Navy supervisor doctored whistle-blower's records
Fired after criticizing subpar care for Marines, a psychiatrist finds his good personnel reviews turned to bad
By Mark Benjamin
Internal documents and e-mails show that Navy officials unfavorably doctored a psychiatrist’s performance record after he blew the whistle on what he said was dangerously inept management of care for Marines suffering combat stress at Camp Lejeune, N.C. The internal correspondence, obtained by Salon, also includes an order to delete earlier records praising the work of the psychiatrist, Dr. Kernan Manion, who was fired last September after lodging his complaints.
Now top Navy officials are tangled up in the blackball campaign. Soon after Manion was fired, Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., asked the Pentagon about Manion’s concerns about healthcare at Camp Lejeune. In a Dec. 17 letter to Jones, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus panned Manion’s ethics and professionalism, presumably based on information Mabus received about Manion from Camp Lejeune.
But Salon has obtained internal Navy documents and correspondence that suggest officials at Camp Lejeune altered Manion’s favorable personnel records after he went public with his concerns, adding new, derogatory remarks similar to some of the information in Mabus’ letter to Jones.
read more here
Navy supervisor doctored whistle-blowers records
Monday, February 1, 2010
Living with the wounds of Fort Hood
Living with the wounds of Fort Hood
By DANIEL P. FINNEY • dafinney@dmreg.com • January 31, 2010
The pink surgery scar runs halfway down Staff Sgt. Joy Clark's left arm like a zipper.
Dime-sized dots mar each side of the limb - permanent reminders of a bullet that ripped through her arm during another soldier's Nov. 5 shooting rampage that left 13 dead and 30 wounded at Fort Hood near Killeen, Texas.
Those scars are as obvious as the grimace on the Des Moines native's 27-year-old face as she grips a weight during physical therapy.
Unseen is the ache inside her. Clark survived the attack, but her injuries forced her to stay home while her unit deployed to Afghanistan.
"I know it's not my fault," Clark said in her first extended interview since the tragedy, "but there is this sense of an unfinished mission."
On Nov. 5, Clark waited in line for a routine medical checkup inside a Fort Hood office building.
The exam was her third stop in a necessary but tedious preparation for deployment to Afghanistan scheduled for after Thanksgiving.
The mission was to be Clark's first overseas mission since joining the military in 2001.
Instead, Clark found herself on the front line of what Vice President Joe Biden later would call the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001.
At 1:34 p.m., military investigators allege Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan entered the building and opened fire on his fellow soldiers.
The soldier closest to Clark, a man she did not know, was hit. He slumped forward. Clark, a field medic, wrapped her left arm around him and tried to help.
A bullet pierced her left arm. She recoiled and the wounded man she held fell to the ground. He died.
Clark looked at her arm. A bullet had passed through it and there wasn't much blood. She felt no pain. With her good arm, she reached out for another wounded comrade.
"We were unarmed," Clark said. "There were no weapons in the building. There was no way we could defend ourselves."
go here for more and video
Living with the wounds of Fort Hood
By DANIEL P. FINNEY • dafinney@dmreg.com • January 31, 2010
The pink surgery scar runs halfway down Staff Sgt. Joy Clark's left arm like a zipper.
Dime-sized dots mar each side of the limb - permanent reminders of a bullet that ripped through her arm during another soldier's Nov. 5 shooting rampage that left 13 dead and 30 wounded at Fort Hood near Killeen, Texas.
Those scars are as obvious as the grimace on the Des Moines native's 27-year-old face as she grips a weight during physical therapy.
Unseen is the ache inside her. Clark survived the attack, but her injuries forced her to stay home while her unit deployed to Afghanistan.
"I know it's not my fault," Clark said in her first extended interview since the tragedy, "but there is this sense of an unfinished mission."
On Nov. 5, Clark waited in line for a routine medical checkup inside a Fort Hood office building.
The exam was her third stop in a necessary but tedious preparation for deployment to Afghanistan scheduled for after Thanksgiving.
The mission was to be Clark's first overseas mission since joining the military in 2001.
Instead, Clark found herself on the front line of what Vice President Joe Biden later would call the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001.
At 1:34 p.m., military investigators allege Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan entered the building and opened fire on his fellow soldiers.
The soldier closest to Clark, a man she did not know, was hit. He slumped forward. Clark, a field medic, wrapped her left arm around him and tried to help.
A bullet pierced her left arm. She recoiled and the wounded man she held fell to the ground. He died.
Clark looked at her arm. A bullet had passed through it and there wasn't much blood. She felt no pain. With her good arm, she reached out for another wounded comrade.
"We were unarmed," Clark said. "There were no weapons in the building. There was no way we could defend ourselves."
go here for more and video
Living with the wounds of Fort Hood
PTSD:Casualties At Home
Reading this took me back to when PTSD ruled over my own house. How many conversations did I have to walk away from? How many times did I listen as co-workers were acting as if their life was ending over someone trivial compared to what I was going thru? It happened all the time.
"My husband's snores and it drives me crazy!" I'd hear and then think, my husband is going through hell, can't sleep through the night, has nightmares so severe he breaks out sweating and screaming. Then he spends the night on the couch watching TV after checking every door and window to make sure we were safe.
"All my husband does is talk about sport!" While I thought about how my husband didn't talk anymore unless he had to. How he didn't want to tell me what was going on with him, why he was acting like a stranger, why he couldn't remember a conversation we had moments before or feel as if he owed me an explanation of where he had been.
So many conversations when someone would talk and the listener would understand but how could anyone understand any of this? Would they even listen? Usually not. I had some close friends over the years working for different businesses. Most of them were really great people but even they would change the subject when I tried to talk about what was going on in my house. I stopped talking. There wasn't much of a point to it when the usual well meaning advice I'd receive was to get a divorce.
Why is it so hard to understand PTSD when it is really not that hard to do if someone wants to know? The problem is, they have no desire at all.
Is it because they can't think of what happens in combat or having to have to take a life? Is it because somewhere in the back of their own minds they know PTSD could wound them as well should something traumatic happen to them?
For us, living with PTSD, we need to make it as plain and simple as possible for them to understand. There is nothing to be ashamed of when you live with PTSD in your home. Until the day comes when most people are aware of this, support groups are vital to our survival so that we can share with other people fully aware of what we're going thru. AA works because everyone there has a deep secret in common and there is mutual trust where there is sharing and not judgment. While it's hard to talk to people with no understanding of what PTSD is, talking to other people going thru it is freeing and empowering.
"My husband's snores and it drives me crazy!" I'd hear and then think, my husband is going through hell, can't sleep through the night, has nightmares so severe he breaks out sweating and screaming. Then he spends the night on the couch watching TV after checking every door and window to make sure we were safe.
"All my husband does is talk about sport!" While I thought about how my husband didn't talk anymore unless he had to. How he didn't want to tell me what was going on with him, why he was acting like a stranger, why he couldn't remember a conversation we had moments before or feel as if he owed me an explanation of where he had been.
So many conversations when someone would talk and the listener would understand but how could anyone understand any of this? Would they even listen? Usually not. I had some close friends over the years working for different businesses. Most of them were really great people but even they would change the subject when I tried to talk about what was going on in my house. I stopped talking. There wasn't much of a point to it when the usual well meaning advice I'd receive was to get a divorce.
Why is it so hard to understand PTSD when it is really not that hard to do if someone wants to know? The problem is, they have no desire at all.
Is it because they can't think of what happens in combat or having to have to take a life? Is it because somewhere in the back of their own minds they know PTSD could wound them as well should something traumatic happen to them?
For us, living with PTSD, we need to make it as plain and simple as possible for them to understand. There is nothing to be ashamed of when you live with PTSD in your home. Until the day comes when most people are aware of this, support groups are vital to our survival so that we can share with other people fully aware of what we're going thru. AA works because everyone there has a deep secret in common and there is mutual trust where there is sharing and not judgment. While it's hard to talk to people with no understanding of what PTSD is, talking to other people going thru it is freeing and empowering.
Casualties At Home
February 1, 2010, by Sharon Adams
Sitting in a dentist’s chair, Susan Binnie asks if she can stay after the dentist is through—just so she can soak up the peace. She lives near St. Albert, northwest of Edmonton with her two daughters, aged nine and 14, and her husband, a veteran who has struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for 15 years. Binnie has discovered if one person in the family has PTSD, the whole family suffers.
And so she takes her peace where she finds it.
Angelle Peacock, a mother of two small boys, lives in Morinville, Alta. She is also coping with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Her husband Ted, a serving member of the military, is in treatment, and at times it has been like she has three small children, especially when her husband has had to be reminded to eat or to shower.
Both women describe other instances when typical childhood behaviour has triggered angry outbursts or flashbacks from their husbands. Both are juggling full-time jobs and family issues that demand full-time attention.
These women—and hundreds more across Canada—cannot turn to colleagues at work or chums for support because those who don’t live under the umbra of Operational Stress Injury just won’t understand. “They say, ‘Why don’t you leave?’” says Binnie. Peacock adds: “I’ve woken in the night to find my husband has taken out a window and is in the backyard ‘fighting bad guys.’ How do you go to work the next day, and over coffee say, ‘You know what’s going on at my house?’”
read more here
http://www.legionmagazine.com/en/index.php/2010/02/casualties-at-home/
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Former Army sergeant major is putting a face on suicide prevention
For sake of country, forsaken by country
by
Chaplain Kathie
When civilians are wounded by traumatic events so deeply felt they suffer with PTSD, we seem to understand it even when we cannot associate a name with it. Regular people we know will talk about something we never experienced but we can see the pain in their eyes and put ourselves into their place, knowing how hard it must have been for them.
Listen to a parent on the news after their child has been abducted or vanished. Any parent could understand that level of pain imagining what it would be like if it had been their child.
When the earthquake came to destroy Haiti, the rest of the world understood the suffering there. So much death and destruction with a natural disaster, people crying out for the loss while still in dire need of help touch everyone's heart. The outpouring of donations is still being sent as we are reminded so many are in need of help.
We can understand pain even if we have never lived through it. We can feel for them. We can feel the tug of our hearts to help them. So why is it so very hard for us to do the same when it comes to the men and women in this nation we ask so much of?
What do we expect when we send them into Haiti on humanitarian missions? We see on our TV sets what is going on there. We saw on CNN how they are putting bodies into mass graves, so it should be easy to assume the men and women in the military are seeing all of it first hand. We see the reporters talking about the wounded and we know they are seeing them as they try to help them. What we don't see, what we don't understand is that the responders to this disaster will be in need of help to recover as well.
We also do not seem to understand that many of the men and women sent into Haiti were on their way to Afghanistan but diverted there. They will end up going into Afghanistan after the crisis is over in Haiti.
Many of them are already wounded by combat from earlier deployments. They are carrying that burden inside of them as they are asked to carry even more because they are needed.
We do a great job responding to need of everyone but them.
Why can't we listen to them talk, see the pain in their eyes and put it all into the same human terms we have no problem doing it with others? Why can't we listen as they grieve for the loss of a friend knowing how hard it must be on them? Why can't we listen to them when they speak of a child that died, weighing heavily on their hearts? Why is it so easy to ignore them and forsake them?
When we send men and women into combat, our job has just begun but we can sit there and say caring about them after combat is not in our "job description" as humans. The numbers of PTSD wounded grow everyday but we do not seem to be as interested in them as we were when we sent them.
We complain when they self-medicate and drive. We want them arrested when they commit crimes, get into fights or cause any trouble at all without ever once wondering how someone could be so valuable, so unique they were ready to sacrifice their lives for the sake of this nation, set aside their own personal needs, wants and desires, but then end up where they are. We don't care when their family falls apart or want to hear about the struggles they go through.
We do a great job caring about strangers as humans but a lousy job caring about the strangers we ask to take care of the rest of us.
We will see all the numbers go up until we manage to care enough to do something for their sake.
by
Chaplain Kathie
When civilians are wounded by traumatic events so deeply felt they suffer with PTSD, we seem to understand it even when we cannot associate a name with it. Regular people we know will talk about something we never experienced but we can see the pain in their eyes and put ourselves into their place, knowing how hard it must have been for them.
Listen to a parent on the news after their child has been abducted or vanished. Any parent could understand that level of pain imagining what it would be like if it had been their child.
When the earthquake came to destroy Haiti, the rest of the world understood the suffering there. So much death and destruction with a natural disaster, people crying out for the loss while still in dire need of help touch everyone's heart. The outpouring of donations is still being sent as we are reminded so many are in need of help.
We can understand pain even if we have never lived through it. We can feel for them. We can feel the tug of our hearts to help them. So why is it so very hard for us to do the same when it comes to the men and women in this nation we ask so much of?
What do we expect when we send them into Haiti on humanitarian missions? We see on our TV sets what is going on there. We saw on CNN how they are putting bodies into mass graves, so it should be easy to assume the men and women in the military are seeing all of it first hand. We see the reporters talking about the wounded and we know they are seeing them as they try to help them. What we don't see, what we don't understand is that the responders to this disaster will be in need of help to recover as well.
We also do not seem to understand that many of the men and women sent into Haiti were on their way to Afghanistan but diverted there. They will end up going into Afghanistan after the crisis is over in Haiti.
Many of them are already wounded by combat from earlier deployments. They are carrying that burden inside of them as they are asked to carry even more because they are needed.
We do a great job responding to need of everyone but them.
Why can't we listen to them talk, see the pain in their eyes and put it all into the same human terms we have no problem doing it with others? Why can't we listen as they grieve for the loss of a friend knowing how hard it must be on them? Why can't we listen to them when they speak of a child that died, weighing heavily on their hearts? Why is it so easy to ignore them and forsake them?
When we send men and women into combat, our job has just begun but we can sit there and say caring about them after combat is not in our "job description" as humans. The numbers of PTSD wounded grow everyday but we do not seem to be as interested in them as we were when we sent them.
We complain when they self-medicate and drive. We want them arrested when they commit crimes, get into fights or cause any trouble at all without ever once wondering how someone could be so valuable, so unique they were ready to sacrifice their lives for the sake of this nation, set aside their own personal needs, wants and desires, but then end up where they are. We don't care when their family falls apart or want to hear about the struggles they go through.
We do a great job caring about strangers as humans but a lousy job caring about the strangers we ask to take care of the rest of us.
We will see all the numbers go up until we manage to care enough to do something for their sake.
Former Army sergeant major is putting a face on suicide prevention
Posted Saturday, Jan. 30, 2010
By HALIMAH ABDULLAH
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — Retired Command Sgt. Maj. Samuel Rhodes keeps pictures of the dead in his pockets.
They’re the faces of young soldiers whose eyes stare out resolutely from photocopied pages worn and creased by the ritual of unfolding them, smoothing them flat and refolding them.
They’re the faces of men who, haunted by problems at home or memories of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the dead children, the fallen comrades and the lingering smell of burnt flesh — pressed guns to their heads and pulled the triggers or tied ropes with military precision and hanged themselves.
The pictures remind Rhodes of how close he came to joining them and how, sometimes when the sadness presses in, dark and suffocating, he still mentally writes suicide notes.
"How many times have I written that letter in my head? I still think about suicide, but when I start thinking about it I have to think, 'What’s the impact on everyone I care about?’ "
It’s been roughly five years since Rhodes came home from his third tour in Iraq. And despite a highly decorated 29-year career in the Army, a new book, more than a hundred speaking engagements and praise from the likes of Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, for his efforts in suicide prevention, Rhodes still wrestles with his own demons. When he speaks to crowds and gently holds up the photos of fellow servicemen who’ve committed suicide, it’s as if he’s holding up a mirror.
"It’s not about me," he tells soldiers. "Every one of us can tell our own story. Start telling it. Change the culture of silence."
read more here
http://www.star-telegram.com/238/story/1935131.html
Saturday, January 30, 2010
The best help comes in person
Col. David Schall seems to understand there is a great need out there military families along with soldiers, and that's a good thing. He could have ignored it but he responded to a post on Spouse Calls. The problem is, he must not know that as he advises families to turn to Chaplains there are several problems with this.
The first one is that many military Chaplains, by their own admission, lack knowledge when it comes to PTSD. What good would it do to go talk to one if they have no understanding of what PTSD is, what it does to the soldier and what it's like living with them? It can cause more harm than good. On the flip side, if they do understand, then they are vital to healing. Keep in mind that PTSD is a wound to where the emotions are held, thus, where the soul lives. There can be great healing if Chaplains become as expert on PTSD as they are on scripture.
The other issue is that there are still some in the chain of command unable or unwilling to understand PTSD itself. Many do not know that PTSD is healable if not curable. Once one of their own heals, they can be better soldiers and ready to help others as well. These are unique men and women, especially in the all volunteer force and it's high time they were regarded as unique. They need to be understood before anyone can say they are taken care of.
This is a good step but they also need to remember the families are on the front line after combat because they will be first to notice the changes and know if their spouse needs help. They will be first to either support them while they seek help or get in the way if they don't understand it. To not include them in a place of healing so they can be helping is limiting what can be achieved with PTSD. To not provide them with a safe, secure place to find support so they can speak freely on every military installation is not using the first responders to their fullest potential.
The first one is that many military Chaplains, by their own admission, lack knowledge when it comes to PTSD. What good would it do to go talk to one if they have no understanding of what PTSD is, what it does to the soldier and what it's like living with them? It can cause more harm than good. On the flip side, if they do understand, then they are vital to healing. Keep in mind that PTSD is a wound to where the emotions are held, thus, where the soul lives. There can be great healing if Chaplains become as expert on PTSD as they are on scripture.
The other issue is that there are still some in the chain of command unable or unwilling to understand PTSD itself. Many do not know that PTSD is healable if not curable. Once one of their own heals, they can be better soldiers and ready to help others as well. These are unique men and women, especially in the all volunteer force and it's high time they were regarded as unique. They need to be understood before anyone can say they are taken care of.
This is a good step but they also need to remember the families are on the front line after combat because they will be first to notice the changes and know if their spouse needs help. They will be first to either support them while they seek help or get in the way if they don't understand it. To not include them in a place of healing so they can be helping is limiting what can be achieved with PTSD. To not provide them with a safe, secure place to find support so they can speak freely on every military installation is not using the first responders to their fullest potential.
The best help comes in person
By Terri Barnes, Special to Stars and Stripes
Scene, Sunday, January 31, 2010
Sheryl is a career Army wife affected by post-traumatic stress disorder. Struggling to obtain counseling for herself and her children, Sheryl wrote: "My next goal and challenge is to speak out and make the military listen to me. I don’t want this to happen to another family, and I will … speak out loud and try and make it better for those who are behind me."
Soon after her comments appeared in a recent Spouse Calls column, I received an e-mail from Col. David Schall, Command Surgeon for U.S. European Command.
He didn’t take issue with Sheryl’s complaint or send me a list of Web sites to prove the military is doing something for families affected by PTSD.
He asked what he could do to connect Sheryl with the help she needed.
Knowing that many more "Sheryls" are out there, I asked Schall about resources for families affected by PTSD.
He and Lt. Col. Marianne Schlitt of EUCOM’s Quality of Life component provided their insights about connecting people with needed care.
It seems to me that information about combat stress is everywhere. AFN commercials tell us to call our chaplains. A mouse click yields plenty of PTSD Web sites. Tricare brochures list "Behavioral Health Services" for members and families, including psychotherapy, psychological testing, family therapy and more.
read more here
The best help comes in person
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