The Rescue Pilot and the Horse
by Larry Shook
*LONG STORY
Bob Nevins was a highly decorated medical evacuation pilot in Vietnam. When he was shot down on one of his missions, two of his crew members were killed outright, but Nevins, suddenly engulfed in white light, had a near-death experience that changed his understanding of life. It also inoculated him against Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
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A May 1, 2024 Pentagon report found that US Army soldiers are “nearly nine times as likely to die by suicide than in combat.” According to a 2021 report, police suicides are up to eight times greater than the general population. A 2022 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study found that US suicides were up 37 percent since 2000.
Nevins has used his Vietnam experience to create a unique suicide prevention program that naturally resets traumatized nervous systems. That reset, traumatized people report, frees them from thoughts of killing themselves. The implications of Nevins’s work are profound, not just for the military, but also for first responders, front line health care workers, and humanity itself. This is his story.
by Larry Shook © 2025
1. Shot Down
January 15, 1971, 3:02 p.m. Ten miles southwest of Hue, South Vietnam.
In those days, Bob Nevins was a Dustoff pilot, a flyer of Huey medical evacuation helicopters. That made him a kind of aerial shepherd tending the last flock of American soldiers in the final phase of a lost war that had broken their country’s heart.
Nevins had spent this particular morning getting advanced instrument instruction before being promoted from co-pilot to aircraft commander. His helicopter medical evacuation unit, Eagle Dustoff of the 326th Medical Battalion, 1st Infantry Division, had been losing aircraft and crews from pilots crashing into mountains hidden by poor visibility—fog, clouds, darkness of night. “Instrument Meteorological Conditions” was the Army phrase. The result was lost aircrews, names of the dead destined in another decade for memorial inscription in the black marble wall of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Helicopter pilots were sent to war in Vietnam with little more than 200 flying hours behind them. That made them greener than the jungles and rice paddies they flew over, inadequately prepared for the brutality of Vietnam.
Nevins grasped immediately the likelihood that he would die in Vietnam. His first orientation flight as co-pilot had exposed him to the last major battle of Vietnam, and one of the deadliest, Fire Support Base Ripcord. That was on July 23, 1970, six months earlier, which now seemed like a lifetime ago. On a remote hilltop, some 500 101st Airborne Infantry Division grunts were being overrun by up to 11,000 North Vietnamese Army soldiers.
The attacking commander, Chu Phuong Doi, had studied Ripcord carefully, personally reconnoitering it himself. He saw that helicopters were its lifeline. He meant to overrun Ripcord with his superior forces, then make a shooting gallery of the helicopters when they attempted rescue.
Under withering fire of heavy anti-aircraft machine guns, rocket propelled grenades, recoilless rifles, mortars, satchel charges, tear gas and small arms, the endless flock of 101st. helicopters came, just as Commander Doi, knew they would. Like a duck hunter watching over his decoys, Doi waited. The pilots lined up, took their turns at landing pads with mortars exploding all around, dispatched their gunners and crew chiefs to run out amid the mortar fire and help the wounded aboard.
The aircraft were perforated with Doi’s orchestrated fire. Still, they snatched the grunts away, limping off in ships so badly damaged that some never flew again. Some of the American survivors shared helicopters with dead friends wrapped in body bags.
Nevins’s pilot, Warrant Officer (WO) Al Avina, was a brand new aircraft commander. “If I get hit,” Avina told Nevins on the way to Ripcord, “fly zero-six-zero degrees to the coast and try to find your way back to Camp Eagle.”
A Mission Impossible
At three in the morning a month later, in pitch black monsoon rain, August 1970, Nevins and aircraft commander Gary Mercer were scrambled out of Camp Evans to attempt a mountain rescue. Wounded 101st troopers lay under triple canopy jungle on a steep, sodden mountainside. Artillery flares dropped through the low clouds with their ghostly silent movie flickering light silhouetting, fleetingly, a vertical landscape perfect for killing helicopter crews.
The driving monsoon rain and blasting wind made flying the helicopter a rodeo—“sportin,” as pilots said. The winch was on the aircraft’s right side and they needed to position it so the jungle penetrator, a rescue seat, would reach the ground. The slope was so steep that on the other side the penetrator would just dangle in empty space.
The pilot, pulling full power, tried to hold the aircraft steady with his pedals, which control the tail rotor. But the velocity of the quartering tail wind kept stealing his “tail rotor authority,” caused him to “run out of pedal,” and kept flipping the ship around 90 degrees. A 180-degree directional swap would jam their rotors into the trees, which would probably cause an instant crash that would kill the crew and those below.
So there were three dangers: 1) Crashing into the jungle; 2) Just getting the penetrator on the ground; 3) Tangling the cable and penetrator in the trees, possibly with a wounded man attached, which could pull the aircraft out of the air with the same disastrous result as stuffing the rotors in trees.
While the pilot was wrestling with the helicopter, Nevins was on the radio with the people on the ground describing the difficulty. Finally, AC Mercer decided to abort this impossible mission. Nevins explained to the grunts on the ground.
“We don’t want to crash on top of you,” said Nevins.
“No problem,” came the voice in their headsets. “We didn’t think you would make it this far.”
The Dustoff crew kept calling for the artillery flares so they could pick their way out of the mountains.
“Are you guys going to be OK ‘till morning?” Nevins radioed the grunts as his helicopter departed. “‘Till first light when we can get back in?”
“Well, Dustoff,” came the reply, “I got three guys that I can’t keep going for half an hour.”
That caused dead silence in the helicopter. Then, over the intercom, a quartet of obscenity:
“Oh, F—-!”
“F—-!”
“F—-!”
“F—-!”
“It was like in unison,” says Nevins.
Nevins looked over at the aircraft commander and saw resignation in his face in the red glow of the instruments. Mercer nodded his head and turned the helicopter around.
“Rucksack Two-Three, Dustoff Niner-Two,” Nevins radioed the grunts on the ground. “Stand by for pickup.”
When Nevins’s ground contact told his buddies the medevac crew was returning, he forgot to take his finger off the radio’s microphone key. “The crazy f——— are coming back,” the Dustoff crew heard him say.
The tone of disbelief and relief in the grunt’s voice changed Nevins forever. He still hears that voice today.
Unknown medic. Unknown wounded soldier. Unknown photographer. They are among the nameless voices living in Nevins’s head. Photo courtesy of Vietnam medic Mike Hastie. See “Immortal Medic” at the end of this story.
“That’s the night I realized I’m going to get killed doing this,” Nevins says. Something in him, he found, had made the decision that he would trade his life to save others. It wasn’t just the way of Dustoff crews, it was a property in his own blood that he hadn’t known about, that connected him to things he could not see.
They raced back through the stormy highlands in eerie flare light and lashing rain, and they fought the monsoon, and they managed to dodge the mountain where the wounded infantrymen lay. The rescue bordered on suicidal.
The Huey was not an easy aircraft to hover, but these guys, soaked in life or death adrenaline, had honed their skills on the steel of war, and they were masters. Ordinarily, they could thread a penetrator through dense jungle and put it in a guy’s hand on the ground from a 150-foot hover. Now, however, the monsoon buffeted the helicopter like a cork in the sea. At one point, Nevins thought he would have to cut the penetrator cable, but he didn’t have to.
Somehow, they stole the three casualties from the monsoon and dark mountain. One of the injured had a gunshot wound to the head and died in the helicopter en route to the hospital. But the other two, Nevins believes, lived.
Nevins’s best friend in flight school was John Nesovanovic. They arrived together in Vietnam on July 4, 1970, both assigned as 101st Dustoff pilots, an assignment for which Nesovanovic had urged them to volunteer. Three months later, Nesovanovic was dead, killed in suddenly bad weather that dropped on him like a shroud during a night rescue mission on October 2. His helicopter crashed in blind darkness in the black water of Cau Hai Bay in the South China Sea. https://www.vvmf.org/Wall-of-Faces/37680/JOHN-L-NESOVANOVIC/
Nevins escorted John’s body home to his family in the Milwaukee suburb of West Allis. There was a military hero’s funeral with a helicopter fly-over.
The family was grief-shattered, of course. After a week, when Nevins was scheduled to return to Vietnam, Nesovanovic’s mother asked the Army to let him stay longer. The family needed him, she said; Nevins was holding her brood together. Nevins thought the request had more to do with keeping him from her son’s fate for as long as possible than helping the family through its loss.
John Nesovanovic’s sister, Christina, was a beautiful TWA flight attendant. She and Nevins had different wounds in their hearts and they quickly formed a deep bond to nurse them together. By the time Nevins left to go back to war he had fallen in love with Christina. Christina said she loved him, too.
They began an intense letter correspondence. “It was really nice,” says Nevins. “It kind of kept me going. I’m gonna stay alive for this girl, I told myself.”
Then it was Christmas Eve. The war didn’t care.
In one of the signature tragedies of the Vietnam War, an American artillery shell had been accidentally dropped on nineteen American soldiers. “Friendly fire.” “Fratricide.”
Nine of the soldiers were killed outright. Ten desperately needed medical evacuation. All were basket cases.
Nevins’s Dustoff was the first on the scene, another mountainside. They got one basket aboard their hovering aircraft. As the second basket was ascending it started to spin.
Spinning, it banged into Nevins’s door. Nevins slid back the armor plate of his seat, opened the window, reached out and steadied the basket.
“So I reach out. I grab the basket and I just pull it next to my door to stabilize it. And I look at this guy, this young guy, and his eyes are flickering. And he’s got his hands laid across his chest.
“But what I notice is, he’s got on a wedding ring, you know. So I know he’s in deep shock. But I see this wedding ring. All I can think of is, are you kidding me? You know, freaking Christmas Eve. And now someone is going to get this message…”
The crew chief got the basket aboard. Nevins turned in his seat and saw that the medic was just leaning over the wounded man, not doing anything, seeming paralyzed. Nevins says he doesn’t know why he said it, because it wasn’t his place, but he barked, “Give that man an IV!”
“Mr. Nevins, I can’t even find a vein,” said the medic.
“And I look,” says Nevins, “and the guy’s like cut in half.”
That moment haunts Nevins today. By Christmas Eve, 1970, Nevins thought he was used to the gore of war. He had hauled away so many torn and bloody young bodies that looked as though they had been attacked by wild animals. But this one—the wedding ring… Christmas Eve…
The name of that one dying young soldier was Michael Ray Nugent. https://www.vvmf.org/Wall-of-Faces/38232/MICHAEL-R-NUGENT/ He is never far from Nevins’s mind. He’s always there on Christmas Eve.
For Nevins, the Christmas Past ghost of Michael Nugent came to epitomize the waste and sorrow of war.
Now it was January 15, 1971, and in jungle outside Hue 101st grunts had stepped into a classic guerrilla ambush of booby traps and land mines. There were seven wounded, multiple amputations.
The ambush wasn’t over. An RPG awaited Nevins and his crew.
WO1 Nevins, flying as co-pilot, and aircraft commander 1st Lt. Jerry Rodgers launched their rescue mission. Cobra gunships took off to cover them. Crew chief William Malifant, who operated the hoist, sat in the “hell hole” nook behind Nevins on the aircraft’s right side. Medic Amile Porchella sat opposite on the left, behind AC Rodgers.
OJT crew chief Daniel Cox rode along for the experience. This was only his second mission. Lt. Rodgers told him he didn’t have to come, but Cox wanted the training.
Ten minutes later, they made radio contact with the ambushed grunts, who had run out of smoke grenades for marking their position. Nevins had the stick and the coordinates they had been given put him right over the top of them in a left-hand orbit. Rodgers then took control of the aircraft and dove sharply from 1,500 feet, an altitude above effective .30 caliber ground fire. They screamed over the treetops, then came to a sudden shuddering hover. Rodgers leveled at about 75 feet, sidled twenty to thirty feet to the left to put the wounded directly below for hoisting them aboard, then nestled the helicopter into the triple canopy treetops for cover. Nevins flipped a radio switch to contact the Cobras. At that exact moment a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into the left side of the aircraft, AC Rodger’s side. It was almost as though Nevins had triggered the blast.
“The explosion was unbelievable,” Nevins remembers. “It felt like being hit between the eyes with a baseball bat.”
The aircraft burst into flames, pitched nose high, rolled hard to the left, and began to drop, spraying burning fuel into the jungle, setting the trees ablaze. A fireball wrapped around the inside of the helicopter’s windshield.
“Oh, God, no!” thought Nevins.
The beast of war from which he had saved so many others had suddenly found him. The heat of the fire scalded Nevins and sucked the oxygen from his lungs. He had an image of his lungs contracting violently, like a glass bottle dropped on concrete, then exploding outward in shards. Nevins estimates it took about ten seconds to hit the ground, but he experienced the fall in slow motion, a kaleidoscopic eternity during which he saw, felt and knew several things that changed his life and that he still struggles to process every day.
First, he had an out of body experience in which he saw himself sitting beside himself in the cockpit and witnessing his death, saw one of his arms torn off, etc. “Oh, well,” he remembers thinking, “I’m not going to need it anyway.”
He felt “so disappointed” to be dead at 21. He felt sorry for the sadness he knew his folks would feel.
“Zip, zip, zip, twenty-one years old, killed in a war,” he thought. “What was that about?”
But, inexplicably, he felt overwhelming love, great peace, and deeper calm than he had ever known.
“A white light totally engulfed me,” he says. He also felt “just a loving and peaceful presence. It was this vey, very peaceful feeling. Very reassuring, very loving. I lost all fear, anxiety, whatever I should have been feeling.”
More than half a century has passed now since that moment and he still doesn’t know a word that can describe the serene acceptance he felt just as the war was about to kill him. It was the proverbial peace of God surpassing understanding.
And it wasn’t just that. He was experiencing two simultaneous perfectly contradictory realities. Two versions of the same experience that couldn’t both be true but were.
During the eternal seconds of his crash he was filled with the certainty that he wasn’t going to die, that he could not die, because there is no such thing as death. All of this during his fiery plunge into the burning jungle. And then…
Boom!
The helicopter hit the ground engulfed in flames. Projectiles struck Nevins everywhere. His right shoulder dislocated in scorching pain, then snapped back into place.
He was buried in the debris of the crash, instrument panel in his lap, overhead console crushing against his helmet, chicken plate (his heavy armored chest protector), torn away, the sliding armor wing of his seat gone, the cyclic gone, center console between the pilots jammed in his left arm pit, fiery hell all around him.
Nevins reflexively ducked his head fearing the rotors would come through the cockpit and decapitate him. When that didn’t happen he thought, “At least I’ll go home with my head.”
Nevins grabbed his seat belt; his pilot’s mind automatically formulated contingency plans for what he would do if the belt didn’t open; he would pull out its floor pins. But his belt did open.
He started to scramble free of the searing heat by contorting himself under the debris and crawling through the hole of his broken chin bubble. He felt his feet touch the ground. Then he noticed two legs hanging over the pilot’s seat he had just fled. They belonged to the medic, Porchella, who was “torn up, starting to burn. He was screaming, ‘Mr. Nevins, help me!’”
Nevins turned around, crawled back into the inferno, hauled Porchella out of the wreckage. Then he dragged him across 50 feet of open ground into brush, expecting to get shot at any moment. In the burning helicopter he could see the body of aircraft commander Rodgers slumped in his seat, starting to burn. He couldn’t see Malifant or Cox. He figured if Porchella was still alive maybe Rodgers was, too.
The helicopter was fully involved in flames and black smoke. It was upright, but smashed on top, rotors missing, skids completely flattened. A twisted, furiously burning mass. Nevins figured they must have rolled on impact.
Nevins didn’t want to, but he raced across the clearing as fast as he could, dropped and low crawled to get under the flames, clawed into the burning ship, found Rodgers now screaming in pain, freed him from the mangled wreckage, and dragged him out of the helicopter. Rodgers collapsed. Nevins didn’t know if he was dead or unconscious.
Porchella’s kidneys were exposed from shrapnel wounds. His face was burned. Nevins doesn’t remember if it was his or Porchella’s DuPont flame-resistant Nomex shirt he removed, but he made a tourniquet out of it and tied it around Porchella’s waist.
An infantry sergeant materialized beside Nevins in the brush. “You got any weapons?” he whispered. “We’re surrounded.”
Nevins could hear “crunching” in the foliage all around them.
Nevins and company were flying ambulance personnel. Their business was saving the wounded. They carried .38 pistols but had no firepower adequate for this situation.
Nevins told the infantry platoon sergeant to radio the two Cobra gunships he had seen on station just before he and his crew were shot down and order an air strike fifty meters in front of their burning helicopter. He also told him to keep other Dustoffs out until the area was secured.
The Cobra pilots had seen the fireball when Nevins’s helicopter was hit, so they needed no further direction. The Cobras hammered the area with their devastating firepower, the explosions so close they knocked the survivors around.
Nevins looked up from giving Porchella first aid and saw that AC Rodgers wasn’t dead, that he had come to and was staggering around his burning aircraft with a piece of its windshield in his hand screaming, “They’re in there! They’re in there!” Drunk with concussion, he was fully exposed to enemy fire.
Nevins was scared to also expose himself to enemy fire, but he ran out and grabbed Rodgers, shook him, yelled, “Come with me!” dragged him back to cover, thinking, “Now they’re going to shoot me in the freaking head.”
Meanwhile, the air overhead crackled with confused radio transmissions. The grunts had radioed their own unit for another Dustoff, reporting that Nevins’s ship had been shot down with no survivors. That mistake got relayed to the 326th Medical dispatcher, who launched an armada of other rescue aircraft.
Soon, these other rescuers arrived with their bright red cross bullseye targets on their noses, each with four young men aboard who knew more about Vietnam’s gore than anyone else, flinging their lives into this violent maw.
In the conflagration below them, incensed at their arrival against his orders because he feared that they, too, would be shot down by RPG, heart thundering in his temples, heart about to tear out of his chest, the world around him nothing but a hellish blur, Nevins was dragging two lives in his hands, Rodgers and Porchella. Their only hope of survival was up to this shot down kid Dustoff pilot whose own survival seemed unlikely at the moment.
Dragging and dragging his crew members toward a pickup site beneath the roar and hurricane of a hovering Dustoff, the din of automatic weapons fire all around him, in the burning jungle Nevins came upon a red headed soldier who was missing both legs. The kid was clutching a green rope cross to his chest. “You okay?” Nevins demanded sharply, more order than question. (How many more lives could he save?) “I’ll be right back for you.” The kid gave him a thumbs up.
Crabbing and ducking their way through the flames to get under a rescue Dustoff, their legs rubber, Nevins and his wounded charges kept being knocked to the ground by the concussion of the Cobras’ rockets. Finally in position, Nevins began orchestrating the rescue with penetrators and baskets.
Aircraft commander Rodgers hugged crew chief Porchella on the penetrator as the two were hoisted out of the jungle. The pilot felt his hands go inside the crew chief’s back where the RPG’s shrapnel had torn him open.
Nevins got all the wounded, the legless red headed kid, too, loaded onto the baskets that pulled them out of the burning jungle. One rescue aircraft was so badly damaged in the process it couldn’t return from its run to the hospital. The last of the Dustoffs hovered so low they sawed trees with their rotors, filling the air with flying wood.
When Nevins was finally loaded aboard the third rescue Dustoff he was aware that one of the wounded had been left behind, hiding in the jungle from all the terror. Nevins had the crew return and pick up that casualty, too, a terrifying return to hell.
Thanks to Nevins, all the survivors were safely extracted. Nevins winced in pain when the medic hugged him as he hoisted him out of the jungle. Fifty percent of Nevins’sbody, the upper half, was burned. Flames and heat had incinerated his mustache.
Next day, Nevins had to identify the bodies of Cox https://www.vvmf.org/Wall-of-Faces/10776/DANIEL-F-COX/ and Malifant (https://www.vvmf.org/Wall-of Faces/32068/WILLIAM-A-MALINFANT/page/3/.) They had been blown out of the helicopter by the RPG, apparently. Cox’s face was caved in. Malifant’s body was not mangled, just lifeless.
The first thing Nevins remembers after the blur of the shoot down and rescue was laying on a stainless steel slab, “probably in the morgue.”
“Eventually, somebody came and got me and then the next thing I really recall is being in bed and people from our unit coming in and interviewing me about what happened.”
They had already interviewed the infantry platoon sergeant who, they told Nevins, corroborated Nevins’s recollection. They told the sergeant he was being put in for a Silver Star.
“Well, I didn’t do anything,” said the sergeant, according to Nevins’s interviewers. “That pilot [Nevins], he’s the one that did everything. He’s the one who told me what to do and who to call. Talk to him.”
“No, no,” Nevins’s interviewers told him they had told the sergeant. “He [Nevins] is being put in for the Medal of Honor.”
That was a serious compliment, of course, but it actually didn’t mean much to Nevins at that point in his life. He had been numbed beyond life’s old meanings. After what he had seen and been through in such a brief period he was just glad to be alive. No commendation could add much significance to that. He had won three Distinguished Flying Crosses, the highest citation for heroism in flight. The actions that produced those awards had been so dangerous and difficult that he had basically been winning a DFC for every 100 hours flown, something almost unheard of.
For his actions that day, for all the lives he saved, for all the sad telegrams home that he kept from being sent with their rippling never-ending grief, for the trauma and danger he had endured and personal risk he had discarded, he was given the Soldier’s Medal, a commendation designed for those who save a life in a non-combat setting. Assistant 101st Airborne Infantry Division Commander Lt. Gen. Sidney Berry insisted on presenting the medal himself. Nevins has a video of the ceremony.
It was a joke. It epitomized the theater of the absurd, the Keystone Cops incompetency of which the Army bureaucracy is capable. How could Gen. Berry, a highly respected, highly decorated combat veteran of two wars, have gone along with such a farce?
Nevins didn’t care.
The battalion psychiatrist told Nevins the trauma of his shoot down qualified him for being sent home immediately. “We don’t expect anybody to go through that twice. I’ll sign the papers right now and we’ll send you home,” said the shrink.
Nevins declined. He wanted to finish his tour, wanted to stay with his buddies, wanted to keep snatching from hell as many wounded grunts as he could. His bosses acceded to his request, but they grounded him for a couple of months to recover, sent him on R and R.
In the spring, the new commanding officer confronted Nevins in the company area one day. “I don’t give a s—t what happened to you, mister,” said the captain. “Get some equipment. You’re gonna fly.”
The insult angered Nevins. It was what shrinks specializing in PTSD call a “trigger.”
Nevins was no malingerer, no goldbrick. He was obeying the orders of his grounding. He was in no mood to gladly suffer the abuse of a petty tyrant.
“No, I don’t think so,” he calmly told the captain, a subordinate way of telling him to take a hike.
The infuriated captain called Nevins into a meeting with the battalion commander. “I want this man’s wings,” the captain told the colonel before anyone could say anything. The colonel looked at the captain, looked at Nevins, looked back at the captain.
“Captain, when you can do what this man has done you come and see me,” said the colonel. “In the meantime, you stay the hell away from him.”
“I think that was my moment where post-traumatic stress could have been my legacy,” says Nevins. “I started feeling right then that control was coming back to me.”
Psychologists note that a feeling of helplessness in the face of overwhelming violence and danger, as in rape, can break the psyche and leave lingering traumatic wounds. In fact, Dr. Judith Herman, one of the world’s foremost trauma authorities, writes in her seminal book, Trauma and Recovery, that rape trauma syndrome and combat PTSD are essentially the same thing.
The captain was waiting outside the colonel’s office for Nevins, “got right in my face,” poked him in the chest, said, “Mister, if you think you’re going to get a Good Conduct Medal from me you are mistaken.”
It was more ridiculous kabuki theater. Nevins poked him right back. “I don’t have any room on my chest.” Nevins resumed flying in March. Although things had quieted down a bit, they did lose a crew in April. Four more names destined for the Vietnam Memorial wall. Nevins completed his tour on July 4, returned to America, San Francisco, and was out of the Army by July 9, 1971.
In the midst of the murder, mayhem and absurdity of war, some force had shown Bob Nevins beyond any doubt that there is no such thing as death. Nevins was not a religious man. Eight years in Catholic school under the tutelage of “tyrant” nuns had persuaded him that “God” was a “loaded and misleading” word. But somehow, during the most momentous seconds of his life, he had become a mystic in ways that would take him years to appreciate and that he still doesn’t expect to ever be able to fully explain.
Except: Years later it hit Nevins that human beings are predators; we behave as predators; that’s where war comes from; but we don’t have to act this way.
Then, this blinding insight: “That’s what Christ was trying to say!”
2. After The War
Like many veterans for as long as there has been war, it took Bob Nevins years to reassemble the pieces of his life. His diaspora began the moment he de-planed from Vietnam in San Francisco.
Looking for Christina
As with countless veterans in all the wars since the foundation of the world, the dream of love, the dream of sweet body and soul connection with a beloved, sustained Nevins during war’s evil hours. He dreamed of Christina Nesovanovic, sister of his dead best friend. That dream, fed by the letters they exchanged, fed Nevins as mere food couldn’t.
At SF International Airport, Nevins, in his Class A uniform with its chest full of medals, went straight to the TWA ticket counter. He asked how he could find Christina and said why he was looking. Of course the ticket agent couldn’t disclose personal information. But he consulted the flight schedules and told Nevins that if he could get right down to the Las Vegas airport he might cross the stewardess’s path. Nevins hopped a flight to Las Vegas.
In Las Vegas, Nevins found Christina’s schedule had changed. So he missed her there.
Excited to be alive, aching for Christina and the salvation of love in the crazy world he had just barely survived, he flew to Chicago and waited to surprise her at her apartment.
“Oh, Robert,” Christina told him, “you know I love you, but…”
She was too broken by her brother’s death to risk the love they had discussed in their letters. Nevins understood, but “crushed” is too weak a word to describe the blow’s impact.
Soul wounded, he flew to his tiny rural hometown of Westerlo in the Heidelberg Mountains near Albany, NY. It was a place where everyone knew him, but it didn’t feel like home anymore. No place felt like home anymore. He took to his bedroom for a month, unable to talk to anyone, and he listened to the Bee Gees song How Can You Mend A Broken Heart? “about five hundred times.”
“I sat there numb, you know. You know, you’re glad to be alive, but geez, I had this beautiful girl, and it’s all gone. Everything’s gone.”
When the numbness wore off enough for him to somewhat resume functioning, he left to get his commercial pilot’s license on the GI Bill at an Oakland, CA. flight school.
The Decade of Numbness
Nevins got that license, added it to his commercial helicopter pilot’s license, but there were no flying jobs to be had.
“I just kind of bummed around for about ten years,” he says.
The shock of Vietnam and losing Christina made it seem as though love itself was a casualty of his war. How do you live without love? How do you mend that broken heart?
Nevins suffered from a deep wound that no one could see, that he couldn’t understand himself, much less know how to treat.
“I was just numb. Nobody would say, ‘Hey, you’re numb. What’s wrong with you?’ I had no sense of direction. I needed to regroup.”Somehow, Vietnam left him a round peg that no longer fit into the world’s square hole.
He tried to put together a hospital helicopter air ambulance business, but the idea was too far ahead of its time. He picked up odd jobs to pay for an apartment. For a while he sold washers and dryers in a department store. But one thing that never left him during those wilderness years was the tranquil epiphany he experienced when war blasted him from the sky and tried to burn him alive.
That’s when the inexplicable certainty that there is no death filled him. That’s when his consciousness mysteriously branded him with knowing that there is something there beyond this life, something beautiful and peaceful. He just couldn’t reconcile that certainty with the foggy sleepwalk that his life had become, or the “emptiness” inside him that “no one could see,” or the haunting sense that there “was something wrong with humanity.” He was living between two worlds.
3. A Secret Healing
Nevins read desperately, trying to understand what had happened to him. Then one day in the library he came across a book that seemed to promise an explanation.
“The world is not in need of a new religion, nor is the world in need of a new philosophy,” read the epigraph. “What the world needs is healing and regeneration. The world needs people who, through devotion to God, are so filled with the Spirit that they can be instruments through which healing takes place.”
“That paragraph spoke to me in a way I’d been waiting for since the shoot down,” says Nevins. “That was my moment.” He closed the book and took it home.
His “moment,” he was about to learn, was his “Pearl of Great Price;” truth from a “secret place of the most High.” It was a translation that made the idea of “God” accessible to him in a way that religion and his Catholic upbringing had not.
The book was The Infinite Way, by Joel S. Goldsmith. Goldsmith was a non-practicing New York City Jew, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran of WWI, who heard a voice when he was 19 years old: “‘Find the man Jesus, and you will have the secret of life.’ That was a strange thing to say to me,” wrote the author, “because I knew nothing of Jesus Christ beyond the name and that Christmas was a holiday celebrating his birth.”
It was a perfect introduction for the dazed and confused pilgrim that Nevins had become.
Obeying the voice that told him to “find the man Jesus,” Goldsmith studied original scriptures in Aramaic, Greek and Sanskrit, logged “all those years from 1909 until 1928 in which I was breaking my heart and head trying to find God” (Beyond Words and Thoughts, 1980). In the earliest records of Christ’s life and teachings, Goldsmith found that the loving advice of the Sermon on the Mount was the furthest thing from the impractical idealism that humanity—including Christianity—had made of it.
Goldsmith’s passionate scholarship made him one of the Twentieth Century’s leading spiritual thinkers. In dozens of books (The Infinite Way, 1947, was first), and essays and lectures given around the world, he demonstrated that human consciousness is an illusion machine that suggests nothing is real beyond the perception of our five senses.
That error separates us from the mysterious forces of creation that we call “God,” Goldsmith wrote. It causes us to mine instead of nurture the living systems on which life depends, makes us enemies of one another instead of friends, and sentences us to painful loneliness.
The solution that Goldsmith found in the story of “the man Jesus” was the one followed by the man himself: meditation. That is, just sitting in silence, turning off the world’s chaos, and listening for the peaceful secret wisdom, the “still small voice” inside us. Christ’s meditation, of course, introduced him to the “Father” within, the “Kingdom of Heaven” within, a way to defeat the world’s evil — “Satan, get behind me”— and the ultimate companionship and protection, “the Father and I [the Father in us] are one.”
When Goldsmith began this simple practice he discovered that the possible life Christ described was actually real, not some supernatural Heaven or mythical Shangri-La.
“Our individual consciousness is the storehouse of infinite spiritual unfoldment,” he wrote in The Art of Meditation, 1956. “The moment we begin to draw from this inexhaustible storehouse, which never takes account of what is in the visible world, we cease being concerned with how little or how much we have, or whether the current economic status of the world be one of prosperity or depression.”
This practice of meditation had no purpose other than momentarily turning off the world’s noise and listening. The benefit was surprising. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result” Einstein reportedly said. Goldsmith’s meditation experience revealed an analogous conclusion: “If we maintain the same consciousness tomorrow that we have today, we cannot expect any different results tomorrow.”
Here, then, was evidence of the pragmatism of Christ’s teaching. “Illumination,” Goldsmith called it, the experience of God that was Christ’s message. Goldsmith repeatedly experienced it for himself.
“Illumination is possible for every individual in proportion to the intensity of his desire for it,” Goldsmith wrote. But this possibility carried with it a serious caveat. Those who would pursue it should keep it to themselves. “Always the world seeks to destroy the Christ.”
Besides, Illumination’s reality—as unique to each individual as fingerprints or snowflakes—could be suggested by words and thoughts but not experienced by them.
Experiencing Illumination requires living it, Goldsmith stressed, and that life is born only in silence. It was like the Zen admonition: “It’s okay to point at the moon, just don’t confuse your finger for the moon.” Or the Tao Te Ching: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”
As soon as he read Goldsmith, Nevins began meditating. His life started changing immediately. He kept his mouth shut about it.
4. Captain Nevins
Nevins’s dream of being an airline captain started when he was ten years old. When he was twelve, he’d take the bus to Idlewild Airport, before it became JFK, and just hang out, endlessly roaming the terminals, ogling the airplanes, basking in the ambience of flight. He intended for his military aviation to lay the foundation for his commercial career.
During his post-Vietnam purgatory decade that dream seemed dead. Would he sell appliances at Montgomery Ward forever? In Goldsmith, Nevins found a “roadmap” for being “in the world but not of it.” Goldsmith offered him a way to navigate a mine field world that couldn’t find a way around war.
The meditation practice Goldsmith taught wasn’t complicated: just sit there and be quiet. Nevins’s meditations brought him intimations of the beautiful other world that strangely flooded him when he was shot down. “From that moment, things clicked,” he says. Subtly, the “emptiness” he felt after Vietnam left him—like fog burning away in morning sun.
A six-month commercial flying job opened up in Albany. He jumped on it. Just like that, he was in the sky again. Then he heard of a new airline starting up in Connecticut.
Unannounced, he sat in the reception area of the chief pilot’s office and waited for him to finish ground school one Friday afternoon. Eventually, the chief took Nevins into his office, “and we had a talk,” says Nevins. “Not so much an interview, but a talk. And he had a group of applications on his desk. And he told me there were no openings at that time, because he had chosen all the applicants.
“But when we were done talking, he said, you know, ‘I tried to call this guy several times. He’s not returned my phone call.’ And he was holding the guy’s application up and he took it and put it on the side, took my application, put it on the top of the pile, and said, ‘Be here Monday for ground school.’”
A Dustoff Pilot Reborn
Life for Bob Nevins had finally resumed. He began a three-decade flying career with American Eagle, a regional American Airlines carrier, began a three-decade marriage, had two sons. With one exception, life was good. The exception was Vietnam veteran suicides.
5. Betting On A Horse
“Body count.” “Casualty report.” These grim words joined the American vocabulary during the Vietnam War as the nightly television news brought the images that went with them into America’s living rooms.
Soon enough, the trauma of these reports spread throughout the nation as the more than 58,000 dead took up residence in the American psyche. “One, two, three, what are we fighting for?”
Families were even less prepared for the body count of suicides that piled up among the war’s “survivors.”
How many Vietnam veterans have killed themselves?
“The sociologists, psychologists and psychiatrists I’ve interviewed for my books put the number of Vietnam veteran suicides at between at least two hundred thousand and perhaps more than three hundred thousand,” says Vietnam veteran John Ketwig, author of the highly respected And A Hard Rain Fell and Vietnam Reconsidered.
A few years ago, the VA published a study finding that twenty-two veterans a day kill themselves. Has that number been constant since the end of the war? If so, it suggests more than four hundred thousand Vietnam veteran suicides.
Whatever the actual number of military suicides, the evidence strongly suggests that many more military personnel commit suicide than are killed by the “enemies” they are sent to fight.
Here, then, is a new kind of war death toll that humanity has yet to cope with.
Nevins, the former Dustoff pilot, couldn’t passively endure his own grief about these losses. In 1978, he was one of four veterans who founded the Albany, NY, chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America. (One of those founders subsequently committed suicide.)
Since leaving the Army, Nevins has worked tirelessly to help veterans and keep them from killing themselves. Among his commendations: the 2013 Jefferson Award Gold Medal, presented to him at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, by Caroline Kennedy; the Four Chaplains Brotherhood Award in 2014; the Saratoga Military Association’s 2016 Veteran of the Year Award, the Congressional Gold Medal awarded to Vietnam Dustoff crews, 2024.
When the deja vu of Iraq/Afghanistan veteran suicides began making the news, Nevins knew he had to do more.
Still Point
Nevins knew nothing about horses, had no interest in them, but for some reason he thought of the “horse whisperer/natural horsemanship” work that had entered the cultural vocabulary. It was about “gentling” and bonding with horses rather than breaking and subduing them. He researched the subject and found a rich literature on learning the language of horses, seeing the world through their eyes, dating back to Xenophon 2,300 years ago. The modern horse whisperers wrote books with words like “unity” and “harmony” in their titles. Nevins studied videos of these gentle trainers and tried to memorize their actions. When he thought he had absorbed as much as he could, he asked a friend with a horse farm if he could use it to experiment.
Beyond calling it a hunch, he still can’t say exactly why he wanted to do this.
In a round pen, Nevins drove his friend’s horse in alternating left and right circles. His heart pounded in the presence of this huge creature that could easily kill or cripple him if it ran over him. The horse watched Nevins closely. As he had seen the trainers do, Nevins raised and lowered an arm to regulate the horse’s pace between walk, trot and canter. Nevins was amazed by the connection he and the horse shared. In the small space, the thunder of the horse’s hooves made a Richter scale of Nevins’s body.
After a few revolutions, Nevins stopped. The horse stopped, watching Nevins for a signal. Nevins stood quietly in the middle of the pen, rotated his body forty-five degrees from the horse, inviting it to come to him. After a moment, the horse quietly walked up to him and laid his head over his shoulder.
In the stillness of that instant, Nevins flushed with well-being. It shot through his whole body, powerful as electric shock, but calming and peaceful. Feelings beyond words, wrapped in the sweet smell of a horse.
Nevins felt “oneness.” It was like magic, or medicine. It might have puzzled him. But he recognized it. He had felt it once before. “It was the closest thing to what I experienced in my crash,” he says.
The Meaning of Oneness
It might not mean to others what it did to Nevins after steeping himself for thirty years in The Infinite Way of Joel S. Goldsmith. “As long as we succeed in making contact with our Source,” Goldsmith writes in A Parenthesis In Eternity, published a year before his death in 1963, “anybody, anywhere in the world, who is turning to Something greater than himself, turning to God on any level…may benefit from our meditation.
“Our individual conscious oneness with God becomes a blessing unto all those who are receptive. Every time God is released into this world through us, It [God] has the opportunity of going out into the world and neutralizing some of the carnal influences in government, the courts, business, and industry, even in the arts and professions.”
Nevins sensed he had stumbled onto something.
By this time, he was well aware that PTSD is a pernicious injury that has plagued humanity for as long as there’s been war. As far as he could tell, no one but the wounded really seemed to understand it. And because it was “hurt beyond telling,” they couldn’t help others understand. No one seemed to know what to do about it.
“Only the dead have seen the end of war,” goes the apocryphal saying. Humanity seemed resigned to it, as though it were natural law, like gravity or sunrise.
“Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it,” Mark Twain said.
The psychological injury of trauma seemed to be like that.
The Dustoff pilot in Nevins’s soul just couldn’t buy it. For one thing, the voice from the dark, stormy mountain was always with him: “The crazy f——-s are coming back!”
He was still coming back. He couldn’t stop.
For another thing, after more than 30 years of studying Joel Goldsmith, he was persuaded that human problems are caused by human consciousness. And human consciousness can’t solve the problems it causes. Human consciousness, human problems. Closed loop ad nauseam. Like the movie, Groundhog Day.
But Nevins knew that human consciousness could change. Because his had in a flash when he was shot down in Vietnam. And then, in another flash, four decades later in a round pen with a horse, that same magical insight returned: our conditioned way of seeing the world is not a prison, after all. We can escape.
What if PTSD sufferers could benefit from this strange moment with a horse?
In his research, Nevins discovered that there was a highly credentialed horsewoman an hour-and-a-half away, in Tinmouth, Vermont, a little village as idyllic as an old Currier and Ives print. Might she be able to help him answer his question: could horses keep veterans from killing themselves?
The name of the horsewoman’s place seemed promising: Forget-Me-Not Farm.
Melody of the Horse
When Melody Squier was a little girl: “I used to get up really early with my dad, and we had our own time. I’d help set the table for breakfast, and then he would read to me from the Bible a little bit, and then I would go about my day and he’d go about his.” She traces the beginning of her life with horses to when she was five years old. Her parents took the family to a working dairy farm bed and breakfast in Maine. She began her day with her father as usual, but then she went out and shadowed the farmer as he did his chores.
Captivated by the setting, she bombarded the farmer with questions. She fell in love with the farmer’s draft horse Maude. “She was a big gray Percheron, and she was gorgeous.”
In the torrent of her questions, the farmer said, “‘Well, little girl, if you want to get up really early when I bring the cows in, I’ll plop you on her back and you can ride her into the barn.’ And, of course, he never ever probably expected to see me out there at daylight with him, but there I was.”
The farmer hoisted the child onto his giant horse’s back.
“And he went to milk the cows, and he said, ‘You just holler if you want to get down.’”
But she didn’t, didn’t holler, didn’t want to get down. Her spirit was transported by the farm’s rhythms and smells to a magically different world where she has lived ever since.
“It was a really old-fashioned kind of bed and breakfast. So everybody ate at the big main table and the big farmer’s breakfast.”
But the little girl wasn’t there. Her parents weren’t worried. They knew where to find her.
“Sure enough, I was out in the barn, chatting away with the horses and the cats and the birds, the barn swallows and the guinea hens, all the beings that were in there. I was just in my element. That started my real horse craze. It was just horses, horses, horses after that.”
She had begun her lifelong study of the language of the horse, a silent language of feelings, not words, a language that, according to brain surgeon and horseman Allan J. Hamilton, can be spoken only with a part of the human brain that modern life has atrophied in most people.
Forever Student
As the decades rolled by, Melody’s experience and knowledge never stopped growing. As a young woman, she taught therapeutic riding to developmentally disabled children and adults. She witnessed the kind of miracles that lay behind Winston Churchill’s famous saying: “The best thing for the inside of a man is the outside of a horse.”
She studied Mustangs in residence at the Return to Freedom Sanctuary in Lompoc, CA. The wild purity of their spirits, their marriage to living nature, deepened her understanding—and not just of horses. She adopted wild horses and brought them home, and pensioned them until they died, and kept and protected their foals. She rescued horses and other animals that had been hurt by people who didn’t understand them—the forgotten ones. She and her husband created a sanctuary for them: Forget-Me-Not-Farm.
Melody became a “barefoot” farrier, learning to care for horses’ feet without shoeing them. She became an equine dentist. She rose to become a trainer in the program of one of the world’s most famous horse whisperers, Monte Roberts. There, Melody met Anna Twinney, Roberts’s head trainer.
When Twinney left Roberts to begin her own work in equine communication, Squier followed her. Twinney, a former English policewoman, became famous as one of the world’s foremost communicators with horses, conducting clinics all over the world.
The London police force, in Anna’s constable days, didn’t carry weapons. When you’re a very young woman enforcing the law, and you’re little and blond and unarmed, Twinney has explained, you learn something about non-violent communication. The powerful, gentle energy of horses drew her out of the human world into the horses’ world.
“What I discovered over the years is the language of the horse was far beyond body language,” Twinney has written. “There are two other pieces to it. One is the energetic connection and one is the telepathic communication.”
Squier studied under Twinney and considers Twinney her most important mentor. At 80-acre Forget-Me-Not-Farm, Melody incorporates the esoteric equine communication art she learned from Anna Twinney with the horse classes that she teaches.
In a human world that has always used the nature of horses against them, “natural horsemanship” is different. It doesn’t break horses and enslave them. It seeks to understand, respect, partner and bond with them.
But even in the natural horsemanship world, the Twinney-inspired communication taught at Forget-me-Not is a step beyond.
6. Captain Nevins Visits The Farm
The airline pilot arrived unannounced at Forget-Me-Not Farm one day in 2004. Melody’s students were off for the afternoon making notes on their horses.
“So it gave me time to sit on the front porch and talk with Bob,” says Melody.
Nevins told Melody about the veteran suicide epidemic that tore at his heart. He told her about the round pen experience he had with a horse, the strange sudden profound medicative calm, like soft lightning in a bottle, that he sensed could somehow heal damaged nervous systems. Did Melody think that it was possible to design a focused encounter with a horse that could keep veterans from killing themselves?
That it was worth exploring that question was something of a no-brainer for Melody. On top of her five-plus decades of intimate horse whispering and endless study: “I’ve had my own personal trauma. My horses were my safe place. So for me, it was like, well, yeah, of course.”
An unlikely partnership was born that afternoon at Forget-Me-Not Farm. Nevins had the steel nerves of a Dustoff pilot and long-honed professional composure of an airline captain. Squier had the burnished, seemingly supernatural “feel” of horse whispering that dated back to her childhood.
Both had a desire to bring safety and healing to a hurting world. And they shared the personal experience with trauma that is the only way to really understand it. Theirs was a potentially catalytic combination.
7. The Code Talker
Janelle Huggard, nee Schmidt, arrived in Bob Nevins’s life just as he and Melody Squier were starting their program. Whatever Nevins and Squier created with their curious horse experiment, whatever good might come of it, they needed help in communicating with PTSD sufferers whom they hoped to keep from killing themselves.
That’s not easy. People with PTSD no longer speak the same language as those without it. They don’t live in the same world, either.
In the case of military veterans, the “illiterate” world that wounded them with PTSD first sent them into the killing fields. That world— human consciousness, as Nevins sees it—then ambushed them with its lies and denials about war. And then it abandoned them to a level of mental health care that is so inadequate as to make Civil War battlefield medicine, with its booze anesthetic and bloody saws, seem sophisticated by comparison.
In the case of first responders and frontline health care workers, the chronic stress of facing trauma daily can cause a kind of silent, progressive nerve damage that destroys health, quality of life, even the will to live.
Those on the verge of suicide find themselves on a terrifying ledge where trust is no longer possible. Enter Janelle Huggard. She had heard of the program Nevins and Squier were starting and approached Nevins at a 2011 social gathering. She told him she’d like to do anything she could to help.
What she had to offer, Nevins and Squier found immediately, so perfectly fit their needs as to suggest a match made in heaven. Like Nevins and Squier, Huggard was deep-running still waters. She had organizational skills that suited needs—transportation, accommodations, meals, etc.—that Nevins and Squire barely understood in the beginning. On top of that, Huggard was an empath. She exuded sincere, powerful, warm, gentle caring and understanding that were beyond words but were a kind of coded medicine to PTSD’s walking wounded.
Over the years, Huggard has become such a cornerstone of Alliance180 that often the first thing arriving participants want to do is meet the woman with the reassuring voice that vectored them in out of PTSD’s fog. During their time at the Alliance180 farm, if Huggard, with her PTSD sixth sense, becomes aware of any development—the unanticipated arrival of a photographer, say—that might burst participants’ fragile safety bubble, she just makes a quiet announcement and nary a feather ruffles.
“She is a godsend,” says Nevins. “We couldn’t do this without her.”
8. The World’s Trauma Machine
The setting of the experiment that Nevins and Squier wanted to conduct is the world’s perennial trauma crisis, spawn of human consciousness, a witch’s brew of institutional neglect, denial and outright deceit that assaults mental health and threatens human survival.
“In war, truth is the first casualty.” the Greek playwright/soldier Aeschylus reportedly said over two thousand years ago. Because the attack on truth by propaganda and censorship is as central to war as weapons, Aeschylus’s proposition suggests that the real cause of war and all the pain it causes is that we lie about it. In other words, if human beings would just stop lying to themselves about war, maybe they would see the end of it.
Many of those who have studied PTSD most closely seem to agree. In his book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a 23-year U.S. Army Ranger veteran and former West Point psychology professor, issues withering indictments of our willful ignorance of war’s trauma.
“Post-traumatic stress disorder has always been with us,” he writes, “but the long delay time and erratic nature of its occurrence has made us like the ancient Celts who did not understand the link between sex and pregnancy.”
Thinking that we can fight a war, like WWI “to end all wars” is as ignorant as not understanding “the link between sex and pregnancy?”
Such ignorance, Grossman charges, is not innocent. He refers to the “paradox of combat psychiatry… the problem is that the military does not want to simply return thepsychiatric casualty to normal life, it wants to return him to combat!”
This “paradox” would be like a surgeon removing a cigarette smoker’s cancerous lung on the condition of continued smoking with the remaining good lung.
Grossman’s critique doesn’t end there. He quotes U.S. Army Brig. Gen. S.L.A. Marshall’s book, Men Against Fire, citing a study finding that, so deep is the natural taboo against killing, “In World War II, 80 to 85 percent of [U.S. Army] riflemen did not fire their weapons at an exposed enemy, even to save their lives and the lives of their friends. In previous wars non-firing rates were similar…
“A firing rate of 15 to 20 percent among soldiers,” Grossman continues, “is like having a literacy rate of 15 to 20 percent among proofreaders.”
The Army solved its non-killing problem by incorporating brainwashing techniques in its training—“psychological warfare conducted not upon the enemy, but upon one’s own troops,” Lt. Col. Grossman writes.
The brainwashing worked. “In Vietnam the non-firing rate was close to five percent,” writes Grossman.
First published in 1995, On Killing cites studies showing that up to 54 percent of Vietnam veterans suffered from PTSD, an often fatal and always debilitating wound that ends marriages, triggers drug and alcohol addiction, destroys careers, drives veteran homelessness, causes veterans to commit suicide. Up-to-date studies would almost certainly show even higher PTSD rates among Vietnam veterans, because of the long latency period that Grossman cites.
The Government’s Frozen Consciousness
American government knows full well, as its own records show, that the psychological wounds of war are much more common than Purple Heart physical wounds.
America’s veterans know it, too. A report by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, for example, shows how frozen government consciousness makes suicide risk a permanent condition of military service.
The VA itself confirmed America’s military suicide crisis with a famous 2012 report showing that 22 veterans a day committed suicide, one every 65 minutes. That added up to 7,500 veteran suicides that year. The same year, the record shows, 177 active-duty service personnel killed themselves, versus 176 combat deaths.
“As shocking as [the VA] number is, it [the number of veteran suicides] may actually be higher,” CNN reported the next year, 2013, citing evidence for that conclusion.
An independent report the same year found that veterans commit suicide at twice the rate of civilians.
A 2021 Brown University study estimated that 30,177 post-9/11 veterans committed suicide, compared to 7,057 killed in action. In other words, the veteran suicide rate was at least four times greater than the combat death rate.
A 2022 Military Times report found that 44 veterans a day might be killing themselves, twice the VA estimate.
A 2022 Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans report found that nearly half of America’s military personnel have considered suicide since enlisting.
If the military scrupulously included this evidence in its recruiting messages, those appeals would have to carry warnings like: “Military service doubles your risk of committing suicide and has caused four times more military personnel to kill themselves than were killed by enemy fire.”
Of course the government would never include such language in its recruiting literature, strong evidence of frozen government consciousness.
The Moral Injury Of Military Service
VA Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, one of the most distinguished mental health professionals in VA history, lays a large part of the blame for the nation’s military suicide scandal on American government’s own bureaucratic paralysis.
Considered the foremost expert on Vietnam veteran PTSD, author of two seminal books on the subject, Achilles In Vietnam and Odysseus In America, winner of a McArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” for his work on the subject, Dr. Shay is as blunt in his criticism of U.S. government as Lt. Col. Grossman.
In the more than twenty years that Dr. Shay worked with veterans as a VA psychiatrist, he discovered that their core wound was what might be called a guilty conscience. Those words, however, don’t begin to capture the deadly nature of the affliction.
“I really don’t like the term PTSD,” he says. “I prefer the term psychological injury.” Throughout the 1990s, Dr. Shay crusaded to get the term moral injury entered into the official lexicon of mental illness treatment. It was finally included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the field’s Bible, in 2013.
Dr. Shay defined the term as a betrayal of what’s right by individuals with legal authority in a high stake’s situation. Colleagues of Dr. Shay modified that definition to mean betrayal of what individuals themselves consider to be right. Either way, it’s hard to find words to describe how dangerous and painful the injury is.
Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock, a protestant theologian and distinguished academician, Senior Vice President for Moral Injury Programs at Volunteers of America, describes moral injury this way:
“If anyone’s ever had a seriously broken heart, it is a searing internal pain that really makes you think you want to die. That’s the experience of moral injury. But it comes from losing your sense of who you are as a good person. Or from experiencing something, or witnessing something, or hearing about something that you can’t make meaning of, you cannot take it in and wrecks your sense of the world.”
Throughout his VA career, Dr. Shay struggled with the institution’s inability to feel the suffering of the men and women America sends to serve their nation in uniform. At a 2014 Columbia University presentation to VA counselors, he described how the boss he loved at the Boston VA hospital, a veteran Navy psychiatrist, was replaced by someone who did not share his and his former boss’s passion to serve veterans.
Dr. Shay told his audience that, “I once was very sharply corrected,” by the woman who replaced his former boss. “I made a remark that, ‘I work for the veterans.’ And she said, ‘You work for the VA!’”
You work for an institution, in other words, not the people it’s supposed to serve. There, in a nutshell, is an explanation of the global institutional failure to deal effectively and humanely with PTSD—to feel the reality of trauma, in other words, not just label and drug it.
Or exterminate it.
Perhaps nowhere has the cruelty and grotesqueness of that failure been brought into sharper focus than in Canada. There, the government has offered its military veterans “Medical Assistance in Dying”—euthanasia—rather than treatment of their injuries.
“Our veterans ask for help. They’re offered assisted death,” Michael Higgins reported in the Canadian National Post on December 2, 2022.
Higgins quoted Parliament testimony of Canadian veteran Bruce Moncur that “the state of [Canadian] Veteran Affairs was ‘apocalyptic’ and painted a picture of hopelessness…There’s a lot of frustration and futility that goes with trying to navigate through Veterans Affairs. And eventually it causes soldiers to lose hope and think about taking their lives. And it’s the triple D policy: delay, deny (and) dead veterans cost no money,’ he told a parliamentary committee on veterans.”
“We are going down a very dark road,” Higgins reported. “Just how dark and bleak and utterly wretched that road is remains to be seen, but the glimpses we are getting reveals it to be verging on the edge of pitch black.”
Dr. Shay made the significance of the U.S. VA’s ineptitude clear in his Columbia University presentation.
“I never in my twenty-and-a-half years that I worked for the VA took on the VA,” he told his audience of VA counselors. “Which is probably why they left me alone. I know that I would have been out the door on my can probably quicker than I could blink if I directly took on VA policy, practice, and culture.”
President Eisenhower’s Warning
All of this resonates with President Eisenhower’s famous warning about the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex. One of the greatest military leaders in history, what Eisenhower was saying is that the difference between war to protect freedom and war to sell bombs and bullets is the difference between chalk and cheese, between the sacred and obscene.
The “prosody of the evidence”—that eloquent legal phrase—shows that America has fallen prey to the war industry that President Eisenhower warned against. As Lt. Col. Grossman shows, the nation’s armed services, captured by the war machine that worried Eisenhower, are brain washing America’s own troops to do the machine’s bidding. That causes them to do things that virtually guarantee the wholesale ruin of their lives. It makes of them a kind of burnt offering that, with their “wrecked sense of themselves and the world,” turn to addiction and suicide to kill their pain.
As Nevins sees it, this is the rogue elephant in the living room of human consciousness that causes the Groundhog Day of the PTSD crisis. If Lt. Col. Grossman is right, as the evidence suggests he is, until humanity accepts the truth that violence and PTSD are as connected as sex and pregnancy there is no hope of responsible and effective PTSD treatment.
And this is the stage on which Nevins and Squier find themselves. Is it a case of fools rushing in where angels fear to tread? Or is it a horse of a different color?
A Different Mission for Horses
Horsepower, of course, has driven civilization from the time humans learned how to harness it. The result has been mostly cruel to horses.
More benign is the medical “prescription” of horses to treat a wide range of human ills that has been around since the time of Hippocrates, “father of medicine,” 400 BC. Clinical “Hippotherapy,” the role of horses in physical, occupational and speech therapy, is named for him.
Xenophon’s The Art of Horsemanship, published around 355 BC, the earliest known work on the subject and still a classic, in a way shows how the unalike species of humans and horses can bond so deeply as to be a kind of marriage.
Equine Assisted Learning, (EAL), Equine Assisted Psychotherapy (EAP), Equine-facilitated Psychotherapy (EFP), Equine Facilitated Wellness (EFW), Equine Facilitated Counseling (EFC), Equine Facilitated Mental Health (EFMH), Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association (EAGALA) are just a few of the enlightened ways that horses are now helping to heal “the inside” of human beings.
On top of that, there are countless “military horsemanship” programs that PTSD sufferers report have given them a new lease on life. And teaching prisoners to train wild horses has been shown to cut recidivism rates in half, one of the most successful inmate rehabilitation programs recorded.
But Nevins and Squier were curious about something else. It was rooted in the inexplicable spontaneous trauma inoculation that Nevins experienced in Vietnam during what seemed to be the violent end of his life. In a flash, that experience seemed to be validated several decades later when a strange hunch led Nevins into a round pen with a horse.
Whatever it is about the “erratic nature” of PTSD that can ruin lives, could an intense encounter with a horse offer healing? That’s what Nevins and Squier wanted to know. If so, it could be so cost effective as to revolutionize the treatment of psychological trauma.
9. Years Of Planning
For the next several years, Bob Nevins and Melody Squier met whenever they could to map out a program. They settled on a three-day format that revolved around 24 hours with a horse in Saratoga, NY.
At no cost to them, participants would fly in one day, be warmly greeted at the airport by Nevins himself or other staffers, be driven to VIP accommodations, get acquainted over dinner together while getting a briefing about what to expect next day.
Nevins would explain the sequence of the next day’s events, which emphasized not having to share “war stories.”
“What you are about to experience is not about what happened to you in the past,”Nevins would explain. “We all have war stories, but this isn’t about them. It’s about what you yourself make of right now, this moment with the horse, and what you do with it afterward. Nothing is pre-determined. There are no guarantees, only opportunities. It’s all up to you. Just step into that round pen with an open mind, follow Melody’s instructions, and see what happens.”
On the morning of the second day Melody would give a primer on equine behavior and language. Program horses would be carefully selected and prepped by her and she would personally match horses to participants.
On horse day, participants would receive classroom guidance, eat a hot, nutritious lunch prepared by Melody, a “foodie,” served on Melody’s own dishes brought from home, and that afternoon take turns in the round pen with their hand-picked horse under Melody’s careful instruction. At the end of that day’s horse work students would return to the classroom to debrief and process their experiences. That evening, they would share another home-cooked meal, this one prepared by Assistant Program Director Janelle Huggard.
(Fourteen years into the project, these “last suppers” of the experience have proven to be celebratory occasions of cathartic “happy tears” where participants share tales of what they experienced in the round pen. It’s as though, in the re-regulation of their nervous systems, some sludge of trauma, like a metabolite of the stress hormone cortisol, has been flushed from their systems. “I can’t remember the last time I had a home-cooked meal,” and, “Coming here is the first time I’ve left my house in two years” are typical dinner table comments. The evening after that dinner, some participants have written, “That’s the first time I really slept in twenty years.” And: “I can’t explain what’s happened to me. I can’t explain how I feel.”
Just as Nevins and Squier had planned all those years ago, participants are driven back to the airport next day to fly home. Throughout, the emphasis is on warm high-touch connection, human and equine.
In the beginning, so long as the participants were kept safe, Nevins and Squier figured, the experience couldn’t hurt. At the very least, they would know genuine caring from people who understood them. In a lonely world that treats military veterans as disposable, where trauma survivors often find the killer of suicide hiding inside them, that had to be worth something. That was their hypothesis.
But could a brief, focused encounter with a horse actually help heal the “erratic” ravages of psychological trauma?
Nevins and Squier had nothing to go on but feelings they happened to share, feelings they had come to along very different paths.
For Nevins, those feelings began in Vietnam when he experienced peace and immortality just when he seemed to be dying.
For Squier, they began when she was a little girl and a kindly farmer “plopped” her on a giant horse and let her bask in the peaceable kingdom of his barn.
So Nevins and Squier shared the experience of a Once Upon A Time Never-Never Land of safety and peace that could be known—they both knew it as surely as they knew anything—but never explained. It could, however, be shared by demonstration. It just couldn’t be described with words.
10. The Circuit Breaker
Nevins retired as an airline captain in 2011 and used his American Eagle retirement money to launch the program. That didn’t agree with his wife; their 28-year marriage ended. They split Nevins’s retirement benefits.
That year, veteran suicides swarming the country like flies, Nevins and Squier worked hard to cobble together a facility—a farm, horses, feed, equipment, etc.—and couple together the necessary support elements—accommodations, meals, transportation details, etc.—to launch their rescue operations. Their mission was a variation on what Nevins did in Vietnam: save lives.
Nevins paid for everything personally with his share of his airline captain’s retirement savings.
“When Consciousness gives us work to do,” Joel Goldsmith had written in Consciousness Is What I Am, “It gives us that work not in order that we may be fulfilled,but that It may be fulfilled.”
In Goldsmith’s language, “It” is the divine, the “something there.”
Over the years, the Nevins/Squier program evolved until today, called Alliance180, it also includes traumatized first responders and frontline health care workers who can find themselves as alone with their “wrecked sense of the world,” and as vulnerable to the perils of trauma—stress-mediated disease, addiction, ruined relationships, troubled families, destroyed careers, even suicide—as military veterans.
By now, fourteen years after they started, Nevins, Squier and company have graduated more than a thousand participants from their program.
“That’s probably as many veterans as we pulled out of the jungle,” Nevins said in a recent television interview, referring to the number of medical evacuations his unit made during his year in Vietnam.
“You saved my life” is a comment so typical from the Alliance-180’s graduates. Nevins accepts it as matter-of-factly as the understanding he had as a Dustoff pilot that if they could get the wounded to the angel flocks of field hospitals in time most of them would live.
Statistics show that more than 97 percent of the nearly nine hundred thousand wounded American soldiers that the thirty-two hundred Dustoff crew members transported to the surgical hospitals of Vietnam did survive.
The Dustoff crews paid dearly for that record. They had a one in three chance of being wounded or killed in action themselves.
Most of Alliance180’s graduates report the kind of life-saving outcome that Nevins and Squier had hoped for. The best description Nevins has heard of what happens alone in the round pen with a horse came from one of the program’s earliest graduates.
“It’s like a circuit breaker got reset and the lights came back on,” he said.
In a recent presentation, Nevins took two minutes to explain what happens.
“What we have discovered in working with over a thousand fellow veterans is that post-traumatic stress is not really a mental health issue,” he said. “It’s physiological. And what I mean by that is any time a normal human being experiences trauma, whether it’s war, sexual assault, on the job shooting, or a horrific accident, what actually can happen to that person is like an emotional circuit breaker pops in their nervous system. And it does that just like if lightning hits your house and the lights go out.
Well, it was supposed to do that. It’s a self-protection mechanism. But it leaves that individual on emergency generator. And after a while that’s not enough to live on. And people eventually take their life.”
Nevins went on to explain how horses help Alliance180 prevent trauma-induced suicide. “The whole purpose is to trigger a re-regulation of the individual’s autonomic nervous system, bringing it back into rhythm, and it’s as if the lights come back on for them.”
With that, he turned the microphone over to a veteran for whom the lights had come back on.
Student One
One summer morning in 2012, Navy veteran Troy Huggard woke up in Orlando, FL, swung his feet to the floor, picked up his 9mm Glock pistol from his nightstand, and put it in his mouth.
Huggard was an eleven-year veteran with two service-related traumatic brain injuries, and VA diagnoses of PTSD, OCD, ADD, ADHD—so many labels, in fact, that the last one felt to him like “LMNOP.”
He had been stuck in the VA system for 13 years. It felt like a gulag to him. He felt like he had done “hundreds of VA programs.” None of them could lift the terrible darkness that had swallowed him. And now the only thing that made sense was suicide.
He was about to pull the trigger when he caught his reflection in the bedroom mirror. He needed a shave and haircut and didn’t want his body found that way so he went to the barbershop, planned to come home afterward, shower, shave, put on his best dress uniform. And kill himself.
But at the barbershop he overheard the barber and a customer in the chair talking about a new program in Saratoga Springs, NY, that was designed to keep veterans from taking their lives. Huggard rushed home, Googled the program, found a Web site that was “Still Under Construction.”
But there was a number to call. Nevins answered the phone.
“He asked me ‘the Bob questions,’” Huggard says.
“Listen, don’t do anything stupid,” Huggard remembers Nevins saying. “Give me fifteen minutes.”
Huggard says the only thing he had left in his life at that moment was his word. “So I gave it. But I’m thinking: ‘At sixteen minutes I’m ready to die.’”
“And he called back, and he’s like, ‘Hey, listen, I bought you roundtrip tickets from Orlando to Saratoga Springs. We’re going to get you up here and help you out.”
Troy Huggard became the first student in a program created by Nevins and Squier based on nothing but their shared hunch and hope. First student, first save.
Listen to Nevins and Huggard in their own words here:
11. Close Encounters of the Inexplicable Kind
“I can’t explain it,” Huggard said of his Alliance180 experience in an interview for this story. “You know that ‘circuit breaker switch’ Bob talks about? Let me tell you about that switch breaking. The day I went through the program it brought me to my knees.”
Suddenly, Huggard says, he could breathe, laugh, feel again. Until that moment, he says, “I was just a shell of a human being. I can’t begin to explain to you how I felt.”
Until that moment, Huggard can’t remember having a belly laugh. Now, he says, he has them regularly.
What could a horse do? Huggard’s fellow Alliance180 graduates also struggle to answer that question.
Pia Carmella Harden
On the morning of September 11, 2001, she had just stepped out of her building on 43rd Street in New York City to go for a run. Her phone rang, and in a stern tone she had never heard from her husband he told her to return home immediately.
Through the balcony window of their apartment, Harden could see a World Trade Center tower burning. Simultaneously, on the television the endless looping of the terrible scene that collectively torched the world’s psyche was already playing.
When asked about the experience in an interview for this story, Harden hesitated. Then, in a voice shaking with emotion, she answered, “Bob said I wouldn’t have to talk about it.”
She said she didn’t want to discuss people jumping out of burning buildings or not needing blood transfusions because their bodies were buried in rubble.
Nevins’s rule for Alliance180 participants is that they don’t have to talk about their trauma if they don’t want to. It’s not necessary in order to benefit from the horse’s strange balm, he told them. The same rule applied to those whom Nevins invited to tell about their experience for this story.
The interviewer told Harden she could share her experience however she wanted. She sent a text.
“It’s a heart to heart experience between oneself and the horse,” she wrote. “It’s invisible. It’s beyond words or at least my vocabulary. In terms of scientific studies we also know it affects your whole nervous system immediately in this experience and so many other beyond words powerful changes. It grounds you it’s forever lasting. It leaves an imprint in you that you will always have with you and you can go back to. If you have any more questions I’ll be happy to speak to you in energetic language:).”
That’s Harden’s text verbatim.
Rudy Ruediger
He was a country boy, born in the quintessential American small town of St. John, a tiny eastern Washington wheat hamlet of fewer than six hundred souls.
As a paratrooper with the 1st Battalion, 325th Regiment, 82nd Airborne Infantry Division, Ruediger served a tour in Afghanistan and two tours in Iraq. His unit was part of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), fighting Al Qaeda In Iraq, inYusufiyah, “a huge hotbed of Sunni insurgents,” when he was badly wounded by an 82 millimeter enemy mortar that also killed his best friend, Angel Mercado Vasquez.
That was actually Ruediger’s second mortar wound. Earlier that day, the hair started standing up on the back of his neck. “I’m like, we’re getting watched.” Minutes later, 60 mm enemy mortars started dropping on the small building where his squad had sheltered.
“And like, I remember… it blew me out of the chair…I had just put my feet up on this desk…I’m like way back and trying to catch a little bit of sleep. Next thing I know I get this explosion. I get blown over. I’m like, what the hell was… The room’s kind of like smoky and cordite and s—t. And a platoon sergeant rolls in and he’s like, ‘You guys alright?’ ‘Yeah, yeah, we’re good.’ Like I just got winged in the arm. It wasn’t bad. It was like, ‘You need a cigarette?’ ‘Like I wouldn’t mind one right now, actually.’”
Sgt. Vasquez, nickname Merc, was sitting on Sgt. Ruediger’s rucksack when the 82 mm mortar killed him. Merc’s son had been born five days before.
“Merc was always kind of like the most professional NCO out of all of us,” says Ruediger.
Vasquez and Ruediger had been ribbing each other about their different leadership styles when the 82 hit. Vasquez was calling Ruediger a “Joe lover,” as in GI Joe, referring to Ruediger’s care for his men.
“I’m like, I know, I realized that I love my soldiers and I’ll take a lot of s—t for them and…”
The mortar exploded.
The last thing Ruediger remembers is Merc’s body flying through the air. The explosion blasted two toes off Ruediger’s left foot, cost him the use of his left leg from the knee down, blew a painful aneurysm in the popliteal artery behind his left knee, peppered him with shrapnel all the way up to the L4 vertebrae in his lower back, and traumatically injured his brain. That was September 1, 2006.
Surgeries and physical therapy let him return to Iraq as part of the surge in July of the next year. He left the Army in 2010 after almost seven years service. The VA diagnoses him with PTSD and TBI (traumatic brain injury.) Living in South Carolina now, he carries thirty pieces of shrapnel in his body that, he says, record weather pressure changes so well that he can predict hurricanes better than TV weather reporters.
It’s PTSD that threatens his life, though. An early gauge of its severity came when he returned home to St. John on leave and “the expression on people’s faces after every deployment [made him ask himself] ‘Do I look that bad?’ I definitely wasn’t the same dude [I was] before I left.”
So he couldn’t go home again. How could he deal with that?
Ruediger struggled with his PTSD for years, couldn’t sleep, had weird nightmares of deadly IEDs on St. John’s peaceful Main Street, the golden Palouse Prairie all around, the familiar bank building and all. He kept seeing Merc. He found the “plethora of VA medications taxing,” offering no help, thoughts of killing himself becoming more frequent and intense, death zeroing in like the bullets of a sniper hiding in his own brain.
“I’ve seen my gambit of therapy and ideas for therapy, and I’ve also seen a bunch of half-assed approaches from more government-related organizations,” he says.
Nothing worked. The VA itself had killed Ruediger’s trust in it. In Iraq, he had been part of missions hunting Shia death squads only to learn that “some of these death squad leaders were members of the Iraqi Army.”
So who could you trust? Ruediger trusted only the Kurds. “I really love the Kurds,” he says. “I did a lot with them.”
After the Army, as a student at Clemson University where he took a degree in history, “I actually did a couple of guest lectures” in which he tried to explain his love for the Kurds, especially the women, whom he considered a gold standard of trustworthiness.
“How can you not be inspired by people like… 16-year-old girls who are willing to fight because the alternative is being sold in the slave market in Raqqa?”
Such questions make veterans like Ruediger poster cases for the complexity of PTSD, which can feel like a shattering of the mind into glass shards glittering in the sun, can blur one’s life story into a confusing run-on sentence. Understanding this can be hard for anyone but fellow veterans like Bob Nevins who know the loss and brain-busting sensory overload of combat.
Ruediger thought about killing himself “almost daily.” Was he lonely? “Oh, f—k. yeah!”
Then he discovered an organization called Stop Soldier Suicide that connected him to “a really great counselor” who referred him to Nevins. Ruediger had grown up with horses and didn’t see how a horse could help him. (“What could a horse do?”) But he felt like he was running out of time and had nothing to lose.
Up until then, Ruediger’s two children had kept his thoughts of suicide at bay. Now, he was worn out from the exhaustion of fighting those thoughts.
The 82nd Airborne, says Ruediger, gave him more of a family than he had known growing up. Now, too many of these chosen family members were committing suicide, some sixteen in his battalion alone, guys whose names and faces he remembered. His first Army roommate, Jay Second, committed suicide. A guy he had gone through the Warrior Transition Battalion with—its purpose was to help return soldiers to civilian life—killed himself.
His friends’ suicides made him feel helpless. “You can’t do s—t about it. It’s like getting pinned to the ground, like getting pounded with mortars. You just gotta take it. It’s like a hole in your soul.”
He arrived at Alliance180 on 9/11, 2023. He was unprepared for its impact.
“I mean it just blew my mind. I don’t quite know how to describe it, but it left me actually feeling happy and joyful for once. As soon as the horse came up and started nuzzling me…I think I was bawling my eyes out.”
After so many years of living with the physical and emotional wounds of war, “It was kind of odd that a horse could get me to drop my guard when for so long no one else could. I don’t know, I felt like I could trust again. I could hope, you know, like have aspiration again. I felt like I could live again. Like I just had momentum again. I think I actually found a place to put my feet down and start living again.”
Rudiger credits Alliance180 with saving his life. “I mean I’m quite certain if I hadn’t gone I probably wouldn’t be here now.”
His wife gave him a framed picture of him and Scout, his Alliance180 horse, and hung it on their wall for Christmas.
Jenn Smith
As with many sufferers, her PTSD had built up silently for years from many experiences.
A twelve-year veteran, she served as a medic with the New York Army National Guard at the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, working Ground Zero, sleeping in big tents in Battery Park at first, then commuting by ferry from Governors Island, immersed in the tragedy for weeks.
In 2003, she volunteered to deploy to Iraq, the violence of war replacing the violence of 9/11. In Iraq, the stress was relentless. She served on ambulance teams, rolled as a medic with combat engineers on IED patrols, pulled brutal 12-14 hour guard stints with night vision goggles on perimeter bunkers, served on aid station quick reaction forces, was pressed into duty guarding enemy prisoners of war.
That was like “being an untrained corrections officer in a jail where there were never really any rules of engagement.”
She was one of four women medics on a forward operating base with 800 men. “That was not a great time.”
Did she bring PTSD back from her Iraq tour? “Oh, God, yes!”
She came home with a psyche supersaturated with the countless bloody memories of combat medicine. But it took her years to understand that the new normal of her constant anxiety and hyper-vigilance were symptoms of PTSD. Her PTSD dripped adrenaline and cortisol into her system 24/7, silently grinding her organs, straining her nerves to the breaking point, steadily draining her vitality. She was like a fish oblivious to the water she was swimming in.
Home from Iraq, she retreated from the world, moving eighteen miles up into the Adirondack mountains. The solitude couldn’t quiet her nerves. Armed with an AR15 rifle, she constantly did perimeter checks around her house, as though an enemy lurked.
“It was a really daunting, scary time. I don’t know how to explain living with PTSD. Years and years of hyper-vigilance and hyper anxiety, being super reactive, and not having any peace. I stayed in the military until 2012 and I almost think [that] helped keep it at bay.”
As soon as she left the Army, “things started to, pretty quickly, I would say, devolve…symptoms of PTSD, but not exactly recognizing what it was.”
She started “drinking a lot of alcohol and spending a lot of time in denial, and avoiding talking about anything, like almost pretending that whole section of my life never existed.”
Eventually, her psyche unraveled. She sought help, checking into an inpatient program at a psychiatric hospital, then an inpatient PTSD program through the VA.
To say that her experience with mental health counseling was uneven puts it mildly. Her first VA counselor, “was phenomenal. Unfortunately, he left.” Her next VA counselors made her PTSD worse. She had one VA counselor actually “tell me that my lack of trust was a barrier to my treatment.” Such Catch 22 double talk was like telling her that her PTSD was preventing her from healing her PTSD.
She felt so violated by another of her VA counselors that she tried to kill herself. Her suicide attempt was serious enough that she still doesn’t know why it failed.
“I think some days I have really good angels watching over me,” she says. Right after Smith’s mother died, her sister, worried about Jenn’s struggle with PTSD, happened to hear about Nevins’s program and referred her to it.
In the round pen with the horse, the chaotic world that had been swirling around and within Jenn Smith seemed to vanish in a poof of smoke.
“At first when you go in the round pen,” says Smith, “you’re very, very aware of everyone around you, all the other participants, feeling that everybody’s watching you. And then at some point that goes away and it’s you and the horse, and you hear Melody, but everything else is gone.”
Smith says she felt something powerful shift inside her. There was nothing subtle about it. “I don’t know how to explain it,” she says. “You know, feeling that connection. Like recognizing that this massive, autonomous being trusted me. It was just so empowering. I really don’t know how to explain it.”
The change was actually transformational. Whatever it was, Smith felt the result immediately when she drove home from the program.
“Something really huge happened,” she says. “We had a big snowstorm.”
Ever since PTSD started strangling her, “I was always incredibly anxious driving in the snow, which is stupid, because I’m from upstate New York. I’ve been driving in the snow all my life.”
Seven years after her time with the horse in the round pen, her anxiety about driving in the snow has never returned. That part of what had been the “new normal” of PTSD’s curse was gone. That foreshadowed things to come.
She can’t say how it happened, or why it happened, but she can say unequivocally what happened: somehow, her experience with the horse in the round pen laid a new foundation for her to rebuild her life. She went back to school and earned her master’s degree in social work.
“I can absolutely one hundred percent correlate the strength that I’ve had to keep fighting this [PTSD] back to the magic that happened in the round pen,” she says.
She did work for a time as an MSW, but then more magic happened. Nevins hired her to manage the Alliance180 farm. In her interview for this story there was unmistakable happiness and strength in her voice. She describes her life of working with veterans and horses now with the kind of joy that she wishes for her military brethren, grateful to be an example of what’s possible.
If not for Alliance180, says Smith, “I wouldn’t be here on this planet. I know this with every ounce of my being. I can never give back what they have given me. I came back home to me, and for the gratefulness I feel there are no words.”
12. The “Science” of a Spiritual Hypothesis
“What Bob basically stumbled onto [with the horse],” says Dr. Stephen Porges, father of polyvagal theory, “is an archetypical reaction of a vulnerable individual to a parent.”
The significance, says Dr. Porges, is that at birth our nervous system automatically calibrates to a much larger mammal, the parent, as the source of safety and protection. This happens as the billions of neurons and hundreds of trillions of synapses of the baby’s brain are wiring the “self” to make its way in a world that presents a wide spectrum of safety and danger.
In the language of polyvagal theory, this calibration of the infant’s nervous system to the parent’s is known as co-regulation. It’s an organic neurological mirroring process that reflects the miracle of birth and the physical reality of human inter-connectedness. Co-regulation continues throughout life, says Dr. Porges.
“The interesting thing about the horse experience,” says Porges, “is that the horse is massive, compared to our own bodies, and that massive, big horse, when it’s coming in submissively, putting itself against our chest in passive engagement, is a massive trigger of our body, saying, ‘This animal trusts me.’ And our body says, ‘I trust that animal.’ And our body shifts into a different physiological state. So it’s almost like you’re dealing with a rescued cat, or a rescued dog, and suddenly that animal feels safe in your arms. But we are the rescued individuals in the horse-human relationship.”
The horse, continues Dr. Porges, “gives us a physiological feeling of safety and trust, and that for a person who has experienced severe PTSD is like opening a window… a portal.”
That “feeling” is actually a physiological phenomenon. It throws electro-chemical switches inside our body. Something like a blast of healing fresh air can flow through the metaphorical window Dr. Porges refers to. This could explain the unmistakable body changes Alliance180 students say they feel in the round pen, the restored life energy they experience afterward, the new lease on life they report.
“When we are anxious,” says Porges, “or when we are hyper-vigilant and scared, or when we go into fight-flight, our physiology can’t support our health, and it can’t support our mental health, either.”
This is important for all of humanity to understand, emphasizes Dr. Porges, because we live in a world that manipulates us with fear. Chronically scared people can’t be physically or mentally healthy. Moreover, focused only on their own survival, scared people can’t be nurtured by the connection with others that our social nature requires. They can’t help weave the E pluribus unum fabric of collaboration that is the basis of a peaceful, prosperous, healthy society.
Polyvagal theory is named after the vagus nerve. Vagus means “wandering” in Latin. The vagus nerve wanders from the brainstem throughout the body, automatically regulating such bodily functions as breathing, heart rate, digestion, immune function. It’s part of the autonomic nervous system, the job of which is to keep us safe and alive. It does this through a mechanism called neuroception, which subconsciously—below the level of thought—scans the environment for danger.
Neuroception would explain why the hair on the back of Sgt. Rudi Ruediger’s neck stood up, and why he could “feel” eyes watching him shortly before enemy mortars exploded around him.
That’s one “scientific” way of explaining what Alliance180 graduates call “the circuit breaker” that suddenly frees them from the prison of PTSD; PTSD essentially being a damaged nervous system.
Dr. Porges’s polyvagal theory replaces the old off/on fight-or-flight understanding of the human nervous system with something more like a rheostat that automatically adjusts to our surroundings.
Polyvagal theory helps explain why the stresses of a painful childhood, war, police work, fire-fighting, frontline health care, etc. can “dysregulate” the nervous system until it can’t accurately assess threat and danger. The result can be many forms of faulty thinking, chronic anxiety, depression, various kinds of addictions, damaged relationships, etc.
Hence, the “disorder” in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Dr. Porges’s polyvagal theory strongly suggests trauma as the common root of such pandemic social ills as poverty, discrimination, addiction, violence and physical and mental illness.
Another scientific explanation of what happens in the Alliance180 round pen comes from horseman and brain surgeon Allan Hamilton. A highly respected physician (peers once voted him among the Best Doctors in America), in his book, Zen Horse, Zen Mind, Dr. Hamilton writes that evolution developed the equine and human brains in very different ways.
In the horse, “the quintessential prey animal.” the intuitive, instinctual, feeling right brain hemisphere is dominant.
Writes Hamilton: “Rather than using words or vocalizations to communicate—sounds that help a predator pinpoint its prey—horses learned instead how not to talk, how not to make sounds, and how to make sense from being, not thinking.”
In man, the planet’s “super-predator,” the left hemisphere controls.
“The success of humans derived from left-hemispheric dominance came at a price,” writes Dr. Hamilton. “Just as the horse surrendered its vocal abilities to gain herd identity, the human species forfeited its intuitive powers for the benefits of language.”
It’s a strange language, though, an idiot’s language in a way. It made us “outcasts in the natural world,” Hamilton continues, “because raising the function of speech to its highest level required the emergence of a separate consciousness. Speech demanded a ‘me’ to be the inner voice. The expression of language gave rise to the autobiographical self, an identity separate from the world at large.”
In a sense, our words left us “eventually no longer in touch with the secrets deep within our hearts.” The left brain’s “gift” of language, in other words, turned us into orphans in the very cosmos that created us.
In a way, Hamilton implies, survival favors the horse. That species has been around for more than thirty million years and has developed an exquisite wordless cooperative language of union that keeps the horse, almost reverently, connected to the forces of life.
The human super-predator, on the other hand, has been here less than a scant two hundred thousand years, and the development of its brain, more verbal than Shakespeare, has given it the suicidal technology noted by Walt Kelly’s Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
On the other hand, argues Dr. Hamilton, humans find themselves sharing their home—this “pale blue dot,” Carl Sagan called it, this “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”—with a magnificent and unlikely teacher: the horse.
Horses can save us from our violent, destructive left brains, brain surgeon Hamilton shows, if we let them.
Interacting with horses, he writes, lets us “glimpse nature from a radically different perspective: a view of the world drawn by the right brain. Relating to horses provides us a unique opportunity to mute our left hemisphere. To force it into silence. Horses provide us with a respite from thinking about ourselves, a chance to escape from the prison of being ourselves by ourselves.”
Here, then, are the words of a scientist using science to explain how horses can help us escape from the potential illusions, the artifice, of what we call “science.”
“You can use all the science you want,” says Melody Squier, “the essence of the horse is feeling.”
And the tripped circuit breaker of feeling, a flash of saving insight, is what Alliance180 students say they experience in the round pen. Who can say more about what it means than what they say themselves?
They say they had taken all the torture of trauma that they could. They say they were going to kill themselves to end their weariness and pain. Then they entered the Alliance180 round pen with a horse. Then they decided not to kill themselves.
“When a person who is partly a mental and partly a physical being receives light, illumination, initiation—call it what you will—he is endowed from on High, and breaks through the barriers of the mind, becoming conscious not merely of a physical and mental world but of a spiritual world.”
In following the “roadmap” of Joel Goldsmith’s work, Nevins eventually came across that passage in the book, Consciousness Is What I Am. It didn’t change the feeling he had when he was shot down in Vietnam—that there’s “something there”—the feeling he hopes to impart to those considering suicide because of trauma. Goldsmith’s words are just words, after all. But they’re as good an explanation as any Bob Nevins knows.
13. Star Throwers
Since the beginning, there has been a core of just three of them: founder Nevins, co-founder horsewoman Squier, “code talker” Huggard. They are backed by a board and administrative staff that Nevins calls “amazing.” He considers them family. Still, their tiny number calls to mind the old Breton Fisherman’s Prayer: “O God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”
From left: Melody Squier, Bob Nevins, Janelle Huggard
Since Nevins cashed in his retirement in 2011 to start the program, he and his team have turned out more than a thousand graduates. Suicide prevention is their program’s mission. “You saved my life” is their graduates’ common refrain.
Not all their students say they were on the verge of suicide—at least as far as they know. Some say they were just chronically miserable from the parasite of trauma. Almost all of them report benefit from the program, says Squier.
Right now, running flat out at full capacity at their picturesque upstate New York farm—it was anonymously donated—Nevins says they can serve twelve students a month, 144 a year. In 2024, emerging from the global disruption of Covid-19, they graduated just 27 students.
Alliance180 farm. A green and gold place to heal.
Any way you look at it, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the well-documented need. A recent Pentagon study found that America’s “soldiers are nearly nine times more likely to die by suicide than they are in combat.”
Shocking as that finding is, the record of veteran suicides is just as heartbreaking. The best number that Nevins is aware of is that 6,000 American veterans killed themselves in 2024.
Any military commander whose unit(s) sustained 6,000 unexplained deaths a year, as though to an invisible serial killer, would be relieved of command. And yet the Presidents of the United States, the Commanders in Chief, have helplessly presided over these suicide losses for decades, if not generations, as though, like death and taxes, they can’t be avoided.
The real culprit, says Nevins, is not individuals. It’s what Pogo said: human consciousness itself.
The Alliance180 protocol created by Nevins is rooted in the Joel S. Goldsmith premise that human consciousness can’t be fixed. It contains a fatal flaw, so it must be transcended.
The horse experience created by Squier is designed to do that with a gentle, wordless, private encounter between two very different brains. That confidential inter-species “dialogue” seems to whisper something that transcends the lie of human consciousness that scares and hurts us so much that we hurt each other in our confusion and even kill ourselves. “Science” seems to suggest that silent communion with the horse naturally re-regulates traumatized human nervous systems in a way that is beyond human thought.
Made a difference to that one. Scout, Bob Nevins, Alliance180 graduate. "Whoever saves a single life saves the whole world."—the Talmud.
Melody Squier has no need for words to explain it. “What happens in our round pen is sacred,” she says.
America’s suicide problem is not confined to its military.
A 2022 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study found that US suicides were up 37 percent since 2000.
Suicide is the leading cause of police fatalities, police suicide rates up to eight times greater than the general population, according to the research platform ScienceDirect.
(As this story was being completed, four active and former Harris County, TX, sheriff deputies committed suicide in a six-week period, three of them in one week. In media interviews, the department’s spokespersons seemed unable to do more than scratch their heads.)
Suicide is the second leading cause of death in the 10-34 age group, according to the CDC.
Against this backdrop, Nevins and company may seem like the star thrower in Loren Eiseley’s story of that title. A popular version of the story has a little girl throwing star fish back into the ocean when a man walks by and asks what she’s doing. “Saving star fish,” she answers. The man chides her. “That can’t make any difference,” he says, pointing to all the star fish littering the beach.
The child throws another star fish back into the sea. “Made a difference to that one,” she says, telling a truth the grownup apparently hadn’t considered.
Goldsmith writes about the reality of star throwing in The Gift of Love: “If we give the love of God just a tiny crack through which to enter this world, we shall see how quickly that love will encircle the globe—faster than sound, faster than light. But there must be an entrance made into this world for God, or else God is kept outside…
“I am not in this world to acquire or achieve anything: I am here as an instrument of God to bear witness to God’s presence…
“We become transparencies for God when we dedicate ourselves to loving God and to loving our neighbors as ourselves…
“…if we can open one tiny little spec of our consciousness for God to get in, God will so multiply Himself over the face of this earth that it will be literally proven that where ‘ten’ righteous men are the city will be saved.”
Setting aside the normal human understanding of “God,” replacing it with words like“something there,” in other words an understanding of what actually is as opposed to what we see through a glass darkly, that is the spirit that took hold of Bob Nevins as a young Dustoff pilot in Vietnam. It didn’t happen in church. It happened in war.
Somehow, that voice out of the black monsoon night— “The crazy f——-s are coming back!” carried a deep truth that changed Nevins: while there is great need and even crisis in the world, we have even greater capacity to manage it. And when we are part of that response we experience wholeness, completeness, oneness ourselves—Melody Squier calls it “sacred”—that we mightn’t otherwise know.
Nevins, the retired airline captain, has a favorite scene in the movie, Sully. It’s when a National Transportation Safety Board panelist credits Captain Chesley Sullenberger with saving all 155 souls aboard his US Airways Flight 1549 by using the 208 seconds of flight remaining to him after birds destroyed his engines to safely land on the Hudson River.
“I disagree,” responds Tom Hanks playing Sully. “It was all of us,” who did the work. His co-pilot, his cabin crew, the cool-headed passengers, the symphony of rescuers who materialized out of New York City’s seeming chaos like flocks of angels to save strangers from icy waters.
Nevins is a veteran of such Archimedes-like alchemy. Again, an extraordinary 97 percent of the some nine hundred thousand wounded American soldiers that the thirty-two hundred or so Dustoff crew members got to the field hospitals of Vietnam alive survived, irrefutable proof of human capability.
You can almost hear Hamlet: “What a piece of work is man!”
And again, the Dustoff crews paid dearly for the miracle they wrought. A third of them were killed or wounded in the process. Nevins himself is surviving evidence of the Dustoffs’ synergy and cost, his best friend John Nesovanovic and crew members William Malifant and Daniel Cox among the 211 killed in action, Nevins one of the 925 wounded.
The Forbes Magazine 2025 Billionaires List contains 3,028 names, representing $16.1 trillion of wealth. That makes them richer than every country in the world but the US and China, reported Fortune Magazine.
If any one of those billionaires picked up the phone and called Nevins (https://www.alliance180.org/) and asked him how the Alliance180 protocol could be scaled to rapidly address the suicide crisis, “I could show them in about ten minutes,” he says. “It wouldn’t be hard.”
But it’s not just billionaires who could supply the resource fulcrum for this lever that could change the world. In the words of the old Brothers Four folk song, Blue Water Line, “If you can’t afford a quarter, then you oughta give a dime. If everybody gave then we could save…” ourselves.
That is, when gifts of whatever amount people can afford flow into the non-profit 501-C3 Alliance180, Nevins and company put them to immediate work to save lives. This is star throwing, Dustoff operations, of the most basic kind, not just “Thank you for your service” platitude.
With a long enough lever, Nevins would begin by immediately building three or four more facilities around the country just like Alliance180’s present upstate New York farm. He would strategically locate them in or near high veteran suicide locations with easy transportation access. (California had 473 veteran suicides last year, Texas, 514, Florida, 553, etc.)
Just like the New York Alliance180 farm, they would be actual working horse farms of about 20 acres, with a barn, indoor arena, classroom, a big living room with pictures of veterans and horses on the walls, a big TV, homey dining room, an office, a separate farm manager’s residence, etc. There would be no signage, no uniforms, nothing of a clinical or institutional nature. They would exude the comfort and warmth of home, because that’s what they would be.
The Alliance180 protocol has already been beta tested. It has been proven to help keep traumatized people from killing themselves. Once it has been leveraged with adequate endowment to prevent military, first responder and frontline health care worker suicides, Nevins envisions how the program could easily be grown to address such other populations as sexual assault victims, at-risk youth, etc.
“Trauma is trauma,” he says.
Program graduates could provide the staffing pool for the program’s growth. With its suicide prevention data in place, the Alliance180 potential to better the general human condition through mental hygiene that amounts to human brain repair should be clear to all but the most closed minds.
What can a horse do? The possibility, not just for historic Archimedean philanthropic leverage but for historic renaissance of the human condition lies in Nevins’s answer.
For one thing, his answer contains the literacy about violence that Lt. Col. Grossman shows in his book, On Killing, is now missing from human understanding. Namely, just as babies come from sex, debilitating and even fatal nervous system breakdown comes from stress and violence. Human thinking can’t change this reality any more than it can think gravity out of existence. This is because, as spiritual and religious thinkers and even enlightened scientists have long understood, human beings can’t break natural law. We can only break ourselves against it.
For another thing, it shows how the fearful consciousness we all share is terminal, but it’s also more amenable to rapid change than is generally recognized.
“Men are conditioned beings,” Hannah Arendt argues in The Human Condition, but we can also change the conditions that condition us by changing our responses to them.
That is, she writes, “we are not mere earth-bound creatures.”
What a piece of work is man!
Finally, the work of scientists like Dr. Stephen Porges and Dr. Allan Hamilton points in a way to a kind of evolutionary human brain damage caused by the atrophy of the brain’s right hemisphere—the “feeling” part that connects us to one another, to nature, to life itself—as a hidden cause of much human suffering and crisis.
In his book, Zen Horse, Zen Mind, brain surgeon Hamilton quotes Dr. Carl Jung, father of modern psychoanalysis, suggesting as much. The loss of our “instinctual foundation,” Jung argues in The Undiscovered Self, has caused man to create an intellectual fiction, a lie, about himself. “…he forgets himself,” Jung wrote, “losing sight of his instinctual nature and putting his own conception of himself in place of his real being.”
Something about the shock that Nevins experienced when he was shot down in Vietnam connected him to understanding that had eluded him. Instead of feeling terror, he felt deep peace. Instead of feeling the imminence of death, he felt the presence of eternal life.
Then, years later, apropos of nothing, “horse whispering” intrigued him. He experimented with a horse and when the horse connected with him, the same inexplicable frisson of peace and oneness shot through him that he felt in the helicopter’s inferno.
Nevin’s hypothesis, that this experience might be leveraged to prevent suicide, has now proved correct. It took Dr. Porges’s polyvagal theory to explain the biological reason that a particular interaction with a horse could be life-saving medicine for re-regulating the human nervous system.
There are three essential non-negotiable ingredients in the Alliance180 method that Nevins “stumbled on,” as Dr. Porges puts it.
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A very specific partnership with the horse. The Alliance180 program is neither “horsemanship” nor “equine therapy” in the usual sense.
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Genuine caring in the human hearts of those running the program, the “star throwers.”
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No government involvement.
The reason for the first ingredient is that the core of the Alliance180 experience is silence, silence and safety, the silence of the “circuit breaker” re-regulating participants’ nervous systems, the safety of an exactly curated method.
There’s never been a mishap or injury in the Alliance180 program. On the other hand, Squire is aware of an imitator’s program that sent a student to the hospital. She has seen videos of that imitator’s work “that traumatize me just to watch.” The Alliance180 program is not about “using” the horse. And it’s not “therapy,” which conventionally entails applying conditioned human consciousness to re-condition human consciousness. The exchange between the two brains in the Alliance180 round pen is beyond human consciousness. It’s “sacred.”
The reason for the second ingredient is “love actually.” “The crazy f——-s are coming back!” That’s “love actually” in Nevins’s experience.
The reason for the third ingredient is that as things now stand, the governments of the world epitomize stagnant human consciousness. The trauma suicide crisis is the result of that stagnation, which can’t correct the problem it creates.
In the Goldsmith sense, government today is like the joke about the guy who loses his car keys on a dark street but keeps looking for them under a streetlight because that’s where he can see. What is needed is the kind of breakthrough that Alliance180 represents. Second order change. Metanoia. Without that, as the PTSD crisis proves, humanity will keep fighting war to end war.
“Immortal Medic.” A tribute to angels I once knew who, before my eyes, “saved the whole world.”
Original Article by Larry Shook.