Bridgewater
The group, known as the Vermont Patriot Guard Riders, had just performed a flag line ceremony at the top of the grassy hill, where a grieving family was holding a celebration of life that was made necessary by a tragic death.
During the flag line ceremony, the riders held flags aloft to commemorate a fallen veteran. But when the 11 group members had trooped up the hill in formation, each one holding a flag, the steep grade had been a challenge for those who have lost a few steps since their Vietnam days.
The woman, Woodstock resident and state captain Patricia Howardell, spoke to her boyfriend, a tall man with long hair and full beard named Gary Herbert. He had been awarded the Purple Heart after being wounded in Vietnam in ‘67.
Howardell asked whether she had gone slow enough to suit them. Herbert grunted at her.
“Too slow,” he said.
They are few, and informal, but the members of the Vermont chapter of a growing national motorcycle group provide a kind of veteran support services that — as far as some people are concerned — the U.S. government cannot.
With the day’s mission behind them, they reverently rolled up their flags and stowed them away in the compartments of their motorcycles. The group began to break up, riding off in groups of two or three.
At the top of the hill at Ottauquechee Farm, friends and family of Brennen Smith Jenkins gathered in small groups in and around the Retreat Center, with children pulling soda cans from a cooler and adults filling paper plates from a table of cold cuts.
In the living room, a picture display showed Jenkins as a man who kept his hair short, his biceps bulging, and his face stubbled.
In most of the photographs — fly fishing, or lounging in sunglasses and a cowboy hat — Jenkins’ expression is serious, but there are exceptions, mostly when alongside a woman with slate-gray eyes, honey-blond hair and a charmingly crooked smile.
That’s Angie Prior, the hostess, who was exchanging warm hugs with guests.
Prior’s 11-year relationship with Jenkins began in Killington in 2005, when she rented a home across the street from him. Jenkins, a handsome 22, had already earned the Army Service Ribbon and the National Defense Service Medal, but Prior said it was his personality that drew her.
“He was just so smart and entertaining and kind and generous,” she said.
Soon, they were in love, with many happy moments frozen in the pictures: Jenkins holding a rescued merganser chick, or clasping a CD by the indie rock duo Tegan and Sara to his bare chest. Jenkins and Prior sitting low on the surface of a lake, kayaking, or kissing in a misty graveyard.
But there was also a dark side to Jenkins, one that took root during his time in the service and never let go. In addition to the medals, he came home from Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Some days he shut down completely, sleeping all day without talking or eating. Or he might take off in his pickup, occasionally for days at a time, before he would reappear, chastened.
“We wouldn’t have a big discussion about it,” Prior said. “He would always be apologetic and say that he wants to be better. We would go from there. Sometimes, it would be a great couple months.”
Their months of love piled up into years. The PTSD hurt, but there were signs of hope. Jenkins began to share his pain.
“That took me four years to get out of him,” said Prior. “He was military police. So he had to do a lot of interrogation, and a lot of horrible things. Sometimes, he said, they were just local farmers and would have nothing to give, no information. But they were suspects. He did what he was told.”
Howardell, like Prior, has had a front-row seat to the pain that military service can cause.
When, in 2002, Alan Howardell stepped out of his red pickup truck and onto the drive of her Langdon, N.H., farmhouse for their first date, Pat Howardell knew there was more to learn about the slight shuffle to his walk.
As a nursing supervisor, she was familiar with all sorts of medical conditions, but she didn’t ask, not right away. She was nervous enough already about the date, which had been set up by friends.
He was tall and thin, with a full-faced beard marked by wire rimmed glasses. His jeans and boots seemed at odds with his profession as a manager at Merck Pharmaceuticals.
She described him as “a man of very few words,” but soon he told her he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s at 40, which she says was the result of contact with Agent Orange during his two years as a helicopter door gunner in the Mekong Delta of southern Vietnam.
In 2005, they married and moved into his Woodstock home, where he played badminton with her three children, and helped her bring life to the yard — apple and pear trees, Japanese maples, rhododendrons, gladiolas and irises.
Over the years, the Parkinson’s ate away at his independence. He could no longer play badminton. Then he could no longer garden. He lost the ability to walk, then to stand, then to feed himself.
They sold the house to pay for his medical care, and moved to a different home in Woodstock. The Parkinson’s began to affect his mind. He developed a habit of smoking in bed, which would have been dangerous, had it not been a figment of his imagination.
“There was no cigarette,” said Howardell. “He’d tell me to get the ashtray.”
His condition continued to deteriorate. A couple of months before he died, he had visions, talking to men she had never met.
“How are you, Buddy?” he’d say. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”
She knew, from the way he said “Buddy,” he was talking to those he’d served with in Vietnam, all those years ago.
Like Jenkins, Alan Howardell was not eager to discuss the war. When a priest from the VA came to his deathbed, she heard details of his service for the first time.
“He talked about how they would take no prisoners,” she said. “He bared his soul. It was time to ask for forgiveness.”
She said the priest reminded him it was a time of war. “That woman, that child,” he said. “They weren’t your friends.”
Howardell has only one memory of the burial of her husband, who died in December 2010.
“All I remember from that day is the American flag flying in the breeze,” she said. “That was my introduction to the Patriot Guard Riders. I wanted to get involved.”
After joining the group, she met Herbert, who taught her to ride. Today, Howardell and Herbert are the captain and assistant captain, and perform dozens of missions each year. In freezing January temperatures, it can get lonely.
“Sometimes it’s only me and Gary here,” she said. “But it’s still a flag line. You only need one.”
The national Patriot Guard Riders formed in 2005 to hold counter-protests to the Westboro Baptist Church, which picketed the funerals of soldiers they said had been killed in action as a divine punishment for the United States’ tolerant attitudes toward homosexuality.
Since then, the riders have broadened their mission to offer support to veterans, emergency responders and their families in other contexts.
Though the group is open to anyone, events are typically populated by a variety of motorcycle groups — Rolling Thunder and Vermont Thunder, Live Free or Die, the Red Knights and the Blue Knights, and the Combat Veterans Motorcycle Association, among others.
This Saturday, they’ll ride to Jericho to hold a flag line for Michael “Spike” Pendriss, a postal worker who served in Vietnam. That same day, they’ll go to the Brookfield Center Cemetery for Cpl. Raymond Phelps, another recently deceased veteran. The following day, they’ll be in Colchester for a “yellow ribbon pre-deployment” event, where they’ll shake hands and offer thanks to outgoing soldiers.
Their actions have knitted together veterans who would otherwise be cut off from each other, and from the healing that being part of a community can bring.
The value of groups like the Patriot Guard Riders comes into focus against the backdrop of the VA, which spent $295 million in Vermont in 2014 to help the state’s population of 48,600 veterans.
Because it’s a wing of the same federal government that sent soldiers overseas, often with orders that resulted in great personal loss — like Jenkins’ PTSD — the dynamic can be complicated.
When he was living with Prior in Stockbridge, Vt., Jenkins was among those who did seek support from the White River Junction VA Medical Center.
Prior said Jenkins, after years of counseling and other forms of treatment, agreed early this year to undergo a different kind of therapy, one that involved him talking about his traumatic wartime experiences.
Prior said they had mixed feelings about revisiting his trauma, but Jenkins ultimately decided to go through with it. Four weeks into the program, Jenkins, 33, unraveled for the last time. Prior said that, on the night he died, one of the things Jenkins said was that he didn’t want to go to therapy.
You don’t have to, Prior told him. She begged him to put the gun down.
He didn’t.
“The only thing I can say is, PTSD is real,” Prior said. “It’s the silent, deadly killer. You can’t see it. And it’s so real. It can ruin lives.”
Laura Gibson, the medical center’s associate chief of mental health, said she couldn’t comment on any particular person’s treatment, but cognitive processing therapy is a process that can include patients writing a narrative about their trauma.
“Some people really want to write about that trauma and delve into it, and others want to skip it, and the therapist respects that,” she said.
Other components of cognitive processing therapy include learning skills to help cope with negative feelings, and how to strike a better balance between the beliefs that a person has before, and after, the trauma occurred.
The VA recently rolled out a national therapist training program for cognitive processing therapy treatment; Gibson said it’s proven to be one of the most effective treatment methods for PTSD. About 30 percent of those who receive such therapy, she said, lose their PTSD altogether, while a majority have a reduction in symptoms.
VA medical staff said they’re often working to overcome a feeling of distrust in their patients.
“We understand that there have been lots of things about the VA in recent years that have caused people to be skeptical,” said Brett Rusch the medical center’s chief of mental health and behavioral science services. “But if you come here, if you talk with us, you see that we’re a group of very normal health care professionals.”
Rusch said that, for the overwhelming majority of veterans, trust begins to build the moment they give the VA a chance.
“It’s not part of the national story about the VA right now, but when people come here they see that we’re nice people that care about them, that have skills that might be able to help them.”
A month after Jenkins died, Prior said, her mother brought her to a salon in an attempt to make her feel better. While they were there, another customer of the salon, a woman, struck up a conversation with them.
It turned out to be Howardell. When she told them what the Patriot Guard Riders do, Prior invited them to the Ottauquechee Farm event.
She said that she, like Jenkins, had mixed feelings about his time in the military.
“There were parts of the service that he liked,” said Prior, “and there was part of it that he hated.”
Still, Prior said, she wanted to acknowledge Jenkins’ service.
“I just feel that it was a part of Brennen,” she said. “Just to have somebody recognize that, I think, means something.”
The role that groups like the Vermont Patriot Guard Riders will play in the larger landscape of veteran support remains to be seen.
Howardell said the group has participated in VA events on occasion; in March, they held a flag line at a Vietnam veteran ceremony at the medical center.
Gibson and Rusch both referred questions about the Patriot Guard Riders to spokesman Joseph Anglin, who did not respond to requests for comment.
Speaking personally, Gibson said, “I think they can have a very positive symbolic impact.”
Rusch said that, in his opinion, the VA values such groups “now more than ever. We want to be part of the same team.”
But the organization is independent and volunteer-driven, with expenses coming out of Howardell’s pocket. That independence can allow them to walk through doors that are closed to the VA, such as Jenkins’ celebration of life at Ottauquechee Farm. Prior said she wouldn’t have wanted the VA there.
The veterans in the Vermont Patriot Guard Riders are informal, and many are well past their prime. But sometimes, in a moment of pain that the government can’t touch, they get the job done.
At Ottauquechee Farm, Howardell led the column of aged veterans up that steep, grassy hill toward the sun.
At the top, Howardell knelt by Prior, whose eyes were wet with tears, and presented her with a plaque commemorating Jenkins’ service. Howardell put her hand on Prior’s leg, speaking intimately, as one bereaved family member to another. As a friend.
Afterward, Prior said the moment was a meaningful bright spot.
“It was,” she said, “beautiful.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.