Sarah Palin Needs Military History Lesson, Quick!

This generation? Is she kidding? Palin repeated the same old line of this generation being different from others.

ALL OF THEM SERVED AND ALL OF THEM WERE NOT TAKEN CARE OF.

Among the number of those committing suicide as Palin stated to be "23" they are not even close but the majority of those veterans are over 50 Gulf War veterans, Vietnam veterans who pushed for everything done on PTSD, and Korean veterans as well as WWII veterans. Palin also didn't even bother to mention that the Congress is responsible for passing laws, rules and funding the VA along with holding people accountable.

Yep, ain't happened in generations.

Sounds like a painful speech Palin should have had Tina Fey read. Wouldn't have been a lot less draining on the ears. Oh by the way, the front of the line has been older veterans waiting even longer for everything she talked about for the newer generation.


Sarah Palin forgot that "he who sent them" was George Bush and he didn't have plans or any intention of getting the VA ready for the growing needs of our veterans. Again, history can't be changed and we know what the history of congress is when it comes to our veterans.

Palin also said that Afghanistan is the longest war. Not true either.

But the official start of the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, set by the Defense Department in 1998, is Nov. 1, 1955, when the Military Assistance and Advisory Group was established in Saigon. The official end of the Vietnam War for the Department of Veterans Affairs’ purposes is May 7, 1975. Matching that with the DoD start date would make the Vietnam War 19 years, six months long.

Vietnam Memorial Wall
The first American soldier killed in the Vietnam War was Air Force T-Sgt. Richard B. Fitzgibbon Jr. He is listed by the U.S. Department of Defense as having a casualty date of June 8, 1956.

The last American soldier killed in the Vietnam War was Kelton Rena Turner, an 18-year old Marine. He was killed in action on May 15, 1975, two weeks after the evacuation of Saigon, in what became known as the Mayaguez incident.
Others list Gary L. Hall, Joseph N. Hargrove and Danny G. Marshall as the last to die in Vietnam. These three US Marines Corps veterans were mistakenly left behind on Koh Tang Island during the Mayaguez incident. They were last seen together but unfortunately to date, their fate is unknown. They are located on panel 1W, lines 130 - 131.

Congress has had since 1946 to get the veterans in this country taken care of so the sum of all these years is, as many veterans claim, "delay, deny and wait til they die" and politicians just keep making speeches like the one Sarah Palin made.

The Committee on Veterans' Affairs of the House of Representatives was authorized by enactment of Public Law 601, 79th Congress, which was entitled "Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946." Section 121(a) of this Act provides: "there shall be elected by the House at the commencement of each Congress the following standing committees": Nineteen Committees are listed and No. 18 quotes: "Committee on Veterans' Affairs, to consist of 27 Members." This Act has since been amended so that there are now 22 Standing Committees in the House of Representatives. The number of Members (Representatives) authorized to serve on each Committee has been changed from time to time. There are currently 29 members of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs.

UPDATE From Washington Post
Sarah Palin’s inaccurate claim about suicides of veterans of the ‘war on terror’

There also were “significant limitations” in using death certificates, researchers noted. This is mainly due to the inclusion of people who were incorrectly identified as veterans on death certificates.

An updated report with data from at least 44 states is scheduled to be released this summer. The VA, CDC and Department of Defense also are working on a larger study that is expected to be the most comprehensive review of veteran suicides rates and trends.

While researchers and advocates need to know as much information as possible many things stand out and honestly, freak us out!

First, they will never really know the true count. Too many variables. Was it an accidental overdose or on purpose? Was it a true single vehicle accident or on purpose? Was the individual a member of the military or just a claim made on the form or omitted from it?

One more factor we don't talk about is that PTSD comes with a huge array of health issue from heart failure due to the stress associated with it and an ever growing list of illnesses set of by PTSD.

Ok, so not one more, add in TBI. Some still haven't figured out the two are not the same. PTSD strikes after the event caused shock and TBI happens during it when the bombs blow up and a brain is mushed around in a scull. Some suicides should be tied to TBI as well.

Whatever the finding, the conclusion is, there are far more suicides now when more is being done and that is inexcusable, but what makes all this worse is, no one really mentions that nothing about what combat does is new.

These are the numbers of Vietnam veterans who committed suicide when no one was paying attention.

According to a study by Tim A. Bullman and Han K. Yang in the Federal Practitioner 12 (3) : 9-13 (March 1995), “…no more than 20,000 Vietnam Veterans died of suicide from the time of discharge through the end of 1993″. However there are others that claim that many more veterans have died of suicide since the Vietnam War. In Chuck Deans’ book, Nam Vet., printed in 1990 by Multnomah Press, Portland, Oregon, 97226, the author states that “Fifty-eight thousand plus died in the Vietnam War. Over 150,000 have committed suicide since the war ended.” According to this book, Chuck Dean is a Vietnam Veteran who served in the 173rd Airborne, arriving in Vietnam in 1965. At the time the book was written, Mr. Dean was the executive director of Point Man International, a Seattle based, non-profit support organization dedicated to healing the war wounds of Vietnam Veterans.

But hey why bother remembering Vietnam veterans? After all, they are the ones who pushed for all the research into what was happening to them, just like all generations before them and they knew, for sure, all generations coming after them.