ARLINGTON, Texas — Veterans in the Dallas-Fort Worth area have access to some of the best peer-to-peer assistance organizations in the country. Now a grieving sister hopes her decade-long effort can be a part of that support system too.
Army Cpl. Chris Coffland signed on with the Army Reserves in December 2007, a month before the 42-year-old age cutoff to join the military. He told his friends and family that it made more sense for him, a single man with no children, to take the place of someone who had a wife and children to go home to.
Coffland was killed by a roadside bomb only two-and-a-half weeks after he arrived in Afghanistan.
"It was a devastating day," Lynn Coffland said of that moment 10 years ago when an Army detail arrived at her home in Baltimore, Maryland to tell her that her little brother had been killed. But in her grief, she quickly decided she needed for his death not to be in vain.
"I feel it's my duty to give service back that way," she said.
She started an organization called the Catch A Lift Fund. "Catch a lift" is what Chris Coffland would always tell his family and friends he was headed to do at the gym. He was a devoted gym rat. Friends said he arrived in Afghanistan in better physical shape than other soldiers half his age.
The idea of the Catch a Lift Fund was to provide gym memberships, trainers, and gym equipment to veterans as a method of battling the physical injuries and PTSD that might have come home from war with them.
Marine veteran Jeff Crenshaw from Spring, Texas. He was a sniper in Afghanistan and is one of the more than 7,000 veterans who have benefited from CAL so far.
"When I came back from Afghanistan, that was really the hardest one," he said of his multiple tours of duty. "Coming back from Afghanistan, I was angry. Oh, I was so angry. The anger was terrible," he said reflecting on friends lost and the difficulty as a gunnery sergeant having to send his fellow Marines into battle.
"Physical exertion is some of the best treatment for PTSD I've ever found," he said. "It's like my nirvana, to be honest with you."
And Marine veteran Jose Ivan Perez from Austin, who had his hand maimed and his spine damaged by a sniper 13 years ago, says time in the gym is what helped turn his life around, too.
He is confined mostly to a wheelchair with limited use of his right leg.
"Life is not guaranteed so we don't know when it's going to happen," Perez said. "Until then, it's really just keep doing exactly what I feel like it's working. And it's working for me," he said of the assistance he gets from CAL.
In its first decade, CAL has awarded more than 8,500 grants to veterans, raised more than $6.2 million and given more than 86% of all donations to CAL veteran programs. The Catch A Lift Fund is active in multiple states across the U.S. and its goal is to help Dallas-Fort Worth-area veterans too.
A recent Sunday afternoon fundraiser at Legal Draft Beer Co. in Arlington introduced local veterans and sponsors to the program where Coffland, Crenshaw and Perez shared their stories.
"I feel very humbled that I was able to take something really sad and painful and turn it into something that's helping our American veterans," Coffland said.
"It's a healing process. It's cathartic," added Crenshaw. "It's a way for you work out the aggression and the literal hate that you have for where you are now."
"Regardless of what you're struggling with, whether it's PTSD or a disability or an amputation or something, no matter what we're still here," said Perez.
Still here and still fighting, with the help of a grieving sister offering help one good "catch a lift" at a time.
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