SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street
The Warrior and Talk Back
Humanities and Sciences Department presents Jack Gilhooley's The Warrior, a play about a veteran of the Persian Gulf War and two tours in Iraq, and the damage her absence has done to her family, and to her mental health. After the performance there will be a Talk Back session which includes questions from the audience and answers. Preview for The Warrior.
Buddy Harris says, "We got Scott." The remains of Captain Scott Speicher are back home nearly two decades after he left for the Persian Gulf War.
Harris was Speicher's best friend. He is now married to Speicher's widow, Joanne.
Harris spoke to the media for about 15 minutes outside of the NAS JAX chapel where Speicher's remains were taken. He would not take questions from reporters, but said it was a heartbreaking day for his wife and children.
"This is the ultimate definition of bittersweet," said Harris.....Rest Here
JACKSONVILLE, FL -- The city, friends and military across the city gave a final salute this morning to Captain Scott Speicher.
The remains of the Navy pilot left the All Saints Chapel at NAS Jacksonville at 9 this morning, after military personnel paid their respects.
There was a steady stream of people through the chapel well into the night and again this morning.
The public salute to the fallen hero began at 9 a.m. when the procession left NAS Jacksonville for the Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Wall downtown.
"The wall, to me, is the altar of freedom in Jacksonville," said Dan McCarthy, the former Military Affairs liaison for the City of Jacksonville. "It is where we come to remember the bravery of the men and women who serve our country. We were here not long ago for Memorial Day. We were here for Purple Heart Day. Now, today we come for Captain Speicher."...............Link to Rest Here and More
Jon Kern, a teacher at Mandarin Middle School, waited 18 years to hear what really happened to Navy Captain Michael "Scott" Speicher.
During the wait, he made it his personal mission to keep the memory of the missing hometown hero alive.
Kern created the Letters for Speicher Campaign, which ultimately led to a book in memory of the Jacksonville Captain missing since 1991.................
The city, friends and military across the city gave a final salute this morning to Captain Scott Speicher.
The remains of the Navy pilot left the All Saints Chapel at NAS Jacksonville at 9 this morning, after military personnel paid their respects.
There was a steady stream of people through the chapel well into the night and again this morning.
The public salute to the fallen hero began at 9 a.m. when the procession left NAS Jacksonville for the Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Wall downtown..........
DU(depleted Uranium) has deadly after affects.Open your eyes and say NO to war.
Epidemiologist Rosalie Bertell (PhD, biometrics)explains the effects of the weaponized DU on the people of Iraq and the planet. In subsequent parts of this series, Dr. Bertell offers readily-accessible ways to detox some heavy metals and poisons from the body.
Their mission is to support you and your families by:
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Providing education and information about the benefits you have earned
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Assistance in obtaining your benefits
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Advocacy in issues important to our generation
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Camaraderie through locally based, national chapters
This morning, I was honored to speak on the Hill. I've touched on some of the same themes before, and will continue to push the importance of addressing the needs of women veterans. I'd love to hear your .........
Since 1991 the U.S. military has admitted to using depleted uranium in armor and ammunition on a large scale. But since then, a debate has raged about its long-term health effects on soldiers and their families.
Could one of the most effective military tools in their arsenal actually be harming soldiers?
Only 77 soldiers from Gulf War I and just four from Operation Iraqi Freedom are being tracked clinically. Jerry Wheat is one of them.
"I had a tumor removed in the 90s from my left arm that was in the bone, and DU stores in the bone," said Wheat.
Wheat said he has endured a series of health problems.
Fahey criticizes the testing methods, characterizing the results as a case of "don't look, don't find."
"So, they have structured their studies, in my opinion, to come out with conclusions that validate their spin, which is that DU is completely harmless," said Fahey.
Fahey suggested that because DU continues to be a critical tactical advantage on the battlefield, the military has a vested interest in keeping it there.
Jim Bunker, president of the National Gulf War Resource Center headquartered in Kansas City, Kan., said it was an honor to be among the thousands who served in the first Gulf War. But now he says, that same service has left him with unanswered questions about his health.
"I went into the service because it was a family tradition. It's something I always wanted to do. My dad was in the service, my uncles were in the service, my grandpa was in the service," said Bunker. "It was something that started over time -- having a hard time breathing, muscle twitches and later on muscle cramps. And nauseousness."
"It's virtually the same script as the Agent Orange saga that happened where you had people exposed to Agent Orange returning home, reporting health problems, and the government denying that, first of all, that Agent Orange was dangerous at all, and then entering this debate of who was exposed and how much they were exposed to," said Fahey.
Melissa Sterry's job was to clean them and ready them for storage. She'd climb inside the tanks and with a simple dust pan and broom, sweep out the Iraqi sand and the rubbish left behind by the tank operators.
Sterry was sweeping up something else too, something too small to see: dust from depleted uranium, a radioactive substance the military uses to make ammunition armor-piercing and bunker-busting. For months, Sterry cleaned these tanks without protective gear, kicking depleted uranium airborne and into her lungs.
Today, Sterry is a medical train wreck. The 46-year-old Gulf War veteran takes 11 kinds of medication — some daily and others as needed for pain — and suffers from chronic headaches, upper respiratory disease, bronchitis and a host of other ailments.
Like most Gulf War vets, the federal Veterans Administration refuses to test Sterry for exposure to depleted uranium or other chemical toxins she was exposed to in the Middle East.
So Sterry turned to the state government, and in 2005 helped Connecticut become the first state in the nation to craft a law to test returning combat troops for exposure to battlefield health hazards, including depleted uranium.
But the state has turned its back on Sterry and the more than 30,000 Connecticut troops who have deployed to combat zones in the Middle East and the Balkans since 1990. The Advocate has learned that Gov. Jodi Rell, through her budget office, quietly killed funding for the veterans health registry without telling the lawmakers who sponsored the program, nor the veterans whom it would serve.
If the registry isn't restored, hundreds of Connecticut-based troops could go undiagnosed and uncatalogued. The state has sent 16,000 troops to war since Sept. 11, 2001 and another 75 National Guardsmen and women shipped off to the southwest Asia last week, their second deployment to the war zone.
"People really don't care about veterans," Sterry says. "They really don't give a shit about us. People want to trot out veterans on photo-ops. They want to go put wreaths on gravestones. But real human beings with real life problems? No, we don't care."
Mary Jodi Rell (born June 16, 1946) is a Republican politician who became the 72nd Governor of the U.S. state of Connecticut on July 1, 2004. She had been the Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut until Governor John G. Rowland resigned during a corruption investigation. Rell is Connecticut's second female Governor, after Ella T. Grasso.
To Sterry, cutting help for vets to balance the books is just plain heartless.
"We understand care and maintenance of our military vehicles, but we don't understand we need to do the same for our troops," Sterry says. "Do you want to change the oil in the engine or do you want to replace the engine when it seizes up? These actions are just a reflection of, We'll just change the engine when it seizes up."
Rell's press office was asked to explain why they cut funds for the registry and to respond to reactions like those of Sterry that denying health screening to combat troops is cold-hearted. Despite four calls and one e-mail to the governor's press shop over three days, we received no response to our questions. The governor's chief spokesman, Christopher Cooper, referred us the Jeffrey Beckham, undersecretary for legislative affairs at OPM, who responded with this statement:
"That program was new and had not gotten started. The agency required some cooperation from the federal government to get it going and I understand that cooperation was somewhat lacking. Given that we were struggling to protect existing programs, we thought that not going forward with that new program was a reasonable call."
We asked Beckham in a follow-up e-mail to elaborate about the lack of federal cooperation and respond to the questions unanswered by the governor's staff, but did not receive a response by press time.
In April 2008, the Secretary of U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs established the Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans. The purpose of the Advisory Committee is to provide advice to the Secretary on the full spectrum of health care and benefits issues that confront veterans who served in the Southwest Asia theater of operations during the 1990-1991 period of the Gulf War. To carry out these duties, the Committee is expected to assess both the effectiveness of existing benefits and services and to determine the need for new initiatives and/or policies that relate exclusively to this population of veterans.
Advisory committees are used extensively by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to provide advice and guidance on a wide variety of programs that deliver benefits and services to our Nation’s veterans. Advisory committees operate as another component of the “people’s voice” in our democratic form of government. Some of VA’s advisory committees have been mandated by Congress to ensure that federal laws, as carried out by the executive branch, are meeting their intended goals. Other VA committees have been created by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to assess specific VA policies or programs.
Advisory committee members are generally acknowledged, by VA’s leadership and members of the veterans affairs committees in Congress, as “consumer representatives” of those millions of beneficiaries whose lives are affected each year by VA programs. Advisory committees must operate in compliance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). Advisory committee meetings at VA are generally open to the public, and notices of those meetings are published in the Federal Register.
One of VA’s principal objectives in managing its advisory committees is to ensure that committee members appropriately reflect the diversity of American society and the veterans’ population. Committee members are expected to have the technical, scientific and programmatic expertise demanded by the committees’ areas of interest and emphasis. Committee members are also expected to offer unbiased advice and to comply with all federal ethics standards.
Please send your comments on this page to VA Advisory Cmte
Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans
To provide advice to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs on the full spectrum of health care and benefits issues that confronts veterans who served in the Southwest Asia theater of operations during the 1990 - 1991 period of the Gulf War.
A powerful post by Scott Lee, a Gulf War veteran who blogs over at PTSD, A Soldier's Perspective, arrived on Friday. We Cannot Make it Through the Confines of Our Minds Without the Help of Others is so full and rich and speaks entirely to my current research that I hope he doesn't mind my reprinting it here to share with you:I am a Gulf War I vet, I felt the same as you when I returned home from combat. For me it was the total sense of feeling alive and being a part of my squad that I missed, although I did not figure this out until after 15 years of insanity.
The more I write here, the more blessings God gives me. Lately I have been talking with people on the national scene, some of the leading PTSD advocates. A high profile PTSD lawyer, some of the leading proponents in the veterans court movement, and authors. Such as the veteran blogger of PTSD: Winning the War Within, Ilona Meagher, who had commented on one of my latest articles. Additionally, Ilona has authored Moving A Nation to Care: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and America's Returning Troops. I do not think that she will mind me dropping her name (I hope).
Key testimony by Julie Mock of Woodinville, national president of Veterans of Modern Warfare, was edited for space from Thursday's story about the Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans hearing in Seattle.
But in this military blog, what gets edited to fit in the paper can be restored. Mock14.PDF
Still, the right people paid attention to what Mock said at yesterday's hearing at Seattle's VA medical center, the latest stop by a 14-member panel visiting city's nationwide as it seeks to help veterans of the 1991 Gulf War. On Thursday, Mock heard from the Obama Administration transition team, which is interested in what she said about rectifying 18-year-old injustices done to those veterans of Desert Storm.
Mock, who has service-connected multiple sclerosis, and her fellow veterans of the 1991 Gulf War continue to suffer disproportionately from chronic multi-symptom illnesses that include extreme fatigue, widespread pain, respiratory problems, severe headaches � to name a few.
"Now is the time to provide relief to Gulf War veterans who are essentially suffering from the neurotoxic effects of the human experiment of pyridostigmine bromide," Mock said.
Veterans all especially Gulf War Veterans Please post this on websites and forward to others that you know. We need a massive effort. The Agent Orange Vets and Atomic vets went thru this and unfortunately we are 17 almost 18 years in to this battle against our own government. I believe each veterans, their family members and spouses can have a huge impact if we all respond now. I am asking for three simple actions that each of you have the ability to do. If you think you cannt then think of General Mich, Major Donnelly and his family they were severly ill and in motorized chairs with respiratory support but they did not give up.
We may have gotten a bum deal so far but this is not about one of us individually but all of us and for the survivors that have already lost a loved one. This is about making a change now that will not be forgotten! You can do these three things from where you live for very little cost! But if we all do it in each state it must result in an impact!
For some reason each of us has some mission in our larger lives and maybe this is it.
For the current and future!
1. Tommorrow or tonight I am requesting each of the gulf war veterans and their families to write a letter to the editor of your local paper...you can find them all on line and can submit them on line. The American people need to hear from you the injuried what it has been like!!!! Tell them what your veterans day or Thanksgiving was really like dont hold back let the emotions and truth flow!
2. Then I also am requesting that if you live in your capitol of your state to hand deliver a copy of the downloaded RAC report to your governor.
Write a short letter and ask them to address the issue in an editorial, ask them to direct their legislatures to have one hearing with their Senate and House VA committee at State level.....ask for a resolution from your state house and signed by governor that 17 years is long enough that the gulf war veterans should get compensated and rapidly. Ask them to support the call for medical research funding thru the DOD CDMRP program as is explained in the report.
3. Then ask them the Governor to have a meeting with the gulf war veterans and the chancellor of your medical school in your state....Share the RAC report with them....Ask for a meeting with the heads of their departments....neurology, hematology, cardiology, immunology, bio chemistry, pharmacology.....Present the findings to them and describe to them the symptoms and problems you have had. WE need to actively find the best of the best to submit research grants in the next cycle....we just had one....but that is okay you want them discussing between departments and getting informed and forming a interdisciplinary team to work together on their submissions. Remember biomarkers, diagnosis, treatment trials(small at first to prove the point and effectiveness)....
YOU CAN MAKE A SIGNIFICANT IMPACT AS ILL GULF WAR VETERANS THAT Dont just want compensation but CARE and treatment and a way to get better and have a quality of life!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is how you can really have a mission!
This battle is not done and each of you can play a significant important role to help not only yourselves but other gulf war veterans.
Enjoy the article below and please get energized because to carry this thru and get the job done is going to take all of us working and doing a little each day....
YOU CAN AND MUST DO THIS...a
handful and a committeee RAC/Adv comm on GWV can not accomplish this without you
Sincerely,
Denise
DSNurse1.
President Bush surprised Congress by refusing to sign a Defense Department authorization bill, in part because the legislation could revive a lawsuit brought by American prisoners of war during the 1991 Persian Gulf War who say they were tortured by the Iraqis.
Their suit sought to establish the principle that war prisoners who were tortured in violation of the Geneva Convention were entitled to sue the country that tortured them.
By keeping the bill from becoming law, the president delayed pay raises for the troops and improvements in the care of wounded veterans. On Thursday, he pointed to a little-noted provision in the huge bill and said it could trigger a wave of lawsuits that might “imperil billions of dollars of Iraqi assets.”
Former POWs' and civilians who were tortured or held hostage during the 1991 Gulf War could pursue lawsuits against Iraq under legislation the House has approved.
The White House, saying the bill would threaten economic and political progress in Iraq, threatened to veto the measure if it reaches the president's desk. It still has to clear the Senate.
The bill limits total recovery for those held hostage to $900,000. Those tortured would be eligible to receive up to $2.5 million plus $6,000 for every day held.
