Montclair group offers free aid to injured vets
When Lech Sierpowski goes to the screening of "Thank You for Your Service" at the Montclair Film Festival Tuesday night, it will trigger some of the anger and despair he lives with every day.
He will leave it agitated; he will wonder why, again, the country he served didn't see problems like his coming and, when faced with it, tried to solve it with prescription upon prescription of physical and mental painkillers. Sierpowski couldn't wait until he turned 18, so he could go down to his hometown post office in Bloomfield and register for the Selective Service. Within a few months, he was in the Marine Corps.
This was 16 years ago, before the USS Cole, the terror attack of 9/11, and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I enlisted because of patriotism," Sierpowski said Friday. "I enlisted because of pride and because I owed my country an obligation."
Sierpowski, now 34, said this in the Montclair law office of Michael Pasquale, who runs the non-profit organization Officers of the Courts Corp. (OCC), which gives free legal services to injured military people and veterans seeking benefits due them for the sacrifices they've made.
"Thank You for Your Service" will be screened at the Clairidge Theater on Tuesday at 7 p.m. A cocktail reception with filmmaker Tom Donahue and Pasquale's group, which has provided over $250,000 worth legal services to wounded veterans in the last year, will follow.
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The documentary centers on a group of Marines, who opened fire on a car that ran a security checkpoint outside of Baghdad in 2003. Inside was a civilian family and three male members were killed.
"PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) comes in many forms," said Pasquale, who has been giving free legal help to veterans for 10 years but launched OCC (www.officersofthecourts.org) last June. "Some of it comes from watching your buddies get killed, some it comes from the killing you've done."
In the film, the Marines struggle with "moral injury," Donahue said after a New York screening in February. "That is an invisible wound. It's a component of PTSD you just can't medicate away."
The stricken men deal with suicidal thoughts, alienation and anger, and prescription drug addiction. Their families don't recognize the men who returned home, war-torn.
Adding to these problems is the woeful lack of psychological support by the military and U.S. Department of Veteran's Affairs.
Sierpowski can relate from his own combat experience and aftercare, if you can call it that.
He was in the first convoys that sped into Iraq in 2003, moving 24 straight hours over rough terrain. He was the turret gunner on a 5-ton transport truck, exposed to mortar and sniper fire.
"You're basically up there waiting to be hit," he said.
And, of course, he did his own hitting. Even now, as he tries to talk about it ... well, he can't. His eyes flutter and his mouth contorts.
"I don't really want to talk about that, if that's okay," Sierpowski said.
"I think people in our society underestimate the mental trauma that comes with killing somebody," Pasquale said.
He's right. It looks so damn easy in the movies and video games of our violence-saturated culture. But the guys who live it know differently.
"I saw a lot of death," Sierpowski said.
His gunny sergeant stepped directly on an IED.
"I helped recover his remains," he said. "I picked up a finger; his wedding ring was still on it. I can't see a wedding ring today without thinking about it."
In a village caught in crossfire between advancing Americans and retreating Iraqis, Sierpowski found a little girl screaming in pain, her face laced with shrapnel and her body burned. She cowered in a destroyed home surrounded by dead members of her family.
"I picked her up and brought her to command," he said. "I'm bawling, crying, 'Saying we have to help her.' They said, 'We can't. It's against the rules. You have to leave her.' "
These are the images Sierpowski and other combat veterans live with. For them, they can't be pushed into some dark corner the general public doesn't want to look into.
"The all-volunteer aspect of the military has depleted sympathy for these guys," Pasquale said. "The lowest percentage of Americans ever serves in the military while we're engaged in the longest war. The war isn't coming home to most Americans. We (OCC) are a civilian organization that shows we didn't forget these men and women."
Sierpowski, who was also once blown out the truck and suffered head trauma and back injuries, experienced that isolation when he came home.
"I joined the VFW and even those guys didn't understand I had been in the same kind of combat they were in during World War II and Vietnam," Sierpowski said.
But it was Jack Kane of the Nutley Post 493 who got Sierpowski to finally admit he "wasn't right" just a few years ago.
In the decade after his honorable discharge in 2004, Sierpowski became an aircraft technician and got a college degree. He was steadily employed and promoted at two different aircraft companies, working on sophisticated software that keeps planes in the air.
But, as he said, "there was a bottom to every bottom."
Vivid nightmares, panic attacks, hyper-vigilance, fear of being in public, jumpiness at loud noises and the fogginess of mood altering drugs and pain killers prescribed by the VA undermined his success.
He can no longer work. The VA ruled him 100 percent disabled but, in another twist of bureaucratic entanglement, Social Security has denied him disability benefits, so he is living on a pittance.
Thank you for your service. Thank you for your sacrifice.
Pasquale and OCC stepped in, and like he has for so many others, the lawyer helped Sierpowski navigate the arcane government paperwork.
"We've won every case and got these men and women the benefits and pensions they deserve," Pasquale said. "After what they've sacrificed - their physical and mental health, their limbs and livelihoods -- it's the least we could do."
Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com. Follow The Star-Ledger on Twitter @StarLedger and find us on Facebook.