Cardinal & Pine hosts ‘Voices for Veterans’ event to highlight the devastating effects of proposed VA cuts

In a panel discussion, veterans, doctors, nurses, and advocates will tell their stories, and call attention to the fatal consequences significant cuts would mean for veterans and military families.

[Update: Watch the recording of Tuesday night’s event below.]

My grandfather served in the Army during World War II. I met him only once, a few months after I was born, when he was in the hospital dying of liver failure and my father placed me on his father’s chest. My grandfather had started drinking heavily when he returned from overseas. He never stopped, even after it cost him his marriage and his relationship with his son.

In 2009, my step-grandfather, who served in the Army during the Korean War, shot himself in the head inside his car while his wife, my grandmother, pleaded outside the window for him to put the gun down. He was an alcoholic, too, and a preacher, and he started drinking in secret after the war.

My grandfathers left the Army decades before PTSD was a recognized risk of military service, but there’s little doubt in my family about what they carried back home with them. I’ve thought about my grandfathers a lot the last few months as I’ve covered the Trump administration’s cuts and proposed cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

I’ve spoken with scores of veterans, doctors, nurses, elected officials, historians, advocates and military families over the last few months, and together they paint an undeniable portrait of the damage these cuts would do to veterans’ healthcare and livelihoods. I thought about my grandfathers a lot during these conversations, especially during my talk with Sean Wright, a former Army medic, who said that “without the VA, I 100% would have taken my life.”

@cardinalandpine

North Carolina veteran Sean Wright joined the large crowd of protesters at a Friday rally against Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose role in the Trump administration has sparked massive backlash. Wright explained why Trump and Musk’s cuts to the VA and veterans’ care are so harmful. “Without the VA, I 100% would have taken my own life,” he said.

♬ original sound – Cardinal & Pine

Each personal story carries the weight of a life, of sacrifice and valor, stories that matter everywhere but especially in North Carolina, which has a huge number of military bases and has one of the largest veteran populations in the country.

So Cardinal & Pine is hosting a live “Voices for Veterans” panel discussion in Fayetteville on Tuesday evening to highlight their stories and help form a chorus from their individual voices.

The lineup

The event will be held from 5:30pm – 7:30pm EDT at Studio 215 in downtown Fayetteville.

We will have two panels, one focused on “the Human Cost of Gutting the VA,” and the other offering a veteran’s perspective on rising threats to democracy. 

You’ll hear from many of the people I’ve been hearing from over the last few months, including Sean Wright, the former Army medic. 

The panelists will include Dr. Kyle Horton, a former VA doctor and current advocate for veterans; Ann Marie Patterson-Powell, a VA nurse in North Carolina; Grier Martin, the chair of the North Carolina Department of Military and Veterans Affairs; Bobby Jones and Scott Peoples of Veterans for Responsible Leadership;  NC Reps. Eric Ager and Terry Brown, and Jay Carey, a veteran and founder of the nonpartisan advocacy group, Resist & Persist.

The panelists will share their expertise and guidance and audience members will have a chance to ask them questions. You can register for the free event here, but it will also be livestreamed for those who can’t make it in person. 

The conversation

In the course of my conversations with these groups and others, I learned that military families often feel left out and overlooked during conversations about veteran care, even though they are affected by federal cuts and Trump policies too. New changes to Tricare, for example, the health care program serving millions of active duty members, veterans, and their families, have delayed payments to providers and made it harder to get referrals even for urgent care. 

We’re going to talk about that tonight.

I learned that the VA’s reach has expanded in recent years because the number of veterans needing care is higher than ever. They’ve seen more combat and faced a greater scale of risk than previous generations. More than 3.5 million service members, for example, were exposed to toxic burn pits in Afghanistan and Iraq, drastically increasing their risk of cancer. 

We’re going to talk about that.

We’re going to talk about how the generation of service members who volunteered after the Sept. 11 attacks are entering retirement age. 

We’re going to talk about the 14,000 North Carolina veterans on Medicaid who could lose their coverage if Republicans in Congress cut that care too.

We’re going to talk about Jefferson Griffin’s effort to overturn his state supreme court election loss by targeting overseas military voters and their families. 

And we’re going to talk about what happens when you cut staff at a crisis hot line and veterans are left on hold at their most vulnerable moments.

‘I just wanted to die.’

When Wright left the army, he stopped taking his medication, thinking he could leave it behind as he left the battlefield.

He struggled to find stability, he told me over several conversations in recent weeks.

“Every day was like walking through wet cement,” he said. “I just wanted to die.”

One night, he sat in his car in a Walmart parking lot, sobbing. 

“I just thought, I should just go and shoot myself,” he said, a common refrain for many veterans.

The suicide rate is high among veterans, but the decision to hurt themselves if often impulsive, Wright said. Which makes it vital that there are no delays when a veteran calls the crisis hotline.

“Most male veterans, they commit suicide with handguns and it’s impulsive. So you’re gonna have a veteran who’s sitting there with a handgun thinking about taking their own life,” he said. “And if they’re on hold for just a little too long, that could be fatal for them.”

When Wright called the hotline, a counselor answered on the first ring.

The trained counselors, who are often vets themselves, talked him through the moment. They listened. They got him the help he needed for that moment, and followed up with him in the subsequent week. He got back on his medication. He went back to school and got a masters degree.

“They were there for me,” he said. “They stepped up.”

‘A war on veterans’

The VA has had its troubles. We’ll talk about those too. But the doctors and nurses who work there, often for less pay than they’d get in the private sector, know how to provide the often unique care veterans need. 

Veterans will not just be able to go to another hospital or physician.

“We know from research that [veterans] get the best care at the VA,” Patterson-Powell told me last month. “So you have a veteran who shows up at another hospital. That they’re not trained how to take care of veterans. They don’t understand them. A lot of our veterans suffer from PTSD. We understand those. We are trained to handle our veterans.”

And the cuts will not be a mere matter of inconvenience. The VA is already short staffed, Dr. Horton and Patterson-Powell said. More cuts mean fewer beds for the veterans who need them, longer waits, and diminished care.

The Trump administration paints these cuts as simply an effort to restore staffing to the levels from 2019. They made it work then, they can make it work now, they say.

But 2019 was forever ago. There’s been a pandemic since then. And there are far more veterans in the system now than then.

“The VA won’t survive in 2025 with 2019 staffing,” Patterson-Powellshe said.

The cuts and other policies amounted to a “war on veterans,” Dr. Horton said.

“Think about who works at the VA and in federal employment in general, right? About 30% of federal employment is veterans,” she said. “At the VA it’s even higher.”

Cutting staffing at the VA means laying off veterans.

These cuts, she said, are “literally going to kill veterans, period.”

She continued:  It’s placing them at higher risk of suicide. It’s placing them at higher risk of not getting appropriate care .. It is un-American. It’s not one any of us believe. It’s not. It’s not even close to what veterans were promised.”

She added: “They don’t deserve to be put in the middle of this BS.”

We will talk about these issues. We will let veterans talk about these issues. You’ll be able to ask questions. 

We’ll be there to give veterans and military families a platform, and to listen. I’ll host one of the panels and my colleague Billy Ball will host the other.

As we talk, as I listen, I know I’ll be thinking of my grandfathers.