Air Force legend, Medal of Honor recipient, Joe Jackson dies at 95
Air Force Times Kyle Rempfer January 15, 2019
Former Air Force Lt. Col. Joe Jackson, a legendary pilot and Medal of Honor recipient, attends an awards dinner in Arlington, Va., in 2015.(DoD)
Retired Air Force Col. Joe M. Jackson, a Medal of Honor recipient, veteran of three wars and Air Force legend, has died.
The 95-year-old Jackson passed away over the weekend, according to Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein, who made the announcement Monday morning.
His death leaves James P. Fleming as the only other living Air Force Medal of Honor recipient, according to Military Times Hall of Valor Curator Doug Sterner.
Jackson, a native of Newnan, Ga., was famous within the aviation and special operations community for his daring rescue of a team of Air Force combat controllers who were stranded at the besieged airfield of an abandoned Army Special Forces camp during the Tet Offensive.
His exploits saved the lives of three men, but risked his own, as the airfield had been the site of multiple U.S. aircraft shootdowns and aircrew fatalities over the past 24 hours.
Although Jackson has passed, his exploits and the significance of the battle he took part in were recorded in the Southeast Asia Monographs, Volume V-7, at the Airpower Research Institute of Maxwell Air Force Base, as well as first-person accounts archived by the Library of Congress. read more here
VA secretary slams union comments on government shutdown as politicizing veterans’ suicide
Military Times By: Leo Shane III 2 hours ago
In a news interview last week, AFGE Local President Edward Canales said that if the shutdown doesn’t stop soon, “we are going to have fatalities, we’re going to have suicides.”
American Federation of Government Employees National President J. David Cox Sr. speaks to federal employees gathered outside the AFL-CIO headquarters about the partial government shutdown on Jan. 4, 2019. On Monday, Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie demanded an apology for the union suggesting that the ongoing shutdown could caused mental health distress for some veterans. (Jessie Bur/Staff)
WASHINGTON — Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie on Monday accused union officials of politicizing veterans mental health care by saying the ongoing government shutdown could cost some veterans their lives.
In a letter to the American Federation of Government Employees leadership, Wilkie demanded an apology for the “reckless comments” and asked for officials to “outline the steps you plan to take to ensure AFGE leaders demonstrate proper respect for our nation’s heroes.”
The move is the latest chapter in ongoing friction between federal workers’ unions and President Donald Trump’s administration, and the VA leadership specifically. In a response statement, AFGE National President J. David Cox Sr. called the Trump administration “one of the worst on record for our country’s heroes” and pushed back on Wilkie’s accusations.
“Federal government employed veterans are hurting right now,” he said. “Regardless of their continued service to our country the President and his cabinet have left them out in the cold, forcing them to work without pay or subjecting veterans and their families to the uncertainty of not knowing when or where their next paycheck will come from.”
At the heart of the dispute is the decision of congressional Democrats and other Trump critics to invoke the impact of the ongoing government shutdown on veterans.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is fully funded for the year, meaning VA employees and veterans support programs are not affected by the ongoing partial shutdown. But about 800,000 employees from other departments — including more than 125,000 veterans — have been furloughed or forced to work without pay because of the ongoing budget dispute.
In a news interview last week, AFGE Local President Edward Canales said that if the shutdown doesn’t stop soon, “we are going to have fatalities, we’re going to have suicides.” read more here
Starting just after Thanksgiving, Eric Benson began leaving voicemails on the work line for his private psychiatrist, demanding medication and treatment for his anxiety. The psychiatrist terminated Benson from his practice.
Food Stamp Programs to Remain Available Through February for Troops, Vets
In 2016, a total of more than 44 million low-income Americans received SNAP benefits, according to the Agriculture Department.The number of active-duty military households currently participating in SNAP has been difficult to track, but the most recent estimate by the Government Accounting Office in 2016 put the number at about 23,000.
‘Things are slipping’ as Coast Guard families brace for missed paychecks
“I have two teenagers and an 8-year-old. All I care about is just getting them fed and having gas to get to work so I can keep that paycheck,” said Murdock, 34. “It’s hard, because they know. The kids know about what’s going on. They ask for things and I have to tell them it’s too tight right now.”Petty Officer 1st Class Ron Murdock is one of roughly 41,000 Coast Guard members bracing for the partial government shutdown to continue through the weekend and to deny them paychecks on Tuesday.
OP-ED: The VA is making real progress on suicide prevention for veterans
By Robert Wilkie, Secretary of Veterans Affairs
Press Release Under President Trump, VA has done more in the last two years than it has in decades in reforming the department and improving care and benefits for our nation’s heroes.
VA has made groundbreaking progress, particularly in the areas of accountability, transparency and efficiency across the department while achieving an unprecedented series of legislative successes, including giving greater choice in care to our nation’s Veterans through the MISSION Act.
As part of these efforts, the department is making great strides in our top clinical priority -- suicide prevention -- and in improving mental health care for Veterans, including through Telehealth, and same-day mental health services.
In his first year in office, President Trump issued an executive order to support Veterans during their transition from uniformed service to civilian life. The order focuses on transitioning service members and Veterans in the first 12 months after separation from service, a critical period marked by a high risk for suicide.
This executive order helps ensure that service members learn about VA benefits and start enrollment before becoming Veterans, and any newly transitioned Veteran can go to a VA medical center or vet center and start receiving mental health care right away. Transitioning service members and Veterans will be able to find information quickly online about their eligibility for VA care. Former service members with other-than-honorable discharges can also receive mental health care from VA medical centers.
We’ve also taken a number of other important steps to reach Veterans at risk. Since becoming VA’s director of suicide prevention, Dr. Keita Franklin has added more than 20 staff to her team, worked to improve the office’s organizational structure and brought clear lines of responsibility and accountability to VA’s suicide prevention efforts.
We also ramped up our spending on suicide prevention outreach in a big way. VA spent $12.2 million on suicide prevention outreach in fiscal year 2018, including $1.5 million on paid media. During fiscal year 2019, our total budget for suicide prevention is approximately $47.5 million, and we plan to spend $20 million of that budget on outreach.
We’ve also made great use of unpaid media through our partnership with Johnson and Johnson to produce a public service announcement featuring Tom Hanks—at no cost to VA. That partnership helped put VA in the top 10 of the Nielsen ratings for PSAs.
More and more Americans are taking advantage of VA’s suicide prevention resources. The Veterans Crisis Line helps about 2,000 callers every day. In the past 10 years, it has answered over 3.5 million calls, engaged in over 413,000 online chats, and responded to over 98,000 text messages. And our suicide prevention coordinators conducted over 22,000 outreach events last year, reaching 2.2 million Veterans and family members.
Also, a recent pilot study found that a Safety Planning Intervention program currently in use at five VA facilities has shown to reduce suicidal behavior by 45%, and this intervention will be expanded to all VA facilities nationwide.
Tragically, an average of 20 Veterans die by suicide each day. Of those 20, 14 have not received recent VA care. The goal of VA’s suicide prevention efforts is not to get every Veteran enrolled in VA care, but rather to equip communities to help Veterans get the right care, whenever and wherever they need it.
This means using prevention approaches that cut across all sectors in which Veterans may interact, and collaborating with Veterans Service Organizations, state and local leaders, medical professionals, criminal justice officials, private employers and many other stakeholders. We’re doing this through the Mayor’s Challenge in which we work with cities to develop community plans to end Veteran suicide, and we’re expanding that program to work with Governors on the same approach in their states in February.
Put simply, suicide prevention is much more than intervention at the point of crisis – it is about creating and fostering cultures where Veterans and their families thrive. We’re all in this together. We must approach this matter compassionately and clinically and build on the important lessons from the past, while expanding our efforts in new directions that make sense.
If any Veteran is in crisis, we encourage him or her to visit the closest VA facility, as all VA health care locations provide same-day urgent mental health care services, or call the Veterans crisis line at 800-273-8255.
While it is true that veterans are less likely to commit suicide if they go to the VA...and there are increasing calls to the crisis line, the rest, not so much on the facts.
Seems more like a push to send them into private care instead of the VA....but then again, we all remember this too.
WASHINGTON — Despite public pronouncements on their continued focus on preventing veterans suicide, Veterans Affairs officials failed to spend millions available for outreach campaigns in 2018 and severely curtailed their messaging efforts, according to a new report released Monday.
The Government Accountability Office study found that of $6.2 million set aside for suicide prevention media outreach in fiscal 2018, only $57,000 — less than 1 percent — was actually used.
In addition, social media content from VA officials on the subject dropped by more than two-thirds from fiscal 2017 to fiscal 2018. Two planned new public service announcements on the topic were delayed, and no public outreach messages were aired on national television or radio for more than a year.
Firehouse Forums Riley Johnson January 13, 2019
Former Lincoln Fire and Rescue paramedic Rob Ravndal is sharing his experiences with PTSD to help change cultural attitudes toward first responders.
Former Lincoln Fire and Rescue paramedic Rob Ravndal. LINCOLN, NE, FIRE and RESCUE
Paramedic Rob Ravndal went on hundreds of emergency calls before the one response that ultimately ended his career at Lincoln Fire and Rescue.
The trauma of that call, a 3-year-old's drowning in 2015, sent the father of young children into a spiral.
Nightmares. Breakdowns. A general sense of fear.
Even after his bosses pulled him off the ambulance, Ravndal struggled at work and at home as he grappled with post-traumatic stress disorder.
One in five firefighters or paramedics nationwide will suffer from PTSD during their career, according to the Journal for Occupational Health Psychology.
Ravndal sought treatment, eventually becoming the first Lincoln firefighter to use a service dog. But he never returned to full-duty and ended his nine-year tenure in October, walking away from the job the he said made him feel like a superhero.
Ravndal, 46, hopes sharing his experiences grappling with the disorder and trying to continue his career will help change the culture toward first responders experiencing PTSD.
"If the people don't do something to change it, they can't be upset if they call 911 and nobody comes," he said.
read more here
Combat PTSD Wounded Times Kathie Costos January 13, 2019 An open letter to Jesus This is a very hard time for me because it seems no matter what I do, what I know and how much work I do, others get praised, even if they are thieves passing my work off as their own. I have no power to stop them. I have no power to make anyone listen to what I have to say. The only power I have is to do whatever I can to help whoever seeks it. You know what is in my heart and I know that the gifts I have came from you. You guide me to seek knowledge and share what is truth. You give me courage to bypass fear of the powerful for the sake of the flock. You arm me in spite of those who ignore all you equipped me to do. You are my shelter.
Psalm 91
1 Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. 2 I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.” 3 Surely he will save you from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence. 4 He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart. 5 You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, 6 nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the plague that destroys at midday. Psalm 91
You brought me into my veteran Father's home and surrounded me with other veterans. You brought me into my veteran husband's heart and showed me what pure love is, as well as the pain I saw in his eyes. Then You showed me what it was like to go beyond the times of darkness, so we could walk the rest of this journey together, still holding hands and loving the way our lives have grown beyond what others thought was even possible. You know the hours, the heartache and you know what it is like for me when someone reminds me of why I do what I do.
You had put a voice within me that I used to gladly sing, but those years have passed and while there has been a song in my soul, it has not passed my lips because there has been too much pain within me. So now I sing a song for You beyond the tears that came because I know, if I share this with those I am supposed to reach, they may know that others go through the same dark times, even if they believe, as I do, that nothing is beyond Your love.
Time for Congress to investigate how it became OK to push veterans out of the VA!
There was a times when taking care of the veterans who became disabled after serving this country, was a sacred duty for the rest of us. There was a time when Presidents and other politicians promised the best care this country could provide for them, because they understood, veterans were prepared to die for this country. Then came a time when they were no longer ashamed they failed to fulfill their end of the duty and veterans suffered. More promises and more pointing fingers, while veterans suffered. More years and more suffering has brought us to their repulsive conclusion that they now should be treated like all other citizens and the debt we owe to them no longer matters, has taken over the soul of this Administration. The VA is an obligation to this nation! It is not something that can be sold to away.
V.A. Seeks to Redirect Billions of Dollars Into Private Care
New York Times By Jennifer Steinhauer and Dave Philipps Jan. 12, 2019
WASHINGTON — The Department of Veterans Affairs is preparing to shift billions of dollars from government-run veterans’ hospitals to private health care providers, setting the stage for the biggest transformation of the veterans’ medical system in a generation.
The Rocky Mountain Regional V.A. Medical Center in Colorado. President Trump made reforming veterans’ health care a major point of his campaign.CreditCreditDan Elliott/Associated Press
Under proposed guidelines, it would be easier for veterans to receive care in privately run hospitals and have the government pay for it. Veterans would also be allowed access to a system of proposed walk-in clinics, which would serve as a bridge between V.A. emergency rooms and private providers, and would require co-pays for treatment.
Veterans’ hospitals, which treat seven million patients annually, have struggled to see patients on time in recent years, hit by a double crush of returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and aging Vietnam veterans. A scandal over hidden waiting lists in 2014 sent Congress searching for fixes, and in the years since, Republicans have pushed to send veterans to the private sector, while Democrats have favored increasing the number of doctors in the V.A.
If put into effect, the proposed rules — many of whose details remain unclear as they are negotiated within the Trump administration — would be a win for the once-obscure Concerned Veterans for America, an advocacy group funded by the network founded by the billionaire industrialists Charles G. and David H. Koch, which has long championed increasing the use of private sector health care for veterans. read more here
They have Trumps ear but will we prove we have veterans' backs?
Getting rid of the stigma of PTSD is like melting black ice.
PTSD Patrol Sunday Morning Empowerment Zone Kathie Costos January 13, 2019
Black ice looks like a puddle but it makes the driving conditions dangerous. The stigma attached to PTSD is like black ice in your life. Facts can melt it so you can heal it! #BreakTheSilence and #TakeBackYourLife Read it here and watch the video of my office back in order again.
Father writes heartfelt message after Airman son's suicide
Sandusky Register Nichael Harrington January 12, 2019
MILAN — The father of an Air Force airman who died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wrote a heartfelt Facebook post remembering his son.
XinHua Mesenburg graduated from Edison High School before he found his calling in the Air Force. He was stationed as a Senior Airman at Andrews Joint Base when his father and stepmother received a picture of an alarming handwritten note on Jan. 5
Mitch, who is from Huron but lives in Florida, shared what the message said in a Facebook post: “I hope that all you remember me fondly, I hope all you will live a long and happy life. As I fade from your memories, please know this was nobody’s fault. The stress life has given me, finally broke my will to live.”
After reading the note, Mitch and Shannon tried desperately to get ahold of him by phone and called authorities in Virginia. Mitch stayed on the phone with a dispatcher for what he described as an eternity, but it turned out to only be 12 minutes.
It is with great regret and a heavy heart that I am writing this letter. On January 5th. at 8:03 pm Shannon and I received a text message picture from our son Senior Airman XinHua Mesenburg who was stationed at Andrews Joint Base. The picture was of a handwritten note, it said.
read more here
