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

Category: Veterans Issues

  • More articles like this

    We need more articles like this one from Reuters about veterans saving the economy and fewer of the crazed murderous types;

    Companies are only too glad they can turn to the growing pool of military veterans, admired for their “can do” attitudes.

    “One of the reasons for employing veterans is that the skills set we are looking for, the values and work ethic are perfectly aligned with the military,” said David Storch, chief executive officer at AAR.

    “Veterans are very disciplined, very focused, in addition to the technical skills that the army trains for,” he told Reuters.

    Last year the firm employed 314 veterans, who accounted for 18 percent of AAR’s total workforce of about 7,000.

    Yet there are not enough qualified veterans to plug the technology and engineering skills gap confronting the U.S. labor market. AAR still has about 600 positions it cannot fill.

    See, Reuters, now how hard was that?

  • Veteran lost for two days rescued by veteran

    A couple of you sent us this link to the story of Jason D. Cooper, a marine combat veteran who suffered from PTSD and fled the scene of a minor car accident into the snowy Oregon country side.

    [OR State Police Officer Sgt. Dave Randall] and Senior Trooper Don Frerichs of the Fish and Wildlife Division returned to the crash scene and followed the tracks for more than five miles on snowmobiles.

    When they came upon Cooper, obviously suffering from hypothermia, Randall addressed him as Staff Sgt. Cooper and asked him how he was doing.

    “He asked me how I knew he was a Marine and I said, `Hey, a Marine always knows a fellow Marine.’ After that, we were fast friends.”

    According to the report, Cooper will be fine after suffering from a bit of frostbite and hypothermia.

    Now compare that PTSD to this case of former Granby Police Capt. David Bourque who was arrested for possessing thousands of child pr0n media;

    In court papers filed Wednesday, Richard Brown, an attorney for Bourque, had argued for a lighter sentence based on an evaluation by a psychologist that concluded Bourque suffered PTSD, affecting his judgment. Brown said it did not excuse Bourque’s conduct, but could be taken into account by a judge when he is sentenced on Friday.

    See the difference? In the first case, PTSD was the REASON SSG Cooper has a problem, in the second, PTSD was an EXCUSE for Bourque’s problem.

  • Marine finally gets to be a man

    I know, this sounds like one of those transgender stories, but its actually not. David Hassan, an Iraq War veteran was the victim of a misprint on his birth certificate which said the clearly male Hassan is a woman;

    Hassan was not bothered by the mistake until he moved to New Jersey after serving in Iraq with the Marine Corp, and tried to get a New Jersey driving license.

    His birth certificate identifying him as female raised eyebrows with the authorities, and the license was not issued, Peter Madison, Hassan’s lawyer, said in an interview.

    In a bid to set the record straight, Lenox Hill Hospital gave Hassan a letter in 2007 to show to the city’s Department of Health, which explained that he was male and not female – although his problems were far from over.

    “The city for reasons known only to themselves said that in the letter the hospital must state that it was their mistake,” Madison said. “Lenox Hill would not admit that it was their own mistake.”

    I’m surprised the Marine Corps didn’t give him shit about it. But, anyway, he’s been battling the hospital since 2007 in court in order to get his sex changed by the bureaucracy which made the mistake. So congratulations to Mr. Hassan for finally getting some satisfaction in his bid to switch teams.

  • PTSD made Sam Haley steal from people

    In Fresno, CA Sam Haley who supposedly spent 22 years in the military, decided it was a good idea to start ripping people off. He lost his real estate license more than 30 years ago, but somehow he stayed in the business long enough to perpetrate a fraud on several people and now mitigates his malfeasance with his military service, which remains in question. Says ABC30;

    But Haley claims he’s just a military veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

    Haley was expecting leniency in court because of his military service, and the mental troubles he says he’s suffering. But while the judge acknowledged Haley’s PTSD, he said that wasn’t what caused Haley to commit grand theft.

    And DVA social workers decided they ought to help him foist this crap on the judicial system when Haley sought treatment for his PTSD upon the occasion of his arrest;

    “Mr. Haley, although he managed it well in the initial years, in the later years it became very obvious,” said Herman Barretto, a social worker with the Department of Veterans Affairs.

    Yeah, nice try, Goober. The prosecutor didn’t buy it;

    The judge sentenced Haley to 180 days in jail, plus five years of probation. He also ordered Haley to pay the victims more than $35,000 in restitution.

    Yeah, there’s a couple of million veterans out here who suffer from PTSD and DON’T steal from people.

    Thanks to Stephen for the link.

  • That irrational fear of veterans

    Joe Momma sent us a link yesterday that sounded too unbelievable to be true, so I had to do some more research, but apparently it is true. According to court documents. Army reservist, employed at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and living in DC, Matthew Corrigan, thought he was calling a veteran support number because he’d been unable to sleep for several nights. Turns out that he called a national suicide hotline instead. After he admitted to the counselor that he is a veteran and owns firearms, he turned off his phone and went to sleep.

    He was awakened at about 4am by someone calling his name through a bullhorn. When he turned on his phone, he found that the police, accompanied by a SWAT Team, were calling him on it telling him to come out of his home. When he did, they cuffed and stuffed him.

    He wouldn’t let the police search his house, so they broke down his door, which he had locked behind him when he came outside and searched anyway. One officer was reported to say, when Corrigan denied his permission for a search; “I don’t have time to play this constitutional bullshit”. Yeah, because it’s involving one of those dangerous, armed veterans, and they don’t deserve the constitutional rights the officer would have afforded a gang banger.

    The police found three firearms, a rifle and two handguns. I’m pretty sure the handguns were illegal in the District without reporting and registering them. And that’s probably why he’s facing charges for that evening, after nearly three weeks in police custody after the incident.

    There’s more to the story, that you’ll have to read at the link. The only reportage I can find on this story is in gun rights blogs and blogs from the right side of the spectrum. So it doesn’t really register on those Liberals’ WTFmeter.

    I’m pretty sure he shouldn’t have owned two handguns in the District, but apparently no one would have known about the guns if he hadn’t admitted it to the counselor, who I guess told the police. Not inspiring confidence in suicide hotline counselors here.

    But, I wonder how many SWAT members show up at every investigation of a potential suicide situation. It seems to me that if they’d got Corrigan to the door and found him in a single piece and not suicidal, they would have left him alone, if they hadn’t also known he was a veteran and had firearms.

  • Coming to a military clinic near you.

    Coming this Monday the military will be starting a program called Respect.mil. The goal of the program is to incorporate additional screening for mental health issues that are affecting the military. The idea is that if the screening is in place, there would be a greater chance of identifying those who would go to behavior health. According to page six of the PCC plan this is how it is expected to work at the initial visit.

    Soldiers • attending primary care clinics for sick call and other reasons are routinely
    screened for depression (two questions) and PTSD (four questions);
    • Those with positive screens complete appropriate diagnostic and severity instruments
    before seeing the PCC;
    • If the instruments suggest that behavioral health issues require exploration and the
    PCC’s diagnostic interview confirms the diagnosis of depression or PTSD, treatment is
    initiated by the PCC who will continue to follow the patient closely;

    But that is not how it is going to happen. You come to the clinic to check into your appointment and receive a colored questionnaire about symptoms from lost of interest to thinking about hurting yourself or others. Once you do that if you answer any questions that say you are given another different colored paper when you get into the room with more detailed questions. Then if you answer a certain way then you fill out another color paper which goes to the provider who will judge if you need to see a specialist in behavior health.

    How this will be incorporated so that it does not increase a already long wait time for patients will be interesting to watch. So expect some longer wait times in the near future before these problems have been ironed out. But I have some personal concerns about a disconnect between getting to get men to open up against women. Something that I see a lot since I have been working in a clinic.

    A guy is going to act defensibly if you put him in a closed off space, in a unfamiliar/unconformable place talking to a person who he does not really know. What makes it worse is the different concepts and jargon of day to day life. If you have to explain minor details in their story about what is troubling them, the person will not want to continue the story. Once that happens it does not matter how many questionnaire you give him, he will just answer the “correct” answers so that he can be left along. I have been told this directly by a patient. This is a big problem. If you want to reach him you need to be mobile. How many times have issues have come up where one guy tells the other “lets take a walk”. I know it is something that will not happen, but this is the best way for a guy to communicate.

    I want to expand more on this problem. It comes when the person telling the story may be reluctant to tell it in the beginning. So the restarts from the listener not understanding or not relating can be frustratingly distracting. This giving the person talking more an more reasons to want to say “Forget it”. Also is a discontent over coping methods. The use of tobacco is the biggest on that I have seen. If you are deployed and used it to help with hairy situations like oh say using your vehicle that your in to roll over a possible IED to test that theory then no one is going to give you a hard time if you light one up after the mission. But in CONUS you will be lectured on quitting regardless of what anti-stress benefits it gives. Also it does not help getting a lecture on why people smoke due to it’s effects on stress reduction from a non-smoker makes me want to light up one right there. If I am feeling this way about tobacco, then imagine the thoughts going inside the person’s head who is reading these forms. It is another person slipping though the cracks.

    Also another concern that may not be written on the website is that during the briefing, it was asked what role would the screener (medic) play in all of this. The reply was that the medic was not expected to or asked to perform additional roles in giving behavior health support. That if a person was positive that they would be handed off to the provider who would manage the issue from there. My concern is that is will create a attitude of “that is not my problem” or “That is not in my scope of practice”. I have seen this first hand during a deployment when a person had voiced a honest intent of wanting to hurt himself that another person present looked at me and told me and I quote; “Sounds like your problem” and “Sucks to be you”. That kind of attitude should not be encourage be it direct or indirect. But moving on.

    Also as a guy, there will be a reluctance to mention anything that is viewed as unnecessary. For example if they are here for flu symptoms that they may be questioning why you are asking things that are not directly related to the visit. Also they may view the questions about their mental health as offensive or trick questions. For example it would be like someone asking you if you had thoughts about cheating your your spouse or had fantasies about cheating on your spouse every time you entered the clinic would be frustrating. Because it could be said that this would be valid due to the high rate of divorces in the military. The person would just not be actively listening/reading and give the “correct” answers again. Similar to the way most people read the licensing agreement to most computer software so they can install it. The speakers claim that the repeated visits will break though this but I refer to any women about the endurance of the stubbornness of the male ego and see if that logic has worked for them.

    All in all, in the fight to find and help those who need it, it must fall on the medic. To listen to their gut and being willing to break away from the conventional to reach them. But most of being a person with genuine concern and kindness. But also be able to call BS on someone when they know they are hiding something. Because a person will reply to a person acting like a person rather then one that is imitating a power point presentation.

  • The parade train

    The Associated Press reports that organizers of the Saint Louis “welcome home” parade for Iraq veterans are getting inquiries from other cities to have their own parades;

    Organizers of the parade that drew an estimated 100,000 observers and 20,000 participants in St. Louis on Jan. 28 said Friday that they have been approached by people from Chicago, Denver, Philadelphia, San Antonio, Oklahoma City, Seattle, Tucson, Ariz., Nashville, Tenn., Greensboro, N.C., and Clinton, Iowa.

    “The revolution for America to rally in support of our troops has just begun,” said Tom Appelbaum, who along with his friend, Craig Schneider, came up with the idea for the St. Louis parade and pulled it off within a month.

    Paul Rieckhof of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America wrote in the Huffington Post yesterday that if New York City and Boston can afford parades for their Super Bowl champions, they can afford parades for the Iraq champions;

    Getting Super Bowl-champ football players a parade in their hometowns is never an issue. But Iraq War veterans? They deserve a little praise, too. They answered our country’s call, and in the least, they survived. But for some reason, they’re running into all kinds of resistance. Last week, New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg said that a parade “would be premature while so many troops are still in harm’s way around the world.”

    While I appreciate the sentiment, I’d rather see the effort to have a parade that would bring those Americans who haven’t been so connected to the events that were perpetrated in our name feel like they did something go towards making veterans feel at home with efforts to help them get back into society. The unemployment rate of veterans, the suicide rates of recent veterans, the erosion of our health benefits all show how thin the appreciation for the job that Iraq veterans really is.

    I get the impression that some people, like Rieckhof, think that parades and organizing for parades will somehow cleanse them of their bad behavior that extended these wars. Remember how we wrote about IAVA and the way they spend their money, and how IAVA only had one paid veteran on their masthead – that veteran was Rieckhof. And how Rieckhof started OpTruth to undermine the war effort in Iraq.

    Now he want to shame American cities into having parades…nothing more than symbols. No one wants the troops to be honored more than me, that’s what this blog has always been about. But I, and I suspect you, want more than pretty words and fluttering banners behind martial music. I want actions that speak louder than words.

  • Love from Montana

    I know…it’s all been about TAH this week, but, hey, we’re having a good week and working very little at it. Anyway, an American Legion Post Commander in Montana at Andrew Pearson Post 117, in Billings, George Blackard, sent us an email last night with his Post’s newsletter with this missive;

    I just thought it was real nice of him to lie about us like that. And Commander, if you ever get out east to the TAH Corporate Resort, there’s a cold one waiting for you in the fridge.