I never knew my father. He was killed in action in Vietnam on January 26, 1969 — before I was old enough to remember him. What I know of him I learned from photographs, from family, and from the slow understanding that comes when you spend your life covering the costs of wars America fights and the soldiers America sends to fight them.
That's not self-pity. It's just the truth. And the truth is the starting point for everything I want to say here.
My father answered when America called. He went. He didn't come back. And for decades, I watched this country argue about what it owed the men and women who made that same choice — and fail them, systematically and repeatedly, in the answering.
What I've come to believe, after 30 years in conservative radio and more time than I want to count studying this problem, is this: the moment we decided veterans were the government's responsibility, we started losing them.
Lincoln Wasn't Talking to Congress
In the final weeks of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln stood before a shattered nation and said what may be the most consequential sentence ever spoken about the American compact:
"...to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan."
— Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865
Read it again. To care for him. Not "to fund an agency that shall process the claims of him." Not "to establish a bureaucracy that shall schedule appointments for him." Care. The word is personal. It implies relationship. Presence. Attention. It's what a neighbor does, what a community does, what a church does, what a citizen does when he looks another human being in the eye and says: you served, I owe you.
Lincoln was not addressing Congress. He was addressing a people. The obligation was always civic and personal — not institutional.
The Government Has Failed Every Generation
The failure did not start with the VA. It started before there was a VA. After the Revolutionary War, veterans were handed land warrants that speculators bought for pennies on the dollar. They died in poorhouses, in destitution, waiting for a Congress that never got around to making good on the promise. Soldiers who won American independence. Abandoned.
After World War I, the Bonus Army marched on Washington in 1932 — veterans who needed their promised bonuses during the Depression. Hoover sent MacArthur to clear them out with tear gas and bayonets. Veterans. American veterans. Chased from the Mall with bayonets.
After Vietnam, Agent Orange poisoning went unacknowledged for decades. After the Gulf War, "Gulf War Syndrome" was denied, dismissed, and bureaucratically stonewalled until men were dead. After Iraq and Afghanistan, veterans came home to wait lists, to secret lists, to a VA Phoenix scandal where staff kept two sets of books — a real list and a fake one to hit performance metrics — while veterans died waiting.
This is not a partisan story. Democrats and Republicans have both presided over these failures. The VA budget has grown 125% in ten years — it now stands at $370 billion annually. The wait time at a VA facility averages 38 days nationally. In Atlanta, veterans wait 44 days for mental health care; at a civilian clinic, it's 11. Denver: 76 days versus 39 for civilians. Dallas neurology: 130 days. The money is there. The bureaucracy grows. The veterans die.
And here is the number that should stop every American cold: 61% of the veterans who died by suicide in recent years had zero contact with the VA in the final year of their lives. More than half had no VA contact in the five years prior. The government's answer was standing right there, and the veterans weren't reaching for it.
That is not a funding problem. That is a structural problem. That is the result of building a clinical bureaucracy and calling it care.
Reagan Understood the Weight of It
Ronald Reagan — the president I believe understood American greatness more clearly than any man in my lifetime — said it at Arlington Cemetery on Veterans Day, 1985:
"We're never quite good enough to them — not really; we can't be, because what they gave us is beyond our powers to repay."
— President Ronald Reagan, Arlington National Cemetery, November 11, 1985
He was right. What they gave us is beyond our powers to repay. But that is no excuse for not trying. That's the very reason to try harder.
And Reagan understood what government is and is not. In his first Inaugural he was direct: "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." He was not talking about veterans specifically — but the principle applies with brutal precision. When the VA fails veterans at $370 billion a year, the answer is not more VA. The answer is us.
The Covenant Is Personal
Here is what I believe: the duty we owe to veterans is not something we can delegate and call it done. Writing a tax check to fund the VA is not honoring the covenant. It is the minimum. It is the floor, not the ceiling.
The ceiling is what a citizen does directly. It's what Tom Selleck and I did when we co-chaired the campaign to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Visitors Center — raising $1.18 million from Americans who wanted to do something real. It's what tens of thousands of donors did when we raised $1.5 million for the WWII Memorial. Americans, choosing, personally, to say: we see you, we remember, we are going to do something about it.
HelpAVet.US exists because the covenant is not the government's to keep. It's yours. Your $365 funds one veteran's full year of Coach Jeff — a 24/7 AI companion built specifically for veterans. No wait time. No appointment. No bureaucracy. There at 2 AM when the nightmares come and there's no one to call. There on a Sunday when the VA is closed and the darkness is not.
My father died for this country. 6,398 veterans died by their own hands in 2023 — after they came home. The battle did not end when the deployment did. And the covenant does not end when the paperwork is filed.
We sent them. We owe them. Not Washington. Us.