The Fort Hood Shootings: My View
Now that all IVAW members of the Fort Hood chapter have been accounted for, I can breathe a little easier, and will give some of my thoughts on this situation.The first and foremost is that it IS telling that the shooter is an Army psychiatrist. It's telling for a lot of reasons, and yes, whether or not the shooter himself had PTSD, it does relate to the Army's PTSD treatment.When I first began receiving treatment for my own PTSD, I had to deal with a couple people who were flat-out incompetent. At one point, I was in an intensive therapy situation, and a Major that I dealt with tried to give me some "helpful advice" - that I should deny my PTSD to anyone who might c

A Letter From Seth Manzel (With My Personal Appeal On Top)
Allow me to remind you all that the cost of being a sustaining donor is very low, and the things that can be done with it are incredible. Speaking purely from the membership and active duty perspective, for $5 a month, you can ensure that 12 member packets can be mailed to new members. For $10 a month, you can ensure that 6 active duty organizer packages are mailed to members in Iraq and Afghanistan. Remember that these things are crucial and necessary. If fellow members of the peace and veteran community can't help us by spreading this cost around and shouldering some of it, it will be falling squarely on our organizers - often those who can afford it least. Because this work m

Not stopping
I can't even begin to describe the frustration that I felt over seeing blog after promising blog rise up in the milblogosphere, only to die down after a short period of time. Sometimes the writer came home, and so the deployment blog stopped. Sometimes they got shut down by their command. Sometimes they just stopped blogging, and no one could figure out why.Anyway, that's not going to be me.Something I've noticed over the past week is how people get treated differently according to the differences in their symptoms of the same disease or condition. I'm sure it won't be a surprise to longtime readers of the blog to hear it once again: I have moderate-to-severe PTSD. I

IVAW's Resolution 3 (Nonviolence Resolution) Passes
There was some confusion over resolution three resulting from a clerical computer error in the tabulation of online votes. The Board has released a statement giving more details of the error which they will be emailing out and passing to the membership. However, the resolution was in fact passed by a majority of IVAW voters and currently stands: Resolution proposing that IVAW only use, supports or endorses, non-violent and peaceful actionsWhereas there is no official statement regarding Iraq Veterans Against the War’s stand on methodology for achieving our goals; namely, ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ensuring all returning veterans have adequate he

A Different View
I think I have a little different view than some of the other milbloggers about the VA's attempts to make everything right on the Post 9/11 GI Bill. And I think that view just may be connected to the fact that I'm still on active duty, and have within the last few months tried to get dollars back from Uncle Sam that I was owed.And that is, man, at least the VA seems to be /trying/. Sure, it is far, far from perfect. And yes, they did owe the veterans those payments already, and it has been a magical clusterfuck to rival all clusterfucks.But how many times have you had to deal with some brilliant but poorly detailed plan in the Army? Something grandiose go