Veterans for Common Sense

June 26, 2008 – Jim Hinde was the real deal. He was born and raised in Ohio. He was a Vietnam Vet who rambled homeless and broke in the early ’70s, lived in the skid road missions, and rode the freights. He settled in Seattle as a father and musician, and wrote a whole bunch of songs. He became such a solid force in the Seattle busking scene that when he died unexpectedly the morning of June 9, the whole city gasped and half of the Pike Place Market went home early.

The wind blew real hard all that day. Jim didn’t like the hard winds because they reminded him of the typhoons when he was in the Navy. That was a time that haunted him. It kept him from sleeping and woke him up with night sweats–Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), the shadow partner that Uncle Sam gives to his military veterans. Jim would spend the last years of his life pursuing his claim for service-related disability benefits from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Not just for himself but for all vets. Maybe it wore him out.

Jim was one of the founders of the Pike Market Performers Guild, an organizing body of Seattle street performers. With his work ethic and background, he was an enormous asset for getting all the nuts and bolts in place to create and produce the annual Pike Market Busker Festival. Organized collectively, the Guild seeks to raise the profile and legitimacy of street performers, who by nature are a little outside the social norm. Jim could bridge that gap. The festival has now become an established part of the city’s culture, and busking a celebrated art form.

Jim Hinde loved the Pike Place Market and he spent a great deal of time there. One of his favorite sayings was, “If you’re going to milk the cow, you have to feed the cow,” meaning that if he was going to make his living there he was also going to support it. And he did. He won an Emmy for his work on the PBS documentary “Pike Place Market, Soul Of A City.” In his voice-over you can hear the love and connectedness. In many ways he was the voice of the soul of the city.

When the Iraq War kicked in, all the vets got a jolt of emergency adrenalin and Jim began his final campaign–countering the national jingo fever with songs of peace and social justice written from the perspective of experience. He knew because he’d been there. Songs like “Marching To the Border” where the singer says “no” to America’s war and heads for Canada, taking half the inductees with him; “Frank Dennis and Me,” about his old shipmates in Vietnam, and how marching to someone else’s gun kills the soul of a person; “The Perp Walk,” about the arrest of Bush and company for war crimes; and the great anthem “Shout Down the Wind,” a call for all of us to take to the streets and stop the machine in its tracks. Jim was a frequent presence at anti-war rallies and demonstrations in Seattle. As a member of both Veterans For Peace and Vietnam Veterans Of America he became a driving force for change. Before he died he was working as one of the main organizers for the national VVA convention. He never did anything he couldn’t give a hundred percent to.

When Jim began to work seriously on his PTSD claim he went to the VA hospital and was diagnosed with high levels of cortisol, a hormone in the blood which is a responder to stress. In combat situations this is the stuff that makes a person hyper-alert and helps them to survive. But over time it eats at the tissues of the heart, and in a PTSD veteran that hyper-alertness does not go away and the cortisol is always there. Jim died of a heart attack. A case can be made that Jim’s combat experience killed him 35 years later, like a real slow bullet.

June 26, 2008 – The Hollywood couple made the donation via their charity, the Jolie-Pitt Foundation.

The money will go to the Education Partnership for Children of Conflict and will help 8,000 children who have lost parents, homes or the opportunity to go to school.

Jolie is known for her charity work and is a goodwill ambassador for the UN’s Refugee Agency. She has visited Iraq twice in the past year.

The actress said in a statement: “These education support programmes for children of conflict are the best way to help them heal.”

The couple hope other Hollywood celebrities will follow their lead and donate a portion of their earnings.

“We hope to encourage others to give to these great organisations,” said Pitt.

During her last trip to Iraq in February, Jolie spoke of the urgent need for aid in the war-torn region.

“There are over two million displaced people and there never seems to be a real coherent plan to help them. There’s lots of goodwill and lots of discussion but there seems to be a lot of talk at the moment and a lot of pieces that need to be put together,” she said.

The 32-year-old Tomb Raider star is currently in France awaiting the birth of twins.

Their arrival will take the couple’s brood to six – they are already parents to Maddox, six, Pax, four, Zahara, three, and Shiloh, two.

Earlier this month it was reported that Jolie had given birth, sparking a worldwide media frenzy, but the story turned out to be a hoax.

June 24, 2008 – Air Guard members often do short tours of duty overseas, but still may experience the stress and brutality of war, said Cathy Cook, a retired member of the Vermont Air National Guard.

Because of their short tours, Cook said, the U.S. Air Force doesn’t give them a critical document — DD form 214 — which would recognize their service as active duty and make them eligible for the full array of veterans services.

Cook explained this problem to Dr. James Peake, new secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, during a 90-minute meeting Monday that Peake had with 150 Vermont veterans and their advocates at the Holiday Inn in South Burlington.

“That’s the first I’ve heard of it,” Peake told Cook. He directed her to provide details to his staff.

Peake, a Vietnam veteran and a surgeon, took over the top job at the Department of Veterans Affairs six months ago. In introducing him, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., praised Peake for crisscrossing the country to listen to veterans. Sanders scheduled Peake for a full day of meetings in Vermont.

“Promises were made to veterans in our country, but these promises weren’t always kept,” Sanders said. “Taking care of veterans must be considered a cost of war.”

Sanders, who serves on the Senate’s veterans affairs committee, urged the crowd in South Burlington to speak up. “If we don’t know what the failures are, we can’t do our job.”

A World War II veteran in a garrison cap asked Peake about the practice of “tranquilizing” people to help them cope with bad memories. He said he knew all about bad memories since he’d fought in Okinawa and killed three enemy soldiers.

“For the next 17 years, I nearly drank myself to death,” he said. He asked Peake, “Are we setting people up for substance abuse by giving people tranquilizers to numb their feelings?”

Peake said the VA is working hard to find the best ways to use medication to treat post traumatic stress disorder. He said medications often are intended “to give somebody a good night’s sleep without dreams.”

Jon Turner of Burlington, who did two tours of duty in Iraq, told Peake he believed there was a tendency to over-medicate veterans. When he sought help, he said he was given six prescriptions.

Nick Palmier, a U.S. Marine who served in Iraq, said the military overreacts when people seek help, seeming to view everyone in counseling as potentially unstable.

He said after he saw a buddy die, he saw a mental health counselor. Subsequently, when home on leave, he had to check in daily with his sergeant. Now that he’s a civilian, he worries his mental health record could prevent him from getting jobs.

Peake agreed that “just because you need a little help doesn’t mean you have long-term problems.” He recounted how two years after his tour in Vietnam, he was walking down a corridor in medical school when a jackhammer started up. He reacted by dropping to the ground.

“You bring up the question of how do we do what is right by people,” Peake told Palmier.

Constance Quintin’s story made clear the answer to that question wasn’t simple. The Richmond woman recounted how her husband received too little service when he needed it most. He committed suicide. She said her husband served in the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Guard for more than 20 years, including war deployments.

He had lived with bipolar disease for years, she said, but developed side effects that led to medication changes. Doctors couldn’t get his disease back under control.

“He was calling almost daily with concerns about suicide,” Quintin said. In his final days, she learned later, he rehearsed hanging himself, but again sought help. He needed to be hospitalized, “but there was no bed available.”

“It was a series of ‘oops’ that led to his death,” Quintin said. “I want families not to have to go through what I went through,” she told Peake.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Peake said. His department is beefing up efforts to manage high-risk cases, he said, “but I’m afraid we will never prevent every suicide.”

Peake fielded a question about what more his department could do to help homeless veterans.

“Homelessness in veterans is down 20 percent over the past year,” Peake answered. Still, he said, “Any single veteran that is homeless is one too many.”

The Committee on Temporary Shelter in Burlington has applied to Peake’s department for funding to establish a transitional housing program for veterans. Ellen Kane, grants manager, said the agency was cautiously optimistic about its application for capital funding to provide 15 to 18 veterans a place to live and wrap-around case management services for up to two years. The agency expects to hear in the fall.

“Put in a good word for us,” Kevin Maloney, homeless veterans’ chairman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, told Peake.

June 25, 2008 – On the eve of last month’s Senate vote on Sen. Jim Webb’s GI Bill, Patrick Campbell clicked “send” on one last lobbying e-mail to staffers. Then he broke down and cried.

Campbell, the legislative director for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, had started his message by laying out all of the latest developments on Webb’s bill.

In the final paragraphs, the Iraq war veteran shared the news that was foremost in his mind, news that he hadn’t shared with anyone outside his unit.

“Yesterday,” he wrote, “one of my buddies from Iraq committed suicide.”

It should have been a heady week for Campbell, a week in which the former staffer for Sen. Barbara Boxer (Calif.) and other Democrats shared a rally stage with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-­Calif.), saw the Senate vote overwhelmingly in favor of Webb’s bill and graduated from law school at Catholic University.

But Campbell and the other soldiers in his unit had recently received notice that they’d be headed back to Iraq early next year. And then, in the midst of all that was happening in Washington, Campbell got word about his friend, a sergeant who had taken him under his wing during his tour of duty in Iraq.

Saturday afternoon, Campbell walked off the stage at the Catholic University graduation, handed his diploma to his parents and headed straight to the airport to fly to the sergeant’s funeral.

In 2007, at least 115 active-duty soldiers and National Guard and Reserve troops committed suicide, the highest rate since the Army began keeping records in 1980. IAVA estimates that between 30 percent and 40 percent of returning war veterans will face “serious mental health injury” — especially post-traumatic stress disorder — and that those numbers are exacerbated by long tours and frequent redeployments.

Campbell says the memory of his friend motivates him to fight for better care.

A former student body president at the University of California at Berkeley, Campbell was on the Capitol Hill fast track by the time he hit his mid-20s. But sitting with co-workers at a Capitol Hill apartment on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Campbell had a feeling of helplessness that he couldn’t shake.

So he walked to the still-smoldering Pentagon and asked if he could help search for bodies. He was turned away, and in that moment, he vowed that he’d become a medic himself. After a few twists and turns on and off Capitol Hill, Campbell joined the National Guard in 2003, squeezing basic training into his first year of law school.

He spent almost a year patrolling the streets of Baghdad with his unit, dodging the constant dangers that accompanied every neighborhood patrol. Although he admits that his unit was “very lucky” and he did not have to treat any major traumatic injuries, Campbell treated many Iraqi civilians.

It wasn’t always easy being a former congressional aide from California assigned to a tight-knit unit from the Louisiana bayou, but Campbell said “the sergeant” — that’s what he calls his late friend, out of respect for the privacy of the man’s family — was the one person who would always include him.

“When we would raid a house, we would have to split up into teams,” Campbell remembered. “I could tell a lot of the younger guys weren’t too excited about kicking in the door with a medic by their side. But he would always take me. … I trusted him, and he trusted me.”

After their tour of duty ended in October 2005, Campbell and the sergeant went their separate ways. Campbell returned to Washington, where he eventually signed on with IAVA. The sergeant went back home to Louisiana, where Campbell said the transition to civilian life took its toll.

“When these guys go [into battle], they learn to shut down their emotions,” said Campbell. “What helps you in Iraq is now hurting you at home.”

During a particularly rough patch earlier this year, Campbell said, the sergeant received a letter notifying him that his unit would be going back to Iraq.

“It was just too much,” said Campbell. “[The sergeant] sent a text message to someone at the armory, and they sent the police to go find him. They found him in a boat a couple days later. He had shot himself.”

Campbell said the funeral was “wonderful and horrible” all at once. It was the first time the unit had been back together since leaving Iraq. But only the sergeant’s body was there, laid out in an open casket, despite a gunshot wound to the face.

Campbell said that the transition from military to civilian life often hits Guard and Reserve troops particularly hard. He experienced it firsthand. After returning from Iraq, he said, it took a full year of his own reckless behavior and an ultimatum from his best friend before he admitted that he needed counseling for combat stress.

Even then, Campbell said he didn’t fully break down until days later, when a preview for an Iraq war film sent him over the edge. He said he spent hours in the theater, crying.

At IAVA, Campbell is helping to push for legislation that would provide returning soldiers with mandatory one-on-one screenings with mental health professionals within six months of returning from combat. He is also working toward increased access to mental health services in rural areas, a particular problem for some of the soldiers in his unit from remote parts of Louisiana.

Campbell wants Congress to lead the charge for a holistic approach to veterans’ mental health, including help for family members and targeted advertising campaigns to reduce the stigma that soldiers attach to counseling. He has also fought hard for the passage of the educational benefits in Webb’s GI Bill, which is expected to win Senate approval this week. He says the benefits would give returning soldiers a sense of purpose and “a reason to get up in the morning.”

Campbell said he’s “still on the hook” for another tour of duty in Iraq, although he does have the option of deferring it. If he does have to go back, he said he wants to go back with his old unit, even if it is a man down.

Until then, Campbell said, he thinks of the sergeant every day as he prepares for work.

At the funeral in Louisiana, Campbell promised his fallen friend that every lawmaker on Capitol Hill would someday know his story. “The last thing I said to him as I stood over his casket was, ‘I am never going to let them forget you.’”

June 23, 2008, Washington, DC – Calling the issue “hugely important,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff today said the nation must fully integrate efforts to help homeless veterans.

“How do we reach out to them, and how do we create opportunities?” Navy Adm. Mike Mullen asked an audience of about 200 members of various organizations that make up the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans in a speech at the Grand Hyatt Washington Hotel here.

“I consider [homeless veterans] to be a hugely important issue,” Mullen said. “We need to do everything we can, as a country, to fully integrate our efforts to understand and help those – our veterans – who have given so much.”

The coalition, which is holding its annual convention this week, is dedicated to strengthening and increasing funding for homeless veteran assistance programs, ranging from employment to housing issues. It provides information about program development and administration, as well as governance and funding guidance to all of the nation’s homeless veteran service providers, according to the organization’s Web site.

Mullen shared his appreciation for the coalition and its work.

“I am incredibly grateful for what you do and keeping [homeless veteran] issues bubbling; not just based on homeless veterans of [the war on terror], but of the entire population and past wars,” he said.

Mullen spoke about his generation of servicemembers and serving during the Vietnam War era. Vietnam veterans make up a large percentage of the homeless veterans in the country, said Mullen, who received his commission in 1968.

He expressed his sympathy for the many homeless Vietnam veterans who weren’t aware of post-traumatic stress syndrome and who have battled unemployment for years because of the disability. He also revealed his concern for veterans of more recent and current conflicts.

“One of the things I said when [operations in Iraq] started in 2003, ‘As we go back to war and put so many people in harm’s way, I would do all I can not to generate another generation of homeless veterans as we did when I was growing up with Vietnam,’” he said. “I had no clue in 2003 that I would eventually be in the position I am in now, but now that I am, I’m anxious to help.”

Mullen reiterated his point that tackling the homeless veterans issue has to be a collective and integrated effort at the local and national levels among the government, society and nonprofit organizations, such as the coalition.

“The vision isn’t anything without execution,” Mullen said. “It has to be a team effort, and I’m truly grateful for what [the coalition] is doing.”

The coalition’s convention features workshops about issues such as public policy and current legislation pertaining to homeless veteran issues, reporting and regulation requirements for federal grants, and legal issues veterans may face.

The convention also will provide training groups focused on issues including employment resources for veterans, women veterans, early intervention and prevention of homelessness for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, incarcerated veterans.