Veteran Fighting After Broken Body and Broken Promises

Broken bodies, broken promises: Valley student-veterans search for answers 
Daily Item
Rick Dandes 
February 14, 2016

“I served three tours overseas. Now I work at Bloomsburg University, and the VA owes me $964,” he said, barely able to control his anger. “I still don’t have it. And I’m fighting to get my truck back. I tried reaching out to the VA on multiple occasions. The educational VA rep we are supposed to be talking to doesn’t answer my emails, doesn’t respond when I call.”

Photo Provided Wayne Bridwell

BLOOMSBURG — Wayne Bridwell, 34, an Army veteran, returned from multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan with a Purple Heart — and arthritis in his hips, knees and ankles.

“When I walk,” he said, “you can hear my bones grinding.”

Bridwell was what grunts call a “door kicker.” He saw considerable action in the most dangerous war zone in the world, breaking down doors as others followed behind in the urban combat.

After returning stateside, a Veterans Affairs doctor told Bridwell there was nothing wrong with him. The doctor took one set of X-rays and when Bridwell said he could make his hip, knee and ankle pop out of place, she called it the usual wear and tear.

Usual wear and tear? For a 34-year-old?

Since then, Bridwell said has hit more roadblocks, thrown in front of him by the very people who there to serve him and his fellow veterans.

“I’ve been trying for two years to get a compensation and disability appointment with the VA,” he said. “That’s not right. Wasn’t the VA created to help people like me?”

Bridwell’s frustration with the VA boiled over recently: His truck was repossessed after a paycheck due him for his work at Bloomsburg University in VA student services did not arrive in time to make a payment.
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Vulture Landlords Taking Advantage of Homeless Veterans

Vulture landlords taking advantage of veterans instead of helping them! Yet one more case of reprehensible creeps taking what they can get from veterans while claiming to be taking care of them. It happens all the time because we don't really pay attention and the government isn't as this story clearly shows.

The confounding story of the disabled veterans who went weeks in winter without heat — and then were evicted
Washington Post
By Terrence McCoy
February 13, 2016

Amber Harding, a housing attorney with the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, said the resource center should scrutinize landlords to whom they refer homeless veterans. “There is a responsibility to make sure as close to 100 percent of these [sites] are safe and legitimate,” she said. “That’s basic good governance.”

Clarence Smith-Bey more booms than talks. An accident during a military exercise in 1973 damaged his hearing and left him with chronic headaches and post-traumatic stress disorder. Within a decade, Smith-Bey was addicted to drugs, unemployed and cycling in and out of homelessness.

That was all supposed to change in 2013. He’d been clean five years and enrolled in classes at Prince George’s Community College. He dropped by the Veterans Affairs Community Resource and Referral Center in Northeast Washington for help getting off the streets. Workers there told him about a local outfit named Peaceful Haven, which contracted with the District to care for the mentally ill and disabled. Peaceful Haven had a house 10 miles from the community college and would handle utilities, Smith-Bey said he was told.
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Love Them Enough To Ask For Help

The Other Type Of Love on Valentine's Day
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
February 14, 2016

There are all different types of love. A parent's love for their children and their love for their parents. There is the type of love we feel for each other deep enough we plan the rest of our lives with them. Then there is another type of love that is even stronger than that. It requires such a deep commitment to others that they are willing to sacrifice their lives so others may live on without them.

Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
John 15:13
New International Version (NIV)

That is something veterans knew all too well but have forgotten what else came with your commitment to everyone you were with in combat. The others were also willing to die for you. How did it become so hard for you to ask for help afterwards?

In combat you know there is nothing wrong with asking for help and reinforcements.  When the enemy force is greater than you are, you need help to defeat it.  It is the same when the enemy force you face trying to claim your life is also stronger than you are.  The enemy you fight back home is PTSD.

As a doer for others you may find it almost impossible to ask for help for yourself simply because you are not looking at it the right way.  While you think no less of the folks you help, somehow you got it into your own head admitting you needed help meant you were weak.  After all, when you are always there for others, it should be a no-brainer to acknowledge you should really need more help because of all you give away.  But you just don't see it that way.

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13
New International Version (NIV)

PTSD only happens after traumatic events. It hits you. It is not a mental illness. It is not a sign of weakness. As a matter fact, it is absolutely a sign of great strength and love for others you carry within you.

It is not a sign of lacking courage.  You did not allow yourself to feel that deep level of pain while the others you were with were in danger.  You did not think of yourself until you were back home and they were safe.  Or at least you though they were safe because they didn't admit they needed help for the same reason you are not admitting it right now.

Here are some examples of courage and PTSD.


Medal of Honor Staff Sgt. Ty Carter

For U.S. Army Sergeant Kyle White, the firefight began without warning.

White's platoon left a meeting with village elders in Afghanistan after an interpreter heard suspicious chatter on an Army radio.

On the way back to their outpost, White's platoon was ambushed. Over the next few hours, White put his own life at risk to save fellow service members during the Nov. 8, 2007 attack.

White said that after the ambush, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He urged veterans suffering from the illness to get help.

Bearing both the Medal of Honor and trauma Dakota Meyer
CBS News
Meyer's father said Dakota asked for new locks on the doors. "Make sure the house was locked up every night. . . . He'd always want to have one or two guns in every vehicle."

"So he always wanted a weapon close," he said, noting that for three months Meyer slept with a weapon - a pistol on his chest.

"Did you try to talk to anybody about it?" Martin asked.

"What's there to talk about?" Dakota replied.

"Get it out of your own mind and into somebody else's?"

"You know, why bother somebody else with it?" Meyer said. "It's just part of it."

Believing he had become a burden to his family, Dakota turned to the bottle. One night driving home he stopped his truck and pulled out a gun.

"I was just like, 'Now I'm done.' And I always kept my pistol in my Trailblazer. I squeeze the trigger and [was] amazed that . . .there was nothing in it."

"You put the gun to your head, and pulled the trigger?" asked Martin.

"Yeah. Click. That's the loudest click you'll ever hear."

"Do you know why there wasn't a round in that chamber?"

"You could state the obvious reason, that somebody took it out."

After the click, Meyer said, he sobered up instantly.
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Dakota Meyer

“PTSD does not put you in the mind set to go out and kill innocent people,” Meyer, 25, added. “The media label this shooting PTSD, but if what that man did is PTSD, then I don’t have it.”

The Marine sergeant said he worries that other service members who fought for the nation and witnessed things that still haunt them could be stigmatized if the civilian public believes PTSD makes them dangerous.

“It’s putting a stigma on all veterans,” he said. “It’s putting a label on all veterans that veterans are psychotic or mentally unstable and they're going to shoot up places. And they’re not."

Meyer said he believes the VA and military were doing as much as they can to address PTSD.

But he also said America had to do more--to stop labeling vets with PTSD as dangerous.

So there you have it. There are many more with the Medal of Honor around their necks talking about PTSD openly. Nothing to be ashamed of asking for help at all. So, the next questions are really simple. Do you still love those you were willing to die for? Then why leave them instead of asking for help? Why not trust them now after you trusted then with your own life? Why would you even think of leaving them grieving because you didn't have enough faith in them to turn to them for help now?

You loved enough to serve. Loved enough to risk your life. Now love enough to allow them to help you stay here with them.

Soldier and 14 Year Old Murder Charges After Mom's Body Found

Girl Pleads Guilty to Plotting Mom's Death With Soldier Beau
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ALLENTOWN, Pa.
Feb 11, 2016

A 14-year-old Pennsylvania girl accused of plotting with her soldier boyfriend to kill her mother pleaded guilty Thursday in a deal with prosecutors.

Jamie Silvonek will be sentenced to 35 years to life in prison, the Lehigh County District Attorney's office said.

As part of the deal, Silvonek pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, criminal conspiracy, abuse of a corpse and tampering with evidence. She will be eligible for parole after serving 35 years. Silvonek, who was charged as an adult, was accused of conspiring with 21-year-old Army Spc. Caleb Barnes via text to kill her mother in the driveway of her home near Allentown last March, after the three returned from a concert. Barnes stabbed the 54-year-old Cheryl Silvonek then he and the teenager ate at a restaurant and went shopping for gloves, bleach and other cleaning supplies, authorities said.

Police found Cheryl Silvonek's body in a shallow grave a few miles from the Silvonek home. The victim's blood-soaked car was found nearby.
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Operation Love Letters At Tampa Veterans Memorial Park

Families to honor fallen military in Tampa during Operation Love Letters
Tampa Tribune
By Howard Altman
Tribune Staff
Published: February 12, 2016

“The event provides an atmosphere to create new relationships with other surviving families,” Giddens said. “It is a chance to gain spiritual insight and resilience, and to interact with the Army Reserve community.”

For Yolanda Mercado, the pain of losing her son while he was deployed in Afghanistan more than four years ago is still raw.

That’s why she is looking forward to Operation Love Letters, a commemoration of Americans who died while in service to the country that is being held for the first time in Tampa on Saturday.

“It is important to me because it is to honor our loved ones,” said Mercado, whose son, Army Pvt. Jalfred D. Vaquerano, was 20 when he died from his wounds in December 2011 after being shot in Logar province. “It’s a day to remember the good times we had with them and share it with others.”

Operation Love Letters was created to bring Gold Star families together to remember their loved ones, said Mercado. The families bring their loved ones’ favorite dessert to share with their memories,, she said. They also write letters to them, do crafts as mementos and release balloons “with the hope that it reaches their loved ones,” she said.

The event will be held at the Tampa Veterans Memorial Park and Museum as a collaboration between the Army Reserve Survivor Outreach Services (part of Army Reserve Family Programs), the Army Reserve Medical Command, as well as survivor family members, said Marshall F. Pesta, an Army Reserve spokeswoman.
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