With PAX South a few hours away, the Stack-Up volunteer team from San Antonio decided to call an audible and descend on San Antonio’s Brooke Army Medical Center for a little supporting the troops. Brooke is one of the military’s largest medical installations; if you have anything medical to do in your job with the military, you spend some time in San Antonio getting trained up. Brooke also sports one of the world’s leading burn treatment facilities as well, which made it quite the busy spot with military casualties coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq with explosion injuries.
Our mission at Brooke Army Medical was two-fold: outfit some of Brooke’s “Fisher Houses” with everything they needed to get their troopers gaming and recognize some outstanding recovering veterans with a little gaming surprise from us.
Fisher Houses are wonderful establishments on military facilities that allow the family members of medically recovering veterans to stay at. Some wounded vets stay at Brooke for anywhere from six months to two years, and that kind of stay can be costly to have family members nearby to help and encourage them during their recovery period. The Fisher House is a way to eliminate that expense by allowing them to live in a lavish mansion-sized house with multiple other families who are dealing with the same problems. The issue there is that while the houses are beautiful and well outfitted, they also don’t have anything for the troopers to do there at night. The units have some amazing facilities available to them during the day, but they close at 8 PM, and then they’re forced back to their rooms with jigsaw puzzles and old paperback books to keep them company.
Not on our watch. We outfitted three of their Fisher Houses with some Playstation 4s games and gear as you can see here, and the troopers were ecstatic, to say the least. Get out of here, jigsaw puzzle!
Now the remaining three PlayStation 4 bundles we had, we talked with the command at Brooke Army Medical and wanted them to recommend to us three of their best and brightest recovering vets for us to help out; folks who were either struggling during their recovery or super awesome people in need of some help. Justus is an Army Specialist who broke his lower back during a routine obstacle course, Kevin is an Army Sergeant who was diagnosed with aggressive cancer, while Adriana is an Army Specialist there in the process of having a tumor dealt with. Of the three soldiers, Adriana’s reaction was the most dramatic: “I know what I’m doing tonight!” she barked gleefully, clutching the new Playstation 4 to her chest in a bear hug.
Big thanks to both our allies at Brooke Army Medical for making our stay at the hospital pleasant and another big shout out to our new friends at Sony Interactive Entertainment of America who helped facilitate the donation of gear for the troops!