Command Sgt. Maj. Gary Iverson needs history lesson on PTSD!

More BS from a leader?

This is a stunner! The "Veteran of the Year" knows nothing about the rest of the veterans he just insulted!

This report has every war from WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam in it and all of it deals with PTSD.

I have it hanging over my desk to remind me why I do this everyday!

The report was based on research for the Forgotten Warrior Project.

"It was not until WWI that specific clinical syndromes came to be associated with combat duty." 

Because a psychiatrist was embedded with the troops. Evacuations were happening because of mental health crisis events. By WWII, psychiatric evacuations went up 300%. The report also has the Korean War and Vietnam, all before the "digital" age that you will read in the article that made my head explode so early this morning.

A Command Sergeant Major, a person of great authority and responsibility, may have just answered how the results of war, after all these years, has produced a higher number of suicides connected to the military and many, many more left out because of discharges that were not honorable. 

How the hell can a Command Sgt. Major know so little about the history of PTSD that he comes out with such nonsense?

It is heartbreaking to lose someone to suicide and addictions but that does not give him the right to insult all the veterans needing help of leaders to heal.

Veteran of Year: Too many like son die of addiction, suicide on the Houston Chronicle has this!

HATTIESBURG, Miss. (AP) — Command Sgt. Maj. Gary Iverson was named the Hattiesburg area Veteran of the Year for 2018, but he took the stage to talk about what was on his mind: the high rate of deaths in veterans from suicide and opioid overdoses. 

"The issues that the troops have today when they come back (from deployment) — they don't have the life-coping skills of World War I, World War II and Korea to deal with them," he said. "As (older veterans) were growing up as children, they understood what it was to butcher a hog or a chicken and what it took to live."Younger veterans have grown up in the digital age, he said, and don't have the same life-coping skills. "In saying that, we have got to take care of veterans in different ways than we did before."

Does he know that as of 1999, before the "digital age" the number of known veteran suicides was 20 a day?

Does he know that all the reports from the VA put more than half of the known suicides ending veterans lives were over the age of 50? Does he know that the number of veterans living in the country at the time of the above report were 5 million more than we have today? Does he know that the latest report from the VA shows the results of inept leaders failing to learn what is required to change the outcome?

What they teaching those who lead has just explained how we have arrived at a time when surviving war is deadlier than war itself. Looks like he failed to even use the "digital age" tools to do basic research before coming out with that load of FUBAR!

 But that was not all he got wrong!

"The first thing, we need to have a conversation about is suicide. We're losing 22 veterans a day. These are some of the best and brightest the country has to offer."

Yep! Does not even know that number has been changed, and what the rest of that story is.