2011 Veteran Legislation Town Hall Meeting

September 20 — 21, 2011

America is in the tenth year of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For those injured veterans who fought in the wars, they are also dealing with a struggle here at home. Technology continues to change on a daily basis, and yet here we are in 2011, and the care our veterans receive hasn't evolved to where it needs to be.

Allan Spiegel, MD and Healing Heroes www.HealingHeroes.org are participating and sponsoring the 2011 Veteran Legislation Town Hall Meeting, because they are convinced more can be done for America's military veterans.

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”—Oliver Wendell Holmes Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932. Holmes helped move American legal thinking away from formalism and towards legal realism, as summed up in his maxim: “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”

During his senior year at Harvard, at the outset of the American Civil War, Holmes enlisted in the fourth battalion, Massachusetts militia, and then received a commission as first lieutenant in the Twentieth Regiment of Massachusetts Voluntary Infantry. He saw much action, from the Peninsula Campaign to the Wilderness, suffering wounds at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, Antietam, and Fredericksburg.

Holmes provides a perspective of the law that can be applied to veterans who suffer from TBI/PTSD/Depression and that should be considered in future decisions and legislation… The aforementioned quote by the Associate Justice begins to answer why.