Dining LIFE AFTER WARTIME Dieter Doppelfeld, right, helps students plate food they’ve cooked at culinary boot camp.
Kitchen Call
At culinary boot camp, wounded veterans find healing BY JESSICA DUR TAYLOR
O
ver a decade after first joining the army in 1992, Scott Shore served as convoy commander of the very first unit to Iraq in 2003, stationed in what he calls “the wild west of Baghdad.” For the first six months he was there, encountering snipers and bombs daily, he was not allowed to contact his wife, Shawna, to let her know he was alive. Six more months of chronic fire took its toll
on his body, and he left the service in November of 2004. “I’ve got a laundry list of injuries,” Shore tells me over the phone recently. “For nine years, I’ve been in constant pain.” But despite sustaining severe back and neck injuries, broken ribs and clavicle, and a traumatic brain injury, Shore misses the military. Which is why just a few weeks ago, he joined a handful of other vets at boot camp. Instead of fatigues, however, they dressed in tall white hats and coats. Instead of surveillance and scuttling, they spoke of dashes
of spices and slicing on the diagonal. Wielding paring knives and spatulas, six vets and their spouses learned how to trim duck breasts and make soup stock at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in St. Helena. The CIA and the military go way back—to 1946, when its original New York location was founded as a vocational training school for returning World War II vets. Now the prestigious school offers culinary boot camps for vets of Iraq and Afghanistan who were wounded in the line of duty. The boot camp is just one of the
18 different progr by the Wounded W a nonprofit servin were injured after Founded by a grou vets in 2003, the p to helping vets tra to civilian life, bec motto goes, “The is being forgotten Admirably nonp about the warrior, the nonprofit has to Shore, who was partake of their se think I deserved t someone worse off Shore, who was un four years and stru traumatic stress d For Shore, who in his house, the b a chance to conne vets, sharing stori for negotiating th nightmarish VA. ( filing his disabilit the VA has finally compensated him After a morning demos, vets at the camp spend the af their chopping, roa techniques to all m pork and potatoes day with a shared more nutritious a than the mess hal “There is no sla come prepared,” sa chef Lars Kronmark that some vets bri knives, utensils an vet with only one designed cutting spikes that acted hand,” Kronmark was still able to ch The boot camps in the CIA’s quiet Viking kitchen be Kronmark points are often sensitive loud noises.” Ami steel equipment t many amateurs in vets learn more th pomegranate glaz “The boot camp confidence to eat 26-year-old Mann joined the Navy in