One's Duty Station
At the Bastion Community of Resilience, veterans find healing in fellowship
“How does it look to you?” Belard Ernest asked me.
Dressed in a white t-shirt, ball cap, and sunglasses, Ernest’s manner was easy as he reclined on the bench across from me. Malik Scott sat to his diagonal. Scott, a shorter, squatter man, was wrapped in a jacket emblazoned with balls of fire and leaned forward as he talked. They’re close friends, both veterans who met living at Bastion Community of Resilience, where I met them that day, but only Ernest is blind, a lasting effect from a surgical complication years ago.
“Let me see it through your eyes,” Ernest said.
I did my best to trace the contours of Ernest’s home. I explained that we were sitting at the far end of a grassy courtyard that opens up like peace fingers across the property. The perimeter is lined with homes that Bastion founder Dylan Tête described as “a contemporary take” on traditional New Orleans double shotgun homes, sleeker and edgier.
The homes are clustered into groups of four, facing each other. The mailboxes, too, are grouped together. This is on purpose, an effort to increase the chances of people engaging with each other, part of Bastion’s antidote to isolation.
The intentional living community—an organized cooperative living space based on a set of shared values—is designed for veterans dealing with physical and emotional wounds of war. Bastion is based on the Generations of Hope intentional neighboring model, and its Gentilly site is home to fifty eight families, a mix of wounded veterans and civilians who want to support them. The community works together in everything from building beds for older members or watching the children of a single parent, to processing hard emotions or providing assistance to members with physical disabilities.
Though there are other intentional living communities, and there are other communities for veterans, Bastion is the first place to combine these two missions, with a goal of helping veterans reintegrate into society.
When Tête first conceptualized the semi-independent living model of Bastion, he had traumatic brain injuries in mind.
Tête, a veteran himself who has struggled with anxiety, saw his friends coming home with traumatic brain injuries and grew curious about their treatment. He toured group homes and said he saw one veteran with a traumatic brain injury “slumped over on the couch with his eyes glazed over and drooling out of his mouth.” Tête thought there had to be a better way.
“Part of the loss of returning home is this family, this military family. And part of what we’re doing at Bastion is recreating that military family, so that when you come here, you feel like you belong.” —Dylan Tête
Most veterans today have to choose between care at the Veterans Affairs Administration hospitals, which may be in-patient, or independent living. For veterans who do not require in-patient care, but may not be ready to live without some support, the options are group homes, geriatric care facilities, or in-home care, where family members may double as caregivers.
Bastion creates a new, semi-independent living option for this population. Veterans can enter a neighborhood setting, rather than a care facility, and work toward achieving greater self sufficiency with the support of staff and fellow residents. Because Bastion is a community, not a care facility, residents can still utilize services from the VA.
However, residents with traumatic brain injuries—the community’s original intended population—have been slower to arrive at Bastion. Because there was no VA hospital in New Orleans post-Katrina until 2016, most of the city’s veterans living with traumatic brain injuries had relocated to other cities. Currently, only one Bastion resident has a severe traumatic brain injury and requires assistance with daily tasks, though a number of residents have mild or moderate brain injuries.
Despite his original intentions, Tête has found great reward in the fact that Bastion has evolved to serve veterans struggling with more behavioral issues like post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and military sexual trauma.
“The miracle is that we’re finding out that this model works for them too,” he said. And I just think that’s extraordinary.”
According to their preliminary data, Bastion is achieving notable success in serving this community. Ninety nine percent of Bastion’s residents have reported some kind of positive growth. Bastion defines this in a variety of ways, including: building relationships, feeling safe in the community, or starting to volunteer. Reported rates of loneliness are decreasing and reported rates of social connectedness are increasing.
The key to this success, residents and staff say, is community.
“We evolved in platoon-sized groups of thirty individuals,” Tête said, referring to the social structure of the paleolithic hunter-gatherer tribes from which we came.
This kind of primal, communal intimacy is how humans were designed to thrive. And in the military, this structure of closely-bound tribes, brought together by the common goal of survival, defines most soldiers’ experiences. Soldiers live in close quarters, follow a regimented schedule, and constantly coordinate with each other to accomplish vital tasks. They do so living with a much more immediate threat to their life than many stateside civilians will ever experience.
Back at home, things are different. Daily structure is self-imposed. Rather than platoons, there are neighborhoods, apartment buildings, and workplaces where social bonds are weaker, camaraderie may not extend much past happy hour, and most people lounge in a far greater sense of safety.
“Part of the loss of returning home is this family, this military family,” Tête said. “And part of what we’re doing at Bastion is recreating that military family, so that when you come here, you feel like you belong.”
Scott served in the navy from 1994 to 2002, then started a business working as a private contractor in Iraq. In total, he spent almost ten years in the Middle East. After returning to the United States, he struggled with depression and was later diagnosed with PTSD. It was hard for him to leave the house. His marriage ended in part, Scott said, because of his anger issues. He lost his home.
Scott moved into Bastion using a VA Supportive Housing (VASH) voucher for homeless veterans. Fifty out of Bastion’s fifty-eight residences are designated as low income housing. Scott has lived there for almost three years now with his two children: a seven-year-old daughter and an eight-year-old son.
"People need to learn these skills to be able to cope with life. We're not soldiers anymore. I became a better person thanks to this program. I became a better father. I became a better neighbor." —Malik Scott
“Being around other veterans was the key for me because I felt that civilians—family—didn’t really understand what was going on,” Scott said. “You don’t want to tell your mother or your friends that you want to kill yourself sometimes. There’s things you try to hide and bury—it comes out in other ways, being aggressive, being angry.”
But Scott feels like he can talk to Ernest. They spend time together almost every day, running errands and eating lunch together. And the whole time they talk about life, what Scott calls, “veteran stuff.”
Bastion not only offers the opportunity to build relationships, but pairs it with a variety of support services. There is limited counseling available, along with social gatherings, a monthly writing workshop, yoga, vocational rehabilitation, and a financial assistance program for residents struggling to pay their rent.
There’s also the Headway program, a day program for veterans in the New Orleans community living with traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, and other neurological conditions. Headway helps participants build vocational and recreational skills, whether that be getting a job or making art. Eventually, the goal is to move all Headway participants who want to do so into homes at Bastion.
Then there’s the “mind-body skills group,” which uses evidence-based techniques like breathing, journaling, meditation, biofeedback, and guided imagery in a group setting to help people manage stress and overcome trauma. It’s not only helpful for those struggling with PTSD, but also for anyone who has ever had to deal with difficult experiences.
“That’s our vaccine,” Tête said. “In addition to providing this community, we’re teaching skills that people can incorporate into their daily lives that will only help healing happen faster.”
Both Ernest and Scott have graduated from the mind-body skills group.
“People need to learn these skills to be able to cope with life,” Scott said. “We’re not soldiers anymore. I became a better person thanks to this program. I became a better father. I became a better neighbor.”
The mind-body groups are open to all, veteran or civilian, Bastion resident or not. Melissa Wofford and Clarissa Moramarco, civilians who live at Bastion, both participate in the groups. Moramarco, a previous mental health nurse, said it fostered a greater sense of connectedness in a shorter amount of time than any other therapeutic group she’s participated in.
Wofford and her husband, a former marine who is not disabled, moved to Bastion because they wanted to be caregivers for veterans living with traumatic brain injuries. The couple spent much of their life living on military bases around the United States. Far from family, neighborhood community became crucial for them. At Bastion, they wanted to pass on the sense of support they felt over the decades.
“Somebody in your community can come alongside you and say, ‘Hey, what can we do to help you?’ … We can come around and love on them and just make them know that they’re wanted and that they’re needed.”
I asked Wofford if she feels wanted and needed herself.
“Absolutely,” she said. “This one calls me all the time,” nodding her head at Moramarco with a laugh.
Both Wofford and Moramarco are senior citizens, another population with documented struggles of loneliness. Tête said that caregivers in this age demographic have been especially attracted to Bastion, and have come to play a significant role in the community.
“I think living here is way easier than living by myself somewhere,” Moramarco said. “It’s okay to be dependent or to have needs. There’s always somebody here that can help you out.”
Wofford volunteers with the Headway program and is working with one participant to prepare him to eventually move to Bastion. Moramarco, Bastion’s grandmother-in-chief, writes Bastion’s monthly newsletter and watches children for single parents who need an extra hand.
Having lived in different intentional living communities since her twenties, including another Generations of Hope community in Illinois, Moramarco said Bastion is the best-run community she’s lived in.
Part of this is because the spirit of Bastion is built upon a dedication to serving one’s community, or, as Scott calls it, one’s duty station. If someone hasn’t seen their neighbor in a few days, they check on them. If someone’s house needs repair, a community member shows up. If Ernest gets lost wandering the grounds, he calls Scott.
Ernest has PTSD not from his military service (he served in the coast guard from 1977 to 1981), but from losing his sight. He said Bastion is among the first places he’s felt okay “getting lost,” and navigating on his own. Staff and residents taught him how many steps to take to the community center and the mailbox, and all the turns along the way. Then they let him walk there on his own.
“They just turned me loose,” Ernest said. “It was like they knew I had to learn this myself. So I just got lost a lot … And they probably watched, but I didn’t know they were.”
They do watch. Scott will sit on his front porch while Ernest wanders, making sure his fellow soldier is safe, cared for, and seen.