UNO documentary: Bastion and honoring our veterans

— Thank you; good to be with you Molly.

— My life is a bit unique in that regard I redeployed in ’04 and moved to New Orleans three months before Hurricane Katrina. In some respects, I was at the right place at the right time, but I really never had a shot at a normal life. You know the the things that I was grappling with at the time were things like hyper-vigilance and depression and suicide ideation. I felt completely alone and disconnected. I felt completely out of place. I felt my best when I was working, since we work ourselves as a coping mechanism to cover up or hide a lot of the pain and loss that we’re experiencing. That’s just a little taste of what I was going through at the time.

My life after Hurricane Katrina completely changed again, and a lot of the things that the army trained me to do actually melded very well in the greatest rebuilding effort since the Marshall plan. At my worst, I did want to end my life, but, luckily I did get the help I needed and started volunteering at a summer adventure camp for gold star kids. Those kids taught me a new expression of courage, which is the courage to live on, and that was really the beginning of about a 10-year journey to come all the way home.

— Fast forward a few years, and my buddies were coming home with this thing called traumatic brain injury (TBI). I had no idea what it was, and I got very curious about it. I went to the pentagon. I went to Walter Reed and the Center for the Intrepid in San Antonio. I went to the hub of the VA’s Polytrauma Network and what everyone described to me — the doctors, the warriors themselves, their caregivers, and loved ones — was that there wasn’t just a gap in the continuum of care, there was a cliff.

Once these warriors were discharged from the hospital, the communities they were moving back to were not equipped to sustain them, to make them viable, to keep them moving forward. I went to a group home that the VA was funding; I thought maybe this could be a solution. It actually made me angry when I walked inside. It’s not a place I wanted to live. I met a young warrior in his 20s who was so over medicated that he was drooling out the side of his mouth on a couch with no one around him. I thought we could do better than this.

I stumbled on this blueprint that Brenda pioneered for foster youth and adoptive families, and we began to adapt it for  military demographic. I have to say it has worked very very well. It took me a little while to convince enough people that this idea could work, but we purchased five acres started building homes. Today there are 58 households who call bastion home. We have a clubhouse, and we’re doing lots of wonderful programming and we are now on the threshold to build 14,000 square foot commercial wellness center that will open to the public and share with them what we’re learning about trauma and resilience. Community is central; it is pivotal; it is the linchpin and the ongoing recovery and reintegration for warriors. I would say anyone who who has experienced trauma needs a community to keep them grounded and to keep them moving forward.

— Service has evolved. That idea of it has evolved since we started. There is a an ethos; it is it is partly the warriors ethos of not leaving anyone behind. So beginning with this sort of expectation of service, we began to uncover a lot of the complexity of our warriors and their families. Some of it was not military connected; it was linked to poverty, adverse childhood experiences, such as growing up Black in the south. The idea of service began to evolve.

Our professional staff, which is composed of occupational therapists, social workers, and certified brain injury specialists, has many functions, and one of their primary functions is integrating neighbors into the care plan. It’s a process of customizing each household’s approach to their own health and healing, but it’s done in partnership with their next-door neighbors. We have retired elders, who, in fact, have even sold their homes to live at bastion and give that kind of instrumental support and peer support that some of our warriors need. If you think about TBI, in the most severe cases these are folks who need skilled care; these are folks who need help with their activities of daily living that you and I take for granted.

It really does take a village, not to be cliche, but when you have that kind of support built in next door it makes all the difference. We’re not tracking everyone’s service hours anymore because the expectation of service was so well ingrained in the beginning and through the orientation and indoctrination of residents as they flowed in. We are all growing together, and it’s amazing to watch how even when our elders need support, our warriors are there to help them. Let’s not forget, we have between 30 and 40 children who live at bastion as well — playing pivotal roles in the recovery reintegration of our warriors and in the quality of life of our elders. Everyone’s benefiting; it’s just beautiful.

–Yes, yes

— Well, on my journey to wholeness, I again stumbled on a model for healing in community. This is a model that the center for mind-body medicine has used all over the world for the last 30 years. We’re using it at Bastion. I’ve taken it to Ukraine to heal veterans from the war, but what I have seen in every location I’ve gone to where I’ve used this model is very personal transformations occurring in real time. I mean, you can see it happening before your very eyes.

I’ve experienced this type of healing coming back from Iraq. I think there was some type of spiritual death. It has taken the better of 10 years to effectively turn this body back on that I had effectively turned off. It took time to connect my mind with my body and with my spirit once again. Recruiting the whole body to heal is something that, as I said before, it’s transformative. So when you do it in a community, the effects and the benefits of that transformation tend to persist a lot longer than they would in a one-on-one type of professional client relationship.

— No, that’s fascinating.

— Yeah, well Joseph Campbell, as you know, really kind of framed this notion that our our lives follow these stories, and these stories have been told throughout civilization. The story of the one who feels a tug calling and separates themselves  conducts a test, an initiation, and then comes home.

Oftentimes, that is the story that is not told but not so much is told about the return. That knight who goes on his quest to slay the dragon finally confronts the dragon, and as he is plunging his sword into the dragon’s chest, he looks one last time into his eyes and sees only the reflection of himself.

This idea that the enemy is not some external threat but it’s actually something in us all.

What do you gain from that kind of awareness with you getting from that kind of insight? I mean I think it could be different for each person but there is a promise. With that knowledge comes wisdom, and that wisdom is not to be bottled up. It is to be shared for the good of humanity. I think for many warriors who are returning home, they are discovering a potential answer for themselves. They are recognizing that they are not alone; actually we are all connected — all of us all around the world. I felt that connection on the front line in the Ukraine, standing in a mortar crater where you could still smell the gun powder because the impact was so fresh. I immediately knew these men and women who were serving on the front line. I recognized them. They were  me, and if I could see in the binoculars the insurgents, the Russian insurgents and soldiers on the other side of that line, I think I would recognize them too.

I think a lot of the what we learned in that trip was that the many soldiers in Russia, who were called and activated to fight were completely lied to. They were given misinformation and told that this was their  great cause. They had to save these Ukrainians for some made-up reasons. I’m going on a tangent, but what I want to say is that we’re all connected; that’s the bottom line. I think that is probably the the one thing that I have received the most in in my own hero’s journey because it’s allowed me to work with other vulnerable groups — with people who don’t look like me, talk like me, who don’t share the same values as me. I’m talking about people we call Americans, and I serve them too.

— Am I saying true or false?

— Then, yes. I’ve learned that my good ideas and my own sense of duty have gotten in the way of things. I am becoming more collaborative. I’m asking a lot more questions. I am not going in with any preconceived notions, and I’m maintaining my humility. I think the answers are already out there, and they’re staring us at the face, but we don’t give people a chance to see or share the solution. 

— Yes

— Oh yes, absolutely 100 agree!

— Yes, but to a point. We’re experiencing it down here in south Louisiana, where we’re just getting battered storm after storm after storm. In some cases, I think you can resilience yourself to death. There are a lot of people down here, for example, who are really questioning whether they want to be here anymore.

— Yes, the military model does not include community, so, yes, if that were included.

— COVID has taught me a lot. At the very onset of it, we did a hard pivot operationally. We turned all of our staff outward facing and began to help our neighborhood across the street, our friends in the city. In fact, we helped over 200 people across four countries in the six months. We implemented a telehealth program. COVID in New Orleans has revealed a lot of disparities, in particular around health. It has hit the African-American community very hard here. Why is that? You begin to peel back this is a journey I did not expect when I started Bastion, but I’m happy to be walking this path with my friends in that community.

We’re definitely learning how food insecure people are and not only that but the food they’re eating is killing them. We started a pilot food program with the support of the Bob Witcher foundation. We are making meals together, we are delivering meals, and we are educating people on nutrition. It’s not just warriors and families, we’re doing this with our  friends and neighbors in the immediate neighborhood. That is a small contribution that we’re making. I hope to make this program sustainable. I want to create a food revolution. I am walking in this new understanding that food is medicine. The gut is the second brain. That is possibly an answer your question; it’s one example of how we’re making a world that is more inclusive and more equitable for the black and brown communities. 

— 2016.

— Yes, thank you for asking that question. I will take a sabbatical and rest my brain. I want to be able to imagine what is possible if it’s scaling more Bastions, if it’s moving beyond the veterans space and co-creating a world that we can all share and prosper in. That sounds like a good use of my time and I’m very honored to receive this award, Molly, thank you.

— Yes yes, let us restore the role of community in our frontal lobes. Let’s get that entrenched in our brain again.