Last week, I shared a tragic story of a veteran who committed suicide less than three hours after being assessed as a "low risk" patient, and was released from VA care. The carelessness of his assessment was largely due to a standardized questionnaire that was used to identify high risk patients. This is a serious oversight, especially when you consider the statistic that by the end of the day, 18 veterans will have taken their own lives.

Since these troops make it home from Iraq, Afghanistan or other battlefields alive, they are not counted as casualties of war. In 2007, 6,256 veterans committed suicide. That's about two thousand more than the number of troops who died in Iraq since the beginning of the war. And yet, these deaths are not counted among the war casualties.

We come together today to discuss one of the more disturbing things that the Administration has done recently...and for a President who claims he "supports the troops", this story is even more disturbing than usual.

It has his fingerprints all over it, however: laws ignored, rules rendered irrelevant, secrets kept from those who need to know—and ultimately, the cost of his bad decisions are being borne by those who have already paid about a high a price as could be possible in the service of this Nation.

Follow along, my friends, and I will treat you to a magic trick: one in which "Support The Wounded Troops" magically becomes "Screw The Wounded Troops" right before your very eyes...and while you probably won’t feel like applauding at the end, it’s nonetheless a trick you don’t want to miss.

As most of you know I am a totally disabled Army veteran. I have many medical issues and use the VA Medical system as my only health care. Last night my wife and I got to see for ourselves how the new system they have set up for "emergency care" works.

You used to be able to walk in like any other emergency room in the nation, but now you call a nurse call center, they forward your call to the local VA Medical center to Dayton, Ohio call center. The process was fascinating and encouraging, a human and a computer program. It sounds like trouble but it's not.

The VA rejected an Afghanistan veteran’s disability claim for PTSD last month, citing his membership in VoteVets.org as a reason for the denial.

I recently traveled to Madison, WI, to interview Rachel and Josh, two young Iraq War veterans about the health issues they've dealt with, due to poor accountability for both the private contractors who are supposed to be supporting our troops, and for the mental health needs of returning soldiers.

When I interviewed Josh about his difficulties seeking help for his PTSD, he recounted the whole horrific process with a smile on his face and a self-effacing laugh. It took me a while to realize that Josh laughed about his troubles because the seriousness of the situation was overpowering. Unfortunately, even the VA is starting to turn its back on the gravity of this problem, even as it escalates to frightening proportions.

Stay tuned to the Progressive Future website, as we will be launching these videos in the near future.

VA Secretary James Peake continued to show little respect for the service of America’s newest veterans yesterday by dismissing concerns about the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI) in troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.  

Speaking alongside Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) in a remote Alaskan village, Peake first used the word "overblown" when discussing PTSD and TBI and then made a "football" comparison.

(cross-posted at Cure This, a community blog centered around health justice)

On Memorial Day, Helen Benedict writes about the challenges facing our women warriors as they return home from duty.  She follows up with a strong call to action.  From "For Women Warriors, Deep Wounds, Little Care":

Women make up some 15 percent of the United States active duty forces, and 11 percent of the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly a third of female veterans say they were sexually assaulted or raped while in the military, and 71 percent to 90 percent say they were sexually harassed by the men with whom they served.

Unbelievable.

(more after the jump...)

(Promoted by MissLaura)

On Memorial Day weekend, Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) and VA Secretary James Peake stood side-by-side in Fairbanks, Alaska to showcase their opposition to--and lack of respect for--today’s newest veterans.

Speaking at the Disabled American Veterans’ 19th Annual Department Convention, Senator Stevens told the majority of America’s most recent war veterans that they had not yet sacrificed enough to have earned a GI Bill that would cover the full cost of their educations.  

Sen. Ted Stevens warned of a "mass exodus" from the military Saturday if the so-called 21st Century GI Bill goes into law without major changes.
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"There are worries that people who are already in for two years will serve one more and leave, and there’s really no incentive to stay," Stevens said.

What Stevens is really saying is that today's troops are unpatriotic--that they're only in it for the money and the college.  And while Stevens’ "mass exodus" theory has been thoroughly discredited by the Congressional Budget Office, the true irony of the situation lies in the fact that Stevens earned his own college degree after World War Two by using the same GI Bill he’s aiming to prevent today’s veterans from receiving.  

At the same convention, VA Secretary James Peake--who is already under fire for the cover-up of an extraordinary number of veteran suicides and for overseeing an organization that may not be taking PTSD seriously--showed a stunning lack of situational awareness by discounting recent media reports and think tank studies by suggesting that fewer returning vets actually had PTSD than is commonly thought.

On the topic of PTSD, Peake questioned if the condition is being overdiagnosed, considering the mental health services available to those in the armed forces.

"I worry about labeling all these kids coming back," he said. "Just because someone might need a little counseling when they get back, doesn’t mean they need the PTSD label their whole lives."

The only reason Peake worries about "labeling all these kids" is because he understands neither the cause of combat PTSD nor how it should be treated.  If Peake viewed PTSD as a combat injury sustained in theater--as the troops and the psychiatrists do--then he wouldn’t worry about the "stigma."  As it stands now, Peake is apparently content to perpetuate the myth of the "crazy, unstable vet guy."  In fact, what Peake--a former contractor--is saying directly contradicts the message of VA psychiatrists like Jonathan Shay:

The American Psychiatric Association has saddled us with the jargon "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" (PTSD)--which sounds like an ailment--even though it is evident from the definition that what we are dealing with is an injury. . .We do not refer to a veteran who has had an arm blown off by a grenade as suffering from "Missing Army Disorder." [. . .]  Combat PTSD is a war injury.  Veterans with combat PTSD are war wounded, carrying the burdens of sacrifice for the rest of us as surely as the amputees, the burned, the blind, and the paralyzed carry them.

To say the least, it’s alarming that the VA Secretary doesn’t get this.

Unfortunately, this double-barreled blast of disrespect for the service of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans on Memorial Day weekend from a Republican Senator and a Bush appointee is not unexpected.  We’re used to it.  However, it should provide all of us with an extra jolt of motivation to rid our nation of those who hold today’s troops in such contempt.
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Also available at VetVoice

For nearly five years -- long before I started doing it recently at DailyKos -- Editor & Publisher has tracked the growing number of suicides among U.S. military personnel in Iraq and after they return home. The deaths are usually branded as simply from "nonhostile" causes by the Pentagon, and the real news often emerges only from local newspapers (yesterday's account concerning a murder/suicide was an exception)

Now it has happened again, via an opinion piece in the Anchorage Daily News.

http://www.adn.com/...

There, Soren Wuerth tells the story of a friend named Merlin, who had graduated from the village school where Wuerth teaches. Merlin had returned to the school, where he had run cross country, to proudly talk about joining the Army and surviving basic training.

The epidemic of suicides among veterans of the Iraq war with PTSD has become so common that I sat down to write about two news ones today and end up writing about an even more recent, and shocking, one.  It involves a decorated vet who wrote about his PTSD for the Marine Corps Gazette-- and this week killed himself and his brother after a long police chase in Arizona.

Police have discovered no motive for the killings, nor why the brothers earlier in the week may have planned to commit suicide by driving into the Grand Canyon -- Thelma and Louise style.

Staff Sgt. Travis Twiggs, 36, who enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1993 and held the combat action ribbon -- and  met President Bush a few weeks ago --  wrote a lengthy article in the January issue of the Marine Corps Gazette detailing his efforts to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder.   He loved his country so much he named his son America, The Arizona Republic reports today.

Reading Brandon Friedman's excellent diaries about the VA e-mail controversy, I was struck by the manipulation of language that is occurring yet again in discussion of the combat condition that occurs after the human body is subjected to the physical and mental stresses of war. I was reminded of a George Carlin stand up routine which really spoke to the history of the language behind "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder". Follow me below the fold for a look at how language is once again being "used to squeeze all the humanity out" of a very human reaction to the stress of war.

Senator Barack Obama involved himself in the VA email situation today by sending a letter to VA Secretary James Peake demanding an investigation into whether or not the Department of Veterans Affairs is under-diagnosing combat-related PTSD as a cost-cutting measure.  Obama then requested hearings on the matter and, within hours, those requests were granted by the chairmen of the House and Senate Veterans Affairs Committees.

[Cross-posted from www.progressivefuture.org]

This entire week, I've been blogging my interview with Rachel, a formerly deployed soldier in Iraq, who has been brave enough to share her experiences with contractor abuse and the harm it is causing our troops. Her testimony has placed a spotlight on the need for policies that truly support the troops in practice, not just in rhetoric. For as much as the current administration uses empty talking points such as "protect of our national security" and "support the troops" to justify its policies, when it comes down to it, our leaders clearly view the well-being of the soldiers on the front lines as an afterthought to the profits they and their cronies have reaped from the war. In this final entry, Rachel weighs in on the need for accountability:

Updates (including links) below. . . .

This is from a joint VoteVets.org/ CREW statement this morning:

Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and VoteVets.org released an e-mail obtained from a Veterans Affairs (VA) employee directing VA staff to refrain from diagnosing soldiers and veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

On March 20, 2008 a VA hospital’s PTSD program coordinator sent an e-mail to a number of VA employees, including psychologists, social workers, and a psychiatrist stating that due to an increased number of "compensation seeking veterans," the staff should "refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out" and they should "R/O [rule out] PTSD" and consider a diagnosis of "Adjustment Disorder" instead.

Here’s the actual email:

Yet another veteran of the Iraq war committed suicide over the weekend.  

The subject of U.S. military veterans suicides, which I have been covered at E&P for nearly five years,  has finally become a hot media topic in recent days, peaking last week with hearings in Congress concerning the surprisingly high suicide rate (about 1000 attempts per month) and the Veterans Affairs apparent efforts to obscure the true numbers.  

The San Francisco Chronicle is out today with a shocking report:  In California in 2006, 666 veterans committed suicide - 21 percent of the 3,198 suicides that year, according to the California Department of Public Health. Yet that year, the 2.1 million veterans in the state represented only 6 percent of the state's 37.1 million residents.

Cross posted at Turn Maine Blue

Our Senator, our friend from up in northern Maine, has another video out, one that I'm sure you will want to share:

Thanks to the hard work of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, there is a list of votes by Susan Collins that shows how much she supports our nation's veterans. See some of the list below the fold:

When a World War II vet sends a message by shooting himself in the head outside a VA clinic, it’s a sign that things are going fairly poorly.

A group of Marines ogling a pinup girl outside their bunkers in Khe Sanh, South Vietnam, in January 1968

Targetting Congressional Pages or Toe Tapping in public bathroom stalls is just fine and dandy, as well as giving male prostitutes seemingly unlimitted access to the White House Press Room and only rove knows where else, and the other numorous sex related adventures of mostly republican congressmen, bet the women have a few little secrets themselves.

But shockingly, once again, after being the Lead Cheerleaders, along with their equally sex confused talking heads, o'really are you listening, you to fatboy cyst, to the extremely failed policy of Wars/Occupations Of Choice we get this: