The Fort Hood Shootings: My View

Now that all IVAW members of the Fort Hood chapter have been accounted for, I can breathe a little easier, and will give some of my thoughts on this situation.

The first and foremost is that it IS telling that the shooter is an Army psychiatrist. It's telling for a lot of reasons, and yes, whether or not the shooter himself had PTSD, it does relate to the Army's PTSD treatment.

When I first began receiving treatment for my own PTSD, I had to deal with a couple people who were flat-out incompetent. At one point, I was in an intensive therapy situation, and a Major that I dealt with tried to give me some "helpful advice" - that I should deny my PTSD to anyone who might care about me until they'd known me for years, at which point it would then be appropriate to spring it on them. This Major, who I wish I remembered the name of, spent more time talking about her own sex life to me, and her own personal life issues, than my trauma. This woman was in no position to be treating soldiers, and especially not in the wing area I was, where a lot of the soldiers had been medevaced out for trauma.

What did I do? I complained. What happened? Really, nothing. They added my formal complaint to a stack of other previous complaints, and said every complaint helps to build a case.

This was far from the last terrible military mental health treatment I received. If it were not for one provider I saw within the last six months, I would still to this day think that there was absolutely NO quality mental health care in the Army.

Let's be honest: the military mental health system is breaking. If it's not already broken, it is definitely breaking, hard. It cannot sustain high quality mental health care for the number of soldiers that need it. So what are they doing? Well, they don't have the funds to attract truly competent civilian providers in the numbers they need. We don't have scads of psychiatrists trying to sign up for the Medical Corps. So the military does what they can with what they have: which includes not looking into their own very closely.

Whatever this major's reasons, whatever went wrong in his head that he thought trying to murder an entire roomful of soldiers was okay, I am not going to argue here. The fact that I hope no one will dispute is that he was absolutely crazy at the moment he did so, and crazy does not, counter to some people's beliefs, happen overnight.

Let me make it clear: I am not interested in arguing here whether it was secondary PTSD or garden variety crazy or religious fanatic crazy. I don't know, and at the moment, I don't care. Any of these three still add up to crazy, and none of them happens in a vaccuum.

Where were the screenings? How did none of his fellow psychiatric colleagues recognize that this man was a problem? No, not a problem because he was a Muslim, not a problem because he may have been against the war, but a problem because he was FLAMING FUCKING CRAZY and they were IN A JOB WHERE THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO RECOGNIZE CRAZY.

And if they are not competent enough to recognize a major crazy problem in someone they work with every day, how are they supposed to recognize problems in soldiers they only see for one hour a week?

On My Shit List (edited): Places that don't provide assistance to AE or AP addresses

Right now, top on my shit list is Ebay. They just did a new "improvement" that requires any address entered into their system to choose their state from a pull-down tab. Great, fine, it spares all those idiots who can't be bothered to type two letters into a state field. Great, right? Not so much. Because nowhere under United States is there "AE or AP, Armed Forces European/Armed Forces Pacific" or any variant thereof.
And unlike many places that have the pulldown tab and a manual entry tab, Ebay has been idiotic enough to eliminate the manual entry completely

After spending a lot of time on the phone arguing with the helpdesk person from India that Armed Forces Europe existed as a state, that the US Postal Service would confirm that they cheerfully deliver to it every day as a state with no extra shipping charges, and that they deliver to inside the United States, she finally pointed out that if I wanted to count "APO/FPO" as a separate country, I could make it happen.

What does this mean, aside from the fact that ebay is full of retards? That military people currently serving overseas buying from Ebay are going to start running into problems with idiots who insist that they're buying from outside the country and should be paying international rates, despite the fact that it doesn't cost international rates to ship to APO/FPO.

It's short sighted and stupid. I can tolerate it when small companies just learning the internet ropes make this mistake, but when a major, multi-billion dollar company makes this mistake? It is flat-out offensive.

Anyway, so I decided to start a list. I'm looking for contributions as well, so anyone who finds another company who does not offer support to military members stationed overseas by:
not allowing them something so simple as a manual tab
refusing to ship to APO addresses
does not acknowledge that APO addresses count as part of the United States for shipping purposes

shall be listed here, and hopefully be a little bit shamed.