TAKE ON NEW SERVICE
‘Unspoken bond’ between counseling intern, clients
During the first of his three tours to Afghanistan, Army Sgt. Brandon Bregel saw his best friend killed on Oct. 30, 2006.
Their trucks were ambushed by Taliban insurgents. Army Cpl. Isaiah Calloway, 23, a father of three with a baby on the way, was hit with a bullet in his face. He died instantly.
Bregel took his friend’s death hard, drinking to numb his pain and volunteering for a second deployment.
“I was very angry at the world and just wanted to go kill as many people as I could for payback for his death,” Bregel told me. “I didn’t care if I lived or died on my second deployment.”
When he came home from his third deployment to Zabul Province, Bregel realized he needed a new purpose in his life. He began volunteering, spending hours by the side of veterans dying of terminal diseases.
Now, Bregel, 32, is enrolled in the Train Vets to Treat Vets program at William James College in Newton, where he’s earning a master’s degree in counseling. The program trains veterans to offer mental health services to veterans struggling upon returning home. As part of an internship, he’s counseling veterans at the Middlesex Jail & House of Correction.
“There’s this unspoken bond that I have with my brothers and sisters,” Bregel said. “The willingness to sacrifice everything we are for somebody else that we’ve never met, we kind of understand, and I feel like a lot of people don’t understand at the end of the day unless they have that experience.”
Bregel suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and physical wounds, including a slipped disc in his back, bone spurs in his knee and scar tissue in his shoulders. Talking to other veterans in group therapy has helped him. And now helping veterans is his new mission. “When a lot of us get out of the military we kind of lose that life purpose. What we were in the military served a purpose and now when we’re out, what we did serves no purpose. I mean nothing to nobody. I’m no longer performing some type of task.”
Bregel, 32, grew up in North Hollywood, Calif. His mother and father, who have since died, were heroin addicts. His mother dropped him off at his grandfather’s home when he was 13. Bregel said he was a “juvenile delinquent” and decided to join the Army in 2005.
Now, Bregel lives in Northbridge with his wife, Ashley, and their 15-year-old daughter, Frankie. He’s part of a veterans motorcycle club. Life, he says, is very good.
“I don’t want them to struggle as much as I did at first,” Bregel said. “This is something you’re never cured of. It’s more along the lines of giving veterans the tools to recover quicker from things and to recognize what’s going on.”