Welcoming Warriors Home

Oregon program helps Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans ease back into the community 
By Paul Fattig

From left, Kim Shelton, Bill McMillan, and Michael Meade will lead a retreat for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan at Buckhorn Springs outside Ashland. Photo by Jamie Lusch

For mythologist Michael Meade, healing a wounded warrior begins with a story.

Preferably a tale of war kept alive down through the ages, thanks to traditional storytelling by an ancient culture. 

"It will be a short story about war and cultures in conflict," he explained. "The way I work, these stories — a lot of them come from the Native American culture — occur to me when we start.

"After I tell it, I will ask the veterans where they are in this story," he added. "They gravitate to places in the story that help explain their own story. We then all work within the story. The healing begins when they understand where they are in the bigger story."  (Continued…)

The Vietnam-era Army veteran from Seattle and Peggy Rubin, an Ashland scholar of storytelling and theater, will lead a five-day Welcome Home Project retreat for veterans beginning May 22 at the historic Buckhorn Springs lodge and cabin a few miles east of Ashland. Both have worked with traumatized individuals, including veterans.

Focused largely on veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it will feature 29 participants, of which eight are family members. The veterans bring an array of war experiences, including a woman whose 22 years in the Army were capped by a tour in Iraq.

The project will culminate with a public event Memorial Day evening in Ashland.

The Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, founded by Meade, is co-sponsoring the event.

The project to help traumatized veterans and their families was created by Ashland couple Bill McMillan and Kim Shelton.

"We wanted to do something to help veterans coming home today," said McMillan, a marriage and family psychotherapist who participates in Returning Veterans Northwest, a group of professionals who counsel veterans for free. Shelton is a documentary filmmaker who will make a film of the event to help educate other communities on how to help traumatized veterans.

"People can help by coming (on Memorial Day) and being open to what the veterans are bringing home," McMillan said. "They can also be doing that afterwards by reaching out to veterans. This is about waking up to the needs of veterans coming back to our communities."

Other counselors lending their expertise are Carl Robinson, an American Indian who did two combat tours in Vietnam; Michael J. Maxwell, a veteran and therapist for veterans; Pat Chandler, a longtime veterans counselor for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs; and Lauren McLagen, a member of the readjustment and transition team at the Salem Vet Center.

Storytelling is an ancient method of helping bring wounded warriors back into the community, said Robinson, 57, of Corvallis.

"My experience in following the Lakota traditional path is that when the warriors were brought back into the village, they had a cleansing ceremony in a sweat lodge, then they would have a feast in which they would tell their stories," Robinson said. "It wasn’t to glorify the experience but to allow the village to relieve their burden. The village would help carry it for them."

There was no community support to help carry his burden when he returned to his home town of Port Angeles, Wash., after the Vietnam War.

"I tried going to college but the atmosphere on campus — the negativity about the war — that bothered me," he said. "I had lost a lot of friends over there."

He dropped out of college and worked a series of construction and other labor jobs.

"I eventually came to the end of my rope," he recalled. "I was having nightmares and intrusive thoughts. I had pretty much given up on life."

But he started talking to a veterans’ counselor in Port Angeles, a former Marine.

"He was the first person I talked to who knew what I was talking about," he said.

Robinson returned to college, earning a master’s degree in social work from West Virginia University. Although he retired from counseling veterans full time in 2003, he jumped at the chance of participating in the Welcome Home Project. He said he was impressed by the storytelling approach as well as an American Indian ceremony that will be offered.

"Towards the end of my career in the VA, I was involved in a program which allowed veterans to tell their story and have them act it out," he said, noting the program worked well.

"The guys coming back now, they kind of disappear back into the community," he added. "The community doesn’t take enough responsibility for their whole experience. These warriors have a pretty heavy burden they need to share."

For thousands of years, most cultures have had a healing process for warriors coming home from battle, Meade said.

"Modern culture doesn’t understand that," he said. "The old tradition was to do a thorough welcoming back, not on a political basis, but on a human basis so people can feel like they can become members of a society.

"At Buckhorn Springs, we will work on getting the veterans’ stories out and shaping them so they can be shared with the community," he continued. "The principle there, regardless of politics, if someone winds up going off to war, they will come back wounded in some way. They see death. They see dismemberment.

"And the story being carried by the vets is not just their story," he added. "They didn’t go in service of themselves. They went in service of everybody, regardless of the politics. So the story and trauma that comes back is everybody’s story and trauma."

Having them tell their stories to the community is part of the healing process, he reiterated.

"Rather than have a bumper sticker that says ‘I support our troops,’ we need to really welcome them back," he said.

To volunteer to help or make a tax-deductible donation for the event, call McMillan at 482-1072 or Shelton at 482-7090. Additional information is available at the project’s Web site at www.thewelcomehomeproject.org.

Reach reporter Paul Fattig at 776-4496 or e-mail him at [email protected].

 

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