Graphic novel aims to ease stress for corpsmen - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Graphic novel aims to ease stress for corpsmen

SAN DIEGO — The Navy has a new tool to help hospital corpsmen grapple with the realities and stresses of war and combat deployments.

The broad experiences of the expeditionary combat corpsman – “Doc” to Marines, Navy Seabees and other deployed sailors – are weaved into four fictional characters whose war stories unfold and lives intersect in Iraq in “The Docs: A Graphic Novel.”

The book was developed by the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego and based on real-life corpsmen and Marines and situations they face in combat and their personal lives.

The NHRC created the 200-page novel for corpsmen as part of Navy Medicine’s “Care for the Caregiver” program.

“Many of them are asked to play these dual roles, to function as one of that line unit but when someone is hurt, they are immediately turned to the caregiver” role, said Heidi Kraft, an NHRC clinical psychologist and former lieutenant commander who penned a war memoir, “Rule Number Two: Lessons I Learned in a Combat Hospital.” Data shows “our expeditionary corpsmen are struggling with a lot of these issues, and certainly that is not a surprise.”

The novel’s creators wanted to develop a tool that was hip, relevant and resonating among corpsmen.

“Graphic novels are very, very popular with this age group,” Kraft said. “The idea was to give Navy corpsmen a training tool, whether they are a junior corpsman or senior master chief who has gone multiple times, at any level to think about what they face in combat.”

The goal, she said, was to acknowledge their experiences and remind them that they must care for one another as they care for their Marines. “It’s something that we hope they would read and be entertained…and they will care about these characters,” she added.

That’s not always easy, said Jerry Larson, the center’s chief psychiatrist for behavioral health. “The military is a culture of stoicism,” Larson said. “It’s easy to believe you are the only one struggling or are dealing with stress.”

He hopes the novel will help corpsmen to recognize the toll combat has taken on them, realize it’s more normal these days and seek out help.

The Navy has bought 5,000 copies of the novel and will distribute it to training schools. The novel also is posted online for download from Navy Medicine’s website. Copies also can be ordered through the Marine Corps’ Combat and Operational Stress Control website.

Cast of characters

The novel’s four corpsmen will likely be familiar characters to many sailors and Marines.

There’s two junior Docs, Hospitalman Derek Jackson, 19, a single sailor on his first combat deployment, and Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class Jason Banks, also 19 with a fiancée Amanda at home and a mother suffering from cancer. Both are on their first deployment to Iraq with an infantry battalion.

There’s the seasoned Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Erica Mendez, 22, a war vet assigned to an infantry headquarters company who was hit in the shoulder by shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade on a previous combat tour.

Then there’s Hospital Corpsman 1st Class John Wallace, 38, a reservist assigned to the Seabees with a wife and kids and a struggling business at home who reenlisted even after a mortar strike on his battalion’s mess tent killed several sailors on a previous combat tour.