April 22nd, 1971, Washington DC, 800 veterans are standing on the steps of the United States Capitol.
Not protesters, veterans.
Men who did the thing, who went, who came back missing pieces of themselves that don't show up on any discharge paperwork.
No DD-214s here.
And one by one, we walk to a fence that's been set up in front of the building.
They throw their metals over it, bronze stars, purple hearts, air metals, hitting the pavement on the other side with this small, flat, metallic sound that is somehow the
loudest thing anyone in that city had heard for years.
John Kerry testified on the Senate foreign relations committee that same week.
He was 27 years old, Navy veteran, actually.
And he asked on the record in front of the cameras, how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
And nobody had a good answer.
Here's the thing that sort of gets me when I think about this moment in history, right?
The people who broke the Vietnam war politically were not the hippies, right?
They were not the campus protesters.
They weren't the guys, the hawks.
couldn't call soft, you know, the guys you couldn't accuse of not understanding sacrifice.
When the base turns, right.
doesn't turn gently.
It turns with metals hitting the concrete.
It turns with testimony delivered under oath by someone who still has the scars, who's still missing a limb walking with a crutch or a cane or a prosthetic.
The machine that sells war.
only runs on one type of fuel.
And that's the loyalty of the people it sends to fight.
When the loyalty runs out, a machine doesn't just slow down.
It just starts running on fumes.
And everyone kind of pretends not to smell it.
Welcome back to The Overlap.
I'm Joshua.
If you're new here, I'm glad you found us, genuinely.
This is a show about systems of power, who builds them, who they're built on top of, on the backs of, and what happens when the people at the bottom finally look up and recognize
the architecture.
We come at it through labor history, political history, American justice, working class issues.
We follow the money and we follow the bodies.
Because usually those two trails lead to the same place.
Today, we're talking about something I've been watching build for a few years now.
And I think we're finally at a moment where it's kind of impossible to look away from.
The American war machine is losing its base.
Not losing it to, you know, the left or the liberals or the demon rats.
Not losing it to sort of
pacifists or foreign policy, you know, doves or anyone in the defense lobby.
can argue against losing it to the people who were almost always its most reliable customers.
Veterans, Military families, rural communities in the South and in the Midwest that have been sending their children to serve for generations.
For a hand up, for a leg up, maybe just for an opportunity that they wouldn't have sitting around their podunk town.
The communities that put the volunteer in volunteer military.
And here's the number I need you to actually stop and hold on to for a second.
The army, the Navy, the air force.
I guess we now have to include the space force.
And of course the Marines, who we all know as a division of the Navy.
They all miss their recruitment targets significantly, like not by a little bit.
And when Pentagon researchers went to actually look for why they found something that no recruitment budget can easily fix young people from traditionally military families from
the communities with the highest rates of prior service are declining to serve at rates that we have not seen before.
The people who know the military best are now the least likely to recommend it to their children.
That's not a marketing problem.
That's not going to be fixed with a Facebook ad.
That is a structural collapse of trust.
Those are different things, right?
One you solve with a better ad campaign or bigger expenditures.
The other one?
The other one you built over decades, Burn pit claims denied for 20 years while veterans got sick and died waiting for healthcare.
Heath Robinson of the Ohio National Guard
Kosovo, Iraq, burn pit exposure, rare lung cancer.
He died in 2020.
The law named Afrim didn't pass until 2022.
The VA backlog created by finally honoring those claims means thousands more people are going to die in that queue.
And now here in 2026,
Doge linked reviews or floating 3.1 billion in VA cuts while Pete Hegseth runs the Pentagon like it's a rebrand project.
That promise is broken.
And the people who believed in it most are the ones left holding the bill.
So that's what we're getting into today.
April 22nd, 1971 in Washington, DC, John Kerry, 27 years old, Navy veteran, two tours in Vietnam, Silverstar.
Bronze star, three purple hearts.
He sat down in front of that Senate Foreign Relations Committee and says on behalf of the veterans he represents, how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
Now that line's been quoted a lot, not by my generation to be fair, but usually stripped of every sort of piece of context that normally surrounds it.
What doesn't actually get quoted is what came before it, right?
Kerry testified for
45 minutes.
He described in clinical and devastating detail what veterans had told him at a gathering called the Winter Soldier Investigation.
Atrocities committed, not by like rogue soldiers as a matter of policy, as a result of the specific rules of engagement and the specific command culture the Pentagon had built.
He named the institution, not the individual bad actors.
the entire institution, the Pentagon.
So sit with this because this is the part that actually matters for what we're tracking today.
John Kerry was not the most destabilizing person on the Capitol steps that week.
The week before John Kerry testified, April 18th through the 23rd, Operation Dewey Canyon Three, over 800 Vietnam veterans came to Washington DC and camped on the National Mall,
despite a Supreme Court order telling them they couldn't do it.
And at the end of that week, they lined up one by one and they threw their medals over a fence toward the Capitol building.
Combat ribbons, Purple Hearts, Bronze Stars, Silver Stars.
One man threw a distinguished flying cross.
These weren't like protesters who had like never served and were just holding signs and screaming.
They were people.
who had done exactly what the country had asked of them.
They weren't like the defense establishment, like people the defense establishment could miss as like, they're naive or uninformed or unpatriotic.
They believed in the mission, who had come home and found that the belief had been built on lies, and they were returning the proof.
That is a completely different kind of dissent, right?
That's the base breaking.
And the Pentagon and the White House understood exactly how different it really was.
Nixon's team spent...
enormous amount of energy trying to discredit John Kerry specifically, right?
And the VAW broadly, planting stories, running surveillance, attempting to prove the veterans were communist infiltrated or fraudulent.
The effort itself tells you how frightened they really were.
You don't run a disinformation campaign against people who don't matter.
This is kind of Streisand effect, right?
Like if you're
If you're addressing the problem, you're already behind it.
What had broken the bass?
Not the protests, right?
Not the draft card burnings or the flat-footed orange demagogues.
Something much more specific.
18 months earlier, November, 1969, a journalist named Seymour Hirsch had published a story through the dispatch news service that most major outlets had kind of passed on, right?
The story described what happened in the village of My Lai on March 16th of 1968.
US soldiers from the Charlie company under the command of Lieutenant William Callie had entered a village and killed somewhere between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians, women,
children, elderly men.
The army had known they buried it and Hirsch found it anyway.
Stop for a second and think about who lost faith over my lie.
Not the people who are already against the war.
The people who lost faith were the ones who had defended it.
Rural conservatives, veterans, families, the communities that had been telling their kids that service was the most honorable thing you could do.
The military was trustworthy.
And the government was telling them the truth about what was happening over here, over there, right?
My lie didn't radicalize the left.
It devastated the right.
Gallup polling from 1969 to 1970 shows the sharpest dropped in war support coming from exactly those demographics.
The credibility gap, right?
That phrase people use for the distance between what the Pentagon said was happening and what was
actually happening.
Didn't destroy support amongst people who already doubted the Pentagon.
It destroyed support among people who had staked their entire identity on trusting the Pentagon.
That's the mechanism.
Write that down.
That matters.
Fast forward to 1991, the Gulf War ends in a hundred hours of ground combat, massive public support.
Ticker tape parades, George H.W.
Bush approval rating hits 89%, 89%.
The military has apparently restored its credibility after Vietnam.
The Powell doctrine works.
We talked about that on a previous episode.
Clear mission, overwhelming force, defined exit.
The hawks are vindicated.
And then the veterans start getting sick.
By 1994, tens of thousands of Gulf War veterans were reporting a wide, wide array of symptoms, chronic fatigue, cognitive problems, muscle pain, neurological disorders that
had no official diagnosis or even an official explanation.
The Pentagon's response was not
let's investigate this, right?
The Pentagon's response was, that didn't happen.
That's not service related.
Don't worry about it.
But internal documents that later surfaced showed officials actively worked to attribute symptoms to stress and psychological causes rather than actually investigate chemical or
environmental exposures.
Same veterans who'd come home as heroes whose war had supposedly redeemed American military credibility.
were now being told by the entire institution that they'd served that their bodies were lying to them.
Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans Illnesses published its report in 1996.
It found the Department of Defense and the VA had failed veterans on multiple fronts.
It found that stress was not a sufficient explanation.
It found that the pattern of denial had compounded the harm.
Here's the dark math of that, right?
The Gulf War was the war that was supposed to prove the military had fixed itself after Vietnam.
And the way it treated sick veterans proved it hadn't fixed anything that actually mattered.
It fixed the optics, sure.
It had not fixed the underlying rot inside of the institution.
And I want you to notice the shape of this because it's not random, My lie to Gulf War syndrome to
burn pits.
It's the exact same architecture every time.
An institution that has every incentive to deny liability does deny liability for as long as it possibly can while the people who are actually sick or dead or grieving absorb the
cost of that denial.
And the communities most likely to send their kids to serve are the communities most directly exposed to the consequences.
when the denial finally collapses.
Now 2004, Pat Tillman walked away from a three year, $3.6 million NFL contract with the Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the army after September 11th.
That's the fact everyone knows.
Here's the fact that matters more.
When he was killed in Afghanistan on April 22nd of 2004 at 27 years old,
Maybe coincidental, but the same age as John Kerry testifying before the Senate.
The army knew within hours that he'd been killed by friendly fire.
They knew.
His platoon leader knew.
The after action report documented it and the decision was made not by some low level soldier covering for a mistake, but up the chain past General Stanley McChrystal.
who later admitted in congressional testimony that he was aware of the friendly fire, nature of the death, before public statements were ever made.
The decision was made to issue a Silver Star citation describing Tillman charging toward enemy fire.
A completely fabricated lie.
Typed up, signed, handed to his family at a nationally televised memorial.
His mother, Mary Tillman,
spent years fighting for that truth.
She wrote a book, you can pick it up, called Boots on the Ground by Dusk by Mary Tillman.
She testified she pushed the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held hearings in 2007.
No criminal charges ever resulted.
McChrystal was later confirmed as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander.
Think about what Pat Tillman represented to the people who were the military's base.
He was proof that the sacrifice was real, that the mission was worthy, that the best among us were choosing to serve.
The Army didn't just lie to his family.
They used his death as a recruitment tool.
While literally lying about how he died, they manufactured a hero narrative.
from a friendly fire tragedy and handed it to a grieving mother and called it a silver star.
And when the truth came out, it didn't just damage trust.
It answered a question, the question that every military family quietly carries.
If something happens to my kid, will they tell me the truth?
The Tillman case answered that question with documented congressional record evidence.
The answer was no.
They will lie if lying serves the institution and they will decorate the lie with medals.
That's not a scandal that stays contained to one family.
That spreads through every VFW hall, every...
kitchen table conversation in every military town in Georgia and Texas and rural Ohio and Oklahoma.
The Tillmans were not a marginal family who could be dismissed.
They were the family and the army lied to him anyway.
Here's what connects my lie in 1969 to Gulf War Syndrome in 1994 to Pat Tillman in 2004.
It's not the bad things happened, right?
Bad things happen in war.
War sucks.
The through line is the institutional response to bad things happening.
Cover-ups, denials, the active effort to protect the institution's reputation at the direct expense of the people who sacrifice the most for it every single time.
And every single time the people most damaged by that pattern are not the critics.
The critics were never trusting the institution in the first place.
The people most damaged are the believers.
The ones who staked something real, a son, a husband, a brother, their own bodies, their own futures on the premise and the thought that the institution was worthy of staking
their daughter, their mother's life on
Daniel Ellsberg was a Marine, a Harvard PhD, a RAND analyst with top level security clearance.
He was by any measure the establishment's own man.
He had access to the full classified record of Vietnam decision-making, all 7,000 pages of it.
He had access to the Pentagon's own internal history.
And what it showed him was that the government had been lying, not just to the public, but to its most trusted insiders for decades through multiple administrations across party
lines.
His leak didn't just inform the public.
It proved that being inside the machine, being credentialed and trusted,
and given access does not protect you from being deceived.
The deception was the point.
He died in June, 2023 at 92 years old.
Near the end of his life, he said he had absolutely zero regrets about the leak.
I believe him.
But I also think about what it costs to spend 50 years being called a traitor by people who were protecting the lie after you'd spent the first half of your life being one of
their most trusted assets.
That's not a small thing to carry.
The base doesn't break because of outside pressure.
It breaks because the institution, given the opportunity to honor the people who believed in it, chooses instead to protect itself over and over.
Same choice, the same result.
And now we're watching it happen again in real time with a different cast, of course, but the same exact story, the same framework.
And the question is,
whether anyone in power has learned a single damn thing from any of it.
They haven't, which is why, of course, we're here.
Pete Hegseth has never run anything.
I want to be concise about this because it matters.
Not a battalion, not a base, not a government agency.
He ran a cable news segment for Fox and Friends.
And before that, he commanded the National Guard unit, which is real service.
Look, I'm not dismissing it, right?
But the, the, the jump from that to secretary of defense, overseeing an 850
B-b-b-billion dollar annual budget, the largest military bureaucracy on earth, is not a promotion.
That's a category error.
And the people who know the difference between those things, the career officers, the NCOs, the veteran service organizations, they are not quiet about it.
But the news is not writing that story.
Here's what's actually moving.
The VFW and the American Legion, organizations that have historically functioned, it's basically rubber stamps for the Republican defense policy, put out public statements in
2025, opposing VA staffing reductions tied to the Doge bullet and budget review.
The VFW, the American Legion, these are not radical organizations.
These are groups that meet in church basements in...
rural Arizona and put flags on graves every Memorial Day.
When they break, you're not watching the left flank crumble, you're watching the foundation crack.
The number of veterans advocacy groups flagged 3.1 billion in proposed VA budget reductions.
Think about that.
The F-35 program has a projected lifetime cost that the Government Accountability Office now estimates at over $1.7 trillion.
One program.
Lockheed Martin received over $62 b-b-billion in federal contracts in fiscal year 2023 alone and spent $13.5 million lobbying to make sure that that spigot remains fully wide
open.
Which, if you're doing the math, is the most efficient investment in human history.
That's not corruption in the dramatic sense, of course.
just how the machine is calibrated.
The money flows toward the contractor.
The cuts flow toward the veteran.
And nobody in the leadership structure of that system experiences any cognitive dissonance about that because the contractor is a line item in a budget and the veteran is a person
with a claim number and a backlog.
That's the mechanism, not malice.
just the slogging weight of bureaucratic gravity.
But I wanna go somewhere specific because the PACT Act is where this becomes undeniable.
The Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson honoring our promise to address Comprehensive Toxics Act, that's the full name, and I read the full name on purpose.
That was signed into law in August of 2022.
2022, Heath Robinson.
was an Ohio National Guard soldier who served in Kosovo and Iraq.
He was exposed to burn pits, the open air trash fires that the military used to dispose of everything from medical waste to ammunition on forward operating bases because truth is
it's just cheaper than real disposal infrastructure.
He developed a rare lung disease than cancer.
He spent years fighting the VA for recognition that his illness was connected to his service, because that's what you have to prove in order to receive benefits for that.
And the VA spent years telling him that it wasn't service related and he died in 2020.
He never saw that bill pass.
It passed two years after he passed away.
The VA has been denying Burn Pit claims systemically for over a decade.
The estimated number of veterans exposed to burn pits by VA data is 3.5 million people.
Three and a half million people who served, breathed that smoke, came home sick, filed claims, and were told, there's no proven connection.
The same script the VA ran on Agent Orange.
The same script they ran on Gulf War Syndrome.
Different chemicals, different wars.
Identical institutional response.
Deny, delay, wait for them to die.
John Stewart had to go to Congress again.
Yes, that John Stewart who spent years dragging senators in front of cameras over the September 11th First Responders Fund.
He had to do the exact same thing for burn pit veterans because the mechanism that denied first responders claims and the mechanism that denied burn pit claims is the exact same
mechanism.
Nobody fixed it.
They just moved it on to a new population.
Here's what you need to understand about that.
The PACT Act costs an estimated $280 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Now that's real money and it should be spent, right?
But when you compare it to the F35's 1.7 trillion, the program that doesn't work, that has chronic readiness failure, that's been in development since the 1990s,
that the Government Accountability Office has flagged repeatedly, that program is untouchable.
The benefit that honors the people who actually went and breathed the smoke and came home with tumors.
Sorry, every time I see that word, I still want to go, Thomas.
That's where the budget hawks show up.
That's where that line gets drawn.
And look, that's asymmetrical, but it's not accidental.
That's the policy.
And right now, 2026 cuts to VA staffing.
At the same time that the PACT Act implementation is generating a massive surge in new claims, the VA is already behind.
They have never gotten ahead.
The backlog is already real.
Veterans who claimed claims under the new law of 2022, mind you, this is four years into it, are already waiting.
And the response from the administration that wrapped itself in the flag harder than any administration in recent memory is to cut the staff processing those claims.
Republican lawmakers from military heavy districts are breaking publicly over this, not Democrats, Republicans.
The political coalition that has sustained the military expansionism since the devil himself, Ronald Reagan, depends on a specific transaction.
We ask you to serve, you serve.
We honor that service when you come home.
When the government visibly refuses to honor that handshake transaction, not in theory, not in some think tank somewhere, but in the form of a claims processor who no longer has
a job.
The coalition doesn't just weaken, right?
It starts asking what it was ever actually for.
This is the recruiting crisis in its true form, right?
The Pentagon and the army have been covering the surface story.
The army, Navy and Air Force all missed recruitment targets by significant margins, 2023, 2024, 2025.
Now they're letting people up to 42 years old in good health join the army, right?
And now you have companies like Palantir talking about a new draft that should be mandatory service for 18 year olds.
And up until now, the official response is throw money at it, right?
$50 million in new recruiting initiatives for the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.
But internal Pentagon research found something that a $50 million ad campaign can't fix.
Declining propensity to serve is concentrated in communities with the highest rates of prior military service.
The South.
the rural Midwest, that's Kansas, that's Minnesota, that's Oklahoma, that's Nebraska.
The places where military service is not just a career option, but a family tradition, a cultural identity, a thing that fathers and grandfathers did and passed down like it was
some sort of trade, those communities are just not sending their kids to war anymore.
It's not because of progressive politics, not because of anything MAGA media can blame on the left, because the people who know the military best
who have a family member who served, who watched what the VA did to their uncle with Gulf War Syndrome, who knows someone waiting on a burn pit claim, those are the ones saying,
not my kid.
That's not a messaging problem.
That's information.
Daniel Ellsberg transformation from trusted insider to establishment's most dangerous critic took years.
of accumulating evidence that the institution he served was systemically lying to protect itself.
The people pulling their kids out of the recruiting pipeline are not making an ideological statement.
They've just done the same math.
And the difference is that in 1971, when veterans threw their medals at the Capitol steps, there were at least a visible politics to the dissent, right?
800 veterans in Washington in public saying, served
and we are telling you this war is wrong.
It had a shape.
It had a face.
What's happening now is quieter and, I think, more structurally damaging.
Because it's not really a protest.
There are plenty of people protesting, and if that's your way of showing your dissent, that's perfectly valid and it's covered by the Constitution regardless of what the current
administration says.
That's withdrawal.
Nobody's marching.
They're just not showing up to the recruiter's offices.
And a machine that runs on volunteers cannot run without the volunteers.
And there's no draft coming, at least not yet.
But they're floating it out there in the world.
And there's no political will for a draft yet, even though they're floating it out there into the world.
So what you get instead of a slow structural hollowing, lower standards, more economic conscription, targeting communities with fewer options, a military that increasingly
reflects not the nation's patriotic traditions, but desperation.
Lockheed Martin will still get his contracts, right?
The F-35 will still fly some of the time when it's operational, which is...
Not always.
The $13.5 million in lobbying will still produce its return.
The machine that makes the weapons is insulated from all of this.
The machine that takes care of the people who use them is not.
I said earlier that the base doesn't just break from outside pressure, right?
I said it breaks because the institution chooses to protect itself instead of the people who believed in it.
Here's the 2026 version of that sentence.
Pete Hegseth is on television defending budget decisions that veteran service organizations, the VFW, the American Legion, the institutional voice of the base are
publicly opposing.
And the MAGA media apparatus has spent years performing reverence for troops.
They can't sell this.
They've tried.
That content is not landing.
because the audience for that content includes a non-trivial number of veterans and military families who know what a VA claims backlog looks like from the inside.
And no amount of flag graphics and Nazi tattoos and solemn music resolves the gap between the performance and the reality.
That's the fracture.
Not some sudden break, it's a gap that keeps widening between what the machine says it is
and what the people closest to that machine know it is.
Keith Robinson died in 2020, the law bearing his name passed in 2022.
The VA is now in 2026 being asked to process an enormous surge of claims from 3.5 million burn pit veterans with a workforce that the same administration is trying to cut.
While the F-35 program, which has never worked as promised, which has cost more than the GDP of almost every country, except for the top five, remains fully funded
and fully lobbied and fully protected.
That's not just irony.
That's not a talking point.
That is the way it was built, running exactly as it was designed.
And the only people surprised by it are the ones who were told the design was something else, who were told the machine was for them, and who are now slowly in the way that trust
actually erodes, which is not all at once, but in the accumulation of specific moments
where the institution had a choice and made the same choice every time.
They have aid, now they're figuring it out.
That's what that means, right?
Figure around, figure out.
And the machine, you know, for all of its $850 billion has zero answers for that.
Let me slow down.
Because we just spent time on the architecture.
the lobbying numbers, the budget lines, the political fracture, and all of that's But architecture doesn't bleed.
So I wanna stay with three specific people for a few minutes.
Three documented cases, and I'm gonna ask you to stay with me, because the temptation when you hear these stories is to immediately reach for what they mean, what they prove, what
argument they support.
Just resist that for a second.
Just let each person be a person right now.
Heath Robinson was 39 years old when he died.
He was an Ohio National Guard soldier.
He served in Kosovo.
He served in Iraq.
And at some point during those deployments, he breathed in the smoke from burn pits.
The open air fires the military used to dispose of waste, including medical waste, ammunition, chemicals, human waste.
Fires that burned at temperatures that produce toxic compounds the military knows are dangerous.
and used anyway because it was cheaper and faster than alternative disposal methods.
Heath Robinson came home, he got sick, a rare lung disease, cancer, the kind of constellation of symptoms that shows up in thousands of veterans who served in those
theaters, in that smoke, in those years.
His family fought for VA recognition for his illness for the better part of a decade.
Not recognition in the abstract, recognition in the specific bureaucratic form-filling monotonous sense that would have meant his care was covered, his claims were honored, his
sacrifice was acknowledged in the only material way a government can acknowledge sacrifice.
And the VA denied the connection for years.
The position was we can't establish a service-connected link, which is a sentence that means we know you're sick, we know you served.
But we are choosing not to connect those two facts in any way that's going to actually cost us money.
And he died in May of 2020.
The PACT Act, Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson honoring our promise to address Comprehensive Toxics Act was signed into law in August of 2022 by President Biden on the
White House lawn with Heath Robinson's family standing there.
John Stewart, who spent years dragging Congress toward the moments.
The same way he dragged him toward 9-11 First Responders Fund was there.
It was described as the largest expansion of veterans' benefits in decades.
Heath Robinson didn't see it.
There are 3.5 million veterans with burn pit exposure.
The VA is now processing their claims.
And the same administration that has Pete Hegsath running the Pentagon, the same Doge-adjacent budget review that veterans service organizations are publicly fighting,
is now cutting the VA workforce responsible for processing those claims.
The CBO scored the PACT Act at $280 billion over 10 years.
The F-35 program, one program, one plane that does not reliably work has a projected lifetime cost at the GAO that puts it above $1.7 trillion.
I'm not asking you to do the math.
I'm telling you that these numbers exist and the people making the decisions know them and they keep making the same decisions.
Heath Robinson's name is on a law he never saw pass being implemented by a bureaucracy being deliberately starved to serve 3.5 million people who breathe the same smoke he
breathed.
And that's not a metaphor.
It's a file.
It's a documented record, congressional record.
It's the White House signing ceremony, August 10th, 2022.
Columbus Dispatch, John Stewart, Congressional Testimony.
Pat Tillman was 27 years old when he died.
He walked away from a three year, $3.6 million NFL contract with the Cardinals after September 11th.
He enlisted, became a Ranger, deployed to Iraq and then Afghanistan.
On April 22nd, in the Sparra district of Afghanistan, he was killed by his own unit, Friendly Fire, shot three times in the forehead at close range, which the Army's own
subsequent investigation would note was inconsistent.
with long range enemy fire.
And the army knew this immediately.
What the army did not do immediately was tell his family.
What the army did instead was write a Silver Star citation describing Pat Dillman dying while maneuvering on the enemy, leading his men under fire, conducting himself with
distinction.
The citation was fabricated.
It was even used as his memorial service.
His family watched it read aloud at his funeral while the people who wrote it knew exactly that it did not happen as described.
General Stanley McChrystal, who later would command the U.S.
forces in Afghanistan, was among the senior officers who reviewed the documents, accurately describing the friendly fire nature of the death before public statements were
made attributing it to enemy action.
That's from the house committee on oversight and government reform hearings from 2007 and the army inspector general report from 2005.
Pat Tillman's mother, Mary spent years, years fighting to get the documented truth of her son's death in a public record, not to punish anyone, though punishment would have been
appropriate to correct a lie, to insist that her son's actual death, which was not a heroic charge into the enemy fire, but a chaotic, tragic accident of war to be
acknowledged.
for what it was.
No criminal charges.
All of the officers involved continued their careers.
Think about what Mary Tillman was navigating.
Her son had made the most visible patriotic sacrifice imaginable.
He gave up wealth and comfort and safety because he believed.
The institution he believed in, the institution he died serving, used his death as a recruitment narrative, used the fabricated story of his death, knowing it was a lie,
and then spent years in active legal and bureaucratic resistance to her attempts to establish what actually happened.
That House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held hearings in 2007, and Mary Tillman was there and testified.
She was precise, documented everything, exhausted in the way that someone is exhausted when they have been fighting for years against an institution with infinite resources and
no personal accountability.
The committee found that the army had violated its own regulations.
Senior officers had been aware of the true circumstances and that the Silver Star citation was unsupported by the facts.
And then largely the institution moved on.
Pat Tillman's case matters here, not because of its celebrity, though the celebrity is part of it, but because the army is willing to lie through its teeth.
about the most visible military death of the post-911 era, the one with the most public scrutiny, the one with a family that had resources and connections and a platform.
If they were willing to lie about that one, what does that tell you about the ones that nobody's watching?
Daniel Ellsberg was not from a working class background.
And I want to be clear about that.
He was a Marine, a Harvard PhD, Rand Corporation analyst with top level security clearance.
He was by any measure the establishment's man, a hawk, someone who had spent years inside the architecture of American military decision-making, who believed in the mission, who
had access to the information that almost no one outside the highest levels of government had ever seen.
What he saw was the Pentagon Papers.
7,000 pages of classified Defense Department, I guess now it's Department of War, history documenting that the United States government had systemically deceived the public in
Congress and itself about the Vietnam War.
That administration from Truman through Johnson had known internally that the war was probably unwinnable, that casualty estimates were manipulated, that the strategic
rationale was weaker.
And what was being stated publicly, the deception wasn't a side effect.
It was operational.
It's how the policy was sustained.
Ellsberg spent two years deciding on what to do with that knowledge.
He tried to get senators to release the documents through official channels.
He tried the formal route.
The formal route led nowhere.
In 1971, he gave the papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post.
The Nixon administration prosecuted him under the Espionage Act.
That case collapsed in 1973, and not because the courts vindicated him, but because the government's own misconduct, including
The plumber's unit breaking into his psychiatrist's office made prosecution impossible to continue.
The charges were dismissed, no vindication, just a quiet implosion.
Here's the thing with Ellsberg.
He wasn't a protester.
He wasn't an outside agitator.
He was the system's own flesh and blood trained by it, trusted by it, cleared by it to see the most sensitive things.
And what the systems documents showed him was the system had been lying to everyone, including its most loyal insiders for decades.
He died in June of 2023.
He was 92.
Three people.
Ohio National Guard soldier who died before the law, bearing his name was passed.
A football player whose mother had to sue the army to get the true account of his death into the public record.
A Harvard educated Marine who read everything the government actually knew about Vietnam and concluded that the only honest thing left to do was let the public read it too.
None of these cases are obscure.
All of them are documented.
All of them are on the official record.
Congressional hearings, court filing, signed legislation, inspector general reports.
The machine had 42 years to learn something different from each of them and it hasn't.
And the people who know that most specifically, not from editorials, not from podcasts like this one, but from their own claims paperwork, their own family's experience, their
own body, those people are still there.
They're still in the base, still being asked to perform loyalty to an institution that is made in each of these cases.
When it had a choice, the same choice.
That's what's breaking.
not the politics, it's the belief.
So here's where we actually are.
The belief is breaking, not the politics.
And that distinction matters more than almost anything else I've said tonight because politics can be managed.
But belief, once it goes, is a different kind of structural failure.
You don't patch it with a press release.
You don't reverse it with a recruiting budget.
When the people who know the institution from the inside, who have the claims paperwork, who watch their family member die waiting for VA decision, who wore the uniform and came
home to find the compact was conditional.
When those people stop transmitting the faith to the next generation, you have a problem that compounds silently until it doesn't.
The military recruiting crisis is the number.
Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, Marines, all miss their targets.
But the number that stays with me is the qualitative one.
Declining propensity to serve is sharpest in communities with the highest rates of prior military service.
The people who know the most are recommending it the least.
That's a verdict.
So before I tell you what to do with any of this, actually, let me push on that.
Do you feel the weight of what it means for who ends up serving instead?
Because when the traditional base just kind of opts out, right, the volunteer force doesn't shrink proportionally.
It shifts.
It recruits harder from communities where military service is one of the only economically viable paths available to escape their current situation.
The sacrifice doesn't disappear.
It redistributes downward by class.
While the contractor class that pulls in $62 billion a year in federal contracts, while the lobbying apparatus that spent $13.5 million in a single year to protect an F-35
program with a $1.7 trillion lifetime cost, those people bear exactly none of it.
Not one body, not one claim denied, not one mother suing the army for the true account of her son's death.
And that asymmetry is the machine.
But.
The machine is losing its fans.
So what do you do?
First thing, if you know a veteran or military family member who has burn pit exposure and hasn't filed the PACDAC claim, tell them to go to the va.gov slash packed right now,
P-A-C-T.
The claims backlog is real and it is moving slowly, which means the earlier the claim is filed, the better.
People are dying on wait lists for decisions that could have been made years ago.
Heath Robinson died in 2020.
The law bearing his name passed in 2022, the gap right between the harm and the recognition is exactly where bureaucratic delay does its quiet killing.
Filing early doesn't guarantee speed, but not filing guarantees nothing.
Second, the VFW and American Legion both issued public statements in 2025 pushing back against the VA staffing and budget reductions.
That's not nothing.
These organizations have historically been cautious about breaking with the GOP administration.
Go to vfw.org and legion.org, find the advocacy and legislation action pages and sign on to what they're pushing that you agree with or meets the need for the cause.
I know those organizations have really complicated histories, but just do it anyway, right?
When the political coalition that's sustained military expansionism starts fracturing from the inside, you want pressure coming from every direction, including the institutionally
creditable ones.
Third.
And this one requires something from you.
Find out who represents you on your House or Senate Veterans Affairs committees, not your general representative, specifically those committees.
Go to veterans.house.gov or veterans.senate.gov.
Find the member list.
Contact the office of whoever sits on that committee from your state or district.
Ask this for them specifically.
Ask them in writing what their position is on the 2025 VA workforce reduction proposals.
Not a form letter, an actual question that requires an actual answer.
Make them go on record.
Staff track constituents' contacts by issue.
So 100 people asking the same question about the same specific policy is different from a thousand people sending a generic email about supporting veterans.
Fourth, and this is the uncomfortable one, if you work in media, if you have a platform, if you write anything that anyone reads, stop treating the defense budget like a third
rail.
The F-35 program costs more over its lifetime than the entire GDP of China.
That's not true.
But it's more than most countries outside of China, the United States, Russia, and the European Union.
I think Canada is actually below that threshold as well.
That is a fact from the GAO, right?
Not some sort of activist pamphlet.
Lockheed Martin spent $13.5 million lobbying in a single year to protect that program from accountability.
writing about that, saying that out loud, naming the number is not anti-military.
That's the thing that people who actually care about the people who serve should be the most angry about.
The money that goes to protect a contractor's stock price is money that's not going to a claims processor working through a backlog of three and a half million burn pit exposure
cases.
They are connected.
Say so.
I don't know if this bends, any of this bends the machine, right?
I'll be honest about that.
Ellsberg leaked 7,000 pages of classified documents and the machine kept running.
The Tillman family got congressional hearings and no criminal charges.
Heath Robinson got a law named after him after he was already dead.
The pattern is documented.
The pattern is in the official record.
The pattern keeps repeating.
But the base is cracking.
And it's over Iran.
It's over this new war in Iran.
So we're going to have more people come out of this.
are, we're already seeing, you know, sailors on Navy ships that are being fed gray meat and slabs of this disgusting stuff.
And you could say, sure, they signed up for it.
Yes, they signed up for it, but nobody that, that is trying their best to serve our country deserves that.
And what we know is when the base starts cracking, it's these people.
who make the most difference because they're typically the most loyal.
And it will crack, and it is cracking, you just have to know where to push.
And then the cracks spread.
So I'm gonna tell you what I thought about most when I went into the deep research here.
I think it's kind of the military recruiting crisis.
Like I knew it was bad.
They're raising the age for the army.
The CEO of Palantir is talking about instituting a federal mandatory service, those sorts of things.
But I didn't know where.
It was bad, right?
The Pentagon's own internal data shows that the sharpest decline in propensity to serve is happening in the South and the rural Midwest, right?
The communities with the highest rates of prior military service, not the places where, you know, that were always skeptical.
I didn't expect a whole lot of Californians, you know, to be signing up for the military or a whole lot of New Yorkers or people from New Jersey, right?
I knew, I didn't expect the people from, from Texas to be, be not
making their recruiting categories of people from Louisiana, from Mississippi, the ones that are strategically poor and don't really have much of uh a GDP to speak of and are
take more in government benefits and government entitlement programs than they actually provide into those programs.
The places that sent their kids generation after generation, right?
That put the yellow ribbon magnets on their trucks.
that made the volunteer force possible.
Those communities are looking at what happened in the burn pit scenario.
They're looking at what's happening currently in Iran that happened to the Tillmans, the Heath Robinson guy.
They're quietly telling their kids, maybe not, right?
Maybe, and that's not an activist position, right?
That's, excuse me.
That is,
The Heritage Foundation even, their own military index, index of military strength, right?
The institution's most loyal constituency is breaking from generational transmission of military culture and they're doing it with not even a whisper.
That's the kind of fact that should keep defense contractors and Pentagon budget hawks up at night for more than any protest at a recruiting office or protests in the streets
talking about the Iran war and trying to violate our free speech rights to do it.
sorry, Will couldn't join me.
Will was occupied with other things tonight.
And so I decided to go ahead and record this podcast myself.
If you like it, right?
And you were hearing it in a place other than our website, you can check out our website at fof.foundation.
We use Castapod, which is a federated,
application that runs our website for the podcast.
We also are available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
So share it with someone who still thinks, you know, criticism of the defense budget means you hate soldiers.
Because that confusion is doing a lot of work for a lot of people who are cashing very, very, very large checks.
I want to leave you with this.
800 veterans threw their medals at the Capitol in 1971, right?
The war ran for four more years after that.
I'm not going to tell you that awareness is enough because it's not.
And that's one of the things that I've really come to notice and really come to understand through this podcast really is that awareness is not enough.
The people who benefit most from your silence are the ones who named a building after Heath Robinson and then tried to cut the staff who processed the veterans' claims, right?
And that's not irony, that's policy.
So let's take care of each other, please.
That's the overlap.
See you next week.
Bye.