GUIDE: GI Bill, Employment and Education Program

Which program is best for me or my dependent?

• Try out the "Road Map For Success" application here that will help you decide which program meets your needs! 

                                                               ~or~

• Check out VA's "Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment VetSuccess Programs" here, if you are a veteran with a service-connected disability rating of 20% or more and are interested in other options for employment, education and independence! 

What if I already know which program I want to use?

• If you are ready to start the application process to receive or transfer education benefits, you can get started here! 

What if I need to verify my monthly attendance for benefit payment?

• You need to verify your attendance every month before payment is issued if you are attending an Institution of Higher Learning (IHL) or Non-College Degree (NCD) program and are receiving one of the following:
• Montgomery GI Bill - Active Duty
• Montgomery GI Bill - Selected Reserve
• Reserve Educational Assistance Program - REAP
• Veterans Retraining Assistance Program - VRAP

                                                  Verify HERE! 

How Much Money Will I Get Under The Post-9/11 GI Bill?

The Post-9/11 GI Bill reimburses your tuition & fees to your school and makes housing and other payments directly to you.

Your school will receive a percentage, as determined by your length of active duty service, of the following:

1. For resident students at a public Institution of Higher Learning (IHL) all tuition & fee payments are reimbursed.
2. For private and foreign IHLs tuition & fee reimbursement is capped at $17,500 per academic year (that amount will change to $18,077.50 August 1, 2012).
3. For students whose tuition & fees exceed this maximum amount per academic year who are attending a private IHL in AZ, MI, NH, NY, PA, SC or TX and have been enrolled in the same program since January 4, 2011 schools will be reimbursed either the actual cost of the program or the maximum in-state tuition & fee reimbursement rate for the 2010-2011school year, whichever is greater.
4. For reimbursement information for on-the job or apprenticeship programs click here
5. For reimbursement information for vocational flight training programs click here

If you are attending a public IHL as a non-resident student or a private IHL that is more expensive than the annual cap you may be eligible for extra payment under the Yellow Ribbon program.

You may also be directly paid:

• A monthly housing allowance (MHA) equal to the basic allowance for housing (BAH) amount payable to an E-5 with dependents, in same zip code as your school.  This allowance is paid proportionately based on your enrollment.
• • If you are attending school at the 1/2 time or less rate or are on active duty or the spouse of an active duty member receiving "Transferred Benefits" you will not receive any MHA. 
  • If you are attending school overseas you will receive a MHA of $1,346.88 a month for 2011 which is the average amount for all CONUS locations (that amount will change to $1,368.00 for the 2012 academic year.
  • If you are enrolled solely in distance learning you will receive a housing allowance equal to 1/2 the national average.
• A yearly books and supplies stipend of up to $1000 paid proportionately based on enrollment
• A one time payment of $500 may be payable to certain individuals relocating from highly rural areas.

To determine what percentage of benefits you will receive based on your active duty time click here

For information about the Yellow Ribbon Program click here

To see the maximum in-state tuition & fee reimbursement rate for the 2010-2011 school year click here

Click here to determine your MHA rate

How Much Money Will I Receive if I am using the Montgomery GI BILL? 

Educational Assistance Allowance for trainees under the Montgomery GI Bill - Active Duty (Ch. 30 of title 38 U.S.C.). The following basic monthly rates are effective October 1, 2011.

For trainees on active duty, payment is limited to reimbursement of tuition and fees for the training taken. If you participated in the “$600.00 buy-up” rates can be found HERE

The following rates apply to those completing an enlistment of three years or more.

Institutional Training
Training Time	Monthly rate
Full time	$1,473.00
¾ time	$1,104.75
½ time	$736.50
less than ½ time more than ¼ time	$736.50**
¼ time or less	$368.25 **

OJT Rates effective October 1, 2011

Apprenticeship and On-Job Training
Training Period	Monthly rate
First six months of training	$1,104.75
Second six months of training	$810.15
Remaining pursuit of training	$515.55

Correspondence and Flight - Entitlement charged at the rate of one month for each $1,473.00 paid.

Cooperative - $1,473.00

** Tuition and Fees ONLY. Payment cannot exceed the listed amount.

---

The following rates apply to those completing an enlistment of less than three years.

Institutional Training
Training Time	Monthly rate
Full time	$1,196.00
¾ time	$897.00
½ time	$598.00
less than ½ time more than ¼ time	$598.00 **
¼ time or less	$299.00 **

Apprenticeship and On-Job Training
Training Period	Monthly rate
First six months of training	$897.00
Second six months of training	$657.80
Remaining pursuit of training	$418.60

Correspondence and Flight - Entitlement charged at the rate of one month for each $1,196.00 paid.

Cooperative - $1,196.00

** Tuition and Fees ONLY. Payment cannot exceed the listed amount.

---

Basic Institutional Rates for persons with remaining entitlement under Chapter 34 of Title 38, U.S.C. Chapter 30 Category II rates effective October 1, 2011.

Institutional Training
Training Time	Monthly rate
	No Dependents	One Dependent	Two Dependents	Each additional dependent
Full time	$1,661.00	$1,697.00	$1,728.00	$16.00
¾ time	$1,246.25	$1,272.75	$1,296.25	$12.00
½ time	$830.50	$848.50	$864.00	$8.50
Less than ½ time; more than ¼ time	$830.50**
¼ time or less	$415.25**

Cooperative Course
Training period	Monthly rate
	No Dependents	One Dependent	Two Dependents	Each additional dependent
Oct. 1, 2011 - Sept. 30, 2012	$1,661.00	$1,697.00	$1,728.00	$16.00

Correspondence - 55% of the approved charges

Flight - 60% of the approved charges

** Tuition and Fees ONLY. Payment cannot exceed the listed amount.

Apprenticeship and On-Job Training
Training Period	Monthly rate
	No Dependents	One Dependent	Two Dependents	Each additional dependent
First six months of pursuit of program	$1,207.50	$1,219.88	$1,230.75	$5.25
Second six months	$866.53	$875.88	$883.58	$3.85
Third six months	$539.35	$545.48	$550.20	$2.45
Remaining pursuit of program	$527.45	$533.23	$538.48	$2.45

How Do I Chose A School? Is it Approved?

• To find a school or program please use this very helpful VA provided tool HERE!

For handouts, information and brochures to print and share, please click HERE!

What Are My Other Options- Click HERE for information on the below?

• Other Programs
• Reserve Educational Assistance (REAP)
• Survivors & Dependents Assistance (DEA)
• Veterans Educational Assistance Program (VEAP)
• Educational Assistance Test Program
• National Call to Service Program
• Veterans Retraining Assistance Program

To Contact VA or Have Your Questions Answered:

Contact Information

Ask A Question

• You can send us a secure email that will usually be answered within 48 hours or less. You can also search for answers to frequently asked questions and register to be notified of any updates to the information. This contact method is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and can also be utilized worldwide.

Click HERE to enter the "Ask A Question" website.

Telephone

1-888-GIBILL-1 (1-888-442-4551).

Be advised this line only accepts calls from 7:00 AM - 7:00 PM central time Monday - Friday and you may experience long hold times.

Overseas

If you are overseas you can contact us via telephone during business hours, M - F 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM EDT. Students and School Certifying Officials calling from outside the United States may call the Buffalo Regional Office at 716-857-3196 or 716-857-3197. Once connected, the caller can immediately enter "option 1" to be placed in a special priority queue. This is not a toll-free number but the caller will be routed to the next available Customer Service Representative for priority service. This is for Overseas customers only, all others should call the toll-free number or contact us via the Questions & Answers section of this website.

Information used above was provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs websites

Help for Veterans and Their Families: National Institute of Mental Health’s “Outreach Partnership Program”

The National Institute of Mental Health’s “Outreach Partnership Program” has made information available to veterans and their families who have concerns about depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other behavioral health problems. The information in this article comes from that resource.

Depression interferes with daily life, and even though each person may experience depression in a unique way, there are some signs and symptoms that one should be aware of, including:

• Persistent sad, anxious, or empty feelings
• Feelings of hopelessness or pessimism
• Feelings of guilt, worthlessness, or helplessness
• Irritability and restlessness
• Loss of interest in activities or hobbies that one once found enjoyable/pleasant/fulfilling
• Fatigue or decreased energy
• Difficulty concentrating, remembering details, and making decisions
• Sleep disturbance of one kind or another (like insomnia, too much sleep, or early morning wakening)
• Eating problems: eating too much or a loss of ones appetite
• Thoughts of suicide, or suicide attempts
• Aches, pains, headaches, cramps or digestive problems that do not respond to medical treatment

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is not uncommon among returning veterans. When the following signs and symptoms last longer than a few weeks, one may be experiencing PTSD:

• Flashbacks
• Bad dreams
• Frightening thoughts
• Avoiding places/events/objects that are reminders of the experience
• Feeling emotionally numb
• Strong guilt, depression, or worry
• Losing interest in activities that were once enjoyable
• Having trouble remembering the dangerous or traumatic event
• Being easily startled
• Feeling tense or “on the edge”
• Sleep disturbance
• Outbursts of anger
• "Drinking" to forget

SELF TESTS FOR PTSD, DEPRESSION & MORE AVAILABLE HERE:

• https://www.vetselfcheck.org/welcome.cfm

• https://www.myhealth.va.gov/mhv-portal-web/anonymous.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=mentalHealth&contentPage=mh_screening_tools/PTSD_SCREENING.HTML

• https://www.myhealth.va.gov/mhv-portal-web/anonymous.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=mentalHealth&contentPage=mh_screening_tools/PHQ_SCREENING.HTML

Many veterans have a difficult time adjusting to life back home after they’ve been deployed. Behavioral health services can help. 

Help is available 24 hours a day, every day 1-800-273-8255 and Press 1

 or 

Send a text message to 838255 to receive confidential support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year

or

Chat Online 24/7 here: Veterans Chat

If you are in immediate need of help and do not want to use the above please CALL 911

Here are some websites where reading material on PTSD, depression, anxiety, and related subjects may be obtained:

http://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/

http://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/Resources.asp

www.nimh.nih.gov

www.nami.org

Military Mental Health Crisis Exposed with Camp Liberty Killings

By ELLIOT BLAIR SMITH 

Bloomberg News

Published: August 2, 2012

Sergeant John Russell lay awake, wondering what his wife would do if he killed himself.

He was so messed up that his first lieutenant removed the firing pin from his M16 assault rifle. Six weeks from the end of his fifth combat-zone tour, and five years from retiring on a 20-year Army pension, he suspected he wouldn’t see any of it.

Before dawn, shaking and stuttering, Russell walked through the still desert outside Baghdad to the quarters of Captain Peter Keough, the 54th Engineer Battalion’s chaplain. Keough listened, and hastily made the sergeant’s fourth appointment in four days at an Army mental-health clinic.

“I believe he is deteriorating,” Keough e-mailed an Army psychiatrist. “He doesn’t trust anyone.” Russell, the chaplain wrote, “believes he is better off dead.”

It was 10:07 a.m. on May 11, 2009. The battalion, military police and combat stress specialists had three hours and 34 minutes to avert tragedy. Instead, after lost opportunities and miscalculations, the blue-eyed sergeant from Texas used a stolen gun to kill three enlisted men and two officers in the deadliest case of soldier-on-soldier violence in the war zone. His victims’ bodies are buried across the U.S., from Arlington National Cemetery to the Texas panhandle.

Russell slipped through the safety net constructed to catch troubled soldiers. More and more are falling. The armed services’ mental-health epidemic has deepened since the Camp Liberty killings. In June, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ordered a Pentagon review of every diagnosis from 2001 on.

Court Martial

“The military and the nation were not prepared for the mental-health needs from being in combat for more than a decade,” said retired Colonel Elspeth Ritchie, the top psychiatric official in the Army’s Office of the Surgeon General from 2005 to 2010, in an interview. “We now confront ourselves with a mental-health crisis that is a legacy of war.”

Prosecutors paint the 6-foot, 4-inch (1.9-meter) Russell as a cold-blooded killer, cunning enough to slip through a back door into a mental-health clinic where he mowed down unarmed men. His lawyers contend that he’s not guilty by reason of insanity, undone by repeat deployments and misdiagnosed in that same clinic.

His hands and feet shackled, Russell said in an interview that he doesn’t remember much about that day three years ago. He’s awaiting court martial at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in the shadow of Mount Rainier in Washington.

Military Life

The Army decided May 15 to seek the death penalty on five counts of premeditated murder, overruling the recommendation at a pre-trial hearing that Russell’s “undisputed mental disease or defect” made that punishment inappropriate.

“It scares me,” Russell said.

Prosecutors declined to comment. This account is based on thousands of pages of Army records, civilian documents obtained with public records requests and more than two dozen interviews.......

MORE HERE: http://www.stripes.com/news/special-reports/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/military-mental-health-crisis-exposed-with-camp-liberty-killings-1.184668?localLinksEnabled=false

One A Day: Military Suicides

Iraq, Afghanistan War Veterans Struggle With Combat Trauma

By: David Wood

david.wood@huffingtonpost.com

HAVERHILLL, Mass. -- Before her life fell apart, before suicide began to sound like sweet release, Natasha Young was a tough and spirited and proud Marine.

Straight off the hardscrabble streets of Lawrence, Mass., a ruined mill town ravaged by poverty and drugs, she loved the Marine Corps' discipline, the hard work, the camaraderie, the honor of service to her country.

She went to war twice, the last time five years ago in western Iraq with a close-knit team of Marines who disabled IEDs, roadside bombs. It was nonstop work, dangerous, highly stressful and exhausting. Six of the Marines were killed in bomb blasts, each death a staggering gut-punch to the others. After they returned home the commander took his own life. Staff Sgt. Young broke down, too, spent physically, emotionally and mentally. Eventually, she was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and, last October, was medically discharged from the Corps.

Having been a strong warrior, now she simply couldn't function. "I was ashamed of myself," she says in a whisper at her home in Haverhill, Mass.

Young is one of a generation of 2.4 million Americans who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan, many of whom are coming back profoundly changed by what combat veteran and author Karl Marlantes described as the "soul-battering experience" of war.

The shock of war, of course, is hardly new. But now the cascade of combat veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is forcing mental health practitioners to a new recognition: the effects of combat trauma extend far beyond the traditional and narrow clinical diagnoses of PTSD and traumatic brain injury (TBI). The current crop of veterans is at risk of a "downward spiral" that leads to depression, substance abuse and sometimes suicide, as Eric Shinseki, secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, said in a recent speech.

Almost a quarter million Iraq or Afghanistan vets have been diagnosed with mental health injuries from combat service. Many more are not diagnosed, yet go on with their lives while experiencing short-term memory loss, headaches, insomnia, anger or numbness -- conditions that can range from merely annoying to highly disruptive on the job and within the family. For some of them, hard work can temporarily mask these symptoms. But only temporarily.

"You can work through it [with therapy], or become a workaholic," says Tom Berger, who still suffers nightmares from his time as a medical corpsman with the 3rd Marine Division during bloody Vietnam fighting in the late 1960s. "Left untreated, you reinforce the trauma, so it makes sense to keep that loaded .357 [revolver] next to you on the car seat," adds Berger, who is a senior adviser on veterans health atVietnam Veterans of America.

Those who go to war, it turns out, carry the traumatic after-effects longer and deeper than previously recognized — perhaps for a lifetime.

At the Army medical center at Fort Gordon, Ga., Dr. John L. Rigg, director of the Traumatic Brain Injury Program, is treating active-duty soldiers complaining of headaches, mood swings, anger, insomnia, and memory loss as many as five years after they experienced concussive blasts in combat. They're still functioning, but they're struggling. "They're not getting better," says Rigg. "In fact, they may be getting worse."

With treatment, says Rigg, some can learn to manage.

"No one gets out unscathed," says Col. Katherine Platoni, a senior Army combat trauma psychologist with two battlefield tours in Iraq and Afghanistan who has seen and felt the deepening effects of combat trauma.

Large-scale U.S. military action is finished in Iraq and scheduled to wind down in Afghanistan. In those places, as President Obama has noted, "the tide of war is receding."

But at home, the tide of war is not receding for millions of veterans returning to a long, difficult and often dangerous transition back into civilian life, struggling to reconcile their searing combat experiences with a civilian society that largely disconnected itself from military service and now, according to polls, tired of war.

Like others leaving the ranks, Natasha Young's struggles with her psychological and emotional storms were compounded by the sudden decompression from the intensity of combat service. No one back home in the civilian world understood what she had gone through, or what she was going through.....

COMPLETE STORY HERE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/04/iraq-afghanistan-war-veterans-combat-trauma_n_1645701.html?org=403&org=403&lvl=100&ite=3928&lea=1891&ctr=0&par=1