The Star Thrower

Help just one person - even if all you can do is convince them they're not alone.

Please enjoy another chapter of my unpublished book.

Sometimes when life-changing events happen, the significance is lost on us until we have the benefit of viewing it through the lens of hindsight. But every once in a while, something happens that smacks you upside the head in real time, and I’ll never forget the day I got a call from the Under Secretary of Veterans Affairs for Benefits in Washington DC.

I was working at the VA hospital in San Diego as the call center manager when a complaint was filed stating I had refused to enforce the dress code. The dress code applied to all administrative staff, regardless of whether they worked with Veterans in person or on the phone. It was the call center. I mean, I made everyone wear clothes – but I said jeans and tee shirts were okay. Someone who worked in the call center decided they’d rather wear business casual and filed a complaint against me. I still hadn’t been indoctrinated in the culture of government employment, and I didn’t realize people would rather be uncomfortable than let others be happy for a second. Now I found myself waiting on the outcome of a review from the Administrative Investigative Board (AIB).

Before we go any further, I should tell you how I ended up as the call center manager at the Department of Veterans Affairs, because it was about a million miles from where I thought I would end up. Frankly, it was a bizarre series of life experiences that led me to that position.

I was completely lost when I got out of the Navy. I went back to waiting tables at Denny’s while finishing my bachelor’s - compartmentalizing the entire ordeal of my sexual assault and moving forward in life like an automaton with the goal of simply surviving. I managed to get a job as an auditor for a major corporation but grew tired of saving “the man” millions while getting paid pittance and being treated like a sexy librarian. After completing my MBA, I sold my condo, quit my corporate job, cashed out my 401K, and didn’t work for several years.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I did join a band and took a part time job at Guitar Center for the discount (cost plus 8% - not too shabby.) It was around 2006, eleven years after my military sexual assault and eleven years of dissociating and shoving down memories, that I began to have panic attacks. At first, I thought they were mini strokes or heart attacks, but the doctors at the VA laughed that off because of my age, and they began asking me if I had ever been assaulted or experienced any kind of trauma. Because I had blocked it out and crammed it away in the back of my brain, I said no every time they asked. Until the time when I said “Well, there was this ONE thing…”

In the meantime, I was doing odd jobs here and there. But I was running out of money, and the part time Guitar Center gig wasn’t cutting it anymore. So I took a full-time job at the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego as part of her grand opening crew in 2007.

My job was to help set up, and then operate “Ground Control.” That’s what the Hard Rock called the hotel operator - but the idea was that Ground Control could take care of anything you needed so the guest wouldn’t get annoyed having to be transferred to a different department. Ground Control operators could take your room service order, fulfill your housekeeping requests, book or change a reservation, send security or engineering to your room - whatever your heart desired. And we called it “First Call Resolution.”

By now you must be asking yourself “what does this have to do with working at the VA?”

Well, it was 2008, Senator Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency was in full swing, and I was all in on his campaign. I even got his hope symbol tattooed on the inside of my right wrist the night he won the Iowa Caucus - mostly because I was proud of America for securing the nomination of either a woman or a black man as one of the major party candidates. It was a time of immense hope. Having been a community organizer, Obama called us to be of service to our country during his campaign just as JFK had done decades earlier. I felt that call in my soul and decided to answer it.

As a disabled Veteran, I couldn’t join the military again. But I had been going to the VA for my panic attacks and was just starting to uncover the PTSD connection to my experience with military sexual trauma - so I decided I wanted to help Veterans for a living. Getting a job in the federal government isn’t easy, even when you’re a disabled Veteran. I applied for every job that was available for over six months until I finally got a position as a GS-5 Medical Support Assistant. That’s a fancy term for file clerk.

My job was to check Veterans in for appointments, answer phones, fax documents, and file. It paid half of what I earned as a corporate auditor - but I finally felt like I had a purpose. Serendipitously, I took the Executive Oath of Office on the same day President Obama took his - Inauguration Day, January 20th, 2009. That day also happened to be my 35th birthday. When I raised my right hand, there on the inside of my wrist was his symbol of hope. This was the beginning of my life after the trauma - a job that would save my life, and a job that I would ultimately sacrifice for my next calling.

After three months on the job, we got word that the call center supervisor - a GS-9 - had left for another position. The Chief of Health Administration Services, who would eventually become one of the most valuable mentors I’ve ever had the pleasure of working for, called me into her office.

“I hear you have some call center experience. We need a supervisor. The position is a GS-9, and since you have a master’s degree, I can promote you into the position immediately. I have to warn you, though, it’s a mess over there. Morale is at an all-time low. You’d be in charge of 20 miserable GS-5s and a couple of GS-7s who would all be wondering how you got promoted so fast. And the metrics haven’t met the standards in I don’t know how long. It’ll be thankless and damn near impossible.”

Never backing down from a challenge, I took the job immediately. It took a few years, but I implemented the same First Call Resolution concept we had at The Hard Rock Hotel, promoting all the GS-5s to GS-6s. I increased the number of representatives from 20 to 40. They all had the authority to handle whatever the Veteran might need so we wouldn’t have to transfer them to a different department. The average hold time went from over an hour to under 20 seconds. I even implemented a customer service award. Of course, the VA wouldn’t spring for a plaque, and ethics policy wouldn’t allow me to spend more than $20 on the staff, so I bought a 1963 copper bowling trophy from an eBay estate sale.

When I received the trophy, it had a little bowling guy on top and a plate on the front that read GLENN WELDEN: LEAGUE CHAMPION: 1963-1964. At first, I thought about removing the plate and replacing it with “CUSTOMER SERVICE AWARD,” but that would put me over the $20 limit. So I contacted the seller to see if I could find out more about Glenn Weldon. Here’s what I got back:

“Well, he was very active in this little town and accomplished a lot. He was 92 when he died, and it was a good and peaceful day. He went to church with his lady, went out to lunch, dropped her off, then came home and died peacefully in his sleep. What a perfect way to end your life - with no pain and no sorrow.”

I googled Glenn and learned he was a WWII Veteran, who spent the remainder of his life after the war in public service working for the US Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation to protect waterways in Oregon. It was a truly incredible life of service, so I left his name on the trophy and called it the Glenn Weldon Public Service Award. After $19.98 and a ton of paperwork, I was able to comply with government ethics rules. (Yet Clarence Thomas doesn’t think a $500K trip needs to be reported; he claims he failed to understand the financial disclosure forms. I’m sorry. If you can’t figure out a financial disclosure form, you shouldn’t be interpreting the U.S. Constitution. But I digress.)

The call center was humming along when I decided to begin work on a doctorate in health administration, as I was determined to work at the VA helping Veterans for the rest of my life. I wanted to learn more about public and government health administration, so that maybe one day I could run a hospital or be the Chief of Health Administration Services like my mentor. But while I did my very best to adhere to policy and regulation, in the government you’re bound to run afoul of the rules at some point. For me, that was failing to enforce the dress code in the VA call center.

Additionally, I was running risk assessments that I ended up using as school assignments, which unbeknownst to me was also against the rules. After the AIB, I was issued a three-day suspension - which was an interesting meeting in the Associate Director’s office. Interesting because the day she called me into her office to dole out my punishment, she also had a national telecommunications award and monetary bonus waiting for me for my work running the call center.

I was temporarily assigned to Health Benefits & Enrollment (HB&E) while the Administrative Investigative Board hearings played out. HB&E wasn’t the best by any stretch, but it was a dream compared to where I was initially detailed during the AIB: the morgue. I was like “can they do that?” Can they just make me work with corpses if I don’t want to? That seems incredibly fucked up, so I told the boss there’s no way I’m removing jewelry from deceased Veterans to prepare them for transport. I’m pretty sure you have to want to work in decedent affairs and you shouldn’t be forced to – so they reluctantly moved me to HB&E.

As an aside, I will say that during my brief stint with the dead, I learned about some of the coolest things the VA does for deceased Veterans. First, when the Veteran is ready to be moved from the morgue, the body is draped in the American flag and wheeled past every available employee who lines the hallway and salutes or puts their hand on their heart honoring the Veteran as they pass. The VA does this with every single Veteran. And if there’s no next of kin, a memorial service is held in the chapel on site in adherence with the religion – or absence of one – listed in the person’s service record (which is also listed on their dog tags.) Those memorial services – often held for homeless Veterans or those who simply have no family or friends, are open to the public. I never realized how many Veterans are alone when they pass, but those are the most well-attended services in the chapel, and any employee who isn’t busy at that time is usually in attendance.

I was sitting at my desk at HB&E sometime at the end of summer of 2012, when I got the call from Under Secretary Retired Brigadier General Allison Hickey. I’m not sure I can convey the big-dealness of having an under secretary in DC call you personally when you are a low-level line supervisor. One must first understand the importance of the chain of command and the vastness of the agency. Chain of Command, or CoC, is a sacrosanct concept in the military and government civil service. It means that under no circumstance do you ever speak to anyone but your co-workers and direct supervisor about a problem. Going over your supervisor’s head for anything other than egregious transgressions on their part means you’re disrespecting the CoC, and completely betraying your supervisor. You can be disciplined for disrespecting the chain - It’s simply not tolerated. Unlike other transgressions which are seen more as tedious than threatening to the agency, like sexual harassment for example, this can get you written up and reprimanded in short order. As they say in government, “shit rolls downhill.”

Then there’s the massive size of the VA. Nearly 400,000 people are employed by the Agency, and at any given time, there’s about 390,000 between you and any director. So your chance of meeting a director or speaking to an under secretary is basically zero. One time, when I was working in the private sector, I got to meet the VP of sales of Sprint Telecommunications, and I have to say it wasn’t any different from meeting a random person at a party. But when I was told I had a call from a retired brigadier general who was also the current director of an office of the VA in Washington DC, it was like getting a call from Dolly fucking Parton. Like WHOA. To say I was nervous is an understatement. One of those psychological remnants of getting the soul beat out of you at boot camp.

So what events had occurred that could possibly have led me to receive a phone call from a retired brigadier general serving as an under secretary at the top of my organization?

In March of 2009, after a long road of therapy and recovery surrounding my military sexual assault, I had opened a claim with the Veteran’s Benefits Administration (VBA) for PTSD. I recounted the story of what happened, put together all my PTSD treatment records, and submitted my claim. Navigating the process of filing a claim with the VA is so complex, it’s a wonder that any Veteran suffering from mental health issues can do it, and sometimes I wonder if that’s the point.

It seems like the VA is counting on you to give up. And people are just looking for ways to say “no” to you. In September of that year, my claim was denied based on a lack of evidence because I hadn’t formally reported the assault. They even had the gall to suggest that because my father died when I was 16, that early tragedy was likely the source of my PTSD. My father died of complications from exposure to Agent Orange. The VA had also denied his claim, but that’s another story I’ll save for later.

It took me eight months and the assistance of therapy to work up the courage to file an appeal. This time, I got a San Diego County Veterans representative to assist me. I even secured a letter from my therapist - and the head of the Military Sexual Trauma department at the San Diego VA - stating that my PTSD symptoms were not caused by my father’s death, but explicitly by a rape that happened while I was enlisted.

My appeal was denied again.

The VA stated that I did not report my rape, nor did they have any “markers” in my service record showing behavioral or conduct problems. My grades didn’t suffer, nor did I have any disciplinary issues “consistent with rape.” You’d think that the VA would understand that a common coping mechanism for trauma is to bury yourself in your work and overachieve. The more you occupy your mind, the less time you have to listen to your brain repeat the mantra that everything is your fault.

There are so many coping mechanisms for PTSD, but they all circle around the same survival spiral: keep your mind too occupied or too numb to think about anything else, because inevitably – those memories will creep back in, and you’ll have to (GASP) PROCESS THEM! Self-avoidance and dissociation eventually became second nature to me, but early on, all I could do to manage was to keep my nose in a book and study. That method of coping would be the story of my life after the VA piled on additional trauma by repeatedly denying my claim.

Imagine battling with yourself, every single day, to accept as absolute fact that a rape isn’t your fault, only to have the organization responsible for helping you tell you that it’s all in your head. I can assure you it’s absolutely devastating to any progress made by the eight-week cognitive behavioral band-aids provided by the student-doctors.

To add to the absurdity of the situation, they went on to cite an incident of domestic abuse in my health record from 2005. At the time, an abusive boyfriend had gone on another rant, grabbing at my wrists, resulting in bruises on my arms. I reported this incident so that I could file a restraining order against this man. The VA felt it was this incident that was responsible for my PTSD. Damned if you report, damned if you don’t. I filed a second appeal and was waiting for the review when my therapist told me about a documentary in the works about sexual assault in the military called The Invisible War, and encouraged me to contact the producers – Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering.

I almost didn’t appear in the movie because until she told me about it, I hadn’t shared the story of my rape with anyone other than my therapist; not with family or with any of my friends. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to tell my story. I was fragile, and the truth of what happened had become muddled in the haze of disassociation. I struggled with my own truth and was blaming myself for the rape, doubting that it happened the way I remembered. The words from the officer I tried to report it to kept echoing in my head: “Let’s just chalk this up to what it really is: poor judgment on your part.”

I wasn’t sure I could sit for an interview and talk about my rape, especially when it could end up in a movie seen by millions. I still felt shame because in my mind I was at least partly to blame. But my doctor encouraged me to reach out to the producers, explaining that giving voice to my story could help other Veterans in similar situations feel like they’re not so alone. I decided to go for it and called.

The producers had already wrapped up filming by then and they called back to apologize, saying it was already in editing. But when they heard my story, they decided they wanted to include it and have me be a part of the project. I was thrilled and terrified at the same time. Thinking about relaying my story on camera was panic-inducing, but I figured if my story can help just one other person, it would be worth it. Having to relive the trauma by discussing it is never easy, but it gets less difficult with each telling.

I drove up to Los Angeles to the home of one of the producers. I sat under bright lights in a living room while they asked me questions from off camera. It was just me and the them. No live audience like I was used to with my stand-up comedy – no feedback about what I was saying. Just speaking the truth into the ether. I drove home numb, unsure of how it would turn out. Worried that no one would believe me. Certain that everyone would laugh at what I had to say.

Then, on a random Friday, back at work, within weeks of the film being released in theaters, I ran into my primary care provider, Leslie Satz. She asked how I was doing. I told her things weren’t going so well because the VA had denied my claim multiple times, and I was losing hope that I would ever have the validation for what happened to me over fifteen years earlier. I’ve spoken to many Veterans who say the claim denials were more traumatizing to them then the initial attack, and I can confirm that to be true. Here I am - fighting desperately to convince myself the rape wasn’t my fault - and here's the government telling me it didn’t even happen. Three times, no less, and over three years. I often wonder what therapists at the VA go through with their patients battling the agency that’s supposed to be there to help them.

My doctor thought she knew someone who could help. She gave me the name of a good friend who was well-connected in D.C. named Dr. Moseley Brown who worked as the Assistant Director for the Center for Women Veterans. She gave me her email and told me to tell Dr. Brown my story and my involvement in “The Film” (that’s how everyone at the VA referred to The Invisible War.) The next day, Dr. Brown responded, letting me know that I had her full support and that she was forwarding my story to Under Secretary Hickey. She asked me to extend her warm regards to Leslie, and to keep her posted about the status of my claim. The first feelings of acceptance were a warm and impactful welcome.

Later that same day, the phone rang. It was the under secretary.

Keep in mind, I had been working on this for over three years, and now within a mere four days after mentioning to my primary care provider that I was in The Invisible War, I was on the phone with the woman at the tippy top of the Veteran’s Benefits Administration.

That phone call set off a cascade of events that I can only describe as incredibly “federal government.” Tuesday morning, I received a call from a Veteran Service Representative at my local regional office in San Diego stating she had looked at my case, but because of the regulations that they have to follow at lower levels, and because there were no “markers” in my file showing that the rape had definitely occurred within service, her hands were tied. She did say she would help by expediting my video conference hearing; a coveted first step toward getting a full exam to evaluate my condition.

Well, that apparently wasn’t the answer General Hickey was looking for because Tuesday afternoon I received a call from the Military Sexual Trauma Coordinator in San Diego. She said, “I have looked over your file, which I haven’t had a chance to review because it’s been in appeals since before I took the job as the MST Coordinator, and I have found a “marker” that will allow me to schedule you a Compensation and Pension exam.”

The marker she found was that I had reported to sick call on base right after the time of the incident, and even though I didn’t tell them why I wanted pain medication (I was desperately trying to hide what happened for fear of retribution), she felt that because I sought medical attention, it was a possible “marker” for the incident.

I had also asked for birth control because I had heard a rumor that if you took ten birth control pills at once, you could prevent a pregnancy. I had not received the birth control because there was no gynecologist on base at that time, as I had been one of the first handful of women accepted into the Nuclear Program.

Two weeks later I received a phone call to schedule a compensation and pension exam (to evaluate HOW disabled I was), and shortly after that, my claim was adjudicated. It was August 12, 2012 - a day I will never forget. It’s even a recurring event in my calendar listed as “the day I took back control.” The rape was officially acknowledged by the United States Military, and I felt like I could breathe again.

Not long afterward, I sent an email to Allison Hickey expressing my most sincere gratitude, and she wrote back immediately saying she was happy to help. Her email signature said, “you are my starfish.”

You are my starfish?

I couldn’t let that one lie, so I wrote back asking “Starfish?” and she sent me a photo of one of those inspirational posters. Here’s the gist:

A child is walking along a beach, picking up starfish and throwing them back into the sea. A cynical old man approaches her and asks, “What are you doing?”

“I’m saving these starfish,” she replies.

The old man says “But look! This beach is miles long and there are thousands of starfish. You can’t possibly save them all. You can’t possibly make a difference.”

The girl reaches down, picks up one starfish, throws it into the sea and says “No, but I made a difference for that one.”

Ten years later, in 2022, the VA would finally determine my PTSD amounted to a 100% service connected disability. That same year, I was invited to the White House for the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act and ran into Representative Madeline Dean. We spoke for a while about the benefits of the legislation and how I could help get the word out. I asked her to be on my podcast and we exchanged information. Then I noticed she was wearing a starfish pin on her lapel next to her congressional pin.

“General Allison Hickey?” I asked.

“You know it.” She replied

EPILOGUE:

I wanted to know where the Starfish story originated, so I googled it. Turns out, it was an old inspirational poster from the 1990s that originated from a 1964 book called “The Unexpected Universe.”

I immediately ordered the book. When it arrived, my Alexa said “Allison. The Unexpected Universe has arrived,” which I found amusing.

When I found the Starfish chapter, I was absolutely blown away. The original inspirational poster focused on the little girl throwing starfish back into the sea, exclaiming that she loved saving the starfish one at a time.

But the reality of the story goes much deeper.

There’s the star thrower, the starfish, the cynic, and the sea. Four crucial participants.

Back when I needed help, I was the starfish and Retired Brigadier General Allison Hickey was the star thrower. That is the simple designation.

But The Unexpected Universe tells the story of how the cynic sees the little girl every day at the beach, and eventually joins her in throwing stars back into the sea. The cynic eventually realizes the joy and impact of helping each starfish as opposed to the doubt of being able helping them all. And eventually, the cynic himself becomes a star thrower.

This allegory taught me that we go through cycles. Sometimes you’re the starfish. Sometimes you’re the cynic.

But we can all throw stars.

~AG