How the Bard is Helping Veterans in Milwaukee

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee associate theater professor Bill Watson had a notion that engaging with the works of William Shakespeare would help veterans cope with the problems they faced reintegrating into society, including PTSD. After all, in several of his plays, the Bard captured the conflicted, powerful feelings of warriors both in the midst of battle and after the fighting stopped.
So a year and a half ago, with the help of his professional actor wife, Nancy Smith-Watson, and Jim Tasse, an adjunct theater professor, Bill started Feast of Crispian, an organization that guides veterans in performing Shakespeare through methods uniquely tailored to their needs.
Feast of Crispian began working with veterans who were receiving treatment for substance abuse issues, PTSD and other problems at the Clement J. Zablocki VA Medical Center. So far, the group has held nine weekend-long workshops for veterans that start with the selection of selecting passages from Shakespeare that have roles for two veterans with plenty of conflict, vivid emotions, and only short lines of dialogue so not to trip up the beginning actors.
“We really get right into it Friday night,” Smith-Watson tells Meg Jones of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “creating a sense of group dynamic, asking them to connect with everyone else in the group really quickly. We’ve been floored at how much that works, that by the end of the first night we have 12 to 18 people who came in saying, ‘I came to check this out but I probably won’t be back tomorrow.’ Yet we rarely lose anyone. They give up a whole weekend to do the work.”
On Saturday and Sunday, they cast the scenes and professional actors work with the veterans to get them expressing the emotions Shakespeare wrote about 400 years ago, yet still speak to the vets’ experiences. The actors define archaic words and feed the veterans their lines as they perform so they don’t have to worry about memorizing. On Sunday afternoon, the vets give a performance that’s open to the public.
Jeff Peterson, a Navy veteran who played the role of Hector in “Troilus and Cressida” in the group’s most recent performance, tells Jones, “It’s an emotional experience like no other treatment. This is something I look forward to. I don’t want it to end.”
Marine Corps veteran John Buck, who portrayed Caliban in a scene from “The Tempest,” agrees. “I consider it theater therapy. It gets veterans to open up about their problems,” he says. “You see veterans slowly opening up throughout the weekend.”
MORE: How Storytelling Can Bridge the Military-Civilian Divide

These Special Writing Workshops Are Geared Towards Caregivers of Vets

With organizations like The Telling ProjectThe 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.
MORE: How Storytelling Can Bridge the Military-Civilian Divide

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.
MORE: Meet A Veteran That Uses a 19th-Century Art Form to Capture Today’s Soldiers

The Military-Civilian Divide Doesn’t Have to Be as Wide as It Currently Is

With more than four decades passing since the draft ended, only 1 percent of the population serves in the United States military. Since being in the armed forces isn’t mandatory, the country needs service members and their families to have a positive experience and also needs civilians to have a positive perception of military service, explains Debbie Bradbard, Ph.D., director of research and policy at Blue Star Families, a nonprofit organization that supports military families. And if they don’t? Well, as Bradbard says, “Who’s going to volunteer in the future? Will we have a sustainable all-volunteer force?”
This is why it’s essential that we eliminate the growing sense of separation between soldier and civilian. While doing so might seem difficult, experts and members of the military family community believe it’s possible to all move in the same direction. Here’s how.
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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.”
MORE: This Mobile App is Preventing Veteran Suicides

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.

Veterans and their families enjoy the beach at a LBWW event, July 29, 2014.

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?

The names and identifying information of the veterans in this story have been changed to protect their privacy.

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

This Veteran Literally Searches Through Shrubbery for Homeless Soldiers Needing Assistance

You can’t miss George Taylor — he’ll be the mustached man wearing a black cowboy hat, a shiny belt buckle and snakeskin boots searching through the bushes for homeless veterans to help along forested trails in Florida. When Taylor finds them, he brings them supplies or talks to them about how they can apply for benefits or find housing.
Taylor, who founded National Veterans Homeless Support (NVHS) in 2008, is passionate about this cause because, after serving in Vietnam and returning home with PTSD, he was once a homeless veteran himself. The 65-year-old Taylor eventually learned that he could apply for benefits because of his disability, and now his mission is to inform other vets about the help available to them.
For the past two decades, he’s been dedicated to the cause of helping homeless vets, which has served as an effective therapy for him. “I was a better person with PTSD by helping that other person,” Taylor tells R. Norman Moody of Florida Today. “I learned a long time ago that with PTSD you can eliminate some of the symptoms by staying busy.”
Since 1991, Taylor and his family have been helping vets. His kids even donated their allowances to the cause, and one of them, George Taylor Jr., grew up to become an Air Force Master sergeant and the vice president of NVHS.
For a long time, Taylor relied on donations and whatever funding he could scrape together to help veterans, but in 2012, the NVHS received a $1 million federal grant, followed by a $500,000 grant the year after. Unfortunately, the grants didn’t come through this year, but Taylor is trying to make up for the loss of funding through furious fundraising.
The infusion of funding allowed Taylor and NVHS to purchase, renovate and run five transitional housing units where 18 homeless vets can stay for up to two years while they try to become self-sufficient. Across Florida, NVHS also has held 16 stand down gatherings where struggling vets can receive medical and dental care, talk to counselors and learn about resources available to them.
Fifty-nine-year-old Adiel Brooks is one of the many veterans Taylor has helped over the years. Brooks has been staying in one of the transitional housing units for a few weeks, and now feels ready to try to reenter the upholstery business. “He is a good man,” Brooks says. “He is a good soldier. He looks out for me. He got me out of the woods.”
MORE: Inspired by Homeless Veterans in his Own Family, This Boy Scout Gives Those in His Community a Fresh Start
 

The Workout That’s Getting Vets Through the Home Stretch

Last month was Suicide Prevention Month, and we can’t ignore the fact that every day, 22 American veterans commit suicide. There are numerous ways — beyond traditional medication and psychotherapy — to reduce those numbers. And while yoga doesn’t fit into the typical military model of physical training, that’s all changing.
Two programs, Yoga Warriors International and Yoga for Vets, are tag-teaming to help veterans’ healing efforts by using the proven millennia-old practice — both during and after their service.
Lucy Cimini started Yoga Warriors back in 2005, training certified yoga instructors how to focus their classes for veterans suffering from PTSD. Cimini is based in Boston, but travels around the country holding weekend-long seminars for instructors looking to get certified in the program, which is approved by the National Association of Social Workers.
“Yoga Warrior classes can help ‘unfreeze’ bad memories or gently unlock rigidly held memories in ways that normal talk therapy might not … classes allow participants to safely release and express stored emotions such as guilt, shame, anger, sadness and grief so they can better understand, make peace with, and manage those feelings. … the mind is allowed to safely associate the body with pleasant sensations, which is important for traumatized individuals who associate their bodies with unpleasant sensations due to war wounds, rape, etc.,” Cimini tells Task & Purpose.
For vets looking to try a class, Yoga for Vets is a website community of yoga “studios, teachers, and venues throughout the country that offer four or more free classes to war veterans.” Founder Paul Zipes, a former Navy deep sea diver, has been doing yoga since 1995 (he’s an instructor as well) and has seen firsthand the transformative ability it has on stressed and injured troops.
Interestingly, not all yoga forms are helpful just for healing — the Army Special Forces use it for strength and conditioning. But a study conducted at a forward operating base in Iraq found that “yoga is an effective, low-risk means of managing combat stress, and potentially preventing combat stress from developing into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).”
The truth is, our government and the VA can only do so much. And while adequate medical attention and treatment is essential for getting vets affected by depression and PTSD over the initial rigor of transitioning back to civilian life, yoga can also make a real and lasting difference.
 

When a Bomb Left This Veteran Without Legs, He Decided to Help Others with Disabilities

In 2003, Robert “B.J.” Jackson was deployed to Iraq while serving with the Iowa National Guard. While there, a roadside bomb exploded, destroying his Humvee and causing a traumatic brain injury (which left him with PTSD) and the loss of both of his legs.
Back home in Clive, Iowa after grueling rehab, B.J.’s wife Abby thought he could use a night out. The two went to a nightclub for New Year’s Eve, but the bouncer turned them away, saying that the custom tennis shoes Jackson wore on his prosthetics didn’t meet the establishment’s dress code.
Abby protested, but B.J. wanted to slink away. When the club’s owner found out what had happened, he apologized and paid to fly B.J. to a veteran’s event. More importantly, though, the incident sparked an idea in B.J., who had been demoralized by his injuries.
“That night gave me a new outlook,” he tells Daniel Finney of the Des Moines Register. “I was ready to just let it go, like there was something wrong with me. But my wife and my friends said, ‘Hey, no, that isn’t OK.’ I realized there’s a stigma on people with disabilities. And I was going to do something about it.”
B.J. and his wife, who now live in Florida with their six children, founded The Right to Bear Stumps, an organization that raises awareness about the challenges faced by people with disabilities and raises money to help them. B.J., who struggled to learn to talk again after his brain injuries, is now a motivational speaker — delivering his message at places like churches and the Harley Davidson rally in Sturgis, S.D.
Through the Right To Bear Stumps, B.J. also helps build modifications to houses to accommodate disabilities and organizes golf outings for people with prosthetic limbs. Although he still struggles with issues stemming from his injuries, he jokes with Finney, “The biggest challenge I face right now is getting all the kids in the van.”
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