A Tiger Among Us: A Story of Valor in Vietnam's A Shau Valley

MoH Recipient Was Saved by Tiger and Sawed-Off Shotgun
Military.com
By Richard Sisk
22 Jul 2018

"The tiger kinda' helped" in scaring off the enemy in March 1966, Special Forces legend and retired Command Sgt. Maj. Bennie Adkins said of the last hours of a four-day battle in Vietnam in which he earned the Medal of Honor.

Adkins sat down with Military.com on Wednesday to talk about his new book, "A Tiger Among Us: A Story of Valor in Vietnam's A Shau Valley," and his work with the Bennie G. Adkins Foundation a day after he and 28 other recipients of the nation's highest award for valor were honored at baseball's All-Star Game at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C.

The rest of the story: The tiger had an assist from the 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun Adkins carried as a sidearm. He had cut down the barrel and sawed off the stock.

The 84-year-old Adkins said he still isn't quite sure how that weapon squared with the laws of war and the Geneva Conventions, but "I did use it, I did, and a lot of hand grenades."
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Someone sold you a lemon.

PTSD Patrol Sunday Morning Empowerment Zone: What drives you?
PTSD Patrol
Kathie Costos
July 22, 2018

Someone sold you a lemon. 

They told you that you were weak. They told you that you need to just get over it and move on. They told you that you grieved long enough. They told you all kinds of things to get you to stop suffering, or so they thought. What they managed to do was to get you to just stop talking.

What good did that do? What good does it do to constantly hear about someone taking their own life after surviving, and wonder why they did not talk to you? Wonder no more about that one. You just read the answer.

You did not choose that moment when trauma hit you. 

You did not choose how it would take over everything.

So why are you making the choice to suffer as its victim instead of fighting to #TakeBackYourLife as what you are? 

You survived it! It did not beat you that time and does not have to win this time.

Jonnie is on the PTSD Patrol Road crew with a mission of making sure that you get on the right road and choose to fight with the power within you.

Female Navy Corpsman Murdered Friday Night

Man Arrested In Fatal Shooting Of Navy Corpsman In Oceanside
By California News Wire Services
News Partner
Jul 21, 2018

The woman was identified as Devon Rideout, 24, a Navy corpsman stationed at Camp Pendleton.

OCEANSIDE, CA – The woman fatally shot at an Oceanside apartment Friday afternoon was identified as a Navy corpsman, and a suspect is in custody, police said Saturday.

The shooting took place at a building at 550 Los Arbolitos Blvd around 4 p.m. Friday, Oceanside police said.

Responding officers found the woman shot. Paramedics tried to save her but she was pronounced dead at the scene.
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PTSD: It happened all in a moment

"It happened all in a moment"
Combat PTSD Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
July 22, 2018

Tia Coleman got onto a Duck Tour boat with her family hoping to have a nice ride. A thunder storm rolled in.

Video captured by a passenger on a nearby vessel shows a duck boat capsize and sink during a severe thunderstorm in Missouri, killing at least 11 people. Source: CNN

Eleven people died. Nine from Tia's family. Duck boat accident survivor mourns her 9 relatives who drowned

"I said, 'Lord, please, I've got to get to my babies. I've got to get to my babies," she said Saturday at a news conference at Cox Medical Center Branson, where she has been hospitalized since the incident that took 17 lives, including her husband, three children and five other members of her family.

Duck boat survivor describes sinking
CNN Newsroom

Duck boat survivor Tia Coleman tells how she survived the incident that killed nine members of her family. Source: CNN

In Los Angeles people were shopping at Trader Joe's. A gunman walked in after his grandmother was shot multiple times, which he is being charged for. Another woman, shopping in the store was killed.

"It happened all in a moment. He came out of the car, the cops were already shooting at him in that instant, right before he came out of the car," said Miguel Jeffrey Trujillo Cerventes, who saw the end of the police chase and the suspect emerge from his car.

That is the cause of every case of PTSD. It happened! One moment the world you live in is "normal" and in the next, chaos. 

For citizens it is the moment you do not expect to come. 

For military folks, it is the moment you dread will happen.

For firefighters and police officers, it is the moment they know may come with the next one.  

Responders prepare to do what has to be done to save the rest of us. They also deal with the same traumas the rest of us do, but the simple fact is, they are willingly rushing to those events for the sake of others.

That is how PTSD starts. That is the only way it happens. The term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder actually says that clearly. 

Post means "after" it happened.

Trauma means "wound" and the "stress" surviving causes the survivor. The "disorder" part seems to the the term people have the most problem with, but that is simply because they do not know what that means. 

"Disorder" means that things were one way one moment and out of order in the next moment.

Nothing is ever the same after you survive a traumatic event. It is not supposed to be back to "normal" moments the moment before it happened.

The key is that you can change again, just as you did from "victim" to "survivor" and defeat what is still trying to kill you.

Veterans commit suicide in public hoping we'll pay attention

Veterans Commit Suicide in Public 
Combat PTSD
Kathie Costos
July 21, 2018

Thursday a friend of mine, Sgt. Dave Matthews of Remember the Fallen covered what the National News used to think was important. The shocking number of veterans committing suicide in pubic! Yes, in public. It happened at least 12 times since March of 2018, and this is just July.

Who hears veterans scream before public suicides?

Dave read about John Michael Watts setting himself on fire in front of the Georgia state Capitol. He was furious that it happened but shocked the press did not give his scream for help the attention he deserved. We did. I had it up 3 hours after Military Times covered it.

Dave called me after he saw it and wanted to do a show on his death. I asked Dave why just him and not all the others committing suicide in public. He was shocked and had a hard time getting his head around the others when I sent him the link to the post.

It took me about an hour to put it together. After all, I was limiting the search down to this year but with over 29,000 articles, there are far more times when veterans took this one last step of being heard.

So who heard them before they ended their lives this way?

When the national news reporters are too busy for those who serve this nation, none of us should be shocked when a veteran decides to turn in the blank check they wrote to this country. The "up to and including" their lives was never supposed to be about the nation turning our backs on them.

We settle all too easily for what gets the image of them of them lying dead out of our heads.

We settle for slogans and support the "cause" of people raising awareness that it is happening but refuse to support the people working to change the outcome. That was abundantly made clear when the Federal Trade Commission decided to put an end to all the bogus charities taking advantage of veterans for their own incomes. 

We settle for the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs using a slogan of "one is too many" but never pay attention to the reports they release showing nothing has changed.

We settle for members of Congress getting their names on Bills that have done very little since 2007 when they passed the Joshua Omvig Suicide Prevention Act and the number of veterans committing suicide has not changed since then.

As a matter of fact the number of military suicides went up after Congress became "aware" of what was going on.

If anyone really wants to know why veterans are facing off with members of law enforcement every week, committing murder-suicides in every state, and taking the lives that survived service, all they have to do is listen. Listen to the screams of those who all of the above never paid attention to before it was too late!