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And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Snrorry with you along with Daniel Brinkley, co founder of the Twilight Brigade again, a not for profit group that is dedicated to making sure no veteran dies along. Their website is the Twilight Brigade dot com linked up at Coast tocoastdam dot com. Danian, is the VA doing all it can for our vets? Is it getting any better?
Well, we have to look at it from this point. This is an election you're coming, okay, And if we dislike for twenty seven years, put the information in the hands of the people and the veterans, then they have a knowledge of a reason why when you see your representative or you see these people on the campaign trail, we can make a difference. So what I've done every year is put together the worst and the best things. But when to answer your question straightforward, is this There
are two studies. They say that seventeen to twenty two veterans kill themselves every day, and then there's another one that says thirty one a day. Well, in eighty six percent of these veterans have interacted with the VA or tried to find help, okay, And so when you look
at that, then the system is failing. It is absolutely failing if these veterans are interacting and trying to find help with whatever they're going through and the system is failing them, because then they get depressed and they kill themselves.
And at the rate that we're watching it happen. This is why everybody as war is building all around us, and we look at what the contract with the government is when you go and put your life on the line, and then to look at the last three from Vietnam forward to now and look at where we are, we
have to do something. So how made a list of a couple of things are the worst parts about the VA, because there's also great things happening, the innovation of integrative and complementary medicine, and the VA is beating all goals. It's beating all standards across the metric of hospitalization therapy modalities.
Has that changed? It wasn't that way thirty years ago, was it?
Oh? My god, George? When I started member. When I started, they didn't have hospice. There was no hospice program. When I started in the VA, and the Tchi Bagage's training has now become the standard end of blafe care model in the Veterans Administration as no vet dies alone. And I was talking to Cheryl Turkilson. It was me, Sheryl Turkison, Thomas EAD's, Beth Clay of the International Chiropractors Association, all of us who came together to push this forward old
health and integrative therapy. They you couldn't even say the word yoga. You couldn't say it. Okay. So now the standard end of life care model used by the Veterans Administration is the Parlett Brigade refined into now a standard the end of life care model. So I have succeeded in achieving that goal. Okay. So when you look at where we are now, the greatest, the worst thing that we have is the eh R, the electronic healthcare system.
It's the worst thing in the world for whoever designed it, George, whoever designed it, did not care about the patient. They cared about records. So what's happening to doctors? And I have like twenty two different doctors that I know in different vas. So I asked them all the same questions, and so the system takes away from time and with the patient, with the veterans, it's worth that. Chasing down
how to put a record together is so hard. You spend all of your time logging information and only have a couple of minutes with the vet trying to diagnose. This is horrible. The other thing that's really bad is they are not looking at They're not looking at what happens after war. I mean, they say they're doing it, okay, but when you look at.
And that's one of the most critical things, isn't it.
It's everything George, Why would we serve because we knew our backs were covered and you know, you work the system. I mean, the worst part. The other part that's the worst is the bureaucratic victims. They build bureaucratic systems that
create obstacles. Like one doctor he said, look, I have to go through ten pharmacists to give a patient of prescription, and they all have to approve it because each one creates a rule or regulation so that they would be in charge of making the decision when the doctor's been a doctor for forty years, okay, And this is throughout the doctors different every type of doctor cardiologists and internists and surgeons, all of them tell me the same thing,
and especially nurse. So this is stuff that we as the we as the people of the night, or we have coasted the coast, we have the power in the next year to stand up for our veterans. And that's why the like light streamers is where I house the toilet Brigade because now it's a government program. And I moved on to caregivers because the thing that's so great that I've watched happen, George, is caregivers have power and survivors. So before it was only just the veteran. Now it's
the caregiver and they can get paid. They can they're gonna do the work anyway. They're gonna do it anyway, and why not get paid for it. Why not respect the caregiver? Because when you when they looked at the Iraq situation and after the Gulf War, which not nobody really got hurt, but you looked at when you came home, that parent became that parent, or that wife or that spouse or that friend became a caregiver, and something had to happen. So this has moved forward. I'll tell you
something else. That's really cool, George. It's peer facilitators. During the COVID time, they had to create ways that people would normally come in for sessions and sit down and talk or that program. Well, they put them on the phone and they put them on a zoom call. Okay. Kathy Bixby at the Washington VA, I mean she pushed this program. She was hospice, but she pushed this program where guys could get on their phone, they could call in and have a peer facilitator. That means I unbat somebody.
They're listening to their story, and everybody listeninging to everybody and interacting together to create that camaraderie that's so important. I mean, I see the opportunity for us because we have consisted. We've been doing this for twenty seven years. Okay, we've been doing this, and everybody who listens, I try to put together the smartest understanding of how to work the VA to get what you need. Okay. And it's
the whole health program. The whole health program. If you're a caregiver and you're listening this, are you no one? Or you're a veteran and you're listening to this, or you no one. You tell them to go to the and look on the website at VA, at the VA slash va dot gov, slash wholehealth dot com and look at it because it's your gateway. And not only that, George, it's the opportunity to take back control of your life with Now you can say yoga, ichi, acupuncture, stretching, I
mean a whole other world. I A practice, a whole other world of integrated therapies are happening in the VA because you have to treat the whole body. You have to treat that. And so my biggest issue is two things. The system is bureaucrats and the other system is the electronic healthcare system. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. And the other thing is tonight, in the two hundred and forty eighth anniversary of the.
Marine Corps, of which you're a marine.
Urrah, fifty thousand becans fifty thousand vecins will sleep on the street. No way, fifty to sixty thousand. I took the low side of the study, George.
Wow.
In Los Angeles, that's all they talk about is a thousand. Why there's eighteen thousand vectans on the street in Los Angeles?
Crazy time.
It's insane.
It is insane. We need to take care.
Let me tell you one of the issues within it, though, George. Here's one of the issues because I lived this every day. You know, I've been at this thirty seven years in the VA and I mean the hospital volunteer for forty five years, you know, in the VAF thirty four thousand dollars at the bedside, and I've been with over two thousand people at three hundred and fifty eight taking their last breath.
There's a place for you in heaven, Danian. If they ever keep you, they keep throwing you.
Back well, because I know you would miss me, George.
Yes.
So here's the other thing too. There's a thing called Operation Operation Patriot FOB OPFOB in South Carolina and it's finding purpose beyond beyond the call of duty. And they're trying to create camaraderies near the Marines, near Paris Island. And I want people to go to Lightstreamers dot com and then go to the Twilight Brigade under resources and look up, look up this op FOB OPFOB light Streamers Twilight Brigade, because these kind of organizations need our support,
because these are veterans helping veterans peer to peter. The other thing that's so much important in integrated therapy, and this is another company I found. It's called Benefits USA, Okay, and they have a series of products that have to do with pain management, okay. And I want people to take a look at it, Light Streamers, Twilight Brigade Resources, and go in and look at it, because if you're in pain and it's a natural way, let's see if it works for you. The other thing is we need
to support the OPFOB. I mean, this needs to be supported because these kinds of programs, George, are the things that's gonna make a difference in the lives of efans. And when you come in contact with a congress person or anybody that's running for office next year, these talking points are gonna make the difference.
Sure, how bad is PTSD.
Well, you've got to be able to separate the concept of PTSD from traumatic brain injury, Okay. And it's horrible. It's horrible, and some of it is caused. Georgia is the thing that made me got me really bad because I heard these stories of guys they're ops people. Because I know, you know, I know everybody. They're ops people. And they were doing a special op in Syria, okay,
and it was a marine battalion. And these guys came back and they were a howardzer battalion and then they were firing one hundred pounders okay, fifteen miles and they so many of these twenty two of them came back and they were having visions and hearing voices, and they were seeing dead people. And one had this little girl that stayed with him all the time. Okay, And I said, wait a minute, wait a minute, what could possibly They
thought they were hecks. They thought that some of the stories that they were told, because when you're firing a howitzer, you're filing at twelve to fifteen miles, and you don't never see a combat. You don't ever see one. But when these guys started having this, they ruled it PTSD,
but it was traumatic brain injury, okay. And when guys wouldn't follow along the system and take the drug protocols that they have so they could classify it under the numbers that they could use so that they could fill it up in their records, as opposed to paying attention to what they're saying when you fire a howitzer maybe one hundred and fifty five. You got one hundred pounder. The percussion, George of when you pull that, when you pull that lever and it fires, there is a percussion
wave that comes backwards. I mean, anybody's ever been in a blast zone.
Those incredible, isn't it?
Yeah? I mean it moves through every muscle, every bone, every organ. I mean it shatters you. And then you fire, and then you at firebase and then you fire four hours. Look at what you're doing. So it's got to be traumatic brain injury. So in separating those two things, look at PTSD, which is a protocol they use. And I'll tell you something about PTSD, George. It has a lot to do with guilt. I mean traumatic brain injury comes.
I mean PTSD post traumatic stress syndrome comes from things that when you get away from it and you don't have the camaraderie of your team, and you don't have the safety of you all supporting each other, and you're all by yourself having to face yourself and what happens in combat and in war you're killing tens of thousands of people. You cannot walk away from that. And when you look at today. You look at today and where we are is the United States of America, and when
what's going on? And where we have? You know what the first thing I would ask myself was, is the president administration refilling the Strategic ore Reserve? That is the only question I would ask the President of the United States today?
Why is that?
Because if you don't have the fuel to convert to run operation, which is diesel, what happens to climate change in a war? George, what happens? Climate change goes out the window? And you know, it doesn't matter anymore because the diesel fuel and killing and murdering and destroying and all the stuff that creates CO two and all those stories that we hear about that. Then what happens if we don't have the fuel, If we don't have the fuel to fight a war, we won't be fighting it. Okay.
So when people start to really look at this, are those reserves being refulled today? And are we pumping in America to make sure that we get to at a price that we can afford to pay? And George, look we're at right now to the United States. We are we don't have a budget, we haven't had a budget like ten or twelve years, But we don't have a budget. We're having continuous resolution right now and it's got to be done by what Monday or are the government shuts down?
Hello everybody? Okay, So if there's ever a chance that we're going to make a difference, it's now. And if we ever were safe enough to look at where we are, we don't have a choice. The thing that I have comfort in, George is you already know the boxes of knowledge and save by the light and from the You know, everybody doesn't know that. But when I put it in that book, it was if they were brave enough to put this stuff on me and I had to come back and take two years to learn to walk and
feed myself. Then when I was going to tell the story, either what they had given me as became future events, what they had given me either reinforced the fact that there was life after death already did not. These are not Danien predictions. These are what they said. And when Paul and I sat down we put it in boxes. All I asked anybody to do is just go look at it and see what I missed. What did they miss? Okay? Then the reality for me it's that there's life after death.
And I've helped contribute to the concept. I've been going through all the crap that I've been through, I've contributed to the concept. So where the toilet Brigade came from? Was it you come to a place in this event when you see your life pass before you in a three hundred and sixty degree you watch it from a second persons point of view as though you were your own best friend, and then you literally become every person that you ever encountered, and you feel the direct results
of your interaction between you and that person. And this is a Danianism. But then you ask a question, if God couldn't come today and God sent you and the life you just reviewed, what difference did you and God make? Well, lying in that bed for eleven or twelve months and getting up the walk again. The difference that I could make is go die with marines. That was the difference I could make, because I'd already been where they're going to go, and I have so much knowledge of what
marines and what combat and what people go through. And so if God couldn't come to and God sent me, and then when it came time to do this book, which is like eighteen years later. It was because I looked at where Raymond was and I saw that how, I mean, how trying so hard to descend something he did a study on. I mean he studied it. He was a philosopher. And I watch what happened, and I just said, Okay, let's put it out there. So I've been out here every day since then.
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