Avalon Chronicles #85: "Massacre and Veterans-Part 1"
by Allen B. Clark
www.combatfaith.com
www.combatfaith.blogspot.com
allenbclark@aol.com
When the first reports came in about the massacre at the small church in a tiny town near San Antonio, I was numbed, devastated, and tearful. At 75 these emotions come over me more often in today's world. I had just returned from my own worship service and I pictured a group of faithful Christians in a rural Texas town worshiping our Lord, when someone entered and shot and killed 26 of them and wounded 20 more.
Information trickled in over the past two days about the murderer who is: from New Braunfels; a former Air Force member; apparently a legal purchaser of three weapons (for which the Air Force is possibly responsible by omission from reporting criminal charges it is stated he faced while on active duty); and in a dispute with a relative by marriage, who lived in the community.
Someone commented to me that as a "veteran" he should have had counseling. If he committed a crime while on active duty, he would not have been honorably discharged and therefore would not have been eligible for veteran benefits, ie: no counseling, which at any rate would have primarily involved extensive medications as it does for all of us in VA therapy. If he had been placed in a mental institution from which another report indicated he escaped, he was supposedly mentally impaired.
Veterandom with its sometime attendant impairment of body, soul, and spirit, is a condition of which I have had extensive personal experience. Allow me to relate again my Army and Veterans Affairs background and my and other's healing process from our military experiences in wartime and other challenges of life. My Army psychiatrist treated me with antidepressants and "therapy" only of a secular nature. There was no "spiritual/religious" therapy as I later recognized was critical and essential to my healing from a distinctive spiritual Christian perspective. After my medical retirement from the Army due to wounds in Vietnam, necessitating the amputation of both my limbs below the knee, I continued to be treated by civilian psychiatrists until about 1975. Since then I have required no psychiatric therapy nor drugs, purely because I got my faith act together and Jesus healed me. Fast forward to the late 1990s when I was employed at the Dallas Veterans Affairs Medical Center. I attempted a personal outreach to the Mental Health section to inquire about meeting with their patients to relate my healing journey from my spiritual walk. I was refused, as I was also refused by the top medical center chaplain when I offered my service to him. He said I would need to be ordained to visit with patients. I was too old for that. I inquired as to whether one of his ordained staff chaplains could accompany me in any gatherings I might conduct to satisfy this understandable policy. Without inquiring for any volunteers from his staff, he categorically and immediately proclaimed that none of his chaplains could be a part of my outreach offer. As an aside, one of my veterans friends, a Marine combat veteran from Khesanh in Vietnam, who was also in the meeting, told me later he was ready to come across the table to punch that chaplain. Righteous indignation perhaps? Obviously, there is no "religious" element to the healing process of our military and veteran patients through the medical systems established to treat us.
A very close and valued friend of mine is a retired psychiatrist with experience in both Army and veteran mental health environments. He was officially denied the opportunity to impart any Christian element to his therapeutic endeavors. The deck is stacked against us to heal from our traumas derived from our challenges and pressures of military service and all the ancillary issues of family, finances, and anger management.
Stay tuned for Part 2 to follow. Part 1 indicates the challenge. Part 2 will portray what I perceive to address the solution, psychotherapy, deliverance, or spiritual.
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