To Combat Suicides, Army Focuses On The Homefront

How many years do we have to hear the military finally understands how important families are in all of this? Two, three, five, ten? How about 30? How about 40? That's how long we've know families need to not just be informed of what PTSD and what they can do, they need help to do it.

They need help to go beyond just staying with their veterans and given the tools to do it, they need support for themselves as well.

To Combat Suicides, Army Focuses On The Homefront
by BLAKE FARMER
January 25, 2013

Alicia McCoy holds a photo of her husband, Sgt. Brandon McCoy. Despite taking part in basewide suicide prevention efforts at Fort Campbell in 2009, Sgt. McCoy took his own life in 2012.

When Sgt. Brandon McCoy returned from Iraq, he showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. His wife, Alicia, remembers him being on edge in public.

"I'm watching him, and his trigger finger never stopped moving, constantly," says Alicia.

Four years later, after he returned from a tour in Afghanistan in 2011, she says, she'd wake up with his hands wrapped around her throat. She told him: Get help or get a divorce. So he scheduled an appointment and — along with Alicia — trekked to the Fort Campbell hospital located on the Tennessee-Kentucky border.

"I sat there and watched this person ask my husband, 'Do you feel like hurting yourself today?' 'No sir.' 'Do you feel like hurting anybody else today?' 'No sir.' And I went, 'Are you kidding me?' " says Alicia.

Her husband was given sleeping pills and antidepressants. But more than a year later, he was found dead in a west Tennessee motel room with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

"I wear his dog tags every day. They were hanging on the rearview mirror in his car," she says. "It is what it is. I can't change what happened."
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40 years ago when Vietnam veterans came home, they didn't have support and their families had even less. In 1982 when I started out after meeting my husband, I didn't have support. I had to read clinical books and old magazines about Vietnam before I started to understand. In 1984 Bill Landreth, a Seattle Police officer and Vietnam veteran, started a group dedicated to helping veterans and their families. Point Man International Ministries developed Out Posts for veterans and Home Fronts for families.

Chuck Dean, publisher of a Veterans self help newspaper, Reveille, had a vision for the ministry and developed it into a system of small groups across the USA for the purpose of mutual support and fellowship. These groups are known as Outposts. Worldwide there are hundreds of Outposts and Homefront groups serving the families of veterans.

PMIM is run by veterans from all conflicts, nationalities and backgrounds. Although, the primary focus of Point Man has always been to offer spiritual healing from PTSD, Point Man today is involved in group meetings, publishing, hospital visits, conferences, supplying speakers for churches and veteran groups, welcome home projects and community support. Just about any where there are Vets there is a Point Man presence. All services offered by Point Man are free of charge.

Dana Morgan has been the President of Point Man International Ministries for many years and heads the group of dedicated volunteer veterans and their families across the country to make sure more and more know about what can be done to heal.

Wives have to not just grieve by the grave of their husbands but regret fills them because no one told them what they could have done differently. Parents visit graves and wonder why no one included them in helping their sons and daughters survive being home after they survived combat.

There are no more excuses left for neglecting the families when they are in fact the ones on the front lines of coming home.

SPC. Brenden Salazar remembered by huge crowd in Oviedo FL

Today in Oviedo Florida at Hagerty High School, a plaque was dedicated to a former student and fallen hero, SPC. Brenden Salazar. He was killed in Afghanistan on July 22, 2012.

This was taken from the video I was shooting of the dedication. While the video should be online tomorrow, when I saw this image of the saluting shadow over Brenden's picture, it was almost as if his spirit was saluting back at all the people gathered together.

Army Specialist Brenden Salazar was killed while serving in Afghanistan on July 22, 2012. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173 Airborne Brigade Combat Team Caserma Ederle Italy. He was 20 years old.

Congress lack of budget causes Navy to cut back

Navy Orders Cuts to Begin; Thousands to Be Fired
Jan 25, 2013
The Virginian-Pilot
by Bill Bartel

Navy flag officers and top executives were told Thursday to begin cutting expenses -- laying off thousands of temporary civilian workers, reducing base operations and preparing to cancel maintenance work on more than two dozen ships and hundreds of aircraft.

Adm. Jonathan Greenert, chief of naval operations, directed the reductions in a memorandum sent to senior Navy officials. The cuts are driven by uncertainty over how much a divided Congress and the White House might approve for the Pentagon's 2013 budget.

"We are making the following reductions, starting now, to ensure we can fund ongoing deployments and other mission-critical activities," the memo said.

The reductions do not specifically mention Navy operations in Hampton Roads, but they are expected to affect numerous private and military facilities in the region -- as well as ships and aircraft. Southeast Virginia is home to multiple bases, including the Navy's largest, Norfolk Naval Station, and Norfolk Naval Shipyard, a government-owned facility in Portsmouth where thousands of civilians work on Navy vessels.
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Military women bigger kahunas than Tucker Carlson

Military women bigger kahunas than Tucker Carlson
by Kathie Costos
Wounded Times Blog
January 25, 2013

There is something about military women that keeps getting missed in all the reports coming out about how they are now going to be allowed to have combat jobs technically when they were already doing most of them. The fact that they have to not only face the same threats to their lives as males, they are also willing to face the fact they could be raped by them. Think about that. They are that determined to serve their country they are even prepared to face that horrible possibility. It hasn't been bad enough for them they have had to hear some male chauvinists shoot off his mouth when he won't even pay attention to what is going on.

Tucker Carlson does not know this is not an office job.

Memorial Day weekend at Walter Reed in 2010 I flew to Washington to meet up with the Nam Knights in Washington for the Memorial ride to the Vietnam War Memorial. When I landed, I caught a cab to Walter Reed for a VIP tour and a chance to meet some of the wounded heroes I wrote about all the time. As a Chaplain with two organizations, I was given the opportunity to talk to these men and yes, wounded women, for as long as I wanted to.

One of them was a young woman the same age as my daughter. (not the woman in the picture) She was a beautiful blonde with stunning eyes. She was an MP and an RPG took off a leg above the knee. When I walked into the room, her Mom was there. I thought about how I would feel with my own daughter lying in that bed and then I decided to not show any sadness.

I talk to her for a bit, then told her about a triple amputee I know and how he handled life afterwards. She started to laugh. Her Mom wiped happy tears of relief from her face. The MP looked up at her Mom with a big smile and said, "Well, thank God it wasn't higher!"

She understood her life was far from over. I understood that when people say things against military women, they are stunningly stupid. They have no clue what these women are like.

By the numbers: Women in the U.S. military
January 24, 2013

More than 200,000 women are in the active-duty military, including 69 generals and admirals. A quick look at women in the military, according to Pentagon figures.

Tucker Carlson has the right to remain safe at home along with the right to prove just how uninformed he is. The thing he missed is that while he thinks this,

Tucker Carlson ✔ @TuckerCarlson
Feminism's latest victory: the right to get your limbs blown off in war. Congratulations.

It was already happening but he just didn't notice. Lt. Dawn Halfaker was featured in this article in 2005!

Women in combat: One soldier's story
CNN
By Jake Tapper and Jessica Metzger
January 24th, 2013

EDITOR'S NOTE: Jake Tapper is an anchor and Chief Washington Correspondent for CNN. He’s also the author of the best-selling book about Afghanistan “The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor”

In her senior year at West Point, Candace Fisher decided she wanted to join the Military Police since it would allow her the most options “to do the most soldier-like things,” Fisher recalled in an interview with CNN.

In 2006 and 2007, Fisher served at what would become Combat Outpost Keating, one of the most dangerous bases in Afghanistan. Fisher – who then went by her maiden name, Mathis – led a platoon of Military Police, supervising 36 troops, including six other women, attached to the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 71st Cavalry.

With Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announcing today that the Pentagon would end its policy of excluding women from combat positions, Fisher – reached at Fort Leonard Wood in the Missouri Ozarks, where she is currently a small group leader for an officer leadership course – said the Army was acknowledging what has already in many ways become a reality in the military.

“It’s a formalization of what we’ve been experimenting with the last ten to twelve years in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Fisher told CNN. “I think that those two conflicts have probably given the Army a pretty good idea of whether or not an actual policy change was warranted.”

Even though Fisher is Military Police and not Infantry or Cavalry, she says “given the nature of the fight over the last ten years or so, it’s made us all very dependent on each other as far as branches, interdependent as far as combined action and combined arms. So there has been a lot of bleed-over for missions regardless of what branch you are based on the conflict.”

During one mission in October 2006, Fisher and her MPs were teamed up with Able Troop’s 3rd platoon when they had to push through a complex ambush. The female MPs returned fire along with the male soldiers. Actually, one male soldier recalled, with their AT-4 grenade launchers, the MPs had stronger firepower than the scout platoon.
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Single mom fought alongside combat troops in Afghanistan
CNN iReport
By Ashley Fantz, CNN
January 25, 2013

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
An unemployed single mom with bills to pay decides to enlist in the Army
In Afghanistan, Kimberly Bratic worked with a combat team
One of her three sons struggled with her decision to leave
She just got home to Ohio and still cannot find a job

(CNN) -- Kimberly Bratic hauled her gear up Afghan mountains. She went into areas where Taliban lived. She grieved when fellow soldiers were blown up by a suicide bomber. She missed her family for a year, and heard the worry in her sons' voices when she got the rare chance to call home.

She lay awake, thinking, "What if I don't make it home?"

The only difference between the 39-year-old single mom and the men she went on 70 missions with was their job titles.

U.S. lifts ban on women in combat

The guys were combat infantry. She was a public affairs specialist, the person who documented their experience training Afghan military and police. read more here

Iraq veteran and wounded CHP officer gets help to heal

Volunteers step up to help disabled East Bay veteran
Laura Anthony
ABC News Team
January 24, 3013

PITTSBURG, Calif. (KGO) -- An East Bay veteran is getting a complete makeover of his backyard, thanks to a team of volunteers from Home Depot.

The volunteers worked from about 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday. The veteran who owns the home served two years in Iraq in a combat zone before he returned to the Bay Area and joined the CHP. He was left permanently disabled after responding to a robbery call in Oakland. The team of volunteers came out to his house to help make his life a little smoother, going forward.

After all the service Shawn Navel has given to his country and his community, he's grateful for what's being given back to him now, "I'm extremely happy and I'm also happy to see all these supporters," Shawn said.

An Army veteran, Shawn served two tours in Iraq before returning to the Bay Area as a California Highway Patrol officer. It wasn't just a career, but something he considered a calling.
But that was all shattered three years ago when Shawn and several other CHP officers responded to a robbery in progress at an Oakland Walgreens. When the robber came out shooting, Shawn was hit eight times.

read more here