THE FIRST BASE VETERANS PROJECT

Over the last few years The First Base Agency has been coming into contact with an increasing number of veterans not only from Iraq and Afghanistan, but also conflicts as far back as the Falklands and Northern Ireland. Many of these veterans are struggling to come to terms with mental heath problems that have resulted from their experiences in combat. Waiting lists for professional help are unacceptably long. While they wait for help, many veterans seek to dull their mental anguish by heavy drinking or taking drugs.

Such a course of action only increases their problems. Alcohol often causes extreme aggression which is frightening to both their families and the community at large. Illegal drugs are all too often the gateway to a criminal lifestyle, and vulnerable ex soldiers are particularly attractive to the criminal underworld as potential enforcers or debt collectors.

Like many across the community, the team at First Base were outraged at the lack of prompt care available to our returning soldiers. We can see the problem escalating sharply over coming years as more and more local soldiers serve out tours of duty in Afghanistan. Pentagon statistics reveal that nearly 30% of American soldiers returning from duty in northern Iraq come home with some sort of mental health problem. The experience for our soldiers in Afghanistan is similar if not worse to that of the Americans in Iraq. There is little reason to assume that our men will escape the mental health problems that thousands of American veterans are now living with.

In the summer of 2008, First Base made the decision to try and establish a service to help local returning veterans and in December we were awarded £9800 by Veterans Scotland to launch our new Project.

The First Base Veterans project works on four distinct levels. Firstly, and most importantly, we will try to all we can to assist local veterans. Although help can be many months in coming locally, it can be more quickly available in other areas of Scotland. We will try to make the necessary connections and we can arrange for one of our ex-service volunteers to drive a veteran to where the help is available. We will also look to ‘signpost’ clients to any other services that can be of assistance to them.

Secondly, we will do what we can to support the families of veterans, most particularly those who are trying to deal with alcohol and drug related issues.

We offer drug awareness training sessions to any organisation working with veterans who have developed a substance misuse problem. It is very hard to help someone who is misusing drugs unless you have a proper understanding about the effects the drugs are likely to have both on lifestyle and behaviour.

Finally, we will try to help in any we can with the goal of Veterans Scotland to raise public awareness about the difficulties so many returning soldiers are facing, particularly in these dire economic times.

AN APPEAL FOR SUPPORT FROM BUSINESSES

We have recently written to nearly a hundred local businesses seeking support for our project. Here is a copy of the letter. Please foward this to any business who might be interested in helping us

Dear

I am writing to ask for you support. You may well be aware that The First Base Agency has been open now for over six years. We run a variety of services, most of which are in ever greater demand as the recession deepens. We support families affected by a loved one’s drug or alcohol use. We support women at risk of violence. We give drug and alcohol awareness classes to over 2500 local school pupils each year. We issue over a thousand food parcels a year.

In January of this year we established our First Base Veterans Project to support the growing number of ex servicemen who are coming through the door to find some help in dealing with mental demons that continue to haunt them many years after they took off their uniforms for the last time. All too often these men are parked up on endlessly long lists for professional treatment. All too often they ‘self prescribe’ alcohol and drugs as a means of blanking out their nightmares and flashbacks.

We have been encouraged by the progress we have been able to make with the new project. Although it is hard to find the right kind of help for the guys locally, we have identified agencies elsewhere in Scotland who can meet many of the needs of the veterans we have seen. We are lucky to have a list of ex servicemen who have volunteered to help us by driving clients to and from appointments out of the area. We of course cover their travel costs.

We would like to ask for your help in three different areas.

1. I have enclosed five copies of our new book, ‘Afterwards’, which tells the stories of three Scottish soldiers who have never been able to escape the harrowing memories of the things they saw and did during their time in uniform. It took huge courage for the guys to be so witheringly frank. The only reason they agreed to lay out their desperate stories for public view was to try and make people better able to understand the awful realities of battle stress and PTSD. They also shared the hope that the book can in some way help to ensure that the veterans of the future enjoy more support than they have received. Please pass the books on to anyone you feel might find them of interest. If you need more copies please gives us a call and we will send them out.
2. I have also enclosed several copies of the leaflet describing our project. If you have a friend who is struggling with the memories of their time in service, please pass the leaflet on and encourage them to make contact with us. If you have any friends who served and might like to volunteer to help other ex servicemen who have not been so lucky, then please pass on a copy of the leaflet. Next month we hope to start holding regular evening get togthers at the Agency – nothing formal: some food, tea and coffee and a chance to talk with other vets in the same boat. We would like these evenings to be available to veterans across the region and so we will certainly be looking for more ex service volunteers to taxi the guys to and from.
3. Money of course! The currant recession is every bit as ruinous for the voluntary sector as it is for businesses. Quite frankly, it is brutal. We have certainly never found things anything like as hard as they are now. Any contribution you might be able to make would make a difference. £25 covers the costs of getting a veteran from Newton Stewart to one of our evenings. £50 gets a client up and down the road to an appointment with a psychotherapist in Edinburgh. Of course we all have different opinions about the wars our country has fought over the last thirty years. Thankfully there seems to be a growing mood among the public that the ordinary men and women who are sent out to fight these wars deserve a great deal more support regardless of any the perceived rights and wrongs of why they were sent to fight in the first place. The Government is a long way behind the public and it is showing little sign of catching up. The best chance of our veterans getting the help they deserve is for the community to take a lead and get on with it rather than waiting on our politicians belatedly doing the right nothing. That is basically what our First Base Veterans Project is trying to achieve. We hope that you will be willing to help us.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I hope you can also find time to read the book. Hopefully you will agree with what we are trying to do and be willing to offer us some help.

Best regards,



Mark Frankland
Education Manager




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