Staff Sgt. Aaron
Heliker riding with Rainier Therapeutic Riding founding Debbi Fisher.
I have just started a job with
PATH, International: Professional Association of Therapeutic Horsemanship. It is in Denver and is the certification and training
organization for the many wonderful horsemen around the country who are helping children and adults find valuable therapy through horses. A friend sent me this article written by Nancy
Bartley for the Seattle Times. I know you will find it heartwarming. These horses and horsemen who help our injured service men are
heroes...truly some of the "NOBLE AND GREAT" ones, as I call them in
Behind the Mist.
Seattle Times: by Nancy Bartley: After six tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, Staff Sgt. Aaron
Heliker's luck ran out.
A roadside bomb left him with third-degree burns, a traumatic brain injury and nerve damage to one leg. But the unseen wounds became the most disabling of all.
The 27-year-old who rode motorcycles, was a whiz at auto-body work and had wanted to be a soldier since he was old enough to ask his mother to "buy some army pants" could no longer tolerate being around people.
He was anxious,
hypervigilant, expecting attack. Memories rushed in of his last tour in Afghanistan, the five-hour attack by insurgents his convoy fended off, the soldier he found bleeding to death but was unable to help.
To block out the memories and the surges of anxiety that made him feel always ready for battle, he began to drink. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (
PTSD) and sent to a
lockdown mental-health facility for veterans.
Faced with overwhelming physical pain, afraid of being close to anyone, and so mired in despair that he could see no hopeful future,
Heliker didn't want to continue living.
Then he met Fred.
A white
Frederiksborg gelding, Fred is one of the horses in Debbi Fisher's
Rainier Therapeutic Riding program in
Yelm, where servicemen are matched with horses they learn to groom and eventually ride.
"I really liked him so I postponed my death for a week,"
Heliker said. "In an office I feel cornered but out here (at the farm) I feel at peace."
Horses are ideal partners for traumatized service members because "they're kindred spirits," Fisher said, and have similar fight-or-flight reactions to perceived threats.
Training a horse not to jump away at a blowing piece of paper, for example, becomes a model for the soldier's own life. Fisher takes 75 soldiers a year — both active-duty and veterans — without cost to them or the government.
When it comes to helping with rehabilitation, equine-assisted therapy has become well known across the country. Texas' Horses for Heroes started in 2007 as a model, and nationwide a number of groups have followed, Fisher's included.
Search for purpose
Fisher, 53, has spent 40 years riding and training horses. After her first husband, an Air Force pilot, died in a car crash in 2006, she felt lost.
Seeking a purpose, she knew there was a need for helping soldiers with physical and emotional difficulties, and had heard of the Horses for Heroes program. The idea of starting a program took off after she married Bob
Woelk, who became the co-founder.
The program was just what
Heliker needed. Nothing else had worked, he said, not treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center outside Washington, D.C., not therapy at a clinic in Texas, not the
lockdown PTSD treatment facility in Oregon — not even his beloved service dog, Chopper, his companion to help with anxiety.
Fred's ability to mirror
Heliker's own emotional state, requiring him to calm himself in order to do as little as brush Fred, has made it possible for
Heliker to get used to staying in control.
Not long after meeting Fred last June,
Heliker canceled his plans to die, and over the course of nine months went from taking 42 pills a day to four.
As far as Dr. Murray
Raskind, a psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs Puget Sound Health Care System in Seattle, is concerned, programs that get service members exercising and out among people are excellent.
"All of those things are good," he said. "Physical exercise relieves depression, anxiety and stress. It gets people out of their isolated state from being in their 'bunkers' ... and gets them interacting with other human beings and (in the case of the riding class) connecting with an animal. Many people feel more comfortable around animals."
But,
Raskind said, it's not a substitute for conventional therapy.
Fisher started her program in 2010, the same year
Madigan Army Medical Center closed its
PTSD program, and when 18,000 service members were returning to Joint Base Lewis-
McChord from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Soldiers are referred to Fisher's program by the Warrior Transition Battalion at the joint base.Other recreation programs are offered as well, but the riding program is among the most popular.
At Rainier, each rider starts slowly by learning to groom the horse, leading it and eventually riding.
Sessions last eight weeks and run four times a year. Participants can repeat sessions and remain in the program as long as they want. Ninety percent are active-duty soldiers, the rest veterans. Some stay on as volunteers, including
Heliker.
"Through this equine-therapy program, I've seen soldiers building relationships, confidence and their self-esteem," said Phyllis Lang, an occupational therapist with the Warrior Transition Battalion.
Fisher donates the use of her eight horses and operates in donated arenas. She says the program costs $700 per rider, which she raises through donations.
Class awaits
Two times a week, Fisher arrives with a caravan of horse trailers.
Heliker and other volunteers help unload horses, saddle them and lead them into the arena with a class of waiting service members — many who have faced the worst of war but are now uncertain about the 1,200- to 2,000-pound animal before them.
Heliker, who has spent nine years in the Air Force, stays in a camper on base. Living in a barracks is uncomfortable right now because he feels safest when alone or with a few trusted people.
While he continues to take part in therapy through the Wounded Warrior Battalion, he volunteers much of the week — mucking stalls, feeding horses and helping other service members. On Wednesdays, he rides with the advanced class.
He knows how easy it is to go the way some older vets from the Vietnam era did — disconnecting from everyone. So he talks to one, Ed
Wilus, who also rides in the program.
Wilus tells him how he gave up a family and job and spent years avoiding his problems by drinking. He ended up living under bridges.
Heliker began building a relationship with Fred when he realized the horse needed to trust him or the animal wouldn't cooperate. On days when
Heliker was angry, Fred reflected it.
Heliker had to calm himself down to get the horse to work with him or face spending the afternoon chasing Fred around a field.
Gradually,
Heliker grew calmer all day long, not only trusting the horse but also forming a close bond with Fisher, whom he regards as a second mother. He is also rebuilding his relationship with his mother, whom he shut out of his life after he was injured.
Sue
Heliker, who lives in Grand Valley, Pa., said the son who had been the family clown disappeared on the battlefield, replaced by the lost soul she saw at Walter Reed in January 2011.
He had stopped talking to her about convoys along the dangerous Highway 1 south of Baghdad — the stories had become so familiar to her, she felt she had traveled the highway.
He had stopped speaking of July 4, 2009, his birthday, when he was the lead gunner on a convoy going over a mountain pass in Afghanistan and his group was ambushed and trapped by small-arms fire for five hours. He didn't even tell her he had suffered a small stroke on his sixth deployment.
So when he was hospitalized for
PTSD at Walter Reed last year, his parents gathered around him not knowing how to make things better.
"Look at me, Mom, look at my eyes. I'm dead,"
Heliker told his mother.
"I looked at him and knew there was no way I could save him," she said.
When he ended up at Joint Base Lewis-
McChord and was referred to the riding program, his mother wondered if it would do any good. But after just three months, she could hear the change in him over the phone.
"You sound so peaceful. You're like the boy you were before you went into the military," she said. "How does a horse do that?"
"When I'm around the horse, he reminds me of a giant puppy dog,"
Heliker said. "You can hug him. You can talk to him. ... It's just relaxing. There's no pressure, just you and your best friend."
Even though he's sad his military career is ending — he expects to be discharged soon — he's beginning to think of new possibilities, such as training to become a
horseshoer. For the first time in a long time, he's thinking of the future, and of horses that will be in it.
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