Veterans @ MindSay

Vet Faces Lawsuit For Flying American Flag

CLERMONT, Fla. -- A Central Florida war veteran faces a lawsuit for flying the American flag on a pole in his front yard.

"I don't understand why it would bring down the values of our homes by flying the American flag from a pole in my front yard," homeowner Jimmie Watkins said.

The former retired U.S. Navy communications officer said he refuses to back down for the American flag.

"Our people are serving today to give us freedom to do as we like here within the law of America," Watkins said. "It is my right to fly my flag from my pole and until a court of law tells me to haul that down, I will not haul it down. I think about all of the people who have served our nation and all of the lives that it's cost and all of the friends that I've lost."

Local 6 reported that all surrounding subdivisions in Kings Ridge allow a flag pole display in a person's front yard.

Jim Hart, who handles property management for 1,500 properties, including Sussex, said it is the association's call and not his.

"Each sub-association has its own set of documents and they can differ," Hart said. "The rationale for that only exists within the minds of the folks that are doing it. I can't sit here and tell you why."

The homeowner's association is not commenting about their rules. But state law said anyone can display a flag in a "respectful manner" as long as it is removable, Local 6 reported.

http://www.local6.com/news/16399678/detail.html

Copyright 2008 by Internet Broadcasting Systems and Local6.com

Thousands of Iraqi and Afghanistan veterans are returning home only to become casualties of war - at their own hands. Suffering from psychiatric injuries, 1,000 veterans under Veterans Administration care are attempting suicide each month. Almost 40 percent of the young men and women returning from combat almost have proven mental health injuries that include Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, major depression and traumatic brain injury.

But when they seek help, disabled veterans face a claims system so mismanaged and inefficient that they often must wait more than five years for any assistance. The Department of Veterans Affairs is choking on a backlog of some 600,000 unresolved benefits claims. Even after their eligibility has been established, thousands of veterans cannot obtain adequate mental health treatment. While they wait for the care they are owed, veterans are dying. About 126 veterans per week commit suicide. Vast numbers of veterans are living with mental illness, sometimes so severe that they are unable to work. Nationally, about 154,000 veterans are homeless on any given night and twice that many are homeless at some time during the year.

In a federal court lawsuit tried in San Francisco last month, two veterans' organizations asked Judge Samuel Conti to order the VA to streamline its systems for deciding benefits claims and obtaining mental health treatment. A decision is expected within a month.

During the trial, the VA vowed to do better, but history warns us against taking the VA's promises on faith. For example, a year ago, the VA adopted a Mental Health Plan for Suicide Prevention, which included many well-meant resolutions. But, in practical terms, none of the recommendations in this plan has been implemented, and none of its stated goals has been met. The suicides continue.

The VA's mental health professionals who work directly with veterans are skilled and caring, but the attitude of the VA bureaucracy is apparent from an internal e-mail from the VA's head of mental health, Dr. Ira Katz, that surfaced during the trial. At a time when the VA was publicly reporting only 790 veteran suicide attempts in all of 2007, Katz wrote, "Shh! ... Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month ... Is this something we should (carefully) address ... before someone stumbles on it?" The VA seems to rate "damage control" as more important than caring for veterans who have been injured while serving our country.

Nonprofit organizations, such as Swords to Plowshares in San Francisco, try to pick up the pieces of veterans' broken lives, but they cannot possibly meet the overwhelming need. In San Francisco, these nonprofits can provide only a few hundred beds where veterans can receive targeted, residential mental health treatment, while at least 1,200 to 1,500 veterans live on the street, and hundreds more sleep in cars, parks and churches.

We learned from the experience of Vietnam veterans that allowing this situation to persist will lead to epidemics of unemployment and underemployment, homelessness and family breakdown. Sens. Barbara Boxer D-Calif., and Kit Bond (R-Mo.) have introduced the Honoring Our Nation's Obligations To Returning Warriors (HONOR) Act, which would improve efforts to prepare soldiers for the stress of combat, and provide supportive services for families. Please ask your congressional representative to support the Honor Act and to demand that the VA fulfill its mission of caring for our wounded soldiers after they come home.

Michael Blecker is the executive director of Swords to Plowshares in San Francisco, and Vietnam combat infantryman.

photo by Gerald Herbert/AP 2007

10 Things to Remember About Memorial Day
by David Holzel - May 25, 2008
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/15234

Memorial Day is more than just a three-day weekend and a chance to get the year’s first sunburn. Here’s a handy 10-pack of facts to give the holiday some perspective.

1. It started with the Civil War

Memorial Day was a response to the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War, in which some 620,000 soldiers on both sides died. The loss of life and its effect on communities throughout the North and South led to spontaneous commemorations of the dead:

• In 1864, women from Boalsburg, Pa., put flowers on the graves of their dead from the just-fought Battle of Gettysburg. The next year, a group of women decorated the graves of soldiers buried in a Vicksburg, Miss., cemetery.

• In April 1866, women from Columbus, Miss., laid flowers on the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers. It was recognized at the time as an act of healing sectional wounds. In the same month, up in Carbondale, Ill., 219 Civil War veterans marched through town in memory of the fallen to Woodlawn Cemetery, where Union hero Maj. Gen. John A. Logan delivered the principal address. The ceremony gave Carbondale its claim to the first organized, community-wide Memorial Day observance.

• Waterloo, N.Y., began holding an annual community service on May 5, 1866. Although many towns claimed the title, it was Waterloo that won congressional recognition as the “birthplace of Memorial Day.”

2. General Logan made it official

Gen. Logan, the speaker at the Carbondale gathering, also was commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans. On May 5, 1868, he issued General Orders No. 11, which set aside May 30, 1868, “for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion….”

The orders expressed hope that the observance would be “kept up from year to year while a survivor of the war remains to honor the memory of his departed comrades.”

3. It was first known as Decoration Day

From the practice of decorating graves with flowers, wreaths and flags, the holiday was long known as Decoration Day. The name Memorial Day goes back to 1882, but the older name didn’t disappear until after World War II. Federal law declared “Memorial Day” the official name in 1967.

4. The holiday is a franchise

Calling Memorial Day a “national holiday” is a bit of a misnomer. While there are 11 “federal holidays” created by Congress—including Memorial Day—they apply only to Federal employees and the District of Columbia. Federal Memorial Day, established in 1888, allowed Civil War veterans, many of whom were drawing a government paycheck, to honor their fallen comrades with out being docked a day’s pay.

For the rest of us, our holidays were enacted state by state. New York was the first state to designate Memorial Day a legal holiday, in 1873. Most Northern states had followed suit by the 1890s. The states of the former Confederacy were unenthusiastic about a holiday memorializing those who, in Gen. Logan’s words, “united to suppress the late rebellion.” The South didn’t adopt the May 30 Memorial Day until after World War I, by which time its purpose had been broadened to include those who died in all the country’s wars.

In 1971, the Monday Holiday Law shifted Memorial Day from May 30, to the last Monday of the month.

5. It was James Garfield’s finest hour—or maybe hour-and-a-half

On May 30, 1868, President Ulysses S. Grant presided over the first Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery—which, until 1864, was Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s plantation.

Some 5,000 people attended on a spring day which, The New York Times reported, was “somewhat too warm for comfort.” The principal speaker was James A. Garfield, a Civil War general, Republican congressman from Ohio and future president.

“I am oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion,” Garfield began, and then continued to utter them. “If silence is ever golden, it must be beside the graves of fifteen-thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem the music of which can never be sung.” It went on like that for pages and pages.

As the songs, speeches and sermons ended, the participants helped to decorate the graves of the Union and Confederate soldiers buried in the cemetery.

6. God knows, not even the Unknown Soldier can avoid media scrutiny these days

“Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God.” That is the inscription on the Tomb of the Unknowns, established at Arlington National Cemetery to inter the remains of the first Unknown Soldier, a World War I fighter, on Nov. 11, 1921. Unknown soldiers from World War II and the Korean War subsequently were interred in the tomb on Memorial Day 1958.

An emotional President Ronald Reagan presided over the interment of six bones, the remains of an unidentified Vietnam War soldier, on Nov. 28, 1984. Fourteen years later, those remains were disinterred, no longer unknown. Spurred by an investigation by CBS News, the defense department removed the remains from the Tomb of the Unknowns for DNA testing.

The once-unknown fighter was Air Force pilot Lt. Michael Joseph Blassie, whose jet crashed in South Vietnam in 1972. “The CBS investigation suggested that the military review board that had changed the designation on Lt. Blassie’s remains to ‘unknown’ did so under pressure from veterans’ groups to honor a casualty from the Vietnam War,” The New York Times reported in 1998.

Lt. Blassie was reburied near his hometown of St. Louis. His crypt at Arlington remains permanently empty.

7. Vietnam vets go whole hog

On Memorial Day weekend in 1988, 2,500 motorcyclists rode into Washington, D.C., for the first Rolling Thunder rally to draw attention to Vietnam War soldiers still missing in action or prisoners of war. By 2002, the numbers had swelled to 300,000 bikers, many of them veterans. There may have been a half-million participants in 2005 in what organizers bluntly call “a demonstration—not a parade.”

A national veterans rights group, Rolling Thunder takes its name from the B-52 carpet-bombing runs during the war in Vietnam. Rolling Thunder XXI (and you thought only Super Bowls and Rocky movies used Roman numerals) is Sunday, May 25.

8. Memorial Day has its customs

General Orders No. 11 stated that “in this observance no form of ceremony is prescribed,” but over time several customs and symbols became associated with the holiday.

It is customary on Memorial Day to fly the flag at half staff until noon, and then raise it to the top of the staff until sunset.

Taps, the 24-note bugle call, is played at all military funerals and memorial services. It originated in 1862 when Union Gen. Dan Butterfield “grew tired of the ‘lights out’ call sounded at the end of each day,” according to The Washington Post. Together with the brigade bugler, Butterfield made some changes to the tune.

Not long after, the melody was used at a burial for the first time, when a battery commander ordered it played in lieu of the customary three rifle volleys over the grave. The battery was so close to enemy lines, the commander was worried the shots would spark renewed fighting.

The World War I poem “In Flanders Fields,” by John McCrea, inspired the Memorial Day custom of wearing red artificial poppies. In 1915, a Georgia teacher and volunteer war worker named Moina Michael began a campaign to make the poppy a symbol of tribute to veterans and for “keeping the faith with all who died.” The sale of poppies has supported the work of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

9. There is still a gray Memorial Day

Several Southern states continue to set aside a day for honoring the Confederate dead, which is usually called Confederate Memorial Day: Alabama: fourth Monday in April; Georgia: April 26; Louisiana: June 3; Mississippi: last Monday in April; North Carolina: May 10; South Carolina: May 10; Tennessee (Confederate Decoration Day): June 3; Texas (Confederate Heroes Day): January 19; Virginia: last Monday in May.

10. Each Memorial Day is a little different

No question that Memorial Day is a solemn event. Still, don’t feel too guilty about doing something frivolous, like having barbecue, over the weekend. After all, you weren’t the one who instituted the Indianapolis 500 on May 30, 1911. That credit goes to Indianapolis businessman Carl Fisher. The winning driver that day was Ray Harroun, who averaged 74.6 mph and completed the race in 6 hours and 42 minutes.

Gravitas returned on May 30, 1922, when the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated. Supreme Court chief justice (and former president) William Howard Taft dedicated the monument before a crowd of 50,000 people, segregated by race, and which included a row of Union and Confederate veterans. Also attending was Lincoln’s surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln.

And in 2000, Congress established a National Moment of Remembrance, which asks Americans to pause for one minute at 3pm in an act of national unity. The time was chosen because 3pm “is the time when most Americans are enjoying their freedoms on the national holiday.”

tomorrow I won't be online as friends from seattle are coming down. she is surviving stage four breast cancer and has turned her life into a walking blessing. so here are my thoughts on memorial day one day early.

having grown up in a beach town on the north shore of long island, memorial day was a big deal.  this meant school was over and the official beach season opened.  The day was marked with a morning parade, where veteran's marched ( some from WW1) and we all wore red paper poppies and waved small  flags. It seemed uniquely american and small town wonderful as afterwards there were back yard barbecues before we hit the beach. Braving the frigid water of long island sound was an ordeal and even when we turned blue and our teeth chattered we insisted we were not cold when admonished by the adults to come out of the water and warm up.  It also meant lightning bugs were not far away in time and that the barefoot days and late nights playing kick the can or "spud" were right on the horizon.

We didn't think about the people maimed or killed in war. we just thought about a lot of very well postured old guys talking about their war buddies. and of course at ten years of age none of it really sank in. But looking back to the trivial markers we , as children,  put on that weekend seems to strengthen my faith in being an American even when our government gets it all wrong. So while I intensely dislike Bush and his fascist cronies, I  thank all the men and women who served our country, gave limbs and lives and eyes and marriages and peaceful sleep for our country and people and I take a moment of silence and deep reflection about the human capacity to help, forgive, rebuild and prevail. And I hope Flander's Field is covered with poppies. I know mine are growing and doing well.