Thousands get a Thanksgiving meal in Colorado Springs thanks to Salvation Army, Fort Carson and volunteers
KOAA 5 News Jessica Barreto November 22, 2018
COLORADO SPRINGS – Thousands of people in Southern Colorado got a Thanksgiving dinner thanks to a tag-team effort between The Salvation Army and U.S. Army soldiers assigned to Fort Carson. The Salvation Army hosts the meal. The Fort Carson Soldiers do the cooking.
“Our cooks have been prepping food for about the last week,” said Brigadier General, William J. Thigpen. read more here
This is the 14th year for "Operation: Homecooking." Military Trainees at Joint Base San Antonio - Lackland, who were not able to be with their own families today, were invited to share delicious firehouse food with firefighters.
Nashville VA reinstates triple amputee veteran's full-time caregiver services after Tennessean report
Nashville Tennessean Yihyun Jeong Nov. 21, 2018
A triple amputee veteran will have his full-time caregiver services reinstated after the Tennessean reported Wednesday that the Nashville VA initially decided to deny the level of his caregiver's benefits.
Staff Sergeant J.D. Williams lost his right arm and both legs while deployed with the 101st Airborne Division in Afghanistan in 2010.
He was discharged and sent home, where his wife, Ashlee Williams, was assigned and paid by the VA to be his caregiver.
But after six years, she wrote on Facebook on Nov. 17, the VA decided to lower her husband to the lowest tier of the program, determining that he no longer needs a full-time caregiver.
She claimed that the VA assumed that the care she provided her husband, including helping her husband with applying prosthetics and lifting him into a wheelchair about 10 times a day, was part of her "spousal duty."
"...should have been included on the marriage certificate according to the VA," Ashlee Williams wrote in a post that was shared more than 25,000 times on Facebook by Wednesday morning.
read more here
Police: Marine reservists attacked, robbed in Philadelphia
By: The Associated Press November 21, 2018
PHILADELPHIA — Philadelphia police say a group of men and women attacked several Marine Corps reservists near a conservative rally last weekend.
The "We the People Rally" near Independence Hall drew more counterprotesters than participants Saturday.
Police say a few blocks away from the rally, the reservists were approached by the group that called them "Nazis" and "white supremacists." Police say members of the group used mace on the reservists and punched and kicked them. They allegedly stole one person's phone before running away.
Police released video of some of the attackers from the earlier counter-protest.
read more here
Combat PTSD Wounded Times Kathie Costos November 22, 2018 Ten years ago, I wrote about being thankful for General Carter Ham because he talked openly about his own battle with PTSD, when other generals were shaming their soldiers for having it. Today, sadly, I just posted about a Command Sgt. Major showing that efforts by leaders such as General Ham, have not educated the people under them. General Ham was not alone that year.
Blackledge got psychiatric counseling to deal with wartime trauma, and now he is defying the military's culture of silence on the subject of mental health problems and treatment. "It's part of our profession ... nobody wants to admit that they've got a weakness in this area," Blackledge said of mental health problems among troops returning from America's two wars. "I have dealt with it. I'm dealing with it now," said Blackledge, who came home with post-traumatic stress. "We need to be able to talk about it." As the nation marks another Veterans Day, thousands of troops are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with anxiety, depression and other emotional problems.
This is what real leaders do! They show those they lead that PTSD is not from what they lack or any kind of weakness. It comes from where their courage to serve took them, and what they had to do for those they served with. A year later, this report came out and yet another General had more to say.
Generals share their experience with PTSD
CNN
By Larry Shaughnessy and Barbara Starr
March 6, 2009 STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Memory of soldier who died before his eyes stays with one general...Another still questions himself over suicide bomb attack that killed 22...By sharing stories, they hope to ease stigma attached to stress...Military should have different view of post-traumatic stress disorder, they say
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Army generals aren't known for talking about their feelings.
Gen. Carter Ham says PTSD is stigmatized, although "intellectually we all know it's wrong."
Brig. Gen. Gary S. Patton says he wants the military to change the way it views post-traumatic stress disorder.
Brig. Gen. Gary S. Patton says he wants the military to change the way it views post-traumatic stress disorder.
But two high-ranking officers are doing just that, hoping that by going public they can remove the stigma that many soldiers say keeps them from getting help for post-traumatic stress disorder. Brig. General Gary S. Patton and Gen. Carter Ham have both sought counseling for the emotional trauma of their time in the Iraq war. "One of our soldiers in that unit, Spec. Robert Unruh, took a gunshot wound to the torso, I was involved in medevacing him off the battlefield. And in a short period of time, he died before my eyes," Patton told CNN in an exclusive interview. "That's a memory [that] will stay with me the rest of my life." Ham was the commander in Mosul when a suicide bomber blew up a mess tent. Twenty-two people died. "The 21st of December, 2004, worst day of my life. Ever," Ham said. "To this day I still ask myself what should I have done differently, what could I have done as the commander responsible that would have perhaps saved the lives of those soldiers, sailors, civilians." Both generals have been back from Iraq for years, but still deal with some of the symptoms of the stress they experienced. "I felt like that what I was doing was not important because I had soldiers who were killed and a mission that had not yet been accomplished," Ham said. "It took a very amazingly supportive wife and in my case a great chaplain to kind of help me work my way through that." Ham and his wife drove from Washington State to the District of Columbia right after he returned from combat. "I probably said three words to her the whole way across the country. And it was 'Do you want to stop and get something to eat?' I mean, no discussion, no sharing of what happened," he explained. Ham still can't talk to his wife about much of what he saw. For Patton the stress hits him in the middle of the night. "I've had sleep interruptions from loud noises. Of course there's no IEDs or rockets going off in my bedroom, but the brain has a funny way of remembering those things," Patton said. "Not only recreating the exact sound, but also the smell of the battlefield and the metallic taste you get in your mouth when you have that same incident on the battlefield." Both acknowledge that in military circles, there is still a stigma attached to admitting mental health problems. read more here
Can you imagine what it would be like today for all the veterans who needed to keep hearing from Generals like them, but only heard about how many veterans committed suicide?
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.
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.
