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Department of Veterans Affairs is launching a new public awareness campaign

admin — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:34:31 +0000

Department of Veterans Affairs is launching a new public awareness campaign and website, MakeTheConnection.net aimed to reduce the stigma that some Veterans associate with seeking mental health treatment and support. To do this, they have compiled over one hundred real stories from Veterans of all eras, genders and backgrounds explaining how they overcame their various post deployment challenges and improved their lives by seeking care.

Take a couple moments to visit the website and watch some of the videos. If you find the site valuable, you can help by linking to the campaign. Additionally if you know of a Veteran who is going through any the situations explained, please forward the appropriate video to them so they can view how a fellow Veteran found the care and support they needed to improve their lives.

This is just one of the videos you will find there…

First Living Marine to Receive the Nation’s Highest Award

admin — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 14:06:52 +0000

Mother says son is “humbled” to receive Medal of Honor

By Claudia Grisales | Thursday, July 21, 2011, 11:24 AM

Felicia Gilliam didn’t know her son was selected as a Medal of Honor recipient — the first living Marine to receive the nation’s highest award for valor in 41 years —- until reporters called her Kentucky home Wednesday morning.

President Obama had called Dakota Meyer on Monday to tell him the news, she said.

That’s Meyer: an adventure-seeking but humble 23-year-old who doesn’t brag about his accomplishments, she said.

“He’s very humble about it,” said Gilliam, 42, whose son moved to Austin when he left the military last year to work for a private employer here. “He doesn’t see himself as a hero. This isn’t for him. It’s for the men that died that day, his friends.”

Obama will present the Medal of Honor to Meyer for braving enemy fire in a bid to find and retrieve the bodies of three missing Marines and a Navy corpsman on Sept. 8, 2009, in Ganjgal, Afghanistan, a remote village near the Pakistan border in violent Kunar province.

He charged into a kill zone on foot and alone and carried the four men out of the area, which had been under fire for hours, The Military Times reported.

“He was very close to them,” Gilliam said of Meyer’s Marine comrades. “These men live, eat and sleep together and they become very close.”

Killed in the September battle were Gunnery Sgts. Edwin Johnson, 31, and Aaron Kenefick, 30; 1st Lt. Michael Johnson, 25; Hospitalman 3rd Class James Layton, 22; an Afghan interpreter and at least eight Afghan security forces members, according to the Military Times.

Meyer, originally from Greensburg, Ky., signed up in 2006 for the Marines out of Green County High School, where he played football and was selected to play in the Pigskin Classic all-star high school football game. He was drawn to the Marines thanks to his appetite for adventure, Gilliam said.

“Dakota has been the adventure-seeker and the military offered him everything he wanted and it would give him goals and skill and an opportunity to serve his country,” she said. “I think he chose the Marines because they were the biggest and the baddest.”

Growing up, he enjoyed four-wheeling, skydiving and rock-climbing, she said.

He was later based in Hawaii for the Marines and stayed until he left in June 2010 to work for a weapons developer in Austin, Gilliam said.

Only two living recipients — Army Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta and Army Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Petry — have received the award for actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to The Associated Press.

“We are all very proud of Dakota,” Gilliam said. “He went above and beyond the call of duty and to say that his actions were selfless is an understatement. But he did what he did because he loved the men he worked with.”

Help Get Our Military Spouses the Recognition They Deserve!

admin — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 15:25:41 +0000

The letter to TIME Magazine is below. Revise at will and then copy, paste, print, sign, and put in the mail on Friday, March 4th.

If you think you’ll forget to mail the letter on Friday and you’d rather mail it today because this is when you’ll remember, mail away.
If you want your letter to the editor to be considered for publication in TIME Magazine, be sure to include your full name, address, and phone number in the letter.

OPPORTUNITY TO WIN A KINDLE: Share the letter – with enthusiasm! – on your blog or facebook page and encourage people to mail it in, and you’ll be entered to win the latest model Kindle. (One winner.) Used just once, it’s as close to brand-new as it can be without being in the original, unopened package, and it even comes with a leather case. TO BE ENTERED TO WIN: Email likeitfortime@gmail.com with the link to the blog or facebook page where you encourage others to send their letter to TIME. Write “letter share” in the subject line. The winner will be announced on March 4th on Enlisted Spouse Radio.

MAIL YOUR LETTER TO: TIME Magazine Letters / Time & Life Building / Rockefeller Center / New York, NY 10020

THANK YOU. Your participation is both necessary and greatly appreciated. Have fun, and good luck to all of us!

Dear TIME Magazine Editor(s),

I’m writing this letter to ask you to consider the military family as your 2011 TIME Person of the Year. If you accept nominations from the public/your readers, please consider this an official nomination.

Military families will be the first to say they don’t want to be honored or praised, but I understand Person of the Year isn’t an honor; it’s a “recognition of somebody’s effect on the world,” as Richard Stengel has said.

I also understand Person of the Year is, as another TIME editor has said, “given to the person, group, or thing that has most influenced the culture or the news during the past year.”

Evidence of the military family’s impact on recent news and popular culture can be found in the efforts of Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden to raise awareness of the military family, in Oprah Winfrey’s multiple shows honoring the military family, in the upcoming fifth season of Lifetime network’s “Army Wives,” and in the E! Entertainment channel special, “E!Investigates: Military Wives.” Any time the wars in the Middle East are in the news, so is the American military family.

Regarding the military family’s effect on the world, Rudy Giuliani was chosen for Person of the Year following the September 11 attacks because he “embodied what was really most important, what we learned about ourselves, which was that we could recover,” explained a TIME editor.

The military family embodies what is most important after a decade of war and multiple deployments: a resilient and unifying force even as the families grow weary of being separated – sometimes permanently – year after year, those years apart filled with agonizing anxiety and uncertainty about the future of their families. That resiliency speaks volumes about who we are.

When the American Soldier was chosen for 2003 Person of the Year, it wasn’t for making the news. It was, according to TIME, “[f]or uncommon skills and service, for the choices each one of them has made and the ones still ahead, for the challenge of defending not only our freedoms but those barely stirring half a world away.”

According to a February 2009 study conducted by Boston University’s Sloan Work and Family Research Network, “43.2% of active duty forces have one or more children.” Without a military family care plan—siblings, grandparents, spouses, or others to care for those children—nearly half of our deployed forces would be rendered useless.

The challenges the families of service members experience don’t include the direct threat of mortar rounds and IEDs, but they do include the 24-hour awareness that mortar rounds or IEDs could kill the person they love – their parent, their child, their best friend – any minute of any day, as well as the unique task of trying to maintain a sense of normalcy for children who have a revolving parent and a home environment that is in a perpetual state of flux.

I hope you’ll give this nomination the serious consideration it warrants.

Sincerely,