The 2026 Leadership Conference

BY Marc Leepson

One enormous issue loomed over this year’s biennial National Leadership & Education Conference in Jacksonville, Florida, in August: the shape and form that Vietnam Veterans of America will take as the organization moves into its sixth decade. That future will be debated and most likely decided by the delegates at the 2027 National Convention next August. The delegates will decide the result of what one conference participant called the “Inevitable Change of Control” that will come in the near future, when VVA, a last-person-standing veterans service organization, either charts a new path or dissolves.

The 2027 Convention will be “extremely important,” VVA President Tom Burke said at the LC’s Opening Ceremonies on Wednesday morning, August 12, as it “will determine the future of the organization.”

The 321 VVA and AVVA members who came to Jacksonville had the opportunity to attend three in-depth presentations on proposed plans for VVA’s future. First came a 90-minute session directly after the Opening Ceremonies in which Tom Burke presented his Mission 75 plan.

That afternoon brought another 90-minute presentation entitled “Six Choices for VVA’s Future,” led by VVA Constitution Committee Chair Leslie DeLong. Mission 75 was one of the options, as was a plan to merge VVA and AVVA. Burke’s “Mission 75 Wrap Up” session, which included a generously timed open-mic Q&A, took place just before the Closing Ceremonies wrapped things up on Saturday morning.

The future of VVA also came up during countless informal gatherings throughout the week, in which conference attendees discussed and debated the plans under consideration. It appeared that the plans most likely to be presented to Convention delegates next year would be Mission 75, which would open membership in VVA to veterans who served after the current eligibility period; a consolidation of AVVA and VVA to form a new corporation with a new name; a merger of VVA into AVVA; or a nonjudicial, voluntary dissolution of VVA that would take place about six to eight years after Convention delegates approved it.

The Leadership Conference also included more than a dozen leadership-related seminars spread over three days. The lineup included a detailed report by the newly renamed VVA Historic Preservation Task Force, chaired by Steve Williams, that covered the preliminary steps the task force has taken to find an archive to house VVA’s materials and to set up a program to record and archive VVA members’ oral histories. VVA PTSD and Substance Abuse Committee Chair Tom Hall also held seminars on suicide prevention and coping with PTSD.

Furthermore, three VVA VSOs led by Marc McCabe, the organization’s Chief Veterans Service Officer, held a Q&A session on the ins and outs of VA claims-filing procedures. The seminars also included informative sessions on parliamentary procedure, legislative advocacy, and the duties of chapter and state council presidents and secretaries.

That was in addition to an array of social gatherings featuring the VVA/AVVA Officers and AVVA luncheons; the Tuesday night Welcome Home Party; the Wednesday and Friday evening dinner and music events; and the annual Saturday night Awards Banquet.

“We came to Jacksonville mainly to learn more about proposed plans for VVA’s future,” said Chattanooga, Tennessee, Chapter 203 President and National Board member Charlie Hobbs, “but we had plenty of time to see old friends and enjoy the camaraderie that VVA members look forward to at all of our gatherings.”

After Tuesday registration, the Conference officially began on Wednesday morning with the always-stirring Opening Ceremonies. The STRAC Nassau County, Florida, Color Guard presented the colors, followed by the National Anthem, the Pledge of Allegiance led by VVA Vice President John Riling, and the presentation and posting of the service flags.

Tom Burke welcomed everyone to Jacksonville, followed by AVVA President Sharon Hobbs’ welcoming remarks and then greetings from Florida State Council President and National Board member Marc Goodell on behalf, as he noted, of the host state’s 29 chapters and nearly 7,000 members.

Retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Kelly McKeague, director of the Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, was the first speaker. He noted that DPAA shares what he called VVA’s “sacred mission,” as both organizations have worked for decades for the fullest possible accounting of U.S. servicemembers missing in action in the Vietnam War.

Gen. McKeague pointed out that in the last two fiscal years, federal government budget cuts forced DPAA to reduce the number of its field missions in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos from 42 teams to 13. He urged VVA to continue its lobbying efforts in Congress to authorize more funds to increase the number of field missions.

Then came a short video highlighting VVA’s new “Note to Doctor” program, followed by the Conference keynote speaker, Dr. Philip Napoli. A Brooklyn College history professor and dean of the college’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Napoli has specialized in writing about the history of American war veterans.

He is the author of Bringing It All Back Home: An Oral History of New York City’s Vietnam Veterans and an AVVA member. In addition to his work at Brooklyn College, Dr. Napoli is working on a history of Vietnam Veterans of America with former VVA President John Rowan. He also is a volunteer adviser to the VVA Historic Preservation Task Force, which he describes as a “labor of love,” and took part in the Task Force’s seminar at the Conference.

In his passionate keynote speech, Napoli spoke about VVA’s long, distinguished history and accomplishments and about the importance of archiving the organization’s materials, no matter what path VVA chooses for its future.

“If you don’t put your history in an archive—physical, digital, or both—it will not be available for someone to save 300 years from now,” he said. “And I promise you, there will be somebody who loves the institutional records you donate and the oral histories that you record and keep. There will be an archivist somewhere who will go to extraordinary lengths to preserve what you give them.”

He ended with a plea: “I am asking you to make it possible for a person 50, 100, 300 years from now to listen to your voice, to hear your story. To know the legacy of VVA.”

Following the speech, President Tom Burke presented Phil Napoli with the VVA President’s Award for Supporting America’s Veterans.

Thursday’s highlights included a half-day of seminars; a special VVA Board of Directors meeting that focused on plans to move the National Office from Silver Spring, Maryland, including the legal and fiscal ramifications of breaking the office’s current lease; the AVVA Luncheon; and the AVVA Annual Meeting.

Friday started with the 7:00 a.m. POW/MIA ceremony and consisted of a full morning and afternoon of seminars, eight in all. The list included Dr. Molly McGaughey’s rundown on best practices for veterans and caregivers on managing the aging process and a presentation by Bill Paton, who chairs the VVA Government Affairs Committee, and James McCormick, the organization’s Executive Director of Government Affairs, on how to become an effective legislative advocate.

Saturday’s Closing Ceremonies began with the traditional open mic. Thirty-two VVA and AVVA members stepped up to voice their opinions about the Conference itself—all had nothing but praise for how things ran all week—and about the different paths for VVA’s future.

Many of the members aired their views about opening up membership to veterans of other eras, including their opinions about how many younger veterans would or would not join VVA. A good number expressed concerns about what would happen to AVVA if Mission 75 were put into place. Others commented that they hadn’t yet made up their minds about what plan to adopt for VVA’s future—or, as one person said, “right now I’ve heard more questions than answers.”

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The Saturday night Awards Banquet capped the 2026 Leadership Conference. VVA President Tom Burke and I emceed the event after Meeting Planner Wes Guidry, my longtime Awards Banquet co-emcee, abruptly announced that he was going on strike. (Although perhaps, in retrospect, that was all part of the act).

Before we presented the four awards, Tom Burke pointed out that VVA is a special and singular VSO in many ways, one of which is that we are the only national veterans service organization that regularly honors Vietnam War veterans and their supporters for outstanding work in the arts and sciences. Even further, he emphasized that VVA has been doing just that at all of our National Conventions and Leadership Conferences since 1987, a monumental achievement.

The evening’s first award recipient was U.S. Navy veteran Ron Osgood, who received the VVA Excellence in the Arts Award. Osgood served for three years aboard the aircraft carrier Oriskany in the Tonkin Gulf during the Vietnam War and is a VVA life member. He also is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker. His latest film, I Do Remember, is a personal documentary in which he tells the story of an unexpectedly eventful 1972 road trip starring himself and his old, cranky Volkswagen van.

Osgood’s other film work includes the Emmy-winning documentary Just Like Me: The Vietnam War/The American War, which weaves together stories of Americans and Vietnamese who took part in the war. He also directed the acclaimed 2010 documentary My Vietnam/Your Iraq, which appeared on PBS stations and highlights eight families of Vietnam War veterans whose children served in the Iraq War.

Shad Meshad, who in 1970 enlisted in the U.S. Army after receiving his M.A. in psychiatric social work and went on to serve as a psychiatric officer working with troops in Vietnam, received the Excellence in the Sciences Award. After coming home from the war, Meshad began a lifelong career as a veterans mental health advocate.

He founded and directed the Vietnam Veterans Re-Socialization Unit at the VA Hospital in Los Angeles in the early 1970s—the first program focusing on the readjustment problems of Vietnam War veterans. During that time, he was among the first mental health professionals to study what would become known as Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. In 1979, he created the conceptual framework for the VA’s Vet Center Program, which now serves veterans in more than 300 locations across the country.

Tom Burke then presented President’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts to two members of the cast of the groundbreaking 1986 Vietnam War movie Platoon, the first Vietnam War film written or directed by a Vietnam War veteran, in this case, both written and directed by one: Oliver Stone. The recipients had impressive accomplishments of their own. Singer, songwriter, and actor Corey Glover, who played Private Francis in Platoon, later became a founding member and lead singer of the influential, Grammy Award-winning rock band Living Colour. Actor, director, and screenwriter Paul Sanchez, who played Doc, directed, wrote, co-produced, and appeared in Platoon: Brothers in Arms, an unauthorized documentary about the making of the movie that came out in 2018.

Glover and Sanchez signed copies of a poster Wes Guidry created for the Leadership Conference for dozens of VVA and AVVA members at the reception that preceded the Awards Banquet.

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