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

Category: Veterans Issues

  • The retirement jealousy thing again

    The Department of Defense is still considering changing the current military retirement system according to Stars & Stripes.

    “Going back 40 years, this is something that has always been talked about,” said Todd Harrison, a fellow for defense studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “But it’s getting more serious attention now than it has in the past.

    “In the current environment, when you’re looking at major changes to entitlement spending like Social Security and Medicare, that makes it easier to talk about changing military retirement.”

    On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that no changes in military retirement have been finalized, but he reiterated that they are under consideration. That includes breaking away from the 20-year plan, and possibly reducing the generous payout that future retirees will be eligible for.

    Yeah, it’s easier to talk about drastically altering military retirement while at the same time you’re NOT talking about drastically altering Social Security or Medicare…but those are the problems. How intellectually vacant is that line of reasoning?

    This is strictly a jealousy issue and manufactured by people who think that military life is just like driving a cab, or hanging out at the coffee pot in an office somewhere. We aren’t getting rich with our paltry retirement pensions…it barely makes up for how much we’re behind our peers when we reenter the real world and look for a job. Not too many of us live strictly off of our military pensions.

    I’ve heard that I’m rich because I continue to work and draw my pension from family and friends who should know better. I tell people, if you want a twenty-year pension, join the military. No, no, no I can’t do that. Damn right, ya little pussy.

    Anyone talking about ending police or fire department twenty-year pensions? Hell, no. Those are union jobs.

    The only thing that still works like it always in this country is the military and Liberals are doing their best to fuck that up just like they did with the education system. Jimmy Carter lowered the percentage retirees got to 40%, but that didn’t fuck it up enough, I guess. Who is going to make a career out of the military with expensive healthcare and no pension?

  • The therapy of the silk

    The Virginia Pilot reports about wounded warriors who find the healing effects of parachuting, thanks to the efforts of another wounded warrior, Jason Redman (Word.doc) who owns “Wounded Wear” a nonprofit clothing company;

    Some came from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Portsmouth Naval Medical Center; others were from local military bases. A few have jumped before and returned for another dose.

    “It’s peaceful,” said Brian Doyne, a former Army explosive disposal technician who lost his left arm and left eye in a 2005 explosion in Iraq. “It’s my Zen time.”

    Now working for a defense contractor and living in Fredericksburg, the 32-year-old Doyne was preparing to make his 28th jump on Sunday. A licensed sky diver, he didn’t have to jump tandem, harnessed to an instructor in a parachute built for two.

    “It’s the only time I’m not in pain,” he said of sky diving. “It’s the only time my body doesn’t hurt.”

  • DoD and VA still can’t share records

    SO here we are, two years after the Defense Department and the Veterans Affairs Department agreed to provide a seamless transition for transitioning service members’ health records between the agencies and they still can’t get the job done. In fact, they estimate it’ll take six more years to complete the project says Leo Shane at Stars & Stripes;

    Information technology experts say departmental infighting is hobbling the effort, and question whether the agencies will be able to stick to even the six-year estimate, considering their rocky past.

    Veterans groups are frustrated as well, especially with a wave of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans already beginning to seek health care services at VA facilities.

    “Every year they talk about a new plan,” said Jacob Gadd, Deputy Director for Health Care at the American Legion. “They just need to pick one that works and move forward already.”

    Yeah, how many of you spend that much time picking software? But who is surprised? Certainly not me. At Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the premiere health care facility in the country, the Army can’t share medical records between clinics in the same building, let alone with the DVA.

    As I’ve written before, I have complete confidence in the doctors and nurses at Walter Reed, but the administration sucks canal water. I could have two or three appointments on the same day and fill out the same forms for each clinic because there’s no file-sharing network in the hospital.

    Now when I retired in 1994, my records were sent by the Army automatically to the VA facility near my home who immediately contacted me and set up appointments for me. What the hell happened between 1994 and now that the two agencies are fighting over interoperability?

    I’m sure it’s contractors who are fighting over whose crap they’ll use. Fire ’em! Anyone who is working for the Defense Department and Veterans Affairs and doesn’t put 100% of their efforts towards the welfare of the troops…just send ’em down the road with empty pockets.

  • Veteran college students have highest suicide rates

    The Stars & Stripes reports that according to a study quoted in the Air Force Times nearly half of veterans in college have had thoughts of suicide;

    Researchers decided to examine the issue of suicide among student veterans because they received reports from campus veterans groups that vets were feeling isolated and disconnected from fellow students as a result of their worldly experiences, said University of Utah professor M. David Rudd, the study’s lead author.

    Isolated and disconnected? No shit? Here are people who’ve already made a mark in the world surrounded by lazy, unmotivated complainers who treat them like shit. Not to mention that they are closer in age to the professors than the students and the professors demean everything that the veterans have accomplished.

    I think the worst part of my life was the year I spent as a student listening to my fellow students constantly telling me how rough their lives were and listening to professors mis-tell the history I’d lived. And I couldn’t understand how the world had gone to shit in the mere twenty years I’d been gone.

  • President to declare war on vet unemployment

    Stars & Stripes reports that the President will outline a plan to combat veteran unemployment over the next several months during a speech this morning at the Washington Navy Yard in DC today. The program will improve transition services for troops leaving the military and incentives for employers.

    White House officials said his speech will also include proposals for tax cuts for companies that hire young veterans and a public challenge to civilian companies to hire 100,000 former servicemembers over the next 16 months.

    According to Department of Labor statistics, the unemployment rate for post-Sept. 11 veterans in June hit 13.3 percent, well above the national rate of 9.2 percent. A senior White House official called the figures unacceptable, and said that “those veterans who have sacrificed for their country … deserve all the support we can give them.”

    While I applaud the administration’s efforts to help veterans, I’ve seen this before. They hire a bunch of school-educated doofuses who wouldn’t know a rifle from a bayonet to tell soldiers how to adapt to civilian life when these counselors can’t even relate to troops’ experiences.

    The government needs to hire combat veterans to run these programs, folks who’ve been in boots and then transitioned to civilian lives. It’s the same solution for lowering the suicide rate among veterans.

    They come back from the defining moment of their lives to discover that they can’t relate to events swirling around them, and combat veterans discover that the most important thing that ever happened to them means nothing to anyone outside their homes. They need someone who went before them and dealt with the same feelings and walked in their boots before them.

  • Priorities

    Most of you know that last year Congress passed and Obama signed an IAVA-crafted  bill that in effect cut GI Bill benefits for most active duty veterans. The bill was one of the few times that the Democrats applied PAYGO rules during the first two years of the Obama administration and some Dems even praised the fact it might save a couple million of dollars.

    Now fast forward to today. Part of the new debt deal is an increase in funding for Pell Grants for civilians who are looking to go college or a vocational school. Wait, I thought this whole debt deal was about cutting spending? Well, gee I guess Pell Grants must be incredibly fucking awesome if they are dumping more money into the program. Wrong. Lets look at some of the things that are fucked up about Pell Grants:

    1. There is evidence the Pell Grants and other forms of federal aid to higher education may actually be contributing to the rising cost of higher education.

    2. Recipients of Pell Grants have on average lower graduation rates than non-recipients (nearly half of all Pell Grant recipients do not receive a degree in six years).

    3. Pell Grants help prop-up worthless for-profit schools that would otherwise be devoured by the market.

    4. Pell Grants put more money in the pockets of corrupt college presidents that have chosen to invest heavily in the administrative aspects of their universities as opposed to the educational aspects.

    5. There is no incentive for a Pell Grant recipient to succeed considering it is a grant and not a loan. There is no requirement to pay back the money with a Pell Grant.

    So, to sum it up, President Obama without hesitation signed into law a bill that weakened the most successful college aid program in the history of the United States but aggressively fought for a massive increase in funding for arguably the worst college aid program in the history of United States.

    Priorities people. Priorities.

  • Veteran is victim of agents at the wrong address

    Ramsey Tossa, a former Army translator, woke to the sound of over-anxious DEA agents pounding on his door of his home near Detroit, according to Detroit’s Fox2;

    “As soon as I opened the door, somebody grabbed me and took me outside and put me on the grass,” Tossa said. “The first thing I thought was they were terrorists who want to kill me because I served in Iraq.”

    Apparently, the agents were looking for Tossa’s landlord’s son. Nice recon work, there, DEA.

    Agents Raid Wrong House in Sterling Heights: MyFoxDETROIT.com

  • Just in case…

    H/T Carrie.

    I missed this, maybe you did too?
    Banks Offering Emergency Plans for Debt Ceiling Crisis

    More banks are announcing plans to help in the event that the federal government debt ceiling crisis results in non-payment of pay for service members and other Department of Defense employees.

    USAA (my bank) appears to be on top of things, and my VA check went in so we can eat and keep our house for another month.