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!