Vietnam Veteran Medford Police Officer Behind Christmas Treats For Troops

Medford police deliver cheer to soldiers
Boston Globe
By Kevin Cullen
GLOBE STAFF
DECEMBER 23, 2014

"Captain Coughlin said the soldiers were whooping it up as they went through the swag. Each box contained 30 pounds of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee."

At this time of year, most of us smile when some guy in a red suit and long flowing beard approaches bearing gifts.

At Forward Operating Base Fenty, where soldiers protect the airfield near Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, the guy with a beard is sometimes bearing an explosive-laden vest.

Over the years, the Taliban have attacked FOB Fenty with some regularity, and so everything that arrives there is treated with extreme caution.

Imagine, then, the reaction of the soldiers from Task Force Wolfpack of the 82d Combat Aviation Brigade when they opened 15 big, 50-pound boxes and found them stuffed to the brim with beef jerky, tobacco, coffee, and all the stuff a grunt would want.

US Army Captain Mark Coughlin is a Medford guy and it was no accident his Wolfpack got this particular care package. His brother, Chris, is a Medford police officer, and ever since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, the Medford cops have put together Christmas care packages for soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen serving overseas.

Harry MacGilvray, who heads the Medford patrolmen’s union, said his department’s organization of the care packages stems from his leadership of the Greater Boston Police Softball League. Since 9/11, cops from in and around Boston and the State Police have organized softball tournaments to raise money to pay for the care packages.

MacGilvray says one of the driving forces is Joe Byrnes, a Medford patrolman who is a Vietnam vet and knows what it’s like to be a long way from home when everybody back home is celebrating. “Joe pushes us,” he said.
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WWII Veteran Gets Honorary Degree From Regis University

WWII Veteran, 93, earns honorary degree
9NEWS
KUSA
Janet Oravetz
December 21, 2014

93-year-old World War II vet received honorary degree from Regis University

(Photo: KUSA)

KUSA - Sidney Shafner, 93, began attending Regis University in 1943 as part of an elite group of American men selected for the Army Specialized Training Corps.

"It was right after Pearl Harbor and, I knew sooner or later I'd get an invitation from Uncle Sam," Shafner said. "My brother, my younger brother, and I both enlisted."

In the meantime, he worked hard at Regis toward an engineering degree.

"I didn't sneak out at night to go to Lakeside or Elitchs. Some of the guys did. I studied. I wasn't great, just studied," Shafner said. "In Physics we had to take a chapter a day. That's no joke."

His education was cut short in March of 1944 when he and the other men in the program were sent to training camp in Oklahoma and eventually deployed to Europe. He recalls the time he spent on the Northwest Denver Campus as a highlight of his life. It was here the Philadelphia native saw the Rocky Mountains for the first time and met his wife of 68 years, Esther.

"We were disappointed and surprised," Shafner said. "We had a good deal while we were at Regis. We were surprised but we knew the reason. They explained the reason for us, we were getting ready for intervention in Europe and they needed as many [young men] as they could get to muster and get together."
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Congress Held Up Combat Action Badge Fairness for All Veterans

Pentagon Could Make Combat Action Badge Retroactive to World War II
Military.com
by Bryant Jordan
Dec 18, 2014

Former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on March 21 ordered a review of all Defense Department awards and decorations programs to ensure the military provides "avenues to appropriately recognize the service, sacrifices and actions of our service members."

Congress has ordered the Defense Department to consider a proposal to retroactively award the Combat Action Badge to soldiers who engaged in actual combat dating back to Dec. 7, 1941.

Though legislation extending award eligibility back to World War II failed to make it into the final version of the 2015 Defense bill, lawmakers told the Pentagon that "the retroactive award of the Army Combat Action Badge" should be considered in its ongoing review of DoD awards programs.

The Combat Action Badge, authorized for soldiers in combat who are not eligible for the Combat Infantryman Badge or Combat Medical Badge, was established in 2005 to recognize that many troops – regardless of their specialty – were coming under fire and engaging the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rep. Richard Nugent, R-Florida, has filed legislation for retroactive CAB authorization for several years, even making it tax-neutral by requiring those who might be approved for the medal to purchase it directly from the supplier.

The House adopted his bills but the Senate has balked.

"I've never gotten a good explanation for why the Senate is so opposed to it. There is no cost to the taxpayer associated with the badge and these men and women have clearly earned the recognition," Nugent said Thursday.

"If there's a good reason not to do this, I certainly don't know what that reason is."

Lawmakers included the directive to the Pentagon in a joint explanatory statement it attached to the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act.

The Combat Infantryman Badge dates to World War II and has been awarded to soldiers bearing the infantry MOS in all subsequent wars and campaigns.
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Sgt. Jamie Jarboe Shot by Sniper in Afghanistan, Killed By Medical Error

When you read the rest of this story, and I really hope you do, keep one thing in mind that the DOD and the VA had less doctors, nurses, claims processors and mental health worker than they had after the Gulf War, but they just hoped we didn't notice.

Wounded veterans return to unprepared medical system
Harvard researcher says federal government lacks a plan to care for them
Kansas Health Institute
By Andy Marso
KHI News Service
Dec. 22, 2014

Esther Klay
Melissa Jarboe documents the medical treatments her husband, Jamie, endured after being shot during a tour of duty in Afghanistan in April 2011. Jamie Jarboe underwent dozens of surgeries, including a procedure in which his esophagus was perforated, before he died in March 2012. Melissa Jarboe started a foundation called the Military Veteran Project and advocates for additional investments in veteran-supported nonprofits and the Veterans Administration health system.

TOPEKA — A sniper’s bullet tore through U.S. Army Sgt. Jamie Jarboe’s neck while he was on patrol during a tour of duty in Afghanistan in April 2011. The bullet shattered three vertebrae, severed Jarboe’s spinal cord and caused severe bleeding.

It was the kind of wound that almost certainly would have been fatal in previous conflicts.

But an Army medic was at Jarboe’s side almost immediately to keep him from bleeding out, and within 17 minutes of the shooting a helicopter lifted Jarboe out of the danger zone.

In less than an hour, he arrived at a state-of-the-art field hospital in Kandahar, where a medical team was waiting to stabilize him enough so that he could be evacuated from the country.

Jarboe arrived back on American soil paralyzed but alive and was able to get the best care the military had to offer at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

But less than a year later he was dead from complications of surgery, one of several medical errors that his wife, Melissa Jarboe, documented in a self-published memoir about her husband’s last months.

“It wasn’t the sniper that shot him that killed him,” Melissa Jarboe, of Topeka, said in a recent interview.
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Amputee Afghanistan Veteran Gets New Home for Christimas

Homes For Our Troops Presents Wounded Veteran With New Home
10 News Ohio
By Jeff Valin
Saturday December 20, 2014

MARYSVILLE, Ohio - United States Army veteran Jason Gibson will be home for Christmas.

Not just any home, but a brand-new, mortgage-free home designed to accommodate his needs. The retired staff sergeant lost both his legs and his left index finger to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan in 2012.

"We stopped for something and I knelt down right on top of one," Gibson told 10TV Saturday, moments after receiving the keys to the house specially built for him in Marysville. He'll move in with his wife, Kara, and newborn daughter, Quinn, right away, from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where standard issue-style housing has proved a challenge and a worry.

"I don't want to be alone in the house with my daughter because I'm too worried about either falling or hitting the wall or something, if I'm holding her," he explained about his Wright-Patterson environs.

The family's new home is a result of many donations of labor and material, coordinated by "Homes For Our Troops," a charity dedicated to providing homes customized to ease the lives of wounded veterans.

As Gibson explains, the halls and doorways of his new home are wider than those in a typical home, allowing easier mobility for him and his wheelchair. But that's not all.
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