You're listening to software, radio, special operations, military news, and straight talk with the guys in the community.

Welcome to another episode of software for radio. I am your honored host, Rad. And first of all, I have a wonderful guest today.

He has a lot of accolades on his resume, but I got to mention one thing that keeps the shop going here, which is our merch store.

Okay. So if you want to support us and you want to keep seeing my guests like the upcoming Doctor Richard Stone, who are about to interview right now, please go check out a shirt or a mug and support us.

And keep the lights on so I can keep interviews going like this with passion. So with that said, thank you so much to my listener for staying in tune with us.

And today I have a very special guest. It is Doctor Richard Stone General Major General, which is two stars, I believe for those of you that are listening.

There's a rank of structure of generals. You have Brigadier General, one star, Major General, two star, Lieutenant General, three star, four stars. You got, you know, McCarthy, five stars.

So at the end of the day, Doctor Richard Stone has taken on so many different roles in his career. The most recent one was from 2017 ish to 2021, where he was the director of the VA health and wellness of the entire VA.

Hey, this is the man. He is the commander right here. And I want to welcome you to the show under Secretary Doctor Richard Stone General sir.

Thank so much for having me and thanks for the introduction. I appreciate it. And I'm looking forward to spend some time with you and your listeners.

Thank you. And I want to let you know, sir, that I know that you were probably, you know, aware that a lot of my listeners have deployed and they are, you know, people who served during your time as serving and they've stepped in the same sand that you may have stepped in when you deployed and were over the whole medical Italian.

But what I want to ask you is how old were you when you decided was it high school that you wanted to enlist in the military and the army was it you're like, you know, this is me. I'm a wrestler or what what was going on through your head.

Yeah, I was part of the Vietnam era lottery for the draft. And I was ready to join the military at that point and found that my number in the draft came up over 300.

And if you've read anything about that era, they took people up to about 175 or 180 on birth dates for the draft lottery.

So I finished my college and entered after I actually finished my medical school training, but it was always my intention to join. It's a fairly complex story that I described in the book that I wrote on what it was to lead the VA

through once in a hundred year pandemic that book is really described sort of how I got into the military. But what happened was during that lottery, one of my sweet mates was the number one birth date chosen.

And he went off and joined the Marine Corps and was killed in Vietnam. And I always thought it was incredibly unfair that your service rested on, you know, when your birth date was pulled out of a bowl of balls that were ping pong balls that were had, you know, birth dates put on a 366 days with February 19 being included.

I just thought it was unfair. And I was always my intention to join life got in the way. And then after my medical school, I joined as a physician, the Army. And thought I had really missed the conflict. But when I became the undersecretary of the VA, I was the first combat experienced veteran rad that had served in that position for 30 years.

Now your listeners are veterans and they should know that 70% of us are combat experienced. And of the 19 million veterans in America, 70% of seen combat. And we're different. We're different than the rest of America just serving makes you different and an incredibly unique group.

And it's why venues such as yours are so important to reach out to veterans and help us connect with each other because we can talk to each other a lot more effectively than we can to people who have never served.

Agreed. Right now, who's listening to us when they listen to this, it might just hit them. And that one person, if we can reach them and show them that they have entitlements to the VA, which we're going to talk about, right, and that they have, you know, okay, all right, let's just crack into it. Let's just get there, general. So let's talk about the big elephant in the room with the VA.

Okay, specifically Salt Lake City. Let's talk about those hallways. What is going on with the mile long hallways that my mom had to push my loving father as she loved my father in a wheelchair to his appointments and break her feet through those long hallways as a spouse, all these caregivers who are there to take care of those members. Let's talk about those hallways. What's the concept behind that first of all?

...