As Memorial Day weekend approaches and we make plans to celebrate with family and friends, there are so many who will not be celebrating. They will, instead, be visiting Arlington Cemetery and hundreds of other cemeteries across the country where their loved ones, who paid the ultimate price for our freedom, have been laid to rest.

And then there are the “lucky ones” who made it home.

Go read the whole thing.

Nine Army officers received reprimands for missing the warning flags raised by accused Fort Hood killer Maj. Nidal Hasan as he rose through the ranks of the military.

The nine officers – all ranked lieutenant or above – were sanctioned with either oral reprimands or possible career-ending written letters of censure, said Army Secretary John McHugh.

The secretary said the officers failed to meet the “high standards” expected of Army officers when they supervised Hasan at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

The harsh sanctions “send a clear message to everyone that the Army will not tolerate such negligence and passivity in reaction to clear signs that a soldier is radicalizing to Islamist extremists,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.)

Photo credit to AP.

Read the whole thing.

]]> http://jrsalzman.com/2011/03/12/walter-reed-officers-disciplined-for-hasan-fort-hood-shooting/feed/ 0 http://jrsalzman.com/2010/07/20/another-walter-reed-amputee-returns-to-combat/ http://jrsalzman.com/2010/07/20/another-walter-reed-amputee-returns-to-combat/#comments Tue, 20 Jul 2010 05:39:14 +0000 J.R. http://jrsalzman.com/?p=264 Continue reading →]]> Capt. Dan Luckett of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division is assigned to one of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan, the Zhari district just north of Kandahar city, where Taliban attacks are common.

He goes on patrols, lifts weights in his spare time and is second in command of his company.

That may not sound unusual.

What is unusual is that Luckett is a double amputee, after injuries he received in combat in Iraq in 2008.

I encountered a handful of other amputees during my stay at Walter Reed who returned to combat. The vast majority were lower extremity, but a couple were upper limb, below elbow amputees (its a lot easier to go back as as leg than an arm).  Make sure you read the whole thing.

As the nation prepares to celebrate Independence Day with parades and barbecues, America’s veterans face a new tax on prosthetic limbs and other vital medical devices.

The health care overhaul passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama earlier this year contains a new tax on medical devices such as prosthetic limbs, pacemakers, and wheelchairs.  This tax, which its proponents claim will raise $20 billion over the next ten years, contains no exemption for the nation’s 22 million veterans.  In fact, Senate Democrats specifically refused to exempt veterans from the tax.

On March 24 2010, Senate Democrats rejected an amendment offered by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to the healthcare bill.  This amendment (SA 3644) would have prevented the medical device tax from hitting veterans covered by the Veterans Healthcare Program or TRICARE for Life.  This amendment was rejected by a vote of 44-54. All but five Democrat senators voted in favor of retaining the tax for veterans.

The medical device tax was one of over twenty new or higher taxes in President Barack Obama’s healthcare overhaul.  This permanent new tax is being collected now.

“On March 24, Senate Democrats had the opportunity to exempt our veterans from Obamacare’s new tax on medical devices such as prosthetic limbs.  But 54 Democrats voted against the measure.  They chose to side with the tax-and-spend crowd in Washington over our wounded warriors,”said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.  “This is one of the many reasons Harry Reid and the Democrats did not want Americans to read the 2,500 page health care bill before it was passed.”

You can get a complete list of all those who voted for it right here. Among the names are Wisconsin’s very own Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Herb Kohl (D-WI), two men who dont have a lot of support for the military.

You want to know what PTSD is like? I’ll tell you.  You have nightmares that go on for weeks.  Mine would always be the same.  Wherever the window was in the room in which I was sleeping I would see a bright white flash. I would wake up screaming to my wife “Get up! Get the f-ck up! An IED just went off!”  Sometimes I would just wake up screaming in agony as I relived the moment where my right arm was ripped from my body by an Iranian shape charge.  (I may not know what childbirth feels like, but I know what it’s like to go an hour with my arm ripped off without painkillers (I’m allergic to morphine).)  PTSD makes you paranoid as hell. “Why is that person staring at me?  Are they a threat? Where is the nearest exit? Why are these people so close to me?  Why is no one pulling security? What was that noise? Where is the nearest cover?  I need to get out of here.”  You lie wide awake in bed at night wondering if it’s safe to go to sleep or if you should get up and start pulling security. When I got home from Walter Reed and started college (a week later, stupid idea) I would often stay up for days at a time without sleeping. Eventually my body would completely shut down from exhaustion and I would sleep for 12 hours or more only to complete the cycle all over again. (I still cannot believe I got all As and Bs.)  Since I was injured in a humvee I am especially susceptible on the road to the effects of my PTSD.  I still get nervous and hold my breath every time I drive by a piece of trash or tire debris on the shoulder or median.  I avoid guardrails and broken down cars on the side of the road.  On a couple different occasions I yelled out “tire!” to warn my wife (who was driving) of a potential IED in the road. There was nothing there (no tire, no nothing).  One late night while driving home completely exhausted on our small two lane country roads at slow speed I locked up all four tires on my car to keep from hitting a cardboard box in the middle of the road.  At that moment I would have bet the contents of my bank account it was an IED.  That’s what PTSD is like.  At no point in time have I ever felt the desire or need to grab a weapon and go shoot someone or something up.  At no point in time have I ever grabbed a weapon and broken a law because I felt the need to protect myself. PTSD urges you mitigate the risk of events that happened in your life.  But if you’ve never had anything traumatic happen in your life, you can’t have PTSD.

If you can get PTSD from treating soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center then why the hell haven’t more people snapped?  Why haven’t all the therapists in physical therapy and occupational therapy, and all the staff on Ward 57 ran around shooting up the place?  They have seen far more wounded Soldiers than this POS ever did. My occupational and physical therapists, like many of the civilian personnel at Walter Reed, have been there since the beginning of OEF.  They have taken care of countless (probably hundreds) Soldiers with a variety of different injuries.  Missing arms (like me). Missing legs. Missing both. Missing parts of the face.  Severe burns. Whole chunks of the skull missing. Missing jaws. Ears. Eyes. Severe PTSD.  Severe TBI (traumatic brain injury) to the point that Soldiers would forget where they were going while walking the 50 feet from physical therapy to occupational therapy (they would be found wandering the halls unsure where they were supposed to be going.  I had a buddy who used to do that walking the 20 feet to prosthetics. My TBI is bad, but not that bad).

So why haven’t they gone crazy?  Because you don’t get PTSD from sitting on your ass around Walter Reed.  Not only is it not possible to “catch” secondhand PTSD, but it is not that kind of a place.  I would know, I was a patient there for nine months.  The place is simply not that stressful or chaotic.  When I was there my PTSD got better, not worse.  And I would be willing to bet my dog tags that I saw far more wounded Soldiers than sh-t bag Major did during our overlapping time there in 2007.  I regularly visited Ward 57 to give advice to the new wounded. Other Soldiers and amputees did it for me when I was there so I considered my visits “paying it forward”. I had daily physical and occupational therapy with other Soldiers.  I regularly partook in activities in and out of Walter Reed with present and past wounded Soldiers.  To say that this guy got PTSD from being stationed at Walter Reed is an absolute farce.  The people who are making this sh-t up have never set foot on Walter Reed, let alone met a soldier with PTSD.

In order to actually have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, you have to go through some sort of traumatic event(s) to have “post stress.” Can therapists be emotionally troubled by the things they hear from patients? Yes.  But you cannot catch PTSD from someone.  It’s not the f-cking swine flu.

I cannot tell you how angry I am right now as a former patient of Walter Reed.  It is an absolute slap in the face for people to use his time there as an excuse for what he has done.  It is an absolute slap in the face for all the wonderful people there who help soldiers every single day.  Some of the most kind, caring, and noble people I have ever met in my entire life work at Walter Reed Army Medical Center day in and day out helping wounded Soldiers like me.

To fallaciously say this guy has PTSD from his time at Walter Reed as an excuse for opening fire on a group of innocent Soldiers is beyond reckless.  It’s an absolute slap in the face for every caregiver and every wounded warrior who ever set foot on Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Update- Nov. 9

First, I would like to thank everyone who has been reading my thoughts and passing them around the web.  When I decided to write this it was not my intention to create something that would go viral.  I was simply blowing off steam and debunking yet another ridiculous claim by our fact-less media. Second, I feel it is necessary to address my rather colorful language in this post.  A day or so after I wrote this, I went back and reread it and thought “wow… I sure did swear a lot!” As regular readers (all three of them) can attest, I almost never include such expletives in my writing.  So how did they come to be?  It has to do with the way I “type.”  The IED that almost killed me left me with four remaining fingers, only three of which somewhat work (my pinky is just “along for the ride”).  So when I type something long like this blog post, I use my voice recognition software. So I’m not actually “typing,” I’m talking.  When I’m very angry and I talk I tend to throw around an expletive here and there, like any good combat Soldier should to prove his worth with the English language.  Unfortunately, such language tends to turn off much of the general public, and tends to retract from the overall statement being made.  So I decided to clean up the language to a more PG-13 rating so that it will possibly get bit more exposure.  Please realize I am not doing this so that I can get more attention, but rather to protect the good name of my fellow Soldiers and all the hard-working folks at Walter Reed Army Medical Center by debunking some of the BS being perpetuated by our media.