FACEBOOK
TWITTER
Bush VA Appointees: 'Believe in God, You Won't Have PTSD'
God, the Army, and PTSD
Is religion an obstacle to treatment?
by Tara McKelvey
When Roger Benimoff arrived at the psychiatric building of the Coatesville, Pennsylvania veterans’ hospital, he was greeted by a message carved into a nearby tree stump: “Welcome Home.” It was a reminder that things had not turned out as he had expected.
In Faith Under Fire, a memoir about Benimoff’s life as an Army chaplain in Iraq, Benimoff and co-author Eve Conant describe his return from Iraq to his family in Colorado and subsequent assignment to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He retreated deep into himself, spending hours on the computer and racking up ten thousand dollars in debt on eBay. Above all, he was angry and jittery, scared even of his young sons, and barely able to make it through the day. He was eventually admitted to Coatesville’s “Psych Ward.” For a while the lock-down facility was his home. He wondered where God was in all of this, and was not alone in that bewilderment and pain.
In a 2004 study of approximately 1,400 Vietnam veterans, almost 90 percent Christian, researchers at Yale found that nearly one-third said the war had shaken their faith in God and that their religion no longer provided comfort for them. The Yale study found that these soldiers were more likely than others to seek mental health treatment through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) when they came home. It was not that these veterans had unusually high confidence in government or especially good information about services at VA hospitals. Instead, they had fallen into a spiritual abyss and were desperate to find a way out. The trauma of war seems to be especially acute for men and women whose faith in a benevolent God is challenged by the carnage they have witnessed.
Of course, not all veterans with mental health concerns are led to VA hospitals by a loss of faith: many simply want to get a night’s sleep without being terrorized by nightmares. Whatever kind of assistance they are seeking, it has been in increasingly short supply. The decline in resources for veterans’ mental health services started in the 1980s, as part of a nationwide effort to move psychiatric patients into outpatient treatment. The number of inpatient psychiatric beds fell from 9,000 in the late ’80s to 3,000 by 2008.
During the Iraq war, however, the great difficulty veterans experienced in getting psychiatric care—greater than before—was not a product of cost-cutting, but of conviction: many Bush administration officials believed that soldiers who supported the war would not face psychological problems, and if they did, they would find comfort in faith. In a resigned tone, one prominent researcher who worked for the VA, and asked that he not be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the press, explained that high-ranking officials believed that “Jesus fixes everything.” Benimoff and the others who returned with devastating psychological injuries found a faith-based bureau within the VA. At veterans’ hospitals, chaplains were conducting spirituality assessments of patients.
The story of the mistreatment of returning veterans from Iraq is well known and shocking. But the role of religious ideology in that mistreatment—how, inside the government, it was a potent tool in the betrayal of an overwhelmingly Christian Army—is much less known.
“I couldn’t stand to hear that phrase any longer—‘God was watching over me,’” Benimoff wrote.
He wasn’t watching over the good men I knew in Iraq. Faith was the center of my life yet it failed to explain why I came home and those soldiers did not. The phrase was a Christian nicety, a cliché that when put to the test didn’t fit reality.
• • •
Things had already begun to change dramatically at the VA by early 2005, shortly after Roger Benimoff left for his second deployment to Iraq. Many appointees at the agency were disturbed that so many Iraq veterans showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In part the concern grew from skepticism about the diagnosis itself, which some believed to be a legacy of the Vietnam-era anti-war movement. Whatever the merits of the diagnosis, it was clearly widespread and, moreover, staggeringly expensive to treat. In 2008 the RAND Corporation put a number on the problem, reporting that one in five veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has suffered some form of mental illness, mostly PTSD and depression.
“God doesn’t like ugly,” one political appointee told Paul Sullivan, an analyst in the VA’s Veterans Benefits Administration, in a clumsy attempt to reduce the cost of caring for psychologically traumatized veterans. “You need to make the numbers lower.” Sullivan left the VA in 2006 and became head of Veterans for Common Sense, a group that filed a class-action lawsuit against the secretary of the VA for the shoddy treatment of veterans. It was dismissed in 2008 and is now being appealed.
PTSD, along with its diagnosis and treatment, has been a charged subject in the United States since the term was introduced nearly three decades ago. Studying returning veterans and working with a group of psychiatrists and others in the 1970s, former Air Force psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton pushed to create an entry for “post-traumatic stress disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the official manual of the American Psychiatric Association. Lifton and his colleagues believed that the kind of horror induced by the experience of war and other comparably catastrophic shocks needed a special category that would distinguish it from lesser kinds of trauma. A definition appeared in the DSM-III in 1980. The DSM-IV, published in 1994, included revised diagnostic criteria that reduced the severity of the external shock required to induce PTSD. From the start, conservatives charged that the disorder was created by anti-war activists with a political agenda. The debate about it has been marked by passion, rhetoric, politics, and religion, all of which have only made things worse for the individuals who have suffered from the disorder.
Tens of thousands of soldiers, including Benimoff, have been diagnosed with PTSD, which occurs when an individual responds to a traumatic event with “intense fear” and feelings of helplessness. For PTSD sufferers, that experience is followed by horrifying nightmares, hyper-vigilance, sleeplessness, and other potentially debilitating symptoms. Some of those diagnosed with the disorder never recover, and for this reason skeptics say that the DSM definition has turned ordinary men and women into chronic sufferers, dependent on government assistance and relieved of responsibility for their own lives. It is true that some Iraq veterans with full-blown PTSD diagnoses have been granted government benefits—usually between $200 and $2,600 per month—even though they might be able to support themselves. (I have met several of them while traveling across the country.) Nonetheless, far more suffer either with poor care or no care at all.
• • •
One soldier I spoke with, Army Specialist Bill Haynes, had grown up attending Highland Baptist Church in Paducah, Kentucky, and was awarded a Bronze Star for his courage during a March 2005 battle in Iraq. When he came home, he was plagued with a recurring nightmare. “At first, it was the same thing over and over and over,” he told me. “It was the March 20 attack. Then one time in my dream, we didn’t have any guns at all, and I knew we were all going to get captured and tortured and killed. This dream was so damn real.”
Haynes saw a therapist at the VA and, like so many veterans who sought help, was given a prescription for trazodone, an antidepressant. He was also sent to group therapy, but the sessions were filled with civilians. “They’re like, ‘I was working in a warehouse, and a piling fell on my head,’” as he recalls. His nightmares centered around the bloodshed he had witnessed on a highway near Salman Pak, an Iraqi city near Baghdad.
Haynes had a hard time relating to the problems the other patients in the therapy sessions described, so he stopped going. He took the antidepressant and drank a lot of bourbon in an attempt to quiet his mind. Neither method worked particularly well, so he tried to shoot himself with a handgun. His wife stopped him, and over time the intensity of the nightmare seemed to fade. “You know, it comes and goes,” he says. Several years after the battle, he sometimes takes over-the-counter painkillers before going to bed so he will not be haunted by the dream.
The treatment for PTSD varies widely; there is little agreement on the best method. However, most experts believe that treatment should be determined by a careful case-by-case analysis, and will most likely include a combination of therapy and medication and, in some cases, a spiritual dimension. Some veterans do well when they receive only counseling, in either group or individual sessions.
Medication alone rarely works, as the family of Derek Henderson, another Iraq veteran, discovered after he returned from the war in 2003. Henderson suffered from psychotic episodes and terrorized the people around him. He carried a knife and other weapons and once tried to run over his mother with a car. She tried repeatedly to get him admitted to the VA hospital in Kentucky for proper care, but nobody was willing to take responsibility for him. Instead, he was admitted for short stints and given prescriptions for a variety of antipsychotic medications. Finally, in June 2007, he jumped off a bridge over the Ohio River and drowned. In this and in other cases, the veterans were not getting a course of treatment tailored for them. All too often they were given a handful of prescriptions and sent on their way. Bruce S. McEwen, a neuroscientist at The Rockefeller University who has spent decades studying post-traumatic stress, told me, “The simple pharmaceutical solutions are just that—oversimplified.” Veterans’ advocates say the pared-down treatment and the over-reliance on drugs is a result of government skepticism about PTSD, and the desire to cut costs.
• • •
Sullivan was working as an analyst at the Veterans Benefits Administration in Washington in early 2005 when he was called to a meeting with a top political appointee at the VA, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Michael McLendon. McLendon, an intensely focused man in a neatly pressed suit, kept a Bible on his desk at the office. Sullivan explained to McLendon and the other attendees that the rise in benefits claims the VA was noticing was caused partly by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who were suffering from PTSD. “That’s too many,” McLendon said, then hit his hand on the table. “They are too young” to be filing claims, and they are doing it “too soon.” He hit the table again. The claims, he said, are “costing us too much money,” and if the veterans “believed in God and country . . . they would not come home with PTSD.” At that point, he slammed his palm against the table a final time, making a loud smack. Everyone in the room fell silent.
“I was a little bit surprised,” Sullivan said, recalling the incident. “In that one comment, he appeared to be a religious fundamentalist.” For Sullivan, McLendon’s remarks reflected the views of many political appointees in the VA and revealed what was behind their efforts to reduce costs by restricting claims. The backlog of claims was immense, and veterans, often suffering extreme psychological stress, had to wait an average of five months for decisions on their requests.
When I asked him years later about the meeting, McLendon laughed. Then his face darkened in anger. “Anybody who knows me knows I wouldn’t talk that way.”
Nevertheless, McLendon was open about the skepticism he felt toward the diagnosis of PTSD, calling it “a made-up term,” which has “taken on a life of its own.” As he spoke about the diagnosis, he pounded the table with the side of his hand more than ten times, hitting it so hard that the wooden surface shook. “Do I think they have a mental illness and should be stigmatized for the rest of their life?” he asked. “What gives a psychiatrist the right to do that?”
Later, in an email about our conversation, he wrote:
[PTSD] is not a diagnosis based on empirical evidence, but rather . . . it is an artificial construct erected by a vote of selected psychiatrists. This does not mean that there are not problems that certain individuals do have [and] issues that need to be addressed. But rather, it means that we have created policies and programs that have not served veterans well.
He recommended several books on the subject, including The Selling of DSM, whose authors, Stuart Kirk and Herb Kutchins, show a deep mistrust about the disorder and the scientific rhetoric surrounding the diagnosis. McLendon’s outlook seems to have had a significant impact on the way veterans are treated upon their return from war.
McLendon and many of the other high-level officials at the VA shared political convictions that, along with doubts about the science of PTSD, made them less likely to push for additional psychiatric services for veterans. They believed in streamlined government and free markets, and they supported a prominent role for faith-based organizations. The secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, R. James Nicholson, had previously served as chairman of the Republican National Committee and as ambassador to the Vatican. McLendon’s politics closely mirror his boss’s, and under Nicholson’s watch, veterans had increasing difficulty in obtaining adequate psychological care.
When a 2006 Government Accountability Office report raised questions about whether soldiers were getting the psychiatric help they needed, an assistant secretary of defense disputed the report’s findings, pointing to the fact that soldiers were being referred to chaplains. During this time contracts for veterans’ services were increasingly parceled out to leaders of faith-based organizations rather than to secular ones, even though veterans’ advocates opposed any bias toward faith-based treatment and argued that replacing empirically proven, nonsectarian programs with faith-based ones was a mistake.
The religious programs grew, despite concerns. At the VA Healthcare Network in upstate New York, chaplains compiled spirituality assessments of patients within twenty-four hours of their arrival. The VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System gave patients a questionnaire that stated one of the System’s goals as helping veterans “Maintain Optimal Spiritual Health.” In Coatesville, patients in the psychiatric ward had a daily, thirty-minute block of time scheduled for “SPIRITUAL UPLIFTING.” Meanwhile Benimoff wondered, “what kind of God would allow people to sink to the depths we here in this ward had sunk?”
• • •
For spiritual uplift, many soldiers and veterans depend heavily on pop-Christian books, especially Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life, and themes of divine purpose and devotion to God. As a chaplain in Iraq, Benimoff himself used the book to cope with the mayhem. He also relied on it to help the troubled soldiers he knew, and he appreciated that the book emphasized helping other people, while other spiritual self-help books tended to promote selfishness. But even a book like The Purpose Driven Life could not solve the problems he faced. Over time, he began to wonder about his own purpose in Iraq and about the government’s, and he felt uncertain and scared.
We had gone to Iraq because there were weapons of mass destruction stockpiled across the country, yet those weapons were never found and may never have existed. I had gone to Iraq thinking that was the cause. But if the cause had been wrong, what did that say about our role there, and mine?
As Benimoff and other soldiers eventually discovered, The Purpose Driven Life was not helpful, especially as the war’s own purpose grew less clear. Since Vietnam we have learned that PTSD tends to hit people especially hard when they fight in wars of choice. Bobby Muller, the head of Veterans for America, told me it was difficult for soldiers to talk about the war in Vietnam after they came home; years later, though:
I would get in touch with some of these guys, and they all had to come to the realization, ‘This is bullshit.’ It’s not just the horror of killing, but its context. . . . If you’re fighting a necessary war, it’s awful. But it’s kind of what you got to do. Let’s take a war that turns out to have been unnecessary. And in fact your leadership betrayed you. That willingness to serve was betrayed by a leadership that lied and squandered that trust. The very moral fabric of your life gets ripped apart.
Despite its limitations, The Purpose Driven Life is still used in the military to inspire soldiers and ease doubts about their mission. Nobody forces soldiers or veterans to read The Purpose Driven Life, of course, but it is extremely popular. Paperback copies are passed around among soldiers, and one edition of the book was published with a camouflage cover, a savvy move by the publisher that helped tap into the military market.
In May Harper’s magazine reported that at a mandatory 2008 suicide-prevention assembly of 1,000 aviators at a U.S. Air Force base in Lakenheath, England, a chaplain relied on the book for his presentation. Warren’s inspirational messages did not always take hold, though, and one soldier, LaVena Johnson, who ended up killing herself in Iraq, according to military documents, had a copy of The Purpose Driven Life.
Many soldiers turned to the book for solace once they came home. One Kentucky veteran who had been wounded in a 2005 battle in Iraq kept the book in his basement apartment, but nevertheless tried to shoot himself and was admitted to a lock-down psychiatric ward in a VA hospital. Nobody believes that the book itself drove him and others to suicide or attempts to end their own lives, but its popularity is yet another indication of the existential despair that many soldiers and veterans feel after serving in combat and the desperation with which they seek help. Military culture places high value on self-reliance, so a spiritual self-help book made sense for Johnson and fellow fighters. But their stories show that, when faced with the immense task of coming to terms with the horror of war, an inspirational book such as The Purpose Driven Life, or a prescription for antidepressants, or any other simplistic approach to the problem, is inadequate.
• • •
The 2010 budget proposed by President Obama includes the largest funding increase for veterans in the past thirty years, and much of it is devoted to treatment of PTSD. The new secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Eric Shinseki, a retired general who was injured in Vietnam (and fought with Rumsfeld over the size of the force needed in Iraq), has shown a strong commitment to the care of veterans. Unfortunately, bureaucracies are slow to respond. After years of neglect during the Bush administration, veterans now have nearly one million claims pending, a record high for the agency. VA officials say that, technically, it is not a backlog, because thousands of claims are resolved each month, and thousands more are added. But none can deny that the situation is enormously frustrating for suffering veterans.
The political fallout from the Iraq war and the government’s failure to care for its veterans has been far-reaching. Shortly before Benimoff resumed his chaplaincy—now at Walter Reed—stories describing inadequate treatment at the hospital appeared in The Washington Post, appalling the public. “I was walking into an institutional crisis,” he wrote. “I’ll speak for myself when I say it felt like everything was broken. If the system was broken, so was I—a broken healer for broken soldiers in a broken system. God save us all.
Related Posts:
Short URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/?p=9415
Posted by Yanira Farray on Nov 16 2009, With 0 Reads, Filed under Vet News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
COMMENTS
To post, we ask that you login using Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail in the box below.Don't have a social network account? Register and Login direct with VT and post.
Before you post, read our Comment Policy - Feedback
This is the tip of the iceberg. I have no doubt that this is true and speaks to the dysfunction in the D.V.A. under Bush. However, lets be fair.
This kind of thing as always happened at the D.V.A. They are not people who want to pay out claims and they never have been. Not ever. Not under any President.
I certainly am not a Bush fan in any way. Do not misunderstand me. But this is not a Bush era problem. This goes back to the very beginning of this Republic and the very beginning of a pension system for disabled veterans, in any form.
The bottom line here is a cultural thing. Americans do not feel an obligation to pay large pensions to disabled former warriors and they never have. Not ever.
We have to realize that this is a cutlural thing with our people and all of our previous administrations, not just the nutty Bushites.
It is our job as veterans to educate our government machinery and our people that we have earned these benefits cleanly and fairly and have a right to them.
CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)
Ture. But like just about everything in the Bush administration, they made matters much worse.
And these guys actually targeted veterans for DoJ prosecution [like Keith Roberts] for pursuing a crime and invented new rules out of whole cloth in pursuit of their mission of denial of benefit claims.
There is no comparison. Bush and his fundies war mongers made were a disaster, even compared to past administrations’ deplorable records.
Religon is not the Problem… TRUTH is the PROBLEM… Once anyone talks “THEY” are considered mentally ILL. OUR Government and those who support “THIS” current government, “CANNOT HANDLE THE TRUTH!” Right along with the pack of “SHEEP” functioning here at Veterans Today…~~~~~~I’m still laughing at the SPIDER MONKEY AND “its” WIFE THE OTHER MONKEY…
The tip of the iceberg is right. I don’t not want a doctor to look at my past surgeries if they have not had a surgery of any type.
Been there done that, means a lot. Most of the people making the rules, still have all their limbs, ability to function in a crazy world and believe we (the Veterans) are the problem.
The military staff, always trains the officers to be good at their job, that is our responsibility as Staff NCO’s. Congressmen and Congresswomen don’t have a clue what it is like to do without, unless they served or have been homeless. Show me one member in a political office who lost their home, health-care, utilities turned off, been fired due to service-connected injuries, seen illegal immigrants given more rights and priviledges than our Veterans. They have not paid the price and they get to decide our future. How UNAMERICAN. I hope the VA Secretary takes a firm stance to help our Veterans.
Haven’t served, get out, you don’t rate.
Haven’t heard this statement spoken since the big wars. We should bring it back.
S/F
Gy Berg
Read a story in a paperback book called Very Crazy, GI (Beaucoup Dinky Dau. Anyways, in “The Price of Combat”, they said this bunch of GIs came upon this camp and found a couple of sackfulls of money, Dollars, Piasters, francs…etc. Well they thought about it and it ended up nobody said nothing about nothing, devided up the money and later on the author of the book got a feee drink for his story. This is kinda like the movie ‘Kelly’s heroes’ if you follow me. Ok in the old days it was to the victor belongs the spoils meaning that in a battle if you came upon a chest full of dubloons, well… and they didn’t have a system to take care of the injured in those days cause that’s the way it was. You fight for gold queen and your own survival and oh yeah, try to outrun the taxman. Maybe the Government needs to stop thinking in the 19th century and start buying in to this help the VET stuff?
So I’m thingking that is the VA’s thinking so hopelessly oiutdated that
Well, I am not impressed that this man has a Bible on his desk. This article just shows again, how out of touch these people are. Let them go and visit the VA hospitals, and take a good look around. I doubt they ever do. Faith in God is a good thing, as I see it, but it doesn’t work for everyone. There is a lot of suffering out there
First of all–that crap–as usual
second –Uhhhhh—Bush is NOT the president!!
Get a life
But Bush appointees unfortunately are still at the DVA making policy.
No, fortunately Bush is no longer President, but, unfortunately, his stench remains. During the last several years of his incredibly corrupt administration they used a practice known as " burrowing [www.washingtonpost.com]" (the transfer of political policy appointees to civil service jobs with the same control over policy) to insure that many Bush / Cheney policies favorable to various business interest close to the Bushies hearts would continue after their reign was over.
This was done hundreds of times in nearly every cabinet department and regulatory agency.
Find these types of trolls to be interesting, this one is probably no different then the rest from the previous eight years, then they kept blaming All the Extremely Bad Policies being done, or none at all in (R) congress, on of all things Clinton, now they want everyone to forget the Crimes Committed byt forget the cheney and his puppet bush, Didn’t You Bam!!!!!!!!!
One of the things I have learned about PTSD, is that it affects different people in different ways. Many things in common, but many different effects when analyzed. The heart and soul of the matter is dependent upon up-bringing. Guys from the inter-city ghettos are exposed to this type of horror from age one. Faith-based families raise children in a more pristine environment, and consequently, entrance into the carnage and wanton destruction of combat imbeds atrocious memories deep into their psyche! To them, it is as if plunged into Hell! The ghetto
dwellers still are affected, but not nearly as debilitatingly so. I suggest interviews of early life culture will help address the solution to PTSD. It is a cause and effect mental assessment – remember there are no “right” answers – only best alternatives. Treat the patient, not the malady!
Come Saturday November 21st HARVEST COMMUNITY CHURCH AT 44TH AND Teller in Wheat Ridge Colorado – we are having, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m., a Thanksgiving Dinner for our Veterans and their famlies — we will also provide free membership to our http://www.veteranschamberofcommerce.org; and introduce the many new legislative offers to help our Veterans in all areas of need -
John l4:12 “Because you believe in Me (TRUTH) greater works will you do than I for I go to My Father”
Alive and well
The War Widows
Veteransjustice@aol.com
303 238 1456
Dear Chaplain Mary Murphy:
I am interested in legislation that your group is proposing. I would also like you to look into the United States Code 38 Title 5301 that our state courts are violating everyday against our disabled veterans. SB 285 was passed in California relating to veterans benefits which was related to my HB 170 in Iowa that passed the first commitee here and then was shot down by a state rep that said the bill would hurt kids. These bills have nothing to do with the children of veterans. The VA already gives dependency amounts of disabled veterans for the children…….and yet state courts are giving away veterans disability compensation to non-disabled spouses? Nobody …meaning lobbyist or human services is advocating for the dependency amounts to be raised when the veteran is married………….they only get involved after the disabled veteran is divorced……..and their primary reason is money. These groups of people along with state courts are looking to gain finanicially while our veterans cant even afford a home to live………..and our congress and senate /America cant understand why we have homeless vets? I have your number and wish to speak with you on the issues. I am a disabled veteran and also a nationally accredited service officer. May God bless our defenders of the past as well as the present………because as plato has said………..only the dead have seen the end of war.
TO: Jerry; Your response is well grounded. Just a small comment. The welfair system found its self in a posistion of allowing FEMALES to be able to produce cash flow by having babies. Welfair created by Democrats and Republicians, in other words POLITICIANS. tHERE WAS AND STILL IS A SEGMENT OF POPULATION USING EXTORTION OF FUNDS FROM WORKING MALES, MANIPULATED BEFOR INPREGNIATION OF THE FEMALE COLLECTING FUNDS (GOVERNMENT IDENTIFIED AS child support). Our Government has and is attempting to shove results of its own actions down the throat of the male population, there by creating a retirement plan for females. Allowing the females to remarry and continue to extract funds from the male. Logically when one enters into a marriage contract with a female with dependents, the male is in a posistion to accept full responsibility for that female and her baggage. Not turn the prior marriage partner into a monitary fund supporting his joint efforts. This created conspiricacy to defraud under the permission of government. Allowing the government to creat another hugh burocracy using more tax payer dollars to creat a= system that makes working males into (their term “DEAD BEAT CRIMINALS”) Again allowing government to divide family thu LEGISTATION. THE GOVERNMENT IS THE CRIMINAL ANY AND ALL ACTION AGAINST ALL STATE GOVERNMENTS IS JUSTIFIED. ALQADA HAS THE CORRECT IDEA. USING THE BEST WEAPON ON EARTH.
STILL LAUGHING!
Michael McLendon is another VA appointee to the best of my knowledge has never served day one in the military. McLendon said that if we believed in God and country we would not come home with PTSD. Well, lets do some research and see if McLendon’s theory is correct. I take it McLendon believes in God and country, for now just ignore the fact that he has never served in the military or has been to war, so let the military create a special slot for this guy in Afghanistan and lets get him in the action for a year or so. Hopefully, he’ll make it home and since he believes in God and country he should not have PTSD; yes, right, McLendon, you sorry son of a bitch, just another fucking blow hard that talks the talk but fails to walk the walk when it comes to God and country! The audacity of this bastard and wasn’t he the one that was in charge when all the Veterans data went missing and he then resigned? This is all about the government having to compensate men and women for putting them through hell and then bringing them back and trying to shuffle them off into society! Many people credit Vietnam Veterans with making counseling socially acceptable to society, I am just one of the many Vietnam Veterans that took a stand and owned up to having PTSD, and I am proud of my small part in getting this recognized! It is not only the Bush administration that this shabby treatment and back door dealing on trying to undercut Veterans with PTSD has taken place, but coming from W Bush, a guy that played soldier boy part time and avoided going to Vietnam when called is so typical of chicken hawks like him, Cheney and this McLendon! It is not just the Repulicans either as the Democrats are just as sneaky and evil! Have you ever wondered why MOST, I did not say ALL, of the top leadership in this country does not go to war? Simple, one can get killed and if they are in combat or some other dirty job seeing lots of blood, guts and dead bodies, medics, corpsman, nurses, surgeons or graves registration personnel, it will never leave your mind!
YOU should talk to the “CHIMP IN CHARGE”
STILL LAUGHING???
You are a total idiot! How many dead bodies did you make in Viet-Nam? I helped make many inside buildings we bombarded. I saw the corpses we left behind. Did you not understand, THOSE WERE DEAD HUMANBEINGS WE LEFT THERE. I am not ashamed of my service for my country, and GOD is my only hope of stability in this world. You sir are a terrorist and traitor to your military service. Why don’t you find some other way to relieve your psychotic delusions, why must you try to make everybody as sick as you are. My nightmares are so bad I only know I have had one when I awake in pain or with my heartbeat pounding in my head as I have forgotten how to remember a dream since 1965-66 in Viet-Nam. You sir should shut-off your computer and expire with what ever dignity you can suck up.
TO: D J Blair; ~~~~All the things YOU are referring to according to all authorities holding power didn’t happen…~~~ Clearly YOU are delusional..~~~~On top of that The best and most efficient weapon against oppressive Government which is moving to over throw the Constitution is “human weapons” makes no difference where they come from or what they believe, “ONLY THAT THEY KEEP FIGHTING” YOU HAVE BAD DREAMS BECAUSE YOU ARE POWERLESS TO ACT AGAINST THOSE WHO CAUSED JUST WHAT YOU ARE REFERENCING IN YOUR DELUSION. EVERY LEADER(CIVILIAN POLITICIAN) KNOWS WHAT YOU HAVE STATED DIDN’T HAPPEN AND THAT SOLDIERS WHO TALK OF SUCH THINGS ARE JUST SICK IN THE HEAD AND NEED MEDICATION. ~~~~YOU OF ANY SHOULD KNOW BY NOW IN YOUR LIFE THAT THERE IS NO JUSTICE IN AMERICA. THERE IS ONLY AUTHORITY AND CORPORATE PROFIT, ALL INDUCED THRU CONTROLLED SLAVERY. PLATO AND HIS PARTNER ARE STILL CORRECT IN THEIR THESIS OF CONTROL CALCULATIONS. CORPORACRACY IS YOUR MASTER GET USE TO IT. ALSO “I AM NOT GOING AWAY ANY TIME SOON. I HAVE MANY SOLDIERS TO RECRUIT FOR THE FIGHT IN THE STREETS OF AMERICA SOON TO COME.
and LAUGHING, AND LAUGHING. TIME TO BOW TO YOUR GOD, CHRIST OBAMA, MAY ALA BLESS HIS HOLY SOLE.
The LONGER our troops serve in Iraq and do not get the support from the UN and NATO in Afghanistan, the greater the number of PTSD cases will be filed as these veterans enlistments from multiple deployments finally wear out. We will continue to ask FAR too much from our troops as the next few years drag on in those zones.
There is no magic cure, no financial short cut, no band aid for this level of psychic trauma. It produces unemployment, domestic abuse, substance abuse, homelessness and suicides. So — strictly as a bean counter, which is more financially sound ? Treating these survivors of wars with adequate facilities and programs or dealing with the extended fall out from benign apathy ? Ethics and morality are a completely different set of parameters for these petty bureaucrats.
If you actually took the established DoD and DVA numbers of returning veterans who will need some form of therapy program for PTSD and actually DID something proactive, I’ll wager it would be far cheaper in the long run to do the RIGHT THING initially than to wait five or ten years ( by then its too late for a significant number them ! ) and THEN come up with adequate programs and funding.
But of course, this would require COMMON SENSE and that my friends, is in tragically short supply these days !
What “THEY” are doing is great recruiting tool. Each can choose, and the choice will be execuit all district attorneys. Then work down the chain of civilian command. YOU ARE CORRECT COMMON SENCE IS IN VERY SHORT SUPPLY ESPICALLY AT THE MONKEY CAGE CALLED THE WHITE HOUSE. JUST TAKE A LONG LOOK AT THE HEAD CHIMP.
Just remember this, The bastards cannot take from you the spirit in which your service was offered to your country. Just because it was misused and abused does not distract from your personal honor. We do have an obligation to try to stop the killing now and to keep it from happening in the future. Overall you need to take the words given to Kris Kristofferson by his father to heart. “Try to tell the truth and stand your ground and don’t let the bastards get you down.
MONKEYS do not function in a common sence mannor. They only react, then look and wonder in puzzlement as to results which didn’t quite go their way. Based on prior history the primate presidental species will LIE to C.Y. it’s Assets. Just examin the actions of the U.S. Attorney. That alone says volums about the road map to socalism.
Hypothesis: The dominant values of Western civilization predispose individuals to PTSD when those individuals are forced to witness and commit acts of savagery. War is subversive. War mutilates individual autonomy and self-esteem. War induces sociopathic behavior. Only exceptional people can resist atrocity upon the self.
Your selection of the TERM “induce” is the dominate modifier. Governments around the world have used “inducements” to manipulate behavior. Now that YOUR certification backs my past writings here on veterans today. It is my suggestion that examination of actions in legislation which has and is altering the behavior of American. Actions tied to migration and race mixing induced thru a system of growing socialism, in acts of legislation undermining the recruit ability (into Military Service) of young Americans of all races. There by encouraging gang activity. Undermining the CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES. All the actions are induced by the OBAMA administration… Citizens are standing like clueless MONKEYS looking for their next stimulation.
Everyone in these articles seem to be complaining about recent issues, but we do have people that are still having issues with PTSD from the Vietnam War and nothing is being done about them. I guess until you shoot someone or throw someone out of a window (if you have or had a window) no one listens to you. I am lioving with a PTSD vet and everyday is not a good and of the military will treat your for PTSD but tell you that you don’t have it. I’m still waiting on someone to here Vietnam Veterans cry for help.
At al ages each is just lacking funds to lock and load on the ones that need to be torchered then killed. Get a clue. The ones in charge on the civilian side of the house are the enemy of FREEDOM.
President Obama will fulfill his promises to veterans in Denver. Support this man!
ALA bless him daily. The over throw of the Constitutional Republic of America will never happen without the promises of Obama, THE HOLY SOLDIER OF ISLAM, IN THE 21 CENTURY…
Bush is gone,…get over it……I don’t have much faith in Obama either. Took him over two minutes to address the Ft. Hood TERRORIST (ops, I am not supposed to say that) after addressing native American conference issues and shout outs and talking about the medal of freedom award.
There is “NO DAY but TODAY” & “NO TIME but NOW”.
Mike Leon,
I cross posted this article on Our Troops News Ladder, Iraq News Ladder, and National Guard News Ladder.
Of note, when I cross post on these sites links return to your original article here at VT increasing the number of reads.
Also of note, anything we cross post on the News Ladder system automatically gets posted on Veteran, troop and military family sites on Facebook.
Bobby Hanafin
Major, U.S. Air Force-Retired
GS-14 U.S. Civil Service-Retired
Veterans Advocacy Editor
Veterans Today News Network &
Our Troops News Ladder
Pfc. Lavena Johnson DID NOT commit suicide. She was Murdered!!!