A Veteran's Story

[ohgeewhiz]

Edward Meagher joined the United States Air Force in 1966. He volunteered to go to Vietnam and spent well over 2.5 years overseas.

Today, Edward has the privilege of working with veterans coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

President Obama's message has been very clear. You stood up for us; we will stand tall for you. He's ended the war with honor, and he's brought them home, and he's doing the same thing in Afghanistan. He understands at a real gut level what these folks have been through.

President Obama has taken a wide view of taking care of veterans who have come back from their service. He's really addressing all their issues: the medical issues, the transition issues, educational benefits, jobs. They have to have access to jobs. They have to have job training. He's put real programs in place -- programs that work.

[stockholmer]

1. Disposable Soldiers: How the Pentagon is Cheating Wounded Vets

http://www.thenation.com/article/disposable-soldiers

The mortar shell that wrecked Chuck Luther's life exploded at the base of the guard tower. Luther heard the brief whistling, followed by a flash of fire, a plume of smoke and a deafening bang that shook the tower and threw him to the floor. The Army sergeant's head slammed against the concrete, and he lay there in the Iraqi heat, his nose leaking clear fluid.

"I remember laying there in a daze, looking around, trying to figure out where I was at," he says. "I was nauseous. My teeth hurt. My shoulder hurt. And my right ear was killing me." Luther picked himself up and finished his shift, then took some ibuprofen to dull the pain. The sergeant was seven months into his deployment at Camp Taji, in the volatile Sunni Triangle, twenty miles north of Baghdad. He was determined, he says, to complete his mission. But the short, muscular frame that had guided him to twenty-two honors--including three Army Achievement Medals and a Combat Action Badge--was basically broken. The shoulder pain persisted, and the hearing in his right ear, which evaporated on impact, never returned, replaced by the maddening hum of tinnitus.

Then came the headaches. "They'd start with a speckling in the corner of my vision, then grow worse and worse until finally the right eye would just shut down and go blank," he says. "The left one felt like someone was stabbing me over and over in the eye."

Doctors at Camp Taji's aid station told Luther he was faking his symptoms. When he insisted he wasn't, they presented a new diagnosis for his blindness: personality disorder. "To be told that I was lying, that was a real smack in the face," says Luther. "Then when they said 'personality disorder,' I was really confused. I didn't understand how a problem with my personality could cause deafness or blindness or shoulder pain."

snip

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Interview with the author of the above article

http://media.theworld.org/audio/050720106.mp3 (right click, save as)

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Branding a Soldier With ‘Personality Disorder’

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/us/a-military-diagnosis-personality-disorder-is-challenged.html?pagewanted=all

Capt. Susan Carlson was not a typical recruit when she volunteered for the Army in 2006 at the age of 50. But the Army desperately needed behavioral health professionals like her, so it signed her up. Though she was, by her own account, “not a strong soldier,” she received excellent job reviews at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where she counseled prisoners. But last year, Captain Carlson, a social worker, was deployed to Afghanistan with the Colorado National Guard and everything fell apart.

After a soldier complained that she had made sexually suggestive remarks, she was suspended from her counseling duties and sent to an Army psychiatrist for evaluation. His findings were shattering: She had, he said in a report, a personality disorder, a diagnosis that the military has used to discharge thousands of troops. She was sent home.

She disputed the diagnosis, but it was not until months later that she found what seemed powerful ammunition buried in her medical file, portions of which she provided to The New York Times. “Her command specifically asks for a diagnosis of a personality disorder,” a document signed by the psychiatrist said.

Veterans’ advocates say Captain Carlson stumbled upon evidence of something they had long suspected but had struggled to prove: that military commanders pressure clinicians to issue unwarranted psychiatric diagnoses to get rid of troops.

snip

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Barack Obama had been at the forefront of this issue. As a senator, he put forward a bill to halt all personality disorder discharges. But as commander in chief, he has done nothing to halt these fraudulent dismissals.

[Omaha Steve]

2. You beat me to the post :-)

K&R!

[ohgeewhiz]

3. Thanks, I do what I can when home alone doing internet.

I'm sure you have 1000 other god threads here on DU.