<p> The emergence of modern warfare has contributed to greater numbers of service members being exposed to morally ambiguous decisions and actions (e.g., harming civilians and non-combatants). The moral and spiritual implications of serving in combat have gained increasing attention since the new wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (Litz et al., 2009). In particular, the injury to a veteran&rsquo;s beliefs and moral expectations may also affect his or her ability to make meaning from the combat-related stressors and upon previously held religious and spiritual beliefs. In addition, spirituality/religiousness and ability to forgive may predict levels of meaning made in the face of morally injurious experiences. Using the newly developed Moral Injury Questionnaire &ndash; Military Version (MIQ-M; Currier, Holland, Drescher, &amp; Foy, in press), this study examined the relations between morally injurious experiences (MIE), several spiritual/religious factors (daily spiritual experiences, religious coping, and forgiveness), and meaning made in a diverse sample of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who had enrolled in a community college since returning from their war-one deployments. In addition to the MIQ, participants completed the Integration of Stressful Life Events Scale (ISLES; Holland, Currier, Coleman, &amp; Neimeyer, 2010), the Brief Religious Coping Inventory (Brief RCOPE; Pargament, Smith, Koenig, &amp; Perez, 1998), the Daily Spiritual Experiences Scale (Underwood &amp; Theresi, 2002), and forgiveness questions from the Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/Spirituality [BMMRS; Fetzer Institute/National Institute on Aging (NIA), 1999]. When controlling for demographics, military service factors, and general combat exposure (as assessed by Combat Experiences Scale, CES, Keane et al., 1989), exposure to morally injurious events (higher MIQ scores) uniquely predicted the meaning made of trauma &beta; = -.43. In addition daily spiritual experiences and forgiveness were positively linked with meaning made, &beta; = .35 and .22, respectively, while positive religious coping had an inverse relationship with meaning made, &beta; = -.33. This study provides further support for the critical relationship between morally injurious experiences and meaning made, while also suggesting the need for more research on the importance of spiritual/religious beliefs in the process of meaning-making after combat deployment.</p>

No description available.

A software-based modem design offers a new opportunity to integrate processing at various levels, to enhance performance (TCP throughput) and robustness (to jamming). There are several key problems that need to be addressed that impact link ARQ performance. ACKs are needed for link sender to retransmit or adapt and an imperfection of ACK feedback from receiver prevents a link responding to loss and may cause the forwarding to be suspended. Another problem identified is that although ARQ may efficiently retransmit corrupted frames resulting from Partial Band Noise Jamming, it is inefficient when operating in environments with significant levels of AWGN. At the same time, a single fixed FEC scheme is insufficient for a wide range of AWGN and would be lead to a high overhead at low AWGN. The approach presented in the thesis therefore provides features to make sure robustness is achieved over a wide range of error conditions. At the physical layer, the design sends individual frames in hops (rather than spreading errors with interleaving) and employs a tailbiting FEC code. At the link, ARQ is used in combination with diversity coding to ensure acceptable TCP performance. Robust framing is provided by status slot replication and an effective synchronisation algorithm. A range of ARQ methods are used to support multiple applications including (a) No ARQ link class option (for packets that do not require ARQ) and (b) ARQ option (3-level retransmission scheme, with increasing level of redundancy after each RTT). To achieve a good throughput with high levels of AWGN uses a novel application of diversity coding. Analysis shows this approach gives good performance. In comparison with HDLC, APRIL performance is comparable to HDLC at low FER (less than 0.1) over a range of jamming, while it outperforms this at high FER (0.1-0.5). Diversity in combination with ARQ significantly improves performance at high AWGN (or a combination of AWGN and PBNJ), but does so in an adaptive way without introducing significant overhead at low AWGN. A key feature of the approach is that it does not require a separate estimate of the link conditions and there is no need to explicitly inform the receiver of either the ARQ mode or the diversity level. The scheme is therefore well suited to the unpredictable characteristics of the military satellite environment.

<p> The purpose of this thesis and the overall goal of this grant is to offer support to a community-based hospice agency by creating a position for a veterans' health consultant. The consultant will train staff to the unique care needs of veterans at the end of life by using the National Hospice-Veteran Partnership model from wehonorveterans.org. Upon the completion of an extensive literature review, this writer wrote a grant proposal for Wisteria Hospice, a local community-based hospice agency located in the City of Long Beach. After conducting a thorough funding search, the Archstone Foundation was chosen as the most compatible funding source. This funding source was selected as this foundation provides funds for professional education and training, focusing on end of life care. The actual submission of this grant for funding was not required for successful completion of this project.</p>

Interest in mental health problems in the military has been growing. However, the research to date has focused on posttraumatic stress disorder and depression. This study focuses on panic disorder and panic attacks, which are common, potentially disabling, and associated with a number of other mental health problems. This study is the first to examine panic disorder in detail in the military and extends the literature to include panic attacks, which have never been examined in this population. Using the Canadian Community Health Survey: Canadian Forces Supplement (n=8441), I investigated associations between panic disorder and panic attacks with a wide range of mental and social variables. Panic attacks and panic disorder were both positively associated with reduction of activities, two-week disability, psychological distress, mental disorders, suicidal ideation, and using self-soothing and avoidant coping strategies. These results have important implications for treatment and prevention efforts in the Canadian military.

This thesis discusses the Canadian nursing sisters who served in the Second World War, as part of the general mobilization of the Canadian Army Medical Corps. It concentrates on a cohort of nurses from Winnipeg who were part of a medical unit known as No.5 Canadian General Hospital (No. 5 CGH). The analysis considers the mobilization of No.5 CGH, examining factors such as personal and professional connections, patriotism, and economic need in describing the recruitment of nurses. The discussion then follows the Winnipeg nursing sisters into various theatres of war, comparing their living and working conditions in England, Sicily and Italy. The study also discusses the nurses’ rapid demobilization after the war, looking at their adjustment to civilian life, their postwar work as nurses, and overall legacy.

British estimates of Soviet seapower from 1930 to 1950 covered three main phases. These were primarily characterised by pre-war suspicion of Communism and the Soviet Union, enforced wartime naval cooperation from June 1941 until the end of the Second World War and, finally, a shift towards Cold War antagonism.It is argued that the Admiralty's Naval Intelligence Division was able to collect sufficient data to maintain a credible intelligence picture of the Soviet Navy's order of battle and war-fighting capabilities, thereby allowing informed decision-making in London. In general, the United Kingdom considered that the Red Navy was poorly equipped and trained, and that it posed little threat to British interests. This was borne out by the Soviet Union's poor employment of seapower during the war.Knowledge of the Soviet Navy was always difficult to obtain. However, a major finding of this thesis is that the wartime Anglo-Soviet alliance allowed British naval representativesin the USSR unprecedented access to Russian warships, facilities and commanders. Though the basing of a naval mission in Russia was principally intended to assist in the common fight against Nazi Germany and to promote liaison between the Royal and Soviet Navies, especially with regard to the Arctic convoys, the British also took the opportunity to examine the maritime forces of their long-standing Communist rival at close quarters. It is contended, therefore, that improved intelligence on the Soviet Navy was made possible by wartime naval collaboration. To examine this assertion, relevant naval aspects of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 are covered in detail in the thesis.After 1945, the Red fleets required some time for consolidation before expansion was possible. The Soviet Navy remained an intelligence target, but British wartime assessments largely held good to the end of the decade.

This thesis uses the record of benefaction in Europe to the Military Orders of the Hospital and the Temple to measure regional crusading support and to provide a description of the contribution of countries outside the crusading heartland, in particular the Empire, Poland, the Czech lands and Hungary, to Europe's crusading enterprise between 1145 and 1291. Through critical interpretation of published sources and secondary literature, making use of more than 400 original documents, among them several from the Hospitallers' Prague archive which remain unpublished, it examines in detail, for the first time as a whole, the endowment of both orders and the establishment of their houses on the territory of the Piast rulers of Poland and in the two Slav principalities of Pomerania. At the same time it assesses the development of the Military Orders' estates in terms of the relative importance of initial endowment, subsequent acquisition, plantation of new properties and alteration in the terms of ownership; in so doing, it aims to contribute to the correction of a long-standing but erroneous model for the economic development of 13th and 14th century Poland. Through an examination of local conditions it postulates a model for the creation of Hospitaller and Templar houses and the evolution of provincial hierarchies. It examines available information for the internal administration of both orders, the activity of their officials, and the number, nationality and regional connections of their membership. It provides new information on the evolution of independent prioral offices in the Hospital's two provinces of Bohemia and of Eastern Germany from 1291. The local involvement of both orders is set in context and closely defined for the regions under consideration. The penetration of Eastern European society by crusading ideology is examined as a necessary background to reassessment of the early activity of 'national' military orders and the Teutonic Knights in the Baltic theatre.

It is often asserted that British army casualties in the Great War were carelessly incurred and that this influenced the way Britain fought in the Second World War. Manpower was a prime resource in the mobilisation for total war but its scarcity only fully realised by end of 1917 when the army was cautioned about casualties. The government, however, had feared an early popular reaction against mounting casualties. It did not materialise: the incidence of casualties was diffused over time, and households had no mass media spreading intimate awareness of battlefield conditions. The army itself never mutinied over casualties or refused to fight. The country considered the casualties grievous but not inordinate or unnecessary. Between the wars unemployment and 'consumerism' mattered more to people than memories of the Great War., kept ritually alive by annual Armistice Day services. Welfare benefits increased, more children went to secondary school but social and political change was tardy. Many intellectuals turned pacifist but Nazi Germany made an anti-war-stance difficult. Air raids rather than memories of Great War casualties preoccupied the nation as it armed for war. In the Second World War army casualty lists were not regularly lengthy until the beginning of 1944 and did not have an adverse impact on civilian morale. The manpower shortage became acute earlier, in 1942, and army commanders were alerted to replacement problems. Politically, Churchill desired a strong, victorious British army but lack of men induced caution about casualties, particularly in relation to the invasion of Normandy, involving frontal amphibious attack on the German army. This caution communicated itself to the citizen armies in the field, which showed little natural bent for soldiering. These circumstances governed the way the army fought in the Second World War, not memories of Great War casualties - which were more numerous because of the extent over time and scale of the fighting.

<p> The purpose of this quantitative study was to explore the factors that predict active duty student persistence to graduating within four years. Data were taken from a secondary data source from a fall 2009 entering cohort from a university referenced here as Ridgeside University (RU). A binary logistic regression was employed in the analysis of the data. Results of the regression indicated that race, sex, military branch, program major, and primary funding type were significant in some extent in predicting active duty student four year completion. Implications of the results and recommendations for future studies conclude this research.</p>