Tag Archives: veteran events
Attention Homeless and At-Risk Veterans – We Want To Honor and Serve You
The Massachusetts Stand Down is ONE DAY ONLY on Friday August 22, 2014
Event Location
IBEW Local 103
256 Freeport Street Dorchester
Registration
Veterans MUST Bring Proof of Military Service
Hours: 8:00am – 4:00pm
No Administration after registration closes
Contact Information
Call: 617–522–8086
Email: veteran@voamass.org
Or Log On To: www.voamass.org
Free Services Include
Housing Assistance * Job Assistance * Legal Assistance * Education * Mass Health * Medical Aid
Eye Glasses * Hair Cuts * Foot Care * Oral Health and Dental Screening * Clothing * VA Benefits * Child Support
VA Boston Healthcare System Registration * Mental Health Counseling * Counseling * Food Stamps
HIV/Aids Resources * Female Veteran Programs * Voter Registration * Massachusetts ID and Driver License Renewals
What Is The Massachusetts Stand Down?
“Stand Down” is a military term referring to the brief period of time a soldier leaves an active combat area in order to rest and regain strength. Today, Stand Down refers to a grassroots, community based intervention program designed to help the nation’s homeless veteran population.
This event has served as a way of bringing a wide range of specialized resources to help the city’s veterans facing a wide range of problems, from homelessness to mental health needs and everything in between. Stand Down is a once a year opportunity for homeless and at-risk veterans to access a broad spectrum of services in one location
Volunteer
The Massachusetts Stand Down depends on a large number of volunteers to help serve over 1,000 Veterans.
Volunteer areas include:
Veteran and Volunteer Registration * Friendly Site Guide * Clothing Tent * Food Preparation and Service * Family Tent
2014 Stand Down Volunteer Application
For questions about volunteering at Stand Down, contact Melita Little at mlittle@voamass.org or 617-522-8086.
Donate
To find out how you or your business can donate time and services, please contact:
Stephanie Paauwe, Volunteers of America, spaauwe@voamass.org or 617-522-8086.
VETERANS BENEFITS: OPERATION INDEPENDENCE MOBILITY VEHICLE PROGRAM
VETERANS BENEFITS | ||
Come to VMi New England Mobility Center and learn more about the Paralyzed Veterans of America and Operation Independence | ||
OPERATION INDEPENDENCE VMI is the premier manufacturer of wheelchair accessible vans. At the VMi New England Mobility Center we are experts in mobility assessment and customization. We have combined our knowledge with the Veterans across America to increase awareness with disabled veterans regarding VA vehicle benefits, and help them get the benefits they have earned while serving our country: • You may be entitled to VA funding for adaptive automotive equipment • In many cases, you may also be entitled to a one-time auto allowance for the vehicle itself.Operation Independence helps veterans get into their first wheelchair accessible van. Whether you are entitled to the auto allowance grant or will be personally funding your first wheelchair accessible van, the VMi New England Mobility Center will give you a $1,000 rebate towards the van we are converting for you.VETERAN MOBILITY BENEFITS To be eligible for financial assistance in purchasing a new or used automobile (or other conveyance), a Veteran or serviceperson must have acquired one of the following disabilities as a result of injury or disease incurred or aggravated during active military service, or as a result of medical treatment or examination, vocations rehabilitation, or compensated work therapy provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) (38 U.S.C. 1151):• Loss, or permanent loss of use, of one or both feet • Loss, or permanent loss of use, of one or both hands, or • Permanent impairment of vision in both eyes with a • Central visual acuity of 20/200 or less in the better eye with corrective glasses, or • Central visual acuity of more than 20/200 if there is a field defect in which the peripheral field has contracted to such an extent that the widest diameter of visual field has an angular distance no greater than 20 degrees in the better eye Even if you are not entitled to the auto allowance grant (21-4502), you may still qualify for an adaptive automotive equipment grant (10-1394) for a wheelchair accessible conversion on a vehicle which you would fund through alternative means. . |
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“FEDERAL BENEFITS FOR VETERANS, DEPENDENTS AND SURVIVORS” | ||
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VA 4502 GRANT
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The grant is paid directly to the seller of the automobile for the total price (up to $18,900) of the automobile. The veteran or service member may only receive the automobile grant once in his/her lifetime. Section 804- Enhancement of automobile assistance allowance for veterans would increase automobile assistance from $11,000 to $18,900, effective October 1, 2011 Click here to see a pdf for more details Automobile and Special Adaptive Equipment Grants Click here to review the Federal Form VBA-21-4502 Automobile Adaptive Equipment (AAE) Veterans are trained, through the VA Driver’s Rehabilitation Program, how to safely operate their vehicle on our nation’s roadways. The VA also provides necessary equipment such as platform wheelchair lifts, UVLs (under vehicle lifts), power door openers, lowered floors/raised roofs, raised doors, hand controls, left foot gas pedals, reduced effort and zero effort steering and braking, and digital driving systems. Additionally, VA’s program provides reimbursements for standard equipment including, but not limited to, power steering, power brakes, power windows, power seats, and other special equipment necessary for the safe operation of an approved vehicle. For more information click on the link below. |
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DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS “Automobile and Special Adaptive Equipment Grants” Can a Veteran Receive Financial Assistance From VA to Purchase an Automobile? The grant is paid directly to the seller of the automobile for the total price (up to $11,000) of the automobile. The veteran or servicemember may only receive the automobile grant once in his/her lifetime. What Disabilities Must You Have to Qualify for the Automobile Grant? • loss, or permanent loss of use, of one or both feet Does VA Pay to Adapt a Vehicle? Adaptive equipment includes, but is not limited to, power steering, power brakes, power windows, power seats, and special equipment necessary to assist the eligible person into and out of the vehicle. Contact should be made with your local VA medical center’s Prosthetic Department prior to purchasing any equipment. The adaptive equipment grant may be paid more than once, and it may be paid to either the seller or the veteran. How Can I Apply for an Automobile and/or Special Adaptive Equipment Grant? Note: After you complete and submit Section I of the application, VA will complete Section II and return the original to you. You are responsible for obtaining the invoice from the seller, updating Section III, and submitting the form to your local VA regional office for payment. If you are entitled to adaptive equipment only (i.e., service connected for ankylosis of knees or hips) you should complete VA Form 10-1394, Application for Adaptive Equipment – Motor Vehicle and submit it to your local VA medical center. Additionally, VA Form 10-1394 should be completed for approval of equipment not specified on the VA Form 21-4502. |
Come visit with VMi New England tomorrow at the Veterans Inc. 8th Annual Stand Down
Come and learn more about wheelchair van’s, Free wheelchair van service (Service for those Who have Served) along with Operation Independence tomorrow at
Veterans Inc.
59 South St.
Shrewsbury, MA 01545
(800) 482-2565
Veterans Inc. has been serving Veterans and their families across America for 20 years, with an award-winning model that affirms dignity and re-establishes independence.
Their mission is to provide safe housing, hot meals, and a variety of services that address the causes of homelessness. We help veterans re-gain control of their lives and, ultimately, we save lives.
More than 40 providers to participate: representing non-profits, for-profits, and government agencies offering veterans’ services, health & human services, and much more. Veterans at the event will be able to obtain FREE food, clothing, personal care items, haircuts, massages, acupuncture, counseling, legal services; and services and advice related to employment & training, housing, healthcare, and a career fair on Friday. Veterans should bring a DD-214 or VA card as proof of veteran status.
D-Day +1
When most people think of June 6th, they think of D-Day, but one story told in the prologue of Citizen Solider will forever mark June 7th off in my mind. It involves the actions taken by one, southern boy from Mississippi named Waverly Wray. I will let Ambrose tell it:
At Dawn on June 7th, Lt. Waverly Wray, executive officer in Company D, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR), who had jumped into the night sky over Normandy twenty-eight hours earlier, was on the north western outskirts of the village, Ste.-Mere-Eglise. He peered intently into the lifting gloom. What he couldn’t see, he could sense. From the sounds of the movement of personnel and vehicles to the north of Ste.-Mere-Eglise, he could feel and figure that the major German counterattack, the one the Germans counted on to drive the Americans into the sea and the one the paratroopers had been expecting, was coming at Ste.-Mere-Eglise.
It was indeed. Six thousands German soldiers were on the move, with infantry, artillery, tanks, and self-propelled guns – more than a match for the 600 or so lightly armed paratroopers in Ste.-Mere-Eglise. A German break through to the beaches seemed imminent. And Lieutenant Wray was at the point of attack.
Wray was a big man, 250 pounds with “legs like tree trunks.” He was from Batesville, Mississippi, and was an avid woodsman, skilled with rifles and shotguns. He claimed he had never missed a shot in his life. A veteran of the Sicily and Italy campaigns, Wray was – in the words of Col. Ben Vandervoort, commanding the 505th – “as experienced and skilled as an infantry solider can get and still be alive.”
Wray had deep South religious convictions. A Baptist, each month he sent half his pay home to help build a new church. He never swore. His exclamation when exasperated was, “John Brown!” meaning abolitionist John Brown of Harpers Ferry. He didn’t drink, smoke, or chase girls. Some troopers called him “The Deacon,” but in an admiring rather than critical way.
On June 7, shortly after dawn, Wray reported to Vandervoort – whose leg broken in the jump, was now in a cast – on the movements he had spotted, the things he had sensed, where he expected the Germans to attack and in what strength.
Vandervoort took all this in, then ordered Wray to return to the company and have it attack the German flank before the Germans could get their attack started. “He said ‘Yes sir,'” Vandervoort later wrote, “saluted, about-faced, and moved out like a parade ground Sergeant Major.”
Back in the company area, Wray passed on the order. As the company prepared to attack, he took up his M-1, grabbed a half dozen grenades, and strode out, his Colt .45 on his hip and a silver plated .38 revolver stuck in his jump boot. He was going to do a one-man reconnaissance to formulate a plan of attack.
Wray was going out into the unknown. He had spent half a year preparing for this moment but he was not trained for it. In one of the greatest intelligence failures of all time, neither G-2 (intelligence) at U.S. First Army nor SHAEF G-2, nor any division S-2 had ever thought to tell the men who were going to fight the battle that the dominant physical feature of the battlefield was the maze of hedgerows that covered the western half of Normandy.
How could the various G-2s have missed such an obvious feature, especially as aerial reconnaissance clearly revealed the hedges? Because the photo interpreters, looking only straight down at them, thought that they were like English hedges, the kind fox hunters jump over, and they missed the sunken nature of the roads entirely.
Wray moved up the sunken lanes, crossed an orchard, pushed his way through hedgerows, crawled through a ditch. Along the way he noted concentrations of Germans, in fields and lanes. A man without his woodsman’s sense of direction would have gotten lost. He reached a point near the N-13, the main highway coming into Ste.-Mere-Eglise from Cherbourg.
The N-13 was the axis of the German attack. Wray “was moving like the deer stalker he was” (Vandervoort’s words), got to a place where he could hear guttural voices on the other side of a hedgerow. They sounded like officers talking about map coordinates. Wray rose up, burst through the obstacle, swung his M-1 to a ready position, and barked in his strong command voice, “Hande Hoch!” to the eight German officers gathered around a radio.
Seven instinctively raised their hands. The eighth tried to pull a pistol from his holster; Wray shot him instantly, between the eyes. Two Germans in a slit trench 100 meters to Wray’s rear fired bursts from their Schmeisser machine pistols at him. Bullets cut through his jacket; one cut off half of his right ear. Wray dropped to his knee and began shooting the other seven officers, one at a time as they attempted to run away. When he had used up his clip, Wray jumped into a ditch, put another clip into his M-1, and dropped the German soldiers with the Schmeissers with one shot each.
Wray made his way back to the company areas to report on what he had seen. At the command post he came in with blood down his jacket, a big chunk of his ear gone, holes in his clothing. “Who’s got more grenades?” he demanded. Then he started leading. He put a 60mm mortar crew on the German flank and directed fire into the lanes and hedgerows most densely packed with the enemy. Next he sent D Company into an attack down one of the lanes. The Germans broke and ran. By mid-morning Ste.-Mere-Eglise was secure and the potential for a German breakthrough to the beaches was much diminished.
The next day Vandervoort, Wray, and Sgt. John Rabig went to the spot to examine the German officers Wray had shot. It turned out that they were the commanding officer and his staff of the 1st Battalion, 158th Grenadier Infantry Regiment. The maps showed that it was leading the way for the counterattack. The German confusion and subsequent retreat were in part due to having been rendered leaderless by Wray. At the scene of the action, Vandervoort noted that every one of the dead Germans, including the two Schmeisser-armed Grenadiers more than 100 meters away, had been killed with a single shot in the head. Wray insisted on burying the bodies. He said he had killed them, and they deserved a decent burial, and it was his responsibility. (Citizen Soldiers, 17-21)
Lt. Wray was killed in action on September 19th, 1944.
It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.Patton, George S.
Source: Attributed to General GEORGE S. PATTON, JR., speech at the Copley Plaza Hotel, Boston Massachusetts, June 7, 1945.These words were reported by William Blair in The New York Times, June 8, 1945, p. 6, and by Stephen Lynch in the Boston Herald, June 8, 1945, pp. 1, 16 . Other newspapers of that day have variant wordings.The speech was extemporaneous and is not included in his published papers. Biographers of Patton have used variant wordings of this quotation, and Mike Wallace as narrator of the 1965 David Wolper television production, General George Patton, quoted this as, Let me not mourn for the men who have died fighting, but rather let me be glad that such heroes have lived.Patton had expressed himself in similar words at a memorial service at an Allied cemetery near Palermo, Italy, November 11, 1943: I consider it no sacrifice to die for my country. In my mind we came here to thank God that men like these have lived rather than to regret that they have died.Harry H. Semmes, Portrait of Patton, p. 176 . · This quote is about soldier