Bush and his friends could learn something from these guys. Kudos to these veterans.

. - Bullets whizzed past as “Sarah” translated for U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Shrapnel from a roadside blast hit her protective vest. In her off hours, she worried about retribution for helping the Americans. A sign reading “traitor” was posted on her family’s door.

“I survived by chance,” she said.

Now, she is in the United States under a visa program for Iraqis who have aided the U.S. military, and she is being helped by a network of Iraq veterans who try to make sure those new immigrants make a soft landing in this country.

Mathew Tully, an Albany-area lawyer who served in Iraq as a National Guard major, volunteered along with his wife to take in Sarah until she gets settled in a new culture and carves out a new life.

He didn’t know Sarah in Iraq, but he feels a sense of duty.

“There’s nobody else out there to help Sarah,” Tully said. “When you’re confronted with the fact that there’s somebody a half a world away who has no place to go when they get off the plane at JFK, I don’t know how as a good American, as a good Christian, I could turn her away.”

More at Yahoo

In 1776, Thomas Paine wrote: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

In 1971, a courageous group of veterans exposed the criminal nature of the Vietnam War in an event called Winter Soldier. Once again, we will demand that the voices of veterans are heard.

Once again, we are fighting for the soul of our country. We will demonstrate our patriotism by speaking out with honor and integrity instead of blindly following failed policy. Winter Soldier is a difficult but essential service to our country.

Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan will feature testimony from U.S. veterans who served in those occupations, giving an accurate account of what is really happening day in and day out, on the ground.

The four-day event will bring together veterans from across the country to testify about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan - and present video and photographic evidence. In addition, there will be panels of scholars, veterans, journalists, and other specialists to give context to the testimony. These panels will cover everything from the history of the GI resistance movement to the fight for veterans’ health benefits and support.

Go here to learn where you can go to listen and watch.

God bless him. It’s so nice he’s alive to attend this event…..and be honored.

They once numbered in the tens of thousands. Today, their numbers have dwindled to just two. But U.S. veterans of The Great War, “The war to end all wars,” are not being forgotten.

They will be honored at the Pentagon on Thursday with the unveiling of portraits of World War I veterans made by photographer David DeJonge.

Defense Robert M. Gates will host the unveiling ceremony at 12:45 p.m. in the Pentagon Auditorium.

DeJonge, who is based in Grand Rapids, Mich., began documenting veterans in 1996. In 2006, he began a project to photograph America’s last surviving veterans of WWI, the Pentagon said today in a press release.

DeJonge partnered with the Department of Veterans Affairs and located and photographed the last known surviving WWI veterans. He has donated his portrait collection to the Pentagon.

Within weeks of their portrait sessions, five of the nine WWI Veterans died. They ranged in age from 105 to 110 and served in the Army and Navy. Today, there are only two known surviving WWI veterans.

• John Babcock of Spokane, Wash., served for Canada in WWI and later in the U.S. Army in the 1940s. He became an American citizen in 1946.

• Frank Woodruff Buckles, who lives in Charles Town, W. Va., joined the Army in 1914 at age 15. He served in England, France and Germany during WWI, assigned to the 1st Fort Riley Casual Detachment. He later served in the Pacific Theater during WWII and was held as a civilian prisoner of war at Los Banos, Philippines.

A native of Harrison County, Mo., Buckles, now 107, will be the guest of honor at Thursday’s event.

He is one of many veterans featured in “Experiencing War,” part of the Veterans History Project at The Library of Congress.

“It’s best for anyone who’s been in the military service if he’s had some disagreeable experiences … to talk about it and get it out of his system and then forget it,” he said in an audio interview for the project.

Read more »

I’ve been watching and watching in the hopes they will find Eric Hall alive and well. This is the first news I’ve seen ………

An underground spiderhole discovered off Loveland Boulevard in Port Charlotte Monday is believed to have been the temporary shelter of a missing disabled former Marine.

Ret. Army Sgt. 1st Class Tim Baker said he believes the shelter was used as recently as Monday morning, suggesting 24-year-old Eric W. Hall may not be far away.

Hall fled from his aunt’s Deep Creek home Feb. 3, apparently from phantom enemies during a flashback. Monday’s discovery is a sign to the search party and members of Hall’s family that the Iraq War veteran remains in the area.

Led by a bloodhound, Ret. Army Sgt. 1st Class Tim Baker and the Southwest Florida K-9 Search Unit scoped out the makeshift campsite they said was created with military training experience within the last two to three days. The scent given to the bloodhound, Clark, from a shirt confirmed that the Marine was at the location.

Baker said he believed Hall was at the site, located near Harold Avenue Park, as recently as Monday morning.

The spiderhole was dug in the ground with a rake, and was covered by dirt-covered plywood panels taken on each side to provide the inhabitant discreet view of the surroundings. Between the plywood covers was a large sleeping area, covered with a plastic truck bed liner.

Near the spiderhole were a “cat hole,” or toilet dug in the ground downwind from the sleeping area, and an unused fire pit with pinecones and papers.

More at the Sun Herald

The Edwards campaign has put out a hilarious, on-target spot with great editing/timing about the lastest round of the media blackout he’s consistently faced (via Greg Sargent, who has some good thoughts, as usual).

What blackout is that? Greg Sargent passes on this helpful graphic:
Read more »

Roger Chapin, founder of Help Hospitalized Veterans, one of the country’s largest veterans charities, is expected to testify today before a congressional committee on questionable spending practices.

Between 1997 and 2005, the charity paid $3.8 million in salary and benefits to Chapin and his wife and spent more than $200 million on fundraising and public education campaigns, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal tax filings. The public records also show that the charity awarded at least $19 million in contracts during that period to companies owned by Richard A. Viguerie, a prominent conservative political commentator and advertising consultant based in Virginia.

Why is it, when I read an sickening article like this, I’m assured ninety-nine percent of the time there’s a “compassionate conservative” involved?

“We’re talking about an individual that has tried to duck the committee; he refused to testify voluntarily. It appears he has something to hide, and if you look at his past operations, there are very good reasons to be suspicious about his activities,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a committee member, said in an interview.

Van Hollen said the committee wants to find a way to distinguish between charities that truly serve veterans and those “committing fraud against the public.”

Mr. Hollen, I think clear distinction can be found in this case.

The Pentagon, much like the Bush administration, is truly a piece of work, I tell ya!

20,000 vets’ brain injuries not listed in Pentagon tally

At least 20,000 U.S. troops who were not classified as wounded during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan have been found with signs of brain injuries, according to military and veterans records compiled by USA TODAY.

The data, provided by the Army, Navy and Department of Veterans Affairs, show that about five times as many troops sustained brain trauma as the 4,471 officially listed by the Pentagon through Sept. 30. These cases also are not reflected in the Pentagon’s official tally of wounded, which stands at 30,327.

How much more of this shit are we going to take? How anyone in congress can flap their jaws about who supports the troops and who doesn’t is beyond me. Not when this kind of stuff is going on. How fucking low can they go?

The U.S. Military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments.

To get people to sign up, the military gives enlistment bonuses up to $30,000 in some cases.

Now men and women who have lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and can no longer serve are being ordered to pay some of that money back.

One of them is Jordan Fox, a young soldier from the South Hills.

He finds solace in the hundreds of boxes he loads onto a truck in Carnegie. In each box is a care package that will be sent to a man or woman serving in Iraq. It was in his name Operation Pittsburgh Pride was started.

Fox was seriously injured when a roadside bomb blew up his vehicle. He was knocked unconscious. His back was injured and lost all vision in his right eye.

A few months later Fox was sent home. His injuries prohibited him from fulfilling three months of his commitment. A few days ago, he received a letter from the military demanding nearly $3,000 of his signing bonus back.

“I tried to do my best and serve my country. I was unfortunately hurt in the process. Now they’re telling me they want their money back,” he explained.

More at KDKA.com

It’s going to be years before we know the true amount of suffering these men and women are going to go through.

From Yahoo News:

The number of Iraq war veterans needing mental-health care has risen sharply since the U.S. Defense Department began screening them a second time for emotional problems, U.S. military researchers reported Tuesday.

Initial screenings of veterans uncovered 4.4 percent who needed treatment for problems such as depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But six months later, a second screening found 11.7 percent were in need of mental health care, indicating that it might take several months for emotional disorders to emerge, the study suggested.

(Click here for a larger image.)

In 1959, Pogo creator Walt Kelly wrote:

The eleventh day of the eleventh month has always seemed to me to be special. Even if the reason for it fell apart as the years went on, it was a symbol of something close to the high part of the heart. Perhaps a life that stretches through two or three wars takes its first war rather seriously, but I still think we should have kept the name “Armistice Day.” Its implications were a little more profound, a little more hopeful.

Amen, brother.

Thanks to all who have served or are serving.

This post is mostly a repeat, since I find it hard to top Kelly. I hope to have several more posts on war and peace done today and throughout the week.

In the meantime, though, there’s also “How to Hear a True War Story.”

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

Sen. Murray, delivering the Democrats’ weekly radio address, stated that veterans were “stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare“. She accused Bush of underfunding the Veterans Affairs Department.

The senator said the number of uninsured veterans has skyrocketed in recent years, and accused President Bush of “hollow talk” in support of U.S. troops.

Source: AP

He was one of America’s first defenders on Sept. 11, 2001, a Marine who pulled burned bodies from the ruins of the Pentagon. He saw more horrors in Kuwait and Iraq.

Today, he can’t keep a job, pay his bills, or chase thoughts of suicide from his tortured brain. In a few weeks, he may lose his house, too.

Gamal Awad, the American son of a Sudanese immigrant, exemplifies an emerging group of war veterans: the economic casualties.

More than in past wars, many wounded troops are coming home alive from the Middle East. That’s a triumph for military medicine. But they often return hobbled by prolonged physical and mental injuries from homemade bombs and the unremitting anxiety of fighting a hidden enemy along blurred battle lines. Treatment, recovery and retraining often can’t be assured quickly or cheaply.

These troops are just starting to seek help in large numbers, more than 185,000 so far. But the cost of their benefits is already testing resources set aside by government and threatening the future of these wounded veterans for decades to come, say economists and veterans’ groups.

More at Yahoo News

By MARILYNN MARCHIONE
The Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - The war in Iraq is not over, but one legacy is already here in this city and others across America: an epidemic of brain-damaged soldiers.

Thousands of troops have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, or TBI. These blast-caused head injuries are so different from the ones doctors are used to seeing from falls and car crashes that treating them is as much faith as it is science.

“I’ve been in the field for 20-plus years dealing with TBI. I have a very experienced staff. And they’re saying to me, ‘We’re seeing things we’ve never seen before,’” said Sandy Schneider, director of Vanderbilt University’s brain injury rehabilitation program.

Doctors also are realizing that symptoms overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder, and that both must be treated. Odd as it may seem, brain injury can protect against PTSD by blurring awareness of what happened.

But as memory improves, emotional problems can emerge: One of the first “graduates” of Vanderbilt’s program committed suicide three weeks later.

“Of all the ones here, he would not have been the one we would have thought,” Schneider said. “They called him the Michelangelo of Fort Campbell” - a guy who planned to go to art school.

As more troops return from the war, brain injuries are a growing burden - for them, for the few programs to treat them, and for taxpayers who pay for their care and disability if they cannot hold jobs.

read more HERE

U.S. military families have become the unseen victims of the war in Iraq, with those left behind suffering when Soldiers go off to fight and when they finally return home.

“I don’t know one military family that is still together or anything like they were before the Soldier in the family went to war,” 30-year-old Mylinda, whose husband was among the first Marines to be deployed in Iraq, told AFP.

Mylinda’s husband returned home from Iraq around a year ago after “we both decided then that he should leave the military because otherwise he would have had to go back,” she said.

“We did pretty well when he first got back, but he never spoke about Iraq.

“I could see he was unhappy and he lost self-confidence when he left the military and couldn’t find a job,” she said.

But then came the bombshell.

“In March, he said he didn’t want to be married any more,” Mylinda said.

The majority of Iraq veterans who took part in a recent study acknowledged having “some family problem at least once a week,” said Dr Steven Sayers of the Veterans Administration (VA) Medical Center in Philadelphia.

More at Military.com

How many ways can the government screw it’s veterans? I don’t know, but I think this administration is trying to find out.

When in doubt, tilt toward the veteran.

That’s what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has suggested to government agencies in two cases involving federal employees who had served in the military reserves and petitioned for back pay because of improperly charged military leave.

The government has long encouraged civil service employees to join the National Guard and reserves, providing them with 15 days of leave for their annual military training. But agencies have not consistently interpreted the benefit, creating a muddle for judges and federal officials.

In 2003, in a case known as Butterbaugh, the appeals court ruled that the government should not count weekends and holidays as leave when the employees were away from their agencies for military training.

Putting that ruling into practice has proved difficult, and federal employees and retirees continue to file claims for back pay. Some federal employees who have served in the reserves and had to use their regular vacation time to cover their military training may be eligible for $3,000 to $10,000 in back pay, Mathew B. Tully, a lawyer who has filed claims on behalf of veterans, said.

More at the Washington Post