Families Bear Brunt of Deployment Strains

Families Bear Brunt of Deployment Strains


By JAMES DAO and CATRIN EINHORN
Published: December 30, 2010
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CloseLinkedinDiggMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalink WAUTOMA, Wis. — Life changed for Shawn Eisch with a phone call last January. His youngest brother, Brian, a soldier and single father, had just received orders to deploy from Fort Drum, N.Y., to Afghanistan and was mulling who might take his two boys for a year. Shawn volunteered.

A Year at War
The Home Front

Articles in this series are chronicling the yearlong deployment of the First Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, based in Kunduz Province, Afghanistan. The series follows the battalion’s part in the surge in northern Afghanistan and the impact of war on individual soldiers and their families back home.

So began a season of adjustments as the boys came to live in their uncle’s home here. Joey, the 8-year-old, got into fistfights at his new school. His 12-year-old brother, Isaac, rebelled against their uncle’s rules. And Shawn’s three children quietly resented sharing a bedroom, the family computer and, most of all, their parents’ attention with their younger cousins.

The once comfortable Eisch farmhouse suddenly felt crowded.

“It was a lot more traumatic than I ever pictured it, for them,” Shawn, 44, said. “And it was for me, too.”

The work of war is very much a family affair. Nearly 6 in 10 of the troops deployed today are married, and nearly half have children. Those families — more than a million of them since 2001 — have borne the brunt of the psychological and emotional strain of deployments.

Siblings and grandparents have become surrogate parents. Spouses have struggled with loneliness and stress. Children have felt confused and abandoned during the long separations. All have felt anxieties about the distant dangers of war.

Christina Narewski, 26, thought her husband’s second deployment might be easier for her than his first. But she awoke one night this summer feeling so anxious about his absence that she thought she was having a heart attack and called an ambulance. And she still jumps when the doorbell rings, worried it will be officers bearing unwanted news.

“You’re afraid to answer your door,” she said.

Social scientists are just beginning to document the rippling effects of multiple combat deployments on families — effects that those families themselves have intimately understood for years. A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in January found that wives of deployed soldiers sought mental health services more often than other Army wives.

They were also more likely to report mental health problems, including depression, anxiety and sleep disorder, the longer the deployments lasted.

And a paper published in the journal Pediatrics in late 2009 found that children in military families were more likely to report anxiety than children in civilian families. The longer a parent had been deployed in the previous three years, the researchers found, the more likely the children were to have had difficulties in school and at home.

But those studies do not describe the myriad ways, often imperceptible to outsiders, in which families cope with deployments every day.

For Ms. Narewski, a mother of three, it has meant taking a grocery store job to distract her from thinking about her husband, a staff sergeant with the First Battalion, 87th Infantry, now in northern Afghanistan.

For Tim Sullivan, it has meant learning how to potty train, braid hair and fix dinner for his two young children while his wife, a sergeant in a support battalion to the 1-87, is deployed.

For young Joey Eisch, it meant crying himself to sleep for days after his father, a platoon sergeant with the battalion, left last spring. His older brother, Isaac, calm on the outside, was nervous on the inside.

“It’s pretty hard worrying if he’ll come back safe,” Isaac said. “I think about it like 10 or more times a day.”

Joining the Army Life

Soon after Christina and Francisco Narewski married in 2004, he applied for a job with the local sheriff’s office in Salinas, Calif. But he got tired of waiting and, after talking things over with Christina, enlisted in the Army instead.

“We both signed up for it,” Ms. Narewski said. “We knew deployments were going to come.”

That day arrived in the fall of 2007, when their third child was just 5 months old. Ms. Narewski missed Francisco dearly and sometimes cried just hearing his voice when he called from Iraq. But when he returned home in October 2008, it took them weeks to feel comfortable together again, she recalled.

“It’s almost like you’ve forgotten how to be with each other,” she said. “He’s been living in his spot for 15 months. Me and the kids have our own routine. It’s hard to get back to, ‘Oh, you’re home.’ ”

“I’ve never missed him as much as I do right now,” she said recently. “It doesn’t feel like we’re moving. It’s like you’re in a dream and you’re trying to get something and you can’t get it.”

Not all the spouses back home are women. Tim Sullivan’s days have revolved almost entirely around his two children, Austin, 4, and Leah, 2, since his wife, Sgt. Tamara Sullivan, deployed to Afghanistan in March.

He rises each weekday at 5:30 a.m. to dress and feed them before shuttling them to day care. Evenings are the reverse, usually ending with him dozing off in front of the television at their rented ranch-style house in Fayetteville, N.C.

He has moved twice and changed jobs three times in recent years to accommodate his wife’s military career. But he does not mind being home with the children, he says, because his father was not, having left the family when Mr. Sullivan was young.

“I’m not going to put my kids through that,” said Mr. Sullivan, 35, who handles child support cases for the county. “I’m going to be there.”

He worries about lost intimacy with his wife, saying that they have had a number of arguments by phone, usually about bill paying or child rearing. “She tells me: ‘Tim, you can’t just be Daddy, the hard person. You have to be Mommy, too,’” he said. “I tell her it’s not that easy.”

Yet he says that if she stays in the Army — as she has said she wants to do — he is prepared to move again or even endure another deployment. “I love her,” he said. “I’m already signed up. I made a decision to join the life that goes with that.”

Doing What Uncle Sam Asks

Isaac and Joey Eisch have also had to adjust to their father’s nomadic life. “I don’t try to get too attached to my friends because I move around a lot,” said Isaac, who has lived in five states and Germany with his father. (Joey has lived in three states.) “When I leave, it’s like, hard.”

When Sergeant Eisch got divorced in 2004, he took Isaac to an Army post in Germany while Joey stayed with his mother in Wisconsin. Soon after returning to the States in 2007, the sergeant became worried that his ex-wife was neglecting Joey. He petitioned family court for full custody of both boys and won.

In 2009, he transferred to Fort Drum and took the boys with him. Within months, he received orders for Afghanistan.

After nearly 17 years in the Army with no combat deployments, Sergeant Eisch, 36, was determined to go to war. The boys, he felt, were old enough to handle his leaving. Little did he know how hard it would be.

When Shawn put the boys in his truck at Fort Drum to take them to Wautoma, a two-stoplight town in central Wisconsin, Isaac clawed at the rear window “like a caged animal,” Sergeant Eisch said. He still tears up at the recollection.

“I question myself every day if I’m doing the right thing for my kids,” he said. “I’m trying to do my duty to my country and deploy, and do what Uncle Sam asks me to do. But what’s everybody asking my boys to do?”

Within a few weeks of arriving at his uncle’s home, Joey beat up a boy so badly that the school summoned the police. It was not the last time Shawn and his wife, Lisa, would be summoned to the principal’s office.

The boys were in pain, Shawn realized. “There was a lot more emotion,” he said, “than Lisa and I ever expected.”

Shawn, a state water conservation officer, decided he needed to set strict rules for homework and behavior. Violations led to chores, typically stacking wood. But there were carrots, too: for Joey, promises of going to Build-a-Bear if he obeyed his teachers; for Isaac, going hunting with his uncle was the prize. Gradually, the calls from the principal declined, though they have not ended.

In September, Sergeant Eisch returned for midtour leave and the homecoming was as joyful as his departure had been wrenching. Father and sons spent the first nights in hotels, visited an amusement park, went fishing and traveled to New York City, where they saw Times Square and the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum.

But the two weeks were over in what seemed like hours. In his final days, Sergeant Eisch had prepped the boys for his departure, but that did not make it any easier.

“Why can’t we just, like, end the war?” Isaac asked at one point.

As they waited at the airport, father and sons clung to each other. “I’m going to have to drink like a gallon of water to replenish these tears,” the sergeant said. “Be safe,” Isaac implored him over and over.

Sergeant Eisch said he would, and then was gone.

Despite his worries, Isaac tried to reassure himself. “He’s halfway through, and he’s going to make it,” he said. “With all that training he’s probably not going to get shot. He knows if there’s a red dot on his chest, run. Not toward the enemy. Run, and shoot.”

But his father did not run.

Dad Comes Home

Just weeks after returning to Afghanistan, Sergeant Eisch, the senior noncommissioned officer for a reconnaissance and sniper platoon, was involved with Afghan police officers in a major offensive into a Taliban stronghold south of Kunduz city.

While directing fire from his armored truck, Sergeant Eisch saw a rocket-propelled grenade explode among a group of police officers standing in a field. The Afghans scattered, leaving behind a man writhing in pain. Sergeant Eisch ordered his medic to move their truck alongside the officer to shield him from gunfire. Then Sergeant Eisch got out.

“I just reacted,” he recalled. “I seen a guy hurt and nobody was helping him, so I went out there.”

The police officer was bleeding from several gaping wounds and seemed to have lost an eye. Sergeant Eisch started applying tourniquets when he heard the snap of bullets and felt “a chainsaw ripping through my legs.” He had been hit by machine gun fire, twice in the left leg, once in the right.

He crawled back into his truck and helped tighten tourniquets on his own legs. He was evacuated by helicopter and taken to a military hospital where, in a morphine daze, he called Shawn.

“Are you sitting down?” Brian asked woozily. “I’ve been shot.”

Shawn hung up and went into a quiet panic. He could not tell how badly Brian had been wounded. Would he lose his leg? He called the school and asked them to shield the boys from the news until he could get there.

Outside school, Shawn told Isaac, Joey and his 12-year-old daughter, Anna, about Brian’s injury. Only Isaac stayed relatively calm.

But later, Shawn found Isaac in his bedroom weeping quietly while looking at a photograph showing his father outside his tent, holding a rifle. Shawn helped him turn the photograph into a PowerPoint presentation titled, “I Love You Dad!”

For Shawn, a gentle and reserved man, his brother’s injury brought six months of family turmoil to a new level. Sensing his distress, Lisa urged him to go hunting, a favorite pastime. So he grabbed his bow and went to a wooded ridge on his 40 acres of property.

To his amazement, an eight-point buck wandered by. Shawn hit the deer, the largest he had ever killed with a bow. It seemed a good omen.

A few days later, Shawn flew with the boys, his father and Brian’s twin sister, Brenda, to Washington to visit Sergeant Eisch at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. At the entrance, they saw men in wheelchairs with no arms and no legs. Others were burned or missing eyes. Shawn feared what the boys would see inside Brian’s room.

But Brian, giddy from painkillers, was his cheerful self. His right leg seemed almost normal. His left leg, swollen and stapled together, looked terrible. But it was a real leg, and it was still attached. The boys felt relieved.

Within days, Brian was wheeling himself around the hospital and cracking jokes with nurses, a green-and-yellow Green Bay Packers cap on his head. While Joey lost himself in coloring books and television, Isaac attended to his father’s every need.

“I feel a little more grown up,” Isaac said. “I feel a lot more attached to him than I was when he left.”

One doctor told Brian that he would never be able to carry a rucksack or run again because of nerve damage in his left leg. Someone even asked him if he wanted the leg amputated, since he would certainly be able to run with a prosthetic. Brian refused, and vowed to prove the doctor wrong. By December, he was walking with a cane and driving.

For Shawn, too, the future had become murkier. It might be many weeks before Brian could reclaim his sons. But he also knew how glad the boys were to have their father back in one piece.

“Brian came home,” Shawn said one evening after visiting his brother in the hospital. “He didn’t come home like we hoped he would come home, but he came home.”

“Every single day I think about all those families and all those kids that are not going to have a dad come home from Afghanistan,” he said. “That hurts more than watching my brother try to take a step because I know my brother will take a step and I know he’s going to walk down the dock and get in his bass boat someday.”

It was late, and he had to get the boys up the next morning to visit their father at the hospital again. The holidays were fast approaching and the snow would soon be arriving in Wisconsin. Shawn wondered whether he could get Isaac out hunting before the season ended.

Yeah, he thought. He probably could.

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Disabled troops, vets misled on service dogs

By Rick Maze - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Dec 30, 2010 13:03:36 EST

Some service members and veterans are being misled and possibly harmed by well-meaning charities promising to provide a trained service dog to help with medical needs, according to representatives of a major veterans service organization.

What o ften happens, according to officials from the organization AmVets, is that disabled veterans who might benefit from a dog trained to do certain tasks may end up with an animal that a charity group has rescued from a pound, has been taught no special skills and might not be a true “service dog” for legal purposes.

“A dog with little or no training might be a great companion, but that’s all,” said Cristina Roof, AmVets legislative director.

Is it a real service dog?
Minimum training standards for service dogs established by Assistance Dogs of America:

• 90 percent of the time, a service dog must respond the first time it is asked to do a basic obedience and skill task.

• By voic e command or hand signal, a service dog must sit, stay, lie down, come and heel.

• A service dog must perform at least three tasks to mitigate a disability.

• The dog must be clean, well-groomed and not have an “offensive odor.”

• Unnecessary barking, growling, whining or soliciting attention from other people is not allowed. That includes begging for or stealing food from the general public.

• When working, a dog should be calm and quiet, and not distracted (even by cats or squirrels). When not working, it should lie quietly without blocking aisles or doorways.

• Unless told otherwise, a dog should be within two feet of its handler at all times.

• In public, a service dog must wear a cape, harness, backpack or other clothing or equipment identifying it as a service dog.

Roof said some media stories about nonprofit groups providing veterans with dogs rescued from shelters give the incorrect impression that an untrained dog is essentially the same as a trained service dog.

“It is incredibly important to remember a service dog may not be a good fit for everyone,” Roof said. “It is also crucial to remember that a service dog is in no way a replacement for your rehabilitation, either.”

Roof said service members and veterans should never pay for a service dog and should try to deal only with groups accredited by Assistance Dogs International, which sets training g uidelines and placement standards.

Dogs not officially recognized as service dogs — sometimes called therapy dogs or emotional support dogs — are pets, and although they may have some basic training, they are not covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act. They may not have access to public spaces and may not enter military and veterans hospitals and clinics.

Roof said ADA rules cover guide dogs for the blind or deaf, seizure-alert dogs, and mobility dogs trained to pull a wheelchair, pick up dropped items and perform similar tasks. A month-old ADA policy revision now also allows public access for psychiatric service dogs if they are trained to perform a specific task.

The Veterans Affairs and Defense departments don’t have to abide by ADA rules, Roof said. VA operates on rules dating to 1994 that al low only seeing-eye dogs into VA facilities, but allow case-by-case access for other types of service dogs.

DoD has similar rules, giving discretion about allowing dogs into hospitals and clinics to base commanders, Roof said.

Roof said access restrictions on dogs can be embarrassing for service members and veterans who believe they have a trained and officially recognized dog but are later barred from bringing the animal into public buildings and medical facilities.

Having a companion dog rather than a recognized service dog also can make a difference in terms of benefits. VA can provide financial help to veterans for service dogs, covering some costs for food and health care, but those benefits don’t extend to emotional support or therapy dogs, said AmVets spokesman Ryan Gallucci.

“It’s a confusing situation,” Gallucci said.

One example of a potentially confusing message is from Pets For Vets, a California-based charity that takes animals from shelters and pairs them with veterans.

Pets for Vets does not claim its dogs are certified as service dogs, but says in promotional material that their program is “a win-win way to give back to our troops who have given so much to us.”

Veterans with physical and mental injuries can have a difficult transition to civilian life, and having a companion can help, the group says. “Our goal is to heal their wounds by bringing together man’s best friend and our returning soldiers while showing them both that we have not forgotten,” the group says.

P ets for Vets did not respond to calls for comment.

Roof said there is no industrywide standard for what skills a dog may need to be certified to help a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder or other mental health issues. VA is in the early stages of research to devise standard requirements for dogs to be trained to help veterans suffering from PTSD.

A Laurel, Md., nonprofit group, Fidos for Freedom, trains dogs in specific skills. They can be trained to open and close doors, retrieve objects, help someone keep their balance while walking, help someone get in or out of a chair, pull a wheelchair for short distances, assist in dressing or undressing, or help someone who has fallen get back on their feet.

The group also trains dogs to help the deaf or hearing impaired by responding to the phone, smoke detector, alarm c lock, microwave, someone knocking at the door or calling a name, the sound of something being dropped or even a baby’s cry.

Disabled troops, vets misled on service dogs

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CIA Tries Again to Duck Responsibility for Doing Drug Experiments on Veterans

CIA Tries Again to Duck Responsibility for Doing Drug Experiments on Veterans

By MARIA DINZEO
ShareThis
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - The Central Intelligence Agency in January will argue for dismissal of Vietnam veterans' claims that the CIA must provide them with information about the health effects of chemicals used on them during Cold War-era human experiments. The CIA also claims it is not obligated to provide the veterans with medical care for side effects of the drugs. It's the CIA's third attempt to get the case dismissed.
In a 2009 federal lawsuit, Vietnam Veterans of America claimed that the Army and CIA had used at least 7,800 soldiers as guinea pigs in "Project Paperclip." They were given at least 250 and as many as 400 types of drugs, among them sarin, one of the most deadly drugs known to man, amphetamines, barbiturates, mustard gas, phosgene gas and LSD.
Among the project's goals were to control human behavior, develop drugs that would cause confusion, promote weakness or temporarily cause loss of hearing or vision, create a drug to induce hypnosis and identify drugs that could enhance a person's ability to withstand torture.
The veterans say that some of the soldiers died, and others suffered grand mal seizures, epileptic seizures and paranoia. The veterans say the CIA promised in the 1970s to compensate those who were made guinea pigs, but the 2009 complaint states that the government "never made a sincere effort to locate the survivors."
In its 32-page motion to dismiss the group's third amended complaint, the CIA claims it has no legal obligation under the Administrative Procedures Act to provide the veterans with notice of the drugs' health effects and that the veterans' notice claim "rests solely on state common-law duty."
The CIA claims that the law on which the veterans base their claim for health care compensation stems from the Department of Defense and Army regulations, "which do not purport to have a binding affect on the CIA."
And it claims that the Defense Department "never intended nor committed to providing medical care for service member participants in the test programs."
In its response, the veterans group says the CIA has already tried, in past motions, "to re-argue issues already decided" by U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken in 2009. "Defendants argue that plaintiffs do not state a claim for relief under the APA against the CIA or the Department of Defense because they do not allege a legally enforceable duty against those agencies," the response states. "Defendants presented this argument in each of their previous motions to dismiss," but the court has already "rejected this line of argument," finding that a letter from the Department of Justice supports the groups' claim that the CIA is obligated to provide them with medical care.
"Contrary to the court's express direction, defendants now seek to use the addition of the new parties as a crass opportunity for another bite at the apple (their third), seeking to re-litigate issues the court already decided nearly a year ago," the group says.
The hearing is set for Jan. 13, 2011 before Judge Wilken. The case is expected to go to trial in 2012.

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the writer made the mistake of calling these "7,800 soldiers as guinea pigs in Project Paperclip." The conde names used for the experiments were known as MKULTRA, Artichoke, Naomi, Blueberry etc Operation paperclip was the OSS/CIA project to bring Nazi war criminals into the US after WW2 as President Truman had stated that no known Nazi's could be brought in they had to be "good germans" so the agencies cleaned up the records of these 2100 men and their families and brought them in primarily thru Canada in the early 50s, men like Werner Von Braun, Dr Strughold men who would do great things for the science and medical communities of the US and many worked for American corporations after they spent a few years or a decade working for military programs at places like Edgewood Arsenal, Fort Detrick, Fort McClellan, Dugway Proving Grounds etc it is estimated that nine of them worked at Edgewood Arsenal during the years that human testing was done on enlisted Army volunteers, however none of the volunteers were ever told that some of the researchers were tied to the death camps of WW2 Europe, I get the feeling that the power to be knew that the soldiers would not have volunteered if they had been given that information. I know I would not have volunteered, knowing what I know now I feel that I was duped and lied to, and I think it is time for the government to tell these veterans all of the substances they were or might have been exposed to and the toxix water wells that were used until 1978, for the bases drinking water and other uses such as cooking and bathing, swimming pools etc, after the EPA conducted tests in 1978 all of the wells were capped on base and in the aquifer of Edgewood Maryland and water was then piped in from an outside source that was clean. The EPA superfund is still working on the clean up of Edgewood Arsenal in 2010, more than 30 years later, the base was really contaminated. The water could hardly be called "safe" before 1978 how much of the toxins were we exposed to and how many of mour medical problems are related to either the experiments themselves or the water? Will we ever know? Who is repsonsible? The Army declines to answer and the VA states we can't prove the water harmed us, can they prove it didn't harm us? What about reasonable doubt?

Seriously a program that has a 75% death and disability rate for men aged 45-65 just leaves a lot of questions and it seems that our government would prefer NOT to answer them, why? What about the PROMISE to care for military personnel either killed by service or harmed by service we have to fit in here some place.

They can stonewall the truth but the graves are full and more will be and that can not be changed. The right or wrong is now irrelevant helping the veterans and their widows should be the goal the misguided reasons for doing the experiments and the men who authorized them are mostly deceased as are most of the "volunteers" but some of them are still alive and they need medical care and compensation as do the widows. The children of these men also deserve the truth. Their fathers were not just crazy old men who felt abused by the Army, they were veterans who were abused by the Army and then the VA, the CIA just used some of the scientists at Edgewood Arsenal to share the data and in some cases guided the substances used to find what would be advantageous for men like Sidney Gottlieb.

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Lawsuit against the VA Fiduciary Program and the veterans rights to appeal

William E. Freeman link to VA Watchdog Today article by Jim Strickland

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR VETERANS CLAIMS
William E. Freeman
Petitioner,
v.
Eric K. Shinseki
Secretary of Veterans Affairs,
Respondent.

"The Freeman case stands to change the way the VA views fiduciary-related matters.

Currently, a veteran who has been found incompetent and appointed a VA fiduciary has no say in the appointment process nor any recourse whatsoever if he or she wants a different fiduciary, is having problems with the VA fiduciary, etc. This is because the VA currently interprets the law regarding fiduciary-related matters (38 USC section 5502) as being at the Secretary's discretion.

The Freeman case is important because it stands to show how fiduciary-related issues "affect the provision of benefits" to a veteran and therefore must be able to be reviewed by the Board of Veterans' Appeals and the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. Given that the VA's Fiduciary Program only has some 102,000 beneficiaries (according to VA OIG report from Mar 2010), the outcome of this case will not affect many veterans.

But, for this group of veterans, if the outcome is favorable for Mr. Freeman, then this case will improve all incompetent veterans' rights to say who can control their VA benefits."

Katrina Eagle, Esq.
President, National Organization of Veterans Advocates, Inc.

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I really encourage all veterans and their family members to go to the link to VA Watchdog Today and read what Jim Strickland has written about this subject, all veterans who get benefits from the VA might one day be affected by the outcome of this court case and you should know what your rights are in dealing with the VA when they deny you appeal rights to a determination of incompentency and mandate a fiduciary of their choice and deny the veterans and their spouses of the right to manage theiir own funds, deny to pay bills, insurance policies, utility bills and provide the necessities of life that most people take for granted.

Some veterans die with tens of thousands of dollars in accounts that the families do not even know about and the veterans were denied funds to fix their vehicles, and in some cases buy their children health insurance, and even Christmas presents because the fidicuary could not be troubled.

This is important to all veterans as this could be you one day.

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Families At Ease VA Program Helps Families Help Their Veterans

Do you know a Veteran who needs help?

“Families At Ease” is a new program developed by Department of Veterans Affairs that works with family members and friends of Veterans of any era to help them help their Veteran get care.

Many Veterans are reluctant to get help for the symptoms or difficulties they are having, or may not recognize their need for help.

It could be difficulty at work or at home, problems sleeping, driving too fast, or drinking too much. Or it could just be that they seem irritable or sad.

Whatever the problem, family members are often very aware of Veterans’ mental health difficulties and want to play a positive role in helping Veterans seek the help they need.

The “Families At Ease” educational campaign attempts to reach new Veterans through their concerned family members and provides information and support to help the Veteran access VA facilities for services and benefits.

A multi-site call center was developed at the Philadelphia, Pa. and Durham, N.C. VA Medical Centers to answer calls from family members and friends, as well as Veterans.

Callers can get information on how to enroll in VA care. They can also get free telephone-based coaching by a mental health consultant to help when a Veteran is reluctant to admit having difficulties.

According to Dr. Steven Sayers, “Familes At Ease” Director, “We take a positive approach to motivating the Veteran, which means while we work with the family member to motivate the Veteran, the choice to come in is always in the Veteran’s hands.”

Dr. Sayers is a Clinical Psychologist with the Mental Illness, Research, Education, and Clinical Center at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center.


Dr. Steven Sayers
Families At Ease Director
He adds that, “Coaching of family members involves discussing ways to talk to the Veteran about the difficulties they are having and offering help without trying to force the Veteran to go for this help. A family member may have one, two or several coaching calls over the span of a few days or weeks in order to try to help them encourage the Veteran to seek care.”

The program has served about 50 family members and Veterans so far and has had positive results. About half of the calls pertained to Veterans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan, with the rest serving in Vietnam, the first Gulf War, and other conflicts.

Seventy percent of Veterans associated with callers were already enrolled in VA care; the coaching of family members has resulted in an increase from 70% to 85% for enrollment in VA care.

A significant improvement was seen in Veterans receiving mental health care, with an increase from 24 percent to 45 percent, thanks to the coaching of family members.

Explaining the importance of the program, Dr. Sayers notes, “The role of family members in supporting treatment of our military Veterans is now a key part of the services provided by VA. ‘Families At Ease’ is an example of the innovative strategies now part of VA services.”

The pilot phase of the program was launched in Philadelphia and Durham in January 2010. By January 2011, “Families At Ease” will being to take calls during expanded business hours and start the process of becoming a national program.

Following the pilot phase of the new program, “Families At Ease” will be a national program with an additional call center site in Los Angeles.

VA is getting the word out on the new program with web-based advertising and networking on Facebook and Twitter.

VA has also reached out through clergy, Welcome Home events, newspaper ads, mass transit ads and grocery store carts.

Family members or Veterans can reach “Families At Ease” at 888-823-7458 (8:00 a.m.-5:30 p.m. ET), by e-mailing Families.Ease.PA@va.gov, or on the web at www.mirecc.va.gov/FamiliesAtEase.

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Defense Department Wrongfully Discharges Nearly 26,000 Veterans Refuses to Release Records

Special Notice: If you are a veteran in emotional crisis and need help RIGHT NOW, call this toll-free number 1-800-273-8255, available 24/7, and tell them you are a veteran. All calls are confidential.
National Call Center for Homeless Veterans:
1-877-4AID-VET or 1-877-424-3838
Defense Department Wrongfully Discharges Nearly 26,000 Veterans,
Refuses to Release Records

Washington, D.C.--The Defense Department's (DoD) failure to comply with the law in releasing records that show it has blocked disabled veterans from receiving disability compensation and other benefits, earned as a result of service to our nation has prompted Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA) and VVA Chapter 120 in Hartford, Connecticut, to file a federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.

The complaint, filed today at the U.S. District Court in New Haven by the Veterans Legal Services Clinic of the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization at Yale Law School, charges that, since the beginning of the Global War on Terrorism, DoD has systematically discharged nearly 26,000 veterans, wrongfully classified as suffering from Personality Disorder, a characterization that renders the service member ineligible for receiving rightful benefits. Personality Disorder is a disability that begins in adolescence or early adulthood and can present with symptoms which may mimic Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

"DoD's Personality Disorder designation prevents thousands of wounded veterans from accessing service-connected disability compensation or health care," said VVA National President John Rowan.

In 2007, the Veterans Affairs Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives charged DoD with deliberately misusing personality disorder diagnoses in order to reduce to the cost of health care and disability compensation by at least $12.5 billion. Since then, DoD has dramatically decreased the number of soldiers it has discharged on the basis of Personality Disorder. After discharging an average of 3,750 service members per year for Personality Disorder between 2001 and 2007, DoD has discharged only 960 service members in 2008; 1,426 in 2009; and 650 to date in 2010. However, rather than repairing the harm it has caused to the veterans it misdiagnosed, DoD is refusing to admit that veterans were inappropriately discharged with Personality Disorder before 2008.

"While DoD protects its reputation and its pocketbook, veterans with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain Injury continue to be denied the benefits and medical care they are due," said Dr. Thomas Berger, Executive Director of VVA's Veterans Health Council. Since 2007, VVA has publically criticized DoD's systematic misuse of Personality Disorder discharges, in correspondence to DoD Secretary Gates and in testimony before the House Veterans Affairs Committee, with the intent of curbing the wrongful discharge practice and assisting those wrongfully discharged veterans in receiving the benefits to which they are entitled.

"If DoD truly believes that all Personality Disorder discharges were lawful, why does it refuse to provide records responsive to VVA's Freedom of Information Act request?" asked Melissa Ader, a law student intern in the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization at Yale Law School, which is counsel in the case. "We hope that this lawsuit will allow the public to assess for itself whether DoD has treated veterans unjustly."


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as a veteran with PTSD I am glad to see at least one veterans organization trying to hold DOD accountable

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Phantom Charity Takes Flight Leaves Veterans Stranded

Phantom Charity Takes Flight
Leaves Veterans Stranded
The United States Navy Veterans Association (USNVA) certainly looked like a legitimate organization on the surface. This multi-million dollar charity, operating since 1927, was registered with the IRS, run by ex-military men, and had dozens of chapters and 66,000 members nationwide. Legitimate, that is, until media investigations revealed that the charity was not in operation until 2002, had only one member or charity official that could be located, was run out of an individual's duplex in Florida, and appears to have consisted of one man using a fake name for whom no record of U.S. military service could be found.

A man we will refer to as "John Doe" stole the name, social security number, and birth date of another man, Bobby Thompson, according to an August 2010 article in the Roanoke Times. He then used this fake identity to set up a sham charity and bilk donors out of nearly $100 million over a seven year period. Authorities have since charged him with identity fraud and issued a nationwide warrant for his arrest. "The real Bobby Thompson, whose identity was stolen…has absolutely no connection to the U.S. Navy Veterans Association," according to a news release on Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray's website. While John Doe abandoned his former residence and has yet to be located by authorities, he will not soon be forgotten by the donors, government lobbyists, politicians, and fundraisers he had dealings with, or by his former lawyers and cohorts he left behind.

Trouble started for John Doe when the St. Petersburg Times (SP Times) began a six-month investigation into USNVA in late 2009. When attempting to locate the charity's national headquarters using the same address the group filed on its tax form and listed on its web site, only a "rented mailbox…at a UPS shipping store" was found, according to the paper. The SP Times had no better luck when trying to locate many of the charity's chapters throughout the country, or any of the officers and directors reported on the charity's tax return and state registration documents. It found that "most state chapter addresses…also are rented mailboxes," and that "none of the three officers listed in Florida registration papers could be found." One officer's address was non-existent, one was the address for the Hilton hotel in Miami, and the last was the address of a condo owned by someone with a different name. Among other searches, the paper looked for the physical address of the commander of the New Mexico chapter, Howard Bonifacio, but found the address did not exist. If it did, it "would sit on a parking lot adjacent to a car dealership," reported the SP Times. For six months the paper conducted "hundreds of searches of directories, online public records databases and newspaper and broadcast stories going back more than 25 years" and reported it was unable to locate 84 of the 85 officers or directors named in the charity's IRS filings.

The only charity representative the paper could locate was John Doe, who apparently ran the charity's operations out of his Florida duplex, but he was not a big fan of transparency. "We are a great charity," he told the SP Times, citing the paper's "character assassination" and "McCarthy-like witch hunts" as an explanation for why the USNVA's state officers and executive board did not want to disclose their whereabouts or respond to the reporter's inquiries. Searches for the charity's internal auditor, Deborah Johns, were also unfruitful. The paper reported in its March 20th, 2010, article that when it asked USNVA for Johns' contact information, John Doe said the charity would release a copy of her audit when "pigs fly."

USNVA was registered with the IRS under a special section of the tax code that exempted it from some of the public disclosure requirements most public charities must follow. For example, USNVA had to report its total expenses each year but did not have to publicly disclose how much it was spending on its programs vs. fundraising and other overhead. For John Doe, however, even this level of transparency was too much for his taste. When asked by the SP Times to supply copies of USNVA's tax returns and IRS exempt status application, which it is required to do within 30 days under IRS rules, John Doe falsely claimed that his charity was exempt from this rule.

If you do not like the rules, change them. This seemed to be John Doe's attitude when he hired attorney Samuel F. Wright to lobby Senator Patsy Ticer of Virginia. The state of Virginia has a large military presence, making it a key fundraising area for veterans and military charities. The vast majority of U.S. states, including Virginia, require charities to register financial and other information with oversight agencies as a condition of being allowed to solicit contributions from residents in their state. Ticer reported to the SP Times that Wright showed up at her office with another Northern Virginia lobbyist whom she knew and that Wright asked her to sponsor legislation that would exempt certain veterans groups like USNVA from registration. She agreed to sponsor the bill, and it passed the state Senate and House unanimously in February and March 2010, respectively. By the time Ticer became aware of the serious problems at USNVA and wanted to squash her bill, it was too late to prevent Governor Robert McDonnell from signing it.

USNVA "has never made a contribution to any candidate for office, ever," John Doe told the SP Times, according to the paper's March 20th, 2010, article. Contributions were definitely made by John Doe to various politicians and officeholders in Virginia, but with so little accountability over the charity's finances, it is difficult to confirm whether he used the charity's funds or his own. Among campaign donations to politicians in that state, $1,000 went to Senator Ticer; $5,000 went to Governor McDonell; $2,000 went to House Speaker Bill Howell, and the largest donation, $55,500, went to Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. Once major issues at USNVA were brought to light, most quickly agreed to donate the contributions they received to other veterans charities, except for Cuccinelli, who held out for about two months before publicly stating he would do the same.

The information on USNVA's web site, navyvets.org, made the group seem impressive, even if its low quality design could have clued donors in that something was amiss. In addition to boasting of its 66,000 members and dozens of state chapters throughout the U.S., it also cited substantial contributions from several foundations, and claimed to have received an award for international news reporting. According to the SP Times, USNVA "refused to provide addresses or phone numbers for the foundations." The paper could not locate any "tax records, web sites, or news stories" about the Irene T. Boyar Foundation, the John F. Kearney Foundation, or the Deborah & Charles Pissot Foundation, nor could it find them listed "in major reference directories of U.S. foundations." As for the Jill Dando Award the charity claimed to have received in 2003, an official from this institution told the SP Times it had "no record of giving any award to the U.S. Navy Veterans Association."

Perhaps most disturbing are the countless thank-you notes and other praise the charity posted on its web site from soldiers who had supposedly received care packages from the group. Disturbing because the SP Times confirmed that many of the notes of praise were substantively copied without permission from the web site of anysoldier.com, an organization that helps Americans connect with active duty soldiers and send them care packages. "Everyone in the unit who received a package from you wants to thank you so much. And for your [web] site," reads a thank you letter on USNVA's web site from Gina Pronzati, U.S. Navy, Afghanistan. The paper reported finding seven thank-you letters on USNVA's web site that "were near duplicates of messages written to anysoldier.com or anysailor.com." According to a June 2010 article in the SP Times, Pronzati told the paper that she never received a package from USNVA, and never wrote the group a thank-you. "I knew immediately it was some sort of scam, because it was exactly what I posted on anysailor.com. It's a pretty horrible thing for someone to do," said Pronzati.

Throughout the SP Times' investigation, USNVA communicated with the paper primarily through its attorney, Helen MacMurray, who also happens to be former Chief of the Consumer Protection Section of the Ohio Attorney General's Office, the department that oversees charity regulation in that state. In response to the paper's allegations that USNVA lifted soldiers' thank-you notes from other web sites, the charity responded through MacMurray that "sometimes out of haste, negligence or simply a belief that charity is its own reward," they did not always include something in the care packages that would identify them as coming from USNVA. For this reason, the group claims that when it saw a thank-you note posted on anysoldier.com from care package recipients, it "felt justified in changing some language and advertising that thank-you message as its own," reported the SP Times.

USNVA made efforts to legitimize the organization in the eyes of donors by associating itself with all things veterans and military related. For example, until recent events compelled the Department of Veterans Affairs to remove the charity from its list, USNVA was listed on the Department's web site as a resource for veterans. John Doe referred to himself as "Commander Bobby Thompson" on the charity's web site and told the SP Times he was a lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserves. Assisted by the nonprofit veterans rights group, the POW Network, the paper searched for Bobby Thompson's military service records but could find none. The charity's tax records listed "Jack Nimitz" as the group's "Director & CEO," who shares a familiar last name with Chester William Nimitz, a well-known five-star admiral in the U.S. Navy during World War II for whom the famous USS Nimitz ship was named. According to the SP Times, the charity "would not say" if Jack Nimitz was related to Admiral Nimitz, and "provided no help locating him…" when the paper requested to speak with him directly.

As bad press drew more and more negative attention to the group, pressure mounted and USNVA scrambled to show that it was doing something charitable. It recruited several acquaintances to pose for photos to be posted on the charity's web site to show that real people were involved with the organization, and rushed out a handful of grants to various charities. While these grants were likely appreciated by the charities that received them, they are surely of little comfort to the donors who contributed millions to the group and for whom little evidence exists that much of what they gave was ever used for the charitable purposes they intended. The charity reports in its 2008 tax return that its national office spent over $2.6 million of its $4.2 million budget on "grants and other assistance to individuals in the U.S." When the SP Times could find no evidence that such assistance was actually provided, it asked the charity for backup. USNVA responded that it can account for the funds, but was not willing to share any of the documentation with the SP Times.

USNVA's last-ditch efforts to provide charity were too late for some state regulators, who by that time had launched their own investigations into the charity or had barred it from soliciting in their respective states. Florida ordered USNVA to cease operations in its state, and launched an investigation into its "potentially unfair and deceptive trade practices." Hawaii began an investigation to find out whether the association fabricated its chapter officials and deceived the public. New Mexico ordered the charity to cease and desist operations in its state after finding that the addresses the association provided in its registration documents are fictional. In May 2010 Senator Jim Webb of Virginia made a request to the IRS that it launch a federal level investigation which would look into USNVA's activities nationwide.


Things began to unravel quickly from here. USNVA's attorneys, MacMurray, Petersen & Shuster LLP, told the SP Times that John Doe "disappeared" around June 20th, 2010, and shortly thereafter the law firm broke ties with the group. The charity's professional fundraisers soon followed suit. On July 30th, 2010, federal and state agents seized documents and computer records from a Florida mother and daughter who were associates of John Doe, according to a SP Times article of the same date. Nancy Contreras and her mother, Blanca Contreras, a former citrus processing plant employee, had signed registration papers in several states claiming to hold official positions at USNVA ranging from acting vice president, to chief financial officer, to acting secretary, according to the SP Times. They had also been described as association members and were featured in photographs on the charity's web site. Months earlier the SP Times had attempted to contact one of the associates, Nancy Contreras, 20, and was warned by USNVA's then attorney, Helen MacMurray, that any future attempt on the paper's part to contact her might "constitute criminal 'stalking'," according to the paper.

Of the nine states currently investigating USNVA, Ohio has arguably been the most aggressive, freezing the charity's bank accounts and shutting down its fundraising in the state. Its investigation into the charity uncovered that John Doe, in addition to stealing the identity of "Bobby Thompson," also stole the identity of a leader of another veterans charity in New Mexico. On October 15th, 2010, an Ohio grand jury indicted both John Doe and Blanca Contreras on corruption, theft, and money laundering charges, according to a SP Times article of the same date. Contreras was arrested in a Charlotte, North Carolina airport, according to the paper, and booked into jail there on an Ohio warrant. John Doe has yet to be located by authorities as of the date this article was published.

The story of John Doe and the U.S. Navy Veterans Association is an unfortunate example of how easily the public can be duped out of millions of charitable dollars by failing to properly research a charity before deciding to give. Many donors automatically assume that a charity is "legitimate" if it is registered with the IRS and are too often impressed by the claims made by a charity in its solicitations, on its web site, or in self-reported tax filings. It is tragic that a large portion of the donations USNVA collected over the years will unlikely be recovered and used to help deserving veterans.

Leaves Veterans Stranded

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This is one of the reasons you seldom see me mentioning any veterans charity organizations, and the grades some of the well known organizations make many veterans question how well their donations are being used even by the so called "good ones"

I always recommend going to any "watch sites" and learn about the group or charity you are donating to BEFORE you write the check

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