Ali Taylor never would have guessed that the end of her husband’s military career would prompt her to try improv: The last time she attempted any type of acting was as a middle-school theater student. But there she was, at a five-day event held at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam near Honolulu for wounded Air Force members and their caregivers, learning the core improv concept of “Yes, and,” and realizing it now applied to her life.
Her husband, Staff Sgt. Brandon Cipolla, had recently been admitted to the Air Force Wounded Warrior Program due to service-related injuries, including post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic migraine headaches, and a shoulder injury requiring several surgeries. Taylor had been appointed his caregiver as part of the program, yet was still working full-time as an executive chef at Mississippi State University in Starkville, Miss. “There’s not a lot of smiling and laughing when you’re in a situation like we are,” Taylor said.
When Cipolla applied to attend the CARE event (which encompasses all of the Air Force Wounded Warrior Program’s areas of support) to prepare for his upcoming medical retirement and transition, Taylor wasn’t sure what to expect. However, she looked forward to a brief respite from their daily routine, as well as the opportunity to find support and camaraderie from others in the same position.
Each day, while Cipolla participated in mock interviews and worked on other job-search skills, Taylor took classes, including financial planning and navigating the military’s insurance programs. At night, she immersed herself in improv workshops, one of several offerings (along with more traditional choices like yoga, journaling, and painting) designed to help participants. Though all workshops are optional, the program encourages caregivers and injured service members to attend as part of their path back to wellness.
While improv specifically may seem a surprising choice for those struggling to transition to life after injury, it’s now part of the resiliency programming the Air Force offers its Wounded Warriors (the term the United States Armed Forces uses to describe injured service members) and their caregivers. Aaron Moffett, Ph.D., a sports psychologist who runs the resiliency program, noted that the resiliency workshops take a holistic approach to teaching life skills. With improv, “it’s really a communication skill,” he explained. “You have to listen to your partner and think quickly: ‘How does what I’m doing relate to what that person just said, and how do I communicate back to that person?’”
The tone is set on the very first day by retired Staff Sgt. and Air Force medic BJ Lange, an actor and comedian who developed the curriculum and launched the improv workshops last year. Lange makes a point of letting participants know that he’s not there as a military training instructor, but as someone who’s committed to helping them have fun on their path toward healing.
Lange starts off by sharing his own story: His traumatic brain injury, two bouts with testicular cancer, struggles with depression and anxiety, and his own participation in the Air Force Wounded Warrior Program. “When my cancer returned, I found myself getting deeper and deeper into depression,” he said. “I had to look back at all of these things I had been teaching for so long about facing my fear.”
In creating the program, Lange looked to the research and overall approach of applied improv, where collaborative exercises are used as a tool for personal or professional growth. While improved listening skills, problem solving, and thinking outside the box are all benefits of the program, one of the most important takeaways is the chance for participants to be with others who are facing similar struggles – and to have fun.
“Teambuilding, camaraderie, and trust in one another: These are all things that can be broken when you’re going through heavy mental and physical adversity,” Lange explained. “I don’t teach the warriors and their caregivers how to be funny; I don’t teach them how to perform. I teach them how to use these skills [and] how they can use them to rebuild their lives.”
But it’s not always fun, laughter and games. At one workshop when everyone was lying on the ground at the start of a new scene, Lange recalled that the setup “looked like dead bodies,” to one of the wounded service members. When flashbacks like this happen, Lange stops the action. The group took time to discuss the participant’s observation and talk about other possible ways to view the scenario before moving forward.
Participants often become more comfortable over the course of the week, whether it’s being able to open up about their stories or even just make eye contact, which can be a struggle for those who have suffered trauma. “We talk a lot about interpersonal skills,” Lange said. “[When you retreat] into your head – from depression, anxiety or a TBI – you look down a lot.”
For some, it’s about being able to tap into what it’s like to feel happy again. Lange recalled one participant who had sustained a traumatic brain injury during his service in Afghanistan and rarely spoke, relying on his wife to communicate for him. At the end of the week, she told Lange that her husband’s participation in the improv workshops was the first time she’d seen him smile since his injury.
This year, Lange expects to teach workshops around the country and in Germany as part of the Air Force Wounded Warrior Program’s CARE events. With about 8,000 participants in the program (not including caregivers), he knows he won’t be able to reach all of them. But for those who have taken his workshop, like Taylor, the skills are ones that carry over into their daily lives, whether it’s honing the flexibility to work with a new situation or being open to finding some humor in it.
“The concept of ‘Yes, and’ is that you work with what you’ve been given: You carry on and keep going,” says Taylor, whose husband recently took a new job requiring them to relocate to Olympia, Wash. “That’s our marriage.”
More: A Hurricane Demolished My City. My Military Experience Is Helping Me Rebuild It.
Tag: Wounded Warrior Project
To Fight PTSD, This Veteran Cross Stitches
With treatments for PTSD ranging from equine therapy and scuba diving to a nudist lifestyle, it’s clear that what works to ease one veteran’s PTSD symptoms might not work for another. Regardless of method, anything that relaxes someone suffering is beneficial.
Veteran David Jurado couldn’t shake the troubled thoughts that serving in Iraq left him with. About his time serving overseas, he tells the Greenville Online, “We definitely saw our fair share of battle. I lost really good friends through IED (improvised explosive device) explosions.”
A few years after Jurado returned home from Iraq to Greenville, S.C., he began to seek help for his PTSD. Companions for Heroes helped him train a service dog from the Greenville Humane Society. “With the resources that Companions for Heroes had to offer, I was able to able to raise my own service dog in about a year’s time,” Jurado says. “The service dog really broke my anti-social shell. I was ready to take on whatever the world had to throw at me.”
While the dog helped, Jurado kept seeking other activities to ease his PTSD — including cross stitching, a craft that his mom taught him when he was eight-years-old. “My wife gave me a pattern, and I jumped right back into it for a reason. It’s something that keeps my mind from wandering into places I don’t want to go or remember,” he says. “Life is pretty simple when all you’ve got to worry about is needle and thread.”
Jurado transitioned from his former career as a police officer to working for Companions for Heroes. He has been so successful with figuring out what techniques help him to manage his PTSD symptoms that the Wounded Warrior Project selected to become a peer mentor for other vets with similar issues.
Now Jurado is always ready to help two other veterans in the Greenville area. “Helping other people with their challenges helps me better handle mine,” he says.
MORE: This 85-Year-Old Knitter Churns Out Hats to Help Homeless Vets
For Soldiers Enduring Seemingly Endless Recoveries, This Organization Provides Free Beach Vacations
With a giant crowd lining the street, fire companies saluting and bagpipes blaring, you’d think it was July 4th or Memorial Day. But the cause for celebration on this balmy July Sunday wasn’t a national holiday. It was to honor the wounded U.S. soldiers and their families who were being treated to an all-expenses-paid vacation to Long Beach, N.Y., courtesy of the Long Beach Waterfront Warriors (LBWW).
Amid all the bad publicity surrounding scheduling discrepancies at VA hospitals nationwide and the plight of our returning troops in general, there’s another issue that’s seldom mentioned: the hardships borne by injured service members who require long-term hospital care.
Soldiers with debilitating injuries — both mental and physical—may never receive the warm hometown welcome depicted in car commercials. Instead, they go to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., to receive treatment and rehabilitation until their doctors classify them as non-medical assist (meaning they no longer need to be at the hospital or require doctors and nurses to be nearby day to day). Depending upon the extent of their injuries, some soldiers are stuck at the hospital for indefinite periods of time.
So in 2009, John McLoughlin, a retired New York City fireman, decided to do something special for those service members by founding the Long Beach Waterfront Warriors. He modeled LBWW on The Graybeards, a civic organization in the Rockaways, N.Y., that runs an adaptive sports festival for the disabled. McLoughlin took this idea a step further, extending it to a weeklong summer vacation and paying for the entire trip and accommodations, as well as providing specialized activities.
This past summer, LBWW flew in 22 injured vets and 46 of their family members to the seashore community.
A few days after the parade, Luke, a Marine from the Midwest who had both legs amputated above the knees after sustaining catastrophic blast wounds in Afghanistan, sits on the beach with his parents and kid sister and talks about the more than 50 surgeries he’s endured in the past two and a half years.
“I was hoping to have my prosthetics for this [week], but…” Luke says with a shrug, referring to the never-ending succession of infections that snag his rehab and timeline for leaving the hospital. Through the Wounded Warrior Project, Luke is one of eight vets in a cyber security training program that upon completion should land him a job with NASA.
Luke’s wife and two kids are also with him in Long Beach (staying at the Allegria Hotel, which has partnered with LBWW for years), where he’s actually able to spend a rare week living with them. That’s because, while his family is able to live in on-base housing, he and the other inpatients on medical-hold stay in barracks on Walter Reed’s campus.
He doesn’t dwell on the subject and instead smiles, recalling the fishing charter he went on that morning. “It was rough out there,” he says. “We were like five miles out, and I got a little nervous for a minute in my wheelchair.” Luke caught the boat’s only keeper of the day, a 24-incher.
Luke and another double-amputee, Jose, are able to participate in perhaps LBWW’s most unlikely activity: surfing lessons. A team of instructors shows up in the early afternoon with boards specially designed to accommodate surfers with disabilities. Both are catching waves in no time.
Jose was enjoying the LBWW vacation with his wife and brother. He also lives at Walter Reed, and his family is burdened by the same circumstances as Luke’s. Fortunately, however, Homes for Our Troops, a nonprofit that builds specially designed housing for disabled vets, recently broke ground on a new house for Jose and his wife on Long Island, not far from his family in Queens.
Historically, LBWW tries to help the most severely injured and those that have recently returned from deployment overseas. In fact, sometimes the families are being reunited for the first time. But as the role of the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan has wound down, the organization has also reached out to vets who’ve been in the hospital for an extended period of time — years or even decades.
Also lounging on the beach that day are 42 Vietnam veterans from the local Northport VA Medical Center. Most are afflicted with some combination of mental and physical illnesses. Ned, a potbellied volunteer with long gray hair and beard, nods to Ralph, a barrel-chested vet with no toes, and explains how much this day means to Ralph. “When he got up this morning, there was a big ‘0’ on the wall in his room. Tomorrow it’ll say ‘365.’ He counts down the days until we come out again next year.”
Just then, four teenage volunteer boys and Jerry, a retired fireman and boisterous volunteer with LBWW since its inception, lift Ralph into a specially designed beach wheelchair and roll him on the sand and into the surf, 10 hands securely on the handles as he bobs and smiles through the waves during his second dip of the afternoon.
The severity of Northport Vets’ disabilities made day trips a huge challenge for the VA’s staff. But with the enthusiasm and organization that LBWW has built over the years, it’s now safe and practical for the group to bring the Vietnam vets out as well. LBWW keeps a team of volunteer nurses from Long Island’s North Shore University Hospital on hand at all times during the week’s activities, led by Nurse Patty, a mainstay with the group.
Jerry explains that LBWW’s success is reliant on its relatively small size, and that repeating their model is best done at the local level. He says that large programs like the “Wounded Warriors Project have great resources” that can help LBWW get off the ground, “but they also have a huge infrastructure, which creates a lot of overhead.” With LBWW’s web of tight, local functionaries, every dollar raised goes directly to their cause. Aside from the considerable cost of plane tickets and accommodations, LBWW has also raised funds for a private tour of Ground Zero and Rockefeller Center, the weekend parade and BBQ, a 5K race, a Mets game and the fishing trip, not to mention three beach days packed with food, drinks, surfing and even a massage tent.
LBWW’s success has already inspired another group, the West Palm Beach Waterfront Warriors, who’ve been bringing wounded vets and their families to the Florida coast since 2011.
Which shorefront community will be next?
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The names and identifying information of the veterans in this story have been changed to protect their privacy.