Military Sexual Trauma has plagued a local vet for decades

After almost 30 years of no contact with Veterans Administration, Bert Whitcombe has been attending therapy regularly for nearly a decade. His is just one of thousands of veterans with reported instances of Military Sexual Trauma. -- Chris Reinoos/Daily Journal

Military Sexual Trauma has plagued a local vet for decades, but he’s beginning to heal

Published 7:02pm Monday, July 28, 2014
By Chris Reinoos Fergus Falls Daily Journal

Bert Whitcombe stands outside his apartment building Thursday afternoon, enjoying the sunny day. He heads into a large workshop he rents below his apartment, a space Whitcombe, a tall 67-year-old with a bushy gray beard and shoulder-length white hair tucked behind his ears, retreats to when he feels frustrated.

He sits down on a love-seat he made out of wooden pallets, a pleasant, gentle breeze blowing in from Mill Street through the door of the workshop, cars and pedestrians passing by with a calming rhythm.

Then he begins to talk.

Whitcombe is an engaging conversationalist, at times animated, funny, serious and touching, sometimes during the same thought. He bounces around from thought to thought, following his mental flight of fancy wherever it leads him.

Sometimes that’s to the media’s impact on society, sometimes it’s to a generational divide.

Other times it’s to big ideas, like reversing troubling climate trends, and others to smaller ones, like bringing benches back to downtown Fergus Falls.

But more than anything, Whitcombe is thoughtful.

It is with this thoughtfulness that Whitcombe has spent the last 10 years reflecting on his traumatic experience as a member of the United States Air Force during the Vietnam War, an experience that left him an angry and broken man for more than 30 years, and one he is still learning to live with some four decades later.

The trauma’s genesis

Whitcombe signed up with the Air Force in 1965 and went to basic training in January 1966. That first year was mostly a good one, as Whitcombe believed in the cause and attacked his training and work with youthful enthusiasm.

Bert Whitcombe gained 80 pounds in his first 10 months in the service and soon became disillusioned and angry. — Photo provided

But late in the year, Whitcombe first began questioning his country’s mission in Vietnam. These questions, coupled with the beginning of a drinking habit and a shoulder injury suffered in mid-1967, quickly turned his youthful enthusiasm into hardened anger.

But it was the events of one night in 1968 that still haunt Whitcombe to this day, leading to nightmares that jolted him awake on countless nights for decades after.

Whitcombe, by now almost 100 pounds heavier than when he enlisted, alleges he was raped by two others with whom he served. He was discharged soon after the incident and did not find any solace with the Veterans Administration offices.

“I’ve imagined many times in therapy, ‘What would happen if someone would have helped me?’” he said. “It probably would have been a non-issue. I would have been pained about it and lost innocence and all that, but it wouldn’t have been something that disrupted my ability to be a citizen.”

Because of these early encounters with the VA, Whitcombe avoided the organization at all costs, growing angrier and falling into deep depression.

He had no contact with the VA from the mid-1970s until the mid-2000s. He felt he was on his own in a country that had not given back to him after he sacrificed so much for it.

“The only thing I wanted the VA to do was make it right, whatever that meant,” Whitcombe said.

It would take 30 years for Whitcombe to come to a place where he could again reach out his hand for help. The next time, he found a hand waiting on the other side.

A persisting problem

The VA defines Military Sexual Assault, or MST, as “psychological trauma … resulted for a physical assault of a sexual nature, battery of a sexual nature, or sexual harassment which occurred while the veteran was serving on active duty or active duty for training.” Veterans can suffer MST without having been attacked or physically violated.

Bert Whitcombe joined the United States AIr Force in late 1965 and maintained his enthuiasm and belief in the country’s mission for most of his first year in the service. — Photo provided

Every veteran seen for health care through the VA’s national screening program are asked if they have suffered MST. One in four women say they have, while one in 100 men say they have, according to the VA.

That is a huge gap in percentages, but because there are so many more men enrolled in military service (82 percent of active duty, reserves, National Guard and Air National Guard as of March 2010) than women, the sheer number of men who report MST is also staggering.

Those numbers, though, only tell part of the story.

The Pentagon has been releasing annual reports on sexually-based attacks in the military for nearly a decade. Attacks increased by 46 percent in the 2013 fiscal year from October 2012 to June 2013. The number of attacks rose from 2,434 in fiscal year 2012 to 3,553 the next year.

It is unclear whether attacks are actually on the rise or if more military personnel are reporting them, but the numbers paint the picture: the problem of sexual assault in the military is not going away.

It is largely because of these troubling numbers that Whitcombe was eventually able to view his alleged attackers with empathy. To him, there are no winners in the horrors of war.

“I used to see him as a terrible, rotten, hateful perpetrator,” Whitcombe said of the principal attacker. “But he’s not. He’s a victim, just like me.”

Empathy

Whitcombe went back to the VA for help in the mid-2000s and got a completely different response than he had 30 years ago. Instead of being told to bottle up and try to forget his problems, he found compassion and a sense of duty he had not seen before.

He credits many of the improvements to a change in organizational direction. Whitcombe feels the VA brought on more healthcare professionals, regardless of their military background or, more appropriately, lack thereof.

“The Veterans Administration is not the military,” he said. “It is medical support for former military staff people in a civilian environment.”

Before settling back in Fergus Falls a few years ago, Whitcombe traveled around the country extensively. During these travels, which included prolonged stays in Minneapolis and Denver, Whitcombe worked with several VA counselors. Some were better than others, but all were willing to help.

His counselor in Fergus Falls is Susan Thompson, a woman with experience working with men, women and, most importantly, sexual trauma victims. Whitcombe had worked with other counselors who did not have this expertise in the area of sexual trauma and the results were not the same.

Whitcombe generally sees Thompson twice a month for individual sessions, occasionally in Fargo but usually at the Fergus Falls Veterans Home. He could not say enough good things about her, praising her compassion, patience and work ethic.

“She gives her lunch hours in order for me to see her,” Whitcombe said. “I will bring a lunch and she will bring a lunch.”

It is not just his therapy either. Whitcombe has undergone several surgeries in recent years and has had nothing but good experiences with the VA in regards to these operations.

On Thursday, Whitcombe was not feeling well and, fearing he had pneumonia, drove to the VA in Fargo to get checked out. He was back in Fergus Falls a little after 4 p.m. and doctors found no symptoms of pneumonia.

That kind of relationship was unimaginable to Whitcombe just 10 years ago, much less in the immediate aftermath of his attack and discharge.

Whitcombe no longer attends group therapy sessions as he did at the beginning of his treatment. The angriest people tend to dominate the conversation in his experience, creating an unhealthy atmosphere.

But he is still interested in knowing how other veterans handle traumatic experiences. He has heard of other veterans who experienced similar trauma who struggle much more than he is. That tells Whitcombe the VA still has a long way to go.

Letting the hate go

When it comes to reaching out, Whitcombe has seen a large divide between older and younger veterans. When he attended group sessions, there were rarely any veterans from the first Gulf War or the current conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan.

This does not come as much of a shock to Whitcombe; after all, it took him decades to process his attack in any sort of healthy way. But there is more help available for veterans today, and Whitcombe hates to see that help ignored or outright rejected by younger veterans.

“Most of us don’t let the hate go,” he said. “The magic bullet … has not happened. We still hate, by and large, and we still feel ostracized.”

Whitcombe is certainly not exempt to lingering anger, sadness and depression. He is in his workshop, the one he uses as an escape when he is frustrated, “pretty often.” There are times he tells his wife, Teresa, he feels he is losing the energy to fight.

But he is better off now than he was 10 years ago. There is no comparison. The help he has gotten through the VA has changed him in almost immeasurable ways, he says.

Now, a big part of his work is getting other people to care.

Starting a dialogue

In the first few decades after the attack, Whitcombe was confrontational with people about what happened to him in the military. He wanted people to be shocked out of their apathy but, more often than not, he turned people off with his bluntness.

He still wants to bring to light the troubling realities of military life, but he does it now with an appreciation for people’s sensibilities. But just because he has developed a more nuanced way of talking about his experience does not make the problem any less urgent.

“The only way we get through this is to confront it,” he said.

That goes both for veterans and the general public. The number of veterans suffering from MST should be enough to get people talking about it, but in Whitcombe’s experience, many people are too uncomfortable with the truth to deal with it.

Some veterans are still too uncomfortable with that reality as well, as evidenced by the relatively low self-reported cases brought to the VA. But by putting a face to the problem, at least in Fergus Falls, Whitcombe is hoping to open up a dialogue about military abuse.

Making a difference

Much of Whitcombe’s anger has been replaced by sadness. The rage that drove his family away for years has largely given way to deeper melancholy. Many vets are pessimists, he said, and he counts himself in that group.

But he is also a man of intense passion, and that passion drives him to make his community a better place. He has long been a public advocate for Fergus Falls and is well-known by many city and county officials.

In his younger days, he was also a passionate man, but that passion was more pure, less damaged by cynicism. The attack forever changed him, and no amount of therapy can bring back the excitable boy who joined the service in 1965, he said.

“That’s the brutal thing about sexual trauma,” he said. “There is no opportunity for innocence.”

A few times in the last decade, Whitcombe has given up on therapy, thinking it had done for him all it could do. He returned each time, “tail tucked between my legs,” and has been going consistently for several years.

The work is far from done, for Whitcombe personally and veterans as a whole. For all the strides the VA has made in recent decades, the current turmoil in the organization has demonstrated the chronic need for more funding and more committed health care workers, he said.

But for at least one person, and surely many others, the VA’s honest effort to help has made a world of difference.

Veterans like Whitcombe across the country will always need their own personal workshop, but it is comforting to know that, with a little help, they can make their way out.