Veterans for Common Sense

January 2, 2008 – On Dec. 12, at 10 in the morning, I was sitting in room 345 of the Cannon House Office Building, as Rep. Bob Filner called to order the Veterans Affairs Committee hearing on “Stopping Suicides: Mental Health Challenges Within the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

The hearings were in response to increasingly ominous rumors of soldier and veteran suicides (which the DoD and the VA have continued to deny), culminating in the dramatic CBS News report about veteran suicides released in late November. Finally, an entity with some insider clout had produced some hard numbers that attest to an epidemic of monstrous proportions. Even so, the bad guys, like Dr. Ira Katz, who is head of mental health at the VA, quibble about whether or not this is “an epidemic” or a “major problem.” “Why hasn’t the VA done a national study seeking national data on how many veterans have committed suicide in this country?” Katz was asked by the CBS reporter. “That research is ongoing,” Katz replied, looking a lot like Lucy promising not to snatch the football away again.

So, on Dec. 12, I and three other citizens found ourselves scheduled for the morning panel: Mike and Kim Bowman, whose son Tim, a veteran of the Iraq war, took his own life a year ago; Ilona Meagher, author of Moving a Nation to Care; and me — all of us, by the way, suicide survivors. We were to be followed by a second panel consisting of Katz and fellow apologists, who were supposed to eviscerate the CBS report and skewer us with their conflicting numbers. Without, of course, appearing callous, slimy or cruel.

Mike Bowmen spoke first, his wife Kim sitting beside him. Kim didn’t speak, but kept her hand on Mike’s back. It was such a simple gesture, but one that spoke volumes: Mike is capable of doing the talking, because Kim makes it possible. They are absolutely there for each other. And for their son’s memory. And for all the other parents who have already — or will someday — have to find ways to survive a death like Tim’s.

The Bowmans are devastated. Their grief is huge and terrible, and together they have found ways to give public meaning to their personal tragedy. Aside from giving such an inspiring human face to statistics so awful anyone would want to become numb and turn away from them, Mike mined his own experience and his son’s for those moments that had seemed most senselessly counterproductive if not just plain stupid. You can read the whole of his testimony on the Veterans Affairs Committee website, but two points, at least, I think are worth sharing. This first reminds me of those rebate offers that make things sound like such a deal, but are really so complicated and time-consuming to fill out that they know you’ll never do it: The VA currently protests that it can’t possibly be asked to take responsibility for veterans who have not registered with the system. They don’t know where to find them. Well then, Mike asked, “Why isn’t the VA sitting there when they get off the bus?” Why don’t they have somebody … with a computer and a desk, registering them before they can go home? They’re coming out of combat. You know that they’re going to need help. Sign them up right there. That way, you know where they are, you know who they are, and they’re in the VA system right away. Don’t make it so that the soldier has to go to the VA. Make the VA go to the soldier.” So simple. So obvious.

Mike’s other point was a simple intervention into military culture, and one that would go a long way towards undermining the age-old stigma that is the main reason soldiers don’t ask for the help they need: Instead of shunning or punishing a soldier who admits to a combat stress injury and asks for help, hold him or her up as a model. “Grab that soldier and thank him for saying, ‘I’m not OK’ and promote him,” he said. “A soldier that admits a mental injury should be the first guy you want to have in your unit because he may be the only one that really has a grasp on reality.”

When Mike and Kim Bowman finished, the entire hearing room came to its feet, and one after another, the committee members fell all over themselves thanking them for their courage and identifying with their pain. Even the Republicans, though they couldn’t quite hide their compulsion to hold soldiers responsible for their own pain. One of my favorites, Rep. Cliff Stearns from Florida, “in all candidness,” told Mike Bowman, “You coming here is good for us, but it’s probably good for you to talk about it.” And then did himself even one better when he suggested that perhaps Mike and Kim hadn’t quite lived up to their responsibility as parents. “The building up of the self-esteem is the key,” he said, “and the parents somehow have to convince him or her that everything is going to be all right, we’re going to work through it. And in this case it didn’t happen, and so, tragic and sad.” Gag me, Cliff.

Steve Buyer, the ranking Republican on the committee, shared a story about losing a childhood friend to suicide. “And there were no signs. There were no risk factors, he said. “It was just one of these bizarre strikes of the mind to just — I don’t have the answers.” Knock, knock, Steve. It does seem that spending time in a combat zone is, in and of itself, a risk factor that screams to be taken seriously. But Steve isn’t in an entirely conciliatory frame of mind. “As we delve into this issue, we have to also be very sensitive,” he said, “because I recognize there are anti-war advocates that also want to say that these individuals that then therefore commit suicide, who have worn the uniform, are somehow victims. And that’s not right either.”

As one of the anti-war advocates he is referring to, I would like to point out that he is conflating two entirely different positions: anti-war and anti-this-war. The two are not mutually exclusive (and I am a proud example of that), but they are different, and pretending they are not is simply disingenuous. As disingenuous as it would be for me to call him pro-war, if I could be persuaded to sink so low.

In fact, aside from anti-war activists, the other thing that seems to terrify this crew is socialized medicine. The VA, properly funded, could actually serve as an example of how universal health care might work. In practice, it has been bearded to look like just any old hospital, replete with exclusionary practices that are a caricature of the most extreme behavior of a private insurance company gone mad.

When after two hours, congressman Bob turned the mike over to me and then to Ilona, we did our best. We did not shame ourselves. In fact, we both had important things to say and (very much to our relief) we said them well. But the Bowmans were a hard act to follow.

The second panel, however, didn’t seem to have noticed. Anything. All Katz and crew wanted to talk about were the fine new programs that the VA has inaugurated — programs that, as Filner repeatedly interrupted to point out, obviously are not enough to stem this outbreak of despair. Filner didn’t even try to disguise his frustration and impatience with these apologists who complained bitterly about how mean CBS was being about sharing their research and the creative new outreach plans they have come up with to bring psychically injured veterans into the system: The agency, according to Katz, is writing a letter that should go out this week or next to all veterans, raising these issues.” Right, Dr. Katz. A letter.

After only two of the four panel members had given their testimony, Filner cut the hearing short: “Throw this away and talk to the Bowmans, talk to Ms. Coleman, talk to Ms. Meagher, and say, What are we going to do about these issues? You’re not doing that. I mean, you had the advantage of listening to them. Respond to them … I still don’t know what you’re doing for those people … You have not done the job. We’re going to have another hearing on this. We’re going to have another hearing on this. And I want you to come back with a better report. This is not very useful.”

That was, I admit, a sweet moment.

There are countless examples, one more painful than the next, of ways this administration has cut corners on soldiers’ and veterans’ healthcare. They have, with consummate cynicism, decked themselves in yellow ribbons, mandatory lapel pins and cheap jingoistic rhetoric while simultaneously sucking and siphoning off the VA’s already inadequate resources. Mike Bowman’s testimony alone is a devastating indictment of those policies. And yet Katz continues to insist, as he did repeatedly during these hearings, that the VA has adequate resources to manage a crisis the parameters of which they have yet to determine and the measures to be taken that might actually intervene in the mounting death toll not yet articulated.

I have hope that good things will come of these hearings, but if they did nothing else, they made a few things very clear. For one, the VA is a system in crisis. It has been deeply underfunded for way too long. It has a bureaucratic system that is adversarial to veterans. And though it employs many dedicated and humanitarian care providers, it is led by a bunch of flunkies who say whatever they think they can get away with to avoid taking responsibility for those Americans who honorably enlisted to defend their country.

The hearings also made it perfectly clear that people like me, a pro-peace activist, can find common cause with a military family like that of Mike and Kim Bowman. The Bowmans still support this war, at least in part because they need to believe that their beloved son died for a reason. I cannot support this war, but I too have a beloved son. I cannot begin to imagine the heat of the rage I would feel had my son died as a result of stupid bureaucratic neglect and mismanagement, not to mention skimping. I may not be in favor of this war, but I am fierce when it comes to taking care of those we sent to fight in our name. The architects of the war and those who implement their policies at the VA have to wake up in the morning and look at themselves in the mirror. With the deaths of so many of our children on their hands, I wonder how they manage.

Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam Veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is Flashback.

January 1, 2008 – MENLO PARK, Calif. — Master Sgt. Cindy Rathbun knew something was wrong three weeks after she arrived in Iraq in September 2006. Her blond hair began “coming out in clumps,” she says.

The Air Force personnel specialist, in the military for 25 years, had volunteered for her first combat zone job at Baghdad’s Camp Victory. She lived behind barbed wire and blast walls, but the war was never far.

“There were firefights all the time,” Rathbun says slowly, her voice flat. “There were car bombs. Boom! You see the smoke. The ground would shake.”

As the mother of three grown children prepared to fly home last February, she took a medic aside. Holding a zip-lock bag of hair, she asked whether this was normal. “He said it sometimes happens,” she says. “It’s the body’s way of displaying stress when we can’t express it emotionally.”

Numb, angry, verging on paranoia, Rathbun checked herself into a residential treatment center for female servicemembers suffering the mental wounds of war. Last month, she and seven others became the first all-Iraq-war-veteran class of the Women’s Trauma Recovery Program here. The oldest of 12 residential centers run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, it is part of a rapidly growing network of 60- to 90-day programs for female warriors who, until the Iraq insurgency, had mostly been shielded from the horrors of war.

Many who seek help are haunted by another demon that can exacerbate their battlefield stress: military sexual trauma, or MT. For Rathbun, 43, of Yuba City, Calif., the war brought back to the surface a long-buried secret: She says she was raped by a military superior when she was a young airman.

Shell shock. Battle fatigue. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The military’s mental toll of war has historically hit men. But more women are joining these ranks.

More than 182,000 women have served in Iraq, Afghanistan and the surrounding region — about 11{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of U.S. troops deployed, the Pentagon says.

That dwarfs the 7,500 who served mostly as nurses in Vietnam and the nearly 41,000 women deployed during the brief Gulf War.

Although some of those women suffered PTSD, few saw actual fighting or were subjected to the stress of multiple deployments.

In Iraq, “there are no lines, so anybody that deploys is in a war zone,” Rathbun says. “Females are combat veterans as well as guys.”

Darrah Westrup has treated hundreds of women since she founded the Menlo Park program in 1992. Only during the past year, though, have large numbers with war-zone trauma sought help. Many learned only recently that there are specialized VA mental-health programs for women.

Those who come, Westrup says, often have seen the most gruesome aspects of war. “Women are talking about dismembered bodies, seeing their buddies blown up in front of them,” she says. “They are trying to reconcile, ‘I have killed people.’ “

The ‘equal opportunity war’

Women are barred from ground jobs in infantry, armor and artillery units and are technically confined to support roles. But those jobs include some of the most dangerous: driving supply convoys, guarding checkpoints and searching women as part of neighborhood patrols.

Iraq is “an equal opportunity war” in which attacks come not only from enemy fighters, but also from roadside bombs and mortars, says Patricia Resick, director of the Women’s Health Sciences Division of the VA’s National Center for PTSD in Boston.

More than 100 female servicemembers have died and nearly 570 have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Pentagon. More than 4,200 men have died and nearly 30,000 have been wounded.

The ranks of psychologically wounded from this war are far larger. In 2006, nearly 3,800 women diagnosed with PTSD were treated by the VA. They accounted for 14{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of a total 27,000 recent veterans treated for PTSD last year.

In June, the Defense Department’s Mental Health Task Force reported that the number of women suffering from combat trauma might be higher than reported. It cited “a potential barrier” for women needing mental-health treatment as “their need to show the emotional strength expected of military members.”

The report also said that after leaving the military, “many women no longer see themselves as veterans” and might not associate psychological symptoms with their time in the war zone.

Yet Rachel Kimerling, a psychologist here, sees the signs: “Driving is so treacherous with the (roadside bombs) in Iraq, they come back and report seeing a paper cup in the mall parking lot and swerving around as if it were life or death.”

Many women become overly protective. Even the innocent pop of a biscuit tube on a kitchen counter can speed the heart, Rathbun says. When young soldiers left Camp Victory and didn’t return, she thought of her 21-year-old son. “Women are protective, nurturing. I couldn’t do either,” she says. “I couldn’t prevent them from dying.”

For some, combat trauma is complicated and intensified by rape or other sexual abuse, often by comrades they’ve trained and fought beside. The VA says 20{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of women seeking its care since 2002 showed symptoms of military sexual trauma, compared with 1.1{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of male veterans.

Like Rathbun, many say they were preyed upon by men higher in the chain of command, crimes military women call “rape by rank.” Rathbun says some women in Iraq risked dehydration by refusing to drink liquids late in the day for fear of being raped while walking to latrines after dark.

Recent allegations that civilian female employees of contractor KBR were raped in Iraq have renewed attention on war-zone sexual assaults. VA research on Gulf War veterans found higher rates of sexual assault and harassment than in the peacetime military.

The Defense Department’s 2-year-old Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office says there were 201 sexual assaults in 2006 within the U.S. Central Command, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s up from 167 in 2005, when the Pentagon began a policy that allows victims to get medical help without launching a criminal investigation.

Kay Whitley, who heads the office, says “restricted reporting” is expected to boost the numbers of cases as more women grow bolder in stepping forward. There is no way to know whether sexual-assault rates are higher in combat areas because “women back-burner assaults,” she says. “There may be more (assaults) over there, and they may be waiting to report it until they get home.”

For military women, abuse by fellow soldiers is “an unnecessary betrayal,” Westrup says, noting that women often are more scarred by sexual violence than combat. “Most go over understanding the nature of war.”

PTSD and MT “will exacerbate the other,” Kimerling says. “It erodes the social support you have to cope with the ongoing stress of serving in a war zone.”

Natara Garavoy, another psychologist here, says there can be added stress for those who are the only woman in a unit. “They don’t want to stand out,” she says, adding that some try to appear unattractive to ward off male soldiers who might not see another American woman for months.

Whatever their trauma, military women often hesitate to report problems. That’s partly because of the military’s ingrained emphasis on unit cohesion and the unspoken taboo against telling on a fellow soldier. It also stems from the fear of reinforcing stereotypes that theirs is the weaker sex.

“Women do have to prove themselves more,” says VA spokeswoman Kerri Childress, a Vietnam-era Navy veteran. “They have to work really, really hard to look tough.”

All that pressure must go somewhere, Resick says. Men with PTSD often are angry and act out aggressively. Women often turn inward and become depressed, she says. Both men and women “try not to deal with it” and often take years to seek counseling, Resick says.

Even so, men started applying to the 41-bed program for males here soon after the war began. Applications for its 10-bed women’s program picked up recently, Westrup says.

Seventeen percent of female veterans use VA health services, compared with 11{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of men. “We may be seeing the tip of the iceberg,” Kimerling says, adding that more women are likely to seek help as they return home with unresolved trauma.

Facing the need to get help

Lauren Bess was a model sailor who rose fast to master helmsman. Driving a Navy fast-combat-support ship in round-the-clock replenishment operations in the Persian Gulf before and during the Iraq war, she was “constantly stressed” by frequent “general quarters” calls to battle and going days without sleep, she says.

As her ship sailed home to Bremerton, Wash., in August 2003, she says, she began getting in trouble for shirking her duties. She constantly felt anxious.

“I was breaking down,” she says.

Bess, now 26, began drinking and stayed away from friends. Her downward spiral cratered the night she overdosed on prescription drugs and woke up in a hospital.

Feeling “like I was failing life,” Bess was put on limited duty and sent to a base in Florida for treatment. During a hurricane, she says, she was raped by a fellow sailor in a deserted barracks.

She says she feared her career would be ruined if she reported the attack, so she said nothing and never filed a criminal complaint.

In April 2005, she was given an administrative discharge under honorable conditions.

“In the military, they train you that your brother is there always for you,” says Bess, her head down, her hands shaking. “The person who hurt me was someone who was there for me.”

Bess moved home to Lodi, Calif., and tried to work through her problems, but it was “rough, really hard.” She finally entered the 90-day residential program here.

“Coming here was the first hope for me to get back to a new life,” she says. Bess hopes that by speaking out, she’ll encourage other women to get help.

Tucked in a corner of a VA campus here, the red-tile-roofed center is reached through a vine-covered walkway. Patients sleep two to a room in hospital beds brightened by stuffed animals and patchwork quilts donated by volunteers.

In a day room down the hall hang other quilts left by women who’ve passed through the program. One is appliquéd with military service patches. A Native American dream catcher is stitched to a quilt hanging next to it, a memento to snare the nightmares of war. In another corner hangs a pink quilt that reads, “Powder Puff Girls — Go Girls Go.”

“They make me feel that I’m not alone,” Rathbun says.

Starting with a military-style wake-up at 6 a.m., the women spend most of their time in group therapy. They learn communication skills, stress management and ways to short-circuit self-defeating behavior.

The most grueling moments come during “exposure therapy,” when the women recount the details of their trauma. The idea: to face fears head-on so they can become desensitized to the pain.

Easier was a trust-building exercise Rathbun and Bess performed. Melissa Puckett, a recreational therapist, asked the women to stand on a wooden board and, while grasping attached ropes, move across a room to pick up objects on the floor.

The two blushed as they fumbled to reach and grab a toy rubber crab. The exercise forced them to work as a team, or else fall off the board.

“You have to trust,” Bess says after finishing.

“How long since you trusted somebody?” Puckett asks.

“Ages,” Bess replies.

After more than two decades, Rathbun says she’s finally coming to terms with the rape that she never officially reported.

Last month, she told her husband, Larry, the Air Force veteran she married two years ago.

Nearly a year after being “sucked out of a vortex” in Iraq, Rathbun is on the mend. She knows there are thousands of other women who need help.

“We went over there and did a job, but it affects you,” she says. “There’s going to be a flood when we drawdown in Iraq.”

December 30, 2007 – Every time I hear about how Sen. Barack Obama is going to “re-brand” America’s image in the Middle East, I can’t help but think about Jimmy Carter’s toast.

When the idealistic Democrat came to Iran in 1977 to ring in the new year with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country’s much-despised despot, throngs of young, hopeful Iranians lined the streets to welcome the new American president. After eight years of the Nixon and Ford administrations’ blind support for the shah’s brutal regime, Iranians thrilled to Carter’s promise to re-brand America’s image abroad by focusing on human rights. That call even let many moderate, middle-class Iranians dare to hope that they might ward off the popular revolution everyone knew was coming. But at that historic New Year’s dinner, Carter surprised everyone. In a shocking display of ignorance about the precarious political situation in Iran, he toasted the shah for transforming the country into “an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” With those words, Carter unwittingly lit the match of revolution.

It’s just this sort of blunder — naive, well-meaning, amateurish, convinced that everyone understands the goodness of U.S. intentions — that worries me again these days. That’s because a curious and dangerous consensus seems to be forming among the chattering classes, on both the left and the right, that what the United States needs in these troubling times is not knowledge and experience but a “fresh face” with an “intuitive sense of the world,” and that the mere act of electing Obama will put us on the path to winning the so-called war on terror.

The argument usually goes something like this: Imagine that a young Muslim boy in, say, Egypt, is watching television when suddenly he sees this black man — the grandson of a Kenyan Muslim, no less! — who spent a small part of his childhood in Indonesia, taking the oath of office as president of the United States. Suddenly, the boy realizes that the United States is not the demonic, anti-Islamic place he’s always been told it was. Meanwhile, all around the Muslim world, other young would-be jihadists have a similar epiphany. “Maybe Osama bin Laden is wrong,” they think. “Maybe America is not so bad after all.”

Mind you, it is not anything this new president says or does that changes their minds. As the conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan describes this imaginary scene in his recent paean to Obama in the Atlantic Monthly, it is Obama’s face — just his face — that “proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.”

Or, in the words of the French foreign policy analyst Dominique Moisi, “The very moment he appears on the world’s television screens, victorious and smiling, America’s image and soft power would experience something like a Copernican revolution.”

As someone who once was that young Muslim boy everyone seems to be imagining (albeit in Iran rather than Egypt), I’ll let you in on a secret: He could not care less who the president of the United States is. He is totally unconcerned with whatever barriers a black (or female, for that matter) president would be breaking. He couldn’t name three U.S. presidents if he tried. He cares only about one thing: what the United States will do.

That boy is angry at the United States not because its presidents have all been white. He is angry because of Washington’s unconditional support for Israel; because the United States has more than 150,000 troops in Iraq; because the United States gives the dictator of his country some $2 billion a year in aid, the vast majority of which goes toward supporting a police state. He is angry at the United States because he thinks it has hegemony over almost every aspect of his world.

Now, more than one commentator has noted that on all of these issues, the next president will have very little room to maneuver. But that is exactly the point.

The next president will have to try to build a successful, economically viable Palestinian state while protecting the safety and sovereignty of Israel. He or she will have to slowly and responsibly withdraw forces from Iraq without allowing the country to implode. He or she will have to bring Iraq’s neighbors, Syria and Iran, to the negotiating table while simultaneously reining in Iran’s nuclear ambitions, keeping Syria out of Lebanon, reassuring Washington’s Sunni Arab allies that they have not been abandoned, coaxing Russia into becoming part of the solution (rather than part of the problem) in the region, saving an independent and democratic Afghanistan from the resurgent Taliban, preparing for an inevitable succession of leadership in Saudi Arabia, persuading China to play a more constructive role in the Middle East and keeping a nuclear-armed Pakistan from self-destructing in the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.

That is how the post-Bush “war on terror” must be handled. Not by “re-branding” the mess George W. Bush has made, but by actually fixing it.

In their glowing endorsement of Obama, the editors of the Boston Globe noted that “the first American president of the 21st century has not appreciated the intricate realities of our age. The next president must.”

True enough. But such “intricate realities” are not best dealt with through “an intuitive grasp of global politics” — Obama’s chief asset, according to the Globe — but through an intimate knowledge of those realities and of the nuanced responses necessary to address them.

Obama may possess all the intuition of a fortuneteller. But as chair of a Senate subcommittee on Europe, he has never made an official trip to Western Europe (except a one-day stopover in London in August 2005) or held a single policy hearing. He’s never faced off with foreign leaders and has no idea what a delicate sparring match diplomacy in the Middle East can be. And at a time in which the United States has gone from sole superpower to global pariah in a mere seven years, these things matter.

The main issue in U.S. foreign policy that the next president will face is repairing our image in the world. But in foreign policy, unlike advertising, image is created through action, not branding. Which is why one cannot help but sense a touch of shirking (not to mention a lack of short-term memory) in all this talk about “intuitive experience” and “re-branding images,” particularly when it comes from those who began the “New American Century” as ardent supporters of Bush’s wars and his self-advertised “gut” instincts.

It is as though, rather than accepting blame for the mess and taking responsibility for cleaning it up, they would prefer to slap a new coat of paint on the problem and declare it fixed. What is the best way to apply stain to a fence? well you can try spray which will good option.

It was “intuition” that made the mess in the first place. It will take more than intuition to clean it up. After all, we are not launching a new product. We are electing a president.

Reza Aslan is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside and the author of “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam.”

December 28, 2007 – The Department of Veterans Affairs is starting a multimillion dollar program at the University of Texas to study brain injuries among U.S. troops.

The program will use UT’s new state-of-the-art brain scanner at the J.J. Pickle Research Campus in North Austin. Initially, efforts will focus on the often invisible and debilitating brain injuries sustained by more than 20,000 troops, according to some estimates.

Identifying and treating the wounds is difficult because the injuries can easily be confused with other conditions or missed by even the most powerful scans.

Officials say they hope the $4.2 million program, which got its funding four months ago from the VA, will eventually expand into brain injuries among children and athletes, and possibly even into the physical causes within the brain for psychological conditions such as post traumatic stress disorder.

Dr. Robert Van Boven, the program director, said he envisions a place to test how well new methods of detection and treatment work, “and hopefully be the birthplace for new standards of treatment for victims” of traumatic brain injury.

Brain injury has emerged as the signature wound of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There, roadside bombs detonate with concussive blasts that can jar the brains of nearby troops. The impact can do damage that varies in severity, and the injuries can create a broad range of symptoms, some of which can take months to manifest.

The injury, like the brain itself, is poorly understood, experts say.

“It’s a virtually unexplored area,” said Michael Domjan, director of the Imaging Research Center, which UT opened in January 2006 before any talks with the VA had begun. “We’ve got a powerful research tool we’re pleased to see used to address a serious medical problem, one that is not limited to just veterans.”

That tool, which cost $2.2 million, is among the most sophisticated brain-imaging devices in the world. Van Boven said the VA program is the first to combine the three types of brain scans the machine can perform.

One type of scan takes snapshots of the brain during various activities, such as a question-and-answer session intended to test memory. The snapshots are used to compare how various areas of the brain are working at different times.

Another type of scan focuses on particular stretches of the microscopic highways that connect various portions of the brain and allow them to communicate. A disruption in those highways can manifest in symptoms such as inability to move a limb or to reason through complex problems.

A third type of scan will analyze the chemicals in a disrupted stretch of that highway to determine what, exactly, is wrong.

The combination of techniques is more precise than most brain scans, Van Boven said, and far more reliable than the standard method of making a diagnosis mostly or entirely on symptoms (which include emotional instability, inability to concentrate and balance problems). The symptoms can easily be confused or intermingled with those of post traumatic stress disorder, depression and sleep disorders, all of which require different treatment.

“In general, we’ve been overly reliant on subjective and nonspecific resources, such as interviews or psychological evaluations, to make a diagnosis,” Van Boven said. “When someone says they’re having trouble remembering things, that’s not a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. … The same problem exists for” brain injuries.

That assessment is shared by Dr. Jim Misko, a neuropsychologist in Dripping Springs.

“This is what the field has been waiting for,” said Misko, a member of the Brain Injury Association of Texas who specializes in treating the condition. “Rehab professionals are sorely in need of knowing which treatments really are effective and which ones aren’t.”

Some organizations, such as the National Institutes of Health and National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, have been funding research into brain injuries for years. But experts and veterans’ advocates say far more money and effort are needed to deal with the consequences of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Among the first tasks for the VA’s new program will be evaluating a series of computer programs created by Dr. Michael Merzenich, one of the world’s leading neuroscientists. Merzenich’s computer programs give the brain mental calisthenics and are designed to tap into the brain’s ability to rewire itself.

As a VA doctor, Van Boven is treating troops with brain injuries, but the program will not begin working with patients until its finer points are approved next year.

After everything is approved, Van Boven said, he will start looking in earnest for patients in Central Texas.

“These guys,” Van Boven said, “deserve real-world solutions, and we’re hoping to help find those solutions.”

Dec. 31: Last Chance for 2007 – Help VCS Fight Bush Veto of Wounded Warrior Bill

– – Please Help VCS Raise $6,000 More Today – –

Dear Friends of VCS:

For those of you who already donated this year, thank you very much for your support.

Today’s message is our last effort this year to raise money so Veterans for Common Sense can fight for our soldiers, our veterans, our national security, and our civil liberties.

We need you now more than ever because President George W. Bush announced he will veto the Defense Bill that contains our critical “Wounded Warrior” reforms that fix many of the problems that caused the terrible Walter Reed scandal.

VCS was the first group to raise the alarm in the press that a veto of the Defense Bill would block a much-needed pay raise for our service members fighting in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Please help VCS on the last day of our year-end fundraising drive.

What do we plan to do with your donation? Here are our 2008 VCS policy goals assisting our Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.

What did we do in 2007? Please read about our major VCS accomplishments this past year.  VCS fights hard and fights smart for news coverage and new laws to improve conditions for our veterans.

* VCS worked with Congress to improve and pass the “Wounded Warrior” bill, S 1606.  VCS also testified twice before Congress about the needs of our Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

* VCS helped get VA $1.8 billion to hire thousands of doctors and claims processors so our veterans get faster healthcare and benefits.  VCS also filed a class action law suit against VA to force them to promptly and properly assist veterans.

* VCS was interviewed by CBS Evening News to break the story about the suicide epidemic among our veterans. Congress then held hearings about this tragedy.

* VCS was interviewed by ABC News for the Bob Woodruff news special, “From Iraq and Back” in February and led the the eventual resignation of VA Secretary Jim Nicholson. VCS was interviewed again by ABC about the increased drug abuse among service members and veterans.

* Since our founding in 2002, VCS has posted more than 9,000 news articles and essays to our web site, educating hundreds of thousands of visitors and supporters.

Your donation may be doubled: A donor agreed to donate a matching $10,000 if our 12,000 VCS members contributed at least $10,000 by Dec. 31. So far we raised nearly $4,000. We need $6,000 more in contributions today to pay our bills for January 2008.

Please help VCS obtain these matching funds by donating to VCS today.

Again, I thank you for your calls to Congress, your interviews with reporters, and your generous contributions to us. VCS leads the way publicizing the critical issues you care about and then promoting common sense solutions because of supporters like you.

Thank you,

Paul Sullivan
Executive Director
Veterans for Common Sense

VCS provides advocacy and publicity for issues related to veterans, national security, and civil liberties. VCS is registered with the IRS as a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, and donations to VCS are tax deductible. VCS does not provide direct services to veterans.

December 31, 2007
Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the House
U. S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515

VIA FAX TO: (202) 225-8259
VIA E-MAIL TO: sf.nancy@mail.house.gov and AmericanVoices@mail.house.gov 

Dear Speaker Pelosi:

Veterans for Common Sense urges you to take action today to prevent President George W. Bush from using a dubious “pocket veto” to reject the National Defense Authorization Act for 2008, HR 1585.  Veterans need your assistance this afternoon.

Please place the House in session today for the public, the press, and the President to see.  Attorneys advising VCS tell us that if the House is in session, then the President must issue a formal veto today in order to properly kill the Defense bill.  However, if the House is in session today, and if the President does not issue a formal veto today, then the bill becomes law tonight.  This is an urgent plea for action today for our veterans.

This critical legislation contains the “Dignity for Wounded Warriors Act,” formerly S 1606, that provides extensive reforms to clean up the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal.  The Defense bill has bi-partisan support.  It passed the House, 370 to 49, and the Senate 90 to 3.  You have been a strong supporter of pro-veteran legislation.

VCS believes President Bush cannot use a “pocket veto” because Congress is in session.  Senator Jim Webb was filmed by CNN on Dec. 26 keeping Congress open in order to prevent President Bush from making any recess appointments.  Furthermore, your spokesman told The New York Times over the weekend that President Bush’s use of a “pocket veto” is not legally viable.  End the crisis by placing the House in session.

Congress must step up to the plate now and declare they are in session and fight for Iraq and Afghanistan war service members and our veterans who keep falling through the cracks because President Bush failed to plan for a long war with heavy casualties.

Sincerely,

Paul Sullivan
Executive Director
Veterans for Common Sense

Veterans for Common Sense is non-partisan organization providing information and advocacy on policies related to national security, civil liberties, veterans’ healthcare and veterans’ disability benefits.  VCS is registered with the IRS as a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, and donations are tax deductible.

The Defense bill is a disaster.  This disaster means more unacceptable delays in obtaining medical care and benefits for our wounded, injured, and ill veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Read the full Daily Kos article here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/12/30/20959/149/37/428122

Veterans for Common Sense Denounces President Bush’s Veto of Defense Bill

Legislation Contained Pay Raise for Soldiers and Benefits for Veterans

For Immediate Release: December 28, 2007 – Veterans for Common Sense, a non-profit non-partisan advocacy group based in Washington, DC, denounced today’s annoucement by President George W. Bush that he will veto the National Defense Authorization Act.  VCS, one of the main organizations fighting for the “Wounded Warriors with Dignity Act” that is part of the legislation, hopes Congress will quickly override the President’s veto in January 2008.

The Defense Bill, as it is commonly called, passed with overwhelming bi-partisan support in early December:

  * The House approved the bill by a vote of 370 – 49 on Dec. 12
  * The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 90 – 3 on Dec. 14. 

“With one stroke of his pen, President Bush ignored huge bi-partisan majorities in both the House and Senate who support our service members and veterans.  Bush is now on record as opposing a much-needed pay raise for our soldiers and Marines fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Bush opposes desperately needed legislative reforms prompted by the notorious Walter Reed fiasco,” said Paul Sullivan, a Gulf War veteran and executive director of Veterans for Common Sense.

“Our Nation has a proud tradition of caring for our military and our veterans.  President Bush has undermined that trust once again because he wants to block the right of a few of our Gulf War veterans to sue the Iraqi government.  Dozens of our Desert Storm veterans were prisoners of war in 1991, and they were brutally tortured by Saddam Hussein’s government.  These veterans earned the right to have their day in court.  Similarly, U.S. citizens and others waterboarded and otherwise brutalized under illegal Bush Administration torture policies should also have their day in court,” Sullivan said.

“When Congress returns in January, veterans expect that their first order of business will be to override President Bush’s disgraceful veto.  America and Congress support our troops and veterans, and President Bush should, too,” concluded Sullivan.

Additional  Background Information:

1. Dec. 26, 2007, Senator Webb keeps Senate in session: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/26/senate.pro.forma/index.html

2. Mar. 19, 2003, Gulf War veteran describes torture as prisoner of war during Desert Storm in 1991: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4155/is_20030319/ai_n12495573

3. April 4, 2002, lawsuit against Iraq by former U.S. prisoners of war: http://www.pownetwork.org/gulf/us_district_court{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}20_suit.htm

4. Sep. 10, 1999, National Gulf War Resource Center statement in favor of allowing veterans to sue Iraq: http://www.idir.net/~krogers/adviso~1.html

5. Undated, Gulf War veteran lawsuit against Iraq for illnesses associated with chemical exposures: http://www.gulfwarvetlawsuit.com/gpitts.html

###

December 28, 2007 – Chris Dana came home from the war in Iraq in 2005 and slipped into a mental abyss so quietly that neither his family nor the Montana Army National Guard noticed.

He returned to his former life: a job at a Target store, nights in a trailer across the road from his father’s house.

When he started to isolate himself, missing family events and football games, his father urged him to get counseling. When the National Guard called his father to say that he’d missed weekend duty, Gary Dana pushed his son to get in touch with his unit.

“I can’t go back. I can’t do it,” Chris Dana responded.

Things went downhill from there. He blew though all his money, and last March 4, he shot himself in the head with a .22-caliber rifle. He was 23 years old.

As Gary Dana was collecting his dead son’s belongings, he found a letter indicating that the National Guard was discharging his son under what are known as other-than-honorable conditions. The move was due to his skipping drills, which his family said was brought on by the mental strain of his service in Iraq.

The letter was in the trash, near a Wal-Mart receipt for .22-caliber rifle shells.

All across America, veterans such as Chris Dana are slipping through the cracks, left to languish by their military units and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The VA’s ability to provide adequate care for veterans with mental ailments has come under increasing scrutiny, and the agency says it’s scrambling to boost its resources to help treat post-traumatic stress disorder, prevent suicides and help veterans cope. It’s added more mental health counselors and started more suicide-prevention programs.

But the experience in Montana, which by some measures does more than any other state to support America’s wars, shows how far the military and the VA have to go.

“The federal government does a remarkable job of converting a citizen to a warrior,” said Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat. “I think they have an equal responsibility converting a warrior back to a citizen.”

“I can’t imagine that it’s only Montana that’s experiencing this,” Schweitzer added. “Our men and women are part of this country, and we have common experiences. It’s not as though the water we drink and the air we breathe in Montana make our experience completely different than everywhere else.”

McClatchy analyzed a host of VA databases and records, and found that mental health treatment across the country remains wildly uneven. While mentally ill veterans in some parts of the country are well tended, those in other places — especially Montana — are falling by the wayside.

The data and records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, included all 3 million VA disability claims in the nation and 77 million medical appointments in the agency’s health system in fiscal 2006.

At a U.S. Senate committee hearing last summer in Great Falls, Mont., a top VA official touted the success of the department’s mental-health operations in the region that includes Montana. But the agency’s records indicate that it ranks below most other regions in measures of access and success.

In fact, Montana veterans trail far behind their peers around the country on the two main VA functions:

–By several measures, the agency provides less specialized mental-health care in Montana than it does in most other states. Veterans seeking to enter the mental health system at Montana’s only VA hospital had longer waits and received fewer visits than veterans did at almost any other VA hospital in the country.

–Recent veterans in Montana with mental ailments receive far lower payments, on average, from the VA disability system than veterans in almost any other state do.

Adam Olivas, from the central Montana town of Laurel, had his post-traumatic stress disorder payment cut this month.

Olivas had been regular Army, and had come home from Iraq with a Purple Heart, shrapnel in his left side, ringing in his ears, back problems and the nightmares, hair-trigger responses and survivor’s guilt that are hallmarks of PTSD.

Since Olivas left the military, his life has been a blur of sleepless nights, drowsy days, nightmares, flashbacks, constant fatigue, spotty memory, counseling sessions and medication. He goes to work, goes home and rarely sees other people.

“I married Adam right before he went to basic training,” said his wife, Shannon. “The only reason I am married to this man is because I know who he was before he went to Iraq.”

His PTSD was rated a 50 in the VA’s complicated system, and with his other injuries he was entitled to a monthly disability check for $1,567. Earlier this year, however, the Montana VA benefits office sent Olivas a letter proposing to drop his PTSD rating from 50 to 30. It would cost him $2,600 a year.

PTSD is rated at zero, 10, 30, 50, 70 or 100, and the VA office in Montana, the McClatchy analysis found, is less likely to rate recent war veterans 50 or above than any other office is. The McClatchy analysis zeroed in on veterans who’ve left military service recently and most likely had combat experience in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The lower rating was a slap in the face, to both Adam and Shannon Olivas, who said that the last four years had been “absolutely horrific.”

Adam Olivas, who works in hospital security, and his wife, a schoolteacher, drove three hours to Helena to appeal the decision, assisted by experts from two veterans groups. A representative from the American Legion said that Olivas’ PTSD rating probably should go up, not down.

But the Montana VA office said that Olivas’ symptoms weren’t severe enough to warrant a 50, and that he’d gotten it only because of a quirk in the rating rules. The Montana office dropped the rating after it was allowed to do so.

Olivas doesn’t know how he’ll handle the cut in income.

“I can’t afford to pay for the gas to go to all these meetings and counselings and all this stuff,” he said. “Which probably isn’t going to be the best thing for me.”

More than 2,500 members of the Montana Air National Guard and Montana Army National Guard are among the 10,000 men and women from the state who’ve served in Iraq and Afghanistan or elsewhere in the war on terrorism, according to Department of Defense numbers.

“When they were called to active duty, they were running a business, driving a truck, working at a mill, teaching school,” Gov. Schweitzer said. “When they returned from being a soldier, they didn’t go back to a military base. . . . They don’t have people they can talk to. They are 300 miles away from their detachment, and everybody where they work didn’t experience what they’ve gone through.

“In fact, nobody where they work experienced what they’ve gone through. Their family doesn’t understand it well.”

Montana has more veterans per capita than any other state, and they return from war to a vast expanse with few hospitals and miles between the ones that do exist. The VA has only one hospital in the state.

Chris Dana’s suicide roiled Montana, which set up a task force to determine how a Guardsman had slipped through the cracks. It concluded that the Montana National Guard was following the national standard program, designed by the Department of Defense, to catch mental health issues as soldiers return from war.

But the task force also found that the national program is “deficient” because it doesn’t provide the vision or the resources necessary to pinpoint veterans’ mental heath problems.

Among other things, the task force said, the standard demobilization process is “ineffective for identifying mental health issues,” and coming-home briefings include such a blizzard of paperwork that things get lost in the shuffle. It noted that veterans are reluctant to disclose their mental health problems and that counseling is lacking and uncoordinated in many parts of the state.

Guard members themselves — more than 40 percent in a survey the task force conducted — said they didn’t think that they were getting sufficient information about the health benefits and services available to them.

The Montana Guard is working to beef up its demobilization process significantly, hoping to keep better tabs on its soldiers as they return to their small towns and their businesses, farms, schools and families.

As we approach the fifth anniversary of the quagmire known as the invasion/occupation of Iraq, many of us feel a need to mark this occasion with an appropriately momentous show of resistance. For the past few months, IVAW has been organizing “Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan.” From March 13-16, 2008, we will assemble the largest gathering of US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan in history, as well as Iraqi and Afghan survivors, to offer first-hand, eyewitness accounts to tell the truth about these occupations — their impact on the troops, their families, our nation, and the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Winter Soldier will require IVAW’s full attention and organizing capacity leading up to and during the event.

We would like to have as many people as possible attend the event and we are making arrangements to provide live broadcasting of the hearings for those who cannot hear the testimony first hand, as space will be limited. We ask all of you to help us to spread the message of the testimony, raise funds, and get more veterans and GIs involved.

We have been inspired by the tremendous support that the movement has shown us and we believe the success of Winter Soldier will ultimately depend on the support of our allies and the hard work of our members. Because Winter Soldier will provide a unique venue for those who experienced war on the ground to expose the truth and consequences of the “War on Terror” to the nation and the world, we are requesting that, from March 13-16, the larger anti-war movement call no national mobilizations and that there be no local protests or civil disobedience actions in Washington, DC.

Some leaders of the movement have expressed a desire to have a mass assembly to mark the fifth anniversary. Some have expressed support for a concert/rally. IVAW would support any events that do not interfere with the Winter Soldier hearings, our strategy, or goals. We would encourage our members to continue participating in events of the larger movement to end the occupation of Iraq, as we acknowledge both the significance and the necessity of such actions for movement building. IVAW will also arrange to make available copies of the Winter Soldier transcript highlights to support the various efforts of the antiwar movement.

We are thankful for your enduring support of IVAW and Winter Soldier. Let us all continue to think strategically and act in a spirit of cooperation.

In solidarity,
Iraq Veterans Against the War

IVAW Board of Directors
Camilo E. Mejia
Jabbar Magruder
Margaret Stevens
Phil Aliff
Jason Lemieux
Adam Kokesh
Liam Madden
Anita Foster
Jose Vasquez

Winter Soldier Organizing Team
Aaron Hughes
Fernando Braga
Adrienne Kinne
Perry O’Brien
Martin Smith
Lily Hughes
Amadee Braxton

For detailed information on how your organization can support Winter Soldier please write to: wintersoldier@ivaw.org