How Wake Forest University Is Serving Those Who Served

Thank you for joining us this Saturday morning.

It’s fair to assume that anybody who wore the uniform of one of America’s military branches would qualify as a “veteran” under the law.

But that’s not what the law says: A less-than-honorable discharge can strip a former service member of all veteran benefits, including health care, disability compensation, and even the right to be buried in a veterans’ cemetery. 

That’s a tall price to pay for behaving poorly, though those are the rules. But what happens when the circumstances surrounding a less-than-honorable discharge are more complex? What happens if the chain of command did not recognize that the poor behavior was caused by an untreated, military-service-induced mental health condition?

The Veterans Legal Clinic inside Wake Forest University School of Law operates in that gray area on behalf of former military personnel. Under the supervision of a licensed attorney, the clinic’s law students represent former service members pro bono to “correct injustices in their military records and advocate on their behalf before the Department of Veterans Affairs,” according to its website.

We spoke to Eleanor Morales, who leads the clinic, about their work.

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Eleanor “Ellie” Morales, a 2010 Wake Forest Law graduate, took over the Veterans Legal Clinic in July 2020. She came to the job after serving in the US Army Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps, deploying to Afghanistan, and serving in the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg. In 2015, Morales transitioned to the reserves and became a federal prosecutor with the US Department of Justice, before eventually relocating to Winston-Salem for her husband’s work.

Her interest in veterans’ legal work traces back to the JAG Corps, where young attorneys often prosecute cases before later moving into defending soldiers. Working in that capacity showed Morales firsthand how untreated mental health conditions can spiral into the kind of “nonconforming behavior” that ends careers. That’s especially true of combat service members who deploy multiple times.

A less-than-honorable discharge has lifelong consequences beyond being excluded from VA benefits. These types of discharges adversely impact the service members’ financial security and ability to gain post-service employment. It can even lead to homelessness, and it increases the likelihood of dying by suicide, a risk that is already elevated among the veteran population.

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So how does the clinic operate? Morales says it runs on a “crawl, walk, run” model. Two students are assigned to each case, alongside substantive instruction in military criminal law, VA disability law, administrative law, and professional responsibility while participating in direct-client representation. Morales supervises all of the client representation, but the students are the face of the case: they call and meet with clients directly. 

Much of the work involves digging into the facts and circumstances of a specific incident. For military record corrections and discharge upgrades, students cross-reference a client’s personal account against military records to reconstruct what may have actually happened. The clinic is multidisciplinary, as the students are trained to recognize post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), and related conditions (and their symptoms), and to build rapport with the clinic client before diving into a case – “learning how to speak his language,” as Morales puts it.

Morales says representation in this area of the law is limited in the private sector and can be expensive. The Wake Forest clinic reaches as many veterans as they can, but she believes the gap in representation is likely wider here than in other states given the sheer size of North Carolina’s veteran population.

North Carolina isn’t entirely without options, though. UNC Law’s Military and Veterans Law Clinic is run by a fellow JAG Corps veteran who trained Morales herself. She calls his program “extraordinary” and describes close collaboration between the two schools. Campbell Law recently secured funding to start its own clinic, and NCCU’s clinic is led by an Army JAG veteran as well. High Point University runs a veterans clinic of its own, too.

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The clinic takes on cases that span from the ordinary to potentially historic. For example, the clinic represented Pvt. James Brown of Leland, NC, in upgrading his dishonorable discharge to fully honorable, restoring his VA eligibility, securing comprehensive health care and tax-free disability compensation. Due to the clinic’s advocacy, Brown was also awarded the Purple Heart for a combat injury during the Korean War over 70 years ago. He was finally awarded it in a ceremony that took place during halftime of a Wake Forest football game, where he received a 30,000-person ovation. At 93 years old, he is now eligible for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. The clinic was recognized nationwide for its efforts in this case when it was awarded the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) Award for Excellence In a Public Interest Case or Project in 2024.

US Rep. Pat Harrigan brought to the clinic’s attention an effort to upgrade Sergeant First Class Tommy Grasso’s Silver Star to a Medal of Honor. We wrote about SFC Grasso shortly after his untimely death earlier this year.

That kind of award upgrade is notoriously challenging. It requires new evidence, and the clinic’s students conducted interviews with numerous people across the country, including several Special Forces service members, along with other extensive factual and historical investigation, to build the case. Morales could only say that it is pending, though an upgrade of this kind ultimately requires sign-off from the President of the United States and Congress passing a law. 

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North Carolina is home to one of the largest veteran populations in the country, and the institutions built to serve that population are part of the state’s civic infrastructure. A clinic reaching so many veterans is a success story, but also a measure of how much further there is to go.