It's PTSD Awareness Week, Keep Up The Awareness!

PTSD is real and Veterans deserve all the care they earned serving our country!

PTSD:

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a psychological condition that reflects the development of characteristic symptoms following exposure to extremely devastating traumatic events. Basically, PTSD is a stress and anxiety disorder that occurs to an individual when the individual tries to react in a normal manner to an extreme abnormal event.

Symptoms:

According to the definition of PTSD to qualify as having PTSD you must meet the following criteria.

1. You have been exposed to a traumatic event involving actual or threatened death or injury, during which you respond with panic, horror, and feelings of helplessness. (Note) (Some individuals have a tendency to misunderstand this symptom of PTSD. They see the word "panic" and they read no further. This symptom of PTSD includes all individuals, men, women, and children. If you are in the military and involved in a combat situation your training and normal survival instincts allow you perform.)
2. You reexperience the trauma in the form of dreams, flashbacks, intrusive memories, or unrest at being in situations that remind you of the original trauma.
3. You show evidence of avoidance behavior, a numbing of emotions and reduced interest in others and the outside world.
4. You experience physiological hyper arousal as evidenced by insomnia, agitation, irritability or outburst of rage.
5. The symptoms in Criteria B, C, and D persist for at least one month.
6. The symptoms have significantly affected your social or vocational abilities or other important areas of your life.

If you are experiencing the symptoms of PTSD, it is imperative that you seek treatment as quick as possible.

Photos of volunteers placing wreaths on grave sites today...

Volunteers lay 100,000 wreaths at Arlington cemetery!

Volunteers have honored tens of thousands of veterans buried at Arlington National Cemetery 

with a massive effort to lay 100,000 holiday wreaths at their tombstones.

Maine's Gov. Paul LePage joined thousands of volunteers Saturday in placing the wreaths. 

A convoy of more than 20 trucks left Maine last Sunday, bound for the cemetery

 just across the Potomac River from the nation's capital.

The tradition began 20 years ago with little fanfare. Morrill Worcester, owner of

Worcester Wreath Co. in Harrington, Maine, and others laid 5,000 wreaths 

on headstonesthat first year to give thanks to the nation's veterans.

Since then, it has grown into an organization called Wreaths Across America 

with ceremonies across the country.

Organizers say 10,000 people may join Saturday's wreath laying at Arlington.

Pearl Harbor from above, 1941-2011

Seventy years after a "date which will live in infamy," this satellite image of Pearl Harbor shows the symbols of a war's beginning and end.

The symbol of the end is more evident: The USS Missouri sits at its dock at Ford Island in the Hawaiian harbor, serving as a museum ship. In 1945, the "Mighty Mo" was the stage for the formal Japanese surrender at the end of World War II. After almost a half-century of service, the battleship was decommissioned for good in 1992 and took its place on Pearl Harbor's Battleship Row in 1998.

The Missouri wasn't even afloat on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese airplanes bombed the harbor and drew the United States into the war. But the battleship Arizona was. In the picture above, snapped by the GeoEye-1 satellite, the outlines of the Arizona are barely visible at upper right, beneath the surface of the water. The USS Arizona Memorial is the white structure sitting above the ship.

GeoEye-1, a polar-orbiting satellite operated by the GeoEye commercial venture, focused on Pearl Harbor on Sept. 24 from a height of 423 miles as it sped over the scene at 17,000 mph.

The scene was quite different in 1941, on what President Franklin Roosevelt dubbed a day of infamy. The aerial photograph you see below, taken from U.S. Navy archives, shows the wreckage in the harbor on Dec. 10, 1941, three days after the attack. Dark trails of oil stream from the dead and damaged ships. From this altitude, you get a sense of the attack's toll on the U.S. fleet, but not of the human cost: 2,390 Americans killed, 1,178 wounded.

Today, veterans, family members and dignitaries are gathering at Pearl Harbor to commemorate the 70th anniversary. Flags are flying at half-staff. And Americans are looking back at the events of 1941 from a remote perspective, as if from a great height.

Alan Boyle writes

http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/07/9263923-pearl-harbor-from-above-1941-2011

Wreaths Across America Day: Saturday, December 10, 2011

100,000 wreaths to be placed on gravesites

at Arlington National Cemetery.

Twenty years ago, wreath company owner Morrill Worcester and a dozen other people laid 5,000 wreaths on headstones at Arlington National Cemetery. It was Worcester’s way of giving thanks to the nation’s veterans with leftover unsold wreaths.

This year, Worcester has arranged for up to 100,000 wreaths to be placed on grave sites at the military cemetery Dec. 10 in his biggest wreath-laying undertaking yet.

A convoy of more than 20 trucks left Worcester Wreath Co. in the eastern Maine town of Harrington on Sunday to begin the six-day journey to the cemetery in Arlington, Va., outside Washington, the final resting place for hundreds of thousands of veterans and a tourist site that draws 4 million visitors a year. Along the way, there will be ceremonies at schools, veterans’ homes and in communities in Maine, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland.

Worcester never expected the wreath-laying effort to grow from a single tractor-trailer carrying a few thousand wreaths to 84 big rigs delivering wreaths to Arlington and hundreds of locations. Besides the Arlington ceremony, his Wreaths Across America organization has also organized more than 700 other ceremonies at veterans’ cemeteries and monuments across the country and overseas involving 225,000 wreaths.

“We haven’t really tried to push it; it’s really just grown on its own,” Worcester said. “We have a hard time keeping up with it.”

Worcester, who has never served in the military, came up with the idea of a wreath-laying ceremony 20 years ago when he found himself with an extra 5,000 wreaths in December, too late to bring to market. He decided upon Arlington National Cemetery, which he had visited as a child.

After that first year, Worcester continued donating wreaths and holding ceremonies at the cemetery. The event remained relatively small with little fanfare until a photo, showing thousands of green wreaths with red ribbons nestled against headstones on a snow-covered ground, made its way around the Internet about five years ago.

After that, Worcester got thousands of emails and letters from people wanting to donate, and inquiries from others asking how they could hold wreath-laying ceremonies of their own to pay tribute to those who have served in the military. So he and his wife founded the nonprofit Wreaths Across America to take in donations and organize hundreds of wreath-laying ceremonies at veterans’ cemeteries.

Wreaths Across America put 24,000 wreaths on Arlington headstones last year, and initially hoped to put them on virtually all 220,000 headstones this year. That initiative fell short, but Worcester said he’s still pleased that they’ll be able to put out 100,000 of the laurels.

Of the 325,000 wreaths in all of this year’s ceremonies, Worcester is donating 25,000. His company makes the rest, but they are paid for through donations from groups and individuals and through corporate sponsorships.

The growth of the event doesn’t surprise Joanne Patton of Hamilton, Mass., the daughter-in-law of World War II Gen. George S. Patton and the widow of Patton’s son, Maj. Gen. George S. Patton IV, who is buried in Arlington.

On Monday, Patton will receive one of Worcester’s wreaths in a ceremony in Topsfield, Mass., which she will then lay on a tank in Patton Park in Hamilton, Mass. She has participated in past Wreaths Across America events as well.

“It’s an amazing expression of honoring the spirit of service,” she said.

Figuring out the logistics of resting so many wreaths at Arlington National Cemetery was complex enough when there were only 5,000 to worry about, said Wayne Hanson, who is in charge of coordinating the ceremony at Arlington. If the weather is nice, Hanson expects more than 10,000 people to participate in Saturday’s event.

Hanson is optimistic that some year soon all the Arlington headstones will have wreaths placed on them for the ceremony.

“We can work toward doing the whole cemetery for our 25th anniversary,” he said.

Morrill Worcester, president of the Worcester Wreath Co., and founder of Wreaths Across America.

For more information on the mission and Mr. Worcester click on the links below:

http://www.worcesterwreath.com/

http://www.wreathsacrossamerica.org/