Page 221 - Total War on PTSD

the left side and held the joystick on my right side. As the controllers kept getting more advanced, I kept telling myself that's it, I'm done, but I always seemed to end up figuring things out.
Bennie and I, we pretty much got hurt within a week of each other. I would see him at the hospital every time I would go to the VA, and he was volunteering his time there, and he would bring his PlayStation, and he was there at the Recreation Center trying to get people engaged with playing video games. When I first got hurt, other Veterans who were disabled or paralyzed would come in to my room and would try to break the ice and talk, but I would always kick them out of my room and would say I didn't want to hear their story, or didn't want to hear whatever they wanted to tell me. When the coin was flipped and I was going into other guys rooms trying to be positive, they would react the same way I used to.
We figured out that there had to be a way to bridge that divide and we kind of wanted to use gaming as the keystone to build that bridge. I figured that all of us had played video games at some point. We thought that if we got them gaming, then maybe we could get them talking, and then just continue building from there. There are just a lot of positive benefits to gaming. It helps with concentration, focus, socialization, task-making, goal-setting, etc.
Well, I told Bennie that we could make the whole gaming concept bigger if he wanted. I put some stuff together and got with a non-profit organization here called San Antonio Area Foundation and met with a lady there and started up a not-for-profit with me and Bennie with the focus of trying to make adaptive controllers.
Both Bennie and my backgrounds were in electronics, from our time in the military, but Bennie is more of the guy who does the fabrication of the controllers. I am more of the face-to-face guy,
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