He had been trained as a forward observer — the person who spots a target and gives coordinates to artillery — but when he got to Iraq, the then 19-year-old instead found himself photographing dead bodies for intelligence gathering. A suicide attempt before his second deployment triggered a less than honorable discharge and a long fight to gain honorable status after being diagnosed with PTSD.

Goldsmith credits the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs medical staff with saving his life.

The VA and its partner mental health providers have kept thousands of veterans in treatment during the coronavirus pandemic through telehealth appointments. But as job losses and increased social isolation take an extended toll, some veterans’ advocates worry the already understaffed VA medical facilities can’t keep up and that telehealth isn’t enough.

“After years of self-imposed isolation … I was really in need of person-to-person contact,” said Goldsmith, now the assistant director of policy at Vietnam Veterans of America. “Flash forward almost 13 years now since I got out, and telehealth is right for me.”

The VA on Friday kicked off a “Now is the Time” campaign aimed at alerting veterans and their families to the mental health resources that are available to them.

But veterans advocates still are waiting for a report by a White House task force established by President Donald Trump last year that was charged with developing a national roadmap to boost mental health care and stem persistently high suicide numbers among veterans, who have been hard hit in the pandemic.

Release of the task force report had been scheduled in March but was abruptly shelved due to the outbreak.

“We are not happy about this decision because we understand that there are partnerships and financial resources tied to this plan that we’d like to see implemented immediately,” said Chanin Nuntavong, executive director of The American Legion’s Washington office.

VA Secretary Robert Wilkie told veterans groups in a call last week that the draft report was being finalized but declined to give a release date.

An administration official, who requested anonymity to reveal internal deliberations, told The Associated Press that officials planned to unveil the plan around Memorial Day. Karen Pence, wife of the vice president, will help launch the effort.

VA officials said telehealth medical appointments jumped from 20,000 in February to nearly 154,000 in April. Many of the department’s partners have moved most or all of their mental health appointments to telehealth, including the Cohen Veterans Network which transitioned 98% of patients at its 15 clinics.

The VA has provided some veterans with tablets, phones and affordable data rates through several private partnerships. Dr. Matt Miller, acting director of the VA’s suicide prevention program, said veterans aren’t waiting long for telehealth sessions, but only wait times for in-person appointments are tracked.

Sherman Gillums Jr., the chief advocacy officer for AMVETS, said telemedicine is likely saving lives, but it is also likely missing some older or less tech savvy veterans. He wants the VA to move veterans with canceled appointments to the front of the line when things reopen and make more inpatient beds immediately available.

“I just don’t want them to oversell telemedicine. We had it before when veteran suicide became an issue, and it wasn’t a fix,” Gillums said.

Gillums said a suicide prevention tool created by AMVETS to train family members to spot signs of suicidal thoughts before a veteran gets to a crisis could help families during stay-at-home orders.

For years, the government reported that 20 veterans die by suicide each day, about 1.5 times higher than non-veterans. Last fall, the VA adjusted the methodology to remove from the count some active-duty service members and former members of the National Guard and Reserve, updating the veteran suicide rate to 17 a day based on 2017 data, the most recent available. There were 6,139 suicide deaths in 2017, which is up 129 from the previous year, even as the total veteran population declined.

The government says about two-thirds of those were not under VA care, pointing to a need for improved outreach.

“We have been very busy during the COVID crisis — with our efforts focused on getting in front of the mental health crisis that we know is coming,” Barbara Van Dahlen, executive director of the task force, told the AP. The group has boosted social media efforts during the pandemic.

At Cohen Veterans Network, website traffic has increased, including a spike between midnight and 4 a.m. Saturdays when people are alone or experiencing insomnia.

Anthony Hassan, the president and chief executive officer of Cohen, said he doesn’t believe the country’s mental health system is prepared for the surge likely to happen from the pandemic. Cohen is opening 10 new centers by the end of next year and hiring more staff.

“The one thing I don’t want to be is too late… We need to be talking now about how we can make sure we are ahead of this,” Hassan said.

Staff have set up online groups— yoga classes, mindfulness training, sessions about unemployment — to help veterans and families cope.

Chad Sneary was only a few hours into his shift at a Mooresville, North Carolina, manufacturing plant when he was laid off in early April. The 43-year-old, who served six years in the Marine Corps and two in the Ohio National Guard, insisted on working his full shift.

Sneary and his family are surviving on pantry items and hoping he is approved for unemployment soon.

“Financial skills is not something the military ever taught you. Most of us live paycheck to paycheck,” he said.

New government statistics released Friday show the unemployment rate among veterans in April was 11.7%, up from 2.3% a year earlier. The overall unemployment last month was 14.7%.

The Independence Fund, a nonprofit that helps critically wounded service members, has received hundreds of financial requests and is struggling to meet a nearly 600% increase in need.

Meanwhile, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America has seen an almost 25% increase in the hundreds of calls to its rapid response hotline for veterans in crisis. Jeremy Butler, the group’s chief executive officer, said the largest increases are requests for financial, housing or mental health referrals.

Goldsmith, who has spent years advocating for other veterans, worries about the trauma that national guard members, first responders and others are experiencing and whether they will get care.

“There is going to be a lot of survivors’ guilt,” he said. “People don’t die from PTSD in the midst of war. When they sit with these new fresh raw memories, that’s when PTSD takes lives.”

Lauer reported from Philadelphia, and Yen reported from Washington. AP Economics Writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this report.

But on Monday, Dominic, 86, and his brother Victor, 91, stood on a tarmac in Philadelphia to greet Emil’s remains as he finally made it home, accompanied from Atlanta by a Marine honor guard and then escorted to a funeral home by state police.

Their mother, who died many years ago, had yearned for such a day. She had buried another son who died in the war and had always hoped Emil could be returned, too.

“My mother always had that on her mind. ‘I want my boy back. I want my boy back,'” Dominic said. “To me, it seemed like a hopeless task.”

Dominic and Victor are the last survivors of an 11-sibling family.

Five brothers fought in the war and two died less than 90 days apart. Nicholas, killed in Italy in 1944, was brought home right after the war. Emil, who died in 1943, remained lost on the Central Pacific atoll of Tarawa, where more than 1,000 Marines were killed in a three-day battle as they stormed the beach.

In 1949, the military notified hundreds of families, including the Raguccis, that their loved ones were unrecoverable, listing them as either unknown or lost at sea.

And for decades, Dominic and his siblings assumed they would never know for sure what happened to Emil.

But a little more than a decade ago, Dominic— who served in the military after World War II along with two other brothers — met a veteran who had fought at Tarawa and gave him some contact information.

A support group for descendants of Tarawa veterans was helpful. They explained that many men who died in the battle were buried in makeshift graveyards and were moved without diligent record-keeping to make way for an airstrip on the island midway between Hawaii and Australia.

But that didn’t necessarily mean Emil was buried on the island. Many men had been washed out to sea as they were gunned down getting off the boats and storming the beach.

A breakthrough came as a result of the work of History Flight Inc., a nonprofit group of forensic anthropologists, archaeologists and other volunteers formed to help repatriate the remains of American soldiers missing in action.

In 2013, they found what was labeled Cemetery 33, a small plot of land with a couple dozen sets of remains. The Department of Defense arranged to fly them to its forensic anthropology lab in Hawaii. Others would continue to be found.

Over the past few years, the lab has managed to identify roughly one person a day through a painstaking process that catalogs, pulls DNA and segregates bones and artifacts for each soldier, said Maj. Jessie Romero, a public affairs officer. The lab works on hundreds of sets of remains at a time.

Depending on the age and condition of the remains, it can be difficult to get a usable sample of DNA. The samples are sent to a facility in Dover, Delaware, where they are analyzed and compared to any samples on file from family.

Six years ago, Dominic contacted the Marines and requested a kit to submit his DNA. Last November, the Marines called to say Emil’s remains had been identified in those found by History Flight.

“I feel very bad that those boys were out there all that time unaccounted for and not appropriately attended to,” Dominic said.

Dominic was just a boy when he answered the door for a telegram two days before Christmas in 1943. His older sister, Aurora, took the telegram and read it to his mother, Carmela, who had come to the U.S. from Italy with her husband Nicola and several children.

“My sister read the telegram and was horrified and screamed. And my mother just broke down,” he said.

He still has the telegram, protected by plastic.

Emil was 19 when he was sent to basic training. He had pleaded with his parents and recruited his four older brothers to persuade them to sign off on his going on active duty.

Dominic recalled his brother rattling off baseball statistics for every player from the late 1930s and 1940s. He remembered a handsome teenager, well-liked in the neighborhood, who always wanted to be a Marine.

The funeral will be Tuesday. Emil will be buried near his brother Nicholas and his parents. He would be 94 were he alive today.

“My father was bitter from a political perspective. My mother was just sad because her heart was damaged. That’s always going to be the case. … Mothers get it here, they hurt here,” Dominic said, pointing to his heart.

“We were blessed in a sense. We had good parents, family that stuck together,” he said. “It’s hard to articulate how they would feel, but I think they’d be happy.”

Arkansas Tech University this month launched a new college, the eTech College, to streamline services for students who take classes online. The University of Arkansas System will begin taking applications Sept. 1 for “eVersity,” a separate university that offers lower cost classes for students who complete degrees entirely online.

Organizers of both programs hope to serve the estimated 350,000 Arkansans who started college but never earned a bachelor’s degree. They also hope to overcome anticipated hurdles in a state with a large rural population that ranks low for high-speed Internet access.

Hanna Norton, the dean of the eTech College at Russellville’s Arkansas Tech, said the initiative will consolidate existing resources and educators hope to offer a streamlined experience for online learners.

“My goal is to help students through this, to hold their hand from the moment they contact us, all the way through graduation,” she said.

Arkansas Tech has already helped 1,071 students with previous college experience finish degrees through its Bachelor of Professional Studies program since 2010.

Norton said the university trains professors to design engaging course material that stays below a certain size: large files take longer to download and increase the likelihood that students will have computer problems.

The university also suggests what kinds of computers and Internet access students should have before enrolling. Norton said only a few of the students who have dropped out of the courses have cited technology problems as the reason.

“We did surveys of those people … it wasn’t a matter of connectivity, it was life stepping in the way,” she said. “It was a ‘Hallelujah’ moment for us to say, ‘OK, it’s not the technology. We’re OK.'”

Michael Moore, the vice president for academic affairs at the University of Arkansas System, said his staff has been working to ensure technological issues, “life” or poverty don’t get in the way.

For starters, Moore said, the university will charge $495 per course but under a waiver from the Arkansas Legislature the eVersity won’t charge fees for health centers, materials or other facilities not used by online students.

The eVersity program is also designed in small increments — one course every six weeks with a one-week break between. A person with a job, children and other responsibilities can focus on learning one subject area at a time and not spend hours every day with course work, Moore said.

Students will also go through a free orientation to assess how they learn and what challenges they’re facing.

“We want to learn what kinds of messages or encouragements will prompt individual students to continue the work,” Moore said.

Students who attend classes on a campus use the state’s high-capacity Internet infrastructure shared by universities. But according to the U.S. Census, about 38 percent of Arkansans don’t have access to high speed Internet because of cost or availability.

“This is where motivation to get the degree is going to come in to play,” Moore said. “There will be literally a map of every county in the state, where we’ll show free points of Internet access whether it’s a church, a hotel, a restaurant.”

The governor called legislators back to Little Rock for a special session that wrapped up Thursday, listing the potential incentive package as the top agenda item. The incentive proposal calls for issuing bonds if Lockheed Martin is the successful bidder for a military vehicle assembly contract for its Camden facility.

The bonds won’t be issued unless Lockheed wins the contract, which is expected to be awarded late this summer.

“They’re in a very competitive position,” Hutchinson said. “I’ve tried to do my own background research, talk to the federal delegation … my sources at the Defense Department just as to what are the opportunities here. And I think they’re good, but it is a competitive environment.”

Two other companies — Indiana-based AM General and Wisconsin-based Oshkosh Defense — also are pursuing the contract as the U.S. military seeks to replace the Humvee.

The proposal received wide support from both chambers, passing 90-0 in the House and 30-2 in the Senate.

Mike Preston, executive director of the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, said he believes the incentive package will give the Camden facility an advantage in its proposal.

“The showing of support from the Legislature, and knowing that you have such a supportive governor to pass this package that Lockheed Martin is now going to be able to put as part of their proposal, really helps their pricing when they’re in front of the Department of Defense,” Preston said.

He said the contract will help the company keep more than 500 jobs and bring close to 600 more to the state. Preston said additional jobs from suppliers and other support companies also could move into the state.

If Arkansas wins the bid, it would be the second time the state issues bonds under a 2004 voter-approved constitutional amendment aimed at helping land major economic deals. Lawmakers two years ago approved $125 million in bonds for a steel mill under construction in east Arkansas.

Arkansas officials say they expect the state to pay off the bonds in 15 to 20 years. The state would spend between $109 million and $122 million for the bond repayment and interest, depending on how the bonds are structured.

Hutchinson also signed other bills Friday along with a resolution passed during the special session. They included a bill approving a one-year plan to move Arkansas’ primaries from May to March in 2016 and a bill that will consolidate several smaller state agencies into larger ones.

As With the two-year anniversary of the Veterans Welcome Home Commitment program approaches, which the company launched on Memorial Day 2013, approaching, the retail giant announced Wednesday that it is expanding its original plan to hire 100,000 veterans by 2018 to hire a total of 250,000 recently discharged veterans by 2020.

Chris Sultemeier, executive vice president for logistics at Wal-Mart, said the company has been pleased with the skills that the veterans bring to a range of positions including retail, distribution and management. He said about 8,000 of the original hires have been promoted.

“Veterans work. They’re disciplined. They’re teamwork focused. They have a hard work ethic. They’re typically committed and loyal,” said Sultemeier, who is an Army veteran. “What we are looking for in an associate and what the military teaches them … it just matches.”

Waits, 25, says he doesn’t mind the early mornings or the structured day. He manages about 45 employees at the distribution center who load and unload trailers.

If the company is successful, the 250,000 veterans would make up close to 20 percent of the retailer’s 1.3 million U.S. workers.

Sultemeier said there are high concentrations of veteran hires near large military bases like Fort Hood in Texas or Fort Bragg in North Carolina. But the company also has helped qualified veterans, who have been honorably discharged since Memorial Day 2013, find work in areas where there are often fewer job options.

In many parts of rural Arkansas, manufacturing and other once-common jobs have migrated to other parts of the country or the world, said Terre McLendon, the director of Community and Industry Studies at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s Institute for Economic Advancement.

“The rural areas in Arkansas and probably a great deal of the U.S. have fewer opportunities today than has been the case in the past, and the kinds of opportunities are limited for them,” McLendon said, also noting that Arkansas-based Wal-Mart got its start by building stores in rural communities.

Bentonville, where Wal-Mart’s corporate headquarters is based, has about 40,000 residents — not rural compared to many places in Arkansas. But it was a more affordable place for Waits and his wife to raise their two children. The Cincinnati native knew he planned to move to the area when he was discharged from the Marines after four years of active duty and two tours in Afghanistan.

Waits said he applied for positions at several companies, but in the end Wal-Mart’s veteran initiative swayed him.

“I wanted to work for a company that wanted me,” Waits said. “It wasn’t a thing where they said, ‘We’re going to do this good deed.’ It was more that I had the skills they wanted, and they wanted me to earn the job. It was more than just publicity. It was genuine.”

Pvt. William Long of Conway was killed and Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula of Jacksonville was wounded when Abdulhakim Muhammad opened fire on the soldiers on June 1, 2009, as they entered the recruiting station on Rodney Parham Road in Little Rock. The announcement by U.S. Sens. John Boozman and Tom Cotton and Rep. French Hill marks the end of a long quest for the soldiers and their families, the delegation said.

Pvt. Long’s father, Daris Long said he didn’t “know how to act right now” when he was reached by phone late Thursday.

“It’s been five years, eight months and 16 days since my son was killed. There really isn’t any closure; there’s that vacancy in your life for what could have been. I was adamant that this would not stand as just a drive by shooting in Arkansas. It was bigger than that,” he said.

The determination that the soldiers could be awarded the medals for sacrifice while serving their country was made possible by language Boozman inserted in the National Defense Authorization Act. The measure allows Purple hearts to be awarded to military members killed or wounded in an attack that specifically targets them because they are a member of the U.S. Armed Forces or is carried out by a foreign terrorist organization.

Before the law change, only military members injured, killed or who later died because of injuries obtained serving on foreign soil were eligible for the medal.

“There’s an anger on how it was treated. It’s upsetting that you have to enact laws to do the proper thing,” he added. “The battlefield is here and it will be different in the future because of this.”

A call to Ezeagwula’s mother was not returned Thursday.

Tre Kitchens, an associate at the Brad Hendricks Law Firm in Little Rock, represented the families in many of the appeals filed over the last six years. Kitchens said Thursday that he ultimately was not responsible for the change that will allow the two soldiers to receive the medals and the benefits that come with them, but he was honored to have helped.

“The bullets are still in Mr. Ezeagwula. Every day, every step he takes he remembers that the U.S. thought he wasn’t shot on the right piece of ground. Nothing will take that bullet out. Nothing will bring that young man back. But I’m gratified that their sacrifice is finally being honored,” he said.

Cotton and Hill called the decision “long overdue.” Boozman agreed in his statement, saying the two soldiers”rightfully deserve” the honor.

Muhammad is serving a life sentence after pleading guilty to capital murder and attempted capital murder in the shootings that he said were in retaliation for U.S. policy in the Middle East.