Cover story
Under-the-radar facility helps servicemen recover from PTSD
The Pathway Home in Yountville is a treatment facility for veterans with combat stress. Pictured is Jack, a Marine and veteran.
The Pathway Home, an independent residential treatment facility for post-9/11 veterans with combat stress, sits amid thousands of acres of trees and lawn in Yountville. But all one Marine named Jack needed of the outdoors was the exit staircase across the hall from his room.
He’d come out of an intense group class, grab his Camel Blues, and by the time he got out on the landing, it was already packed as tight as a Humvee, with 10 or 15 others with post-traumatic stress disorder huddled together and drawing deeply on the nicotine to calm their nerves.
“Devil Dog, How you doing?” they’d greet Jack, using the nickname for his rifle company. “I’m doing,” he’d say.
This scene is real. But its cinematic equivalent is now out there in the film “Thank You for Your Service.” The Dream-Works film stars Miles Teller as Sgt. Adam Schumann in the true story of troops coming home from Iraq and struggling to adjust to civilian and family life in Fort Riley, Kan.
“Thank You for Your Service,” based on a book of the same name, tells the story of Schumann, a platoon leader with a gift for sniffing out roadside bombs, who is physically uninjured in three tours of duty. But the injuries to his mind are so severe that he comes in from a patrol, walks through a door marked “Combat Stress,” and in short order, he is standing alone on a tarmac waiting for his own medevac helicopter. His war is over, but he cannot get over the guilt of leaving his men behind, and he cannot handle the shame of being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
The Department of Veterans Affairs medical bureaucracy only makes things worse until finally, as a last gasp, he is accepted to the Pathway Home, an independent and underthe-radar nonprofit that serves veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. At the Sacramento airport, he is met by Fred Gusman, a social worker who left the VA to start his own live-in clinic, supported by donations and grants, with a minimum stay of four months. It occupies a redundant hospital building at the Veterans Home of California-Yountville, 9,000 Wine Country acres in the Napa Valley.
The facility came under duress during the fires in early October. At one point all 850 residents of the Veterans Home, including the Pathway, were ordered to evacuate. Residents and staff of the Pathway were sent to Napa Valley College, where they waited for three hours in the gymnasium. While on alert for a week, the campus came under no
further threat.
“It just feels like I’m in another country,” Schumann says, as the car meanders around to the two-story Spanish building. “I’m so damn nervous.”
This dialogue, and the film itself, comes out of a two-volume history by David Finkel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the Washington Post who embedded with an Army Infantry Battalion created for the troop surge of 2007 and 2008 in Iraq. The first book, “The Good Soldiers,” published in 2009, follows the troops as they try to stabilize a city at the same time insurgents try to blow up the Humvees that are sent out to help the population.
Two years later, Finkel embedded again, this time at the battalion’s home base in Fort Riley. He narrows his focus to Schumann and follows him out to the Pathway Home, which is depicted in heroic fashion in the follow-up, “Thank You for Your Service,” published in 2013.
During the surge in Iraq, the most common injury was on the inside — traumatic brain injury, or TBI, suffered while riding in an armored Humvee that hits a roadside bomb. Its effects are not immediate but show up over time when victims seem to forget what they are going to say or do and are prone to snapping over the tiniest infraction.
The guilt and stigma over a PTSD diagnosis is so strong that veterans often wish they’d lost a leg or an arm in the war, or show visible scars of a head wound, just so it would not look like they are faking it.
Jack, the combat vet, was not at the Pathway Home at the same time as Schumann, and he has not read the book. But his story parallels that of Schumann. The technical differences are that Jack is a Marine and Schumann was Army. Jack was in Afghanistan, and Schumann in Iraq. Schumann served seven years and Jack six. Both were in the infantry facing the same insurgent dangers. Both came home seemingly intact but badly damaged. Both took a few years of struggle and bouncing between jobs at home before hitting the wall in their late 20s. Both arrived at the Pathway Home as chain smokers, but every combat vet has that habit. Both left the program once before returning to finish the job.
The major difference is that Schumann is literally an open book while Jack is extremely guarded. Once a Marine, always a Marine,
and there is still shame in a wound that cannot be seen. As such, he will not reveal his last name and will not allow his face to be photographed.
He will not discuss what happened to him as a rifleman in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2009 and 2010 or what happened to him after the war to land him in Pathway. But it is not too hard to figure out. According to statistics quoted in the book, among those admitted to the Pathway Home, 80 percent have tried school and quit, 70 percent have been fired from a job, and 60 percent have attempted suicide.
“I came home from the war and realized that I couldn’t calm down,” is what Jack says about his condition. It must have been serious because his father, a Vietnam veteran drove him up from his home in Southern California.
“I didn’t want anyone to know I was coming here,” he says. “What will my friends think of me. Am I weak? That’s a difficult barrier to get over.”
By the time veterans in Jack’s and Schumann’s era reached the Pathway Home they had been through the VA treatment programs and/or those offered through private insurance. The first line of defense was heavy medication and, if that did not work, a VA residential treatment program ranging from four weeks to seven weeks.
Fred Gusman, the Pathway founder, did not want to deal with either the VA or insurance so he scraped up $5 million in private funding before he opened 10 years ago. Financial independence allowed him to do it his way, which was the long way. VA treatments assumed that the veteran had no psychological issues right up to the moment PTSD hit, but Gusman knew this was too simplistic. There were childhood issues at play here, and his treatment programs emphasized these in long emotional classroom sessions called Trauma Group.
In Jack’s case the day went this way — chow, class, smoke break, class, smoke break and so on. He came for four months and stayed six. Then after a failed re-entry back home, he returned for another year.
“The camaraderie built here was so strong, and it wasn’t built in class, it was built in the smoke pit,” he says while using the nickname for the fire escape and table at the foot of the stairs.
Jack and his cohorts never mixed with the older men at the Veterans Home, most of whom served in World War II, Korea or Vietnam. The Iraq and Afghanistan vets stuck together and only under cover of darkness would they walk out of the building and up the hill to a cemetery that dates to the Civil War.
“Guys would talk about the guys they’d lost,” Jack says.
When Jack arrived he’d emphasized the word Pathway in the name, as in a route to somewhere else. By the time he left, he accented the word Home, as if this Spanishstyle building were it.
The Pathway Home used to hold a graduation ceremony, and family came from across the country. A few hundred veterans over the years walked to the podium to be handed a long-stemmed yellow rose and given a few moments to make a speech. When it was Schumann’s turn, he first turned to Gusman and said, “I want to thank you for saving my life.” Then he turned to his wife, Saskia (portrayed by Haley Bennett in the film) and said, “I’m going to be home. Finally home.”
Then Gusman retired. After treating 450 veterans from all over for PTSD and mild traumatic brain injury, or MTBI, the Pathway Home narrowed its mission.
In 2016, the Board of Directors refocused to serve post-9/11 veterans from California, as they transition to higher education to pursue studies at Napa Valley College, Santa Rosa Junior College and elsewhere.
Christine Loeber, 47, a social worker with her master’s from Boston College, was hired away from the VA clinic in Menlo Park, the place Ken Kesey made famous in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
“When these people are in combat, their systems are programmed to keep them alive under incredibly stressful situations,” she says. “Nobody helps them understand that when they get back they have to reprogram their nervous system to operate at a different caliber so they can be successful civilians.”
The Pathway Home is funded by donors with an annual budget of $1 million, and VA medical records are not required for admission. A monthly fee of $700 per patient is requested, as a sign of commitment. But the fee is not a barrier to entry.
The Pathway Home has always been just for men, but Loeber plans to open it to women. A housing wing on a different floor from the men has already been secured.
When that happens the resident population is expected to ramp up to 34. For now it is staffed for 14, and there are not enough smokers to form up on the fire escape. Jack himself has quit his pack-a-day habit altogether. Now 30, he is married, lives in downtown Napa and has a job as a wine consultant. But he is available on short notice. The Pathway Home is home.
Room 4137 to be exact. On this day his old door is closed, and there is a veteran behind it dealing with issues. If Jack can be of help, all that veteran has to do is open the door.