Note: This document contains the transcribed notes as transcribed by Dory Switzer derived from a private recording of a public event - the Ministry Forum and is not meant to be anything more than for the purposes of general reference notes as they relate to the issues concerning soldiers, their disabilities and CHAT. This document should not be reviewed in any other context.
Welcome: Chaplain Jonathan Gibbs, Garrison Chaplain
Topic this month is ministry support for wounded soldiers and their families. We have a number of presenters which will present information in that area. Obviously, this is a topic of great concern and interest to us. As chaplains and I hope to you as religious leaders in the community. As I mentioned before 70% of the soldiers at Fort Carson live off post. So, there are people who are that are in your neighborhoods in your churches synagogues and mosques your places of worship they are people that you have the opportunity to provide direct ministry to I assume you are here because you are interested in that and you want to know more to better minister to the soldiers in your congregations.
What we try to do at the forum is present information from a variety of sources on different topics so that issues that are of concern or directly involve our army families, not just army but our military families in general. Obviously we have proprietary interest in army families but we are also concerned in our air force, coast guard and marine families as well. Ministry to Wounded Warriors is an important topic and obviously takes up a considerable amount of time with our Warrior Transition and our army hospital but it also takes place in the community because we have Wounded Warriors who live in the community and who access civilian resources as well. So understanding some of the challenges the soldiers that they face because of their wounds and recovering and possibly returning to the units or in many cases transitioning out of the army and the challenges that presents to soldiers and their families is what we are going to be talking about today.
Introduction of Sergeant Major Brian O’Connors by Chaplain Gibbs
First speaker is going to be Sergeant Major Brian O’Connors – he is the Command Sergeant Major for the Warrior Transition Brigade here in Fort Carson. He is going to be talking about some of the challenges wounded warriors face as they recover from their injuries.
Sergeant Major O’Connors
I am kind of old school we are used to doing our operations orders where we find a wide spot in the trail and we draw it out. So, that was back before we had computers and stuff. My name is Brian O’Connors Warrior Transition Battalion.
Since it is St. Patrick’s Day and I do have a repertoire of Irish jokes I can’t tell in mixed company. So, what I thought about was going to kind of lead into what I was going to talk about for those of you the story of Saint Patrick, first off he wasn’t Irish he was Scottish; he was kidnapped by the Irish; spent his childhood in Ireland escaped and went back to England; went to seminary and became an ordained bishop; went back to Ireland to convert to Catholicism. Of course he wasn’t welcome when he got there he wasn’t welcome. When he showed up they were going to burn him – behead him whatever they did back then. He was kind of struggling trying to explain the whole idea of Christianity and the tri-union of the father, son and the Holy Spirit. I guess either he thought of this before or God blessed him and he reached down and plucked a shamrock off the ground and he used the used the three leaves of the shamrock to demonstrate how you can have three different yet one divine entity.
The three issues I want to talk about and the three issues we need to deal with– we have what we call the triad of care we also have the triad of healing and that is the body the mind and the spirit. We call our organization the Warrior Transition Battalion because less than 50% of our warriors are combat wounded today. Some of them are – when I say that and I have to caveat that is because you see the poster and everyone expects to see the guy in the wheelchair or the guy on the crutches missing an arm or the bad burns and that is a segment of our population but we also have population that has multiple traumatic brain injury where they have survived IED attacks and have no bodily injuries but just like Troy Aikman have had their bell rang one too many times because of that we now been diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury and we have to deal with that. Because of what they have seen we find now they have PTSD and one of the things we have learned about PTSD is that there could be people in the audience with PTSD because something happened previously where you really feel like your life was threatened. Some event happened, a car accident, childhood event, something you witnessed but nothing has triggered that in you. So in our case we have soldiers, some of which they had when they came into the military and now something has happened since they came into the military and it has triggered this PTSD and we are treating them for that. We have other behavioral disorders, bipolar, anxiety and depression. These are all things that society has and we are part of society, we have them too. So those are the mind piece.
And then the spiritual piece is sometimes the soldiers are not who they used to be and sometimes they are struggling with all of that. I think that this is a piece that this group could maybe help us with.
The body is - I hate to say it - is easy – but you know when you are missing a leg you can see that. We have been dealing with missing legs forever right and now we have great prosthetics and therapies and now you can learn to accommodate the fact that you are missing a leg or missing an arm or you have been burned, you have been disfigured or you have been shot and we can fix you up inside and make you as close to whole as possible. People expect that from veterans, if you see a soldier/veteran that is missing a leg or an arm or has those issues - they have been in combat so that is what they expect to see and they are visible wounds and they are treatable. They are accepted by society, so you when you go into get a job, there are all these benefits to hiring a disabled veteran. The government will come in if you need a wheelchair ramp they will build one for you. If you need to adapt your equipment so that a disabled veteran can work at your facility – the government will you do that too. So there are all these programs that are offered that have been out there for a while to deal with all this. The family also has an easier time dealing with this because the soldier looks different but is not a different person he just looks different he is the same person. Maybe he can’t throw the ball with his right arm any more but he can still throw with his left, he can still catch; he is can still run around – he has limitations but he can work adapt and work with those.
So, when we have a soldier which has a bodily injury, it is an easier thing for us to treat because medical science has evolved and we have been dealing with that for a lot longer. When we come to the mind it’s a little bit different. We have an idea on how the brain works but we aren’t 100% sure we get it right. Its confusing if men are right sided and women are left sided. There is that whole issue of how does the brain actually work. How is we have people that lose half their brain and they still function. We don’t understand all this. It is not the exact science that if your wound is here we are going to take it above the knee and we get this prosthetic and in six months we will have you running down Arlington Cemetery with the President.
The mind is a little bit different. With that there is a lot of other challenges. The onset is a traumatic brain injury (TBI) a concussive device or fall, some kind of injury or a lot of minor injuries which have added up.
Football fans – a quarterback gets a concussion in practice he doesn’t play on Sunday. That’s a new rule they started this past year. They give him that two week break – not sure that is long enough. What we found is that minor concussions are cumulative. If you don’t let the brain heal in between injuries, the injuries get worse they don’t get better. If we give the brain time to heal it will. The upside to traumatic brain injury is, if severe, we can see that. We have the technology to see the brain has been damaged. Guess what – you get a purple heart for that. The IED goes off and you have a severe concussion, unconscious and they do an MRI, CAT scan and they would see the injury – you get a purple heart for that.
You don’t get a purple heart for PTSD. That is still a challenge we have. Now think about this…I have a younger sister who has a traumatic brain injury. She lives up in Maine and used to be a school teacher. She is not a school teacher any more. She still teacher; she does tutoring in special-ed – she can’t function in a regular classroom because of her injury. My brother-in-law and my niece and nephew had to go to training (as my nephew used to say) “What to do when mommy starts acting goofy.” Its little simple things like remembering the socks go on before the shoes. You laugh about this but this is a serious injury.
I am a guy; we don’t ask for directions because we know how to do everything. When we really don’t know how to do it; it becomes very frustrating and this is where the anger comes in – so we have anger management issues to deal with. This could lead to the onset to PSTD – part of the issue. Now we get depressed because we are not the man that our wife or our parents thought we were. By the way we have women with the same issue. Although, we don’t put women in combat; women are in combat. So this is a big issue for us – these injuries. So all the behavioral health that we have to deal with…we tried medications, we tried therapy – some if it works; sometimes it’s a matter of time – adjusting different meds and trying different things. What works for one may not work for another. So even though you may have the same injury; it’s not the same people and their brains don’t work the same way. So we have to constantly modify and change that. You can’t just go to the doctor get a prescription for TBI PTSD, depression, anxiety, sleep disorders. What we find is they are all intertwined. So, we are trying to treat one while we are trying to treat the other. If we give this guy medication for PTSD and then when he give him Ambien because he has trouble sleeping and now he doesn’t sleep for 20 hours because this medication affects the other. So, now we have a non-functioning person, so we can’t do that. So it is a constant. I am NOT a medic – I am a combat engineer by training. I am here for leadership purposes not for medical purposes. That is an issue.
Now you look at how this affects relationships. So now you have soldiers who normally would stand at parade rest – do everything right. Now as soon as you challenge them they get very defensive. They get irritated. So there is that piece there – their anger management is always right below the surface. The way they deal with their spouses, with their friends - again they are not the same person. The spouse has to learn that the person I married is not the person who I am married to. He or she has changed. There is a whole challenge with that. Same thing with kids, sometimes the kids are pretty adaptive, sometimes we have an issue with who is this stranger who looks like daddy? Why do they always get so angry? They never used to yell at me. They went away to the war and now they are always angry at me. So there is a lot of challenges to that.
Now you look at the employer side of it. The employers are kind of…”PTSD …you’re not going to go postal on me? Cause I hear that happens, I had this experience with some Vietnam guys and they had PTSD and it was bad.” So there is a stigma associated with PTSD.
A lot of veterans’ hospital clinics have separate clinics for behavioral health, PTSD, TBI from the physical injuries. There are a couple reasons for that. One is if I am a soldier going in there, I walk talk and look the same, I can do a PT test, I can shoot, move, communicate but I have PTSD TBI behavioral health issues and that is what I am being treated for and I am waiting in line to see the doc with the guy next to me that doesn’t have any legs. “Well – he needs it more than I do. I am not going to take services away from him. I am going to do something else. Maybe Jack Daniels can help me, or Jim Beam or something else.” That is the challenge we have.
The last piece of this is the spiritual piece. I have to be careful because I am wearing a uniform. I like to tell the story… If George Washington was General of the Army today and somebody took a picture of him kneeling in his tent at Valley Forge before an open bible, he would be fired. That is just a reality of where we (the Army) are at. They even coach chaplains on how to pray sometimes so that we don’t offend people if they are doing a non-denominational service. It is just the society we live in today.
Spirituality of our soldiers is a very important piece, a very important segment of what we do. There is a reason why there are as many chapels in Fort Carson as there are day care centers. Every battalion should have a chaplain because we understand that is a big part of who we are and what we do. Soldiers struggle with this. Part of this is a generational thing, I refer to them as the X-box generation. They grew up in a life where reset is an option. That was not the way I was raised. Decisions have circumstances and I am going to be held accountable for those. That is how my parents raised me. Even being raised as a Roman Catholic I was given that sense that I had value and that my life means something and that every life means something. We struggle with that with some of our youngest soldiers. They just don’t have that base. Their foundation is on shifting sand not on solid rock. So that is a big issue for us. The challenge we have is we kind of rely on our chaplains to do that (a piece of it for us). You got one chaplain 600-800 soldiers in a battalion, if you are fortunate to have a chaplain in your battalion. They can’t be everywhere at once. They do a phenomenal job.
The spirituality piece is something that we find is very, very important. I am going to tell you it has been a challenge because we have some soldiers go off to combat and come back and now they want to drag their family to church. Family: “What you got to be kidding me?” Soldier: “No, trust me, I have been there, I know it is important. We need to go to church. It is what held me together for the 12 months I was in Iraq or the 12 months I was in Afghanistan.” This is a big challenge for us. Because one of the things we deal with is we have young soldiers who some of them came into the Army for the education and the benefits and pay their dues and get out. There are some soldiers, they really raise their right hand, (less than half of one percent do that by the way). They want to serve 20-25-30 years. Now we are telling them they can’t be a soldier anymore because they have an injury. To the guy without the leg, give him a PT test; fit him with a prosthetic; return him to duty. Soldiers with PTSD TBI, well, it’s the opinion of the doctor you are not fit for military service. I got it; you still shoot as expert; you still pass the PT test; you can hump a rucksack. Challenge is we can’t have you wigging out with a loaded gun in combat. So, we are going to kick you to the curb.
We DO treat them, one of the things we change; one of the challenges we have in our program that something that happened a few years back was the Army says you are either fit for duty, you had to be retrained and do MOS*; if you can do combat Army; you can still do something else and stay in the military or you are not fit for duty. If you weren’t fit for duty, we treated you as best we could. We made you a veteran. Then we told you to go knock on the VA’s (Veteran Administration) door to get benefits. We don’t do it that way anymore. 2006 forward, you get diagnosed as not being not physically fit, you go into the disability evaluation system.
By the way, I have got just under 400 soldiers in my battalion. There are 2,000 counting my 400. There is another 1,600 not medically ready at Fort Carson.) of which about 1,200 of them are in the disability evaluation system. I only get the complex cases. The less complex cases – the simpler cases they are still in the 4th Infantry Division of the 45th garrison first special forces; all the other units are here in Fort Carson - 1,200 of them are in the disability evaluation system and what they are doing is they are being evaluated by the military and they only need one disqualifying factor – they could have five – but we are just going to list the one. At the same time they are going to be dealing with the VA and they are getting the Veteran’s assessment. So that the one disqualifying factor that we give them which is 30 percent or higher usually is one piece of it. Then the VA looks at the whole thing. Ok – so they disqualified you because of severe PTSD – wells that’s 50 percent; but you also have traumatic brain injury (TBI) that is another 25 percent; you tore your rotator cuff and you got hearing loss so there is another 15 percent so you are 90 percent disabled from the VA. If you did that math it doesn’t add up – it is VA math and that is a whole other class. It is just the way it works.
Now, we just had a job fair yesterday at what is called The Soldier’s Family Assistance Center. The job fair catered specifically to our Wounded Warriors population that we know are going to be getting out and looking for civilian jobs. A young E-4 – 50 percent of an E-4 salary does not pay a lot of money. Because people forget that if you are on active duty, you are a single soldier you get your base pay – you are living in the barracks; you get a housing allowance and a food allowance – that is not part of your disability pay. When you retire you get 50 percent of your paycheck – it is 50% of your paycheck not your housing piece or substance piece. And the same thing at the VA – it’s based on your base pay. So, even at any point he is drawing 90 percent of his base pay that is still not a lot of money when you realize that about 30 percent of what he was living on is gone and 90 percent is what is left. So they are still looking to get other jobs.
The other issue we have is that we have spouses who had nice jobs. They have left those employment to deal with their Warrior transition because the medications they are on means they can’t drive. Their physical limitations mean they can’t drive. Guess what – the spouse drives. Now we provide transportation but that is not always the solution. Sometimes the spouse is still required because they guy forgets. We give them PDA’s and we give them tools to try to help them but sometimes it really takes that non-military family member who is dedicated and loves that soldier who is going to take care of them. Now we are asking them to live on a lot less than half of what they are used to living on. So it is a big transition for them.
We get a lot of help from a lot of people. It is GREAT. One of the challenges we have is getting the help together in a systematic way so that we can maximize the benefit.
Where I see you helping us is coming in and understanding and talking to a wide population which is a little bit easier because we are all in one place. Versus the other group it’s a little tougher. Getting them to the sense that they still have a value, they are a value to themselves, they are a value to their family, they are a value to their community, and they are a value to their church. Now whether they want to hear it or not God still loves them. They need to hear that. So they can transition and realize that my life is different but is still my life and I own it. This population that we have is 18 to 25 or so called the X-box generation – they are the ones that really need this. Us older guys, just cause we been around a little bit longer; we kind of gather that things happen and we kind of moved on. We are used to dealing with it but for some of these younger kids this is the first really bad thing that has happened to them and they just don’t know how to deal with it.
At this point I will take any questions you have.
Question: The Strong Bonds program ( I am not familiar with); that is not specifically a spiritual-based program, of which there is a spiritual element to it and that gets to be a little tricky at times as to what passes through that spiritual window (as you might call it). Would it be a parallel in looking at the Warrior Transition program. Would have that same thing NOT (specifically spiritual based obviously) but a spiritual window where materials and things that would serve that need come into play?
Response: Yes, the big challenge we have and the premise we touched on correctly. We can do all the spiritual stuff we want it just has to be voluntary. If we understand and we do that disclaimer up front, when you go to Strong Bonds you are going to learn about these things and one of those is your spirituality, your moralistic foundation, what are you basing your decision making on. That is one of the key points that some of our younger soldiers are missing – they just don’t have that solid foundation to make decisions on. Now add into that if they are borderline and now their brain’s not functioning because of traumatic brain injury (TBI) or other brain issues – now we have an even bigger challenge. So, a lot of soldiers that I get to talk to, unfortunately, are the ones that are in trouble and that is one of the chronic issues I see is that their decision making is flawed. We need to help educate them and try to fix that. Something that is coming from the outside, as long as we are up front and tell they that “hey, we think this is going to be a good program for you,” like Strong Bonds is and America Retreats and all the other stuff we do. Chaplains do this all the time – PowerPoint at the bottom of the slide is a psalm is a proverb, there is some other saying, they don’t even read that part but it is there just to kind of reinforce that this is based on something this isn’t something I made up. Our civilization has been doing this 6,000 some years going back to Judeo-Christian foundation that this country was founded on regardless of what people may claim. There is ways to do that – so yes sir.
Chaplain Jonathan Gibbs: The main thing is that it’s (A) whatever information is being put out is being put out by the unit chaplain so that the route to get at the soldiers is through the chaplain cause we have literature racks, displays, we do briefings so that is the first thing we work through our unit chaplains. The second thing is participation by the soldiers of any kind of spiritual fitness or religious program event is strictly voluntary.
(Ministry took 15 minute break. Please see note below for reference to other presenters at this meeting.)
(End of Sargent Major Brian O’Connors Presentation)
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