Marines


News

Base Logo
Official U.S. Marine Corps Website
Crossroads of the Marine Corps

Base uses counselors, chaplains to confront tragedy

1 Apr 2013 | Mike DiCicco Marine Corps Base Quantico

Following the March 21, 2013, shooting at the Officer Candidates School, requests for sessions with chaplains and with secular counselors, provided by Marine Corps Community Services, skyrocketed, so reinforcements were called in.

“These things shake our foundation because they’re not supposed to occur,” said Lt. Cmdr. Arthur Wiggins, the chaplain at OCS. “So when they happen, we want to know why, and then our brain tries to wrap around it and make it rational.”

While such high-profile and confusing tragedies occur rarely, personal calamities happen to everyone, and warfighters deployed to combat zones are especially prone to traumatizing experiences. The Marine Corps is aware of this, and on the front lines of the effort to deal with personal or public tragedy are the chaplains, MCCS’s family advocacy counselors and military family life consultants, or MFLCs.

Laurie Wilson, director of MCCS’s Behavioral Health Programs, said counselors want to provide services early on, as a preventive measure. “We’re trying to get on the front end of it before anything happens that would be a formal incident,” she said.

In the wake of the shootings, MCCS requested a surge of 12 additional MFLCS, who are staying for up to 30 days, taking shifts to keep at least two of them on duty at OCS at all hours, Wilson said.  Additionally, family advocacy counselors were available during the week and on weekends.  

“It’s the first time we’ve done it since I’ve been here, and it worked pretty smoothly.”  

Navy Capt. Milton Gianulis, the Quantico command chaplain, said chaplains, especially in the military, are well-experienced at helping others handle grief and shock. “The church has been dealing with grief for over 2,000 years, and religion has been dealing with grief since Abraham was in diapers,” he said.

In the case of a public tragedy like last month’s, he said, a chaplain’s role is first to provide ministry to those who are shocked and need to feel the presence of God, then to offer comfort to those who came into contact with the carnage, and finally to help family, friends and coworkers of the deceased to work through the grief of their loss. For that final task, he said, a chaplain may refer people to clinical social workers.

“By nature, what a chaplain does is more crisis management,” Wiggins said, adding that when someone needs months of counseling for a specific issue, chaplains perform “what we call a handoff” to clinical counselors.

Likewise, MFLCS are intended to provide more for short-term counseling, Wilson said. In the interest of confidentiality, they take no notes and keep no records, and they cannot provide medical counseling.

With more and more Marines who have seen deployment now back in the garrisons, she said Quantico is in the process of beefing up counseling services. “That’s an expansion that’s happening Marine Corpswide.”

The base has two MFLCS for the installation and one for children and youth, and another recently embedded in the Headquarters and Service Battalion. Another MFLC will arrive at The Basic School next week, and Security Battalion is to have its own MFLC in the near future, Wilson said.

She said the base plans to open a counseling center at TBS sometime after July.  Four of the community counselors that the base plans to hire will be there, along with three new Family Advocacy Program counselors and one substance abuse counselor. The community counselors will be able to provide more extensive counseling services and make diagnoses, but will not be able to prescribe medication. If they think medication may be necessary, they can refer patients to a psychiatrist.

Wilson said the counselors also collaborate with the chaplains. “The chaplains refer people to us, and we refer people to them.” She said some people respond better to religious counseling.

“We’re there to find faith in all kinds of human experience and help people work through whatever kind of human experience they’re having,” Gianulis said. In the case of a disaster, whether public or personal, he said, “a chaplain’s presence is there to assist people in finding meaning, understanding and spirituality.”

“We’re all working through it, but you don’t have to work through it alone,” Wiggins said of the shooting. “We’re going to work through this together.”

— Writer: mdicicco@quanticosentryonline.com


Marine Corps Base Quantico