This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Veterans Issues

  • Dignified Burial Of Unclaimed Veterans Act passed

    This is about a week old, but I hadn’t heard of it until my cousin Scott sent me the link. Apparently Patty Murray done good and got this Act passed to make sure that every veteran gets dignified last salute as they pass into the great beyond. It looks like Congress and the Senate passed the Act last week;

    U.S. Senator Patty Murray, (D)-WA, wrote the bill which passed the Senate and then the House on Sunday.

    In a statement she said, “When America’s heroes make a commitment to serve their country, we make a promise to care for them.”

    It’s something local funeral director Robert Falcon took into his own hands.

    He covered the casket and service costs for Robert Varley.

    “Our nation’s veterans deserve the absolute best that we can give them,” falcon said.

    It was the fourth time Robert had done something like that, but the legislation would lift that burden off of him and the Patriot Guard Riders.

    “Because they deserve that respect, no less respect than any other veteran,” said Mary.

    Murray pisses me off on most issues, but this time she gets accolades, right up there with the patriot Guard Riders. My cousin never served, but he does take time out of his busy family life to do his duty as a PGR, so hats off to all of them.

  • Joshua Boston, Marine answers Feinstein

    We saw the open letter that Joshua Boston wrote to Dianne Feinstein and was posted on CNN iReports a few weeks ago. Boston is a real Marine veteran (it’s sad that I have to say that), we checked him out when the ladies of Victory Girls asked us if he was real and it turns out that he served with our own StrikeFO.

    But, the basics of his letter is that he considers unconstitutional Feinstein’s proposal to ban those weapons that she considers to be “assault weapons” and force those of us who already own scary-looking guns to register them and be fingerprinted. Boston says that he won’t register his weapons.

    He holds up very well against an obvious onslaught from the CNN reporter this morning;

    The Huffington Post provides a mixed bag of comments in regards to Boston’s open letter.

    But it illustrates what is at stake here. Americans who believe that the Constitution protects us from government will suddenly find themselves considered to be criminals in the eyes of their representatives.

    The fact that Democrats have had to keep their mouths shut about gun control since the 1994 midterm elections in order to keep their jobs, demonstrates that the majority of Americans don’t want to restrict gun ownership more than it’s been restricted already.

    If their so-called assault weapon ban is passed, Democrats will suffer in the midterms again. That’s why there’s so much confusing information coming from the investigation of the Connecticut school shooting – to keep the electorate ignorant.

    Boston makes an excellent point that we don’t have to worry about violating Feinstein’s ban because no one is interested in enforcing the law in regards to David Gregory’s blatant violation of DC’s gun laws, so no one is going to enforce laws against the rest of us, right?

  • Homeless vets number doubles despite Shinseki’s best efforts

    USAToday reports that the number of homeless veterans or veterans at risk of being homeless has doubled over the last two years, while VA Secretary Eric Shinseki has assured us that the numbers were falling, you know, before the election;

    Through the end of September, 26,531 of them were living on the streets, at risk of losing their homes, staying in temporary housing or receiving federal vouchers to pay rent, the Department of Veterans Affairs reports.

    That’s up from 10,500 in 2010. The VA says the numbers could be higher because they include only the homeless the department is aware of.

    Of course, the VA says it’s because they’re working harder to identify veterans, but, if they were working REALLY hard, the numbers would be falling because they’d be weeding out actual veterans from the number who say they’re veterans. But, I guess working REALLY hard would mean that they’d have to actually work instead of throwing themselves lavish parties and calling it training.

    So, where is Shinseki’s resignation? The backlog of claims have grown, the number of homeless has doubled and those were the two things Shinseki said he was going to cure at the DVA. Maybe if he gave all of the homeless black berets, that would cure the problem.

  • A Ready Reserve to Keep Our Kids Alive

    I get weekly emails from old Army buddies about jobs available to former military personnel, primarily in the Middle East, jobs offering excellent salaries. Most ads are seeking the crème de la crème, the special operators, or at least those with the advanced combat skills that would be in the resume of any former or retired Ranger or Airborne/Marine infantry NCO. Playing down the potential downsides of these contracts, such as living in Muslim countries under Sharia law, these ads tend to emphasize the outsized recompense rather than the discomforts.

    I look at those salaries and wonder why is it we have federal contractors who are willing to pay these lucrative compensation packages for former warriors to assume huge risk and minimal conditions of daily living while, simultaneously, we have school districts throughout this nation that could be employing them and their skills to even greater effect. These experienced tough guys, who devoted their younger lives to protecting this nation and its principles, could well apply all that training and experience protecting the nation’s most sacred resource, our children.

    May I be so radical as to suggest that school boards all across this country take a hard look at their administrative trees and lop off a few of those really questionable deputy superintendents for this, and assistant deputy superintendents for that? Just what contribution do all these highly paid, administrative dead branches make to the education of the children these boards are responsible for? Do a little math and you’ll see that some judicious trimming of these bloated school district administrations could free up some funds to hire teams of those veterans I described above, the millions of potential applicants out there who possess the requisite firearms and security skills to walk the halls of our educational institutions from kindergarten through college, armed and prepared to neutralize any threat to our children. Celebrities hire these people all the time. Are celebrities more essential to America than her children?

    A school district wouldn’t even need to have highly trained and lethal security teams in every school at all times. Multiple teams could be rotated through all the district schools on a totally irregular and unpredictable schedule. That very unpredictability would give pause to many of the deranged when considering mayhem on a helpless schoolroom. It might drive these crazies to the mall food courts or theaters, true, but I believe right now, in view of last week’s horror, that’s a better option than an elementary school or a kindergarten, because there is likely someone in those places who is armed. Think about it, mall killing events don’t produce the high numbers of victims that campus events do. There’s a clear and simple reason for that: the schools are stupidly but publicly announced gun-free zones and the killers, well aware of that, know where they can inflict the most horror before they are brought down.

    We are a nation with schools with construction budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, managed by administrations with similar budgets. With all this tax money being spent to provide our young ones with such excellent learning environments under such expensive tutelage, are there no funds to do this one essential thing: hire, tough, seasoned, knowledgeable professional warriors to keep our children alive? All you liberal parents out there so afraid of guns should weigh this: who is more essential, some totally helpless, multi-degreed, deputy assistant doofus for dietetic planning or some hard-nosed, bad-ass, old pistol-packin’ Ranger who, when it all hits the fan, will, by his training and his core beliefs, give his own life to keep your kid alive?

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • Alex Horton: Veterans Feel Anxiety, and Relief, After School Shooting

    Our buddy, Alex Horton, formerly the blogger at Army of Dude, and currently a public affairs specialist at the Department of Veterans Affairs, wrote a piece at the New York Times yesterday about how we all (veterans) silently prayed that the shooter in Connecticut wasn’t one of us;

    Call it the Rambo Effect: when a war veteran returns home and faces conflict, for the uninformed, it seems no stretch that he would respond by killing everything in his path, just as he did overseas.

    It’s an embarrassing, inaccurate, yet pervasive trope that percolates throughout entertainment and mass media. This year, when two Iraq veterans committed unrelated murders in Washington State and California, journalists quickly and incorrectly connected their crimes to post-traumatic stress as a result of their combat experiences.

    Yeah, well, it’s not just that. Remember how the media tried to connect Jared Loughner to the military because he’d once gone to a recruiting station? The media also tried to connect that shooter in Portland last week to us, Jacob Tyler Roberts, because he couldn’t join the Marines due to an injury. Yeah, I don’t know how many times someone would tell me that they’d have been airborne if it wasn’t for some phantom injury.

    But, Alex ends his piece;

    One Afghanistan veteran summed up the strange acquittal many of us felt when we heard that Mr. Lanza never served.

    “I am relieved,” he said in response to my post on Twitter. “What does that mean? I don’t know, honestly.”

    Well, just wait…maybe he talked to a recruiter at some point in his life which will somehow explain it all to the media.

  • A Brief Public Service Announcement . . . .

    Jonn’s article yesterday about the recovery of MOH recipient LTC Don Carlos Faith Jr’s remains brought to light something I didn’t know – and which may not be common knowledge.  Some of TAH’s readers may be interested.

    The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) is the DoD entity having the mission of accounting for US POWs/MIAs.  They often use maternal-line mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in the identification of recovered remains.  That much is fairly well-known.

    However, the JPAC also maintains lists of unaccounted for US personnel from three conflicts for which they still need maternal-line mtDNA samples.  These lists are reportedly reasonably complete, and are available in PDF and Excel formats; the PDF versions are linked below:

    Excel versions of these lists may be found here under “Search”.

    Additionally, the JPAC maintains a partial list of World War II unaccounted for personnel for whom current investigations have a critical need for mtDNA samples.  Unfortunately, the list from World War II is not complete due to the sheer magnitude of US personnel still not formally accounted for (78,000+) and the relatively limited scope of JPAC’s work to date on World War II casualty cases.

    General contact information for JPAC can be found here; an explanation of who can give a useful sample can be found here.  If you or anyone you know have a relative who never came home, please consider seeing if you can help JPAC  find them.  Even if you can’t give the sample yourself, you may be able to help them locate someone who can.

    Everyone deserves a proper burial – if possible, in their homeland.

  • Marine languishes in Mexican jail

    A whole bunch of you sent us links to the story of Jon Hammar, a Marine and Fallujah veteran who is stuck in a Mexican jail when he and a friend had plans for a motor trip to Costa Rica in a used RV. Jon had been warned not to bring his .410 shotgun, but he brought it anyway. He filled out paperwork to bring the weapon across the frontier, but he was apprehended by Mexican authorities.

    On Aug. 18, Mexican prosecutors leveled serious charges against Hammar. Curiously, it wasn’t the type of shotgun that broke Mexican law. It was the length of the barrel, which the formal citation said was shorter than 25 inches, although a discrepancy has emerged over how the barrel was measured.

    Making matters worse is the nature of Hammar’s confinement, a matter that’s drawn the attention of Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Hammars’ local representative.

    “His family has described a very disturbing situation that includes their son being chained to a bed in a very small cell and receiving calls from fellow inmates threatening his life if they did not send them money,” Ros-Lehtinen said. “The family also says that the jail where their son is being held is controlled by the dreaded and brutal Zetas drug cartel. The family wants their son back home, and I will do my best to help them.”

    Now, if Hammar had just told the border patrol that he was with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and that he was delivering weapons to the drug cartels he might have got away with it.

    Since I have spent some time in jail south of the border myself, I can absolutely sympathize with Hammar. I guess the lesson here is never take weapons into Mexico, even if you think you’re within the law.

  • VA to ID incompetent veteran gun owners

    I’ve had this link sent to me about twenty times this morning. Most of the emails had “WTF?” in the subject line. It seems that Congress is trying to stick a line in the defense budget which would allow bureaucrats at the Department of Veterans Affairs to name veterans they deem as incompetent to manage their financial affairs, needing a fiduciary to manage their money for them, and enter those names into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. Apparently, the usual suspects are willing to take these folks’ rights from them in Congress;

    Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., objected, saying the measure would make it easier for veterans with mental illness to own a gun, endangering themselves and others.

    “I love our veterans, I vote for them all the time. They defend us,” Schumer said. “If you are a veteran or not and you have been judged to be mentally infirm, you should not have a gun.”

    Yeah, that makes me feel better. I’ll be able to sleep tonight because Chuckie Schumer loves me. But, we’ve all witnessed the incompetence of the Veterans’ Affairs Department. We know that they’ll be more than happy to put as many veterans in NICs system as they can cram in to the data base, because they’re always eager to do anything that doesn’t have to do with helping veterans.

    A core group of lawmakers led by Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., has for several years wanted to prohibit the VA from submitting those names to the gun-check registry unless a judge or magistrate deems the veteran to be a danger. This year’s version of the bill has 21 co-sponsors. It passed the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee by voice vote, a tactic generally reserved for noncontroversial legislation.

    What Schumer objects to is the amendment by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. who wants a judge to make the decision as to which veterans get put on the list, which makes sense, since the last I heard, the Fifth Amendment says “No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…”, and since owning a gun is a right, a liberty, veterans should be granted due process, not subject to the arbitrary decision of a faceless, nameless bureaucrat.

    The Associated Press article claims that only 185 veterans have been put on the list against their wishes since 1998, but one is too many. When one person loses their rights, we all lose.

    Someone you may have heard of spoke to this issue four years ago;

    Mark Seavey, a lobbyist for the American Legion, supports Burr’s proposal and said it isn’t right to lump veterans with financial troubles into the group of people on the no-buy list.

    He also worries about broadly stereotyping veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder but still have control of their affairs.

    “We didn’t want to stigmatize people,” Seavey said. “It should be anybody who actually is a threat to themselves or others. I think veterans as individuals ought to be given the constitutional rights they fought for.”

    But, rest assured that Chuckie Schumer loves you. He’d love you more if you didn’t own a gun.