Depression
7 Vital Steps to Resiliency for Veterans
A warrior relates strategies for beating depression and PTSD.
Posted November 6, 2018
Guest post by Mark E. Green, Lieutenant Colonel, United States Army (Retired)
Coming from where I came from—the oldest boy of six growing up fatherless with a single mom in a series of rundown trailers in Missouri—it was unlikely I would advance from being a buck private in the U.S. Army to becoming a member of the illustrious 82nd Airborne, being part of the inaugural team that got Taekwondo recognized as an All-Army sport, or being named Soldier of the Year for my battalion.
I went on to serve two stints as an Inspector General—including a yearlong deployment with nine months of it in Afghanistan—and eventually retire from the U.S. Army as a decorated Lieutenant Colonel after 34 years of service with 24 as active duty. What I didn’t expect was that I’d be facing one of the biggest challenges of my life: transitioning to civilian life and joining more than 250,000 military personnel who annually exit and become veterans.
After all, among the eight of us—including my absentee father—my family and I have been affected by all kinds of struggles: everything from alcoholism, physical and mental abuse, AIDS, a family member’s unsolved murder, rape, a shooting, crack cocaine addiction, 13 divorces, suicide, problems with the law and much more.
What I’ve learned from listening to my many mentors is that we all have that warrior’s spirit within us. It may just be dormant and waiting for the right conditions. We all have those moments when we need to take stock and reevaluate.
For me, one of those moments came in the wake of my deployment in Afghanistan. My assignment there was as an Inspector General in charge of the southern half of the country along the red desert from the borders of Pakistan to Iran. That job requires you to be the eyes and ears of the commander on the ground.
I was also in the middle of working toward my law degree. Getting my assignments in on time presented a big challenge given my limited off hours and the frequent loss of connectivity. One night I was just about to hit send on an important assignment, when the warning blared alerting us to incoming enemy rockets. I followed protocols but was determined to get that assignment submitted since I had just attached it and was about to hit the send button. In transition, I reached up until I could feel my laptop keyboard and hit send before heading to the bomb shelter.
Poor connectivity also frequently interrupted the sparse Skype sessions I had with my wife, Denise, and our son, Adam, then a preteen. I felt the stress building in both relationships. My lack of rest coupled with the long hours on the ground left me tired to the bone, which magnified my feeling of being disconnected from home.
Then during the last month of my deployment, I aggravated an existing physical condition when I jumped off the tailgate of the back of a C-130 aircraft during combat maneuvers.
By the time, I got back home from active duty to Florida where my family was, I not only had lost 23 pounds I had so much pain in my right hip that I could hardly walk. The orthopedic surgeon explained that my hip had jammed so hard into the socket when I made that leap to the ground that it was damaged beyond repair.
“You need a full hip replacement,” he said, adding that I’d likely never run again or compete at Taekwondo. I was only 48.
As an athlete with lots of energy to burn, running has always been one of my releases and taekwondo is part of who I am. I only had a short number of months to rehabilitate to pass my physical fitness test that would determine if I kept my seat at Command and General Staff College. If I couldn’t learn to walk again and fast, my chance at being promoted to lieutenant colonel would be gone along with my military career.
We were thrust into survival mode as a family. I didn’t have time to process the emotional scars I’d suffered from being in a war zone or from being away from my family for that year. Denise took charge of my rehabilitation and figured out a plan that gave me the best shot of rehabilitating in time to take the required physical fitness test.
I needed a framework to help me physically, mentally and spiritually prepare and started developing one for myself. I ended up passing the test and within a year of my hip replacement, my wife Denise and I completed a triathlon together.
In 2014, after my request for compassionate transfer to Florida to care for my ill mother was denied, I hit the wall emotionally. I was alone in a crummy apartment in South Atlanta, which was the closest the Army could get me to Florida. It slowly dawned on me that I didn’t know how to rest, relax or take a break. I’d been in a state of hyper-vigilance ever since that night I went to sleep as an 8-year-old dreaming of playing with my dad with the new baseball he’d given me for my birthday and woke up to life without Dad. Then I’d given my all in service to my country for more than three decades.
Night after night, I’d station myself in a chair facing the door in that dark apartment, gun close by, because I felt I was not far from danger. All I had at what I dubbed the Hobo Hotel was a chair, a small lamp I bought at a thrift store for $3, a plastic tote to put the lamp on, my TV, and a small bed.
Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again yet expecting different results. I’m no Einstein, but I knew I had to make some changes and fast if I wanted to get out of the deep, dark hole of depression I was in. I had to stop pretending I was super-human just because I was a warrior and give myself permission to take a break every once in a while. I had hit a tipping point in life and it was no longer about achievement. It became a battle of the mind. That was a big shift in thinking for me.
Those two tough periods in my life caused me dig deep. All the trauma from combat, failed marriages, homelessness and bankruptcy piled on top of the traumas I’d experienced as a youth and came crashing in on me. I felt on the verge of losing everything. In my off-duty hours, I returned to writing my story as therapy. During the holidays, I reached out to writer Echo Montgomery Garrett. Shortly after the New Year in 2015, she agreed to read my manuscript and told me she thought I had a story that could help others. We started working on my memoir, “Step Out, Step Up: Lessons Learned from a Lifetime of Transitions and Military Service.”
As I prepared to transition out of the military, I realized that what I created could help my brothers and sisters with the struggles they were going through as they tried to integrate into civilian life. The strategies I used to learn to walk again after my injury in Afghanistan and to dig out of the dark hole I was in became the basis of the 7 Vital Steps to Resiliency, which make up the Warrior’s Code 001.
Change is always hard. Over the next three years, changing my mindset—the way I thought, my self-talk, who I listened to and who I allowed in my circle—became my new mission. Now may well be one of those moments for you. Maybe you’ve lost sight of your dreams. Maybe you’ve lost hope. Maybe you feel broken physically, mentally or spiritually—or on every level. Maybe you’ve lost yourself —who you are at your core—along the way. Maybe you’ve gotten so far away from who you once were that you don’t even recognize yourself anymore.
The following Vital Steps to Resiliency will guide you to renew and reinvigorate yourself taking stock of where you’ve been and taking care of yourself:
STEP 1: REST to be your best.
STEP 2: RECONNECT with yourself and others.
STEP 3: RESET your mind.
STEP 4: REMOVE negativity.
STEP 5: RESOLVE issues.
STEP 6: RECON to map out your future.
STEP 7: REENGAGE and get on with it!
One final thought: Respect that your experiences are part of what got you to where you are today. Don’t minimize what you’ve gone through. Acknowledge it and then use these words as a bridge to help you connect with your future.
The Mindset Vet Mark E. Green and award-winning co-author Echo Montgomery Garrett's books include STEP OUT, STEP UP: Lessons Learned from a Lifetime of Transitions and Military Service and WARRIOR’S CODE 001: 7 Vital Steps to Resiliency. The authors launched Warrior’s Code 001 at VetFestLive in Missouri on Labor Day Weekend 2018 and the e-book promptly made Amazon Bestseller status in the self-help category. Green and Garrett, who interviewed more than 100 veterans for WARRIOR’S CODE 001, are developing curriculum from that book to help all of those who are struggling with transitions.
