MACV Foundation holds that America carries a vital patriotic and ethical duty to uphold the sacred promise given to every person who has served in our armed forces.

Mobilizing America’s Commitment to Veterans was founded in 2008 by Jerry D. Walker and Mary Ellen Walker. Jerry served twenty-eight and a half years as a Navy hospital corpsman, from Vietnam through the 1991 Gulf War. Mary Ellen spent twenty years as a cardiovascular intensive care and emergency department nurse, earned her master’s degree in nursing, and went on to teach the next generation of nurses. She traveled with Jerry through his entire Navy career. Between them, they had spent decades caring for people on the hardest days of their lives, and they knew what veterans needed because they had lived that life themselves.

When Jerry retired, he was elected to the Maricopa County Community College District Governing Board, where he served from 2005 to 2010. That’s where he saw the problem. Veterans were coming home to Phoenix from Iraq and Afghanistan to find their GI Bill benefits running out, or falling far short of a degree, and no path into the workforce. The Walkers started a nonprofit to fix that, alongside founding board member Doug Brown, who helped stand up the 501(c)(3).

They raised money to put veterans in school. They helped veterans file for the disability pay they’d earned. When the Post-9/11 GI Bill passed in 2008, they taught veterans how to use it. And they walked veterans of every era, from Vietnam to the Gulf War to Iraq and Afghanistan, through a VA system too complex to face alone. The help was free. Navigation was the work from day one.

The name carries weight on purpose. During the Vietnam War, MACV was the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. It was the principal U.S. joint military headquarters in South Vietnam from 1962 to 1973. Within MACV was a quieter organization, MACV-SOG, a highly classified special operations task force activated in 1964. Its members ran covert missions in South Vietnam and across the borders into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. Much of their work remained classified for decades. Many of them never got the welcome home they earned. When Jerry Walker chose those four letters, he was telling the Vietnam generation that this organization was theirs, too, and that their service would not be forgotten.