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BEHIND THE STRIPES

Command Sergeant Major Gretchen Evans and VetDog Rusty

By Atlanta United FC

November 3^rd, 2023

When traversing dangerously steep terrain like a mountain ridge or crossing a fast-moving current on a river, a rope team is essential.

The term describes a group of people bound together on an expedition. The purpose of a rope team is to have support when charting difficult waters or climbing treacherous ground. If one person were to slip and fall, or get swept away in the current, other members of the team are there to provide help and support. The mission is to survive adverse conditions and accomplish a challenge as a unit.

At the end of the day, the rope team sticks together, through the ups and downs, both of which retired Command Sergeant Major Gretchen Evans has experienced in her life. As one of the most decorated female veterans in United States history, her military experience has taught her that she can’t do it all alone. She relies on her own rope team to see her through life’s most challenging and most beautiful moments.

“It's a great metaphor for life,” she says. “I think that everybody should have a rope team because we all get kicked to the curb at least once in life, if not a couple of times. If you've got people who are going to pick in for you until you can stand back up on your own and continue, then there's beauty in that.”

Evans grew up in Abilene, Texas as the middle child in a patriotic family; her father served in World War II. When she was young, disaster struck: her parents passed away within six months of each other, leaving Evans and her two brothers to care for themselves. Her older brother came home from college to take care of Evans until she reached the age of 18, which is when Evans would be on her own and responsible for herself.

While Evans attended college at Texas Tech in Lubbock, she worked full-time to provide for herself. The load was a struggle, so she began looking into ways to find aid, which led her to the military. She signed up thinking that she’d learn a skill and save some money for college, but she ended up falling in love. And so, what began with the expectation of four years, a short-term solution to help her fund college, turned into 27 years of service.

"I liked the structure,” she says. “Even though some people think it's always the same, you get up, you go to the chow hall, you do this and this and this, but there's always different dynamics that are happening. You learn something new every day. Every day is not like Groundhog Day. It's different.”

What Evans also found in the military was being part of something bigger than herself, a powerful message that military members often sum up with the descriptor, “to be in the service.”

“It means I'm in the service of something other than myself, serving my country, serving other people and serving other countries, humanitarian efforts,” she says. “It's bigger than you. It’s a noble career and I was very happy to do that.”

“That’s your home and people you love live there. You’re willing to put yourself in harm’s way in order to protect that home address."

Evans would go on to serve nearly three decades in the U.S. Army. Her career took her all over the country and abroad as well. During her time in the army, Evans served in places such as Central America and the Middle East.

She served combat tours in Afghanistan, which is where Evans suffered a horrific incident. In 2006, a rocket blast wounded Evans critically. She lost her hearing and suffered a traumatic brain injury, which also developed into post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The result would end her military career, but her outlook on the situation was strong and determined.

“That was certainly a bad day in my life, but I’m not broken,” she says. “I had to learn how to adjust my life to accommodate these injuries and these illnesses that I have, but I don't consider myself disabled. I consider myself mixed ability, not disabled.”

Every aspect that Evans lost in the blast she replaced with another ability. She lost her hearing but learned to lip read. Part of her brain was affected and doesn’t work exactly like it used to, so she became an exceptional note taker. Her PTSD, what she calls her “moral injury,” made her more of a kind person.

“I became more empathetic and sympathetic with people in life because I knew how it felt to have your whole world come apart,” she says. “The things that were taken from me, I replaced with different skills and different abilities.”

Her injuries led Evans to create her advocacy group in 2019 called Team UNBROKEN, a team made up of adaptive athletes to help them live a purposeful life. The team consists of both veterans, like Evans, and civilians to model collaboration, unity, teamwork, and perseverance.

“Team UNBROKEN is very near and dear to my heart,” Evans says. “The whole premise behind Team UNBROKEN was the ‘World's Toughest Race’ was coming back and I wanted to take a team of adaptive athletes. Part of that was what I had just experienced after I got wounded when people looked at me. Most of my injuries are invisible.”

Everybody on Team UNBROKEN has a life-altering injury, illness, trauma, or disability, which is reflected in the Team UNBROKEN logo. The mark shows a chain of rope with knots in the rope. Each knot represents a member of Team UNBROKEN. At one end of the rope is an arrow to illustrate always moving forward. On the other end of the rope is a knot that isn’t filled in.

“That's for everybody that we're racing for and that represents everybody out there that needs to be on a rope team or wants to be on our rope team,” Evans says. “We encourage people who want to be on Team UNBROKEN just to reach out to us. If you want to go and experience something with Team UNBROKEN, come on and do it. Do it with us and we'll show you the power behind being part of a rope team.”

The mantra for Team UNBROKEN is being there for each other. As Evans explains, there are times in life when we all need someone who can pick us up. On her rope team, sometimes Evans is the person that’s filling in for someone else. Other times, when she’s struggling or facing a challenge, she needs a teammate to pick her up. This give-and-take shows teamwork and most importantly a responsibility to be there for the people around us when they’re going through a hard time.

“We hope to be a visible inspiration for people who face barriers and obstacles, to be able to say, these disabilities, these mixed abilities don't define me or what I can accomplish. Only I get to do that. Other people don't get to define what I can and can't do, based on their perception of the limits of my abilities because of my disabilities. I own that. So, I want them to feel like all doors are still open to them.”

“Doing things together has power and joy in it. You get to see the faces of other people as they accomplish something that maybe was out of reach for them.”

Evans fought to get her team on the ‘World’s Toughest Race,’ a televised race that followed 66 teams from 30 different countries over 11 days. Each team who competed in the World’s Toughest Race had to complete a 417-mile obstacle course over rivers, ocean and swamp. The race had five legs and teams must pass 31 checkpoints to locate five medallions.

Initially, some didn’t want Team UNBROKEN to compete in the race, including the show’s producer Mark Burnett. He had a phone call with Evans, explaining his reservations about putting people with mixed abilities into such extreme and challenging environments. Evans, however, advocated for her team to be included. She encouraged the show’s producers to put them on the same playing field as everybody else and let the team do their best.

Her passionate words convinced the show, and Team UNBROKEN went on to compete in the race. The group went through the rigors of the race. Not only did they compete, but people loved their story. Of the 66 teams to compete, only 10 were featured in the series that aired on Amazon. One of the featured stories was Team UNBROKEN.

“We just went out there and did the best that we could and navigated all these crazy things,” Evans says.

An important member of Evans’s rope team is Rusty, a gorgeous black Labrador. Rusty is a hearing service dog from America's VetDogs who is not just a companion for Evans but also a valuable helper.

With Evans experiencing hearing loss, Rusty helps alert her to sounds that she doesn’t hear. For example, if someone comes to visit Evans and rings the doorbell, she won’t be able to hear the noise. But Rusty does. He’ll hear the sound, run to Evans and poke her in the leg to alert her to the sound.

The same goes for other sounds around the house – the washer, dryer, microwave. Rusty even brings Evans her phone when she gets a text. He’ll also alert Evans when her husband calls her name, which explains her sweet nickname for Rusty as “the marriage-saver.” Having a VetDog allows Evans to drive legally because with her hearing loss she can’t hear traffic or emergency vehicles. But with Rusty in the car, he notifies her of the important sounds on the road.

“He gave me back my independence, along with my first service dog, Ora, but Rusty does so much more than that,” Evans says. “He’s my constant companion. He's so intuitive. Like if I'm in an uncomfortable situation, Rusty just feels that. He'll lean on me, or he'll put his head in my lap, and he's just there.”

Another area that Rusty helps Evans with is her PTSD. Among his trained skills is nightmare interruption. If Evans is having a nightmare, Rusty recognizes it and he’ll pull the sheet off her with his teeth. That slight change in temperature is usually enough to pull Evans out of a bad dream.

“If that doesn't work, then he nuzzles me, and that usually always wakes me up,” Evans explains. “Because he's a big boy, he'll start nuzzling me. But in the instance that that doesn't work, Rusty gets on the bed and lays on my chest. He weighs almost 80 pounds. I weigh 105. So, that always wakes me up.”

There’s also a social component to having a VetDog like Rusty. In the military, service members learn not to let anyone put a hand on you, so they prefer to keep people at a distance of an arm’s length. Rusty helps with this by providing physical space for Evans just by standing in front of his owner and giving her a little bit of a buffer with other people.

Additionally, it helps with uncomfortable questions that might trigger PTSD. For a veteran, a simple conversation icebreaker such as ‘What do you do?’ can be complicated. As Evans explains, this question can lead to the unpleasant next question: What did you do in the military? Someone who lived through what Evans lived through doesn’t want to relive those horrible experiences, and a simple introduction or conversation can quickly turn dark.

“This is not a casual conversation for us,” Evans says. “I don't think people mean anything by it. It's the same conversation you would have with other people which, for us, could be intrusive and we're not ready to share that information yet or we don't want to talk about it. Having a service dog helps with that. They teach the dog how to greet people.”

And who wouldn’t like to receive a greeting from a friendly, well-behaved dog, especially a sweet boy like Rusty.

“Rusty gives me an opportunity to engage people without having to talk about myself,” Evans says. “Sometimes you need that soft introduction because veterans sometimes don't want to talk about themselves. Maybe they don't know how to talk about what they did in the military, or they don't want to talk about it. But you can always talk about your dog. I can talk all day long about Rusty and never mention anything about myself. It gives me that nice soft opening into a dialogue with people that I'm meeting for the first time and maybe I don't want to divulge.”

Together, Evans and Rusty served as the honorary captain at Atlanta United’s military appreciation match on October 7 against Columbus Crew. They both walked out onto the pitch with the two teams prior to kickoff, waving to the crowd enthusiastically while the stadium honored all those who served.

Evans says it was a privilege to represent veterans and that she feels grateful anytime Atlanta United brings a veteran down onto the field.

“We stand for all veterans, and when I'm standing there, it's not just me – I'm representing the hundreds of thousands of people who've worn the cloth of our country and I just happened to be the one that's there today. I hope that is conveyed, and I'm sure that it will be,” she says.

Evans says that if there’s one thing that’s sometimes misunderstood about being a veteran and nationally observed holidays like Veterans Day is that people sometimes conflate politics with service. She hopes that civilians understand that veterans like herself take their service seriously and just want to be acknowledged for their commitment.

“Serving our country is very important to us and very meaningful to us and we take it very seriously,” she says. And when people ask us why, we say it's never about politics, it's never about land, it's never about oil. It's always about the address on our driver's license, our home address, because we're fighting for that.”

“When things get really tough in combat and you have to remind these young men and women why we're doing this because it can get very clouded,” she continues. “I say to them, remember why we're doing this? Remember that we're fighting for that one home address, each and every one of us, and that's America, so that when we get done we can go home.”

“It’s a noble career and I was very happy to do that.”

For Evans, she considers sports an important part of life, for anybody, men or women. Sports, she says, can teach a variety of things. Although teams aspire to win, Evans says that some of the most fruitful lessons can come from failure. This might be tough to accept, especially for Atlanta United and the club’s supporters, but Evans says that it’s the response we show in difficult moments that builds character and prepares us for life’s toughest challenges.

“Half the people here are going to leave as winners and half the people are going to leave as losers – and it's okay to be a loser because we're all not going to win every battle we fight,” she says.

But for now, Evans hopes the team keeps winning. She’s settled down back home in Texas in Northlake, which is just north of Dallas. She’s about 17 miles from Dallas Fort-Worth International Airport, which makes it easy for her to hop on a plane and visit other cities. She comes to Atlanta frequently to visit friends and take in as much soccer as she can. The retired command sergeant major is all about the team. When asked specifically about this year’s squad, her answer is straightforward: