Colleen has been highlighted here on You Served more than once and we’ve had her on the Spouse and Family Highlight show a couple of times as well. She is also a part of the Pittsburgh Tribune investigation related to the last article I posted.
Military Wives Take Charge to Ensure Quality Care for Injured Husbands
Excerpt
WASHINGTON — Colleen Kenny Saffron of Castle Shannon married her artilleryman nearly two decades before an improvised explosive device detonated on his truck near Al Rasheed, Iraq. The May 5, 2004, blast killed two buddies next to him and carved off parts of his jaw, which doctors can’t replace.
The muscles in Staff Sgt. Terry Saffron’s arm unrolled like bark on a tree — surgeons pared four inches of bone from it — and he can’t always remember where he is when he’s left alone in the soup aisle of a grocery. The Veterans Administration rated the former Ambridge man 100 percent permanently disabled. He retired honorably from the Army in October.
Colleen, 39, who is legally deaf, quit doing freelance design work to care for him and raise their three children. During the six years when Terry, 39, was in the Army medical system — the last year in Fort Hood’s Warrior Transition unit — she says she received no educational loans, extra financial help or special training about how to tend to her brain-injured husband as they edged toward his retirement.
“Everything I learned, I learned online. All the student loans I got, I got on my own to help the family when he transitioned. I received little help from Army. Individuals within the Army were wonderful, but as a system, a process, I got very little help,” she said.
This is a serious issue that absolutely needs more attention. I feel the wounded and their families are too often forgotten and/or ignored.
Forgotten, left behind and sometimes dare I say punished — maybe not in a direct way, but in a very passive aggressive way. If it happens to the warriors it happens to their families too. I saw how my husband was punished for his leg breaking during training and how hard it was for me to have to sit quietly and watch it happen… if I had said a word he would have been punished more. It’s wrong. I love our Army but there are some mentalities that simply need to go.