That crazed vet thing again
The Christian Science Monitor writes about how terrible vets are, using Bradley Stone, the crazy ginger from Pennsylvania as an example;
While the vast majority of veterans, studies show, resume peaceful lives upon returning from the front, some turn to violent crime at higher-than-average rates.
Middle East war vets who struggle with PTSD and alcohol are seven times more likely than a healthy veteran to engage in acts of “severe violence,” according to a University of North Carolina School of Medicine study done with the cooperation of the Department of Veterans affairs.
According to court records obtained by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Stone had been arrested twice for drunk driving and was taking medications as part of mental health treatment. During his testimony after his 2013 arrest, he claimed to be fully disabled by PTSD, in what he testified was a combat-related ailment. Taking pity on Stone, the judge allowed him to go into a Veteran’s Treatment Program instead of going to jail or having to pay a large fine.
The thing is that, despite Stone’s claims, he wasn’t rated as disabled by the VA, in fact the VA and the Marines say that there’s no record of Stone being injured or even witnessing any combat during his grueling four months in Iraq. CSM goes on to admit that Stone was a “combat meteorologist” – the weather forecasting must’ve been traumatic in Iraq.
But other witnesses say they saw a difference in the man who returned from Iraq.
Lisa Andrey, a neighbor of Ms. Stone’s mother, Patricia Hill, who also was killed on Monday, told the Philadelphia Inquirer: “He was a great guy and an excellent father. And then he went away to Iraq and came back and was a completely different man.”
Four months of predicting weather in the sandbox, never hearing a shot fired in anger made him a completely different man. Got that? Just being in Iraq is so traumatic that it makes you hate your wife and kill her and everyone related to her. Except that he wasn’t so crazy that he killed his kids.
It sounds to me that Stone was just using his brief time in Iraq as an excuse to be a bad man. It’s what the civilians expected, so he played the role to the hilt. The article says that his ex-wife that Stone killed told the police that she thought he would do bad things, the police say that he was on their radar, but that’s as far as it went. I noticed the article doesn’t mention a protective order. A protective order might have got Stone’s guns taken from him and prevented him from buying more, but we’ll never know.
I guess it’s too easy to say that his military service and his four months in Iraq caused this, but the facts remain that he’d been battling his ex-wife for years, as opposed to four months predicting the weather in Iraq – they’ve been divorced for five years and locked in combat over custody of their children.
Oh, yeah, CSM mentions that this happened just weeks after Eric Frein was catured after his manhunt – emphasizing that Frein was a “war re-enactor” as if pretending to be an East German soldier somehow caused his murder of a State trooper. It must be the uniforms that cause PTS episodes – right before their mention of Frein, they tell us that Stone was wearing “military fatigues”.
Did anyone else notice that no one is telling us what job he’s had since he left the Marine Reserves? I assume that if he was in the Reserves, he had another job, but none of the media are calling him a janitor at MacDonald’s or a financial planner, or whatever job he’s held recently. Every news story starts out “Iraq veteran” even though that is the briefest portion of his life.
Category: Military issues
Not to argue, and I don’t trust “The Huff”, but they report that he was receiving money from the VA for PTS. Also, reported by NBC that the VA had diagnosed him with PTS. My point is, if he was getting money, it seems they would have to see him as “disabled” (made up by him or not). Still, not an excuse for his actions and not a proper lead in a story by the Lib MSM with “Vet”.
I think people with any sense are going to realize that bad soldiers are like bad cops — they are not indicative of the military community as a whole. I think people also realize that the media has lost any honor it ever had, and will exploit any angle of any tragedy they get wind of. They are not to be taken at face value anymore, and no one with a working brain cell does.
People’s occupations are often listed in a headline or body copy. The issue here is that the veteran aspect is a former component of one’s life but if we are being honest it is a major component.
There is no one who serves who is exactly the same when they leave as they were when they entered. For 99.9999999% of us that means we are better, more focused, more results oriented than ever before.
I don’t think about this as much anymore, just like the headline that reads, “Banker kills wife and then turns gun on himself.” Did being a banker make him crazy? Who knows, stress is a funny thing in that it affects all of us differently. You don’t need to be a combat vet to let divorce make you crazy, you only need to realize your ex is trying to make sure that your children never see you again until they are old enough for college and your influence will be non-existent in their lives. Does being a vet predispose you to violence? Probably not anymore than being a banker or truck driver or salesmen.
Again this crazed vet meme is easy though because how many people serve? And how many people actually know a veteran? People believe the media, that’s why people think what Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton are doing actually matters in the world. People are basically stupid, I no longer have large expectations from the public at large.
When a YouTube video is posted showing dozens of college students unable to identify when the civil war took place and half of them unable to identify the winners of that conflict but all of them can tell you has been involved with Brad Pitt and whatever a Snooki is….well that’s all you need to know about the general public in a nutshell.
a “combat meteorologist” – the weather forecasting must’ve been traumatic in Iraq.
I can hear it now, “The forecast for today is hot. The forecast for the next ten days is…HOTTER. Chance of precipitation…0, humidity is, has been and will be…0. This is a recorded forecast from last month and the months before and most likely will be for the months to come. If the event of a tsunami or unseasonable, heavy jungle type, rainfall, we will immediately go live to your local weatherman, Bradly Stone. Please keep good thoughts out there for our Bradley because he is having a very difficult time here in Iraq. He is lonely and has been here three months already, scheduled to rotate home next month. So the prayers from all of us here in meteorology services go out to Bradley Stone. And you guys on the front line think YOU have it tough!”
Yeah, I commented on that. Not sure if it was that or calling the author a lazy rolling stone type reporter that got me my thumbs down.
The most trauma he had in Iraq came over the phone from his wife…
The second I saw on CNN that they were looking for this guy a couple of days ago and why when my Mom and I were waiting for the tires on her car to get changed, I began a mental countdown for the “crazed veteran” blowback.
“combat meteorologist”
Christmas came early.
My sides.
Hey, fuck you guys! You don’t know what I went through fighting the crowds, trying to get to the window to order a pizza at Arifjan ….
War is hell, damn it!
Or being served a lukewarm cup of coffee at Green Beans OR getting to the Mess Hall (*OOPS*, the Dining Facility) RIGHT AFTER they run out of crab legs, OH, THE HORROR!!!
I guess if he would have been at Balad he would have shit himself on a daily basis from the mortars sailing in.
Until the media dingbats are directly affected by the disruptions of war (unlikely), this labeling game will probably continue. Their ignorance is directly related to how little vested interest any of them have.
It’s also behind the idiotic idea that going to a hot zone like the Middle East to get the ‘other side’ of the story is okay, because they aren’t soldiers and are just there for the story. And we’ve seen the direct results of that stupidity broadcast on video, haven’t we?
Not for nothing but, those 15 main meals selections, 4 meals a day for 4 months of REMF duty would drive any man crazy. That’s where he got the PTS from. Its hard to be a Fobbit and not be changed after returning home…