Veterans Affairs committee  Vice-chair and members of the committee, thank you for having me. It's my pleasure to be here. I was asked to say just a couple of brief words about the battlemind training system. Is that correct? Is that what the focus of this--

Veterans Affairs committee  Okay. I want to highlight maybe just three key things if I can. One of them is that the U.S. Army has officially adopted the battlemind training system as a mental health training program, and I really should emphasize that the battlemind training system is a mental health trai

Veterans Affairs committee  I'm a colonel.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, sir.

Veterans Affairs committee  No, that is the right word. That is the right word, sir.

Veterans Affairs committee  Okay. At the end of my answers to your questions, if I actually skip one, please remind me. Let me first say that we started looking at changing the way we do mental health training because the way it went in 2001 and 2002, when the war in Afghanistan started, was that the U.S.

Veterans Affairs committee  Let me give you some data that we collected about six months ago looking at our pre-deployment training. By the time the program came out a year ago, obviously a lot of soldiers had deployed to Iraq and didn't get the battlemind pre-deployment training, and some soldiers did ge

Veterans Affairs committee  That's a very good question. I probably should have started with this, given that your committee is focused on the veterans affairs. We have been working very, very closely with the Department of Veterans Affairs. They have actually taken the battlemind training system, which we

Veterans Affairs committee  A very good question. We've taken two approaches to that. One approach is that we still employ the platoon level of battlemind psychological debriefings, so one mental health care provider can interact and support 30 soldiers at a time. In addition, we have resources for those wh

Veterans Affairs committee  Good question, sir. We try to do the pre-deployment battlemind training within 30 days of soldiers deploying. There are two post-deployment battlemind training modules. One of the modules is intended to be given to soldiers within the first week of returning home, prior to them

Veterans Affairs committee  That's right.

Veterans Affairs committee  That issue is being discussed. Right now there is a plan in place to start doing periodic health assessments, and part of that would be a psychological screen for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Veterans Affairs committee  The reservists and the National Guard in the United States also have to go through this three- to six-month post-deployment health evaluation, including the mental health screen, and they are also required to go through the second battlemind training. Where we really stumble is

Veterans Affairs committee  Well, on the first question, I think it really is important to understand that a lot of the symptoms and reactions service members have when they are in a combat environment are actually quite adaptive. Being hyper-alert or hyper-vigilant when you're in a combat environment where

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, participation is mandatory now, which makes doing any further studies and evaluations problematic, obviously. What we're trying to do is to see whether or not we can add elements to the battlemind training to even further improve its effectiveness. We're doing that now. I