Veterans For America

“To suffer the way our family has suffered is a complete and total betrayal.” Renee Peuchot spent more than a year battling the military bureaucracy at Fort Drum to win treatment for her husband’s post-traumatic stress disorder after he returned home with injuries sustained in an IED explosion in Iraq. Despite his PTSD diagnosis, Spc. Leroy Peuchot was told health facilities were understaffed and he’d only be seen once a month. He was denied permission for off-post treatment. Their requests to have Traumatic Brain Injury testing was also denied. The heroic sacrifices made by our troops merit far better than this. Perhaps there are places in the Pentagon budget where money can be found and used to improve treatment?

Last night’s debate included one vice presidential candidate getting it totally backwards on what the top U.S. General in Afghanistan said. Hint: it wasn’t that an Iraq-style surge is the answer. That candidate also got facts on the surge wrong, too. Perhaps if more attention was paid to the needs of our National Guard, our candidates would have a clearer sense of the needs of all of our strained troops. There is no “at ease” for our deploying and redeploying National Guard members with more than 660,000 shipped off to sustain deployment policies in the last seven years. In Connecticut, the operational tempo of the Guard has ramped up “from the speed of sound to the speed of light.” The head of Alabama’s National Guard, preparing to deploy 1,600 citizen-Soldiers, sees no immediate relief for his troops: “This is the future.” And when our Guard Soldiers return home, they “need better care for mental health.“

Now, at last, injured troops have a chance to give some official feedback on the Military Health System. The deadline for completing the online questionnaires is Oct. 15. Family members are also encouraged to participate. The questionnaires can be found HERE.

Among the many considerable challenges facing our troops in war, add one more to the list: toxic dumps. A Rand Corp. report finds that the Pentagon has no policy for environmental mishaps, allowing spills, messes and toxic accidents to fester. This also creates political disputes with the locals in Iraq and Afghanistan and expensive clean-up costs for someone to bear. “If not properly addressed in planning or operations, environmental considerations can make it more difficult for the Army to sustain the mission,” according to the report.

Congress approves $2.4 million for a National Trauma Institute to help advance treatment for troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our troops are in pain and require treatment. Because “readjusting to a daily life interrupted by two, three or even four deployments to Iraq is an ongoing challenge.“

Our National Guard members now face the “double whammy” of deployment to war and a tailspinning economy at home.