Charles heard of Give an Hour through e-mail over three years ago and immediately signed up to offer pro bono support: “I . . . always keep time open for my Give an Hour work.” He often gets to know the military families in the community through wives of soldiers who come to him with anger management issues. “At first I see the spouse and then if all goes well, we progress to couples therapy. The adjustments post-deployment can be huge for these young couples.” Military Academy, a small military boarding school for students from sixth grade through twelfth is twenty minutes away.
Charles spends one morning a week seeing cadets for mental health and behavioral issues and is always on call for them. “A good number of these children come from military families and have issues because of moving around so much and having parents deploy more than once. My wife’s father was in the military so she gives me insights that I myself might not have about what they go through.”
Most of Charles’s clients are young people, high schoolers and college students, but he has also counseled the occasional older veteran. “I recently worked with a Vietnam veteran in his sixties. He contacted me because I had worked with his daughter in the past. It seems he was at a bank one day and the teller was giving him the runaround, and suddenly he felt an overwhelming rage. Then he began to have flashbacks. He said, ‘I had no idea that I would remember half this awful stuff.’” Charles is an ardent supporter of Give an Hour. “These folks do so much for us, at the very least we should give them the help they need,” he says.
