Network of Care
Lt. Governor Brown: Service today in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan is extremely challenging and difficult.
Since 2001, the United States has deployed 1.7 million troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ms. Beaugrand: Just some of the things, the horrible things that have happened in the military, sometimes can haunt you.
Over the next two years, 1.5 million of these veterans will return home.
Mr. Fitzmaurice: When folks go to war, they don’t know what they’re going to find.
Ms. Beaugrand: You’re one person when you go in and you’re a totally different person when you come out.
Lt. Governor Brown: The transition from combat back to community can be as challenging, and in some cases more challenging for many of our service members as they return back to their families, as they return back to their jobs, back to their community.
Mr. Fitzmaurice: Some of the people that are over in the Iraq and Afghan theater now who were signed up because they would get help with their college education. So they signed up in the military, never expecting to go to war. So over they go and home they come. And it’s a rude shock for the people when they come home to see this person has changed.
Ms. Beaugrand: I seen like a plane crash, go down and everybody died. It’s hard to adjust unless you have, like, a really good background in, like, what you want to do when you get out -- like, I’m going to do this or -- most people don’t know what they’re going to do. Because the jobs are so different than what they are in the civilian world. It’s just hard to adjust.
Mr. Fitzmaurice: Some of them come home with post traumatic stress issues and those are real. And to that extent, some of them rely on self medication and that’s how they end up in places like this. Some of them come home to the jobs that the Government, by law, said that the employers must hold for them, but the company may have gone bankrupt, they may have been absorbed by someone else, so there’s no job. So they end up as a homeless individual.
According to the National Coalition on Homelessness, 40 percent of homeless men are veterans.
20 percent of new homeless in San Francisco and other major cities are veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mr. Bronzan: We have to grasp the fact that we’ve failed these people. That all of our institutions -- collectively, we’ve failed. A person can go into war and then come home, but that doesn’t mean the war leaves them. And it certainly doesn’t mean that the effects of war leave them. They have the effects forever, for the rest of their lives. Yet we, as a communities, haven’t grasped that and haven't dealt with that in saying we not only welcome you back, what can we do to help?
Mr. Fitzmaurice: We are very fortunate to have with us this afternoon as a guest, Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown from the State of Maryland. Lieutenant Governor. (Applause.)
Lt. Governor Brown: Thanks, thanks a lot. How’s everybody doing? I went to Iraq and I left my family, it wasn’t easy. It was probably more difficult for them than it was for me. And it wasn’t easy when I came back, you know, to go through that transition. And there’s some easy days and there’s some not so easy days.
And I know they’re doing great things here in Massachusetts. We’re trying to do a few good things in Maryland as well, to make sure that we recognize and honor the sacrifices that we, as veterans, have made, and make sure that when we take that uniform off, that we=re taking care of our veterans, whether it’s housing opportunities, whether it’s employment services, whether it’s health care. (Applause.)
Last March, Maryland launched a new website, Network of Care, to help veterans and their families find the critical services they need.
Lt. Governor Brown: We have asked these men and women to answer a call to duty. We’ve asked them to make sacrifices. It is now our obligation to ensure that we provide for the needs, the interests, of these men and women when they return home to our community.
What attracted us in Maryland to the Network of Care and the potential resource that it is for veterans, is it does several things. One, the Network of Care links veterans and veteran family members to services; whether it’s employment services or housing services, or counseling services. And those services are available at the Federal level, the State level, not-for-profit public services. And regardless of the source of that service, it’s made available in one place, it’s like a one stop shop.
The Network of Care creates a community for veterans and family members where they can link to services, get information, and identify other veterans who share similar experiences.
Dr. Romberg: Most of the people who come back, they have no idea why they’re struggling. People come home, they have difficulty re-integrating, they have difficulty fitting back into their community, that’s sort of at the mildest level. You know, figuring out their identity now after what they’ve been through, what they’ve seen.
300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans suffer from PTSD or depression.
Yet, only half of those veterans sought help from a provider in the past year.
Mr. Raschke: A lot of the things that I’ve gone through since returning home have been, I think, a direct result of that stress and then subsequent other guilt issues and all that other kinds of stuff.
But I think the stress level is what has stopped me from maybe being as successful in my life as possible, because my ability to handle stress has been changed.
Because of his personal experience, Chris Raschke was hired to work on developing the Network of Care.
Mr. Raschke: I did my tour in 2003 during the actual invasion. So while we were in Kuwait and we fought up through -- up to Baghdad and then past it to the town of Tikrit. The stress kind of builds and builds and builds. And not only are you in a foreign country that you’ve never seen before, but you’re seeing things that you would never normally see.
The damage that’s wrought by artillery fire is devastating. And so driving past the places that we had just shot on hours earlier was -- it was tough to see that kind of destruction and buildings leveled and massive holes in the landscape. And that kind of stuff.
And, yes, there were some dead bodies. So it was incredibly stressful.
Dr. Romberg: Post traumatic stress is very pervasive. Among those who are on the front lines, being injured, repeatedly exposed to horrific experiences -- we expect that, in fact, they will have symptoms and that’s what we’re seeing.
On average, 18 suicides per day are committed by veterans in the United States.
This year, more U.S. service members have committed suicide than have been killed in action.
Mr. Khosravi: It’s possible for Chris to get up and leave, just leave the company, and explain a day and-a-half later that he had to do it. However, we are in it, we know what that is. We understand. We are a company that in this field, that has this knowledge.
What we would like to do is to take that education Chris has given us and make sure all other companies know it as well.
Dr. Romberg: If we think in our lives of a traumatic event that might happen to any one of us, like a serious car accident, that event itself will ripple through your life for days and days and maybe weeks and months. And that’s one event.
So if you think of six weeks of being shot at or shooting at or being in explosions or watching your buddies injured or being constantly on alert and vigilant. And what many of these folks are dealing with are dead bodies, body parts, seeing children and civilians caught in the crossfire. This is high level human trauma that they’re absorbing. And then the implications and the ramifications can last for a lifetime.
Governor Schwarzenegger: Fighting in a war is a life-changing experience. A veteran can leave the battlefield, but leaving behind the pain, the anguish and the terrible memories, I think, is much more difficult and much more challenging to do.
So our veterans need help. I think that all of us need to do everything that we can to provide that help. And this is why it’s important to recognize that many of them do not know where to turn and who to go to. So this is why this veterans Network of Care is important. (Applause.)
Mr. Bronzan: There is nothing like the Network of Care out there for veterans. And the reason for that is the very first important thing is the service directory. The service directory encompasses every single service that we could find out there for veterans.
Another huge part of that is also the library. The Network of Care library is incredibly dense and what we’re doing is delivering information so that way the person can make informed decisions about their own care. It’s all there in the library.
Another huge part of that and continuing with the idea of a community is the Social Network of Care. The Social Network is going to allow people of a like mind to and with the same kind of stories to go online and find people that have those same experiences and to share that.
Dr. Romberg: Obviously, from the perspective of all of us who are out here providing services, we want the people who we’re providing services for to know about us. And so having all these services in one place, we know that the veterans, their family members, are going to be able to go there, find what they need, make use of the services that we’re working so hard to provide.
Mr. Raschke: My mother would say to me, you know, how are you doing, are you okay? And I would just go, Oh, mom, I’m fine. Because I didn’t want to recognize that something was wrong.
And so it took me finally, you know, going through my trials and tribulations and recognizing when I hit rock bottom that, oh, my God, you know, these poor choices and these mistakes that I’ve made are not just because I’m a dumb kid. There was something else going on here and I had to look at that.
And so when I started going to counseling at the vet. center, my mom was like what took you so long to find this, what took you so long to understand this.
Mr. Bronzan: When you’re coming back if you need counseling, if you need emergency services, which is very critical. Just look at the suicide rate. If you need a job, if you need assistance on how to work that GI Bill, which can be complicated, and go back to school. No matter what you need, it needs to be brought to you, in terms of it’s our responsibility to make it simple for you and easy for you to access. And I think that’s what the Network of Care does.
Lt. Governor Brown: I think Network of Care is a tool that every state ought to consider adopting for the very reasons that Maryland did. More and more veterans, more and more people generally are accessing information, are finding needed services, are communicating with other people, via the internet. The Network of Care with its veterans portal is a convenient one stop location for veterans to do all three of those things.
So I’m expecting good things to come out of the Network of Care.
