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# Major Instills Sexual Assault Response Practices in Guard

By Sgt. 1st Class Christie Smith,National Guard Professional Education Center

NORTH LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - There’s a tourniquet and a Warrior Skills: Skill Level 1 book on the table. The book is a manual of everyday Soldier tasks with step-by-step instructions. A red tab marks figure 081-COM-0048-1: Combat application tourniquet.

Maj. Bridget Flannery opens with statistics of the more than 60,000 U.S. service members killed and wounded in combat since Sept. 11, 2001. The most common catalyst: improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.

Soldiers know how to apply a tourniquet: “high and tight until the bleeding stops.”

They know how to identify when one is needed.

They know that no matter what level of care comes next for their buddy, correctly applying the tourniquet is critical to getting them to that next step.

If Buddy Aid were a test on tactical combat casualty care, participants would be dismissed in the first 10 minutes. But battlefield amputations are not the most likely threat to service members. This class is about the more than 47,000 service members who are wounded every year – not just in combat, but at home, too.

“This is Buddy Aid,” Flannery says. “This is first response to sexual assault.”

In 2012, Flannery was an intelligence officer preparing to deploy to Afghanistan with the South Dakota National Guard’s 152nd Combat Sustainment Support Battalion. She had enlisted as a transportation Soldier more than two decades earlier.

After the Gulf War, she got out of the military and spent years working in training in the banking industry and dabbling in academia. When she returned to the military, she took a commission and joined the intel community. As she prepared her unit for potential threats in Afghanistan, she felt confident in their ability to thwart the adversary.

“Kinetically, the most dangerous time is entering and exiting theater,” Flannery said.

As Flannery’s unit transitioned into theater at Kandahar Airfield, a Soldier in one of their down-trace units was sexually assaulted. This was not the traditional adversary she and her unit had focused on.

“That was a bucket of cold water,” Flannery said. “There were a couple of bucket-of-cold-water moments.”

As a mobilization requirement, Flannery had been certified as a sexual assault response coordinator. Throughout that deployment, she and her commander, then-Lt. Col. Michael Oster, began to operationalize how they handled the threat of sexual assault.

“Standing in front of a formation and saying, ‘I will not tolerate this,’ doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen,” Oster said. “That would be like standing in front of the formation and saying, ‘I will not tolerate anybody being killed on the battlefield’; the enemy always gets a vote.”

Operationalization looked like including sexual assault in threat briefs. It looked like Flannery going truck to truck as Soldiers prepared to leave the wire, “kicking tires,” as she put it. She was there both as an intel officer, ensuring they were prepared for the mission, and as a victim advocate, ensuring there was nothing they were experiencing that would take their head out of the fight.

“We just started treating sexual assault the same way we treated IEDs,” Flannery said. “In a lot of ways, it was the Soldiers that built it.”

She realized they were achieving change when a mission commander briefed his Soldiers on the truck numbers of the medics, followed by the truck numbers of the victim advocates.

At the end of their deployment, Oster told Flannery she could not let what they learned in Afghanistan stay there. He retired as a brigadier general, holding several key positions in the South Dakota National Guard. At each one, he championed what would become Buddy Aid.

“That experience probably made me one of the biggest cheerleaders for Buddy Aid in the country,” Oster said.

The program, which consists of five pillars, gets after the primary clinical link to the outcome for victims of sexual assault – the first responder’s actions at the time of disclosure.

The training addresses what to say and not say when someone tells you they’ve been assaulted, what to do and not do, and how to identify signs that something traumatic has occurred when a survivor has not come forward.

After Afghanistan, Flannery provided Buddy Aid training throughout South Dakota. The program spread by word of mouth, and she trained units by invitation.

In 2019, Flannery’s state sexual assault response coordinator told her about the Warrior Resiliency Fitness Innovation Incubator – a program that could provide resources to make Buddy Aid bigger and better.  Buddy Aid became one of 11 inaugural projects for the incubator. With an advisory board and greater tools for data collection, Flannery developed a Buddy Aid Train the Trainer course, or T3.

In December 2019, Flannery taught the first T3 in South Dakota. Then-Master Sgt. Rebecca Motley, the Wyoming National Guard state sexual assault response coordinator, enrolled herself and four advocates. After graduating from the course on a Friday afternoon, she and her advocates returned to Wyoming and trained Buddy Aid for the first time that weekend at drill.

“It was presented in a way that would make sense to Army people because it was like a mission brief,“ Motley said. “I could not understand why we hadn’t presented response to sexual assault in that manner before.”

Motley’s immediate adoption of Buddy Aid sparked interest in her state’s highest leadership. After presenting the training two months in a row to the leaders and staff members at her Joint Force Headquarters, the assistant adjutant general told Motley he wanted 100% of the Wyoming National Guard to be trained in Buddy Aid. That first year, Motley and her advocates trained at least 70% of Wyoming Guard members.

“What we are finding is the units that have adopted it in not just the sexual assault area, but in any stressor or traumatic event – because it’s transferrable – have been more successful at opening communication and shifting the culture in their units,” Motley said.

As the program spread across the nation, it caught the attention of a Soldier at the National Guard Professional Education Center in North Little Rock. Buddy Aid became the first pilot to launch from the incubator into a national initiative at the request of then-Col. Leland Blanchard III, the Professional Education Center commandant.

With base camp at PEC, Buddy Aid training has been conducted in 33 states, districts and territories.

Now in the process of becoming a National Guard program of record, Flannery works with instructors and curriculum developers at the National Guard Bureau.

Aleigh Suffern, one of the Buddy Aid curriculum developers, attended a T3 course in Lansing, Michigan, in November.

“I see it as a leading program,” Suffern said.

As an enlisted Soldier, Suffern was sexually assaulted and struggled to deal with the trauma of that assault and the lack of support from others in uniform. Eventually, the impact led her to end her military career.

“I think Buddy Aid would have kept me in uniform,” Suffern said. “When we talk about retention, Buddy Aid is a retention tool.”

The things Suffern said she needed to hear as a young Soldier make up the first pillar of Buddy Aid — immediate response to the disclosure with phrases such as: “I believe you,” “I’m here for you,” and “I’ll get you the help you want or need.”

These phrases, though easy to remember, can be difficult to summon the moment someone tells you, “I’ve been sexually assaulted.”

Suffern hopes her work with Buddy Aid can help make saying, “I believe you,” to a survivor of sexual assault as instinctive as providing first aid or dialing 911.

“Buddy Aid is that 10-level task; everything starts at the lowest level,” Suffern said, referring to the most basic Soldier skills.

Service members, untrained as victim advocates or sexual assault response coordinators, need the basic tools to render aid until a VA or SARC can be notified.

When Flannery first applied to enter Buddy Aid in the incubator, she committed to two measures of effectiveness for the first response program:

1. Increased disclosures: “We will get disclosures,” she said. “You might not see increased reports; they might not get help. But people won’t be alone.”

2. Operationalization: “Humans will change how they do business. They will treat [sexual assault] like any other kinetic threat.”

If you ask her, she will tell you Buddy Aid is a response tool; any other implication is not her focus.

If you ask those who have experienced Buddy Aid, who have taken it back to their states and their units and spread the message, there’s a third measure: prevention.

“Buddy Aid couldn’t be more preventative,” said Andrew Kalinen, the state sexual assault response coordinator for the Utah National Guard. “We are letting the adversary know we are looking.”

As a therapist and Air Force veteran, Kalinen said the worst part of his job title is that nowhere does it say “prevention.”

“I am constantly responding to sexual assault,” Kalinen said. “You know, that’s my job, and we do it very well, but there’s nothing in my job title that says prevention.”

Kalinen also attended the November T3 course in Lansing with two of his victim advocates. This month, he hosted a T3 in his state.

“If I have my say and a magic wand, I will have every Soldier trained in Buddy Aid,” Kalinen said.

This is a goal Flannery is working toward. On March 15, Flannery was invited to speak to her first exclusively active Army audience at Fort Shafter in Hawaii.

For the rest of the fiscal year, Flannery will be in a different state every month. The goal is to operationalize sexual assault response in all 50 states, territories and the District of Columbia across all branches of the Department of Defense.

Like any good intelligence officer, she is relentless in pursuit of her objective.

“We are trained to do hard things,” Flannery said. “This is another one of those hard things.”

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South Dakota National Guard

Buddy Aid

Wyoming National Guard

sexual assault

Utah National Guard

SARC