"These failures almost took my husband from me. Multiple times over 3 years. His time now is for resting and recovery. Mine is for fighting to get him, and people like him, care that fits their complex injuries. I don't ever want another family to go through what we've been through especially when so much of it could have been prevented with the right care in the first place."

Taylor McGowanFounder, Behind The 22

Behind The 22 is built in honor of my husband:

My husband, Michael, is a former USMC Sergeant who deployed with HMLA-169 attached to the 15th MEU (Special Operations Capable) in 2001, part of the element that stood up Camp Rhino, the first American base in Afghanistan, and returned for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Afterward, he spent his career on the other side of the rescue as a firefighter, an EMT, K9 search-and-rescue, and a caseworker for homeless veterans.

He has an extensive head and spinal injury history, heavy toxic exposure, severe PTSD, autonomic dysfunction, a heart pacemaker in his mid-40s, and more. The lack of knowledge at the care level for his health issues - which could also be considered a progressive version of "operator syndrome" - led to multiple suicide attempts. Once we were finally able to find an operationally functional VA, they were able to save his life.

Now it's time to fix the issues that led to his harm and others who we've already lost.

The person behind this

I'm Taylor McGowan. My background is in forensic management accounting, systems engineering and quantitative model-building where I'm trained to follow a paper trail until it actually explains what happened and why, not just what got reported. I've spent years working in messy enterprise systems and software engineering, the same skill set used for Behind The 22's own research tools.

When I'm not focused on Mike or working on BT22 I'm working toward a bachelor's degree in human systems engineering, with a minor in medical physics, (restarting 2027) the same two disciplines Behind The 22's research is actually built on: one for understanding the physical mechanisms behind an injury, the other for understanding how the systems around a person produce, or fail to produce, the outcome they end up with.

I'm working toward VA claims agent accreditation as well (for research only no client spots), and I plan to pursue a JD closing the gap between finding a systemic problem and actually being able to do something about it.

Before any of this had a name, I did corrective strength training with those who had complex health issues and injuries. A significant amount of my clients were veterans and first responders or other high-risk occupations. I even taught other trainers for 10+ years. translating scientific knowledge into practical application. I built an intensive in person 100-hour training program for advanced/master trainers in 2013 and over 50 trainers completed the full program. I've had extensive hands-on training for injury and health assessment long before there was a research organization or a caseload behind it. It's still the same work. It's just at a different scale now.

You can see more details about my background on my LinkedIn here.

Independent on purpose

This can't be run by VA, DoD, or any organization with a stake in the outcome, not as a judgment against the people who work inside those systems, just as a matter of basic incentives. An organization with something to protect can't fully investigate itself. Behind The 22 answers to the people it serves, and to no one else.

Almost none of this is secret

What we find comes from public inspector general reports, court records, and policy documents not hidden files. The problem was never that this information was secret. It's that the system is so siloed, and so sprawling, that almost no one has the vantage point to connect it. When something genuinely goes beyond public record, we bring in real legal support alongside everything else we've already documented.

Support that doesn't exist yet

We're working to build real, in-person volunteers who can walk alongside someone through operational, policy, and workflow advocacy not legal aid, not crisis support, but the specific, unglamorous work of pushing a broken process to actually change. That kind of support doesn't currently exist for this community. We intend to build it.

We want our research picked apart. Every claim we make is built from public documentation and hard evidence - historical records, government reports, court decisions - precisely so that anyone can check it. The more people who understand how to verify this kind of evidence, and how to advocate for themselves and others with it, the better. We're not interested in being the only ones who can do this work.

That same openness applies to what we intend to build with it. We're not planning to stay passive by documenting problems and hoping someone else acts. We intend to draft actual legislation from what we find, modeled directly on our own evidence.

Want to see the actual research this comes from? Our open case files and everything behind them are on the research page.

A mutual-aid and research organization correcting the root cause of institutional harm.

Behind The 22 is a mutual-aid and research organization. Nothing on this site is medical advice, legal advice, or a VA/DoD claim of any kind, and no information here should be used as a substitute for consulting a qualified medical or legal professional about your own situation. Case information we collect is handled under a written consent protocol and is used, in de-identified and aggregated form, to identify recurring patterns never to authorize us to contact any agency, provider, or third party on a person's behalf without separate, explicit permission.

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