Collages by Mark Weaver. Source images: Pilots at George Air Force Base and an aerial view of the base, courtesy the San Bernardino County Museum, California; documents, courtesy the National Archives; the Mojave Desert © Green Planet Photography/Alamy
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Frank Vera III doesn’t remember the exact time or month of the incident. He just remembers that it was hot, like many days at George Air Force Base, in California’s Mojave Desert—a landscape so desolate, he says, it felt like the loneliest place on earth.
It was 1973, and Frank, an airman first class, was twenty years old. He’d been having a hard time. A few months earlier, he’d been crushed beneath the thousand-pound nose gun of a fighter jet he was working on, leaving him with a concussion, a dislocated wrist and shoulder, broken ribs, compression fractures in his lower spine, and a broken tailbone. He’d been placed on duty restrictions after the accident, and he was degreasing aircraft parts using trichloroethylene—now a known carcinogen—one day when he got word that a friend had died in Vietnam, the third he’d lost to the war.
When Frank’s shift ended, he got on his dirt bike and headed south. George Air Force Base stretched across more than eight square miles, its residential bungalows arranged in neat lines, sporting gardens and grills. Frank made his way past the golf course, where the emerald grass thrived thanks to hissing sprinklers and loads of pesticide, to a recreational area at the edge of the base where he liked to blow off steam. He slipped his bike through a gap in the barbed-wire fence and set off into the dunes.
In the open desert, he noticed a glint of metal in the sand. On closer inspection, the gleam was a stainless-steel ring, bolted onto what seemed to be a large metal drum. Curious, Frank pried open the lid and found that the barrel was filled with yellowish powder. Fifteen minutes later, his lungs began to itch and burn.
Feeling queasy, Frank tried to stumble back to the base, but collapsed somewhere along the way. A father and son eventually found him convulsing near the side of the road and took him to the hospital. Believing that Frank had overdosed on the Tylenol, Valium, and muscle relaxants he had been prescribed after his previous accident, the doctors pumped his stomach and discharged him several hours later.
After a few days, Frank was back in the hospital, suffering from debilitating headaches, chest pains, an irregular heartbeat, fatigue, nosebleeds, and nausea. His stool looked like egg whites with spots of clotted blood. The doctors were confounded by his symptoms; his vital signs and blood tests were normal. Once again, he was sent back to the barracks.
Frank’s commander grew increasingly concerned about him. “I firmly believe that [Vera] is not physically fit for any position in the USAF,” he wrote, in a letter requesting that Frank be given a medical and mental evaluation. “From personal observations, he seemingly does not have the physical ability to perform nor the mental attitude to adapt to military standards.”
Soon after, when Frank returned to the hospital to have his wisdom teeth removed, he bled so profusely that he had to receive transfusions. While recovering, he was approached by a base commander, an engineer, and the head of the hospital, none of whom seemed to take his complaints seriously. Frank was granted an honorable discharge, but it was unclear how generous his Department of Veterans Affairs benefits would be. He felt used and discarded. He’d wanted to serve his country, and now it was abandoning him. His doctors gave him a prescription for Valium and told him to “pound sand,” in Frank’s words.
Or at least this was the story he told me.
In one of the many obscure corners of the internet where desperation draws people together, Frank, now seventy-two, is considered a hero. His website—relatively simple and, at first glance, at least somewhat official in appearance—attracts up to forty thousand page views a year. It serves as both a forum for veterans and their family members who believe they were harmed by contamination at George—which was shuttered by the Air Force in 1992—and a public archive for the countless documents that Frank has acquired through more than thirty years of obsessive research. On the site’s home page, Frank offers a sober summary of his claims:
From 1941 to 1992 (51 years), over 100,000 people were potentially exposed to unsafe levels of hazardous, toxic, and radioactive materials on and around George AFB. . . . The Air Force and the Department of Defense (DoD) were aware of the contamination, in some cases for decades. However, they failed to address the issue or inform those stationed at the base or living nearby about the potential health risks.
I first emailed Frank in November 2021, after stumbling upon his site while researching a different story. He called me within the hour. “When this gets exposed,” he said, breathless, “it’ll be a shitstorm for the DOD—lawsuits flying, people will be fired, some people will go to jail.” My timing, he said, was serendipitous: a group of forty-nine veterans, their dependents, and others who had lived on or near George Air Force Base were joining forces to file a lawsuit against the federal government. They were seeking millions of dollars in damages for “adverse health outcomes as a result of exposure to toxic, hazardous, and radioactive waste deposited into the soils, groundwater, and water supply” at the base, and they wanted press coverage. I was wary of this enthusiasm—which seemed to indicate that they considered me an unquestioning advocate for their cause—but equally intrigued by the magnitude of Frank’s claims: Had the government been turning a blind eye to the veterans it had exposed to toxic contaminants? Given the realities of Agent Orange in Vietnam and the hazardous burn pits in the Middle East, it didn’t seem all that unlikely.
Over dozens of phone calls, in rants that often strayed some distance from the subject at hand, Frank told me his story. Following his discharge from the Air Force, he was homeless for nearly twenty years, all while continuing to suffer from his symptoms. He filed claim after claim with the VA asserting that his incapacitation had resulted from his time in the service, seeking what the VA calls a 100 percent disability rating, which would entitle him to generous benefits, including a livable monthly stipend. Instead, the VA deemed that the majority of his disabilities were unrelated to his time in the military, and Frank was granted a mere 10 percent rating.
Then, in 1985, a friend showed Frank an article in the local newspaper with the headline low-level radioactive dump discovered at george afb. It described a one-acre area of the base in the “extreme southern boundary” that served as an “old military repository for low-level radioactive waste.” Signs had been discovered there, “broken and lying on the ground,” bearing “the symbol for radioactivity” and reading caution—radioactive waste burial site. digging in this area is prohibited without approval of the base civil engineer and director of base medical services. Frank brought the clipping to his next doctor’s appointment with the VA, where he says he was asked to draw a map of the base and retell his story. According to Frank, the VA doctor suggested he may have been exposed to “toxic substances.” Five years later, a consultation report from his doctor was more specific: “I believe him to have had an exposure to nuclear radiation at George Air Force Base.”
Frank used this report in a new claim he filed with the VA, but it, too, was rejected. When the VA finally granted him an increased payment in 1997 for “low back strain combined with osteoporosis with discogenic disease with spondylosis,” it made no mention of potential radiation poisoning, or any of his other, more severe ailments.
Frank was grateful for the money, but he still felt as though justice had not been served. In the early Nineties, aided by a local librarian, he had learned how to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and began submitting them nearly every week. His first request, he told me, was for his own complete medical records from the Air Force and the VA. In response, Frank says, he received only a handful of documents, none of which mentioned the incident with the barrel.
Over the years, Frank filed hundreds of public-records requests with numerous state-level agencies, as well as with the Air Force, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Energy—any institution that might know something about what might have been dumped at George. In return, he received thousands of pages of documents, a handful of which actually yielded some useful information. A 1972 Air Force report, for instance, confirmed that it was “common practice” in the Fifties for the Air Force to bury a “wide range of radioactive materials” on its sites, including at George.
Source images: An aerial view of George Air Force Base, courtesy the San Bernardino County Museum, California; documents, courtesy the National Archives; a vial of blood © M.Sobreira/Alamy
Frank began to believe that there must have been others who had been harmed at the base. But for years his website, the first version of which he built in 2003, did not draw much attention. So in 2014, he started a Facebook group, uploading some of the key documents he’d found and encouraging anyone who’d been at George to contact him with information. Calls started coming in immediately—three, four, five times a day. People who had been stationed at the base told him about their neurological problems, kidney cancer, leukemia, lymphoma. Among them, Frank said, were hundreds of women who had developed fertility issues, had miscarried, or had children with defects. Frank was stunned. “I kind of thought it was just me,” he said. The women’s stories, in particular, sent him spiraling. “They ask all these young men and women to go defend the country in its hour of need—and then they poison us?”
He watched in awe as more than a thousand veterans flooded to the page to share their experiences. For the first time in decades, Frank didn’t feel alone.
It was impossible for me not to see Frank’s Facebook group as part of a larger trend toward conspiratorial thinking—including on the part of some who now occupy the highest positions of power in the federal government. And yet the ubiquity of the terms “conspiracy” and “misinformation” obscures the fact that not all conspiratorial thinking is mistaken. Which is why separating the facts of Frank’s story from various fictions he’d picked up online presented such a challenge. Was I myself falling for a conspiracy theory? Or had I just landed on a major cover-up?
Not long after Frank and I first spoke, he posted a note to his Facebook group informing its members that a “major investigative feature” was in the works about George Air Force Base. (“I am so proud of some of our media!!” one woman commented, to my dismay.) Per my request, he’d shared my contact information, and the next morning, I woke up to more than twenty messages. Frank was indeed not alone: in the weeks that followed, I talked to more than a dozen George veterans who claimed they had suffered from health problems ranging from the relatively common (endometriosis, miscarriages, blood clots, breast cancer) to the less common (lupus), and the rare (uterine cancer at twenty-three). Each of them believed they’d been exposed to one or multiple dangerous toxins at George: asbestos, lead, mercury, various radioactive materials, jet fuel, pesticides.
There was Lisa Lee, who served at George in 1979 while she was pregnant with her first daughter. “I always thought there was something about that place,” she said. Her daughter died at the age of sixteen after a four-year battle with mixed-phenotype acute leukemia, a rare and aggressive cancer. There was Terese Halsey Tice, who lived at George in the late Eighties and was diagnosed a few years later, at the age of thirty-four, with two different types of breast cancer despite her having no family history of the disease. And there was Michael Harris, an airman who claimed to have witnessed the disposal of a mysterious substance out in the desert in 1985. Eight years later, he said, his entire body began to fail him—he’d sometimes completely lose all control over his muscles. His doctors still hadn’t made a diagnosis.
I left these conversations feeling a certain sort of vertigo, my thoughts following a never-ending circle. It was a fact that there had been poisonous waste at George, exposure to which could very well result in the sorts of ailments described by the veterans. But I had spoken with only twenty people; George had housed tens of thousands across its decades of operation.
Evaluating Frank’s trustworthiness was its own challenge. On his website, his tone is matter-of-fact, straightforward, focused only on the pursuit of the truth. And in conversation he seemed to have extensive knowledge of the Department of Defense—its organizational structure, its procedures, and all the accompanying initialisms. But at times, it felt as though his obsessiveness bordered on fanaticism. It was apparent that he was just as much aggrieved for reasons beyond his particular injuries—he was part of a broad swath of the American public that felt fundamentally betrayed by the federal government. “They just don’t care about us at all,” he told me.
Yet on Frank’s personal Facebook page, his sense of betrayal and suspicion had led him to promote a slew of fringe theories. Alongside memes depicting the FBI as a crime mob, his page gave voice to a number of popular right-wing talking points, like how the CDC is a corrupt, for-profit “vaccine company,” as well as wild speculations about the deaths of Anthony Bourdain and the musicians Chester Bennington, Avicii, and Chris Cornell: before dying, Frank wrote, the four had been in the process of making a documentary about pedophilia and sex trafficking. Frank appeared to be a devoted fan of Steve Bannon’s War Room, a podcast known for suggesting that COVID vaccines were made from fetal tissue, that the CDC was setting up concentration camps, and that Bill Gates owned a patent for microchips that could be injected into people’s bodies to mine cryptocurrency. Many of Frank’s posts had been flagged with Facebook’s “false information” warning, which he seemed to find amusing. “I identify as a conspiracy theorist,” he joked in one post. “My pronouns are Told/You/So.”
Despite Frank’s proclivities, there was something undeniably exciting about the work he and his fellow veterans were doing. In 2018, a woman named Lisa McCrea had begun recruiting potential plaintiffs for the lawsuit that Frank had mentioned to me, claiming that the government failed to “alert and treat” individuals exposed to toxic contamination. The group was excited about the possibility of a big win. “Thank you Frank for being at the forefront,” one of his followers posted on Facebook. “Without your decades of work in bringing awareness to the masses many of us would still be thinking we just drew a genetic short straw.”
It’s no secret that the U.S. military has been dumping toxic waste in and around its bases for decades. It’s also true that the DOD has dragged its feet in cleaning up those sites while downplaying the severity of the contamination. In a study published in April 2022, the Pentagon acknowledged that it had served unsafe water containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to some 175,000 people a year across twenty-four military installations. “The DOD knew it was harmful and toxic,” Jared Hayes, who studies PFAS contamination at DOD sites around the country for the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, told me. “And the more the DOD tests for it, the more they’re finding it.” Today, the EPA lists more than eighty military bases as Superfund sites in need of remediation.
George itself was placed on the list in 1990, after the EPA discovered a cocktail of dangerous chemicals on-site. A large volume of jet fuel had leaked into two separate underground aquifers, and high levels of benzene, as well as trichloroethylene—the carcinogenic degreaser Frank had used—were detected in the groundwater.
But even as the government acknowledged the contamination at George, it denied that it had ever harmed anyone living on the base. When I reached out to the Air Force to confirm aspects of Frank’s story, I was met with a number of impressively evasive responses. An Air Force spokesperson directed me to the Air Force Civil Engineer Center, which referred me to the VA and the Air Force surgeon general’s office. The VA wrote back that “currently there is no scientific evidence that warrants the establishment of a presumption of disability compensation benefits for any health effects due to service at George AFB.” The Air Force spokesperson pointed me to a 1998 study by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry—which I had already seen on Frank’s website—that read, “On-site and off-site groundwater do not represent a past, present, or future public health hazard.” “There are no nuclear waste sites at former George AFB,” the spokesperson wrote. Several months later, as I persisted in asking questions, the office of the Air Force surgeon general finally told me that any medical records that might exist for Frank were under the custodianship of the National Archives in Washington, meaning it would require a laborious back-and-forth with the National Personnel Records Center in Missouri, a process that could take years. Meanwhile, the DOD referred me to the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, which never responded to my queries.
At long last, I managed to elicit an unhelpful response from the DOD, affirming that “protecting the health of our personnel, their families, and the communities in which we serve is a priority for the Department.” A representative from the EPA referred me to the same study from 1998, which stated that there was no “apparent past public health hazard” as a result of contamination at George. The “limited contamination” found at the base, the representative told me, had been cleaned up in the Nineties and Aughts, according to Air Force records.
These responses only obfuscated things further, but there was one note from the Air Force spokesperson that I found interesting. In it, he cautioned me not to trust Frank. “Mr. Vera’s website is filled with false information,” he wrote.
For several decades, the Air Force, US EPA, the State of California, and the Centers for Disease Control’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, have provided responses to his inquires countering the false information he routinely presents.
Existing articles from other media outlets, he added, “may contain wrong facts that were subsequently not corrected. Fact checking is advised to avoid continued misinformation.”
I knew that several people had attempted to debunk Frank’s story in the past. A 1994 article from the local Desert Mountain Express quotes a civilian Air Force employee who said of Frank, “There is nothing wrong with Frank Vera, except maybe mentally.” I’d gotten other warnings about Frank’s reputation over the course of my reporting. William Muir, a retired geologist who’d worked for the regional water board, told me that he’d been familiar with Frank’s story for decades. It was a running joke, he said, among the consultants overseeing George’s cleanup. When a new journalist contacted them, they would say, “Oh shit, Frank Vera’s got ahold of another one,” he told me. “Frank raises some good issues,” he admitted, but cautioned me to take his claims with a grain of salt.
The various warnings about Frank were troublesome. Frank had indeed trafficked in the most familiar examples of disinformation of our time: that Nancy Pelosi was the “true architect of January 6th,” that the COVID vaccine was “horrific stuff.” It was in part because of men like him that there was a booming information industry devoted to fact-checking online. But for anyone interested in dismissing reports of military abuse, Frank’s statements were a very convenient way to discredit him. The betrayal he said he had suffered at the hands of an institution that had already admitted to treating many of its service members carelessly was both real and broadly shared. To dismiss his findings as “fake news” was exactly the kind of thing you would expect of a government that had long been abusing the trust of once-loyal citizens like Frank.
In June 2022, I went to meet Frank at his home in Jamestown, California, an old mining town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. He offered me a glass of water as he showed me in. “It’s filtered,” he assured me, unprompted; the tap water was over-chlorinated, he explained. He’d installed a complex purification system to remedy the problem.
Frank retained the rough contours of a military man. His gait was strong and stiff, though he grimaced in pain as he moved. I was somewhat relieved to discover that his home appeared to be quite ordinary, with family photos on the walls and children’s art on the fridge. His wife smiled kindly and asked me about my trip. Frank, uninterested in small talk, stood impatiently in the corner, eager to ask if I’d seen the latest report about George. When I said that I had not, he led me into his office to print out a copy.
As we entered the room, the warmth of Frank’s house disappeared. The walls were covered with maps and typed notes: not a coverup. the af denies responsibility. Some of the papers listed the names and phone numbers of FOIA officers, military officials, librarians in nearby Victorville. A sticker above the doorway read trump 2020: forget your feelings, and next to it was a large black-and-white map of George. Above Frank’s desk was a framed letter that his then thirteen-year-old son had written to Donald Trump in 2019, asking for help accessing his father’s “military records and records of the George Air Force Base.” Next to it hung another piece of paper with a stack of words reading who what when where why how.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“I try to answer these questions,” he said as he cautiously lowered himself into his desk chair. Squinting at his two monitors, he printed out the new report. It was a response to the Air Force’s five-year review of the environmental issues at George by a regional office of the California State Water Resources Control Board, which monitors water quality across the state. “It’s scathing,” he said.
I leafed through the report as he turned and disappeared into his computer for several minutes. He said he spent most of his time online, from the moment he woke up at five-thirty until the early evening, with breaks to drop off and pick up his twins from school. The family lived off his monthly paychecks from the VA, supplemented by the money his wife earned from substitute teaching. He wanted to show me a short video he’d sent to a lawyer at a firm in San Francisco, one he’d hoped would take on his case. “This is stupid,” he muttered, as I leaned over his shoulder to watch. “My name is Frank Vera,” he told the camera. “I am one of approximately eighty thousand men, women, and children who were forced to work, live, and go to school on George Air Force Base.”
Frank said the lawyer had told him that his was “a good case, but a tough case,” and ultimately declined to take it on. “To sue the federal government,” he said, swinging around in his chair to face me, “they have to give you permission to sue them.” He launched into a lengthy explanation of the Feres doctrine, which bars service members from suing the government for service-related injuries. “You’re just dead in the water,” Frank said. “The government is supposed to lead by example. They shouldn’t be allowed to, you know, falsify records, withhold records, commit massive fraud.” He believed that the Air Force’s environmental-restoration program was flawed, that the Air Force lied about the damage to the sites it had contaminated. With barely a pause, Frank began to detail what he saw as the demise of a once-honest government, an account ranging from secret societies to central banking, from J. Edgar Hoover to Eliot Spitzer and Jeffrey Epstein. He told me he had already been threatened for investigating the government. In the Nineties, he said, he and a friend began engaging in what he called ambush journalism. They’d shown up at public meetings hosted by George’s Restoration Advisory Board to discuss contamination and recorded the proceedings. At one town-hall meeting, after drawing attention to George’s toxic history, he said he was approached by a man who flashed a gun at him, saying, “You know, you need to back off of this.” This all sounded implausible: like much of Frank’s regaling, the story felt conjured from an Eighties spy thriller.
We talked in his office for close to four hours—about vaccines, the state of the media, PFAS, the DOD, the FBI, the mistreatment of veterans. The more we spoke, the more confused I became. Many of his most impassioned beliefs seemed wildly incoherent. But Frank’s emotional and physical pain was undeniable. He cried several times. And even if he lacked a smoking gun, he had enough evidence to indicate that the Air Force wasn’t being totally forthright about whatever had been going on at George.
As I was leaving late that afternoon, I paused to study the black-and-white map of George. “I did three or four records requests for that map,” Frank said, guiding his finger along the parchment to show me the place where he had found the barrel. He was still in pursuit of a more complete version of the map—one that would precisely detail what sort of hazardous waste was stored and when. I told him I’d try to help track it down.
Two months later, the lawsuit was dismissed. The court cited a lack of “subject matter jurisdiction to adjudicate the claim.” One plaintiff wrote on the Facebook group:
Kinda sickening that it was tossed out because I’m quite sure the judge was paid off or told to throw it out because we have the information that shows negligence without a shadow of doubt.
Within a week of the dismissal, I got an email from Frank with a copy of the decision. I asked if he’d expected to win, and he admitted that a part of him had. His hopefulness pointed to a touching fantasy in much conspiratorial thinking: on the one hand, the whole apparatus of power is thought to be in on the plot; on the other, it takes only a single truth teller, and a few lucky breaks, to bring it all down. “I am bummed out,” Frank wrote. “I was hoping that this 30+ year fight was over.”
I’m not sure any one outcome would have satisfied Frank, but the legal path forward seemed bleak. Momentum was stalling. Aside from a few regulars, fewer and fewer people posted on Frank’s Facebook group. Meanwhile, the despair and anger felt by the plaintiffs only intensified. McCrae told the Facebook group that she was back in the hospital, having suffered an anaphylactic reaction from sunlight exposure. While in the ER, she wrote, the doctors discovered an undiagnosed liver disease and a kidney infection. “People wonder what exposure to jet fuel, benzene, trichloroethylene and organochlorine pesticides along with 60 other chemicals and radiation looks like 30 years later, this is it!” she wrote.
I’m not fear mongering here, these are just cold hard facts. . . . Thousands of people from the base that I used to call home are sick or have already died. The Department of Defense is not your friend and they certainly do not give a flying f@#k whose life they destroy. An enemy or an American, it’s all the same to them.
Then, in April 2023, one of my FOIA requests for items on Frank’s wish list yielded a promising response: there were “potentially relevant collections” to the master plan for George sitting in a National Archives facility in College Park, Maryland. When I arrived at the heavily guarded building a couple of weeks later, the archivist told me that I was just in time: some of the records relevant to my request had been marked “temporary” and would soon be destroyed.
My sense of good fortune was short-lived. Soon I found myself pushing a cart with twenty-four boxes of files dating from the Forties and Fifties: thousands of pages related to land leases, ammunition storage, radar siting, and geodetic surveys. But despite the enormous quantity of material, I felt some inkling of Frank’s confidence that something significant would be revealed if only I kept searching. Eight hours later, a voice over the intercom announced that the building would close in fifteen minutes. I had two more boxes to finish sorting through before I’d be kicked out. And then, with only minutes left, there it was: a map of the Victorville Army Airfield—what would later become George Air Force Base—from 1945, secret stamped across the page. On the map, nearly corresponding to the section of the base where Frank claimed to have found the barrel, in tiny lettering, were the words chemical bomb storage.
This didn’t quite accord with Frank’s allegations, but seemed to suggest that there had been dangerous weapons stored at George. When I got home, I emailed Frank a photo of the new map. He didn’t seem particularly excited. “That is a great find,” he replied, attaching a new document of his own: a preliminary plan of George from 1952 that bore almost no resemblance to the one I’d found. He posted the photos I sent him to his Facebook group, which generated a brief discussion about the exact location marked on the map. “Not shocking though to see they had that,” someone commented.
In the following months, I reached out to the Air Force again with some questions about my find. Exactly what kind of weapons had been stored at George? Eventually, I found an Air Force historian who told me that, in the late Fifties and early Sixties, George had housed jets that were equipped with nuclear warheads, though he didn’t know whether any of those weapons were buried there. As for the label on the map, he found it difficult to discern. chemical bomb storage indicated only that the designated area was capable of storing something like mustard gas, rather than nuclear materials. When I asked how I could determine what exactly might have been stored there, he sighed and gave what seemed to be the most truthful answer I’d heard in a while. “I think it’s just difficult to access,” he said. “Not that the government’s necessarily keeping the secret, but it would be difficult to track down. Like, even if you go into NARA”—the National Archives and Records Administration—“you would have to dig through the records. Like, deep, deep, deep records of every single military installation in the country, essentially.” I considered that there might be less of an ongoing cover-up than an unnavigable amount of bureaucracy and paperwork.
Over the next few months, I continued contacting historians and various government agencies, trying to get a more satisfying answer about what really happened at George. The EPA denied that chemical weapons had ever been stored at the base, but couldn’t explain why the map suggested otherwise. Every so often, I got emails from Frank. “The Downs Law Group started taking people from GAFB for the PFAS contamination,” he informed me, referring to a new law firm that was considering accepting the case. In another, he asked if I’d received a response to my request from the military archives for his full medical records. I had not.
Frank, meanwhile, had turned to side projects such as monitoring the local elections in Tuolumne County and calling attention to purported voter fraud. (Nobody took an interest except for Newsmax, which quoted him in an article as a “whistle blower and patients’ rights advocate for U.S. veterans.”) He still loves his country, he told me. He still believes in America as a concept, a faraway dream that was once real and true. At times, he blames himself for not “putting it all together sooner.” “My county,” he told me in the same grave tone with which he had spoken about the federal government, “is corrupt beyond belief. . . . We have mail-in ballots without signature verification—it’s like peeing in the wind.” But Frank has an abiding faith in the system as he thinks it was intended to work. “What governs us is the democratic process. If there’s transparency in the government, it’s okay. Everything self-corrects.”
Frank has more public-records requests stacked in his queue, and no plans to quit anytime soon: “Until they acknowledge what they’ve done to these families, I’m not going to roll over and play dead.” America is still his country, even if it keeps letting him down. And he’s determined to make it trustworthy again.
