Meeting on the 1st Thursday of each month at 6PM at 60 New Legion Road, Double Springs, AL 35553. Click here for map.
Phone Number: (205)549-3177

Civilians Lived on Bases Without Full Background Checks: IG

Civilians Lived on Bases Without Full Background Checks: IG: Sloppy background checks at three bases allowed 120 members of the general public to live in base housing without proper vetting.

How To Help The Local Reps The VA Depends On

County veterans service officers perform a critical role for veterans, especially those living far from major population centers. Often working closely with small-town chapters of organizations such as Veterans of Foreign Wars, CVSOs are local, state-employed representatives whose purpose is to assist veterans in navigating the bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Their responsibilities are defined by the individual states. 
There is certainly merit in having state oversight of the CVSOs: each state has different benefits for veterans. However, the VA has not standardized how these officers should operate across the 3,143 counties in the U.S. This results in individual states dictating how a small town CVSO should conduct business with a federal entity. Creating more standardization across the board would help reduce strain on “big VA,” both serving veterans within their own communities and ensuring they receive the benefits they deserve.

Unsung Heroes: The Harrier Pilot Who Picked Up A Rifle And Ran Into Combat

When a group of Taliban fighters launched an assault on a massive forward operating base in Afghanistan, Marine Maj. Robb McDonald, a pilot, charged into the fray

On the night of Sept. 14, 2012, a group of 15 Taliban fighters split into three five-man teams and snuck through the outer perimeter of Camp Bastion, a sprawling compound in Afghanistan’s Helmand province that served as a base of operations for nearly 30,000 NATO troops, most of them British soldiers and U.S. Marines. Their attack prompted an immediate battle on the flight line. Initiated when the insurgents began firing rockets at aircraft, the fight drummed on through the night in violent bursts as the heavily-armed insurgents maneuvered in the darkness, hellbent on killing as many Western troops as they could. The plan, as later explained by one of the insurgents, was to kill them in their sleep.

The Army has broken ground on its first national museum to celebrate a history of service

The Marine Corps opened its newest one to great fanfare in Quantico, Virginia, in 2006. The Air Force has had once since around 1950 and the Navy opened one in 1963.

So now, it’s the Army’s turn to get with the times.

Senior officials with the service and supporters recently broke ground on a new National Army Museum to be housed at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The museum will be free-of-charge to visitors, and is expected to open in 2019. Plans for the 185,000-square-foot facility include more than 15,000 pieces of art, 30,000 artifacts, documents and images.

It’s the first of its kind for the Army.

“This museum will remind all of us what it means to be a soldier, what it means to serve with incredible sacrifice, with incredible pride,” said Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Mark A. Milley.

Inside The Drive To Collect DNA From 1m Veterans And Revolutionize Medicine

This is our brand new freezer,” Don Humphries said. “It holds 4 million vials.”

You’d think a freezer big enough to hold 4 million vials of blood would be easy to spot. But to my great embarrassment, I couldn’t see it.

Humphries and I were standing in a lab in the basement of the Veterans Affairs hospital in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. He had led me through a labyrinth of windowless rooms, packed with robots handling tubes of blood donated from veterans, pipes roaring with coolant, and gorilla-sized tanks of liquid nitrogen, until he stopped next to a featureless wall.

After a few awkward moments, I admitted my ignorance. “So, where is the freezer?” I asked.

Humphries, the scientific director of the lab, blinked and then looked at the featureless wall. “Right here,” he said. He craned his head upwards. “This is it.”

I followed his gaze, and then it clicked. The wall was actually the side of a vault that seemed to be about as big as a two-story house.

Near the top I could spy a small window. Humphries led me up a mobile staircase so that I could look through it. Inside the vault was a long, dimly lit corridor, flanked on either side by 16 separate compartments cooled to as low as 80 degrees below zero Celsius. A robot inside the freezer ferried vials to their assigned compartments.

This is no walk-in freezer.

The freezer, in fact, is at the heart of one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken to understand our DNA. The Department of Veterans Affairs is gathering blood from 1 million veterans and sequencing their DNA. At the same time, computer scientists are creating a database that combines those genetic sequences with electronic medical records and other information about veterans’ health.

The ultimate goal of the project, known as the Million Veteran Program, is to uncover clues about disorders ranging from diabetes to post-traumatic stress disorder.

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