(Tribune News Service) — Steve Penn’s only regret with the Pittsburgh Warriors is that he didn’t join earlier.

A friend tipped off Penn, a 13-year military veteran living in Lower Burrell, to the nonprofit that helps honorably discharged service members connect, heal and grow through hockey. After military service spanning two wars, Penn came to the Warriors just in time.

“Around the time when I joined, I hung myself and I was dead and they had to revive me four times,” he said. “It was a really bad suicide attempt.”

Penn was temporarily paralyzed, forcing him to re-learn how to walk and talk. His Warriors teammates rallied around him, checking in on him to ensure he was progressing well and providing him with the military-like camaraderie he longed for.

“They reach out to you. If they don’t hear from you, they don’t just give up,” he said of his teammates. “They will call you to make sure you’re doing well.

“I just like the environment in the locker rooms, traveling with the team, practicing, playing tournaments. It kind of gives us that feeling that people haven’t forgotten about us.”

Penn felt lost in shuffle of civilian life after he was medically discharged from military service. He can’t work due to injuries from his service time, so hockey provides him with a way to avoid falling into depression again.

“This gives me a purpose. I have to go out and go practice,” he said. “I got back into hockey a lot. I play on several different adult hockey teams around my house. I’m constantly working out, going to the gym, want to play hockey because of it. It just gives you the strength, mentally and physically, to keep on going.”

The Warriors organization began in 2018 with Sam Johnson of McMurray and two other veterans. Johnson is a retired Army colonel of over 30 years who served in the first Gulf War and wanted to help veterans like himself through sports.

“It really disturbed me to watch veterans who got handed a bunch of pills because they’re having trouble dealing with their PTSD,” Johnson said. “They go home and they take these pills and they become lonely, they become depressed and they become suicidal.... We [were] missing the moment on how we help veterans deal with their traumas.”

Johnson took action, holding a first Warriors practice with just three players in 2018. Five years later, the Warriors are fresh off hosting their first tournament, which took place at Hunt Armory Ice Rink in Shadyside a few weekends ago and included teams from Buffalo and Rochester, N.Y., as well as Washington, D.C.

The Warriors currently have over 200 members spread across a number of teams, all competing in the Disabled Veterans Hockey League. The team practices nearly every week, due in part to the Penguins, who’ve provided financial support to cover ice time costs, among other expenses.

The Penguins are also currently looking for a corporate sponsor on the Warriors’ behalf. Without the NHL team’s backing, Johnson believes the Warriors would have crumbled years ago.

“The idea is that healing happens when you get on the ice a lot. If you only did it once a quarter or something, that’d be more of a Band-aid,” Johnson said. “We don’t want it to be a Band-aid. We want it to be a healing experience.”

Healing continues for players like Penn, as well as Andrew Slaugenhaupt of Monroeville. The former hockey player for Penn Hills High School once aspired to play in the NHL. His dreams were derailed following the untimely death of his father from brain cancer while Slaugenhaupt was in high school.

His grades slipped and he decided to enlist in the Army rather than continue delivering pizzas.

“I didn’t have an avenue to get into the NHL, and I wasn’t going to go to college,” Slaugenhaupt said. “My goal was to join the Army, put in my three hard years as an infantry soldier and come out at the craziest, top, peak physical shape and try to get in through an affiliate team.”

He enlisted just months before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and was deployed to Iraq. He lost 60% of the hearing in his left ear after an errant shot from a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. He also witnessed casualties that were difficult for any young person to process.

“There’s some stuff that you can’t unsee as a young person, seeing little kids and families being blown into pieces and having to pick up the parts,” Slaugenhaupt said. “That was probably the most brutal part of it all was the casualties around us, not so much our own casualties. As an infantry soldier, you kind of know when you sign up and as you get your training that ... you’re going to be shot at, you might get shot and you might die.”

Slaugenhaupt survived his deployment but not without deep emotional scars. Returning to civilian life proved difficult and he resorted to vices like drinking to get through five years of “darkness.”

But a few years ago, he returned to hockey through the Warriors. It wasn’t a seamless transition for Slaugenhaupt, though.

“My panic order and anxiety was so bad at the beginning that I was not even finishing practices,” he said.

“I would make it halfway through, jump off the ice because my anxiety was so bad. My body wasn’t allowing me to get my heart rate up to a certain level because if it got up to that certain level, my body would automatically trigger a panic attack because it would feel like it’s under a threat.”

Slaugenhaupt’s anxiety has declined, but he still takes breathers on the bench when necessary. He’s not leaping up from the pine of an NHL rink, but he embraces the fact that he’s found an outlet somewhat similar to his former role as a squad leader in the Army.

“Scoring a couple of nice goals, that feels good, but what feels better is teaching that person who needs help skating for the first time or shooting,” Slaugenhaupt said. “There’s that opportunity that I can still be that trainer that I was in the Army. I get that fulfilled, but I also get to fulfill my hockey love at the same time.

“It’s a really broad satisfaction for me because it fills a lot of the voids I lost as a soldier.”

Johnson has watched proudly as the organization he started continues to make a difference in veterans’ lives.

“Every week, you put them into a hockey locker room and it takes a good 30-40 minutes to put all that gear on. Now they’re in an environment where they’re surrounded by guys with the same kind of issues they have and it allows the stress to just fall off their shoulders,” he said.

“It allows them to tell their stories about what they went through in their times in the military and get some support for it because they know they’re talking to someone who understands.”

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