BOSWELL, Pa. — On the large veranda outside the mess hall/conference room, Dick Liston sat alone, elbows on knees, soda can on the table. His eyes seemed to draw a bead on a gold-leafed thicket just beyond the porch. He had a searing headache.
Inside, veterans and support teams were scuffing and scraping chairs, filling plates with bagels and sausage, refilling coffee cups and settling in for the day’s first session. Two sets of crutches leaned against a table where, of five men seated around it, one had visible scars.
Liston entered the room, found his seat from the evening before and lowered his head, like a man dozing on a bus.
It was Day 2 at Semper Fi Outdoor Odyssey, a former Boy Scout camp in Somerset County where six times a year, veterans (male and female) and a few active-duty service members gather to break through logjams of pain, grief and denial, to set goals, create fire teams to hold them accountable after they leave and to enjoy a little R&R.
Each weeklong session can accommodate roughly 30 veterans in various stages of crisis — “not even scratching the surface,” said Tom S. Jones, a retired major general in the Marine Corps from northern Virginia who bought the property 20 years ago.
A cadre of volunteers and staff, including mental health professionals, make the trip from throughout the country for each retreat. All support volunteers have served in the military.
Liston made the six-hour drive from Prichard, W.Va., to try to calibrate his life, recognizing bitterness was hurting him, he said, “hoping the experience would help me get rid of some of my anger.”
He served five tours in the Army, three in Afghanistan, two in Iraq. (By comparison, most Vietnam veterans served one or two.) A platoon sergeant when he signed up for a sixth, he was deemed non-deployable due to post-traumatic stress and medications. His daily headaches are due in part to having hit the roof of the truck he was riding in when an explosive device went off in front of it.
His Vet Center counselor back home thought Outdoor Odyssey would be a good fit, he said. “But when I first got there Sunday evening, I almost left. I thought, ‘How is this gonna help me?’ Monday, I was skeptical, but by Tuesday, I started to get it. The general cares. That was the main thing, his concern for us. You can hear the passion in his voice.”
Each veteran began the week rating mind, body, spirit and emotional condition from 1 to 10. They would reconsider their numbers after four days of scary honesty.
They reported goals, one to be a physician’s assistant, one to stay alive. Another wants to be a history teacher. Of recent accomplishments, one said, “moving my knee.”
“I got my dad to go to the VA for the first time,” Liston said. Two veterans said their most recent accomplishment was admitting they have a problem.
Through days of sharing sobering revelations, the group also harnessed up for zipline rides and wall climbing, meditated and practiced yoga. Mentors led one-on-one sessions in walks through the woods and huddles on the veranda.
The mentors, several of whom are veterans of the war in Vietnam, have stayed in touch with younger buddies over the years. They are adjunct members of the iterations of fire teams — the smallest unit in the military, three or four people. Ideally, the fire teams hold the veterans accountable on their goals and hold them up if they start to backslide.
Foundations and other contributions support Outdoor Odyssey. It recently established links to regional Vet Centers so Vet Center counselors can help their clients maintain goals they set at camp.
Jones is a whip of a man who spent 30 years in the Marine Corps. He volunteered for the Wounded Warrior Project and Semper Fi Fund before starting Outdoor Odyssey 20 years ago. It is open to veterans from all branches of the service.
“When we started, we were trying to help them transition to jobs, but we were seeing too much post-traumatic stress,” he said during an interview. He scrapped the idea of resumes in favor of helping people get into emotional and mental shape to stay employable.
“We have had people who are so broken that we fear for them,” he said. “We had a guy from the June class commit suicide [later]. It tore me apart. He had given me a poem on Thursday night. He had made a lot of ground that week.
“This work is not for the faint-of-heart. Every Monday, there is so much skepticism, and by Friday you hope you have created enough trust to last.”
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When he gathers his teams in the room, Jones bangs the drum for “the two most important words — genuine concern.” He has it for them, they’d better have it for themselves and they’d sure better have it for others.
“I try to strike a covenant with them, to invest myself so much in their lives that they will not let me down,” Jones said. “I don’t make a penny from this place, and I don’t have to. I feel an obligation to give back because I have no illusions about my success. I can look at one person” as the catalyst.
He described his childhood in southern Illinois as “being good at being bad.” He would not have finished high school had it not been for that person, a teacher-coach who believed in him.
As a result, SFOO started as a camp for troubled youth. Their sessions run through the summer.
Jones has a rat-a-tat pace of talking as he paces the floor. He exhorts, he castigates, he jokes. He calls the hero-worship of veterans “crap” and dares them to unleash their civilian warrior: “Serving in the military is not the only responsibility you’ve got,” he barked, staring at his audience like an eagle. “Who knows the preamble to the Constitution? Anyone?”
Jeff Lee, whose name card read “staff sergeant,” stood up. The general paused and Lee recited it from memory.
“Good!” the general shouted. “We the people! Despite mental anguish in our lives, we’ve got to invest in ‘We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.’”
During a break, he followed one former Marine, a returnee to the camp, to a corner of the veranda. They stood together a long time, the young Marine smoking, his eyes red, the old Marine shifting positions, leaning in.
The young Marine is a New Yorker named Brian, “and if it’s OK, don’t use my last name or say where I work” because he thinks his path has been too dodgy for his employer to know about.
“I was in a lot of pain and felt like I had no control, no purpose in life,” he said. “The first time here, I believed everything the general said but I didn’t know how I could do it. I’ve been out 13 years and there were younger people in transition who seemed to be making this program work for them, but I fell apart.”
He first had to deal with depression and addiction. “When they asked me what I wanted to do, I said, ‘I just want to be happy, to notice things.’ I wasn’t looking for a great big answer. I never was. All I ever wanted in life was to be a Marine, fall in love and have a family.”
Sharing his strengths and spirit with fellow veterans “started to make me feel better,” he said. After his first visit to the camp, he said, “I started doing cognitive therapy, bringing up events I’d never brought back up.
“I started drawing again. I started doing T-shirt designs and prints to raise money for charity. I took everything I learned here and put it to work. I did things I was proud of.”
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On the second day, the general walked to the front of the room. Liston raised his head and visibly tried to loosen his shoulders. Now it was the general who looked to be in pain.
“I read everybody’s mission statement last night,” he said, pursing his lips. “I find it distressing that some of you don’t have goals and don’t want one, have no interest in a fire team.
“Why are you here?” he shouted. “Life is a team event! When people say, ‘All I want to do is collect my stipend,’ that pisses me off! To think of the skills you have to offer. Share yourself with others. That’s what life’s about!”
Early on, veterans reported depression, lost relationships, addictions, stupid accidents, neglect and anxiety as responses to unabated stress.
Mental health counselors Leigh Conant and Katie Schmitz presented classes on the physiology of stress, explaining what the brain does to accommodate normal stress and how it reacts to a mass of it.
“If you have anxiety and anger, there is nothing wrong with you,” Conant said. “It makes sense that your body has been doing what it’s doing, but no one has taught you why, or how to deal with it.”
As she explained how trauma changes the brain’s patterns, affecting the limbic portion that controls fear, veterans around the room began scribbling notes, many with legs bouncing. They wrote about how you can learn to understand what triggers that first reaction, how to redirect the next action and prevent escalation. They took notes about how a toe that’s pricked will register pain but if someone is holding your hand when your toe is pricked, the same place in the brain that lit up before, signifying pain, does not light up.
“If you do nothing else here,” Jones said in his fervent, fast-paced bark, “don’t ever let anyone make you think you are weak because you suffer stress. You can’t go to war without coming home changed.”
Jones said he hadn’t known about the amygdala, the fear center of the brain, before.
“The first thing to realize is the physiology of yourself,” he said. “These are normal feelings. We see a lot of moral injuries. We have one guy here who can’t reconcile some of the things he saw. It absorbs every waking minute of his life. A lot of people are struggling. It shouldn’t be a surprise when you’re deployed five or six times.
“Unfortunately, some never reconcile. It absolutely has to do with forgiveness, but it has to transcend that.”
The general said he might once have scoffed at the concept of mindfulness, before realizing the power of being in the moment, purposely, without judgment.
“If someone had suggested [years ago] that I would be doing mindfulness exercises...” He grinned, shook his head and made a humorous attempt at a yoga warrior pose. “I do mindful exercises every day. It will ameliorate your symptoms” of traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress.
Nicholas Caris said he found such relief through yoga that he returns to SFOO regularly to lead sessions. “Every time back it fuels my fire.”
At the end of his four years of service in 2011 he said he was taking pain pills for a back injury and drinking to excess.
“When I would have a triggering of PTSD, I could observe my body doing violent things and I had no idea why,” he said. “I didn’t allow that to go on very long.”
An official with the Semper Fi Foundation “got me into yoga,” he said. “I couldn’t bend so I started practicing in a chair. That was a crush to my ego. I was a big bad Marine. But the next thing I knew, I was in a weekly Sunday yoga class.”
Caris got sober, became a vegan and lives with a boxer-mix service dog named Ruby in Tampa, where he teaches adaptive yoga for veterans with the Exalted Warrior Foundation.
Back home, Liston reports sleeping better, with his dog curled against him. He is waiting to get into a testing program for traumatic brain injury.
He said the work he did at SFOO, trying to balance mind-body-spirit-emotion and having a mission statement for personal and professional growth, “forces you to be more honest with yourself. The team leaders are amazing up there. To talk to other veterans really helps.”
His fireteam includes his pastor and a counselor at his local Vet Center. He has decided to finish his bachelor’s degree in human resources at Marshall University, near his home.
“I‘ve been denying a lot of things and holding resentment,” he said, “and now I am making plans to move forward in my life.”
Diana Nelson Jones: djones@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1626. Twitter@dnelsonjones.
First Published: November 11, 2018, 4:33 a.m.
