Navy League, Navy Safe Harbor
Team To Help Wounded Warriors
By PETER ATKINSON, Deputy Editor
After inching out of the gate earlier in the year, the Navy League’s Anchor Program mentor support
partnership with the Navy Safe Harbor program to
help seriously wounded service members readjust to
civilian life has gathered momentum in recent months.
A handful of candidates have been teamed with Navy
League “senior mentor” volunteers, and more are in the
program pipeline around the country awaiting the selection of mentors from councils in their local area.
“No question, I would say the Navy League has
supported us the most as far as enthusiasm and energy
and trying to go out and find senior mentors for me.
It’s the easiest call I make,” said Dave Pennington,
Anchor Program director for Navy Safe Harbor and a
retired force master chief. “The Navy League and the
Fleet Reserve Association are far out in front of every-
body else with regards to support.”
Created in 2005 and expanded by a memorandum
of agreement to include the Coast Guard in April
2009, Navy Safe Harbor is the lead organization for
coordinating the non-medical care of wounded, ill and
injured Sailors and their families, according to the
program’s mission statement. Headquartered in
Washington, it provides a lifetime of individually tai-
lored assistance designed to optimize the success of
service members’ recovery, rehabilitation and reinte-
gration activities.
As part of the effort, Navy Safe Harbor has teamed
with a number of military support organizations and
associations to help participants get reacclimated into
the community. The Marine Corps has its own
Wounded Warrior Regiment, based out of Quantico,
Va., with a similar mission.
“It’s really neat when you can advertise this out and
say, ‘We’ve got a wounded warrior who’s coming back
to your hometown. You want to take this guy on and
just be a friend, see if you can help him out?’” Penning-
ton said. “And without fail, people are like, ‘Hey, Roger
that. We can do that.’”
Although the Anchor Program partnership agreement
has been in place since last summer, the program really
began in earnest this spring. Twenty-one service members
had enrolled as of early August, according to Pennington.
The first program enrollee to connect with a senior
mentor was Navy Corpsman Stephen McCloskey, who
was teamed with the Philadelphia Council and its pres-
60
ident, Fran O’Brien, in April. The recipient of two
Purple Hearts for injuries suffered during his three
deployments to Iraq, McCloskey joined the Anchor
Program as he was moving back to the Philadelphia
area, where he had grown up.
“Our outreach was simple,” O’Brien said. “We called
him and arranged an informal get-together with a
small group of NLUS council board members.”
The group included Charlie Bohnenberger, a former
Marine lieutenant and current executive with Allied
Barton Security Services; Anselm Sauter, of the Greater
Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce; Jackie D’Angelo,
an attorney with the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s
Office; and O’Brien, who works with the Delaware
River Port Authority.
“Since we had never met the corpsman and did not
want to ‘gang up’ on him, we decided to make our first
meeting fun,” O’Brien said. “We met at an iconic loca-
tion. Boathouse Row’s University Barge Rowing Club
was walking distance from his apartment and the deck
view of the Schuylkill River was awesome.”
Subsequent meetings have taken place at other local
establishments, she said, during which, “We learned
that he was very busy working full time at a company
located a distant 90 minutes from home. He was also
attending graduate school [pursuing a master of busi-
ness administration degree at Arcadia University] and
busy completing coursework.”
The council reached out to some of its business and
corporate contacts in the area on McCloskey’s behalf
and arranged for one formal interview and one infor-
mational meeting in an effort to see if he could find
employment that was closer to home.
McCloskey ended up finding a new job on his own,
and recently joined the Constance Financial Group in
Wyncote, Pa., as a senior associate, working with one of
the students he met in grad school, according to O’Brien.
“My relationship with the council has not been
strictly business,” McCloskey said. “I have toured the
city, watched the Phillies and gone out socially with
council members, as well as attended a Navy League
dinner and met [Marine] Gen. [James N.] Mattis [who
recently was confirmed as commander, U.S. Central
Command]. I look forward to finding more time in my
schedule in the weeks to come so I can take them up
on all of their offers.”
