When classmates cop out on birthday party, boy’s mom calls the cops
KWTX News By Julie Hays Nov 16, 2018
GATESVILLE, Texas (KWTX) When classmates failed to show up for a pizza party celebrating the birthday of the son of two Gatesville Army veterans, the youngster’s mother called police, thinking that officers would appreciate the unneeded pizzas and the cops responded, bearing goodwill and an armload of gifts.
Kaleb Jansen and his parents, Brian and Tara, both former military police officers, moved to Gatesville from Colorado six months ago.
Tara spent five years as an MP and Brian served for 24 years, spending time at Fort Hood and deploying several times to Iraq.
Classmates didn't show up for Kaleb Jansen's 11th birthday party, but police did. (Courtesy photo)
Kaleb invited his new classmates to his 11th birthday party over the weekend at Studebakers Pizza in Gatesville, but his parents’ hearts sank when not one person walked through the door.
“It’s so hard as parents to see your little one sitting there just waiting for friends,” Tara said.
“I was afraid I put the wrong date on the invitation or something.”
“I think he did on a certain level understand what was going on, but he understood some people had other things to do and it was a weekend. We have moved quite a bit being in the military so he’s used to making new friends and going different places.”
read more here
Combat PTSD Wounded Times Kathie Costos November 17, 2018 "10,000 Student Veterans Haven't Received Crucial GI Bill Payments, VA Admits" is how Fortune reported the GI Bill payments what were not delivered. WTF?
We just read how the number is 82,000!
They also got the wrong info on the IT system!
“Essentially, the law requires a 50-year-old IT platform that was designed to do the equivalent of basic math to instead perform something akin to calculus in short order,” a VA spokesperson told the Journal in an email.
The VA spent $4 million on 300,000 hours of overtime August through October to try and deal with the immediate ramifications. The agency further estimates that 450,000 veterans have some sort of error in their payments.
Last year, the VA estimated that the necessary computer changes to update their systems would cost $70 million.
Ya, they did, but what happened to all the other millions and all the lost years?
"We live in a world where we never want to see what goes on in the lives of the men and women we depend on for what we enjoy. No one wants to see the price they pay or how hard they have to fight in combat we send them into or the nightmare they have to go through trying to move on with their lives. It's easier to ignore them as if they weren't there." Kathie Costos Wounded Times
In 2008, the thought was to create a new GI Bill that would inspire more recruits into the military. This was reported by Stars and Stripes.
"It is a very attractive incentive package, there’s no question about that. So individuals will be very interested in enlisting for education benefits," predicted Curtis Gilroy, director of accession policy for the Department of Defense. "But we will see a spike in the quality of our enlisted cohort as well," Gilroy added, because that heavier flow of prospective recruits "primarily will have college in mind."
The House was very busy back then. They were also adding funds to what came after the recruits were turned into veterans.
By a vote of 409-4 the House today passed legislation funding the Department of Veterans Affairs for FY 2009. The bill (HR 6599) includes $3.8 billion for mental illness treatment and $584 million for substance abuse treatment in the VA, significant increases over current year funding. Overall, the Veterans Health Administration budget is set at $40.8 billion for FY 2009 -- $1.6 billion more than the President requested and $3.9 billion more than current levels. It is projected that the VA will serve 5.8 million veterans in 2009.
It is really a shame on all of us when there was a surplus of funds that were supposed to be for suicide prevention. Oh, but the problems with the VA did not happen overnight and when we look back at what was promised, what was spent, and what the results turned out to be, most heads explode!
VBA's pending compensation and claims backlog stood at 816,211 as of January 2008, up 188,781 since 2004, said Kerry Baker, associate legislative director of the Disabled Veterans of America, during a Wednesday hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense.
Baker said VBA must have the funds necessary to upgrade its IT infrastructure to handle the backlog and a growing caseload. Anything short of an increase is "a recipe for failure," he added.
Carl Blake, national legislative director for the Paralyzed Veterans of America, said VBA needed $121 million in its fiscal 2009 budget for its information technology. According to VA budget documents, VBA requested an IT budget of $109.6 million for its compensation and benefits programs, down $23.8 million from $133.4 million in 2008. VA requested an overall 2009 IT budget of $2.53 billion in 2009, up from $2.15 billion in fiscal 2008, with the largest portion earmarked for the Veterans Health Administration.
If Mother Jones is paying attention to military suicides, why haven't others?
I have to admit I am shocked at the depth in this report. Not the information, but the fact they covered so much in it. Back in 2012 when I wrote The Warrior Saw, Suicides After War, it took a long time to find everything, and I had the resources to do it within the thousands of reports on this site.
While the average of military suicides has been around 500 a year since 2012, no one has really bothered to piece it all together. It looks like someone just made a tremendous effort to do just that. There are many who were kicked out before they could kill themselves, and many more who did it afterwards. Many more attempted it, more than once and survivors were kicked out. Whenever there is an effort to put a number on what price is being paid, the cost of a human life, will never be measured in full, because of what is being paid by those left behind, and left out. This is a long piece, but if you really want to know, go to the link and finish reading it. The Pentagon Spent Millions to Prevent Suicides. But the Suicide Rate Went Up Instead. Mother Jones Dan Spinelli November 13, 2018
“We started this office to prevent suicide,” said Jackie Garrick, DSPO’s founding director who now runs an organization for whistleblowers. “I’d still like to see us follow through and actually prevent suicide.”
The United States Department of Defense employs nearly three million people, but only nine of them are responsible for developing a suicide prevention strategy across the armed forces. They are the staff of the Defense Suicide Prevention Office, the crown jewel of an Obama-era effort to respond to the burgeoning suicide rate among active duty personnel and overhaul the way the military had historically addressed the problem.
With $20 million in funding allocated by Congress shortly after its founding in 2011 and a mandate to modernize the way DoD prevents suicide among active-duty service members, DSPO has found itself increasingly generating more turmoil than solutions. A nasty internal squabble three years after its inception between the founding director and Pentagon higher-ups resulted in an uncomfortable leadership transition and months of employee complaints. A series of unexecuted or discontinued contracts have hurt staff morale and drawn the ire of lawmakers. Annual reports have been sporadic.
For more than a year, the office has gone without a permanent director, cycling through a series of temporary leaders—none of whom had a background in mental health treatment or suicide prevention. Oversight from either Congress or the Pentagon has been sparse. By 2014, DSPO had already bounced between four different chains of command within the Pentagon’s unwieldy bureaucracy. Having been founded initially as a policy office, DSPO at one point was reporting up to DoD’s human resources directorate.
As the founding director, Garrick with Army Lt. Gen. Michael Linnington, then the top-ranking military officer in the Office of Personnel and Readiness, convened periodic meetings with relevant leaders from the different branches of the armed forces to review suicide statistics and compare prevention initiatives. Nearly 900 different prevention programs existed at that point, and despite some successful outliers, many contained “inconsistencies, redundancies, and gaps in [their] approach,” Garrick later told Congress in a March 2013 hearing.
Since Franklin left for the VA after less than two years at DSPO, the vacancy has been filled by a series of acting directors. The Trump administration’s pace in filling key government posts means that DSPO has had virtually no oversight.
The Office of Personnel and Readiness that supervises DSPO has been substantially depleted in recent months. Once Robert Wilkie, the last permanent undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, was nominated to head the VA, Stephanie Barna became the sixth different person to lead the office in three years. Two other top positions, including the one Barna vacated, have been filled in a temporary capacity. (Gleason, the Pentagon spokesperson, said DoD is “in the process of assessing and interviewing the best qualified candidates” to take over the office.)
“If the Department of Defense thought it was a priority, they would have done something by now—but they have wars to fight,” a former senior DoD official said.
Seven years after its creation as a standalone office, DSPO still seems to be retracing its steps. Among the first things Garrick set out to do as director was evaluate suicide prevention programs across the military to eliminate redundancies, yet an official Pentagon document summarizing DSPO’s efforts said the office evaluated “all Service suicide prevention programs in 2018” and then “established a DoD wide metric model to evaluate suicide prevention efforts across the total force.” Garrick outlined this same plan in a report issued by DSPO in 2012 listing its annual activity, but no such report has been issued for five years, an oversight Gleason attributed to the office leveraging “other published documents such as the Quarterly Suicide Report, the DD Suicide Event Report, and our website to pass on suicide-related information.” Those quarterly suicide reports are at least two years behind schedule while DSPO’s social media presence—including a Twitter account with fewer than 600 followers—is limited at best. And, even as Congress has continued funneling more money toward the office, it still has just nine staffers, the same amount from Garrick’s first year as director.
Most importantly, the suicide rate among active-duty troops continues to rise. According to the most recent public figures, it is now at 21.1 deaths per 100,000 troops, a rate that is two-and-a-half percentage points higher than it was in 2011, the year DSPO was founded. read more here
It may be a typo but when it is reported that the report is two years behind, it is not. The DOD releases Suicide Quarterly reports about a quarter behind. They should be releasing the third quarter suicide report next month.
Combat PTSD Wounded Times Kathie Costos November 16, 2018
When Vietnam veterans came home, one out of three, had PTSD.
By the time the Forgotten Warrior Project was released in 1978, there were 500,000 of them. Yes, and all of them with the same wounds we see today. What we do not see, are people stepping up to make sure they are not forgotten again! I see so many charities starting up but few even mention Vietnam veterans. Other than some welcome home parades, and getting pins, saying "thank you" to them needs to be a lot more than just two words. I keep hearing the commercial from the famous "warrior" group saying that it is a tragedy to be forgotten. That is, right after they list the different names PTSD used to have. The commercial says that "today it is called PTSD" but that group does not mention that it was called PTSD because of all the work the Vietnam veterans did to have the research started. They say that for OEF and OIF veterans the rate is one out of five, but as you have seen, the rate for them was much higher. We hear about burn pits in the wars of today, yet back then either they buried everything, or set it on fire, just like today. They had Napalm, Agent Orange, among other things to add to the danger to them. Yet, they did not settle for "just what it is" and go away quietly. They fought for everything they went through, for the generations that came before them, and those who would come after them. No wound of war is new, and they remember what is so easy for the rest of us to forget. When you think about veterans, remember, ever since the Revolutionary War, veterans have had to fight the same government who decided the battles had to be fought. The government never told them, they would be fighting for the rest of their lives for promises to be kept. The list of effects of Agent Orange, continues to grow, because they did not give up, as you will read below. The question is, why has it been so easy to give up on them and move on?
November 15, 2018, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
The latest in a series of congressionally mandated biennial reviews of the evidence of health problems that may be linked to exposure to Agent Orange and other herbicides used during the Vietnam War found sufficient evidence of an association for hypertension and monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS). The committee that carried out the study and wrote the report, Veterans and Agent Orange: Update 11 (2018), focused on the scientific literature published between Sept. 30, 2014, and Dec. 31, 2017. From 1962 to 1971, the U.S. military sprayed herbicides over Vietnam to strip the thick jungle canopy that could conceal opposition forces, destroy crops that those forces might depend on, and clear tall grass and bushes from the perimeters of U.S. bases and outlying encampments. The most commonly used chemical mixture sprayed was Agent Orange, which was contaminated with the most toxic form of dioxin. These and the other herbicides sprayed during the war constituted the chemicals of interest for the committee. The exact number of U.S. military personnel who served in Vietnam is unknown because deployment to the theater was not specifically recorded in military records, but estimates range from 2.6 million to 4.3 million.
Hypertension was moved to the category of "sufficient" evidence of an association from its previous classification in the "limited or suggestive" category. The sufficient category indicates that there is enough epidemiologic evidence to conclude that there is a positive association. A finding of limited or suggestive evidence means that epidemiologic research results suggest an association between exposure to herbicides and a particular outcome, but a firm conclusion is limited because chance, bias, and confounding factors could not be ruled out with confidence. The committee came to this conclusion in part based on a recent study of U.S. Vietnam veterans by researchers from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which found that self-reported hypertension rates were highest among former military personnel who had the greatest opportunity for exposure to these chemicals.
UPDATE: Can someone please update POTUS on what has happened to the GI Bill? This is from Stars and Stripes
Trump also said his administration has improved access to education benefits for veterans.
Read the rest for yourself. It is too depressing to know the rest of the story. It appears that reporters forgot how to LOOK UP WHAT THEY ALREADY REPORTED ON!
Veterans Affairs official reassigned after House hearing over delayed GI Bill benefits
NBC News By Phil McCausland November 14, 2018
A House committee will hear testimony Thursday from Department of Veterans Affairs officials over delayed GI Bill payments potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of veterans. NBC News reported Sunday that computer problems at VA have caused GI Bill benefit payments covering education and housing to be delayed for months or never be delivered, forcing some veterans to face debt or even homelessness.
On Wednesday, one of the key witnesses called to testify from VA was reassigned by the federal agency to a regional office in Houston, multiple officials told NBC News.
Robert Worley, executive director of Education Service of the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), based in Washington, has been appointed to serve as the executive director of the VBA’s Houston regional office, according to two sources close to the VA and an email reviewed by NBC News.
Molly Jenkins, a spokeswoman for Republicans on the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, confirmed Thursday that Worley would be departing his current position to lead the VBA office in Houston.
read more here
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Well, that is the way NBC reported it. It turns out that way back in 2008, there was another report about President Bush signing the GI Bill too. In that report the "overhaul" was a long time coming.
"And, for the first time since the Vietnam War, there will be a completely free veterans' education benefit program that pay enough to fully cover the cost of getting a four-year college degree."
