WHY IS FACEBOOK BLOCKING ADS TO HELP VETERANS?

Facebook needs to explain themselves to veterans!

Combat PTSD Wounded Times and PTSD Patrol
Kathie Costos
November 13, 2018

Facebook notified me that I should boost a post, and then turned it down. Why? Read what they sent.

This is my reply!

What was so offensive? UCF Restores and the program they have helping veterans heal PTSD!

Stunning when you consider they must be making a boat load of money off of the folks raising money to "raise awareness" they are talking about suicides. 

Read the post and then you decide if it had anything to do with politics! UCF Restores Hope

The good thing is that they did allow all of them after I protested. The question is, what are they going to do TO STOP DOING THIS?

POTUS wants mail in ballots from troops excluded?

President Trump Attacked Mail-In Ballots in Florida. Here Are the Facts

TIME
By ABIGAIL ABRAMS
November 13, 2018

Members of the U.S. military, their families and other U.S. citizens living overseas can also vote by mail thanks to the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. States are required to send ballots to these voters at least 45 days before a federal election.

Advocates for overseas voters harshly criticized President Donald Trump for arguing that some mail-in ballots shouldn’t be counted as he spread a conspiracy theory about Florida’s elections on Monday.

In a tweet on Monday, Trump called for the state to stop counting ballots and stick with the results from Election Night, a move that while circumventing state law would also disenfranchise members of the military and civilians overseas, whose ballots can arrive until Nov. 16 and still be counted.

“These overseas and military voters, the worst thing for them is to hear our country’s leaders saying don’t count these votes,” said Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, president and CEO of the U.S. Vote Foundation, a nonprofit that helps overseas voters cast their ballots. “They go to incredible lengths to send their ballots back.”

Some states also don’t require that the counting be finished immediately. In Florida, counties had until Saturday to complete their initial tallies. And in California, officials have weeks to count their votes.
read more here

BTW: Notice this

Michael Steele to Lead U.S. Vote Foundation

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 9, 2018 --U.S. Vote Foundation's Board of Directors unanimously elected Michael Steele, Former Chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), as Chair of U.S. Vote Foundation (US Vote) and its Overseas Vote initiative. His appointment will strengthen the nonprofit, nonpartisan organization and support its work to advance its mission to make Every Citizen is a Voter, a reality.

“With the 2018 midterm election now underway, Mr. Steele's leadership and skill at driving engagement will positively augment our outreach efforts,” US Vote President and CEO Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat. “His breadth of communications experience and insight into the political and media establishment will help us keep our finger on the pulse during this important midterm election year.”

So the President of the United States does not want votes counted from the troops? Seriously? Does he understand that would include all of them? Democrats, Independents and Republicans?

Vietnam Veterans Memorial dedicated

History
Near the end of a weeklong national salute to Americans who served in the Vietnam War, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is dedicated in Washington after a march to its site by thousands of veterans of the conflict. 

The long-awaited memorial was a simple V-shaped black-granite wall inscribed with the names of the 57,939 Americans who died in the conflict, arranged in order of death, not rank, as was common in other memorials.

The designer of the memorial was Maya Lin, a Yale University architecture student who entered a nationwide competition to create a design for the monument. Lin, born in Ohio in 1959, was the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Many veterans’ groups were opposed to Lin’s winning design, which lacked a standard memorial’s heroic statues and stirring words. However, a remarkable shift in public opinion occurred in the months after the memorial’s dedication. Veterans and families of the dead walked the black reflective wall, seeking the names of their loved ones killed in the conflict. Once the name was located, visitors often made an etching or left a private offering, from notes and flowers to dog tags and cans of beer.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial soon became one of the most visited memorials in the nation’s capital. A Smithsonian Institution director called it “a community of feelings, almost a sacred precinct,” and a veteran declared that “it’s the parade we never got.” “The Wall” drew together both those who fought and those who marched against the war and served to promote national healing a decade after the divisive conflict’s end.

Remember the uncounted who could not count on us

There is a question each of us should be answering today. It is the day after the one day of the year we are supposed to honor our veterans. Cannot think of a better day to try to get an answer.

For over a decade the DOD has been talking about how they are making sure that the troops know what PTSD is and are supported to seek help.

Since 2012 an average of 500 a year kill themselves instead of knowing what is making them suffer and getting help to heal it.

The DOD says that most of them were not deployed, yet apparently their programs are not even good enough to prevent the suicides of non-deployed servicemembers. They expected to have us overlook the fact it was not good enough for them, then it would not work on those they sent? 

There as so many questions we will never get answers for as long as people are willing to settle for slogans instead of standing up for what they need from us!

Over 2 million have been discharged without honor and most should have been helped to heal.

Thomas Burke was one of them. He tried to kill himself and ended up with a "less than honorable discharge.

Dillan Tabares was one of them and he was shot by police.

By 2016, OEF and OIF were 300,000 with that less than honorable discharge since 2001.

Peter McRoberts was one of 2 million discharged from Vietnam and his widow fought for 40 years to clear his name.

 Do you want to leave them in the dark, or

light the way for them to heal?

When you wonder why so many are still committing suicide, remember the uncounted who could not count on us keeping the promise made to care for the wounded.

Do you want to keep supporting a slogan that could keep killing them or actually support one that could help them #TakeBackYourLife because the first one will cost you money and their lives. The second one will cost you just your time and save their lives.

They got the number wrong on the last report. They use 22 and mention the rise from 2015 to 2016 of younger veterans. What they did not mention is that the percentages have gone up since "awareness" started.
Military Suicides: Stories of Loss and Hope

Arthur Roberts, Scottish WWI Black Soldier Unforgotten Now

Jackie Kay on Arthur Roberts: the black Scottish first world war soldier who felt forgotten

The Guardian
Jackie Kay
November 11, 2018

In 2004, Roberts’s wartime diaries were discovered in a Glasgow attic. A century after he went to war, Scotland’s makar remembers his contribution

It is one thing to make sacrifices; it is quite another thing to become the victim of a kind of national amnesia. Reading Arthur’s diaries and looking at his photographs, I felt compelled to save his face, commit him to memory.

Arthur Roberts, left, with two soldiers. Photograph: Hopscotch Films

Arthur Roberts was a black Scottish soldier who survived the first world war and ended his days in an old people’s home in Glasgow. His name would have been lost to us were it not for a remarkable sequence of events. In the autumn of 2004 a young couple found his diaries, letters and photographs in a house they had bought in the city a few years earlier. The diaries were written over the course of a single year: 1917. In his diary, he detailed his experiences of war and loss, of heavy shelling, blood-covered rations, of comrades he witnessed dying. Arthur, who had died in 1982, was miraculously returned, his voice brought back to life.

There were no black troops included in the Peace March of July 1919, a victory parade held in London to mark the end of the war. Allison O’Neill, one of the care workers in the home where Arthur spent the last of his days, said that he had felt forgotten on Remembrance Sundays. He would go and sit in his room and not watch the ceremonies on television. Perhaps he had tired of the “glory of war” and the “old lies”, and perhaps the wound cut deeper.
read more here

Double amputee faces charges, but who else should too?

Understand that this is a double amputee, who was not diagnosed with PTSD, or treated for it. If a double amputee does not understand PTSD enough to know that trauma is the cause of it, then what the hell as the military been doing all these years on the "education" end of the deal?

Army combat veteran says shooting incident 'was never about the Xbox'

Knoxville News Sentinel
Hayes Hickman
Nov. 11, 2018

"I want people to know," Jones said, "if they need help, get help."

Casey Jones (Photo: submitted)

After reaching for a handgun in a moment of crisis, Army combat veteran Casey Jones says he decided instead to empty the pistol's clip into his bedroom ceiling in a desperate bid to save himself from his demons.

Jones, 30, fired every round from a second loaded weapon into the surrounding walls after that. One of those bullets went through a window and lodged behind the shutter of his North Knox County neighbors' home across the street. Thankfully, no one was hurt.

"In my mind, I was trying to get rid of those rounds before one ended up in my head," Jones told the USA TODAY NETWORK-Tennessee. "But I never wanted to hurt anyone."

The episode led to his arrest in the early hours of Wednesday. The Purple Heart recipient now faces four felony counts of reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon.

According to arrest warrants, Jones and his wife told responding sheriff's deputies he snapped while playing video games on his Xbox.

"But that wasn't the reason for it — it was never about the Xbox," he said. "It was just one of those nights."

'Whatever it takes to make this right'

Jones has never formally been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, although he reluctantly is beginning to recognize his struggles. Wednesday's incident wasn't the first time Jones has put a gun to his head, he confessed.

He hopes, however, that this time was the turning point.

Jones, not his wife, called E-911 that night. And in the days after his release from jail, he contacted a counselor through the local Veterans Affairs office.
read more here

Military women slammed for leaving kids? Seriously? Still?

Shamed for their sacrifice: Military moms don't always get a hero's welcome home

NBC Today
By Allison Slater Tate
Nov. 9, 2018

While deployed for six months with the U.S. Navy, Dr. Marion Henry had all the usual worries about being away from her husband and three children at their home in San Diego, California.

But that 2015 deployment — as the Director for Surgical Services on the USNS Mercy — was particularly hard for her, because it meant she missed the first day of school for Jack, then 8, Maggie, then 6, and Katherine, then 3. It was hard, she told TODAY Parents, to miss meeting her children's teachers, knowing which days they had "specials," and getting to know their friends and their friends' parents. When she came home in October, it was "very disorienting," she said.

In response to this story about a little boy rushing into his mother's arms as she returned from deployment with her National Guard unit in Afghanistan, one woman commented on Facebook, "Shame on her for leaving her child."

read more here

Note to military women: Do not expect them to understand you, or respect the fact that ever since the first women set foot on this land, fighting for their families, and yes, even in war, is part of our history.

The same things were said of these women in their own time!

College Veterans Benefits Not Being Paid Still!

Veterans haven't received GI Bill benefits for months due to ongoing IT issues at VA

NBC News 
By Phil McCausland 
November 11, 2018

"I’m about to lose everything that I own and become homeless. I don’t want to be that veteran on the street begging for change because I haven’t received what I was promised."

U.S. War veterans salute during the Veterans Day parade in New York on Nov. 11, 2017.Eduardo Munoz / Reuters file

Shelley Roundtree departed the U.S. Army in 2013 after seeing friends and fellow soldiers die in combat during his tour in Afghanistan. He was committed to transitioning to civilian life, and one of his first steps was to enroll in college with tuition and housing benefits he'd earned under the GI Bill.

Roundtree, 29, began studying marketing at Berkeley College in Midtown Manhattan. He dreams of working in the fashion industry, and he's close to graduating — but now there's a serious obstacle.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is suffering from a series of information technology glitches that has caused GI Bill benefit payments covering education and housing to be delayed or — in the case of Roundtree — never be delivered.

"I’m about to lose everything that I own and become homeless," Roundtree said. "I don’t want to be that veteran on the street begging for change because I haven’t received what I was promised."

Without the GI Bill's housing stipend, Roundtree was kicked out of his apartment and is now living on his sister's couch, miles from school, where he feels like a burden on his family. The new living situation required him to move all his belongings into a storage container, which he can no longer afford. Now all of his possessions are in danger of being auctioned off by the storage facility.

"It’s just confusing," said Roundtree. "Who is there for us? Who is representing us? Who is helping us? Who is doing what they need to do to better the situation for veterans?"
read more here

USA Today has some explaining to do!

USA Today has some explaining to do!

"Veterans sacrificed enough: USA TODAY investigations of VA health care help our heroes"

That was their headline, but if they are referring to reports like this, they need to explain what the rest of the story was and why they did not report it!

"In Phoenix, reporter Dennis Wagner's coverage of the VA crisis led to nationwide investigations and major changes in veterans' health care, as well as in the administration's accountability and transparency. Internal VA investigations verified that patients were dying while awaiting care and documented widespread mismanagement and reprisals against whistleblowers."

"The VA secretary was forced out. Congress approved a $15 billion emergency fund and launched the Veterans Choice program giving VA patients a private-care option."

Reporters keep doing that! Patting themselves on the back for only telling part of a story the rest of us live with...and if you read Wounded Times, read all the time too.

Here are some other headlines on this topic.

Veterans call program to get health care with civilian doctors 'a disaster,' broken

Veterans from around the state expressed frustration over the Veterans Choice program, meant to increase access to health care, during a listening session in Helena on Monday night.

Independent Record reported that on 10/24/2017 and veterans added that the VA had gone downhill over the last 8 years.

The Cherokee Tribune had a report in May of 2018 that 1.3 million veterans had been overcharged and were getting reimbursements.

And in June WHIO 7 News reported this mess.

A key program being expanded by the Trump administration to give veterans greater access to private doctors has failed to provide care within 30 days as promised due to faulty data and poor record-keeping that could take years to remedy, according to a government investigation released Monday. The Government Accountability Office, Congress’ auditing arm, found veterans often had to wait between 51 and 64 days for appointments with private doctors under the Veterans Choice program. It cited a lengthy scheduling process that took as long as 70 days.

Read more of this type of pat on the back while the rest of us are scratching our heads instead of pulling our hair out!

"New VA leadership carried out what has been described as the most comprehensive overhaul in agency history."

Treating veterans like the rest of us in never right. Sending veterans into the same system members of Congress have been complaining about, is even worse. When reporters get a pat of the back for not telling the whole story, that is the worst!
Military.com had this in June.

The GAO said veterans could wait up to 70 days for private-care appointments under the Choice program because of poor communication between the VA and its facilities and "an insufficient number, mix, or geographic distribution of community providers."

As for the Whistleblowers protection, you can look that up yourself since that has also been going on for a very long time. Yep~Congress yet again. 

 

Vietnam POW U.S. Army Captain Isaac “Ike” Camacho

El Paso Army veteran recalls life as POW in Vietnam

El Paso Inc.
By Lisa Amaya
November 11, 2018

Camacho escaped the camp on July 9, 1965, during a monsoon, slipping through the bars of his cage and hiding in the jungle for four days until he reached U.S. forces.

Memories of being caged, shackled and exposed to the powerful herbicide Agent Orange linger in the mind of retired U.S. Army Captain Isaac “Ike” Camacho, the first American to escape a prisoner of war camp in Vietnam.

Still, Camacho, who spent nearly two years as a prisoner of war, said he would serve again if he could.

“At one point in your life you have to serve your country. This would be one way of serving your country,” the now 81-year-old Camacho said from his home in East El Paso.

Camacho is among the thousands of borderland veterans whose service to the country will be commemorated during Veterans Day on Sunday, Nov. 11.

His life story has been recounted in “Isaac Camacho, An American Hero.” The book by Billy Waugh, a retired Army sergeant major, was released in March by Permuted Press.
read more here