The Mind Field: Alternative Routes of Recovery, Summit for Soldiers

Navy veteran Mike Fairman reached the summit of Mount Everest at 11 a.m. May 19, 2016, having climbed from a depth so low it nearly killed him. He returned home from war a half-dozen years ago with a headful of post-traumatic stress that triggered two suicide attempts on the same alcohol-fueled night. He spent three days in a hospital trying to reconcile what happened to convert his combat exposure as a corpsman with the 3/25 Marines in Afghanistan into a decision to end it all in Ohio.

“You’re in a dynamic environment,” Fairman says of his wartime experience; he did two stints and 19 years altogether in the Navy, the second tour to deploy and perform combat medical care in theater. “A kinetic environment. You don’t have time to think. You have time to do your job. So, whatever might happen, you compartmentalize and push it away. Imagine coming back home. Now you don’t have that intense environment where you have to think constantly. What do you do? You sit around, probably alone. You withdraw. The people closest to you, you push away. You grab a bottle of booze, and now you can start to think about things that may not have been at the front of your mind before. You play it back. Why do I get to step on an IED, and it does not blow up and I do not die, and someone else runs over it in a blast-resistant vehicle and they die? You start to think about these kinds of things. There’s a lot that gets wrapped around PTSD.”

Psychological stability for Fairman could not be delivered through medication alone, self-administered or doctor-prescribed. He needed an alternative plan to fight what has been called the “signature wound” from the war on terror. His rise from the edge of death to the top of the world depended on rigorous outdoor activity, camaraderie with fellow veterans, a VA psychologist who understands him, and a higher purpose. His chosen purpose, to help other sufferers, would in 2009 lead Fairman and an Army friend from Tennessee, Steve Redenbaugh, to start Summit for Soldiers, a nonprofit group run and populated by American Legion members who have struggled with the psychological shift to civilian life after war. The group describes its approach to helping other veterans as “adven-therapy.” They go on rafting trips. They hike in parks. They ride bicycles. They climb mountains. They call each other on the phone just to talk. And they boldly raise awareness about PTSD and suicide risk.

“The most dangerous place to be for a person with PTSD … is alone,” Redenbaugh says. “How important is it? It’s imperative. It’s the difference between living and dying.”

Fairman’s ascent to the top of Everest was his tribute to the “silently fallen,” veterans he has known who have committed suicide. The flag he carried to the summit bore their names. Beneath his parka, Fairman’s tattooed arm displays the numbers 22 (veteran suicides a day), 60-80 (minutes between each), 8,000 (veteran suicides a year) and minus-1 (“That’s me,” he says). 

The Ohio group’s approach matches American Legion PTSD-TBI Committee recommendations that promote alternative therapies for veterans with mental injuries. The committee urges Congress and VA to aggressively study, expand and accept programs that use alternative approaches such as hyperbaric oxygen, virtual reality, horses, dogs, art, yoga, music, outdoor activity, martial arts and others that do not depend on drugs. Because each veteran’s condition is different and may include other injuries and varying levels of support at home, the Legion’s committee promotes individualized treatments that involve the whole family. By resolution, the committee also urges DoD and VA to collaborate under a shared strategy to get a better handle on mental injuries – whether sustained on active duty, during the separation process or years later – and their treatment.

“There is no magic pill for service-connected PTSD, TBI or military sexual trauma (MST),” says American Legion Past National Commander Bill Detweiler, chairman of the PTSD-TBI Committee. “That is not to say there’s no place for prescribed medicine. The right medication in the right dosages, balanced with hyperbaric oxygen treatment, for instance, or a specific activity and talk therapy may work well for one veteran but not for another. The American Legion operates dozens of programs that give veterans with mental injuries a place to go and something to do among friends who understand. In a very real way, that was a founding purpose of The American Legion nearly a century ago.”

 Dietrich Stallsworth of Columbus, Ohio, a Legionnaire who served two combat tours in Iraq with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division before he was medically discharged following a suicide attempt, describes the therapeutic value of a group like Summit for Soldiers this way: “Coming out and having something like Summit, where I am constantly asking, ‘What’s the next thing? What’s the next event? What’s the next trip we’re planning? Where are we going to next? How are we getting more people involved?’ Having that to constantly push and keep me active and keep me going … it’s kept me alive.” 

Stallsworth is one of six Legionnaires who climbed to Everest Base Camp on the heels of Fairman’s summit expedition in May. Along the way, the group delivered tents to Nepalese schools whose classrooms were destroyed by a massive earthquake and ice floe.

“It was a beautiful place regardless, but if you have a mission to help someone else, that really is an added benefit,” says Anna Pelino, a 26-year-old Army veteran and Legionnaire who made the base camp trek and plans to return to Nepal to continue helping villagers. “The hardest thing about coming back (from war), is that every little thing you do has a purpose in the military. Then you come home, and it’s hard to find that kind of purpose in everyday life. I found different ways to ignore that feeling. Some weren’t good. I have realized that the biggest thing was to find a purpose.”

Estimates of PTSD prevalence among the nearly 3 million post-9/11 veterans run as high as 20 percent. The percentage of Vietnam War veterans estimated to have been afflicted at some point in their lives is as high as 30, according to the National Center for PTSD. More than 250,000 veterans have been diagnosed with TBI. And VA has reported that one in four women and one in 100 men have screened positive for MST. 

“One challenge of treating these conditions is that they can overlap,” Detweiler says. “In some cases, a veteran might have all three, plus other service-connected injuries or conditions. Many variables need to be considered.”

The Legion’s PTSD-TBI Committee strongly opposes overmedicating of veterans facing mental health injuries. A resolution passed at the Legion’s 97th National Convention in 2015, amid widely publicized incidents of opioid overprescription and addiction among veterans, extended that position beyond those with mental injuries, and called on DoD and VA to advance research and acceptance of alternative therapies.

“Even two people side by side in the same situation will react differently to a situation, based on their lives,” says Pelino, who worked in psychological operations in Afghanistan. “I think everyone sees it in a different way. And not everyone wants to just talk about it. You can have therapy just by immersing yourself in something. Better than any drug.”

When she traveled to the Himalayas with fellow veterans, Pelino saw the flipside of something that troubled her in Afghanistan. On active duty, she was involved in missions to distribute items like solar-powered radios and backpacks to Afghani villagers, “which is cool but at the same time it was really frustrating. We would give stuff away, and you would see the next day that the Taliban came through the village and shot anyone who had something we had given to them.”

The May trip to deliver tents to children in Nepal proved deeply therapeutic by comparison. “Seeing the joy in their faces was beautiful,” she says.

Likewise, Stallsworth found that Nepal helped him reconcile his experiences in Iraq. 

“Some of my problems come from things that we did in combat, things that we saw done in combat, things that you felt bad about in combat. Well, this is a way, instead of going overseas and deploying somewhere to go take down a wall, we’re going to go help build a wall back up. We’re going to not tear down and kick in somebody’s door. We’re going to help them rebuild and make sure that their family is safe.”

The same philosophy applies for veterans helping one another. “It’s the nature of what soldiers, Marines, sailors do,” Redenbaugh says. “When somebody’s in trouble, someone is going to pick you up. Someone is going to walk with you. We can all say we’ve been there. Until you’re back on your feet, we’re with you. We’re not going to judge you. We can definitely offer friendship and a place to hang out ... Some people need a network.”

In recent months, Pelino has reached out to other veterans and invited them along. “With Summit for Soldiers, I have told my friends they have to come get into it, even if it’s just hiking in Ohio.”

“We’re not mental health professionals,” Fairman says. “We’re just veterans who are willing to walk the road with you. We don’t promise you a thing other than we will be here at any time of the day, with that open forum, where you can say things you don’t dare tell your family.”

The Legion’s Department of Ohio is an essential ally of the Summit for Soldiers veterans, who wore Legion emblems on their shirts and parkas during the Himalayan trek. “What we don’t want to do is compete with other veterans and other veterans organizations,” Redenbaugh says. “I find that irresponsible with donated money. It’s also not what’s needed. What’s needed is more and more groups doing things that help veterans to eliminate suicide and support one another, especially around PTSD. The American Legion gives you a home, a place to call home, a place to spend time. What we do – the adven-therapy and the outdoors work – is a great way to collect one another and get to the outdoors. Not only do we have adven-therapy, we have a place to call home and to network.”

Participation, awareness and relationships have shown the Summit for Soldiers veterans just how important it is to band together, as they did when in uniform. “No longer is this just an exciting project,” Redenbaugh says. “It’s a responsibility.”    

Jeff Stoffer is editor of The American Legion Magazine.