When veterans return home after being wounded during service, they face innumerable challenges, one of which is often just getting into and navigating around their own houses.
Several charities, including Building for America’s Bravest, the Gary Sinise Foundation, and Operation Homefront, have stepped up to provide wounded veterans with customized homes equipped with ramps, wide doorways and appliances accessible to people in wheelchairs. While these specialized houses are free, they often saddle veterans with a large annual tax bill, which some struggle to afford (especially if their injuries prevent them from working).
Nick Mapson, injured by two IEDs while serving in Afghanistan, is a recipient of a customized home from New American Homes, Inc. “It’s hard to explain all the widened doorways, all the easy accessible things throughout the house, the stoves the microwave, just a whole bunch of the things a lot of people take for granted,” Mapson, who lives in the Chicago area, tells Fox 18.
Mapson described the home as “the most amazing gift.” But then he learned how much he owed in property taxes. “We came to find out that they were almost $11,000 a year. That was out of our tax bracket for us to pay.”
Thankfully, Illinois recently passed a law, Senate Bill 2905, that eases the property tax burden faced by wounded veterans. Prior to the law, up to $70,000 of a wounded veteran’s home’s value was tax exempt, but only if the Disabled American Veterans built it. Now up to $100,000 of the home’s assessed value is exempt from taxes on homes donated by any nonprofit or individual to wounded veterans.
Mapson was relieved. “Now with the bill it affects everybody,” he says. “Veterans in Illinois that have donated homes and specially adapted homes built by the V.A. This is a pretty huge moment for us.”
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Tag: wounded veterans
Ancient Native American Ceremonies Help Soldiers Overcome PTSD
You’re probably not aware, but about 1 percent of veterans are of American Indian or Native Alaskan descent.
While this group is just a tiny percentage of our Armed Forces, Native American veterans are two to three times as likely to experience PTSD as white veterans, says Dr. Spero Manson, Ph.D., who leads the Centers for American Indian and Native Alaskan Health at the University of Colorado’s School of Public Health.
Why does this group suffer mental anguish more than others? Manson, who is a member of the Pembina-Chippewa tribe, thinks it’s because Native Americans are more likely to spend more time in combat than soldiers of other ethnicities. “The greatest predictor of trauma among veterans is, in fact, exposure to combat,” he tells Colorado Matters.
Although the issues faced by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are unique, Manson believes this problem isn’t new, extending back for as long as there have been warriors. “The returning warriors of that time came back to their local villages and communities exhibiting many of the same symptoms that veterans today, who have seen combat, do,” he says. “They’re irritable, quick to fight, they distance themselves from others. They’re very difficult to reintegrate into their communities.”
Manson believes the ancient ceremonies tribes developed to address these problems can be helpful to today’s soldiers. He cites the Lakota Wiping of Tears, “where tears are symbolically brushed from the cheeks,” as being helpful.
Manson’s own son returned troubled after serving in the Marine Corps and finally got back on his feet through a mixture of tribal and traditional medical interventions. “We just have to figure out how to…support them in the process,” Manson says.
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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.
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This Bakery Offers More Than Muffins; It Gives Veterans a New Career Path
Step inside the new Dog Tag Bakery in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., and your nose might tell you it’s just a place to buy some delicious scones, muffins and bread. But while it does sell freshly-baked goods, the bakery’s actual mission is to train wounded veterans how run a small business.
Ten wounded veterans comprise Dog Tag Bakery’s initial class of “fellows,” who take classes in baking, business management, marketing, inventory and more; the former soldiers work 15 hours a week in the bakery to gain hands-on business experience. Bakery general manager Justin Ford tells WTOP, “The bakery is a conduit to teach our fellows small business management.”
Phil Cassidy, board chair of Dog Tag Inc., adds, “At the end of the six month period, ideally, they’ve learned the skills to get on with their lives.”
Dog Tag Inc. has partnered with the Georgetown School of Continuing Studies to allow the vets to earn a certificate of business administration through the program.
Rebecca Sheir of WAMU spoke to some of the veterans participating in the program. Maurice Jones spent 22 years in the Army, working in I.T. and telecommunications before he was injured. He tells WAMU, “I want to start my own I.T. consulting firm,” and says of Dog Tag Bakery, “They treat us like adults, professionals. They don’t look at our disability as a hindrance or a disability at all. They’re looking to provide us with the skills and knowledge to progress and succeed in any endeavor we’ve got going on.”
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For Struggling Veterans, Strumming Guitars Can Help with the Healing Process
In Texas, a group of veterans at the San Antonio Military Medical Center is making beautiful music, thanks to volunteers with the Warrior Cry Music Project.
The nonprofit gives instruments — guitars, drums, trumpets and more — to injured service members, then provides them with music lessons.
Robert Henne started the organization five years ago because he believes playing instruments helped him recover from injuries he sustained in a car accident. At the time, his wife was working as an Air Force doctor at the Walter Reed Medical Center, and he wondered if the same process could help wounded veterans recover.
As the veterans work through the inevitable squawks and stumbles that come along with playing an instrument, they also learn to overcome other challenges. “It’s not just learning to play music,” Henne tells the San Antonio News-Express. “It helps reprogram what’s going on in the head.”
The former soldiers agree. Army veteran Ricardo Cesar suffers nerve damage in his fingers, but plucking the guitar is helping with his recovery. “Just parking here and knowing I’m coming in here lowers my blood pressure,” Cesar says. “This is my time. This is my therapy. Now when I’m starting to transition (to civilian life), at home, I can shut the world out and start playing my guitar, rather than, you know, drinking or doing all types of other nonsense that I don’t need to be doing.”
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These Special Writing Workshops Are Geared Towards Caregivers of Vets
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.
MORE: How Storytelling Can Bridge the Military-Civilian Divide
Being Severely Burned Didn’t Stop This Veteran From Hitting the Links
Before enlisting in the Army, Rick Yarosh of Windsor, N.Y., had taken up golf and was getting good at it. He planned to continue his pursuit of the sport when he returned from deployment.
But in 2006, while Yarosh served as a sergeant in Iraq, an I.E.D. exploded, burning 60 percent of his body and causing him to lose his nose, ears, a leg and several fingers. Since then, Yarosh has been continuing his physical therapy while also working at Sitrin Health Care Center, helping with its military rehabilitation program.
Yarosh was eager to try golf again, but he couldn’t find an adaptive club that worked with his disabilities. Luckily, two students from SUNY-Polytechnic Institute (near Utica, N.Y.) stepped in to help.
Nicholas Arbour and Adam Peters had a class assignment to solve a real-world problem and started meeting with Yarosh in January to design a golf club that would accommodate his needs. Arbour and Peters studied professional golfers’ swings and created three prototypes on a 3-D printer to develop their final design, which includes a wrist guard and a handle that Yarosh can hold while he swings the club.
On October 28, Arbour and Peters presented Yarosh with his new golf club at a ceremony at Sitrin Health Care Center. “I’m so happy,” Yarosh tells Syracuse.com. “I tried the club and I could hit the ball with it quite a distance. Now I can go out with my friends again and play golf. It’s an incredible feeling…I used to wrestle and play football, and I like to be competitive. It was another piece of my life that I lost, and these two helped me get that back.”
Arbour and Peters earned top grades from their professor for their project. “I would have written to their professor and protested if they didn’t get an A,” Yarosh says. “They worked really hard at this, and it means a lot to me.”
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The Double Amputee Veteran That’s Now an Eye-Catching Cover Model
Noah Galloway of Birmingham, Ala., never dreamed of entering the military — then history intervened.
“There’s a lot of military history in my family, and I didn’t want anything to do with any of it,” Galloway says in a video for Men’s Health. “September 11th happened, and I was twenty years old, I was physically fit, and I just saw it as something I needed to do.” In October 2001, he enlisted.
Then during December 2005, Sergeant Galloway was serving in the Infantry in Iraq in when his unit received orders that required driving a Humvee into an area known as “the Triangle of Death” in Yusufiah. Driving with the headlights off and night vision goggles on, they didn’t see a trip wire, which detonated a roadside bomb as they drove over it. The explosion blasted Galloway into a canal and led to the amputation of both his left arm and leg.
Personal turmoil soon followed. “I thought more than a few times that it would have been better if I’d have just died,” he says. “I’d have been looked at like a hero. But instead, here I am, I’ve had two of my limbs taken from me. I would drink every day, but then I would go out in public and I was fine. There was this other side of me that I was just really hiding. I finally decided this has got to stop.”
Galloway joined a gym, began working out extensively and changed his diet. “Everything in my life started to improve,” he says.
The father of three now works as a personal trainer specializing in helping disabled vets, and he doesn’t let his clients get away with their excuses for not excelling. “Whatever it is that you tell me that you can’t do, we can find something to get it done,” he says. “I’ve had nothing but people try to help me. The least I can do is try to help anyone that’s in need around me.”
Most recently, Men’s Health named Galloway its “Ultimate Men’s Health Guy,” picking him from among the 1,246 contenders who entered the magazine’s first-ever contest and placing him on the November cover. Galloway won the reader’s choice poll of three finalists — finishing with more than 60,000 votes.
We bet that his inspiring story will motivate some couch potatoes to lace up their sneakers.
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When a Wounded Veteran Needed to Get Back on His Feet, This Toy Helped
Who better to know what a veteran needs to recover after being injured than a fellow wounded soldier?
Back in 2010, while Dave Flowers was recuperating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, following the loss of his leg and several other injuries, he began playing the Nintendo Wii Fit at the suggestion of his physical therapist. “Within about nine days of just playing that thing every single day, not even very long, just a couple hours a day, I was able to start walking with a walker, and then a few days later just two canes,” he told Michelle Basch of WTOP.
Because the game helped him find success, Flowers created the program Wiis for Warriors to provide free Wiis to other vets.
Flowers won a Bronze Star Medal for his valor in Afghanistan. In 2009, when he was a Staff Sergeant with the 455th Air Expeditionary Wing at Bagram Airfield, he was clearing a weapons cache site with his team when he stepped on a mine. His left leg was shattered and he lost his right leg below the knee, but he prevented fellow soldiers from being injured when he fell back into the hole the blast created.
Flowers’s selflessness doesn’t stop with his actions on the battlefield or Wiis for Warriors. Now living in Mississippi, he started the Dave Flowers Foundation as a way to honor and assist wounded veterans of a prior generation who served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
“I know for a fact, told to me by my surgeon, if it wasn’t for the field medic tactics generated during Vietnam, I wouldn’t be alive,” Flowers told Patrick Ochs of the Sun Herald. “I kind of feel like I owe those guys a little bit…When you’re told that in Vietnam they would have stepped over you because they couldn’t have saved you — they developed those techniques because of the people in Vietnam.”
Flowers’s goal is to help older veterans in southern Mississippi with any needs they have that aren’t covered by VA benefits. He notes on the foundation’s website that some older veterans are reluctant to ask for help because of pride or past negative experiences when seeking assistance.
“I’m alive because of a different generation,” he told Ochs. “You have to help them.”
We couldn’t agree more.
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Splish Splash: This Aquatics Program Eases Veterans’ Transition Home
Fifty years ago, Dr. Jane Katz was a pioneering member of the U.S. synchronized swimming performance team in the 1964 Olympics, helping to promote the aquatic competition involving nose clips, coordinated moves, and big smiles that eventually became an official Olympic sport in Los Angeles in 1984.
Now Dr. Katz is using her years of experience in the water to rehabilitate veterans.
Katz, who teaches at John Jay College in New York City, developed her own swimming rehabilitation program after she suffered injuries in a 1979 car accident, eventually publishing many books and videos that teach her methods to others. For years, she also has been teaching swimming to NYC policemen and firefighters through her college’s Department of Physical Education and Athletics. And most recently, she decided to expand her WET (water exercise technique) classes to specifically appeal to veterans.
“I have found that many of the vets, regardless of age, have joint pain and as a result they stopped working out…Water is always great for healing,” she told Swimming World. Which is why in WETs for Vets, Dr. Katz engages veterans in exercises designed to help their physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
“I don’t think the public has enough of an appreciation for what these vets go through when they return to civilian life,” she said. “It’s a very difficult adjustment, mostly from a psychological standpoint as many suffer from various degrees of post traumatic stress. The WETs for Vets program helps them in several ways. The workouts help relieve stress, and there’s a real camaraderie among the students because they share a common bond that those of us who have not been in combat cannot really understand. ”
Marine Corps veteran Marc MacNaughton told Swimming World that Dr. Katz’s class has been invaluable to him. “As I and others can attest getting in the pool makes coming home from war easier for our military service members, veterans, and their families…The unique program that Dr. Katz has designed has given us increased confidence, family and social connections, and to some, learning how to live with a new physical adaption. It has improved mental health for some of our veterans, and a few have shared with me even recovery from addiction. ”
FINA, the international governing body for swimming and aquatic events, recently presented Dr. Katz with a certificate of merit, which the deserving recipient can add to her many other rewards.
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