MOH Recipients Push PTSD Counseling

It’s among the most sensitive subjects for troops stressed out from war while trying to get on with their lives, their families and their careers: whether to tell anyone what’s going on inside.
 
Now, a unique band of brothers has come together to tell those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder that it’s more than OK to tell. The group consists of 35 Medal of Honor recipients – men from America’s past wars who have the credibility to tell those fighting its current wars that help is there for the taking and to take it.
 
“Anybody that’s been to the gates of Hell has PTS,” Paul “Bud” Bucha, who was awarded the nation’s highest award for valor for actions in Vietnam in 1968, says in a 34-second video. “It’s something you have to remind yourself of if you find yourself drinking too much, snapping at your kids, snapping at your wife. Go seek help. It took me 30 years to do. Look for it now, and most important, stay sober.”
 
Bucha’s advice and encouragement, along with 34 of his peers, is being made available for free from Medal of Honor Speak Out. The short, to-the-point videos were developed with the help of TriWest Healthcare Alliance, which manages the Tricare program for the Defense Department’s 2.7 million beneficiaries. The MOH recipients – survivors of combat and ex-prisoners of war – say on the website that they are compelled to speak out to the current generation of troops to encourage them to seek help for behavioral health issues that are often a result of deployment and combat.

The message: “Don't let the enemy defeat you at home.”
 
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“Those of us who were in the military follow more closely than the typical person” what occurs with returning troops, retired Air Force Col. Leo Thorsness, a Medal of Honor recipient and Vietnam prisoner of war, told Military.com. “We’re aware of the issues, of the suicide rates, of increased problems from multiple deployments overseas.”
 
Thorsness, president of the Medal of Honor Society, spent six years in the Hanoi Hilton. But he says he was probably in better psychological shape when he came home than are many of the men and women now returning from deployments. He believes that’s because the last three years of his captivity he and other POWs were allowed to stay together, and they used that time to talk about what they were going through and what they would have to do when they got home.
 
His first three years as a prisoner were spent in solitary, he said, and “if we had come home after three years, just out of solitary, we would have been goofy.” The time spent talking about issues and making plans made a big difference. “We came home much better adjusted.”
 

David McIntyre, president and chief executive officer of TriWest, said the company has come to know nearly all the surviving MOH recipients in its role as health-care provider. He also sits on the board of the Medal of Honor Foundation. McIntyre said many of the MOH recipients routinely try to reach out to current military members and veterans, and some of them asked TriWest to help get their message out.

“We said we’ll do that,” McIntyre told Military.com. “We have a video team in our company and one of the people is a recovering service person from these wars who was shot while filming these conflicts. That’s how we got into it.”
 
“We got mock-ups done, we took them forward, did some testing,” he said. “We showed them to some senior [military] leaders, family members [and] to some people in the media to say, ‘Hey, does this resonate? Are these people credible in terms of being able to speak to this?’ The overwhelming response was, ‘Yes’.”
 
Though the MOH recipients are from past wars, everyone agreed they had the credibility to speak to today’s warriors and veterans, he said. The videos and the website went up on May 15, Armed Forces Day.
 
“The object is to make this content available to anyone who wants to use it,” he said. McIntyre estimates the company may have spent anywhere from $250,000 to $500,000 in developing the videos, which it hopes will be picked up for use on other websites, television stations and base movie theaters. There is no cost for use, and nowhere on the videos is there a company name, logo or phone number.
 
McIntyre said the military leadership is firmly committed to standing by servicemembers who seek help and counseling.
 
“The message repeated to me regularly by the head of the SEALs, by the commandant and assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, and the leadership of the Army and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and by the Medal of Honor recipients themselves, is if you go into combat, you’re going to be affected. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be weak,” he said.
 
“And at the end of the day, the appropriate thing to do is to make sure the tools are available to support those who have been affected.”