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Thanksgiving in a Foxhole

Thanks to Gary for sharing this poem with us.


by Gary Jacobson © November 2006

Well, here it is, Thanksgiving in a foxhole...
I'm trying to fathom what thankful presentments fill my soul.
You know, it could be a whole hell of a lot worse
I could be pushin' up posies 'stead a here spoutin' verse.
So I guess most of all, I'm thankful I ain't yet dead
Laced with bullet holes oozing red
Here in Vietnam, ten thousand miles from home
Sent forth the rotting jungle to roam.

War has reduced my passionate patriotism to stone
Still so abandoned ... still so alone
Still bearing pains born in this land of egregious hurt.
To survive it this grunt just keeps on poundin' dirt.
So pardon me for wish'n for family, hearth and home
'Stead of walkin' this park from dawn till dark
Just a might cumbersome.. .
Just a might adventuresome. ..
This blithesome war chuck full o' shock and awesome.

I guess I'd like to say I'm truly thankful
Heaps more thankful than regretful
Sent where ham and choker C-rats take an awful toll
Leaving spirits kinda sick ... kinda droll.
I'd give my left, uh, you know, manhood, the Nam to quicken
Fer a bucket o' golden Kentucky Fried Chicken.
U'um, I'd like some of that bird finger lick'n good
You better know I would.

In my foxhole, visions of drumsticks float in my head
Remembering feeling good and overfed
Thanksgiving feasts with heaping turkey back in the world
The parties, the girls, the cruising, the girls unfurled
My car, the girls, my mother and apple pie, the girls, my family.
That's why I'm here, just an armed turkey
Mired in Nam's fickle state of perplexity
Surviving eternal "move 'em outs" with a grunt's dexterity.

I'm most thankful for rare nights of relative calm
I laugh and joke with brothers, peace on weary minds a balm
When there's no bloodshed, no firefight
No Charlie's comin' through the wire tonight
Just the routine clamor of interdictive artillery overhead
Reassuring I can snuggle into Nam's warm ground, my bed
Though in my foxhole repressive fears always abound
Senses acutely attuned to every little sound
Tight so nothing escapes you, in or out-bound.

You see, I'm fighting here for freedom's bright ray
And they can't take that away
Though war's full of conundrums, in this dirty little fray
Where I clearly see man's hypocrisy and greed
Vile corruption in hatred's evil seed
For which my brothers for the good fight bleed
So I'm here for them, my brothers, my fellow man
Laboring alongside surviving in the heart of Vietnam.

I'm thankful for good things in this park that abound
Deep dank dark depths of hell in the devil's compound
True brotherhood forged in this gory battleground
Where men to duty bound, astonish and astound,
Men honor bound, war's complexities bewilder and confound
In Vietnam, where I lost the boy, but found the man
Mid contentious toil and strife
Roiling, boiling hatreds brewing his carnal life.

I'm thankful to know I'm living
To pay sorrowful homage to the dead and dying
I survived this war's inhumanity unfurled
Surviving back to this knock down ornery world,
From war's pack of lies to rise to kiss the skies
Grateful to live through what I've seen
That from wars bestial carousel careen
Living with ghosts of brothers and enemies unseen.

Though by the Nam heart-stricken
This 'ol home-boy can take a lickin'n keep on tickin'
Held in the service of our country
That sent me so far to march with hell's infantry
Carrying in every deed His ever righteous sword
In the service of our Lord...
Gone for the world to save
Risen from a most foul grave.

I'm grateful for my PTSD
Given with a worlds sweet pain to comfort me
Guiding me back to war's malignant melee
Once again down in the valley of the shadow reverie
Forever riding bestial iron horses of the infantry
War's ogres dancing betimes with me
Do-si-doing in and out of the maw of death
Welcome back ... grateful to take a peaceful breath...

So chow down on your turkey with humble thanks giving
Grunt, be ever grateful for your living
Grasp your family to your bosom dearly
Know there are men out there, who this night do not rest easy
Who yet hear brave voices whispering in hot war winds breezy
Daily contending with wrong and right
Men, women, this very Thanksgiving night
Valiantly pursuing for the land they love, the eternal fight.
************
read entire poem here

World War Ones youngest victim



The 26-year-old victim of the First World War

An encounter with an unexploded RAF bomb changed Maité Roël's life for ever. Robert Fisk finds out what the Great War means to her

Friday, 20 November 2009


Maité Roël is just 26 and she is the youngest victim of the First World War. And when she walks to meet me past the old churchyard in her village of Bovekerke, she limps, ever so slightly, on her left leg, the living ghost of all those mutilated, long-dead men whose memory the world honoured on Armistice Day earlier this month. She even holds a First World War veteran's card – "mutilée dans la guerre" – and when she shows it to the local railway ticket inspectors for reduced fare train trips, they suspect her – with awful inevitability – of stealing it from dead grandfather or great-grandfather.

But it's all true. After shaking off – so far – a 10-year addiction to the morphine which Belgian doctors gave her during 29 excruciatingly painful operations on her leg, Maité is now a young mother with a year and a half old baby and, incredibly, a total disinterest in the war that almost killed her. Only an hour before I met Maité, I was listening to the "Last Post" at the Menin Gate, 15 miles away in Ypres. "I know nothing about it," she says to me with indifference. "I've read nothing about it. This month was the first time they ever took me to show me the preserved trenches of the war."

They are all around her. Bovekerke was in German-occupied Belgium during the First World War, on the very edge of the Allied-held Ypres salient, and so was the military camp at Wetteren near Ghent when a bomber of the newly created RAF, successor to the Royal Flying Corps, dropped a bomb there in 1918. The Germans were already in retreat across France and Belgium, abandoning the terrible battlefields of Ypres and the Somme, pursued by British, French, Empire and newly-arrived American troops, harried by RAF bi-plane fighters and bombers. Those critical last months of the "War to End All Wars" almost did for Maité 17 years ago.
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"We went on a scout camping expedition to Wetteren and I remember now that it was an old military camp," Maité recalls very slowly. She has tiny dreadlocks that hang down her slim face and a silver ring in her nose – not the usual face of a First World War victim. "It was July 6th, 1992. I knew nothing about war. I remember we all built a fire using bricks round the outside and the other kids starting throwing logs on it. I was tired and so I went a few metres from the fire so I could sleep. Then there was a sudden explosion – I woke up and saw sparks from the explosion. Everyone was running and shouting and I tried to get up and I couldn't. Everyone was looking at me and I looked down – and I saw that my left leg was hanging by a piece of skin."

A million British soldiers had experienced this same terror in this same land more than 60 years earlier. But Maité could not understand. She was rushed to the local hospital at Wetteren where there were no specialist surgeons and she had to be rushed by air to Ghent University Hospital. For three hours, she wept and cried in pain before doctors could give her a sedative because the doctors were not sure which medication to administer. "I only started feeling the pain when I saw my leg – and then it never stopped," she said.

Nor has it stopped now. The doctors took skin and muscles and arteries from thighs and back and ribs to reconstruct her left leg – and saved it after 29 operations in which Maité spent two years in hospital, all of them on morphine. For the next 10 years she was addicted, desperate to detoxicate but still finding the pain unbearable. Maité now has only one artery in each leg. The birth of her child, Damon, and the love of his father, Kurt, helped her, she says, admitting with a smile that she still needs cannabis and alcohol to survive the pain but has been without morphine for a year and five months.

She is now cared for by the Belgian Institute for Veterans' Affairs and War Victims. The Institute, along with doctors and police officials, quickly realised that the scouts must have picked up the cylindrical RAF bomb, thinking it was a mouldy log – and thrown it on the fire. The explosion blasted the bricks into pieces, one of which almost severed Maité's left leg. Belgian explosives officers later identified the fragments as those of an RAF bomb – typical of many found over battlefields in the decades that followed the 1918 Armistice – manufactured in 1918 and used during the German retreat. The Wetteren camp was used by the Reichswehr during this period because the town was a major rail centre for German military traffic to the front.

With one of those bitter ironies that war alone can produce, the RAF's youngest victim – long after both the pilot and his intended targets must have died – turns out to be partly British. Maité's grandmother, Janette Matthieson, is Scottish and now lives in Ostend, making Maité's French-speaking mother half-British. Maité now lives on £700 a month, a stipend available to her since she was 16. When she was so grievously hurt, not a single newspaper outside Belgium mentioned her fate.

Belgian authorities are still paying monthly allowances to much older victims of First World War munitions as well as survivors of the Second World War – including Belgian Jewish survivors of the Holocaust – and newly-arrived wounded from Afghanistan. Maité wants to go on a clothes-making course and open a boutique – "I don't want to work for a boss," she says as cheerfully as any 1914-18 British soldier with a "Blighty" wound, though she may be more successful than the men who came home in 1918 and found that theirs was not a land fit for heroes.

"I have an '051'-coded card from the First World War veterans' department and when I buy train tickets, they often question me about it," Maité says. "They think I've taken it from an ancestor but it's completely real. I'm just the youngest victim of that war."

I ask her why she shows no interest in this terrible period of history which struck her so mercilessly – and so literally – when she was younger. She shrugs her shoulders. So much for the Somme and Verdun and Gallipoli and the nine million military dead of the Great War and the Last Post just down the road in Ypres. But I rather suspect Maité is right. Her boutique and her home-made clothes sound a far better future than an examination of the awful mud upon which her village of Bovekerke was rebuilt after the War to End All Wars.

USS Intrepid Serves Those Who Served With Job Fair

USS Intrepid Serves Those Who Served With Job Fair

video

The New York State Department of Labor held a special job fair this week for the state's veterans.

NY1 Employment reporter Asa Aarons was there and filed the following report.

There was a time when 1,000 military members on line to board the USS Intrepid meant one thing – war. It still does, though now it’s a different combatant, a battle with late mortgages sinking credit, and dwindling grocery supplies.

Today’s military veterans are face to face with the enemy called unemployment.

The New York States Depart of Labor chose the Intrepid for a career fair this week featuring 75 companies offering more than 2,000 jobs.

In the shadows of the world’s fastest, strongest, most aggressive machinery, veterans are donning the new battlefield armor, a business suit and updated resume.

With unemployment at nearly 15 percent for the state’s veterans, soldiers-turned-jobseekers poured in from every area and every era.

“Vets, we paid our dues,” said vet Charise Herbert. “Serving in Iraq, putting my life on the line.”

“I served in the Vietnam War,” said vet Victor Cotto.

Regardless of the era of service or military branch, veterans are known to bring strong qualities to the workplace.

“They are true professionals with a strong work ethic,” said Pedro Rodriguez, an Air Force veteran.

The DOL serves nearly 50,000 veterans each year. At this event, in addition to job matching, the agency hoped to show area vets ways to expand and improve their job-hunting skills.

“We get someone to look at their resume, give them some tips on interviewing skills, and also to let them know where the jobs are,” explained Leo Rosales of the DOL.

“The times are tough now and anything they can do to help anyone find a job is greatly appreciated by everyone,” said job-seeking veteran Lee Drescher.

And, some of the opportunities available at the job fair are practically tailor made for veterans.

“Basically our requirements are 39 college credits,” said New York City Department of Corrections worker Mark Washington. “But if they served two years active in the military with an honorable discharge, it’s equivalent to the 39 college credits. So they don’t have to have the college education.”

The USS Intrepid is one of the world’s most famous docked vessels. With the job fair, it becomes a ship serving those who served, and bringing them from the storm to safe harbor.

Disabled Combat veteran beaten At McDonalds by Employee

 

 

Iraq Vet Says McDonald's Workers Beat Him

 

 

By BARBARA LEONARD 
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     BROOKLYN (CN) - A disabled Army captain who was wounded in Iraq claims McDonald's employees beat him with garbage can lids after he brought his service dog to the restaurant. Luis Montalvan says the attack came as he was photographing the restaurant after he repeatedly complained about the treatment he received there. 

     Montalvan says he became disabled after 17 years in the Army and began using a service dog named Tuesday in November 2008. 

     Montalvan says he was wounded with knives and hand grenades during his first tour of duty in Iraq, and developed post traumatic stress disorder, in addition to his spinal cord damage and brain injury. He was awarded a Purple Heart and two Bronze Stars, according to his federal complaint.

     He says that when he brought his dog Tuesday to McDonald's, the employees told him he had to leave his "pet" outside.
     

Montalvan replied that Tuesday was a service animal, not a pet, as indicated by the bright red vest the dog wore. He says the employees continued to make him unwelcome and uncomfortable by hovering over him and glaring at him.
     

He says the rude treatment brought on a panic attack that hurt his performance on final exams at Columbia University, where he is enrolled in a master's program in journalism.
     

Montalvan says he complained about the treatment he received, and McDonald's area supervisor Claudia Alvarez apologized and said employees would receive training to help disabled customers.
     

Six weeks later Montalvan says he returned to the McDonald's with Tuesday, but manager Carlos Sala said the dog was not allowed in the restaurant, despite a new sign welcoming service animals.
     

Montalvan says he explained that service animals are allowed in public restaurants under the Americans with Disabilities Act, but Sala said he was a new manager and had not been trained with on the ADA.
    

 Two days later, Montalvan says returned to the restaurant to find that it had been shut down for health code violations. He says he took some photos of the place, and then unidentified McDonald's employees beat him with garbage can lids, pinching a nerve that forced him to use a neck brace for 8 weeks.
     

Montalvan seeks punitive damages for ADA violations, discrimination, and assault and battery. He is represented by David Lackowitz with Gersten Savage

http://www.courthousenews.com/2009/10/30/Iraq_Vet_Says_McDonald_s_Workers_Beat_Him.htm

 

VA and Kaiser Permanente Invite Veterans to Participate in Health Record Pilot Program

VA and Kaiser Permanente Invite Veterans to Participate in

Health Record Pilot Program

Working Together to Share Records Safely, Improve Care



WASHINGTON (Nov. 25, 2009) - The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and
Kaiser Permanente today announced an exciting program designed to
improve care and services to our Nation's heroes.  VA and Kaiser
Permanente are launching a pilot program to exchange electronic health
record (EHR) information using the Nationwide Health Information Network
(NHIN) created by the Department of Health and Human Services.



"The ability to share critical health information is essential to
interoperability," said Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Eric K. Shinseki.
"Utilizing the NHIN's standards and network will allow organizations
like VA and the Department of Defense to partner with private sector
health care providers to promote better, faster and safer care for
Veterans."



This week, VA and Kaiser Permanente will send a joint letter to Veterans
in the San Diego area who receive care from both institutions, to invite
Veterans to participate in this first-ever pilot program.  Veterans, who
respond and ask to participate, will enable their public and private
sector health care providers and doctors to share specific health
information electronically, safely, securely and privately.  This
initial pilot is planned to begin in mid-December 2009.



"This partnership demonstrates the power of a large-scale EHR that
safely connects several care systems.  Securely digitizing American's
health care information is only the first step in realizing the cost
saving and improved quality benefits possible with health care
technology," said Andrew M. Wiesenthal, MD, associate executive director
of The Permanente Federation. "The reality is that most people receive
care from multiple providers.  Without the ability for caregivers and
patients to have access to their data, all of the time, there is the
possibility for wasted time and resources duplicating tests and
procedures.  Exchange of current health record data at the point of
treatment also improves quality, allowing medical decisions to be made
quickly, with the relevant background."



The pilot program connects Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect(r) and the
VA's electronic health record system, VistA, two of the largest
electronic health record systems in the country.



The program puts the highest priority on patient privacy and data
security, and no exchange of information will occur without the explicit
permission of the individual patient. Explicit policies and technologies
to safeguard patient information are part of the NHIN. Patient
information will not be shared without first obtaining their consent.
Veterans' access to care will in no way be affected at either
institution if they choose not to participate.  Patients who do choose
to participate will benefit by allowing their doctors at any one of the
institutions to obtain key health record information from other
participating institutions.



VA, DoD, and HHS have been working closely to create a system that will
modernize the way health care is delivered and benefits are
administered.  DoD will be included in the next phase of the pilot
program in early 2010.