Happy Monday folks.  Hope everyone had a peaceful, enjoyable, and happy weekend.

 

No VA HQ Vets News today as Kevin Secor is off (and he certainly rates that time off!)  :-) 

 

For you Maryland Veterans, Katie Sonntag, Maryland Department of Veterans Affairs has sent in the latest Maryland VA Newsletter for Summer 2011.  Please go to following Link:

http://www.mdva.state.md.us/documents/MDVANewsletterSummer2011.pdf   Thanks Katie!

 

Joe Jennings, VVA Ohio sent in an OPM write-up that announces that 72,000 Veterans were Hired into the Federal Government in FY 2010. Please go to following Link for details. Thanks Joe

http://www.opm.gov/news/more-than-72000-veterans-hired-in-federal-government-in-fy-2010,1672.aspx

 

John Bonnell, Marine and senior member Marine Corps League clues us into scams targeting Veterans in Wisconsin.  Please see attached and please be alert. Thanks John!

 

Prayers and blessings for you and your loved ones and for our wonderful Troops and their loved ones everywhere.

 

Best.................Wayne

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CJCS PA News for Monday, June 20, 2011.  Thanks to Richard Osial at CJCS PA Office.

 

COMBAT, OPERATIONAL & POST-DEPLOYMENT STRESS, PTS/TBI

 

·         Where men talk about a crime too terrible to talk about: ( PROVIDENCE JOURNAL, RI) --- The other five men sitting around the table nod in agreement. This is the place, Building 14, where so many have come to deal with damage that is maddeningly difficult to pull from the past and pin down. This is the place where posttraumatic stress disorder is finally confronted, where common ground is found by people who thought they were alone in their fear and confusion.  http://www.projo.com/news/bobkerr/kerr_column_19_06-19-11_GOOLTVN_v11.5f1ea.html

 

SUICIDE

 

·         Elevated suicide rate for female soldiers, veterans: study: (CTV, CANADA) --- The Canadian military and Veterans Affairs are trying to understand why female personnel in their early 40s, including former and current members, were more than twice as likely to die from suicide as their civilian counterparts. http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Canada/20110620/suicide-rate-military-110620/

 

WOUNDED WARRIOR CARE/TREATMENT

 

·         Injections help injured soldier 'regrow' leg: (THE EMIRATES, DUBAI) --- In a pioneer medical experiment, a US soldier who had lost most of his leg muscle in Afghan war has seen it grow back, providing new hope for thousands of injured soldiers and other fire victims.  http://www.emirates247.com/news/injections-help-injured-soldier-regrow-leg-2011-06-20-1.403631

 

·         Debate Swirls Around Research Showing Lung Problems For Returned Troops: (NY TIMES) --- In 2009, a major survey of military personnel, the Millennium Cohort Study, found that 14 percent of troops who had deployed reported new breathing problems, compared with 10 percent among those who had not deployed.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/us/20lungs.html

 

·         Camp Leatherneck opens new Wounded Warrior berthing area, combined aid station: (USMC NEWS) --- “The old combined aid station was located in tents, it ran off generator power, it had very limited and small exam spaces that weren’t well separated, so the patients that came through didn’t have a very good sense of privacy,” Elwell explained.  The new facility expands the staff’s ability to care for patients by giving them more rooms for patient privacy and a two bed trauma bay.  http://www.marines.mil/unit/iimef/iimef-fwd/Pages/CampLeatherneckopensnewWoundedWarriorberthingareacombinedaidstation.aspx

 

 

WOUNDED WARRIOR & FAMILY SUPPORT

 

·         For loved ones, a lingering grief: (PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER) --- If not the enemy, grief is a ceaseless companion for the families of about 6,000 U.S. service members killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan military operations in the last decade.  Of the two million service members deployed to those missions, the great majority have been men, mostly active-duty Army, followed by Marines, Navy, and Air Force. The deaths have come on the battlefield and off, some from fighting, some from accidents, others from suicides and illness.  http://articles.philly.com/2011-06-19/news/29677000_1_service-members-iraq-and-afghanistan-grief

 

·         Wounded Warrior Project helps injured soldiers become independent as they rejoin communities: (GRAND RAPIDS PRESS, MI) --- The goal of the Wounded Warrior project is to help soldiers become as functional and independent as possible as they integrate back into the community undefined with their families, jobs and education, said Dr. Jacobus Donders, chief psychologist at Mary Free Bed.  http://www.mlive.com/health/index.ssf/2011/06/program_helps_injured_soldiers.html

 

 

WOUNDED WARRIOR RECOVERY

 

·         Despite the loss of a leg, Army Ranger is back in the fight: (USA TODAY) --- The story of Joe Kapacziewski's rebirth as the only Army Ranger serving in direct combat operations with a prosthetic limb is more than a tale of will power and physical hardship.  It also is the story of a young man with a natural insensitivity to morphine whose screams of pain brought nurses at Walter Reed to tears. It is about a bedridden patient, his leg held together by rods and pins, doing stomach crunches.  http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2011-06-19-Afghanistan-Iraq-Army-Rangers-amputee-Purple-Heart_n.htm

 

 

VA

 

·         Insult to injury: Iowa vet struggles as VA's backlog of claims grows: (DES MOINES REGISTER) --- His appeal is trapped in a paperwork backlog that is delaying payments to injured veterans across the country.  "There's thousands of guys. It's not just me. It's a joke," he said. "I just don't understand why it takes so long." http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20110619/NEWS/106190337/Insult-to-injury-Iowa-vet-struggles-as-VA-s-backlog-of-claims-grows?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|Frontpage

 

·         Veterans Affairs addresses growing demand of women needing care: (STAR-TELEGRAM, FT WORTH, TX) --- The growing number of female veterans, including many with combat experience and some with debilitating injuries, has led the Veterans Affairs Department to re-engineer some of its services to a population that was largely unfamiliar to the VA system in the past.  http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/06/19/3163910/veterans-affairs-addresses-growing.html

 

LEGAL AFFAIRS

 

·         Is the Feres Doctrine fair?: (STARS & STRIPES) --- Now, Witt’s death is the latest tragic case of military medical malpractice that has worked its way to the doorstep of the Supreme Court in an attempt to upend the legal precedent known as the Feres Doctrine. For more than 60 years, the ruling has protected the U.S. government from being held liable when servicemembers are killed due to official negligence while on duty.  http://www.stripes.com/is-the-feres-doctrine-fair-1.146905

 

·         Lack of specialty court in Clark County upsets veterans: (JOURNAL-REVIEW, LAS VEGAS) --- Two years ago, the Nevada Legislature enacted a law giving court systems across the state the authority to set up a specialty court for defendants who are veterans. But Sanson has become increasingly frustrated that Clark County, home to about two-thirds of the more than 330,000 veterans living in Nevada, lags behind other counties in establishing such a program.  http://www.lvrj.com/news/lack-of-specialty-court-in-clark-county-upsets-veterans-124175569.html?ref=569

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Following scoop sent in by Lisa Wolford, a Marine, and a very successful SDVOSB. Thanks Lisa!  Better keep our eyes open folks and ears close to the Ground...healthcare costs are a major target.  Also, many of the "Service" contracts within DOD are held by untold small businesses.  Be intersting to see just how the Government can make its 23% small business numbers during this budget slashing process. 

 

Senate wants DoD contractor 'hiring freeze'

June 20, 2011 - 5:15am

By Jared Serbu

Reporter - Federal News Radio

 

The Defense Department's spending on service contracting would be ratcheted back to fiscal year 2010 spending levels under a major Pentagon funding bill approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday.

 

The cuts, amounting to $1.1 billion in various DoD operations and maintenance accounts, are intended to mimic the hiring freeze now in effect for most of the department's civilian workforce, and come along with other unspecified "contracting improvements," according to a committee press release detailing provisions in the 2012 defense authorization bill.

 

The Senate version of the legislation, as in prior years, was crafted in a session that was closed to members of the public and the media.

 

The service contracting cuts are among the largest dollar areas Senators took aim at as they trimmed back authorized spending from the President's Defense budget request by a total of $6.4 billion, including funds in both the department's base budget and its overseas contingency accounts, which support activities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

Other large cuts included:

 

More than $1 billion in military construction funding

 

The elimination of all 2012 funding for the Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS) program, totaling $407 million

 

The elimination of $684 million in "excess unobligated balances," based on an unspecified Government Accountability Office analysis

 

$200 million of $775 million in the president's budget request for the Army's Joint Tactical Radio System.

 

$130.0 million from operation and maintenance accounts for military intelligence

 

$269.0 million in Air Force operation and maintenance funding

 

$230 million in operations and maintenance funding for DoD business systems, to be achieved by "aggressively implementing a new approval requirement for expenditures on such systems and the eliminating funding to maintain business systems that are obsolete, no longer needed, or not a part of the objective business systems architecture of the Department"

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the committee, said his panel felt compelled to seek reductions in President Obama's spending request given the country's overall fiscal situation. That was bolstered, he said, by the President's own announcement, made after the administration's budget was released, that Obama wants to reduce national security spending by $400 billion over 12 years.

 

He expressed frustration, however, that the White House Office of Management and Budget had not told Congress when the administration believed those cuts should begin or in what areas they should be made.

 

"We've tried twice, and without any success," he said in a conference call with reporters on Friday. "It sure would be useful. We're not bound by their recommendation any more than we're bound by their spending request, but for OMB to send us a recommendation in February that has one number and then for the administration to say a couple months later than they're recommending these reductions without telling us the amount of cuts for year one seems to be losing an opportunity."

 

The Senate version of the bill also includes a 1.6 percent pay increase for active duty servicemembers and continues more than 30 different special incentive pay programs designed to encourage recruitment and reenlistment. It also authorizes the military to give buyouts amounting to one year's salary for officers with anywhere between 20 and 29 years of service.

 

Senators also took up DoD's perennially contentious request to raise health care premiums for military retirees, an issue Defense Secretary Robert Gates gave a dire warning about only a day earlier when he told another Senate committee that the military "risks the fate of other corporate and government bureaucracies that were ultimately crippled by their personnel costs" without changes to its health care financing system.

 

Senators acquiesced to most, but not all, of the Pentagon's requested health care changes. Their changes to TRICARE, the military's managed care insurance system, largely mirror the version of the authorization bill the House passed in May.

 

Like the House, the Senate decided not to block Gates' request to increase premiums for working-age military retirees by $5 per month (the fees have not risen since 1995), but instead of the Pentagon's proposal to index future years' increases to the actual rate of health care cost inflation, fees would be tied to the pension increases retirees receive as their annual cost of living adjustment, a much lower figure.

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From Joe Davis at VFW. Thanks Joe!

 

MEDVEDEV APPOINTS RUSSIAN COCHAIRMAN TO JOINT POW/MIA COMMISSION

 

VFW thanked for its critical support

 

WASHINGTON (June 20, 2011) undefined The Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S. is extremely pleased that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has appointed Yekaterina Priezzheva as the new cochairman of the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIAs.  The Friday announcement came less than three weeks after the VFW and six other veteran and POW/MIA family organizations wrote to ask for his personal support of the Joint Commission.

 

The U.S.-Russia Joint Commission was created in 1992 by Presidents George H.W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin to help determine the fates of missing American and Russian soldiers.  In 2004, however, the Russian government eliminated their cochairman's position, which effectively shut down the Joint Commission, to include America's access to Russia's central military archives undefined a potential treasure trove of information regarding missing Americans from World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War.

 

"Much has been accomplished since you and President Obama exchanged diplomatic notes in July 2009 to revitalize the Joint Commission," wrote the executive directors of the VFW, American Veterans, Disabled American Veterans, Jewish War Veterans, National League of POW/MIA Families, The American Legion, and Vietnam Veterans of America.

 

"General Major Aleksandr Kirilin was appointed as acting cochairman; U.S. researchers were allowed back into the Central Military Archives as well as continued to have access to potential eyewitnesses; and American forces continue to provide Russian loss coordinates when discovered in Afghanistan.  What is missing is a full-time Russian cochairman to help lead your presidential commission."

 

As head of the Russian defense ministry's education department, Priezzheva's appointment, along with more than 30 other Russian commissioners, is being viewed positively by the U.S. side of the Joint Commission because it signals the future viability of a presidential organization whose only purpose is to return fallen soldiers to their families.

 

In a letter of appreciation sent today, the American cochairman, retired Air Force Gen.  Robert H. "Doc" Foglesong, thanked the seven organizations for the important role they played to restore Russian cooperation, as well as to help ensure the U.S. side of the Joint Commission was adequately resourced and empowered to move forward.

 

"We simply could not have prevailed without your critical support," he wrote.

 

"I am extremely proud of the VFW for the leadership role we played to help bring the Russians back to the table," said VFW National Commander Richard L. Eubank, who last fall became the seventh consecutive VFW national commander to travel to Russia to meet with their veterans, politicians and government officials to urge their support of the Joint Commission.

 

"As we wrote to President Medvedev, recovering our fallen is a humanitarian gesture that honors a soldier's promise on the battlefield," said Eubank.  "I thank the Russian president for his support of military families everywhere."

 

Attached are PDF copies of President Medvedev's Decree No. 815 and General Foglesong's letter of appreciation.

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Godspeed all...........Wayne

 

Wayne M. Gatewood, Jr. USMC (Ret)

President/CEO

Quality Support, Inc.

A Service Disabled Veteran and Minority Owned-Small Business

8201 Corporate Drive, Suite 220

Landover, MD 20785

301-459-3777 EXT 101   -   Fax 301-459-6961

www.qualitysupport.com

 

"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional as to how they perceive the Veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by their Nation."  - George Washington