With organizations like The Telling Project, The Combat Paper Project and The Art of War Project, art has helped many veterans cope with returning to civilian life. But there’s another group that can struggle as much as vets: their caregivers. So a writing workshop program is offering classes and mentorship for military family members to turn their experience into poetry and prose as well.
The Helen Deutsch Writing Workshops, sponsored by the New York-based Writers Guild of America East Foundation, were initially offered to wounded veterans in 2008 and 2009, kicking off with meetings in Columbus, Ohio and San Francisco. Starting in 2011, the organization partnered with the Wounded Warrior Project to sponsor writing classes taught by professional writers (some of whom are veterans) for the caregivers of permanently injured veterans.
The workshops are not therapy — they’re focused on teaching the participants how to craft stories, essays and poems, but many participants find that the writing process helps ease their suffering and sense of isolation.
Sandra Hemenger, whose husband was injured in Iraq, attended a New York City caregivers workshop. “I began to write a book about everything that has happened to us in the past four years,” she tells the Writers Guild of America. “Although I still do not have a lot of time to write, I have a new found love for writing that I never knew existed. For some, they would say our story has taken a bad turn but to us it feels as if the bricks were taken off our chest and we can breathe again. My husband has sensed a change in me since I have been writing. I am no longer keeping everything bottled up inside and I have become a better person because of it.”
Andrea W. Doray of the Denver Post spoke to one of the mentors in the program, Seth Brady Tucker, an Iraq veteran and author of the memoir “Mormon Boy” and the poetry collection “We Deserve the Gods We Ask For.” Tucker led a workshop this month in Denver for participants from around the country, and for the next six months, he’ll continue to assist them with their writing projects.
Tucker tells Doray that as he worked with the caregivers, he struggled “not to break down and cry every 10 minutes,” but he’s hopeful that the writing process that’s helped him since serving as an airborne paratrooper will also enhance the lives of his students.
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Tag: Military Families
Meet The Photographer That Captures Veterans’ Emotions About Returning to the Civilian World
We’ve heard about how difficult the transition from the military to the civilian world has been for many post-9/11 veterans. But sometimes statistics and unemployment percentages don’t convey the grave situation to others the way that a work of art can.
For the past eight years, Brooklyn-based photographer Jennifer Karady has been traveling throughout the United States to capture arresting images of soldiers returned from combat. She spends time with each veteran to learn his or her story and then composes a scene that conveys their emotions. As Karady’s website notes, “she works with real people to dramatize their stories through both literal depiction and metaphorical and allegorical means.”
When Karady spent time with former Marine Corps Sergeant Jose Adames, for example, she learned that he was struck by a mortar when he was in a convoy — resulting in shrapnel wounds, plus 17 fellow Marines in his unit also sustaining injury. When he returned home to Brooklyn, Adames found he was terrified of garbage trucks because they sound similar to exploding mortars. Karady depicted Adames in his uniform on the streets of Brooklyn, crouched and covering his ears as a garbage truck rumbles along behind him.
Karady spoke about her project, “Soldiers’ Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan,” with the PBS NewsHour. She says that she interviews the veterans extensively before photographing them: “through those interviews, we are looking identify a moment from war that’s come home with the person into the civilian world. So we talk about both that memory of war and then also the way that memory manifests itself in the present.”
She continues, “In each photograph, the veteran is in uniform and we’re restaging this memory from war, but that moment is recontextualized in the civilian world. So you get this sense of a collision or collapse between these two worlds, and trying to represent something that’s invisible, something that’s unconscious, something that’s emotional, so what it feels like for the veteran to come home and sometimes experience two different realities at once.”
Karady travelled to the Omaha Nation reservation in Nebraska to photograph Shelby Webster, a single mother who left her kids to serve in Iraq. Her first convoy was attacked, which caused her to worrying about her kids. But she heard her deceased grandfather say, “Well, you’re going to be all right,” and she smelled burning cedar. She later learned that the Omaha people held a prayer meeting for her at which they burned cedar. In the photograph, Webster is on the ground, pointing her gun, while her children cling to her and her brother performs a cedar ceremony in the background.
In the coming years, Karady plans to publish photos from her project in a book and exhibit the portraits in galleries, accompanied with text or recordings of the soldiers telling their own stories.
Through Karady’s images, we can understand a little better the haunting memories that run through veterans’ minds when they return home.
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The Challenges Facing Military Families are Unique, So This Program Gives Social Workers Specific Training
The suicide rate among veterans standing at an alarming 22 deaths each day. As if that’s not enough, military families also face the challenges of high unemployment, debt and PTSD.
So the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work decided to create a Master’s program that would train graduate students to address the needs of veterans, service members and military families.
Social workers are often on the front lines when service members return home — diagnosing their problems and helping vets find housing, jobs and stability. Part of the USC program’s emphasis is in training students how to deliver effective therapy that doesn’t drive military members and their spouses away, a problem with some counseling that results in veterans failing to get the help they need. But in the USC program, a concept called the Motivational Interviewing Learning Environment and Simulation (MILES) teaches students how to effectively manage that vital first contact with both service members and veterans.
Many of the students that have enrolled in USC’s program since its inception in 2009 have direct experience with the military themselves — either as soldiers themselves or spouses of deployed military.
Pamela and Mark Mischel recently helped endow a new scholarship program, the Yellow Ribbon Scholarship Fund, which will pay the tuition for military members and vets who want to enroll. “These young men and women have given so much, and we want to do our small part to be able to help,” Mark Mischel tells USC News.
Pamela says that when they learned that many veterans and their spouses were interested in enrolling USC’s military social work program, they decided to help. “If these people wanted to become social workers, then we wanted to help them do that,” she says. “This is our small way of giving back to them for the services they’ve done for our country.”
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Decades Later, These Veterans Get Their Due
The widespread disdain over the Vietnam War meant that veterans returning home didn’t receive a heroes’ welcome. For some, this caused a sense of shame that worsened the difficulties that military members often face when transitioning to civilian life. And while the war ended almost 40 years ago, some service members at Joint Base Lewis McCord in Tacoma, Wash. wanted to show their appreciation to those vets that fought in Vietnam.
So they threw a big welcome-home party to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War. (According to a presidential proclamation, the 50th anniversary of this long-running conflict can be observed any time between 2012 and 2025.) More than 2,500 veterans and their families packed the JBLM parade field and retired General Barry McCaffrey spoke to the crowd, which included representatives of all branches of the military.
“It is never too late, never too late, to pay tribute to the men and women who served and continue to serve our country,” I Corps Commander Lt. Gen. Stephen Lanza tells Adam Ashton of The News Tribune.
Veteran Stephen Stribling returned from Vietnam in 1968 and was moved by the long-delayed tribute. “I’m like a baby to something like this. It’s so unreal,” he says.
Seventy-nine-year-old Magnum Tulto, an Army veteran, was similarly delighted by the honor. “When we came home as Vietnam veterans, they didn’t like us. I’m glad they like us now,” he tells Ashton.
One Army Lieutenant Colonel, Jeff Schmidt, brought his Vietnam Veteran father-in-law all the way across the country from Coral Springs, Fla. to attend the salute. “I feel it’s important to give them the welcome home that soldiers get today. They served our country just as honorably as us,” Schmidt says.
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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.”
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How the Government Plans to Protect Military Families Against Unscrupulous Lenders
In 2007, Congress passed the Military Lending Act in response to stories of service members sinking under debt or losing their homes because payday lenders or unscrupulous life insurance providers targeted them.
While this law capped the acceptable interest rate for payday loans offered to service members at 36 percent, it only covered loans of up to $2,000 that lasted for 91 days or less and car loans of 181 or fewer days. Many financial predators didn’t bat an eye and found ways to get around the changes — increasing the loans they offered to $2,001, extending them for a period beyond 181 days, or keeping them open-ended, without a set date for repayment. Another trick was to offer an interest rate under 36 percent for the first 91 days, only to increase the rate (sometimes by quadrupling it or raising it even higher!) on day 92.
Richard Cordray, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, tells the New York Times, “We have seen firsthand how lenders use loopholes in the rule to prey on members of the military. They lurk right outside of military bases, offering loans that fall just beyond the parameters of the current rule.”
According to a Wall Street Journal survey, 39 percent of active-duty service members report being short on cash between paychecks, 16 percent are over their credit limit on credit cards, and 10 percent find themselves unable to pay their monthly bills.
Ed Olander, a personal financial maager at Naval Base San Diego’s Fleet and Family Support Center tells Alan Zibel and Ben Kesling of the Wall Street Journal that the lenders are “really like Whac-A-Mole, you hit them in one area and they pop up in another.”
Fortunately, the Defense Department recently announced a plan that would expand the types of loans covered by the existing legislation beyond payday lending to include credit cards, retail payment plans and other financial products. The new plan will also eliminate the time-period limitations, making it more difficult for lenders to play around with repayment schedules. Finally, it will not allow lenders to force borrowers to agree to settle disputes through arbitration — making it possible for military members to sue lenders for predatory practices.
Indebtedness of military members and their families is a vexing problem. Not only is it sad for those that have served their country to be saddled with so much financial hardship, but the stress it causes can contribute to homelessness among veterans. Additionally, soldiers in debt can be labeled a security risk, leading to their security clearances being stripped and leaving them unable to perform their jobs.
The payday loan industry, and legislators who accept campaign money from these businesses, of course, oppose the proposed changes, but those behind them hope to have the new rules in place by 2015.
When an Elderly Veteran Tried to Build a Wheelchair Ramp, These Volunteers Didn’t Let Him Go at it Alone
Eighty-six-year-old Navy veteran John Walker of Gulfport, Miss., is used to taking care of himself. So when his wife Kathleen broke her leg, he decided to build a wheelchair ramp to make it easier to get her in and out of the house.
But when the Retired Senior Volunteer Program of Harrison County (RSVP), learned about the situation, the group contacted Disability Connection, a nonprofit that helps with emergency home repairs and modifications for veterans, the disabled and low-income families.
Disability Connection executive director Janie O’Keefe tells Trang Pham-Bui of WLOX that after Walker build his ramp, “We came and inspected it and it did not look like it was as safe as it should be. It did not look like it would survive long term, so we agreed to basically start over and give him a fresh, brand-new ramp.”
At first Walker refused the help. “I’m used to doing for myself, for my family,” he said. But he soon realized he and his wife could use the support of people like U.S. Army Specialist Kegan Wood, who pitched in to build the new ramp using materials that the Home Depot donated. Pham-Bui asked Walker how he felt to see so many people volunteering to work on the project and he says, “It makes me want to cry.”
“If anybody deserves it, you and your wife do,” O’Keefe tells Walker.
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
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The Start-Up That’s Recruiting 50,000 Military and Veteran Drivers
Uber, the ride-sharing company founded in San Francisco in 2009, noticed something interesting about the ratings its drivers received: Those earning the most accolades were often military members or veterans. Additionally, current and former military member drivers tended to make more trips than civilian drivers through Uber.
These findings sparked a new initiative announced last week: UberMILITARY, an effort to recruit 50,000 veterans, military members and their spouses to become Uber drivers over the next 18 months. Representatives from the company will visit veteran job fairs, offer recruitment bonuses and waive city fees and deposits for veterans.
Uber runs a background check on its driver applicants, and then if they pass, puts them through an online training course. Additionally, it provides financing to its drivers to buy a new car or lets them drive their own car. Uber takes a 20 percent cut of the driver’s gross earnings (the drivers pay for gas, insurance, and maintenance themselves).
Some have pointed out that earning a lot of money through Uber requires working a very long week, but the benefit for military members might be the flexibility. Drivers can work when they want and as much or as little as they want — making it a reasonable gig for someone who is attending school, has a spotty job record (as some military spouses do due to multiple moves) or might be called up to active duty with little notice.
Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense, is serving as the volunteer chairman of the Ubermilitary advisory board. He and Travis Kalanick, Uber’s CEO, write in Politico, “Too often, businesses do not have a clear understanding of how service members’ skills might translate to the civilian workplace. UberMILITARY is a reflection that high-quality service, an unparalleled commitment to safety and the leadership potential inherent to small business entrepreneurship are values shared by those who have selflessly served our country.”
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This Award-Winning Veteran Is a One-Woman Giving Machine
The Veterans’ Voices Award is an honor given by the Minnesota Humanities Center (MHC) that recognizes former service members giving back to their communities in a way “that is going above and beyond the call of duty,” MHC Communications Director Christi Shortridge tells William Loeffler of the Southwest Washington County Bulletin.
Recently, 28-year-old Amber Manke of Milaca, Minn. was honored with this distinction for her incredible record of service.
“I’m incredibly humbled and wondering why I was selected over all the other candidates that were nominated,” Manke says. But those familiar with all of the good work that Manke does in her community aren’t surprised.
In addition to her school and military duties, Manke volunteered over 100 hours last year at Second Harvest, Habitat for Humanity, Feed My Starving Children, Make A Wish Foundation and the Mission Continues (a nonprofit that supports veterans as they transition to civilian life). Additionally, she coaches a team for Girls on the Run, an organization that helps girls — especially low-income ones — learn about running and healthy behavior.
She also took time on Veterans Day last year to speak to elementary school students about what the holiday means. “I like being a soldier,” she told a group of third graders, according to Lesley Toth of the Mille Lacs County Times. “I love going out and making sure you guys are safe back here.”
Manke helps others in part because she knows what it’s like to be in need of assistance. She grew up in poverty with an out-of-work mother, living on a farm with 13 brothers and sisters, often visiting food banks when they were hungry. Manke began working when she was 15 years old and worked two jobs while attending college.
In 2012, Amber Manke was selected from among thousands of applicants to become a Tillman Military Scholar. The scholarships, sponsored by the Pat Tillman Foundation, help military members pay school expenses that aren’t covered by the G.I. Bill. Manke is using her funding to pursue a Ph.D. in organizational leadership and policy development at the University of Minnesota.
And that’s not all she’s been up to. Somehow, she found the time to complete the 2013 New York City Marathon, raising money for the Pat Tillman Foundation.
“Everyone says that they don’t have enough time,” she says. “I truly believe that you make time for the things that are important to you.”
It’s a safe bet that we can expect to hear about more accomplishments from this dynamic veteran in years to come.
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This Generous Country Singer Helps Put Roofs Over Needy Veterans’ Heads
Although longtime country star Tim McGraw lives in a sprawling Nashville mansion, he’s never forgotten what it was like to grow up poor and lack the money for necessities.
So for the past several years, McGraw has teamed up with Colorado Springs-based charity Operation Homefront to give mortgage-free homes to veterans, and last month, the singer introduced the recipients of the nonprofit’s 100th home onstage during his performance in Dallas.
The lucky recipients? The Frachiseurs of east Texas.
BJ Frachiseur served in the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan for eight years. When he left the military, he and his wife Brooke and their two children faced a difficult situation. Their only housing option was to squeeze into a guest room at Brooke’s mom’s house because they couldn’t afford a down payment for a home of their own and didn’t qualify for a mortgage.
They applied to Operation Homefront’s Homes on the Homefront program, which provides bank-owned, renovated homes mortgage-free to needy military veterans. When there’s an available home, the nonprofit considers financial need, whether the veteran is wounded and whether the family has close ties to the community. After a family moves in and proves they can maintain the house and pay property taxes, insurance and homeowner’s association fees for two years, the home is theirs to keep.
Chase Bank owned the homes that McGraw has been awarding to military families at each of his tour stops for several years. Other banks, including Meritage, have provided other homes to the program as well.
McGraw’s connection to Operation Homefront helps raise awareness of the charity, which runs a myriad of programs besides the home-giveaways — from holiday toy drives to Thanksgiving meals for military veterans to rent-free housing for wounded veterans.
BJ Frachiseur tells Jake Whitman of NBC News that receiving the home “has taken a weight off my shoulders. I’ll go home, and I’ll say, oh, I’m going to my house. My house. Watching my kids play in the back yard and say, ‘Oh, this is my house.’ My house. Awesome.”
McGraw, whose sister, grandfather, and uncle are all veterans, tells Whitman that when he awards houses to vets, “They all — they don’t expect it. They don’t think they deserve it. The thing I’ll try to tell them is that, ‘You deserve everything good that comes to you in life. And take this, and build a life with it.’”
MORE: This Non-Profit Puts A Debt-Free Roof Over Veterans’ Heads