Page 30 - Tacoma-Pierce County Lawyer Magazine - September October 2018

VETERANS:
A FREE RANGING DISCOURSE
30 PIERCE COUNTY LAWYER | September/October 2018
By Richard DeJean
Take a drive along the Selway River in north-central Idaho and chances are you will meet Jose or
Jimmy or Mark or Rick. ey are combat injured veterans who were deployed as Army Rangers in Afghanistan. At various times of the year you will meet many other combat injured veterans in this part of Idaho. is is exactly the same part of Idaho that the Lewis & Clark Expedition traversed when they came over Lola Pass from Montana.
e organization to which these veterans belong is "Send-A-Vet" Foundation (www.send-a -vet.org), an organization formed and run by combat injured veterans. Its mission statement is: "To ensure a positive respite experience for our combat wounded veterans." It would be di cult to imagine a better setting
in which to carry out their mission statement.
ese are the Americans who ght our wars. ey have all fought in either
Iraq or Afghanistan and have all been wounded in doing so. I have volunteered with this organization for some 3+ years and all of the veterans I’ve met have disabilities recognized by the VA, some being 70%-80% disabled.
While I am not aware of any medical doctors being part of the organization, its members have intuitively hit upon "therapies" that provide immense satisfaction to these veterans. A large percentage, if not a great majority of these men and women su er from PTSD. is was the result on so many occasions of being blown up by IEDs (improvised explosive devices) or being subjected to other high velocity explosions.
It has been my experience that while these veterans are appreciative of any recognition given them for their services, they had in large part been deployed
as part of elite ghting units, they are action-oriented and especially like outdoor oriented activities.
e organization, Send-A-Vet, has physical facilities along the Selway River where they provide outdoor experiences together with food and lodging for these injured veterans. Depending upon the proclivities of the veteran, this may manifest itself in
the form of shing,
hunting, hiking or
simply relaxing.
While all of these veterans su er from a disability of some sort, they are still what I might describe as "tough" individuals. Because so many of them are amputees, the organization and its volunteers take measures to ensure that these veterans can get into this vast wilderness area which remains essentially unchanged from the time of Lewis & Clark. I can personally attest that these interludes along and about the Selway and the Lochsa Rivers (two of the rst of America's Wild and Scenic Rivers)
has produced positive results in every veteran I’ve met.
PTSD VIS-A-VIS THE LEGAL SYSTEM
Many of these veterans were deployed for 10-15 years before they were wounded in combat. As one might expect, coming back into a society which is so dramatically di erent from their experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq can exert considerable pressure upon them. Add in PTSD and/or TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) and you have thrown
them into a pressure pot that many of them do not have the ability to navigate. As mentioned in a previous article in the Pierce County Lawyer (November/ December, 2017) the City of Lakewood established a Veteran's Treatment Court providing an alternative to prosecution
for eligible veterans and an intervention and recovery feature instead
of incarceration. Present Superior Court Judge Grant Blinn was one of the initial promoters of this and present City Judge Susan Adams administers it today.
e mission of this Court is to assist veterans to reintegrate back into their communities by connecting them with public services they have earned.
Cameron Himes, who is a Commissioned Court O cer in the Veteran's Treatment Court in Lakewood told me something I have witnessed personally, that is veterans in the court system with PTSD respond better when dealing with people who have had similar experiences. He also mentioned there are similar veteran's courts in urston County (Judge Buckley) and in Spokane County (Judge Peterson).
Grady Leupold, an attorney with the US Attorney’s O ce, who spent seven years on active duty, to include a tour of duty in Afghanistan, told me that
in prosecuting service members with mental illnesses who have violated criminal codes, he noticed that a
large population of these su er PTSD together with their physical injuries.
He also indicated that the Department of Defense has dedicated considerable resources to provide treatment to these veterans. So if you have a client with a federal criminal charge, be mindful that