Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I believe Mr. Benjamin hit the nail dead on. I've seen how we treat our veterans. I watched this and other administrations cut badly needed veterans health care after we exposed soldiers to various chemicals and radioactivity. I've watched them deny the stuff was dangerous, and I've seen the results. One of my friends can only go the VA on certain days because there has to be a doctor of high enough rank present to even read his file.
Our soldiers volunteer to potentially give their lives. Their reasons are many, some are well thought out, others are not. Our soldiers voluntarily give up a fair chunk of their civil rights when they enter the military, only to face many broken promises when they get out.
If you're suffering from PTSD, or it's symptoms, there is a treatment that can help. Gary Craig, a Stanford trained engineer developed the process. It's called Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), and you can learn to do it on yourself. If your PTSD has progressed far enough, it's still wise to seek the help of a trauma trained psychologist.
Folks, I am completely serious. This technique has been used at the VA hospital in LA, there are video tapes of it. It doesn't matter how long you've had it, or how you got it, and I swear, you don't have to dig through, re-live, and dissect everything that happened. EFT will help you find peace and get your life back!
I live in NC, near Hight Point, and I am an advanced level EFT practitioner. I am offering to speak and demonstrate on this subject FREE (yes, I really mean FREE) to any group of veterans (from any service era) who asks within a 50 mile radius of my home. If you're 50-100 miles away, just cover my gas and I'm happy.
If you want more info on EFT, you can go to my website, www.kaywarren.org, or you're welcome to visit Gary Craig's website, www.emofree.com. At Gary Craig's site, the instruction manual is a FREE download. We both truly want the people who need this to have access. Our veterans have suffered long enough, and it's long past time for people to help each other out.
Kay Warren
Yes, the guy who sang "One, Two Three, What are we fightin' for?" He was a Navy veteran, and in the 90s helped set up a Vietnam soldiers memorial in Berkeley, CA. And at that time he said that blaming soldiers for war is like blaming firefighters for fire.
In fact, I toned it down. I try hard not to be one of those veterans who says, "If you never served, then keep your mouth shut."
But in this case, this woman is typical of the kind of callousness I had to put up with when I came home some 38 years ago. It hasn't gotten much better.
So I make no apology.
SR, good point. The average age and education of the NGs is older and higher than ever. Most of them that I've met are better men and women than were in the military when I was in. However, there are far too many impressionable kids who are getting sucked in. The damned military recruiters are going into our high schools now and catching these mere boys at an age where proving your manhood seems like a high priority. The recruiters prey on these kids and fill their heads with shit.
They think they are invincible and you can't tell them anything. "Army Strong," "The Few, the Proud, The Marines," the "Code" of Semper Fi and all that other nonsense gleams in their heads. Once they get to Iraq or Afghanistan, all that crap goes away real quick.
Now to the point of Benjamin's report: From about 1969 through the pull out in 1973, there could not have been more than a dozen idiots serving in Vietnam who thought we were "winning." That's when grunts started questioning their commanding officers. That's when the fragging started. That's when some gung ho lieutenants got shot in the back.
I agree with Benjamin's sources. Frustration over being betrayed by those in command and those in the Pentagon, who sent us to war, then fucked us over in a thousand ways, is a prime cause of chronic PTSD. After that, you tend not to trust people ever again.
Let me caution all the optimistic folks who seem to think that PTSD resulting from combat can just be cured with some new miracle method. Just get a good therapist, or go to the VA and talk to the counselors is good advice. But to say you are going to evaporate the mental triggers inculcated from combat is unrealistic.
I think people who talk like that not only have never been in a VA psych joint for a while, or served in combat, but worse, they want to believe in a quick fix and send the vets out the door cured. It doesn't work that way.
My father was a medic in Vietnam and I was born with severe birth defects due to his exposure to the chemical "Agent Orange" (something else the government tried to cover up after the war). I have a half brother that was born with a deformed foot and my sister was born upside down, but I suffered the most severe effects. My father also suffered from PTSD, most of which I didn't find out until after I grew up and my mother decided to tell me years later.
My parents divorced when I was six, this I remember, what I didn't know was that this was largely due to his PTSD. My mother told me stories of how she had found him sitting naked in the bath tub threatening to cut his dick off, or how he would disappear for days at a time and when he was finally found, he wouldn't remember who he was, or of the time he threatened my mother and sister with a knife while waving the bible in the air, all while I was asleep in the next room (my sister actually remembers this). My father was a brilliant man, he could draw, I remember watching him at the kitchen table drawing a picture of Jesus and thinking at the time "I could never do that". He loved motorcycles, he would take me and my sister for rides on his and he even converted an old Honda to a Harley on his own. He was an intellectual, he studied psycology under the author of the book "I'm OK, Your OK", and worked with mental health patients after the war.
He also had his quirks that I saw. He would get angry at little things, break our toys for apparently no reason, threw the dog against the fence and it bled out it's ear, all of which I'm sure was due to his PTSD. I am not telling you this to evoke sympathy for me or my family, I am telling you this because for too long the government has gotten to aviod taking responsibility for the messes they make. I don't want any child to have to go through the same things I had to go through, no four year old should have to see her father threatening her and her mother with a knife.
This administration learned nothing from Vietnam, not surprising since none of them served over there, as a result, they have recreated the same problems Vietnam did. We must not let this destructive cycle continue into another generation. We must not let any more brilliant minds be destroyed by a war based on a lie and callous politicians whose only concern is their own "legacy".
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
