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: Families of Veterans
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