Ranger School and the Ugandan Orphanage

May 2000

The Georgia sun climbed higher in the morning sky. My squad had just finished up our first patrol in the first phase of Ranger School. Of the three leaders, one received a go. The other two got no-go’s.

I was one of the no-go’s. I was the team leader of the team in charge of land navigation. Anybody that knew me probably would have made good money on my no-go. Putting me in charge of land navigation was a little bit like putting a fish in charge of a footrace. Unfortunately, my number two wasn’t much better. We were lucky to stay in Georgia, much less get to our objective on time.

The three of us walked down a dirt road from the grading area back to our patrol base. I was telling a story about high school when one of my buddies found his grandpa’s hang glider in their garage. I checked about a book about hang gliding from the library and we were off. I was just about to the part where the hang glider flipped in the air and dropped Chet into a cactus patch when we got to the trail that led back to the patrol base.

One problem, the Ranger candidate who led the squad the night before didn’t turn down the path. The other team leader and I followed behind asking him what he was doing. He didn't answer, not wanting to tell us that he'd forgotten his rucksack on the ground before we established the patrol base. The other clueless member of our party and I got more and more confused. I didn’t know whether it was worse to leave a fellow Ranger candidate alone or follow him off into the middle of nowhere.

Before I came to the right conclusion, a truckload of Ranger School Instructors pulled up in a Humvee and made it very clear that both options were wrong.

Half an hour later, I dug my firing position and tried not to think about what the Company Commander was going to do to me and my two squad mates. It was going to be bad. The only question was how bad. In the peacetime Army, it didn’t get much worse than being an Infantry lieutenant that got kicked out Ranger School. Being forced to restart the phase was the better option, but still miserable.

I hacked the little shovel into the ground over and over again. My brain drifted through prayers. Ranger School could turn even the moderately religious towards piety, although the effects usually didn’t hold after the candidate’s first sighting of a woman or beer. I was tired and hungry. I couldn’t believe it could be over.

I asked God to show me something positive: something to carry me through the chain of command’s upcoming decision.

I was answered with an image of an old black woman standing in front of a dilapidated brick building. She had a broom. I could tell it was Africa. There was no sign of kids, but something told me it was an orphanage.

I felt my chin hit my chest and woke up. I went back to digging. Thoughts of the old woman and her orphanage had replaced the feelings of impending dread.

August 2006

I sat in the passenger seat of the SUV as Peter Francis Luswata drove through the streets of the small Ugandan town. I’d been in Africa for two days and I was about to get my first view of the Uganda Rural Fund’s (URF) projects in AIDS-ravaged countryside.

Peter was talking about how a priest had bought a building and turned it over to his sister to run an orphanage. URF provided some of the resources to help keep the orphanage going. I tried to listen, but my mind kept drifting to Mike.

I’d begun volunteering for URF as a tribute to Mike MacKinnon. I’d been friends with Mike since I was five and followed him to West Point. He died in October of 2005 when his Humvee was hit by an IED in Iraq. At his funeral someone from the unit said that they were delivering toys at the time of the ambush.

I was still to gimpy for the military, but somehow I’d fixated on the idea of working with AIDS orphans as a way to honor his sacrifice. An internet search led me to a home-grown Ugandan nonprofit that was desperate for volunteers.

I didn’t know if I was ready for the reality of that pledge. I got out of the SUV in front of an old brick building.

Peter was ahead of me. I heard him say, “This is Josephine. The house mother.”

I looked up and into the eyes of an old woman. She was the same one from the dream that I’d had in Ranger School six years before.

Josephine had tears in her eyes. She said, “I prayed that you would come and now you have.”

I wish that I could say that I turned into some powerful force for good in Uganda. I did what I could when I was there, but I haven’t been nearly as helpful as I’d hoped when I got back to the U.S. The one thing that I did do before I left was to hire Caroline, a twenty year old girl who grew up in the orphanage to help Josephine attend to the children.

It’s been four years since I left Uganda. I still sit on the URF board, but I'm not a stellar contributor. Each month, I send money for Caroline’s salary. It’s a meager sum and I’m embarrassed that I don’t give more. But from all the reports that I’ve gotten back of Caroline’s stellar work at the orphanage, I believe that the old woman’s prayers were answered.

If you’d like to see Josephine and her Nazareth Orphanage, here is a film clip. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpTVTp2C-pc. The organization’s website is now http://www.ugandaruralfund.org/ not the one that is listed in the film.

URF is now in need of monthly donations for teachers’ salaries. At $150 a month, it’s a great opportunity to make a difference in a lot of incredible children’s lives. If you're interested in donating, you can find out more at http://www.ugandaruralfund.org/.

Five Minutes

I haven’t shared this story with more than one or two people. I don’t know if I’d be sharing it today, if someone battling mental illness hadn’t challenged me for hiding my own struggles with depression.

End of November, 2000

I pulled the knot tight in the green rope and then secured it with an overhand hitch knot. I put my weight on the rope. It held strong around the rafter.

The white chair wobbled beneath me. I opened the noose and tested the length of the rope. It would be about an eighteen-inch drop. Perfect.

I shifted my leg brace down and stepped off the chair. I went downstairs to write a note.

A rational mind struggles to comprehend suicide. Those of us with depression or another mental illness struggle not to comprehend it. The sick brain self-destructs by sending out waves of overpowering chemical and electrical signals. It’s similar to how the bone marrow of someone with leukemia creates abnormal white blood cells bent on destroying the body.

My world had collapsed over the course of six months. An injury in Ranger School shattered my military career and left me crippled. My fiancée had betrayed me while I was at the Office Basic Course and Ranger School. It seemed that everyone I knew on the island had kept that betrayal from me.

I’d suffered from depression before and this combination of events more than set it off again. I couldn’t see how I could make it through another day. It felt like being trapped in a dark room where suicide was the only door. I fought not to open it, but eventually the darkness overcame me.

I stopped on my way down the stairs and prayed. “God, I love you, but I just can’t do this any more. If you have some reason that I should stay alive, I’ll give you five minutes to show me a sign.”

I didn’t expect an answer. I hobbled around the kitchen and pulled together a paper and pen. I wrote and then threw out two suicide notes. The final one just said, “I’m sorry, Matt.”

That summed it up. I hung the paper on the wall and went back upstairs

I stepped up on the wobbling white and blue chair. I slipped the noose around my neck and had a few final thoughts. One thought wouldn’t go away.

I needed to pay the rent. It would probably take a week or two for my unit to send the police to my apartment. It would probably take two or three weeks to clean it up and get rid of my gear. There was no way that they could have it rented again before the first of the year. The least I could do was pay them for the month of December.

There was one problem. I didn’t have any checks. I’d ran out of checks the week before and was still waiting for the new ones to arrive. I’d tried to take the money out of my ATM the day before, but had hit the daily withdrawal limit well short of what I needed.

I’d looked through the checkbook multiple times for a spare check that I may have missed among the duplicates. There was nothing. My irrational mind was battling with my irrational mind. Go look again versus get on with it. Go look again won.

I took the noose off my neck and got down to look through the checkbook again. I flipped through the duplicate checks once, nothing. I flipped through them again, nothing. I flipped through them one last time and found a check.

I filled it out and then walked outside to drop it in the mail. The mailboxes were in the center of the complex. On my way there, I said hello to my neighbor Jeff who was sitting on his porch.

I said hi. Jeff said hi back. We were amicable, but hadn’t said more than a few words over the two months that I lived there. Jeff was a Hawaiian native and I was a lily white haole from the mainland. The insider and the outsider. A cultural barrier left over from the island’s colonization.

I dropped the envelope in the mail slot and turned back towards my apartment. I heard a soft whimper from across the street. Jeff was crying.

I walked over and sat down next to him. We began to talk and didn’t stop for the next two hours. Jeff thought he was about to be laid off. His marriage was already on the rocks and he was terrified about what that meant for his children.

I didn’t have any answers, but we talked until he felt better. Somewhere along the way I began to feel better too.

We hugged and I went back to my apartment.

I’d forgotten how much peace can be found through trying to help someone else. It was a lesson I’d learned as a child while trying to help Darcee battle her eating disorder.

It was another door out of the darkness. A door that I wouldn’t have found if something higher hadn’t planted the idea in my brain that I couldn’t say goodbye to this world without paying the rent.

The Fiasco That Was Part of a Bigger Plan

April 2005 through August 2010

When I moved back to Montana from Hawaii, I started swimming rivers to get a freediving fix. I brought the hobby to Oregon when I went to law school. After a couple of trips down the Willamette River through downtown Eugene, I tried to swim the Rogue River. The Rogue was a good teacher. It taught me that swimming face-first down serious rapids with nothing more than a bike helmet for protection is really not a good idea.

Somewhere on the Rogue, I became addicted to whitewater. I’d learned my lesson about swimming rapids, but could never afford the cost of a kayak or the time to learn to ride one. Someone overheard my wailing about the predicament and said that they saw a video filmed in New Zealand where they ran brutal rapids while riding flat on some type of plastic board.

It took some crafty Googling and some serious begging of the local river equipment retailer, but eventually I was floating down the MacKenzie River on a rented riverboard. All it took was one Class III and I was obsessed. I bought my own board and took it back to Montana to play for the summer.

The obsession evolved to the point where I decided that I needed an inflatable riverboard. There weren’t any on the market. I contracted with a company in Colorado to build me a prototype. It was awesome. I took it off a fifteen foot waterfall and tested it in rivers from Oregon to Africa.

I placed an initial order of twelve boards and shipped them to river rats around the country to build the buzz for a spring shipment. I was stoked. It was a pretty awesome side gig and a lot more fun than lawyering. What I didn’t know was the market for riverboards was about to collapse and adventure sports companies were about to bring out a fleet of inflatable riverboards that retailed for as much as it cost to make our board.

I toyed with another design, but couldn’t get it dialed in to the point where I felt comfortable bringing it to market. Eventually, my wife made it very clear that the money I was sinking into this goat rope probably needed to go towards raising kids, paying for the house, etc. As much as I hated to admit it, she was right.

I looked at all of the work I put into the project and all of the money. What a waste. According to my view, nothing had come out of it but a few cool river toys, some youtube videos and a funny bullet on my resume.

I was wrong. Four boards off my initial order of twelve ended up in the hands of J Dubb an owner-guide for Bearpaw River Expeditions. After taking them through the Grand Canyon, J Dubb decided to stash one of the boards on the floor of his raft during trips down the Lochsa the following summer.

Jesse, one of J Dubb’s yearly regulars, had just returned from an intense tour in Iraq as the combat medic. He was battered by injuries, PTSD, and addiction. All you had to do was look in his eyes to see that the war had followed him home.

Sometime during the trip, Jesse conned J Dubb into blowing up the inflatable riverboard so Jesse could try it out on the massing swells and raging hydraulics of the Lochsa. (For anyone reading at home, please do not try riverboarding for the first time on this potentially deadly river). Jesse got battered, whipped, and tossed. He found enough breath to survive the ride and he found something else – peace.

Jesse came back the following day, and the next; reclaiming his life amidst the whitewater and pines.

I met up with Jesse and J Dubb after the season when Jesse was in Helena to go to the VA. Jesse had heard about my step-brother’s PTSD-induced suicide and some of the work that I did after his death. Jesse talked about his own struggles and then said, “If it was for riverboarding, I’d be dead right now.”

I made him explain. Jesse told me about the mix of the adrenaline, the healing power of the river, and feeling like a badass again.

It was an amazing story. I told Jesse that he had free boards for as long as I could get them. We said our goodbyes, but Jesse’s story lingered in my mind. Was it just him or could other returning veterans find the same kind of peace in the churning water.

A few months later, my sister Janna was trying to come up with a project for her doctorate work in Occupational Therapy. We talked about a couple of potential ideas and then I remembered Jesse’s story. I gave Janna his number.

Over the course of the next five or six months, Janna and Jesse laid the groundwork for a therapeutic program that would involve taking veterans riverboarding. They partnered up with the Missoula Vet Center and Montana River Guides.

The program succeeded beyond anything I’d ever imagined. I’d been involved with PTSD and reintegration issues on a national level and I’d never heard of anything remotely that successful at plugging vets back into life and traditional forms or therapy. Before long, they’d started up a second session.

Rave reviews came in from as far away as Washington, D.C. for this unconventional treatment that was so popular that they had to turn interested veterans away due to a lack of spots. It's hard to imagine a program with a higher potential to help our men and women returning home from combat.

Jesse stopped by my house last August to pick up another board for a trip up to Alaska’s rivers. We sat on the porch and talked about riverboard design.

I looked across the table at Jesse and realized that he had found a deeper peace. The trauma-induced tension had left his face and he was excited about the future.

At that moment, I realized that the purpose of my whole riverboard building fiasco was so that there would be an inflatable riverboard sitting at the bottom of the raft on the day that Jesse needed it. My obsession with the sport left me as nothing more than a domino in the chain reaction that put the board there for Jesse to use to find his own peace and develop a model that would bring his comrades peace.

Some would call it a coincidence, but I’ve seen enough of these coincidences to know that it was more – much more.

Here's is a story and video on the group.

http://missoulian.com/news/local/article_bc722694-8726-11df-94ed-001cc4c002e0.html

http://www.nbcmontana.com/video/24352095/index.html

Something Went Wrong

I didn’t plan to cover this part yet. I wanted to describe about ten or fifteen episodes when I was fortunate enough to see things that I couldn’t explain in a rational manner and then pull in other stories to complement them. After describing all of these events that I couldn’t justify rationally, I figured that I’d write about what conclusions I’ve drawn from them.

That idea went out the window sometime around five o’clock this evening. The devolution of my writing process may have begun when I spent forty minutes this morning talking with a woman trapped in a deep psychosis. Her brain is so sick that she can’t realize she’s sick. The woman is lost in a nightmare of delusional immune diseases and conspiracies. Over the years, she’s lost her husband, her kids, her career, and her home. Our society values her “civil rights” too much to force her to take the treatment that will keep her brain from further breaking down. Montana doesn’t have the combined legal and medical framework to help pull her out of that psychosis. As she spoke, I tried not to think of her chances of making it through the winter.

Or maybe it began yesterday, when I talked with a mother of two about her husband’s bipolar disorder-induced suicide in order to help her deal with her unnecessary guilt. Or maybe it was this afternoon, as I mumbled into the telephone trying to find the right words to help comfort a mother grieving her teenage daughter’s suicide. Or maybe it was some of the personal challenges that I’ve faced recently.

Either way, I decided it was time to bring up the biggest question of spirituality. If there is something beyond what we can see that ties us together and even has the power to affect our individual lives, then why can the world be so horrible and unfair?

If this spiritual realm had the power to warn me to catch Shane before he slipped of the building, why didn’t I get the same voice telling me to take Darcee to the hospital for a full examination when I last saw her two weeks before her death? If this spiritual realm had the power to send me a miracle to pay for my family’s bills, then why didn’t it just cure my wife of her devastating illness?

I don’t have those answers and I don’t think any person has them to the level of specificity that would please me.

The best explanation that I’ve heard came from a former Army sniper with PTSD and TBI. He was haunted by his past and struggled with addictions in the present. While we had coffee one morning, he told me about the simple spiritual revelation that helped him make sense of the horrors he’d seen.

“God didn’t create evil. God didn’t create death and He didn’t intend for us to suffer.”

The veteran’s simple and common sense explanation put the paradox in perspective. It was too deep for me to ever understand, but all that I really needed to know was that something went wrong.

Fundamentalist Christians would point to Adam, Eve, and the snaky Devil. To other denominations that story acts as a metaphor that passes on the basic truth that humanity strayed from the path our Maker intended. Either way, the message is that something went wrong in between creation and the present.

To me, it’s the only explanation for how the spiritual world that I’ve seen do so much good can coexist with a natural reality where there is so much suffering and evil. While that explanation leaves a multitude of mysteries about what actually went wrong, it does provide enough of an intellectual framework to help us look beyond some of the horrors of our everyday lives to something much more powerful and good.

Without that framework, it's pretty hard to see the bigger picture.

For anyone looking for a deeper explanation of what might’ve went wrong. I think that Jesus left another powerful clue in parable of the Tenants and the Vineyard. Luke 20:9-19.

Guest Post: A Final Goodbye

One of the reasons I started this blog was because I felt that others had had similar experiences that didn't have rational, scientific explanations. I knew that there is nothing special about me and therefore others must be having similar experiences. I hoped that by sharing mine that others would share theirs. I am amazed that it only took a few weeks for the first guest post to arrive

This guest post is from a childhood friend Stephanie Sampson. It's an amazing statement to how a few kind deeds can bond souls beyond the limits that we see every day. If you've got a similar story that you'd like to share, please send it to me. The only requirements are that: (1) it must be true, (2) it must be 1-2 pages, and (3) it must be generally well-written or close enough that a little editing can get it there.

Thanks Stephanie.

A Final Goodbye

A new family moved into the apartment next to me and my mother in April of 2000. They were from Kazakhstan and spoke Russian. I could tell that they were poor, but my heart broke as I watched them take abandoned furniture from the complex trash and pull it into their apartment.

I knew that I wanted to do something to make them feel welcomed. I was pregnant and single. I had a good job, but I wasn’t about to go buy them a Mercedes. I went to the bookstore and picked up a Russian dictionary.

After learning some of the basics, I knocked on the door. The family looked at me nervously.

I said, “Preeviet.”

That was all the introduction I needed. From then on, the family and I spent the nights on the steps of our apartment complex going over translations from Russian to English.

When it was time for the kids to go to school, I made sure the little girls had a new set of clothes and shoes. They acted like little princesses with their hair ties, little girl lip gloss, and jewelry. The outfits didn’t cost much, but the presents were enough to light up their eyes again.

The boy’s shoes had duct tape wrapped around the toes. I took care of that on his birthday. We picked up a bike that was for sale in the neighborhood. I sunk some more of my waitressing tips into spoiling the kids with a Playstation and covering some of their groceries until they got on their feet.

After three or four months, we may as well have been a family with the tides of people going back and forth between the two apartments.

I would sit with the old sick grandma and the children would translate for her. She was worried about me being pregnant and alone. I tried to convince her that it was going to be ok.

The old woman looked at me seriously and said, “You are my family’s angel.”

I didn’t know what to say.

She continued, “Watch out for my family.”

I didn’t know what she meant. I had a bad feeling, but I vowed to do what I could.

I gave birth to my son Jade and it was the Russian family’s turn to be angels. As a single mom, there are few things better than an extra set of hands. They had nine sets and each one was more than happy to tend to Jade.

One night I dreamt of the Russian grandmother. I awoke to someone shaking my bed. I glanced around the room and there was no one there. The shaking stopped when I sat up.

The phone rang beside my bed. It was one of the little girls from next door telling me their grandmother had passed away. My tears fell upon the covers of the now-still bed.

I don’t have a natural explanation for what happened that night with the dream of the grandmother and the shaking bed. In my heart, I know that she came to say goodbye.