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This episode of Confluence is the second in a two-part series honoring our graduate student veterans during Veterans Week. Thomas Basolo retired from the military in 2017. In this episode, we discuss his study in social work, his service ethic, and his support for other veterans who are struggling with a variety of issues as they acclimate to civilian life, especially addiction.

On Confluence, we are proud to celebrate these veterans who bring their commitment to service, their discipline, and their support of their fellow human beings to their work as graduate students. The world is a better place when our veterans get the support they need to grow and develop when their service to our nation’s military is done. We are delighted to share their stories with our listeners.

Story Transcript

Ashby Kinch

This is Confluence, where great ideas flow together. The podcast of the Graduate School of the University of Montana. I'm Ashby Kench, Dean of the Graduate School on Confluence. We travel down the tributaries of wisdom and beauty that enrich the soil of knowledge on our beautiful mountain campus.

Pat Beckwith

Thomas, he's a quiet professional, a strong advocate on campus to help other veterans’ kind of redefine themselves. He wants to assist other student veterans to help them feel like this is the place to be. They made the right choice to pursue education. For Thomas to really give up his time and to help other people, I mean, to me, that's one of the most redeeming qualities an individual can have.

AK

You just heard the voice of Pat Beckwith, director of Military and Veteran Services, talking about our guests on this week's episode. Thomas Basolo. Thomas is a first year graduate student in social work, having retired from the military in 2017. Before returning to get his undergraduate degree in social work, extending his service ethic beyond his military experience, Thomas has dedicated himself to supporting veterans. Extending his service ethic beyond his military experience, Thomas has dedicated himself to supporting veterans who are struggling with a variety of issues as they acclimate to civilian life, especially addiction. This is the second of a two-part series honoring our graduate student veterans during Veterans Week. If you have not already, make sure you check out episode number 74, our conversation with army combat veteran Elizabeth Barrs, a PhD student in history who served as a military intelligence officer, among other roles. On Confluence, we are proud to celebrate these veterans who bring their commitment to service, their discipline, and their support for their fellow human beings to their work as graduate students. The world is a better place when our veterans get the support they need to grow and develop. When their service to our nation's military. Is done, we are delighted to share their stories with our listeners. Welcome to Confluence. Enjoy the float. 

AK

Welcome to Confluence, Thomas.

Thomas Basolo

Thank you. 

AK

So you're joining us on Veterans Week. We're highlighting veterans who are graduate students. That's our lane, right? The graduate school. Tell us about your graduate school experience. What program are you in and what brought you into graduate school?

Thomas

I am a first-year grad student in the Social Work department pursuing my Master's Social Work degree. When I retired in 2017, I had to find a real job. So I decided to go back to school and I went in and got my Bachelors of Social Work degree. And I just kind of realized at that point that in order to really affect change that I was going to have to go on. And I wanted to go on just because knowledge is power. So that really was the beginning of my journey into the Masters of Social Work.

AK

But already back there after retirement, you already had seen social work as an area where you wanted to work. In other words, you already saw a bit of a mission there. I mean, some reason why you chose that degree and not another one. 

Thomas

In my military career, I spent a lot of time as a medic, and so a lot of our jobs was patching up, wounded, but also the mental health of squad members. And so we're kind of an all, a holistic entity of that. So not only were we physical treatment, but we also mentally talked with guys, Joes, as we call them, just to make sure that they were okay. And so, looking at that, I've always wanted to help people. And throughout my military career, I've had multiple jobs. I was a medic, I was an infantryman, and then I went to operations, and then I finished my career in human resources, which I was still able to affect and help soldiers. But it wasn't it was a different role. And then when I retired, I noticed, and I noticed this while I was in, that there's a gap once your usefulness to the United States army, in my case, or the Armed Forces is used up, you're kind of discarded. You're kind of just kind of left to flounder by yourself. And so I notice that there is a gap in between that to include coming back from deployment. And there's a lot of, a lot of individuals, a lot of my brothers and sisters that fall through the cracks. They don't ask for help.

AK

We'll talk a little bit more about. It, you open up, obviously, a very important topic for us to talk about in the broader culture. They don't ask for help. Part of that is the ingrained resilience component, which has this really strong positive virtue if you're in battlefield scenarios. But in civilian life, that same resilience can maybe create scenarios that are not healthy for the individual.

Thomas

Absolutely. The veteran suicide is 22 a day, and that's one too many. And so not asking for help because they're prideful or they don't think anybody is going to be able to help them, or nobody can understand. And that's one of the things that I struggled with. Nobody's going to understand what I'm going through because nobody's lived it. And it's acceptable within the military. You have to be tough and strong, and you can't talk about your feelings and what you're going through mentally, because then there's that stigma that goes along with it, and then there's also that shame.

AK

And that's something in general, public health, discussions of mental health, there's a general stigma, but it's more intensified within that particular subpopulation for all these reasons we're talking about. It seems like weakness. It seems like incapacity.

Is the military itself changing in that regard? Have there been shifts?

Thomas

There has been shifts. It's obviously not enough, but yes, there has been shifts. And really, societies demanded it. Troops on the ground are asked to do these extraordinary things, and then they come home and they don't have any support. I feel like it's a direct reflection on the armed forces that there are 22 veterans a day that take their own life when there could have been more done. So that's really what drove me into this field, to affect the change. And I'm not so naive to think that I can change the world, but I want to change my little piece of it and help one person at a time.

AK

Absolutely. And that's, of course, all we could do, right? Whether it's in our own personal journeys, taking one step at a time, or helping one person up, that's all we can do. We can potentially have massive impact if we do that enough. So I'm kind of pivoting back to the so you did the Bachelor of Social Work, but I'm guessing part of it is also coming from a military background. You knew how to retrain. I mean, in other words, you had had that experience of going through multiple jobs. There's a technical term in the military. Say it. What do you call your military job?

Thomas

Your military occupational specialty, your MoS.

AK

MoS. There we go. So you went through that change, and that last one was HR. And I'm guessing that's a cumulative work. You've done a lot of battlefield work, and it's time for you to pivot away from that. But then you know how to train, right? I kind of think that's one of the great strengths of the military. We talked about a kind of weakness, but one of the strengths is the ability to kind of go and make a career and learn how to learn. Right. Learn how to pick up a job and go do it. And I'm guessing that's played a role in your ability to be successful in that undergraduate degree.

Thomas

Absolutely. Adaptability is one of the I mean, everybody in the military has habit. You have multiple roles. If you're an infantryman, you're not just an infantryman, you’re many other things and having that ability to switch gears and flow and do whatever needs to be done for the mission accomplishment is huge. And you're going to learn stuff that's useful and you're going to learn stuff that's not useful. And so just taking it for what it is and being able to go with the flow. I think if there was one individual that would be that I would say influence most of it, and this is only my undergrad would be Linda, Dr. Linda Eagle Heart. And I think she retired, but she was instrumental because when my mom died in 2020, I was going to take a semester off. And it kind of worked out. Like friends and family were like, no, don't do that. That's just going to make it harder to go back and blah, blah, blah. So I didn't. But by the time I was registering, well, it was one it was too late. But the semester had already started so I had to email professors to see if they would allow me in.

Thomas

And that really kind of screwed up my course. And through dumb luck I got a hold of Dr. Eaglehart because the chemical addiction studies through the missile college and she was like, not only will we catch you up, she said yes. And not only that, but we'll catch you up and we'll make sure where you need to be for your chemical addiction stuff so you can finish at the same time with your bachelors and your addiction studies. And so it turned out I wasn't where I thought it was. And so she really was instrumental in ensuring that I got to where I could graduate with both of them.

AK

So I'm going to go back to your knowledge's power, of course, really important in some levels it's just like a fact, right? Or a truism. But you said it was such determined focus. I want to hear more about that. So you sort of feel like pivoting and going into the graduate school, applying and pursuing a graduate degree in a way of deepening that knowledge and you see that as kind of your view. I mean, this is a grad school podcast, so we like to talk about that motivation to kind of be at a higher level of knowledge that will give you a little bit more capacity. You feeling that so far as a grad student?

Thomas

Absolutely. One of the things that's really important to me is having that being able to connect not just with clients that I'm working with in addictions, but also like other individuals and having that genuineness and being able to help them navigate through whatever they're going through from that shared experience. Like we've all been down in the mud and the muck and being able to have that knowledge to help them navigate to where they're not, you know, even if they're crawling, they're stuck. Yeah, absolutely. Where they're moving forward continuously. Even if they're crawling, that's still moving forward and that's still progress. Just because you're struggling doesn't mean you're failing. And so having that mindset and having the knowledge and the ability to help somebody navigate whatever life is throwing at them because they're not alone. And so I feel like for me, learning everything that I'm learning in grad school in my first year is really impactful. It's all interesting, it's all new and exciting and keeping that excitement because everything that I'm learning is going to be useful to me in the future.

AK

And having some excitement about graduate studies. Pretty important just because it's also hard, right?

AK

I mean, both the graduate study itself and the hard work you're doing right, aren't easy. And you have to have that motivation that drives you forward and clearly you do. And so you mentioned, and we had just been talking about that before coming on air, that you want to focus in addiction. Tell me about that. You already have done a substantial amount of work on that. Why'd you choose that area as a focal point?

Thomas

A lot of my passions and my desires to help come from my own experience. And so I was down in the mud and the muck, and I drank like a fish. And that's just the reality of the military. The military, it encourages alcohol and condones it. There are many times where we have justified what we were doing, hey, somebody lived through this mission. Let's go have a drink. Somebody died through this mission. Let's go have a drink. You could always justify, and it was strongly encouraged and condoned. And so my own journey to sobriety kind of led me down this dark path. And so when I got to the bottom, there was no place to go but up. And just knowing that at times I wanted to give up and I didn't want to move forward anymore. And so just having those individuals that were there with me and they weren't addiction counselors.

AK

They were just friends.

Thomas

They were just friends, just brothers and sisters that would help me along. And I just realized that there's this huge gap of even if the VA does have them, I don't know where they are, to be honest with you. And so trying to bridge that gap and helping somebody to know that it's okay, that you will make it through and just having that person I won't walk in front of you. I won't walk behind you, but I'll walk beside you through that journey. And that's really where my philosophy comes from, and it's my own personal experience of being down in the mud and the muck and trying to move forward.

AK

Now you've got this journey ahead of you in the program. You'll simultaneously be working on your coursework, but then you're already hard after the clinical hours, which is a key part of this program. Every graduate program has some of that applied work, but probably no program has a more important anchor in practice. Social work, clinical psychology, clinical, mental health counseling, all those programs. You got to get in there and do it. But there is no you don't just have the knowledge, and all of a sudden you're a counselor. You got to go in there and do it under supervision. So you have these certain number of hours you got to hit. How's that been for you? Can you feel changes in your practice that you cross thresholds by accumulating those hours? Can you feel a difference? You had different plateaus of experience and.

Thomas

Understanding absolutely every single day I learned something new, and whether that's from clients or whether that's from colleagues or classmates or professors, I'm fairly new at this. So, like, learning to be comfortable talking one on one with a client or to facilitate a group, it's a little different in the army, in the army, everything. There's a task, condition and standard. Everything is laid out for you you can add to but you can never take away. And so you have this blueprint of, this is what you need to teach. This is how you need to teach it. Addiction is a little different, like a little windy. It's a lot of how feelings and how the client directs it. You could go in there with the best laid plan, but if the client's not feeling where you're going, you're not going to get anywhere. So you have to be able to adapt to what they feel, what they want to talk about, because you might.

AK

Not be allowing them yeah, absolutely. To say something you need to say.

Thomas

Yeah. And so being from going from a directive leadership position, this is the stuff that you have to learn. There's no leeway. You will learn that force fun or mandatory fun to really being flexible and moving. That has been one of the biggest things that I've learned just in the short amount of time that I've been doing this.

AK

Yeah. And it's probably more like a muscle that you got to build up, then something just automatically you're good at it, right?

Thomas

Absolutely.

AK

Learn some habits, learn some new ones.

Thomas

Lean into the discovery. Because it's completely uncomfortable for me to not be in control of that environment. I'm supposed to be the subject matter expert, and in some respects, people expect that and others they don't. But just being able to say, I don't know, or if you don't know, I'll find that out. And just leaning into that discomfort of not having all the answers all the time and to be able to let them lead.

AK

What an important phrase, too, leaning into the discomfort. I mean, one of the themes we're always hitting on this podcast is graduate school is hard. It's a tough no matter what field you're in, the whole point is you're being asked something, being asked to jump a level, and there is discomfort in that. But there's a fine line between discomfort and sort of being pushed to an extreme that melts you down. So all of our mentors and advisors and students are kind of trying to find that balance. Embrace the suck is the phrase in the military. But it's a little different when you put it in that way. Right. Embrace the suck is about getting through the thing. Leaning into discomfort is more like learning from being in that new space. Not that you can't learn from embracing the stock. Right. But it's kind of interesting pairing.

AK

That rhetoric.

AK

So how'd you end up in Montana?

Thomas

I'm born and raised in Montana. I was born in Bozeman, Belgrade. I grew up there. The only time I've ever left is deployments. And then when I was on active duty, I was out in Washington, but I've been in Montana the entire time.

AK

Yeah. So that desire to go off in the military. We know this, that Montana has got one of the highest rates of military participation. Where did it come from for you?

Thomas

My dad was in the military. He's a Vietnam vet. And then my grandfather was in my mom's side was in World War Two. He was part of the 101st Airborne Division in Northern Africa. So it was really inherent to me.

AK

Yeah, I mean, that's a rich legacy.

Thomas

Yeah, absolutely.

AK

And we were talking before coming on about the Italian part of your head over there and it's Italy. Was there a military thing or was that kind of new to the US.

Thomas

Just new, yeah.

AK

But your grandfather's World War Two deployment probably ran them through Italy before they head to north. 

Thomas

Yes, absolutely did.

AK

That must have been interesting.

Thomas

Yeah. I think about how even my evolution of deployments from my first one is in 2004, 2005. And that was an 18 month deployment. That was a long one. And on that one we were on this remote Fob right outside the city.

AK

That's Ford Operating Base for our listeners. 

Thomas

Yes, absolutely. It was right outside Hawija and so they didn't like us there. And so we were constantly under attack. Mortars coming in, roadside bombs, everyday occurrence. And to communicate with the outside, we could sign up for we had an Internet tent and so we can sign up for a half hour on the computer or half hour on the phone. And the phones were the delay. They came in through Maelstrom and they connected you. And so talking on those phones, it was like a three second delay. And so that was my first deployment and then my 2nd, third, and fourth subsequent. It got better and better. And by the fourth time we had internet in our containerized housing units, our shoes. And so we didn't even have to leave to go sign up for the phone or the Internet. We can do it all from the comfort of our bed, so to speak. And so just that evolution. And I thought back about those guys in World War II. That was real. They spent four years and letters came over by snail mail and they may or may not have contact with family and friends for months on end.

Thomas

And so just how fortunate I was to be able to communicate with my parents and friends on a fairly regular basis.

AK

Yeah, I mean, you just can't spend any time looking at World War II at all without just having immense respect for what they went through. 

Thomas

Yeah, just awe.

AK

Awe. That's exactly the right word. Thomas, thanks for joining us on Influence. It's been great talking to you and best of luck in your degree and in your future career. We just wish you the very best.

Thomas

Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

AK

If you like what you've heard, you've got Kate Lloyd to think. She's a student in our MFA program in Media Arts her deft ear and keen editing touch have created the sonic landscape through which you're floating. We'd like to thank UM's College of Arts and Media for providing studio space and talent to support this production. Confluence is brought to you by the Graduate School of the University of Montana. Innovation. Imagination, intellect to serve the state, the region and the world.

AK

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