Baffico Finds Healing in Service to Military Veterans, Families

Paul Baffico did his duty.

After coming home from Vietnam in 1971, he kept his mouth shut, put the ugliness of war behind him and marched forward.

For the next 36 years.

After an illustrious career with Sears Roebuck, serving as president and CEO of Sears Automotive, Baffico retired at age 53.

During all that time, the war had never left him. His mind free from the corporate pressures and being that go-to guy, thoughts he believed to be stored in a safe place began to flood his present life.

“I was kind of sitting on top of the world,” the said about retiring. “As you go into that chapter of your life, there are not so many future chapters, so it becomes ‘let’s go back and look.’ Not because you want to focus on it, it just happens.”

Five years ago, Baffico was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder from his service in Vietnam. Since then, he has thrown himself fully into helping veterans and their families. He became a certified peer-to-peer support specialist and volunteers as chairman of the Veterans and Family Services program advisory committee composed solely of veterans to spearhead a national grant from the Department of Health and Human Services that assists veterans and their families in Lake and McHenry counties.

The American Red Cross  is recognizing Baffico’s efforts today, April 19, as a “Military Hero” during its 10th annual Heroes Breakfast, which also will laud 15 other Chicago-area honorees. (See the attached video)

His Moral Compass

Growing up in San Francisco, Baffico’s high school and college years were in stark contrast to the escalating war in Vietnam. By the time he graduated high school in 1965, Marines had been deployed and America’s advisory role in Southeast Asia had been replaced by all-out engagement. By the time he graduated the University of San Francisco in 1968, the anti-war movement was spreading like wildfire.

“The moral compass was very screwed up at the time,” Baffico said. “ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) was mandatory the first two years at USF, and I was sharing the cost with my parents, so I’m thinking that I have to keep doing this ROTC thing. My friends are like, ‘Are you crazy?’ Some fled the country, some overdosed on drugs. I took a lot of heat on campus for staying in ROTC.”

He thought the war would end before he would have to be shipped over. It didn’t. He served a two-year stint from 1969-71. When he returned to San Francisco, he sought refuge in his career at Sears.

“I just wanted to be invisible —not talk about it, not engage anybody on it and try to process how many friends I lost because I had gone to war,” he said. “My solution was to work my buns off for Sears, which will keep me distracted, and don’t look back.”

Sense of Direction

As a platoon leader of a communications division with the 101st Airborne, Baffico lost five men, whose names along with more than 58,000 others adorn the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. He tried to make peace on one visit to the Wall, but the emotions, the pain, were too much.

“I could not stand being there,” he said.

The questions he asked didn’t seem to have answers.

“When you have survivor’s guilt, you always question why didn’t it happen to me,” Baffico said. “If it didn’t happen to me, what am I supposed to do with what I’ve been given?”

He soon found out. With his wife urging him to seek help, on another trip to Washington, he returned to the Wall. As he stood there alone, the pain resurfacing, his focus turned to a docent, a war veteran like himself who seemed to embrace this call to duty.

“We had a lot in common,” Baffico said. “We were both ROTC. He was a platoon leader. We were in Vietnam at exactly the same time. I asked him, ‘Why do you do this? This is crazy.’ He said, ‘This is best I have ever felt since I have been home is to stand in front of my men.’ I’ve never forgotten that. That really hit me.”

This weekend will mark the 72nd consecutive month that he has served as a volunteer docent for the National Parks Service at the Wall. Every month, he designates a weekend and leaves on a Saturday morning, returning on Monday at his own expense.

“I do get out of it as much as I put into it. It’s cheaper than therapy, and it works a lot better,” he said, smiling.

The Last to Ask for Help

Military training creates veterans who are often the last to ask for help, Baffico said.

So, when he went looking in 2006, Baffico visited the Veterans Administration hospital at Naval Station Great Lakes. However, the path did not seem as clear as it should have been, and the desire to make it so found roots when Ted Testa called him last year.

Testa, behavioral health services director for Lake County, received more than $3 million in federal money to fund a grant to provide services not just for veterans, but also for their families in both Lake and McHenry counties. It’s a one-of-a kind program, so when he went looking for veterans to fill his advisory committee, Baffico’s name kept coming up.

“They told me I needed to talk to this guy,” Testa said. “So I called him up and within five minutes, he was on the advisory committee. I had never seen this type of passion.”

Transforming Lives

The grant differs from government programs by including all veterans, regardless of discharge, and addresses veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, starting at pre-deployment, and continuing through to post-deployment.

Baffico also likes the outreach it provides for families, who are as much a part of this journey as the veterans themselves.

“Our mission is to provide these services so the veteran and family can move on with their life, not so they are attached to the VA for the rest of their lives, not so that they will be under the very close care of the veteran community” he said. “They can be, but the transformational part comes in, the clinicians, the people that we partner and work with, understand that we want these people to have a life. We just don’t want them to be safe. We want more than that.”

Baffico chairs the veterans advisory committee and the subset in Lake County. The committee provides input from a veteran point of view, which creates a bridge in which other veterans can engage.

“When we talk to veterans or they talk to us, we have a better understanding than actually a professional clinician in some instances,” Baffico said. “There is an unspoken action amongst veterans, particularly combat veterans. You scan through what you are hearing, and it’s genuine or imposter. If it’s genuine, there might be some relationship. If it’s somebody who is not a veteran, you’re not going to talk to him about your problems. You’ll talk to him about other things.”

Baffico has talked up the program in front of local Rotary Club chapters and community organizations, noting how it works at transforming the lives of veterans and families rather than simply throwing money at the issue and hoping something happens.

“Paul is a natural leader,” Testa said. “He has managed to keep everyone involved and keep the mission going. I know of no one in my career as dedicated and determined to making a difference in this much-needed area of service.”

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