MALIBU, Calif. — At first glance, the scene unfolding at a Malibu ranch might appear to be a petting zoo for adults, as a group of men takes turns slowly leading two horses and a pony by the reins around a dusty corral. A woman in a cowboy hat orchestrates the proceedings while from outside the corral, others watch intently.
But what’s happening at the Big Heart Ranch on a recent afternoon, the Pacific Ocean sparkling in the background, is something altogether more profound — in fact, it may even be a matter of life and death.
The men in the corral are part of the latest cohort of U.S. veterans to go through a five-and-a-half day “war detox” program designed by the Save A Warrior organization to heal the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder and do something to stem an epidemic of suicides among veterans. On Day 3, the 11 members of “Cohort 009” attend an equine therapy session at the Big Heart conducted by cowboy-hatted therapist Suzi Landolphi.
“There’s a holocaust approaching,” warned Save A Warrior founder Jake Clark, a former California National Guard captain. “You’re looking at 100,000 suicides in the next 10 to 15 years.”
Also enlisted in the “detox” effort is transcendental meditation, a high-ropes course, cliff-climbing and other exercises that teach mindfulness and self-discovery to veterans who have experienced the trauma of combat in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere and who, since coming back home, have struggled to reintegrate into society.
Former Army National Guardsman Richard Moseley was a member of Cohort 005 and has returned to the Big Heart to encourage the latest recruits. He credits the equine therapy — or Horse-Inspired Growth and Healing — in particular for saving him from a despair so deep he contemplated suicide and was institutionalized in a mental hospital.
“Horses, you can’t lie to them … They know it,” Moseley, tanned and fit, told MintPress in an interview at the ranch. “They shy away from you. You have to let it all go to work with a horse.
“I realized I couldn’t lie to myself anymore,” he added.
Moseley said he found no relief from the military health system, which has spent nearly $2 billion on anti-psychotic and anti-anxiety drugs over the past decade. “Medication was doing nothing,” he recalled. “If anything, it made it worse.”
Clark is now planning to expand what he calls “the Project” to locations in Virginia, Tennessee and Texas and ultimately provide mental health services to 1,200 veterans every year. He and others believe his program is a cost-effective, non-pharmaceutical model for how the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs and private veterans organizations should be helping traumatized veterans.
“The VA just gives you meds,” said Aaron Schilleci, who flew Apache helicopters for the military in Iraq and was a member of “Cohort 009.” “It doesn’t fix the demons, it just fixes the symptoms.”
Tidal wave of trauma
“Everybody who comes [into the program] is suicidal,” Clark said. “You ask them, ‘What’s going on?’ They say, ‘I’m taking pills, I can’t sleep, my wife is threatening to leave me.’
“They’ve been betrayed by nearly every stakeholder” in the military health system, he said. “This is the last house on the block.”
Clark pointed out a 23-year-old Marine Corps sniper — one of three active-duty service members in Cohort 009 — taking part in a trust-building game that mimicked crossing the desert.
“Seven weeks ago, he was sitting on a park bench with a .45 pressed to his forehead,” Clark said. “He called 911 and said, ‘This is where you’ll find the body.’”
The sniper, whose mother knew of someone who had completed the Project, has avoided becoming another addition to the ever-increasing roll of military suicides. According to data released by the VA in February, 22 veterans take their lives every day — equivalent to a suicide every 65 minutes.
Those suicides were reported by 21 states from 1999 through 2011, representing about 40 percent of the population. Other states, including California and Texas, did not make data available. The numbers also do not include veterans who may have committed “suicide-by-cop.”
In one recent incident, 23-year-old veteran Lorenzo Aguilar was shot dead by a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officer after being pulled over for suspected drunken driving.
From 2001 to 2009, the Army’s suicide rate increased more than 150 percent while orders for psychiatric drugs rose 76 percent over the same period and, according to the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, mental health disorders were the leading cause of hospitalization of active-duty service members in 2007, 2009 and 2011.
According to the VA, 30 percent of the 834,463 Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans it has treated have been diagnosed with PTSD, and the money spent on psychiatric drugs since 2001 has included more than $800 million on anti-psychotic medications such as Risperdal and Seroquel.
The military command “appears to be content with the nation’s troops being diagnosed as mentally ill and then, like freshmen at a frat keg party, plied with multiples of psychiatric drugs,” the Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights, a mental health watchdog, said recently.
With the military downsizing due to budget cuts, the demands on the VA system are only expected to increase.
“There’s going to be a tidal wave of [traumatized] warriors coming back,” Schilleci predicted.
“Play like your life depends on it”
Clark, 47, could himself have been a statistic. The son of a Marine, he enlisted in the Army at age 17. After five years in the service, he embarked on a career in law enforcement, working for the Los Angeles Police Department and FBI, but struggled with civilian life and an alcohol problem.
After 9/11, Clark spent another four years in the military and was deployed with the California National Guard for two tours in Kosovo. What he saw there left him feeling suicidal, but he began practicing transcendental meditation after taking a course partially subsidized by Oprah Winfrey.
“Oprah played a big part in saving my life,” he said.
Instead of thinking about killing himself, he started developing a program that would combine meditation with other therapeutic techniques.
“I wanted to put something together similar to what I had experienced in other people’s programs,” including the Equine Experience, a pioneering equine therapy program in Miraval, Ariz.
The first Save A Warrior cohort assembled in September 2012.
“I pawned a couple of Rolexes to do the first two cohorts,” Clark recalled.
The $1,200 cost of the program — which includes dormitory accommodations at a camp in the Santa Monica Mountains — is now completely covered by corporate and other donations. The services of meditation instructor Dusty Baxley are donated by film director David Lynch’s foundation.
PTSD-afflicted veterans “don’t get rest, they don’t sleep so stress and anxiety just builds,” said Baxley, who developed the disorder during three combat tours in the military. Transcendental meditation, he said, “is designed to settle the mind … It’s like a release valve 20 minutes twice a day.”
The Project’s motto is “Play like your life depends on it.” Every exercise, including the crossing of the desert, is performed with the concentration the cohort members may have once used to focus on military targets.
“Don’t let any coyotes get their hands in there,” Landolphi, the equine therapist, exhorts the cohort.
Coyotes are the Project’s metaphor for “People who don’t respect your boundaries.”
Baxley has taught meditation classes at a military hospital and believes it is becoming more accepted within the military health bureaucracy.
“It should be integrated into the DoD before guys even go [into combat],” Schilleci recommended.
“It should be taught in basic training,” Baxley agreed.
Clark is projecting he will employ 20 people full-time on an annual budget of $3 million once the Project gets up to full speed. That’s a fraction of the budgets of veterans service organizations such as the USO, the Wounded Warrior Project, and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
“They’re just trying to make payroll,” Clark fumed. “They should be giving me money. I cracked the code.”
Clark may sound brash, but the cohort members and alumni gathered at the Big Heart Ranch appear to be living testimony to the effectiveness of his methods. A veteran who is now an LAPD officer says life has been “100 percent different” for him since he went through the Project.
“He still has issues sometimes at work,” Clark noted. “He’s trying to get meditation into his work schedule.”
And then there is Moseley, himself a police officer for 20 years, who one day, he recalled, “ripped off my badge, took off my gun belt, and just walked away from my life. I woke up in a mental hospital.”
His first few days in Cohort 005 were “really tough” because “so much emotions were coming out. I had years of built-up anger. I had breakdowns every day. But the guys didn’t give up on me.”
Moseley now has sessions with an equine therapist near where he lives. The Project, he said, was “the turning point in my life … I realized I wasn’t alone.”