We Honor Veterans, trains hospice workers to serve dying veterans

Program tailors hospice care to traumatized veterans

By RAY SEGEBRECHT

Special to The Star

The Vietnam veteran pulled low the bill of his baseball cap, staring absently at the small terrier splayed across his lap.

From his recliner, he wouldn’t let Crossroads Hospice chaplain Ron McCullough see his eyes or the trauma behind them — now decades old, yet intensifying as he drew nearer each day to death.

Though graphic memories of killing Viet Cong were resurfacing, increasingly, he insisted he didn’t want a chaplain. Nor did he want to talk about the war, as if trying to dismiss McCullough and his military service at once.

Gary Jones was dying of cancer, but McCullough detected another condition that he has seen more frequently in recent years: latent post-traumatic stress disorder afflicting dying veterans as they confront unresolved war memories, some for the first time.

McCullough is part of a new national program that offers terminally ill veterans honor and emotional healing. The program, We Honor Veterans, trains hospice workers to serve dying veterans by helping them die peacefully and with pride in their service.



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