The most important action a provider can take to ensure that a veteran receives optimal health care is perhaps the easiest and, ironically, the most neglected: asking if a patient has served in the military and taking a basic military history. In previously published articles, Jeffrey Brown1 and Ross Boyce,2 physicians with prior military service, reported that their own health care providers had rarely asked about their service. For Dr Brown, in the four decades since his combat service in Vietnam, he noted
