Broken warrior finds healing water
Veteran, organization give injured soldiers camaraderie, fly fishing
Nick’s heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling. — Ernest Hemingway, “Big Two-Hearted River”
The bomb that struck Saul Martinez’s vehicle during the 2007 surge in Iraq mangled his legs and killed two friends: Sgt. Blake Stephens and Spec. Kyle Little.
The Army did its best to patch Saul together. It provided him with two prosthetic legs and pinned a Purple Heart on his chest.
Saul’s wife, Sarah, tended to the heart that pumped inside him. She loved him and gave him a reason keep it beating.
But Blake and Kyle ... their loss burrowed into Saul’s soul. How was he to make peace with their deaths? How was he to make peace with his survival?
“There is not an hour in a day that goes by that I don’t think of them,” he says.
“Ever.”
Saul is sitting at a wrought-iron table on the patio behind Bacchus restaurant at Cudahy Tower. The patio overlooks Veterans Park, which on this late afternoon is Crayola green. Beyond the park is the lake, more sparkle than blue. Blake and Kyle.
“That is where my mind is,” Saul says.
“That is where it always is.”
Saul decided years ago that perhaps the best he could do is to try to live his life in a manner that honored Blake and Kyle.
He remained in the Army for a couple years, a heroic figure serving as a Warrior Transition Squad leader.
But in 2009, Saul crashed.
“I think I was more broken than I wanted to admit,” he says. “I tried to put up that facade, tried to be what everybody expected me to be — which was strong and able. My world was chaos for a while. I didn’t know what was going on with me mentally. I didn’t know who I was physically.
“I didn’t know anything.”
That year, Saul went to Montana. What brought him there was the Warriors and Quiet Waters Foundation, an organization based in Bozeman that seeks to expose injured post-9/11 veterans to a healing art: fly fishing.
Some have noticed that standing in a stream the way that anglers do — that is to say, to stand in a state of hope, to affirm that hope each time the line is lifted and the fly is tossed back out — can ease the trauma of war.
More than a half century before the American Psychiatric Association added post-traumatic stress disorder to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Ernest Hemingway wrote “Big Two-Hearted River,” the story of a wounded and shell-shocked young man, Nick Adams, who finds restoration on a river in northern Michigan.
“Nick felt happy,” Hemingway writes. “He felt he had left everything behind.”
Though Saul hadn’t been much of a fisherman, he found himself transformed. On the ponds, streams and rivers of Montana, he found release.
“It’s just magic what happens to you out there,” he says.
Saul moved his family to Montana, earned a degree in sociology from Montana State University and now works for Warriors and Quiet Waters as director of warrior services.
Which is what brought Saul to Milwaukee recently, for a fundraiser at Bacchus.
The mission of Warriors and Quiet Waters is as crucial as ever. Perhaps more so.
In recent years, Saul says, there has been a kind of diaspora of the sailors, soldiers, airmen and Marines injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They have left their VA hospitals and have returned to their communities. They have found jobs, tried to move on. But the pain is still there. Sometimes it’s veiled, sometimes it’s not. Often they suffer in loneliness, without the camaraderie of other men and women — warriors — who have seen what they have seen, have felt what they have felt.
They find that companionship at Warriors and Quiet Waters. And they find what is alluded to in the program’s name.
It’s taken from Psalm 23:
“He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul.”
Join us in telling the stories of our better angels, of the kindness, compassion and decency that brighten our community. You can call or text Crocker Stephenson at 414.858-6181. Or email him at crocker.stephenson@jrn.com.