It was the sight of a little boy peering at her from behind a pole that signaled to Staff Sgt. Stacy Keyte that readjusting to life at home was going to be tough. Keyte had just returned from a nearly two-year deployment to Iraq, and this doubtful child was her son, Caleb, then almost 3. Caleb had been shown lots of pictures of Mommy while she was away, and he had talked to her on the phone and by videoconference many times, but he was still reticent to come forward for a hug. “He was saying, I know you, but Iʼm not really sure about you,” Keyte says with a chuckle.
She can laugh about it now, thanks in part to the support of other female veterans who know firsthand what she went through. Keyte works with and for former servicewomen as one of seven staff facilitators at Grace After Fire, a Texas organization that aims to connect Americaʼs women veterans to one another. Keyte sought help from the group after returning from Iraq in 2006, and soon after joined the program as a staff member. Headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, Grace After Fire operates under the mantra: knowledge, insight, self-renewal. According to its mission statement, it strives to help female vets overcome a multitude of challenges “not by putting a Band-Aid on the wounds of post-traumatic stress, military sexual trauma, depression, or substance abuse, but by giving time and space for women veterans to listen, connect and heal with one another.”
The service, which is funded through the Texas Department of Health Services and a variety of private funds, is especially valuable in the state. In 2014, Texas surpassed California as the state with the most female vets and counts 192,000 women among its growing veteran population — about 47,200 Texas women have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. In the United States, there were a total of 1.6 million female veterans in 2012, 60 percent of them under 30, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). To reach vets outside of the state’s borders, Grace After Fire also runs “Graceʼs Garden,” an online community where vets can share tips, experiences, problems and a compassionate ear.
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Keyte, who lives in Fort Worth, received her orders to deploy to Tikrit, Iraq (Saddam Husseinʼs hometown), in 2005, just after Caleb’s first birthday. She celebrated her own 25th birthday in Iraq. Keyte’s husband, a Texas Army National Guardsman like Keyte, also got orders to ship out for service along the U.S.-Mexico border shortly after his wife did, and the couple was forced to place Caleb in the care of his grandmother.
In Iraq, Keyte struggled to cope. She found one “battle buddy” who had left her teenage children at home, but no one who shared her particular situation. “It was hard, especially since I was a first-time mom,” she says. She kept in touch with Caleb over the computer and telephone, but calls had to be made in a communal building with close-set booths that made privacy impossible. (When her husband did another overseas tour in 2009, soldiers were able to call home using Skype on their laptops in more private settings.)
Keyte’s deployment was difficult in itself. She worked as a media communications specialist in Iraq, behind the front lines — but that didn’t mean she was safe. In Iraq and Afghanistan there is no defined battlefield. Keyte often felt and heard the shock of incoming artillery. Though she had been fully trained in combat skills, her first brush with indirect fire was still disconcerting. “Thereʼs no safe place there,” Keyte says, adding that no matter what kind of training a soldier receives, it cannot prepare him or her for the first encounter with live fire.
After coming home, Keyte set about reconnecting with her almost 3-year-old son, but even the simplest, everyday tasks reminded her of the time she had missed. When she was asked in a restaurant if she needed a high chair or a booster seat for Caleb, she didnʼt know. Her readjustment was difficult — made harder by painful migraines for which Keyte sought treatment through the VA — but she pulled through, went back to school, earned a master’s degree in marketing, had another baby, a son now aged 4, and joined Grace After Fire to work on the groupʼs signature program Table Talk: Color Me Camo.
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Table Talk focuses on setting up peer-to-peer groups, says Lil Serafine, chief operating officer of Grace After Fire, bringing together vets in supportive small groups to talk about their needs. The program also helps veterans navigate the various agencies and organizations that can help them with specific issues, be it child care or health services. Facilitators like Keyte, who are all home-based around the state, also train volunteers on how to set up their own peer-to-peer groups, an especially useful tool in such a big state as Texas with lots of small towns and rural communities.
Grace After Fire also holds a couple of retreats each year for vets and their families. In June, they will gather at a San Antonio-area resort with a full schedule of events and programs — some just for fun, like the visit to a nearby ranch, and others aimed at helping renew bonds in families that have been apart. Sessions are held for spouses and children to allow them to talk about their problems and concerns, and also to help them deal with Momʼs transition from soldier to civilian. The retreat is likely to attract 100 families or more, says Serafine, and with full funding from the Newmanʼs Own Foundation, it will be free for families.
For Keyte, now retired from the Texas Army National Guard, her job has been “an answer to a prayer,” enabling her to serve her fellow vets. “I know a lot of women who are always focusing on everyone else and never stop to deal with themselves,” she says. Grace After Fire is all about helping warriors renew themselves. “In the military we are not allowed cry or someone will say, ‘Youʼre so weak, so emotional,’” Keyte says. “Here, we learn to be our natural selves again.”
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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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Remembering A World War II Vet Who Gave 3,000 Fellow Vets a Final Salute
World War II Veteran Kenny Smith believed in honoring his fellow vets — whether he knew them or not. In fact, his extraordinary commitment led him to assist with more than 3,000 funerals at the Idaho State Veterans Cemetery in Eagle, Idaho between 2004 and 2014. Not only that, but he also wrote down the names of each veteran whose funeral he attended in a log book and kept photographs and other mementos of these vets.
At the age of 86, Smith died just three days after the last funeral he attended on April 4.
Smith, who was the head volunteer at the cemetery, lost both of his legs to frostbite after serving in the Pacific with the Navy during World War II. He bought an all-terrain-vehicle to help him get around the cemetery. He would greet families in his ATV, and then rise on his prosthetic legs to salute the flag during the funeral services. Cemetery director James Earp told Matt Standal of KTVB, “Kenny was here watching the construction of the cemetery unfold, and it was a point of pride for him to understand it. He felt very much a part of this, and we all agree that Kenny is a big part of this cemetery.”
Before each funeral he volunteered at, Smith also took time to visit the resting place of his wife, who died in 2003. His daughter Sandy McCary told Standal, “He felt like could speak with her there. [He’d] communicate back and forth, and try not to miss her so much that way.”
Before Smith died, Idaho’s governor C.L. “Butch” Otter had honored him for more than 6,500 hours of volunteer service at the cemetery. Smith will be laid to rest with a military flag line on April 21. Let’s hold a moment of silence for this honorable American.
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When Vets Come Home: 5 Things You Should Say (and 5 Things You Shouldn’t)
If you’ve ever stopped or stuttered midsentence when talking to a vet recently home from war, you wouldn’t be alone. Not knowing what to say to returning soldiers is a common struggle says Mike Liguori, a former Marine who served during the Iraq War and is now director of community at Unite US, an online platform that connects current and former military members and their families.
Well-intentioned friends and family members may say something that actually increases stress or negative emotions: Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, affects up to 20 percent of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. With no official blueprint on how best to help military members ease back into civilian life, we surveyed a range of vets and experts to tell us what’s helpful — or hurtful — for vets to hear from loved ones.
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What Not to Say
1. Don’t ask if they’ve killed anyone.
“It’s a frighteningly difficult question to answer for a lot of reasons,” says Army veteran Nate Rawlings, 32, who served two tours in Iraq. “It perpetuates a stereotype that all combat is shooting at bad guys and blowing things up. The truth is that combat involves long periods of boredom, anxiety and anticipation, punctuated by bursts of action many people would rather not discuss with family and friends, let alone strangers. Most veterans, at least for me, and most of the ones I know and have talked to, aren’t prepared to answer that question when they come home. Give them a pass — if they want to tell you, they might do so, in their own good time.”
2. Don’t tread too gently around vets because you assume everyone has experienced trauma.
“There’s no need to coddle vets,” says Amber Barno, a former OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopter pilot who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. “There’s this stigma that people need to watch what they say, and frankly, veterans get annoyed at over concern. Veterans come out with priceless skill sets, as well as experience — ask about that experience, what it was like to serve their country.”
Daniel Gade, 39, an active lieutenant colonel in the Army and a professor at the United States Military Academy, West Point, says it’s important not to assume that all returning service members have PTSD or emotional problems just because they’ve served, even if they’ve served in direct fire combat. “One of the problems in society is our mentality of extremes — that veterans are maimed and need to be treated with kid gloves or that they’re all heroes,” he says. “Most of them are neither heroes nor victims, so treating them as normal human beings would be very useful.”
3. Don’t ask them to put difficult experiences behind them.
Being impatient is never helpful, warns Edna Foa, a clinical psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “Don’t say things like, ‘Well, you’re back here. Iraq or Afghanistan is behind you — there are no dangers here, so put that all behind you,’” she says. If the returning soldier has PTSD, it’s a disorder. “It’s not up to a patient’s will to get over it.”
4. Don’t snap — even if they snap.
“Don’t take things personally if they don’t want to talk about something,” says William Hansen, 46, who has served as a truck commander and squad leader in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Egypt with the Army. “It’s not about you, or your relationship. It takes five to six months for a person back from combat to get their bearings about them. So act natural toward them, act human. Many vets are struggling with what to say, and a lot of times they’ll say the wrong things at the wrong time. If you snap, they’ll stop talking — and stop reaching out.”
5. Don’t describe their experience for them.
“Avoid judgmental comments, like, ‘What you had to do was awful,’” says Capt. Wanda Finch, a division chief and program manager at the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury. Finch is also a representative for the Real Warriors Campaign, a multimedia public awareness effort designed to encourage help-seeking behavior among service members, veterans and their families. “You might think it’s sympathetic, but we want to stay away from taglines like, ‘War is hell,’ or other clichés.”
What to Say
1. Ask before throwing a welcome-home party.
“When they’re ready, or even before they return, ask how they would feel about a small, welcome-home gathering of close friends,” says Jamie Lynn De Coster, 31, who deployed to the Arabian Gulf, South China Sea, Iraq and Afghanistan, among other places, with the U.S. Navy. “Family and friends often want to gather around the returning service member, celebrate their return and just want to be near them. But the truth is, we don’t want the Budweiser parade. Look at the soldier’s face in that commercial — my veteran friends and I interpreted that not as happy surprise, but as being totally overwhelmed.”
2. Give updates on fellow troops from a vet’s unit.
“Keep in mind that the majority of a veteran’s unit is still going to be in combat if he gets injured and sent home,” says Michael Schlitz, 37, a Purple Heart recipient who lost both hands and the vision in his left eye when a propane tank exploded during a road-clearing mission in southern Baghdad in 2007. The Army veteran spent six months in the intensive care unit and an additional four months in the burn ward while recovering from his injuries. “Vets are going to want to hear how their guys are doing. They still wish they could be with them. But because they’re not there, they’re going to want to make sure people are watching their backs, that they’re getting what they need.”
3. Dole out the tough love when necessary.
“If you happen to reach a point where a guy is laying in bed, seven days a week, not doing anything, someone’s got to step in, slap him upside the head and say, ‘You’re still alive, you go forward and live for the people who don’t have that opportunity,’” says Tommy Clack, 67, a triple amputee and Vietnam War veteran.
4. Ask detailed questions relating to that individual.
“I don’t like when people ask, ‘What was it like?’ as if there’s a single answer that one individual could give that would cover the experience of everyone,” says David Eisler, 29, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran. “It’s not meant as a stupid question, but it feels like quite the burden to answer for every single vet, especially if you’re being approached by a stranger. Start with more general questions — what did you do? when did you serve? — when talking to veterans you don’t already know.”
5. Go beyond saying, “Thank you for your service.”
“I’ve heard some veterans don’t like when civilians tell them, ‘Thank you for your service,’” says Liguori of Unite US. “It’s not offensive to them, but it creates a barrier, like civilians can just say thank you and it’s enough. Many vets are leaving the service and coming home from overseas struggling with unemployment or just not knowing what they want to do after the uniform. It’s hard for a guy who shot a machine gun for 15 months to come back home and see how shooting a machine gun applies to digital marketing. Veterans are finding it challenging to really transition to civilian life. They would rather hear, ‘Thank you for your service. How can I help you?’ since that second part gives civilians a way to find out how they can help.”
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Can Ancient Native American Traditions Heal Today’s Vets?
For centuries, many Native American tribes held traditional rituals when their young men returned from battle to help reintegrate them into society. Today, some are performing these ceremonies to help veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Utah filmmaker Taki Telonidis of the Western Folklife Center in Salt Lake City is shooting a documentary about these traditions and their effects on returning vets, many of whom come home with “invisible drama,” he told the Elko Free Daily Press. Telonidis is documenting the traditions of warriors among the Blackfeet tribe and the work of one Shosone-Paiute medicine man who conducts sweat lodges for all interested veterans at the George Wallen Veteran Affairs Center in Salt Lake.
This Partnership Encourages Vets to Become Farmers
The Farmer Veteran Coalition Partnership and the Farm Bureau have teamed up to encourage veterans to become farmers or seek employment in the agriculture industry. The groups released a guide for veterans interested in transitioning into agriculture, and plan to help them find farms they can buy or work for and offer assistance in purchasing farm equipment. 44% of people in the military come from rural areas, even though only 17% of Americans live in rural areas. The FVCP is hoping to return some of that talent to its rural roots.