If you could do this, than you would have a nice lightweight AR 15 that’s dependable as well.

“Jill, Thank you for this article. Junior Seau was one of my all time favorites. I have been a Charger fan for all of their existence. I agree with you that all of the Care Givers both in the military and the VA should memorize this letter. Your letter brought tears to my eyes as I read it. I am a 30 year DAV and have been working for many years as a Psychologist, Facilitator, and in any other way I can to help all of us Veterans. Thank yo for what you do. Please look us up Vet-Power.com. Sincerely, Shannon Jernigan, Co-Founder of Vet-Power”

I thank you so much for the encouragement as I truly don’t much of that because what I do isn’t bringing home the bacon. Its not sexy to talk about TBI and PTSD and all the issues that our combat wounded war fighters have to live with. However, I am motivated every time I can help touch a life or make an impact, even if its just one person.

My ultimate dream is to bring it to the mainstream networks and I have several concepts that would do that in a way that America could enjoy without it being a giant bummer…cause this stuff aint easy to talk about! Its sad stuff, but its not going away and we need more resources and tools on how to deal with the cards we’ve been played as families, friends and patriots.

I feel like the bottom line is that we’re ALL in this together with our troops, otherwise, why do we have them in the first place?

Semper Fidelis!

The first thing out of my husbands mouth when I told him of Jr.’s death was that he was sure it was only because of a brain injury, and from all I’ve read recently, it appears to be just that. It is devastating that his Mother, children, and family will have to endure this loss from something that seems so senseless. There must be a way to play this game without destroying people’s lives.

Hopefully this brings this to the front of people’s minds as we welcome home our Veterans.

Nicely done Trucker Redbeard!

For as long as I can remember (I am 28 years old now), my parents have given of themselves to anyone and everyone around them, even down to the last dollar in their wallet. Even though, they never gave out of abundance, they still gave. My parents taught my brother, sister and I about generosity and self sacrifice in word and deed.
We grew up on a small farm in Tennessee. I recall my dad driving thirty minutes away to a tire plant, and working the night shift for much of my early childhood. While most in this situation would come home to a comfy bed for a few hours of sleep, my father did not. He spent the day tending to our cattle and various other livestock. He worked so hard to provide for us. My parents financial situation could have been eased if my mother had gone to work full time. But, both of my parents were unshakably certain that her time was better spent instilling values in her children such as respect, love and the importance of being a good citizen. My parents were never able to give us all the frills life had to offer, but they gave us so much more; a genuine love for God, each other and our country.

At the age of 15 (my brother was 17 and my sister 5) my parents uprooted our family from our small town and moved us to Florida in hopes of providing better opportunity for their children.

At the age of 21, my brother, Aaron, enlisted int he United States Navy. He immediately enrolled in the SEAL Challenge Program. After completing boot camp, and later B.U.D.S, he went on to achieve a meritorious career in the SEALs. After seven years in the teams he was drafted as a member of the elite Team 6. It was a life long dream fufilled.
in the meantime, my parents again went out on a limb and opened their own business. It was a small land clearing business that quickly grew to be a very successful company. They always treated their employees with the utmost respect. I recall several instances when money was tight and my parents chose to forgo their own salary in lieu of being able to pay their employees. As time went on, the housing market sank, and the economy tanked, my parents lost their business. But, true to their character, they did not go without a fight. I watched as my parents even sold their own home, their only nest egg, to make payroll just a few more times. All the while, they clung to their faith in God and in people. Even during those times you’d never find one of their cars without a “hand out bag” in it. This was a bag of food and drink they’d prepared in advance and always kept on hand in case they encountered someone in need. I also remember those last few Christmas’ we were all together my parents decided that we, their children, were no longer allowed to spend our money on gifts for them. Instead, we were challenged to find someone in true need and give that designated money or gift to them instead. On top of that, we spent our Christmas Eve evenings delivering groceries to families in need. Of course at the instigation of my wonderful parents.
After losing the business, their home, their nest egg, and their plans for the future. They are now facing bankruptcy because of debt from the failed business.
So, my dad, at the age of 54, took a job driving all over the country delivering trailers to various companies. It is a thankless, tiring, and extremely lonely job. But, he was left with few options.

Then, on August 6th, 2011, my parents were forced to give up more than they ever had before. They gave their son for you and for me. My brother, not quite two months past the age of 30, was killed in the now infamous helicopter crash in the Wardock Province of Afghanistan. The news came to my parents separately, as my dad was in British Columbia, Canada, working. This news is devastating enough for parents to receive, but they were not even able to grieve together until the next day. We spent that Saturday frantically looking for a way to get my dad home to us. After receiving the news that his only son was dead, he was forced to spend that day with strangers; traveling by ferry, then taxi, then plane, then a layover, and another plane until he was finally home.

But that unfortunately was not the last of their laborious travels. Because of the magnitude of this tragedy, our family spent the next two months traveling to Dover, then to a memorial in Tennessee, then to a memorial in Virginia Beach, then the funeral in Arlington. That still was not the end. We were stuck in Virginia Beach after the funeral because of a hurricane. It was a whirlwind of planes and cars and airports and memorials and sadness. To this day, they are traveling to events in my brother’s memory or to honor his team. It would be too much for some. But my not my parents. Instead of allowing their grief to engulf them, they are reaching out. They have started a website; http://www.forourson.us. They use the sight to carry on the fight my brother gave his life for. They are sitting for an average of two interviews per week for various radio stations around the nation to talk about their sone, their faith and the real issues facing our nation. (obviously with no monetary compensation) They recently traveled to Israel for 10 days to help shine a light on the tragic lives of many Israeli citizens due to ongoing terrorism and hostility from neighboring countries. They are also in the process of organizing an annual Frog Man swim in our community in my brother’s honor. The swim will not raise money for my parents, even thought they are in real need, but instead for the families and children of soldiers who sacrificed their lives for America.
My dad is also still driving for a living to makes ends meet. So they have very little time together. They so desperately need time to grieve together.
My mother still serves faithfully at our church. She does it with a smile on her face. She has shared her story with our women’s group and numerous groups of high school students. They, together, are determined to help others through the tragedy they’ve been dealt.

They are so deserving of a break. What more can they give? Please find a way to honor them.

Sincerely,
Tara Baldwin (their loving daughter)

Secondly, I am glad the NRA is capitalizing on our true power: the registered voter. 2nd Amendment education, take a kid shooting and community outreach are all part of the strategy. However, the real power is in your one vote. It allows you to align your values with others and thus become a force of reason.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for writing your story!~ I hope that anyone who stumbles across this blog will take the time to hear your voice and Malisa’s. I know that for the last two years, I have counted my blessings and become empowered by the caregivers I work for. In a perfect world, your family would be fixed, but then…in a perfect world, we’d have no veterans. So, with every day a new beginning and a chance to make the most of what we do have. Life, family, able bodies at times…but most importantly, LOVE. That is what makes this world a place worth living and you and Malisa and the hundred of thousands like you, are the embodiment of LOVE for your husbands. Thank you for your strength, tenacity, patience and love for your warriors. The rest of us count on you and yours to make this world a place worth living in.

I’ve got YOUR back!

Jill

First, thank you for writing this blog. You are truly giving a face and voice to all of us in the Caregiver Community. It’s a road that no one who hasn’t traveled it could imagine…..

For those reading Malisa’s posts here, let me give you a little background. Malisa has touched on the life of a Caregiver beautifully. I wonder though if those who aren’t living this life know what “Wounded Warrior” can really entail. There is a perception that if a soldier isn’t an amputee or in a wheel chair or full of gunshot holes, they aren’t really “wounded”. I beg to differ.

My name is Steff Smith & I am also a Caregiver to a combat wounded, disabled Army Veteran, and like Malisa, I am the “post-combat” wife. I also was a single Mom, working as a social worker, specializing in homeless prevention/advocacy and crisis intervention, and working on my MSW. Since meeting my husband and realizing the level of care he needed, I left both my job and school. While I miss both and hope to return to school now that he is retired, I don’t regret the decision at all. We’re also still a work in progress as we try to blend 7 very different kids ranging in age from 23 to 4 into a new family structure.

My amazing husband Tom was medically retired in October 2011 after 23 years of Active Duty service, multiple deployments, and numerous injuries. Tom suffers from chronic PTSD, complete with nightmares, night terrors, hallucinations, paranoia, withdrawal and multiple suicide attempts. The last one, in November, was nearly successful. My greatest fear is that after fighting so hard for him, I will lose him to his demons. He is wracked with guilt for not being able to bring all his “Joes” home and that survivor guilt is a constant siren song luring him to thoughts of killing himself.

He also has a TBI that causes debilitating migraines, confusion, memory loss, aphasia, and cognitive function issues. He forgets what he’s doing often. Once, he forgot he was driving while he was on the interstate. I drive now. He has a hard time recognizing numbers, and words for commonplace items escape him to the point that he doesn’t talk much in public anymore.

He has a spinal cord injury and damage to the discs in his lower back and neck. He’ll have a spinal cord stimulator implanted in his back in the next few months to hopefully reduce his need for pain medication. He will have knee replacement surgery sometime this year due to failed surgeries to repair his knee, and is being evaluated to see if his lung function problems are a result of burn pit exposure and sulfur fires near Mosul, Iraq. He sleeps with an oxygen mask at night and breathes like a 90 year old, not a man who is only 40. He works with a speech therapist to overcome the aphasia and does various therapies to help with memory and concentration. At one point, his medication list contained 28 different pills.

I met Tom after he was injured but before he was properly diagnosed with the PTSD or the TBI. During the early Iraq deployments, TBI wasn’t a term on anyone’s radar, and after a blast, soldiers – even those who lost consciousness – were shaken awake by their buddies, helped up, and “shook it off and soldiered on” as Tom puts it. The headaches, hearing loss, dizziness and even drainage of clear fluid from the ears in the days after a blast were just something else to deal with. No time to stop and certainly no desire to see a medic…..that might have separated Tom from his “Joes” and that wasn’t happening unless he was on a medevac. Even then they’d have had hell taking him away from his boys.

After deployment, Tom slowly fell apart. His former wife didn’t care to deal with his injuries and soon after he returned stateside she left him. His pain levels grew, his paranoia increased, he self-medicated with alcohol, and he deliberately wrecked his Harley more than once. He thought that if he died in a motorcycle wreck it would be easier for his kids to deal with than if he committed suicide in an obvious way. Nothing less than God’s grace kept him alive during that time.

I was blessed to meet him in 2008 and we married in 2009. He was transferred to a Warrior Transition Battalion in early 2010 and began the process of a medical board. After 18 months of treatments and almost daily doctor appointments….. I think the record was May 2010…67 medical appointments in 28 days…..He was medically retired on October 25, 2011.

In our three and half years together, he’s been hospitalized around 11 times, tried to injure himself at least 5 times, and we’ve spent countless hours with doctors, therapists, and counselors. In the midst of night terrors, he’s confused me with an enemy combatant and broken my ribs, my wrist and my hand, blackened my eyes more times than I can count, destroyed a floor lamp that looked a like a human figure in the shadows, and actually wandered away in sort of a half waking, half hallucinatory fog thinking that he was in Iraq on a mission. I found him in the rain, camouflaged in leaves, completely unaware of his true surroundings. It took 2 hours of sitting in the leaves with him to bring him around and for him to let me get him home.

I can’t leave him alone for any length of time and I can’t sleep unless he is asleep and I physically have a hand on him so I know if he moves with the beginning of a nightmare or wakes up and tries to get up without me knowing it. People think I can catch up on my sleep when he’s in the hospital. Ha. I am awake all night, acutely aware of his absence. He is such a part of me and my day is built so thoroughly around him that I am at a complete loss when he is inpatient.

Please understand that none of what I am saying here is a complaint. In spite of all the challenges, finding Tom and loving him is the best thing that has ever happened to me. If, on the day we met, I knew then what I know now, I’d still choose to do it all again. No regrets. The only thing I would change is that we’d have found each other sooner. My purpose in sharing all the gritty details is to let people see that the struggles that these Veterans face are real and profound and affect every aspect of their lives.

My stories, and Malisa’s, are but a few. There are thousands more like us. And the story we tell isn’t new. My mother had to take care of my father when he got a certain look on his face…. The “look” meant that Daddy was thinking about Vietnam and us kids needed to be quiet or go outside. Since there have been warriors, there have been those that took care of them after the battle. As Malisa writes her story here and others of us in the Caregiver Community comment and respond, my hope is that we make the sacrifices and struggles of our Veterans a little more real to the people that read these words, and maybe bring some understanding to what the price of freedom really is.

~~~Steff

We have worked getting prizes for prize tables the last several years. Finally the Match Director and I decided to stop. We just announced we stopped and pre-registrations fell by half as did attendance. Then we lowered the entrance fee and attendance was back up to prior levels. This year we are tired of setting up 10 stages so we are cutting back to 7. Each year has been less stress than the last, but nothing like stopping the prize table. Our club is a 501(c)(4), and to pay out prizes would jeopardizethat status in AL (Bingo hall test, don’t ask more). I assume regional competitions are for profit thus why they pay prizes. Not my worry as I am/was not treasurer of them, just our club.

It would be worth writing an article on the topic since I personally know of two high finisher national competitors to have sold a dozen or so irons each in the past couple years. They picked prizes they could sell the easiest since they did not need any more firearms and needed the money. For anyone that watched the Benelli video, Jansen Jones (whom I do not know personally) stated how it takes competitors money, relationships, career opportunities and more to be at the top. How true. Sponsors sell their goods to their sponsored shooters at dealer cost, the lucky ones get their hardware free. Some even get travel expenses, albeit Motel 6 rates, but something is better than nothing. It is amazing how much money is spent on advertising but very little of that money goes to the people who actually use the guns as intended. And active duty military get some break on the costs, but their payscale is significantly less than private industry. IHMHO, military need all the industry’s support since they are fighting and dying for the freedoms we take for granted. As a vet myself I can go on forever on this, but I digress.

If your promotion co. can present a business case to the industry that will leverage those purse dollars beyond advertising budgets, it may be a game changer. I know the publishing industry will be at odds with this since it tends to take away from their ad sales, but 3 Gun Nation deserves all our applause for blazing a trail like this. As nice as the prize table at the AR15.com gig was (it was PHENOMENAL), many of the top finishers sold off their prizes in private party transactions right there in the parking lot.

I’d love to see a change. Entrants dream of having their pick of the prize table, while the winners dream of having income to support their ability to compete. There has to be a better way.

Ruff

The pleasure was all mine to meet you! I am so impressed with your dedication to the sport and to tactical training, as well as your charitable help for the troops and veterans! I heard about the meeting with my USVC today! You guys rock! I’m going to post the pics of the H3 soon and write up the story about it all. Thank you so much for your support! No coincidences in this life!

David Peters