Cover Story

Band of Brothers

Band of brothers. From Shakespeare to Stephen Ambrose, the term has been used to describe men in battle – the camaraderie built fighting side by side against a common enemy. Here, the term is used to describe a slightly different kind of brotherhood. Men in the Union Gospel Mission Freedom Bound recovery program are certainly fighting a battle against very real – albeit unseen – enemies, but the weapons, the goals and the methods have changed.

Sean Stevens, 40, was a career military man. He spent 17 years on active duty in the army, serving in many of the world’s hot spots – policing in Haiti, searching for abandoned mines in Ethiopia, peacekeeping in Kosovo, and interrogating prisoners in Iraq. He had reached the rank of E7 – sergeant first class – with top secret security clearance and had just returned to the United States after leading 93 men on a mission in Iraq when his life exploded like one of those abandoned mines.

While he had tried his best to ignore it, trouble had been lurking just below the surface for some time. When he and his wife, also a member of the military, married at 21, they already had twin girls. From the beginning, Sean said, he felt inadequate, unequipped and overwhelmed. He turned to alcohol as a way to escape the pressure and have fun. Then, for the next 20 years, it became his best friend – the one he desired and sought after more than any other.

Human friends were elusive. He feared people outside the military wouldn’t understand his experiences, and amongst his fellow soldiers, there was a bravado to be maintained – both because it was expected and because he wanted to advance in his career.

Sean remembers being disturbed by the sight of pigs feeding on the bodies of gang victims in the slums of Haiti but having nowhere to go with that emotion:  “I wasn’t going to go out and say, ‘Man, I’m having trouble today. I saw that pig eating those people, and it’s messing me up’ . . . It wasn’t manly. That wasn’t the military norm. You couldn’t feel bad. You couldn’t talk to anybody.”

Alcohol helped him to forget and to cope . . . until alcohol itself became the problem. Sean had trouble seeing that at first. He lost his job, his family, and ended up at the Union Gospel Mission but didn’t consider himself an alcoholic. He had hit rock bottom and didn’t know he was there.

Enter the brotherhood. Sean’s job at the Mission when he first came was helping to stock and organize the coolers. The men working alongside him spoke into his life: “Dude, you got a problem.” He said he was thinking about joining the recovery program, and one of them said, “What are you doing for the next 17 months? Ruining your life? Join the program. You’re not doing anything else.”

Sean came to the Mission in September 2008, joined the recovery program in December and started phase one of his classes in February 2009. In April, just as he was beginning to make some progress, a mistake from his drunken past caught up with him. Two police officers came to the Mission and arrested Sean for failure to appear at a child support hearing in Maryland. He spent the next four months in a Maryland jail. His counselor and men from the Mission stayed in touch. After the charges were dismissed, he knew he wanted to come back and continue his recovery, but he didn’t have any money. Men from the Mission took up a collection and sent him enough for a bus ticket back to Spokane.

“I knew I had to come back to change myself, and this is the first place I’ve ever felt connected or had the family structure, you know, a bunch of brothers, and everybody actually loves you and cares for who you really are. I could have had a million friends in the army or wherever, but nobody was close to me.  I wasn’t going to tell anybody my struggles.”

Being transparent is part of what builds the brotherhood at the Mission. Through small group therapy and a large group self-evaluation process, men work through the thoughts and feelings behind their behavior. In Sean’s words: “You share your feelings with each other, and for the first time, you’re able to tell other guys what you’re thinking and what’s happened to you and stuff you’ve never been able to tell anybody before . . . and nobody’s going to use it against you. I can trust these people. We can all trust each other.”

Sean is in phase three of the Freedom Bound recovery program. He hopes to go into military ministry when he finishes.