The $125-million Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Failure

There was a time when I would read something like this and just shake my head. Now I start to yell at my computer. The evidence is in. It has been in since 2008. This so called program does not work. Aside from this, there was Battlemind, which basically "trained" the troops to think they could toughen their minds and if they didn't, it was their fault, they were weak. Unintentionally, that was the message they got out of the program. This is just a repeat of it.
The evidence is, the suicide rate, attempted suicide rate and the calls to the Suicide Prevention Hotline. With all the reports from the DOD there is also the numbers coming out of the VA. With these reports as bad as they are, aware people are even more saddened thinking about the numbers of servicemen and women not counted in either report. They are discharged, so not the military's problem anymore and they haven't been able to get a service connected disability from the VA, so the VA doesn't count them.
The good thing is that the reporter, Kim Murphy, pointed out that there are experts saying this does not work. I trust the experts I've been learning from for almost 30 years. There are many "programs" that do work but somehow this one got the blessing and funding no matter what the results have been.

Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program aims to equip troops mentally Brig. Gen. Rhonda Cornum of Gulf War fame has been deployed to lead the military's new program to prepare soldiers for the psychic trauma of war and its aftermath. By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times December 26, 2011
Reporting from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash.— Brig. Gen. Rhonda Cornum found out what combat stress was in the back of a pickup during the first Gulf War in 1991 when one of her Iraqi captors unzipped her flight suit and, as she lay there with two broken arms and an injured eye, sexually assaulted her.
The reed-thin Army physician, whose Black Hawk helicopter had been shot down, became a symbol of everything America was worried about in sending women to war. Her successful return home — sane and not that much the worse for her ordeal — became a powerful argument for the irrelevance of gender in conditions of indiscriminate violence.

The $125-million Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program requires soldiers to undergo the kind of mental pre-deployment tests and training that they have always had to undergo physically. Already, more than 1.1 million have had the mental assessments.

read more here

When you grow up in a family where everyone has a PhD from the school of "talk it to death" it is hard to let anything brew.  Too many times I faced death starting with an alcoholic father who liked to beat up my oldest brother and cause general trauma on a daily basis.  He stopped drinking when I was 13 but the damage was done.  Done to my brothers and my Mom but somehow I was able to just forgive him.  I was changed by growing up the way I did but I didn't end up with PTSD.

When I was 4, I took off from my brothers and headed up the "big kids" slide at the drive-in movie.  I wasn't supposed to go up it on my own but I had a hard time following rules or understanding why my Mom had them.  At the top, I was afraid to go down.  The kid behind me didn't want to wait, so he pushed me.  I went over the side, falling head first on the concrete.  My skull was cracked and I ended up with Traumatic Brain Injury, but no one knew what it was at the time.  It was not until years later research came out about head trauma.  I had a speech impediment and was afraid of heights for many years into adulthood but no PTSD.

I had a serious car accident.  I could have been killed.  As a mater of fact, I thought I was going to die, so I let go of the wheel, covered my face, because I knew my Mom would be furious if she couldn't have an open casket for the Greek funeral.  My parents picked me up at the hospital, drove to where the car was, made me look at it, and then, they did the best thing they could have done.  They made me drive home. I was afraid of that highway for a long time, but no PTSD.

My ex-husband of a year and a half, came home from work one night and decided it was a good idea to  start beating me.  He came close to killing me but our landlord started pounding on the door and called the police.  He snapped out of whatever possessed him and was in shock.  I was afraid every time someone raised their hand for a while after that, but no PTSD.


After my daughter was born, I didn't feel right.  I was tired all the time.  She was my first, so I thought the way I felt was normal.  8 months after, I couldn't get up out of bed.  My husband, the one I'm still married to, got me to the doctor and I had a fever of 104.  By the time I got to the hospital it was 105.  To tell the truth, I was so miserable, I wanted to die and even prayed for it until I thought about my baby and wanted to live. It turned out that a bladder infection after she was born never cleared up and I became septic. My doctor said he had never seen a bacteria count that high on a live patient. Again, no PTSD.

All these years later, I couldn't understand why I didn't have PTSD since I am a very sensitive person.  It just didn't make sense until I started to go through training for crisis intervention.  Then it all made sense.  Talking about it, making things "normal" enough to talk about with people I trusted made all the difference in the world.  The other big factor was my faith.  Being able to forgive the people who hurt me allowed me to move past what they did.  Being able to forgive myself, helped me to forgive everything.

My fears are gone for the most part.  I drive on highways, but avoid them when I can.  I fly when I have to without fear taking control, but it took a lot of flights to be able to say that.  I still avoid rides at amusement parks that are high off the ground because to me, they are still not much fun.

When it seems as if everyone around you is walking away fine from what is taking control over you, you don't want to admit it.  You may feel less than they are.  Less tough than they are.  For me, I had a strong mind already, just like the men and women in the military, so getting their minds tough is a waste of time since you can't get more tougher than being able to do what they do.  The thing that works is being able to talk about it with someone you trust and a strong faith the way it should be.

Thinking that God did it to you can destroy that connection, no matter what faith you practice.  Believing God saved you spares you all the questions you have running around your head.  You can move past "why me" faster.  Understanding what trauma does to a human, helps you to forgive what it is doing to you so you don't feel as if you have to suffer with it, hide it or deny it.  For me there is no doubt that I escaped PTSD because of the support I received and the faith I held onto.  Neither one was perfect.

There were times when I blamed God but those times didn't last long.  There were times when someone in my family said the wrong thing, but I knew they loved me anyway.  There were time when I just wanted to be left alone but my friends wouldn't let me be alone.  All in all, this is how you avoid PTSD or heal from what trauma does to you faster.  One more thing is, understand that no one is ever the same after trauma.  It changes everyone even if they don't end up with PTSD.


If you needed any more evidence, here is another report from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, the same base Brig. Gen. Rhonda Cornum is from. There have been too many reports from here that have not been positive. Keep in mind that this approach has been around for a long time and what they are doing is not new.

A military base 'on the brink' The toll of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is catching up with the Washington state communities near Joint Base Lewis-McChord in the form of suicides, slayings and more.

At Joint Base Lewis-McChord, described by the independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes last year as "the most troubled base in the military," all of these factors have crystallized into what some see as a community-wide crisis. A local veterans group calls it a "base on the brink."

By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times December 26, 2011 Reporting from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash.— Mary Coghill Kirkland said she asked her son, 21-year-old Army Spc. Derrick Kirkland, what was wrong as soon as he came back from his first deployment to Iraq in 2008.
He had a ready answer: "Mom, I'm a murderer."
He told her how his team had kicked in the door of an Iraqi house and quickly shot a man inside. With the man lying wounded on the floor, "my son got ordered by his sergeant to stand on his chest to make him bleed out faster," Kirkland said. "He said, 'We've got to move, and he's got to die before we move.'"
Not long after, Derrick told her, he had fallen asleep on guard duty, awakening as a car was driving through his checkpoint. He yelled for it to stop, but the family in the car spoke no English. "So my son shot up the car," she said.
Summing up her son's mental state after that deployment, Kirkland said: "What's a nice word for saying that he was completely [messed] up?"
Kirkland relates the remaining years of her son's life as if reading a script: He was depressed by his wife's request for a divorce. On a second deployment in Iraq, he was caught putting a gun in his mouth and evacuated on suicide watch to Germany. There, he tried to overdose on pills. He was flown back to his home base here in Washington state. After a brief psychiatric evaluation, he was left alone in his room. He hanged himself with a cord in his closet.
Apparently worried that no one would notice, Spc. Kirkland left a note on the door of the locker in his room. "In the closet, dead," it said. read more here