THE WARRIOR SAW, SUICIDES AFTER WAR on Kindle

THE WARRIOR SAW, SUICIDES AFTER WAR is available on Kindle, finally!

April 18, 2013 Military and veteran suicides are higher even though billions are spent every year trying to prevent them. After years of research most can be connected to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

PTSD has been researched for 40 years yet most of what was known has been forgotten. Families are left blaming themselves for what they were never told.

Reporters have failed to research. Congress failed at holding people accountable. The military failed at giving them the help they need. We failed to pay attention.

There are several things to think about right now. The first one is the bombings in Boston have set off mild PTSD into full-blown. Most of the OEF and OIF veterans were not prepared for what a secondary stressor could do to them.

Second Marathon bombing suspect captured yesterday was not the end of the story for them. Brigham and Women's Hospital is where the bomber has been taken after being wounded. So were many of his victims.

War medicine now is helping Boston bomb victims
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
By:Associated Press

The bombs that made Boston look like a combat zone have also brought battlefield medicine to their civilian victims. A decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has sharpened skills and scalpels, leading to dramatic advances that are now being used to treat the 13 amputees and nearly a dozen other patients still fighting to keep damaged limbs.

"The only field or occupation that benefits from war is medicine," said Dr. David Cifu, rehabilitation medicine chief at the Veterans Health Administration.

Nearly 2,000 American troops have lost a leg, arm, foot or hand in Iraq or Afghanistan, and their sacrifices have led to advances in the immediate and long-term care of survivors, as well in the quality of prosthetics that are now so good that surgeons often chose them over trying to save a badly mangled leg.

Tourniquets, shunned during the Vietnam War, made a comeback in Iraq as medical personnel learned to use them properly and studies proved that they saved lives. In Boston, as on the battlefield, they did just that by preventing people from bleeding to death.

Military doctors learned and passed on to their civilian counterparts a surgical strategy of a minimal initial operation to stabilize the patient, followed by more definitive ones days later, an approach that experience showed offered the best chance to preserve tissue from large and complex leg wounds.

Many of the National Guardsmen were there helping the wounded and had also seen what happened in Iraq as well as Afghanistan. Many of the police officers and firefighters along with emergency responders also knew the horrific wounds of war. The last thing they thought was that it could happen in their hometown.

After the massacre at Fort Hood was something the soldiers did not expect to happen in their "hometown" where they lived with their families, went shopping and to school.

It happened after September 11th 2001 when people decided to kill as many as possible. The veterans didn't expect it to happen here.

As bad as it is that none of them were prepared for the secondary stressor of the bombings in Boston, we should have learned by what happened before, but we didn't.

We should have learned what happens to veterans when they came home from Vietnam because after all, they are the ones that pushed for research and treatment. They are the reason we have psychologist, mental health professionals and crisis intervention responders.

We should have learned what happens to them after battlefield technology saved the lives of the wounded citizens we take care of in hospitals around the world, but we didn't.

If you want to know why we didn't learn from the past, it is in THE WARRIOR SAW, SUICIDES AFTER WAR. It isn't just about who took their own lives but about why. It isn't just heartbreaking stories from families, but stories from newspapers around the country that tell what else was going on so you will be just as infuriated as I am.

It is also about what we can do for them right now. If we don't, we will lose more.