Taking the Next Steps Into Life After Service: What Were Steps That You Had Trouble Taking?

On September 11, 2001, I was at Ground Zero in New York City. I was one of the fortunate ones able to step away from the carnage of that day. I walked out of the city with the mass of humanity that had survived, but had no way home except to help each other keep putting one foot in front of the other. That experience sparked a passion for helping those who serve our country take their own first steps forward.

A decade ago, we learned that soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan lacked an assortment of basic necessities, including socks, sunscreen and baby wipes. Friends and neighbors joined me to co-found SoldierStrong, a nonprofit organization working with local Connecticut-based businesses and organizations to hold supplies drives and fundraising events to benefit veterans.

As word of our mission spread and we gathered and sent 85,000 pounds of items to troops overseas, our partnerships began to grow vastly in scope and size.

As the wars began to scale down, we kept our mission, but expanded it to helping veterans take their first steps into life after service.

Today, SoldierStrong provides revolutionary medical rehabilitation devices to injured and paralyzed veterans, along with virtual reality systems to treat post-traumatic stress and scholarships for veterans seeking to finish their education. Simply put, SoldierStrong’s mission is to help veterans take their next steps forward – in some cases literally.

We realized early on that education offers some of the best opportunities to members of the military once they return home from the service. That is why in 2012, SoldierStrong launched a scholarship initiative, SoldierScholar, which assists veterans in taking an academic step into their future. SoldierScholar provides funds for veterans who seek to finish their college education in order to continue public service careers upon the conclusion of their military service. Since then SoldierStrong has awarded over $500,000 in scholarships to those who have fought for our freedom.

The following year SoldierStrong began partnering with some of the country’s most developed medical technology companies to provide state-of-the-art rehabilitation and powered prosthetic technologies, such as exoskeletons, to veterans like Sgt. Dan Rose.

Sgt. Rose experienced a harrowing spinal cord injury, so devastating that doctors told him he would never walk again. But through Sgt. Rose’s connection with SoldierStrong and a donated SoldierSuit, he has been able to regain strength and enjoy life’s little moments like standing at his kitchen counter. Sgt. Rose had been told to give up on walking and thought of it as a pipe dream, so to be able to stand on his own two feet and walk across a room was a very emotionally rewarding experience for him.

It was a rewarding experience for me too. Watching Rose’s progress with the help of an Esko suit donated by SoldierStrong and hearing how the suit dissuaded him, and many others, from completely giving up and instead choosing to fight, has served as a constant source of inspiration for me to keep fulfilling our mission at SoldierStrong.

Since donating the first suit to Sgt. Rose, SoldierStrong has placed 22 exoskeletons in VA and other medical clinics across the country through our SoldierSuit and SoldierRecovery programs, which 35,000 veterans now have access to.

In 2019, with 10 to 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans dealing with the effects of post-traumatic stress, SoldierStrong realized the need for easy access to revolutionary virtual reality hardware systems which allow clinicians to customize scenes in VR headsets to mimic the sights and sounds of the veteran’s worst war memories.

Reliving such memories in a secure and supportive environment can help veterans open up to therapists about their experiences in war and process their emotions around the events. The first StrongMind virtual reality system was donated to the Syracuse VA in September 2019 and seven additional StrongMind virtual reality systems will be arriving at VAs before the conclusion of 2019.

SoldierStrong understands that there are and always will be more steps forward that need to be taken in serving those who have served our country and that there will always be veterans that need help taking some of those first steps after returning home from war. Like Sgt. Rose and so many other veterans, SoldierStrong will never give up on helping veterans take those next steps.

For more information about SoldierStrong, please visit us on the web at https://www.soldierstrong.org/