The Art of Mentoring Veterans in 2022
Where are mentoring, advocacy, and counseling similar, even over lapping? Where and under what circumstances are they different and necessarily so? How do these disciplines complement each other? How might they detract from each other if misunderstood or misused, intentionally or otherwise? Mentoring is a recent phenomenon birthed formally by the developed 20th Century and today swiftly evolving as the 21st Century unfolds. Mentors have joined forces with licensed counselors, clinicians, psychologists / psychiatrists to provide a continuum of high-quality care and services. Still, there are differences between what a mentor can and should offer a mentee as opposed to what a counselor or psychologist might a client or patient.
I worked at the Portland VA hospital with the Operation Iraqi and Enduring Freedom Patient Transition Program while attending school. This program was new and came into being as a direct result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The program is a transition, or bridge program for those most seriously injured and wounded veterans returning to Oregon and Washington. Most often those coming to the OIF/OEF program are transferring from military hospitals where their injuries addressed initially. The program relied on a fulltime staff of three licensed social workers / clinicians and two work-study patient advocates, of which I was one of.
In our position of patient advocates we complimented the work of the clinicians doing basic administrative tasks. Over the course of this term mentorship of those who we work it, our clients, has emerged as an important aspect of the overall program. In my case it was accepted by our staff that I was a natural mentor. By the nature of my military background and service, to include combat experience in Iraq, and my age (55 at the time) with the accumulation of Life and additional educational and career experiences, those primarily younger wounded warriors and I formed a swift and unique bond when we were introduced. Natural mentors lack an academic definition, as noted in Chapter 10 (DuBois). “Researchers also currently lack a common definition of natural mentors and ways to define these relationships…We know very little about the qualities of natural mentoring relationships, specifically the amount and kinds of interaction within them (Zimmerman et al, P. 151-152).”
However natural mentors are very much understood in the military community, particularly in the Combat Arms fields (Infantry, Armor, Artillery, Special Operations) as both a rank structure and emphasis on leadership training create mentors, especially when the senior ranks are reached, and the emphasis becomes the cultivation and care of those younger soldiers of lesser rank and experience.
Combat, as a shared experience, creates deep bonds of loyalty and trust, as well. Soldiers do not fight for a cause or a country as much as they fight for each other – to ensure the other’s survival – out of the fiercest love of one’s comrade in arms against an enemy most often dehumanized to some degree to enable acts of great devotion, sacrifice, and courage to occur “in the face of the enemy”. All of this serves to form a natural mentoring role and process in the program I have been involved with, a process that also creates what might be called a natural mentee.
To answer the questions raised earlier the areas of counseling, advocacy and mentoring indeed overlap although great care must be made to define the degree of such shared disciplines. In my experience as a mentor with the OIF/OEF program noted my role, and then as a trained and certified Recovery Care Coordinator, the mentoring and care advocacy role was brand new. According to Gladding (P. 470), “Many rehabilitation counselors belong to the American Rehabilitation Counselor Association (ARCA)…A distinguishing aspect of counseling with people who are disabled is the historical link with the medical model of delivering services (Ehrle, 1979).” As a volunteer and then compensated mentor I did not meet the professional criteria to provide counseling services to the disabled, but I did, again as a mentor and advocate, interact with professional counselors by providing information, insights, and observations about a shared client/mentee that the counselor can transpose into an appropriate treatment.
As the clinicians in such programs advocate on behalf of the client directly with the overall medical system and its resources, as a mentor my role overlapped with theirs in that I advocated for the mentee with the clinicians, often providing information the mentee may not have felt comfortable sharing with them and offering a professional interpretation of such information as coming from the realm of the professional combat soldier / veteran. This overlap, or linkage between client/clinician and mentee/mentor/advocate served to provide the greatest possible insight in a timely manner so that, as with counseling, the wounded warrior was served as to his or her carefully identified needs and desires.
Where all three are in essence equal is their focus on appropriate treatment of the veteran and treatment the veteran learns he has a say in his treatment. He understands and is comfortable in undergoing those processes he is now being educated in as an equal partner. In this instance the mentor also serves in a reinforcing role, one of trusted confidant and empowerment.
Where all three are different is in the degree of qualification, certification, and accountability. Even so, counselors / advocates / mentors are each a part of one treatment team with their roles carefully defined and their lanes of practice well identified and agreed upon in terms of overlap.
This answers the question of shared care. If the treatment team described begins to encroach on each other’s roles or begin to undermine the role or work of one member of the team with the client/mentee so as to gain some benefit or “inside track” it is the client/mentee who will be seriously affected and under-served. To combat this situation from developing the treatment team to include its mentors should meet frequently to discuss specific clients, their progress or setbacks, and to share information as well as to seek thoughtful guidance and direction for future interactions.
Much in favor of those others involved outside of the mentor role is the depth of quality academic and scientific research that has been done and is ongoing in these fields. Mentoring, only emerging in the 20th Century, is seen essentially as a volunteer or layman’s service. The breadth of mentoring resources or focuses covers at risk youth, after school mentoring for gifted (and not so gifted) students, mentoring coming from the faith-based traditions and certainly mentoring in the VA system of which an example has been given. Mentoring as a field and practice in the 21st Century will benefit greatly from the same levels of research and practical analysis that counseling and clinical advocacy have. A universal Code of Ethics and Core Values for mentors and advocates would be one result of quality research and development. Best practices, due diligence, and certification standards for mentors will also enhance the field and ensure the still emerging role of the mentor as an important component in the overall equation.
There is a critical aspect of mentoring that is oft overlooked if it is noticed missing at all. That is Stewardship. Defined by noted author Peter Block in his book Stewardship (Berrett-Koehler, 1993), stewardship is “Choosing service over self-interest”. Mentoring is just this, and mentors consciously choose serving their metees over their own self-interests in terms of compensation, resources, and academic certification. Mentors choose to provide self-empowerment to, instead of seeking power over, their mentees. Again from Block (P. 10).
“Ultimately the choice we make is between service and self-interest. Both are attractive…The antidote to self-interest is to commit and to find cause. To commit to something outside of ourselves. To be part of creating something that we care about so we can endure the sacrifice, risk, and adventure that commitment entails. This is the deeper meaning of service.”
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Mentors choose partnership over patriarchy when interacting with their mentees. Patriarchy implies leadership and there is a place for such a role in the service of others. Counselors and advocates / clinicians do not, as a rule, partner with their clients and patients as much as they assume a leadership role in their treatment. A mentor, on the other hand and in specific where my role has been developing, sees its best results when a partnership is formed between mentee and mentor. “The ideas of stewardship, empowerment, and partnership are useful because they clearly carry within them the intention of doing something about the distribution of power. If the issues of real power, control, and choice are not addressed and renegotiated, then our efforts to change organizations [and individuals] becomes an exercise in cosmetics (Block, P. 27).”
Mentoring is the act of empowering the mentee whether he or she is disabled, gifted, at risk, or otherwise possessing of special talents or needs. To accomplish such individual acts of empowerment the mentor must be of service, meaning he / she must serve rather than lead. I have found this to be true in specific cases where those I am privileged to mentor, for whatever time they are with me while attending medical appointments or services, where the mentee instinctively knows in which direction he or she wants and needs to go; has a fair grasp of the challenges facing their recovery and rehabilitation; has a sometimes deep pool of fears and secrets they want to bring to the surface but are unsure of how to do so, or what the reaction will be of those working with them; and are looking for a peacetime comrade-in-arms whom they instinctively can and will trust once the necessary bona fides have been exchanged in a relaxed and respectful manner.
Those with particularly traumatic amputations and brain injuries, concurrent with additional challenges such as PTSD, are proving to be receptive to a mentor relationship especially when they learn the (natural) mentors – have themselves incurred wounding or injury under similar circumstances as their own.
The mentoring process is determined to great degree by the mentee’s scheduled medical appointments or hospital stays for treatment(s). Again, in stewardship the mentor seeks to voluntarily adjust his / her schedule and energy to when he can meet with the mentee, and in the overarching setting of the professional medical facility where “quiet” spots for the mentoring process to occur can be found in either an office, a waiting room, or chapel area. More structured mentorship programs such as in-school programs allow for greater consistency and frequency for mentor/mentee interaction.
Mentoring military patients often becomes a "Force Multiplier" process as mentees can and do, upon reaching a specific level of individual recovery and rehabilitation, become mentors themselves.
In closing, the mentor can be an integrated factor in the overall treatment equation of a program such as the ones I was privileged and indeed blessed to become involved with. Formal academic training, greater research efforts, and an emphasis on stewardship over leadership will create mentors whose influence and impact will be formally recognized by their peers and highly valued by the mentee population, possibly the greatest potential pool of future mentors on the horizon.
Author profile
Greg Walker served with the United States Army's elite "Green Berets". He is a combat veteran of the wars in El Salvador and Iraq.
From 2009-2013, upon becoming certified by the Department of Defense, Mr. Walker worked for the U.S. Special Operations Command's Care Coalition Recovery Program (CCRP). First as a CCRP Advocate and later, as a Recovery Care Coordinator. His region and frequent travel included the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, Hawaii, California, Montana, Idaho, Korea and Japan.
In these positions Greg worked directly with those deemed "Very Seriously Injured" and "Seriously Injured". The nature of these two categories included but was not limited to traumatic amputation, severe burns, severe PTSD and TBI, and terminally ill patients.
Today retired, Greg lives and writes from his home in Sisters, Oregon, along with his service pup, Tommy.