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CALIFORNIA VFW POST GIVES BACK TO WOUNDED

VETERANS -- Their mission is to give thanks, companionship

and material aid to soldiers recovering from brain injuries

and other terrible wounds.

 

 

For more about the VFW, use the VA Watchdog search engine...click here...
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Story here... http://www.recordnet.com/
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Story below:

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Group gives back to wounded veterans

Group dedicated to repaying the courage and sacrifice of wounded veterans and their families

By Dana M. Nichols
Record Staff Writer

SAN ANDREAS - For the past eight months, members of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2600 have become long-distance commuters, every month or so making a six-hour round trip to a sprawling Veterans Affairs hospital in Palo Alto.

Their mission: to give thanks, companionship and material aid to soldiers recovering from brain injuries and other terrible wounds. They've provided comfort ranging from moral support to buying civilian socks and providing phone cards.

They now know more than they ever wanted about how buried explosives can rattle the soft tissue inside skulls and mangle spines - the hallmark injuries of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And by bearing witness to the wounds from the current U.S. wars, they've also begun, in a small way, to heal wounds from an old war.

"We won't ever let anyone who was in a war after us to come home and not be welcomed," said Dave Zahniser, 56, a Vietnam veteran and member of Post 2600 who has made repeated visits to the hospital in Palo Alto.

Zahniser was a Navy aviation hydraulics mechanic and served on the USS Ranger aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Vietnam war.

"There weren't too many (people) greeting us at Travis Air Force Base when we got back," Zahniser said.

The connection between Post 2600 and the soldiers recovering in Palo Alto began in December, when the Vietnam Veterans of Sonora invited post members to join them on a visit to the hospital's Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center. The facility is one of four such centers nationwide that specialize in helping soldiers recovering from brain damage that has become all to common because of roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That first meeting was a powerful experience, said Joyce Friday, wife of Post 2600 Commander Russell Friday, 55, who also served in the Navy during Vietnam.

"On the bus trip back, it was dead quiet," Joyce Friday said. "When they started talking, it was unanimous - we wanted to go back."

The contacts the post members have with the veterans in the hospital often would seem small, even mundane, in another setting. But in the lives of veterans recovering from horrific wounds, they take on deeper meaning.

Russell Friday remembers one soldier who usually had family members with him. One visit, the soldier was alone, so Friday spent time by his bed.

"When his mom wasn't there, he'd look at us. We'd get eye contact," Friday said. "Little things like that mean a lot."

Ellen Hulett, 78, a former Post 2600 commander who served in the Army Nurse Corps during the Korean War, said she visited one soldier who was unable to speak and struggled even to move. She congratulated him on the birth of a child to his wife. Hulett said the soldier marshaled the strength to give a thumbs up in response.

"You could see in his eye that he knew what we were saying," she said.

Hulett remembers another man in a wheelchair: "He did not talk or move. He couldn't move his eyes at all."

Then, after several visits, the soldier's eyes moved when Hulett came to him. "He remembered who I was," she said.

The visits have taken their toll on some post members, too. At least one member's doctor ordered him not to go back, saying it would bring back old trauma to see so many people missing limbs and other parts of their bodies. Other post members who suffer from war trauma also found the experience too much to handle, Russell Friday said.

The need to prevent post-traumatic stress disorder relapses cuts both ways. Recreational therapists and other staff at the hospital have trained the Post 2600 visitors to speak one at a time and to come no more than two at a time into the wounded soldiers' rooms.

Even the video games they bring as gifts have to be carefully screened, hospital recreational therapist Kayla Forster said.

As a result, Joyce Friday has on her current shopping list a video game called Jumping Cows.

"Do you know how hard it is to find video games that don't involve blowing something up, shooting something or knifing something?" she said.

Post members have raised more than $7,000 to buy therapeutic bicycles, video equipment, games and other items for the soldiers. Operation Military Support, a San Andreas-based charity, has provided snacks, socks, teddy bears in military uniforms and many other gifts for post members to deliver. And Jackson Rancheria, a casino in neighboring Amador County, has provided a bus to transport post members for most of the hospital visits.

The Post 2600 volunteers say that the VA provides well for the medical needs of the soldiers. But small luxuries - such as having personal socks rather than simply hospital-issued attire - make a huge difference to the soldiers.

"We take care of their recreation and morale," Russell Friday said.

The Fridays said they've met a number of soldiers who were initially unable to speak because of their wounds. Later, those who were able to regain speech told the Fridays they were grateful for the human contact that Post 2600 volunteers provided.

"It's very nice to have people around you when you're rehabbing," said John Potter, 26, who came through a tour as a Marine in Iraq but then was severely injured in September 2005 in a vehicle accident while serving as an assistant trainer at the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center on Highway 108 on the east slope of the Sierra Nevada.

As generous as they've been, post members say what they get back may be greater.

"When I came back from Vietnam, I was pretty bitter," Russell Friday said, saying he felt officials had misled him about the benefits he would receive from his service. He turned down a chance to play tuba in a Navy band because it would have meant signing up for another long enlistment.

But the severely wounded young people he's met in Palo Alto are not bitter, Russell Friday said.

"The amazing thing to me is most of these kids, once they get out of there, they want to go back (to the war zones)," he said.

Post members say they are inspired by the younger soldiers, and that they will do more outreach to recruit the new generation of veterans as members and to try to reconnect with Vietnam-era veterans who so far have largely stayed away from veterans organizations.

"The Vietnam vets, they are just now coming to our post," Hulett said.

Post members worry about the divisive politics surrounding the current wars and whether it could undermine the care returning soldiers need. But whatever the politics and however long the wars last, Post 2600 members say they plan to continue making the monthly drive to Palo Alto.

"These kids are over there doing whatever they are told to do," Hulett said. "And we have to take care of those people."

Contact reporter Dana M. Nichols at (209) 754-9534 or dnichols@recordnet.com. 

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Larry Scott  --