Marine with Spartan blood

I love small media outlets because they do the best reporting on our troops and veterans. The national media, not so much and frankly, AWOL on the one issue we can all agree deserve our attention. I was reading this story about a young Greek-American U.S. Marine talking about his faith in God, the Greek Church and Spartan blood. That got me thinking about the "moral injury" a lot of reports want to pretend is some kind of new phenomenon that is behind Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in combat veterans.

What choice do they have since most reporters given the task of reporting on PTSD and military suicides were in grade school or not even born when real research on PTSD began? To them, this is all new even though they must have had at least one combat veteran as a relative. They just didn't pay attention to their WWII granddads and Vietnam veterans any more than they paid attention to Gulf War veterans. Just because they didn't pay attention that didn't mean it was not happening as it was going back to the beginning of "civilization" when nation sent men to fight against other nations.

This is my favorite book on combat and PTSD because it is honest, thoughtful and written by a real expert on PTSD before reporters knew about it.

Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character
October 1, 1995
In this strikingly original and groundbreaking book, Dr. Shay examines the psychological devastation of war by comparing the soldiers of Homer's Iliad with Vietnam veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Although the Iliad was written twenty-seven centuries ago it has much to teach about combat trauma, as do the more recent, compelling voices and experiences of Vietnam vets.

In this new year we can have a new beginning in defeating PTSD but only if we go back to when real research was being done and stop pretending PTSD is new.

Dr. Jonathan Shay "Indeed Moral Injury is one of the primary if not the primary personal theme for the soldiers described in his books "Achilles in Vietnam" and "Odysseus in America" leading to lifelong psychological dysfunction from PTSD and other treatment-resistant deficiencies in prior or basic functioning."

ACHILLES IN VIETNAM
A DOCUMENTARY FILM

YMCA gives injured Marine new purpose

YMCA gives injured Marine new purpose
By Marcia Moore
The Daily Item
January 2, 2013

MILLMONT -- Jim and Sandy Sanders credit their son's participation in the YMCA in Centre County with helping put his life back on track after losing a leg while serving in Iraq seven years ago.

"It's certainly been significant," said Mr. Sanders, a Greater Susquehanna Valley United Way board member.

Mrs. Sanders said her son, Jeff, 29, a Marine, had been in Iraq for six weeks in September 2004 when the jeep he was riding in struck an explosive and he was thrown from the vehicle.

In addition to losing a leg, Jeff Sanders suffered a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress.
read more here

Marine fills aching void after PTSD, TBI and amputation

Keeping hands busy with automotive work helps disabled Marine heal
Toiling on cars and motorcycles fills the aching void in his life left when his war wounds stripped him of the ability to be a combat Marine. He will be a mechanic for the Dakar Rally race.
By Tony Perry
Los Angeles Times
January 1, 2013

Marine Cpl. Tim Read struggles to tighten a bolt beneath his car at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot hobby shop garage in San Diego. (Don Bartletti, Los Angeles Times / January 1, 2013)

SAN DIEGO — Marine Cpl. Timothy Read, who lost a leg in Afghanistan and has been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, is applying some Rustoleum to a new drive shaft for his prized 2003 Mustang Mach 1.

It's more than just a hobby. Working on cars and motorcycles, Read said, fills the aching void in his life left when his war wounds stripped him of the ability to be a combat Marine.

"My hands are meant to be dirty," he said. "I'm meant to be busting my knuckles, doing a man's work."

With other injured Marines, Read souped up a custom-made motorcycle for last summer's Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota.

Next month, he'll travel to Peru to be a ride-along mechanic for a Land Rover Discovery for a team of wounded U.S. and British military personnel during the 6,000-mile Dakar Rally. The team is sponsored by an organization called Race2Recovery, supported by the royal family.

And when he's not busy in San Diego at therapy appointments or other things, Read spends time working on his car at the auto center at the Marine boot camp. Other wounded Marines are doing the same on their cars.

"They're putting their cars back together, but what they're really doing is putting their lives back together," said Richard Siordian, assistant manager of the auto center and a retired Navy corpsman.
read more here

The long nightmare of the 112th Congress ends today

The long nightmare of the 112th Congress ends today
by Kathie Costos
Wounded Times Blog
January 2, 2013

If you want proof of how much mid term elections matter, this is it. This is what we got when average people didn't show up to vote. All of this can be tracked back to this 8 second announcement from Senator Mitch McConnell. "Our top priority is to deny President Obama a second term."


While some may have thought that was a great idea, they didn't bother to consider what it would cost them in terms of real life.

Those words meant the country had to suffer in order to make the President fail. Nothing was done. No budgets other than emergency ones, the list of sufferings is very long and ended the two year nightmare of our suffering last night. Not with the deal congress finally managed to get done or the fact McConnell was a huge part of it, but as of tomorrow, a new congress comes in. The long nightmare of this congress is over!

112th Congress legacy: Unfinished business
Politico
By JONATHAN ALLEN
1/2/13

"The members of the 112th Congress just hope they don’t get sworn at."

The 112th Congress came in with a bang, but it is crawling out with the soft whimper of failure.

For two years, President Barack Obama and Congress ignored virtually every other pressing matter to engage in an ideological war over the size of government and who should foot the bill for it.

They racked up more processes than policies: a blue-ribbon White House commission, Vice President Joe Biden’s working group, bilateral talks between Obama and Speaker John Boehner, a “supercommittee,” a “Gang of Six” that became a “Gang of Eight” and, finally, Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) coming to a deal that leaves open as many politically thorny issues as it solves.

They didn’t even hit their deadline. The Senate voted two hours past the zero mark of midnight on New Year’s morning, and House Republicans spent most of Tuesday wrangling with each other over whether and how to move forward — with a final late-night vote that passed the Senate bill on the strength of a majority of House Democrats and a minority of House Republicans. Their uncertainty was a stark reminder of how fractious the House majority has been over the past two years. After all, the bill had just passed the Senate with all but five Republicans supporting it.
read more here

The article from Politico points out all the massive failures this congress still managed to get paychecks for. The average people I talk to are very patriotic because they are either military families or care about them.

"The members of the 112th Congress just hope they don’t get sworn at."

Too late for that because while they were playing political games trying to take President Obama down, that is exactly what we've been doing.

We have been watching this country fall apart but we've also been watching families fall apart while congress just kept spending money, holding hearings, pretending they really cared about the military suicides and attempted suicides. This wasn't just about the active duty forces, but National Guards, Reservists and yes, veterans.

The most disgraceful thing of all is these men and women were will to die for the sake of others yet the 112th congress was not willing to work together to save their lives. Political games in Washington is nothing new, but they've been playing politics instead of holding people accountable for the failures in the DOD and the VA. When they kept funding the same programs that failed, we should have been asking who was being protected against the results.

They got away with all the "preventative" steps to make the armed forces "resilient" and prevent PTSD when the reality is, they just prevented and prolonged healing. They were not help accountable but everything the troops did, they were held accountable for. Discharged for drinking and being overweight but no one was held accountable for what was the cause of these things. PTSD has a lot to do with both in too many cases. If you read this blog then you know how much they have all suffered.

When will people ever learn that all elections matter and holding them accountable for what they do afterwards should matter even more?

Fort Hood Victory Corner revisited

Victory Corner revisited
Dec 31, 2012
Rose L Thayer
Herald staff writer

The history of Victory Corner can best be described by the inscription on the monument there: “At this site during all hours of the day and night, people cheered and proudly waved flags and banners as over 26,000 soldiers passed by on their way home to their waiting units and to their loved ones.”

Photos of the dusty U.S. Highway 190 and Clarke Road intersection from the spring of 1991 — just after the Gulf War ended — depict cars lining the street and people standing and waving American flags. In one, a man riding a horse can be seen in the background and on the hill is a van, broadcasting each plane’s landing as if it were a hometown football game.

Always present were wooden cutouts of Uncle Sam and a camel named Clyde. A sign read, “Hope this is the last camel you see.”
read more here