Retired brass broke bread Wednesday with active enlisted service members, veterans, and appreciative civilians while commiserating over the healing power of the National Abilities Center, co-founded by a military man.
About 30% of the people the organization serves today are connected to the U.S. military. As speakers pointed out over lunch, marriages have been saved through programs at the center, no doubt lives. Lots of them.
Warriors protecting a nation’s freedoms need healing sometimes, too — even the lucky ones such as himself, limbs and health intact, as retired Command Sgt. Major Bill Thetford said in his turn at the podium as the keynote speaker.
The Hall of Fame Army Ranger who fought in the Mogadishu, Somolia, battle popularized in “Black Hawk Down” and earned the Distinguished Service Cross for his part, had a four-decade career filled with deployments to war zones and command assignments at home.
“I consider myself blessed,” he said, articulate, fit, alert. “My service seemed to make me stronger and more resilient. At the same time, our wounded warriors taught me that not everyone is so fortunate.”
He gestured from his neck up. “You can’t neglect what’s going on upstairs,” he said, and spoke to the role of chaplains and psychologists, along with the National Ability Center, in healing beyond the body itself.
He acknowledged turning to professional help for his marriage and family life, no shame.
“It’s so important to message that we’re all OK to get some help from the neck up and model that,” he said. “Just because you’re the senior leader, or the sergeant major, doesn’t mean you are immune to those challenges.”
This was the primary message from another speaker, Marcy Hehnly, who sat interview style with a general’s daughter and veteran herself, Caitlin Bognaski, the National Ability Center’s development director.
Hehnly, a criminal justice professor at Utah Valley University, served for 15 years as a police officer in the military and in Georgia. She also runs a nonprofit organization, Project Overwatch, for women who are in the military or first-responders, that has programs at the National Ability Center.
She said she very much is dealing today with her personal traumas and is devoted to helping other women, who tend to be vastly outnumbered in their chosen, often highly charged fields, through community and openness with theirs.
One workshop at the National Ability Center has led to another and another. The place and the staff has made all the difference, she said. This all sprung from checking out an archery program at the center a handful of years ago and experiencing healing herself.
Tracy Meier, the chief program director and education officer, has heard variants of this story many times in her 21 years at the center.
She talked about a couple in a program for Marine vets who were left 40 feet up on the ropes course as long as needed for them to say a civil word to each other, then figure out how to get through the exercise called the tango together. Meier said the two had not said anything to each other that anyone had noticed that week at the center.
The experience up in the air saved their marriage, they said. She told the lunch crowd that’s not the only time. The Rangers, the Marines, the midshipmen, someday members of the Space Force take on their missions committed to protecting America. Some return from their assignments missing limbs, survivors of traumatic brain injuries are far more numerous with advances in medicine, and of course PTSD takes its toll.
Even seemingly straightforward adjustment to civilian life can be perilous after a career in the military.
The Hall of Fame Ranger, Thetford, acknowledged this, citing his own struggle shifting out of military life. He also spoke at length about the challenges for families of active military members deployed overseas for long periods, often in danger.
What the National Ability Center provides through programs and adventures tailored to military families is crucial for them, as well, then.
The center’s military roots go back to co-founder Pete Badewitz, a Vietnam veteran and athlete with a disability, who with Meeche White started all this in 1985. All this, of course, includes the programs, the 24-acre site, the recently opened McGrath Center at the base of Park City Mountain.
And the annual luncheon specifically saluting the military and its contributions to community shortly before Veterans Day.