Police Trained to Help Veterans Through PTSD Wave 
by Mark Muckenfuss

Riverside police Sgt. George Masson can see it coming. He remembers what it was like 27 years ago when he joined the force.

"When I first got into police work, I recognized that the people we were often dealing with were the Vietnam vets," Masson said. "People that came back that were hurt. People who came back with certain emotional problems."

He's expecting another wave.

"Seeing what our country's in now and seeing some of the people rotating out (of the military), I said, 'This is going to happen just like Vietnam did.' "

Masson, along with fellow Riverside officer Phil Fernandez, recently organized a seminar focused on veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. The daylong session taught officers strategies for dealing with affected veterans...

Silicon Valley Executives Give Wounded American Veterans a Helping Hand 
By LJ Anderson / Daily News Columnist

Confusing paperwork, delays and fragmented services often characterize the health care system for injured veterans in need of care. Backlogs for disability claims can take years to settle in an overburdened Veterans Affairs system. Physical changes like spinal cord injuries and amputations require extensive rehabilitation, and a lack of available mental health care for veterans is a major health crisis, according to a Rand Corporation report. Many injured veterans have families and themselves to support, degrees to complete, jobs to find, and are expected to successfully adapt to significant physical and mental health changes - often without adequate resources or guidance.

There was little common ground, ostensibly, between several successful Silicon Valley executives and wounded American soldiers who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan. But Menlo Park businessman Dana Hendrickson and co-founders, Wes Rose and Patrick Corman, decided to find common and higher ground by launching Rebuild Hope (www.rebuildhope.org) in February of 2008, an online financial support network to directly help injured military and their families.

Q: Why did you and your co-founders start this organization? (continued...)

Oregon program helps Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans ease back into the community 
By Paul Fattig

From left, Kim Shelton, Bill McMillan, and Michael Meade will lead a retreat for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan at Buckhorn Springs outside Ashland. Photo by Jamie Lusch

For mythologist Michael Meade, healing a wounded warrior begins with a story.

Preferably a tale of war kept alive down through the ages, thanks to traditional storytelling by an ancient culture. 

"It will be a short story about war and cultures in conflict," he explained. "The way I work, these stories — a lot of them come from the Native American culture — occur to me when we start.

"After I tell it, I will ask the veterans where they are in this story," he added. "They gravitate to places in the story that help explain their own story. We then all work within the story. The healing begins when they understand where they are in the bigger story."  (Continued...)

This story is carried forward from Renewal tour of duty.
by Paul Newell, www.GreenRecovery.org

As Jon comes to his conclusion. I am already thinking of the most effective type of Green Recovery program for Jon.

Regardless, the slightest of sound, sound travels. And with sound, travels vibration. These vibrations are real. Allowing these vibrations to reverb is to allow a release  of spent energy. Spent energy must be released And with any action there has to be a reaction. This reaction cannot be suppressed. I could surely feel these vibrations. Although Jon in the event had indeed followed the orders that had been given him. His actions may have cut even shorter a life that was surely lost already. At the same time it was those same actions that had spared four other personel the same fate. As he concluded he sunk back into his chair and released heavy sigh and fell silent. I was exhausted as well with that. So we just sat for a few minutes feeling the heat of the burned down wood. The rest of the world just kept spinning with all its glory, leaving us in its wake, and seemingly frozen in time.

"Jon I am awfully sorry that you’ve had to go through these circumstances in your life. And I am glad that you feel trust in me to tell of them. I know that you would like to deal with your feelings and your trauma that’s why you’re here. You have already started this process by expressing yourself this way...

A Renewal Tour of Duty
by Paul Newell, GreenRecovery.org

The ”renewal tour of duty" is a duty to yourself. You have given your pound of flesh perceived as duty. Now you have a duty to yourself. That duty is to regroup with your energies your thoughts and your shattered soul. These are what I call personal recourses.

Example of one tour:  Jon

He’s traveled by train to meet me at Vancouver British Columbia. Said he was coming from Sioux City, Iowa.  Well I think it takes a braver person to want to confront their traumas before they can do any more damage. I’m not always sure what the Veteran looks like, so I’m standing holding a sign that say’s Green Recovery.org.

Jon hasn’t told me much about his trauma or about himself through our correspondence. Just that he was onboard the U.S.S. Cole when she was attacked and that had been the scene of his traumatic event. He did not want to talk about it...

Ask not what your Soldier can do for you; but what you can do for your Soldier.
By Paul Newell, Green Recovery 

According to CBS News, 120 combat veterans (home for 8 months or less) committed suicide in 2005 every week.  This is unacceptable! www.GreenRecovery.org was created because of the unacceptable conditions and futures that Soldiers face upon returning home from deployment. 

In January of 2007, I saw a report on CNN that became the catalyst to start Green Recovery. The article was a story about a homeless Desert Storm Veteran that had been wounded on disability and living in his car. This story was so compelling to me that I launched www.greenrecovery.org  - a non-profit, grass-roots organization that has been built specifically to assist Veterans decompressing from their Military tour responsibilities in a neutral environment. I am dedicating five years of my direct efforts to ensure that Green Recovery is a wholly effective support organization dedicated to and available to any Veteran in need of an effective healing process. 

GreenRecovery.org gives returning soldiers the chance to use time in solitude to reunite with themselves first and then to sort through their personal traumas without any outside interference or added hardships returning soldiers typically face when returning from the war. These Soldiers deserve a chance...

One blind veteran says the experience is all about "trust"
By Rusty Dornin, CNN

Left, Ivan Castro, a blind war vet, skis down the slope: "You know when you're blinded, you don't know what life is."

SUN VALLEY, Idaho -- Ivan Castro, a former Army Ranger, gingerly makes his way down the ski slopes, guided by instructors down a snow-packed Idaho mountain. For this Iraq war veteran, his goal is simple: make it from the ski lift down to the bottom of the mountain without falling.  

Castro is blind -- the result of a mortar exploding just five feet away from him. After he lost his sight, he says, he "never thought" he'd be able to do something like skiing again. Less than two years later, he is accomplishing a feat he never dreamed possible.

"You know when you're blinded, you don't know what life is. You don't know what's out there," Castro said.

Castro and nine other Iraqi vets blinded in the Iraq war were in Sun Valley for the Sun Valley Adaptive Sports program last month. The program is offered to anyone with disabilities, but there is a special program for veterans wounded in Iraq...

Illinois paves the way in Congress for better post-war care for war veterans
by Philip Dine, Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau 

WASHINGTON -- Barely off the ground, Illinois' first-in-the-nation program to help returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans deal with mental health issues is drawing intense interest from legislators who would like to see the country as a whole take similar steps.

In late January, Illinois began using state money to set up mandatory screening of all returning National Guard and Reserve troops for post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, and also established a 24-hour hot line for veterans having trouble readjusting.

''We should be doing it nationwide, and we should be paying for it at the federal level,'' says Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., who is exploring what aspects of the $8 million Illinois program can be implemented at the federal level. ''These are ticking time bombs. We've got suicides, homicides, domestic violence.''

Last week, Rep. Phil Hare, D-Ill., called on Congress to adopt full mandatory funding for veterans' health care - making it a legal requirement in the federal budget, like Social Security and Medicare...

A new wave of homeless veterans is struggling to cope

by Erin McClam and Sarah Palermo

Left, veteran Peter Mohan cries while speaking about a friend of his who was killed in combat in Iraq.

NEW HAMPSHIRE--Peter Mohan traces the path from the Iraqi battlefield to this lifeless conference room in Leeds, Mass., where he sits in a kilt and a Camp Kill Yourself T-shirt and calmly describes how he became a sad cliche: a homeless veteran.

There was a happy homecoming, but then an accident - car crash, broken collarbone. And then a move east, close to his wife's new job but away from his best friends.

And then self-destruction: He would gun his motorcycle to 100 mph and try to stand on the seat. He would wait for his wife to leave in the morning, draw the blinds and open up whatever bottle of booze was closest.

He would pull out his gun, a .45-caliber, semiautomatic pistol. He would lovingly clean it, or just look at it and put it away. Sometimes place it in his mouth...

Many of our veterans come home from war and have problems dealing with the transitioning out of warrior mode. This gets especially compounded when you are a reservist because you go from all out war right back to civilian life. 

by Johnny Waltz

We have too many veterans are committing suicide (average of 18 daily), committing crimes, involved in substance abuse, and homeless (300,000 average annually). There has to be a call to action to ensure our veterans are taken care of… enough is enough. Simple gestures by some veteran organizations and the calls for action in Congress have seemingly gone on with nothing accomplished. How many more lives do we need to lose?

Sgt. Joe Lorek took his own life at approximately 4:00am Sunday January 6th, 2008.  Sgt. Lorek was a two tour OIF veteran and under the care of the VAMC for PTSD and a back injury. Sgt. Lorek served with the Light Armored Reconnaissance units in OIF.  He had been discharged more than a year ago and was one of the Mentor Seven (Seven Members of a High School Class that enlisted together).

I encourage all to send a card to the family if they won’t be able to attend the services later this week...