He’d cycle out with a pension and
half his life in front of him. What would happen after that wasn’t exactly
clear, but college figured somewhere in his plans. He was thinking that maybe
he’d like to pursue his lifelong passion of philosophy. He enlisted. Now 23,
Elder, originally from Bellingham, Wash., is a long way from that life. He
folds his 6-foot-5-inch frame into a chair in Balboa Park’s Hall of Champions.
Wearing jeans and a T-shirt, he could use a shave. “That’d been my plan,” he
says, looking away, “before all this happened.”
The event that derailed
Elder’s dream came on hard and fast during the spring of 2010. He was stationed
on Okinawa with the Marine Third Maintenance Battalion. At the time, he’d been
involved in the process of working through channels on a report about his
company’s morale issues. It involved sit-downs with high-ranking Marines and
the pressure was on. Elder stopped sleeping and eating. He paced the barracks
compulsively, began drifting in and out of another world. The unit’s master
sergeant intervened, finally, and asked this: Was he using drugs? No. He drove
Elder to the base hospital. There, doctors told him to drink more water, to get
more sleep—the military cure for just about everything.
Instead, Elder got
worse. He was confined to the infirmary. Fully delusional at this point, he
tried to escape. Hospital personnel darted him with a tranquilizer gun and
strapped him to a gurney bound for Balboa Naval Hospital’s Wounded Warrior
Battalion West. There, he would spend the remaining year and part of the next
attached to the Marine’s Wounded Warrior unit. The final diagnosis? A manic
episode, triggered by stress. As a result, Elder was now bi-polar. He was
prescribed a long list of daily pills including lithium and Risperdal. They
curbed his mood swings, but there was something else going on in Elder’s head
that the meds couldn’t touch.
“I had a great sense of
guilt. In the Marines, you are conditioned to be mentally tough and to hold
your own. When you’re in the hospital for mental health reasons, you end up
feeling like a loser.” Elder perceived what he thought of as a measure of
disgrace surrounding his hospitalization. He’d never seen a day of combat. His
injuries were debilitating, but they were all in his head. “I think the
military is getting better at it, but there’s still a stigma of having a mental
disorder, particularly being in the Wounded Warrior Battalion,” he says,
“surrounded by wounded Marines when I myself wasn’t ‘wounded.’ ” He adds
later, “there were some Marines I’d served with who thought I had faked the
whole thing in order to get off Okinawa.”
Rich Cherry is an
ex-Marine from Buffalo, New York. He saw active duty during the first Iraq War. Post military,
Cherry worked as the director of operations at the Skirball Cultural Center in
Los Angeles and as the CIO/director of facilities at the Guggenheim. He is now
the director of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative, a group that provides
tech support to 27 different entities within Balboa Park. The BPOC needed
staff, but they didn’t have the budget. In the past they’d used interns from Hi
Tech High and it had worked out well, “but there was a hospital across the
street,” he says, meaning Balboa Naval Hospital. In October 2010, Cherry and
his team designed the “From Convoys to Computers” technology internship
program. With funding help from the Gary and Mary West Foundation, they
tailored the program for wounded warriors.
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