The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 316: Dan Clare—Not On My Watch

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

The Iraq War veteran and Chief Communications and Outreach Officer for Disabled American Veterans explains the circumstances that led him to blow the whistle on the Iraq burn pits. www.dav.org www.patriotbootcamp.org  

It is episode number 316 of the way I heard it. This one is called Not On My Watch. My guest is Dan Clare, who works with the DAV, the disabled American veterans. Chuck, you've been familiar with this organization and their work. I am too. I think a lot of people are, but you actually supported them for a while. I still do, yeah. I've been sending them a check every year for, I don't know, 15, like 20 years.

when I first found out about this organization, I was like, I mean, it says it all in the title. They're helping, you know, veterans who need help, you know, missing limbs, PTSD, any sort of injury occurred in battle or just from serving, you know, our country. And that's good for me. Actually, with respect, I don't think the title says that at all. The title is not on my watch, which is really a, it comes up in the conversation and it means a couple of different things. you'll be able to piece it together. We don't have to take a deep dive on why this is called not on my watch. I think it'll be self-evident.

What's not self-evident, though, is the degree of difficulty facing men and women who are coming home. It's not headline news. It's been out there for a while. We all know the suicide rates are awful. We all know that people are wrestling with PTSD in a lot of different ways. But a lot of people don't know that the DAV is the grand deal. daddy of all veteran organizations. They came into existence back around 1920 at the end of the First World War. There was no Veterans Affairs organization then. There was nothing to help these

men at that point, right, who were coming back, just hopelessly damaged. This guy, Dan, Dan Claire, he's a whistleblower. He's the one who finally got it out there, it being the incredible damage that was being done by burn pits. And it's weird, man. I've been familiar with burn pits for over a decade. As you'll learn in the conversation, it's one of the most requested dirty jobs. You know, guys used to write me all the time. Come on over and work the burn pits. What is that? I'm not going to Afghanistan to shoot an episode of dirty jobs. I would have. In fact, I would have liked to. But in hindsight, I don't think a burn pit is something I'd ever want to be around. and I can't imagine why anybody would.

Yeah, I think it was, Dan's time was in Iraq. Yeah. Is it Iraq or Iraq? For the purposes of this podcast, it's Iraq. Iraq, you rack, we all rack for Iraq. Yeah, he had a firsthand look at it. And he did, you know, he followed his conscience and did what was right and made the country aware of it. It was a big deal, man.

Big deal, yes. By the time they finally wrote it down. By the time the armed forces acknowledged the fact that something very bad was happening, we entered into this very weird period where nobody in charge, not on their watch anyway, wanted to be responsible for this information coming out. Dan was the guy who took the information, scanned it, sent it back to the DAV, and just like that, we were having a whole different conversation. So look, if you care about our vets, if you've served, if somebody in your family is served,

I think this is an important conversation because Dan's organization truly has been moving the needle for decades. They do great work. He's a great guy. There are a couple degrees of separation that we'll talk about as well. I just want you to know him. And I want you to know what the DAV is up to. And I promise we're not going to put the arm on you. But you need to know what's going on.

You need to know how the needle's being moved. And you should know, too, how you can help if you're so incredibly. declined. 316, not on my watch. It all starts right after this. Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth? You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time. Do you miss the rotary phone? Well, get over it. The genie is out of the bottle. The poop is out of the goose, I'm afraid. AI is here to stay. In every business in the country is asking themselves the same question. How do we make it work for us? Well, the answer to that question varies, but you'll find it in a free guide that you can get right now

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Yes, it does. Hi, Dan, Claire. Hey, great meeting you, Mike. It's great to meet you. First things first. We've got a couple of degrees of separation, I guess. Ray Crosby, ring any bells? Sure. Yeah, Ray's a big guy for us. Yeah. Chuck, Ray is the guy. I don't know if you guys connected, but Cheryl Donaldson, my old friend from Baltimore, works for Ray. Ray has a marketing and advertising firm who's been working with disabled American vets now for how long? Gosh, it's been almost 10 years, I think.

Great PSA work. They do all our creative for our PSAs. Isn't it crazy how important decent PR is when you're trying to run a foundation whose primary goal is to change people's minds, right? Move the needle, challenge stigmas and stereotypes. I mean, I know what the answer is, but it's always fun to commiserate a little bit with somebody who's in the same. basic fight. Yeah, it does. And for us, we went through, it's not kids stuff when you're dealing with broadcast stations and standards and requirements and stuff. You know, we had to do a lot of research with Ray before we ever got started. And we landed on victories for veterans as a campaign theme.

And it really spoke to empowerment. It spoke to a different way of looking at veterans, the idea that we can help veterans and then they can help their communities. So working with Ray and those guys has been incredible. We've had in the last 10 years, over the last 10 years, over a million television placements of our PSAs. That's all donated. Wow. You know, and for a charity, there's no way on earth we could afford a fraction of that kind of coverage.

That's right. People don't get it, man. They look at a 501C. They look at a philanthropic endeavor. They look at a charity. And they put it in their mind in some other category. But the truth is, what you are doing is no less competitive. Maybe that's the wrong word.

but it's so noisy out there. It's no different than running a real company with a real product that has a real agenda. And if your message isn't crystal clear, it gets lost in the noise. And just to get this out of the way up front, Dan, I'm such a fan of what your organization is done. I know you're not the only ones in this space,

but you've been around for a long time. And I guess maybe the sensible thing to do is just say a few words to folks who sort of know of you, but don't really understand how the DAV evolved and why it's so important today. Yeah, well, we came out of the trenches of World War I. I mean, that's where we trace our roots. It was folks who'd been, you know, through the first kind of mechanical war, they'd endured gas strikes, muster gas attacks.

They'd lived in trenches for a long period of time. They suffered brain injuries and a lot of the stuff that we see now. but of course the care was so much worse back then. And then they were returning home to jobs that were, you know, extremely physically demanding. So I think coming out of, you know, 1920 DAV was founded, the thought at the time was, we have to get together and take care of ourselves because no one else is going to take care of us. There's no VA. There's no VA.

Right. There's some great programs on the state level in some states, but it was all a hodgepodge, you know, kind of a patchwork of support structures out there. And thank God, we're past that in terms of how many great organizations are helping folks. But I think from the get-go, DAV's always been, we've talked about, well, what's the promise that we have to people who serve? What do we actually owe them? It's an honor to serve in the military. But if you're changed, really where the promise is, is we owe you to get back as close to normal as we can.

And when you look at people like Travis Mills is a good friend of yours, you could never repay traffic. Thomas Mills for what he sacrificed for our country. There's no... It's not just that, but so many people wind up feeling foolish and futile for even trying. Like, how do you even say, I mean, thanks for your service doesn't quite cut it. Thanks for forming a foundation and walking the walk gets a little bit closer. But when you really look at the totality of what that guy has done, and many others like him, language fails me.

I agree. I mean, I've never experienced anything remotely closed, and most people haven't to what Travis experienced. I think it's really like there's thank you for your service is nice, but thank you for your service. Here's the ability to take care of your family. Thank you for your service. Here's a job that you can do that you'll feel good about the impact of your job. Here's just the start. We're just going to get you started towards starting your own company, towards starting, you know, towards a meaningful career. All those things can. can make a huge difference. And we were talking about before with Chuck, it's really about people finding meaning in what they're doing. You get a lot of meaning when you're in the military. You experience a sense of teamwork and camaraderie that's unique. But when you get out, that's all kind of taken away from you. And in the case of someone like Travis, you know,

what are you going to do after that? You can't stay in the military. You're going to have to figure something out. You know, I talk a lot about this idea of a reverse boot camp. right? Because there's such a, people understand basic, they understand boot camp and they understand the unassailable logic of taking a civilian and turning him or her into a warrior. It's not going to happen with a flick of a switch, but to come back to civilian life without something similar, right? That seems to be just magical thinking. And really, before we talk about what's going on right now and the incredible

work you guys do, helping people navigate through the myasma that is the VA, unfortunately, in so many ways. Can we go back to the First World War for just a second? Because I don't know if there's ever been a more terrible, more gut-wrenching, awful conflict ever. I mean, I know all war is a hell of a thing. But in my mind, that really was the war to end all wars, except, of course, it didn't. And the idea that there was no VA and the idea that people were coming back, like we didn't have PTSD back then, at least not by that name. I think they called it, what was it, shell shock, right? Yeah, there were a bunch of names for it. Yeah, shell shock. There was, I mean, there were all these disorders that they would assign you. Yeah, nervous disorders. Yeah,

your battle fatigue, you know, and I mean, we, we experienced that coming out of World War I. And then the World War I veterans were coming up when people were coming out of World War II. And finally, by Vietnam, DAV helped fund the research that led to PTSD being recognized as a condition. And a lot of people now will challenge, well, do we want to call it a disorder? You know, is it just post-traumatic stress or is it post-traumatic stress disorder? And so you can get into the language choices of that. But until we had PTSD, we didn't have kind of that funnel where we could start taking care of people from a benefits perspective, make sure that they get, you know, they're able to care for their basic needs.

And also, I think people were just afraid of that kind of treatment. Coming out of World War I, there's no way on earth you wanted to be someone who would be considered a coward, possibly if you're complaining about trauma or someone who's crazy. I mean, coming out of World War I, if you think about it, you didn't want to be disfigured. You didn't want to look disfigured and go out in public. You were ashamed for doing that. You know, the lessons we've learned are, it's great. There's still further to go, but you're absolutely right.

When you think about the cost of World War I, what people went through, we're doing so much better as a country right now. I don't know any soldiers or Marines who aren't students of history to some degree. You know, I mean, if you're not, if you're not that curious, I just don't know of anybody who isn't. So I'm just going to assume you are. But I'm fascinated by a couple of things. Like when World War I was happening, there were still a lot of people walking around in this country who had fought in the Civil War. You imagine that? It just seems like another life.

But what was Shell Shock in 1865? Who was having that conversation? What about the War of 1812? What about the Revolution? What about the Punic Wars? What about Carthage? What about Rome? What about Constantinople?

I mean, for as long as we've been bipedal, right? we've been shaving down the sticks and pointing them at each other and then trying to deal with the effects of it. So, you know, before we get into your personal story and back to the DAV, I just wonder how much thought, if any, you've given to the fact that PTSD by any other name has surely been with us for as long as we've been walking around. I mean, is there anything new under the sun to say about this? You know, I'm not sure. I think you can get into the type of war and the type of experience people had. like World War II veterans used to sometimes disparage Vietnam era veterans.

And they'd say, well, you guys are doing one-year tours. And then the Vietnam veterans would say, yeah, but we got this great thing called a helicopter. And on average, in a one-year tour, we're seeing as much combat in many cases as some of the World War II veterans saw in their entire, you know, three, four years that they spent in the military. I mean, there's new things, you know, even the nature of having a front versus, having kind of a decentralized war, which is what Iraq and Afghanistan kind of were. You're dealing with a different kind of experience. Some people will even compare combat and non-combat occupations in the military and say that a combat veteran maybe is expecting to be in a combat situation. And when something strikes behind the lines, it causes more havoc for people who,

that just wasn't part of their day-to-day thing. So it's caused more trauma maybe for them. And And I mean, you know, combat itself is a, that's just such a big animal in terms of what that does to change people. But I think, too, one of the things you're noting is it doesn't mean always that you're worse. You know, having PTSD or having something like that, it doesn't mean that your military service didn't also make you better in a lot of ways. And I think that's important to keep in mind, too, because we can kind of get to that point where you think of PTSD and it's just this, it's like a rain cloud that hovers over veterans. And I don't want to feel that way about my service or what I did. And I don't know very many veterans who feel that way. You were in the Corps for, did you do four years?

Four years in the Corps, yeah. When did you get out? I got out in 98, and I was out for a good while. I was out for about two years. Right before 2001, I joined the California Air National Guard, which at that time I thought was a military-affiliated beer drinking club. And then 9-11 came by. And, you know, of all the things, you know, I joined the Marine Corps and I thought that was my serious military time. But on 9-11, I was in Orange County,

and I was able to go to the base on that day. You know, I saw the attacks on TV, and I had an outlet for that. And that meant a lot to me. You know, we flew, I flew with the FEMA teams to New York that, So it was something that I was proud to be a part of. And it was kind of like after that, I was spending as much time as I could in the military, doing more military stuff because it was just so much more fulfilling. Wow. Is it because suddenly the mission became a bit more crystallized? The stakes became a bit more real, closer to home maybe? Oh, absolutely.

And, you know, I, do you remember they played America the Beautiful, I think, in one of the chapters. in London, you know, like the English were playing an American song in their national cathedral, I believe it was. And I thought, man, if we can do this, if we can stop this terrorism stuff, what else could we do? What else could we do as a country? You know, can we cure these diseases? Can we all come together and do some important things? And it's not how things turned out, of course, but I was ate up. I was ready to go. I wanted to go from the start. In 2004, I was supposed to go in and I broke my ankle trying to get fit in a short period of time. And so I didn't get to go until 2007.

I was playing basketball. I was like, oh, and I'm playing, you know, monster basketball trying to get fit quick. And then broke my ankle. Oh, my God. I've done the same thing. Not while I was trying to prepare for the military. But, geez, my story was so humiliating. I was in a hotel room on a conference call and I had my foot draped over the chair I was

sitting in, right? and I'm there with a professional treasure hunter and my partner, and we've got these guys on the phone. We're right on the verge of making a big deal. And a couple of things happen, not that you care, but this just makes me laugh every time I think of it. The sun came down at an angle that it was suddenly in my eyes. In that same moment, I realized that the gin and tonic I'd been enjoying was depleted.

My brain said two things. You've got to put that curtain down to stop the sun, and you really should go ahead and replenish your electrolytes with another G&T. Not necessarily in that. order. Well, they're, they're both clear and present in my mind. And as I stood up in that moment of ambiguity, I turned left and right at the same time, not realizing that all of the blood had stopped flowing to the foot attached to my leg that was draped over the chair. And so it was just like putting a dead limb on the ground. I couldn't feel anything. And I twisted my ankle. And then I

rolled it. And then I heard something pop. And then I just sat there for an hour. realizing I actually just broke my ankle trying to get a genitonic or maybe close the drapes, right? If there's any value in sharing that story, it's that in a moment, whether you're on the basketball court or in a hotel room, I mean, it comes down to joints and tendons, Dan, like these little things happen to us and suddenly you and I probably aren't having this conversation if you don't jack yourself up as a point guard. I remember that rolling pop noise, you know, Something bads happen. And the next day I come in, you know, I go, it was a Saturday, I went into the medical.

And, you know, the x-ray tech, they're not supposed to tell you, hey, this is, you know, this is really bad or whatever. And I said, hey, I just need to get this taped up. You know, I'm supposed to be going to Saudi Arabia. I got these plans. And she just looked at me and smirked. And she said, I don't think you need to worry about those plans right now. She knew from the pictures what was going on. Do do do do do do do do.

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So then what happened to you? Your deployments delayed? What do you do? Yeah, I mean, between then, I ended up getting hired a buddy from the Marine Corps, came to work for DAV. I still wanted to go. I'd transferred to Ohio for the Guard, and I was finally able to get orders to go in 2007.

And where were you, exactly? I was at Balad. Belad was Balad Anaconda. If you're in the Army, you called it anaconda. It was kind of a dual base. one of the biggest bases in Iraq, and that's where everyone who was medically evacuated out of the theater went for their care. You know, they stabilized the patients, got them out to Landstool, and then got them state-side. So it was, I wasn't really happy with it.

I wanted a little bit of a different kind of military tour. I didn't want to necessarily be in a hospital the whole time, or that was where I spent a good amount of my time. But it was an important place because that was where you don't get to see a whole lot of, the war beyond incoming, you know, when you're at Blod, they call it Mortaritaville. So you'd get rockets and mortars daily, and that was just part of your thing. Mortareritaville. Yeah. Mortaritaville. Classically dark. I love it. Yeah, classic military.

You had a front row seat then to all kinds of injuries, disabilities? Absolutely. How many would you reckon you saw during your time there come through? I mean, it would be hundreds a month, and it wasn't just Americans. I mean, sometimes it was Iraqis, Iraqi children who'd been burned. You ran the gamut of what kind of things were there. We had times where they would come in on a helicopter, and we'd bring in some guys who were wounded, and the next helicopter would have the guys who wounded them, the enemy guys.

And when the guys kind of came to and realized that the guys, who'd blown up their friend was in the bed next to him, they'd have to, you know, kind of tackle a bunch of people to prevent the war from continuing in the ER there. So it was crazy, but it was a, it was like a great, great hospital. It was a full service trauma hospital. If you could make it to blot in an hour, they called it the golden hour. If you could make it in that time period, your chances of surviving to get to Lanchtoll were in the, you know, it was above 90%.

You were probably going to live as long as you, you could. could get there in time. Wow. So, I mean, being a child of the 60s, I can't help but think of the 407. I can't think of, you know, mash units. I mean, is there any corollary or is this just mash on steroids in blood? There's absolutely the same kind of vibe that you get, you know, doctors. It's amazing. You could these guys go through all this medical school. We spend all this money on them. And these guys are sleeping wherever they can sleep when they're not working. It seemed like those docs were. they're either looking at a chart or sleeping all the time and just working their tails off. I mean, they had full service, the ability to scan something, 3D scans.

They had a 3D image of an American who'd actually been stabbed in the head with like a bayonet, with a big knife. And they would show that to people and they could turn the head and you could see the blade and then see all the persons, you know, everything else going on, the shape of the head and everything. And the guy lived. That was the thing that was always amazing was how many people lived. And not, of course, not everyone lived, but a good number of people you'd think there's no way that that person's going to make it home. Travis Mills was one of those guys.

No way he's going to make it home. I just was in Wasilla, Alaska. And I saw a buddy who I met in 2004 who had been woken up or had been discovered rasping in a body bag on a helicopter. Oh, my God. And now this guy, though, this dude is he's back home in Alaska. He's running a veteran service post. He's doing great work. You know, he's kind of a pillar of the local veterans community.

He sees the northern lights from his deck at night if it's out there. You know, he's just, it's amazing what kind of meaning he's found in his life. You know what, man. Wow. When you're awake enough to realize you're being unzipped out of your own body bag, that has to be one of the great resets of all time. Like, you're now on bonus time. You're literally, you're born again, you're resurrected.

That must not be a unique feeling. You know, I mean, maybe not that extreme, but for a lot of people. I saw a photo speaking of the Civil War of a guy I think he fought for the South. He was shot between the eyes. And the slug was still there 30 years later, about two inches. in and it eventually fell out on its own. The doctors were, didn't want to pull it out at the time, but it didn't kill him. And he was left for dead. And then they found him wandering around disoriented. But yeah, I mean, I just imagine there's just endless stories of I shouldn't be

alive, but dot, dot, dot, dot, here I am. Yeah, and going back to that time frame, you know, you had, if he would have gone into surgery for, you know, a scratch on his arm, he could have died from an infection. I was just reading a book about Civil War guys and how the docks would perform a, it was on the 20th Maine, and the docks would perform an amputation, and they literally just wipe the saw off on their, you know, smocks or whatever and go back to work on the next patient. And I think you see like with every war, they always say this, he survived and never would have survived in any war before that. We hear that all the time. But what it kind of undermines is that we now have this all-volunteer force, which is great.

You know, we don't have to draft people. Maybe, you know, some people debate there's some social stuff that goes with that. Well, maybe we should draft people. Maybe we'd be more conscientious or whatever with foreign relations or things like that. but now we have this all-volunteer force, you have all these people who have gone for so many combat tours. I mean, just over and over again, seeing a two-war veteran before,

you'd be like Vietnam and World War II or Korea and Vietnam or whatever. Nowadays, it's an Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran, there's tons of folks like that out there, and they just had to go back over and over and over again, so the claims are a little bit different, but they've had to deal with a lot of war over the last 20 years. It's ironic, you know, when you think about the invisible killers, right?

I mean, you can't do a war movie really about germ theory because you can't see the germs. You know, you can talk about it, but the idea that, you know, Iggy Samu Weiss wasn't around in 1865. He had yet to be incarcerated and locked up in an insane asylum. Louis Pasteur's whole theory, we just didn't know. So you've got these invisible germs that are killing hundreds of thousands of people. due to infection, and we just physically don't understand it. But how ironic today, in spite of all our enlightenment in so many ways in the medical field, to still have a couple dozen guys killing themselves every day because of a thing we can't see.

And whether it's shell shock or battle fatigue or nervous disorder or PTSD or whatever it is, that's really why I wanted to talk to you, Dan. Some people call you a whistleblower, the whole burn pit thing. want to jump into now because so much of what was going on, we just, it was right in front of us, but we didn't see it. And one other quick thing, too, I don't know if this is just tragic, ironic, or weird, but from 2004 until 2007, I got a lot of mail for over a decade on dirty jobs, but the single job that was most often proposed to me was proposed by people over there fighting, who I guess it was Armed Forces TV, they got a steady diet of the Discovery Channel,

and people saw a lot of dirty jobs. I can't even begin to tell you. You'll think I'm exaggerating, but it's hundreds, maybe thousands of invitations to come over and work the burn pits. Guys who would watch that show would say, hey man, love your show, but you think that's dirty, come over here and let me introduce you to a burn pit. I didn't know what they were talking about. And to be honest, Dan, I'm still not sure I really understand what was being burned or what invisible demon was being unleashed as a result of all that fire. Yeah. It's Iraq, you know, you start a war and you go over there and you have objectives and you take over these bases. Military is really good at military operations.

We're really good at, I mean, look how quickly we were able to accomplish our primary objectives in Iraq. What we're not great at necessarily is now you've taken this expeditionary force, these people who are used to living out of tents, living in austere environments. You put them in this place and you've got to set up a city now because you have all these operations that are going. You have tens of thousands of people on this base. And over time, you start to accumulate trash. It's not all flammable or highly toxic substances from planes.

A lot of it's styrofoam. A lot of it is commanders saying, well, I'm not going to deploy. an American citizen to go to Iraq to wash dishes and get mortared. I'm just going to use styrofoam in plastic plates and we'll get through that. So tons and tons of trash. Now you have this city that's got all this trash. You can't landfill the trash or you have to expand the base and make the base bigger so you can defend a larger area.

That's not workable. Burning the trash is the only thing that really made sense. It's what we've been doing since Vietnam. It probably wasn't really good for us then either, but now you have it on this massive scale. You have all this plastic, all this styrofoam, uniforms, tires, anything that could burn. You couldn't turn that stuff over to the enemy.

You couldn't turn over a scrappy uniform to the enemy that they could use, or even an ammo box. That looks familiar. They won't notice that if, you know, that's sitting by the side of a road kind of thing. So they were burning everything that you could think of. They were burning body parts from the hospital. Jet fuels, all the carcine,

carcinogenic whatever trash that we had, it was all going out in that burn pit. It was so bad that when it was burning, sometimes the wind would change direction and they'd have to shut down the flight line. I used to have a... I mean, that's when the commander's like, you know, I'm here to fight a war. I'm not here to run a city, you know, and there were people that were there to kind of do that, but this wasn't like a malicious commander who said, well, we can just live with the trash or whatever. This was just, it is what it is.

And Iraq, you had all these people doing all these different jobs, and everyone who was there was sucking those burn pit fumes. It was common. It was around the clock kind of thing. I used to have this seven-day forecast, you know, like you get from Weather Channel. And every day in the morning forecast, it said, smoke and dust. That was like the, that was the weather forecast for Belaad for seven straight days. give me a sense of the size of these things.

And are they lit like, did they bring in like an excavator and dig a hole in the ground? Absolutely. They had bulldozers. But at the end of the day, they weren't just piling it up or moving around. They're moving it to burn it and moving it to burn it and moving it to burn it. I mean, yeah, they had bulldozers. They had people out there throwing trash around, moving stuff around. It was just one person's job to sit out there and deal with that. then also you had all along the wire guarding the burn pits guarding the whole base,

you know, you had airmen out there with rifles making sure that the base was safe. And those folks, I mean, I remember spending a Thanksgiving morning, you know, out what the troops doing their guard duty and just thinking, oh my God, I can taste this stuff in the back of my, you know, it tastes that you could taste it, really. That's the thing about smells, man. All odors are particulate, right? It's not just this vaporous gas. They're actually particles of things, like real tangible.

Put them under a magnifying glass and you can see it. Maybe it's a bit of feces. Maybe it's a bit of human. Maybe it's whatever it is. And just like that, it's not just in your nose. It's in your blood. And then it's in your brain. And then it's in your body.

It's in your lungs. It's everywhere. I'm going to ask it the wrong way. Because if I say, when did it become a problem? That means when did it become a thing that people began to talk about. But when did you or when did people start to whisper the way they always do? Like when you're looking over your shoulder going, I'm just not sure all this smoke is a good thing. I mean, people in the military are a little bit. You sign away your life in so many different ways. Through so many

different forms when you, you know, just enlist or join the military. So there's a certain amount of suspicion that I think is pretty common among folks in the military. I landed in Iraq and I always thought, like what's the most dangerous thing that's going to happen? And I knew I was going to be in the wire, as they call it, you know, in kind of a safe, contained area. But I thought, well, it's going to be just the landing. That's the time that I would be trying to shoot down an aircraft. It's right when this massive thing full all these people lands. And when they opened the doors, you know, this was the first person to say hi when we landed in Iraq.

You know, going back to the memo that Darren Curtis wrote this memo and he was a bio-environmental engineer, And he was saying, this is the worst disaster that I've ever seen in this letter. But he'd said that year after year, it was a constant turnover thing where people in the military were saying, this is obviously horrible for people. When you have to change your flight line operations to accommodate a cloud of toxic smoke, you knew it wasn't good. I think we all kind of knew it was bad. But seeing that memo and just getting confirmation that this isn't just bad,

it's probably worse than you think. It's probably way worse than anything. I'm just trying to think of a civilian corollary. The only thing I can think of is like if you went out to your boat every day, you know, just to take a little cruise around the bay, the harbor, the island, and you were constantly going through an oil spill. You'd be like, where's this oil coming from? This is awful.

This is an oil spill. And then you go back and you make some calls. You go about your life. The next day you go out. And there it is again. You're just back in the same oil spill. It's like the Valdez, but it never went away. It never really got cleaned up.

So at what point do you get sucked into this, Dan, and how do you become a whistleblower? Well, I mean, it's bizarre because I was there doing the same kind of work that I kind of do for DAV. I'm a communications kind of person. So we were doing news stories. I was escorting the media to the hospital in Iraq. And then my major calls me one day, calls our deputy in, someone else. And we sit down and he says, well, we got a job. We got this memo and he hands out this memo. We all look at the memo. I'm reading it

and just shock, you know, just kind of like, I'd even heard at that time that there was a memo. I'd never seen it myself. And you're reading what Colonel Curtis wrote. And I mean, I'm just looking at this, just stunned at how, what an obvious problem we were dealing with. And he said, well, this is kind of a, basically we were the crisis communications team that was going to address. address this. And the goal with addressing it was to not be proactive and say, hey, look, we have this little problem in Iraq and we're trying to address it. The goal was to not have to answer any questions about it at all. You know, it wasn't, it was the, you know, not on my watch. Yeah, that's exactly what it was. It was, the thought was, and I even, I had that memo for a second, and we got out of that

meeting, and I was scanning it to send it back to DAV. I was like, well, there's no question to me that this needs to get back home as soon as possible. And my major walks in and caught me, like, while I was making the scan, which is the scan that's now all over the internet. And he started looking at me. I'm sure he got the suspicious, like, that guy's looking at me real funny and not finishing what he's doing on the scanner there. And I was like, I said, you know, this is going to come out, right? You know that. I work for disabled American veterans in my civilian job. I'm going back there when this tour's over. And he said, as long as it doesn't happen, you know, while I'm here, I don't really, you know,

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Planning started right away. And so when I got back to the States, I got back in February, I think of 08. I worked with a journalist for Military Times called Kelly Kennedy. And we'd worked with her before a long time. She was a veteran herself. She was a disabled veteran herself. she'd gone and deployed and written a book about, you know, she put her life on the line to tell the stories of soldiers in combat. So we felt really good about Kelly.

We felt good about military times and being able to reach the largest audience, probably military audience through that. So we worked with Kelly, got the story announced, and then Kelly comes back and she says, okay, she became a lightning rod for all these people who say, well, I got a problem, you know, or my spouse didn't, you know, is gone, or my spouse is dealing with this, or I'm perfect. personally dealing with this. And that's when, you know, Kelly was like, hey, DAV, what are you going to do for these folks? And we said, well, we kind of had to approach it like we did Agent Orange, where you look at it and you say, well, what's, what can we assume is service connected related to this? I mean, that was always the thought was follow the Agent Orange playbook. That's why the Vietnam vets, when I got back from Iraq were so incensed by this was because they were looking at dioxins. They're like, well, this is Agent Orange. We can't afford, though, to go the 50 years, literally, that it took for some ancient orange benefits to get across the plate.

So Kelly started referring to people to us, and we started a registry. And that registry then went on, you know, the VA recognized, you know, it's just like setting up for the VA, this is what needs to happen next. It can't be done by exclusively by DAV. You know, this has got to be a government effort. It's got to have that kind of resource behind it. So that was the next step, was the registry. and it was starting with legislation to first off,

let's get these burn pits that are operating wherever we can. Let's get them offline. Let's figure out a better way to deal with that problem, knowing that it's probably deadly for people. Did that happen? Yes, it did. It happened, but, you know, it's always the military where it can be done kind of thing,

which is kind of discretionary. But, I mean, I think the military, it was pretty loud and clear when the public found out that there were going to be consequences if you're running Burn Pits places. But it's not totally done. I was just at an event in Chicago, and a retired colonel was telling me about a son

who is in Syria right now in one of those undisclosed locations doing undisclosed work for the government. And he's saying, well, what am I going to do with my kid who's not covered by the Pact Act, which is the legislation that was recently passed for Burn Pits? What am I going to do?

And so then, you know, that's a new type of fight that we're going to have to take on. And we're finding out, too, there was a base in Uzbekistan going all the way back to 2004 where we set people up, you know, before we went into Afghanistan, it was an old Soviet base. And they're known for their environmental concern. You know, the Soviets are known foremost for how deeply they care about the health of their citizenry. So this is K-A-K-2 is what everyone calls it. I probably mispronounce it because everyone just calls it K-2.

but there's people and they're talking about like this lake that was formed, you know, when we were kind of cleaning up the base and water would run in and form this little pond and they called it Skittles Pond because it had every color in the rainbow. It's like it was toxic ooze everywhere, people getting sick before they even got into Afghanistan. So K2, you know, now it's like K2. And I wish there wasn't such a toxic legacy for veterans because it's not, you join the military, maybe thinking, well, I'm going to meet the enemy, and that's how I'll get, if I get hurt or, God forbid, something happens, that's what's going to happen. And a lot of times it seems like it's just exposures. You know, but again, not that it's a obvious corollary, but it's life, too. You mean, you've got your plans and then you play basketball and you're rolling an ankle. I'm going to go on a, you know, a treasure hunt. But some drapes and a gin and tonic conspire to send me down another road. You know, we just don't get to choose. You know, we just don't get to choose. how this ends. I have many questions based on what you just said, but on a super practical level,

in these areas where all of a sudden the burn pits were closed down, what did they do to deal with the trash? What was the fallback solution in a world where there was no solution other than to burn it? I mean, I think sadly that there always was a solution in Iraq. You know, the commander, everywhere he went, Bertfield was the guy's name, General Bertfield, and he cared a lot about his people. And so everywhere he'd go for a commander's call, someone would bring up burn pits. Always. This is not people who have the memo sitting in their hand and they're quoting it. These are just people saying, we're getting sick.

We have headaches. We're dealing with sinus issues. We're dealing with all these problems because of these burn pits, fatigue, whatever else. So it's taken care of people, but they had the incinerators over there. And it was just, it didn't seem to what I know about it, it didn't seem like there was the will to move the bureaucracy enough to get the incinerators going, to take care of the problem at the time. As soon as it became a national news story,

then all of a sudden there's some momentum to accomplish all kinds of things. Back to PR. Squeaky wheels, right? I mean, because now we're deep into the age of social media. So you've got guys there, boots on the ground, front row seat, posting pictures. There must have been a lot of people trying to tap the country on the shoulder and saying, hey,

This is jacked up in a big way. Yeah. You know, I think you're right, but I think, too, that I remember from that time period right before I left, there were some really negative stories that were coming out from soldiers misbehaving using their phones or using recorded devices. I think people were a little afraid of that. But I can't explain why burn pits weren't a thing. I know we weren't supposed to take pictures of them.

It was just something that everyone just wanted to pretend wasn't. that's not really going on, you know, kind of thing. It was kind of bizarre. Red flag number one is when they say don't take pictures. Right, right. Yeah. I mean, it's just so ironic. I'm thinking back Abu Ghraib, right? Sure. Well, now there's a photo that had some repercussions. And while that's happening, think or say what you want about it, the pits are burning everywhere. Why weren't those photos all over the place? I know why we couldn't document Agent orange. I mean, that was, you know, 68, 69. The tech just wasn't there. And that's probably why, at least part anyway, it took 50 years to start to get our arms around that thing. Anyway, I don't

have a question other than to ask how many people are now in this registry that you've put together who have been affirmatively impacted by this? I wish I had that stat right now. I'm not sure how many people the VA has, but I do know that it's kind of like Agent Orange was so bad. We knew how bad Agent Orange was on a chemical level that we'd say that if you, before we even, even if you were off coast, which is a more recent development, but if you step foot on Vietnam on shore, in Vietnam, if you stepped foot at all for like 30, 40 years and went back on the ship, and that's all you ever did was you stepped foot in Vietnam. We knew Agent Orange was so bad that we had this list of disease and we say, well, we'll just presume that we knew how horrible this was. And this is

what's going to, you know, so if you get these diseases, you know, we're probably to blame for him. We will own it. And I think that's where we're at kind of with burn pits now. We're saying, here's a list of diseases. If you were in Iraq and you get one of these things, we're not going to make you try and prove that it's service-connected. We're just going to go ahead and take care of you. And that's why that PACT Act legislation was such a big deal. It's just we've never never been able to do something that fast before. What are those diseases specifically, Dan, that most often manifest? I mean, you're talking about a list of cancers, a list of emphysema, COPD, bronchitis. There's a laundry list. There's a whole website dedicated, you know, you can kind of go through the list. And that's

why it's like, yeah, the PACT Act, it's great news. It's great that we're doing that. But then you look at that list and you say, hey, good news. You get some benefits to go with your cancer now. You know, it's, it's, or your survivors are going to finally get taken care of after maybe they weren't for the last couple decades or the thing that we said before was probably not service connected. Now you can go back and you can get taken care of for it. So it's, it's kind of better sweet, but that's kind of the 18 years of helping veterans. That's kind of the way it goes when you're working with the government and everything else. So what's been the blowback personally for blowing the whistle, for putting it out there? How much grief have you gotten?

And forgive me, I should know the answer to that. I love to ask questions I know the answers to, but I don't. It's also odd when you look around today at the number of leaks, the number of hacks, the number of whistleblowers. I mean, it's so interesting, the language, right? Are you a good guy or a bad guy? Did you betray a trust? Did you ever feel really conflicted about whether or not this was the right thing to do?

No, I never did. If it would have been something that would have compromised the defense of the base, or if it was something like that, then I would have felt very conflicted about it. But it was just, it was never a question for me, the information you need to get out. And I mean, my military career, what was kind of left of a guard career,

I just never was very concerned about it. It just never, it wasn't that big of a deal. I got back home. I went to work for, you know, I went back to work for DAV. And I wasn't really publicly associated with burn pets beyond some initial stuff on it. You know, I don't think the military is going to spend a lot of time going after someone for revealing a memo that was all related to health. Yeah, good luck. Come after me if you guys want to do this because I already know how the public opinion part's going to go down.

So then shifting gears, you know, all that's happened. That's kind of in the past. And here you are still essentially running the oldest organization of its kind. What worries you most? What consumes most of your time? And what's the real benefit? What are you most proud of in terms of how the needle moves? Wow. Let's start with the biggest worry. My biggest worry is that we're 22 years after 9-11, and you realize that, you know, the people deploying now weren't even alive on 9-11. And so all that, the headspace that goes with being someone who survived 9-11 is completely changed.

It's absolutely bizarre. It's bonkers that way. But my concern is that the momentum to help veterans is going to diminish. If we wouldn't have gotten the PACT Act passed now and momentum, you know, and things keep moving and all volunteer force, smaller percentage of the population, you don't represent as large of a voting block, we could be in real trouble just being able to take care of the community. We're the VA's budget's over $300 billion right now, which has expanded dramatically, you know, over time. And it's like, well, if you look at it.

back at the last 20 years or so that that budget's gone through the roof, it's really a cost awards. What's happened since 9-11's what we've taxed our people with. So that's inevitable, and we're still paying for passwords with that. As far as what makes me proudest, it's the people. The veterans we're helping right now. It's this, it's a shared sense of justice that I see in people. You know, we're helping veterans with their claims for benefits. We're helping them with transportation, their medical appointments. We're doing some important work there. But I think veterans are starting to see that it's not the same as it was when you were coming back home from Iraq or Afghanistan. The cold climate's changed, but we can still take care of each other.

And we see that with entrepreneurship. We see that with careers, you know, where people want to hire veterans. So there's some very, you know, some things to be very hopeful about, too. So then what about the, I talked about my shorthand for it was reverse boot camp. You're doing a Patriot boot camp. What do people need to know and understand about that? A Patriot boot camp is an entrepreneurship program. And, you know, DAV works with veterans. And one of the big things we do, of course, is helping with benefits.

Making sure that you're able to navigate that. It's frustrating sometimes dealing with the VA. You don't have to do that alone. We're going to go through that process with you. we're going to try and help get justice there, getting people health care, getting them to their health care, advocating so that we have a good system in place to take care of people. That's a thing. But through Patriot Boot Camp, by empowering entrepreneurs, you're able to turn them into benefits providers. You know, you're able to turn them into employers. And everyone we're encountering,

and it seems universal in Patriot Boot Camp, they all have a mission that goes with their for-profit. Whatever it is, it's something more that they're doing. You know, like when they talk about Band of Brothers and they say, of all the guys that came back from Band of Brothers, how many of them went into construction trades? How many of them went into jobs where they could have a healthy impact in their community? We see the same thing with Patriot Boot Camp. What they need is they just need the building blocks. They need kind of a level playing field so that they can compete.

And once they're able to compete, they're off doing really important stuff. What kind of numbers are you talking about? How many people have gone through the bootcap? We're talking on a given year we could have up to 150 folks go through. And that's in DAV terms, in some charities, that's a big number. In DAV terms, it's not necessarily the biggest number when we help a quarter of a million people with benefits, for instance. But it's what they're able to do, what 150 companies can do if they're all hiring veterans, if they're all contributing. to the economy, helping rebuild America. That's what's exciting about it to us.

Not only that, we have validation. We have people who've gone through and they're on Shark Tank and they might win Shark Tank. Or we have people come back to us and they say, well, once I got connected with the kind of the ecosystem that is Patriot Boot Camp, I was able to increase my sales by $50,000 in the first six months. And I've got these contracts. I've got these things lined up to do the next thing. So there's a lot of exciting stuff that goes on.

within that figure, but it's about 150, and that means we need 150 mentors to match with those folks to help get them through the program as well. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure, but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before, with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of

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You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself. And see too how easy it is to get involved. Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic.

That's skillsusa.org slash mic. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S.S. U.S.S.S.S.S. USA. Yeah, I feel like I might have missed the head. Is it primarily existing companies who want to build a vet-friendly on-ramp into their organization, or is it vets specifically who, with an entrepreneurial spirit, want to hang out their own shingle or become an independent contract or a freelancer or even an employee? Like, what's the tail? What's the dog?

Yeah, they're founders. They're new companies, new ventures, new founders, going through the program. Most of them are in an on-ramp kind of situation. most of them aren't too far along that way. They're being matched up with people who've gone through and made them, honestly, what we're finding is some of the most successful CEOs that we have who contribute to the program, they all had a hard time at one point or another. They all made huge mistakes at different times. They talk about not meaning payroll.

You know, you have this multimillionaire talking about the time that he almost didn't make payroll and what he went through. But that vulnerability and just the dedication, they have to helping people not make those first five or six mistakes that could have sunk the boat. That's what we see that's really exciting about the program. This is not the conversation I plan on having, but I'm really like, I really love this and I really wonder what microworks can do. We can talk about it offline later, but it just, I mean, I've tried this before, Dan. I'm friendly with a couple of retired generals up here in the Bay Area.

and I'm sure you know many retired generals and you know how pissed off they can get at a very specific way when they come back here and they see young men living in cars and just teetering on the edge of the terrible suicide statistic that I want to ask you about as well. And they've tried to set up welding programs down at Pendleton and various other things.

And so many of them do decent work, but back to the PR thing, nobody knows anything about it, really, it seems. I've tried to help to the extent that I can without getting too far out of my own lane. But is there some shared real estate on our Venn diagrams vis-a-vis the skilled trades and what's going on in the Patriot boot camp? I think absolutely, sure. I'd love to talk to you more about doing that. I'd love to have Mike Roe. It wouldn't be a dirty job to be a mentor, but I'd love to see you guys involved in

working with programs like that. And I agree. I know, you know, especially generals, they see these folks and people forget that the military, how much you have. to have right in your life just to join the military. I mean, I think a lot of people still think of it like the military's the third choice that someone might have for a career or for something in their lives. And the truth is that just to get in the military, you're looking at a tiny percentage of the population that qualifies. And it's harder and harder to meet those figures, you know, for the Army, for the Marine

Corps to recruit, to get people who meet those. And then to see those folks struggling, to see them feel no sense of purpose in the world, that they would kind of make a permanent decision to commit suicide is, it's disgusting. It's appalling. Absolutely. Well, that's tragic. What's appalling to me is that so many times when it comes right down to a hiring decision, and again, I'm going to talk in broad strokes and apologize in advance,

but just the statistics indicate that on average, a returning service man or woman will quite possibly find him or herself sitting across from a hiring manager who's between 29 and 33 years of age, more often than not female, who has absolutely no understanding at all that that person on the other side of the table was being shot at six weeks ago and shooting back and is dealing with a whole host of things. But at the same time, signed up, right? The soft skills are done. They're going to show up on time. They'll show up early. They'll stay late. They're trainable. They're there. They're not broken in that sense. And so it just seems like so many people, Dan, wind up talking past each other and so many good, well-intended companies just can't seem to assimilate the vets into their organization

as easily as it seems like they could and should. It makes generals angry. It makes me angry. And I didn't even wear a uniform. So I can't even imagine how it makes you feel. Absolutely. And, you know, I mean, it's kind of a dichotomy of things going on there. But one of the things you're talking about is you got someone who interviews someone and they don't necessarily, they have no military experience whatsoever. It's 1% serving less than 1% at any given time. But my bigger concern is that that person is going to see PTSD or have some assumptions about PTSD that could be a barrier to hiring somebody. And we tell people, you know, what are the most common causes of PTSD are often car accidents?

The most common causes of traumatic brain injuries in the United States are car accidents. You wouldn't dream of not hiring someone because they were in a car accident. But if, you know, you have this veteran who's been resilient and done great things in their lives and they have to deal with the whole combat veteran is going to come back to work and, you know, God forbid, Rambo the whole office or something like that, it's really hard on our folks, you know, just, it's just another obstacle that they need to hurt. How many times do you find yourself cringing when you're watching television or movies? When you see a typical, stereotypical, I should say, portrayal of a vet that just reinforces

all of that junk that gets in the way of having an honest interaction after they're deployed home? It happens a lot. Sometimes people even laugh about it a little bit in a way that I'm not against, you know, like a family guy. you know, the cartoon show family guy. They did this thing and they were talking about Peter makes some offhanded comment about how the vets are, you know, how this next generation of vets is going to hell. And then he says, but we're taking care of those guys, aren't we? You know, and it's kind of like it reveals this, are we?

No one really knows. Are we doing this or not? There's a lot of media stuff. You know, we work with Dale Dye who did, Dale Dye is the guy who prepared people for, you know, saving private Ryan. He was in platoon. Of course, he had a huge role in both behind in. Full metal jacket, was he in?

I know he knew the guy. They served together with the guy who wrote Full Metal Jacket, but he's been in almost anything. This company's called Warriors Inc. And that was their sole purpose. You know, Band of Brothers they worked with, the Pacific. Their sole purpose was, let's get this right. Let's make this authentic.

It's okay to have some good guys. It's okay to have some bad guys. We can have some warts and glory. But let's get this right. and at the end of the day, let's have an honest relationship with the people that we task with defending our country. And they do a great job with it. But I'm concerned, too, though, about the idea that veterans are fragile or that you have to take a class to be able to talk to someone who served their country. I just was at an event with Floe Groberg, the Medal of Honor recipient.

Amazing, amazing, person. But he was talking about how any veteran who can't put up with the question, how many people did you, you kill over there. If you can't deal with that constructively, then you're probably not going to have great interactions with a lot of people who are just ignorant. And that's, you know, that's a teaching moment for you is how Flo put it. And he's absolutely right. But yeah, John Stewart did you a solid, didn't he? He did. He did a, I just saw him at that same event at the University of Chicago with Warhorse. And it's interesting that, you know, when you talk about PR, that Warhorse event, really the purpose of the event was that we were going to talk about issues, but we're also

educating policymakers and educating journalists so that we kind of can get away from some of the bad coverage or the negative things that are coming out. We're working with a group called military veterans and journalism to do similar work to get some veterans in newsrooms, working with the National Association of Broadcasters, just so that we have people around who actually know what the hell actually happens in the military and can work with people on that. But John Stewart was great. Him getting behind that issue was really, really important for it to get to the PACT Act. Yeah.

It's so interesting, man. I mean, if you made a list of things we agree on and disagree on, I suspect there'd probably be more disagree. But boy, do we agree on that. And I was rooting for him when I saw him in front of Congress. I thought his outrage was righteous, and I shared it. And you're so right about the PR. Moments like that will get people's attention. And if we don't get their attention, then we're back to your earlier point, which I think is hugely important.

The majority of people volunteering for today's armed forces weren't born when the towers came down. That's as shocking just to my sense of chronology as the idea that millions of people were still walking around in 1915. It's 1917 when the First World War started. who were at Gettysburg or Shiloh. Time just marches on and, you know, Reagan was right. We're a generation away from freedom at any given time, but we're even less than that away from forgetting. Less than a generation away from forgetting.

I don't know what the slogan or the motto is for DAV, but it seems like, you know, making sure people remember all of this has to be somewhere near the top. Absolutely. I agree 100%. What can people do, just in a really general, shameless plug kind of way? What do you need? How can they help?

When you say shameless, I get really good at that. One of the biggest things where we need help right now is volunteerism. We do about a quarter million rides a year getting veterans to and from their hospital appointments, and that's done through volunteers at local VA medical centers. We donate vehicles through Ford, and those vehicles get the veterans to and from their appointments. Without those vehicles, a lot of those folks don't make it. They're not going to get the care that they need. It'll shorten their lives or hurt their quality of life.

So volunteering through the Transportation Network, volunteering through local DAV chapters. I think we have 1,200 chapters, around 1,200 chapters nationwide. That's a great way to get involved. Hiring veterans is a huge thing for us. We have a Patriot Employer Program where we recognize them. We have career fairs that we do with a company called Recruit Military. Those are a great way, you know, just hiring veterans getting them into your company, making them a goal maybe to part of your

diversity, equity, and inclusion work. It'll make you a better team getting involved. Of course, you can donate to DAV. That's always nice. Monthly donors are great, but there's all kinds of other ways to get involved. Paying attention legislatively to what's going on in our country is important as well, because there's so many voices, and it's bizarre how certain legislation can be presented in a way that makes you think that it's beneficial, but it isn't always, as you guys know. Yeah, the titles of bills and various legislations are just a topic for another time. But wow, two final personal questions, really, if you don't mind. One, regarding PTSD.

What did this do to you, if anything, having a front row seat to all of this for so long? It made me appreciate what we have in the United States a lot. You know, it made me realize that, I mean, just seeing how people lived and what they went through and their lives made me appreciate the United States. I felt a lot of guilt about, just about seeing people in their final moments and thinking, well, you got this kind of chubby sergeant from the Air National Guard with this guy in his last moments and his family can't be there or his spouse can't be there or her spouse. So, I mean, I felt some guilt towards that, but I think that what kind of makes up for it is just the chance to get back.

DAV's done that for me. It's done for, I know a ton of veterans who they feel like DAVs their mission, whether they're members, whether their benefits representatives, national service officers, they're doing really important work through DAV, and that's enough of a draw for them. So those are some lessons, I guess. Finally, I admire a lot of people. I don't envy many, but the ones I both admire and envy are people who find themselves doing exactly what it appears to be they should be doing.

Like the fact that you're running this organization at this point in your life, given your past and everything else, makes me think that you're one of those guys. Tell me if I'm wrong, but assuming I'm right, how does it feel to have a job that so perfectly aligns

with all of the things that you give in them about? Well, wanting to keep my job, I need to start off by saying, I don't run DAV, I got a couple other people above me who are two in that. part of it? Just checking. Look, you're the only one to come on this podcast. So as far as I'm concerned, you're in charge of the DAG. Congratulations.

I just got a big promotion that's not going to go over well. Dan Claire, huge promotion, huge promotion from Mike Row and the way I heard it. I worked in advertising before I came to work for DAV. You know, I was in Orange County and I was doing advertising and it was a fine way to make a living, but it didn't feel like I was actually doing anything or it didn't feel real meaningful. And so it's a blessing. It's a blessing to be able to come into work somewhere where where you make a difference and make an impact. So I'm thrilled to be a part of it, but I'm just as excited to get more people involved

because the need is there, you know, and it's just the opportunities are there to make a difference. I don't know anyone who volunteers for DAV who doesn't say over and over again, and you can't take it for granted because it's so important, but that they get more out of helping veterans than the veterans get out of being helped. So, you know, that's the kind of people we need more of.

Look, I saw that firsthand on a show called Returning the Favor, which I did for a couple of years. And we went out of our way to highlight eight or nine different organizations who all took very disparate approaches to the vet suicide nightmare. Right. And it didn't hit me right away, but it's so true. By the time I got to the end of that tranche, it was clear that the people who had dedicated their lives to this cause were getting as much out of it. honestly, as the people they were assisting and many times saving. I just think that's an important point, you know, especially when you come back to philanthropy. It's okay to do a good thing for a selfish reason. If it makes you feel good to drive a vet to an appointment, don't shy away from that.

It's a great thing. And I'll tell you this too, finally, in closing, the most cynical people I know are in my industry, advertising, marketing. You know, they spend their life doing this. That guy I mentioned earlier, Ray Crosby, I don't know him personally, but I sure know Cheryl, who works for him. And I can tell you, working with you and helping keep your message out there is so important to them because, you know, you're not selling soap. We all need soap, but you're not selling it.

You're out there with another kind of message. And it's a privilege to help share it. I appreciate it. Well, I appreciate you. And along those lines with the privilege and talking about, about some of the bad stuff that's going on. If you know someone who needs help and you can connect him with resources, of course, Travis Mills has a great group. He's doing great work up there in New England. Yeah, yes. And we work with Sava Warrior and Boulder Crest retreats that do follow a similar

sort of treatment methodology. If you know someone who needs help, refer them to those groups, a lot of veterans don't want to, you know, they don't start off saying, well, I need help or that's just not something they're real comfortable with. But if you can get them to one of those events, get them to one of those retreats, it can make such a difference in their lives. And they can be that person, you know, that idea of the bone that breaks is stronger where it's broken. I think we see people that when they come out of those programs, Save a Warrior, Boulder Cress, that they're stronger than they were before they went in, before, in some cases,

you know, they were injured in the military. So it's important that we all, if you want to do something for a veteran, hire them, get them the help they need, get them to the care they need. And then you'll see that they'll give back to our country in ways that are, Just incredible. Amen. Dan, thank you for your service, your continued service. Thanks for doing what you're doing.

Most of all, congratulations on your most recent promotion, the new head of the DVA, the Warnelie Dan Clare. DAB. Hey, look, if I can't get his name right, you think I'm going to get that name right? Let's say, head of it. Let's go DVA what he's saying the head of it. Dan is now running the Department of Motor Vehicles,

and we couldn't be more excited for him. He's doing great work. bureaucrats have to eat. Seriously, dude, you're one of the good guys. What a privilege to know you. Did I forget anything? Any other shameless pluggery in the remaining eight seconds? Hey, God bless you, DAV.org, patriotbootcamp.org, if you're interested in getting involved.

Chuck, did I cut you off? No, I was going to say exactly what you said, but I do want to ask one question, and that is, does the DAV have any plans for, to commemorate Memorial Day? We always do. We're always in D.C. We do the rethlaying at the memorial. Yeah, and throughout the country, DAV chapters are always involved in things like that.

And it's important for people to remember. That's not a veterans holiday. That's a holiday that honors the fallen. But you can honor the fallen. You can do a lot of help for honoring what they died for if you're taking care of the people they died to defend. So we'll be out there in force. Excellent.

Great. Dan, Claire, real pleasure. I appreciate it. God bless you. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Chuck. Yep, thank you. Adios.

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