Navy Veteran lost everything, until stranger wanted to help her

Homeless veteran gets second chance, thanks to kindness from a stranger

CBS 12 News
Kristen Chapman
January 24, 2020

"Don't be defeated by your situation, you defeat it." 

Bakita Denegal

LAKE PARK, Fla. (CBS12) — A Navy Veteran who had been living in her car in Lake Park for weeks was given a second chance from someone she had never even met before.

60-year-old Bakita Denegal spent 15 years in the Navy based in Virginia, then moved to Riviera Beach where she worked for the Riviera Beach Police Department. It wasn't until years after she retired when she found herself homeless.

"I never say why me? Because then I think, why NOT me," shared Denegal.

Denegal says she hit hard times when doctors discovered blood clots in her legs, and then found blocked arteries in her heart. The procedures kept her in the hospital for weeks at a time, twice in two months.

The hospital bills were so high, she couldn't afford her rent.

"He found I had blood clots in my legs, my thighs, my lungs because the right side of my heart was weak," she shared, "She [her landlord] mailed a copy of the money order back to me and it says, 'I don't want your rent.'"

Her landlord evicted her.

Derrick Dorsett owns the Kangaroo House Subs restaurant in Lake Park. However, he says it's only around to help fund his higher purpose, which is helping others through his non-profit "God's Loving Hands Feeding Homeless."
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Female Native American Veterans Struggle For Same Treatments Male Veterans Receive

Native American veterans still struggling to get the health care they were promised

Cronkite News
By Madeline Ackley
Jan 19, 2020

“It was very hard to get into,” Barnes-Saucedo said of the VA system. “Since I was freshly out of the military, I still had a hard time getting into a clinic down in the Phoenix VA.”

Vanissa Barnes-Saucedo said she hasn't received the same respect and resources as fellow Hopi veterans who are male. She is one of an estimated 133,899 Native American Veterans. Madeline Ackley Photo Cronkite News

KYKOTSMOVI — Vanissa Barnes-Saucedo was 21 when military recruiters stopped her in a shopping mall, waving enlistment papers in front of her. Although she says she wasn’t entirely sure what she was getting herself into, she signed the papers anyway.

For the next six years, Barnes-Saucedo was stationed around the world: Virginia, Colorado, South Korea, Kuwait and Iraq. However, by the time she was honorably discharged in 2014, she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

When she returned home to northeastern Arizona, Barnes-Saucedo had difficulty navigating the Department of Veterans Affairs — the government agency in charge of veterans’ health care. She’s Hopi, born and raised on her tribe’s ancestral lands. The nearest full-service VA center, in Flagstaff, is a two hour drive; the VA campus in Phoenix is a four hour trip.

“It was very hard to get into,” Barnes-Saucedo said of the VA system. “Since I was freshly out of the military, I still had a hard time getting into a clinic down in the Phoenix VA.”

Although she didn’t mind making the trip, she said she was bothered by the treatment she received there.

“They made me feel like . . . I was making up some of the issues I was having,” she said. Barnes-Saucedo also wanted to make in-person doctor appointments but felt pressured by staff members to use the telemedicine service instead.

“I felt helpless . . . It was difficult,” she said. Eventually, she decided to go to her local Indian Health Service center, a government-run agency tasked with caring for Native populations.
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No one knows where Margaret Corbin’s grave is?

The Missing Grave of Margaret Corbin, Revolutionary War Veteran

Atlas Obscura
BY SHANE CASHMAN
JANUARY 14, 2020

IN 2016, FIVE DAYS AFTER Thanksgiving, Margaret Corbin’s grave was dug up for the second time since her death in 1800. It began by accident. Contractors were working on a retaining wall near the West Point Cemetery, at the U.S. Military Academy, when a hydraulic excavator got too close and chewed through the grave.

As soon as they noticed bones spilling from the soil, they alerted the military police. The plot was quickly cordoned off, her monument was wrapped in tarp, and rumors started to spread about Corbin’s resting place—that is, if it even was her resting place. When forensic archaeologists arrived at the scene, they were perplexed: The bones seemed oddly large.

On the West Point monument, Corbin wears a long dress and a powder horn, and she operates a cannon while her long hair flies in the wind. SCIENCE HISTORY IMAGES / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

The monument to Margaret Corbin is West Point’s only monument to a woman veteran, and it greets visitors near the main gate, just feet from a neoclassical chapel. It faces Washington Road, where the Academy’s top brass live, and depicts Corbin in a long dress, operating a cannon as her long hair and cape fly in the wind. She wears a powder horn and holds a rammer to load cannonballs; the rest of the rather cramped cemetery sprawls out behind her. The monument portrays the moments before Corbin became a prisoner of war.

WHEN MARGARET CORBIN DIED IN 1800, she was buried in a pauper’s cemetery in Highland Falls, just three miles from West Point. But in 1926, the national society of women known as the Daughters of the American Revolution saw to it that Corbin would earn her vaunted cemetery plot. The society, which is made up of women who can trace their lineage to participants in the American Revolution, was celebrating the sesquicentennial of American independence, and saw Corbin as the consummate symbol of both their organization and the Revolution. A year-long effort convinced the U.S. Military Academy to help them exhume and transport the remains to the prestigious cemetery, to be reburied with a military funeral.

A horse-drawn hearse carried a flag-draped casket that was said to contain Corbin’s remains. DAUGHTERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

The remains in Corbin’s grave actually came from an adult male. DiGangi determined that it was a large man, who could’ve been anywhere from five-foot-seven to six and a half feet tall. The remains of Margaret Corbin were not in Margaret Corbin’s grave.

So where is Margaret Corbin? Since the attempted reburial of Corbin’s remains, in 1926, her original gravesite in Highland Falls has been lost to time. Sometime in the 1970s, the town dropped a sewage plant where many believe it was once located. Yet Minus remains optimistic that Corbin’s remains will one day be found. read it here

When "factors behind alarming suicide rate among women veterans" leaves out combat...that is part of the problem!

The factors behind alarming suicide rate among women veterans

KOAA News
By: Renae Skinner
Jan 15, 2020

Guthmiller talked about her struggles with PTSD after she got home from deployment. She says it's a very isolating feeling.
"I would feel alone, it's nerve racking, and little things would make me nervous," Guthmiller said. "It's a really hard thing to explain."

PUEBLO — When you think of the faces of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, usually our brave men in uniform come to mind. However, one group in the military we often forget is women.

The United States Department of Veterans Affairs says the suicide rate among women veterans is double that of women who don't serve.

A local veteran and professor spoke to News5 about what factors are contributing to this startling reality.

"Being in the military, we have to be strong because we are around men," Christine Guthmiller said. "We're trying to prove ourselves, and I think it's a stigma."

Guthmiller is a veteran and a financial coordinator at the Veterans Resource Center at Colorado State University-Pueblo.

According to the U.S. Office of Veterans Affairs, the suicide rate is higher among women who report military sexual assault, domestic violence, sexual discrimination and harassment-- all factors that can contribute to PTSD.
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Why did they choose to overlook combat itself?

Women have served this country...including combat operations, since the Revolutionary War. They have been awarded every medal, including the Medal of Honor. They have served in every branch...even before there were branches.

So why do we still assume military women do not get hit by PTSD for all the reasons males do? Is it so hard to acknowledge their service in all respects to that service?


Army Rangers

Since the school was opened to females in 2015, 42 women have earned the coveted Ranger tab.

U.S. Army Sgt. Danielle Farber, Pennsylvania National Guard 166th Regional Training Institute Medical Battalion Training Site instructor, and U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Jessica Smiley, South Carolina National Guard military police non-commissioned officer currently serving with the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, graduate U.S. Army Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia, Dec. 13, 2019, as the first National Guard enlisted females to complete the leadership school. Smiley and Farber completed the mentally and physically challenging school, which focused on squad and platoon operations designed to prepare Soldiers to be better trained, more capable, and more resilient leaders. (Photo Credit: Sgt. Brian Calhoun) DECEMBER 17, 2019 SGT. BRIAN CALHOUN

Navy SEAL

Navy SEALs perform advanced cold weather training in Kodiak, Alaska.Eric S. Logsdon/U.S. Navy via Getty Images/File

For the first time ever, a woman has successfully completed the rigorous screening stage for the Navy SEAL officer training program, according to an independent publication Military.com.

Though she was not selected as a SEAL, the fact that she was able to make it past the screening stage is an accomplishment on its own.

Female candidates for these jobs are required to complete the same training as men. There are no special considerations based on an individual’s physical ability.

Marine Corps Recon

Marines with 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion, 3rd Marine Division, conduct combat rubber raiding craft training on Camp Schwab, Okinawa, Japan, on July 16. (Cpl. Josue Marquez/Marine Corps)

The first female Marine has passed the Basic Reconnaissance Course and earned the 0321 reconnaissance Marine military occupational specialty, or MOS, the Marine Corps has confirmed.

Lance Cpl. Alexa Barth graduated from the grueling 12-week course Nov. 7, 1st Lt. Sam Stephenson, Marine Corps spokesman, confirmed to Marine Corps Times Thursday.

Barth still has a few more training schools to go through before joining her unit at 1st Recon Battalion at Camp Pendleton, California, said Maj. Kendra Motz, spokeswoman for 1st Marine Division. Barth is expected to arrive at her unit late spring 2020.

It is long past the time when it is OK to dismiss what has been happening to our female veterans, or pass it all off as if PTSD is all about what happened to them as the "weaker" sex. Sure, the list above are part of the reasons female veterans get hit by PTSD, but no one assumes when a male talks about PTSD it has anything other than combat attached to it.

It is time to get this right...if we are ever going to make it right! #BreakTheSilence and #TakeBackYourLife

“I want to show it’s possible to suffer but also to recover."

Former Mansfield soldier who tried to end her life stars on SAS: Who Dares Wins

CHAD UK
By Andrew Topping
Tuesday, 14th January 2020

A former soldier from Mansfield who was told she may “never walk again” after trying to end her life has gone on to star in Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins.

“I want to show it’s possible to suffer but also to recover." Donna Watts

Donna Watts, 36, served for eight years in the armed forces, being stationed in Germany for seven – which also included six months in Afghanistan with the Marines.

Donna, who had “always struggled with my sexuality”, came out as gay while in the Army and was named as ‘best recruit’ during her development.

The former Mansfield Town Ladies footballer left the Army in 2010 and went on to work for South Yorkshire Police, putting her Royal Military Police expertise to good use.

But during her time in the police she began to develop post-traumatic stress disorder and had a “mental breakdown” – trying to end her life, which was almost successful.

She has shared her story to raise awareness about mental health and the risks of PTSD.

“I drove to Whitby and jumped 200ft from a cliff to end my life. I was rescued about 10 hours later by helicopter”, she said.
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