{"id":29272,"date":"2012-03-27T08:10:19","date_gmt":"2012-03-27T12:10:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=29272"},"modified":"2012-03-27T08:10:19","modified_gmt":"2012-03-27T12:10:19","slug":"tah-in-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=29272","title":{"rendered":"TAH in Politico"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sunday night I did an interview with Austin Wright<\/a> of Politico. For some reason, he’s a lurker at TAH he says. Austin writes an daily early morning column at Politico called “Morning Defense<\/a>“, which he explains is his work reporting on soldier- and defense-related issues. <\/p>\n

Today’s column includes portions of our chat on Sunday night, mostly about the media’s mistreatment of veterans in regards to the SSG Robert Bales’ investigation;<\/p>\n

MD INTERVIEW — We chatted over the weekend with Jonn Lilyea, a combat veteran who runs the blog \u201cThis Ain\u2019t Hell.\u201d Over the past week, Lilyea has written a series of posts blasting media reports that suggest PTSD as a possible explanation for the killing spree that left 17 Afghan civilians dead, and he expanded on his views during our discussion.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople say these things without a minute\u2019s research,\u201d Lilyea said. \u201cI think they should just shut up until there\u2019s a medical professional that tells them that this particular person has PTSD and whatever they did was a direct result of PTSD.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lilyea, who started the blog in 2006 and now has a loyal following, describes himself as \u201cmore conservative than Mitt Romney and less conservative than Rush Limbaugh.\u201d He added that he\u2019s concerned the media\u2019s portrayal of PTSD will lead the public to believe that all combat veterans are capable of horrific acts.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can talk to most of the people who are regulars on my blog, and they will tell you that they have some level of PTSD,\u201d he said. \u201cEven in my workplace, I\u2019ve had people tell me, \u2018All veterans are crazy.\u2019 And it all stems from that perception of PTSD.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scroll down for additional excerpts from our interview with Lilyea.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Scrolling down from there, you can read Quotable Lilyea;<\/p>\n

AND, AS PROMISED, MORE FROM OUR INTERVIEW WITH JONN LILYEA —<\/p>\n

On blogging: <\/strong>\u201cI don\u2019t know a thing about blogging. I\u2019ll spend hours researching and writing and put something up and nobody will respond to it. And then I\u2019ll just pull something off the top of my head, and it\u2019ll get a million responses.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the media:<\/strong> \u201cThere are not very many people in the media who were veterans. That\u2019s probably a big piece of the disconnect.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd journalists have this perception of themselves that they\u2019re the experts on every subject, and they just prattle on and mostly they just spew out the same kind of stuff that the popular culture spews out, and to me that\u2019s very irresponsible.\u201d<\/p>\n

And more on PTSD:<\/strong> \u201cWhen you look at the number of people who are suffering from PTSD, especially from the most recent wars, there are hundreds of thousands of them, according to the VA and DOD. These guys aren\u2019t killing people. There are some of them who are committing suicide, but not a whole host of them. They are not beating their wives and not driving their cars off bridges and things like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI went to the range today and shot off 400 rounds of ammunition, and I didn\u2019t shoot one person the whole time that I was out there.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Austin made me sound smarter than I really am, but then he’s a combat veteran of sorts. His bio says he taught middle school in Southeast DC, so that counts a little bit, I suppose. And he really does read the blog because he mentioned some of our posts during the interview. Don’t ask me why, I can’t even figure out why you guys read it.<\/p>\n

And before anyone else says it; I am more conservative than Mitt Romney, but at this stage of the campaign, I think Obama might be more conservative than Romney.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sunday night I did an interview with Austin Wright of Politico. For some reason, he’s a … TAH in Politico<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-veterans-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}