Air Force Major Helping Healing of Combat PTSD

Before you cringe reading Wounded Warrior, keep reading because this is about Wounded Warrior Program and to them healing is not a project. It is a mission.

If you think that women are only hit by PTSD from experiencing sexual assaults, this should be an eyeopener. Too many forget they are still in the same combat zones and trying to get through it the best they can. After all, the lives of others depend on them too.

There are heroes in combat and then there are heroes because of it. Maj. Lisa McCranie is one of them.

Wracked by PTSD for years after combat, an Air Force pilot finally got help
San Antonio Express-News
By Sig Christenson
January 28, 2017

That’s how it is in the pilot community, she said, explaining that no pilot she’s known has ever admitted to suffering from PTSD and the Air Force had no formal support program to help them.

Photo: Bob Owen, STAFF / SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS
Members of one of the basketball teams playing an exhibition game huddle before the start of a game at the Air Force Wounded Warrior Program Warrior Care Event at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph on Friday, Jan. 13, 2017. The CARE event provides seriously wounded, ill and injured military members, veterans and their caregivers focused and personalized service through caregiver support, training, adaptive and rehabilitative sports events.

A veteran of Afghanistan, Maj. Lisa McCranie is a pilot to the core, so steeped in the culture of never showing weakness that she hid every symptom of post traumatic stress disorder even as the weight of war began to crush her spirit.

Years in uniform and the bulk of 2,800 hours in the cockpit went by — 1,100 of them in combat — before she even realized she had PTSD.

McCranie found herself in yet another war, to get help.

“I told my commanders, ‘I’m not OK right now,’ and then part of my story is how I’ve been treated in the military, which hasn’t been good. I had an ops group commander who basically threatened to take my wings from me if I didn’t go through a re-qualification and fly,” she recalled.

McCranie recently earned a medical retirement from the Air Force and will soon leave the service and head to a culinary school in Denver. A feeling of isolation followed her through much of her military career, but after spending time at a recent Air Force Wounded Warrior program Warrior CARE event in San Antonio, which drew more than 120 wounded, ill and injured airmen, she was relieved to find that she wasn’t alone.

McCranie flew four different aircraft after entering the Air Force in 2004 — the C-17 Globemaster III, T-6A Texan II, MC-12W, a reconnaissance plane, and the UV-18A Twin Otter.
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