Tony Harrison has been cooking up holiday meals for homeless Baltimoreans for years. However, he’s hoping to expand on that tradition this December by making enough delicious BBQ to feed hundreds of Baltimore’s homeless veterans ahead of Christmas weekend.
Veterans have given so much of themselves that we kind of think just one day of honoring their service doesn’t quite cut it. Well, Baltimore County Animal Services seems to agree. That’s why all week long, they’re offering a special promotion to help make it easier for veterans to adopt a loving pet and bring a furry companion home. Through Sunday the 16th, the shelter will waive animal adoption and spay/neuter fees for veterans who are Baltimore County residents. In addition, during the remainder of the year, veterans living in Baltimore County will receive a 50 percent discount on animal adoptions and spay/neuter services. Now that’s a way of saying “thank you.”
The day after Veteran’s Day seems like a good time to point out that the Baltimore VA office has the longest waiting time in the country before injured vets get their benefits. According to the VA, vets should see their claims filed and processed in 125 days, or about 4 months; in Baltimore, the average wait time is 780.8 days, or more than two years. The office also makes more mistakes than any other one nationwide, reports the Baltimore Sun.
Okay, so it’s not quite as cool as growing a new ear on someone’s arm (like Johns Hopkins did last year), but this is still pretty impressive: surgeons performed a rare double arm transplant on a soldier who lost both arms and legs in Iraq on Easter, 2009.
Back in December, we brought you the story of Sargent Michael Frazier, the Marine who lost both legs when he stepped on an IED in Afghanistan. At that time, Sargent Frazier was heading to Miami (for free and on a private jet no less, courtesy of Veterans Airlift) to meet his fiancee’s family for the first time. It was an intense time for Sargent Frazier, who was getting used to his prosthetic limbs and figuring out how to deal with his badly damaged hand.
Members of the military with ties to Maryland who were killed while serving in Iraqi and Afghanistan, will be honored at Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens’ annual Memorial Day Ceremony. The traditional ceremony will take place Monday, May 28, 2012 at 10:00 a.m., in the Circle of the Immortals, Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens. The observance is free and open to the public.
Ryan Bailey was a 20-year old lacrosse player and accounting major from Seaford, New York; Tim Coyer was a 27-year old veteran who returned after two tours in Iraq hoping to get a degree in business administration. Both were juniors at Towson University, and both died on campus on Saturday, March 31 in two separate incidents.
As the war in Iraq comes to an official close and troops begin to withdraw from Afghanistan, veterans of those conflicts are coming home to a world that sometimes seems as though it’s not quite ready to accommodate them. There are the big problems (unemployment, undiagnosed brain trauma). But then there are the little things – like flying home for Christmas.
Consider Sargent Michael Frazier. After three tours in Iraq, he was deployed to Afghanistan with the Marines. While out on patrol, Frazier stepped on a pressure plate IED. No one else was injured, but Frazier lost both legs and much of the use of his right arm. He spent his first night back in the U.S. intubated and being prepped for intense surgery; drawn in by his blue eyes, Navy corpsman Monica Montes stayed up with him all night and went with him into the operating room the next day. After they got engaged a few weeks ago, the couple started making plans to spend the holidays with Montes’s family in Miami. Frazier was eager (and maybe a little apprehensive) to meet his future father-in-law for the first time. But Montes and Frazier had larger worries than awkward silences at family dinners: namely, how would they get from Walter Reed National Military Center in Bethesda (where Frazier is undergoing rehabilitation) to Montes’s family home in Miami?
These days, air travel isn’t easy for anyone. That’s even more true for Frazier and his fellow wounded warriors, many of whom have injuries that make commercial air travel range from grueling to downright impossible. That’s where Veterans Airlift comes in. The organization links wounded vets (and their families and friends) with a national network of volunteer pilots and plane-owners. When a combat veteran needs to go somewhere – say, to Miami to meet his future in-laws – an alert gets sent out on the Veterans Airlift email list. A pilot on the list who has plans to fly on a day and a route that matches the vet’s needs will volunteer to take the mission. The wounded warrior gets a ride in a private jet without having to worry about switching flights, cramped middle seats, and nightmarish transportation scenarios. Oh, and the flight is free.
On a recent morning, Frazier and his fiancee, Monica Montes, joined Glyndon residents Stephanie and Edwin Greenberg before the two-hour flight to Florida. The Greenbergs are accomplished pilots and have flown five previous missions with the organization. “[Veterans Airlift] is one of those miracles of the internet,” says Stephanie Greenberg. “It pairs a need with a desire to help.” These days, the 2,000 pilots who make up Veterans Airlift’s volunteer force are so eager to help that requests like Frazier’s get snapped up right away, and it’s easy to see why – the goodwill in the room is palpable. It’s as if no one in the room can stop grinning.
Stephanie Greenberg credits Walt Fricke, the Vietnam vet who founded the organization, with understanding just how crucial it is for wounded vets to be able to see family and friends. In its five years of operations, Veterans Airlift has flown more than 4,700 wounded warriors. Most missions are like the one the Greenbergs are flying with Frazier – taking a warrior to see far-flung family. Others have a more light-hearted intent; last year, the Greenbergs helped two Marines get to Miami so they could hang out with friends.
Spending time with wounded warriors has allowed Stephanie Greenberg to “see the untold cost that war has taken on these young people and their families,” she says. “And for the duration of a flight, we’re able to honor them. And it’s a great honor for us – very gratifying and humbling.” For their part, Frazier and Montes seemed excited to bask in their first jaunt on a private jet; they’d brought cupcakes to share, and looked forward to hanging out with the Greenbergs’s dalmatians, which were along for the flight as well.
Like many wounded warriors, Frazier resists attempts to paint him as a hero. “I was just doing my job,” he insists. And yet, that job changed his life irrevocably. We live in a world where, as Frazier notes, “a lot of people still don’t know that there’s a war going on in Afghanistan.” Frazier doesn’t have the luxury of that ignorance; and by connecting people like Frazier with people like the Greenbergs, Veterans Airlift helps make the world a bit easier for those who have given so much.
Sometimes I just want to slap Science on the back and tell it that it’s doing a great job. Like today, for example, when I heard about an experimental treatment for vets with spinal cord injuries that’s being run by Johns Hopkins. The study’s participants gained an “unprecedented” restoration of neurological function, but not a new drug or an innovative surgery. Their breakthrough therapy was scuba diving.
The first germ of the idea came from Cody Unser, a young woman who was paralyzed from the chest down as a teenager. Fortunately enough, Unser was also the member of a prominent (and wealthy) auto-racing family, so when she noticed that she regained some feeling in her legs while scuba-diving, she was able to sponsor this pilot study through her foundation. The next thing you know, the Hopkins researchers were flying to the Caribbean with ten wheelchair-dependent vets, ready to embark on a series of dives. And though the study only examined a small number of people, the results were striking: the vets showed significant gains in muscle movement, increased sensitivity to sensation, and large reductions in PTSD and OCD symptoms. (Healthy controls who dove along with the vets showed no neurologic changes.)
The researchers are still trying to explain just how and why the underwater experience had such a restorative effect. Was it the buoyancy? The increased oxygenation of tissues from pressurized air? The beautiful Caribbean waters? Sure, there are plenty of questions to be answered, and more studies to do. But for right now, we’re just happy to hear that there’s hope for those with spinal cord injuries. Good job, Science.
