Mike, this is such a tremendous pleasure.
And what the audience don't know is that we have been in concentric circles for a
long time, but never met face to face or virtually.
So I'll share my background so everybody knows.
Actually, the military committee for the rotary that I was part of is a big
partner.
with your organization.
So we've been huge fans of your work for a long time.
And with no further ado, tell us what you do, Mike.
Tell us what the organization is and what they
Well, the Warrior Bonfire Program, and to tell you what we do, I kind of got to tell
you how we got started, because that's not what we do.
A guy named Dan Ford, I suppose, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, a guy I started my
Army career with 40 plus years ago.
Dan in
to late 2012 had this idea that he wanted to take some wounded warriors on a deer.
Tim and his brother have a nice piece of hunting property in Mississippi.
so Dan, being who Dan is, he calls up Walter Reed and BAMC in San Antonio, all
these big military hospitals.
And they're like, who the hell are you?
away.
Don't call us again.
And so Dan figured, well, if I'm going to do something like that, I might as well
start a nonprofit.
somebody to listen to.
So we went through all that process and he also during that process ran into a
wounded veteran, Purple Heart recipient Chuck Williams, who had been injured in a
rocket propelled grenade attack and we call him GCC and he told Dan that, you
know,
First of all, we don't need to go all over the country.
There's plenty of people in our own backyard, plenty of wounded veterans in
our own backyard, meaning Mississippi and Louisiana.
And then he tells Dan that, you know, I could spend all day with the counselor and
not find the therapeutic value I could get with hanging around a bonfire with five or
six guys that had been there.
So with those two things, Dan went out and brought these guys to a deer hunt.
And all he thought he was going to do was show them a good time.
Let them hunt and have fun together.
But the first night, Dan and his brother Hunter are talking after everybody had
gone to bed.
And they're like, holy crap, there is a lot more going on here than deer hunting.
Guys are opening up with each other, sharing with each other, advising each
other.
So what it turned into is what we do today.
We take small groups of six Purple Heart recipients, those guys wounded in combat
at the hands of the enemy, and we bring them on what we call bonfire retreats
around the country.
Now we base it around recreational therapy.
There's healing in the great outdoors, know, skiing, hunting, fishing, surfing,
kayaking, you name it, we've done it.
And to anybody that ever questions me about a recreational therapy, that's a
bunch of hogwash.
I kind of tell them, hey, have you ever had a crappy day in the office and you
went outside and walked around the parking lot a couple of times, came back feeling
refreshed?
That's recreational therapy.
But what we're really doing.
is helping these guys build support communities, fostering their healing and
improving and saving their lives.
there's three things we do on every bonfire retreat.
One is typically the first night after everybody's had dinner and is settled down
is everybody tells their story, whatever that might be.
Now, I've probably been on 50, 60 of these things.
And not once have I come across one where suicide wasn't at least mentioned.
Sometimes it's, I thought about it, I contemplated it, but didn't do it.
Sometimes it's I tried, but I failed, which is a good thing.
And then somewhere in the middle of it,
we conduct a coping session.
And it's really for the guys to share how they cope with different things.
And it doesn't matter if it's, you know,
PT, nothing but military stuff, post -traumatic stress, TBI.
That's usually the stuff they talk about.
But sometimes they talk about dealing with raising children.
Sometimes they talk about marriage, different kind of things.
And really, it's just designed for them to gather other ideas on how to cope with
things.
And I'm going to give you an example of one that kind of helped me.
I'm not a wounded veteran, but it kind of helped me in my regular life.
And it was the first one of these sessions I was on.
And the guy, his name is Art, and he just said he gets angry so fast anymore.
And it happened when he got home, it wasn't before he...
deployed and he gets so angry at people and things and all that kind of stuff and
he learned for him to say the Lord's Prayer.
Now he said, now sometimes I'm mad and I say it once and it works sometimes I got
to say it 10 times but you know and that has kind of helped me a little bit.
I don't have anger issues but with other stuff.
Right.
And then the last thing we do at every one is, know, where your bonfire, we have a
bonfire.
Now, granted, it depends on where you're at in the country, whether it's a big
roaring fire or a very controlled campfire.
But we retire a US flag and we do it a little differently.
And first of all, we use an old Boy Scout ceremony and
Rather than retiring the flag whole we prepare it into stripes red white and blue
and everybody gets one of each and and they retire each one in honor of a fallen
comrade a Lot of these guys when we got started we knew we were gonna have to deal
with survivors Because a lot of guys have survivors go that should have been me not
them Helps him kind of remember that they got to keep going on for that buddy.
They lost
And then the other thing that we weren't really planning on is some of these guys
got injured, blown up, shot, whatever it was, and they got medevaced out and they
lost a buddy in that attack and never got a chance to say goodbye.
So we're giving them an opportunity to say goodbye.
And what's kind of cool with it, about it, is we gather ashes from every bonfire.
We have all these little urns and we gather ashes from every bonfire.
Then we have a big urn that we put all those ashes in.
We just completed 199 bonfire trips.
So we've got ashes from all 199 mixed together.
So we're kind of memorializing each bonfire, but we're memorializing each
person we've honored at the bonfire.
think that when people read about the organization at the beginning, then I
don't think people understand how fundamentally valuable it is towards a
process of healing.
But you're also supporting the families, not just the veterans.
Right, because we do spouses retreats, which mirror the retreats for Purple
Hearts.
The only difference is the activities might be a little different.
And then we do retreats for couples.
Same thing.
It mirrors, but we do more, we do some outdoor activities, but we do a lot of
marriage, not counseling, but discussion.
And there's a huge divorce rate in this country.
There's a huge divorce rate within the military.
And as you get guys wounded with post -traumatic stress, TBIs and all those kind
of things, it makes marriages struggle.
And just like the Purple Heart.
the spouses, they got to deal with PTSD even though it isn't their PTSD.
They don't have to deal with the TBI, but they got to deal with their husband's TBI
or wife's TBI or spouse's TBI.
Because there are female, we do have female Purple Hearts.
And Mike, all of this work requires funding.
So one of the things that you're doing is a gala.
And keep me honest here, it's once a
It's one seer.
Diamonds
that they can be quite fun, but tell me what happens in these gala's, like what is
the activities and stuff?
it's really kind of different, each one.
Diamonds and Dog Tags, and that name was coined by the wife of one of our Purple
Hearts.
But we've always done it either in Jackson, Mississippi, because we're
founded in Vicksburg, Mississippi, or in Denver, where we have a fairly decent
presence.
And this year we're doing it in Poughkeepsie, New York, up in the Hudson
Valley, just north of New York City.
But yeah, always a little different.
You know, for example,
This one in New York, she's got a game planned in the middle.
We're doing, and I don't understand the game, so I'm not gonna explain it.
We're doing a whiskey pool.
Again, I don't understand the game, so I'm not gonna explain it.
But we got some great entertainment.
We got a great guest speaker, a great emcee coming, some pretty well -known
people.
at least in the military circles.
last year in Jackson, we did it at a country club.
And we had a news broadcaster on the national news that came as our guest
speaker a couple of years ago in Denver.
That one was a little different because it wasn't a sit down thing.
There was chairs where people could sit down, but it was more of a long cocktail
hour and we had a comedian.
So yeah, they're fun and they're different.
What I've heard is, because I've heard all the Rotarians who have been to this, that
it's a lot of fun and it's tremendously valuable to help the program continue to
provide the value that they do.
do people, I'm assuming locally come, but do people fly over for this?
You know, every year we have a few.
If you've never been, it's right around West Point, if you've never been up that
Hudson Valley, if you're in the Hudson Valley, you realize that you are not in
New York City.
It's just an absolutely, it's a gorgeous part of the country, but you you're not in
suburbia either, so it's pretty
enough.
give us the details
Well, you know, the event is August 10th in Poughkeepsie, New York.
The best place to go for details, to buy tickets, to sponsor, to donate, whatever
you want to do, is to go to www .warriorbonfireprogram .org slash DDT,
Diamonds and Dog Bags, DDT.
And everything's on there.
I'll give a recommendation to also sign up for the newsletter.
I've been on this newsletter for years, ever since I was involved with the Rotary
Military Committee.
and it has
content.
Mike, first of all, thank you for your service, not only in the military, but
also putting together, I think, this tremendously valuable program.
Let me ask you one last question.
If you had to, beyond coming to the gala, obviously, but if you had to say one thing
that you can advise us, know, civilians, to that we can do a little differently to
help or support or better understand
our veteran community.
What would that
Well, think, you know, obviously there's always monetary donations, they're always
appreciated and always needed.
But we have a wide variety of volunteers.
And really when I talk to people about when, you know, if you called me up and
said, hey, I want to volunteer.
What do want me to do?
I'm going to, I'm going to talk to you a while and then I'm going to say, you go
think about what you want to do.
I'll give you some examples of what people are doing, but you go think about it
because the worst thing you can do is have a volunteer give him something he wants to
do and he doesn't want to do it.
He's going to walk away.
And then you got to measure that you got to you also got to measure the person's
time.
If I don't give you enough to do, you're going to walk away.
If I give you too much, you're going to walk away.
So so it's really got to get buy in from the volunteer.
You don't just assign.
But we got volunteers doing all sorts of stuff.
You know, my my son does our bookkeeping, my his buddy does our website.
We've got a group here in Colorado that that It's just an amazing what they do But
they take the guy take our groups ice fishing, you know So there's just all
sorts of different things big small and different where we call every one of our
Purple hearts once a quarter.
We have volunteers We started with with with the Rotary Club, but now we've added
to
because we need more, but so there's all sorts of stuff you can do.
You can donate in kind.
Hey, I got a lake house.
If you guys want to use it for a bonfire, I'll let you do it.
All sorts of things.
Mike, again, thank you so much.
I deeply appreciate the work and the work of your whole team, Thank you so much for
your time today.
I appreciate
Thank you, Ari, and it's always wonderful to talk about the Warrior Bonfire.