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Guardsmen volunteer to help wounded soldiers

FORT RILEY, Kan. — They’ve gone to war recently themselves, but a cadre of Kansas National Guard soldiers has volunteered for a year — maybe longer — to help wounded soldiers get back on their feet.

Located in a cluster of tan modular structures adjacent to Irwin Army Community Hospital, the Warrior Transition Battalion is designed to give wounded soldiers a place to get well, while getting services they need to continue their Army career or life as a civilian.

Command Sgt. Maj. Terence Hankerson, a Guard soldier from Topeka, is the senior enlisted soldier at the battalion. He was wounded in Iraq last year and volunteered to serve at Fort Riley.

“Obviously, you want somebody who’s been through the process,” he said. “You’ve got to be able to identify with these guys. I can look them in the eye and go, ‘I know what you’re talking about. Believe me, I had an E-6 dogging me the whole time, too.’

“It doesn’t matter if you are a sergeant or a colonel, you’re still expected to make your appointments and heal, first and foremost.”

The battalion results from last year’s controversy over the quality of care wounded soldiers were receiving at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Over the past year, Congress and the Department of Defense have worked to improve care and put more personnel in contact with the wounded as they move from combat back to their home posts or civilian lives.

Most the 300 soldiers in Fort Riley’s battalion are active-duty Army from units deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, though some are Guard soldiers and Army Reservists.

Sgt. Bonnie Capp previously deployed with a medical detachment out of Lenexa but volunteered to work at Fort Riley. She’s a squad leader, making sure 12 wounded soldiers get to medical appointments on time and their needs addressed at all hours of the day.

It’s a new challenge, she said, calling for skills that aren’t standard for the military.

“You have to be a mother, you have to be a sister, you have to be a friend. You’re everything that these soldiers rely on,” Capp said.

That includes advocating that soldiers get the services they need, even when someone tells them no.

“As for us being National Guard, we have a little more understanding, but military — the uniform — is not all that we know about,” said fellow squad leader Sgt. Voneen Hale. “We have our education; we have our civilian jobs.”

Col. Lee Merritt, the battalion commander, said a new Soldier and Family Assistance Center specifically for the wounded centralizes key services, such as medical, educational, child support or financial.

The center had an open house Friday, then a luncheon for the wounded soldiers, families and those staffing the battalion.

“This is a traumatic time for the soldiers and their families, because they are going through a period of treatment. They may be getting out of the Army, but they don’t know exactly when,” Merritt said. “This is really a community project.”

He said Fort Riley hopes that soon it will be able to track wounded soldiers for a year after they leave Fort Riley or the Army.

Sgt. Daniel Wright is in the Guard and volunteered to go to Iraq with a military police company in June 2007. He served in Kosovo from 2004 to 2006 with a Manhattan unit.

But during training at Fort Bliss, Texas, Wright injured two discs in his lower neck and couldn’t go. His arms go numb, and wearing more than 100 pounds of gear and body armor is out of the question. After being a mechanic all his life, he doesn’t know what he will do next.

Wright previously deployed with some of the Guard soldiers working in the unit.

“When you have family and friends around, and also fellow soldiers you’ve been deployed with, you just know that you’re going to get the best care you can when you’ve got people around you know and trust,” Wright said.

“A lot of them are very compassionate. They understand the problems that we have; it makes life just that easier.”

Sgt. Michael Anderson watched Friday’s events from a wheelchair, both ankles in casts. He was wounded in March 2007 during an infantry patrol. He had been in Baghdad for only a few weeks when a bomb exploded just feet from his Humvee.

Anderson is living in the barracks for the wounded and spends a lot of time interacting with the staff. Some of them noticed that he seemed depressed. He was missing his family, so the staff started contacting medical care in his home of Caldwell, Idaho, and arranged a temporary leave in the coming weeks.

“Other than getting out of this wheelchair and getting better, going home — those are my goals,” Anderson said.

He’s disappointed that he is likely to miss the ceremony when his unit, known as the Black Lions, comes back after 15 months in Iraq

“That’s my unit, but my family’s more important, and that should always be the case for anybody,” Anderson said.