Military Families and Veterans Initiative

Celebration of the Military Child Outside, Metro DC, April 1st

Hey Sierra Club Nation!

We are very excited that we will be recognizing our Nation's youngest heroes on April 1st at Prince William Forest Park, next door to Marine Base Quantico. April is National Month of the Military Child and we are so excited to be bringing together a group of 20+ different outdoor recreation and conservation organizations to the Park with fun outdoor activities for the whole family that include trail hikes, fishing and kayaking demonstrations, and an opportunity for families and kids to sign up for late spring and summer activities through the partnering organizations. Additionally, a number of other National Parks, public land divisions, and State Parks, will also be sharing their information with participants.

You can register here and download the flyer to send around to all your friends to get them involved as well (click on the Register Now word on the .pdf to also register).

Co-Hosts for the event include Blue Star Families, the Armed Services YMCA, the National Military Family Association, the Outdoor Alliance for Kids, and the National Park Service. We are excited that Active Network is hosting our registration.

We look forward to seeing you on April 1st at Prince William Forest Park!

Help spread the word!

~Stacy Bare, OIF Veteran

Military Families and Veteran Representative to the Sierra Club

"Helping America's Military and Veteran Community experience the freedom of the land they defend"

 

Resources Outdoors

America is reaching out to the veteran community. Sometimes, however, the veteran community may not always be reaching back to America, and parts of America are not reaching out. However, scarier than that, is that sometimes, as America is reaching out and so is the veteran community, but the hands just are not touching. Why do I say this?

Because last summer, our Apprentice, former Corporal, still Marine, Mark Lemke did an investigation on the number of outdoor recreation focused organizations in the United States. We know this list is far from complete, but its a great start. With these organizations, and the addition of folks like the Sierra Club working to integrate their outings programs for military families and veterans, or start specific veterans and military family outings groups, we as veterans should have far fewer excuses about what our communities are and are not doing on our behalf. And hey, ladies and gentlemen who have served, if we like what an organization is trying to do, but think it needs new leadership...be that new leadership.

Here is the list that Mark made. Have more to add to it? Leave us a note in the comments section!  Download Offical MFO Org Contact List

Mark also did a great job writing a fantastic paper about military and veteran community life and why the outdoors are so important to veterans. You can check out the full paper here, Download Veterans and Military Families in America Mission Outdoors or just read the executive summary below. Agree, disagree? Let us hear about it in the comments section, just be respectful!

 

Veterans and Military Families in America: Mission Outdoors

Authored by Mark Lemke 

"In war, there are no unwounded soldiers." -Jose Narosky 

Executive Summary

This paper is a comprehensive review of challenges that active duty military personnel, their families and veterans face due to war and how and why outdoor recreation is an effective response. Even with increased services from the Veteran Administration and services on base, active duty military and veterans suffer the side effects from issues related to Post Traumatic Stress and Traumatic Brain Injury long after they leave the military and return to civilian life. An in-depth analysis discusses the problems and shows how and why experience and time in nature can increase the quality of life for the military world.

Military families also endure the hardships of battle and this has long lasting implications. Spouses and children often go through long periods of stress, anxiety and despondency.  The outdoors offers a place for children and their parents to experience stress reduction and strengthen the family unit in a healthy, sustainable manner. Children are born into military families and have no say in their situation. Often boys with parents deployed show increases in disruptive behavior in the class room and girls show an increase in anxiety. Like all children in the United States, we are seeing an upward trend in obesity and diseases linked to obesity.  Children spend up to eight hours in front of an electrical device outside of school. Exercise is a far better stress relief activity than video games or television. Time in the outdoors can address this health problem both mentally and physically. The Sierra Club recognizes the struggles a parent may have with their spouse at war to get their children outside. We aim, however, to help spouses, families, service members, and veterans gain the skills and confidence necessary, as do a number of other groups, to get our military and veteran community outside more consistently.

Veterans have been suffering from PTS and TBI since the Civil War, but the issue has really come to light after the Vietnam War. The suicide rate for veterans is 18 per day. Veterans also have high levels drug abuse including legal and illegal drugs and pain killers. In many cases drugs and alcohol were present at scene of suicides. This number is expected to rise in the next couple of years as more and more service members come home and cease to deeply. The United States learned their mistakes in “handling” veterans after Vietnam, but even with the new help from the VA, veterans are falling through the cracks.

Through research at the college level and intervention from non-profits, nature has the ability to save lives and increase the wellbeing of the military community and veterans. Non-profits range from adaptive sports to nature outings, with the goal of helping veterans and the military community deal with the side effects of war. This paper highlights thirty-nine organizations that reach out to the military community and veterans. Afghanistan and Iraq have been America’s longest wars and the wounded continue to come back to us. How will we answer this challenge? We will answer it by ensuring that military families and veterans experience the freedom of the land they defended, and this paper will show why this strategy is so important.

 

Welcome Home Troops, now what??

Today's guest blogger is Heather Ehle. The founder and director of Project Sanctuary. We are excited about our partnership with Heather and our research program together with Regis University.

Project Sanctuary partnering with The Sierra Club to make a difference.

Rightfully so, the news has been full of pictures of excited families, reuniting after returning home from Iraq, tearful embraces among the Welcome Home signs. These images leave the majority of American thinking; “Ahhh, there is a happy ending”. When in fact the war may just beginning.

Repeated deployments and conditions such as Post Traumatic Stress and Traumatic Brain Injuries complicate the happily-ever-after, and often leave their mark on ALL the family members. Suicides, divorces and Veteran unemployment are all record highs.

The traditional approach to treating PTSD relies on the use of medications provided solely to the individual. What if there was an alternative method and incorporating treatment for the entire family??  Providing the family with an adaptation strategy to help break the cycle of PSTD rather than masking its symptoms. And what if, what if, we could get these families moving in the right direction…outdoors!!

Project Sanctuary offers six-day therapeutic retreats in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, hosted with YMCA’s Snow Mountain Ranch. By utilizing year round outdoor recreation, our families are allowed to break their cycle of stress, bond with other families all the while enjoying hiking, fishing, skiing, tubing and horseback riding.     

The goal is for the military family to obtain the skills necessary to integrate back into society in a healthy environment. Using year round recreational opportunities to assist with bonding, communicational skills and enhancing overall moods is a key element.   They are empowered to work through difficult issues as a family unit and continue to receive support from Project Sanctuary for two additional years.

This March, The Sierra Club, Project Sanctuary and Regis University are teaming up host ten military families for our 22^nd retreat.  This collaboration brings together the best of all organizations with the goal of conducting a formalized study proving that outdoor recreation is a viable, timely and useful tool in healing the effects of PTSD in our military families. 

So, “Welcome Home”.  Now grab a back pack, your family and hit a trail.  There is healing to be done!

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Project Sanctuary is a Colorado 501C3 hosting therapeutic retreats for all military families. Retreats are lead by Licensed Professional Counselors, Recreation Therapists and Veterans.  Healthy Marriage, Financial Peace classes along with outdoor recreation are utilized in this one of a kind program. To date, Project Sanctuary has hosted 20 retreats and of our 143 families we can report zero suicides. 
For more information please visit: www.projectsanctuary.us

 

Project Healing Waters-Fly Fishing

The Sierra Club Military Families Outdoors and Veterans Initiative is excited to partner with Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing! Later this year we will offer a leadership and training course to ensure more veterans, their families, spouses, and interested community members learn how to be leaders in PHW-FF and get more veterans and their families out to our Nation's waters! Here's what Dr. Warren Phillips, has to say about the program: 

Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing, Inc., (PHWFF) serves military personnel who have been wounded, injured, or disabled to aid their emotional and physical recovery by introducing or rebuilding the skills of fly fishing and fly tying and by using and enjoying the benefits of these skills on fishing outings and as lifelong recreation.  In association with Federation of Fly Fishers and Trout Unlimited, PHWFF serves the diverse group of both active military personnel and veterans with disabilities throughout the nation and in Canada.  We are delighted to be able to partner with the Sierra Club, Military Families Outdoor program to expand our ability to help more affected military to realize the advantages of outdoor activity.

The project’s activities are designed to rekindle and enhance participants’ appreciation and enthusiasm for fishing outings while also encouraging socialization, adjustment, and community reentry.  PHWFF relies on fishing organizations and clubs to sponsor events. The volunteer staff and instructors include professional educators and fishing guides as well as experienced anglers, all of whom donate their time and knowledge to support the participants.  All PHWFF activities are dependent on tax deductible financial donations under the provisions of Section 501©(3) of the IRS Code. PHWFF strives to effectively serve the deserving past and present members of our armed forces who have made great sacrifices in the service of our Nation.

We are proud of our accomplishments to date:

      Provided thousands of hours of classes throughout the United States in the basics of fly fishing, casting, fly tying, wading and rod building

      More than 3,000 wounded veterans have participated in our classes

      Many of the participants have developed the confidence and skill to teach their peers

      500 veterans or active duty servicemen and women have participated in several three, five and ten day fishing trips and approximately 2,500 veterans have experienced one-day outings

      We’ve worked with a variety of individuals with disabilities, both psychological (PTSD, TBI) and physical (amputations, loss of vision, hearing impairments, paralysis, etc.).

      Our ratio of program to overhead expenditures has been better than 80:20 for the last two years

      Our program has been featured in major magazines, including The American Legion magazine and Vanguard, the official publication of the Department of Veterans Affairs

      Our 2010 trip to the Big Horn River was featured on the TV show “Fly Rod Chronicles” and was so popular that it has been re-shown several times

      Our 2010 national 2-Fly Tournament was also featured on “Fly Rod Chronicles” as were two Spruce Creek fishing trips and an inaugural PHWFF event in Cherokee, North Carolina

      Since Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing was established in 2005 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., we have grown to over 100 programs in 38 states and the District of Columbia

      The sport of fly fishing has been approved as an authorized physical therapy by the VA 

Therapeutic recreation has become a prominent modality in mental health treatment although its role may not yet be fully realized. Involvement in recreational activities shows a consistent positive relationship in improved self-esteem, self-efficacy, social skills, problem solving, and greater levels of cooperation and trust. Through the therapeutic benefits of fly fishing, veterans with disabilities who have endured the stress of serving in harm’s way participate in a recreational activity that enhances mental health and addresses symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In contrast to the traumatic experiences of warfare, fly fishing embraces the calm of pursuing a wild fish in a natural, untrammeled environment that is then carefully released, unharmed, into its watery sanctuary, and allowed to remain free.

The residual therapeutic impact varies depending upon each individual’s disabling condition, but participation in PHWFF may increase motivation and attendance at outpatient therapy sessions while also enhancing self-confidence and address the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, i.e., sleep disturbance, irritability, anxiety, substance use, etc. There are additional physical therapeutic benefits including improved fine motor skills, eye-hand coordination, balance, range of motion, concentration and more.

Partnering with Sierra Club MFO programs would offer support to existing programs and develop new programs enhanced by Sierra Club participation.   Jointly we intend to develop a “TRAIN THE TRAINER” curriculum to identify and recruit leadership-trainees. Our goal is to continue program development with MFO in an ongoing effort to assist veterans with disabilities benefit from recreational activities through fly fishing.  We hope that together with Sierra Club a lasting partnership to help veterans with disabilities transition back into society and the outdoors is accomplished.

Warren R. Phillips, Ph.D.

Acting CEO, Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing

http://www.projecthealingwaters.org

 

Happy New Year Sierra Club Nation!

Happy New Year’s Sierra Club Nation! 2011 was a great year for us at the Military Families and Veterans Initiative, but one that certainly brought a great number of positive changes and challenges to our programs that we certainly hope you’ll be a part of in 2012.

We certainly hope one of your resolutions for 2012 is to spend more time outside!

One of our initiatives for 2012 is centered around hearing from you, the military and veteran community (including families, youth, and spouses) and the Sierra Club outings community so that together, we can build an outings program and leadership training program that best meets the needs of the military and veteran community.

We will be hosting 10 active duty military and veterans for a weekend, along with 10 Sierra Club outings leaders at Island Wood near Seattle, WA from February 17-19^th for an intensive experiential based listening session. We will be hosting a similar listening session near Washington DC from March 23-25^th and a military spouses and veterans caregivers specific listening session in Colorado from April 13^th-15^th. We need your voices to make this program successful. If you are interested in attending one of these listening sessions and building this program, please get in touch with me by leaving a comment here or e-mailing to stacy.bare@sierraclub.org.

The listening sessions will flow into leadership training sessions throughout the summer and will be augmented by a number of other partner programs conducting leadership training on our behalf for the military and veteran community. You have already been reading about some of our other outings partners who, along with the University of Michigan will be research partners to help us show the positive changes some time in the outdoors and wilderness can bring.

We firmly believe that this research will help all programs working with the military and veteran community outdoors. The saying, ‘A wave lifts all boats’ certainly applies here. And while we are very excited about our partner programs, we are also very excited about a number of other programs that are making a difference by ensuring that our military men and women and their families can enjoy the freedom of the land they defended!

One of these programs is Outward Bound (OB). OB and the Sierra Club have a long tradition of working together with the Club providing funding for several years for OB to run its veteran programming.

Just a few of the testimonial quotes from past veteran participants on OB courses. I can say with certainty, that every outdoor program has similar statements from its participants. There's just something about being outdoors!

 It gave me a new benchmark to measure things by besides Iraq. Much nicer."

"I am a strong person, much stronger than I gave myself credit for. My life is not over yet."

You can read more testimonials here and sign up for one of their amazing courses through their course scheduler right here!

Another great program that is out there for you and your families to participate in is Challenge Aspen Military Opportunities. A part of the overall Challenge Aspen program, Houston Cowan and Sarah Volf have been doing great work in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley since 2005!

There are literally dozens, if not 100s of more programs out there that exist to get you the service member, veteran, military spouse, or military child outside. Its up to you to take the challenge, push yourself, or just sit yourself back into a raft, or cast dreamily into a trout stream. Whatever your fancy, just get outdoors—and if you need any help or have any questions, get in touch, we’ll get you outside!

Have a Happy New Year and a great 2012 Sierra Club Nation! We’ll see you out at the trail head, the put in, the base of the climb, at the trout pond…well you get the idea! 

 

~Stacy Bare, OIF Veteran

Military Families and Veteran Representative to the Sierra Club

"Helping America's Military and Veteran Community experience the freedom of the land they defend"

 

 

 

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! Our gifts to you!

Merry Christmas Sierra Club Nation!

Here's wishing you a very happy holiday! Whether you celebrate this time of year as Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanza, or something else, the Sierra Club's Military Family and Veterans Initiative as part of Mission Outdoors, thanks you for another year of service to our Nation!

We have a lot of great opportunities coming up this year to get military families, service members, spouses, youth, and veterans outside. However, I can't contain myself any more on the opportunities we have in partnering with the University of Michigan to study the positive effects of getting outside for our military and veteran communities.

We've partnered up with four great organizations who will provide up to four weeks of multi-day outdoor experiences for roughly a squad sized element each week of activity. Keep up with this blog, our website, and these partners for more information and to sign up for the experience of a lifetime! Over the next couple of weeks, we'll be profiling each one of these organizations on our blog. Again, Happy Holidays and I hope you can unwrap one of these great trips in the New Year!

Wilderness Inquiry

Women's Wilderness Institute

Wasatch Adaptive Sports

Higher Ground, Sun Valley Adaptive Sports

~Stacy Bare, OIF Veteran

Military Families and Veteran Representative to the Sierra Club

"Helping America's Military and Veteran Community experience the freedom of the land they defend"

 

Mark Lemke's Last Words

Mark Lemke is today’s guest blogger. Today is Mark’s last day with Mission Outdoors. Mark has worked for six months at the Sierra Club as part of the highly prestigious Apprenticeship program. He was one of nine apprentices nationwide and selected from a pool of 300 applicants this past year. In early 2012, the Sierra Club will be publishing a white paper authored by Mark Lemke about the possibilities of outdoor recreation as a large piece of the solution in helping military families and veterans cope with the stresses of 10 years at war. Thanks for all your hard work Mark! You'll be missed!      

 The time I spent at the Sierra Club I always felt there was some kind of stigma about veterans and the environmental or outdoor movement. The reason I felt it is because it does exist. Veterans are associated with social and political beliefs that do not always align with the environmental movement and vice versa. I am not sure if this is due to ignorance, but I know that I certainly fit into this stereotype myself. Like Bob Dylan once sang though, “Times are a changing”.

The reality is, both sides have a lot in common. We’re all fighting for our land. Sierra Club forced me in some kind of subconscious way to face my veteran background. I had both an internal and an external struggle here. What I felt on the inside about being a veteran, getting outside, and the environmental movement, was very different than the external pressures I heard from fellow service members and non-veteran colleagues. In college I felt that I could not be both a veteran, and an environmental, or even an outdoor recreation activist. I thought the two couldn’t coexist, but I was happily proved wrong.

I like to think of myself as the breaker of stereotypes and I think that The Sierra Club Mission Outdoors: Military Family and Veterans Initiative does this as well. I’ve always had the internal struggle of what it means to be a veteran in today’s society. I did not intend on ‘being a veteran’. As such, I did not pay attention to the external pressures. I tried to justify to people why veterans need to be a major part of the environmental movement, but I could never really form a concrete argument. The key element to the puzzle was the external pressure. At the Sierra Club I received external pressure from other Sierra Club veterans and employees. It helped me to see the whole picture.

People today do not view veterans today as they did Vietnam veterans. There was no intervention from American society to help these men and women when they returned from war. They were simply forgotten. Veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are targeted for help and rehabilitation, yet veterans are still suffering and much of the help is cosmetic in nature; kind gestures, with little substance to offer real hopes of integration or healing. The major piece of the puzzle that is still missing on a grand scale is nature and outdoor recreation. What better medium than the outdoor world to bring together veterans and non-veterans to work individually or corporately on the issue at hand?

We, as veterans, fought for clean air and clean water, and those are just as much part of our benefits as anything!

 

 

 

Take a break: surfing with the USMC

Quick update: I should have thanked new friend and all around great guy, Clark Cunningham for handing me off a copy of the SJ referenced below! Its people like Clark that keep me motivated and knowing that America really is beind us as a veteran community! 

 
You may remember on 9/11/11 this year, the Sierra Club hosted Paddle Out for Heroes, an opportunity for military and non-military surfers to honor the sacrifices of our service members and their families since 9/11/01. In the office or on the trail, my mind often drifts off to far away waves. In my mind, I'm able to surf them, but as the picture here shows, I can't. Nevertheless, on the way home from Joshua Tree last week I crammed myself back into the cross continental flight and fished out a copy of the Surfer's Journal, volume sixteen, number two. I had to bury my sorrow from a seven day trip to Southern California where only ankle high waves rolled in and our climbing trip to Joshua Tree saw two out of the five inches of annual rain fall come on two out of the three days we had to climb.

Sometimes nature wants you just too watch...

I turned to an article entitled "Coming Home: A Rare Camp Pendleton Surf with the United States Marines" by Mark Anders. In the third paragraph, Anders writes about Major Ted Handler's platoon, the "Nemesis" in a fire fight outside of Tikrit:

The firefight lasted almost two hours; Handler's unit successfully ran off the insurgents and moved forward to hold ground outside of Tikrit. "Your adrenaline is pumping the whole time, then when it ends you're like, 'holy smoke,' and you need to find a way to decompress...That was one of those times when I just needed a break, kind of searching for anything so that I could distance myself from reality for at least a couple of minutes. Every surfer I toalk to in the Marines ahs a particular wave they remember or a great tube ride they can go to. Those memories come in handy. They help me take a pause, then enable me that intense focus."

Two things struck me about this article:

1. I had no idea Major's commanded platoons in the Marine Corps. We have Lieutenant's do it in the Army.

2. Surfing is a force multiplier and part of individual, and perhaps even unit readiness.

While not everyone may be stationed near a surf break, there's no reason that rock climbing, fly fishing, hiking, mountain biking, etc. cannot be what surf was and is for the surfing Marines highlighted in this article. 

It follows as well that if surfing can be a force multiplier, the very memories of it allowing a hardened war fighter the tools to maintain intense focus, how much more can it help when the warrior comes home? How much can it help for the warrior's family and the warrior's community to help reintegrate the warrior upon their return to a society and family that did not fight the war?

If there were no surf breaks for the Major and his Marines, would they be an effective fighting force? And if not, don't we, as a Nation which has decided to maintain the world's best fighting force, require there to be places where our fighting men and women can make these memories of great tube rides, off width climbs, sweet powder days, and sublime hikes? 

Taking the Major's statement to a possible logical conclusion: ensuring there is an outdoors for our service men and women to recreate in, and outdoor recreation, are indeed issues of National Security.

Too big of a logic jump for you? Let me know why or why not.

 

 

~Stacy Bare, OIF Veteran

Military Families and Veteran Representative to the Sierra Club

"Helping America's Military and Veteran Community experience the freedom of the land they defend"

 

 

Summer Camp Review

Since starting the Military Family Outdoors (MFO) program in 2006, the Sierra Club’s first major partner was the National Military Family Association, who launched the first Operation Purple Camp ® in 2004. The Sierra Club has been a proud sponsor of these camps since 2007. The program partners with other youth camps, primarily from the YMCA or the American Camp Association (ACA) to provide an all military youth camp experience that includes specific curriculum changes from a normal week at camp that include a military day, special mental health support from Tri-Care, an ecological education program, and of course, a service project.

For years, this has been the marquis program of the Sierra Club’s (MFO) program and was one of the major selling points for me when I first applied for the honor to be the National Military Families and Veterans Representative for the Sierra Club. After all, who would not want to spend time at summer camp?

Out of the near 3,000 total military youth participants that the Sierra Club and other partners helped get outside this past summer, I had the opportunity to visit three camps compromising less than 10% of the total participants, but wow! If the rest of the participants were as amazing as the few military youth I got to meet, what a great group of kids! The Military Kids loved being around other kids that they did not have to explain themselves too. However, at two of the camps, the camps hosted a number of non-military youth and in these cases, everyone seemed to benefit greatly from learning from one another.

As a percentage, very few of our Nation’s young people are directly related to the military, but as the National Military Family Association is so fond of saying, “kids serve to!” Even though I was in the Army, and certainly had a number of friends, soldiers, colleagues, and senior leaders who had families, I do not have my own military kids and each young person I met had a lot to teach me about the military experience.

There were young boys and girls who had parents not make it to a birthday party in the last five years. Little League championships had been missed, as had first crushes, school suspensions, talent shows, and more. Many of the young people at the camps were with siblings. In these family units, it was clear to see the roles of mother or father that the older siblings stepped up into since one, or at times, both parents had been serving our nation overseas, while their children served back home.

More than anything though, it was just great to see kids be kids. We don’t, as a nation, give our kids enough opportunities to play, or encourage them to play enough, but many times with only one parent at home, its even harder for military families to get their kids outside. Operation Purple Camps ® at least for one week each year, gives hundreds, if not thousands of military families an opportunity for their kids to run, laugh, and play outside.

As the year comes to an end, I look back on these, perhaps my fondest memories of the summer: running, laughing, and rediscovering my inner child in getting to know you games with five year olds, all the way to zip lines with 17 year olds; some already signed up to follow their mother or father into uniformed service for our nation.

I hope you enjoy a few of the pictures from some of my visits this past summer to the three great camps I got to visit: Camp Erdman on the beautiful North Shore of Oahua; Camp Shady Brook, nestled in the shadow of Pikes Peak; and NorthBay Adventure Camp across the Chesapeake Bay from Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland.

~Stacy Bare, OIF Veteran

Military Families and Veteran Representative to the Sierra Club

"Helping America's Military and Veteran Community experience the freedom of the land they defend"

 

Day One without a war in Iraq: a call to action

Good morning Sierra Club Nation,

Today is day one of the United States of America, not being at war in Iraq. Yesterday passed without very much fanfare. The majority of the news coverage seemed to me about how little fanfare there really was. There are estimates that the cost of the war is anywhere from $823 billion to upwards of $3 trillion when you factor in the healthcare and needs of veterans and their families. I’m not sure about either of those two numbers, but I do hope that there is enough funding over the next 70-80 years to make sure that the men and women, and their families, who fought in this most recent of wars, are taken care of for the sacrifices they made on behalf of our great country.

I’d be interested to know how much money we could save on health care for our veterans (and me) if we could get all of our veterans and their families outside and breathing fresh air, fly casting for brook trout, climbing mountains, floating down rivers, surfing our beaches, or trekking across the desert. My guess is there would be significant offsets and we’d have a happier, healthier nation after nine years of war in Iraq.

MountainMan Coffee posted this on Faecbook last night:

Though politicians can sign a piece of paper and pronounce that the ‘war’ is over, all those who participated, deployed, sacrificed and waited for their loved ones to come back…it will never be over for them; for it impacted their lives and changed them forever. I pray that they can come home or continue their life with peace and rest in the understanding that they impacted my life and all of those of the American, Iraqi, Afghani, and the global population in volunteering to be our heroes and heroines in a time of need! God bless them and their families and God bless America!

Now, we as a total Nation, need to step up and extend our hands to our military families and veterans to help them do the things MountanMan Coffee hopes our returning men and women can do: to come home, to live a life with peace and rest. And while there are no ticker tape parades in our major cities, no ship loads of troops coming home to legions of cheering citizens, I think we’re all right with that. The audacious shows of support and cosmetic ‘thank yous’ of free food and oil changes on a few days of the year are nice, but they are not the only, or always the appropriate response to our returning veterans.

We are not, as a veteran community, looking for charity. We are, however, looking for an opportunity, a hand up versus a hand out, and an equal playing field when we come back home. What that means in the context of my work, ensuring that our veterans and military families experience the freedom of the land they defended, and beyond that, making sure all of America is connected to the great outdoors, is that we have a moral obligation to our veterans, to ensure there is a field to play in.

Another facebooker wrote, “Think what you will about the politics of our involvement, nothing can diminish the esteem I have for those who honorably served us.”  If asked point blank, most Americans I believe would agree with both Facebook posts, but how to turn that belief, that esteem, into action? Get involved. Volunteer with your local Sierra Club chapter to get out and take a hike, help rebuild a trail, clean up a riverbed and before you go, invite the local VFW or American Legion Post. Swing by the VA and ask to speak to the volunteer coordinator and see about getting a group of veterans out on a hike with you. Call up your local Fisher House and see if you cannot bring out the kids whose mothers and fathers are at the Fisher House on a hike with your ICO group. Need more ideas? Keep reading this blog, or visit other partner organizations like the USO, IAVA, AmpSurf, the Wounded Warrior Project, Higher Ground, Veterans Expeditions, Paradox Sports, National Military Families Association, Big City Mountaineers, Blue Star Families, Armed Services YMCA, Warriorgateway.org, Phoenix Multi-Sport, the list goes on.

So show your local veterans what you know about America’s great outdoors. Give us an opportunity to learn, to teach you what we've learned, to serve, and ultimately to lead again. That’s how you can really say thank you.

~Stacy Bare, OIF Veteran

Military Families and Veteran Representative to the Sierra Club

"Helping America's Military and Veteran Community experience the freedom of the land they defend"