Note: Catholic’s regularly ask saints to pray for them or others. While this practice isn’t followed by Protestants, it’s fundamentally no different than asking anyone else for their prayers. This is a story about how one of those prayers was answered.
In early March of 2007, our family lost my stepbrother to a PTSD suicide. Chris had been back home from Iraq for about a year and a half. He was a good kid that became a great man, but the traumatic stress injury he sustained in Iraq was too much for even the brave Humvee machine gunner to defeat.
The suicide was precipitated by an Other Than Honorable discharge that he received in the mail. Other Than Honorable discharges are typically given to service members convicted by a civilian criminal court and incarcerated or if the conduct leading to that civilian conviction brings discredit upon the military.
Chris’s only crime was that he didn’t attend his monthly National Guard drills, because of his debilitating PTSD. To this day, it’s still hard to imagine how that discharge ever went through. It was the most damning piece of evidence that our military didn’t have a process to effectively care for its heroes returning home with PTSD injuries.
The most basic question was why hadn’t Chris’s unit sat him and all the other returning soldiers down in front of a mental health professional for a PTSD screening? If they’d identified the injury, they could have directed him towards treatment. Instead, they left it up to his battalion who either missed or ignored the red flags for PTSD and flushed him out of the service.
A few days after Chris’s death, his family stood in his mother’s kitchen and decided to tell Chris’s story to try and prevent other families from having to go through the same tragedy. As a veteran and attorney, I took the lead.
The first week after a tragedy is critical to any effort to force a systemic change from that event. You either harness the wave of media attention that the tragedy inspires or you let it slip by and lose the opportunity.
I spent that week talking to staff of the politicians that could force the National Guard to implement changes in their systems of caring from returning service members. I also talked with the local media. I seemed cut and dry.
I was wrong. The papers came out at the end of the week mourning the tragic death. There was no mention of the discharge, that the military had failed in its duty to care for an injured soldier, or that the system of care could be improved. In short, I failed.
I met with a retired general and another seasoned member of the state government that Sunday. They drew the same conclusion. It was over. The attention would go back to the state’s budget or some other issue and nothing would be done.
I was dejected. I’d failed Chris while he was alive and then again after his death. On my way home, I stopped by the grocery store and picked up a dozen roses for St. Therese of Lisieoux. The little French saint had worked miracle after miracle for our family from curing my grandmother’s infant paralysis to helping me pass the bar exam after I’d spent a summer focusing on the wrong material.
St. Therese loves roses and the only thing I could think to do was to buy her some roses as a way of asking/thanking her for praying to God for a miracle to fix my failed attempt to make something good come out of Chris’s tragic death. I set the roses on the passenger seat of my car and began to drive home. By the time I pulled into the driveway, a barebones plan had popped into my head.
I put the roses on the table. Prayed again and began typing…
I couldn’t have imagined how powerfully that prayer was answered. Eighteen months later, the State of Montana was recognized as the best state for caring for its service members returning home from combat. The foundation for its program was multiple, staged face-to-face mental health screenings for every service member returning from combat. One year later, Congress required a similar screening mechanism be put in place across the military. The Department of Defense is currently working to implement it.
According to the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the program has the potential to save more lives than armored Humvees.
January of 2009
I walked back into the caboose of the Inaugural Train. Soon-to-be President Obama introduced me to his wife Michelle and told her about some of the things we’d accomplished after Chris’s death.
I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out two religious medals. I gave a St. Michael medal to Michelle and told her to ask him to defend her family.
I handed President Obama a smaller medal with the image of St. Therese of Lisieoux, the little Carmelite nun that died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four.
“It wasn’t me,” I said. “It was her.”
End Note: I think it’s important to point out that praying for this does not always fix all of our issues in this damaged world. I know this too well tonight as this is the first night that I do not have my children due to an impending divorce. Prayers are not always answered how or when we want them to be, but that doesn’t change the fact that a miracle occurred after I asked St. Therese to pray for better care for our returning heroes.
