Last month, a burglar broke into veteran Andrew Myers’s Seattle house. But as the security camera footage in the YouTube video “Mr. Wrong House – Robber Meets Paratrooper” shows, Myers tackled the robber, punched him and held him until police arrived. The story spread across the country, and the video has been viewed almost 4 million times.
“Part of the reason it became a national story is, gratuitously thanking veterans makes people feel good about themselves,” Myers tells KIRO Radio. “That’s my opinion as a soldier watching civilians. It makes people feel patriotic. It’s like warm apple pie to see veteran justice. Another element to it is, people love instant karma. It really seems like these low-level home invasions are a much bigger deal than I realized. So many of these comments are people with similar experiences.”
When some suggested Myers should try to profit from his new fame, he rejected the idea. But then he got to thinking about a grave problem facing veterans — the suicide rate of 22 deaths a day — and decided his video might be able to help. After all, he knew what it was like to have long lasting effects from military service.
Myers served in Afghanistan as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division. When he returned home, he began to experience symptoms of PTSD. He soon contacted Paws and Stripes, an organization that provides service dogs to veterans with PTSD, and was matched with Hunter, an Australian shepherd. Myers instantly felt better with Hunter by his side. “I was 100 percent different person within two days of having the dog. I was like, ‘I need you.'”
So Myers set up a website, MrWrongHouse.com, where he invites people to take a donation challenge which involves uploading a black-and-white photo of themselves with their arms extended in a “come at me, bro” gesture that he makes in the security camera footage, making a donation to Paws and Stripes and nominating three other individuals to participate.
“Go on the porch, do the wingspan pose, take a black and white picture, and challenge your friends to do the same,” he says. “Keep the challenge going long enough to hit that viral-ity that will raise enough money to make a difference.”
After viewing the “Mr. Wrong House” video, our guess is many people will be inclined to do what Myers tells them to do.
MORE: After Losing Her Marine Son to PTSD, This Mom’s Mission is to Save Other Veterans
Tag: Veteran Suicide
When Families Are Left Behind After Veteran Suicide, This Oklahoma Nonprofit Helps Out
The staggering tally of 22 veteran suicides a day has impacted communities across the country. In Oklahoma alone, more than 140 veterans kill themselves each year, and these deaths account for about a quarter of all the suicides in the state.
One vital nonprofit, Veterans Corner, of Goldsby, is working to end this trend and to help the families left behind by it.
The families of veterans who commit suicide often need financial assistance, but they can’t bear facing the paperwork required to access their benefits. So Shirley Clark-Cowdin, a volunteer with Veterans Corner, personally accompanies widows and widowers to apply for their survivor benefits from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. And when a veteran comes to her in grave need, as did a suicidal female veteran who had been raped while she serving in the military, Clark-Cowdin makes sure they are immediately admitted to a psychiatric facility.
Dale Graham, the VA agent who founded Veteran’s Corner, tells Rick Green of NewsOK, “There was a boy who came back from Iraq and went to Oklahoma City to the VA hospital and asked for help and was given paperwork to fill out. There might be 10, 15, 20 pages to fill out. Talk about a stressor. For PTSD, you have to fill out a form saying who got killed, what day it happened. That’s bringing all that stuff to the forefront. When the kid got back home and looked at all those papers and just killed himself.”
But when Veteran’s Corner is able to reach despairing veterans in time, they are able to prevent this outcome. And so far, they have a 100 percent success rate.
MORE: This Mobile App is Preventing Veteran Suicide
This Mobile App Is Preventing Veteran Suicides
In 2011, Jake Wood attended the funeral of Sergeant Clay Hunt, a fellow Marine Corps veteran who suffered from PTSD and depression that committed suicide just a few months after he left the military. While there, Wood learned that three other Marines from their unit lived near Houston, but didn’t know Hunt was there.
Wood had the thought that if these Marines had known where their fellow comrades settled after leaving the military, it might’ve enabled someone get Hunt help before it was too late.
Inspired by this idea, Wood teamed up with veterans Anthony Allman and William McNulty to create an app that would let former service members know when other veterans were nearby, and if needed, guide them toward organizations offering help. The app, called POS REP (military jargon for “position report”), uses GPS data to plot veterans and resources on a map and aims to stop the disheartening number of veteran suicides — an average of 22 a day, according to the VA.
When veterans using the app draw near a fellow vet, they receive a message saying who “has entered [their] perimeter.” (For safety reasons, it doesn’t show a vet’s exact location unless the vet wants to make it known.) And when users are near a career or counseling center for veterans, POS REP also sends an alert.
The app is available across the country, but for now according to Hayley Fox of TakePart, it works best in Los Angeles, where the developers are working with the Volunteers of America’s “Battle Buddies” program.
Allman explains its purpose to Kenrya Rankin Naasel of Fast Company: “We’re now in our 13th year of combat operations in the global war on terrorism that has been executed with an all-volunteer force — there hasn’t been a draft — and the burden of war has fallen on a small segment of American society. This makes transitioning out of the military and returning to civilian life particularly challenging. POS REP allows veterans to discover and communicate with a network of peers who can relate to those unique situations. Think of it as a sacred digital space where veterans can discuss issues pertaining to reintegration without judgment.”
The veterans behind POS REP hope it will help prevent other veterans from feeling isolated and that the information it provides will spur them to meet each other or just reach out online. Allman says that he recently received an email with the news that POS REP helped prevent a suicide. “Knowing that we were involved in preventing another loss of life is the reason I get up in the morning,” he says. “It really doesn’t get any better than that, considering our inspiration.”
MORE: The Future of PTSD Treatment: A Phone App
After Losing Her Marine Son to PTSD, This Mom’s Mission Is to Save the Lives of Other Veterans
Wendy Meyers’ son Brandon wanted one thing in life: To be a Marine.
Once he graduated from high school in Plainfield, Illinois, Brandon immediately enlisted and soon deployed to Iraq for nine months. He briefly returned home and then returned to Iraq for 19 months.
When he came home a second time, in 2012, Meyers knew something was deeply wrong with her son. “My husband woke up one night and heard him on the roof,” she told Fox 17, “He went out and talked to him, and he was doing sniper duty in the middle of the night on our roof. He never left Iraq.”
Brandon sought help from the VA, who judged him 70 percent disabled due to PTSD. The VA prescribed him medication and gave him counseling via teleconference. Still, things weren’t improving. Meyers said that Brandon told her, “When he died, just scatter his dust back in Iraq, because that’s where he died anyway.”
Sadly, Brandon took his own life in June 2013, becoming one of the estimated 22 veterans a day who commit suicide.
Meyers has turned her grief into a new mission. She aims to start a charity called Bubba’s Dogs for Warriors, which will provide service animals to veterans suffering from PTSD — a treatment she thinks might have helped her son better than the therapy he did receive. “We have lost more men and women to suicide than the wars themselves from start to today,” she told Brad Edwards of CBS 2 Chicago. “We can help. Every penny and dollar we give can save a life. They have done this for us. Let’s not forget.”
Meyers launched a GoFundMe campaign with the target of raising $30,000 to fund two service animals. So far, she’s collected more than $7,000. On the page Meyers writes, “We’ve poured our broken hearts into research and found the highest degree of treatment success can come in the form of a constant companion — a dog, a service dog. Training these PTSD dogs is expensive, up to $15,000 each. In our son’s memory, we’d like to save lives.” She notes that service animals are not covered by the VA, which is why so many nonprofits are stepping up to provide them.
Brandon achieved his goal of becoming a Marine; now, his mother works toward her mission of helping her late son’s comrades. If you’re interested in helping Meyers hit her target, click here.
MORE: This Service Dog Has A Mission Beyond Helping Just One Vet
This Non-Profit is Making Sure Kids of Fallen Heroes Can Go to College
Funding a college education can be a difficult proposition for anyone, but for children of parents who died while serving in the military, it can be downright daunting. According to the Jacksonville, Florida-based nonprofit Children of Fallen Patriots, 15,000 American children have lost a military parent over the past 25 years. Now, the foundation is on a mission to identify as many of them as possible and offer them help paying their college bills. So far they’ve found 5,218 of these students, and paid $7.5 million toward their college educations.
“Our focus is on military children who have lost a parent in line of duty or any related deaths, like PTSD suicide or illnesses from exposure launch,” Army veteran David Kim, the founder of Children of Fallen Patriots, told Helena Hovritz of Forbes. “When government benefits don’t come through, we step in and pay for what they need.”
Hovritz writes that before Daniel Richard Healy’s final deployment, he told his son Jacob Centeno Healy that what he most wanted was for him to go to college. When Senior Chief Petty Officer Healy died, Jacob didn’t know how he could pay for college. “The VA wouldn’t provide benefits to me because they didn’t recognize me as my dads’ son,” Healy told Forbes.
So Fallen Patriots stepped in and funded Jacob Healy’s education. Now he works as a program administer for the organization, helping other people who’ve lost parents in the military find all the scholarships and government aid available to them, and covering the rest of the costs with funds from the nonprofit.
On this Memorial Day, Children of Fallen Patriots reminds us that we owe our fallen heroes so much. They gave our country their parents: the least we can do is provide them with a college education.
MORE: Providing Assistance to “The Forgotten Heroes of America” is Top Priority for This Veteran
22 Veterans Take Their Lives Every Day. Here Are 3 Ways We Can Change That
Long after Jennifer Crane returned from her 2003 deployment to Afghanistan, where she worked as a liaison with the local population, the U.S. Army veteran was haunted by troubling images: tire tracks that led into mine fields, limbless children bleeding through their bandages, a fellow service member dying in front of her in a C-130 aircraft.
When she returned to her hometown of Coatesville, Pa., that fall, Crane, 31, found escape in drugs and alcohol. She slept in her car, lived on fries and shakes from McDonald’s and smoked crack. “I figured my heart would explode if I did it enough,” she says. “Drugs just became a way to hurt myself more than anything. It was, ‘If I can’t be the person I am, I might as well kill myself.’”
It was only after she was arrested for narcotics possession three years later that things began to turn around. As part of a drug court program, she was paired with a psychotherapist who changed — and in fact saved — her life. Cognitive behavioral therapy helped her deal with her post-traumatic stress (PTS) by enabling her to be “open and honest” with herself. “The more you speak about these things, the less power they have over you,” Crane says.
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Crane is one of the lucky ones. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, 22 veterans take their lives every day, though the number is likely even higher because there is no comprehensive system to track veteran suicides.
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) spoke of this statistic in early April when he addressed an audience of mental health professionals in Washington, D.C., about the needs of those returning from war. “There isn’t one therapy that is the silver bullet,” Ryan said, emphasizing the importance of providing a spectrum of solutions and then connecting the dots between them.
Here are three impressive approaches to combatting the veteran suicide problem.
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Hundreds Trek the Boston Marathon Route to Raise Suicide Awareness
Running a marathon takes a lot of courage and commitment. And so does marching the same distance while carrying a 50 pound backpack.
On March 29, hundreds of people did just that along the 26.2 mile Boston marathon route to raise awareness about the disturbingly high suicide rate among veterans. Sadly, an average of 22 veterans a day kill themselves, and the marchers are determined to reduce that number. Some turned the trek into a “ruck march” — carrying heavy backpacks like those servicemen and women wear, while others wore tutus and one accountant wore a gas mask, according to Todd Wallack of the Boston Globe.
Carlos Arredondo, the cowboy-hatted good samaritan who sprang into action to help victims of the Boston Marathon bombing last year, was on hand to support the marchers. His son Alexander was a Marine killed in Iraq in 2004, and his son Brian committed suicide in 2011. The cause is “very close to our hearts and our family,” he told Wallack.
Participants set a goal to raise $75,000 for Active Heroes, a Louisville, Kentucky-based nonprofit building a retreat for veterans and their families (the same charity one father and son team are hiking the Appalachian trail to support). Michelle Lyons, who served in Afghanistan, told Wallack that for veterans, “There is so much help out there — they just don’t know how to get to it.” As for the suicide rate among veterans, she said, “Hopefully we can bring that number down to zero.”
With the determination of these marathon marchers, veterans’ despair should be turned into hope.
MORE: This Father and Son are Hitting the Trail to Prevent Veteran Suicide
This Father and Son Are Hitting the Trail to Prevent Veteran Suicide
On an average day, 22 United States veterans commit suicide, resulting in more lives lost than the combined military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Air Force veteran Kevin Steele, a resident of Eufaula, Oklahoma, learned of this sobering statistic when a young veteran he knew killed himself after returning home from deployment. The loss devastated Steele, so to raise money for veteran suicide prevention, he decided to hike the Appalachian Trail (a lifelong dream of his) with his son Hunter.
“The one particular kid that I think about, he practically grew up in my house,” Steele told Burt Mummolo of Tulsa’s Channel 8. “If we can do anything to spare any family out there that kind of pain, it’s worth walking 2,200 miles for.”
Kevin and Hunter have named their mission the Hike for Heroes and set a goal to raise $100,000 on their walk, which will take them through 14 states — from Georgia to Maine. They believe that they can meet their target if they find about 5,000 people willing to donate a penny per mile walked — or $22 in memory of those 22 veterans lost every day to suicide. With the funds, the Steeles want to work with the Kentucky-based charity ActiveHeroes to build a retreat center that will provide treatment for veterans suffering from PTSD and other issues.
The duo embarks on March 17. Presumably, every blister they endure will be a reminder that they’re walking to prevent the pain that suicide causes.
MORE: Salute the Non-Profit That Helps Continue to Serve When They Return Home