(This is a personal, political rant and does not reflect Bombshells or anything I have edited or written. It doesn't mean I am not deeply involved with people who have served, moreover, it is my American point of view August 30th, 2008) It is just me, little ol me, as a woman after the homefront wait, a woman interested in the future of my country.
Desperate men do desperate acts. McCain picked a hockey mom with less than two years experience as governor of a state that is mainly wilderness. I doubt her management of deer will prepare her for Iraq, Iran or Israel, let alone countries that do not begin with the letter I.
There were loads of amazing prospects to choose from, but he chose her. What does she have that someone like Mitt Romney doesn’t have? Mitt served as CEO of the 2002 Olympics, that’s pretty international, and he was governor of Massachusetts. He went to Stanford, then BYU. Oh yeah, he is Mormon and that would surely ignite evangelical ire. God knows John needs those evangelicals.
McCain could have picked Tom Ridge who has served as Homeland Security Advisor. He was twice elected as Governor of Pennsylvania. He probably had to manage deer, Amish and taxes; that had to be hard. Tom cut taxes and worked with green technology, also helped with education initiatives, and increased healthcare availability for children in his state. So what does a self-styled hockey mom have that Tom Ridge doesn’t have? Sara Palin doesn’t have experience. She isn’t more qualified than men like Ridge or Romney, hasn’t served more, didn’t score higher on her SATs, or go to better schools.
Palin got a scholarship to college from winning second place in the Miss Alaska Beauty Pageant. She only minored in political science. Mitt Romney got into college with his perfect score on the SATs. News agencies aren’t talking about her dynamic intellect; no the news is abuzz about her workout and her eating habits.
Why would McCain consider a second place beauty queen with a minor in poly-science with miniscule political experience over a man who served as Homeland Security Advisor? The answer is so transparent it makes me sick. He thinks Clinton supporters will turn on Barrack and vote for him for having a woman on his ticket.
I voted for Barack in the primaries, but if Hillary won the nomination, I would have voted for her because she was smart, strong and qualified. She went to Wellesley as an undergraduate, (and not on a beauty scholarship). She went to Yale Law School and worked her tail off for children and other causes. She became a lawyer, married Bill, raised her family, and stood by him as wife and first lady both as governor then as president. Come on, she was elected as Senator of New York. Does New York have a deer problem? I wasn’t voting for Hillary because she has the parts necessary to make babies. Frankly, I would have voted for her because if she were a man, she would have been president a long time ago. She is smart, articulate, well educated, level-headed, and relentless. I will not vote for McCain; first, because he voted with Bush 90 percent of the time. Bush’s decisions have made a disaster of our economy and our standing in the world. Secondly, McCain’s choice of Palin is an outrage.
McCain’s decision to overlook all those educated, highly qualified men to pick a hockey mom – hunter is nonsensical and categorically offensive to every woman who has ever struggled for equality. How dare he! If I could slap him, I would, then I would slap her for being dumb enough to think she was qualified for the job. Are you kidding girlfriend. He is just using you for your Va- Jay Jay; did you not learn anything in college?
Lastly, Palin is the mother of five and one will soon be sent to Iraq. I would be more proud of bringing home the sons and daughters of America than to boast sending out more, especially my own.
We can’t afford this course for our country. We started out 8 years ago with a surplus of cash; we are now over 9.6 trillion dollars in a national debt that grows by the second. This leaves at least 31 grand on each of our backs; we will need are sons and daughters at home to pay this off. We will need unity to pay this off. We will need to change to pay this off. Not an endless war and endless debt. We do not need four or eight more years of this, and besides, nobody reading this could ever afford it.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Saturday, March 08, 2008
5 years on, Iraq war has changed lives
By KIMBERLY HEFLING, Associated Press Writer Sat Mar 8, 12:44 PM ET
Laura Youngblood clutched her husband's photo as she drove alone to the hospital. She'd become pregnant nearly nine months earlier, the day he'd left for training for Iraq. Hours later, after the baby was born, she placed the photo in the bassinet next to the infant he'd named Emma in his last letter home. He would never hold her.
Petty Officer 3rd Class Travis L. Youngblood, 26, had died two months earlier, killed by an improvised explosive device.
Laura Youngblood is just 29 years old, but she insists she will not remarry. Her life is her children, now ages 2 and 7. One day, she says, she'll be buried in the plot with her husband at Arlington National Cemetery.
"I tell people I'm a happily married woman," she says, crying.
Five years after U.S. troops invaded Iraq, there are many tears — though not everyone is crying. For the great majority of Americans, this is a war seen from afar. They turn off the news and forget about what is happening a world away.
Then there's the other war, the one that's a very vivid and present part of some Americans' lives.
It's the war that more than a million U.S. soldiers have fought, leaving nearly 4,000 dead and more than 29,000 wounded in action. The one in which thousands of contractors rushed in to serve and to make a buck — though some paid the ultimate price, as well.
Around military bases across America, vacations are planned around deployment schedules. Mini baby booms occur nine months after troops come home. Support groups for widows and injured soldiers have come together.
At small town National Guard armories, the focus has shifted from one weekend a month to filling out life insurance forms and packing a rucksack for war.
"'How did I end up in this kind of a situation?' There were a lot of guys that said that," says Jeff Myers, 48, a tech sergeant in the Pennsylvania Air National Guard from Pillow, Pa. His lips still discharge shrapnel shreds, the residue of two roadside bombs he survived in 2004; a neurologist monitors the concussions he sustained.
In his job as a gunner guarding Army convoys, he saw men so paralyzed by fear they wouldn't go outside the wire. He saw others die 15 minutes after he was chatting with them.
It's not a matter of whether you will have to deal with things like irritability and nightmares after you get home, he says: "It's how you deal with it when it does happen."
And how you deal with your fellow Americans who experience Iraq from a distance.
Amanda Jordan, whose Marine husband was killed three days into the war, says she doesn't know what bothers her more — the days that go by when no one speaks of the war, or the punditry. At a local diner she frequents with her 11-year-old son near their home in Enfield, Conn., she's contemplated standing up and leaving so he doesn't hear when people say Iraq was unnecessarily invaded.
"This is like my life. You're saying my spouse, my child's father, is dead for no reason," says Jordan, a 39-year-old former paralegal who is studying to be a therapist specializing in grief. "That's a pretty harsh thing to hear all the time."
___
Some can tell you exactly when their lives changed.
For Hazel Hoffman, from outside Grand Rapids, Mich., it was when the phone rang and she learned her son, Josh, was shot by a sniper. He was left a quadriplegic, unable to speak.
"I cried so hard that I had tears of blood. I remember looking down wondering, where is all this blood coming from? And it took a few seconds for me to realize this was coming out of me," says Hoffman, who has lived more than a year in an apartment with her son's girlfriend near his hospital in Richmond, Va.
Suzanne Stack, 48, was soaking in the bathtub in their house at Fort Campbell, Ky., when the doorbell rang. There were two officers at the door.
Afterward, still numb from the news of her husband's death, she walked her kids to the school bus. She sensed that people were looking at her fearfully, as if they were afraid they would be next. Even before the funeral, one spouse told her there was a waiting list for post housing. When would she be moving out?
"One day you're one thing. The next thing you're not. It's really quite a shock," says Stack, of Fredericksburg, Va., who now volunteers as an advocate for widows on Capitol Hill.
Walter Lajuane Williams, 33, of Fremont, Calif., was stoned when his turning point came. He was couch surfing, unemployed and in an abusive relationship after he left the Army, which took him to Iraq and Afghanistan. Even his service was criticized: "I had a person tell me, `How could you kill another person?'"
He went to the nonprofit Swords to Plowshares, looking for help finding work. A caseworker, wise to his drug use, took him aside. "I'm going to tell you candidly how I feel and what I smell," he said. "I'm going to work with you. Don't make me regret it."
Williams now helps other vets find jobs.
"All we need is a chance," Williams says.
Recently, an Iraq veteran came to Daniel Fox's office and asked to take a screening exam for post-traumatic stress disorder a second time. He'd lied the first time, he said.
"When I asked him why he wasn't honest, he said because I had just gotten home and everybody's like saying, 'Welcome home hero,'" Fox says. "And how could he tell him that this hero was not doing well?"
Fox, 47, works for the Department of Veterans Affairs as a case manager, assisting Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. For a year, Fox, an Army Reservist, worked as an intensive care nurse at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany; the injured would be airlifted from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Fox and his fellow nurses called themselves the ICU angels on the ICU angels tour. To lighten the mood, they made T-shirts with the slogan. Their bravado just helped mask their intense emotions.
"You had a mom and dad and the new wife with the babies in their arms standing in the door of this patient's room and he's got a gunshot wound to the head," says Fox, of Wichita, Kan. "How do you explain that to them? You can't console them."
"After a while, you go home and you cry about it," he says.
He used to be more macho and unemotional. Today, "I have more sympathy, more compassion," he says.
Lt. Col. Douglas Etter's job was sympathy and compassion. Etter, a minister, was a chaplain with the Pennsylvania National Guard in Al Anbar Province; his battalion lost 13 soldiers and two Marines.
He laid his hands on some of the men and delivered last rites. One morning, after he memorialized two of the dead, he says his stoicism dissolved; jogging by the Euphrates River, he cried.
In blunt newsletters home, he chronicled what the troops were seeing and experiencing, from delivering shoes and school supplies to happy Iraqi children to the story of a dead soldier wrapped in a flag by his fellow soldiers in the middle of a firefight because nothing else was available.
"As excited as we are to go home, many are equally afraid," he wrote in one of his last letters.
When Etter himself returned on leave to Pennsylvania to officiate at the funeral of a close friend, he turned to his wife and said he wanted to go home.
"I said, `OK, get in the car. Let's go home,'" said Jodi Etter. "And you said, 'No, my home in Iraq. I just want to go home.'"
When his tour was over, and he went with his wife to buy furniture for their new house in Lebanon, Pa., he had to remind himself that it was important to her — even if it seemed trivial to him after the war. He drove fast, and bought a BMW so he could do it. One day, Jodi pointed out that he was drinking more.
With time, his life settled down, and he came to feel that his months in Iraq were a time of growth. Now executive director of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Veterans Affairs, Etter says a deployment is like a magnifying glass.
"Personalities that are strong become stronger," he says. "Personalities which are weaker are made to become weaker."
Phil Nesmith came away from Iraq with a certain clarity.
It wasn't the money that lured him to Iraq, he insists. He was like most of the U.S. troops he was living with at the time — idealistic about the mission.
He had been an Army paratrooper, but now he was among the first group of government contractors to arrive in Iraq after the invasion in 2003. His task was to help get telecommunications running.
At night, rockets flew into their compound. Sometimes they missed and hit apartments nearby, killing Iraqis. On the ground near where he was sleeping, a young officer shot and killed himself.
Violence did not account for all the stress. While he was there, Nesmith says, his relationship with his girlfriend of three years ended and she got pregnant by another man. "Pretty much every other soldier around me, husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever, had left them or they suspected them cheating on them."
It was hard. "You've left your life and you're wanting to maintain some kind of connection with that, but everything you left behind is continuing on even though your life is kind of suspended while you're there."
As he left Iraq, he crossed paths with a contractor who bragged about what he was going to buy with the money he was going to make in Iraq.
"I was just like, well, `You know, everybody's got their reasons, but I've got to ask you this: You lose both your legs, is that $160,000 going to be worth it?'" he says.
By that point, Nesmith says he knew what he wanted, what was important. He wanted to backpack through Australia, visit Montana, and go to photography school.
He did all three.
He had taken pictures in Iraq. Now he took some of those shots and manipulated them to look like they were taken in the Civil War era. They were shown at Washington, D.C.'s Irvine Contemporary Gallery in Washington, D.C., and priced at $1,500 each.
One photo depicts a single soldier standing alone in the desert. It reminds him of his own plight. "I knew I was on my journey back and when I got there I was going to be alone," Nesmith says. "No one was going to understand what that year was like."
Another photo, his favorite, is of an Iraqi flag flying outside a government utility office. Some Iraqis had just put it up. It was a time of optimism.
But now, he says, "it just seems like a more naive time, when you thought there was so much more that could possibly happen."
Before Travis Youngblood left for Iraq, he and his wife watched a TV interview with a pregnant woman whose husband had died in Iraq. Laura Youngblood cried.
"I felt so sorry for her," Youngblood says.
But then, "When my husband died, my first words were, 'I became her.'"
Today in nearly every room of her Florida house, there's a photo of her husband.
"It is hard. I feel bad for my son because he's 7. He doesn't know how to ride a two-wheel bike. His daddy was going to teach him," she says. "I can't do all the boy things that he wants to do."
She put together videos so her daughter will know the father she never met.
"I'm a survivor of the war. I'm a surviving spouse," Youngblood says. "That's the best way I can say it because every day you're surviving."
Laura Youngblood clutched her husband's photo as she drove alone to the hospital. She'd become pregnant nearly nine months earlier, the day he'd left for training for Iraq. Hours later, after the baby was born, she placed the photo in the bassinet next to the infant he'd named Emma in his last letter home. He would never hold her.
Petty Officer 3rd Class Travis L. Youngblood, 26, had died two months earlier, killed by an improvised explosive device.
Laura Youngblood is just 29 years old, but she insists she will not remarry. Her life is her children, now ages 2 and 7. One day, she says, she'll be buried in the plot with her husband at Arlington National Cemetery.
"I tell people I'm a happily married woman," she says, crying.
Five years after U.S. troops invaded Iraq, there are many tears — though not everyone is crying. For the great majority of Americans, this is a war seen from afar. They turn off the news and forget about what is happening a world away.
Then there's the other war, the one that's a very vivid and present part of some Americans' lives.
It's the war that more than a million U.S. soldiers have fought, leaving nearly 4,000 dead and more than 29,000 wounded in action. The one in which thousands of contractors rushed in to serve and to make a buck — though some paid the ultimate price, as well.
Around military bases across America, vacations are planned around deployment schedules. Mini baby booms occur nine months after troops come home. Support groups for widows and injured soldiers have come together.
At small town National Guard armories, the focus has shifted from one weekend a month to filling out life insurance forms and packing a rucksack for war.
"'How did I end up in this kind of a situation?' There were a lot of guys that said that," says Jeff Myers, 48, a tech sergeant in the Pennsylvania Air National Guard from Pillow, Pa. His lips still discharge shrapnel shreds, the residue of two roadside bombs he survived in 2004; a neurologist monitors the concussions he sustained.
In his job as a gunner guarding Army convoys, he saw men so paralyzed by fear they wouldn't go outside the wire. He saw others die 15 minutes after he was chatting with them.
It's not a matter of whether you will have to deal with things like irritability and nightmares after you get home, he says: "It's how you deal with it when it does happen."
And how you deal with your fellow Americans who experience Iraq from a distance.
Amanda Jordan, whose Marine husband was killed three days into the war, says she doesn't know what bothers her more — the days that go by when no one speaks of the war, or the punditry. At a local diner she frequents with her 11-year-old son near their home in Enfield, Conn., she's contemplated standing up and leaving so he doesn't hear when people say Iraq was unnecessarily invaded.
"This is like my life. You're saying my spouse, my child's father, is dead for no reason," says Jordan, a 39-year-old former paralegal who is studying to be a therapist specializing in grief. "That's a pretty harsh thing to hear all the time."
___
Some can tell you exactly when their lives changed.
For Hazel Hoffman, from outside Grand Rapids, Mich., it was when the phone rang and she learned her son, Josh, was shot by a sniper. He was left a quadriplegic, unable to speak.
"I cried so hard that I had tears of blood. I remember looking down wondering, where is all this blood coming from? And it took a few seconds for me to realize this was coming out of me," says Hoffman, who has lived more than a year in an apartment with her son's girlfriend near his hospital in Richmond, Va.
Suzanne Stack, 48, was soaking in the bathtub in their house at Fort Campbell, Ky., when the doorbell rang. There were two officers at the door.
Afterward, still numb from the news of her husband's death, she walked her kids to the school bus. She sensed that people were looking at her fearfully, as if they were afraid they would be next. Even before the funeral, one spouse told her there was a waiting list for post housing. When would she be moving out?
"One day you're one thing. The next thing you're not. It's really quite a shock," says Stack, of Fredericksburg, Va., who now volunteers as an advocate for widows on Capitol Hill.
Walter Lajuane Williams, 33, of Fremont, Calif., was stoned when his turning point came. He was couch surfing, unemployed and in an abusive relationship after he left the Army, which took him to Iraq and Afghanistan. Even his service was criticized: "I had a person tell me, `How could you kill another person?'"
He went to the nonprofit Swords to Plowshares, looking for help finding work. A caseworker, wise to his drug use, took him aside. "I'm going to tell you candidly how I feel and what I smell," he said. "I'm going to work with you. Don't make me regret it."
Williams now helps other vets find jobs.
"All we need is a chance," Williams says.
Recently, an Iraq veteran came to Daniel Fox's office and asked to take a screening exam for post-traumatic stress disorder a second time. He'd lied the first time, he said.
"When I asked him why he wasn't honest, he said because I had just gotten home and everybody's like saying, 'Welcome home hero,'" Fox says. "And how could he tell him that this hero was not doing well?"
Fox, 47, works for the Department of Veterans Affairs as a case manager, assisting Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. For a year, Fox, an Army Reservist, worked as an intensive care nurse at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany; the injured would be airlifted from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Fox and his fellow nurses called themselves the ICU angels on the ICU angels tour. To lighten the mood, they made T-shirts with the slogan. Their bravado just helped mask their intense emotions.
"You had a mom and dad and the new wife with the babies in their arms standing in the door of this patient's room and he's got a gunshot wound to the head," says Fox, of Wichita, Kan. "How do you explain that to them? You can't console them."
"After a while, you go home and you cry about it," he says.
He used to be more macho and unemotional. Today, "I have more sympathy, more compassion," he says.
Lt. Col. Douglas Etter's job was sympathy and compassion. Etter, a minister, was a chaplain with the Pennsylvania National Guard in Al Anbar Province; his battalion lost 13 soldiers and two Marines.
He laid his hands on some of the men and delivered last rites. One morning, after he memorialized two of the dead, he says his stoicism dissolved; jogging by the Euphrates River, he cried.
In blunt newsletters home, he chronicled what the troops were seeing and experiencing, from delivering shoes and school supplies to happy Iraqi children to the story of a dead soldier wrapped in a flag by his fellow soldiers in the middle of a firefight because nothing else was available.
"As excited as we are to go home, many are equally afraid," he wrote in one of his last letters.
When Etter himself returned on leave to Pennsylvania to officiate at the funeral of a close friend, he turned to his wife and said he wanted to go home.
"I said, `OK, get in the car. Let's go home,'" said Jodi Etter. "And you said, 'No, my home in Iraq. I just want to go home.'"
When his tour was over, and he went with his wife to buy furniture for their new house in Lebanon, Pa., he had to remind himself that it was important to her — even if it seemed trivial to him after the war. He drove fast, and bought a BMW so he could do it. One day, Jodi pointed out that he was drinking more.
With time, his life settled down, and he came to feel that his months in Iraq were a time of growth. Now executive director of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Veterans Affairs, Etter says a deployment is like a magnifying glass.
"Personalities that are strong become stronger," he says. "Personalities which are weaker are made to become weaker."
Phil Nesmith came away from Iraq with a certain clarity.
It wasn't the money that lured him to Iraq, he insists. He was like most of the U.S. troops he was living with at the time — idealistic about the mission.
He had been an Army paratrooper, but now he was among the first group of government contractors to arrive in Iraq after the invasion in 2003. His task was to help get telecommunications running.
At night, rockets flew into their compound. Sometimes they missed and hit apartments nearby, killing Iraqis. On the ground near where he was sleeping, a young officer shot and killed himself.
Violence did not account for all the stress. While he was there, Nesmith says, his relationship with his girlfriend of three years ended and she got pregnant by another man. "Pretty much every other soldier around me, husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever, had left them or they suspected them cheating on them."
It was hard. "You've left your life and you're wanting to maintain some kind of connection with that, but everything you left behind is continuing on even though your life is kind of suspended while you're there."
As he left Iraq, he crossed paths with a contractor who bragged about what he was going to buy with the money he was going to make in Iraq.
"I was just like, well, `You know, everybody's got their reasons, but I've got to ask you this: You lose both your legs, is that $160,000 going to be worth it?'" he says.
By that point, Nesmith says he knew what he wanted, what was important. He wanted to backpack through Australia, visit Montana, and go to photography school.
He did all three.
He had taken pictures in Iraq. Now he took some of those shots and manipulated them to look like they were taken in the Civil War era. They were shown at Washington, D.C.'s Irvine Contemporary Gallery in Washington, D.C., and priced at $1,500 each.
One photo depicts a single soldier standing alone in the desert. It reminds him of his own plight. "I knew I was on my journey back and when I got there I was going to be alone," Nesmith says. "No one was going to understand what that year was like."
Another photo, his favorite, is of an Iraqi flag flying outside a government utility office. Some Iraqis had just put it up. It was a time of optimism.
But now, he says, "it just seems like a more naive time, when you thought there was so much more that could possibly happen."
Before Travis Youngblood left for Iraq, he and his wife watched a TV interview with a pregnant woman whose husband had died in Iraq. Laura Youngblood cried.
"I felt so sorry for her," Youngblood says.
But then, "When my husband died, my first words were, 'I became her.'"
Today in nearly every room of her Florida house, there's a photo of her husband.
"It is hard. I feel bad for my son because he's 7. He doesn't know how to ride a two-wheel bike. His daddy was going to teach him," she says. "I can't do all the boy things that he wants to do."
She put together videos so her daughter will know the father she never met.
"I'm a survivor of the war. I'm a surviving spouse," Youngblood says. "That's the best way I can say it because every day you're surviving."
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Hug a soldier? Not enough! Help the vets!
Hi Everyone!
Everywhere I go I hear people say, "I don't support the war, but I do support the troops." Well, now is the time to stand by that! Our veterans need us--let's not let them down like we did during and long after Vietnam. It is possible to affect change--but only if we actually begin taking action!
I signed IAVA's Petition to Secretary Nicholson, head of the VA, calling for increased mental health funding at our nation's Vet Centers. The VA hospitals are the primary source of readjustment and mental health services for our young men and women returning from war, and it's absolutely crucial that Vet Centers get the funding they need.
This is only part of the battle though, as the VA hospital system is separate from the Army. We also need to start pressuring our Government representatives to change the way the Army and all branches of the military evaluates and treats mental health in all our Soldiers, etc. Remember this, these veterans are returning to civilian life regardless if they receive proper treatment or not. So even if you don't care about the vets themselves, care about your self enough to do something about it.
Interested in viewing the petition and learning more? Then go to this link:
http://www2.iava.org/dia/organizationsORG/OpTruth/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=420
Thank you!!
Everywhere I go I hear people say, "I don't support the war, but I do support the troops." Well, now is the time to stand by that! Our veterans need us--let's not let them down like we did during and long after Vietnam. It is possible to affect change--but only if we actually begin taking action!
I signed IAVA's Petition to Secretary Nicholson, head of the VA, calling for increased mental health funding at our nation's Vet Centers. The VA hospitals are the primary source of readjustment and mental health services for our young men and women returning from war, and it's absolutely crucial that Vet Centers get the funding they need.
This is only part of the battle though, as the VA hospital system is separate from the Army. We also need to start pressuring our Government representatives to change the way the Army and all branches of the military evaluates and treats mental health in all our Soldiers, etc. Remember this, these veterans are returning to civilian life regardless if they receive proper treatment or not. So even if you don't care about the vets themselves, care about your self enough to do something about it.
Interested in viewing the petition and learning more? Then go to this link:
http://www2.iava.org/dia/organizationsORG/OpTruth/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=420
Thank you!!
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Times Under Fire from Charles Sheehan Miles Blog
From Charles Sheehan Miles Good sttuff
Charles
Thursday, 17 January 2008
Times Under Fire for Vets article
Posted By Charles at 9:59 AM
On Sunday, the New York Times ran a lengthy article chronicling a series of homicides committed by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans over the last several years—more than 120 killings here in the United States. Now, the Times is under fire, according to some articles and bloggers, for perpetuating “The Killer Vet lie” and “Vet-Bashing.”
Not surprisingly, the culture warriors who are still intent on perpetuating the Vietnam era hawk vs. dove debate have jumped in feet first, specially after the Weekly Standard ran an analysis by John J. Dilulio which attempts to debunk the conclusions of the times by pointing out that the murder rate among same-age Americans is much higher than among returning veterans. The terms of the debate are the usual:
· The article is “presumably an attempt at making another case for ending the war, if we know anything about the Times's editors.”
· Mike Burleson writes: Just throw out a few unverified facts and let the "blame America first" crowd, as well as the radicals overseas gather their talking points.
· At “The Two Malcontents”, they write, “The Times has committed a gross slander.” This, of course, is on the same blog which has categories titled “Americans who Hate America,” “Commie Pinkos” and “Blame America”
Unfortunately, all of these articles miss the real point raised by the Times article. Are we doing enough to help war veterans coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan? And the answer to that question is a resounding no.
It makes me angry that a legitimate issue that should be of concern to all of us has to be tied up in the pro-war/anti-war political debate. Let’s get that out front. To those on the left who would use this article as an argument for leaving Iraq, I say: stop using the troops as your political football. To the folks on the right who would use this as an opportunity to bash the left: screw off. Both sides make me sick. Because the people getting left behind in this debate are the people who actually need our help.
I’ve written in the past about the profound impact killing has on the psyche. Killing sucks. Sometimes its necessary, and war is one of those times. But that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with. Frankly, I struggled for years with the remorse, rage, and sometimes-waking nightmares that were a result of killing another human being.
My first novel, written in the three years following my own experience with killing in the Gulf War, goes directly to this issue: the experience of killing in combat, the impact on the soldier, and most importantly in this discussion—the possibility of a violent response to the experience.
The question of whether or not returning veterans are less or more likely to kill than the general population is an important one and needs to be looked at more systematically than has been done in the past. But using the question as yet another manifestation of the left-right culture war is the real disservice to veterans.
Tags: PTSD Iraq military war NY Times wingnuts culture warriors
Posted By Charles at 9:59 AM
Charles
Thursday, 17 January 2008
Times Under Fire for Vets article
Posted By Charles at 9:59 AM
On Sunday, the New York Times ran a lengthy article chronicling a series of homicides committed by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans over the last several years—more than 120 killings here in the United States. Now, the Times is under fire, according to some articles and bloggers, for perpetuating “The Killer Vet lie” and “Vet-Bashing.”
Not surprisingly, the culture warriors who are still intent on perpetuating the Vietnam era hawk vs. dove debate have jumped in feet first, specially after the Weekly Standard ran an analysis by John J. Dilulio which attempts to debunk the conclusions of the times by pointing out that the murder rate among same-age Americans is much higher than among returning veterans. The terms of the debate are the usual:
· The article is “presumably an attempt at making another case for ending the war, if we know anything about the Times's editors.”
· Mike Burleson writes: Just throw out a few unverified facts and let the "blame America first" crowd, as well as the radicals overseas gather their talking points.
· At “The Two Malcontents”, they write, “The Times has committed a gross slander.” This, of course, is on the same blog which has categories titled “Americans who Hate America,” “Commie Pinkos” and “Blame America”
Unfortunately, all of these articles miss the real point raised by the Times article. Are we doing enough to help war veterans coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan? And the answer to that question is a resounding no.
It makes me angry that a legitimate issue that should be of concern to all of us has to be tied up in the pro-war/anti-war political debate. Let’s get that out front. To those on the left who would use this article as an argument for leaving Iraq, I say: stop using the troops as your political football. To the folks on the right who would use this as an opportunity to bash the left: screw off. Both sides make me sick. Because the people getting left behind in this debate are the people who actually need our help.
I’ve written in the past about the profound impact killing has on the psyche. Killing sucks. Sometimes its necessary, and war is one of those times. But that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with. Frankly, I struggled for years with the remorse, rage, and sometimes-waking nightmares that were a result of killing another human being.
My first novel, written in the three years following my own experience with killing in the Gulf War, goes directly to this issue: the experience of killing in combat, the impact on the soldier, and most importantly in this discussion—the possibility of a violent response to the experience.
The question of whether or not returning veterans are less or more likely to kill than the general population is an important one and needs to be looked at more systematically than has been done in the past. But using the question as yet another manifestation of the left-right culture war is the real disservice to veterans.
Tags: PTSD Iraq military war NY Times wingnuts culture warriors
Posted By Charles at 9:59 AM
Sunday, January 20, 2008
About 2 below and the repost from Anonymous Infantryman
"I read 2 Below. My first instinct was to state what every jacked up combat vet thinks, but am afraid of how bad it will be attacked by others.
Killing is like virginity and sex. The first time is awkward. You've heard your buddies talk about it, you've seen it on tv. and it can be addicting.
But every situation is different. The mother ****er who ran a road block with a family inside actually bothers me. The mother ****er who set off an IED. well, I feel good about what we did, and bad that we missed one. It made me feel REALLY good sometimes. It fixed any problem. It really really bothered me sometimes. But by the end of the tour, we looked for every opportunity we could. The emotion was gone. It just was. Like a drug addict rock star. First the music, then drugs and music, then just the drugs.
The truth is that the primitive mind remembers serious threats,
......got bit by a dog, don't f*** with it. Whatever solution it used in the past, (assuming it worked) the brain will reuse. If lethal force with a weapon resolved a threat. Hey, it worked last time, and the time before that. Why not?? It ain't broke. why change or fix it.
That's for a threat. Someone is gonna harm me, or someone near me.
few more things. 1: WW II, Korean, and vietnam vets toughed it out, they didn't get anything and nobody cared. It just seems like everyone else in the world telling us (Soldiers) what we're feeling. and how normal things are to an abnormal situation. -Well, isn't fighting and 'waring' human nature? so WTF?
It's also f***ed up to bring up a problem without a solution, so I thought, what do I think, or how would I change it. That's when I realized, I called battle buddies to check. I asked 4 of my most f***ed up battle buddies. no one ever asked us.
Like I said. I've been spoon fed what I'm suppose to be going through by some "expert" wearing birkenstocks and in desperate need of a haircut... ya. But people don't seem to realize that there is no privacy in the Army. If you want to know anything about anyone. ASK 'EM. I don't have any interest in maintaining my privacy AS LONG as whatever it is used for is done respectfully and not used, well, how can I say this. To benifit any hippy claims. I.E. war =bad, war is for business. ETC.
But if you or someone else wants to know what's going on upstairs in our gorrilla minds. Ask. I would feel confronted by the first question out of their mouths, "didja keel anyone."
But would answer PTSD questions.
So what! A few joes killed some people. Hey did America know that people in the Service use drugs too? Yeah, alot!
The truth is, is that like any community, someone is bound to any number of illegal activities. Yes the percentage might be higher, right now then in the past, but seriously. How many people were killed in Detriot, LA, NY.. Shit happens.
I don't understand what you meant at the end of your writing, the last two paragraphs were hard to follow. You had me going, then the last 2 make it sound like you have some kind of hidden agenda or cheap shot at I don't even know what. But it always seems to leave a sour taste, rather than that of a genuine care. Maybe it's just well beyond my level of either education, social class, or care. I just don't get it.
(I've never heard the blue cord refered to a pretty blue braid most people don't know that means infantry). Thanks
Killing is like virginity and sex. The first time is awkward. You've heard your buddies talk about it, you've seen it on tv. and it can be addicting.
But every situation is different. The mother ****er who ran a road block with a family inside actually bothers me. The mother ****er who set off an IED. well, I feel good about what we did, and bad that we missed one. It made me feel REALLY good sometimes. It fixed any problem. It really really bothered me sometimes. But by the end of the tour, we looked for every opportunity we could. The emotion was gone. It just was. Like a drug addict rock star. First the music, then drugs and music, then just the drugs.
The truth is that the primitive mind remembers serious threats,
......got bit by a dog, don't f*** with it. Whatever solution it used in the past, (assuming it worked) the brain will reuse. If lethal force with a weapon resolved a threat. Hey, it worked last time, and the time before that. Why not?? It ain't broke. why change or fix it.
That's for a threat. Someone is gonna harm me, or someone near me.
few more things. 1: WW II, Korean, and vietnam vets toughed it out, they didn't get anything and nobody cared. It just seems like everyone else in the world telling us (Soldiers) what we're feeling. and how normal things are to an abnormal situation. -Well, isn't fighting and 'waring' human nature? so WTF?
It's also f***ed up to bring up a problem without a solution, so I thought, what do I think, or how would I change it. That's when I realized, I called battle buddies to check. I asked 4 of my most f***ed up battle buddies. no one ever asked us.
Like I said. I've been spoon fed what I'm suppose to be going through by some "expert" wearing birkenstocks and in desperate need of a haircut... ya. But people don't seem to realize that there is no privacy in the Army. If you want to know anything about anyone. ASK 'EM. I don't have any interest in maintaining my privacy AS LONG as whatever it is used for is done respectfully and not used, well, how can I say this. To benifit any hippy claims. I.E. war =bad, war is for business. ETC.
But if you or someone else wants to know what's going on upstairs in our gorrilla minds. Ask. I would feel confronted by the first question out of their mouths, "didja keel anyone."
But would answer PTSD questions.
So what! A few joes killed some people. Hey did America know that people in the Service use drugs too? Yeah, alot!
The truth is, is that like any community, someone is bound to any number of illegal activities. Yes the percentage might be higher, right now then in the past, but seriously. How many people were killed in Detriot, LA, NY.. Shit happens.
I don't understand what you meant at the end of your writing, the last two paragraphs were hard to follow. You had me going, then the last 2 make it sound like you have some kind of hidden agenda or cheap shot at I don't even know what. But it always seems to leave a sour taste, rather than that of a genuine care. Maybe it's just well beyond my level of either education, social class, or care. I just don't get it.
(I've never heard the blue cord refered to a pretty blue braid most people don't know that means infantry). Thanks
Grunts and a repost
A friend who has served both as a Marine, then again as Army Infantry and now back as a marine posted this, with permission to repost. These are not my words at all, nor are they meant to persuade anyone to anything, just one voice among many...
" Jan 17, 2008 12:01 AM
Subject: Aaaaahhhh!!!!
Body: GRUNTS- Body: Underwear is entirely optional at all times -You go on missions with your fly undone so you can piss while pulling security. -You have issues with female authority. -You have issues with females. -You have no problem running 5 miles drunk. -You have no problem maxing a PT Test drunk. -You have no problems doing a 12 mile forced march drunk. -You have no problems but drinking problems, and you don't think its a problem at all. -You would fight for a guy you barely know, as long as he's a grunt. -You'd fight your best friend, even though he's a grunt. -Monday morning formation should be taped and sent in to the Howard Stern Show. -You know someone who has done the following: 1. pissed themselves, shit themselves, puked on themselves, and in turn did all of the above on other people, and loved it 2. killed a Hadji, and loved it 3. killed a case in between COB and last light, and loved it. 4. ran a few miles on a broken something, and loved it. -You know that work is work and play is play. -You pride yourself on getting dirtier than any POG, but looking prettier at the same time. -You know heroes. -You know heroes that dont care if they are heroes. -Your buddies know all of your business, tell all of your business, but when the shit gets hot, its always time to handle some goddamn business. -You wince when a POG handles his weapon like a POG. -You know POG dudes hate you because POG chicks love you. -You realize you are one of the hardest motherfuckers in the country, and that's just before anyone else gets out of bed. -You got stopped in the airport by some fat security guard on the way home from OIF or OEF because your uniform had bomb residue, blood, or powder burns on it, and they treated you like a terrorist because of it. -You say Roger when Roger could mean a really bad day. -You say Roger because you welcome a bad day. -You would bleed on the flag so the stripes stay red. -You can fall asleep absolutely anywhere. -You hear Kuwait, you automatically get the shits. -You hear Iraq/Afghanistan, you say, fuck it dude, Round Two, Three, Four, whatever. -You are the sore-footed, camo-faced, sunburnt, dirty, tired hungry sons-of-a-bitches that have fought so long to keep the wolf at the gate. You know this and you don't care if anyone else knows this. -You are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world, and damn proud of it. -I'll drink to that. -Repost this if you're a grunt or know a grunt. If you're a chick, do your best to go f**k a grunt, ask anyone, its the best lay you'll ever have...."
POG is a person in the armed services with a desk job. They usually have blogs with fierce pictures, but they sit in air conditioned rooms away from any danger. The above post was written by a a young man who has been to the sandbox more than once, and upon his last return, tried to get into law enforcement, etc, but decided to re-up and return to Iraq.
Ok, the point of posting this is to demonstrate that real people from all walks of life serve in the armed forces, they aren't all pilots killing at a distance, or supply sergeants loading something, some are in the streets doing the dirty work. I think Infantrymen think like this friend. He is adrenaline filled and full of living in the moment, just filled to the brim with the excitement of the next door, yet upon return home, he has to schedule appointments, make appointments, pay bills, do the drudgery of school, and make his own way, which is really not fly compared to the zipper-down, piss anywhere, shoot anyone time he just had.
" Jan 17, 2008 12:01 AM
Subject: Aaaaahhhh!!!!
Body: GRUNTS- Body: Underwear is entirely optional at all times -You go on missions with your fly undone so you can piss while pulling security. -You have issues with female authority. -You have issues with females. -You have no problem running 5 miles drunk. -You have no problem maxing a PT Test drunk. -You have no problems doing a 12 mile forced march drunk. -You have no problems but drinking problems, and you don't think its a problem at all. -You would fight for a guy you barely know, as long as he's a grunt. -You'd fight your best friend, even though he's a grunt. -Monday morning formation should be taped and sent in to the Howard Stern Show. -You know someone who has done the following: 1. pissed themselves, shit themselves, puked on themselves, and in turn did all of the above on other people, and loved it 2. killed a Hadji, and loved it 3. killed a case in between COB and last light, and loved it. 4. ran a few miles on a broken something, and loved it. -You know that work is work and play is play. -You pride yourself on getting dirtier than any POG, but looking prettier at the same time. -You know heroes. -You know heroes that dont care if they are heroes. -Your buddies know all of your business, tell all of your business, but when the shit gets hot, its always time to handle some goddamn business. -You wince when a POG handles his weapon like a POG. -You know POG dudes hate you because POG chicks love you. -You realize you are one of the hardest motherfuckers in the country, and that's just before anyone else gets out of bed. -You got stopped in the airport by some fat security guard on the way home from OIF or OEF because your uniform had bomb residue, blood, or powder burns on it, and they treated you like a terrorist because of it. -You say Roger when Roger could mean a really bad day. -You say Roger because you welcome a bad day. -You would bleed on the flag so the stripes stay red. -You can fall asleep absolutely anywhere. -You hear Kuwait, you automatically get the shits. -You hear Iraq/Afghanistan, you say, fuck it dude, Round Two, Three, Four, whatever. -You are the sore-footed, camo-faced, sunburnt, dirty, tired hungry sons-of-a-bitches that have fought so long to keep the wolf at the gate. You know this and you don't care if anyone else knows this. -You are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world, and damn proud of it. -I'll drink to that. -Repost this if you're a grunt or know a grunt. If you're a chick, do your best to go f**k a grunt, ask anyone, its the best lay you'll ever have...."
POG is a person in the armed services with a desk job. They usually have blogs with fierce pictures, but they sit in air conditioned rooms away from any danger. The above post was written by a a young man who has been to the sandbox more than once, and upon his last return, tried to get into law enforcement, etc, but decided to re-up and return to Iraq.
Ok, the point of posting this is to demonstrate that real people from all walks of life serve in the armed forces, they aren't all pilots killing at a distance, or supply sergeants loading something, some are in the streets doing the dirty work. I think Infantrymen think like this friend. He is adrenaline filled and full of living in the moment, just filled to the brim with the excitement of the next door, yet upon return home, he has to schedule appointments, make appointments, pay bills, do the drudgery of school, and make his own way, which is really not fly compared to the zipper-down, piss anywhere, shoot anyone time he just had.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
A Veteran’s Descent, and a Prosecutor’s Choice
From the link above... click link for entire story....
TOOELE, Utah — Not long after Lance Cpl. Walter Rollo Smith returned from Iraq, the Marines dispatched him to Quantico, Va., for a marksmanship instructor course.
Mr. Smith, then a 21-year-old Marine Corps reservist from Utah, had been shaken to the core by the intensity of his experience during the invasion of Iraq. Once a squeaky-clean Mormon boy who aspired to serve a mission abroad, he had come home a smoker and drinker, unsure if he believed in God.
In Quantico, he reported to the firing range with a friend from Fox Company, the combined Salt Lake City-Las Vegas battalion nicknamed the Saints and Sinners. Raising his rifle, he stared through the scope and started shaking. What he saw were not the inanimate targets before him but vivid, hallucinatory images of Iraq: “the cars coming at us, the chaos, the dust, the women and children, the bodies we left behind,” he said.
Each time he squeezed the trigger, Mr. Smith cried, harder and harder until he was, in his own words, “bawling on the rifle range, which marines just do not do.” Mortified, he allowed himself to be pulled away. And not long afterward, the Marines began processing his medical discharge for post-traumatic stress disorder, severing his link to the Reserve unit that anchored him and sending him off to seek help from veterans hospitals.
The incident on the firing range was the first “red flag,” as the prosecutor in Tooele County, Utah, termed it, that Mr. Smith sent up as he gradually disintegrated psychologically. At his lowest point, in March 2006, he killed Nicole Marie Speirs, the 22-year-old mother of his twin children, drowning her in a bathtub without any evident provocation or reason.
“There was no intent,” said Gary K. Searle, the deputy Tooele County attorney. “It was almost like things kept ratcheting up, without any real intervention that I can see, until one day he snapped.”
TOOELE, Utah — Not long after Lance Cpl. Walter Rollo Smith returned from Iraq, the Marines dispatched him to Quantico, Va., for a marksmanship instructor course.
Mr. Smith, then a 21-year-old Marine Corps reservist from Utah, had been shaken to the core by the intensity of his experience during the invasion of Iraq. Once a squeaky-clean Mormon boy who aspired to serve a mission abroad, he had come home a smoker and drinker, unsure if he believed in God.
In Quantico, he reported to the firing range with a friend from Fox Company, the combined Salt Lake City-Las Vegas battalion nicknamed the Saints and Sinners. Raising his rifle, he stared through the scope and started shaking. What he saw were not the inanimate targets before him but vivid, hallucinatory images of Iraq: “the cars coming at us, the chaos, the dust, the women and children, the bodies we left behind,” he said.
Each time he squeezed the trigger, Mr. Smith cried, harder and harder until he was, in his own words, “bawling on the rifle range, which marines just do not do.” Mortified, he allowed himself to be pulled away. And not long afterward, the Marines began processing his medical discharge for post-traumatic stress disorder, severing his link to the Reserve unit that anchored him and sending him off to seek help from veterans hospitals.
The incident on the firing range was the first “red flag,” as the prosecutor in Tooele County, Utah, termed it, that Mr. Smith sent up as he gradually disintegrated psychologically. At his lowest point, in March 2006, he killed Nicole Marie Speirs, the 22-year-old mother of his twin children, drowning her in a bathtub without any evident provocation or reason.
“There was no intent,” said Gary K. Searle, the deputy Tooele County attorney. “It was almost like things kept ratcheting up, without any real intervention that I can see, until one day he snapped.”
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