PBS National Memorial Day Concert Had Tribute to Military Women

PBS National Memorial Day Concert

Tribute to military women

Allison Janney pays tribute to Women in Service on the 2018 National Memorial Day Concert

And yes, Dr. Mary Edwards Walker being the only woman to wear the Medal of Honor, was mentioned. 

Memorial Day does not have to include you next time

Leaving Pain Behind You
PTSD Patrol
Kathie Costos
May 27, 2018 

Commuter: Drives down same road without change.

Sightseer: Just looking at what others found.

Adventurer: Drives down new road to see where it goes.

Pioneer: Makes the roads everyone else takes.

What type of driver are you? Do you look forward to the next part of your journey, or do you constantly look in the rear view mirror?

If you escaped death in the service of others, why wonder where it is now? Why think that the others were worth saving, but you are not? Why look at things through the darkness surrounding you as if there is all there is?

It depends on where your light source is.

These pictures were taken at Glen Haven Memorial Park, at the same time, with the same camera and the same settings. 

There are things we see, then, there are things we just imagine. You may imagine that the pain you feel right now is all there is. Do you want to see things with a different light source?

Then look at the reasons you were willing to die for others to find the reason to live for yourself.
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Life and death struggle for veterans, lost on reporters

PTSD potentially a life and death struggle for veterans
Lima Ohio News
By Bryan Reynolds
MAY 26, 2018

Veterans with PTSD face second life and death struggle

LIMA — Barney Hovest of Pandora last saw his son alive on Easter 2016 while driving him home to Chicago after spending the holiday in Ohio.

Staff Sgt. Benjamin Hovest had served two tours of duty in Iraq with the Army Rangers 82nd Airborne from 2002 to 2003 and in 2006. He returned home from his first tour showing symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Barney Novest holds a photograph of his son Benjamin with his jacket and flag. Benjamin was an Army Ranger in the Iraq war that suffered from PTSD and took his life in 2016.

“He was different when he came home after his first tour,” his father said. “We talked on the way home and he actually talked about committing suicide. And I said, ‘You know you can’t do that. That would just kill us all.’ He goes, ‘I know, I just started going to this veterans group and talking.’ I really thought, ‘Finally, he’s talking to somebody at least.’”

On June 5, 2016, Hovest received the call no parent should ever receive. His son had turned his suicidal thoughts into action. After 13 years of dealing with PTSD, Benjamin Hovest wrote letters to each family member, got the military paperwork together his family would need for organizing a funeral, walked behind the place he was living and shot himself in a deserted alley.

“I was shocked because I thought he just sounded like he was different. He’s finally getting some help talking to these other vets,” Hovest said. “I don’t know what happened that day or that night. It’s a phone call I’d rather not ever get again.”
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Did you notice the date? How is it that the press still settles for what they think is happening instead of ever researching how it got worse than they can imagine?

Isn't that what they are supposed to be doing?

This is Memorial Day weekend, and tomorrow is the official day we are supposed to be honoring the lives lost keeping this nation free.

Some died in combat and others died because of it. It is for them we have got to get this right...and long overdue.

'He Had A Very Sad Heart': This Memorial Day, Remembering The Overlooked Heroes on NPR seemed like a good story to read.

In 2012, Army Spc. Robert Joseph Allen took his own life while serving in the U.S. military. At the time, the suicide rate for active-duty troops was at its highest ever, with more soldiers dying from suicide than in combat. Since then a law enacted in 2014 requires all service members to undergo one-on-one mental health screenings once a year and there's been growing attention to reducing military suicide.

It looks like NPR failed to read this report before doing this story. Department of Defense Quarterly Suicide Report which shows that after the "law was enacted in 2014, it did no good at all. Keep in mind that as the number of suicide remained about the same, the number of enlisted went down.

The "training" to prevent suicides started over a decade ago and the "law" that said they had to have mental health screenings did not happen. All NPR had to do is review the videos on C Span during hearings with the Committees and hear Generals say they were not doing "post" deployment screenings and the Senators held none of them accountable for ignore the law.

Maybe if all the reporters paid attention all along there would be fewer veterans in their graves instead of in their homes.

Veteran Peer Support and Healing Waters

Peer programs key to helping vets move forward
Metro Daily News
By Jeff Malachowski
Daily News Staff May 27, 2018

Young, who spent 42 years in the National Guard, served for 24 months in Iraq and said there was heavy fighting during his second deployment, which took its toll. Young learned of Project Healing Waters while on a group hike with Manson and felt the companionship of his fellow veterans would help be a distraction from his PTSD.

SUDBURY — The tranquility of a peaceful spring evening at Josephine Pond is a far cry from the battlefields of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Instead of hearing the pop of gunfire, more than a dozen veterans last week listened to the birds chirp and traded stories as they cast their lines into the small pond behind the Wayside Inn in hopes of landing a trout - a welcome respite for some of America’s heroes.

“It’s very rewarding and uplifting,” said George Kincannon, a retired Army first sergeant.

A national program with small chapters across the country, Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing brings together disabled veterans from all branches of the military twice a month for an evening of fly fishing and conversation that doubles as a form of rehabilitation. The organization is one of many aiming to ease the transition back to civilian life and help veterans deal with grief and loss they experienced while serving in combat.

“It’s an opportunity to immerse yourself in an activity that needs your focus and not think about anything else,” said Bill Manson, program leader for Project Healing Waters’ Fitchburg chapter. “It’s something that pays dividends.”

Many of the close to 20 veterans that participate in the Fitchburg chapter suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Joe Young, a retired sergeant major with the Massachusetts National Guard, is one of those veterans. He said spending an evening fishing and socializing with his fellow veterans keeps his mind away from his memories of the battlefield during two deployments to Iraq between 2003 and 2005.
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Daughter says Paramedic Dad had no one to help him

When my father needed help, no one was there
Sydney Morning Herald
By Cidney Jenkins
27 May 2018

Many of us assume that the most traumatic part of a paramedic’s job is what they find when they respond to an emergency call. What many of us failure to consider is what happens to paramedics once they leave a scene.

For many of us, an experience requiring an ambulance is often limited to a single unfortunate event. An event that will never be repeated or forgotten. For our paramedics, this is their daily life. My father, Tony Jenkins, was one of them.

As I sat at my laptop a few weeks ago, fumbling around with words for my father’s eulogy, I was left questioning how it had come to this.

How could a man, who preached about his good fortune, his loving family and his remarkably happy life, be driven to take his own life, without warning?

How could a husband, father and friend who had never spent a day in bed leave the world that he had so openly enjoyed and loved every single day?

But the final hours of my father’s life were spent behind closed doors with incompetent and insensitive managers, whose response to my father’s plea for help was to drive him back to his station, where he was left to walk off into the street, by himself. The next morning, police and ambulance workers came to our house, to tell us they had found his body.
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