thedrifter
08-28-07, 04:33 AM
Time to decompress
Demobilizing in Indiana gives Wisconsin soldiers a chance to adjust to a new reality
By CROCKER STEPHENSON
cstephenson@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Aug. 26, 2007
Second of three parts
About 3 a.m. July 16, soldiers from the Wisconsin Army National Guard's 1st Battalion, 121st Field Artillery, gather outside the battalion's rows of sand-blown tents at Camp Virginia, a military base in the Kuwaiti desert.
The soldiers, most of them from Wisconsin, have been in Kuwait for 12 months, escorting supply convoys throughout Iraq.
Now it is time to go home.
A Dumpster is piled with stuff the soldiers care neither to mail nor to carry back to the States. A set of dusty golf clubs leans against the overflowing container.
A bed - just its rusty frame and saggy springs - has been pulled away from the mess. On the bed, his backpack beneath his head, is the battalion's chaplain, Capt. Mark Brooks, pastor of a Baptist church in Menomonee Falls.
"Anyone is free to join me," he jokes.
Brooks, as a young man, struggled with the idea of God. How could there be a God, he wondered, and yet so much pain in the world? What kind of God permits so much pain?
But God, he says, humbled him and called him to preach. And it was God, he says, who brought him here, where suffering is epidemic, to comfort both those who share his faith and those who don't.
For some, it has been the hardest year of their lives. Marriages have failed. People both in Kuwait and at home have died. Soldiers, some still in their teens, have struggled with loneliness, injury and fear.
Brooks has counseled his soldiers through these difficult times, even as he himself has suffered loss.
On June 7, doctors induced his wife, Melissa, and she delivered a 22-week-old baby who had died in her womb.
Brooks bought a hand-carved box and mailed it to Melissa. They will bury their daughter in the box once he is home.
* * *
Three chartered planes, on different routes and schedules, carry the 1-121 from Kuwait. Everyone will regroup at Camp Atterbury, a base in Indiana. One plane stops to refuel in Bulgaria, then Iceland, then finally, early July 17, Pease Air Terminal in Portsmouth, N.H.
"Welcome home," the pilot announces to the cabin. The soldiers have been processing through military customs and traveling for many, many hours. They are exhausted. Some are unsure of the day or time. Only a few cheer as they stagger out of the plane, eyes bleary, boots and uniforms still floured with Kuwaiti sand.
It is dawn. Most are expecting an empty airport where they can stretch their legs, smoke and brush their teeth.
But as they reach the terminal, a roar goes up. More than 100 people - old, young, children, mothers and fathers - hold signs and cheer. The signs say "Thank You," "Welcome Home," "We Are Proud of You" and "Heroes."
No one in the welcoming group, known as the Pease Greeters, knows the men coming off the plane. They have been waiting for hours. Some have come from hundreds of miles away.
No soldier is left to himself. Each is patted, hugged, offered doughnuts, coffee and homemade cookies. A bank of phones is available for free use.
Paul LeBlanc is among the greeters. He has a handlebar mustache and shaggy gray hair curling out from beneath his do-rag. He rode in on a motorcycle. A faded insignia he once wore on the shoulder of his Army uniform in Vietnam is sewn to the chest of his leather jacket.
LaBlanc came home from the war in 1972 on a commercial flight to California. He was ridiculed at the airport and on the train he rode to Boston. He showed up at his parents' door, unannounced and ashamed.
"I will not let what happened to me happen to them," he says.
* * *
It is midmorning when the plane that stopped at Pease descends through rain clouds to land in Indianapolis.
Soldiers slide their window shades up and watch. Highways. Treetops. A river. Everything enlarges as the plane nears the ground. Shopping centers. Churches. Houses with chimneys. Cars. The streets are wet. Raindrops collect on the plane's windows. Bushes. Grass. Three small birds chase the plane's right wing. Then the bump of wheels on the runway and everyone leans into their seat belts as the plane brakes.
"Please remain seated until the plane comes to a complete stop and the captain has turned off the fasten seat belts sign," a flight attendant announces above a cacophony of unfastening belts.
"And welcome home."
But they are not home. Not quite.
They will spend five days at Camp Atterbury. As once they trained to go to war, now they will train to come home. Plenty of soldiers grouse. It's been 15 months. They don't see giving the Army five more days.
Lt. Col. Ron Morris is deputy commander of the base's Joint Maneuver Training Center, which handles demobilization. He says the program, begun in 2001, gives soldiers time to decompress. The migration from combat to cul de sac, even in the best situations, is a jolt.
It also helps soldiers understand and get plugged into the services available to them: medical, financial, educational, psychological, social.
"These are all entitlements," Morris says. "We are telling these soldiers, 'If you have needs, here is what is available to you.' "
The system does not always run as smoothly as intended. For example, assessments ask soldiers about what physical or emotional injuries they might be experiencing.
Soldiers worry that an honest response will land them in medical hold and further delay their homecoming. Some frankly admit they minimize their responses.
"This is not the time to be keeping secrets," Morris says.
"Everybody wants to go home. Going home broken is not the answer."
* * *
The tone of the demobilization process bears the stamp of its coordinator, Master Sgt. Lorrie Pierce, a gentle woman in civilian clothes who, when speaking to someone, leans her face toward theirs with a reassuring expression of attentiveness.
As Pierce approached her demobilization from active service in 2003, she learned, within a period of three days, that her father was dying of lung cancer and her husband of 25 years, with whom she had three children, was filing for divorce.
"I had nothing to go home to," she says. "I went through the three D's: death, divorce and depression."
She did not seek help or counseling.
"Every day, I told myself: 'Suck it up. You're a soldier.' "
Pierce and a small group of privately contracted therapists circulate through the troops during their stay at Atterbury. Their approach to the soldiers is purposefully oblique. No one is forced to unload. But if a soldier wants to talk - and several do - they are there to listen.
The soldiers meet at a base auditorium for classes. One speaker is the post's chaplain, Lt. Col. Eric Ebs, a giant of a man deployed once to Bosnia and twice to Afghanistan. He reminds the soldiers that they can no longer drive down the center of the road or guzzle bottled water without paying for it.
He tells them that the home they have idealized and fantasized about is unlikely to match reality.
"You feel like you're in a parallel universe," he says. "Everyone looks the same. Everything looks the same. But you don't feel the same. This is normal. Everyone feels it, and it's going to take you a few months to adjust."
Agitation and frustration will be inevitable.
"Soldiers returning home can become angry that they are not able to go right back to where things were in their lives. Their spouses have become more independent. They become angry that they can't share everything they experienced with their family."
Ebs recalls his own life after deployment. He couldn't sleep in a bed, for example. A bed didn't feel right. Too big, perhaps. It felt better to sleep on the couch.
Some aspects were more disturbing.
He went for a walk one night on a golf course. He reached a green and was overwhelmed by a sense that he had wandered off trail. He began to worry about land mines.
His brain, he says, told him there were no land mines on the golf course. His body, conditioned otherwise, froze. "I had to talk myself across that green," he says.
* * *
On July 19, the first group of 1-121 soldiers to arrive at Atterbury gathers in the auditorium for a final briefing, which is delivered by another of the post's chaplains, Maj. Douglas Brown.
He does not mince words.
"Your soul has taken a hammering," he says. "This last year has been hell.
"It's going to take time to adjust. If you need help, get help. If you need to cry, cry. You can cry. You are human beings. You can cry.
"Do not, do not, do not let anyone disparage what you have done. You have done a good thing. Do not let someone disparage what you have done."
With that, the soldiers file out of the auditorium. They sit on piles of duffel bags and wait for the buses that will take them to Milwaukee.
Journal Sentinel reporter Crocker Stephenson was embedded with the Wisconsin Army National Guard's 1st Battalion, 121st Field Artillery, in Kuwait on July 12 and remained with the unit throughout its journey home and until the soldiers were dismissed from duty July 19.
Ellie
Demobilizing in Indiana gives Wisconsin soldiers a chance to adjust to a new reality
By CROCKER STEPHENSON
cstephenson@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Aug. 26, 2007
Second of three parts
About 3 a.m. July 16, soldiers from the Wisconsin Army National Guard's 1st Battalion, 121st Field Artillery, gather outside the battalion's rows of sand-blown tents at Camp Virginia, a military base in the Kuwaiti desert.
The soldiers, most of them from Wisconsin, have been in Kuwait for 12 months, escorting supply convoys throughout Iraq.
Now it is time to go home.
A Dumpster is piled with stuff the soldiers care neither to mail nor to carry back to the States. A set of dusty golf clubs leans against the overflowing container.
A bed - just its rusty frame and saggy springs - has been pulled away from the mess. On the bed, his backpack beneath his head, is the battalion's chaplain, Capt. Mark Brooks, pastor of a Baptist church in Menomonee Falls.
"Anyone is free to join me," he jokes.
Brooks, as a young man, struggled with the idea of God. How could there be a God, he wondered, and yet so much pain in the world? What kind of God permits so much pain?
But God, he says, humbled him and called him to preach. And it was God, he says, who brought him here, where suffering is epidemic, to comfort both those who share his faith and those who don't.
For some, it has been the hardest year of their lives. Marriages have failed. People both in Kuwait and at home have died. Soldiers, some still in their teens, have struggled with loneliness, injury and fear.
Brooks has counseled his soldiers through these difficult times, even as he himself has suffered loss.
On June 7, doctors induced his wife, Melissa, and she delivered a 22-week-old baby who had died in her womb.
Brooks bought a hand-carved box and mailed it to Melissa. They will bury their daughter in the box once he is home.
* * *
Three chartered planes, on different routes and schedules, carry the 1-121 from Kuwait. Everyone will regroup at Camp Atterbury, a base in Indiana. One plane stops to refuel in Bulgaria, then Iceland, then finally, early July 17, Pease Air Terminal in Portsmouth, N.H.
"Welcome home," the pilot announces to the cabin. The soldiers have been processing through military customs and traveling for many, many hours. They are exhausted. Some are unsure of the day or time. Only a few cheer as they stagger out of the plane, eyes bleary, boots and uniforms still floured with Kuwaiti sand.
It is dawn. Most are expecting an empty airport where they can stretch their legs, smoke and brush their teeth.
But as they reach the terminal, a roar goes up. More than 100 people - old, young, children, mothers and fathers - hold signs and cheer. The signs say "Thank You," "Welcome Home," "We Are Proud of You" and "Heroes."
No one in the welcoming group, known as the Pease Greeters, knows the men coming off the plane. They have been waiting for hours. Some have come from hundreds of miles away.
No soldier is left to himself. Each is patted, hugged, offered doughnuts, coffee and homemade cookies. A bank of phones is available for free use.
Paul LeBlanc is among the greeters. He has a handlebar mustache and shaggy gray hair curling out from beneath his do-rag. He rode in on a motorcycle. A faded insignia he once wore on the shoulder of his Army uniform in Vietnam is sewn to the chest of his leather jacket.
LaBlanc came home from the war in 1972 on a commercial flight to California. He was ridiculed at the airport and on the train he rode to Boston. He showed up at his parents' door, unannounced and ashamed.
"I will not let what happened to me happen to them," he says.
* * *
It is midmorning when the plane that stopped at Pease descends through rain clouds to land in Indianapolis.
Soldiers slide their window shades up and watch. Highways. Treetops. A river. Everything enlarges as the plane nears the ground. Shopping centers. Churches. Houses with chimneys. Cars. The streets are wet. Raindrops collect on the plane's windows. Bushes. Grass. Three small birds chase the plane's right wing. Then the bump of wheels on the runway and everyone leans into their seat belts as the plane brakes.
"Please remain seated until the plane comes to a complete stop and the captain has turned off the fasten seat belts sign," a flight attendant announces above a cacophony of unfastening belts.
"And welcome home."
But they are not home. Not quite.
They will spend five days at Camp Atterbury. As once they trained to go to war, now they will train to come home. Plenty of soldiers grouse. It's been 15 months. They don't see giving the Army five more days.
Lt. Col. Ron Morris is deputy commander of the base's Joint Maneuver Training Center, which handles demobilization. He says the program, begun in 2001, gives soldiers time to decompress. The migration from combat to cul de sac, even in the best situations, is a jolt.
It also helps soldiers understand and get plugged into the services available to them: medical, financial, educational, psychological, social.
"These are all entitlements," Morris says. "We are telling these soldiers, 'If you have needs, here is what is available to you.' "
The system does not always run as smoothly as intended. For example, assessments ask soldiers about what physical or emotional injuries they might be experiencing.
Soldiers worry that an honest response will land them in medical hold and further delay their homecoming. Some frankly admit they minimize their responses.
"This is not the time to be keeping secrets," Morris says.
"Everybody wants to go home. Going home broken is not the answer."
* * *
The tone of the demobilization process bears the stamp of its coordinator, Master Sgt. Lorrie Pierce, a gentle woman in civilian clothes who, when speaking to someone, leans her face toward theirs with a reassuring expression of attentiveness.
As Pierce approached her demobilization from active service in 2003, she learned, within a period of three days, that her father was dying of lung cancer and her husband of 25 years, with whom she had three children, was filing for divorce.
"I had nothing to go home to," she says. "I went through the three D's: death, divorce and depression."
She did not seek help or counseling.
"Every day, I told myself: 'Suck it up. You're a soldier.' "
Pierce and a small group of privately contracted therapists circulate through the troops during their stay at Atterbury. Their approach to the soldiers is purposefully oblique. No one is forced to unload. But if a soldier wants to talk - and several do - they are there to listen.
The soldiers meet at a base auditorium for classes. One speaker is the post's chaplain, Lt. Col. Eric Ebs, a giant of a man deployed once to Bosnia and twice to Afghanistan. He reminds the soldiers that they can no longer drive down the center of the road or guzzle bottled water without paying for it.
He tells them that the home they have idealized and fantasized about is unlikely to match reality.
"You feel like you're in a parallel universe," he says. "Everyone looks the same. Everything looks the same. But you don't feel the same. This is normal. Everyone feels it, and it's going to take you a few months to adjust."
Agitation and frustration will be inevitable.
"Soldiers returning home can become angry that they are not able to go right back to where things were in their lives. Their spouses have become more independent. They become angry that they can't share everything they experienced with their family."
Ebs recalls his own life after deployment. He couldn't sleep in a bed, for example. A bed didn't feel right. Too big, perhaps. It felt better to sleep on the couch.
Some aspects were more disturbing.
He went for a walk one night on a golf course. He reached a green and was overwhelmed by a sense that he had wandered off trail. He began to worry about land mines.
His brain, he says, told him there were no land mines on the golf course. His body, conditioned otherwise, froze. "I had to talk myself across that green," he says.
* * *
On July 19, the first group of 1-121 soldiers to arrive at Atterbury gathers in the auditorium for a final briefing, which is delivered by another of the post's chaplains, Maj. Douglas Brown.
He does not mince words.
"Your soul has taken a hammering," he says. "This last year has been hell.
"It's going to take time to adjust. If you need help, get help. If you need to cry, cry. You can cry. You are human beings. You can cry.
"Do not, do not, do not let anyone disparage what you have done. You have done a good thing. Do not let someone disparage what you have done."
With that, the soldiers file out of the auditorium. They sit on piles of duffel bags and wait for the buses that will take them to Milwaukee.
Journal Sentinel reporter Crocker Stephenson was embedded with the Wisconsin Army National Guard's 1st Battalion, 121st Field Artillery, in Kuwait on July 12 and remained with the unit throughout its journey home and until the soldiers were dismissed from duty July 19.
Ellie