Irony? Tragic irony? Again?
I was on the phone last week with former U.S. Army 2nd Lieutenant Stacy Bare, PTSD sufferer, when unbeknownst to either of us, the former Navy Reservist Aaron Alexis, alleged PTSD sufferer, was shooting up the Washington Navy Yard. Thirteen dead (including Alexis) and at least that many wounded.
The facts surrounding the Navy Yard murders are still too raw and fragmented, and in the wake of these incidents I generally subscribe to the military credo, "Never believe a straggler and rarely believe a casualty." But, in truth, I just cannot bring myself to write--again--about the oxymoron of our country's gun control policies. Words just get in the way of what I really want to say. For apparently Aaron Alexis had plans instead of hopes, and today I would rather write about hopes.
Which is where Stacy Bare enters this story. Stacy has just returned from 11 days exploring Alaska's Arctic Circle, where in his role as the Sierra Club's Director of Outdoor Missions he accompanied two civilian guides and four OIF and OEF veterans on a journey that, with luck, will constitute continuing steps in healing their minds. Like Stacy, some of the vets that hiked through the Philip Smith Mountains of the mighty Brooks Range have been formally diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The rest remain undiagnosed but--shall we use the word--troubled. Every one of those men, however, is connected to the others by what Abraham Lincoln called "the mystic chords of memory." In most cases the memories are not good.
"These were all pretty bad-ass guys, Special Operators, 101st Airborne, like that," Stacy tells me. "The kind of vets, like a lot of vets, who get home from combat, see the challenges other vets are facing--whether it's PTSD or Traumatic Brain Injury, or just finding a damn job--and throw themselves headfirst into helping these other vets without really ever taking the time to see and work on the challenges they face themselves. To ask themselves, ‘Hey, what kind of help do I need?' And a trek like the Alaska hike allows them to not only recharge both their bodies and minds, but the nature of, well, nature itself lends itself to some serious introspection."
That the 35-year-old Stacy Bare would be coordinating any expedition based on outdoor therapy for troubled veterans might seem, in retrospect, a bit of a stretch. Born and raised in South Dakota, Stacy graduated from Ole Miss's ROTC program in 2000 and began his Army career as an intelligence officer stationed in Germany and Sarajevo. Following our invasion of Iraq in 2003, he repeatedly applied for deployment Downrange. When the requests were denied he opted out of the service and signed on with "The Halo Trust," a nonprofit NGO that dismantles long-buried land mines. The work took him first to Angola--where the 6-foot-8, 265-pound Stacy fell ill and dropped to under 200 pounds--and, later, to the former Soviet state of Georgia.
In 2006 he was recalled off Ready Reserve and sent to Baghdad as an Army Civil Affairs team leader. You may recall 2006 as one of the most brutal years of the Iraqi civil war and the revolt against the occupying Americans. Stacy can tick off from memory the names of the dead and wounded from his Ready Reserve outfit. By the following year he was back in the States, working toward his Masters Degree in Urban Development at the University of Pennsylvania. He was also mightily messed up.
(Editor's note: This column was updated to remove a reference to Alexis using a semi-automatic rifle in the shooting. FBI Director James Comey has confirmed that Alexis used a shotgun.)
"I ended up living a pretty significant double life," he says. "I was a respectable grad student by day, but I also developed a major cocaine habit, and I was abusing alcohol. I didn't see any of those things as problematic at the time. But looking back on it, of course it was PTSD."
Stacy managed to earn his MBA, but over the next several years he bounced from job to job, still struggling with his addictions. Then, he remembers, "Ultimately one of my Army buddies got me out rock climbing. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world, and that every veteran needs to do it."
An Outward Bound dog-sled expedition through northern Minnesota sponsored by the Sierra Club followed, and it was as if a light bulb went off over Stacy's head.
"By then I had gone sober with cocaine on my own," he says. "I was also enrolled in other programs for my PTSD, for my alcohol abuse, and the therapists helped a little. But I could never open up. There's not a lot of joy in those group-therapy rooms. Then I joined what they call a sober-active community, where a group of people get together and climb, or bike, or do jiu-jitso or yoga, with the unifying factor being that we're all sober. But it was really the outside expeditions that turned things around for me. After that I asked myself, 'How do I take this experience and utilize it to help other veterans?' "
Stacy and a partner attempted to start their own company in Colorado to sponsor wilderness expeditions for veterans finding difficulty adjusting to civilian life. But funding proved problematic. Finally, he recalls, "We realized that in order to get more veterans outside, we needed an organization with national reach."
He went back to the Sierra Club, which hired him in 2011 to run its military veterans outdoor program. Funny thing is, the higher Stacy Bare rose through the ranks of the Sierra Club--he is now the director of all outdoor programs--the kookier the "fringies" got.
"It was always a hoot when some of my old Army buddies found out what I was doing," he says. "They'd call and say, ‘What are you doing working for that anti-American, New World Order outfit?' People would tell me that our national parks were the places where international troops were training and plotting with the United Nations to take over America.
"And then there was the other side, Sierra Club members calling to ask me to ask if I was infiltrating the organization in order to militarize it.
"Man oh man, there's fringies everywhere."Earlier this summer, before Stacy and his group departed for their trek through the Last Frontier, he mentioned that the ideal outcome of the Alaskan expedition, "would be for guys to continue to engage in their healing process. I want these vets to come away from this committed to continue to get outside because there's a foundational element to this healing process. I want them saying, ‘I want to go deeper into this and I want to lead my other veteran brothers and sisters out in the country.' I also want them to learn that our public lands are incredibly important. Not only are they helping me overcome my PTSD, but we all have to fight to keep those lands as they are for other veterans who also need that help."
So now that he's back, I naturally ask him if he met those goals.
"Oh, yeah," he says. "It was incredible. And it speaks to the heart of the role that outdoor therapy can play in the healing process. Why hiking in Alaska? Why ice climbing anywhere? Why white-water rafting? Hell, why just a walk in your local park? Because veterans have lived intense lives, and we have seen some things that are just awesome--and I don't mean awesome as either good or bad; just as in, ‘That is some awe-inspiring shit. I don't know what to do with it.'
"And then you come home from deployment and say, ‘Where is the excitement? Where is the thing that I really believe is worth fighting for?' You're a warrior one day and the next you're mowing your lawn or unplugging the toilet. For some that is enough. But not for every vet, including so many fighting the inner demons that are the residue of combat.
"I'm not knocking sitting in a circle in a room undergoing group therapy. That's helpful for a lot of folks. But a big part of group therapy for PTSD sufferers is talking it out, and for a lot of vets like me, it's just so hard to open up, to learn to trust again. Well, what do you think happens at the end of the day on one of these expeditions? Being outdoors has taught me and so many other veterans how to open up. How to be vulnerable. How to trust people. As one of the guys said one night around the campfire, ‘It takes some time to learn to be comfortable in your own discomfort again.' Even I didn't realize how much I missed that. None of us had pushed ourselves this hard in a long time, since our deployments. We talked every night about achieving the things we dreamed about, and how to keep ourselves accountable to those dreams. To that end several of the guys want to keep doing this by becoming expedition leaders themselves. Trainers training t rainers, to in turn train more veterans to become trainers."
Stacy estimates that over the past year all Sierra Club activities tailored specifically for military veterans--from rigorous mountain climbs to fly-fishing expeditions to outdoor picnics--attracted some 3,000 former military servicemen and women and their families. "The year before," he says, "maybe we touched about 400 people. So the exponential effect, well, I wouldn't want to guess, but I can tell you that it's going to just keep becoming more and more significant."
Which brings me full circle to Aaron Alexis and the Navy Yard slaughter. I can only wrap my mind around the senselessness with the old GI question: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
So instead, today I prefer to dwell on Stacy Bare, and his Alaska journey, and all the PTSD sufferers who do not succumb to their demons. To those who reach for a piton or a fishing rod or a kayak oar instead of an AR-15. It is a pity I must fool myself so.
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