'Fearlessly exposed himself to enemy fire': The only 2020 Democrat to experience combat finds it counts for little in political arena
The Washington Examiner by Emily Larsen September 07, 2019
But despite having what one Republican strategist described as “the most perfect resume of all time,” Moulton made barely a ripple in the crowded field of presidential hopefuls during his four-month bid. When his campaign ended last month, so too did the possibility that Democrats would nominate an experienced battle leader to be the next commander in chief.
It has been more than three decades since the United States elected as commander in chief a veteran who fought in combat. In 2020, that period will be extended after the only candidate who fought in battle dropped out without making a debate stage or registering above 1% in polls.
Two other Democratic candidates served in uniform in a war zone — Pete Buttigieg in Afghanistan and Tulsi Gabbard in Iraq — but neither fired a weapon or themselves came under fire. President Trump avoided Vietnam service because of bone spurs, Democratic front-runner Joe Biden because of asthma.
By contrast, Seth Moulton, 40, a Massachusetts congressman, served four tours in Iraq during his seven years as a Marine Corps officer from 2001 to 2008, retiring as a captain. He fought in one of the first American units to reach Baghdad in 2003 and led troops in intense battles in which some of his Marines were killed or wounded. He was awarded two medals for valor.
“I felt when I came back from Iraq that I'd seen the consequences of failed leadership in Washington, decisions made by people in Congress and the White House who had no idea what it was like to be a Marine in the infantry on the ground,” Moulton said. “I don't think you can ever fully understand it [combat]
unless you've been through it yourself."
read it here Also
'I refuse to die in here': the marine who survived two tours and is now fighting deportation
The Guardian by Sam Levin in Adelanto, California September 7, 2019
However bureaucratic challenges mean some immigrant service members don’t complete it, and under the Trump administration, a series of changes have made the process even harder. Some also mistakenly believe citizenship is automatic, advocates say. When immigrant veterans who haven’t been naturalized are convicted of certain felonies, they can then be deported.
Jose Segovia Benitez, a US Marine Corps veteran, is being detained in an Ice facility. Photograph: Damon Casarez/The Guardian
In his 21 months of detention, Jose Segovia Benitez says he’s been denied critical treatment for his PTSD and heart condition
Jose Segovia Benitez survived two tours of duty with the US Marine Corps, a bomb blast, and a traumatic brain injury.
But the US is not helping him recover. On the contrary, the government may be leading him to his death.
Segovia is currently imprisoned at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center in Adelanto, California where he says he is being denied critical medical and mental health care. The 38-year-old veteran is facing deportation to El Salvador, a country he left when he was three years old and where his loved ones fear he could be killed.
“I’m not going to die here. I refuse to die here,” Segovia said on a recent morning, wearing a red jail uniform and seated in a cramped room with no windows to the outside.
During his 21 months of detention in the southern California facility, Ice has failed to provide adequate care for Segovia’s serious heart condition, denied him proper treatment for his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and repeatedly placed him in isolation, according to the former marine and his lawyers. The consequences, they fear, could be fatal.
Segovia is one of fifteen current detainees who filed a federal lawsuit against Ice last month alleging medical neglect and horrific conditions that rise to the level of “torture”. He is also one of the estimated thousands of veterans who have faced deportation over the years despite their service to the country. read it here
Discovery of WWII diary revives a Sarasota widow’s trauma
Herald Tribune Billy Cox September 6, 2019
Lorraine Glixon recently discovered her late husband’s World War II diary. Harry Glixon was a POW who was part of a historic prisoner exchange with Nazi Germany in 1944.
SARASOTA — Struggling through Parkinson’s disease, dementia and a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, Harry Glixon spent the last decade of his life racing the undertaker, pecking away at the keyboards with the two-fingered intensity that characterized his typing skills.
His widow, Lorraine, describes him as “obsessed” as the old warrior demanded more and more of her time to edit the manuscript he would call “My Story.” Over the years, she would sometimes hear him coming to terms with what he’d done and seen, raising his voice in his study, “I can’t do this! I can’t do this!” And Lorraine discovered she couldn’t do it, either.
After Lorraine gave up, Harry relied on three outside editors/writers to advance his memoir to an abrupt ending in 1962. That’s how far he’d gotten when, in 2006, 11 years into “My Story,” Harry took a spill in his motorized wheelchair and never recovered. He died a year later, at age 86.
The unfinished work that Harry Glixon left behind was so raw — and in so many ways, unflattering — that he requested in the preface that “the contents of my book be kept from the children until at least their 25th birthday.”
He had hoped, according to that preface, that his accounting would “demonstrate that I was a good person and not selfish.” But he also feared his journey through the past would “regenerate old demons and impact and diminish my current happiness.” And that, according to Lorraine, is exactly what happened.
Of the unfinished memoir’s 304 pages, roughly 80 are devoted to World War II, during which Harry Glixon earned two Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star with V for Valor and a recommendation for the Distinguished Service Cross. He also made history in such unprecedented fashion, it played on newsreels that cheered audiences in both the U.S. and Germany. read it here
Why do Pentagon heads remain deaf, dumb and blind to the misery they spread?
Wounded Times Kathie Costos September 6, 2019 If you are guessing I am more angry than usual lately, you are correct. Too bad the leaders in this country are still delusional. It is almost as if pushing the "prevention" training has not worked after a decade, then they have to push it harder. As if something like that would ever make sense to rational people. May 9, 2009 I wrote that Comprehensive Soldier Fitness would make it worse for those who serve and would increase suicides.
I was right and that should freak everyone out. Why? Because I am not in charge. I am not a paid expert with a long list of degrees. I was never in the military. Freak out because all I did was pay attention to them. Why didn't the ones in charge? What we have seen ever since then was predicted, so no one should settle for "we did not know then" just as they should not settle for not knowing now.
The facts remain that the number of suicides has reached an all time high. The fact that the known suicides among OEF and OIF veterans has also remained high, even though they were trained to not do it, is the direct result of this malfunctioning preventive!
IT WAS THEIR JOB TO KNOW WHAT THEY WERE DOING. TO KNOW IF IT WOULD WORK BEFORE THEY PUSHED IT. TO HAVE THE COMMON SENSE TO STOP DOING IT AS SOON AS MORE WERE COMMITTING SUICIDE!
Coast Guard Base Kodiak units gathered together to participate in the Save 22: Veteran Suicide Awareness and Prevention Push Up Challenge, Aug. 29, 2019, in Kodiak, Alaska.
The challenge serves as a reminder that every day, 22 veterans commit suicide, and by participating in this challenge, Base Kodiak hopes to spread the message, create awareness and provide resources to those who are dealing with or are affected by suicide-related issues.
Does anyone really think that pushing your face into the ground will make a veteran think "gee they are doing pushups, so I should stay alive today" instead of thinking about all the other "22" who did it that day?
Watch the video and know this BS is part of the problem. They already know they are killing themselves and they know how to do it. What they do not know is how to heal and spread that message out the way these stunts spread death. Spread the message about what? "What's the problem? It's just a number!" That is what people use to respond when confronted with the truth. The problem is, that "number" is supposed to represent the number of veterans who end up taking their own lives because their "problem" is not even worth knowing what the actual truth is.
A reminder of a lie? It is not now, nor ever has been 22 a day. It had been 22 the VA was aware of at the time, but even they warned the "number" should not be considered a fact. The VA only had limited data from just 21 states. Aside from the states that were not included, they did not have data from anyone who did not have an honorable discharge. Why? Because they are not counted as "veteran" even if they were part of the over 3 million kicked out of the service because of what their service did to them. So, the Coast Guard is doing pushups and repeating the "number" one reason more veterans at taking their own lives than before. And yet, with all the "awareness" that suicides are happening, they seem to have learned nothing from them. The suicide of Petty Officer 1st Class Jose Christopher Trujillo-Daza is a reflection of what all the stunts produced.
Yet in spite of the mandated suicide prevention training and the promotion of CG SUPRT, Wright-Williams acknowledges there may be some people, like Trujillo-Daza, who may not be reached by—or reach out to—those services.
The last drill weekend she saw Petty Officer 1st Class Jose Christopher Trujillo-Daza alive, Petty Officer 2nd Class Natalie Crane ate lunch with her coxswain and section leader.
“He was sitting on the boat, and we were eating, and he said, ‘This right here, being on a boat with buddies? This makes it all worth it,’” Crane remembered.
A week later, Trujillo-Daza was dead, a victim of suicide. Crane and her fellow reservists at Port Security Unit 313 in Everett, Wash., were stunned. What had happened in the intervening days? What else could they have done to prevent it?
In the past five years, 10 Coast Guard reservists have died by suicide, an average of two a year. That percentage is lower than that of other military branches and on par with the civilian suicide rate. It’s also small enough that statisticians and health professionals have difficulty pinpointing patterns that would provide Trujillo-Daza’s shipmates reliable answers or contexts.
All the things civilians are capable of, these men and women, like the members of the military, also commit murder-suicide with their own families. The difference is these men and women dedicated their lives to doing whatever they could to save lives...not take them. Oh, sorry I failed to mention that the members of the Coast Guard are not counted within the military numbers, or veteran numbers. Then again, people can spin anything. That was made clear by the recent report of US military members having less "mental disorders" than the general public.
Diagnoses for mental health conditions among active-duty U.S. military personnel have remained steady over the last four years, with 8.3% of the total force diagnosed in 2018, compared with 8% in 2014, according to a new study from the Defense Department.
The study looked at the number of diagnoses for eight mental health conditions, including adjustment disorder, alcohol dependence, anxiety, bipolar disorder, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychosis and substance abuse, and found that the most common mental health diagnoses in troops were adjustment disorder, anxiety and depression.
That does not mean there are actually less with things like PTSD. It means there are less getting diagnosed and treated than the general public. When you factor in that all branches of the military have reached the highest level of suicides, that study should be sounding alarms all over the country. No one is tracking the number of veterans facing off with members of law enforcement, but in 2017 we found it happened at least once a week all over the country.
The air marshal union letter to the OSC notes that just over a year earlier, TSA Administrator David Pekoske received an email from union officials "dated June 9, 2018 entitled ‘Concerned FAMS,’ where he was warned that unless immediate action was taken more tragedies would occur," but failed to react. “Since that warning the agency has seen 4 suicides, a murder suicide, and its first on duty death,” the letter grimly notes. The letter is dated July 22, the same day last month that a Washington D.C.-based supervisory air marshal named William Sondervan, 46, was found dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound.
It happens because veterans like Everett Glenn Miller , did not receive the help they needed in the military during his over 20 year career, or afterwards.
"This was truly the perfect storm," Mills told jurors. "He was homeless, he didn't have a job, he was heartbroken. ... He was admonished for being a walk-in at the VA three days before this crime was committed."
Joe Biden is being questioned for being partly right, but the fact that more commit suicide than die in battle has been going on for decades, as far as the reports go back to, but again, no one knows the whole truth on any of this. Why? Because it is easier to just talk about something happening than it is to actually do something about it.
Biden’s claim that more Iraq/Afghanistan veterans have committed suicide than were killed in action
The Washington Post By Glenn Kessler September 5, 2019
“More suicides per month in the U.S. military, returning vets, than people killed in action, by a long shot.”
— Former vice president Joe Biden, at a town hall event at Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., Aug. 23, 2019
The Washington Post recently detailed how the former vice president told a moving but false story about an incident in Afghanistan. While watching a clip of the lengthy monologue that led to this tale, we were struck by his claim that there are more suicides per month of returning veterans than those killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan — “by a long shot.”
This seemed an interesting subject for a fact check, though it turned out the data is sketchy and not especially clear. There’s also an added wrinkle — what did Biden, who is not especially precise in his phrasing, mean with his comment?
The Facts When we first watched this clip, we assumed that Biden was comparing the number of military personnel killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan over the course of the two wars — about nearly 5,400 — with the number of veterans of those conflicts who have taken their own lives.
Before he made this statement, Biden said: “Every year for the last 13 years I have wanted to know I call every morning to the Defense Department, not a joke, to learn exactly how many women and men have been killed in Afghanistan or Iraq. Every single one of them is a fallen angel left behind an entire community. … It’s 6,883, as of this morning.” (There are different ways to crunch the numbers, but it’s about 7,000.)
Biden continued: “Know how many are coming back with post-traumatic stress? 300,000. 300,000 estimated.” (He appears to be referring to a 2008 Rand Corp. study that said 20 percent of military service members, or 300,000 at the time, report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder — PTSD — or major depression.) read it here
“If we do not focus on [suicide prevention]…we will be doing a disservice to those Veterans we care for, and a disservice to the memories of those millions who have come before.The most definitive answer that we can give to our fellow Americans and to our Veterans, is that this is a task that we will all conquer together."VA Secretary Robert Wilkie
