Col. Phil Stemple looks like a brigade commander, and he speaks like a brigade commander, but he did something this week that would shock veterans who remember their own cigar-chomping colonels.
The flat-topped Stemple stood up in front of 37 soon-to-deploy Nebraska National Guard soldiers and their loved ones, and he talked about his feelings.
In his clipped tone, he told the crowd about how his wife battled insomnia in the months after their son deployed for the first time. How he'd find her curled on the couch at 5 a.m., worried sick about “the boy,” as she still called him.
Col. Stemple worried, too.
“Remember, your folks are worried about you,” Stemple told the guardsmen, who will deploy to Iraq next summer. Then he addressed the parents and spouses in attendance.
“We know we can't do away with your anxiety,” he said. “But we want you to know we'll do everything we can to get your soldier home safe.”
In the audience, the mother of one young guardsman removed her glasses so she could wipe away tears.
This town hall meeting is one of two dozen that Stemple is holding across the state before his 67th Battlefield Surveillance Brigade deploys — the most comprehensive set of pre-deployment sessions the Guard has ever offered.
Guard leaders are prodding soldiers and their families to ask questions and share concerns during these meetings, hopeful that the openness will help to psychologically prepare soldiers frightened by their first deployment or frayed after multiple deployments since 2002.
The necessity of this new approach is evident in the flag flying half staff outside the northwest Omaha Guard center: Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, about to be deployed to Afghanistan, is accused of killing 13 people during a rampage last week at Fort Hood. That mass murder is the latest in a staggering number of recent suicides, murders and other violent events that have prompted the military to begin rethinking how it psychologically assesses soldiers before, during and after war.
The new approach is also necessary because today is the seventh straight Veterans Day that Nebraska Guardsmen and their families have marked since joining wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Those seven years, Stemple believes, have placed a strain on military personnel and their families.
More than half of the 750 who will deploy with Stemple next summer have already gone to Iraq or Afghanistan at least once. A quarter of those deploying have endured two or three previous combat tours.
Initially, guardsmen often stayed on dangerous deployments for 18 months, lengthy stays that exacerbated the stress, Stemple said.
The military has since rolled out new policies and programs — shorter stays in Iraq and Afghanistan, town hall meetings, financial and marriage counseling, child care and even free oil changes for military spouses.
“These are programs we didn't have in 2002, in 2005,” Stemple said. “It's been an evolution. Now we're gonna try to I.D. anything that's causing a problem for a soldier and get that person the proper care.”
The military has long relied on a pre-deployment health assessment to identify servicemen and women who might not be psychologically suited for a deployment.
But a recently released U.S. Army study found that more than half of deployed soldiers eventually diagnosed with mental disorders had concealed those disorders while completing the survey.
The National Guard has buffered its pre-assessment screening with a “battle buddy” program. Each guardsman gets a battle buddy, and they regularly check in with each other and report to superiors if they notice a change in a buddy's behavior.
“Like, ‘There's something wrong with Lechner, he's really quiet,'” said Stemple.
The Guard and other military branches also now offer counseling that a service member can access without the knowledge of a commanding officer. The confidentiality is offered to lessen any stigma, real or imagined, that soldiers often think stains them if they admit a problem, Stemple said.
The stakes of properly identifying mental problems are undeniably high: 133 U.S. Army soldiers committed suicide last year, the most in three decades.
Fort Hood, the world's largest military installation, had already been rocked by two murder cases involving recently returned soldiers even before Hasan's alleged killing spree. And the rates of domestic violence and other crimes have skyrocketed in and around the Texas base in recent years.
At Offutt Air Force Base near Bellevue, officials offer regular counseling to soon-to-deploy airmen and their families.
Air Force Sgt. Richard Williams, a public affairs officer heading soon to southern Afghanistan, recently went through the base's mandatory pre-deployment briefing.
It introduced him to Hearts Apart, which will maximize the number of times he can call his wife from Afghanistan.
Williams will soon go to the base's multimedia office, where he'll be videotaped reading his 2-year-old daughter's favorite bedtime stories, part of a program to minimize the deployment separation anxiety often felt by younger children.
While Offutt personnel are deployed, the base offers their families free child care at least once a month, holds group counseling sessions for family members — even offers free oil changes to spouses.
“In 2003, we pushed out a lot faster,” said Williams of his first deployment. “Really, in the past few years, we've learned a lot about trying to prepare our people.”
At this week's Guard town hall meeting, Jim Keen prepared himself for his son's deployment with the 67th Battlefield Surveillance Brigade.
Keen scribbled notes onto a yellow legal pad. He circled important dates, like a two-day February conference where Guard families can learn more about how to get insurance, make out a will and access behavioral health and substance abuse services.
It gave the Omaha father peace of mind to hear a detailed explanation of the brigade's extensive training his son, Dale, will receive before he heads to Iraq.
“The biggest question for him is, ‘Am I coming back?'” Keen said of his son. “We've started the mental preparation, making sure he's ready to go. This helps. ... it takes some of the mystery away. It makes things real.”
Contact the writer:
444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com
Copyright ©2012 Omaha World-Herald®. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, displayed or redistributed for any purpose without permission from the Omaha World-Herald.
