'After Action' Tries to Bridge a "Gap in Communication" Between Veterans and Civilians

After Action airs Sundays at 7:00 pm on WTTW Prime and is available to stream via the PBS app. 

An after-action review is a tool used in the U.S. military to assess an operation after the fact in order to identify things that could have been improved. So the title of the PBS show After Action refers not just to the post-service lives of the veterans it convenes to discuss their experiences; it also applies the concept of after-action reviews to issues affecting veterans.

“We can always improve,” says After Action host Stacy Pearsall. “We hope that this show will help by looking back to move forward.”

Pearsall was a military photographer with the Air Force for ten years, deploying in over 40 countries before combat wounds forced her to retire from military service. During the dark period of her life that followed the end of her military career, she contemplated suicide and spent hours in Veterans Affairs waiting rooms. It was in one of those rooms that the idea was born for the Veterans Portrait Project, in which she ignored the predictions of doctors that, due to her injuries, she would no longer be able to photograph and eventually took portraits of over 8,500 veterans across all 50 states.

That decade-long immersion in the lives of other veterans led her to the realization that talking to other veterans could offer “catharsis,” and that “there’s this sort of gap in communication between the veteran community and those who want to support them,” she says. Out of that diagnosis was born After Action.

Each episode brings three veterans with different backgrounds and perspectives together to talk about a single topic: the experience of POWs, homelessness, or veterans who have become farmers, to take the example of three episodes from the new third season. They convene in the coziness of Pearsall’s own home to converse “as if nobody else is in the room,” Pearsall says. “When veterans are talking to each other, there’s no holds barred, nothing to translate, we just talk like we don’t have anything to hide.”

The military jargon that can trip up civilians is explained by pop-up text boxes in the show, allowing stories to continue uninterrupted – like “VH1 pop-up videos,” Pearsall says.

The hope is that watching veterans discuss their experiences in a comfortable, unfettered atmosphere can help bridge that gap in understanding between civilians and veterans. “We tend to internalize our experiences because, first of all, a lot of what we experience is really painful,” says Pearsall of veterans. “And the last thing we want to do is project that pain onto our family and our loved ones. So we keep that in.”

That reticence can lead to a reluctance to communicate on the part of civilians. “People who love their veterans see they’re in pain, but they don’t know how to approach talking to them,” Pearsall explains.

But the show can be helpful for veterans, too, as Pearsall knows from her own experience in relating to other veterans through conversation. “That made me feel less alone,” she says. “I think it’s important for our community to hear other veterans speaking candidly and openly.” 

Veterans are almost twice as likely to die by suicide as civilians; in 2023, the military suicide rate rose by 6%. Pearsall says After Action has prevented suicides. “There have been veterans who reached out to us saying thank you,” she says. “One in particular had the gun loaded in their hand and it was like two in the morning and the show came on and they put the gun down and got help the next day.”

The “machismo” culture that has prevented veterans from seeking help in the past has started to change, Pearsall says, but still persists to an extent. “I have to stop myself and slap the back of my own hand because I find myself” engaging in a “rub some dirt on it mentality,” she says. But “it’s never too late to want to be better and lessen the burden of the struggle.”

Pearsall has made a point of addressing the experiences of women in combat and including women in After Action, with episodes on women who experience sexual trauma in the military or were the first women in their fields. “Being a young female, I was definitely marginalized a lot and was confronted with a lot of prejudices,” she says.

Because of her own frustration with stereotyping, she’s wary of pigeonholing anyone, and hopes that After Action can reveal veterans in their full complexity. “Each of us have walked away from our service with a unique experience, and there are reasons why,” she says.

“It is important that every veteran knows their value and worth and their service, and to know that they’re not alone and to have these stories talked about so they don’t feel marginalized in any way, regardless of where they’re coming from, or how much they have in their bank account, or their religion or gender,” she adds.

The breakthrough moment that led her to start the Veterans Portrait Project came when she met at a VA hospital a World War II veteran who had survived D-Day and liberated a concentration camp. She immediately assumed he would dismiss her as a veteran’s wife or daughter, or a health care worker, as others had. Instead, “such an unassuming, incredible person reached out a hand to me in a time of need,” she says.

“All the while I thought people were being prejudiced against me, and I was developing my own prejudices,” she continues. “So I sat back and I thought, ‘Well, how can I be part of a solution to this problem, and redefining who we see the veteran community as?’”

After Action is part of her answer.