There’s so many people and resources out there ready and willing to help these warriors and their families.”Ī lot of the same TBI issues veterans have been advocating for have gotten attention because they are close to the injuries football players suffer, with attendant depression and suicides. Being stubborn is just a good way to think yourself literally to death. There’s one thing that sucks worse than suffering and that’s suffering alone. I was a warrior and ‘that’s not what warriors do.’ Which is total BS. Schick said one reason it took him a while to get right was that “instead of doing it healthily and being productive, like going to therapy, which i was anti-doing. But God showed me the light and I crawled toward it.” I didn’t see any hope or light, and I was hard on everyone around me. You can’t go through 40-plus operations and 20-plus blood transfusions and not have a bit of an addiction. It was not anyone’s fault, just the way it is. When I left (Brooke Army Medical Center) San Antonio I was a fullblown drug addict, government issued. “I was around 22 when I got hit, and around age 25 or 26 when I really was heavy on drugs, painkillers, and thought ‘this isn’t going to end well.’ I was in a bad place mentally. He also beat a painkiller habit that resulted from his recovery. I enjoy working under pressure, but you have to be quick on your feet, or in my case, foot.” “With me it’s more of the challenge of being able to connect with an audience. “I haven’t had a problem speaking my mind,” he said. He was lucky, he said, because he was able to emerge from his comfort zone, being alone with his wife and child, and face the public. “A long dark hole to crawl out of by yourself.” “Hell, it’s an emotional roller-coaster,” he said. Schick says he knows first-hand because he suffered a TBI and post-traumatic stress, which he refuses to call a disorder. We’re losing too many guys at a rapid rate, and it’s unacceptable. Below the neck, that’s something we’ve always addressed and been good at, but its above the neck that we really need to get busy working on. We really need to address that above-the-neck issue. But (those) guys don’t have any flesh wounds or scars but God only knows how many times they got jarred around inside a Humvee or a track. “If I wear shorts and a T-shirt it’s easy to see that I had a bad day at the office at some point. “My injuries got a lot of attention because they’re visible,” he said. Part of the problems in that the anguish and depression and brain injury aren’t visible wounds. Those two states don’t even report their numbers and they have the greatest veteran populations in the United States.” That doesn’t include California and Texas. “There’s 22 (suicides) a day and that’s just the ones we know about. “We’re losing those (veterans) at a rapid rate,” he says. Traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress and veterans’ suicide are key concerns for him now, and don’t be surprised if they come up in his talks here. He’s also appeared in an HBO documentary put together by the late James Gandolfino, in the Mindset episode of 60 Minutes Sports, works with the nonprofits Carry the Load veterans’ support group and American War Heroes Foundation and works at the Center for Brain Health, in Dallas. That story includes drug addiction, self doubts, anger and a process of growth and redemption that now has him working with veterans with traumatic brain injuries, making public talks such as those here, marrying the Navy doctor who treated him through several of his dozens of surgeries, becoming the father of a 3-1/2 year-old son, Jackson, and serving this week as a grand marshal in the Dallas Veterans Day parade. I’m sure I can come up with a unique story.” “I’m going to stay focused on how proud I am to be from there and how the community pulled together after I got hit and did a lot to help my family out, and how thankful I am and we are for them stepping up after that day,” he said. Saturday, he’ll speak at Bravo Company’s Marine Corps Ball. Today he’ll speak at the Shreveport Bar Association’s annual luncheon honoring veterans at the Petroleum Club. Schick, now 32 and living in the Dallas area, was the most seriously wounded member of Bravo Company, and he’s in Shreveport this week to speak publicly about his ordeal and transformation twice. One minute he was a lance corporal with the Bossier City-based Bravo Co., 1/23 Marine Reserve based in Bossier City, the sassy, brassy son of a Shreveport banking executive and on the next side of a heartbeat defined by bullets and explosions he was a wounded man, his right leg blown off below the knee, the bones in his left leg and foot broken almost too much to count and a large chuck of his left hand and arm gone. It’s been just over a decade since combat in Iraq changed Jacob Schick’s life forever.
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