At the Veterans Roundtable last Friday in Webb Hall, a retired U.S. Army Major shared his story about the army and recovering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with the help of art therapy.

Tyler Curtis, executive director of alumni relations, saw a picture of Hall sporting an Emporia State Alumna jacket in a magazine and contacted him about speaking at ESU.

Curtis said Hall, for the most part, donated his time and talent. He said he thinks that it’s important we have a dedicated Hornet who is willing to come back to his alma mater to share his story.

“I’ve been retired now for about two months and I’ve entered maybe the hardest action I’ve ever attempted in my life and that is to grow a full head of hair,” said the speaker, Jeffery Hall. “So far I’m failing.”

Hall grew up in Diamond, Oklahoma and spent a lot of time with his father’s military friends. Hall said they would tell stories about being in the army, about great adventure, but they forgot to talk about all of the freezing to death, the wet conditions and the pain that comes with it.

“They were the best recruiters that I could have ever ran into,” Hall said.

Hall joined the army in 1988.  He then enrolled at Emporia State and graduated in 1997. He was first assigned to Fort Seal and then quickly moved to Alaska, where he served as a Life Fire Support Officer. Hall said this is where his foundation for all of his beliefs in the Army stemmed from.

“I am a Cold War creature,” Hall said. “I believe in lots and lots of fire power. I believe in winning at all costs.”

Hall deployed to Iraq twice. When he returned, he asked to be assigned to a Reserve Officers’ Training Center (ROTC) in order to rest. Instead, he was assigned to the Joint Readiness Training Center in Fort Polk, Louisiana, where he would spend another three years training soldiers.

“It had the most devastating effect on me and my family,” Hall said.

While at Fort Polk, Hall was training artillery men to be infantry men. Hall said it is very hard to switch from one to the other.

“I went to my boss and said, ‘Sir, we need to recycle these guys, they’re terrible.’ He looked me straight in my eye and said, ‘there is nothing we can do to stop them from being deployed on time,’” Hall said.

Three months later Hall opened up The Army Times, a publication that included faces of men killed in battle, and saw the men they had just trained.

“I started to realize hey, maybe I’m onto sometime and everyone else is not,” Hall said.

In the spring of 2008, Hall’s wife asked him if he had suffered a mid-life crisis. The shock of being confronted with the question of ‘is there something wrong with me?’ made him hit the floor. Hall said he couldn’t even crawl. He was afraid he had lost his mind.

“At this point the love of my life was in pain and I didn’t know how to help,” said Sheri Hall.

Sheri Hall said that in 2005 when her husband returned to Fort Riley she could tell that there was something wrong. From then on they were constantly covering the problem up. Sheri Hall said that she couldn’t leave him, even when he told her to, because she was afraid if she did, he would kill himself or starve himself to death.

“I would come home from going to pick our girls up at school and in the 30 minutes that I was gone, my fear was that he would have taken his life,” Sheri Hall said. “So I would come home and I would get out of the car as fast as I could and go make sure he was still alive.”

Hall was sent to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for an intensive treatment program at the Deployment Health Clinical Center.

Hall went through interviews with many different types of doctors to determine what had happened to him and if he qualified for the PTSD program.

“During this interview process they sent me into a man’s office,” Hall said. “He was staring at the ceiling and I sat down in a chair and I was just staring at him with hard eyes, I’m sure. And he just kept staring at the ceiling for like ten minutes. And I was like what the hell is wrong with this guy? And then finally he ducked his eyes at me and he says, ‘what the hell are you doing in here?’ and I was so angry. I exploded. I wanted to choke the living tar out of this guy.”

Hall said the doctor ended up opening up a wound for him and found out that he was an angry man and was a fit for the program.

“I never believed that I had PTSD, I just thought I was just madder than hell,” Hall said. “I wanted to win. And there wasn’t no winning going down.”

Hall’s wife, Sheri, was able to go with him to the medical center. Though this had never been done before, the doctors agreed it could be helpful.

“Went to Walter Reid,” Hall said. “They started a very intensive program where Mr. (Roy) Clymer ripped the scabs off all my wounds and I bled on his carpet for about two and half weeks before he finally let me up for air.”

Hall said the thing that really changed his perspective was that he was so tired of being angry that he couldn’t stand to be angry any more.

“One day as he asked me to speak I started and he said, ‘why don’t you shut up and listen to her,’” Hall said. “And it was the first time somebody had ever told me to listen to my wife because in this war, she moved to the back. She didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. And he made me make her matter again.”

Hall said he listened to his wife and was ashamed of the behavior he had had in his house—pure rage. He said he was very humbled by listening to his wife.

“He’s my strength as much as I am his,” Sheri Hall said. “And I can’t walk away from that. I couldn’t do that.”

“(Art) has probably been the number two thing besides my family standing with me that has saved my life,” Hall said. “Art therapy has actually been able to transfer my anger onto a page and then be gone with it.

After Hall returned to Fort Riley, he became an advocate for PTSD treatment. Hall said people were beginning to reach out to him and others involved and it put a new mission in their lap.

Hall then worked on creating a program called Soldiers Helping Soldiers. He said soldiers speak the same language, making it easier for them to help one another than for an outsider to help them. This program also included outreach to spouses of soldiers which helped his wife.

“I think the thing that helped us the most was we are the most uneducated people there are in the army,” Hall said. “I am a grunt. And I had no 50 pound brain idea about anything, all I know is what I know. And I would tell them what I saw, how I felt, and how I heard it.”

In 2010, Hall suffered a neurological attack. He couldn’t find his way home from a building 800 meters away. He said it was as if he had had a stroke. After a brain scan, anomalies in his frontal lobe were found.

Hall was asked to visit the National Intrepid Center of Excellence and advocate for them while he had the media’s attention.

At the center they asked Hall to be one of the first people evaluated for a neurological issue at the Intrepid Center. Here they found out that he had a traumatic brain injury, which he got treatment for.

“I’m definitely not a hippie,” Hall said. “I don’t believe in hippie things, or I didn’t. But I am probably the biggest hippie there is now because I believe in all that yoga stuff and everything you can possibly do, I do it now.”

Hall said the Intrepid Center was ‘the greatest reinforcing fire’ that they have had for PTSD because of how much they care.

“I don’t think I will ever be healed from all of the anger that I hold in my heart,” Hall said. “We’re survivers.”