Arizona Coalition for Military Families hosted its annual Statewide Symposium in Support of Service Members, Veterans & Their Families in Phoenix last week.
Various leaders spoke at the event, the most memorable being a well-known widow to the community.
Bailey McCray, widow of clinician and veteran Dr. Adam McRay, shared her story about her husband’s suicide. Adam, a veteran, and a psychologist who was known in the Phoenix community through his work VA outreach, refused to get help out of fear he’d lose his license to practice, according to McCray.
Bailey said he ended up losing his practice anyway.
Groups later broke out into rooms, discussing veteran care strategies and topics.
At a creating veteran communities workshop, three speakers discussed the importance of creating veteran spaces.
Speaker Ro Gonzales, from the non-profit Valors Veterans Community AZ, said veterans stumble down similar paths and if they don’t reconnect with others with similar experiences.
“I was homeless, until I was looking for resources and stuff, and I didn’t know where to look to. I didn’t know where to go to. I was on top of South Mountain ready to pull the trigger,” he said. “My purpose now is, how do I keep my brothers and sisters from going down the same road.”
Speaker and Arizona veteran hall of famer, Travis Burns, said veterans are wired differently.
“The military serves to protect the national security interests of the United States, whatever they are, wherever they are, people have to be trained and conditioned to endure, inflict and survive the warfare environment that training leaves marks,” he said. “Approximately 30% of veteran military veteran suicides are from people that never deployed. So if you have been trained for warfare, you have learned two things. You have learned the vast and terrible truth of war, and you learn the truth of life or death.”
Army veteran Jessica Roza, founder of West Valley Women Veterans, told the group that women need veteran-specific communities for themselves.
“I think when you’re in the military, it’s a man’s world, right? And you stick out like a sore thumb, but when you are coming back into the community, you become invisible,” she said. “And a lot of places that are veteran-serving organizations, they say we welcome women veterans, and we want them to join our groups. But one of the things that women veterans have said is that they feel like they don’t belong. So what we did is we created a space for them.”
