BOSTON, MA – Before a triple-header took the field at Fenway Park in the early morning hours of July 22nd, the stands began to fill as crowds cheered for the heroes before them. On this day, friends, family and fans stood with hands over their hearts as the ballpark came alive for the 14th annual Run To Home Base. The message to 2,500 runners on the field from Red Sox announcer Tom Caron: “You are not alone.”
Dedicated to healing the invisible wounds of war, the Massachusetts General Hospital based program Home Base provides wellness, education, research and support to nearly 3,000 veterans each year at no cost. “We now know that 25 veterans die from suicide every day. Far more than the national average. Home Base started because the VA is not equipped to handle this by themselves,” explained Tom Werner, Chairman of The Boston Red Sox.
Jokingly, he welcomed fans to the oldest MLB ballpark. “I saw this morning when I came here that there was one runner with a Mets hat. Um, that’s fine, and we welcome all fans, but if you’re running with a Yankee hat, please put it in the garbage.”
Yet the meaning behind the day’s mission was far more serious. “1 out of 3 soldiers returning from overseas conflicts came back with an invisible wound – PTSD, a traumatic brain injury. One out of three.”
For Colonel Kevin Trujillo, an Army Ranger who served 18 years in the Special Forces with 10 deployments – the Home Base program was life changing. “I was tired, angry, irritable, couldn’t sleep, unable to focus, and growing more anxious by each day. Looking back now, it was clear I was experiencing some cognitive complications resulting from repeated blast exposures. I also had persistent pain from multiple nagging injuries which I just didn’t have the time to address. Years of back-to-back combat deployments were finally taking their toll and I was falling into the proverbial ‘dark place’ and it was, for me, my darkest time. So I did what most green berets do best: to push through tough times, I compartmentalized. And I compensated but as time went on, these hidden fractures became more evident,” he explained. “But no one knew, not even my family knew, how bad that I really was feeling.”
Sadly, his story is not unique.
“There’s a lot to it. You deploy overseas, you feel like you’re saving the world and sometimes you are, you work with these high-performance teams, and then suddenly it’s over and you’re back home. And life is not the same,” explained Brigadier General (Ret.) Jack Hammond, Executive Director of Run to Home Base. “It’s a difficult time for many people to make that transition.”
That, he says, is why the experts like Dr. O’Neill Britton at Massachusetts General Hospital & Home Base have been working hard on treatment, support, and education to family members surrounding our veterans on how to recognize signs a hero may need help. “The wounds we live with every day..are not physical. But I would dare say, and offer a little nuance, they’re not quite invisible either. We see the change in behavior, we see the struggles personally. What we struggle with is how to respond.”
Best explained, perhaps, with an analogy: “Running is as much a challenge as it is a physical one. Marathon runners call it ‘hitting the wall’, so when your body feels like giving up it’s your mind that pushes you forward,” says Werner. “But what happens when the mind feels like giving up? And that’s a small glimmer of what our veterans feel like when they come home.”
One of the largest obstacles? Shifting a suck-it-up mindset. “In the army, we have any expression we talk about: you can either be hurt or injured. And if you’re hurt, we have an expression that follows that and that says ‘suck it up, buttercup’. Take an aspirin or two, and you’ll feel better, rub some dirt on it. If you’re injured however you need a medical intervention, and all too often, with the invisible wounds, we mistake the two. We think we’re hurt and in fact, we’re injured.”
Regardless of how heroes find their way to Home Base, Werner’s message rings loud and clear when they arrive. “You have served your country, now it’s our time to serve you.”
Emmalyn Reid 