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Veterans’ health records can now include their gender identity, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced Wednesday. The department said it began including gender identifiers in its national medical record system last month “to help VA providers better understand and meet the health care needs of Veterans,” including transgender and gender-diverse veterans. It added the categories “transgender male, transgender female, non-binary, other or does not wish to disclose” as options in its gender identity field. Nonbinary refers to an individual whose gender identity is neither exclusively male nor female. Denis McDonough, the secretary of veterans affairs, said in a statement that...

The great majority of Marines today live our core values on a daily basis and exhibit the true warfighting culture of our Corps. A few do not. This memorandum concerns them... because of the values our individual Marines embody: Honor, Courage, and Commitment....We must speak plainly and forcefully with our recruits and candidates from day one, and tell them that racists, sexists, bigots, homophobes, and bullies are not welcome...I expect leaders who see any sexism, racism, or other destructive attitudes in the ranks to step in immediately and intervene, just like you would to stop an impending safety mishap.

New Jersey is set to pay approximately $53 million in settling claims its negligence contributed to the deaths of over 100 veterans in state-run homes amid the coronavirus pandemic, attorneys announced Thursday.

101st Airborne veteran Earl Ervin McClung is remembered as an American Indian whose service during World War II was heroic, brave and memorable. As a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division, McClung jumped into battle on D-Day, and landed behind enemy lines amidst gunfire both in the air and on the ground. ... McClung has modestly explained, though, that the praise received by Easy Company, following the successful HBO series, could have easily been based on many other airborne companies. “They all went through the same things we did,” McClung said. “This was supposed to have what these men and...

...After he saw our story on the “Chase Wave,” he wanted us to know that something very similar happened to him.... If you remember, we posted a document sent in by a new source who said it was a step-by-step instruction sheet that Scientology’s “registrars” were given, explaining to them how to lie to Chase credit card operators in order to open up new credit card accounts for cash-poor Scientology members, and then max out those cards with Scientology charges in order to saddle members with huge debts. The “Chase Wave” involved opening up a series of different Chase cards...

Study in Science of more than 780,000 Veterans is the first to compare waning protection rates across all three vaccine types available to most Americans and to directly report death rates after breakthrough infection. A new study in the leading journal Science reviewed COVID-19 breakthrough infections among 780,225 Veterans, finding that vaccine protection declined from 87.9% to 48.1% during the 2021 Delta surge in the U.S. The researchers from PHI, the Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the University of Texas Health Science Center found a dramatic decline in effectiveness for the Janssen (Johnson and Johnson) vaccine, from 86.4% in March...

Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans and Military Families has opened a new National Veterans Resource Center to help more veterans and military families thrive. The Institute for Veterans and Military Families has operated since 2011. The new resource center is designed to enhance collaborative efforts to help veterans as they transition into civilian life. "It's typically not about knowledge, skills and abilities. It's more about culture and fit," Mike Haynie, founder and executive director of the Institute for Veterans and Military Families, told News 3 anchor Todd Corillo. "I'm a veteran myself, I served 14 years in active duty. I...

Veterans Day was first known known as Armistice Day. It was established by Congress in 1926, to honor Americans who fought in World War One, which came to a victorious end with the armistice of November 11, 1918. In a White House proclamation, President Calvin Coolidge described the conflict, then known as the Great War, as “the most destructive, sanguinary, and far-reaching war in human annals.” Yet a few years later came an even greater and more destructive war, World War Two, and soon thereafter, a smaller war in Korea. So in 1954, Congress renamed Armistice Day, by now a...

Sgt. 1st Class Doug Kirby curled up, broken and burned, on the ground in front of the flaming Army fuel depot. Nothing remained of his left leg but a bloody stump. Kirby enlisted in the Army in 1961 and was a sergeant first class by the time he arrived at Qui Nhon, South Vietnam, in June 1970. In the hours just after midnight that morning — June 5, 1970 — Kirby had been guarding the fuel farm at Qui Nhon, South Vietnam.

On the Google.com homepage today, you’ll find that the usual logo has been replaced with a bit of artwork created by Phenix City, Alabama-based artist and veteran of the US Army Steven Tette. The Veterans Day Google Doodle shows the diversity of members of the military as well as what they do at home. To express the duality of each service member, they’ve been artistically split in half, one side showing their branch’s uniform and the other showing the uniform of their civilian jobs.

This Emmy-award winning short is a tribute to all veterans of the armed forces.

President Joe Biden referred to legendary baseball pitcher Satchel Paige during his Veterans’ Day speech on Thursday referring to him as “the great negro.” “You know, I’ve adopted the attitude of the great negro at the time, pitcher in the negro leagues, went on to become a great pitcher in the pros, in the Major League Baseball after Jackie Robison, his name was Satchel Paige,” Biden said as he began his speech.

Our treatment of troops returning from combat has led to a culture of permanent disability. They deserve better. Far too often, however, veterans returning to the civilian world are diverted from paths of self-sufficiency and shuffled down paths of dependency and dysfunction. I witnessed this personally at Walter Reed. Soldiers were transformed from men and women of consequence—bravely fighting for their country—to wards of the state, dependent on others and on charity for their sustenance, purpose and meaning. One soldier whom I knew had been wounded in 2003 and was fully able to function by 2005—yet lingered on at the...

Gary Sinise's iconic role as Lt. Dan in Forrest Gump provided the world a glimpse into a soldier fighting his post-war mental monsters with alcohol and anguish. Although a fictitious character, Lt. Dan's use of alcohol to drown out the psychological and physical pain is a reality for thousands of service members who served here and abroad. In the 1990s, we trained for a conventional war based on a Russian threat. Conventional forces battled on training grounds against imaginary forces called Krasnovians. The military focused on large-scale at a distance war, not up close and personal like the Vietnam War....

Today we remember all who have served in the U.S. Armed Forces; they deserve our respect, honor and gratitude.Sadly today’s military is not your Dad’s (or Mom’s) military. Rather than the proficient, disciplined, skilled and adept vets of yesteryear the overlords want current recruits to be woke and poked. They will turn our proud military into a joke unless steps are taken to reverse this foolishness. Don’t look to our current Commander in Chief to spearhead that effort.He seems to travel to the tune of a different piper altogether.Fortunately previous generations of men and women were able to carry on...

Editor’s note: In 1993, the late, great Chicago columnist Mike Royko wrote what may be the best column on Veterans Day ever. It’s reprinted below. I just phoned six friends and asked them what they will be doing on Monday. They all said the same thing: working. Me, too. There is something else we share. We are all military veterans. So how does this country honor them?... ...By letting the veterans, the majority of whom work in the private sector, spend the day at their jobs so they can pay taxes that permit millions of non-veterans to get paid for...

I just returned from being honored as a vet.

First, the good news. resident Joe Biden’s Veterans Administration (VA) budget request for Fiscal Year 2022 is $270 billion--a 10% increase over 2021 levels. Now, the bad news. Picking up where a failed Senate bill in 2019 left off, the budget’s language would amend Title 38 of the U.S. Code, a.k.a. Veterans’ Benefits, to limit veteran options on who may legally file disability and benefits claims on their behalf. It would hurt millions of veterans. Though well-intentioned, the last Congress introduced legislation which would criminalize providing such services without being accredited by the VA, thereby sharply reducing veteran claim options....

Two months after the Pentagon began requiring all troops to get the coronavirus vaccine or face dismissal, the vast majority have now had shots, in part because none received a religious exemption, military officials said. https://t.co/3zpPg5hpG6 — NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) November 4, 2021 Troops who refuse the coronavirus vaccine won’t see any extra protections or leniency in how their dismissals are handled, Defense and Veterans Affairs officials confirmed Wednesday. Instead, decisions on whether to give those individuals other-than-honorable discharges — potentially blocking them from a host of veterans benefits — will be left to local commanders, and their cases won’t...

Amid the chaos of the final US withdrawal from Afghanistan, commentators from across the political spectrum have lamented the abandonment of our Afghan allies, many of whom served critical roles in our military’s mission. Many have also reiterated the commitment to honor our veterans from the twenty-year Global War on Terror. resident Biden explicitly said as much in his address to the nation on August 31: “The cost of war they will carry with them their whole lives [sic].” Unfortunately, America has already abandoned its veterans—though not in the way most people may think. By any measure, we give more...