Still Standing, Thanks to the Few; 250 Years Paid in Full

As I write this, I just got back from voting. I always love going in-person. Not because I enjoy the line. Because it is nice to see everyone, blue collar, white collar, middle class, wealthy, all doing the same thing, and every person’s vote matters the same. If that ain’t American, I don’t know what is. Pretty cool when you think about it. Well, here we are, 250 years later. Memorial Day Weekend. This is actually a pretty old day of recognition. Established shortly after the civil war, it began as “Decoration Day,” where the graves of soldiers would be decorated. Over 150 years since the first Decoration Day,” we’re still standing strong.

Semiquincentennial Sacrifice

While most see Memorial Day as the kickoff of summer vacation, its hard for me not to reflect a little more. We are rapidly approaching the Big 250 birthday, the semiquincentennial (I still can’t say it twice in a row). Two and a half centuries of an experiment in freedom. It hasn’t been free. It is hard for us, as Americans, to not be thankful for the ledger of what it cost to get here. Freedom isn’t built on parchment, and it isn’t preserved by committees or PowerPoints in Washington. It is bought, paid for, and maintained by a very specific kind of currency: American skin in the game. American dominance and her warfighters. Think about that timeline for a second. Two hundred and fifty years of sacrifice. And, it stretches a lot of miles. Valley Forge. Lexington and Concord. Gettysburg, where we fought our own. The death trenches of World War I. The beaches of Normandy, or the jagged coral of Iwo Jima. Korea. The tall grass jungles of Vietnam (where we are finally seeing the real effects of Agent Orange). Or, the oil fields of Kuwait, where we are seeing what happened with the Vietnam generation play itself over. More diseases. More sacrifices. Iraq. Afghanistan. Or, you guessed it, Iran. Those are just the big ones.

That is the Semiquincentennial Sacrifice. It is a unbroken line of unbroken men and women stretching back 250 years, willing to do the work to keep us a free and prosperous people.

Memorial Day isn’t about the opening of the neighborhood pool, and it sure as hell isn’t about a three day weekend mattress/car/you name it sale. It’s about the names that didn’t get to come home to a front porch rocking chair. It’s about the empty chairs at the dinner table that never got filled again.

Veteran Suicide

Speaking of an empty dinner table. Veteran suicide is something that has always bothered me. It is so preventable. Yet, it seems like we as a society never do anything about it to stop it. You come home from two 9-month tours. You’ve seen death. Suffrage. Horrible things. We ship you home, give you a weekend long “Transition Assistance Program,” and send you on your way. You should be fit for the normal world again. What gives? Don’t worry though. Show up to the VA any time, healthcare is free, if you can get an appointment.

The first time I had an up close and personal encounter with Veteran suicide was with a client of mine. This will make your teeth hurt. Why was he a client of mine, you ask? Well, the VA had proposed to reduce his PTSD rating from 70% to 30%. Guess he really showed them when he blew his brains out. Sadly, Kevin had totally isolated himself. He had isolated himself so bad, he hadn’t spoken to his parents in years. The coroner didn’t know who to notify. I tracked them down myself to let them know…

So, that was Kevin’s sacrifice. He didn’t make it to see the Big 250, but the spirit of his willingness to serve and defend sure does live on. I remember him this Memorial Day.

From Muskets to Burn Pits

Reading about the history of the VA is always pretty neat to me. It’s easy to look at the massive, bureaucracy we deal with today and forget that this institution has a history dating back to the founding of our Nation. Judge Greenberg, in his decisions, taught me a lot. He would always go through this spill: Congress first sought judicial assistance in affording veterans relief when it adopted the Invalid Pensions Act of 1792, which provided “for the settlement of the claims of widows and orphans...and to regulate the claims to invalid pensions”. The Veterans Administration was established in 1930 when Congress consolidated the Bureau of Pensions, the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, and the U.S. Veterans’ Bureau into one agency. Three years later, President Roosevelt created the Board of Veterans’ Appeals by Executive Order 6230 and delegated to it the authority to render final decision on appeal. The Board was and is charged with the duty to “to provide every possible assistance” to claimants and to take final action that would “be fair to the Veteran as well as the Government”. In 1989, it became a cabinet level position and was named the Department of Veterans Affairs.

But if you sit back and look at that timeline from 1792 to today, you realize something. The weapons changed from flintlocks to roadside IEDs. The toxins changed from camp fever, gangrene, to the black, oily smoke of modern burn pits. But the fundamental question on this Memorial Day has never changed. Will the government keep its word to the folks it sent into harm’s way? Will we, the people, ensure that bargain is upheld? Every time I fight a claim for a Veteran exposed to toxic smoke in Iraq, it is just a continuation of what our founding fathers told soldiers of the Revolution. “We owe you.” It’s a 250-year-old promise. Our job today is to make sure the bureaucrats remember the “fair to the Veteran” part of the deal.

It is a beautiful thing that our Founders recognized this debt before the ink on the Constitution was barely dry. But a promise from 1792 doesn’t pay for oxygen tanks in 2026 or rare cancer treatments.

That is why this history matters. It gives us our marching orders. Our job today isn’t just to read the history books (if anyone still does that kinda thing), it’s to force the VA to remember the “fair to the Veteran” part of the deal. Because if we don't hold their feet to the fire today, then the sacrifice of the next 250 years is just a talking point.

They gave up their tomorrows so we could have our todays. Let’s make sure we live lives worthy of that 250-year-old receipt. To those who gave all, and to the families who still carry the weight of that sacrifice, we see you. We remember you.

Godspeed.