“Chaplain, we need you,” the platoon sergeant said. “Can you come talk to this specialist?”
Luckie followed the platoon sergeant to an adjoining tent where he found a young Army specialist sitting on the edge of his cot playing with a 9mm Beretta.
“It was loaded,” Luckie recalled.
The soldier was distraught and angry.
“What are you doing?” Luckie asked him.
“I can’t take it anymore,” the soldier said as he looked down at the weapon in his hand and back at his platoon sergeant and Luckie. “I am going to do this.”
Luckie asked questions, and then he listened.
The soldier’s wife had taken their children and left, and on her way out of town cleaned out their bank account.
After a few minutes, the soldier gave his weapon to Luckie and the soldier was taken for psychiatric evaluation. At that point, the soldier failed to become just one more statistic.
Luckie has been on the line with the troops he holds so dear.
“I have trooped the line,” he said. “I have literally been fox hole to fox hole.”
His task is different now.
As the chaplain at Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center, his primary task is the re-integration of the soldier with his or her family, not always an easy thing to accomplish.
Luckie uses his intuition and the science of body language, typically referred to as relational dynamic, but really nothing more than an introduction.
“You have to get to know the person,” Luckie said. “That’s what I do as a chaplain and as a pastor: go out and meet people, find out who they are, where they are and what they are doing in their lives and begin to notice changes in their lives.”
In a soldier’s world, the chaplain is never an outsider, no soldier is ever a stranger to a chaplain.
“I don’t confront them, I come alongside them,” Luckie said.
When Luckie makes his rounds he pays particular attention to the very young man or woman, but it could be anyone who is withdrawn.
Soldiers who are rotating home from the theater of war can fall through the cracks if they don’t admit something is bothering them.
If a soldier feels things have progressed as far as he or she will let them, “this is a serious event and it needs to be taken seriously,” Luckie said. “Warriors that I have found, if they have a plan, if they have a weapon and if they have a place where they want to kill themselves … then there needs to be interdiction right now.”
That is when Lt. Col. Ben Phillips, chief of behavioral health at Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center, becomes an important piece of the puzzle.
When a soldier is referred to behavioral health, he or she is evaluated immediately.
The goal is to help before the soldier is beyond help, especially when the soldier is coming home.
“Obviously, what motivates them at that point is that they want to see their families,” Phillips said. “So will you get as valuable a screening as you will 90 to 180 after they come back? Probably not because they won’t be as forthcoming. They are thinking that they don’t want anything to interfere with getting back to see their family.”
Still, the soldier undergoes a post-deployment health assessment when he or she returns and a reassessment three to six months after returning.
“It is after that month or so of block leave that we see a significant upswing in the number of referrals,” Phillips said.
That is when some soldiers may begin to experience difficulties coping with reintegration into society and their families.
The soldier may be referred to behavioral health either by their command, chaplains, primary care physicians, their families or themselves, Phillips said.
“This is for any mental health issue, such as their family seeing that they are unable to sleep, changes in behavior, not just suicide,” Phillips said.
If a soldier is showing signs of internalizing his or her problems, if there’s even a hint he or she is planning suicide, “It’s really key that family members, buddies or whomever, make a referral if they are concerned,” Phillips said.
What of that young specialist who stood on the precipice between living and ending his life on that dark night in Afghanistan? He is doing well today, Luckie said, smiling.
“We helped him through his divorce and he is back with his unit.”
