More love for our troops from the top... by chrisisall

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

More love for our troops from the top...

POSTED BY: CHRISISALL
UPDATED: Monday, December 17, 2007 16:51
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VIEWED: 2179
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Saturday, December 1, 2007 5:30 PM

Geezer, with ALL the f***ups going on regarding the vets coming home from Iraq, you wanna tell me Uncle Sam cares at all? ....so, no conspiracy- I can go with that- but you have to see me a 'they don't give a s**t' in return, K?

Chrisisall

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Saturday, December 1, 2007 5:50 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Then perhaps you should have posted and cited an article which wasn't mainly an accusation of a conspiracy

It was one I had seen earlier, so I looked it up. Sheesh!

---------------------------------
Always look upstream.

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Saturday, December 1, 2007 8:12 PM

RUE

I have a vote and I'm not afraid to use it!

Rap

"Exactly what a Left winger would be expected to say, to paint a distorted picture of the media landscape."

If you had looked it up (using searchable quotes) you would have seen that I quoted an article from a website that detests the left and the organization, and spent many many words trying to make a connection between Hillary Clinton and Media Matters. And couldn't.

So, to get back to the original point, no, none of this comes from 'Media Matters'. So rest assured the information isn't tainted by that horrible source.

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True believers of the world unite ! You have nothing to lose but your mind !

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Sunday, December 2, 2007 4:14 AM

GEEZER

Keep the Shiny side up

Quote:
Originally posted by chrisisall:
Geezer, with ALL the f***ups going on regarding the vets coming home from Iraq, you wanna tell me Uncle Sam cares at all? ....so, no conspiracy- I can go with that- but you have to see me a 'they don't give a s**t' in return, K?

I agree that there have been some F-ups, and one is too many, but I'm not sure that there are more than in any bureaucracy. Veteran's benefits are right up there with Social Seurity and income tax refunds as issues which cause letters to congressmen and congressional inquiries to the agency. The Fort Carson issue is a good example, and has resulted in a GAO audit. If there were a disproportionate number, it'd be all over the news.

Don't forget that you're part of "Uncle Sam" too. Your representatives are the ones who set the DOD and VA budgets, and if expenses go up, the VA can't raise prices to cover it, but has to try and get more $ out of Congress. I'd be happy to chip in an extra few hundred a year in taxes for vet's benefits, along with what I contribute to DAV and other organizations.

"Keep the Shiny side up"

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Sunday, December 2, 2007 4:20 AM

GEEZER

Keep the Shiny side up

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
It was one I had seen earlier, so I looked it up. Sheesh!

Okay.

But, really, does the GAO audit of PTSD mis-diagnosis make you feel any better about the situation? I think we both agree the actions at Ft. Carson were pretty bad, and the audit is gonna be system-wide. When it's complete, they'll publish a full report. Having experienced a routine (i.e. not congressionally requested) GAO audit in the past, I can tell you they miss nothing.

"Keep the Shiny side up"

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Sunday, December 2, 2007 5:04 AM

CHRISISALL

Quote:
Originally posted by Geezer:
Your representatives are the ones who set the DOD and VA budgets

*paraphrases Sean Connery from Outland*
My representatives are s**t.

But thanks for a most reasonable response, sir Chrisisall

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Sunday, December 2, 2007 7:35 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
But, really, does the GAO audit of PTSD mis-diagnosis make you feel any better about the situation? I think we both agree the actions at Ft. Carson were pretty bad, and the audit is gonna be system-wide. When it's complete, they'll publish a full report. Having experienced a routine (i.e. not congressionally requested) GAO audit in the past, I can tell you they miss nothing.

I don't know because I haven't had much time and I haven't looked up your link. (Xmas coming and all that)Hope to get to it soon.

---------------------------------
Always look upstream.

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Tuesday, December 11, 2007 4:50 PM

RUE

I have a vote and I'm not afraid to use it!

'A Soldier's Officer'

By Dana Priest and Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 2, 2007; Page A01

In a nondescript conference room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, 1st Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside listened last week as an Army prosecutor outlined the criminal case against her in a preliminary hearing. The charges: attempting suicide and endangering the life of another soldier while serving in Iraq.

Her hands trembled as Maj. Stefan Wolfe, the prosecutor, argued that Whiteside, now a psychiatric outpatient at Walter Reed, should be court-martialed. After seven years of exemplary service, the 25-year-old Army reservist faces the possibility of life in prison if she is tried and convicted.

At the hearing, Wolfe, who had already warned Whiteside's lawyer of the risk of using a "psychobabble" defense, pressed a senior psychiatrist at Walter Reed to justify his diagnosis.

"I'm not here to play legal games," Col. George Brandt responded angrily, according to a recording of the hearing. "I am here out of the genuine concern for a human being that's breaking and that is broken. She has a severe and significant illness. Let's treat her as a human being, for Christ's sake!"

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"Global warming - it's not just a fact, it's a choice."

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Tuesday, December 11, 2007 4:54 PM

RUE

I have a vote and I'm not afraid to use it!

The Hotel Aftermath
Inside Mologne House, the Survivors of War Wrestle With Military Bureaucracy and Personal Demons

By Anne Hull and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, February 19, 2007; Page A01

The guests of Mologne House have been blown up, shot, crushed and shaken, and now their convalescence takes place among the chandeliers and wingback chairs of the 200-room hotel on the grounds of Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Oil paintings hang in the lobby of this strange outpost in the war on terrorism, where combat's urgency has been replaced by a trickling fountain in the garden courtyard. The maimed and the newly legless sit in wheelchairs next to a pond, watching goldfish turn lazily through the water.

But the wounded of Mologne House are still soldiers -- Hooah! -- so their lives are ruled by platoon sergeants. Each morning they must rise at dawn for formation, though many are half-snowed on pain meds and sleeping pills.

In Room 323 the alarm goes off at 5 a.m., but Cpl. Dell McLeod slumbers on. His wife, Annette, gets up and fixes him a bowl of instant oatmeal before going over to the massive figure curled in the bed. An Army counselor taught her that a soldier back from war can wake up swinging, so she approaches from behind.

"Dell," Annette says, tapping her husband. "Dell, get in the shower."

"Dell!" she shouts.

Finally, the yawning hulk sits up in bed. "Okay, baby," he says. An American flag T-shirt is stretched over his chest. He reaches for his dog tags, still the devoted soldier of 19 years, though his life as a warrior has become a paradox. One day he's led on stage at a Toby Keith concert with dozens of other wounded Operation Iraqi Freedom troops from Mologne House, and the next he's sitting in a cluttered cubbyhole at Walter Reed, fighting the Army for every penny of his disability.

***************************************************************
"Global warming - it's not just a fact, it's a choice."

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Thursday, December 13, 2007 11:13 AM

CAPTAINOLEY

What would we do without the Washington Post? I have such respect for those guys. This is an interesting thread. Living in a military area, this has a lot of impact on the people around me. I am definitely going to keep up with this one.

Oley

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Thursday, December 13, 2007 11:55 AM

FREMDFIRMA

You know, none of this addresses something the VA and military pointedly don't offer, or at least to my knowledge do not.

When a lot of these guys come home, especially from multiple stop-loss extended tours, they have difficulty re-entering civilian life, especially if their civilian life as they knew it has in some way deteriorated in the process (lost the house, wife left, got outsourced, etc) or if some physical disability has occured.

Now, barring physical disability, I have long suspected the reason they don't out-counsel was because, feeling adrift and unable to cope, most of those folks would turn around and re-up, into the only thing that they really understood anymore, rather than deal with a traumatic and difficult adjustment into a world they no longer recognised.

But it's easy to leave the military physically, once discharged, leaving it mentally is far and away something else again, all your responses are wrong, there's no hard and fast structure to cling to, no supervisor to ask for directions, and the conditioning against making your own decisions all conspire against you and left you feeling... lost and adrift in a world you don't really comprehend anymore... remember, I served too, a long time ago, and the adjustment was a right bitch given the death of every current supportive member of the family during that period.

I call this phenom "Decompression Sickness", for lack of a better term, and do a LOT of counselling on it for guys coming back to "The World" and just not assimilating well, as one who did serve, even as a supply grunt and truck driver, there's a common background, and being disabled myself, I can relate to most of the injured ones (I have some pretty specialised knowledge of prosthetics as well, and a TON of local contacts with the docs and engineers who make the very best ones) enough to get through to em.

VA support is pretty sporadic, they'll go all out for one guy, and stall/ignore another with no apparent method to the madness, so it's real helpful for these guys to have something, or someone, solid to lean on when they get back and can't cope so well - not everyone on my mailing list bought it, and not all of em come back in one piece, one Spec4 who was mortified at the thought of being unable to walk... we had a sachs-foot standard heavy bar all ready for him when he got here, and all we had to do was the initial fit (the final socket fitting comes about 3 weeks later) and the look on his face after having been wheeled into the clinic, he got to WALK out, on his own power, was something to treasure.

WE can support the troops, not with some stupid magnetic ribbon on the back of a gas guzzler (which I notice have mostly disappeared) but with information, comfort and counsel, without regard to how we feel about the dimwits cutting the orders - and here's a non-shocker, a lotta THEM feel the same way about the SOBs.

It's pretty shameful how the powers that be have always regarded "used-up" troops, with about the value and meaning of a used kleenex, and how they've never gotten their due since at least the 1860s...

I may not be that sympathetic, but what most of em need is HELP, not sympathy, and comfort and sympathy are different things anyway, leastways in my book.

So if you know, even distantly, any of these guys when they come back, talk to em, BE there for em, cause that adjustment is a helluva lot harder than most civvies think it is.

-Frem

It cannot be said enough, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to endlessly repeat it

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Friday, December 14, 2007 6:29 AM

CAPTAINOLEY

Absolutely, do whatever you can to help. I have an employee who was over there last year. He handled it pretty well, but when people bring it up he kind of moves away. He has to go back in teh spring for six months. I am not looking forward to that.

Oley

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Monday, December 17, 2007 4:51 PM

FREELANCERTEX

Ok, now I'm pissed. *picks up bat*
*goes to breakables room*

*pokes head back in door for a sec* yeah, if I get my leg blown off and they ask me to repay part of my enlistment bonus, they can kiss my ass and go to hell.

__________________________
Have you ever wondered why in a dream you can touch a falling sky?
Or fly to the heavens that watch over you?

"I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar."

A man is least himself when he speaks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will show you his true self.

You can't take the sky from me...

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