If you repaid "bonus" money DOD needs to give it back

Great news for the wounded who already had to pay back their money! Thousands of them should not have had to pay one dime back but they all got letters just like Fox did.

DoD: No repaying bonuses for wounded
Staff and wire reportsPosted : Tuesday Nov 27, 2007 12:53:38 EST

If you are wounded in combat and discharged as a result, you will not have to pay back your enlistment bonus, Defense Department officials said Monday.

“Bonuses are not recouped simply for one’s inability to complete an enlistment or re-enlistment agreement through no fault of the military member,” according to a policy statement cited in an American Forces Press Service story.

The policy statement was issued one day after Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., held a press conference criticizing the Pentagon for dunning wounded troops to pay back their bonuses, a practice the senator said affected hundreds.

He said that when the case of Pfc. Jordan Fox, an Army sniper partially blinded by a roadside bomb in Iraq, was called to the Pentagon’s attention, officials replied that the demand for him to repay $2,800 was a “clerical error” and canceled the debt. But what about the others, he asked, standing in front of a World War I memorial.

“When you talk to the Pentagon, you get different answers from different people,” he said.
Schumer called on the Defense Department to conduct an internal investigation and audit to identify recently wounded personnel who received the dunning letters and assure them that repayments were not necessary.

He also said he would support proposed legislation, to be called the Veterans Guaranteed Bonus Act, to require full payment of bonuses to enlistees within 30 days of discharge from the service due to combat-related injuries.

The statement came after Fox appeared on local and national TV and radio shows to talk about the letter.

Fox, 21, from Mount Lebanon, Pa., was partially blinded in his right eye and sustained a back injury in a roadside bomb explosion in Baqubah in May. He returned to the U.S. two months later and received a discharge.

In late October, Fox got a letter from the Army seeking repayment of part of his enlistment bonus because he had only completed about a year of his three-year service.

Another letter arrived a week later warning he could be charged interest if he didn’t make a payment within 30 days.

“I was just completely shocked,” Fox said. “I couldn’t believe I’d gotten a bill in the mail from the Army.”

“Department policy prohibits recoupment when it would be contrary to equity and good conscience, or would be contrary to the nation’s interests,” according to the Defense Department policy statement. “Those circumstances include, for example, an inability to complete a service agreement because of illness, injury, disability or other impairment that did not clearly result from misconduct.”

According to the DoD story, Army officials said Fox will not be required to pay back any enlistment money he received.

Anyone who does have an issue can call the Wounded Soldier and Family Hotline at (800) 984-8523.
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/11/military_payback_bonus_071127w/

Now if they will do something about the wounded who had to pay for their meals and lost equipment, they will be on the right track of doing the right thing.

Combat veteran tries to find and help those who also fought

Combat veteran tries to find and help those who also fought
By CHRIS VAUGHN
Star-Telegram staff writer

STAR-TELEGRAM/ JEFFERY WASHINGTON

Nearly 400 veterans are receiving help from the center. FORT WORTH -- Joel Chaverri has seen combat, having participated in the 2004 attack on Fallujah, Iraq, the scene of some of the most bitter street fighting involving U.S. forces since Hue in Vietnam.

He knows the readjustment that a young man must go through when he leaves behind that kind of carnage.

So when Chaverri left the Marines and returned to North Texas, he accepted a job with the Department of Veterans Affairs. His mission: to go out and tell young combat veterans that it's OK to ask for counseling.

"I tell guys, 'You don't have to have a PTSD diagnosis or have a disability rating,'" Chaverri, 25, said. "'You don't have to have a disorder.' Our brochures never use the word PTSD. We offer readjustment counseling."
go here for the rest
http://www.star-telegram.com/metro_news/story/326068.html

Coping when loved ones have dangerous jobs

• Coping when loved ones have dangerous jobs
  Story Highlights
  Families of soldiers, police, firefighters live with anxiety
  
  Expert: Family stress symptoms similar to those of post-traumatic stress
  
  Eating and sleeping problems, headaches, irritability and withdrawal
  
  Widow: Make the most of time together because it is not unlimited

(LifeWire) -- RoseEllen Dowdell wakes up in the middle of the night, thinking about her sons, one in the military and one a firefighter. Kristina Zimmerman changes the channel when she hears of another soldier killed -- not wanting to worry about her husband, a military policeman.

For them, and for other families of firefighters, soldiers, police officers, miners or anyone else who risks death to do their jobs, anxiety is a part of life.

"It is a constant state of worry and this feeling like your stomach is in your throat," says Zimmerman, 23, a stay-at-home mother of three whose husband, Michael, searches for drugs and bombs with an Army K-9 unit. The military will be sending him to Kosovo for a year in early 2008.

"I get frustrated because, yes, I know he is just doing his job and that he is doing it for us," says Zimmerman, who lives in Miesau, Germany -- where her husband is stationed. "But at the same time I don't understand how he can put himself at risk, and our kids and me at risk of losing him as a father and husband."

Dowdell, 51, who lives in the New York City borough of Queens, knows that kind of risk intimately. Her husband, Kevin, a 20-year veteran New York City firefighter and a member of an elite rescue unit, died in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Dowdell and her sons waited many anxious months for Kevin's body to be recovered
It was not until April 2002, when the majority of debris had been cleared from ground zero, that the Dowdell family was able to hold a memorial service and experience some kind of closure. Kevin Dowdell's body was never found.

go here for the rest

http://www.cnn.com/2007/LIVING/personal/11/27/uncertainty/

Overwhelming Response to Vets Helping Vets

Overwhelming Response to Vets Helping Vets
By: Steve Nicoles, Reporter
By Steve Nicoles
Story Created: Nov 26, 2007
Story Updated: Nov 26, 2007
IOWA CITY - Friday KCRG-TV 9 News reported on a group of veterans trying to raise money to help other veterans. The group hit a bit of a snag Monday. But the initial response has been overwhelming. The employees at Wells Fargo Bank say thy have received a lot of calls from people wanting to help. One man from Dubuque is even donating a three-bedroom apartment.Some people might think this group came together following the death of Sonny Iovino a couple of weeks ago. Iovino was a homeless veteran.

But the idea for “Vets Helping Vets” came weeks before Iovino's death under an Iowa City bridge. The group wants to be able to help veterans with their needs. They are asking for donations. They need money, coats, shoes, hats and blankets. “Vets Helping Vets” met with Wells Fargo Bank Monday to work on becoming a non-profit organization. But the members say they found a problem. They want to help now and the process can take a few weeks. Len McClellan said, “People have responded and we need to get our stuff in order so they can help. All we want to do is help our fellow vets." The group is trying to speed through the process. And anyone wanting to donate should contact the downtown Iowa City Wells Fargo. For more information call Michelle Reuss at (319) 887-7461.
Email Steve Nicoles at Steve.Nicoles@kcrg.com
http://www.kcrg.com/news/local/11838971.html

70 to 80 percent of deployed civilians to Iraq have trauma related wounds

Statement of Laurence G. Brown, M.D. Director, Office of Medical Services, U.S. Department Of State

Although many employees working in Iraq are direct hire Foreign Service employees others are permanent civil service employees, while still others are civil service working under limited, non career appointments, the so-called 3161s. I want you to know that all of these employees come under the department's medical program in Iraq. They are all eligible for preassignment training, for medical and mental health services while in Iraq and for post assignment out briefings.

Although the medical services for the 3161s end when their employment is terminated, they are covered by worker's compensation for injuries or occupational health conditions that developed in Iraq. Other contractor personnel in Iraq are covered by their individual companies who hve full responsibility for medical and mental health care and follow up.

The DOD cannot take care of the soldiers who have been wounded by trauma but they are treating non-combatants? The soldiers cannot simply collect workman's comp, have to wait for months just to file a claim and be evaluated, then wait over a year more to have a claim approved? Our tax dollars are funding the contractors and they cannot take care of their own employees? Our tax dollars are supposed to be taking care of our troops and all of their medical care. What is going on here? This also explains why the State Department employees were so upset about going to Iraq. The hearing happened June 19, 2007. They would have all known about this report and knew the dangers of being sent to Iraq.

Later in the testimony

Some contractor personnel in Iraq are personal services contractors (PSC) that have the same medical support a do direct hire employees. Other contact personnel are either non-personal services or professional services contacts. While all the large contact companies have full responsibility for medical and mental health care and follow-up for their employees, there are several smaller contact companies who are authorized to use Government furnished medical support in Baghdad.

In a question and answer session

Dr. Brown
I think it is fair to say based on anecdotal reports and from our survey that again is not totally complete but it appears that most people--let us say 70 or 80 percent of those who leave Iraq--have some sort of an emotional problem at least temporarily when they return to the United States. As I said, most of them

go here for the whole report
http://www.internationalrelations.house.gov/110/36206.pdf

They are not participants in combat but they are in combat zones. So why do we doubt the soldiers, Marines and all other military personnel exposed to the traumatic events of combat on a daily basis would develop PTSD? Dr. Brown also said they did not anticipate these findings. Neither did the DOD or the VA and no one has taken this all seriously enough to being emergency response to it. Our soldiers are dying after they come home. They are dying a slow, painful death. Their families are falling apart and trying to deal with all of this. Financial problems caused by PTSD and the inability to work crush what little strength they have to deal with any of this. What is congress and the President doing about any of this? The Democrats have been trying but even they do not fully appreciate how serious all of this is.kc

Neglect? The VA's current backlog is 800,000 cases

Neglect? The VA's current backlog is 800,000 cases. Aside from the appalling conditions in many VA hospitals, in 2004, the last year for which statistics are available, almost 6 million veterans and their families were without any healthcare at all. Most of them are working people -- too poor to afford private coverage, but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or means-tested VA care. Soldiers and veterans need help now, the help isn't there, and the conversations about what needs to be done are only just now beginning.

120 War Vets Commit Suicide Each Week
By Penny Coleman, AlterNet.

Posted November 26, 2007.

The military refuses to come clean, insisting the high rates are due to "personal problems," not experience in combat.

Earlier this year, using the clout that only major broadcast networks seem capable of mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone -- and remember, this is just in 45 states -- there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day.

As the widow of a Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home, and as the author of a book for which I interviewed dozens of other women who had also lost husbands (or sons or fathers) to PTSD and suicide in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, I am deeply grateful to CBS for undertaking this long overdue investigation. I am also heartbroken that the numbers are so astonishingly high and tentatively optimistic that perhaps now that there are hard numbers to attest to the magnitude of the problem, it will finally be taken seriously. I say tentatively because this is an administration that melts hard numbers on their tongues like communion wafers.

go here for the rest

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/68713/

Local Paper Uncovers Another Apparent Soldier Suicide in Iraq

This is what it takes to end "under investigation" and get real figures of the price of war!

Local Paper Uncovers Another Apparent Soldier Suicide in Iraq
From Editor & Publisher, November 24, 2007
By Greg Mitchell

Hundreds of U.S. troops in Iraq have committed suicide since the war began in 2003, though this subject is kept quiet by the military. As E&P has documented in recent months, the deaths are announced as “noncombat” with the only details that they are “under investigation.” But local newspapers often find out the true cause from surviving family or friends, and occasionally from nearby military bases.

Some 130 are now officially listed as suicides in Iraq but dozens more being probed, and then there are the suicides in Afghanistan, and hundreds or thousands more back in the U.S., as CBS News recently revealed. Now there is probably one more.

Spc. Melvin Henley was on his second tour of duty in Iraq family members say when he died Wednesday at Camp Striker in Iraq from injuries suffered from a noncombat-related incident, the Associated Press reports.

The U.S. Department of Defense announced Henley’s death on Friday.

The cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the head, Jim Jeffcoat, a spokesman for Fort Stewart in Georgia, where Henley was assigned, told The Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson, Miss. “It is under investigation,” Jeffcoat said.

Henley, 26, from Jackson, was a helicopter mechanic. He was assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart in March 2007. He served one tour of duty in Iraq from November 2003 to November 2004.
go here for the rest
http://www.freepress.net/news/28402

What PTSD warriors are up against at home

TODAY'S LETTERS: Military Suicides, Bob Dylan, Scott McClellan and Bilal Hussein

By E and P Staff

Published: November 26, 2007 10:20 AM ET

NEW YORK Readers wrote in about military suicides, the Bob Dylan biopic and Scott McClellan and the AP's stance on Bilal Hussein.

Who Will Probe 'Noncombat' Deaths in Iraq?
Gimme a break. The guys who commit suicide would probably do the same in any type of tough situation, whether it be war or bad times at home.

This is a volunteer ARMY. If you're not willing or able to fight and serve overseas, don't join the army. People are just looking for any reason to blast America's military forces.

Army Mom

Click post title for link to this. I had to stop reading as soon as I read this first one from "Army Mom" because, as hard as it is to believe, this is what our soldiers are up against when they come home.

This attitude still exists! It is a wonder what this "Army Mom" would do if it was her son or her daughter returning home with a mind wounded by trauma. Either the woman has not read a single report on PTSD in over thirty years, or she will never understand this is a wound no different than a bullet wound, bomb wound or burn wound. It is a wound cutting down humans.

They come home and they look fine. At least they do until you take a good look at them. You notice it in their eyes. You then notice it in the way they act, what they say or don't say. The signs of PTSD are there if you care enough to look for them. Yet when military families, especially, pass it off, belittle the wound, attack the wounded, they are in fact causing the wound to fester.

Veterans will tell you that their families fell apart when they were needed the most. Some families, even knowing what this is, just don't have enough compassion to stay together. Some find it impossible to live together. I used to blame the families for turning their backs on the wounded but understanding first hand how hard it can be, some are just not able to fight for them. Then there are people like "Army Mom" who would rather pass all of it off, ignore it, not bother to research a single report, or even talk to someone who has it. If FOX did a report on it the way CNN, the Military Channel, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, The History Channel or PBS has done, they may wake up and believe it. Yet FOX would rather ignore it. Occasionally they talk about it but they do not do any real reports. These other stations dedicated hours of programming on it. Even that is not enough to stop attitudes such as what you just read.

Can you imagine coming home to a family you thought would stand by you, love you, missed you, only to find out they did not trust you, believe in you or even know you well enough to understand you have been wounded? They are still the same person inside, under the wound, but too many family members would rather suddenly blame the wounded than realize who sent into the horrors of war did not come back the same.

To "Army Mom" you need to get educated and stop being an enemy to the men and women who serve this nation. You need to stop being an enemy to the veterans of this country. You need to stop being an enemy to the wounded. It will not go away just because you say it is not real, but they will when they commit suicide!

Kathie Costos
Namguardianangel@aol.com
http://www.namguardianangel.org/
http://www.namguardianangel.blogspot.com/
http://www.woundedtimes.blogspot.com/
"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington

NYC Columbia University PTSD study wants you

Columbia University in NYC now recruiting PTSD patients for study of serotonin & stress system interactions

ImmuneSupport.com

11-26-2007
This study, to be conducted at Columbia's Neuroscience Clinic for Mood and Personality Disorders in New York City, will involve brain imaging/analysis, and compensation will include up to 6 months of outpatient treatment.

STUDY TITLE:
PTSD: Serotonin & Stress System Interactions
Please refer to this study by Identifier # 4344
Principal Investigator: Gregory Sullivan


For More Information Contact:
Brendan Carroll; bc2234@columbia.edu
phone 212 543-5902


PURPOSE & DETAILS
This is a brain imaging research study of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with and without depression.

Eligible participants receive two brain positron emission tomography (PET) scans on one day which assess the amounts of two proteins of the brain’s serotonin system in various brain regions.

A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan is also obtained, and there are interviews and rating scales that are part of the study.

Participants also receive a test of the stress system known as the low dose dexamethasone test.
Up to 6 months of outpatient treatment is offered to participants in the study at no cost.

Also, participants may be compensated $350 for time and inconvenience. For info call 212 543-5902
go here for the rest
http://www.immunesupport.com/library/showarticle.cfm/ID/8533

New Jersey Homeless Veterans

Nonprofit aims to give vets hope
Lyons VA campus opening wing for homeless veterans.

By KARA L. RICHARDSON STAFF WRITER
BERNARDS -- A transitional housing program for homeless veterans was full within a year of its 2004 opening at the Lyons Veterans Administration campus here.

Now, as a new wing with 25 more beds is about to be unveiled today, Community Hope, a private nonprofit organization contracted to run the homeless veterans program, has the same challenge.

The additional beds, making a total of 95 spots in the program, will be helpful, but J. Michael Armstrong, Community Hope's executive director, said, "It will still only be a drop in the proverbial bucket."

On any given night, an estimated 8,000 veterans in New Jersey are homeless. So, the additional beds already are spoken for from a long waiting list of clients, he said.

"Our residents have experienced repeated homelessness as far back as their service in Vietnam. It is an incredible challenge to break that lengthy cycle, but these veterans are succeeding in the program and experiencing hope for the first time in many years," Armstrong said. "The opening of this new wing enables us to help more veterans turn their lives around."
click post title for the rest