Veterans find themselves pulling for their lives
BOUNDARY WATERS CANOE AREA WILDERNESS, NEAR ELY — It was the ninth improvised explosive device in Iraq that got him, Erick Millette said. He was a combat patrol leader in the Army serving near Balad, Iraq, in October 2006.
“I had just re-enlisted,” he said. “We were on patrol. The blast came from a roadside bomb made from four 155-mm explosive rounds.”
Those are artillery shells about the size of your thigh. The concussion from the blast wracked the Humvee in which Millette was riding, slamming his head against a radio mount and twisting his body so violently that it tore his knee apart.
Millette, an Army veteran from Paxton, Mass., was telling his story last week in a wall tent heated by a woodstove on Gabbro Lake. Eight of us were gathered in the tent, where the woodstove was rosy red, kicking out heat on this below-zero January night.
The 34-year-old Millette was one of five veterans on an eight-day Outward Bound dogsledding and skiing course in the million-acre wilderness along the Minnesota-Ontario border. All of us, including Millette’s fellow vets, listened in silence as he told his story.
The roadside blast caused Millette’s sixth concussion in two tours of duty in Iraq, and he would need multiple surgeries to repair his knee.
“My career was over,” Millette said.
He began to sob softly. The tent was silent except for the purring of the woodstove.
“My transition home was pretty sh——-,” he said through his tears.
Now back home, he said, he had lost the confidence he once had.
“I almost didn’t get on the plane to come here,” he had said on the trail that morning. “I had no confidence about coming out here.”
He is self-conscious about being a vet. He wonders what others think of him, what assumptions they make about him when they see the bronze star on his license plate.
Sharing among vets
One by one, that night in the wall tent, the other vets told their stories from Iraq and Afghanistan. They felt safe sharing their experiences in this wilderness setting, surrounded by their fellow service members. That’s exactly the purpose of these Outward Bound trips for vets. The courses, offered from Ely to Florida to North Carolina to Colorado, give vets a way to connect with each other and to help them as they readjust to life beyond the military.
Voyageur Outward Bound School at Ely offers several vets trips each winter. Sixteen of this winter’s 34 trips at the school are for vets. All of the vets trips, including the vets’ flight costs, are funded by private donations and foundations.
“It’s a much easier choice to do a trip with vets,” said Andrew Torchia, 26, an Army veteran of three tours in Iraq. “You have that common ground. I hate walking into a crowd when you don’t know anyone.”
Outward Bound co-instructor Greg Heide, an Army vet who also served in Iraq, understands.
“You come home, and this world that was Iraq is no longer there,” said Heide, 39. “All of a sudden, you’re around people who don’t know what’s going on with you, don’t know the things you saw. … (Vets) come on these trips, and they see, ‘Oh, there are other people like me. I’m not alone.’ ”
“Each branch of the service has its own culture,” said Tom Imrich, an F-16 pilot from Phoenix who had served in Afghanistan. “But it’s amazing how similar you are. We’re more similar than we are different.”
Tough by design
In the morning, we fed our 11 sled dogs and hit the trail again. Outward Bound trips are not easy, and this vets trip was no exception. We would cover 25 miles in a little more than five days of travel, some of it on frozen lakes, some of it on gnarly portages between lakes. Half the group skied each day, while four others drove two dog teams pulling sleds loaded with 500 pounds of gear.
“Ready, dogs!” cried Jaysi Bennetto, 26, the only woman on the trip and an Army veteran who served as a petroleum supply specialist in Afghanistan. “Let’s go!”
The portage from Bald Eagle Lake to Gull Lake is more than half a mile long and makes a steep and rocky ascent. It’s difficult enough with a loaded dogsled in a good snow year, but this hasn’t been a good snow year. The rocks lie just beneath the snow, waiting to snag the hard plastic runners on our sleds.
The image of a dog team loping over the snow with a lightweight sled flying along behind is nothing like the reality of a winter camping trip. Torchia learned that his first day behind a team.
“It was one of the coolest and hardest experiences of my life,” he said.
Bennetto and I, paired for that day’s travel, heaved against our sled on the Bald Eagle-to-Gull portage. Up front, lead dogs Oates and Tally, along with Merk and Walker and Sue, strained against their tug lines. The sled lurched forward a few feet at a time, only to ground itself on another boulder.
Again and again, we readied the dogs and urged them forward. Again and again, we put our shoulders to the load and tried to shove it up the hill. Up ahead, Millette and Heide fought the same battle with their dogsled. Sometimes the skiers would come back to help, and five or six of us would push and pull to inch a sled up the hill. Occasionally, the entire procession ground to a halt as we took out saws to clear fallen trees.
Even Heide found the going plenty tough.
“That was a brutal day,” he would say later.
But cool things began to happen as we struggled and succeeded. One could feel everyone’s confidence growing and the dynamics of the group changing. We loosened up. We trusted each other more. We began to feel as if nothing could stop us.
Evening ritual
Each night in camp after those tough days, the routine seemed easier. Stake out dogs. Feed dogs. Shovel a place for the fire. Rig the tarps for sleeping. Cut wood. Split wood. Chisel a water hole. Haul water. Have hot drinks. Eat dinner.
Always, there was opportunity for the vets to share their thoughts about military service. Like vets everywhere, some make the transition home from Iraq or Afghanistan with little problem, while others find themselves searching for direction.
“I’m just trying to figure out what the hell to do with the rest of my life,” said Torchia, who served three tours in Iraq with the Army. “It’s starting to settle in that I don’t know what to do. From the time I was small, all l really wanted to do was be in the Army. But now I know that being in the Army isn’t what I want to do with the rest of my life.”
Tim Vandervlugt, 46, of La Grande, Ore., earned a bronze star for his service with the Army in Iraq. Now, back home, he’s been passed over for a promotion and is counting the days until he can retire in April 2013.
“My anger issues aren’t going to go away,” he told the group one night around the fire. “But this week has been a break, not being angry all the time.”
Bennetto, of Portland, Ore., spent most of a year in Afghanistan, inspecting fuel before it was loaded into helicopters. It was a tough time.
“The day I got to Afghanistan, my brother had been shot in Iraq,” she said.
Further, she was unhappy with her unit in Afghanistan.
“I worked with morons,” she said bluntly.
Bennetto considered her few days of service assisting a medical team and passing out food to Afghanistan natives the most meaningful part of her time in Afghanistan.
Some vets have escaped their experiences in Iraq or Afghanistan relatively unscathed. Imrich, 40, recalled his tour in Afghanistan as an F-16 pilot.
“I got shot at and everything else,” said the pilot from Phoenix. “But that was the most rewarding flying of my career.”
Now, he’s back home, still flying an F-16 and training pilots for the Air Force Reserves in Phoenix.
Heide, who has led several vets trips for Outward Bound, believes the courses can be important in a vet’s life.
“It doesn’t necessarily solve all their problems,” Heide said, “but it allows some people to refocus on what’s important to them. ‘What do I want to do with my life?’ And to feel like, ‘Other people are struggling like me.’ ”
Snow sculptures
Our final night on the trail, Heide and co-instructor Jeff Weaver asked us to craft a snow sculpture that symbolized something we had learned on the course. We plodded into the deep snow of our bay on the Kawishiwi River and went to work.
Most were simple creations. Vandervlugt sculpted eight human figures in a circle to symbolize the team we had become. Bennetto created a small house because she said she had learned to feel “at home” on the winter trail. Imrich re-created the strewn bones of a wolf-killed deer he had encountered a day earlier.
Millette sculpted his snow into a giant coffee cup. With leftover cranberry juice from that day’s water bottle, he stained the bottom half the cup red.
“This is my cup of life,” Millette said. “Before I came on this trip, my cup of life was half empty. But after being out here, especially after some thinking I did last night, I’m going to look at my cup as half full.”