At 75 years old and not yet retired, Linda McClenahan, better known as Sister Sarge, is helping other veterans with PTSD heal through a spiritual lens.

“I kept trying to retire and every time I said that, people said, ‘No, you have to keep doing this. I have friends,’ McClenahan said.

After graduating from high school in 1967, McClenahan planned to become a nun, but first, to protect her older brother, she took a detour that changed her life.

“I thought if I was there, Mark wouldn’t have to do it, and I was really worried about knowing my brother like I did,” he recalled. “I was pretty sure I would get him killed.”

After enlisting in the Women’s Army Corps, she quickly rose through the ranks to become a sergeant before being deployed to Vietnam in 1969.

He worked in a communications center, dealing with classified information and coded messages.

That’s when the reality of war changed everything.

“We were under attack, they shot at us and we all fell to the ground,” he recalled of one incident. “I tapped the captain next to me and said, ‘I don’t understand this, aren’t we here behind the lines?’ And he said, ‘Ma’am, this is Vietnam, there’s no behind the lines.’

McClenahan said he worked six days a week 12-hour shifts, but the hardest part of the job was all the victim reporters who came through the office.

“If all your life you grow up and know ‘thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not kill…’ Oh, it’s different now that we’re in a war. Here is a weapon you can kill with. “There is some dissonance that is going to occur there,” he explained. “So I didn’t believe in God anymore.”

I was angry at the military, the government, and constantly felt one of two emotions: numbness and anger.

“I was kind of an angry sergeant who drank a lot and swore,” he said.

The harsh reception she, like many Vietnam War veterans, received when she returned home made matters worse. McClenahan said he found himself making unhealthy decisions, experiencing road rage, hanging out with the wrong crowd and not being able to hold down a job.

Watch: Swearing Nun helps address PTSD through a spiritual perspective.

‘Sister Sarge’ helps heal other veterans

During the first two and a half years after his return, he worked in 13 different places.

“I had come to the conclusion that all the bosses I worked for were a bunch of idiots,” he said. “Then, at some point, I realized that the only thing in common, the only common dominator in all those jobs that went wrong was me.”

Now McClenahan is in recovery and has been sober for 31 years. He said to get to that point he had to go from victim to survivor and finally find his way back to being a witness.

“It occurred to me that it wasn’t that I no longer believed in God, but that I didn’t believe in the god of my childhood, who was a kind of God Santa Claus,” he explained.

“The annoying voice in my head kept talking about being a sister,” McClenahan shared. “I thought, ‘man, no convent in their right mind would want me now,’ not with what I’ve done and what I’ve been through.”

But it is exactly that experience that he now uses as a tool. For the past 25 years, he has led retreats focused on moral injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.

He has helped hundreds of veterans like Tim Sullivan face the horrors of war.

“Walking through the airport it was a bit shocking, there were people screaming, calling me a baby killer, people spitting,” he recalled. “We learned to keep our mouths shut, keep it to ourselves and live with it.”

Sullivan served as a courier in Vietnam and, after decades of suffering, learned of McClenahan’s withdrawals from his late wife Kate.

“She encouraged me to go,” Sullivan said. “More than encouraging me, it dragged me to the first.”

Sullivan said for a while he just listened and watched, drawn to Sister Sergeant. It wasn’t until his third retreat that he felt comfortable sharing.

“She made us feel comfortable and calm,” Sullivan said.

In fact, one of McClenahan’s tactics for getting hardened veterans to open up is how Sister Sarge got her other nickname, “the cussing nun.”

Seven years later, Sullivan has become one of the retreat’s facilitators. Now he’s encouraging other struggling veterans to seek help.

McClenahan has held retreats all over the country. He is based on Erie Street with the Racine Dominicans.

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