RA.
RA is the founder of We Got You 1776, a Veteran-founded education-technology company for military families, and the Veteran who built its first product, College Tool.
He built it after running into the VA education-benefits maze while planning his own daughter's college. He did what he had spent a career doing in the Air Force, took something hard to navigate and turned it into a process a person could actually follow. He built the process first, then turned it into the app.
That was the shape of twenty-one years in uniform, most of it in Air Traffic Control. He started as a B-52 crew chief, cross-trained into Air Traffic Control, and worked every rung of it, from trainee to watch supervisor to Chief Controller across several bases. At MacDill he ran the tower through more than 52,000 aircraft operations for Special Operations, Central, and Strategic Command, and was named his major command's Air Traffic Control Facility Manager of the Year. He was part of the team behind an airshow recognized as the best in the world.
Mid-career he moved up to the Air Force Materiel Command headquarters at Wright-Patterson, where he became the Air Traffic Control career field's point of contact above the base level, with a direct line to the career field manager and the assignments chief that reached to the Pentagon. While he was there, the Space Operations mission came under the command, and he absorbed the whole thing, the same programs run without a hitch, from functional oversight and the awards program to working directly with the Space Operations Chief Controllers and flight commanders on how they organized, trained, and equipped. It was two headquarters' worth of work in one seat. He also deployed from that headquarters to a U.S. embassy in Pakistan.
His last job in uniform was one he was asked for by name, Chief Controller of the tower at Patrick Space Force Base and Cape Canaveral, two separate facilities run as one, which he held until he retired in 2024. After that he stayed on at Cape Canaveral as a civilian on the Eastern Range through 2025, where scheduling the launches and controlling the radar are normally two jobs and he did both at once. For most of the last decade, nearly every role he held was really two.
WE GOT YOU 1776, LLC came out of that same habit. He built it after making a college-benefits guide for his own daughter and finding that most military families were still planning around the old 48-month cap on combined VA education benefits, a limit that a 2013 law, Public Law 112-154, had already raised to 81 months, and that the VA’s own regulation did not formally catch up to until 2025. He runs it the way he ran the work in uniform, as a real operation, and College Tool is the first product of what he is building. He is the author of The Order Matters: A Plain-Language Guide to VA Education Benefits for Military Families, available free at wegotyou1776.com.
In 2026 he completed the VA's School Certifying Official (SCO) training, the coursework that prepares the officials who apply these education-benefit rules.
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