Saying ‘thank you’ will never be enough

R.K. Butts is someone we knew fairly well. He’s been gone from this Earth for three years now, but some of us can still do a fair impression of his gravelly twang. No one who worked in this newsroom during the decades-long R.K. Butts era will ever forget picking up the phone and hearing his voice on the other end, calling once more to hold us accountable.

We consider it a privilege that he shared a lot of what he thought with us in letters, phone calls and sometimes books he’d read and highlighted for our edification. Butts was never shy about sharing is opinions, whether with us or at public meetings.

We will always wonder what he was thinking the day he chose to take his own life in the parking lot of the Wasilla Veterans Administration clinic. We lost a friend that day. And the U.S. lost a faithful soldier who served his community, state and nation to the very end.

Truthfully, he was a feisty old vet who drove us crazy with his relentless attention to details like bail and sentences handed down for driving drunk. There are newsroom practices still in place that grew directly from his sharply worded suggestions for how we could improve.

Three years on and his letters and a stack of books are still in our editor’s closet: we miss our gadfly Butts and we can’t bare to part with what is our last reminder of a cantankerous friend gone too soon. We wish he had made a different decision that awful day.

But, if part of what he was thinking was that his last act on this Earth would shine a light on problems at that clinic, and with the V.A. in general, we hope he’s watching and smiling with pride over the recent statements out of Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s office.

Murkowski has called for an investigation of the Wasilla clinic. She wants to know why veterans aren’t served there the way they should be. She says Butts suicide may have been the call to action that moved this story into full public view.

“I think this was where it first became more public outside of V.A. circles that there were issues within the Alaska V.A. that were not being addressed. As tragic as that was, I think for many it was the first appreciation that perhaps the V.A. was not attending to those who clearly had need,” she said in a Frontiersman interview Thursday.

This is a system that affects the Valley more acutely than other parts of the state and even the nation.

Alaska has the highest number of veterans per capita, and the Valley has a very large and growing portion of those vets. We are meeting more and more local veterans every day as our reporting on the clinic draws many of them to write, call, or stop by our offices and share their stories.

That these men and women who stood in harm’s way on our behalf must now stoop and grovel for the health care — and other services promised them is unconscionable.

We as a country must honor the promises we made to care for the men and women who fulfilled their part of bargain when they served. Now it’s up to us to keep our word.

Thank yous, handshakes, yellow ribbons and “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers are nice, but these things can never pay the debt we owe.

As a nation, we must keep our word, honor the promises made to every veteran, pay a fair wage for the work they’ve done, and provide the best mental and physical care for them that modern medicine can provide.