We know the military has been changing the rules of the game as the "war on terror" has frawn down the normal "all volunteer" military we as a nation have relied on since 1974, when the services went to all volunteers.

I was in the Army when the first all volunteer unit, the 9th Infantry Division at Fort Lewis, Washington discharged the last of the nations draftees on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in November 1974. They partied like it was New Years eve 1999.......ralkabout parties, it was one of epic proportions.

It is the story of the forced retention of military members who had completed their contractual obligations to the Army and Marine Corp between 9-11-2001  and now. Most military member sign up for 3 or 4 years active duty then they would either go into the inactive reserves or some would choose to go to either a reserve unit or a National Guard unit to finish out their 8 year requirement. When I enlisted back in 1973 the obligation was six years and most signed up for 3 years or 4 depending on the schools. Now I hear you sign up for 3 years and 17 weeks, I guess that covers basic and AIT, and then they have you for three years of actual duty.

Bottom line is the rules have changes since the 70's and the draft was ended, let's take a look at who was in power back then, and now when stop loss was implemented.

The reason he is under fire for the bonuses is the fact that he and his subordinates have settled sexual harassment lawsuits, discrimination complaints etc, with dollars from the VA. To the tune of 500,000 dollars in the past few years.

While going thru all of this, and the Regional Office is in disarray and veterans wait for years to have their claims adjudicated and get stuck on the hamster wheel, the VA management decided he was doing such a great job, they awarded him 50,000 dollars in bonuses. It must be great to be a VARO Manager in the Veterans system.

I am an old pragmatist, and maybe I am looking at this wrong. Everyone is all excited about Governor Richardson endorsement of Senator Obama for President. Granted it might have done Obama more good before the Texas contest, but what has the endorsement really done, let's take a look at it.

Senator Obama has stated numerous times that super delegates should vote with their voters, preference, and in New Mexico they voted for Hillary Clinton, so by this theory he is taken an endorsement from a super delegate that should be voting for Hillary by Obama's rules, why?

On February 28, 2008 the Government Accountability Office (GAO) the only branch of the government I trust at this point released this report on the progress or rather the lack of progress by the Department of Defense in looking for tens of thousands of Cold war era veterans used in several programs that used enlisted men and a few officers as "test vets" or "med vols" in programs known as SHAD/112 which was primarily a program that used unwitting naval personnel on ships at sea where they sprayed them with biological agents and in some cases had caged animals on deck and the crew then had to collect the dead animals for the scientists to do autopsies on them. They then had to decontaminate the ships before the crew could come back on deck. This is the link to the SHAD/112 website Project Shad.com. This is just one of many Cold War Era programs, to me this is the worst one, they never told the sailors what they were involved in and kept in the dark for over thirty years until DOD admitted to the experiments in the late 1990s.

I know I am just another voice in a long list of voices to speak about the 5th anniversary of the Iraq War, that started with "Shock and Awe" to us that watched it on TV is was a billion dollar fireworks display, to the Iraqis who lived thru it, it was a night of hell, that was just the beginning of their long nightmare. One that has still not ended.

We are being told that the "Surge" has worked that violence is down, yes but to what levels? The same levels that were "normal" in 2005, not the accelerated deaths of 2006, so is that success or just the reality of war, our press seems to have bought into the fact the "surge" has worked, we no longer see the war daily on our TV  sometimes it can go fow a week or more without mention, especially now that we have financial problems, home foreclosures, large corporations in trouble, high gas. All we need is another missing blonde woman and the war can be completely forgotten.

There has been numerous stories over the years about the mysterious medical maladies that has become known as Gulf War Illness or the Gulf War Syndrome.  Many people have writen it off as mental conditions rooted with no links to "real" medical probelms.

The Department of Defense had a vested interest in finding no link to any cause that would hold them liable for compensation payments. If they could link the physical ailments that the 500,000 Gulf War era veterans were experiencing, the cost of compensation paid to veterans and their families would escalate by the billions, and rapidly. So research contracts were written in such ways that full disclosure would never be known and past medical studies with chemical weapons were to be ignored.

Last night Rick Noriega won the Democratic nomination for the Senate Race to try and unseat Texas Senator John Cornyn. As of the last public figures, Cornyn has 6 million dollars as of Feb 15, for the general election, Rick is going to need every dollar he can get his hands on.

As a disabled veteran I am asking you to support this man, the reasons are many, he is a veteran himself, having commanded troops in the current wars, he has also done National Guard service on the border fences, with his troops.
Meet Rick here Boadicea, written back in the fall of 2007. He will support the progressive agenda, the type of leader this nation needs, for all of us, disabled veterans, veterans and regular taxpayers, the average "joe".

If this wasn't so damn serious this would be hilarious. Most of the regular readers of my diaries know that I am one of 7120 former enlisted men the Army used in chemical weapons and drug experiments between 1955 thru 1975. The progam I was used in went thru many names NAOMI, BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA, the infamous LSD experiments related to the CIA and DOD and the infamous CIA characterDoctor Sidney Gottlieb retired Navy Commander Jeff Huber wrote an excellent review of the program in 2006The Manchurian Veterans today the federal government played it's newest hand of cards in this decades long farce.

There is in the Guardian tonight dated Feb 28,2008 an article about a book The Three Trillion Dollar War  being released in the U.K. today written by Nobel Prize Winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Professor at the Kennedy School Linda Bilmes. She is the one who gave the report to Congress on the fact that taking care of the wounded soldiers alone from the Iraq war would be one trillion dollars.  It seems as if they got more "curioser" and after being accused of being to "outlandish" in her estimates of the "true cost". Below is excerpts of the article  but you need to go to the link and read the entire piece, it is well worth the time.

If anyone has read my diaries over the past few years, they would hardly accuse me of being in the "tank" for Obama,

I literally and figuratively was in the "tank" for General Wesley Clark when the primaries started and he kept teasing about he was "looking at jumping in". But then I have been a supporter of General Clark for decades, I first met him as a Staff Sergeant in the Army while at NTC and he was a Colonel and Commander of the OPFOR Brigade. I worked for him, and he showed his leadership skills on the ground at NTC, in his care for his soldiers, their families, their lives, theior schools, their shopping possibilities, entertainment, etc, he realized then that a soldier needed a happy family to be a happy and competent soldier capable of doing the hard day to day job of training for combat.

I have lived a long life, interesting and full of adventure and strange twists to it. I made a comment in BeninSC  diary earlier this morning that got me to thinking, which isn't hard to do these days.

but my diaries about me are interesting how many (2+ / 0-)
other Kossacks can write about   drugs, chemical weapons, Nazis, the CIA  Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and have it be the truth   I mean c'mon it's more like a bad B movie  and the truth is stranger than fiction  welcome to my world  rofl

I have lived since Eisenhower was President, Kennedy and Camelot, the Hillside Strangler, Charles Manson, the Zodiac Killer, Vietnam, the Korean DMZ, Nixon, Watergate, 444 days Iran held Americans Hostage, the Beirut Bombings, 1972 Munich Olympic Games and the Israelis, the Bader Mein Hoff attacks of the 70s, Carlos the Jackal, and now I have lived thru the worst American Administration in history. I know that is an opinion but I have a lot of experience to base it on.

Below is the list of expectation that the men expect that Congress and the Veterans Administration will agree to in light of recent developments world wide, the recent settlement of the British Porton Downs veterans  the British version of Edgewood Arsenal. The Canadians settled their case with the veterans of Gagetown in 2006 also Gagetown was the Canadian version of Edgewood Arsenal.

These governments used fewer soldiers, and as far as we can tell, did not have their  spy agencies involved the way the C.I.A. was in the Edgewood experiments nor funded the way DR Gottlieb funded the Edgewood "mind control experiments" which leads the "Edgewood Veterans Expectations" to be higher than the British or Canadian settlements, also both countries have "universal health care" and they are their families are cared for, unlike our veterans who have to be service connected for their medical problems to be cared for, it seems as for the past 50 plus years the Edgewood veterans did not nor could NOT make claims for medical care or compensation. I will explain below.

Senator Obama, your friend Senator Ted Kennedy was neck deep in the early investigations in the 70s over the human experimentation, he can help quide you on this.

I know you are NOT responsible for what your "cousin" Dick Cheney did in 1974 and 1975, but his actions and those of his friends and co-workers left American soldiers dead from long term medical problems related to these experiments and the federal government denying all liability even now more than 30 years later, despite Great Britain settling their lawsuits last week with Porton Down subjects then there is even this story about the China Pays Nuke test victims   I don't know but if China can care for their abused citizens it saddens me to see America ignore their abused soldiers from the past 53 years.

I have PTSD, a classic case or as some say a "classic textbook case" this was determined after a four month evaluation by a team of three mental health professionals. They do not allow a single doctor to determine a combat veterans case of PTSD or in other diagnosis they will allow a single doctor to determine a case of Personality Disorder (PDO) or in some outrageous circumstances they deny the effects of combat on the veterans mental state, they use childhood fights with your brothers or sisters, problems with your parents, detention at school or problems with the police as a teenager to deny PTSD and allow the base Mental Health doctors to slap combat veterans with PDO to discharge them with no future compensation benefits, from either the Army or Marines.  The past few years of stories coming out of Fort Carson and Fort Hood show this to be fact, approximately 22,000 men and women deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan many of them 2 or 3 times, then they come back and self medicate either with booze or illegal drugs, forget the zombie prescriptions mental health puts them on. In some cases the Commanders have refused to allow the soldiers to take their medications or return to clinics for continued treatments.

I have the authors permission to distribute his writings as a way to advocate for veterans and disabled veterans. I still think DR  
Linda Bilmes of the Harvard Kennedy School has the best solution and if the old veterans organizations are against it, it is because this new way of claims processing will mean veterans will no longer require stodgy old men in VARO offices who are more committed to enlarging the membership rolls than actually caring for and getting the compensation claims of the veterans and their widows completed. DR Bilmes suggestion does away with backed up claims waiting for years for approval, (the current system). In other words the old system hates the new system, despite the fact the new system actually helps disabled veterans and their families.

Well we are down to the final two, Senators Obama and Clinton, the Kodak Theater moment is behind and they both promised to unify the Democratic Party for the General Election by November. It is obvious from the fund raising of Democratic candidates that the nation is jazzed up this year, record turn outs in all the primary states so far, here in South Carolina we had parity turn out with the Republican party for the first time in decades.

South Carolina has been Republican so long it's hard to remember when Democrats actually last ran the state, not since I have lived here any way. I retired here from Georgia in 2003. Had to be near the grand kids  lol. Gives my wife something to do, baby sit.

By now everyone has heard about the "rebate" or "stimulus" checks that President Bush has proposed to jump start the economy to keep it from sliding into recession on his "watch" the problem with it, it it's to late, for most of us we are living the recession, lost homes, high cost of gas and utilities, and food  etc. My SSD check was increased 2.3% this year, the problem with that is according to the news, inflation was 4.1% for 2007. So for those of us dependent on Social Security we are behind and just getting behinder.

President Bush wants to give "stimulus checks" to taxpayers, only those people who pay in enough to get real return checks, the top side of middle class I have seen singles making 65,000 or couples making 115,000 would get 800 each or 1600 for a family. He wants them to go shopping again, not save it or pay down existing bills, but splurge and buy new stuff and to hell with us "poor people" after all we don't pay taxes.