![]() This program was designed to be a part of their continuing therapy, which for some has lasted as long as five years. These men may have left the war, but it never left them. The five-day veterans’ course, however, sought to be much more. Strangers come together, they are presented with activities that challenge them mentally and physically, and, ideally, their shared experience creates a strong bond among the members. The imposing silhouette of Huron Peak stared back from the southwest.Īll Outward Bound courses - whether for people seeking wilderness experience, for troubled teenagers seeking a new course in life, or for adult professionals taking a moment to reflect on the road they’ve taken - follow a carefully designed arc. The men with him were silent as they looked out across vast granite bowls speckled with old mine entrances among the evergreens. O’Rourke, a Vietnam veteran, choked back tears of his own. “Look around this countryside: you guys deserve this,” said Bob O’Rourke, a 62-year-old retired marine and one of the instructors for the Outward Bound course. 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. 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. They were a wary group of strangers, guarded and slow to trust, who had arrived at the Outward Bound Wilderness school in Leadville, Colo., a few days before, wondering how a one-week course in the wilderness could help them heal. Some had seen combat so close they killed with their knives. ![]() Others couldn’t gather memories blown away by an explosion. Several knew the pain of bullets tearing through flesh. THE nine men who climbed to the summit of the Colorado mountain were combat veterans who had fought in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam.
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