Sarah Palin blames son’s putting a gun to his girlfriends head on PTSD

By Nate Thayer

January 25, 2016

Let us not blame Sarah Palin’s son, Track Palin, who was arrested for beating up his girlfriend and putting a gun to her head last week, for his mom being a wack-a-doodle.

But he might consider a family intervention to stop her from dragging his name–and that of thousands of U.S. military veterans who legitimately suffer from PTSD– through the late night comedy television circuit.

Last week, Palin endorsed Donald Trump. That was the same day that Track Palin was arrested for beating up his girlfriend and allegedly putting a gun to her head. She was found by cops hiding under her bed, afraid for her life. Track Palin was charged with assault, interfering with reporting of a domestic violence crime, and a weapons charge.

Sarah Palin and her model family

Said Sarah Palin: “My family is going through what we are today with my son, a combat vet who served in a Stryker Brigade fighting for you all, America, in the war zone. But my son, like so many others, they come back a bit different. They come back hardened. They come back wondering if there is that respect for what it is that their fellow soldiers and airmen and every other member of the military have so sacrificialy given to this country. The question, though, comes from our own president, where they have to look at him and wonder: ‘Do you know what we go through? Do you know what we are trying to do to secure America and to secure the freedom that have been bequeathed us.’ So when my own son is going through what he goes through coming back, I can certainly relate to other families who kinda feel these ramifications of this PTSD and some of the woundedness that some of our soldiers do come home with.”

Trump, if elected president, would never leave “our wounded warriors” behind, she said. “It makes me realize more than ever, it is now or never for the sake of America’s finest that we have a commander-in-chief who will respect them and honor them.”

It is all Obama’s fault.

What is a disgrace is that Sarah Palin would link the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs scandalous neglect to provide medical care for American veterans for her own failures to raise a healthy, functional, non-criminal family.

“What we’re trying to avoid is our troops being used as political pawns in a campaign and our bases being used as stages for electioneering,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told the AP. “The military has to stay out of the fray of politics; it has to remain apolitical. We go to great lengths to ensure that.”

“What kind of mother looks at her son’s domestic-violence arrest and thinks, political opportunity?” writes Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald.

Police report on Track Palin’s arrest this week

Your son, Track, according to the evidence, was sort of left behind by you, Sarah Palin, and didn’t come back much different from he was when he left the comfort of your motherly embrace, Sarah.

It seems pretty much all of your progeny, Ms. wack-a-doodle Palin, are intimately familiar with law enforcement, the criminal justice system, and reality television, all of which are not part of the experiences of most combat veterans who suffer PTSD as a legitimate consequence of combat war service.

Is Obama also at fault for your daughter, Bristol’s, two out-of-wedlock pregnancies? Bristol Palin took home $262,500 in 2009 from the Candie’s Foundation, who promotes “the way youth in America think about teen pregnancy and parenthood”, tax documents show. “We know that Ms. Palin’s work has had a positive effect on creating awareness about teen pregnancy,” Candie’s spokeswoman Ali Tyrangel said in a statement at the time. Bristol went on to get pregnant out-of-wedlock again.

A few years back, before he joined the military, Track Palin cut brake lines on school buses which resulted in a school being closed. He was addicted to Oxycontin, according to reports. It is said that Sarah Palin sent him to another state to cut a deal that he could just join the military rather than be sentenced to prison. 

Diana Palin, the sister of Sarah’s husband, Todd, has been charged with burglary, theft, and child endangerment related to addiction to narcotics and spent five months in jail before being ordered to chemical dependency treatment and receiving a suspended sentence. She used her child to gain entry to people’s homes by having the child ask to use the bathroom and going with her.

Sarah’s other daughter, Willow Palin, has also had her troubles. Sarah was on vacation in Hawaii when she had to rush home after Willow vandalized and stole from someone’s house that was not hers. Sarah Palin argued Willow was not there, but the other kids who were there said otherwise.

This week, Track Palin’s girlfriend told a police officer that he hit her in the eye with a closed fist and she curled up in a fetal position, “because she didn’t know what else he would do.”

More from last week’s police report

She said Palin also kicked her in the knee, threw her phone, and then cocked an AR-15 semi automatic rifle and pointed it at her head and said, “do you think I won’t do it?”

Track Palin wasn’t hardened by war: He was a product of his dysfunctional upbringing by his wack-a-doodle mother. “It wasn’t PTSD from combat that ‘hardened’ Track Palin into the gun-toting asshole that hits women, it was bad parenting, plain and simple,” said one commentator, a military veteran on the excellent website thisainthell.us

Let’s be clear. It is not fair to blame Track Palin for the wackiness of his mother.

We all have wacky mothers.

But it is pretty darn unconscionable for his mother to misrepresent his military service record for her own political ambitions.

Track Palin’s official military service record

PTSD is no joke. Actual combat veterans deserve the respect of not having others blame their personal bumpiness on the road of life on combat experience they never, well, experienced.

That just makes people not take seriously the very, very real injuries that afflict military veteran’s brains after doing what they do in the service of their country.

According to Track Palin’s military service records, he never saw any combat duty.

Nobody shot at him. He didn’t shoot anybody. Nor did he go through any of the life altering stuff that happens while one engages in the former and the latter.

Track did serve in Iraq, but there is no record of him ever seeing hostile action. The details of his DD-214–the official military record of Track Palin’s military service–suggest he never saw any combat. What stands out from his official military service record is that Palin was not awarded a “Combat Infantry Badge”–a routine award given to pretty much everyone who remotely saw some sort of combat during their tour of duty.

Private First Class Track Palin went to Iraq with the 1st Stryker Brigade, 25th Infantry Division Combat Team. Palin provided security for the Brigade deputy commander, according to Major Chris Hyde, an army spokesman at Fort Wainwright, Alaska. Track’s 50-person unit within that brigade, Delta Company of the 52nd Infantry Regiment (Anti-Tank) – was the “Dragoons”.

More official records

“Historically, as an anti-tank unit we would go out and conduct one-on-one battle with enemy tanks because we are tank killers for the brigade,” said Sgt. 1st Class Michael Fulkerson, a platoon sergeant with Delta Company, 52nd Infantry, Anti-Tank, Brigade Support Battalion, 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division. “However, in Iraq there is no tank threat so that necessity is no longer needed, thus we were broken down once we got over here to provide a Personal Security Detail for the brigade.”

Track Palin was part of the personal security detail of his Brigade commander. “He’s a good kid and a good soldier and he’d like to remain anonymous,” said Col. Burt Thompson, who commanded the Alaska-based 25th Infantry Division’s 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, known as the “Arctic Wolves.

The Wolves comprise three infantry battalions and a cavalry squadron, as well as several attached specialist units.

“Most of what the Wolves do is not all that glamorous, but it’s vital to our eventual victory in Iraq. They train Iraqi Army mechanics how to maintain their vehicles and teach first aid to Iraqi first responders. They back up the Iraqi police. They rebuild schools and transport supplies. They’re even teaching the Iraqis how to recycle!” said the website conservatives4pailin.com.

It is “strange that an infantryman in an infantry company in Iraq didn’t get a CIB (Combat Infantry Badge), said Jonn Lilyea, a combat veteran of Vietnam who runs the thisainthell.us website devoted to people claiming military service which never happened. “I know I’d be pissed if I spent two years in Iraq and didn’t get a CIB. But other than that, nope, it all looks pretty normal to me.”

“He was in my Brigade and I met him a few times when the BDE TAC came to my COP. He was a member of the Brigade Commander’s PSD,” said another commentator on thisainthell.us. “Not much happened to us on that deployment. I don’t remember the BDE TAC ever getting into contact and one would think that an event like that would have made the rounds around Brigade pretty darn quick.”

January 2016 police reports

But, no, his mom decided that she would make him collateral damage in her quirky, aspiring political career.

Track Palin seems to have enough problems on his plate–not the least his politician mother.

On September 11, 2008, when Track deployed to Iraq, Sarah Palin said: “This is one of the moments when we have to face the fact that you may not need our protection anymore. In fact you’re the ones who will now be protecting us, protecting America.”

Good plan, Momma. I feel safer in Track’s girlfriend-beating, weapon-toting, opiate-abusing, and likely PTSD suffering from his pre-military childhood hands than I do in yours.

Please go away.

You are an embarrassment to the thousands of actually know what serving one’s country in war means, and has dealt with the very real consequences. Which are very different from reality television.