21 years ago I was in a real sad state of affairs. It was one of the lowest points of my life, and sometimes continues to plague my memories during the holidays. I was at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina, just mere days from deploying on what would be one of the biggest adventures of my life. It was Christmas eve in the Marine Corps, and not a happy time.
Most of my friends, actually all of my friends were out in town, staying in motels with their families that had come to visit. Some of my buddies had even broken rank and illegally chartered a plane and flown back home for one last visit. In short– I was alone. The heater in the barracks didn’t work very well so it was cold in my room. I remember sitting on my cot, listening to mix tapes on my Walkman. My roommates and even the guys next door were nowhere to be found. Britani was back at home, and had slipped on some ice at a Christmas party and suffered a concussion…she was asleep in bed. Besides, back then (long before emails, cell phones, and texting) you had to make a jaunt down to the Phone Banks and wait in line just to call home.
Up until that time, my memories had always consisted of meeting up with family at my grandparents on Christmas eve for food, fellowship and presents. Now, I was completely alone. I recall actually stepping outside my barracks every so often, just to see if anyone was stirring….yes, even an mouse. No one.
The next day was even worse. The place was deserted. I knew somebody had to be at the chow hall, so I made the shivering trek down there and stood outside in line, waiting to get inside to the lukewarm heat.  Alas, I recognized not one marine. How could an entire battery of jarheads just up and disappear like that? Strangely, most of the marines eating there that day were officers, and most of them had family with them. I sat and ate alone. It was such a terrible feeling, and one I’ll not soon forget. I trudged back to the barracks that Christmas day and sunk deep into my sleeping bag on that stiff cot, freezing from the chill and depression that had set in. A week later on New Years Day I was on a 747, en route to the Persian Gulf. 

Last night the line at Dick’s Sporting Goods was a mile long. Literally.  The customers in that line were mad (myself included) because they only had 3 checkers working, while other employees sauntered along the aisles, doing nothing. The checkers were grumpy from their 12-hour shifts on their feet, and the manager said they didn’t need to open any other registers that night. Later, while at Starbucks (yes, I was at Starbucks. Doubleshot is closed at 2100 hrs; what’s a coffee snob to do??) they had run out of Peppermint Latte’s, and had no salt for the salted carmel hot chocolate. Geez, did they even have coffee? I settled for a plain hot chocolate.  Traffic sucked.  And so it goes in Tulsa and around the country during the holidays. People get in a hurry, stand in long lines, and some decide it would be fun to punch other humans over a pair of stupid shoes or a fuzzy puppet. A general aire of rudeness settles over the land. People are out of work, having trouble making ends meet and they’ve been playing Christmas tunes on the radio since Halloween. Ugh!  So much to be depressed about this time of year.
Today, I have so much to be thankful for. I am so very blessed in my life. I have a loving wife, two wonderful girls, and a great family. The lord has bestowed me with many, many blessings, including my health and a great fulfilled dream of a ‘business’ that is the Bowman Lodge. I am allowed to do his work in a dream setting within his great creation of the beautiful outdoors. Despite my general curmudgeoness most days, I’ve had time to reflect on what this season really should be about. Yes, it’s definitely about Christ’s birth. But I’ll never forget those cold, lonely days back at Camp LeJeune and the worst Christmas of my life.

There are thousands of men and women deployed in forward areas of the world today.  Most of them are in very inhospitable places, and some of them include bombs, bullets, and IED’s intent on shredding their flesh and bones.  Thankfully in today’s day of technology and the information age, these servicemen and women can communicate with their loved ones back home to some degree, unlike the troops from the old days.  But even that doesn’t take the sting away that burns inside.  Every vet knows what I’m talking about.  Yes, it sucks to be away from family during the Christmas holidays, but somehow it’s even worse and compounded when you are deployed.  Your friends and buddies must do the things they can to calm the pain inside, even going their separate ways for awhile.  Cling to each other, dear brothers.

Moreover, there is a special group of veterans– it’s our wounded warriors who are struggling with the pain and suffering of physical injuries suffered on the battlefield.  Our mission at the Bowman Lodge has literally taken on a life of it’s own, and merely underscores the need these great Americans are in.  What most folks don’t realize is that they are not usually permitted to go home, even for the holidays, until their medical review boards are complete.  Sometimes that takes months upon months.  These guys have served dutifully and have suffered ungodly injuries, enduring months and even years of surgeries, rehab, and endless doctors appointments.  In some ways, they are in the same boat I was in that gloomy weekend 21 years ago.  How many of them are sitting in a chilled room, wishing they were somewhere else?  How many of them would gladly trade places with me so they could stand in a long line with their wife, suffering the injustices of retail hell?  How many won’t be with their families at all this Christmas time?  How many will have to eat chow hall turkey and gravy with strangers tomorrow?

So, in this time of uncertainty, holiday angst and tepid ambivalence, please be thankful for all that you have, even if it doesn’t seem like much.  You have so much to be thankful for.  You are alive.  Christ was born and has risen!  You aren’t sitting on an OP somewhere in the snows of Afghanistan, or manning a machine gun bunker on the 38th Parallel.  Somebody else is doing it for us.  Some men have traded limbs for the opportunity to serve our nation.  I’m betting most of them would trade places with any of us to be stuck in traffic or sitting in a crowded church pew with bickering relatives.

God bless America, God bless Christmas joy and God bless the American fighting man…….

The December hunt for 2011 is now on the books. The weekend was simply amazing. Everything just clicked. We had 3 out of 4 hunters get nice, nice bucks. Gunny Tony Webb was the odd man out, and that was the only downside. He had been taunted by the seemingly constant presence of our breeder buck, “E-tool”, and saw no other deer but him. The weather positively sucked, but the hunting was awesome.

"E-tool"

I had a good feeling about this one, for some reason. I just knew it would be successful. We had a camera crew from the Sportsman Channel filming a yet-to-be-determined episode. At first it altered the vibe and comfort level of the hunt, but only slightly. That first night, all hands were on deck around the fire pit…everyone! The stories quickly turned south, and the content was positively off-limits, even for cable TV. I became instantly aware that the cussing and the crass commentary and banter would render the entire video being shot at the pit by two separate cameras completely useless or left on the cutting room floor. Indeed….I knew then that no matter what happened, it would turn out to be a great weekend.
We also had a full house; a complete contingency of four hunters, two spouses, and three escorts. We also had two extra guides; Connor– son of Gunny Booth, Linda Klark to help Starla in the kitchen, the camera crew and their producer, Nick Davis, and special guest Cpl. Rory MacEachern, who joined us to lead the Warrior’s Walk with his bagpipes. VP of marketing for the Sportsman Channel, Ben Lines, also paid us a visit. An old friend from high school, Justin Ward, who just retired from the Coast Guard, and his father Tony, stopped by and joined us for dinner on sunday. I love weekends like this one!
The hunting was pretty horrid for the first day….until the long, cold rain finally lifted at dusk in a strange broken cloud formation, dripping with orange humidity. When I went outside to snap some photos, I thought the time was perfect for the deer to emerge from the wet, wasted day to feed. Sometime during that exact moment, Cpl. Rawlings made a 202 yard shot at a sweet-looking 10 point down at the blind we call “Hathcock”. The level of excitement always takes hold when word comes down that we have a deer ‘on the ground’, and life picks up with flurried activity. I rushed down on the quad to get some pictures, and it was nearly dark by the time I got down into the bottom where they were located. Earlier that morning, Rawlings told us, “I need to kill something. I am going to see a deer…and kill it.” His prophecy was fulfilled that night for sure. He is a stoic, stereotypical Marine grunt….but his shell broke for a moment down in that bottom as he assisted with field dressing, clearly pleased.
Starla’s chicken-fried perfection was outstanding as usual that night. We stayed up late by the fire. Fellow Marine Jason Albro had hooked us up with a batch of Cuban Partegas for smoking, and, as if to not be outdone, mutual friend Rogers Shaw stopped by with some guide shirts and a half box of Cuban Montecristos. Oy! We did a ‘flash-humidifier’ trick and they were good-to-go.
Nothing, however, could prepare me for the biggest, broadest and toothiest grin the next night from Sgt. Brian McPherson when he shot his near 170-class buck. His face said it all. Within minutes, Gunny Jasper Heilig shot his buck in the Three Fingers area. An interesting parallel emerged when his deer was brought in, however. Last year, Cpl. Matt Bradford pleased us all with his native, young two-year old scrapper buck, a fighter with broken and worn-down nubs for tines. It was a perfect symbol for the young, broken but never defeated Bradford himself. Heilig’s buck was old…likely 5-years old, also a native. He had four broken tines and his main beam was worn down nearly flat in front. His body was riddled with bruises and wounds. It became evident that he was probably the most dominant buck on the entire ranch, and was fighting off all the new beastly bucks with racks twice his size. You all know I’m a sucker for symbolism, and here it was yet again.  Heilig had never hunted anything before, other than people.  Saturday was his first day to deer hunt.  Now on the second day he had killed a perfect emblem of himself and what it is to fight for your life.
My buffalo turned out perfect at dinner. The ladies (Starla and Linda) insisted I make my Squash Rockafeller, and it was good, too. We ran out of Shiner Bock at one point, but the coffee lasted through till monday, thankfully. I made a feeble attempt to memorize the Warrior’s Walk speech, and I damn near pulled it off without screwing it up. Rory’s bagpiping added a chilling, goosebump-inspiring jaunt down the path, and I hope he joins us again.
Something different occurred on this hunt, however. Something that we hadn’t planned on or could have created on our own. Greg and I sat down with the camera crew and producer Davis on monday morn. Equally we both spent around 2 hours each being interviewed. It was the first time I had ever had to pointedly consider some of the things we do here and are accomplishing with high success, I think.
McPherson had said that shooting a gun for the first time since he was injured had been a good thing, a good feeling again. That made me think about the notion of the potential psychology behind it all. You see, as cretinous as it may sound, Marines are trained to develop an intimate relationship with their weapon. We name it. We sleep with it. It becomes an extension of our mind and body. This is why we are so damned effective with them, period. When a soldier or Marine is wounded and taken from the battlefield, that relationship is either put on hold or severed outright.  One might even say it is an emasculating event deep down.  When that person is reunited with a rifle and is allowed to fire it, I believe it rekindles that lost bond, that connection between flesh and cold steel.  Call me Mr. Metaphysical, but I think it’s true.

Further, it dawned on me upon being forced to answer a question from Nick (thanks, Nick!) that, quite obviously the business of killing is one of the most horrific, serious, and peak events of humanity.  It’s the biggie.  The taking of a life is, for all intents and purposes, evil.  It is bad.  A bad, bad thing.  Sure, our servicemen are doing their job, and must kill to defend themselves and one another.  But that isn’t what I mean….Marines are trained to kill people and destroy things.  Period.  And they are quite good at it.  When one pulls a trigger of a rifle or machine gun, and unleashes a torrent of lead downrange into the enemy, they are acting out the biggest taboo among human kind: taking the life of another.  At the ranch, we hunt animals for trophies but also for food.  For nourishment of ourselves and our families.  Killing for food and hunting in general is as primal as it gets.  We’ve done it for survival since the very beginning.  I firmly believe that the act of reuniting our guests with a rifle and using it for a more positive thing has got to be therapeutic in some way.  We are flipping the evil intent of killing into a good event.  I think it somehow releases them, it gives them a new paradigm to use for good.  They can now repeat this act with positive, tangible results every time they hunt.  They will forever be reminded with the tokens of the hunt– the actual animal’s head on their wall, and their nourishing flesh in their freezer.  Maybe I’m wrong.  But more than once have we seen a catharsis occur once that trigger is pulled again, only with a Whitetail deer in the crosshairs instead of another human being.

I also was forced to consider our entire mission at the Bowman Lodge.  I realized how crucial the immense sacrifice is that it takes to serve this nation.  These concepts are nothing new to us, really.  I’ve never had to sit down and articulate it on the fly for a camera, though.  And the Lodge has truly become a transformative place, and not just for our guests.  We all get a little something each time we have a hunt.  We learn things.  We are illuminated.  Though I hate cliche’s, I use them often because they work.  In short, the Lodge is a magical place.  It has a life of it’s own now.  Things happen there as if they were scripted, meant to be.  We facilitate the trip, but the vortex takes off on it’s own course and all we can do is hang on for the ride.  That force was strong last weekend, and I know I wasn’t alone in feeling it.

I broke down a couple of times during the interview process.  I think it really hit me hard of the serious endeavor this has become for me and all my staff.  It’s changing lives, most of all our own.  I have essentially lived a life of service and sacrifice of one form or another, but I’ve never looked at it like that before.  I love my country.  And I love my job.  It is my new calling.  We take time away from our families and other commitments to serve these wounded warriors.  I’ve said it a million times that it is the least we can do for them.  But the Bowman Lodge has become a force to be reckoned with emotionally for us, I think.  It is a respite for me, for my guides, for our visitors, and for our veterans.  I don’t really know how we made this happen.  I only hope we can continue this mission until there are no more wounded servicemen and women to try and help heal.

I want to personally extend my deepest gratitude to Rory MacEachern for driving down from Ft. Leonardwood, MO., to come pipe for us.  He resolutely refused any form of renumeration from me, so I must figure out how to repay him.  I think he thoroughly enjoyed getting to hang out with other Marines in such a fun setting, though.  I also want to thank Nick Davis for inspiring me to think, to cry a little, and to ruminate on exactly what it is that we are doing here for our wounded and disabled vets.  I know that we will meet again someday.

During this holiday season, please remember that the war is not over.  It will never be over until they all come home.  Only then can the healing begin.  Be thankful for the men and women that put themselves in harm’s way for all of us, for our way of life.  Semper Fi, Mac….