Author Spotlight
Sophie Lindberg
*name changed to protect identity
Veteran Johnathan Smith* loved Winstead’s — especially their cheeseburgers and chocolate shakes. Of the three times a week that East parent and Navy veteran Todd Steinbrecher came from his office at Hospice Partners to visit his retirement home, they almost always sat together and ate those revered cheeseburgers.
They talked about Smith’s long-unspoken war stories in Vietnam and discussed the where-abouts of each other’s kids. They would bond over their shared military experiences — they both agreed that it’s easier to talk about it with a fellow veteran. The two veterans had been visiting for three months when Steinbrecher got a call from Smith’s nurse.
Smith was quickly losing his battle with cancer, and had requested that Steinbrecher be there for his last moments. There was no question, he would be there. And he was with him when he passed away.
“I’ve been in a room when a baby’s born and there’s this kind of energy that happens when a life comes in,” Steinbrecher said. “It feels the same when [a life] comes out. I think [it was] an honor.”
Since serving in the Navy from 1999 to 2008, Steinbrecher has dedicated his life to helping other veterans reach emotional stability, being there by their side in their last moments or simply bringing them a Winstead’s cheeseburger. In fact, he’s spent his life after serving as a hospice care coordinator in the Kansas City area.
Hospice wasn’t always a plan in his life path. At age eight Steinbrecher watched “Top Gun” with his dad and saw a rescue swimmer jump out of a helicopter during Goose’s death scene — he turned to his dad and said, “I want to do that.”
So he did.
Growing up, he had heard stories from his dad and grandparents — most of them served in the military, so serving wasn’t necessarily “special” for his family.
Fresh out of high school, Steinbrecher trained in Pensacola for air crew and avionics school — known to civilians as “rescue swimmer school”. The stakes were high — trainees completed tasks like retrieving and putting on masks and snorkels from the bottom of a 14-foot-deep pool. If the young men failed after two attempts, they were booted from the program. That wasn’t an option for Steinbrecher — he had already failed the task once and wasn’t willing to let go of that childhood dream just yet.
So, he was forced to think about just how bad he wanted it. Would it matter if he failed again? Of course it would. He dove 14 feet down, scrambling to get the rubber gear on before the instructors made up their mind. He shot his hands into the air and waited for the verdict. He passed.
But physical qualifications were nothing compared to the mental tasks. The instructors focused heavily on confidence in decision-making and thinking outside of the box, like when he got a bag of sticks and rocks and was told to figure out how to save a person with them.
He continued training in SERE — survive, evade, resist and escape — in California and in Guam for search and extraction while training to be a plane captain.
He finished training a week before September 11, 2001.
Steinbrecher was immediately deployed on three back-to-back tours — the first in the Middle East. Six months in, he broke his neck in a helicopter crash, rehabbing as fast as he could to get back into the field. But Steinbrecher says it’s injuries like that that you never fully recover from, physically or emotionally. While getting his undergraduate in 2008, he spent 2-3 days a week in rehab for his neck. Seven years later.
But it didn’t stop him. One of his many jobs was being a 50-caliber door gunner — a crewman that manually handles an automatic gun aboard a helicopter.
“Sometimes the scariest thing is not actually what happened,” Steinbrecher said. “[But] what could have happened. The anticipation of, ‘Is this guy gonna shoot? Or am I gonna shoot him?’”
It’s the dark reality of hunting people that haunts Steinbrecher and stops him from openly discussing his military experience very often. Living through violence and suffering for months on end is a feeling that Steinbrecher notes very few people experience. There’s no way to understand that pain if you haven’t lived through it.
This mutual understanding between veterans is part of what guided Steinbrecher into hospice work today. He helps them to get what they didn’t before — medical equipment, health care, survivors’ benefits — and make a personal connection.
In 2013, Steinbrecher witnessed his father go into hospice with terminal cancer. As his father also served, Steinbrecher helped him get his veterans benefits. It was when he was helping him that he discovered his frustration with how veterans in hospice were being treated — according to him, 90% of veterans don’t ever know what their benefits are, like a disability claim or career counseling.
“I don’t like the way the system has happened,” Steinbrecher said. “Because I feel like some people are doing this for marketing, for business, and I actually give a damn about these people. And I want to help them.”
These veterans in hospice have battlefields from helicopters over Vietnam burned into their memory. Steinbrecher understood. He voiced his frustrations with veteran support to a palliative care coordinator at Leavenworth Veterans Affairs, and she gave him documents outlining the benefits that veterans are entitled to. In 2014, Steinbrecher began the Veterans Initiative Program to help veterans and their families receive their benefits of medical care and supplies, and survivors pension.
Through his former employer, Hospice Partners, Steinbrecher built VIP as a passion project.
Now that Steinbrecher works at Kansas City Hospice, he continues his aid on their veteran board for assisting veterans in hospice.
“I can’t speak for people that are no longer with us — they gave the ultimate sacrifice,” Steinbrecher said. “But there’s a lot of survivor’s guilt too. If you haven’t lived it, you don’t understand. And that’s OK.”
East parent Lynnette Siegel was on TDY — temporary duty.
A deceiving name for what was essentially an all-expenses-paid vacation to a destination of her choosing.
“They basically said, ‘You’re so great. We want to keep you, we want you to re-enlist, do four more years,” Siegel said. “And as an incentive, why don’t you go check out some other places you could go.’ So I thought, ‘Oh, go to Berlin.’”
She didn’t want to re-enlist — it was time for a new experience, but she wouldn’t turn down a free trip to Germany.
It was 1989, and Siegel had been working in the Air Force as a Cryptologic Linguistic Specialist for three of her four contracted years as an intelligence collection translator. After the Berlin Wall was removed, she thought it was time to visit Germany. She’d always been one for adventure.
The wall had gaps missing — pieces of it were being sold off — and she looked around at the scene, noticing a particularly large gap that some people in West Berlin were speaking through. Though she had studied some German in addition to the four other languages she had previously learned, she couldn’t make out what they were saying. As she peered through to East Berlin, she saw a soldier. No older than 19. They looked like they were telling the soldier to cross the wall, to come to the East.
“But it just really hit me deep in my core,” Siegel said. “Did [the soldier] want to do that, but he’s too scared? He just stood there. Even though he’s staring through a hole in the wall.”
This moment, deemed by Siegel as the most memorable of her military career due to the small yet captivating moment, was an opportunity that never would have arisen if she hadn’t been serving. Siegel’s military experience from 1986 to 1990 allowed a place for her love of learning and curiosity to run rampant, and gave her a chance to learn yet another language.
An 18-year-old Siegel was working at a hotel when she struck up a conversation with the head of security. When he told her about his son’s Air Force career, one of adventure and opportunity, Siegel marched down to the recruiting office that same week, knowing that she could pay for college, travel the world and continue her love of languages that started in high school. It was a bit of an impulsive decision, but that’s normal for Siegel.
And lucky for her, she spent a year learning another one: Russian. After taking the Defense Language Aptitude Battery test, she was discovered to have a proficiency in learning Slovak languages. Thus began a year of intense close-to-full-immersion study — where at work, they only spoke Russian — an environment that Siegel thrived in.
“I remember the first day going into the class, and all these people walk in this room and you sit down,” Siegel said. “Someone walks in [and] they’re speaking in Russian. And they say that they can tell that day just from the look on people’s faces who will be there in a month and who won’t.”
On that first day, she had to learn the entire Russian Cyrillic alphabet 20 vocab words and had a test the next morning. It was hard, but nothing she couldn’t handle. In fact, she couldn’t wait to start.
“I need this rush of super intense learning,” Siegel said. “When I learn it, I’m like, OK, I can do this job now.’ [Then] I think I get bored. And so I go for the next kind of learning challenge.”
Naturally, Siegel was the honors graduate of her training group with strong abilities in Russian linguistics. So being placed in Crete, Greece — a location with no real military issue — was a bit of a letdown. She felt she should be stationed somewhere with a more challenging mission to match her abilities, but she soon found that this was the least of her concerns.
“I get there, and I start getting oriented to do this kind of work that you don’t have to be a linguist to do,” Siegel said. “And I thought, ‘I just went through this whole year of intensive, intensive training. I was the honor grad — I am good at this stuff. And you’re gonna put me in this position [where] I don’t even need it?’”
Knowing that she didn’t want to give up on her dream job, Siegel did some research. She found out that she could make a complaint to the inspector general. She brought the issue up to them — thousands of dollars had been spent on her training, and for what?
A week later, she was moved.
“If I hadn’t stood up for myself, I might never have used my language skills that they just spent a year training me on,” Siegel said. “So I guess that’s the fact: don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself.”
After that, her work was regimented. Four days working middays. Four days working nights. Four days working days. Four days off. Repeat. She would come home from her shifts to the upstairs space rented from a Greek family that babysat American children as their source of income. And, on her days off, she would leave that generational home to go Greek island hopping, exploring her home for the next four years.
A year after her service ended, Siegel was three credits away from a Soviet Studies degree that she had started while still serving and was paid for by the GI Bill. Then, the Soviet Union collapsed. Along with her next learning opportunity — most schools stopped teaching Soviet courses.
While she eventually decided on a B.S. degree of Biology to replace her original undergrad choice, Siegel decided to continue her learning at law school. She had worked for a law firm part-time while getting her undergraduate degree, and was convinced by her employer to come back as a lawyer. And she did, for 17 years.
But of course, her itch to learn never ends. She decided to go back to school, and for the past five years has worked in nursing, currently with SMSD.
But it all goes back to the Berlin Wall. Siegel still has a piece that she bought from a merchant with a tiny bit of graffiti on it — though some of it has worn off with time. It’s the perfect memento — an item representing her celebration of knowledge.
In the open California desert, then-Seabee Adam Cumley sat in a foxhole for six hours with two other men. He was thinking about how this was astronomically better than maintenance work when across the barren land, he saw “bad guys” approaching on foot, M4s hovering in their hands.
All of a sudden, rounds popped — it was an ambush. The excitement built up in Cumley as the bullets ricocheted off of his bulletproof vest.
The bullets were blanks, and the ambush was a simulation. It was the “pretend” aspect that disappointed Cumley.
Culmey was in the Navy Construction Battalion, better known as the Seabees. They’re trained to construct airports, operations bases and other structures on the water at theaters of war. But what he trained for was never going to happen. 2011 to 2015 weren’t particularly “exciting” years.
Instead of constructing airports on the water in places of conflict or at a country that needed military help, Cumley and his command went to Camp Pendleton for a month every year — a trip that they would take for Seabee Combat Warfare certification — and did maintenance work on a daily basis.
Cumley gained responsibility and thankfulness from his military experience, making him grateful for what it taught him, but he also saw the waste and lost potential that the military had from an up-close and personal perspective.
“I really liked the job that [we] did when [we] did it,” Cumley said. “But we just barely ever did it.”
He loved the days that they went “under way” — essentially practicing putting together an RRDF, a roll-on roll-off distribution facility.
The command would boat out into the San Diego Harbor to assemble the sections that made up the platform. A ship would unload onto it and “stab the beach” — using a little boat to unload directly onto a beach rather than find a pier. Setting up those systems, his true job, was what interested Cumley.
There were chances to work, like the flooding of the Philippines in 2012. Cumley was bouncing off the walls — this was the ideal way to get him and his fellow Seabees out doing good. But when officers were sent over to attempt to assist in the humanitarian effort, no one could come to a contractual agreement. The perfect situation for the Seabees — gone. Typical. Back to routine maintenance from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m..
“There’s a lot of waste in the military,” Cumley said. “That’s the drawback. What I see in looking at our spending budget now, we’re still spending hundreds of billions of dollars on it. Ultimately, my command didn’t need to exist, but it still did.”
But there were moments of clarity. In his third year of service, he got a new commanding officer, Captain Abby — someone that would inadvertently teach him a valuable lesson. The command was lined up in ranks to hear a review of the previous week presented by the commanding officer.
The new captain came out and walked towards the podium but stopped in his tracks halfway there while everyone was waiting for him. He bent down, picked up a piece of trash and put it in his pocket. There was trash all over the base, why would he stop to pick up that specific piece?
“If the lowest ranking person on base sees the highest ranking person on base doing what’s right, then there’s no stigmatism behind it,” Cumley said. “Setting that example of being responsible, even the little things like that responsibility and doing the right thing can have a huge impact. That has truly stuck with me.”
The responsibility was a value he carried with him through schooling and into his teaching career.
After his service, Cumley went to KU on the GI Bill — the military paid for his schooling — to go into teaching. He’d made the decision to turn his life around after flunking out of schools and working lower-level positions at car dealerships. But now the pay-off was no debt, a sense of responsibility and doing something he loved.
Cumley didn’t leave service feeling like a war hero. But he left with responsibility, dignity and pride that shaped him into the person and teacher he is today.
East father Jeff Harms had just gotten a taste of confidence. It was the ninth day of standard boot camp — inspection day. Everything in his bunk space had to be perfect: Uniforms neatly folded, photo frames squared up, badges in the mandated spots. The training instructor strolled down the aisle, tearing apart the beds of recruits that didn’t set up their space perfectly.
But Harms was one of the three recruits in the room of 50 to pass inspection. For the next hour, he had a bounce in his step. While the other soldiers re-tidied their beds and placed their belongings lovingly on their nightstands, Harms went down to the shop on base to get a candy bar and call his family.
On his first day, he had gotten chewed out by his instructor after being unable to unlock his locker, reminding him to lay low so as to not get harassed again. Now, a week later, he’d matured into a model soldier and finally felt he belonged on base.
The Air Force would soon boost Harms’ confidence through guidance in developing a career, helping him discover his skills in management and business.
Initial training for the finance department for 18-year-old Harms was at Sheppard AFB in Wichita Falls, Texas — the same place he would be stationed. He was an accounting and finance technician — one of few military careers that resembles an office job. He worked 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., helping airmen with their financial needs. Except, he had to worry about pressing his uniform and shaving with a straight razor before showing his face at the office unless he wanted to be sent back to his dorm to make himself military presentable.
“Everything had to be lined up. Your medals and your nametag had to be positioned on your shirt in the correct locations,” Harms said. “Every day when you’re outside in uniform, you have to wear a hat. It’s a structured environment, from the moment you wake up.”
While working in military pay — from handling travel funds to pay changes for fellow airmen — Harms noticed a problem. The four employees in that section, including himself, spent all day assisting airmen with their pay, leaving little to no time to actually process the paperwork. So he came up with a solution.
If two technicians worked directly with people who needed travel money or a pay raise and the other two worked in the background — not speaking directly to the customers but processing documents and pay requests — efficiency would skyrocket. Harms came in on a Saturday to reposition some cubicle walls, reorganizing the entire office to streamline efficiency.
It paid off. He got recognized for his problem-solving through a military-issued Commendation Medal — a mid-level medal for meritorious achievement. The medal still sits on the left breast of his dress blues today.
2 years later, he went to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on temporary duty. It was only 90 days, but that was long enough for a good culture shock.
“That was an experience that quickly led me to understand how much I had grown accustomed to the US way of doing things as opposed to how the rest of the world does it,” Harms said.
If he didn’t volunteer for the job, there was a pretty good chance he would be assigned later in his career. Might as well get it out of the way, he thought.
He worked at a bank on base, calculating conversions in his head from US Dollars to Riyals, the Saudi Arabian currency.
After working in finance for his first enlistment, he had the opportunity to cross-train in a different field. Even though it would add at least another two years to his military career, he made the choice to become a paralegal at Hanscom in Massachusetts. It was there that he would meet his future employer, the person that would give him the space to continue expanding his leadership skills.
Michael Hammond transferred in from Germany in 1998. Harms was his sponsor, meaning that he would take him under his wing to show him around and introduce him to working at Hanscom. Fast forward 20 years, the life-long friends remain in contact, and Harms comes on at Michael Hammond’s IT security company OCD Tech LLC as a part-time employee. After a couple years, he went full-time.
“I’ve worked for him for four years now as a full time employee in IT security and auditing,” Harms said. “That is strictly because of the fact that I met him while I was in the military. And we’ve kept in contact this whole time. So for my current career, there’s no way I would be doing what I’m doing today if not for that connection I made 25 years ago in the military.”
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