[Bonnie] Carroll founded TAPS in 1994, after her husband Brigadier General Tom Carroll died in the crash of an Army C-12 plane, to help surviving families find a safe place to land. It offers peer mentoring, grief counseling and all kinds of social support, and for five days over Memorial Day weekend there’s a mass gathering in Washington that families like the Dosties attend. The kids go to a Good Grief camp, where they are matched with mentors, take tours, write journals, bond with other kids who have lost a parent. They lay wreaths made of their handprints, each with a message to their loved one, at the Tomb of the Unknowns. The adults attend workshops like Grief Support for Siblings, Dream Visits, Creating a Facebook Memorial, Coping with Suicide Loss. There is one conducted by military physicians called Did My Loved One Suffer? “It’s a very tough session but always the most packed,” says Carroll. “It’s an opportunity for families who don’t understand elements of a traumatic, horrific death to ask questions of absolute experts.”
Almost every weekend, somewhere in America there is a gathering of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of survivors looking to help one another cope ”” 30,000 families registered to date. It is a far cry from the days of early Vietnam when the Army was so overwhelmed with casualties that it enlisted cabdrivers to deliver the telegrams with news of a soldier’s death and when fierce opposition to the war sometimes translated to an inhuman lack of sympathy. “We’d hear things like ‘We’re glad he’s gone. He was a baby killer,'” recalls Kit Frazer, president of Gold Star Wives of America. “It was a very unhappy time. Now there’s an outpouring of love for widows and widowers and an attempt to help them.” Children get medical and dental benefits until they are 21, rather than just for three years after the death; the Army has a 24-hour call center for survivors with benefits questions, a new family center at Dover Air Force Base and Survivor Outreach Services to coordinate the efforts.
But there is also, sadly, a growing need, which private groups like TAPS are serving.