The Wire
This site documents one family's fight. We are not the only ones fighting it — and we are not the only ones writing it down. **The Wire** gathers the sites that document the same system from their own seats: veteran-run newsrooms, forum communities older than most VA secretaries' tenures, advocates who have beaten the Department in its own courts, and the primary record underneath them all.
Every source on the Wire gets a page: who they are, the work of theirs to start with, and their latest — refreshed by a weekly scan of their own pages and feeds. Summaries are ours and are labeled as ours. The work is theirs. We link to it; we don’t lift it.
On the Wire
- HadIt.com — the veteran-to-veteran claims institution, free since 1997: guides, tools, a 400,000-post community, and data journalism built on VA’s own numbers.
- The War Horse — a nonprofit newsroom reporting the care side of military and veteran life, at a standard that has triggered federal oversight.
- Veterans Benefits Network — the long-haul forum community, with dedicated boards for the Caregiver Program and Survivor Benefits.
- r/VeteransBenefits — the highest-volume daily conversation in the benefits world, and a wiki that has become a reference in its own right.
- AskNOD — two decades of doctrine on Special Monthly Compensation, aid and attendance, and the veterans court.
- DisabledVeterans.org — Benjamin Krause’s FOIA-driven investigations into VA fraud, waste, and contractor abuse.
- Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute — the policy layer: what privatization and community-care expansion actually do to the system.
- Tbird’s Quiet Fight — the HadIt founder’s long-form investigations.
- The Primary Record — OIG reports, GAO audits, and VA’s own data: the documents everything above stands on.
The Wire is scanned and refreshed weekly. If a site here goes quiet, its page will say so — a source we can no longer verify is a source we no longer carry as current.