America’s nurses are about to become the first line of defense in recognizing and treating symptoms of PTSD and TBI.
Today Michelle Obama announced an initiative by more than 150 nursing organizations and hundreds of nursing schools to train current and future nurses to recognize the injuries and care for veterans suffering from them.
My son is nine years old. He has spent more than half of his life living without his father. That is the reality of deployment for many military children.
And though he attends a school that is 99 percent military, participates in a Cub Scout pack that is purely military and lives on base, he still struggles every time his father packs his bags to leave.
Deployment, and the enormous range of emotion that come with it, is not something easily talked about on the playground, in a scout meeting or in a classroom.
Student veterans often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. That is true. But what also is true is that student veterans are dedicated learners, leaders in student activities and contributors on campus.
Still, the conversation too often returns to PTSD and stereotypes. Classmates, and sometimes college administrators, veterans say, see them as one-dimensional characters on the verge of a breakdown.
When Lynnette Holly told her children to go find a quiet activity to do while she completed her homework, her request was rebuffed.
Instead of understanding the grind of daily homework, her children demanded to know, why it wasn’t finished. After all, they did theirs upon arriving home from school that day.
Lynnette’s answer was simple.
“Because if I sat in front of the computer all day, no food would get cooked, no laundry would get done, nothing else would happen,” she said.
It’s hard for many young military spouses to imagine that they would need to seek out a Veteran Center to help care for their husband – before they’ve even reached retirement age.
But the number of young veterans, some as young as 21, who require veteran medical services has skyrocketed with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Department of Veterans Affairs offers a wide range of services to combat veterans learning to re-adjust to the civilian world.
MILITARY FAMILIES REPAID FOR INCORRECT INTEREST RATES TOO
The five largest mortgage companies have agreed to an additional settlement for military families in addition to the $25 billion settlement to compensate families who were wrongly foreclosed upon.
Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Ally will be required to give military families a minimum of $116,785 plus lost equity and interest for violating terms of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act.
After five deployments, my family has seen and tried a lot of ways to keep connected.
We’ve emailed. We’ve skyped. My husband has recorded himself reading books to the kids. We’ve made countdown charts. We’ve lit deployment candles. My kids have a daddy doll, a daddy blanket and a jar full of kisses to eat each night before he returns.
They are each sweet, cheesy and necessary in their own way. I’ve finally come across a deployment item that just weirds me out a bit: the heart beat pillow.
It is tax time again! Want to save yourself the cost of purchasing software to configure your taxes? Head online to www.militaryonesource.comwhere you can use the software for free. H&R Block offers free online tax filing services on the site to military families. Just go to the Military OneSource site and click on the tax service page. It will ask you to log on to Military OneSource, so if you have not signed up as a member of the site, do so now. Then it will direct you to the tax preparation software.
Last year 4,400 veterans and military spouses found work with the help of Milicruit, the national leader for virtual career fairs for veterans and military spouses.
The virtual job fair, which allows potential employees and industry leaders to connect across the miles via the internet, was a hit for military families who often cannot afford the additional cost of traveling for similar in-person events.
This year, Milicruit has set a goal to help 10,000 service members and their spouses find employment.
Need a job in 2012? This should be your first stop.
Hell hath no fury like a student whose tuition assistance has been yanked.
In October of 2011, the Marine Corps slashed the amount of money students were given each semester and drastically cut the number of classes they could take each year.
The Marines have since done an about face and restored all tuition assistance levels to those that existed before the cuts.
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