Outward Bound program helps veterans heal their emotional scars
By Conrad Mulcahy Published: August 24, 2007
THE nine men who climbed to the summit of the Colorado mountain were combat veterans who had fought in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam.
Several knew the pain of bullets tearing through flesh. Others couldn't gather memories blown away by an explosion. Some had seen combat so close they killed with their knives.
They were a wary group of strangers, guarded and slow to trust, who had arrived at the Outward Bound Wilderness school in Leadville, Colorado, a few days before, wondering how a one-week course in the wilderness could help them heal. But on the fourth day of their five-day journey in mid-July, after more than three hours of tough climbing up steep, moss-covered scree fields and beyond the tree line, these hard military men, ranging in age from 23 to 52, mourned in silence, 13,000 feet above sea level on the summit of Virginia Peak. Stripped of life's routines, they stood under an iron-gray early morning sky and finally allowed the tears to fall for friends who would never see this place.
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