Flanders Fields

https://secure.qgiv.com/event/laurenelkinssupport/

We need to ask something of this community.

Daniel Elkins is a Green Beret. Four deployments. Years in the Special Forces Qualification Course. He founded the Special Operations Association of America so that the men and women who served alongside him would have someone in their corner. He has spent his entire adult life showing up for other people.

Now his wife Lauren is fighting glioblastoma, a grade 4 brain cancer, the most aggressive there is. Two weeks ago surgeons at OHSU removed a tumor from her brain. What follows is chemo, radiation, and a road most families never have to imagine. The prognosis is measured in years, not decades.

Lauren and Daniel have a twenty-two month old daughter named Sloan. She weighs about thirty pounds. For the next six months, her mother is not allowed to pick her up. Lauren cannot work, drive, or lift more than eight pounds while she fights for the time and the good days she needs to be the mother she has waited her whole life to be.

Daniel is not good at asking. He said so himself. Men who have spent their lives carrying the weight for everyone else rarely are. But he is asking now because pride cannot come before his wife having every possible day with their daughter.

Insurance covers the surgery and the treatment. It does not cover the caregiver Lauren needs. It does not cover travel, lodging, prescriptions, or the simple cost of staying afloat while a family fights to stay together. The conservative number for what is ahead is around $250,000.

This is one of our own. A Green Beret asking for help for the woman who held his entire life together while he was downrange. If you can give, give. If you can’t, share this. Pray for Lauren. Pray for Sloan. Pray for Daniel.
We will be sharing more on our own veterans soon. But today, this family needs us.

Celebrate 250 in style - Stars, Stripes, and Second chances 🇺🇸
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Flandersfields.org/freedom

Mental health doesn’t end on May 31st.

As summer arrives and calendars fill up with vacations, ballgames, cookouts, and busy schedules, it becomes easy to push self-care to the bottom of the list. But healing, rest, connection, and checking in on yourself — and on each other — matter all year long.

For many veterans, first responders, and those quietly fighting battles no one else can see, summer doesn’t make the struggle disappear. In fact, busy seasons can sometimes make isolation, anxiety, depression, and PTSD feel even heavier.

So as we head into the summer months, here’s your reminder:✔️ Check in on your buddies.✔️ Make time to rest.✔️ Ask for help when you need it.✔️ Keep showing up for yourself and others.

You don’t have to carry everything alone.

Mental health awareness may have a month, but mental health matters every single day. Let’s not let the conversation — or the care — fall off when life gets busy.

Flandersfields.org/donate

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Flandersfields.org/freedom

Celebrate 250 years in style, and help save lives at the same time 🇺🇸

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row.

Our organization takes its name from a poem written in 1915 by a soldier who watched his friends die and needed the world to know it mattered. More than a century later, that need hasn't changed.

Today is not about us. It is not about fundraising or programs or campaigns. Today belongs to the fallen. Every generation of American service has produced men and women who gave everything, and today we honor them by remembering that their sacrifice was not abstract. It was specific. It had a name, a face, a family, a life that was just getting started.

If you know a Gold Star family, reach out today. Not with a text. Make the call. Tell them their loved one is remembered. That is the only thing that matters today.

And if you want to honor the fallen by taking care of the living, the ones who came home carrying wounds that don't always show, we will be here tomorrow to help you do that.

Today, we remember.

flandersfields.org/donate

April 29, 1975. That is the day Donald Wayne Haynes graduated boot camp at Parris Island and earned the title of United States Marine. He went on to serve at Cherry Point, North Carolina, working as a mechanic on Harrier jets until an injury cut his service short with an honorable discharge in November 1977.

Fifty years later, Donald is 100% disabled and living on a fixed income. But ask anyone who knows him and they will tell you the same thing. He doesn’t slow down. He doesn’t sit still. After the Marines, he became a trim carpenter whose work is the kind people remember. He has spent his life building things and teaching the next generation of tradesmen to do the same.

He is also the kind of man who doesn’t ask for help. Stubborn in the best way. Independent to a fault. That is part of why we are stepping up for him now, because he wouldn’t do it himself.

Donald needs a reliable vehicle. For a man who has to be moving, who has spent his whole life going where the work is and helping the people in his life, that isn’t a luxury. It is how he stays himself.

This is a guy who served his country, served his trade, and served the people around him. Now it is our turn.

flandersfields.org/donate

Stars, stripes, and second chances ❤️🇺🇸

Flandersfields.org/freedom
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