Headline on military suicides misleading

This headline on military suicides misleading for several reasons. The first is that there are less in the Army than there were in 2012, and as bad as 2012 was, there were less serving then compared to 2011.

Army
2011
As of March 31, 2012
557,780

2012
Total as of December 31, 2012
535,247 (-22,533)

Total as of July 31, 2013
530,382 (-4,865)

(-27,398)

These are the number of suicides for those same years

For 2010, 156 potential active-duty suicides and 145 "among reserve component soldiers."

CY 2011: 166 and 116 (80 Army National Guard and 36 Army Reserve)

For 2012, there have been 182 and 143 potential not on active-duty suicides (96 Army National Guard and 47 Army Reserve) (Revised to 185 in December of 2013)

For calendar year 2013, there have been 139 potential active duty suicides and 139 potential not on active duty suicides (89 Army National Guard and 50 Army Reserve (Up to November)

Suicides among younger veterans has also increased 44%.

The department said the suicide rate increased nearly 44 percent for male veterans between the ages of 18-29 from 2009 to 2011. During the same period, the rate among female veterans increased more than 11 percent.

Now they claim suicides are down 19% but fail to mention the fact there are less serving and fewer deployed into Afghanistan. They also did not count the number of National Guards and Reservists. As of today the DOD has not released the Army yearly suicide numbers or the December numbers. I have seen no data on the other branches. The DOD has not released the Suicide Event Report for 2012 or 2013 containing detailed information including attempted suicides and all branches.

Suicides in the Army decline sharply
USA TODAY
Gregg Zoroya
January 31, 2014

A historic pattern of rising suicides among soldiers that tormented the Army for nearly 10 years reversed dramatically in 2013.

FORT CARSON, Colo. — Suicides in the Army fell by 19% in 2013, dramatically reversing a rising trend plaguing the Army for nearly 10 years.

There were 150 suicides among soldiers on active-duty status last year, down from a record 185 in 2012, according to Army data. The numbers include both confirmed and suspected suicides.

Lt. Gen. Howard Bromberg, chief of Army personnel, says he is cautiously optimistic in seeing success in Army programs to avert suicides by giving soldiers coping strategies for keeping a positive or optimistic outlook.

"I'm not declaring any kind of victory here," Bromberg says. "It's looking more promising."

Within the ranks, it has meant that people such as Levertis Jackson, an Afghanistan War veteran whose despair led him several times to try to kill himself, have chosen life.

"It was like before, all my doors were closed, and I'm in a dark room," says Jackson, 41, married and father of four. "(Now) I look for reasons why I need to continue to live."
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Four Homeless Vietnam Veterans laid to rest with honor

Four Homeless Veterans Finally Receive Burial
WIBW News
By: Greg Palmer
Jan 31, 2014

TOPEKA, Kan. (WIBW) Four more homeless veterans were honored Friday for their service to their county and laid to rest with full military honors at The Leavenworth National Cemetery.

13 news first covered this story last month, when we received a tip that the body of veteran Charles Thompson had been in the Shawnee County Morgue, unclaimed by family for four months.

The names of the four Vietnam veterans are

Clarke Paul Gould

Robert Lee Norris

Ramsey Phillips

James Allen Young.
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Fort Bragg Staff Sgt.'s death under investigation

Fort Bragg soldier found unresponsive in Hope Mills home, later dies
Fay Observer
January 31, 2014

A soldier with the 82nd Airborne Division was found unresponsive at his Hope Mills home early Tuesday and was later pronounced dead.

The cause of death is under investigation, Fort Bragg officials said Thursday in a news release.

Staff Sgt. Alton Jefferson II, 36, of Lancaster, Calif., was a military intelligence systems maintainer/integrator with Delta Company, 127th Brigade Engineer Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team.

Jefferson joined the Army in October 2000, attended basic combat training at Fort Jackson, S.C., and advanced individual training at Fort Huachuca, Ariz. He joined the 82nd Airborne Division in February 2012, the release said.
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Indiana National Guardsman gave away Purple Heart

Soldier surrenders 'Purple Heart' to WWII veteran at his funeral
Greene County Daily World
By Nick Schneider, Co-Editor
Friday, January 31, 2014

Rural Bloomfield resident Leonard Wayne McIntosh was a World War II hero and on Wednesday afternoon he was buried in possession of one of the nation's highest military decorations that can be awarded to any soldier.

First Sgt. Gregory Swanson

The Purple Heart didn't come the usual way from the United States government.

It came more than 50 years late, but the honor and recognition was shining brightly on the cold day at the rural Greene County church.

The long-due award came as a precious gift from a young family friend, who had earned his Purple Heart while a member of the Indiana Army National Guard's 387th Military Police Company unit out of New Albany in Afghanistan for injuries sustained in 2012.

Minutes before McIntosh's funeral service began at Tulip Church of God, First Sgt. Gregory Swanson, of rural Bloomfield, walked to the casket where he was greeted by his close friend, Kenny McIntosh, the youngest child of Wayne and Oaklene McIntosh.

The two embraced and Swanson handed him the Purple Heart he had earned. It was a gift to the McIntosh family in honor of their deceased father and husband.

It was his personal gift of love and respect to a war-injured veteran who deserved to be honored by his country, in his opinion.

It was a selfless gift, thinking only of his elder soldier comrade -- wanting to give him the well earned honor that had eluded him.
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Veteran went from homelessness to introducing President Obama

First on CNN: Once-homeless Iraq vet will introduce Obama at unemployment event today
Posted by
CNN Senior White House Correspondent Brianna Keilar
January 31, 2014

(CNN) - At Friday morning’s White House event on the issue of long term unemployment, President Obama will be introduced by a California man named Erick Varela who served as a combat infantryman in the 82nd Airborne in Iraq, according to a White House official who shared Erick’s personal story with CNN.

When Erick, a skilled heavy equipment operator, left the Army in 2008 and returned home to Manteca, in California’s San Joaquin Valley, the housing crisis was in full swing and he was unable to find work. He applied at fast food restaurants and in retail but couldn’t find a job. His financial situation became so dire that he and his wife, Katey, lived out of their car when they could no longer afford to pay their rent.

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New Zealand Military Admits They Don't Understand PTSD

Military admits: We don't understand trauma
New Zealand Herald
David Fisher Senior reporter of the year
Saturday Feb 1, 2014

Military chiefs have admitted they do not have a "well-developed" understanding of combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder.

It comes as Weekend Herald inquiries reveal low levels of reported PTSD in the New Zealand Defence Force and no statistical collection of the mental health problem by Veterans Affairs.

There have been just 13 cases of PTSD relating to New Zealand deployed to combat zones in the last 10 years.

The number equates to half of the level established by Australian Defence Force research which pegged the level at 2 per cent for each deployment.

Research found 8 per cent of current serving members suffered PTSD.

PTSD is caused by exposure to stressful events and can lead to anger, aggression, flashbacks, sleeplessness and a range of other mental and physical health issues.

It follows figures from NZDF showing there have been five suicides in the past two years, against five in the previous eight years.

New Zealand's military partners are having fallout from years of combat in Afghanistan with increased mental health problems and a soaring suicide rate among veterans.
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Winter Park Florida and Budweiser welcomed home Lt. Charles Nadd in style

AP may have finally paid this story attention but you saw it here first.

Jan 9, 2014
Winter Park Florida and Budweiser welcomed home Lt. Charles Nadd in style on January 8, 2014. He flew from Afghanistan to Fort Drum and then flew to Florida arriving late due to the weather. This parade will be part of a documentary and commercial for Budweiser.

Fla. soldier, his hometown star in Super Bowl ad
By Associated Press
January 31, 2014

WINTER PARK, Fla. — Lt. Chuck Nadd knew something was up when Anheuser-Busch’s private jet flew him from Fort Drum in New York to his hometown in central Florida within hours of his return from a tour in Afghanistan in early January.

The 24-year-old Army helicopter pilot and operations officer had been told he was on a public affairs assignment to give a speech to a Veterans of Foreign Wars group in his hometown. But when he got to downtown Winter Park, hundreds of residents, relatives, teachers and friends greeted him with a surprise parade complete with tickertape and Anheuser-Busch’s Clydesdale horses.

The brewer, which played a central role in putting the parade together, has fashioned an ad around the event. It will run during Sunday’s Super Bowl, and Nadd says he hopes it gets people talking about honoring returning soldiers.

“I hope the visibility it gets starts a conversation about recognizing those who have served and served in a greater capacity than I have,” Nadd said Thursday. “I would hope this commercial helps people look for those heroes in their communities.”

Nadd’s involvement in the ad started when his girlfriend, Shannon Cantwell, nominated him for a VFW contest to honor a soldier with a tickertape parade in the soldier’s hometown.
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PTSD Researchers already know how to forget with lab rats

PTSD Researchers already know how to forget with lab rats
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
January 31, 2014

New rodent lab at Detrick could advance PTSD research, but by even thinking it is new proves that too many researchers all ready know how to forget what they do not want to remember.

Center for Environmental Health Research’s newest lab. Called a vivarium, the 2,145-square-foot space will be used to house up to 4,000 mice or 900 rats for research and observation.

In an ever growing list of wasted funds the military is repeating what has already been done. This time at a cost of $2 million to start another rat study on PTSD. Rats? Yes, rats. In one of the first studies reported since the Afghanistan and Iraq wars there was this report.

Last year, in a landmark experiment in rats, LeDoux opened a path to doing just that. He showed that it's possible to obstruct the memory of a specific traumatic event without affecting other memories. He also demonstrated that when the memory was stifled, the fear it roused vanished as well.

When was that report released? 2007!

Even that research was a repeat of what was done before.

"United States and China announced last week that, for the first time, they had found a means of selectively and safely erasing memories in mice, using the signaling molecule αCaMKII. It's a big step forward, and one that will be of considerable interest to the military, which has devoted efforts to memory manipulation as a means of treating post-traumatic stress disorder. But some military research has moved in another direction entirely.

In the 1980s, researchers found that even low-level exposure to a beam of electrons caused rats to forget what had just happened to them (an effect known as retrograde amnesia — the other version, anteretrograde amnesia, is when you can't form new memories). The same effect was also achieved with X-rays. The time factor was not large — it only caused memory loss about the previous four seconds — but the effect was intriguing."

They tried this in 2008

Cognitive restructuring, which entails rebuilding the thoughts and responses to a traumatic event to be more accurate and beneficial for the patient, is one common form of therapy to help prevent PTSD in those with acute stress. Exposure therapy is another therapy used to this end in which the patient is re-exposed in some way to the source of the trauma, in the hopes of habituating the patient and thus decreasing the response. There is some evidence that many clinicians do not use the latter form of therapy because it can cause distress for recent survivors of trauma.

Magnets to treat PTSD was yet another research project. "The treatment could blunt the effects of PTSD by strengthening the synaptic connectivity between patients' prefrontal cortex -- the region of the brain responsible for more logical thinking -- and their amygdala -- the region of the brain that processes the deep emotions associated with PTSD, Zangen said."

This also came out in 2008

"The Army and the National Institute of Mental Health have begun a five-year, $50 million research program into the factors behind soldier suicides and how to prevent them, Army Secretary Pete Geren told reporters at the Pentagon yesterday. Geren said the new partnership with NIMH, the Army Science Board and the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs would build on work that already is under way to conduct the most far-reaching and comprehensive research project ever undertaken on suicide and its prevention."

Studies using Ecstasy trials for combat stress came out in 2005 but studies using LSD started long before. Treating trauma connected to war is not new and has not improved enough simply because researchers failed to use findings from long ago.

Since the First World War the medical and psychiatric profession has mobilized to treat the psychological trauma suffered by participants of war. Initially the military and the mental health profession considered military psychiatry to have two important roles in a war setting. The first was to treat soldiers who suffered a mental breakdown as a result of combat and when possible, return them to their units as quickly as possible. The second and equally important - and infinitely more difficult - job of the psychiatric profession was to aid the military in preventing combat related mental trauma. Through intense study, first-hand experience, and trial and error mental health professionals learned over the course of the twentieth century effective ways to treat and sometimes prevent severe traumatic breakdown.

This is about WWII

Shades of Gray (ca.1940s) WW2 Shell Shock Film
Oct 26, 2013
This is a rare film on the subject of shell shock.
Shades of Gray (1940s) - This is a dramatized documentary on the subject of being shell-shocked and seems to be geared towards psychologists.

So now comes yet another waste of time and money to study rats and getting them to forget. Seems that researchers should study why they have forgotten everything. Suicides tied to military service keep going up even as they do more.

Camp Pendleton Marine Wife Spouse of Year

Face of Defense: Top Marine Spouse Serves Others
Department of Defense
By Marine Corps Cpl. Laura Gauna
1st Marine Logistics Group
CAMP PENDLETON, Calif.
Jan. 30, 2014

The men and women in uniform are not the only ones making a difference in the 1st Marine Logistics Group here.

Dannielle Maxwell, a family readiness assistant with 1st MLG, dedicates her time to ensure the Marines and their families within Combat Logistics Regiment 17 transition smoothly into military life.

Dannielle, wife of Gunnery Sgt. Dustin Maxwell, Landing Support Co. Gunnery Sergeant, CLR-17, 1st MLG, distinguished herself throughout 2013 for her hard work and dedication to her family, community, and her husband’s unit. She was honored as the 1st MLG Spouse of the Year.

“It feels wonderful to be named the Spouse of the Year,” Dannielle said. “I am really grateful. My advice for other military spouses is just to get out there, meet people and volunteer.”

Throughout this year, she not only found time for her family life, but also used her experience as a Marine spouse to help 1st MLG families prepare for upcoming deployments.

She logged more than 600 volunteer hours supporting the Family Readiness Officer, volunteered as an aide at her son’s school, coached her children’s sports teams, assisted with Marine Corps Ball fundraisers and became the curriculum team leader for the Leadership Education Seminar, which educates spouses on taking leadership roles.

“I’m really proud of what she does,” said Dustin, her husband of almost 10 years. “She volunteers, works hard and sincerely likes helping Marines.”
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Marine trying to get home on leave slept at airport

Marine Sleeps At Airport When Bad Weather Prevents Trip Home
WITN News
Jan 30, 2014

Dozens of flights out of our three local airports were cancelled due to the weather this week.

The Pitt Greenville Airport is back to normal operations as of Thursday afternoon, but the Jacksonville airport is still closed.

New Bern's airport was hopeful to get flights out by Thursday night.

WITN spoke to a local marine from Camp Johnson who is really hoping to get home.

Private First Class Derek Stiles has order to Japan on February 6th. Stiles had a flight on Tuesday so he could visit his family and fiance before two years of service in Okinowa.
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