‘We’re going to take care of you.’ Marine Corps museum offers veterans respite.

At the National Museum of the Marine Corps, staffers are getting training in how to spot folks who might be feeling post-traumatic stress while visiting the very realistic installations. There is a brief recap of the best – and worst – ways to reach out.

“Who wants to run up and hug them?” asks Michael Murray, a Marine running the workshop on this late-summer day. A few hands go up. “Yeah, don’t,” he says. “Slow your roll.” 

Likewise, approaching museum guests from the front is confrontational, from behind a potential ambush. From the side, in their sightline, “with empathy,” he says, is the way to go.

And if they don’t want help, that’s OK, too. The key is “giving ground and then turning away, gently, slowly, warmly,” adds Mr. Murray, founder of the Liberty Organization for Veterans and Emergency Responders. “There’s a possibility that they will come back to you.”

The occasion for the training is the opening of what the museum has dubbed its “respite room,” designed for guests grappling with wounds of war, or simply in need of a quiet place to reflect on comrades, loved ones, and battles fought long ago. 

Some find it surprising that it’s an initiative of the Marine Corps, which takes great satisfaction from its cultivated image as the roughest and toughest of America’s fighters.

But creating a respite room, with the implicit acknowledgment of its need, can help act as a “shock absorber” for those who are suffering, says retired Maj. Gen. James Lukeman, president of the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation.

Just having it on-site can also open up a conversation about post-traumatic stress, he notes.

“I don’t see it as any kind of admission of weakness. It’s, ‘Hey, we’re leading the way in taking care of our own.’

“Once a Marine, always a Marine. Whether you’ve served four years or 40 years, we love you,” he adds, “and we’re going to take care of you forever.”

Recognizing the need for care

The exhibits here are designed to be immersive – cooler temperatures to represent mountainous climes, recordings of explosions, and flashing lights help paint a picture of epic fights. During the Korean War Battle of Chosin Reservoir, for example, 15,000 American troops, mostly Marines, were cut off from supply lines, knee-deep in snow, and surrounded by 120,000 Chinese soldiers.

Frostbitten forces batted back grenades with shovels as the bolts on their rifles froze in blizzards. Medics momentarily warmed their hands in their injured comrades’ spilled blood. 

“I’ve been cold ever since,” recalled a Navy doctor, one of the vets who referred to themselves as the Chosin Few.

Still, they kept fighting and executed a remarkable retreat despite heavy losses. “All right, they’re on our left; they’re on our right; they’re in front of us; they’re behind us – they can’t get away this time,” legendary Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis “Chesty” Puller is rumored to have remarked.

These stories of characteristic Marine Corps bravado – relayed with a wink and a smile, but at the heart of the service’s ethos – make the respite room a notable, and necessary, addition to the museum, experts say.

Wounds of war have been alternately acknowledged and shrugged off throughout military history. “I started to work on combat trauma in the late ’70s, and there was no post-traumatic stress disorder,” says Terence Keane, director of the behavioral science division of the National Center for PTSD, who spoke at the respite room’s opening. 

But in the years since, health professionals say there has been growing recognition of the condition, and of the fact that fighting forces respond well when care is provided. “The progress has been simply astounding,” Dr. Keane says.

The respite room is across the corridor from the museum’s new Afghanistan and Iraq War permanent exhibits, opening in October.

These installations will bear witness to big Marine Corps battles of recent decades – Fallujah, Ramadi, the hard exit from Afghanistan. In doing so, they may also stir up emotions and even memories of moral injury – which can happen when soldiers see or take part in events that go against their values and moral beliefs – Mr. Murray says.

Veterans of America’s most recent wars have not yet had the time to process their experiences that, say, Vietnam-era forces have had, adds David Vickers, a Marine and deputy director of the museum.

The hope is that the respite room will be a “subtle but meaningful way” to do that.

A spot for healing

A former restroom transformed by warm wood accents, cozy armchairs, and succulents, the respite room has relaxing spa music designed to soothe and provide some noise-canceling privacy. 

It also has tissues, a mirror, and a sink, where visitors can splash a little water on their face if the need arises.

It used to have a heavy metal door that slammed shut – “not the feeling we want to give” to visitors averse to being trapped in, General Lukeman says. 

Today, that has changed. There’s a new opaque glass door with an "occupied" sign but no lock, because those had occasionally proved problematic for museum guests in crisis. 

“Sometimes we had to get security to open the door,” he says. 

The room is not just for veterans, but for noncombatants, too, caught up in the tragedy of war. Mr. Vickers recalls giving a tour years ago when “an older Vietnamese lady came up, just crying her eyes out.”

Her dad had been a councilman for the Vietnamese city of Hue, and communist adversaries had put him on a list to be shot. She was hurt and hiding with her family as a little girl when Marines found them and got her care. 

In one of the museum’s realistic displays, a child roughly her age at the time was shown injured in the very same place.

“I wish we would have had a respite room at the time,” Mr. Vickers adds. “I would’ve said, ‘Hey, come on. Let’s take a moment.’ It was extremely emotional for her.”

Often veteran visitors are inspired to share stories that they've never shared before. When this happens, it helps, Mr. Vickers adds, to have a quiet place where they can go and talk and families can record the stories for posterity.

“You’re in the business of capturing – of bringing forth – memories,” Martha Corvea, clinical research director with Mr. Murray’s Liberty Organization, tells the museum staff. 

“You’re in the right business to take a moment in their lives – to take a piece of themselves and an experience that they’ve been through – and to make it a healing one.”