RAE ANNE HO FUNG

I faced a lot of adversity growing up, including losing my mom at five years old. As I became a teenager, the military looked like a pathway out of adversity, so I enlisted in the Army National Guard at seventeen.

Nine years of service included a deployment to Camp Bucca, Iraq, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I watched the toll deployments took on soldiers over several decades of war, learned about the conditions Iraqi civilians endured under a dictator regime, and felt the weight of the atrocities so many U.S. service members carried with them. None of it belonged to me directly, but all of it asked something of me. I wanted to help.

My best friend from elementary school through high school had joined the Army too. After several deployments to the Middle East, he lost his life to an accidental overdose. That loss has stayed with me.

Simultaneously, I was an elementary school teacher in the inner city, and found more of the same. Wherever I turned, trauma seemed to sit at the center of what kept people from living the lives they wanted.

I needed to be part of the solution to all of it. That need led me back to school, where I earned my PhD in Counseling Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. My dissertation focused on the experiences of women survivors of military sexual trauma.

In 2014, I volunteered to help support a Military Sexual Trauma retreat through Healing Warrior Hearts. As the women shared their stories, I recognized how much I had in common with them, and how much healing work I still had left to do myself. I moved from volunteer to participant, and the shift changed me. I experienced a depth of healing I had not found anywhere else, and I have wanted to pay that forward ever since.

I now co-lead retreats several times a year, and every one of them reminds me why this work matters.