Colorado Springs, Co.
traveling companions: none
event: lunch with Captain Jeremiah Ellis and 1st sgt. Jack Robison
I couldn’t pass through Colorado Springs without looking up Captain Jeremiah Ellis and First Sgt. Jack Robison, with whom I’d embedded in Kandahar Province last April. Their unit, Dog Company of the 1/12 of the 4th Infantry division, had rotated back to Fort Carson in June. Ellis and I had kept in touch and I was anxious to hear about how the Dogs were doing back from a year in a district that was 80% Taliban controlled. We agreed to have lunch at a sushi place just outside the Fort Carson gates.
The lunch went dramatic very quickly. We’d just sat down when a young man at the next table–clearly a soldier in civvies–walked over, stared long and menacingly at Ellis and then walked back to his table. A few minutes later, the fellow start shouting, “We lost so many guys over there. I lost my two best friends … and they [freaking] died for what?” Now he started pointing at me, “For politicians like him!” Ellis and Robison got up to defend me, the angry guy got up too and so did the two soldiers he was sitting with. The restaurant went quiet. Ellis and Robison braced him and a heated conversation began. I could hear snatches of it. Ellis said, “two tours, in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The guy said, “You’ve got a ranger tab.” Which means a lot in the Army: survival in the toughest training course around.
Ellis and Robison sat down with the soldier, then took him outside. After about ten minutes, Ellis and Robison came back. “That’s what we’ve been doing since we got back,” Ellis said. “He just started bawling, said the army had sent him to a psychiatrist, but he was all f*cked up. So we gave him our numbers and told him we might be able to help.”
Some of you may remember my April cover story about Dog Company’s futile effort to open a school in the town of Senjaray that had been closed and booby-trapped by the Taliban. Captain Ellis had told me then that his career plan was to leave the Army and get a Masters in experiential therapy–that is, using Outward Bound-like experiences as a way of reintegrating Soldiers into civilian life. “Sgt. and I started talking about this six months ago in Afghanistan,” Ellis said. “He’d been part of a dirt-bike riding group when he came back from his first tour. It really helped.”
Robison took over: “Just getting out there with guys who’d had the same experience, doing extreme and sort of dangerous stuff outdoors together, made it easier for us to talk about what we’d been through. It’s the best therapy,” he said. “It turned out that guy”–the angry one–”is in our battalion. He’d done two tours in the same places as me. When he found out that we’d been out there, too, he calmed down. All of us feel deep suspicion and resentment when we come home toward the people who weren’t there–sometimes toward people who didn’t have the exact same experience as we did.”
Ellis said he’d nearly lost it in a supermarket checkout line the week before. “This dude was complaining about something…and I’m thinking, what the f*ck do you have to complain about? I almost punched him out. See we’re not dealing with a machine here. We’re dealing with a human being–and, until recently, the Army didn’t give much thought to how to refurbish that particular piece of equipment. You’d get a strict maintenance schedule for your radios, your vehicles, your weapons, but there’d be nothing to reset and refurbish your Soldiers. If someone has a problem, you send them to a psychiatrist, you give them a pill. But that’s not enough. It isn’t even close.”
Ellis and Robison hatched a plan to reset Dog Company. The normal drill when a unit rotates home from downrange is two weeks setting up at the new base, then a month home leave. “We figured we had to get to some of these guys before they went home. We knew who we were dealing with and so we could choose the most likely candidates to get into trouble. We set up a three-day ‘reintegration training’ course–whitewater rafting, rock climbing, adventure races,” Ellis explained. They brought in psychiatrists from Fort Carson and experts in experiential therapy from the University of New Hampshire, where Ellis got his degree, to work with their Soldiers. “It really seemed to work,” Ellis continued, “There were lots of stories. But the one that sticks out in my mind was a medic who said, ‘You know, being out here, it was the first time I could think clearly since we got home.’”
After the month home leave, Ellis and Robison made experiential therapy part of the regular weekly schedule. “It was like, Monday you go to the motor pool and work on the vehicles. Friday you go mountain-climbing, fly-fishing, dirt-bike riding or whatever, and work on your mind,” Ellis said. And Robison added, “We do it with a light touch. If we told them, ‘every Friday we’re going to go out there and explore your feelings, we’d get 30 dental appointments. Instead, we raise a theme–like, worst-case thinking–at the beginning and then, as we’re loading the bikes to go home, we may ask them if they’ve thought about that and start a conversation.”
“I told them about this situation with my girlfriend,” Ellis said. “We were supposed to meet at this gym, but she didn’t show up. I couldn’t reach her on the phone. I went immediately to, ‘Maybe she’s pissed at me. Maybe she wants to dump me. Maybe she was in a fatal car crash.’ But then I caught myself and said, what about a best case scenario: Maybe she won the lottery. That seemed far-fetched … and so was the idea that she was dumping me or severely injured. What was the most likely scenario? Turned out she had to do something for work and left her phone in the car.”
Ellis and Robison would like to try experiential therapy with other units, and while the Army knows that it has a serious problem with returning vets and wants to do something about it–and is doing something about it from unit to unit in scatter-shot fashion–there is just too much pressure when units come back to turn them around, retrain them, get their equipment ready and then send them back for another tour. “Last weekend, I had to cut some trees at my house and so I got out my chainsaw,” Robison said. “There was a lot more to it than I thought. Had to work all day and when it was done, I’d burnt out my chainsaw. Now I realize I’ve got a couple more trees to do, but no chainsaw to do it with. And that’s what we’ve got wit the Army: we’re burned out and there’s more work to be done.”
We talked for several hours, about all sorts of things. We talked about the situation in Senjaray, which has deteriorated. We talked about the war and what they’d learned from their tour. I was, yet again, wildly impressed by the dedication of these men–the hard work they put in to take care of their Soldiers, their creativity, their good humor and candor. People like Robison and Ellis are exactly what this country needs. We need them to come home and help make this country work once again. They’re why I suspect their comrades in the military–not so much the generals, but the captains and majors who had to govern places like Senjaray, deal with the local tribal shuras, build roads, try to open schools–will provide the next great generation of American political leaders. They know how to get things done.
Meanwhile, Sgt. Robison had a roadshow playlist for me:
Workers Song and Good Rats–the Dropkick Murphys
Gypsy Rose Lee–Distillers
I Still Do, Drink Your Whiskey Down and Crazy Eddie’s Last Hurrah–Reckless Kelly
Rebubula and Captain America–Moe
The Rocket, Bailin’ Again and Wilder than Her–Fred Eaglesmith
Feeling Good Again and Songs About Texas–Robert Earl Keen Jr.
So thanks Captain Ellis and First Sgt. Robison. I’m proud to call you friends. Stay safe, keep in touch and I’ll see you down the road.
This post is part of my Election Road Trip 2010 project. To track my location across the country, and read all my road trip posts, click here.
