Here Are the Items Needed for Wounded Veterans and Their Families

Here’s the second part of the guest post from Shelly Vail of Troop Support Alliance in Tampa, FL. Above is a photo of Troop Support Alliance's Friday flag waving day. And below Shelly is going to give us a wish list of needed items for wounded military personnel at the Haley VA Hospital and their families who have come to stay at Haley House in order to be near the hospital.

I was just over at the hospital last Friday to do a pre-Christmas drop off of a donated used desktop PC and some PC and video games. Those will be shared in several areas of the hospital. Mary Ellen Harlan was getting the PC set up to be given to a spinal injury patient. He is having a hard time socially with most of his family and friends not able to visit with him while he is here. This will allow him to be closer to them even if it is only through the internet, but that should help.

The video games are something I started using as support almost six years ago. The guys in the poly-trauma wing (blast unit) and the ones in the nursing home who play on the games systems and PCs seem to require less pain meds. Our goal is to have each patient room in the blast unit have an XBox360. The older guys over in the nursing home area play the PC coffee break type of games and they have a Wii system but only two games at this time.

I hope we can attract some new awareness of what the families go through and the cracks the system has out there, yet what can be done to help them through it all.

This is the wish list I got in from a recreational therapy person in the spinal cord injury area:

• ethernet cables for bedside connection (patients bring their own laptops but not the cables so we need some to loan out)
• Wii remotes and games
• headphones (again for bedside use, primarily in 4-bed rooms (but the cheap kind because we cannot share them among patients due to hygiene concerns so the headphones must be “disposable”)
• puzzle books (word searches, crosswords, Sudoku, misc.)
• laptop stands
• countertop convection oven (deep enough for 12-inch pizza to cook)
• griddle
• rectangular electric skillet

Many of the older guys might not have any family to help them with extra personal needs so we try to get items for whoever needs them.

Nursing home list:

• Wii games
• PC games ( puzzle, solitaire, casino style)
• New patient items such as pajamas, socks, underwear, etc.
• hygiene items such as shaving items, deodorant, shampoo, soap, etc.

Haley House list:

• small amount gift cards ($10) to places like Wal-mart or Target for when a family has needed items they forgot.
• phone cards for patients and families to use to stay in contact with home
• VISA or MasterCard gift cards that can be used to buy groceries to stock the kitchen area for families staying at Haley House
• Wounded Warrior van -- trying to find a new van and new sponsor to replace the van we had to return this summer

Anything I can get donated Mary Ellen Harlan finds a way to use. Any used PCs (XP operating system level) I can get are used either by patients or military families who really need a PC. Any video games, game systems or PC games are used at the VA as well with the recreational therapy crews helping patients use them with wonderful results.

Send all items to Haley House Fund Inc., P.O. Box 701, Brandon, FL 33509-0701. Email questions can be addressed to me at mshores@ij.net . And anything you can send or donateto Haley House will be so very much appreciated.

Supporting Our Wounded Troops in Tampa, Florida: Please Help If You Can

I asked Shelly Vail, who is part of the support group for Haley House (see my previous post), to write a guest post about the Troop Support Alliance and also a wish list for Haley House besides the much-needed monetary donations. Above is a photo from Friday flag wave and below is the first of two parts of Shelly's guest post.

The Troop Support Alliance is an umbrella name used by a bunch of small grassroots groups here in Tampa Bay who do troop support. We also do the Friday flag waves as the Troop Support Alliance as well. We also help support each other's projects and we all support Haley House and the Haley VA in as many ways as we can on top of our niche areas.

My group is called Operation Gamer2Gamer and was started back in 2002 while I was working for Microsoft as a retail field rep. It was a way for the gamer guys here to help support their military gamer family serving overseas.

I was adopted by a game clan called Xtreme Eagles who continue to help me out with troop support even during my extended time as a wounded warrior – xtremeeagles.net and g2g.extremeeagles.net.

We used the video games as moral support at first to help the guys over in combat to relax during off duty hours. Then through Mary Ellen Harlan and Haley House we were able to expand to help with the recreational therapy crew over at the Haley VA Hospital. So since 2004 we have been using the video games as extended physical therapy with some really amazing results.

These are some of the other small grassroots groups that are part of Troop Support Alliance:

Operation Warm Heart – This group raises funds that are given 100% to the needy junior enlisted troops at MacDill AFB. The fund is controlled by the First Sergeants Council at MacDill and is used for those in dire financial need through no fault of their own. Any donation you give is put to good use and is greatly appreciated – operationwarmheart.org.

CENTCOM Memorial – This group is based out of MacDill AFB in Tampa, Florida. It has taken five years but the group has finally gotten its petition through Congress and approved for the memorial. This memorial will be built and maintained at the base to remember all our troops who have paid the ultimate price for freedom –
centcommemorial.org.

Banana Bread for the Troops – This family group actually makes and bakes a special high potassium banana bread that is frozen and shipped over to the troops. Barbara and Al Davis even have the recipe posted for you to try yourself. They recently moved back up to Indiana to live near family but continue to bake for the troops –
bananabreadforthetroops.org.

Stay tuned for my next post with Shelly's wish list for Haley House families and for the wounded troops at the Haley VA Hospital.

Haley House in Tampa, FL, Provides Housing for Relatives of Hospitalized Military Personnel/ Vets

Nancy Brown of YourMilitary.com and I interviewed on our BlogTalkRadio show Mary Ellen Harlan, the volunteer director of Haley House Fund, which raises funds for the Haley House in Tampla, Fl, to provide housing for family members visiting patients at the nearby James A. Haley Veterans Hospital.

I have to admit that a couple of times I had to force back tears as Mary Ellen described what she and the other volunteers do to provide support for our military personnel going through rehab at the VA Hospital or veterans who have come to the VA Hospital at the end of their lives.

Mary Ellen described one wounded soldier who claimed he wanted to die. But the Haley House was a temporary home for his wife and baby daughter. Mary Ellen encouraged him with the reminder that he was his baby's only father. And with the support of his family nearby, he recovered his will to live and was discharged from the hospital.

Haley House is run totally on donations, and there's a real shortage at the moment. Mary Ellen was passionate about her determination not to turn down any family member who wanted to be near hospitalized loved ones. But she doesn't know how she's going to get the money she needs.

Please go to Haley House Fund and donate whatever you can. And if you're not convinced by my words, then go to YourMilitaryLife.com and listen to Mary Ellen tell in her own words how Haley House provides badly needed support for our wounded troops and veterans -- and how Haley House now is badly in need of support itself to continue its amazing work.

Vantage Point Consulting Helps Military Personnel to Utilize Their Yearly Tuition Assistance Enlistment Benefits

On our BlogTalkRadio show Your Military Life, Nancy Brown of YourMilitary.com and I interviewed Patti Hunt, military and retention specialist and program mentor with Vantage Point Consulting.

Patti works with various branches of the military, including the Coast Guard and National Guard, to help military personnel know about and utilize their yearly tuition assistance enlistment benefits. Patti stressed how many service personnel do not even know about these benefits. And, if they do, they face obstacles such as dealing with the complicated forms for accessing these benefits.

I asked whether there was an online video tutorial or webinar to help service personnel navigate these forms. Patti replied that there wasn't, although Vantage Point mentors do work with service personnel on filling out these forms.

Therefore, I want to throw out this challenge: If you or anyone else you know could work with Vantage Point to develop a video or webinar tutorial for filling out the forms, this could be a very important aid for service personnel who wish to take advantage of these benefits.

Vantage Point already has helpful information on its site, which is optimized for viewing on mobile devices. (Presumably this is because Vantage Point works with deployed personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan and other locations.) A video or webinar tutorial that would walk service personnel step-by-step through the forms could be a great addition to the existing information.

If anyone wants to accept this challenge, email me at pzmiller@mrslieutenant.com to connect with Patti Hunt.

An Embedded Reporter Tells How He Got to That Point in His Life

Last week author Andrew Lubin wrote a guest post about sending holiday joy to our troops. This week his guest post is in a more personal vein:

I always liked to write, but ended up in business school with a Masters in International Management instead. It was a great career, and I did some writing and speaking, but not on a professional basis. And to be honest, I never found a topic that really grabbed me – until five years ago.

I was driving home from Camp Lejeune, N.C., with my son Phil after he returned from Iraq in June 2003. He's a proud Marine, and fought in the initial invasion in March 2003.

He’s an artilleryman, and was an active participant in the big fight at An-Nasiriyah where so many Marines were killed (and in fact he was instrumental in rescuing Army private Jessica Lynch). So I was anxious to hear all about it.

My first questions to my 19-year-old combat veteran Marine were "What'd you do? What was it like?"

He proceeded to tell me the most hair-raising stories about the fight. And I realized that the press coverage, although well done, didn’t begin to do the story justice.

I was totally impressed by his stories as well as by his remarkably calm demeanor in relating them, and I thought I’d make a few pages of notes. Both my mom and dad were Marines (S/F!) in WWII, and I've still got a lot of their uniforms and memorabilia.

So I figured I'd write 10-15 pages about the battle and Phil's part in it, throw in some photos, and in 30 years some grandkid would say "Grandpa did all that ??"

Well, 50 pages and three calls to publishers later, I had a book ... my first: "Charlie Battery; A Marine Artillery Unit in Iraq."

Suddenly I had a topic that grabbed me.

The book did well and I was invited to do a lot of TV and radio spots. I wrote some articles for various newspapers and I received a grant from the Marine Corps to write another book.

And then I went to Beirut with the 24th MEU and then to Iraq. And all that went well, so I went to Afghanistan. And suddenly I'm an embedded journalist with an audience who follows my work.

I've taken a boots-on-the-ground approach to my writing. I let the armchair gasbags and officious pundits talk about the war from the safety of their Washington offices. I’ll go out in the field and talk with the Marines and soldiers who are doing the fighting and dying.

I think that these young men and women are America's best, and therefore I need to do as good a job writing about their efforts as they do in fighting. And to do that I need to be up on the front lines with them.

So that’s one way to start a writing career. Perhaps not the safest, but certainly the most rewarding. I’ll be returning (for the fourth time) to Afghanistan in late March 2009 to cover these men and women.

They’re your sons and daughters over there, folks, or your neighbors' sons and daughters, and you need to know what they’re doing in your name. I’ll be covering them on The Military Observer, and I hope you’ll join us.

The photo for this post is of Andrew and his son Phil on deployment day in December 2005. Andrew's book "Charlie Battery" won the 2007 Gold Medal for Best Military Non-Fiction from the Military Writers Society of America. His newest book “Keep Moving or Die; Task Force Tarawa at An-Nasiriyah” will be published by Naval Institute Press in the second half of 2009. He has been on ABC, CNN, FOX, and Patriot Media and does a regular spot on Joey Reynolds WOR Radio (710 AM). He also writes on our troops on The Military Observer.

Soldier Wishes: Iraq Veteran Tonight on Your Military Life BlogTalkRadio Show Will Talk About This New Project

Join Nancy Brown of YourMilitary.com and me tonight on our BlogTalkRadio Show Your Military Life as we interview Iraq veteran Jared Still. He's the director of the Soldier Wish Campaign and the senior vice president of special projects with Wishy Inc.

BlogTalkRadio thought our show today so worthwhile that it is one of the featured shows on the home page.

Tune in to hear about this new project to give back to America's military personnel. If you can't tune in live at 6:30 p.m. Eastern today, the recording of the show will be available to listen to about an hour after the show ends.

Wall Street Journal Shines Spotlight on Military Families at War

The December 13th front-page Wall Street Journal story carried the headline "Families at War: Military Clans Face Hardship as U.S. Fights on Two Fronts."

Life for military families used to be simpler. Fathers went off to war and left children behind. Children typically didn't go to war until after their parents retired from the armed forces. There were hardly any female troops.

Today, that calculus is being changed by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, two of the lengthiest conflicts in American history, and the growing numbers of female military personnel. Military families now have parents, children and other close relatives serving in Iraq and Afghanistan simultaneously. The armed forces have growing numbers of married couples deployed to war zones at the same time.

How many of us who do not currently have family or close friends serving in the military have considered this "calculus"? To me it's an amazing picture of U.S. military forces today.

MRS. LIEUTENANT takes place in the spring of 1970. The Journal article states: "Female soldiers make up 13.7% of the Army, compared with 2.6% in 1973, when the military became an all-volunteer force."

In referring to families with multiple relatives serving in the armed forces, Maj. Gen. Mark Hertling, the top U.S. commander in northern Iraq, is quoted as saying:

"It's a good thing, because it does show a family character of selfless service and patriotism. But it may be a bad thing because it's also fostering a society where a small group of citizens do most of the tough work."

I found this last sentence particularly compelling. I personally think that, more upsetting than a smaller group of citizens serving, is that this means there's even a larger group of citizens who are clueless as to the service of their fellow citizens.

One of the goals of both the novel MRS. LIEUTENANT and this blog is to help more people understand the important role our military plays in the survival of our democratic country. And to understand who are the men and women who put their lives on the line for the rest of us to sleep at night.

Read the entire article yourself at the link below. But before you do, I want to share one more quote from the article. Given the rules that a Mrs. Lieutenant had to follow in 1970, this quote from a reverend officiating in September at a military wedding brought tears to my eyes: "With great joy, I now present to you, Lieutenants Eric and Claudia Donahue."

Read the entire article now.