At 75 years old and not yet retired, Linda McClenahan, better known as Sister Sarge, is helping fellow veterans with post-traumatic stress heal through a spiritual lens.
“I kept trying to retire and every time I would say that People would say ‘No you got to keep doing this I’ve got friends,” McClenahan said.
After graduating high school in 1967, McClenahan planned to become a nun, but first, to protect her older brother, she took a detour that changed her life.
“I figured if I was over there then Mark wouldn't have to, and I was very concerned knowing my brother the way I did,” she recalled. “I was pretty sure he'd get himself killed.”
After enlisting in the Women’s Army Corps, she quickly moved up the ranks to become sergeant before being deployed to Vietnam in 1969.
She served in a communications center, dealing with classified information, and coded messaging.
There is when the reality of war changed everything.
“We were under attack, incoming rounds and all of us hit the floor,” she recalled of one incident. “I kind of poked the captain next to me and I said, ‘I don’t get this aren’t we behind the lines here?’ And he said, ‘Lady this is Vietnam there are no behind the lines.”
McClenahan said she worked six days a week for 12-hour shifts but the hardest part of the job was all the casualty reporters that came through the office.
“If you’re whole life you grow up and you know ‘thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not kill— 'Oh, it’s different now we’re in a war. Here’s a gun it’s ok to kill.' There’s some dissonance that’s going to happen there,” she explained. "So, I no longer believed in god.”
She was upset with the military, the government and constantly feeling one of two emotions: numbness and anger.
“I was kind of a hard-drinking, hard swearing angry sergeant,” she said.
The harsh reception she, like many Vietnam war veterans, got when she returned home made matters worse. McClenahan said she found herself making unhealthy choices, experiencing road rage, hanging with the wrong crowd, and unable to hold down a job.
Watch: Swearing Nun helps tackle PTSD through a spiritual perspective.
For the first two and half years after she returned, she worked at 13 different places.
“I had concluded that all of the bosses for whom I was working were all a bunch of idiots,” she said. “Then somewhere along the line, I kind of realized the only thing in common, the only common dominator in all those jobs that went wrong was me.”
Now McClenahan is in recovery and 31 years sober. She said to get to that point she had to go from victim to survivor and finally find her way back to witness.
"It came to me that it wasn't that I didn't believe in god anymore, I didn't believe in the god of my childhood, which was kind of the Santa Claus God,” she explained.
“The nagging voice in my head kept saying about being a sister,” McClenahan shared. “I thought, ‘man no convent in their right mind would want me now’ not with what I’ve done and what I’ve been through.”
But it’s exactly that experience she now uses as a tool. For the past 25 years, she’s been leading retreats that focus on moral injury and PTSD.
She’s helped hundreds of veterans like Tim Sullivan cope with the horrors of war.
“Walking through the airport it was kind of shocking it was people screaming, calling me a baby killer, people spitting,” he recalled. “We learned to just keep our mouth shut and keep it to ourselves and just live with it.”
Sullivan served as a courier in Vietnam and after decades of suffering, he learned about McClenahan’s retreats from his late wife Kate.
“She encouraged me to go,” Sullivan said. “More than encouraged me, she dragged me to the first one.”
Sullivan said for a while he just listened and watched, drawn in by Sister Sarge. It wasn’t until his third retreat that he felt comfortable sharing.
“She made us feel comfortable, at ease,” Sullivan said.
In fact, one of McClenahan tactics to get hardened veterans to open up is how Sister Sarge got her other nickname, “the swearing nun”.
Seven years later Sullivan has grown to be one of the retreat’s facilitators. Now he's encouraging other veterans struggling to cope to seek help.
McClenahan has held retreats throughout the country. She is based on Erie Street with the Racine Dominicans.
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