Message Center

Actor/comedian Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” announced plans to take his show to the Persian Gulf as part of a USO/Armed Forces Entertainment tour. Trekking to the region to bring comic relief to troops, Colbert will soon treat service members to an exclusive behind-the-scenes look of the making of “The Colbert Report” and tape four episodes before an audience of Marines, soldiers, airmen, sailors and Coast Guardsmen.

Dedicated to troops stationed around the globe and those who have fallen, “The Colbert Report” will temporarily wrap up filming in New York City and head to the front lines. The first TV show in USO history to film multiple episodes in a combat zone, the program will feature an inside look at conditions overseas, shout-outs from military personnel and four nights of comedy.

“I’m taking my show to the Persian Gulf,” Colbert said. “If there was any hope of peace in the Middle East, you can forget it now.”

The Marshall Foundation cordially invites you to the Marshall Lecture Series featuring Dr. Christopher Catherwood, author of Winston Churchill: The Flawed Genius of WWII

April 8, 2009
5:30 p.m.
Marshall Foundation Pogue Auditorium
Reception and book signing to follow in museum lobby
RSVP by April 6, 2009
(540) 463-7103, ext. 138 or
mcfaddinlh@marshallfoundation.org

To learn about Dr. Catherwood and his book, visit the Marshall Foundation Web site at www.marshallfoundation.org

Helping nurses provide better support for the spouses and families of deployed soldiers is the goal of a recent study conducted by University of Wisconsin Oshkosh College of Nursing professor Suzanne Marnocha.

The study, titled “Military Wives Adaptation and Coping with Deployment during Wartime,” involved in-depth interviews with 11 soldiers’ wives from northeastern Wisconsin about how they coped with the deployment of their husbands. Read full coverage of the study.

“Spouses are often the silent partners trying to manage the home, family and work environments,” Marnocha said. “By understanding how deployment and separation affect these women and their relationships, healthcare providers can better care for these families. It is important to understand how deployment affects the spouses of soldiers before, at the time of notification, during their absence and after they return home.”

Common themes that military wives reported were:

• A desire for normalcy;
• A sense of emotional chaos and turmoil;
• A need to make preparations and take the reins of the family;
• A desire to place the focus elsewhere;
• A need to reach out; and
• A need to re-establish roles upon the spouse’s return.

A special preview screening of a new primetime special, Coming Home: Military Families Cope With Change was held today at the Pentagon hosted by William J. Lynn, III, Deputy Secretary of Defense. Special guests included Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Eric K. Shinseki, Gary E. Knell, President and CEO, Sesame Workshop and Sesame Street’s Elmo and Rosita. The special was created by Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization behind Sesame Street, in association with David Letterman’s production company, Worldwide Pants Incorporated and Lookalike Productions will premiere on PBS on April 1 at 8pm ET/PT (check local listings).

Featuring Queen Latifah, John Mayer and Elmo, this half-hour HD program tells stories of service members who return home with injuries, visible and invisible, and explores the heroic struggles their families face in discovering a new way of finding a “new normal.” The special, which premieres in conjunction with April as the “Month of the Military Child,” salutes the extraordinary courage and strength of these military families and offers the general public a powerful glimpse into what they often must endure.

A preview of the new Sesame Street military families special Coming Home: Military Families Cope with Change, airing on PBS on April 1 at 8 p.m., was held today at the Pentagon and was hosted by (l-r) Gary E. Knell, President and CEO, Sesame Workshop, Walkaround Elmo, Eric K. Shinseki, Secretary of Veterans Affairs and William J. Lynn, III, Deputy Secretary of Defense.

Do you Twitter? Twitter is a micro-blogging social-networking service that allows users to share text-based posts (or tweets) of up to 140 characters.

Starting Monday, March 16, ReMIND.org and Porter Novelli ask Twitter users to register at TweetToReMIND.org.

The Tweet to ReMIND event will take place over Memorial Day weekend (Friday, May 22, to Monday, May 25). Participants will be asked to donate one dollar per tweet. Tweet to ReMIND’s goal is to register 400,000 twitterers by Memorial Day, and to raise $1.65 million during the weekend event, which represents the 1.65 million service members deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11. Each Twitterer must tweet four times in order to meet our goal.

More than 35,000 service members have been physically wounded and it is estimated that more than 320,000 have sustained traumatic brain injuries and more than 300,000 have psychological wounds. Tweet to ReMIND empowers Twitter users to spread this message and raise money to give injured service members, veterans and their families the local support and resources they deserve as they heal and reintegrate into their communities.

Individuals, groups or companies can sponsor and donate designated hours of their Twitter updates to ReMIND.org.

The Tweet to ReMIND campaign call to action was announced March 16 at SXSW Interactive’s Social Media for Social Change panel discussion, sponsored by Porter Novelli at Stubb’s BBQ in Austin, Texas.
TWITTERERS: Please use hashtag #TweetToRemind when you tweet for Tweet to ReMIND.

ReMIND.org, a Bob Woodruff Foundation (BWF) initiative, provides resources and support for returning U.S. service members injured while serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, as they reintegrate into their local communities.

Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan resolution declaring 2009 the “Year of the Military Family“!

With more and more folks noticing military families, if you are a military family member, be sure you and/or all the military families you know are a part of the conversation about what we need by taking 10 minutes to complete the Blue Star Families’ Top Military Family Issues Survey 2.0 by visiting www.BlueStarFam.org. While you’re there, take a look around to see the new direction of the group and sign up to receive notice of the survey results.

Blue Star Families have partnered with the American Red Cross, USO, National Military Family Association, Military Spouse Magazine and Military.com to present this survey to an even larger audience but they still need your help.

To make sure you’re an/or your friends’ military family voices are heard, it’s very important to both take the survey (even if you already took the first version in January) and pass the link to every military family member you know. BSF will make sure it gets to the people that matter – the media and top government officials.

The survey should take less than 10 minutes and closes on March 22!

Training Indigenous Security Forces Requires Time, Organization and Partnerships

A new paper from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) challenges the perception that standing up security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan is a relatively simple task. In The Simple vs. The Complete, ISW Senior Fellow Lt. General James M. Dubik, USA-Ret., draws on his extensive experience as the Commander of Multinational Security Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I) to show the daunting challenge that transitioning security responsibility in Iraq and Afghanistan poses for Coalition Forces.

To read the full paper, visit http://understandingwar.org/press-media/commentary/train-and-equip-strategy-not-simple-task.

“In Their Boots,” a documentary film project that began early in 2008, is hitting the road for a 10-month national tour to raise awareness about the challenges facing U.S. servicemembers and exploring ways to improve veteran care. The new documentary about these issues will be released during the 10-city tour, which begins in March.

In its first year, it produced 12 documentaries, released them in a weekly Webcast online at www.intheirboots.com, and generated substantial media coverage in its effort to raise awareness for the sacrifices servicemembers, veterans, and their families are making as our country continues to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  A three-minute summary of the work from 2008 can be seen at http://intheirboots.blip.tv/#1847450.

The tentative schedule is as follows:

• March, San Francisco — A who’s who crowd of the veteran’s community in Northern California for the Premiere of Broken Promise.  Broken Promise raises the issue of mental health care for returning veterans, and offers a model for the VA to consider to improve its mental health care treatment.
• April, Houston — explore the complexities of traumatic brain injury, the signature wound of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• May, Washington, D.C. — to highlight the problem of homelessness among veterans and effective ways to address it.
• June, Atlanta — to demonstrate the need for “veteran’s courts” and alternative sentencing to support veterans in their efforts to reintegrate when they return home.
• July, Chicago — to examine the impact on children of losing a family member in the war.

These events are all free and open to the public.  For more information, visit www.intheirboots.com.

The CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence released six volumes of previously classified books detailing various aspects of the CIA’s operations in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in the ’60s and ’70s.

The works were distributed and discussed at a weekend conference hosted in Lubbock, Texas, by Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Center and Archive.

The documents, penned by CIA historian Thomas L. Ahern Jr., draw on operations files as well as interviews with key participants to review American foreign policy and provide what CIA chief historian Gerald K. Haines calls a sharp analytical look at CIA programs and reporting from the field.

Ahern covers topics including the CIA’s rural pacification efforts in South Vietnam, efforts to stabilize and democratize South Vietnam following the fall of President Ngo Dinh Diem, intelligence officers’ failure to identify and monitor munitions supply lines to lower South Vietnam, and failed black entry insertion efforts into North Vietnam.

The books, scanned and stored on DVDs, were distributed to participants at the annual Vietnam Center Conference where this years’ topic is Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand and the Vietnam War.

Steve Maxner, director of the Vietnam Center, said the documents were released at the conference to ensure that the international slate of historians and other scholars and veterans who attended the event had access to the materials.

“One of the rights that Americans take pride in is their freedom to access information,” Maxner said. “The government engages in activities that must remain out of the public eye, and that means that while failures often get a lot of press, many successes don’t. These books present a very honest look at both the successes and failures of the intelligence community during that time period.”

Plus, it makes good reading.

“These materials are the kind of thing you see in spy books and movies, but this is the real thing,” Maxner said.

Copies of the books in PDF form are available for download at:

http://today.ttu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/01-cia-and-the-generals.pdf

http://today.ttu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/02-cia-and-the-house-of-ngo.pdf

http://today.ttu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/03-cia-and-rural-pacification.pdf

http://today.ttu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/04-good-questions-wrong-answers.pdf

http://today.ttu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/05-the-way-we-do-things.pdf

http://today.ttu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/06-undercover-armies.pdf