Up to 20% of troops serving in Afghanistan, Iraq have brain injury

Brain trauma common in Iraq
Up to 20% of troops serving in Afghanistan, Iraq have brain injury
By ED KEMMICK
Of the Gazette Staff

When an improvised explosive device blows up, Army Spc. Nicholas Wells said, the first 10th of a second "feels like forever."

The blast is enormous, "and the first thing that hurts is your ears. It's like somebody stabbing you with a screwdriver," he said.

During his one-year tour of duty in Iraq as an Army scout and lead gunner on a Humvee, Wells was close to more than 20 IED explosions. The roadside bombs are a favorite of insurgents in Iraq.

While he was in Iraq, Wells said, nobody thought about the cumulative effects of the explosions. "It was weird," he said. "Nobody told us anything."

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and Harvard University budget expert, has estimated that the lifetime cost of care for severely brain-injured troops from Iraq and Afghanistan could rise to $35 billion, according to Discover.

Dawna Lynn Wells said the frightening thing about traumatic brain injury is that so little is known about it. She said it is possible that people who have it might be at higher risk for early-onset dementia or other maladies.

Nor does she know whether her son will recover his short- and long-term memory. "And I don't know if he'll ever sleep through the night again," she said.

go here for the rest
http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2008/01/23/news/state/21-truama.txt

For now, he said, he thinks he'd like to work for the railroad. He wants a straightforward job where he can work outside and where he's not around too many other people.

For my husband it was working in construction and being outside, then he worked jobs where he was also on the road and usually working alone. We met when he was a cable technician. They don't like to be around other people and they have low tolerance for an office job.

PTSD and TBI shouldn't have to be a "to die for" wound.

Tricare Advocacy Program

New TRICARE Advocacy Program
The TRICARE Southern Region's new Warrior Navigation & Assistance Program (WNAP) for Wounded Warriors and their families provides guidance to active-duty, National Guard and reserve service members as they transition through the military health care system. Service members can call 1-888-4GO-WNAP for direct access to a multi-disciplinary team that will assist them or their family members. In addition, resources are available on the Humana-Military website including the "Information and Resources for Combat Veterans" brochure and tools for health care providers. This brochure addresses the unique needs of service members returning home from deployment.

Updates at: http://militaryspousesforchange.com/helpandinfo.html

Association Offers Congressional Guide

The Fleet Reserve Association (FRA) is offering a free guide called "Communicate With Your Elected Officials" to help Sailors, Marines and Coast Guardsmen and their families participate in the legislative process. The guide provides contact information for members of Congress, a roster of key committees, the proper ways to format correspondence and definitions of key election terms. It also highlights legislative issues related to military personnel such as pay increases, benefit parity and Montgomery GI Bill funding. To order a free copy of the guide, send an e-mail request to bethw@fra.org with your name, mailing address, rank, and branch of service or call 800-FRA-1924.
Updates at: http://militaryspousesforchange.com/Did_You_Know...html

PTSD: The carnage of war weighs heavily on the soul

Most of the emails I receive break my heart. Some of the emails I receive piss me off. The ones that tick me off the most, contain rants by some jerks who would rather attack the media when they finally do report on important stories, instead of understanding what the reporter actually said.

When we read numbers like "1 in 5" returning from Iraq have psychological wounds, that should be an eye opener. These bullshit artists will turn that into a personal attack instead of noticing the magnitude of the problems we need to deal with. The rate of PTSD is one out of three, but we need to clearly understand what that rate means and where it comes from. It is for every three exposed to a traumatic event, one of them will walk away with the event eating away at them. We've had an inkling all through this about the numbers of PTSD wounded this will create for many years.

At first, using the data from Vietnam, it appeared to be heading at over 100,000 but that was in the first two years of the occupation of Iraq. Knowing that many would not present symptom right away, they were included in that figure. The following year we were fearing 300,000, then 400,000 and now we are looking at 800,000.

The figure includes the rate of kill to wound rate at 1-7. For every soldier killed, seven survive. This is a great accomplishment for the military doctors, however it is also producing seriously wounded who will need to have their bodies and minds taken care of for the rest of their lives.

Vietnam had 1.6 million in what were considered combat zones. Actually there were more exposed to the violence but it gave a good starting point since we are close to that figure with Iraq and Afghanistan already.

IN UNIFORM AND IN COUNTRY...
Vietnam Vets: 9.7% of their generation.
9,087,000 military personnel served on active duty during the Vietnam Era (Aug. 5, 1964-May 7, 1975).
8,744,000 GIs were on active duty during the war (Aug 5, 1964 - March 28, 1973).
3,403,100 (Including 514,300 offshore) personnel served in the Southeast Asia Theater (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, flight crews based in Thailand, and sailors in adjacent South China Sea waters).
2,594,000 personnel served within the borders of South Vietnam (Jan. 1, 1965 - March 28, 1973)
Another 50,000 men served in Vietnam between 1960 and 1964.
Of the 2.6 million, between 1 - 1.6 million (40 - 60%) either fought in combat, provided close support or were at least fairly regularly exposed to enemy attack.
7,484 women (6,250 or 83.5% were nurses) served in Vietnam.
Peak troop strength in Vietnam: 543,482 (April 30, 1968)
http://history-world.org/vietnam_war_statistics.htm

Yet by 1978 the DAV study found that 500,000 had already been diagnosed with PTSD. They knew the numbers would rise for at least the next 10 years. The at "least part" was very telling. Last year a report came out an additional 148,000 Vietnam vets sought help for PTSD in an 18 month period. We need to calculate the numbers of deployed in both occupations, considering they are rotated in and out of both and Afghanistan has seen an increase in attacks against the occupying forces. Two studies put the number of suicides between 150,000 and 200,000. The homeless rate was over 300,000. This does not even include those who ended up in jail also suffering from the price of combat. I don't know if we will ever know how many of them were there because of PTSD or because they were just like the rest of us where some commit crimes and some do not. I doubt there have been many studies done on how many had PTSD.

The Vietnam vets were considered collateral damage as just another price of the war and they were then ignored. They fought to have their wounds tended to. They fought for equal attention as with generations before them, but they also demanded more for all of them. No one thought about the families these wounded would also affect.

The carnage of war weighs heavily on the soul and we need to address this instead of ignoring it. No matter how many times the fools attempt to minimize the damage done to those we send, it will not make the problem disappear. It will only make the problems worse as the veterans begin to experience progressively worsening symptoms. Their families will be needed to be added to the grim figures of damaged by war.

What we are now seeing is just the beginning of many more years to come and we have a choice to make. Do we disregard the reports and the studies, attack the reporters for bringing this all into the public's knowledge or do we really do something about it? Do we tend to the needs of all wounded now or do we cast them aside and hope they die early? Do we wait until more have committed suicide because of PTSD or do we go into emergency mode to make sure fewer of them actually succeed at ending their suffering?

What do we owe them? It is not about supporting the occupations or being against them. It is about the price paid by other humans we send into abnormal situations.


If you want some really grim numbers go to this site.http://www.brookings.edu/fp/saban/iraq/index.pdf


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

Veterans Incarcerated Program.

In keeping with the reports on what happens to some of our veterans, this article is brings it all to life. Some of them turned to drugs and alcohol. While some of them are in fact addicted to the components of these substances, most of them used them to cope. When you think about a veteran in jail the next time, maybe after reading this you will think of them differently.

Program Helps Incarcerated War Veterans

Vets in the Veterans Incarcerated Program at Sierra Conservation Center hope the camaraderie they've found behind bars will help keep them out once they are released
by Alisha Wyman, The Union Democrat


Jerome Lesesne, 41, fought for the Marine Corps during Operation Desert Storm.

Alex Flores, 48, was in the Army National Guard for 21 years.

Howard Wright, 52, is an Army veteran who served in the states during the Vietnam War.

James Poole, 61, was in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War.



When Poole opens his high school yearbook, it's a reminder that many of the faces smiling back at him went to Vietnam but never came back with him.



In years following his return, there was a stigma attached to Vietnam veterans, he said. They were called "baby killers" and scorned for their service rather than revered.

The loss of his first wife to an auto accident and the subsequent failure of his second marriage only fueled feelings of loss and rejection.

It's that feeling that headed him down the path to the crime.

Tears still come to his eyes when he talks about the war, but he's working with others to start over.

"It's emotional ties to the past, but it's helping us look toward the future," Poole said.


"A lot of us got our apprenticeship in drugs and alcohol there in the service," said Mendiola, an outside volunteer.

Wright began using cocaine starting in the military. The habit only grew after he left the service, until he was arrested for selling the drug.

go here for the rest

http://www.veteranstoday.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2776

Out of gratitude to them

It's not about pro-war or anti-war. It's about saying thank you to the men and women who serve without having to say a single word.

http://www.gratitudecampaign.org/fullmovie.php


To download a high quality file of our video(s), please select the version of the video and file type that you would like to download. The file will download automatically to your computer desktop. (This may take a few minutes)
QuickTime files for use on your computer:
The Gratitude Campaign (short)
The Gratitude Campaign (full length)
VOB files for use on a DVD player (download the file, then burn to a DVD):
The Gratitude Campaign (short)
The Gratitude Campaign (full length)

We all can't go out and protest on one side of the street or another. We all can't write letters and send emails to Congress. Ok we all should but that doesn't happen. What we all can do is to do this simple action with our hand and out of our hearts to let them know we do care about them and thank them for what they were willing to do. I suggest we all do a lot more like begin to take care of all the wounded, but at least this is a start in the right direction.

Gun law another road block to PTSD treatment?

I can understand the need to do something to prevent this kind of mass murder ever again, but often the law makers with the best intentions do the most damage to innocent people. I don't know what the answer is but I can tell you that this law, the way it's written, is a road block for veterans seeking treatment for PTSD.

I'm not a lawyer so I don't understand all that goes into a bill like this. I approach it the way every other regular person reads it. If I'm wrong, I'm begging you to address it so that I can pass on the information to others.

HR 2640

(9) On April 16, 2007, a student with a history of mental illness at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University shot to death 32 students and faculty members, wounded 17 more, and then took his own life. The shooting, the deadliest campus shooting in United States history, renewed the need to improve information-sharing that would enable Federal and State law enforcement agencies to conduct complete background checks on potential firearms purchasers. In spite of a proven history of mental illness, the shooter was able to purchase the two firearms used in the shooting. Improved coordination between State and Federal authorities could have ensured that the shooter's disqualifying mental health information was available to NICS.

SEC. 3. DEFINITIONS.
As used in this Act, the following definitions shall apply:
(1) COURT ORDER- The term `court order' includes a court order (as described in section 922(g)(8) of title 18, United States Code).

(2) MENTAL HEALTH TERMS- The terms `adjudicated as a mental defective' and `committed to a mental institution' have the same meanings as in section 922(g)(4) of title 18, United States Code.

They regard PTSD as a disability and therefore a defect. Most have to go on medication. Some have to go into rehab and receive mental health treatments from talk therapy to medications. This will keep veterans, and already has kept them, from seeking treatment from the VA.

(3) MISDEMEANOR CRIME OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE- The term `misdemeanor crime of domestic violence' has the meaning given the term in section 921(a)(33) of title 18, United States Code.

This is good because some do turn violent.

Standard for Adjudications and Commitments Related to Mental Health-

(1) IN GENERAL- No department or agency of the Federal Government may provide to the Attorney General any record of an adjudication related to the mental health of a person or any commitment of a person to a mental institution if--
(A) the adjudication or commitment, respectively, has been set aside or expunged, or the person has otherwise been fully released or discharged from all mandatory treatment, supervision, or monitoring;

If they are seeing a doctor for PTSD then they have not been discharged.

(B) the person has been found by a court, board, commission, or other lawful authority to no longer suffer from the mental health condition that was the basis of the adjudication or commitment, respectively, or has otherwise been found to be rehabilitated through any procedure available under law; or

PTSD is not cured. It can be healed to a point but that depends on how soon treatment begins and the level of the illness the veteran has.

(C) the adjudication or commitment, respectively, is based solely on a medical finding of disability, without an opportunity for a hearing by a court, board, commission, or other lawful authority, and the person has not been adjudicated as a mental defective consistent with section 922(g)(4) of title 18, United States Code, except that nothing in this section or any other provision of law shall prevent a Federal department or agency from providing to the Attorney General any record demonstrating that a person was adjudicated to be not guilty by reason of insanity, or based on lack of mental responsibility, or found incompetent to stand trial, in any criminal case or under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

PTSD is considered by many as "not mentally responsible." They cannot enter into a legal contract and a lot of them have to have someone legally responsible for them.

(iii) A record that identifies a person who is an unlawful user of, or addicted to a controlled substance (as such terms `unlawful user' and `addicted' are respectively defined in regulations implementing section 922(g)(3) of title 18, United States Code, as in effect on the date of the enactment of this Act) as demonstrated by arrests, convictions, and adjudications, and whose record is not protected from disclosure to the Attorney General under any provision of State or Federal law.
(iv) A record that identifies a person who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or committed to a mental institution, consistent with section 922(g)(4) of title 18, United States Code, and whose record is not protected from disclosure to the Attorney General under any provision of State or Federal law.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h110-2640



Some have self medicated to kill off feelings they do not want to re-experience in a flashback. They use alcohol and drugs to accomplish this. This will keep them from seeking help.

As this bill stands, most in the military deployed with PTSD should not be using a fire arm. In other words, if they have PTSD, by their own rules, those deployed should be removed from combat and removed from their guns. If they are not responsible enough to have a gun in their home town then they are not responsible enough to be deployed into combat with a machine gun.
Some veterans have jobs requiring them to have fire arms. Some veterans entered into law enforcement with mild or dormant PTSD until a secondary stressor hits them. They realize they need help to cope with the symptoms of PTSD and if they get treatment, they begin to heal. The problem is under these rules, if they go for help, they will lose their jobs.

Some veterans entered into the DEA. Again, if they go for help under these rules, they can lose their jobs.

Some veterans want to stay in the military and some of them are capable of doing their duties provided they have proper medication and treatment to continue. Under these rules, they would not be able to do this.

PTSD is not a one size fits all illness. There are different levels of it and different problems. The symptoms can strike with full force and a veteran can get all of them or only some of them. It depends, as with everything else, on the individual. Some do get violent or homicidal. Some get suicidal. The greater majority do not turn either way.

Again I don't know what the answer is but this way, they will fear losing their jobs and their careers if they seek treatment. It was hard enough to get them to go for help in the first place. Then it got harder when I did manage to get them to go for help, but the system was too overloaded. Now with this, they are afraid for their jobs as well. What do I do with them now?

Post a comment if you know the answer or email me in private if you have any answers. I don't know what to tell them now when they ask.


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

Mom Searches for Missing Veteran Son Gary Chronister

Mom Searches for Missing Veteran Son
By DAN BARRY,The New York Times
Posted: 2008-01-21 15:15:38
Filed Under: Nation News
KENNESAW, Ga. (Jan. 21) -- The man emerged from the night’s anonymity to sit at the counter, across from the stainless steel grill and the stacks of white plates. He wore a blue jacket appropriate for the January cold, but his left hand was covered with writing of some kind. And, ever so softly, he was talking to himself.

It was 3:20 on the second morning of a new year indistinguishable still from the difficult one just past, in a 24-hour chain restaurant on Highway 41 called the Huddle House, where pie and respite are served to the hungry and solitary. The tired waitress, Patsy Schirmer, pulling a rare overnight, approached the customer and asked:

What can I get for you?

The man accepted this open-ended question in terms of food only, muttering an order of scrambled eggs and grits and requesting water, with lemon. He ate everything on his plate, continuing his private conversation all the while. He paid his bill, left no tip, and slipped back behind night’s curtain.

A woman walked in 20 minutes later, carrying leaflets. Her name was Sheryl Futrell and she had been searching for weeks for her disoriented son, an Iraq-Afghanistan war veteran named Gary Chronister. Here is his photograph, she said — and you know the rest.

Soon the waitress was wailing Oh my God, he was just here. Soon the mother was making frantic telephone calls, searching for a flashlight to beam into the brush out back, bouncing between sorrow and joy. Yes, my son always orders scrambled eggs. Yes, he always asks for lemon with his water. Yes, he is so off his meds that he would be talking to himself.

Ninth annual Newman’s Own awards kick off

Ninth annual Newman’s Own awards kick off
By Karen Jowers - Staff writerPosted : Monday Jan 21, 2008 16:55:36 EST

Does your organization have an idea for improving the quality of life for service members and their families?

Submit your proposal to the Newman’s Own Awards competition, which will give grants totaling $75,000 to volunteer and not-for-profit organizations. This marks the ninth year of the competition, jointly sponsored by Newman’s Own, Fisher House Foundation and the Military Times Media Group, publisher of the Military Times newspapers and their Web sites.

The deadline for submitting proposals is May 2. The most innovative plan will receive $15,000. The remaining $60,000 will be divided among the other top-scoring entries, in varying dollar amounts.

To date, the competition has recognized 99 organizations with grants totaling $430,000. Last year’s winning entry was the Sentinels of Freedom Scholarship Foundation, which connects injured service members with communities that mobilize attorneys, financial counselors, real estate professionals and other volunteers to help service members with housing, transportation, employment, mentoring and ongoing support.
This year’s winners will be announced in August.
For more information, visit the Fisher House Web site or call (888) 294-8560.

Not enough chaplains in National Guard units

Va. National Guard has chaplain shortage

The Associated Press
Posted : Monday Jan 21, 2008 16:53:07 EST

NORFOLK, Va. — The Virginia National Guard has a chaplain shortage amid the wartime needs of an expanding military, a trend that mirrors the nationwide shortfall.

The Virginia National Guard has eight chaplains, well below the 19 slots it’s allotted, said Chaplain J.D. Moore, who works full time with the Guard.

Prospective recruits know that “if you join as a chaplain, you’re pretty much guaranteed to deploy,” said Daniel Pruitt, who went to the Middle East in September with a Portsmouth-based Army Guard unit, the 2nd Squadron 183rd Cavalry.

Virginia’s shortage is part of the National Guard’s overall shortage of 350 chaplains — out of the 700 it is authorized, said Chaplain Randall Dolinger, spokesman for the Army Chief of Chaplains Office. The Army Reserve only has filled 220 out of its 650 allotted slots, Dolinger said.

Active-duty units without their own chaplain often request a Guard chaplain to fill the post when deployed overseas. Guard chaplains not only accept such assignments, they’re “double-volunteering” and deploying more frequently to make up for the shortage, Dolinger said, and he fears that clergy may burn out with more frequent tours.
go here for the rest
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/01/ap_guardchaplains_080121/

Very troubling considering the DOD said they were relying more on the chaplains to fill in the gap for stressed out forces. There are not enough psychologist to fill the need and now we're finding out there are not enough chaplains either. So who is taking care of deployed soldiers with PTSD and a pocket full of pills?

Richard Stengel, exactly what part of "dinosaur stuck in a tar pit" didn't you understand?

On The Chris Matthews show, Richard Stengel, the managing editor of TIME gives us a chilling new report that the Pentagon is releasing about the serious head injuries our troops are sustaining in Iraq.
Download (472) Play (481) Download (340) Play (234)
Stengel: When we got into the Iraq war we didn’t know how long it would last. When we got into the Iraq war we didn’t know how much it would cost. It’s lasted longer, it’s cost more than we ever expected. The real toll is coming out now. The Pentagon is releasing a report saying, one in five American serviceman and women who have been in Iraq are coming back with brain injuries. Mild, traumatic brain injuries. More than 250,000 people. That legacy of that will last all of our life times and it’s incalculable.

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/01/21/
pentagon-report-due-1-in-5-soldiers-returning-from-
iraq-with-brain-injuries/

First, 1 out of 5 troops is really high considering the rate of PTSD is 1 out of 3 exposed to a traumatic event. That would mean over 80% have been exposed to traumatic events at least once.

The part that got me in all of this was how angry I am with the media. Richard Stengelis managing editor of TIME and considering TIME has been around for a long time, along with some fantastic reporters and photographers through the years, I'm pretty sure they have a massive archival system that they could refer back to whenever they saw the need to look back at a little history. In this case, they didn't have to go back further than 1991. Heck, they didn't even have to go back that far but considering this all involved the first Gulf War, it would have been a really good place to start to figure out what they claim "they didn't know" what they were getting into.

FROM PBS INTERVIEW
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/oral/schwarzkopf/1.html

Schwarzkopf
"Plain and simply, Washington came to me after we had won an overwhelming victory at a minimum loss of lives and said "We want to stop the war at midnight tonight. Do you have any problem with that?"

And my answer was "No I don't have any problem with that". So it's just that simple.

Schwarzkopf: Wait a minute. Wait. Just a minute now. Realistically, it is not a military decision to go to war any more than it is a military decision to end a war.

Schwarzkopf:
So anyone who says it was a military decision to end the war is a cop out artist, that's what it is. OK, it's just that simple. Again, I wasn't in the room, any more than I was in the room on the 6th October briefing that I dearly wished I had been there, but I wasn't there. So I know nothing about what went on in that room. I know what I said, I know what said to me on the other end of the telephone and I have explained a thousand times how that came down.


Schwarzkopf: On the question of going to Baghdad. If you remember the Vietnam war, we had no international legitimacy for what we did. As a result we, first of all, lost the battle of world public opinion and eventually we lost the battle at home.

In the Gulf War we had great international legitimacy in the form of eight United Nations Resolutions, every one of which said "Kick Iraq out of Kuwait", did not say one word about going into Iraq, taking Baghdad, conquering the whole country and hanging Saddam Hussein. That's point number one.

Point number two, had we gone on to Baghdad, I don't believe the French would have gone and I'm quite sure that the Arab coalition would not have gone, the coalition would have ruptured and the only people that would have gone would have been the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

And, oh by the way, I think we'd still be there, we'd be like a dinosaur in a tar pit, we could not have gotten out and we'd still be the occupying power and we'd be paying one hundred percent of all the costs to administer all of Iraq.

Thirdly, I don't think we could have found Saddam Hussein if we'd done that. We forget the lessons of Panama. We had ten thousand Americans on the ground in Panama before we went into that very small country, we still couldn't find a fellow named Noriega, so what makes you think that we would go into a nation the size of Iraq and be able to find one person who has all the ability in the world to escape and hide and fly out of the country.

But I think, more importantly, there's a strategic consideration. Saddam Hussein portrayed that war from the very beginning as "This is not a war against Iraqi aggression against Kuwait. This is the Western colonial lackey friends of Israel coming in to destroy the only nation that dare stand up to Israel, that is Iraq".

Had we proceeded to go on into Iraq and take all of Iraq, I think that you would have millions of people in that part of the world who would say Saddam was right, that that was the objective.

Now there were many more interviews and speeches given following the Gulf War. Some by Cheney and some by Bush 41. What is very telling about all of this history is that they did in fact know in full what they were getting into, what would happen, how long it would go on and what kind of a toll it would take on the men and women sent to do it. They knew what would happen to the Iraqi people. They knew what it would do historically to the minds of the men and women who survived but were wounded and they did absolutely nothing about any of it.

I changed the name of my other blog from Nam Guardian Angel G I Care to Screaming In An Empty Room for this very reason. The media all played a role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq along with everything that came with it and they had a responsibility to report the facts to prepare this nation because the president did not. They failed and now they are trying to play catch up to what they cannot cover up.

No one cared about the troops or they would have increased all services to make sure they would meet the need for all of them because they knew exactly what kind of carnage would follow this. No one did anything in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and baby steps were taken in 2007 once the GOP was no longer in power. So please tell me what part of any of this was not understood and "not known" because I would really love to know how any of these people got their jobs when I knew it and I'm unemployed.
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