Marine laid to rest before holding newborn son

Detroit marine, new father will have his final salute today
By Gina Damron
Detroit Free Press Staff Writer
July 2, 2012

U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Steven Stevens II, left, with his wife Monique. Family photo

Nearly every day, U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Steven Stevens II would open his email and find pictures of his newborn son.

His wife sent photos and videos when baby Kairo started cooing, laughing and focusing on objects.

Kairo listened to Stevens’ voice across a phone line, and Stevens watched his son over Skype. The last time, when Stevens said his son’s name, Kairo reached toward the computer camera.

“That was like, the best feeling of his life,” Monique Stevens said of her husband, who told her: “Oh, he knows me. He understands me. He knows my voice.”

But Stevens, a 23-year-old stationed in Afghanistan, was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade last month and never got the chance to hold his now 3-month-old child, born eight days after he deployed.
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Vietnam War at 50: A lesson for Afghanistan?

These are reporters that did the research and they added in what happened after most reporters leave off. The Mayaquez Incident

• Vietnam War: Judge and McMahon are generally considered the last to die. Lt. Col. William Nolde, a military professor at Central Michigan University who'd volunteered for Vietnam, was killed by artillery fire on Jan. 27, 1973, 11 hours before the United States signed the Paris Peace Accords. He's considered the last U.S. fatality in the war's combat phase.

But the killing didn't end even after the fall of Saigon. Two weeks later, Cambodian communist forces seized the U.S. merchant ship Mayaguez. The United States launched a military rescue operation on an island where the crew was thought to have been held. When the force withdrew, two Marines — Gary Hall and Danny Marshall — were accidentally left behind, and later killed.

Vietnam War at 50: A lesson for Afghanistan?
By Rick Hampson and Carmen Gentile
USA TODAY
7:32 AM, July 3, 2012

At center, brothers Jeff Walling, right, and Mike Walling, left, sit as their father Air Force Lt. Col. Charles M. Walling of Phoenix, is buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., just outside Washington, Friday, June 15, 2012. Walling's F-4 Phantom jet crashed during a mission in Vietnam in 1966 but his remains were not recovered until 2010. / AP Photo

By April 29, 1975, America's war in Vietnam had been over for two years. But as he stood post at the gate of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, a city encircled by 16 communist divisions, Sgt. Bill Newell got the news: Two fellow Marine security guards had been killed at the airport.

Charlie McMahon and Darwin Judge were new in country; McMahon had arrived 11 days earlier. They'd never fired their weapons in combat. They'd been assigned to the airport in part because it was safer and would be evacuated sooner.

Instead, because of an enemy rocket, they'd be the last Americans to die in the Vietnam War.

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Flashbacks and fireworks

Flashbacks and fireworks
by Chaplain Kathie
Wounded Times Blog
July 3, 2012

We hear the haunting sound of taps played and we get sad. They remember the friends and others "for which they gave the last full measure of devotion" as President Lincoln said. We jump even after seeing the honor guard raise their rifles into the air, then fire the shots. They remember the weapons fired at them.

We get angry sitting in traffic and afraid we're going to get hit when a car is coming too close too fast. They remember the suicide car bombers and bombs planted in the road.

On the 4th of July, we pack up the car, head out to see the fireworks and are willing to sit for hours until it gets dark enough for bursts to light up the sky. For combat veterans, it is waiting for the darkness surrounded by a bunch of strangers they don't feel safe around, waiting for the dark to make their anxiety stronger. When the sky turns black, they hear the sound and smell the burnt gunpowder, and they remember when the night came while they were at war.

Homeless Gulf War Veteran saves life of shooting victim

Homeless veteran credited for saving life of shooting victim
by KING 5 News
Posted on July 2, 2012

A homeless veteran is credited for saving the life of a shooting victim in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood early Monday.

Seattle police said around 3 a.m. near 2nd Avenue and Bell Street, an argument between two men escalated into a fight, which ended with one man pulling out a gun and shooting the other man. According to officers, the victim ran a block before collapsing on the street.

A couple of blocks away, a homeless man known on the streets as Staff Sgt. Royal, a 10-year Army man and a veteran of the first Gulf War, heard the shots and came to the man’s rescue.
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Staff Sgt. Travis Mills fights to recover after losing limbs

Mich. soldier fights to recover after losing limbs
MIKE HOUSEHOLDER
Associated Press
Tuesday, July 3, 2012

VASSAR, Mich. (AP) — Army Staff Sgt. Travis Mills served two deployments to Afghanistan without suffering anything close to a major injury. Then, in a second, everything changed.

On patrol during his third tour in April, Mills put his bag down on an improvised explosive device, which tore through the decorated high school athlete's muscular 6-foot-3 frame. Within 20 seconds of the IED explosion, a fast-working medic affixed tourniquets to all four of Mills' limbs to ensure he wouldn't bleed to death.

"I was yelling at him to get away from me," Mills remembers. "I told him to leave me alone and go help my guys.

"And he told me: 'With all due respect, Sgt. Mills, shut up. Let me do my job.'"

The medic was able to save Mills' life but not his limbs. Today, the 25-year-old Mills is a quadruple amputee, one of only five servicemen from any military branch to have survived such an injury during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Maria Tolleson, a spokeswoman at U.S. Army Medical Command. And instead of serving alongside his unit, he has been spending his days based at Walter Reed Medical Center, working on rehabilitation after the accident that dramatically altered the trajectory of his life.

Mills doesn't dwell on that. Sitting in his hospital bed, he describes his situation plainly: "I just had a bad day at work."

His family — especially his wife, Kelsey — admires him for that.

"I think he's Superman. I really do," she said. "It's amazing to see just how lucky he is. I mean, he's the luckiest unlucky guy."
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Wife can't believe Staff Sgt. Robert Bales is guilty

Wife of Robert Bales, soldier accused in Afghan massacre, speaks out
July 2, 2012
CBS News

The wife of U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the soldier accused of leaving his southern Afghanistan base and murdering 16 unarmed civilians, believes her husband is innocent.

Kari Bales said she's in touch with her husband, but has not asked him about what happened.

"I just don't need to ask him," she said Monday on "CBS This Morning." "I know my husband, and it's not a question I really need to ask. I know him. I know what he's capable of and not capable of, so I don't need to ask the question."

When asked what life would be like if her husband were to be found guilty, Bales said, "At this point I haven't gotten that far. I truly believe that my husband did not do this. I really just want the facts to come out through the fair trial."
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Psychologists question Army resilience program

If I said I told you so, it would do no good for all the men and women suffering since 2008 because of this. No one wanted to listen!

This is the comment I left on Army Times for this.

Wounded Times · Editor, Publisher and Videographer at Wounded Times Blog I have been against this "program" since 2008 but it did little good to be right when our troops came home and suffered for taking this training. This "training" was geared toward rape victims and not combat troops. I am tired of them feeling they are responsible for ending up with PTSD "because they didn't train right" or because the DOD told them they were mentally weak and needed to train their brains! What took so long for the rest of the mental health community to respond to this?

Psychologists question Army resilience program
By Patricia Kime
Staff writer
Army Times
Posted : Monday Jul 2, 201

Army Comprehensive Soldier Fitness is a $125 million program that seeks to make troops as psychologically fit as possible.

But a group of psychologists says there’s no proof that the program — or similar resilience-building efforts in the other services — works.

Worse, say members of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, these programs could undermine coping mechanisms developed by troops who already successfully handle stress.

TELL US

Have you gone through a resilience training program? Military Times would like to hear your views of that training — positive or negative. Email staff writer Patricia Kime at pkime@militarytimes.com.

Created in 2008 to address alarming trends in soldier behavior, such as rising suicides, alcohol and drug abuse, and behavioral health problems, CSF is based on the teachings of Martin Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania professor and proponent of positive psychology. He says an optimistic outlook can affect all aspects of life and ward off anxiety and depression.

The training, and the program’s annual measurement test, the Global Assessment Tool, is mandatory for all soldiers. Since 2009, 8,000 officers and enlisted personnel have attended master resilience courses. They in turn teach CSF at the unit level.
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VA NEWS EMAILS spam

UPDATE July 3, 2012

All List Serve Subscribers,

We have corrected a glitch in the settings for the subscriber list that allowed individuals to reply to the entire list. We apologize for the confusion and the concern this error has caused for those of you on the subscriber list.

In the last few days, subscribers wishing to be removed from the list serve replied to the original message they received regarding news releases. Unbeknownst to them, when they clicked on the reply button, the list serve address was entered in the “to” line of the message. When they clicked on send, their message was sent to the entire subscriber list. Subsequent replies often repeated the process.

We have adjusted our process to preclude this from happening in the future. This e-mail is being sent with the address in the “Bcc” line so replies will only be received at this address. We have also asked our automation personnel to re-set the list serve setting to prevent a repeat of this error.

If you wish to be removed from the subscriber list, please go to the VA website link below and follow the instructions.

Thank you for your patience and we apologize for the inconvenience.

VA Public Affairs

VA NEWS - L @ LIST SERV. VA. GOV

If you get an email from this address, just delete it. I made the mistake of opening an email this morning and the emails keep coming in. They seem to be attached to a press release about Louisville Replacement Hospital. Unless you want to waste most of your day, don't reply to it,,,,don't even open it!

88 percent of veterans drop out of school during their first year

It is not that they were out of education for so long. I'm proof of that. Not as a veteran but as a 51 year old going back to college for Digital Media. I finished before I turned 53. It wasn't easy and I had to work harder than students in their 20's but I managed to finish with a 3.1 GPA.

I talked to a lot of student/veterans and they thought that it was the way they learn that was changed by the military culture more than anything else. The disconnect between the "civilian" world and them was secondary.

Thousands of veterans failing in latest battlefield: college
By Bill Briggs

Among the approximately 800,000 military veterans now attending U.S. colleges, an estimated 88 percent drop out of school during their first year and only 3 percent graduate, according a report forwarded by the University of Colorado Denver, citing the analysis by U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education and Labor and Pensions.

During a pair of six-month stints in and around Fallujah, Iraq – then a fiercely volatile city – Navy corpsman Lucas Velasquez came to know about life. And death.

From late 2005 through early 2007, not long after nearly 100 U.S. troops and more than 1,350 insurgents were killed in Fallujah during Operation Phantom Fury, Velasquez routinely rendered emergency aid to wounded Marines while ducking bullets, rocket-propelled grenades and IED blasts. In uniform, Velasquez was smart and quick, adept at practicing field medicine literally while under the gun.

In 2007, after retiring from the Navy, Velasquez, then 23, enrolled at Columbus State University in western Georgia. He promptly failed four of his first six classes.
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Media hype on veterans committing crimes

This is something that needs to be sent to every single reporter looking for a headline.

"Data from the Department of Justice indicates that the homicide offender rate in the civilian population during that same period varied between 25 and 28 homicides per 100,000 young American males – implying that veterans might actually be less likely than their non-veteran, age-group peers to commit a violent homicide."

The only problem with this is they won't read it because it would take away their power to grab a "top of the fold" position.

As Attitudes Shift on P.T.S.D, Media Slow to Remove Stigma
By MIKE HAYNIE
New York Times
July 2, 2012

In 1999, President Bill Clinton convened the first White House Summit on Mental Health. The aim of the conference and the public campaign that followed was, in part, to educate the media on the moral and ethical imperative related to dispelling the stigma associated with mental illness. In a radio address to announce the conference, Mr. Clinton said, “Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma and bias shame us all.”

In recent years, the Department of Defense has made unprecedented progress toward eliminating the stigma associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues affecting service members. This cultural shift within the military is a sea change, as more and more of our service members are seeking and receiving the support they need and deserve from a grateful nation. In the face of that progress, it’s unfortunate that some in the media continue to perpetuate a stigma linking military service to mental illness and violence.

This is seen in news articles throughout the country, with some referring to veterans as “ticking time bombs.” By describing vets as “time bombs” who are highly trained in “guerrilla warfare,” media outlets prove far too careless with regard to providing societal context for isolated acts of violence committed by people who sometimes happen to be veterans.

Reporting has been biased toward paper-selling sensationalism that perpetuates the stigma of a dangerous combat veteran akin to Rambo, invading our neighborhoods and homes. Consider the media coverage of the case of Itzcoatl Ocampo, who has been charged with the murders of several homeless men in California. Some news outlets went as far as to identify him as a former Marine before even mentioning his name. Others were sure to immediately identify him as an Iraq war veteran, and then described how the victims were tracked in a meticulous manner, blatantly attempting to portray Mr. Ocampo as if he believed he was still on mission. Mr. Ocampo has even been called an “Iraq war veteran” and a “monster” in the same paragraph, connecting the two.
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Marines talk about severity of Combat PTSD

Marines Discuss the Severity of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome
WHSV News
Jun 27, 2012

Marine Corps Veteran Daniel Fahey served for years before being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. It is an anxiety disorder that can start after psychological trauma, like warfare.

“If you don't at least recognize and make that first step, it can really start to tear you up and tear everybody else around you down,” said Fahey.

He served in Afghanistan and in Iraq counseling other soldiers.

Fahey said he considered suicide by driving off the road to get rid of his problems. That was when he realized he had a problem.

“It can seriously just cause you to implode slowly, and that's a very lonely place to be.”

Staunton Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) members wanted to make sure people have information about PTSD, in case they suffer from some of the symptoms. They held a forum so other people could learn about PTSD.
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Army Sgt. Major Raymond Chandler III keeps fighting to save lives

One of the heroes on PTSD is Sgt. Major Chandler and in this article he "called himself the poster child of someone with PTSD" with a lot of courage. He's been open about his own battle with Combat PTSD making him a true hero in the fight to save the lives of the men and women serving today and the veterans of yesterday.

Officials Say Progress Must Continue in PTSD Treatment
By Terri Moon Cronk
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, June 27, 2012 – Great strides have been made in treating service members with post-traumatic stress disorder, but progress must continue, military and medical leaders told an audience here today.

The military’s three surgeons general and the Army’s senior sergeant major spoke at an event to mark the third-annual National Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Awareness Day.

Sgt. Major of the Army Raymond Chandler III called himself the poster child of someone with PTSD who is concerned about the stigma associated with seeking treatment, something which he says is an on-going issue for many.

His first brush with a life-threatening event in Iraq became life-altering, he said, adding that it caused him to do things that led to a “downward spiral.” For example, during his post-deployment health risk assessment, he wasn’t completely honest about his situation because he was being redeployed.

“I felt that if I said truthfully what happened and what I was feeling, I wouldn’t be able to succeed and move on. I’ve come a long way since 2005,” he added, noting that he had turned off a good part of his life -- the emotional, spiritual and physical elements to deal with being the professional soldier.

Chandler finally entered a two-week behavioral health program which he said made a significant difference.

In 2011, when he interviewed with then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. George W. Casey Jr. for the job as Sergeant Major of the Army, he said Casey was glad to have him onboard with his experience in PTSD counseling, because Chandler could speak to the challenges and treatment.

Chandler got the job and went on to tell his story to service members and families.

“I think we’ve made a difference,” Chandler said. “I know in many of our soldiers’ lives and the many challenges of the past 10 years, we’ve made tremendous strides in our behavioral health care access, and our care and quality of care, [but] we still have a long way to go.”

“I believe we will work through this and we will be better as a nation,” he said.

Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Patricia D. Horoho told the audience “As a society in military medicine we must be able to provide care for the invisible wounds of war in the long run. As a nation, it is our opportunity to partner and lead the way in breaking the silence [of the invisible wounds].”
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Canadian Military ‘Disappointed’ head of veteran’s suicide probe

‘Disappointed’ head of veteran’s suicide probe won’t press Peter MacKay for key documents after Defence Minister’s stonewalling
Chris Cobb
Postmedia News
Jun 27, 2012

OTTAWA — The head of a federal inquiry probing the suicide of Afghan war veteran Stuart Langridge says he won’t immediately challenge Defence Minister Peter MacKay in Federal Court over his refusal to hand over key documents.

MacKay refused a request by Military Police Complaints Commission chairman Glenn Stannard to waive solicitor-client privilege in the Langridge case and provide the inquiry with the documents.

“While I’m disappointed with this response by Minister MacKay I continue to respect his position of authority,” said Stannard and his undoubted prerogative to exercise his discretion with respect to any request to waive privilege.”
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Changes needed in Guard, Reserve pay

Review: Changes needed in Guard, Reserve pay
Stars and Stripes
Published: July 2, 2012
A Pentagon review of compensation members of the National Guard and reservists receive is recommending that changes be made to make salaries and benefits more equitable, according to an article from The Associated Press.

Guard members and reservists normally receive two days of pay for each weekend day they spend training in the States, but only receive one day’s pay when deployed to Afghanistan, according to the article.
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Troop hospitalizations show mental toll of war

Troop hospitalizations show mental toll of war
By WYATT OLSON
Stars and Stripes
Published: July 1, 2012

YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan — Hospitalizations of troops with mental disorders such as suicidal or homicidal intent and debilitating psychosis reached a 10-year high in 2011, underscoring the mental and emotional toll of America’s dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center says 13,133 servicemembers were treated as inpatients last year for mental disorders, the top reason for hospitalization of active-duty troops. That was up from 10,706 in 2007.

The total number of hospitalizations for mental disorders in 2011 was about 21,700, suggesting that many patients were treated more than once, based on annual data from a recently released Medical Surveillance Monthly Report.

The number of visits for outpatient mental health treatment has also ballooned, almost doubling from just under 1 million in 2007 to about 1.89 million in 2011, the report revealed.

The number of hospitalizations is almost certainly higher because it does not include inpatient treatment of mental disorders during deployments or field training exercises, or on ships at sea.
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