Thousands attend memorial for slain Border Patrol agent

Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times
Thousands attend memorial for slain Border Patrol agent
The Border Patrol honor guard stands at attention before carrying agent Robert Rosas' flag-draped coffin from a memorial service at the Southwest High School theater in El Centro.

About 4,000 attend a service for Robert Rosas, who was shot dead while on duty in eastern San Diego County. Mexican authorities have detained five men in connection with the case.
Associated Press
6:27 PM PDT, July 31, 2009


EL CENTRO, CALIF. -- A Border Patrol agent who was slain in a rugged, remote area along the Mexican border was buried today after being remembered as a gregarious family man who dreamed that his 2-year-old son would follow in his footsteps.

About 4,000 people attended a memorial service for Robert Rosas, 30, who was found dead with bullet wounds to his head and body on the night of July 23 in Campo, about 60 miles east of San Diego. People crowded the aisles of Southwest High School's theater, and many agents arrived too late to get even a glimpse of the service on closed-circuit television in the adjoining gym.
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Thousands attend memorial for slain Border Patrol agent

Veterans start service as sheriff's officers

Veterans start service as sheriff's officers
Philadelphia Inquirer - Philadelphia,PA,USA
By Edward Colimore

Inquirer Staff Writer

Lou Tomassone of Atco has vivid memories of his service as a turret gunner in a cavalry unit in Tikrit, hometown of Saddam Hussein. The 24-year-old former Army specialist once escorted an Iraqi police chief through town when a bomb blew up, spraying his turret with shrapnel and miraculously missing him.

Sean Smith of Runnemede recalls coming under fire in Fallujah, guarding prisoners and teaching Iraqis how to police their country. The 22-year-old, who was in the Marines, showed the recruits how to conduct house raids and patrol the streets.

Louise Bazelak of Barrington remembers taking cover as insurgent mortar rounds fell into her camp at Balad. The 33-year-old former Air Force staff sergeant and F-16 aircraft mechanic still kept the planes flying.

After years in the military, Tomassone, Smith, and Bazelak now have changed uniforms and begun service of a different kind - in their own community.

The three were among 14 military veterans sworn in as Camden County sheriff's officers yesterday during a ceremony to mark the opening of the Camden Veterans Administration Outpatient Clinic adjacent to Cooper University Hospital.

The 12 men and two women were immediately marched to Camden City Hall to undergo processing. Another Iraq veteran was in Marine reservist training yesterday and will be sworn in later, officials said.

Police departments across the country typically have a high percentage of veterans, he said.

"They have discipline and are used to stress," Billingham said. "In the Middle East, they were also used to confrontation, used to dealing with innocent people in crisis."click link for more

I couldn't agree more!

Police need to know what's behind the emergency

Police need to know what's behind the emergency

When police respond to calls from citizens for help, they need to know what they're getting into. If they do not understand the 911 call involves a veteran, opportunities are lost and things could go from bad to worse.

There is a lot of great work being done in several states to educate law enforcement about the unique circumstances involving veterans. It is especially important for every state to be able to deal with the combat veterans considering National Guards and Reservists are being used as much as they are. There are veteran's courts being set up so that veterans dealing with the ravages of combat are treated properly instead of being sent to jail for crimes with the extenuating circumstances behind what they are being accused of. Here are several different scenarios based on news accounts and actual events in order to explain how snap decisions can destroy a golden opportunity to help a veteran.

It's 3:00 am.
You arrive at a house responding to a call about domestic violence.
The wife opens the door crying. She's in her pajamas. Her eye is swollen. There is blood on her night shirt from a nose bleed.
Three children are sitting on the floor, all of them crying.
Husband sits on the sofa, hands over his face as he rocks back and forth. He appears to be in shock.
As you look across the living room, it appears to be a very nice house with pictures hanging on the wall.
The wife says "He kept bunching me!" She wants him arrested.
What do you do?

You are on patrol on a street and notice a car weaving, slowing down without a clear reason.
You follow the car for several minute as the driving becomes more erratic.
Trash barrels line the street and he hits one of them.
You pull the car over.
The driver seems as if he is disorientated.
You do not smell alcohol on his breath.
You suspect drugs because his eyes are glazed.
You ask him if he's on drugs and he says no. He will not look you in the eye.
He opens his wallet to hand you his drivers licence.
You see other cards in his wallet as he fumbles to select the licence.
When you call to see if there are any warrants on the vehicle, you return to the car and he is shaking.
What do you do?

In the first case, the husband is a National Guardsman. There was a picture of him in uniform taken in Iraq. He served in Iraq in some of the worst fighting. He has been dealing with PTSD but does not know what it is. It was one more night of a violent nightmare. The wife was getting aggravated because of the frequency of being woken up in the middle of the night by her husband. Her patience was gone. She yelled at him to wake up and he responded by hitting her three times in the face before he realized where he was and what he was doing. The wife didn't know what PTSD was. She had no clue what was going on with her husband after he got home several months before.

In the second case, it is a Marine veteran who became a civilian. He was having a flashback with the trash barrels lining the street and was trying to avoid being near them. He was re-experiencing a road in Iraq where a bomb had blown up some of his friends. As he opened his wallet, there was a VA hospital identification card he almost handed you instead of his drivers license.

When people make assumptions, they tend to leave it at what they are thinking. A lot of veterans have ended up in jail because no one knew what the veteran was going through. These men and women were willing to give up their lives for the sake of the nation but ended up in jail because of what they went through doing so.

If you, as a police officer are aware of PTSD and what comes with it, you would have known to ask the wife more questions. Use your skills of observations to access the situation. You don't have to make a diagnosis but you should be aware that there is more there than seems obvious.

The wife and the veteran are dealing with what comes after war all too often. Even police officers and firefighters exposed to horrific situations can develop PTSD. Knowing what it is saves lives. If you simply arrest someone and no one asks what was behind the attack in the case of the domestic violence call, there could be a combat veteran put into jail instead of helped to heal. Take your suspicions and have the veteran diagnosed so that if it is PTSD, he is helped and not arrested. The same thing with the driver you suspect of being on drugs, when clearly he is not. It won't be clear to you unless you again use your skills.

There are older veterans suddenly experiencing PTSD because of changes in their lives. Most of them have lived out their days with mild PTSD but as they get older, other traumatic events occur in their lives, it comes on them with a vengeance. It's PTSD on steroids.

There are regular civilians who develop PTSD from traffic accidents, natural disasters, violence and crimes. If you are aware of what you're dealing with, you will not only keep a wounded person out of jail, you will be of great service to the community.

As time goes by, more and more people are becoming aware of what PTSD is but it takes years before people understand what it is. All too often the veteran finds himself in jail, loosing their license to drive or having an arrest on their record when they were suffering instead of just being guilty.

The more the law enforcement community becomes aware of what comes home after trauma, the better the veteran will be served.

Senior Chaplain Kathie Costos
International Fellowship of Chaplains
Namguardianangel@aol.com
http://www.namguardianangel.org/
http://www.woundedtimes.blogspot.com/
"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington

Milwaukee Police Department target PTSD

Few police agencies address suicides within ranks

CARRIE ANTLFINGER
July 22, 2008 01:48 PM EST
MILWAUKEE — Police Sgt. Chuck Cross pointed his department-issue .40-caliber handgun at his temple, finger on the trigger, as he sat drunk against his hallway wall.
"I was about eight pounds of a trigger pull away," he said.

He's unsure why he stopped. Fellow officers, called by his girlfriend, took him to a mental health center. He was charged with disorderly conduct while armed, and was fired.

He says his department had no idea how to handle his situation that March 2007 night, but after six suicides in three years the Milwaukee Police Department now provides suicide awareness training. Since starting the program early this year it has had two more suicides.

"We wear a Superman cape. You're not supposed to be emotional or show it. It might show that you are weak," said Cross, who pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and won his job back. "I don't think I'm so far off that a lot of cops haven't walked down the path I have."

In Milwaukee, Cross didn't know how depressed he was until the night he put the gun to his head. He had been through a divorce. He was stressed about his then-11-year-old disabled son. He'd seen his share of crashes, murders and rapes and he had worked with three officers who committed suicide.
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Jeff Johnson educating law enforcement on PTSD

When the war comes back home
When veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan bring their troubles home, police and judges often are the first to deal with them.
By Jill Carroll | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the July 11, 2008 edition


During 21 years in the Marine Corps, Jeff Johnson saw young adults walk into his recruiting office and newly minted marines walk out of boot camp just a few months later. Now working at the other end of that pipeline at the Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs, he sees far different, troubling changes in those coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The changes were dramatic. I'd never seen these kinds of changes in people," says Mr. Johnson of those wrestling with the mental and physical trauma of war.

The once upstanding service members were getting arrested for domestic violence and bar fights, and being pursued by police as they raced along streets at 100 miles per hour – often with drugs or alcohol involved – seeking to replicate the adrenaline rush of combat or to commit suicide by motorcycle or police bullets.

He was moved to action, creating a presentation about the mental injuries of war for police and other first responders, usually the ones called when a veteran hits bottom.

A year later, he's delivered his message more times than he can count and he's been in demand from police departments across the country, hungry to prepare for what they worry is a coming surge of mentally injured veterans.

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Military, civilian leaders faulted for Iraq aftermath

While we should be concerned for the welfare of all the men and women deployed into Iraq and Afghanistan, we need to pay more attention to the National Guard forces and Reservists.

It also reports that Army National Guard and Reserve soldiers have demonstrated in Iraq and Afghanistan that they "are a fully capable, and indeed, an absolutely essential part of the Army." But it warns that "the price paid by reservists and communities to sustain the long and repetitive mobilizations, however, may not be sustainable in the future."

Army's History of Iraq After Hussein Faults Pentagon
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 29, 2008; Page A03

A new Army history of the service's performance in Iraq immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein faults military and civilian leaders for their planning for the war's aftermath, and it suggests that the Pentagon's current way of using troops is breaking the Army National Guard and Army Reserve.


The study, "On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign," is an unclassified and unhindered look at U.S. Army operations in Iraq from May 2003 to January 2005. That critical era of the war has drawn widespread criticism because of a failure to anticipate the rise of an Iraqi insurgency and because policymakers provided too few U.S. troops and no strategy to maintain order after Iraq's decades-old regime was overthrown.

Donald P. Wright and Col. Timothy R. Reese, who authored the report along with the Army's Contemporary Operations Study Team, conclude that U.S. commanders and civilian leaders were too focused on only the military victory and lacked a realistic vision of what Iraq would look like following that triumph.
go here for more of this
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/28/AR2008062802427.html

What they thought they were getting into when most of them joined.

National Guard helps shore up Ottumwa sub-station
With water levels rising rapidly in Ottumwa by the hour, one of the city’s power sub-stations was in danger of being overrun. However, thanks to nearly 100 National Guard Soldiers, this central power supply was rescued through the construction of a three-foot tall levee...June 19, 2008

Air National Guard works to corral Mississippi
The men and women of the 185th Air Refueling Squadron from Sioux City, Iowa, are teaming with local farmers to maintain the 20 miles of levees, keeping the flooded Mississippi from inundating the 14 thousand acres of homes and farmland here...June 19, 2008

Guard ratchets up Missouri mission; tackles floods in five states
Missouri was the latest Midwest state to see increasing numbers of National Guard Citizen-Soldiers and –Airmen on duty in the face of the region’s worst flooding in 15 years...June 20, 2008

Guard aircraft, aircrews battling California wildfires
Army and Air National Guardmembers from California and North Carolina were supporting firefighting efforts in Northern California today following a state active duty call up by Gov. Arnold Schwarznegger and a request for airborne firefighting assets by the Interagency Fire Center...June 24, 2008

North Carolina Air National Guard fights California wildfires
The North Carolina Air National Guard deployed four C-130 Hercules cargo aircraft with flight crews and support personnel to Northern California June 23 to assist the U.S. Forest Service and the governor in firefighting efforts to contain, control, and extinguish wildfires...June 25, 2008

Fighting floods and fires, National Guard on duty from coast-to-coast
National Guard Citizen-Soldiers and –Airmen fought Midwest flooding and California fires Thursday...June 26, 2008

National Guard Bureau chief: Firefighting and flood efforts “outstanding”
Assessing the National Guard’s California fire and Midwest flood-fighting efforts first-hand Thursday and Friday, the chief of the National Guard Bureau visited adjutants general and troops in impacted states....June 27, 2008

These reports are just from the this month. When they are helping the nation deal with natural disasters, they are able to still do their other jobs. Their jobs are what they base their personal budgets on. Often their incomes do not come close to taking care of their financial needs when they are deployed. This adds to the stress they are under when they are deployed into foreign lands. While it may be true they are highly trained to do their assigned jobs while deployed, they are not trained as fully as the regular military for the rest of what they have to go through.

When they come home, they return to family and friends, jobs they had (provided the jobs are still there) and are expected to pick up where they left off. Some return to businesses as craftsmen, offices, laborers, while others return to law enforcement positions and fire departments. They are expected to return the same way as they would if they were simply doing the same kinds of duties they carry out on our own soil, not unlike the reports above. Yet when they come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, the long absences, they also carry with them the traumas of combat.

We have neglected their needs even more than we have neglected the needs of the regular military. At least when their deployment is over, they return with their brothers in arms by their side and have a watchful eye on them if there should be readjustment problems. The citizen soldiers however return to the lives they had before, the extra strain on their finances, families unaware of the wounds they carry within and no one around them able to understand.

Too often they return with PTSD, but as hard as it is to understand what they went through deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, it is nearly impossible for others to understand the signs of wounds they cannot see. VA clinics and hospitals are too far away to get to on a regular basis for many of these soldiers. Civilian mental health providers do not all understand PTSD. Civilian doctors are also lacking knowledge of this wound and the physical illnesses spawned by PTSD. Local clergy are unaware of the wound, the strain on marriages as well as the spiritual wound that needs to be addressed. This is where the communities need to step up for the sake of the citizen soldiers. Why isn't this happening?

Local providers are trained to focus on all the problems civilians endure. While they can address some of the issues these citizen soldiers face, they cannot address the central issue to all of the problems, which is the horrors of war. We cannot keep neglecting their needs. We cannot keep treating them like the rest of the citizens.

This report on the mistakes made regarding Iraq and the increase of the Taliban's capabilities in Afghanistan should raise a red flag warning these occupations will go on much longer than civilians planned on requiring the more deployments of the citizen soldiers as well as their families. National Guard forces are reporting rates of PTSD at around 50%, yet they receive less help than regular military men and women receive. The citizen soldiers only have their communities to depend on in return for us depending upon them.

Even when they are returning to jobs usually associated with traumatic events, law enforcement and emergency responders, often their own commanders are unaware of PTSD at the levels deployments raise the risk of and depth of this wound. Again, they need more attention than civilian forces never deployed receive.

If we do not address the additional needs of the citizen soldiers, they will suffer needlessly. This is a moral duty for all of us as well as a financial one for every community across the nation.

Un-addressed PTSD leads to the break up of families, drug and alcohol use as self-medication, crimes, homelessness and suicides. This puts a strain on the finances of the local governments as they must deal with arrests, drunk driving, accidents, crimes, violence, domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, growing need for health services in mental health care as well as the physical illnesses extreme stress causes. Reliance on social services are increased. This also leads to reduced incomes as all too often the citizen soldier's wound is neglected to the point they can no longer function on their jobs. We've already seen evidence of all of this because we still have not come to the awareness of PTSD in the citizen soldiers.

When are we going to do it? When will local officials put out an emergency call to all the people in their communities to address this? When will programs be in place across the nation to take care of them? When will the local clergy and physicians be educated to deal with the burdens the citizen soldiers carry? While the plans for the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq found fault with the military and civilian planners, what is happening to the citizen soldiers is also caused by the same officials and lack of planning.


Senior Chaplain Kathie Costos
International Fellowship of Chaplains
Namguardianangel@aol.com
http://www.namguardianangel.org/
http://www.woundedtimes.blogspot.com/
"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington

Rosen Family Wellness Center for Law Enforcement and Military Personnel

Mendenhall, far left, in training, and with wife, Linda Kushner, in their Huntington home. (Newsday / Julia Gaines)

Troubled Huntington GI aided by new center
BY RHODA AMON | rhoda.amon@newsday.com
9:49 AM EDT, May 3, 2008

When Sgt. Stanford Mendenhall returned to Huntington from duty in Iraq with the "Fighting 69th" infantry, he found himself unable to work, suffering repeated flashbacks and severe chest and back pain and getting no help from military sources.

The pain began in Baghdad, where Mendenhall patrolled the dangerous airport road, seeing explosive deaths and destruction and helping pick up body parts. Returning in 2005, he faced Army and Veterans Administration doctors who, he said, couldn't find anything wrong with him.

In the next two years while he fought for help, the former Hicksville letter carrier went into a financial spin; his car was repossessed, fuel, utility and credit card bills mounted to more than $40,000.

Mendenhall, who was 42 when he returned home, older than most soldiers, first enlisted in 1984 for three years because there was no work in his Alabama hometown.



He re-enlisted in the 69th National Guard unit in Manhattan in 1987 and served on security duty at Ground Zero after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. He was deployed to Iraq in 2004.

"You do what you're supposed to do," he said, "but when you come back they don't want to take care of you."

A soldier in distress

A spokeswoman at the Keller Military Medical Center at West Point said, "We addressed the concerns that he came to us with a year ago." The process may be taking longer, she said, because "there are a lot of soldiers going through here these days."

Mendenhall has post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. About 320,000 military personnel returning from Iraq or Afghanistan have PTSD, a major depression, according to a RAND Corp. report, "Invisible Wounds of War," released last month.

In Mendenhall's case, emotional distress was coupled with physical injuries and ailments, including a spinal fracture, bone loss, lung problems and seizures, some of which may have been caused by exposure to toxic materials either overseas or possibly at the 9/11 site, experts say.

But Mendenhall has found a place where he is heard, receives treatment for PTSD and gets help navigating the military medical establishment.

The Rosen Family Wellness Center for Law Enforcement and Military Personnel and Their Families was opened last year at the Manhasset campus of the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health Care System. About half the center's 30 current clients are military, most of whom, like Mendenhall, are having difficulty readjusting to family life.

click post title for more
linked from ICasualties.org

The challenges facing cops returning from battle with PTSD

Coming home, part 2: The challenges facing cops returning from battle


Part 2 of a 3-part exclusive PoliceOne series

Note: This series deals with the potential problems of LEOs attempting to reintegrate into domestic policing after serving military combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our reporting is based on the presentations of experts at a unique, invitation-only symposium for law enforcement and mental health professionals at the Washington (D.C.) Metropolitan Police Academy, organized by Dr. Beverly Anderson, clinical director and administrator of the Metropolitan Police Employee Assistance Program. PoliceOne was the only communications agency permitted to attend.

In Part 1, we explored the battlefield culture, the mental injuries war commonly inflicts, and the fact that returning veterans will inevitably be changed, sometimes in negative ways, by what they have experienced.


Once a law officer—or any returning soldier, for that matter—begins the process of reintegrating to home and job, “the road is likely to be longer, steeper and tougher than getting ready for combat,” said Capt. Aaron Krenz, a criminal justice-trained reintegration operations officer and Iraq veteran with the Minnesota National Guard. Often the men and women involved “don’t anticipate this.”

Hyper-vigilant, quick-trigger mentalities that helped an officer survive for months in a combat zone “don’t just go away, there’s no switch to turn this off,” Krenz said. And that’s the core of the reintegration struggle. Explains Maj. David Englert, chief of the Behavioral Analysis Division of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations: “Everything that made sense over there doesn’t make sense here.”

A simple example is driving style. In Iraq, Englert said, you’d swerve if you saw a water bottle on the roadway because it might be an IED, the greatest cause of injury and death in the war zone. You’d run cars off the road to get to your destination as fast as possible. You’d shoot any unknown vehicle that got too close to you for fear of an ambush.

He told of one returning vet who slipped behind the wheel of his family’s car after his wife and kids met him at the airport. “His wife stopped him even before they got to the ticket booth in the parking lot, and she took over” because his driving was so scary.

When an officer leaves for military deployment, “he takes a mental snapshot of how it’s going to be when he comes back,” Krenz says. But after the hugs and kisses of a brief honeymoon period—sometimes amazingly brief—a different reality often sets in.

Here are just a few of the reentry challenges that can impact an officer’s life back on the job and at home, according to the seminar faculty. Bear in mind that not all returning officer/veterans will experience these symptoms or be impaired by them. Just as with critical incidents in law enforcement, the lingering consequences of having been in combat will vary in nature and intensity from one individual to another.
click post title for more

Reset? How do you reset when you know you will be heading right back within a year? The figures we had from Vietnam were due to most tours lasting just one year and then that was it. While some went back, most did not. The redeployments increase the risk of PTSD and this has been documented, but what has not been discussed enough is the depth of the wound the sending back in to the traumatic environment of combat is causing. Many have been sent back to Iraq and Afghanistan, already diagnosed with PTSD and TBI. This should cause alarm bells to sound off across the nation as to what will come.

Police officers have the same issue when they are back on the streets. If they do not deal with what they face, it cuts into them. We do a better job with police officers than we do with soldiers. We know what to do, we know how to do it, but when it comes to the soldiers, we don't do it.