk assessment of enclosed walkways and fix slip hazards, have staff regularly identify and remove expired supplies, and have the network Director monitor the facility’s processes to prevent repeat environment of care findings.

Healthcare Facility Inspection of the VA Shreveport Healthcare System in Louisiana

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 26-00057-170 · October 2, 2026 · Office of Healthcare Inspections

What the OIG found

OIG inspected the Shreveport system from March 23 through 26, 2026, with an update in June 2026 and primary care wait time data reviewed through July 2026, examining a mid-high-complexity facility that provided direct care to about 39,700 patients in fiscal year 2025 across five domains: culture, environment of care, patient safety, integrated veteran care, and the veteran-centered safety net. Both recommendations came from patient safety: the facility lacked service-level workflows outlining staff roles in communicating test results, and the Chief of Staff and Associate Director for Patient Care Services did not consistently review performance data on test result communications or take corrective action when abnormal results were not communicated within seven days as VHA Directive 1088(1) requires. No recommendations arose in the other four domains, including environment of care and access to primary and community care. OIG recommended the two leaders develop written workflows for test-result communication and routinely review the performance data and correct noncompliance with the seven-day standard for abnormal results.

Healthcare Facility Inspection of the VA West Texas Healthcare System in Big Spring

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 26-00040-285 · October 2, 2026 · Office of Healthcare Inspections

What the OIG found

OIG conducted a focused Healthcare Facility Inspection of the West Texas system in Big Spring, evaluating care across five domains: culture, environment of care, patient safety, integrated veteran care, and the veteran-centered safety net. The inspection produced five recommendations in two domains. In environment of care, staff were not consistently following the facility’s Legionella prevention plan for the community living center, including testing, documentation, and mitigation requirements under VHA Directive 1061(4). In patient safety, the facility lacked a written policy and service-level workflows for communicating test results aligned with VHA Directive 1088(1), had not taken corrective action on unfavorable trends in test-result communication, and its Healthcare Delivery Board was not providing proper oversight of clinical care quality. OIG recommended the Director enforce the Legionella plan and evaluate the board’s oversight, and that the Chief of Staff and Associate Director for Patient Care Services write the test-result policy and workflows and act on the negative communication trends.

Healthcare Facility Inspection of the Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System in Little Rock

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 25-00203-180 · September 30, 2026 · Office of Healthcare Inspections

What the OIG found

The OIG carried out a focused inspection of care at the Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System in Little Rock, looking at culture, environment of care, patient safety, integrated veteran care, and the veteran-centered safety net. Problems surfaced in only one area, the environment of care. The OIG issued three recommendations, all in that area, calling on the director to assess where temperature and humidity monitoring is needed, to address liquid nitrogen tank storage and keep access to exits clear, and to prevent previously identified findings from recurring.

Healthcare Facility Inspection of the Central Virginia VA Health Care System in Richmond

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 25-00213-242 · September 30, 2026 · Office of Healthcare Inspections

What the OIG found

The OIG performed a focused inspection of the Central Virginia VA Health Care System in Richmond, examining culture, environment of care, patient safety, primary care, and the veteran-centered safety net. The findings requiring correction were in patient safety and centered on communication of test results. The OIG made two recommendations: revise the facility’s test-result policy, including how providers communicate life-changing results to patients at high risk for suicide as VHA Directive 1088(1) requires, and establish service-level workflows for communicating test results.

Healthcare Facility Inspection of the William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital and Clinics in Madison, Wisconsin

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 25-00254-277 · September 30, 2026 · Office of Healthcare Inspections

What the OIG found

The OIG conducted a focused inspection of the William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital and Clinics in Madison, Wisconsin, across culture, environment of care, patient safety, integrated veteran care, and the veteran-centered safety net. The identified weakness fell under patient safety and concerned how test results are communicated. The OIG made two recommendations: update the facility’s test-result communication policy so it aligns with VHA Directive 1088(1), and develop service-level workflows that spell out staff roles in communicating test results to providers and patients.

Healthcare Facility Inspection of the VA Amarillo Healthcare System in Texas

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 26-00042-279 · September 28, 2026 · Office of Healthcare Inspections

What the OIG found

The OIG completed a focused inspection of the VA Amarillo Healthcare System in Texas covering culture, environment of care, patient safety, integrated veteran care, and the veteran-centered safety net. The deficiencies identified were in the environment of care. The OIG made two recommendations: develop and carry out a plan to repair and maintain walls, floors, and ceilings while keeping clean and dirty items separate, and put measures in place to monitor temperature and humidity in medication rooms, both in line with VHA’s Comprehensive Environment of Care Program directive.

Healthcare Facility Inspection of the VA Bedford Healthcare System in Massachusetts

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 25-00247-234 · September 28, 2026 · Office of Healthcare Inspections

What the OIG found

The OIG carried out a focused inspection of the VA Bedford Healthcare System in Massachusetts across culture, environment of care, patient safety, integrated veteran care, and the veteran-centered safety net. All of the issues requiring correction were in the environment of care. The OIG made five recommendations for the director, covering support for patient and visitor navigation and wayfinding, repair of exterior walkways and mitigation of safety hazards, improved cleanliness, safety, and maintenance of patient care areas, keeping exit pathways free of obstructions, and requiring the Comprehensive Environment of Care Committee to monitor corrective actions and report on whether improvements are sustained.

Healthcare Facility Inspection of the VA New Jersey Healthcare System in East Orange

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 25-00242-195 · September 25, 2026 · Office of Healthcare Inspections

What the OIG found

The OIG performed a focused inspection of the VA New Jersey Healthcare System in East Orange, evaluating culture, environment of care, patient safety, integrated veteran care, and the veteran-centered safety net. Issues requiring correction appeared in two domains, environment of care and patient safety, and produced the largest recommendation set in this group of inspections. The OIG made 11 recommendations, addressing safety and cleanliness, airflow testing in supply rooms, temperature and humidity monitoring, fire doors and fire safety inspections, sprinkler system testing, and prevention of repeat findings, as well as service-level workflows for communicating test results, follow-through on root cause analysis improvement actions, and handling of adverse events and institutional disclosures.

Audit of Processing of Community Care Requests for Services

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 25-03946-211 · September 24, 2026 · Office of Audits and Evaluations

What the OIG found

The OIG audited how quickly VHA decides and communicates decisions on requests for services — the requests community providers submit when a veteran needs more or different care than VA initially approved, which under the MISSION Act framework must be decided, with notice to the veteran and provider, within three business days. Reviewing nearly 2.6 million requests entered in the Consult Toolbox from October 1, 2024 through January 31, 2026, the audit found facilities met the full three-business-day decision-and-notification standard only about 17 percent of the time; roughly 45 percent were decided on time, about 46 percent had no documentation that the required notification was ever made, and notifications averaged about 12 days. The OIG attributed the shortfalls to backlogs, staff shortages, manual processes, and the multiple systems and steps involved, compounded by inconsistent oversight and data entry. The OIG issued six recommendations to strengthen oversight and improve timeliness, including expanding automation, fixing system limitations, updating national procedures, improving receipt-date accuracy, ensuring accurate notifications to providers and veterans, and instituting routine oversight of the process.

Review of Contracted Backup Services for the Veterans Crisis Line

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 23-03464-146 · September 1, 2026 · Office of Audits and Evaluations

What the OIG found

The OIG examined a $32.5 million contract meant to provide backup answering for the Veterans Crisis Line, including handling at least 10 percent of calls and all calls in an emergency. It found VA paid about $11.2 million for backup services that were never delivered after the original subcontractor stopped work and a replacement could not start because it had not met federal security requirements, lacked enough staff, and had not trained responders to contract terms. VA officials learned of the problems within months but kept approving payments for nearly a year. The OIG questioned the full $11.2 million and recommended the Office of General Counsel decide whether VA should recover it, and that VA improve how it sets and verifies information system security requirements for contracts involving sensitive information.

Review of VBA’s Processing of Adverse Actions for Service-Connected Disability Compensation

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 25-01011-154 · August 31, 2026 · Office of Audits and Evaluations

What the OIG found

The OIG checked whether VBA followed the law and its own procedures when it moved to reduce or end veterans’ service-connected disability compensation — actions the law says cannot take effect until the veteran has been properly notified. Reviewing calendar year 2024 cases, the team estimated claims processors made one or more errors in about 34 percent of proposed and final reduction decisions: cutting or proposing cuts without sufficient due-process notification, failing to update the rating decision codesheets that drive payment, applying the wrong effective dates, and in some cases never finalizing the action at all while the case sat closed. The OIG estimated these errors produced at least $16.9 million in improper payments in 2024, with at least $964,000 more going out every month until they are corrected, and it found cases still being closed prematurely in a 2025 sample. The OIG made four recommendations — standardized due-process notices, stronger review of final decisions, automated tracking of unfinished adverse actions, and correction of every error identified — and VBA’s principal deputy under secretary for benefits concurred.

Audit of the Healthcare Enrollment Program at VA Medical Facilities

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 24-03691-175 · August 21, 2026 · Office of Audits and Evaluations

What the OIG found

The OIG audited whether facilities processed health care enrollment applications consistently with national standardization policies, reviewing records created from October 2022 through November 2025 amid a post-PACT Act surge and procedures through January 2026. Staff processed 75 percent of 420 sampled applications correctly, but 14 percent were not maintained or date-stamped so timeliness and accuracy could not be verified, and errors in interpreting, overlooking, or entering information produced wrong eligibility or priority group determinations in 10 percent. Some facility practices also kept or delayed applications from ever entering the enrollment system, a gap quality assurance missed because it only looked at completed applications. The OIG made eight recommendations, and the acting under secretary for health concurred with all of them.

Audit of VHA and VBA Controls Over the Toxic Exposures Fund

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 25-03218-133 · August 20, 2026 · Office of Audits and Evaluations

What the OIG found

The OIG audited controls over the PACT Act’s Cost of War Toxic Exposures Fund, from which VHA and VBA spent about $51.7 billion from fiscal years 2022 through 2025 to deliver health care and benefits to veterans exposed to environmental hazards, with another $52.7 billion appropriated for fiscal year 2026. Reviewing transactions from October 2024 through September 2025, the team found VHA had built methods to estimate, track, and reconcile spending with the Office of Management and Budget but needed stronger monitoring of expenditure transfers, with about $371,000 in miscoded transactions found and corrected during the audit. VBA, by contrast, had only an estimation and tracking method that could not reconcile costs to actual PACT Act workload, hampered by system limits and leadership turnover. The OIG made four recommendations; VA has since updated fund policy with standard operating procedures and committed to building a workable VBA reconciliation process.

Review of VBA’s Unidentifiable Mail Certification Process

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 25-02228-172 · August 12, 2026 · Office of Audits and Evaluations

What the OIG found

The OIG checked whether VBA accurately certified mail packets as unidentifiable — meaning staff could not match submitted documents to a claimant’s electronic folder — as of March 1, 2025. Of more than 164,000 such packets, the OIG estimated about 35,100, or 21 percent, actually contained enough information to be matched, linked to at least $822,000 in underpayments since July 2018, with another 19,900 packets carrying potential benefit-affecting errors and nearly all sampled packets showing missed steps. Causes included staff skipping required identification steps, lacking access to needed systems, weak quality review, and no staff-specific training for this work. The OIG made five recommendations to strengthen controls, training, and oversight, noting VBA had begun expanding system access for contracted staff.

Review of Timeliness of Mental Health Community Care Appointments

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 25-03623-147 · August 10, 2026 · Office of Audits and Evaluations

What the OIG found

Using fiscal year 2025 data, the OIG tested whether community care mental health appointments met VHA’s seven-day consult scheduling standard and the contract metric for the appointment itself to occur within 30 days. Only five of 133 healthcare systems met the seven-day scheduling standard on average, while 128 averaged above it. About 80 percent of appointments did occur within 30 days, but veterans in the remaining 20 percent waited an average of 56 days. The OIG traced much of the delay to scheduling itself, including staff relying on phone calls and postal mail to reach veterans, difficulty contacting community providers, and providers not offering appointment types veterans wanted, and made six recommendations to improve scheduling.

Review of the Fiduciary Program’s Misuse Allegation Process

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

VA Office of Inspector General · Report 25-02440-122 · July 24, 2026 · Office of Audits and Evaluations

What the OIG found

The OIG reviewed about 1,600 fiduciary misuse allegation cases completed from April 2024 through March 2025 to see whether VBA fiduciary program staff followed governing guidance. Staff did not always record the earliest date an allegation was received accurately and did not advance every allegation of potential misuse for investigation as required. The OIG attributed the problems in part to confusion over unclear manual provisions and misapplied standards of evidence, and found no systematic national monitoring to catch the mistakes. It made four recommendations to clarify guidance and strengthen recognition, recording, processing, and investigation of misuse allegations; VBA concurred with all four, and one is already closed.

60 Minutes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On YouTube · CBS News’s flagship investigative broadcast (generalist channel; the VA-relevant segments below are full or substantial reports, not clips).

60 Minutes is a generalist broadcast, but its veteran segments are substantial, full-length reporting. The standouts here are its 2024 segment on the children who step up as caregivers for veterans with PTSD, its reporting on veterans driven to unconventional PTSD therapies after conventional care failed them, and Morley Safer’s archive report on Vietnam’s women combat nurses.

About the Author — Thomas Bowman, Jr.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thomas Bowman, Jr. has never worn a uniform. He holds no rank, claims no service, and wants none of the credit that belongs to the men and women who did. Everything on this site was built by a son, out of honor for his family — because the Department of Veterans Affairs became the worst problem of his life.

The caretaker

By his count, five years a caretaker — and the VA helped with none of it.

About This Site

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Why this site exists

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.

Accenture Federal Services

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Accenture Federal Services — IT & consulting — VA technology modernization (T4NG) · accenturefederal.com.

What it sells

Accenture Federal Services, a wholly owned Accenture subsidiary, is a VA technology contractor under the T4NG modernization vehicle and on task orders such as VA enterprise service management (ServiceNow) and the VBA Loan Guaranty system redesign — IT modernization and program support, not health-care delivery.

The contract and the money

VA T4NG multiple-award IDIQ (awardee since 2016); Service Management Office task order (5 years, announced Apr 28, 2020); Loan Guaranty (VALERI-R) redesign task order (announced Feb 8, 2018).

Acentra Health

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Acentra Health — Medicare appeals & quality contractor (BFCC-QIO) — and a VA claims-system contractor · acentra.com.

What it sells

Acentra Health (Carlyle-backed; formed 2023 by the CNSI–Kepro merger) sells claims, utilization-management, assessment and quality-oversight services to Medicaid agencies and federal agencies. Two of its roles matter here, and this page keeps them separate because the record does: for CMS it is a Beneficiary and Family Centered Care Quality Improvement Organization (BFCC-QIO) — the body that hears Medicare discharge and service-termination appeals and quality-of-care complaints in 29 states, Florida among them (Region 4). For the VA, its documented work is claims machinery: support to the VA’s Financial Services Center and the eCAMS electronic claims system that adjudicates community providers’ medical claims. It is NOT a Community Care Network administrator, and no source shows it as one.

AdventHealth New Smyrna Beach

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

AdventHealth New Smyrna Beach — Community hospital in the Bowman chain — AdventHealth system · adventhealth.com — New Smyrna Beach.

What it sells

A 109–112-bed community hospital in New Smyrna Beach, Florida (formerly Florida Hospital New Smyrna, renamed Jan 2, 2019), part of AdventHealth — one of the nation’s largest faith-based systems, with nearly 50 hospitals in nearly a dozen states. It is a community provider, not a network administrator; no VA contract number or hospital-specific VA payment figure was verified in this build’s research, and none is asserted.

AIVA Claims

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Free nonprofit claim-preparation help · A program of ESBE Inc., an IRS-recognized 501(c)(3); founded by Barklee Sanders, a 100% P&T veteran

The clean counter-example to the claim sharks. Donor-funded and free: its tools read a veteran’s records and draft the claim package — injury statements, buddy letters, nexus drafts — but every document stays a draft the veteran reviews, edits, and submits themselves. It states plainly that it is not a law firm, not a medical provider, and not VA-accredited, and it takes no percentage.

Alfred Procopio Jr.: The Sailor Who Never Set Foot in Vietnam — and Moved Its Legal Shoreline Twelve Miles Out to Sea

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

His case is a study in how a boundary gets drawn. For more than two decades, the Department of Veterans Affairs treated the coastline of Vietnam as a legal wall: a veteran who served on the land, or on the brown rivers inside it, was presumed exposed to Agent Orange; a veteran who served twelve miles offshore — close enough to watch the war, close enough to be sprayed by the same wind off the same coast — was presumed nothing at all, and had to prove the unprovable or go without. Alfred Procopio Jr. was one of the offshore men. What he did, over thirteen years of denials, was refuse to accept that the line was law. When a federal appeals court finally read the statute Congress had actually written, it found no wall there — and his name is now the citation a generation of sailors' claims stand on.

Alfred Rascon: The Medic They Called Doc, and the 34 Years It Took to Give Him His Medal

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Alfred Rascon's platoon knew exactly what he had done, because he had done it on top of them — twice throwing his own body over wounded men to take grenade blasts meant for them, shot through the hip, a grenade's shrapnel in his face, still crawling back for a machine gun the enemy was about to capture. His sergeant recommended him for the Medal of Honor within days. The recommendation never advanced. Rascon got a Silver Star, went home, and lived twenty-seven years without knowing he had ever been nominated — until the sergeant he had saved asked him how it felt. This page is the documented record of what he did, what his institution did with the paperwork afterward, and who carried his case when the system would not.

Alwyn Cashe: The Man Who Walked Through Fire, and the Sixteen Years It Took to Say So

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Alwyn C. Cashe did everything his country asked, and then he did the thing no order can produce: on fire himself, he went back into a burning vehicle again and again until his soldiers were out. This page is the documented record of what he did near Samarra, Iraq, in 2005, what his own institution did about it afterward, and the fight his sister carried for sixteen years — told in dates, findings, and the Army's own words.

Amedisys (UnitedHealth / Optum)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Amedisys (UnitedHealth / Optum) — Home health & hospice — acquired by UnitedHealth’s Optum in 2025 · amedisys.com.

What it sells

Amedisys is a national home-health and hospice provider, acquired by UnitedHealth Group’s Optum in August 2025 (about $3.3 billion, after a DOJ antitrust suit — context, not VA money). As with LHC, veterans may receive Amedisys services through VA purchased community care generally; no direct national VA contract was documented in the sources reviewed.

American Legion Auxiliary

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The American Legion Auxiliary is where the Legion's family belongs in its own name — spouses, parents, children, siblings, grandparents, grandchildren — and after its 2026 eligibility expansion, that door is wider than it has ever been, with Gold Star families named expressly.

Founded: 1919, during the first National Convention of The American Legion
Status: 501(c)(19) veterans’ organization; the auxiliary of The American Legion (no separate congressional charter)
Headquarters: Indianapolis, Indiana
Reach: members in “nearly 7,200 local communities” in the U.S. and abroad; its National Headquarters describes mission outreach delivered by “over 600,000 volunteers” (the Auxiliary’s own figures; it publishes no single membership total)
Website: alaforveterans.org

Who can join — stated exactly

Under the Auxiliary’s current eligibility language, membership covers grandparents, parents, siblings, spouses, and direct or adopted descendants within two degrees of consanguinity of:

American Red Cross — Military and Veteran Caregiver Network

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Caregiver peer-support network · American Red Cross, Service to the Armed Forces

Created for caregivers by caregivers: a vetted, secure online community for caregivers of all eras and relationships, with trained peer mentors, online and in-person support groups, whole-health workshops, and a local resource directory. A RAND study of its online community found social isolation dropped within three months for new members — the rare caregiver program with measured results.

AMVETS — American Veterans

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

AMVETS is the door with the widest threshold: membership is open to anyone who honorably served or is currently serving in the U.S. Armed Forces, and AMVETS states plainly that you do not need to be a member to receive free help from its service officers with a VA claim.

Founded: 1944; chartered by an act of Congress
Status: Congressionally chartered veterans service organization
Headquarters: Washington, Pennsylvania
Size: “more than 250,000 members nationwide” (AMVETS’ own figure)
Website: amvets.org

Who it serves

Membership is open to anyone who honorably served or is currently serving in the U.S. Armed Forces, including the National Guard and Reserves. There is no combat-service requirement and no era requirement — if you served honorably, you qualify.

Arthur "Bud" Kelder: Fourteen Men in One Grave, Seventy-Two Years to One Name

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Arthur Kelder was never lost — the fact his family spent years in federal court establishing. The Army knew the grave he was buried in, because the prisoners who buried him kept a roster. The Army dug that grave up after the war, carried the remains through three burials, charted the gold inlays in one set of teeth in 1946 — and then lost the teeth, closed the file, and told his parents in 1950 that their son was non-recoverable. He spent sixty-four years under a white cross in Manila, in a grave marked as an Unknown, while his file sat in government custody naming the ten graves that held his burial party. What returned his name was not a new technology appearing on its own. It was a cousin who would not stop asking, two federal lawsuits, a court that signaled it would order the remains produced, and only then an exhumation. This page is the record of his service, of what the institution did with his remains and his family's questions, and of what his case set in motion.

AskNOD

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Veteran advocate’s blog · “Nod,” veteran advocate and author

Two decades of hard-won doctrine on the claims system’s sharpest edges — Special Monthly Compensation, aid and attendance, and the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims — written by an advocate who has fought the VA to the Federal Circuit and won.

Why we carry them. When a question turns on SMC or aid-and-attendance doctrine, this is the deepest well we know. We mine the doctrine, in his citations — the law, checked at the source.

Aveanna Healthcare

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Aveanna Healthcare — Home health / hospice / private-duty nursing — TRICARE-facing; VA role small and indirect · aveanna.com.

What it sells

Aveanna is a national home-health, hospice and private-duty nursing provider whose documented military-facing work is for TRICARE families — private-duty nursing for medically fragile children and adults, and TRICARE ECHO case management. No VA national contract or Community Care Network role was documented in the sources reviewed; any VA role is small and indirect at the local provider level. It is profiled so the census is complete — and labeled honestly.

Barry Coates: The Colonoscopy That Took a Year — and the Testimony That Became the Face of the VA Wait-Time Scandal

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

He is the face of the scandal because he insisted on being one. Barry Coates was not killed by a secret list — that was Phoenix, and his case is older and in a way worse: his doctors wrote the right test in his chart, month after month, and the system simply never ordered it. By the time he fought his way to a colonoscopy, the cancer that a rectal exam could have found was in his lung and his liver. What he did with what remained of his life was testify — plainly, specifically, with dates — postponed his own chemotherapy to do it, and left a sworn record so complete that his page here can be built almost entirely out of his own statement. The institution he addressed promised reform in his name's season. He did not live to see two years of it.

Blinded Veterans Association — BVA

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

BVA is the one organization in this directory built by and for a specific wound: veterans who lost their sight in service. Its accredited National Service Officers provide practical assistance with VA claims and appeals at no cost, and its Auxiliary exists for the family members and caregivers who live the blindness alongside the veteran.

Founded: March 28, 1945, at Avon Old Farms, Connecticut; chartered by the U.S. Congress August 27, 1958
Status: Congressionally chartered veterans service organization; not-for-profit, 501(c)(3)
Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
Size: BVA does not publish a membership total on its own site (NOT-STATED)
Website: bva.org

Who it serves

Membership is defined in BVA’s current bylaws: any person having honorably served, or currently serving, in the Armed Forces of the United States who qualifies for the VA’s Blind Rehabilitation Service (BRS) is eligible for membership. Membership is held as Life Member (Legally Blind) or Life Member (Low Vision). The board may also extend honorary membership.

Borland Groover

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Borland Groover — Gastroenterology practice — Jacksonville, Florida · borlandgroover.com.

What it sells

Borland Groover (founded 1947, Jacksonville) describes itself as one of the largest gastroenterology clinics in the United States — 60+ board-certified physicians providing colonoscopy, endoscopy, EUS and ERCP across Northeast Florida. It is a community medical practice, not a contractor: no FPDS, USASpending, VA or company source found in this build’s research names it as a federal/VA contractor, so no dollar figure is published for it.

Brandon Caserta: His Name Is Now the Way to Ask for Help

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Brandon Caserta did the things a trapped junior sailor is told to do. He earned evaluations that called him a proven self-starter, highly recommended for retention and advancement. He applied for the transfer that would take him out of Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 28 and into the aircrew rating, and he was accepted. What he could not do was get out from under a lead petty officer whose public berating of the sailors beneath him was known inside the command, or find a confidential door to mental health care that did not run through the chain of command he feared. On June 25, 2018, three days after his command recommended him to a disciplinary review board over a driver's license he said he effectively did not have, and while his father was on the telephone with the command master chief asking for help for his son, the twenty-one-year-old walked onto the flight line at Naval Station Norfolk, apologized to the plane captain, and died by suicide in the spinning tail rotor of an MH-60S helicopter. The Navy's own command investigation concluded that his lead petty officer's "noted belligerence, vulgarity and brash leadership was likely a significant contributing factor" in that decision — and then recommended against punishing him. This page is the record of Caserta's service, of what his command did and did not do, and of the statute his parents built out of his name.

Bruce W. Carter Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Bruce W. Carter Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center · Miami, FL — part of the Miami VA Healthcare System. VA’s own page for this facility.

The doors

Main phone: 305-575-7000
Patient advocates: The system’s Patient Advocates page states that patient advocates at the Miami VA Healthcare System are specially trained to help veterans resolve issues with their care; no individual advocates are named on the page.
Leadership: the system’s leadership, as VA publishes it

On the record

What the VA Office of Inspector General has published about this facility, newest first. The summaries are ours; the reports are theirs.

Burn Pits 360

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Toxic-exposure advocacy nonprofit · Founded 2010 by Capt. Le Roy Torres and Rosie Torres

The family-built nonprofit that carried the burn-pit fight for a decade before the PACT Act — and stayed after the law passed. It runs an independent burn-pit exposure registry where family members can record veterans who have already died, publishes clinician and family guides in English and Spanish, and keeps pushing on the diagnosis gap the law left behind.

C.W. Bill Young Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

C.W. Bill Young Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center · Bay Pines, FL — part of the VA Bay Pines Healthcare System. VA’s own page for this facility.

The doors

Main phone: 727-398-6661
Patient advocates: The system’s Patient Advocates page (titled Veteran Experience Office) lists patient advocates and patient representatives by name, located on the first floor of the C.W. Bill Young main hospital (Building 100), Monday–Friday 8:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m., with additional representatives at Lee County.
Leadership: the system’s leadership, as VA publishes it

On the record

What the VA Office of Inspector General has published about this facility, newest first. The summaries are ours; the reports are theirs.

Carl T. Hayden Veterans' Administration Medical Center

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Carl T. Hayden Veterans’ Administration Medical Center · Phoenix, AZ — part of the VA Phoenix Health Care System (VISN 22). VA’s own page for this facility.

The doors

Main phone: 602-277-5551
Patient advocates: Patient Advocates page lists named advocates including Supervisory Patient Advocate Victoria Briggs-Franklin and Senior Patient Advocate Matthew Pawlak, says the Office of Patient Advocacy is in the Veteran Resource Center at Carl T. Hayden (first floor) and at the Phoenix 32nd Street clinic, reachable via the Veteran Resource Call Center, My HealtheVet secure message, or mail, with advocate callback within 3 business days; no direct advocate phone numbers were shown in text extraction (VA patient advocates page)
Leadership: the system’s leadership, as VA publishes it

On the record

What the VA Office of Inspector General has published about this facility, newest first. The summaries are ours; the reports are theirs.

CCK Law — Chisholm Chisholm & Kilpatrick

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On YouTube · Chisholm Chisholm & Kilpatrick LTD, a national VA-accredited veterans law firm (since 1999) — this is a law firm’s education channel, including its “CCK Live” streams.

One of the largest free VA-law education libraries on YouTube: roughly 1,300 videos and about 111,000 subscribers, updated several times a week. CCK’s attorneys and accredited advocates explain ratings, appeals, TDIU, and court decisions in plain language, and the firm publishes its own investigations into VA delays. It is advocacy education from a firm that litigates against VA — authoritative, and openly on the veteran’s side of the table.

Civilian Exposure (Camp Lejeune)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Toxic-exposure awareness nonprofit · Founded 2013 by Gavin P. Smith, in memory of his father, a civilian Camp Lejeune worker who died of acute leukemia in 2008

Built by the son of a civilian Camp Lejeune worker who died of acute leukemia, Civilian Exposure documents toxic contamination at Camp Lejeune and then base after base beyond it — Superfund histories, PFAS, and the studies families need. An honest note on cadence: the site is live today but its newest post is dated January 2, 2024, so treat it as a deep archive rather than a news feed. For a family tracing an exposure, the archive is the value.

Clay Hunt: A Hundred Percent, Five Weeks Too Late

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Clay Hunt did everything the system says a veteran in trouble is supposed to do. He reported his symptoms. He kept his appointments where he could get them. He used VA — and only VA — for his care, in Los Angeles, then Grand Junction, Colorado, then Houston. He appealed the 30 percent disability rating that did not match the condition keeping him from holding a job, and he waited while VA, by his mother's account to Congress, lost his files. On March 31, 2011, at twenty-eight, he died by suicide in Houston, two weeks after finally seeing a psychiatrist there and telling his mother he could not go back. Five weeks after his death — eighteen months after he filed the appeal — VA granted it, rating his post-traumatic stress at 100 percent. This page is the record of his service, of what VA did and did not do while he was alive to ask, and of the statute his parents carried through Congress in his name.

Code of Support Foundation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Veteran services navigation nonprofit · National nonprofit founded in 2011, based in Alexandria, Virginia

Built for the moment a family doesn’t know which door to knock on. Its case coordinators take on complex, multi-problem cases one-to-one, and its PATRIOTlink database puts thousands of vetted, cost-free services into one searchable place — built with VA under a 2018 agreement so the resource list stays current.

Why we carry them. Most families in a VA fight don’t need one service, they need six at once and a human to coordinate them. That coordination is this foundation’s whole job.

Combat Craig

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On YouTube · Combat Craig and a team that includes former VA personnel, including ‘RaterX,’ a former VA rater

One of the biggest peer-educator channels in VA claims, with roughly 191,000 subscribers and more than a thousand videos demystifying the disability process. The teaching is plain-spoken and process-first: C&P exams, supplemental claims, Higher-Level Review, combined-ratings math, and the traps that cap a rating. The channel was still posting new claims videos in 2026.

Conduent

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Conduent — Government claims & payment processing — state Medicaid fiscal agent; no VA role documented · conduent.com.

What it sells

Conduent is a business-process outsourcer whose government health work is as a STATE Medicaid fiscal agent — claims processing, eligibility and call centers under state Medicaid systems that must meet federal CMS certification. No VA contract was documented in the sources reviewed; calling Conduent a VA claims processor would be unsourced, and this page does not.

Conley Monk Jr.: An Undesirable Discharge, and the Two Fights That Followed

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Conley Monk Jr. volunteered. He was twenty years old, working part-time at the VA hospital in West Haven, Connecticut, where he had worked as a high school student, when he enlisted in the Marine Corps on November 12, 1968, following his father — an Army veteran of the Normandy invasion — into service. In Vietnam he drove troop trucks through Quang Tri Province under mortar and sniper fire, earned decorations, and drew a high proficiency rating. Then his unit rotated out of the war, the symptoms he had no name for closed in, and the Marine Corps put him out in 1970 with an "undesirable" discharge — other than honorable — accepted to avoid a special court-martial. Post-traumatic stress disorder would not become an official diagnosis until 1980. The paper followed him for forty-five years: VA denied his unemployment claim, his education benefits, his disability claims, and his home loan, decade after decade, on the strength of that discharge. He has spent the years since fighting two fights — the first for his own paper and for the tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans discharged the same way, the second, opened in 2022, over what VA's own records show about how the department has treated Black veterans as a class. This page is the record of both.

Conviva Care Centers (Humana / CenterWell)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Conviva Care Centers (Humana / CenterWell) — Senior primary-care clinics — Humana-owned; this family’s primary care network · convivacarecenters.com.

What it sells

Conviva is Humana’s senior-focused primary care organization (with CenterWell): value-based clinics in Florida and Texas — Daytona Beach among them — serving mainly Medicare Advantage patients. Humana reported Conviva and CenterWell together caring for about 318,000 seniors in nearly 300 centers across 15 states. Conviva is not a VA contractor or network administrator: it is paid per patient through Medicare Advantage and Original Medicare. No Conviva-specific federal contract dollars exist to print, and none are invented here.

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

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

DAV — Disabled American Veterans

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

DAV is the organization a family should know about before it ever files a VA claim alone: its National Service Officers are accredited claims experts, and DAV states plainly that its help is free to all veterans and does not require membership.

Founded: 1920, Cincinnati, Ohio (as Disabled American Veterans of the World War, by Robert S. Marx)
Status: Congressionally chartered veterans service organization (chartered 1932); nonprofit
Headquarters: Erlanger, Kentucky
Size: “more than 1 million members” (DAV’s own figure)
Website: dav.org

Who it serves

Membership is open to any service member who was not dishonorably discharged and who sustained an injury or illness during service — whether or not the VA has service-connected it — or who aggravated a previous injury in service, so long as they served during a period of armed conflict (direct combat is not required).

DaVita

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

DaVita — Dialysis chain — VA community care · davita.com.

What it sells

DaVita is one of the two chains that dominate American dialysis — together with Fresenius, roughly 74% of the U.S. market per HHS’s 2026 kidney plan — and a major VA community-care dialysis provider. The VA spent about $1.2 billion on community dialysis across ALL providers from Oct 2020 through Sep 2022 (VA OIG); no DaVita-only VA total was found in this build’s research, and none is invented here.

Daytona Beach VA Clinic

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Daytona Beach VA Clinic · Daytona Beach, FL — part of the Orlando VA Healthcare System (VISN 8: VA Sunshine Healthcare Network). VA’s own page for this facility.

The doors

Main phone: 386-323-7500
Patient advocates: The Orlando system’s patient advocates page names the Daytona Beach advocates as Minisha Forbes and Jykala Ward, and the system’s phone directory lists a dedicated Patient Advocate line for Daytona Beach: 386-323-7527 (VA patient advocates page)
Leadership: the system’s leadership, as VA publishes it

On the record

No facility-specific OIG report found in this build’s check (2026-10-24). Oversight inspections of the parent system, where they exist, are carried on that system’s Atlas pages.

Delta Dental

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Delta Dental — Dental benefits — VA Dental Insurance Program (VADIP) carrier; CCN dental network participant · deltadental.com.

What it sells

Delta Dental is the nation’s largest dental benefits provider (a not-for-profit association of 39 independent companies). Its VA roles are two, and this page does not merge them: (1) VADIP — Delta Dental of California is one of two carriers (with MetLife) for the VA Dental Insurance Program, the dental insurance the VA arranges for enrolled veterans and CHAMPVA beneficiaries — for which the VETERAN pays the full premium; and (2) the Community Care Network, where Delta presents itself as the dental network for providers in TriWest’s Regions 4 and 5 (Delta is a network participant, not the CCN prime contractor). A third layer arrived in 2025: the VA awarded Optum Serve the nationwide community-care dental network (see Optum’s page) — the layer where the OIG found $910.7 million kept.

DisabledVeterans.org

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Investigative veteran journalism · Benjamin Krause, disabled veteran and attorney

Investigative reporting on VA fraud, waste, and contractor abuse — FOIA-driven, document-first, and unafraid of naming the machinery. Publishing since 2010.

Why we carry them. The document-first habit this site runs on, practiced at scale. Krause’s contractor coverage is the wider record behind half the patterns.

Start here — their essential work

Veterans Could Lose Food Assistance Under Confusing SNAP Rules (2026-10-21) — New SNAP rules are confusing enough that veterans who qualify for food assistance risk losing it on paperwork alone.
New VA Suicide Report Shows a Stark Divide Between Veterans Inside and Outside VA Healthcare (2026-10-14) — VA’s latest suicide report counted 6,488 veteran suicides in 2024, with a stark divide between veterans inside VA healthcare and those outside it.
VA Is Starting to Measure Veteran “Well-Being,” Not Just Illness (2026-10-07) — VA has begun measuring veteran well-being, not just illness — a shift in what the system counts as success.
Veteran Caregivers Are Carrying More Than Ever — But Are They Getting Enough Support? — Caregivers are carrying more, for longer, as veterans live longer — while VA caregiver support still trips families up on eligibility, awareness, and paperwork.
Why Veterans Across America Are Watching the Supreme Court Closely — Johnson v. United States Congress asks whether constitutional challenges to benefits laws belong in federal district court or only inside VA’s own review system.
The Major Richard Star Act: Why Thousands of Veterans Are Still Watching Congress Closely — Combat-disabled retirees still lose retirement pay to the disability offset the Star Act would end — and Congress keeps not passing it.
Non-VA Emergency Room Bill Denial, An Update To Kare 11 Investigation — VA denied non-VA emergency-room bills under the prudent-layperson standard until press inquiries reversed them — including the author’s own claim.
VA Fights FOIA To Cover-up Growing TBI Scandal — VA fought FOIA requests over the Minneapolis TBI examination scandal documented by KARE 11.
The Biggest Mistake Veterans Make - Trust — The site’s signature essay: trusting the VA’s process blindly loses claims — verify everything, in writing.

The latest

Veterans Could Lose Food Assistance Under Confusing SNAP Rules (2026-10-21)
New VA Suicide Report Shows a Stark Divide Between Veterans Inside and Outside VA Healthcare (2026-10-14)
VA Is Starting to Measure Veteran “Well-Being,” Not Just Illness (2026-10-07)

Gathered weekly from their own pages and feeds by the Wire scan.

Edward Hines Jr. VA Hospital

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Edward Hines Jr. VA Hospital · Hines, IL — part of the VA Hines Healthcare System. VA’s own page for this facility.

The doors

Main phone: 708-202-8387
Patient advocates: Patient Advocates page lists Sarah Kraner (Patient Advocate Program Manager), Mike Calia (Lead Patient Advocate), John James, Hector Ocampo and Julio Reyna as specially trained to help resolve care issues, also reachable via My HealtheVet secure email — (VA patient advocates page)
Leadership: the system’s leadership, as VA publishes it

On the record

What the VA Office of Inspector General has published about this facility, newest first. The summaries are ours; the reports are theirs.

Elaine Harmon & the WASP: The Women Who Flew for Their Country, and the Fight to Be Buried by It

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Elaine Harmon flew military aircraft for her country in the Second World War, spent forty years making sure her country remembered the women who had done it, and left one final wish: to be laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery, with her fellow veterans. The Army said no — a month before she died, it had decided women like her never belonged there at all. This page is the documented record of the service, the two times the institution moved the goalposts across seventy years, and the daughter and grandchildren who refused to accept the second move.

Elizabeth Dole Foundation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On YouTube · Founded by Senator Elizabeth Dole in 2012; the nation’s lead advocate for military and veteran caregivers — the ‘Hidden Heroes.’

The Elizabeth Dole Foundation exists for the people this site is written from: the spouses, parents, and children who care for wounded, ill, and aging veterans. Its Hidden Heroes campaign and Dole Caregiver Fellows put individual caregivers — including a son caring for his father — on camera in their own words, and the channel is active now, with new uploads in 2025 and 2026.

Elizabeth Dole Foundation — for the caregivers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Every other page in this directory serves the veteran first. This one serves you — the spouse, parent, son, daughter, sibling, or friend carrying a wounded, ill, or injured veteran's care. The Elizabeth Dole Foundation calls that constituency "hidden heroes," and it is the only national organization built entirely around them.

Founded: 2012, by Senator Elizabeth Dole
Status: National nonprofit (no congressional charter; it is a foundation, not a VSO, and runs no claims service)
Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
The community it serves, in its own figure: “14.3 million military and veteran caregivers” in America; its Dole Caregiver Fellows number 290, across all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and D.C.
Websites: elizabethdolefoundation.org · hiddenheroes.org

Who it serves

In the Foundation’s words: “the spouses, parents, siblings, family members and friends who care for America’s wounded, ill or injured service members and veterans.” There is no membership to buy. A caregiver registers — the Hidden Heroes campaign works to build a national registry of military caregivers at HiddenHeroes.org, connecting them to resources and support.

Emil Kapaun: The Chaplain Who Stayed Behind, and the 62 Years It Took to Honor Him

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Emil Kapaun never fired a shot in Korea. He was a chaplain — an unarmed priest from Pilsen, Kansas — and at Unsan, with his battalion surrounded and the able-bodied ordered to break out, he chose to stay with the men too wounded to move, knowing it meant capture. He spent the last six months of his life in a prisoner-of-war camp, stealing food for starving men, praying over the sick, and giving away his own rations and clothes, until he died there on May 23, 1951. The Army decorated him within months — with its second-highest medal. The men who lived because of him said, for the next sixty-two years, that the medal understated what he had done. This page is the documented record of what he did, what his institution gave him for it and when, and who carried his case until the record was corrected — twice.

Every Little Thing — Where the VA Fails

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Every item on this page is, by itself, a little thing. A chair. A denture. A lab test. A phone call that never came. The Department of Veterans Affairs does not usually fail a veteran all at once, in one dramatic refusal. It fails him a little at a time, across a dozen programs, over years — until the little things add up to the whole of his care.

And the gauntlet is rigged in one specific direction. The VA’s systems can be survived — barely — by a healthy advocate with a telephone, a car, and a year to spare. The veteran who needs them most is the one who can no longer stand, no longer drive, no longer hold on a phone tree for an afternoon. As soon as a veteran becomes less mobile, he has almost no chance of dealing with the VA — because every little thing the VA owes him requires the mobility he has just lost, spent in the VA’s waiting rooms, on the VA’s phone lines, in the VA’s parking lots. His family becomes his mobility. If he has no family able to carry him, the record of this case suggests what happens: nothing. Nothing is what happens.

Express Scripts (Cigna / Evernorth)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Express Scripts (Cigna / Evernorth) — Pharmacy benefit manager — TRICARE’s PBM; NOT the VA’s · express-scripts.com.

What it sells

Express Scripts is NOT the VA’s pharmacy benefit manager, and this page says so plainly: the VA dispenses in-house through VA pharmacies and its Consolidated Mail Outpatient Pharmacy (CMOP) system. Express Scripts’ large federal role is the Defense Department’s TRICARE pharmacy benefit, held since 2009 — a military benefit, not a VA one — which is why it belongs in the census: families meet this company at the pharmacy counter and are told it is ’the system.’ It is a system — just not the VA’s.

Fisher House Foundation — a free home at the hospital

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A family camped in a hospital parking lot, or paying hotel rates it cannot afford beside a VA medical center, is a family Fisher House exists for: comfort homes, on the grounds of VA and military hospitals, where military and veteran families stay free of charge while a loved one is in the hospital.

Founded: 1990, by Zachary and Elizabeth Fisher
Status: 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation (not a VSO; no congressional charter)
Headquarters: Rockville, Maryland
Reach, in the Foundation’s own figures: 100 Fisher Houses in the U.S., Germany, and the U.K. (as of January 2026); daily lodging capacity 1,400; more than 570,000 families served and 13.4 million lodging days since inception
Website: fisherhouse.org

Who it serves

Family members and caregivers of service members and veterans receiving care at the medical center where the house sits. The houses are built by the Foundation and gifted to the military and the VA, which operate them. There is no cost to stay at a VA Fisher House.

Fleet Reserve Association — FRA

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

FRA is the sea services' enlisted voice: founded in 1924 by a Navy Chief, it represents the interests of enlisted members of the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard before Congress — and its accredited representatives can assist a service member, veteran, spouse, or dependent who appoints FRA to represent them before the VA.

Founded: 1924, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by Navy Chief Yeoman George L. Carlin; congressionally chartered
Status: Congressionally chartered, nonprofit veterans service organization, 501(c)(19)
Headquarters: Alexandria, Virginia
Size: “over 25,000 dues-paying Shipmates” in “more than 130 Branches” (FRA’s own figure, from its Membership Manual)
Website: fra.org

Who it serves

Membership is restricted by FRA’s constitution to personnel who have served or are now serving in an enlisted status in the United States Navy, Marine Corps, or Coast Guard — including the reserve components — regardless of length of service. Active duty, reserve, retired, and veteran enlisted Shipmates are the membership; discharge under bad-conduct or dishonorable conditions is disqualifying.

Follow the Money

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The thesis of this site is simple: the check comes, and the care takes a fight. This page is about the check. What follows is what the Department of Veterans Affairs pays — per day, per program, per building — for a veteran's last days, taken from the VA's own budget books, from the Government Accountability Office, and from the federal contract record. Every figure on this page carries its source. Nothing here is estimated silently, and nothing is rounded into a lie: where a number is an estimate, it is labeled one, with its method shown.

Freddie Stowers: The Corporal Who Took the Hill, and the Recommendation His Army Lost for 73 Years

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Freddie Stowers did the thing the Medal of Honor exists to recognize, in front of his whole company, and died doing it. His commanders recommended him for the medal within days. Then the United States Army lost the paperwork — misplaced it, by its own eventual admission — and the recommendation sat unprocessed while the man it belonged to lay in a grave in France. Seventy-three years later, an Army investigation into a simple question — why did no Black soldier hold a World War I Medal of Honor? — found the lost file, and a president handed the medal to Stowers's two sisters. This page is the documented record of what he did, what his institution did with his name afterward, and how the account was finally settled.

Freeman Field: The 477th Bombardment Group and the Club They Would Not Be Barred From

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They were officers of the United States Army Air Forces, training in B-25 bombers for a war their country was still fighting — and their own base commander built them a separate, dilapidated officers' club and ordered them to stay in it, in defiance of the Army regulation that said he could not. In April 1945 the men of the 477th Bombardment Group answered in the only way left to them: they walked into the club they were entitled to, and then, when ordered to sign away that entitlement, 101 of them refused — knowing the refusal could, in law, be punished by death. This page is the documented record of what happened at Freeman Field, what the institution did to them for it, and the fifty years it took the Air Force to take it back.

Fresenius Medical Care

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Fresenius Medical Care — Dialysis chain — VA community care · freseniusmedicalcare.com.

What it sells

Fresenius Medical Care is, with DaVita, one of the two chains dominating U.S. dialysis (roughly 74% combined per HHS’s 2026 kidney plan) and a VA community dialysis provider under the same audited arrangements. No Fresenius-only VA contract total was found in this build’s research; none is printed.

The contract and the money

VA community dialysis via the Community Care Network / Nationwide Dialysis Services Contracts (see the VA OIG audit below). Fresenius also settled with the VA and DOJ over reimbursement for dialysis services to veterans (Jan 2009–Feb 2011), an agreement expected to raise its 2017 revenue recognition by about EUR 100 million (company announcement).

Garlin M. Conner: The Man Who Called Artillery on His Own Position, and the 73 Years It Took to Say So

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Garlin Conner did the thing the Medal of Honor exists to describe. On a January morning in 1945, alone in a shallow ditch in front of his battalion's line, he directed American artillery onto a German assault for three hours — and when the assault massed to overrun him, he ordered the guns onto his own position and stayed on the telephone. His commander knew what it was worth, and said so in writing. He also sent Conner home with the second-highest award instead, on purpose, so the medal would not be held up in paperwork while Conner was shipping out. Correcting that took seventy-three years, a widow who refused to stop, a stranger who started the case, a lawsuit, a court-ordered mediation, a unanimous Army board, and an act of Congress. This page is the documented record.

General Dynamics IT (GDIT)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

General Dynamics IT (GDIT) — IT services — VA service desk and claims-records digitization · gdit.com.

What it sells

GDIT, a General Dynamics business unit, is a long-standing VA IT contractor: it has supported the VA Enterprise Service Desk since 2018 and digitizes veterans’ military and claims records for the Veterans Benefits Administration — IT and records work, not clinical care or claims adjudication. When a veteran’s paper file becomes the digital record the VA decides on, companies like this one do the converting.

HadIt.com

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Veteran-run claims knowledge base and community · Founded 1997 by Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983–1990)

The veteran-to-veteran institution of the VA claims world: free since 1997, no lawyers, no paywalls. Step-by-step filing guides, C&P exam and DBQ explainers, a backpay calculator, a searchable Board of Appeals decisions database, rate charts back to 1975 — and, increasingly, original data journalism and oversight coverage that treats VA’s own numbers as evidence. Its community forum carries more than 400,000 posts of veterans answering each other.

HadIt.com Veteran To Veteran

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On YouTube · Run by Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, Navy veteran and founder of HadIt.com (veteran-to-veteran community since 1997); not a law firm.

The video arm of HadIt.com, the long-running veteran-to-veteran VA claims community founded by Tbird. The channel is small — 11 videos as of this scout — but it relaunched in 2026 with sharp, plain-spoken explainers on VA policy changes, claims mechanics, and documentation projects. It is the allied community voice in this section: a veteran explaining the system to other veterans.

Health Net Federal Services (Centene)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Health Net Federal Services (Centene) — Legacy community-care administrator (PC3 / Veterans Choice), exited VA 2018 — Centene · hnfs.com.

What it sells

Health Net Federal Services, a Centene subsidiary, was one of the VA’s two original community-care middlemen, administering the eastern Patient-Centered Community Care (PC3) and Veterans Choice networks until its VA contract ended September 30, 2018. Its main federal role was TRICARE West, which it lost in the T-5 recompete (TriWest took over Jan 1, 2025).

Heath Robinson: The Medic Who Came Home Sick, Was Told to Prove It, and Put His Name on the Law

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Heath Robinson did the job the Army sends toward the worst moments: he was a combat medic. He served in Kosovo and in Iraq, yards — in the President's later words — from burn pits the size of football fields, and he came home, built a family, and kept serving in the Ohio Army National Guard. Ten years after Iraq, the fittest soldier in the room — a man who ran half marathons and was twice named his state's Noncommissioned Officer of the Year — began falling asleep on the couch, coughing blood, and losing his voice. What followed was a nine-month road to a diagnosis of stage 4 lung cancer, a fight with the Department of Veterans Affairs over whether his service had anything to do with it, and a death at 39 that left a widow, Danielle, and a six-year-old daughter, Brielle. This page is the documented record of the man, the denial his family describes, and how his name came to be carried by the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act of 2022 — the PACT Act, Public Law 117-168.

Henry Johnson: The Sentry Who Held the Post, and the 97 Years It Took to Honor Him

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Henry Johnson did everything his country asked, in a war his country would not let him fight under its own command. On a single night in 1918 he held a forward outpost against a German raiding party, saved the man beside him, and took 21 wounds doing it. France decorated him almost immediately. The United States gave him nothing — no medal, no Purple Heart, no disability allowance — and then took ninety-seven years to say his name at the White House. This page is the documented record of what he did, what his own institution did about it afterward, and who carried his case when no one else would.

Hill & Ponton, P.A.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On YouTube · Hill & Ponton, P.A., a nationwide VA-accredited veterans disability law firm — this is a law firm’s channel, including its weekly live Q&A and “Tactical Claims” series.

A deep, plain-spoken VA disability library — roughly 3,000 videos and about 100,000 subscribers — from a firm that handles nothing but veterans’ cases. Its recent “Tactical Claims” series is built for this site’s readers: C&P exam mechanics, rating protections, and the firm’s reporting on VA wrongly closing tens of thousands of appeals. New videos land daily, and attorneys answer veterans’ questions live every week.

His Victories

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This site holds Secretary Collins to account. Accountability that only counts a man's failures isn't accountability — it's a vendetta. So here is the other ledger: what his VA has done that worked, documented the same way we document the failures — with dates, numbers, and sources.

How to read the labels. VA-reported means the figure comes from the VA's own releases — real, but self-graded. Independently reported means outside outlets or another agency's data confirm it. Mixed means VA numbers that independent reporting has carried, sometimes with caveats. We label his victories the way we wish the VA labeled its promises.

House Committee On Veterans' Affairs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On YouTube · The official YouTube channel of the U.S. House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs (majority/committee channel); a government oversight body, not a law firm.

The committee’s own hearing archive: about 400 videos, with new full and subcommittee hearings posted within days of each session through 2026. Titles on the channel are generic (‘Full Committee Oversight Hearing’), but the recordings are the oversight record itself — VA officials, including Secretary Collins’s May 15, 2025 budget testimony, answering to Congress on camera. A companion Democrats’ channel (@housevadems / ‘Committee on Veterans Affairs’ Democrats’) posts minority-side hearings and roundtables.

Hoveround Corporation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hoveround Corporation — Power wheelchair manufacturer & Medicare DME supplier — Sarasota, Florida · hoveround.com.

What it sells

Hoveround (founded 1992, Sarasota, FL) designs, manufactures, delivers and services its own power wheelchairs, and sells scooters, lifts and vehicle lifts, primarily direct-to-consumer, handling Medicare/insurance paperwork for buyers. Its documented federal footprint is Medicare durable medical equipment: almost $50 million in Medicare Part B power-mobility reimbursement in 2010 — the second-largest federal PMD reimbursement that year (HHS OIG). No source found in this build’s research shows Hoveround as a VA prosthetics supplier; its profile here rests on the Medicare record and on labeled family testimony.

Humana Government Business / Humana Military

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Humana Government Business / Humana Military — CCN Next-Gen awardee (new entrant, 2026) — Humana Inc. · humanamilitary.com.

What it sells

Humana’s government arm administers TRICARE East for the Defense Health Agency (about 4.6 million beneficiaries; a relationship dating to 1996). In August 2026 it became a VA community-care middleman for the first time, winning a seat on the CCN Next Gen Medical vehicle; it held no prior VA CCN regional contract.

James A. Haley Veterans' Hospital

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital · Tampa, FL — part of the VA Tampa Healthcare System. VA’s own page for this facility.

The doors

Main phone: 813-972-2000
Patient advocates: The system’s Patient Advocates page describes patient advocates who help veterans resolve issues with their care, and the Contact Us page lists patient advocates reachable at the main number, 813-972-2000, ext. 105856 and ext. 105757.
Leadership: the system’s leadership, as VA publishes it

On the record

What the VA Office of Inspector General has published about this facility, newest first. The summaries are ours; the reports are theirs.

Janey Ensminger: Conceived in the Water's Reach, Dead at Nine, and the Name on the Law

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Janey Ensminger never enlisted in anything. She was conceived in base housing, in December 1975, in a housing area called Tarawa Terrace, where the drinking water came from wells the federal government would later model as having carried a dry-cleaning solvent above today's federal safety limit for 346 months. She was diagnosed with leukemia at six and dead at nine, on September 24, 1985, and for twelve years her father — a career Marine drill instructor who had trained more than 2,000 recruits — had no answer to the only question he was asking. He got the first piece of it from a television newscast in 1997. This page is the record of her short life, of what was in the water while her mother carried her, of what the Marine Corps and the VA did and did not do afterward, and of the two statutes — the second still being fought over in federal court in October 2026 — that carry her name.

Jason Simcakoski: Thirteen Prescribed Drugs in Twenty-Four Hours

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Jason Simcakoski did the thing the system says a veteran in trouble is supposed to do, twice over. As a patient, he checked himself into the Tomah VA's psychiatric unit on August 10, 2014, asking for help with anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and drug misuse. As a witness, in 2013 he had already called the Tomah VA's own administrators, the Tomah police, and the FBI's La Crosse office to report that patients at that hospital were selling their prescription pain medications — reports his widow later testified disappeared. On August 30, 2014, in the hospital's short-stay mental health unit, he was found unresponsive in his bed. He had taken thirteen prescribed medications in twenty-four hours, several of them known to suppress breathing, including a new one started the day before his death that neither of his two psychiatrists had explained to him or to his family. The autopsy finding was mixed drug toxicity. He was thirty-five, a former Marine corporal, the father of a young daughter. This page is the record of his service, of what the Tomah VA did and did not do while he was its patient, of what its watchdog did and did not do for the three years before that, and of the law his family carried into the United States Code under his name.

Jeffrey Lucey: Turned Away Seventeen Days Before the End

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Jeffrey Lucey asked for help in the open, in the end, with his family standing beside him. He had a private therapist's diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. He had VA progress notes, which his family later shared with reporters, recording that he planned to overdose, hang himself, or suffocate himself. He had been admitted to the VA hospital in Leeds, Massachusetts, involuntarily, as a danger to himself, and kept under observation for four days. Then the same system discharged him, and when his family brought him back four days after that — drunk, despondent, days past wrecking the family car — it sent him home again, this time, his family and later VA's own inspector general said, without a psychiatrist examining him at all. Seventeen days later he was dead. This page is the record of his service, of the three weeks in May and June of 2004 when the institution made the two decisions that frame his case, and of the lawsuit his parents carried — the first of its kind in the Iraq war — until the government paid to end it without ever admitting it was responsible.

Jewish War Veterans — JWV

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

JWV is the oldest active veterans service organization in this directory — founded in 1896 by Jewish veterans of the Civil War. It speaks for Jewish uniformed service members and veterans, and its service officers, in JWV's own words, connect any veteran, Jewish or not, to the VA benefits they earned.

Founded: 1896, by Jewish veterans of the Civil War
Status: Chartered by an act of Congress; nonprofit
Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
Size: JWV does not publish a membership total on its own site (NOT-STATED)
Website: jwv.org

Who it serves

Active membership is for Jewish veterans. In the words of JWV’s constitution: any person of the Jewish faith, a citizen of the United States, who served on active duty in the uniformed services of the United States — including the National Guard, Reserves, U.S. Public Health Service, and NOAA — under conditions other than dishonorable. JWV’s membership page adds that Jewish service members join free while on active duty and for the first year after leaving service. Associate membership covers Jewish veterans whose active-duty service fell outside a war or conflict, and veterans of allied forces who later became U.S. citizens.

John Chapman: The Man Who Fought Alone, and the Fight That Never Ended

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

John A. Chapman did everything his country asked, and then he did more than his country has ever been able to comfortably explain. This page is the documented record of what he did on a frozen Afghan peak in 2002, what his own institutions did about it afterward, and the fight his family is still carrying — told in dates, findings, and the services' own words.

The service, and the promise

John Chapman enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in September 1985 and cross-trained into one of the most demanding jobs in the military: combat controller — the airman who goes in with ground forces and directs air power onto the enemy. By 2002 he was a Technical Sergeant with the 24th Special Tactics Squadron, attached to a Navy SEAL element known as Mako 30 during Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan’s Shahikot Valley.

John L. Canley: The Gunny Who Took Command at Hue, and the Ten Rejections It Took to Honor Him

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

John Canley did the thing the Medal of Honor exists to describe. When his company commander went down at Hue City in 1968, the company gunnery sergeant took command, held it for three days, and spent a week carrying wounded Marines across fire-swept ground on his own back. His country agreed he had done it — it gave him the Navy Cross, its second-highest award for valor, in 1970. Then, when the men who had watched him do it asked the institution to finish the sentence, the institution rejected the upgrade ten times — never, his advocate says, on the merits; always on procedure. This page is the documented record of what he did, what his own institution did about it afterward, and who carried his case when no one else would.

Jon Town: The Rocket Said Wounded — the Paperwork Said 'Personality Disorder'

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On an October day in 2004, Army Specialist Jon Town was standing in the doorway of his battalion's headquarters in Ramadi, Iraq, when a 107-millimeter rocket struck two feet above his head. It knocked him unconscious, drove shrapnel into his neck, and left him bleeding from his ears. He had served seven years and been honored twelve times, and he would receive a Purple Heart for that day. Two years later, the Army sent him home to Ohio with a diagnosis that said none of it counted: a "personality disorder," a condition the regulations treat as pre-existing — no medical board, no disability pay, no long-term care, and a demand that he repay more than $3,000 of his re-enlistment bonus. Town's fight, carried into print by reporter Joshua Kors of The Nation and into a House hearing room in July 2007, became the public face of some 22,500 such discharges. This page is the documented record of what he did, what was done to him, and what has — and has not — been done about it since.

Jordan Anderson - VA Claims Academy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On YouTube · Jordan Anderson, Air Force veteran and founder of VA Claims Academy

Anderson started VA Claims Academy after paying $15,000 for claim help that produced little, then teaching himself the system to a 100% permanent-and-total rating. His channel — about 134,000 subscribers — is a DIY classroom: how to prove service connection, what raters look for, C&P exam prep, and nexus letters, in a direct, no-jargon style. New process videos were still posting in September 2026.

Know the Law Before You Speak

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Speaking is a legal act as well as a brave one. This page collects — from public sources, verified October 25, 2026 — the laws and programs that protect veterans, families, and insiders who put a statement on the record about the VA, Florida's state veterans homes, or the contractors between them. It is information, not legal advice. Where a protection is new, pending, or narrower than people say, this page says so in plain words.

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

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Labcorp

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Labcorp — Clinical laboratory — VA reference lab, region by region · labcorp.com.

What it sells

Labcorp provides reference laboratory testing to VA facilities region by region. There is no single national VA lab contract: VA orders run off Labcorp’s VA Federal Supply Schedule contract (FSS-621-II) through VISN-level delivery orders and blanket purchase agreements. Every veteran’s labs — the PSA tests, the A1cs — move through companies like this one, one delivery order at a time.

Lake City VA Medical Center

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Lake City VA Medical Center · Lake City, FL — part of the North Florida/South Georgia Veterans Health System (VISN 8: VA Sunshine Healthcare Network). VA’s own page for this facility.

The doors

Main phone: 386-755-3016
Patient advocates: The system’s patient advocates page names the Lake City advocates as Traci Davis-McGuire and Pamela Smith (VA patient advocates page)
Leadership: the system’s leadership, as VA publishes it

On the record

What the VA Office of Inspector General has published about this facility, newest first. The summaries are ours; the reports are theirs.

Le Roy Torres: He Won at the Supreme Court for a Job Congress Had Already Promised Him

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Le Roy Torres did everything his country asked — twenty-three years in uniform, fourteen as a Texas state trooper — and came home from Iraq with lungs that no longer worked. This page is the documented record of what he asked for when he got back (a job he could still do, which federal law already guaranteed him), what his own state did instead, and what it took to make Texas answer for it: a wife who would not quit, a nonprofit built out of a hospital promise, a 5-4 win at the Supreme Court of the United States, a unanimous jury — and, after all of that, one more appeal by the state.

Legal — Terms, Privacy, Publisher, Corrections

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Last updated October 25, 2026. These terms govern this website. By using the site — including submitting a story, a statement, a petition signature, a poll vote, or a problem report — you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use the site.

Publisher

Published by Bowman Web Services LLC, 2280 La Flor Lane, Port Orange, FL 32129 · (386) 384-8445 · bowmanwebservices.com

Not affiliated

DearDougCollins.com is an independent publication. It is not affiliated with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the Veterans Health Administration, or Secretary Doug Collins, and nothing on this site is a VA communication. The Secretary’s name is used solely to identify the public official, in his official capacity, to whom the published letters are addressed.

Leslie H. Sabo Jr.: The Rifleman Who Crawled Toward the Bunker, and the File His Family Never Saw for 29 Years

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Leslie Sabo was at the rear of his platoon when the ambush opened at Se San, and he could have stayed there. Instead he charged forward, threw himself over a wounded man as a grenade burst, and then — already wounded, then mortally wounded — crawled straight toward a machine-gun bunker and silenced it with a grenade, at the cost of his own life. His family was told he had been killed by a sniper while on guard duty. They did not know he had died a hero for twenty-nine years, because the recommendation that said so was never processed. This page is the documented record of what he did, what his institution told his family instead, and who found the file.

Letter No. 1 — To Secretary Doug Collins

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On behalf of Thomas Alan Bowman, Sr. — 100% service-connected Navy veteran, now in hospice — and the family the VA made carry him. Six asks: a named human accountable, a written accounting of consult #9247778 and the recommendation behind it that was never carried out, a written accounting of every unanswered caretaker request, written confirmation the conflated record is corrected, an audit of how many veterans carry the same defect, and a substantive reply within 30 days.

Letter No. 2 — To Secretary Doug Collins

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Day 10. Thomas Alan Bowman Sr., 84, a 100% service-connected Navy veteran, is dying at the Emory L. Bennett Veterans Nursing Home — still waiting for the Secretary’s answer to the letter that reached him on October 15. The Department pays that home $520.16 for every day of his care: the money arrives every day; the answer has never arrived at all. Installment No. 1 of The Count Continues.

LHC Group (UnitedHealth / Optum)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

LHC Group (UnitedHealth / Optum) — Home health & hospice — owned by UnitedHealth’s Optum since 2023 · lhcgroup.com.

What it sells

LHC Group is one of the largest U.S. home-health and hospice providers, owned by UnitedHealth Group’s Optum since February 2023 (a $5.4 billion acquisition — context, not a government contract). Veterans can reach providers like LHC through VA purchased community care generally, but no direct national VA contract for LHC Group was documented in the sources reviewed; its documented federal exposure is Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE and FEHBP reimbursement.

Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center · Cleveland, OH — part of the VA Northeast Ohio Healthcare System (VISN 3). VA’s own page for this facility.

The doors

Main phone: 216-791-3800
Patient advocates: Patient Experience / Patient Advocates page says advocates are specially trained to help resolve care issues and lists Tyler Estell, Supervisory Patient Experience Officer (Tyler.Estell@va.gov), under ‘Connect with a patient advocate’ — (VA patient advocates page)
Leadership: the system’s leadership, as VA publishes it

On the record

What the VA Office of Inspector General has published about this facility, newest first. The summaries are ours; the reports are theirs.

Loyal Source Government Services

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Loyal Source Government Services — Compensation & pension exam contractor — Orlando, Florida · loyalsource.com.

What it sells

Loyal Source is the fourth and newest VBA exam vendor, added to the program in 2022 — initially for exams across the western United States, where it opened 21 exam clinics. The Orlando-based company now holds a Regions 1–4 seat alongside VES, QTC and Optum Serve.

The contract and the money

Loyal Source holds MDEO Indefinite Delivery Contract 36C10X25D0001 under the 2025 Regions 1–4 recompete.

Magellan Federal (Magellan Health)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Magellan Federal (Magellan Health) — Federal behavioral health & EAP — DoD/federal civilian; no VA contract documented · magellanfederal.com.

What it sells

Magellan Federal (a Magellan Health subsidiary) delivers behavioral-health, resilience and employee-assistance programs for federal customers — principally the Defense Department’s Military and Family Life Counseling program and EAP/WorkLife services for DoD, HHS and FAA employees. No VA-administered contract was documented in this research: its population is service members and federal employees, not VA-enrolled veterans. Profiled for census completeness, labeled as such.

Malcom Randall Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Malcom Randall Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center · Gainesville, FL — part of the North Florida/South Georgia Veterans Health System (VISN 8: VA Sunshine Healthcare Network). VA’s own page for this facility.

The doors

Main phone: 352-376-1611
Patient advocates: The system’s patient advocates page names the Malcom Randall advocates as Misty Carter, Jerilynn Moore, and Shawnta Bradley (VA patient advocates page)
Leadership: the system’s leadership, as VA publishes it

On the record

What the VA Office of Inspector General has published about this facility, newest first. The summaries are ours; the reports are theirs.

Margaret Witt: The Poster Nurse, the Outing, and the Standard That Bears Her Name

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Margaret Witt did everything the Air Force asked, and the Air Force said so, in writing, for years: superb evaluations, a chest of medals, selection as the literal face of Air Force nursing — the flight nurse on the recruitment flyer. In 2004, a man who was not in her chain of command, not in her unit, and not in the military at all sent an email to the Air Force Chief of Staff about her private life, and the institution that had put her on its posters began throwing her out under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" — not for anything she did on duty, in uniform, or on base, but for who she was at home, some 250 miles from it. She was, by the account the Ninth Circuit recorded, less than a year short of the twenty years of service that would have earned her a full retirement pension. Witt fought for seven years, and her fight changed the law's terms for everyone behind her: the government would have to prove, person by person, that a discharge was necessary. When it finally had to try, in September 2010, it could not. This page is the record.

Marine Corps League — MCL

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The League is the Marines' own fraternity, founded in 1923 by the Commandant who led them at Belleau Wood. Its stated mission is to preserve the traditions of the Corps, strengthen the fraternity of Marines and their families, and serve those who wear — or have worn — the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor.

Founded: 1923, by Major General John A. Lejeune, Commandant of the Marine Corps; chartered by Congress August 4, 1937
Status: Congressionally chartered veterans service organization; nonprofit, 501(c)(4)
Headquarters: Stafford, Virginia
Size: The League does not publish a membership total on its own site (NOT-STATED)
Website: mclnational.org

Who it serves

Regular membership is set by the League’s national bylaws: Marines who are serving or have served honorably in the U.S. Marine Corps or Marine Corps Reserve — and U.S. Navy personnel who served honorably with Fleet Marine Force units for more than ninety days and earned the Marine Corps device, or who earned the Fleet Marine Force Enlisted Warfare Specialist Device or the Fleet Marine Force Qualified Officer Insignia. (The FMF Navy route is the corpsman’s and the chaplain’s road in.) Honorable service is read from the last DD Form 214; a General Discharge under Honorable Conditions is acceptable.

Mary Edwards Walker: The Surgeon They Could Not Commission, and the Medal She Would Not Give Back

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Mary Edwards Walker did the work before she was ever given the title. Denied a commission because she was a woman, she served anyway — in hospitals, at the front, and in a Confederate prison — and in 1865 she received the Medal of Honor, the only woman who ever has. In 1917 the Army took her name off the Roll. She refused to return the medal and wore it every day for the rest of her life. This page is the documented record of what she did, what her institution did afterward, and who carried her case after she was gone.

Maxim Healthcare Services

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Maxim Healthcare Services — Home health & respite — VA Community Care Network provider · maximhealthcare.com.

What it sells

Maxim is a nationally contracted VA Community Care Network provider of in-home care for veterans, including respite care under the VA’s caregiver program (PCAFC) — a participating community provider, not a network administrator. By Maxim’s own reporting: 1,533 VA-funded patients and 804,920 hours of care in 2023, and just under one million hours of in-home care to VA-funded veterans in 2024. The dollar value of its VA participation was UNSOURCED in this research.

Michael Blassie: Buried as the Vietnam Unknown, Named by DNA in 1998

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Blassie was never, in the full sense of the word, unknown. The patrol that found his crash site in October 1972 found his identity card and his wallet with it, and for years the file on his remains carried his name as "believed to be." What happened next is the subject of this page: a laboratory in Hawaii decided the bones could not be his, his name came off the file, and the remains — reclassified X-26 — were chosen in 1984 to lie in the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington as the Vietnam Unknown, guarded day and night, while his family in St. Louis was never told his remains had been recovered at all. It took an outside advocate working from Pentagon records, a sister who would not accept the Air Force's first answer, a seven-month CBS News investigation, and a technology that did not exist when he died — mitochondrial DNA testing — to reverse the file. On May 14, 1998, the Tomb was opened. On June 30, 1998, the Defense Department announced that the Vietnam Unknown was First Lieutenant Michael Joseph Blassie. On July 11, 1998, he was buried under his own name in St. Louis.

Mike Partain: Born at Camp Lejeune, and the Fight the Water Started

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Mike Partain never chose Camp Lejeune. He was born there — conceived, carried, and delivered at the base hospital in January 1968, in a Marine family, drinking and bathing in the same water as every other child of the Corps. This page is the documented record of what was in that water, what it did to him, what his father's institution did about it afterward, and the fight he and the Lejeune families have carried for nearly two decades — told in dates, findings, and the government's own words.

Military Order of the Purple Heart — MOPH

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

MOPH is the most exclusive door in this directory: its active membership is composed exclusively of living Purple Heart recipients — men and women wounded in combat. Its mission, in its own words, is to provide "service to all veterans and their families." One fact a family must have before knocking: MOPH has discontinued its service program and no longer files VA claims — it now points veterans to the VFW, The American Legion, DAV, and county and state service officers.

Military Times — Veterans Hub

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Military and veterans news outlet · Military Times newsroom (Sightline Media)

The daily news record for the military community, and its Veterans hub is where benefits, VA policy, and oversight land first: inspector-general findings, pay and COLA changes, and the human stories behind the numbers. Publishing daily — its hub carried multiple new stories on Oct. 23, 2026 alone. When a VA story breaks nationally, it is usually here within hours, in plain language a family can act on.

Modivcare (formerly LogistiCare)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Modivcare (formerly LogistiCare) — Non-emergency medical transportation broker — the national broker layer (no VA contract found) · modivcare.com.

What it sells

Modivcare (the Providence Service Corporation’s transport unit was LogistiCare until the January 2021 rebrand) is a leading non-emergency medical transportation BROKER: payers pay it to schedule and broker rides, which are driven by a network of independent local transportation providers, not its own fleet — about 36.8 million trips managed in 2024 across 48 states and DC (per its SEC 10-K summary). Its documented broker business is state Medicaid, Medicaid managed care and Medicare Advantage. No VA contract to Modivcare was found in FPDS/USASpending-style searches for this build — VA transport is documented as facility-run Veterans Transportation Service, Beneficiary Travel reimbursement, and facility/VISN-level contracts to local providers. This profile is the broker layer as an industry, printed because every family in the system meets this layer and deserves to know how it is built — and labeled so no reader mistakes it for a VA contractor.

National Association for Black Veterans — NABVETS

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

NABVETS was created in 1969 by African American veterans returning from Vietnam, who saw the inequality in access to benefits, services, and recognition for themselves. Its mission keeps that founding commitment — addressing the challenges and disparities experienced by Black veterans — while, in its own words, "proudly opening its doors and services to all Veterans."

Founded: 1969, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Status: A nationally certified veterans service organization and VA claims representative (NABVETS’ own description). NABVETS does not claim a congressional charter on its own site
Headquarters: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Size: NABVETS does not publish a membership total on its own site (NOT-STATED); it states it has more than 100 chapters across the United States, including Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic
Website: nabvets.org

Who it serves

Membership, in NABVETS’ own words, “is open to honorably discharged veterans, active service members, and associate members who support the mission of the organization.” Membership is not limited to Black veterans — the associate route is open to supporters, and NABVETS describes itself as “serving ALL Veterans and their families.”

Non Commissioned Officers Association — NCOA

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

NCOA was created in 1960 for one constituency: the enlisted — the noncommissioned officers and junior enlisted who are most of the force and most of its veterans. One thing to know at the door: NCOA is an advocacy and member-benefit association, not a claims service — it does not file VA claims. What it offers a family is a voice in Washington and benevolent funds that belong to its members.

NVLSP — National Veterans Legal Services Program

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

When a benefits fight stops being paperwork and becomes law, this is the organization that does law. NVLSP is an independent nonprofit of veterans-law attorneys — litigators whose class actions and appeals-court cases have rewritten outcomes for entire classes of veterans, and whose pro bono network puts volunteer lawyers from more than 100 firms on individual cases, free.

Founded: 1981
Status: Independent nonprofit veterans service organization (no congressional charter)
Headquarters: Arlington, Virginia
Reach, in NVLSP’s own figures: “$7.2B delivered to veterans”; “8,100+ advocates trained”; “98%+ of CAVC cases won”
Website: nvlsp.org

Who it serves

Veterans, service members, and their families seeking benefits they were wrongfully denied — across discharge upgrades, combat-related special compensation, medical retirement, traumatic injury insurance (TSGLI), burn-pit claims, appeals to the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims (CAVC), and class actions.

Operation Fouled Anchor: The Investigation the Coast Guard Hid From Congress

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Coast Guard investigated itself, and then hid the investigation. Beginning in 2014, the Coast Guard Investigative Service spent years examining 102 reported incidents of sexual assault at the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut — assaults from the late 1980s to 2006, implicating 43 individuals. Its final report, summarized in January 2020, concluded that Academy leaders had failed to protect cadets, had not treated the allegations as serious crimes, and had let reputation take precedence over the victims. Then senior leaders made a second decision, documented in their own emails: they would not tell Congress, and they would not tell the public. Operation Fouled Anchor stayed secret for more than three years after it closed — until CNN reported it on June 30, 2023. This page is the record of both failures: what was done to cadets across two decades, and what was done with the truth afterward.

Optum Serve / Optum (UnitedHealth Group)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Optum Serve / Optum (UnitedHealth Group) — Community Care Network administrator (Regions 1–3), exam contractor, and the VA’s national dental-network administrator · optum.com — VA programs page.

What it sells

Optum Serve — the successor to Logistics Health Inc. (LHI), inside UnitedHealth Group’s Optum — holds every middleman layer at once: it is the third-party administrator for the VA Community Care Network in Regions 1–3 (36 states, DC, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands), building the provider network and processing community-care claims; it performs compensation & pension exams (over 1.27 million in 2023, per Optum); and it won the VA’s next-generation nationwide community-care DENTAL network contract. In August 2026 it also took a seat on CCN Next Gen Medical.

OptumRx (UnitedHealth Group)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

OptumRx (UnitedHealth Group) — Pharmacy benefit manager — UnitedHealth/Optum · optum.com — OptumRx.

What it sells

OptumRx is UnitedHealth Group’s pharmacy benefit manager for its commercial and government plans. It is NOT the VA’s PBM — VA pharmacy is in-house/CMOP — and its documented direct VA work is small: an Optum Pharmacy entity holds small VA blanket-purchase calls for hazardous chemotherapy compounding for individual VA medical centers. UnitedHealth’s large VA role runs through Optum Serve (see its own page), a different business from OptumRx; the two are not conflated here.

Oracle Health (Oracle Cerner)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Oracle Health (Oracle Cerner) — Electronic health record vendor — the VA’s EHR modernization program · oracle.com — Cerner acquisition.

What it sells

Oracle Health is the health unit built on Cerner — acquired by Oracle for about $28.3 billion (closed June 8, 2022). It supplies Millennium, the electronic health record the VA is deploying to replace its legacy VistA system under the Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM) program. Every number below is labeled for what it is, because this program’s numbers are routinely conflated: a CONTRACT CEILING is not a PROGRAM ESTIMATE, and neither is money spent.

Orlando VA Medical Center

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Orlando VA Medical Center · Orlando, FL — part of the Orlando VA Healthcare System (VISN 8: VA Sunshine Healthcare Network). VA’s own page for this facility.

The doors

Main phone: 407-631-1000
Patient advocates: VA Orlando publishes its patient advocates by location on its patient advocates page. The Lake Nona (Orlando VA Medical Center) advocates are Lisa Sparveri, Greg Donohue, Eddie P. Hernandez, Rafael Myrie, and Amarilis Torres; the system’s phone directory lists the Lake Nona patient advocate line as 407-631-1187. The page also names Congressional Liaison Mary Annette Chaffee (VA patient advocates page)
Leadership: the system’s leadership, as VA publishes it

On the record

What the VA Office of Inspector General has published about this facility, newest first. The summaries are ours; the reports are theirs.

Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

PVA is a specialist in a directory of generalists: the only congressionally chartered veterans service organization dedicated solely to veterans with spinal cord injury or disease. Its membership is narrow by design — but its service officers, like the other chartered VSOs', help all veterans and their families, free of charge.

Founded: 1946 — conceived January 18, 1946, by seventy paraplegic patients at Birmingham General Hospital, Van Nuys, California
Status: Congressionally chartered veterans service organization; 501(c)(3) nonprofit
Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
Size: “more than 16,000 members”; 73 offices and 33 chapters nationwide (PVA’s own figures)
Website: pva.org

Who it serves

Membership is limited, and PVA states it exactly: a U.S. citizen or territorial national, a veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces discharged other than dishonorably, with a spinal cord injury or disease (SCI/D) — including ALS and MS (all veterans with those diagnoses qualify), cauda equina syndrome, poliomyelitis, spina bifida, spinal cord tumor, severe spinal stenosis causing neurological impairment, syringomyelia, and transverse myelitis. Service-connected and non-service-connected disabilities both qualify.

Paris D. Davis: The Captain Who Would Not Leave, and the Paperwork That Vanished Twice

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Paris Davis did the one thing his profession asks above all others: he would not leave. Wounded, outnumbered, and twice ordered to get out, he stayed at Bong Son in 1965 until every American under his command was recovered — and every one of them lived. His reward, for fifty-eight years, was a file that could not be found. This page is the documented record of what he did, what his institution did with the paperwork afterward, and who carried his case when the Army could not find it.

Pat Tillman: Killed by His Own Platoon, and the Five Weeks the Army Let a Different Story Stand

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Patrick D. Tillman gave up professional football to be a soldier, and on the evening of April 22, 2004, in a canyon in southeastern Afghanistan, soldiers of his own Ranger platoon shot and killed him. That was known inside the Army almost immediately: the Pentagon's Inspector General later established that clear evidence of fratricide had emerged by the next day, and the hearing record shows that within seventy-two hours at least nine military officials, including at least three generals, knew or had been informed. What the Army told the world — and, for five weeks, told his family — was something else: that he had died charging the enemy. His nationally televised memorial was held on that story. His Silver Star citation was written on that story, describing "devastating enemy fire" and an enemy that "withdrew." The Ranger who had been at Tillman's side testified to Congress that he was ordered not to tell Tillman's own brother what had happened. This page is the record of the shooting, of the five weeks, and of the investigations that followed — including the Inspector General's express finding that there was no deliberate cover-up, and the family's documented reasons for rejecting it. Both are carried here, because the record carries both.

Paula Coughlin & Tailhook: The Gauntlet, and the Navy That Looked Away

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On the night of Saturday, September 7, 1991, Navy Lieutenant Paula A. Coughlin — a decorated helicopter pilot serving as aide to Rear Admiral John W. Snyder Jr. — walked into the third-floor hallway of the Las Vegas Hilton, outside the hospitality suites of the Tailhook convention, and into what the men lining that hallway called the gauntlet. In the Ninth Circuit's later words, she was "attacked, groped, grabbed, and handled by a throng of men," and feared she was about to be gang-raped before she fought her way into an empty suite. She reported the assault to her admiral the next morning. What followed is the subject of this page: a chain of command that did not act, Navy investigations the Pentagon's own Inspector General would condemn, a scandal that cost a Secretary of the Navy his job and a Chief of Naval Operations his full term — and a disciplinary process that ended without a single person tried for sexual assault. The officer who left the Navy over Tailhook was Paula Coughlin.

Peraton

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Peraton — IT services — VA infrastructure as a managed service · peraton.com.

What it sells

Peraton is a federal IT integrator whose flagship VA work is infrastructure: it runs VA storage and computing infrastructure as a managed service, integrating on-premise systems with the VA Enterprise Cloud and supporting mission workloads including VistA Imaging — the systems veterans’ images and records live on.

The contract and the money

VA Infrastructure-as-a-Managed Service (IaaMS) — storage and computing infrastructure, fixed-price, 7 years (announced Aug 2, 2021).

Petition — Secretary Collins: Read the Record and Answer

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Secretary Doug Collins: read the record and answer.

We, the undersigned, ask Doug Collins, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, to read the documented record published on this site and to give Letter No. 1 a substantive written reply by November 14, 2026 — the deadline the letter itself requested.

The case, in brief

Letter No. 1 was mailed on October 15, 2026 — the first letter this family addressed to Secretary Collins personally, and at least the sixty-third substantive letter it had sent. The correspondence did not begin with the Secretary: it began with his patient advocates, his hotline, and his correspondence office — his department, at every level — and the archived case correspondence opens July 23, 2026. A letter to the team is a letter to the man who leads it; that is what the office means. The letter was written on behalf of Thomas Alan Bowman, Sr., a 100% service-connected U.S. Navy veteran (1960–1970). Everything below is documented on this site, from the VA’s own records:

Project On Government Oversight (POGO)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Nonpartisan government watchdog · Nonpartisan independent watchdog organization, Washington, DC

The watchdog that made VA whistleblowing its business: in 2014 POGO and IAVA opened a secure intake for VA whistleblowers and received roughly 800 submissions in little over a month, then spent a decade testifying that VA’s own accountability office lacks independence and can become a channel for retaliation itself. Still publishing daily in 2026 across federal accountability. Its VA testimony is the documented case that the official complaint channel is part of the failure it is meant to police.

ProPublica

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On YouTube · Independent nonprofit investigative newsroom (generalist channel; only its VA-specific work is curated here).

ProPublica’s VA reporting has repeatedly moved the needle, from its Reliving Agent Orange series, which gave exposed veterans a first-person platform, to its exposé of the flawed AI tool DOGE used to decide which VA contracts to kill. Only a small slice of its generalist channel is VA work, so the selections here are deliberately narrow and VA-specific.

ProPublica — VA Reporting

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Nonprofit investigative newsroom — VA series · ProPublica; its VA tip and reporting effort is fronted by Eric Umansky, editor-at-large

ProPublica’s VA work runs as the series ‘Veterans’ Care at Risk’ — 14 stories since 2025 documenting staffing losses, rejected clinicians, and care setbacks inside VA hospitals, built from internal emails, data, and tips from VA staff and patients. Its /va address now routes to an open call for veterans and VA workers to report what they are seeing, updated July 10, 2026. Slow, documented, and hard for the department to wave off.

Protect Our Defenders

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Military sexual-assault survivor advocacy nonprofit · Founded 2011 by Nancy Parrish; Senior Vice President Josh Connolly is its voice in its 2026 statements

The national organization dedicated to ending sexual violence in the military — and to representing the survivors the system leaves without counsel. It provides free legal and other assistance to survivors, including veterans and civilians the military itself provides no lawyer, through its pro bono network and intake. Active this year: an August 21, 2026 statement challenging the Pentagon’s progress claims, and support for a bipartisan bill that would finally let service members sue the military for sexual assault.

PsychArmor

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On YouTube · Nonprofit founded by Marjorie Morrison; free video education for anyone who lives with, works with, or cares for veterans.

PsychArmor turns military-culture expertise into short, free video courses — including a dedicated caregiver curriculum (its Invisible Wounds of War at Home series and Conversations with Caregivers programs) built for families, not clinicians. Most of its course library now lives on its own learning platform, but its flagship 15 Things Veterans Want You to Know remains a YouTube staple, updated in 2024.

Psychiatrick (Substack)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Veteran clinician’s Substack · Rick Leach, MSN, APRN, PMHNP-BC — combat veteran, now a psychiatric nurse practitioner

A combat veteran turned psychiatric nurse practitioner writes about VA mental-health care from inside the clinic: what the wait-time numbers actually mean for a veteran in crisis, and how power, policy, and trauma collide. Independent, free to read, and blunt about the gap between the department’s promises and its appointment book.

Why we carry them. He does the math on VA’s own wait-time data and says plainly what it means at the kitchen table — the closest voice in the sweep to this site’s premise.

QTC Medical Services (Leidos QTC Health Services)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

QTC Medical Services (Leidos QTC Health Services) — Compensation & pension exam contractor — owned by Leidos · qtcm.com.

What it sells

QTC is the largest VA disability-exam contractor by obligated dollars. It schedules and performs medical disability examinations for veterans and for separating/retiring service members, through a nationwide provider network, telehealth and mobile units. Owned by Leidos Holdings.

The contract and the money

QTC works under the same shared VBA Medical Disability Examination vehicle as the other exam vendors: $6.8 billion original ceiling, $13.2 billion extended ceiling. Separately, in 2022 QTC won two VBA exam-office IDIQ contracts with a combined estimated $1.7 billion value if all options are exercised (Leidos/QTC release, May 31, 2022).

Quest Diagnostics

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Quest Diagnostics — Clinical laboratory — VA reference lab, region by region · questdiagnostics.com.

What it sells

Quest Diagnostics provides reference laboratory testing and courier services to VA facilities region by region under the same VA Medical Laboratory Testing Federal Supply Schedule (FSS-621-II) — VISN-level agreements, not one national contract.

The contract and the money

VA Federal Supply Schedule FSS-621-II, contract V797D70090; example: VISN 6 single-award BPA for reference lab testing and courier services, Apr 2023–Mar 2028.

r/VeteransBenefits

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Reddit community and wiki · Veteran-moderated subreddit

The highest-volume daily conversation in the veterans’ benefits world, with a wiki that has become one of the best plain-language claims references anywhere. What veterans are actually hitting this week shows up here first. Its wiki has moved to its own home — the Veterans Benefits Knowledge Base at veteransbenefitskb.com — and the essential pages gathered below live there.

Why we carry them. The fastest pattern sensor in the ecosystem — the system’s new failure modes surface here before they surface anywhere official.

Rafael Peralta: The Act His Citation Swears By, and the Medal His Country Withheld

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Rafael Peralta gave his adopted country everything it could ask, up to and including the last act of his life — an act the United States Navy describes, in its own citation, in the language of a deliberate, selfless choice. This page is the documented record of what his fellow Marines say he did in a Fallujah house on November 15, 2004, what the Pentagon's experts said he could not have done, and what his mother did about the medal they sent instead — told in dates, findings, and the institution's own words, with the contested parts stated as contested.

Ralph Puckett Jr.: The Ranger Who Ordered His Men to Leave Him, and the 70 Years It Took to Honor Him

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ralph Puckett Jr. did the thing the Medal of Honor exists to recognize, in front of witnesses, on a hill in Korea in November 1950 — and his own Army wrote it down one grade lower. He carried a Distinguished Service Cross for that night for seventy years. He did not campaign to change it. Another man campaigned for eighteen years, was denied in 2007, denied again on appeal in 2009, and kept going anyway — while Puckett himself asked him to stop. This page is the documented record of what Puckett did, what his institution did about it afterward, and what it finally took to get the record corrected in his lifetime.

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

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Rocky Versace: Thirty-Seven Years to the Medal

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Army's own citation is a plain document, and it is enough. A captain, severely wounded in the knee and back, fights until his ammunition and strength are gone so the men with him can get out of the killing zone. Taken prisoner, he assumes command of the other Americans, scorns interrogation and indoctrination, tries repeatedly to escape on untreated wounds, is manacled in irons in an isolated cage on extremely reduced rations, and is executed by the Viet Cong on September 26, 1965, because — in the citation's words — the enemy was unable to break his indomitable will, his faith in God, and his trust in the United States of America. Humbert Roque "Rocky" Versace did all of that between October 29, 1963, and September 26, 1965. What his country did with it took thirty-seven years: a Medal of Honor recommendation filed in 1969 and downgraded to a Silver Star, a file that lost its eyewitness statement and then lost itself, and a medal finally presented by a President on July 8, 2002, to a brother. This page is the record of the service, of the long institutional delay, and of the people — classmates, hometown friends, family, and one stranger in Cleveland — who refused to let the file stay lost. His remains have never come home.

Ruth Moore: Twenty-Three Years of Denials, and the Error the VA Finally Admitted

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ruth Moore joined the Navy at eighteen, from a poor family, in her words because "college was not an option." Two and a half months into her first assignment, overseas in the Azores, she was raped by her supervisor — twice, she told Congress under oath. She sought help from a chaplain and got none. She contracted a sexually transmitted disease, attempted suicide, was medically evacuated to Bethesda, and was discharged with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder that she has always said she did not have. No one was ever charged. Then the second institution took its turn: the VA denied her PTSD claim, again and again, for twenty-three years — at one point on the stated ground that she had not proved a rape for which she had submitted eyewitness testimony and treatment records, in a file her own VA treatment team later found had been partially expunged. The VA ended the fight in stages: a 70 percent rating with individual unemployability, and then, on May 29, 2014, a phone call telling her the department had made a "clear and unmistakable error" in denying her in 1993, and owed her more than $405,000. This page is the record of the assault the Navy did not prosecute, the diagnosis that replaced it, and the quarter-century it took the government to admit it had been wrong.

Sedgwick Government Solutions

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Sedgwick Government Solutions — Claims administrator — federal workers’ compensation; no VA contract documented · sedgwick.com.

What it sells

Sedgwick is the large commercial claims administrator; its federal arm manages workers’ compensation medical case management for injured FEDERAL EMPLOYEES — Labor Department/OWCP, DHS and CDC programs. No VA contract was documented in this research: federal-employee workers’ comp is not veterans’ benefits or VA health care, and the page says so.

The contract and the money

DOL (OWCP) nurse and vocational rehabilitation case management, 5 years (announced Feb 6, 2025); DHS enterprise workers’ compensation medical case management BPA, 5 years.

Signature Recorded — Thank You

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Your name is on the record.

Your signature has been added to the petition asking Secretary Doug Collins to read the documented record and give Letter No. 1 a substantive written reply by November 14, 2026. It will be counted and shown exactly as you directed — first name plus city and state, or anonymous, counted only.

If the Secretary replies, the reply will be published in full on this site, next to the letter. If he does not, the silence counter on the homepage keeps running, and the count of names asking for an answer keeps growing next to it.

Story Received — Thank You

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Your story is in the registry.

Thank you for putting it on the record. It will be handled exactly at the level you chose — published with your name, published anonymously, or record-only and never published. Stories are reviewed against the documents families provide before anything is published; submitting does not publish anything by itself.

If you have documents that belong with your story — letters, Blue Button reports, case or consult numbers — you can email them to care@bowmanwebservices.com. Please do not include Social Security numbers.

TAPS — Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

When the worst has already happened, this is the door. TAPS provides care to all those grieving the death of a military or veteran loved one — regardless of the service member's duty status at death, the survivor's relationship, or the circumstances or geography of the death. No membership. No cost. No deadline by which grief must arrive.

Founded: 1994, by Bonnie Carroll, after the 1992 death of her husband, Brigadier General Tom Carroll, and seven fellow soldiers in an Alaska plane crash
Status: 501(c)(3) nonprofit (no congressional charter; TAPS states it receives no government grants or funding)
Headquarters: Arlington, Virginia
Reach: “more than 120,000 bereaved military survivors” supported since founding (TAPS’s own figure); in 2024 alone, 8,911 newly bereaved survivors connected — an average of 24 a day
24/7 National Military Survivor Helpline: 800-959-TAPS (8277)
Website: taps.org

Who it serves

Everyone grieving a military or veteran death: spouses, partners, children, parents, siblings, extended family, friends, colleagues, battle buddies. You do not need to be legal next of kin. That expressly includes suicide loss — the VA’s own guidance confirms TAPS welcomes anyone grieving a service member or veteran who died by suicide. Services are free and carry no time limit since the death.

Tbird's Quiet Fight

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Investigative essays · Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, founder of HadIt.com

The HadIt founder’s own long-form investigations into VA policy and contractor accountability — slower cadence, deeper dives, same evidence discipline.

Why we carry them. HadIt is the newsroom; this is the column. The essays here are where her biggest findings get their full length.

Start here — their essential work

F#!k You for Your Service: Doug Collins (2026-10-21) — A Ballcap Caucus essay aimed squarely at Secretary Collins and what his tenure has meant for the veterans the VA serves.
Optum Kept the Difference. VA Gave It the Network. (2026-10-06) — The OIG found VA paid Optum and TriWest about $910.7 million more than the dentists who did the work received — and VA then handed Optum a new $30 billion dental contract.
VA Cut Contracts “Regardless of Incomplete Reviews” (2026-09-26) — Per the OIG, VA reviewed 1,049 contracts in under 11 hours in February 2025 and told Congress it had cut $120.9 billion when the real figure was about $1.1 billion.
Nine Deadlines, No Rule (2026-09-21) — VA’s mental-health rating rule, proposed in 2022, burned through nine promised deadlines; its medication clause was the rule rescinded in February 2026.
The War Department Gets a Blank Check. Veterans Get a Bill. (2026-07-17) — Contrasts the stalled Major Richard Star Act with proposed tinnitus and sleep-apnea rating cuts in H.R. 9237.
VA’s $600M Press Release, Autopsied (2026-05-14) — Fact-checks VA’s $596 million infrastructure claim against 29 primary documents, including an Oracle EHR program with 16 of 18 GAO recommendations still unimplemented.

Summaries are ours. The work is theirs — we link to it, we don’t lift it. Visit Tbird’s Quiet Fight →

Tell Your Story

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

One family's case is an anecdote. A registry of them is a pattern the VA has to answer. If the VA has failed a veteran you care for, this page is how your family's record joins this one.

The format

Every story on this site runs in the same structure — the same structure as the Bowman case:

The service and the promise — who served, when, and what they were promised.
What the VA delivered — the documented failure, in dates: the consult that never produced the care, the record that’s wrong, the benefit never approved.
The family ledger — what the family carried instead: the hours, the years, the requests that were never answered.
Every office contacted — case numbers, what they answered, and how long the silence has run.

Dates and documents, not adjectives. That discipline is what makes the record hard to wave away.

The 1994 Black Hawk Shootdown: Twenty-Six Aboard, and No One Convicted

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Twenty-six people went up that morning on a mission of mercy that had been running for three years, and none of them came back — not to an enemy, but to two American fighter jets flying the same mission, under the same airborne control, in clear weather. The helicopters were American, painted with American flags precisely so they would be recognized. The fighters had been told nothing about them. The radar plane overhead, which knew the helicopters were there, said nothing that stopped the shooting. What followed was an investigation that found a "chain of events" and no single culprit, a court-martial that acquitted the only man tried, reprimands and groundings handed out under congressional and family pressure, and an independent review by the Government Accountability Office that documented, item by item, what the Air Force's report had left out. And running underneath all of it was a number: $100,000, paid by the Department of Defense to the family of each foreign victim, and not paid to the families of the 15 Americans. This page is the record of the two crews and their passengers, of what the institutions did and did not do afterward, and of what their families asked for and are still owed.

The 22: They Went For Broke in Battle and Were Second-Guessed at Home — and the Medal Took Fifty-Five Years

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They volunteered from behind barbed wire. The 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team — segregated units of Japanese American soldiers, many of whose families were imprisoned in camps at home — fought in eight campaigns in Italy, France, and Germany, rescued a lost Texas battalion at a cost of more than 800 casualties, and came home the most decorated American unit of their size in the war. Their country gave them one Medal of Honor. It took Congress, a two-year search of the files, and fifty-five years to correct the count by twenty-two. This page is the documented record of what they did, what the wartime awards process did with it, and the day in 2000 when the record was finally set straight.

The American Legion

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The American Legion is the largest veterans organization in the country — and the fact that matters most to a family in a benefits fight is the same one its smaller cousins lead with: its accredited service officers, some 3,000 of them, give free VA claim-related assistance regardless of membership in the Legion.

Founded: 1919, Paris, France (first caucus of the American Expeditionary Force, March 15–17, 1919)
Status: Congressionally chartered veterans service organization (chartered September 16, 1919)
Headquarters: Indianapolis, Indiana
Size: “more than 1.6 million members” in “more than 12,000 local posts” (the Legion’s own figures)
Website: legion.org

Who it serves

Membership was widened by the LEGION Act (2019): any veteran who served at least one day of federal active duty during a qualifying period — the current period runs from December 7, 1941 to the present, with a separate World War I era — is eligible. All current active-duty service members are eligible; combat-zone service is not required.

The Atomic Veterans: Ordered to Watch the Bomb, Then Ordered Never to Speak of It

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They dug trenches in the Nevada desert, crouched in them with their backs to the fireball, and then, on order, stood up and advanced toward ground zero. They watched from the decks of ships in the Pacific as the sky lit brighter than daylight. They walked the streets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the weeks after the bombs fell. Then their government swore them to silence — on pain, as the veterans themselves recount it, of a $10,000 fine and ten years in prison — and for half a century many of them could not tell a wife, a family, or the Veterans Affairs doctor treating their cancers what they had seen or where they had been. This page is the documented record of the Atomic Veterans: what they were ordered to do, what the secrecy cost them, what the institution eventually admitted and paid, and what — as of October 2026 — it still has not done.

The Blue Button Test

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

"Pull your Blue Button. Whose birthday is on it?"

Blue Button is the VA’s own health-records download — the report VA.gov generates about a veteran, from the veteran’s own account. On August 14, 2026, the report pulled from Thomas Bowman, Sr.’s account described the wrong man. It takes about five minutes to check yours. Here is how, what a correct report looks like, and the five red flags his carried.

Step by step

Sign in to VA.gov with the veteran’s own account (ID.me or Login.gov — the only two sign-ins VA still accepts). If you are a caregiver, do this with the veteran or as their authorized representative — it has to be the veteran’s account, because that is the record being tested.
Go to My HealtheVet → Health records, and choose “Download your VA health records (Blue Button®)”.
Select all available dates and all record types, then generate and download the report (PDF or text file).
Open the report and check the five things below — name, date of birth, email, service-connected percentage, and military service history.
Save the file with the date you pulled it. A dated copy is evidence; a memory of what the screen said is not.

What a correct report shows

The veteran’s own name and own date of birth.
The veteran’s own contact information.
The veteran’s actual service-connected disability percentage.
A military service history that exists — branch, service period, service data present.
Caregiver and contact information that names living, actual caregivers.

The five red flags — from a 100% veteran’s own report

The Blue Button report pulled August 14, 2026, from the account of Thomas Alan Bowman, Sr. — U.S. Navy 1960–1970, rated 100% service-connected — contained all five:

The Bonus Army: The Veterans Who Marched for a Promise, and Were Routed by Their Own Army

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They had served in France, and in 1924 their country handed them a certificate — a promise of payment in 1945. In 1932, out of work in the depths of the Great Depression, they came to Washington to ask whether the promise could be kept early, while it could still save them. They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force. The answer they got, on July 28, 1932, was the United States Army: cavalry, infantry, tear gas, and tanks, sent against unarmed veterans and their families, and a camp burned within sight of the Capitol. This page is the documented record of what was promised, what happened that summer, and what was — and was not — settled afterward.

The Borinqueneers: The Regiment That Held the Line, and the Convictions That Were Pardoned but Never Cleared

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They were the Army's segregated Puerto Rican regiment, and in Korea they were good enough to cover the 1st Marine Division's retreat from the Chosin Reservoir and to be among the last men off the beach at Hungnam. Two years later, after a hill called Jackson Heights, the Army court-martialed ninety-six of them in fifteen trials — the largest mass courts-martial of the Korean War — for a collapse its own chief of staff would tell Congress was caused by rotations, a language barrier, and officers without battlefield experience. The sentences were pardoned away within two years. The convictions were never formally cleared. This page is the documented record of what the Borinqueneers did, what was done to them, and the one entry in the ledger that is still open.

The Bowman Case

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thomas Alan Bowman, Sr. did everything his country asked. This page is the documented record of what his country did back — told in dates, case numbers, and the VA's own files, by the son who carried the case.

The service, and the promise

He was not drafted. He volunteered — twice. Thomas Alan Bowman, Sr., 84, enlisted in the United States Navy on February 25, 1960, and when that enlistment ran out he signed again — re-enlisting on February 20, 1964, with the war in Vietnam escalating — for two enlistments totaling 9 years, 11 months and 16 days of active service. (His DD-214 prints those numbers; so does the VA’s own rating decision of September 4, 2024, which lists his service as February 25, 1960 – February 19, 1964 and February 20, 1964 – February 10, 1970.) He was on active duty through the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, in his first enlistment. His final period of service was anchored in Da Nang harbor, December 1969 – February 1970, on salvage operations — the anchoring documented in his Agent Orange Registry exam. Radioman Second Class (RM2), USS Arikara (ATF-98), honorable discharge, Vietnam era. He is rated 100% service-connected (330% combined) and has received Special Monthly Compensation since October 2022. He is a widower; his wife, Julieanne Bowman, died on August 27, 2019. His son’s verdict on everything that follows is plain, and it is the reason this page exists: a man who volunteered twice, his son says, “has been betrayed by his country.”

The Brownsville 167: A Whole Battalion Discharged Without Honor, Without a Trial

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They were regulars — Black enlisted men of the 25th Infantry, veterans of Cuba and the Philippines, some of them a year or two from retirement. In August 1906 their battalion was blamed for a shooting in Brownsville, Texas that no investigation ever tied to any one of them. Their officers said the men were in their barracks and their rifles unfired. It did not matter. President Theodore Roosevelt discharged all 167 of them "without honor" — no trial, no hearing, no individual charge — in the largest summary dismissal in the history of the United States Army. This page is the documented record of what happened at Fort Brown in 1906, what was done to the men afterward, and the sixty-six years it took the Army to say the record was wrong.

The C-123 Reservists: The Spray Planes Came Home From Vietnam, and the Dioxin Came With Them

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They never set foot in Vietnam. Their war was a cargo hold in Massachusetts, Ohio, and Pennsylvania — an aging Fairchild C-123 Provider that had spent the previous decade spraying Agent Orange over the jungles of Southeast Asia and now flew airlift and aeromedical missions for the Air Force Reserve. The spray tanks were gone. The chemical was not. Between 1972 and 1982, by the Institute of Medicine's estimate, some 1,500 to 2,100 Air Force Reserve personnel trained and worked on those aircraft, eating, sleeping, scrubbing, and breathing inside fuselages whose interior surfaces still carried residue of 2,3,7,8-TCDD — dioxin, the contaminant in Agent Orange. When they sickened and asked VA for the same presumption of exposure granted to veterans who served in Vietnam, VA told them, for years, that dried dioxin residue was not "biologically available" and could not have harmed them. This page is the record of what the science showed, who carried the fight, and what the rule that finally ended it did — and did not — pay for.

The CivDiv

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On YouTube · Clayton Simms, a Marine Corps veteran who works under an accredited claims agent at Borne Accredited Claims

TheCivDiv teaches veterans to build evidence-based VA disability claims, working from 38 CFR and the M21-1 manual rather than hype. Clayton Simms started the channel after a clueless transition briefing left him to learn the system himself, and it now mixes claims-process teaching with running commentary on VA policy, oversight, and fraud. New videos were still posting the week of this scout, including one on the day of the check.

The Correspondence — Our Personal Experience

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The correspondence — the whole count

88 sent — ~247 received

88 messages the family sent survive in the preserved record — 82 of them substantive. The family’s own count across every channel runs past 200 sent, and is named here as the family’s count. Against those sends: ~247 messages received — the bulk of them acknowledgments, automatic replies, VA newsletters, and 19+ delivery-failure notices, including a discharge-appeal rebuttal that bounced and never arrived. Full preserved archive: 335 messages across all mailboxes, in both directions. The count below is the floor, not the ceiling.

The Edgewood Test Subjects: They Volunteered, Were Sworn to Silence, and Spent Fifty Years Proving It Happened

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They answered a call for volunteers. At Edgewood Arsenal, on the Edgewood Area of Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, the Army gave them nerve agents, mustard agents, and some of the most powerful psychoactive drugs ever synthesized — then swore them to secrecy under threat of court-martial and sent them back to their units, many of them to Vietnam. For more than three decades the oath did its work: men who believed they had been injured could not tell a doctor what had been done to them, could not prove to the Department of Veterans Affairs that it had happened at all, and were sometimes treated as fabricators when they tried. This page is the documented record of the Edgewood program, of the secrecy that outlived it by thirty years, and of the litigation — still unfinished — that has forced the institution, piece by piece, to acknowledge its own volunteers.

The Enewetak Cleanup Veterans: They Scraped a Nuclear Test Site Clean, and Their Country Spent Forty Years Saying They Were Never Exposed

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They were not at the tests. That was the whole of the case against them, stated in a single fact: the last bomb at Enewetak went off in 1958, and they arrived in 1977. What they arrived to was the residue of 43 nuclear detonations — plutonium, cesium, and strontium worked into the soil of a Pacific atoll — and an order to clean it up so the people who had been removed from those islands a generation earlier could come home. For three years, soldiers, sailors, and airmen scraped the topsoil off contaminated islands, hauled it by truck and barge to Runit Island, and buried it in a bomb crater under a concrete dome the Marshallese call the Tomb. Then they went home, grew older, and began, in striking numbers, to get sick — and were told, claim after claim, decade after decade, that their service had exposed them to nothing worth naming. This page is the documented record of what they did, what the institution said afterward, and the precise line where the accounting still stops.

The Fight — Fighting for Veterans

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Fight

This site began as one family’s fight for one veteran. Thomas Alan Bowman Sr. lies dying at a veterans nursing home, still waiting for the Department of Veterans Affairs to answer a single letter. The fight does not wait with him. It gets bigger.

If you are a veteran, or you love one, you are not powerless inside this system. You are uninformed inside it — and that part is fixable. Everything below is a weapon this family built, found, or learned the hard way. Use all of it.

The Filipino Veterans: Called Under the American Flag in 1941, Written Out of It in 1946

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They were called into the service of the United States by name, by presidential order, in July 1941 — some 260,000 of them. They fought the Japanese occupation of their own country under an American commander and an American flag, and more than 57,000 of them died doing it. In 1946, Congress answered with a sentence: their service "shall not be deemed" to have been service in the armed forces of the United States. This page is the documented record of the service, the sentence, the partial remedies that followed across eighty years, and the account that remains open.

The Fort Hood Victims: Thirteen Killed in the Readiness Center, Five Years as 'Workplace Violence'

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood was not a battlefield, and that was the point of it. It was the building where soldiers went, unarmed, to be made ready — medical checks, dental checks, records, immunizations — before deploying overseas, and where they processed back in when they came home. On November 5, 2009, an Army psychiatrist who was himself weeks from deploying walked into that building and opened fire on the people inside it. Thirteen people were killed and thirty-one were wounded by gunfire. The government that had sent those soldiers to war then spent more than five years calling what happened to them workplace violence — a classification that kept the Purple Heart, and the benefits that travel with it, out of their hands — even though the shooter had been in communication with an al-Qaeda propagandist and would tell his own court-martial that he had switched sides. Congress finally rewrote the rule, and the medals were awarded on April 10, 2015. This page is the record of the service those soldiers were performing in that building, of what was done to them there, of the five years the institution spent misnaming it, and of the narrower fight — over whether the wounds count as combat-related — that the medal did not end.

The Government Doors — the official channels, and how a family knocks

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Not every door is a charity. Some of the most important ones belong to the government itself — the VA's own directory of accredited representatives, the patient advocate inside every VA facility, the caregiver program Congress created, and, in Florida, a second, state-run layer of free service officers. A family in the fight should know every one of these doors, what each one actually opens, and how to knock so the knock is on the record.

The Gulf War Illness Claimants: They Won the Shortest War, Then Spent Thirty-Five Years Proving They Were Sick

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Their war lasted six weeks. The ground war lasted one hundred hours. Then somewhere between 175,000 and 250,000 of the nearly 697,000 Americans who served in Southwest Asia in 1990 and 1991 came home with an illness that had no name, no test, and no diagnosis — crushing fatigue, widespread pain, failing memory, burning skin, ruined digestion — and spent the next thirty-five years being told, in examination rooms and in denial letters, that there was nothing measurably wrong with them. Congress wrote them a presumption in 1994: if you served there and you are sick with what cannot be explained, the law will presume your service did it. The Department of Veterans Affairs then denied their claims anyway, at rates the Government Accountability Office measured at three times the norm. This page is the accounting of what was done to them, what has been done since, and what — a working presumption, a diagnostic test, a Khamisiyah reckoning — is still owed.

The Hello Girls: Sworn In as Soldiers, Sent Home as Contractors

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They were recruited because the Army could not fight without them. They swore the Army oath, wore Army uniforms with Signal Corps insignia, held rank as operators, supervisors, and chief operators, and worked the switchboards through the largest battles in American history to that date — and when the war was won, the Army informed them that they had never been soldiers at all. This page is the documented record of the 223 women of the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit — the "Hello Girls" — what they did in France, what their own institution did to them when they came home, and the two separate fights, sixty years and then a century long, that it took to set the record straight.

The Holyoke Soldiers' Home: Seventy-Six Veterans, One Merged Unit, No Convictions

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The men who lived at the Holyoke Soldiers' Home in the spring of 2020 had already done the dangerous part of their lives. They were veterans of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, many of them living with dementia behind the locked doors of the home's memory-care units, in a state-run facility whose stated mission was to provide care with honor and dignity. In late March 2020, as COVID-19 moved through the building and staff called out sick, the home's leadership consolidated its two locked dementia units into one — placing, by the attorney general's count, 42 veterans, some of them COVID-positive and others showing no symptoms at all, into a unit built for 25 beds. Within days the home's morgue was full and bodies were being stored in a refrigerated truck. At least 76 veterans died over eleven weeks. This page is the record of who those residents were, of the decisions made over them, and of everything the Commonwealth of Massachusetts did — and did not do — afterward.

The Hotline That Doesn't Call Back

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There is a phone number in Washington that exists for exactly one purpose: when the VA fails a veteran, the veteran — or his family — can call it, a real person documents the concern, and the VA calls back. That is the promise of the White House VA Hotline. This page is the documented record of what that promise was worth to one family in crisis.

The promise

The White House VA Hotline — 1-855-948-2311 — is the VA’s flagship complaint line, staffed around the clock. The VA presents it as the place where concerns are documented by VA employees, routed for action, and followed up. Veterans and families are told: call this number, and the system will respond.

The Houston 110: Marched After a Beating, Hanged Without Appeal, Cleared After 106 Years

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They were Buffalo Soldiers — the 3rd Battalion of the 24th Infantry, sent to Jim Crow Houston to guard the construction of a camp that would train white soldiers for France. When Houston police beat two of their own in the street on August 23, 1917, 156 of them took rifles and marched. The Army's answer was the largest murder trial and the largest court-martial in American history: 118 men tried, 110 convicted, 19 hanged — the first 13 in secrecy, without appeal, on a scaffold built overnight. This page is the documented record of what happened in Houston in 1917, what the Army did afterward, and the 106 years it took the Army to take it all back.

The Independence Fund — Caregiver & Family Program

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Caregiver and family support program · The Independence Fund, founded 2007, Charlotte, North Carolina

For the heroes behind the heroes, in its own framing: retreats, virtual events, respite, and community for caregivers of severely wounded veterans, plus family retreats and aftercare for the whole household. The fund says it has assisted more than 2,100 caregivers and more than 300 families through these programs — one of the few national programs built specifically for the caregiver’s own recovery.

The K2 Veterans: The First Boots on the Ground After 9/11 Were Put on Poisoned Ground, and the Paperwork Is Still Catching Up

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They were among the first Americans sent to war after September 11, 2001 — soldiers, airmen, Marines, and special operators staged through a borrowed Soviet air base in Uzbekistan called Karshi-Khanabad, known as K2, or Camp Stronghold Freedom. The Department of Defense's own survey teams, working in 2001, 2002, and 2004, documented what was in that ground and air: petroleum-soaked soil under the tents, depleted uranium beside the tent city, burn pits upwind of the ammunition point. The surveys stayed classified for nearly two decades. The veterans who lived on that ground have spent the years since — through a congressional investigation, a landmark toxic-exposure law, two rounds of cancer rulemaking, and a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit still in court — trying to get their own government to finish the accounting its survey teams started. Parts of it are now done. This page records which parts, and which are not.

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

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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 MAVNI Recruits: The Citizenship They Were Promised for Serving

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They were recruited because the Army needed what they had and could not grow at home: native fluency in languages spoken where American soldiers were fighting, and medical training the services were short of. In exchange for an eight-year service commitment, legal immigrants who were not citizens — and not even green-card holders — were offered the oldest bargain in American military history, made explicit: serve honorably, and the country you serve becomes yours, fast. More than ten thousand took the deal. Then, beginning in 2016, the Defense Department froze their program, rewrote the terms after they had signed, withheld the single form that made the citizenship promise operative, and — in hundreds of cases documented in the Army's own filings — discharged the recruits or left them waiting until the visas they had arrived on ran out. It took three federal class actions, spread over six years, to make the government issue the paperwork it had promised at the recruiting station. This page is the record of that promise, of how it was broken, and of what the courts did and did not restore.

The Mustard Gas Test Subjects: Gassed by Their Own Military, Sworn to Secrecy, and Then Asked to Prove It

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They were American soldiers and sailors, most of them teenagers, and the gas that burned them was American. Between 1942 and 1945, the Army and Navy used more than 60,000 servicemen as human subjects in secret chemical-defense tests of protective clothing, ointments, and gas masks, exposing them to mustard gas and Lewisite. At least 4,000 of them went through the most severe tests — locked in gas chambers, or sent into fields saturated with the agents. The experiments were kept off their service records, and the men were ordered never to speak of them, under threat of dishonorable discharge and military prison. No follow-up care was provided, although the long-term harm was already known by 1933. This page is that record — the tests, the 1993 report, the 1994 regulation, the promise kept for only 610 of some 4,000, and the last remedy in 2017.

The Nehmer Class: A Widow's Name Forced the VA to Reopen a Generation of Denied Agent Orange Claims

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The case is named for a widow. Beverly Nehmer stood first in the caption of a class action brought on behalf of all Vietnam veterans and their survivors who had been denied benefits for diseases they attributed to Agent Orange — and of everyone who would ever file such a claim in the future. What the class won was not a single payment but a machine: a court order, still running today, under which every time the VA concedes that another disease is connected to herbicide exposure, it must go back through its own files, find the claims it denied years or decades earlier, decide them again, and pay as if the original claim had been granted. This page is the record of the rule that made the denials necessary, the order that voided them, and the thirty-five years of enforcement it has taken to make the government keep its word.

The New Jersey Veterans Memorial Homes: The Virus Spread Virtually Unchecked

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The residents of the New Jersey Veterans Memorial Homes at Menlo Park and Paramus were a defined and identifiable group: honorably discharged veterans — many elderly, many living with dementia — together with veterans' spouses and Gold Star parents, all living in nursing homes the State of New Jersey itself owned and ran. When COVID-19 arrived in March 2020, the two homes were near capacity, with a combined 648 beds. By the Justice Department's later count, 101 residents at Menlo Park and 89 at Paramus died of probable COVID-19 in the pandemic's first wave — 190 probable deaths — and the department concluded the real number was likely much higher and is, on the homes' own records, impossible to determine. What investigators described was not a facility overwhelmed despite doing the basics. It was, in their words, a systemic inability to implement clinical care policy, poor communication, and a failure to ensure basic staff competency that "let the virus spread virtually unchecked throughout the facilities" — and then a failure to hold the gains after outside help left, so that the same breakdowns were still observed during the Omicron outbreaks of 2021 and 2022. On September 7, 2023, the Justice Department found reasonable cause to believe the conditions violated the Fourteenth Amendment. This page is the record of what the state promised these residents, what happened inside the two homes, and what has — and has not — been done since.

The Nisei Soldiers: They Volunteered From Behind Barbed Wire, and Became the Most Decorated Unit of Their Size in Army History

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They were classified as enemy aliens by the country of their birth. Their families were held behind barbed wire, in camps their own government built, while they wore that government's uniform in Italy, in France, and across the Pacific. The 100th Infantry Battalion, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and the Military Intelligence Service became, by the Army's own accounting, the most decorated soldiers of their size and length of service in American military history. This page is the documented record of what they did, what was done to them and their families at the same time, and how long the reckoning took — an apology in 1988, twenty Medals of Honor restored in 2000, a Congressional Gold Medal in 2011, and one group of the incarcerated whose redress was never made equal at all.

The Port Chicago 256: Ordered Back to the Ships, Punished for Asking Why

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They loaded the ammunition that won the Pacific war, under orders, without training, in a segregated Navy that gave the most dangerous work on the dock to Black enlisted men. When the dock blew up and killed 320 of them, the survivors asked one question — what will be different? — and for asking it, 258 of them were court-martialed. This page is the documented record of what happened at Port Chicago in 1944, what the Navy did to the men who survived it, and the eighty years it took the Navy to take it back.

The Primary Record — OIG · GAO · VA

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Primary sources · VA Office of Inspector General · U.S. Government Accountability Office · VA’s own publications and data

The documents everything else stands on: the Inspector General’s reports, the GAO’s audits, VA’s press releases and datasets (including the VetPop population model). We read VA’s own announcements as claims to be checked, never as corroboration.

Why we carry them. Every wider-record citation on this site traces back to a document in this row. The Wire scan watches all of them weekly.

The Qarmat Ali Veterans: They Guarded the Plant, and Breathed What Was Blowing Off Its Ground

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They were sent to protect other people while those people worked. From April through September 2003, Army National Guard soldiers from Oregon, West Virginia, Indiana, and South Carolina — joined by other U.S. soldiers and British RAF personnel — guarded the contractors restoring the Qarmat Ali water treatment plant in the Basrah oil fields of Iraq, a plant whose ground and air carried sodium dichromate, the orange-yellow source of hexavalent chromium, a known lung carcinogen. The soldiers testified they were told the dust was a mild irritant. What followed is the documented record: Senate hearings in 2008 and 2009, an inspector general's finding that the contractor had not fully complied with its contract's safety standards, an $85.2 million Oregon jury verdict in 2012, its vacatur in 2015 because Oregon had no jurisdiction over the contractor, the dismissal of the re-filed Texas case in 2017, and a VA surveillance program that monitors these veterans without presuming any illness is connected to the plant. This page is that record.

The Shaw Seven: 432 Medals, None of Them Theirs — Until 1997

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They fought in a segregated Army that assumed, as a matter of policy, that they could not fight. They held a castle approach in Italy, a river bridgehead in Germany, a sinking ship in New Guinea — and when the medals were handed out, 432 of them, not one had their name on it. It took the Army itself, half a century later, paying a Black university to audit its own record, before seven of those medals were finally awarded. Six of the seven men were dead. This page is the documented record of what the seven did, and what it took to make the record whole.

The System — The Problems Every Veteran Runs Into

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This site began as one family's case. It did not stay one for long, because almost nothing in Thomas Bowman Sr.'s file turned out to be unique to him. The delayed consult, the record that isn't his, the referral that had to be fought for, the door that locks the caregiver out — these are not this family's misfortunes. They are the system's standard outputs, documented in this case page by page and confirmed at national scale by the government's own auditors. This page names the patterns. As other veterans' documented cases reach this site, they will be added here — because a pattern one family can prove is an anecdote, and a pattern a hundred families can prove is an indictment.

The Trail of Silence

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is the trail, whole. Every message in the family's preserved case archive — the care@ corpus, the mailbox the family's case ran through — in date order, with the direction it traveled, the office or person it names, and the subject it carried. No selection, no highlights reel: the asking, and what came back, line by line. The questions went out for months, to every door the family was told to knock on — the VA, its advocates, a United States senator's casework office, the state veterans' department, the sheriff, the hospitals, the press. Read what came back.

The USS Arizona Unknowns: Eighty-Six Men, Eighty-Five Years, One Word on the Stone

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Eighty-six sailors and Marines of the battleship USS Arizona have names. Their names are on the ship's muster rolls, on the wall of the memorial that stands over the sunken hull at Pearl Harbor, and in the records of the families who lost them on December 7, 1941. What they do not have, as of October 2026, is their names on their own graves. These are the men who were recovered after the attack — pulled from the wreckage or the harbor, burned or broken past recognition by the standards of 1941 — and buried as Unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, the Punchbowl, ten miles from the ship. For more than eighty years the institution declined to open those graves, on the stated ground that the family DNA needed to identify them could not be gathered in any reasonable time at any reasonable cost. A civilian — one of their own grandnephews — gathered it in three years. On April 23, 2026, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced that the required threshold had been met, and in October 2026 it set the date: the first eight caskets come out of the Punchbowl on December 7, 2026, the 85th anniversary of the attack, with hundreds of family members present. This page is the record of the service, of the eighty-five years of refusal and reversal that followed, and of what remains undone.

The Valor Review 24: Denied by Prejudice, Read Again at Last

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Every one of these twenty-four men had already been decorated for the same act. The Army had judged their courage once, in wartime, and written it down — then stopped one step short of the nation's highest honor, in case after case, along lines of race, ethnicity, and faith. It took a childhood friend who refused to drop the matter, an act of Congress ordering the files reopened, and a twelve-year review of 602 Distinguished Service Crosses to establish what the wartime record had said all along. This page is the documented record of the Valor Review 24: what the men did, why the medal stopped short, and what it took — and what it still has not taken — to set the record straight.

The War Horse

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Nonprofit newsroom · Founder Thomas J. Brennan, Marine veteran

Original, newsroom-standard reporting on military and veteran life — including the care side, where almost nobody else reports. Its investigation into VA therapy practices helped trigger a federal oversight probe in 2026.

Why we carry them. The one outlet doing original reporting on the care side of this fight. When The War Horse documents it, it arrives pre-verified.

Start here — their essential work

War Horse Report Spurs VA Inspector General Probe into Veterans’ Therapy (2026-09-02) — Its reporting on VA therapy session limits helped trigger a VA Inspector General probe; the OIG’s August 2026 report faulted how caseload metrics pressure therapists.
Veterans’ mental health is being capped, VA therapists say — The original investigation: VA therapists say management metrics are quietly capping how much therapy veterans receive.
Veterans say they struggle with mental health when VA ends therapy (2025-12-11) — Follow-up with veterans cut off mid-treatment, plus facility policies obtained through FOIA that capped sessions at 8, 15, or 24.
List of Mental Health Care Resources for Veterans (2025-12-11) — A standing resource list for veterans who need mental-health care outside or alongside the VA.
VA sent warning letters to veteran disability benefit companies (2025-12-02) — A War Horse and NPR FOIA investigation found VA sent more than 40 warning letters to claims-consulting companies over a decade, and most of the warned companies kept operating.
For-profit firm spends millions to maintain stake in VA benefits claims (2025-04-18) — Veterans Guardian spent $2.3 million lobbying to protect its fee-based claims business, which has charged some veterans fees over $20,000.
Congress advances bill for firms to charge veterans for VA help (2025-06-12) — The CHOICE for Veterans Act would let companies charge veterans up to $12,500 for claims help that accredited representatives provide free.

Summaries are ours. The work is theirs — we link to it, we don’t lift it. Visit The War Horse →

The War Horse News

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On YouTube · Nonprofit newsroom founded by Marine veteran Thomas Brennan; staffed by veteran and military-family journalists.

The War Horse is an award-winning nonprofit newsroom reporting on the human impact of military service — veterans, military families, and the VA systems they depend on. Its managing editor Kelly Kennedy was the first reporter to cover burn-pit illnesses in 2008, and its symposiums put VA leadership on stage with the families living the consequences of VA policy.

The Whistleblower Door

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The family has told its story. This door is for everyone standing next to the story — and everyone working inside the machine that produced it.

Who this door is for

You do not have to be a veteran to have seen what the system does to veterans.

This door is for:

Veterans who were delayed, denied, misrecorded, discharged into danger, or left waiting.
Families and caregivers who carried the calls, the paperwork, the travel, and the consequences.
Insiders — nurses and RNs, physicians, CNAs, technicians, therapists, administrators, contractors, and anyone else whose work puts them inside a VA facility, a state veterans home, a community-care company, a claims operation, or the vendors around them.

If you worked a shift, processed a claim, answered a phone, cleaned a room, drove a route, reviewed a chart, or watched a decision move upward until nobody owned it, your statement belongs in the record. You may know one incident. You may know the pattern. Both matter.

The Widow's Tax: The SBP–DIC Offset, and the Widows Who Repealed It

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Survivor Benefit Plan was sold to generations of military retirees as insurance: pay premiums out of your retired pay, month after month, and if you die first, your spouse will keep receiving an annuity of up to 55 percent of the base amount you elected. What the sales pitch did not say was that if the service itself caused the death — if the retiree died of a service-connected injury or disease, or was killed on active duty — the annuity would be cut by the amount of the other survivor benefit, the VA's Dependency and Indemnity Compensation, dollar for dollar. For many widows and widowers the cut was total: the DIC equaled or exceeded the SBP, the annuity their spouse had paid for vanished, and all that came back was a refund of premiums. Survivors named the rule for what it felt like — the "widow's tax." This page is the record of that offset, of the roughly 65,000 spouses it touched, and of the surviving spouses — Kathy Prout of California foremost among them — who organized, walked the halls of Congress for years, and finally repealed it, prospectively only, in 2019.

The WWII Merchant Mariners: They Delivered the Goods, Then Waited 43 Years to Be Called Veterans

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

They were civilians, and they died like soldiers — at a higher rate, in fact, than any branch of the armed forces. Roughly a quarter of a million American merchant mariners crewed the cargo ships and tankers that carried the Second World War across every ocean, and one in twenty-six of them did not come home. Their president said, in so many words, that the country would do for them what it was doing for the men in uniform. The country did not — not in 1944, when the GI Bill passed them by; not in 1945 or 1947, when Congress let their own bill die; and not for forty-three years, until three mariners sued the government and a federal court made the Air Force reconsider. By then the education benefits were gone, and, by the House Veterans' Affairs Committee's count, more than 125,000 of the mariners were dead. This page is the documented record of the service, the promise, and the wait.

Thomas H. Corey VA Medical Center

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thomas H. Corey VA Medical Center · West Palm Beach, FL — part of the VA West Palm Beach Healthcare System (VISN 8). VA’s own page for this facility.

The doors

Main phone: 561-422-8262
Patient advocates: The system’s Patient Advocates page lists named patient advocates for the West Palm Beach system, including Beverly Ries and Carrie Wallace.
Leadership: the system’s leadership, as VA publishes it

On the record

What the VA Office of Inspector General has published about this facility, newest first. The summaries are ours; the reports are theirs.

Tibor Rubin: The Survivor They Sent Up the Hill Alone, and the 55 Years It Took to Say So

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Tibor Rubin survived a Nazi concentration camp as a boy, crossed an ocean to repay the soldiers who freed him, and then — in the uniform of the country that had liberated him — held a hill alone for twenty-four hours, manned the last machine gun at Unsan, and kept dozens of starving prisoners alive for thirty months. His reward, for half a century, was silence: the officers who recommended him for the Medal of Honor were killed, and the first sergeant ordered to file the paperwork was, in his comrades' sworn words, an antisemite who wanted him dead instead. This page is the documented record of what he did, and what his own institution did about it afterward.

TREA — The Enlisted Association (The Retired Enlisted Association)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Do not let the name turn your veteran away: TREA began as The Retired Enlisted Association, but its current bylaws open regular membership to any honorably discharged enlisted person — retired, veteran, Guard, or Reserve — and to those currently on active duty. Spouses can be members in their own right. Its benevolent arm, TREA GIVES, exists for military members, veterans, and their families in financial difficulty.

Founded: 1963, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, by Air Force retirees George Skonce and Dean Sorrell; congressionally chartered (TREA’s homepage dates the charter to 1992)
Status: Congressionally chartered nonprofit organization
Headquarters: Centennial, Colorado
Size: TREA does not publish a current membership total on its own site (NOT-STATED)
Website: trea.org

Who it serves

Regular membership, per TREA’s national bylaws: “Any enlisted person who has been honorably discharged from any active or reserve component of the Armed Forces of the United States, or is currently Active Duty, shall be eligible for regular membership, including life membership.”

TriWest Healthcare Alliance

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

TriWest Healthcare Alliance — Community Care Network administrator (Regions 4–5) — Phoenix, Arizona · triwest.com.

What it sells

Phoenix-based TriWest (founded 1996) is the VA’s third-party administrator and payer for Community Care Network Regions 4 and 5 — 14 western states, Alaska and the Pacific territories — maintaining the community provider network and processing and paying claims (through PGBA). Since January 1, 2025 it also administers TRICARE West. It states that veterans have received more than 92 million appointments through its VA network since 2013. Florida is not TriWest’s — it is Optum’s Region 3 — and this page does not pretend otherwise: TriWest is profiled because it is half of the national machine, and because it took a seat on the next generation of that machine in August 2026.

U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs (Official)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On YouTube · The official YouTube channel of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs itself — the institution, speaking for the record; not a law firm or advocate.

VA’s own channel: about 2,700 videos and 458,000 subscribers, posting several times a week. Included here deliberately as the primary source — this is what the Department says about its own caregiver program, its own forms, and its own performance, in its Secretary’s own words. A VA-accountability reader should be able to check the site’s claims against the Department’s, side by side.

UF Health Shands Hospital (Gainesville)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

UF Health Shands Hospital (Gainesville) — Academic medical center in the Bowman chain — Gainesville, Florida · ufhealth.org — Shands Hospital.

What it sells

UF Health Shands Hospital is the University of Florida’s private, not-for-profit teaching hospital in Gainesville — a system with a state-designated Level I trauma center and regional burn center. No FPDS/USASpending source found in this build’s research states a VA contract or VA payment total for Shands, so no VA dollar figure is published for it. (Its audited financials put Medicare at about 35% of net patient service revenue in FY2019 — context, not a VA figure.)

USS Indianapolis and Capt. Charles B. McVay III: The Captain Convicted for a Sinking He Did Not Cause

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Charles McVay did the hardest thing a captain can do: he stayed with his ship, got his surviving men into the water, and then wrote personally to the families of the 879 who did not come home. His reward was to be the only American captain of the Second World War convicted for losing his ship to the enemy — on a charge the enemy commander himself testified should not have stood. This page is the documented record of what USS Indianapolis did, what was done to her captain afterward, and what, fifty-five years later, was finally — and only partly — undone.

Vanessa Guillén: The Soldier Fort Hood Failed, and the Family That Would Not Be Quiet

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Vanessa Guillén was twenty years old, and she believed the Army would take care of its own. She told her family she was being sexually harassed at Fort Hood, and she did not live to see the Army admit she was telling the truth. This page is the documented record of what the institution's own investigations found, what it did about the leaders who failed her, and what her mother and sisters forced into law — told in dates, findings, and the Army's own words.

Veterans Benefits Network

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Veteran-run forum community · Volunteer-run veteran community

One of the oldest veteran-to-veteran forums on the claims fight — and one of the only ones with dedicated boards for the VA Caregiver Program and for Survivor Benefits, the two rooms where families like ours actually live.

Why we carry them. The closest demographic match to the Vietnam-era, long-haul fight — and rare first-person evidence for the caregiver and survivor patterns.

Start here — their essential work

VA Claims, Compensation, Benefits FAQ’s. (2007-10-16) — The forum’s living master FAQ, maintained since 2007 and still updated: service connection, rating protection, DIC, records requests, and how congressional inquiries actually work.
VA Disability Claims (General) — The network’s main claims board — roughly 40,000 topics and 329,000 posts of veterans working live claims problems with experienced members.
C&P Exams, DBQ’s, Etc — A deep board on Compensation & Pension exams and Disability Benefits Questionnaires — what examiners record, what goes wrong, and how veterans respond.
Appeals — Board for legacy and AMA-era appeals — Higher-Level Review, supplemental claims, Board hearings, and cases that reach the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims.
VA Caregiver Program — Dedicated board where family caregivers trade experience on PCAFC applications, stipends, denials, and reviews — rare first-person evidence on the caregiver program.
Survivor Benefits — Board for DIC, death pension, and burial benefits, where surviving spouses work through survivor claims and compare what VA told them.
VA Health Care Benefits & Issues — Nearly 5,000 topics on VA health care itself — Tricare, CHAMPVA, fee basis and community care, Medicare interactions, and getting treatment authorized.
PACT Act Claims — Board tracking toxic-exposure claims under the PACT Act, including presumptive conditions and the exposure-litigation questions veterans are asking.
AO, Heart Disease, Cancers, Parkinson’s… — Agent Orange board covering presumptive diseases and Blue Water Navy questions, with some of the most-read threads in the forum’s history.

Summaries are ours. The work is theirs — we link to it, we don’t lift it. Visit Veterans Benefits Network →

Veterans Evaluation Services (VES)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Veterans Evaluation Services (VES) — Compensation & pension exam contractor — owned by Maximus · ves.com.

What it sells

VES conducts the VA’s compensation & pension (Medical Disability Examination) exams for the Veterans Benefits Administration — scheduling, performing and documenting the exams the VA uses to set a veteran’s disability percentage. Owned by Maximus, Inc. since 2021, it has held exam contracts continuously since 2008.

The contract and the money

VES works under the VBA Medical Disability Examination contracts — a SHARED vehicle: $6.8 billion original ceiling (2018), extended/recompeted at a $13.2 billion ceiling covering Regions 1–4, pre-discharge and overseas exams.

Veterans for Common Sense

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Veterans advocacy nonprofit · Founded 2002, Washington, DC; Gulf War illness advocates including Anthony Hardie and Paul Sullivan

A 501(c)(3) veterans organization founded in 2002 that has spent two decades on the fights VA most wanted to outlast: Gulf War illness recognition, toxic exposure, and disability-rating cuts. Still active in 2026 — its homepage carries an August 31, 2026 rulemaking letter to CMS, an August 2026 push for a Gulf War illness rating schedule now that CDC has recognized the condition, and coalition work against rating cuts for sleep apnea and tinnitus. Small, technical, and persistent.

Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Policy research institute · VHPI — veterans, clinicians, and policy researchers

The policy layer: research and analysis on VA healthcare, privatization, and what community-care expansion actually does to the system veterans use. HadIt’s founder serves on its advisory board.

Why we carry them. When a fight on the ground traces back to a policy decision, VHPI is where the decision is documented.

Start here — their essential work

The VA Privatization Playbook: Two Decades of Denial — VHPI’s flagship report by Russell Lemle and Suzanne Gordon: two decades of how VA care was steered to private providers, and what it cost the system veterans use.
VHPI Releases Comprehensive National Analysis on Private Care Gaps (2025-08-11) — Announces “Veterans’ Health Care Choice: Myth or Reality?”, a 50-state analysis documenting how thin private-sector capacity really is for the 9 million veterans enrolled with VHA.
VA’s Private Health Plan Faces Huge Cost Overruns — Community-care spending quadrupled from $8 billion to $31 billion in a decade, while studies show the private care is slower and lower quality than VA’s.
Veterans Are Dying Because There’s No Regulation of Community Care (2023-12-09) — Study after study shows higher mortality in community care than in VA hospitals — and neither Congress nor VA will impose VA’s quality standards on contract providers.
New Paper Shows How VA Privatization Threatens National Security (2023-10-26) — Ryan Leone’s paper argues that hollowing out VA also dismantles the nation’s backup medical system for wars and disasters.
Community Care Fail: Private Providers Practice Unsafe Prescription Habits (2023-10-12) — The OIG found over 80% of community-care opioid prescribers never certified they had read VA’s safety guidelines — and the network managers never checked.
It’s Clearer Than Ever VHA Must Remain the Primary Provider of Veteran Care (2021-12-15) — The case for keeping VHA as veterans’ primary provider and fixing the flawed quality and access standards used to justify outsourcing.
VHA Caregivers Provide Privatization Reality Check (2021-09-29) — Two surveys of VA clinicians warn that the community-care program is dysfunctional — a reality check from the people who deliver the care.

Summaries are ours. The work is theirs — we link to it, we don’t lift it. Visit Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute →

VFW — Veterans of Foreign Wars

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The VFW is one of the oldest doors in the veterans' world — and for a family fighting a VA claim, its most useful fact is this one, in the VFW's own words: its accredited service officers help free of charge, and you don't have to be a member to use them.

Founded: 1899 (Columbus, Ohio and Denver, Colorado organizations; merged 1914 as the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States)
Status: Congressionally chartered veterans service organization (chartered May 28, 1936)
Headquarters: Kansas City, Missouri
Size: “more than 1.3 million VFW and Auxiliary members” combined (the VFW’s own figure)
Website: vfw.org

Who it serves

Membership requires U.S. citizenship or national status and honorable service in the U.S. Armed Forces in a foreign war or overseas operation recognized by a campaign medal, service in Korea after June 30, 1949, or receipt of hostile-fire or imminent-danger pay.

VFW Auxiliary — the family's own membership

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Most families never hear this: if your veteran is eligible for the VFW, you are probably eligible for the VFW Auxiliary — in your own name, with your own membership — whether your veteran is living or has already died. It is the VFW's organization for the family itself.

Founded: 1914
Status: The auxiliary organization of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States (the VFW is congressionally chartered; the Auxiliary states no separate charter)
Headquarters: Kansas City, Missouri
Size: “nearly 480,000 members” (the Auxiliary’s own figure)
Website: vfwauxiliary.org

Who can join — stated exactly

Members must be citizens of the United States or U.S. nationals, and at least 16 years old. You qualify through your relationship to a veteran who was or is eligible for VFW membership (honorable overseas service recognized by a campaign medal). The eligible relationships are:

Victor B. Skaar: The Airman Who Measured the Plutonium — and Spent Sixty Years Fighting the Government's Math

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Some betrayals are a single act. This one is a method. When the plutonium settled over the fields of Palomares in January 1966, roughly sixteen hundred American servicemembers were sent in to clean it up with no protective gear, and the Air Force set about measuring what they had breathed. The measurements taken on site were discarded as impossibly high. The measurements that replaced them produced doses so low that, for half a century, almost no Palomares veteran could qualify for the benefits Congress had provided for radiation-exposed veterans. Victor B. Skaar was one of the men who gathered the original samples. He has spent the years since — claim, denial, class action, Supreme Court petition, and, at eighty-nine, still more litigation — trying to make the government answer for its own arithmetic.

Vietnam Veterans of America — VVA

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

VVA exists for one generation of veterans and the families who carried them home. Its founding principle is printed on everything it does: "Never again will one generation of veterans abandon another." If your veteran served in the Vietnam era, this is the organization that was built for him — and its associates organization was built for you.

Founded: 1978 (first organized as the Council of Vietnam Veterans); congressionally chartered 1986
Status: Congressionally chartered veterans service organization; nonprofit, 501(c)(19)
Headquarters: Silver Spring, Maryland
Size: “national membership of over 92,000, with over 600 chapters” (VVA’s own figure)
Website: vva.org

Who it serves

Membership is for Vietnam-era veterans. Per VVA’s Membership Procedures Guide, a member is anyone who served on active duty (for other than training purposes) in the U.S. Armed Forces in the Republic of Vietnam between February 28, 1961 and May 7, 1975, or in any duty location between August 5, 1964 and May 7, 1975. Proof of service (a DD214 or equivalent) is required with the application.

Wellpoint Federal Solutions (Elevance Health)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Wellpoint Federal Solutions (Elevance Health) — CCN Next-Gen awardee (new entrant, 2026) — Elevance Health (formerly Anthem) · wellpoint.com.

What it sells

Wellpoint Federal is Elevance Health’s federal-services arm — historically National Government Services, a Medicare Administrative Contractor processing Medicare claims at national scale. In August 2026 it won a VA CCN Next Gen Medical seat, its entry into VA community-care network administration; it held no prior VA CCN regional contract.

West Los Angeles VA Medical Center

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

West Los Angeles VA Medical Center · Los Angeles, CA — part of the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System (VISN 22). VA’s own page for this facility.

The doors

Main phone: 310-478-3711
Patient advocates: Patient Advocates page lists Kevin Wright, Veteran Experience Officer, plus five Veteran Experience Specialists (DeAndros Long, Amanda Liverpool, Willie J Brister, Lawrence Lizewski, and Jamie Fryer) to help with patient concerns and patient/family rights; no phone numbers were shown for them in text extraction (VA patient advocates page)
Leadership: the system’s leadership, as VA publishes it

On the record

What the VA Office of Inspector General has published about this facility, newest first. The summaries are ours; the reports are theirs.

William Shemin: The Sergeant Who Kept Going Back, and the 97 Years It Took to Say So

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

William Shemin did everything his country asked, and then he did the thing no order can produce: three times in three days, he left cover and crossed an open field under machine-gun fire to carry wounded men back, and when his officers were down he took command of the platoon himself. His Army decorated him for it — with its second-highest medal, and no explanation of why the highest one was not his. This page is the documented record of what he did at the Vesle River in 1918, what his institution did about it afterward, and who carried his case when no one else would: his daughter, for more than a decade, until she had changed the law itself.

William Swenson: The Soldier Who Went Back In, and the Packet That Vanished

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

William D. Swenson did everything his country asked, and then he did the thing his country later put on film: he went back in. This page is the documented record of what he did in the Ganjgal Valley on September 8, 2009, what his own institution did with the paperwork afterward — it lost it — and how long it took, and who had to apologize, before the record was set straight.

Wounded Warrior Project (WWP)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

WWP is the post-9/11 generation's big service organization: mental health, physical wellness, financial wellness, and lifelong care for wounded, ill, and injured veterans — with one eligibility line that surprises people: a VA disability rating is not required, and neither is a deployment. Family members and caregivers register in their own right.

Founded: 2003, Roanoke, Virginia
Status: 501(c)(3) charity (no congressional charter)
Headquarters: Jacksonville, Florida
Reach: “more than 300,000 post-9/11 veterans and their families” served (WWP’s own figure)
Website: woundedwarriorproject.org

Who it serves

Veterans and service members who incurred a physical or mental injury, illness, or wound on or after September 11, 2001, in connection with military service. Family members and caregivers of a wounded warrior may also be eligible, registering as Family Support Members. Registration is free, and WWP states warriors never pay for its programs and services.