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"In Changing the Organizational Culture, his article in Small Wars Journal, Caldwell writes that it's time for the Army to rethink its approach to the new media. Caldwell has some experience here: he was the person you saw in the Baghdad press conferences last year, speaking for the Multi-National Force [MNF, as he refers to it below]. Wherever you stand (or stood) on the war, what he's saying here bears reading, as he's proposing a new approach: Recent experiences in Iraq illustrate how important it is to address cultural change and also how very difficult it is to change culture: After MNF-I broke through the bureaucratic red-tape and was able to start posting on YouTube, MNF-I videos from Iraq were among the top ten videos viewed on YouTube for weeks after their posting. These videos included gun tape videos showing the awesome power the US military can bring to bear. Using YouTube - part of the new media - proved to be an extremely effective tool in countering an adaptive enemy."

"The VA's position on PTSD-combat links is untenable, though. Critics such as independent journalist Ilona Meagher, who edits the online journal PTSD Combat: Winning the War Within, argue that the government willfully ignores PTSD issues, which leads to troubling results such as increased troop suicides. "

"Kenneth Ellis"

PTSDcombat.blogspot.com (Ilona Meagher, author of Moving a Nation to Care: PTSD and America's Returning Troops, has created an "online journal" for vets returning to civilian life.)

The blogs that soldiers are writing from Iraq and Afghanistan may not be as valuable to historians as the letters and journals that troops, as warriors have done for centuries, are writing by hand.

"Past studies have shown group therapy to be ineffective on veterans with PTSD, but authors of this study, published in the April issue of the Journal of Traumatic Stress, said the amount of exposure therapy - 60 hours - in this group may be the key to why it works."

Cited in "Joshua Omvig Veterans Suicide Prevention Act of 2007"

Deploying to Afghanistan, Craig Mullaney writes, "was a slow immersion, like Dante's descent into the Inferno."\n\nOne moment, Mullaney and his Army Ranger platoon waited in an airport terminal at Fort Drum, N.Y. Televisions were tuned to Major League Baseball games. The soldiers ate what one jokingly called their "Last Supper" - rubbery T-bone steaks with Mexican rice.\n\nThey received an intelligence briefing warning them of the dangers awaiting them in Afghanistan, including ticks, cobras and camel spiders that can run more than 30 mph. Then they marched onto a cavernous cargo plane. Two flights and 7,000 miles later, Mullaney and his men stepped out into the dusty, baking heat of an airbase in Kandahar. It was 128 degrees, in the shade.\n\nIn that summer of 2003, Afghanistan had fallen off the front page. Attention had shifted to the war in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Taliban regime that had been toppled by the U.S. invasion following 9/11 was resurgent. Operating from across the border in Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was suspected to be hiding, Taliban and al-Qaida fighters harassed local villages and Western occupiers.\n\nMullaney's Army Ranger training did not cover desert warfare, which had been dropped in 1995. Studying modern military history at West Point, he took just one paragraph of notes on Afghanistan, involving the Russians' failed experience there in the 1980s.

tiny http://tinyurl.com/6achspv http://tinyurl.com/5u4lcg9 http://tinyurl.com/6dvdsas http://tinyurl.com/6bf9xpv http://tinyurl.com/3t47oyz http://tinyurl.com/3t944jt http://tinyurl.com/42cub6w http://tinyurl.com/6cey9t2 http://tinyurl.com/64ok3gx

Legislation introduced recently by Rep. John Hall, D-Dover Plains, would lift the burden of proof from veterans who served in combat zones and have a diagnosis of PTSD, allowing them to receive disability benefits without having to prove that a specific incident caused the disorder. In the Iraq and Afghanistan wars alone, more than 100,000 veterans have been found to have PTSD, but only 42,000 have been granted service-connected disability for their condition, said Hall, chairman of the Veterans Affairs Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs. The disability claims backlog at the VA tops 800,000. A large percentage of that number are Vietnam veterans seeking compensation for PTSD, Hall said.

Jason Brown

Ryan Kohlheim began looking for answers. He and his family sifted through every stitch of his brother's clothing, Kohlheim said, looking for a letter, a note, anything that could tell them why a decorated Indiana National Guardsman barely home from a recent tour in Iraq would take his own life.

She said it was the weight of post-traumatic stress from these and other incidents that caused her 46-year-old husband to mentally collapse last September. That's when he went on a shooting spree that began in their mobile home at Terrible's Lakeside RV Park and Casino in Pahrump and ended after a pre-dawn gunbattle with Nye County sheriff's deputies. Lamoureux was wounded and surrendered. He has been charged with multiple felony counts of attempted murder with use of a deadly weapon. His preliminary hearing is expected to be held next month in Nye County Justice Court in Pahrump.

But recent scientific and technological advances could transform the biochemical-threat landscape. Indeed, in 2003, military analysts from the Counterproliferation and Technology Office of the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington DC predicted that emerging biotechnologies were likely to lead to a "paradigm shift" in the development of biological warfare agents2. They warned that it would soon become possible to engineer agents to target specific human biological systems at the molecular level.

"Andrew Engstrom"

"Casey K. Johnson"