Great to be with you, Chris. I appreciate the work of Judicial Watch. Thank you very much. The work that you’re doing at the National Center for Healthy Veterans I believe fills an absolutely critical need or gap in Veteran health care coverage. Can you give our viewers and our listeners just a little overview of what it is you’re doing at the center? Sure. As we discussed, may I do a 90-second video? Please do. That would be great. And then we’ll dive in here. What we do has ripples across eternity. Our mission here is to return healthy Veterans to America.

You know, a patriot goes home healthy, and you see the whole family dynamics change. We partner with this organization right here is going to make a huge difference in these communities, and we get to be a little part of that. That is the coolest thing I’ve ever done in my life, just to be a little part of that. When I leave here, I’ll be returning back to Bedford County. I have a house there, and I’ll probably be going back to school. This place has given me purpose, my home, and life. Our mantra is returning healthy Veterans to America.

We want them to go be part of America, because America needs our Veterans now more than ever before. That’s just a brief overview, but it gives you maybe a picture worth a thousand words. Absolutely. That’s very powerful indeed. I think what comes to mind for me is that when it comes to Veterans, not all the wounds are necessarily apparent, but there’s folks walking around with stuff inside of them that just looking at the outside, you may not know what’s going on on the inside, and it appears to me that you’re working on the inside job, on stuff that people are carrying around inside of them.

Can you talk to us about the kind of guys who come to you and what their situations are? You bet, of course, Chris. We say our intellectual property is how do we rewire the brain, reshape the heart, restore the soul. Yes, it’s about those inner wounds. We have fellows with post-traumatic stress disorder. That’s a normal reaction to abnormal experiences in your life, and the hormones just flood through the brain. They basically fry some of the circuits. The good news is that it’s a condition that can heal over time. We had a young soldier that we met him, and he had serious disciplinary issues.

The military had been kicked out on a dishonorable discharge. We put him into a 14-month program of physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, relational, life reset. One of the first things we did was we spectral imaged his brain, and it showed the five hotspots, the four hotspots in his brain that illustrate post-traumatic stress disorder. We put him on a reset of brain foods, nutrition, physical exercise, spiritual disciplines, new friends, all of that combined, and a year later, his brain was substantively different. He saw ways he could heal, and frankly, we were helping him, but more importantly, he was helping us understand anew.

He lived under our roof for 14 months. That is an amazing story. It’s a little different from reading about it in a textbook or even experiencing it yourself. Right, right. That is really amazing. One of the themes, just in looking at your work, one of the things that you’re trying to battle and trying to roll back is this sort of separate apartness, this disconnectedness that some of the guys come to you, they’ve withdrawn. They’ve cut themselves off, whether it’s physically or through drugs and alcohol or through some other kind of emotional lashing out.

They are withdrawing and separating, and you try to get them back into connection, isn’t that right? Oh, you’re right, Chris. You’re on top of this. Isolation is one of the primary causes of veteran suicide, and as probably most of your viewers know, we have a significant epidemic of veteran suicide in America today. It shouldn’t be happening. So as we try to defeat the causal factors of veteran suicide and other mental and behavioral issues, one of them is exactly what you say. It’s community to defeat isolation. There’s a wonderful community of formerly homeless people in Austin, Texas called Community First.

I have lived down there, and we went to school on that, and we’ve modeled some of our organization, our alignment of our houses, our community centers around a proven model, and in the community center, that’s where they do their meals. That’s where they do their classes. They even have stronger internet in the community center. In their homes, they’re comfortable. They have a microwave. They have a refrigerator, but no cooking facilities, because we do everything possible to get them out of isolation. The community center view on the front porch with the rocking chairs is the million-dollar view, again, to pull them out, get them to do things together, and we’ve recently gone to a cohort approach where we have groups, not just individuals, and it’s a powerful dynamic.

The one another, they quickly bond, and they get that fellowship, that community that they need. Another component for you is that work is therapy. It has therapeutic results. That’s exactly right. It’s interesting. Some of the guys go out, they’ll be mending fence, banging a hammer alongside our ranch foreman, or they’ll be working in the garden with our agriculture guys, whatever it is, sometimes, or doing construction, sometimes that’s more beneficial to life change and to truly develop trusting relationships, and then they can open up and share their internal wounds, concerns, anxieties, and begin the healing process.

I just know from being a dad and from having other friends that sometimes the best conversations I’ve had with people are conversations that we have while we’re doing something else that has absolutely nothing to do with some heartfelt, deep topic. You’re out breaking a sweat and you’re talking, whether it’s yard work or some kind of construction, and you end up talking about the big stuff in life as sort of a corollary to what the work is, but the work environment creates the conditions that allows for that kind of sharing. Right. You’re exactly right.

It’s interesting. We have 339 acres, Chris. We have 30 horses. We have a herd of cattle. We have 300 egg-laying chickens give us 80 dozen eggs a week. There’s plenty of dignified work, and you’re exactly right. Many times in the course of that work, they really open up. We’ve seen a lot of life change. So give us an idea of your facilities, not just generally the location, but also, you know, you mentioned the acreage and the fact that it’s a ranch farm type environment, but give us kind of an overview of the facilities that your organization runs.

Right. You bet. Well, starting with our location, we’re 12 miles south of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. I once was a vice president at Liberty University, so I recognized the spiritual DNA and then the military patriotic DNA that was perfect. And so when I selected a place, I drew a circle around Liberty and then started looking for it. So we’re close to Liberty. We have a lot of staff and faculty expertise, volunteer support. And then we’re in a wonderful community, very supportive. And so that’s a very nice location for us. Internal, we have a large barn complex.

It has a 14,000 square foot indoor riding arena. We do horsemanship in there. We do equine therapy in there. We have a number of stalls and external paddocks for the horses. And so we’re a first class equine facility, but that’s we do houses and horses. But as I said, that’s not what it’s all about. It’s about the inner man. And then as part of our platform, we have developed the first village is 19 homes with a community center. That village is full now. And we have a waiting list for our September classes of eight.

We’ll be graduating four or five in September, and we’ll squeak in as many as we can into the village. Some may still have to wait until the next cohort. The cohort starts every four months. We’re a nine month residential program. And then we’ve already started construction on a second village. That’s great. That’s good news. Well, that’s five homes, new community center. Obviously, we’re stretching, but our first veteran who was suicidal lived in a horse stall because we didn’t have any houses. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last three and a half years.

But the bottom line, there’s still people out there that need what we have. We don’t have enough capacity. So we’re really pressing into getting that second village in place. And then the next capital project is a healthy veteran lodge. Because, Chris, you may not know, but one half of our referrals are women and mostly with military sexual trauma. It’s a different model, but they need help. We’ve got the expertise. We just need the facility. And so we’re building a lodge complex, part of which can focus on developing a women’s program, different context, different level of security, privacy, and so forth.

Certainly. Yeah, that’s a whole different. It’s an entirely different problem set that you’ve got to solve for. And it is a very grave, very serious problem that needs to be addressed. So I’m glad you’re doing it. Give us an idea of your staff. You must have quite a collection of people on staff to run this. Well, we do. It’s interesting. Seems like God provides the staff when we need them. The diversity of them is we have a licensed professional counselor. Under him, then he supervises a resident counselor who just needs more hours around the track to get their own licensure.

And then we have three doctoral students from Liberty University all doing different types of research. And that’s part of our veteran care organization. That’s the Patriot Care. Patriot Life is the missionals. We have missionals that live 24 hours a day. There’s about eight of those that work on a rotational basis. They do life. Oftentimes, they’re a retired senior enlisted that has a strong spiritual and just street smart about them. Those are maybe sergeant majors, first sergeant types. And then we have our barn and ranch operation with a barn manager, equine therapy. We have five equine therapists now.

They’re not all salaried summer volunteers. Overall, Chris, it’s a staff of about 30. And some are part-time, some are full-time. And then we have an army of 700 volunteers. It’s just been incredible. I don’t think you can see it behind me, but the Spirit of Virginia Award is sitting back there. We were awarded the Governor of Virginia’s first Spirit of Virginia Award in 2022. And then in 2023, in his State of the Commonwealth message that he gave, he had us come to the State House and had us stand up and was a singular military organization that he honored in that speech because he and his wife, the First Lady, are confident that we’re doing good work, right things for the right reasons for the veterans in Virginia and far beyond.

That is tremendous. Now, I’m sure there’s quite a number of interesting stories wrapped up in this, but how do people find you? How do people get to you or access you? And is there, I mean, I’m sure some folks just kind of arrive on your doorstep, but there’s others I’m sure that are kind of routed or referred to you. What does that process look like? Right. Well, thanks for asking, Chris. First, as in most organizations, our website, go to healthyveterans.org, healthyveterans.org, and they can find out how to refer a veteran to our program.

They can find out how to volunteer. They can certainly donate to the cause. And then in that website, it tells a lot about what we do. So that’s helpful. Now, the second thing is that we operate by referral. We, anxious mothers and fathers and family members, whose son has been in the basement for the last five years doing video games, and he has a failure to launch. He’s isolated himself. Others prison correctional officers who have somebody coming out of prison, they know he’s a veteran and they think he would be a right fit for us.

Others might be homeless. So we’ve had people discover homeless on the streets and they bring them here. We have a client care council that reviews these applications. Last night, we had an application from Dr. Ben and Candy Carson. They have a friend who has a son that needs help. And last night, we had two other referrals, I believe. So we have quite a few referrals. Then we have a committee that vets these things out. We do a FBI background check. We get medical records because that’s important for us to figure out what medication management is like, mental and behavioral health history.

And then we rigorously go through their sort of life history on the application form that they do, and then decide if we’re going to bring them into the program. It’s an important commitment on our part. If we bring them in, their family for basically the rest of their lives. It’s a nine-month residential program, but just like I know with college age and young adult children and then grandchildren, it’s never over as you take care of them in various ways. And so it is with our veterans. We love them to death after they go through the program.

We watch their lives change. We help them get employment and do well. Some of them getting married. Sometimes the families are reunited. It’s just a thrilling thing. And then in addition to the website, it’s just word of mouth. The word spreads. We’ve had people just walk in. They come to our Thursday night bonfire, which we have every Thursday night as sort of a community outreach event. People have come to there and they walk in and say, hey, we need help. Just for a moment, touch on families because families are sometimes the greatest support, but then there’s some instances where families kind of complicate the matter.

So give me your kind of your sense on that, on how you’ve different experiences you’ve had in that regard. Yeah, you bet. Well, on the positive side related to families. So I’m looking across the conference room here and in my mind’s eye, I see the young family that walked in. Both the father was coming into the program, the mother very accomplished. And they were both graduates of a major university. And they came in and I said, well, why are we doing this? And the wife simply said short term pain for long term gain, meaning that she recognized the family was going to have to make a sacrifice.

But she later confided that they’d been circling the drain as a couple, as a family, because of a lot of trauma that was unresolved from his service as a U.S. Marine. And then I turned to the young 13 year old to the side and I said, well, why are we here? And she said, we just want our daddy back. And that family is doing much better. We’re trying to help them get their daddy back. And that he’s making progress. Another one they walked in off the bonfire, said, we think we need to be here.

And why? And he pointed to the young infant in the car seat and he said, I want that young boy to have a future. So and that family is doing very well also. Right. So and then in the case where we have families like that that are intact, we do the couples counseling, individual counseling, but couples counseling. We, in some cases, counsel the children who need help. So it’s a lot of counseling in various regards. And then for in many cases, the reality is the family is the greatest heartbreak that they have in their lives.

And sometimes it’s recent, sometimes it’s the abuse they received as a young person in a family. And all the bitterness and all the adverse childhood experiences is a technical term that they’ve had. Many of times those are precipitated by additional military service, training, combat. That just opens up these wounds of childhood. And so when we help these veterans, many times we go all the way back to the very origins of the challenges they face. And it has to do with family, dysfunctional family. General Dees, you’re doing tremendous work. You and your colleagues there.

I can’t thank you enough. And I can’t thank your colleagues. This is such important stuff. And you have identified and you have filled exactly the gap or the crack in the coverage. And you’re doing stuff that is just, it is very inspirational. It touches me personally. It’s just, it is tremendous. So for myself, for my colleagues here at Traditional Watch, we thank you. We support you. We’re going to push this out to as many people as we can get it to. There’ll be information so that our folks who see and hear this podcast in either form, they’ll be able to click through and get to the center and find out more about your work.

Maybe they’ve got a family member, or maybe they just feel compelled to send some money along to you to help move the ball down the field. But thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Chris. It’s a privilege to be with you. Major General Bob Dees, the leader, the founder of National Center for Healthy Veterans. If you don’t know about the organization, you need to hit the pause button, get online, see what they’re up to, and support them. Thank you for listening and for viewing this week. I’m Chris Sparrow on Watch. [tr:trw].

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