WHEELING — After two days on the road across West Virginia, visiting posts, meeting veterans and listening to their concerns, American Legion National Commander Dan Wiley wrapped up his statewide tour in a place steeped in history — the nation’s oldest American Legion post.

Wiley concluded his trip Tuesday at American Legion Post 1 in Wheeling, whose first meeting was held March 1, 1919, just months after the organization was founded. For Post 1 Commander Tom Abell, the visit carried special significance.

“He saved the best for last,” Abell joked. “That’s what the commander does. He visits all the states and visits all the posts that he can. He’s on the road quite a bit and has been living out of a suitcase for quite a while.”

Wiley has been doing just that since being elected National Commander Aug. 28, traveling the country to connect with the organization’s grassroots membership and bring their concerns back to the national stage.

“I’ve been in West Virginia since Sunday,” Wiley said. “We arrived in Virginia and went to Charleston where we spent the night and we traveled in the Eastern Panhandle yesterday and the Northern Panhandle today. We have stopped at seven different posts and we’ve had some really good turnouts.”

The stop in Wheeling capped a busy tour across the state that included several posts on Tuesday escorted by American Legion Riders.

“We visited seven posts today and we had a great escort, by the way, the American Legion Riders — 15 to 20 motorcycles that escorted us everywhere we went plus law enforcement,” Wiley said.

Wiley said visiting local posts is a critical part of his role as national commander, allowing him to hear directly from veterans and community leaders.

“The National Commander — there’s only one of us — and travels around the country,” Wiley said. “Having the National Commander come into posts like this is important because this is the leader of your organization at the national level. When the national commander comes in, it’s big for these communities.”

The American Legion is the nation’s largest veterans service organization, with about 1.5 million members and roughly 12,000 posts nationwide. Wiley said those local posts are often the backbone of small communities.

“There’s about 5,000 Walmarts in this country,” he said. “We have 12,000 posts in the American Legion nationwide. I get that Walmart is a big conglomerate, but we are more prevalent in a lot of small communities and in a lot of those communities, especially smaller communities, the Legion is the backbone. They are the center of the community. They take care of one another and take care of veterans.”

The National Commander spends much of the year traveling to maintain those connections.

“We are on the road 340 days out of the year,” Wiley said. “We left home Jan. 11 and our next day home since Jan. 11 is March 25. So that’s 73 days straight of being on the road.”

Since his election, Wiley said he has traveled extensively across the United States and abroad, representing the organization at major events and meetings.

“We will visit all 50 states. We will visit 10 foreign countries and territories,” he said. “For example, we were at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7. We will be in Normandy on June 6. We’ve been to Washington, D.C., five or six times. We met with the president in the Oval Office. We’ve testified in front of Congress.”

While the visits celebrate the Legion’s community presence, Wiley said the organization’s top priority at the national level is addressing veteran suicide.

“Our primary mission at the national level is to be the one campaign that deals with suicide,” he said. “We believe that veteran suicide is the biggest epidemic and biggest crisis facing our veterans and our families.”

According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 6,398 veterans died by suicide in 2023 — an average of about 17.5 per day.

The American Legion’s “Be The One” initiative aims to reduce those numbers by raising awareness and encouraging people to support veterans in crisis.

“So we are having the conversation first off, more and more about mental health and trying to reduce the stigma of mental health and making sure people get the help they need,” Wiley said. “That it’s OK to not be OK.”

Through the initiative, the organization provides suicide-prevention training using the Columbia Protocol, which teaches participants how to approach veterans, ask questions about their mental health and listen for warning signs.

“We’ve trained about 25,000 nationwide right now,” Wiley said. “We are here to help them — whether it’s something as simple as a referral to 988, which is a suicide hotline, to taking them to get emergency help, or just listening to them and being a sounding board.”

In addition to suicide prevention, the American Legion also advocates for veterans through federal legislation and policy.

Wiley said the organization was involved in efforts surrounding a December executive order by President Donald Trump to reclassify cannabis from a Schedule I to a Schedule III controlled substance.

On Dec. 18, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to move marijuana to Schedule III, a classification that acknowledges potential medical uses and reduces restrictions that have limited research.

“And to give you some insight into what a Schedule 1 drug is, that’s cocaine,” Wiley said. “You can say a lot of things about cannabis, but it’s not cocaine.”

Wiley said the Legion has advocated for years to allow more research into cannabis as a possible treatment for conditions that disproportionately affect veterans, including post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injuries, chronic pain and depression.

“We believe that by allowing this federal research eventually what it’s going to show is that marijuana is another tool that people have in their toolbox to treat these conditions,” he said.

As his West Virginia tour came to a close in Wheeling, Wiley emphasized that visits like the one to Post 1 help ensure the voices of local veterans are heard at the national level.

“You’ve got to know what veterans are concerned about at the local level — the grassroots level — to be able to take that to Washington,” he said.

For those interested in joining or learning more about the organization, Wiley said information is available online.

“We are the largest veterans organization at 1.5 million veterans across the country,” he said. “If somebody wants information in regards to the American Legion, whether they want to belong or learn more about what we do, they can go to legion.org.”

And for Post 1 — more than a century after its founding — hosting the national commander was a reminder of the organization’s enduring mission.

From community service to national advocacy, the work of the American Legion, Wiley said, still begins at the local post.