Bonnie Carroll: Unlocking the healing power of Alaska

Bonnie Carroll fell into military widow mentorship and advocacy in the worst way possible: through the death of her own husband.

The commander of the Alaska Army National Guard, Brig. Gen. Thomas Carroll was killed in 1992 when the C-12F twin-engine Beechcraft he was taking to Elemndorf Air Force Base crashed 30 miles west of Juneau. All eight people aboard died. Bonnies late father-in-law, Maj. Gen. Thomas Carroll, had also served as the head of the Alaska Army guard, and was killed in a C-123J crash in Valdez shortly after the 1964 earthquake. The Guard’s Camp Carroll is named in his honor.

After her husband’s death, Bonnie Carroll, who had herself served in the Air National Guard, was launched full force into the world of military widows. She knew about grief, at least from a distance, through her work with organizations like Victims for Justice and others. But now she was in the thick of it, a widow herself looking for others who could relate to her loss and provide comfort.

She had trouble finding them.

“I really started looking and searching for the kind of group that exists for so many other types of loss in our society, and knowing how helpful and therapeutic that is,” she said. “It really became very clear that you do need your own tribe.”

That, she says, is how what is now known as the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS) got its start. Although a separate military widow’s organization focused on advocacy, no organization was dedicated to mentorship or peer support.

“We grieve because we love — and that’s an epiphany. People think of grief and equate it to depression. Grief is actually an outpouring of having loved someone. … The only thing you can really do for that is just being, and understanding and normalize that experience that you are having,” she said. “It’s suddenly ‘oh my God, I’m not alone. Oh my God, I’m not going crazy.’”

The top non-profit for surviving military family members, TAPS has worked with 75,000 military family members since its official founding in 1994. Annual seminars, “Good Grief” camps for surviving kids, a 24/7 survivor helpline, survivor financial assistance, advocacy at the White House and on Capitol Hill and retreats, including two annually held in the Anchorage area, are among the many services the organization provides.

Although the TAPS website is quick to point out that the groups is not officially endorsed by the U.S. Department of Defense, there is no denying the sway they hold at both Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs, where they have a formal memorandum of understanding in place to help military survivors. For example, at least in part because of their advocacy, the Pentagon change the way it works with survivors of military suicide, expanding in 2009 the official

Carroll can regularly be found on in D.C. working events and advocating for surviving military family members. Yet she still calls Spenard home, and returns up to twice a month, she said.

Her ties to Alaska are about more than returning regularly to a place she has called home for more than 30 years or seeing friends, she said. She keeps coming back for the same reason she regularly brings retreats to the region: she knows Alaska heals.

“This is a very healing place, it’s a very spiritual place,” she said. “Being in the mountains, being in the outdoors, connecting on such a grand scale. After Tom was killed I used to get in the care at 10 at night and drive to Seward and back and just look at the beauty. It transcends the immediate back into what’s permanent. The mountains have been here for hundreds of thousands of years and will be here long after we are gone.”