Rachel Powers hangs out with Iraq War vets at the local VA Hospital, just in time to remember the 4,071 Americans who won’t be around to celebrate this Memorial Day
On March 20, 2003, the first American soldier left a boot print on Iraqi soil in the battle to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Monday will be the [...]

According to the government’s top psychiatric researchers, post-war suicides of soldiers home from Afghanistan and Iraq may exceed combined combat death tolls. Bloomberg reports:
Community mental health centers, hobbled by financial limits, haven’t provided enough scientifically sound care, especially in rural areas, said Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. [...]

Excluded veterans will walk in Martin Luther King Jr. event, possibly Veterans Day Parade

PHOTO by DANIEL DE BOOM
An adviser to Lt. Gov. John Garamendi—a veteran whose grandfather was a Superior Court judge in Long Beach—says that pacifist veterans groups excluded from last November’s Long Beach Veterans Day Parade in North Long Beach will likely be [...]

My God, can you imagine what the numbers would be if we didn’t have all those yellow ribbon magnets?

I haven’t fully digested this piece, but it seemed important enough to warrant immediate transfer to the Daily Briefing. The upshot: many, many more war U.S. veterans commit suicide daily than die in hostile action [...]

Anatomy of a conservative attack dog
In any other circumstance, police harassment of an American gun owner and war vet would become a conservative fable, burnished into a action-packed tale of liberal bureaucrats feasting on the body of a true hero, evidence of American weakness and the triumph of feminism. But Adam Kokesh, a gun owner [...]

They might be trolls, maybe
You dig into a story expecting something big. On this one, I guess, I was digging for a giant of local conservatism and discovered a mere troll. Turns out Raoul Deming is real–maybe surreal–and that he lives somewhere on the East Coast and that, sure, he’s just a museum piece somebody [...]

Homeless vets will watch Vets Day Parade from sidewalk
Like war itself, the skirmish over the Veteran’s Day Parade makes for weird alliances. We find ourselves suddenly warming to flag-waving Tom Hennessy; his P-T column today delicately takes on parade organizers for their decision to ban anti-war veterans groups. On the other hand, while we’ve said [...]

On the heels of three anti-war groups being banned from Saturday’s Veterans Day Parade, the AP reports that veterans now make up 25% of the country’s homeless population. What’s worse is that according to the study cited by the AP, younger soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan are already finding their way into soup kitchens and  [...]

The Press-Telegram reports today that three groups have been denied access to march in Saturday’s 11th Annual Long Beach Veteran’s Day Parade. Those groups–Veterans For Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War and Military Families Speak Out–were excluded from the parade because, organizers said, they did not “fit the spirit of the parade. The spirit being [...]