From the S&S archives: Army medical team helped Jenco

HEIDELBERG — When Moslem extremists released the Rev. Lawrence M. Jenco last month, a little-known Army medical team flew to Syria to help the former hostage make the transition from captivity to freedom.

Team members also were in Egypt to greet hostages from the cruise ship Achille Lauro and to console members of the 101st Airborne Div after 248 of their comrades were killed in a Gander, Newfoundland, plane crash in December. The team also counseled an American tour group returning to Germany from the Soviet Union after the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

Known as the Stress Management Team, the 7th Medical Comd unit works to prevent stress reactions — including sleeplessness and anger — from coming home with returning hostages. Combat experience has shown it's best to treat mental health problems as close as possible to the site of the trauma, said team members Lt. Col. Calvin Neptune and Dr. (Maj.) David McDuff.

The U.S. European Comd and 7th Medical Comd created the team following the Army's experience at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center with injured Marines evacuated from their bombed headquarters in Beirut, Neptune said.

Neptune, a 7th Medical Comd social work officer, said Landstuhl medical personnel recognized the Marines' need for a support group in which they could discuss their feelings about losing their friends or about going to sleep in Beirut and waking up in a hospital in Germany.

The team took to the air for the first time in June 1985, when TWA hijacking hostages were released.

The core team of six, headed by Dr. (Col.) Robert Sokol, 7th Medical Comd psychiatry consultant, includes psychiatry and social work specialists from 7th Medical Comd and the Army hospital in Heidelberg. It can be expanded depending on the situation. When the tour group returned from the Soviet Union, personnel from the Army hospital in Bad Cannstatt joined the team.

The team assesses the emotional condition of the people involved, then starts working with those suffering the most acute emotional problems. They continue working on flights back to Germany, where former hostages undergo medical exams at the Wiesbaden Air Force Regional Medical Center.

Sometimes their work seems simple: ordinary conversation, getting a cup of coffee for someone, sitting close by. One Achille Lauro hostage told Neptune, "I never knew they had officers for flight attendants."

Team members focus on seating patterns and help natural groups stay together. Group support, even when it's simply a presence, has tremendous therapeutic value, they said.

Americans from the Achille Lauro already were a tight-knit group, McDuff said. Many were lifelong friends and older people.

"They had a wealth of life experience to draw from," McDuff said. "There was a lot of stability in this group. They were extremely objective about what had happened. That's not to say they were not angry or afraid."

Jenco did not have a natural support group because he was the only hostage released, McDuff and Neptune said. So they formed one for him, including Terry Waite, the special envoy of the archbishop of Canterbury, and a friend who was in the Middle East. The group flew to Germany with Jenco and drove with him from Rhein-Main AB to the Wiesbaden hospital.

Shortly after release, hostages start reviewing and judging what they did and felt during captivity, McDuff and Neptune said.

"They don't label the experience as abnormal. They label what they were thinking, feeling and their behavior as abnormal," McDuff said.

Team members tell the hostages they acted normally, given abnormal circumstances. Also, they point out that the anxiety, disorientation, guilt and anger they are feeling are common to hostages.

"It's the circumstances that are crazy, not the individual," McDuff said.

Neptune said he relearned "lesson one" in social work business during the TWA hostage release: "Start where the patient is."

The social worker said he hadn't understood why the TWA hostages were silent and unmoving after he traded places with the terrorist guard in their van — until he realized the hostages hadn't recognized his Army battle dress uniform. The moment he said he was with the U.S. Army, the former hostages started cheering and crying.

"Everybody wears camouflage outfits down there," Neptune said. "They were afraid they were being shifted to the control of some other Arab nation or Arabs. They got the news in a lightning bolt. I assumed they had been told exactly what it was going to be."