Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
A Ranger leads the way
Retired Army colonel creates Darby’s Warrior Support to help ex-servicemen deal with the wounds of war
It’s before dawn and retired Col. Shawn Daniel has already been up for hours, making preparations to lead his next incursion. He checks his firearm, counts his ordnance and, stepping out into the frigid early-morning air, pulls his cover low and his gaiter up. Little can be seen of the career warrior but a splinter of skin across the eyes.
Daniel greets his men, each one similarly outfitted and good to go. Army Rangers all, they carry the same lethal bearing imparted by Uncle Sam’s training and proofed by foreign deployment, of which each has completed multiple times. The mood is loose, but there’s a quiet intensity as they mount up and head out.
Reaching the hot zone, they take their places and scan the horizon. The sun will crack through the ceiling soon and as the eastern glow gathers intensity, the adrenaline starts to drip into their collective bloodstream. When at last the sun splits heaven from earth, exploding the morning into color overhead, targets come into view. Each man takes aim, pulls the trigger, repeats.
Another grand morning on Arkansas’ Grand Prairie has begun for Darby’s Warrior Support.
Daniel watches the vets retrieve their quarry, joshing each other as they do so. It was a morning very much like this one in 2002 that he brought three fellow soldiers to Arkansas to sample the state’s famed duck hunting. The take was lousy — an embarrassing 17 ducks in four days — but the interactions among the battle-hardened men were cathartic.
Inspired, Daniel decided to formalize the hunts five years later as the nonprofit Darby’s Warrior Support. Hundreds of post 9/11-era servicemen have been hosted since, most of whom arrive looking to bag ducks or deer or bass and leave having reclaimed a lost
part of themselves.
“We’re bringing them in four at a time per weekend. We focus on the special operations community,” Daniel says. “We’re hosting 150-200 a year and we’ve had 0.0 cases of suicide from anybody who’s come through our facility.
“People are like, ‘What does hunting have to do with healing?’ Anybody that asks that has never watched the sunrise with three or four other men they’ve spent some really, really hard days with. This is an opportunity to get away from the flagpole, have a couple cold beers and just check on your friends. There’s a lot of healing associated with that. They go back bone-ass tired from the weekend, but recharged.”
Five years after retiring from the service, Daniel will be inducted into the Ranger Hall of Fame on July 22. Hall of Fame candidates “must be deceased or have been separated, or retired from active military service for at least three years at the time of nomination,” according to the website ranger. org. Candidates also “must have served in a Ranger unit in combat or be a successful graduate of the U.S. Army Ranger School. A Ranger unit is defined as those Army units recognized in Ranger lineage or history.”
The ceremony is held at Fort Benning, Ga; each inductee is presented with an engraved bronze Ranger Hall of Fame medallion suspended from a red, white and blue ribbon, according to the website.
FIRST STOP: JROTC
Daniel still itches under civilian life, like a new set of clothes someone else picked out for him. He first put on a military uniform as a standout in Little Rock Catholic High School’s Junior ROTC program, having already set his sights on a military career.
“I enjoyed pushing myself physically and the appeal of being in the military,” he remembers. “I watched a lot of my peers go to the University of Arkansas and pick-yourGreek-letters. Man, I’m not doing that. As soon as I throw my hat up in the air in Catholic High’s gym I’m taking off. I’m going to see the world and I’m going to do exciting stuff and I hope to make it back to Arkansas one day. But I’m gone.”
Wanting to go to West Point but lacking the grades, Daniel enrolled in the Arkansas National Guard during his senior year of high school with the intent of making the West Point Prep School after graduation, a yearlong proving ground where candidates go to buff out rough spots on their record.
He was a model cadet — good grades, soccer team and serving as one of just three cadet company commanders — meaning West Point was an all-but-assured next step. One of his classmates, however, wasn’t as accomplished and, seeing the writing on the wall, decided to take someone down with him.
“They have what they call aptitude boards for cadets struggling to meet the standard,” Daniel says. “This panel of officers [is] like, ‘You don’t shine your boots, you don’t press your uniform, you’re not doing well academically, and your peers don’t say good things about you. Why should we send you on to West Point?’ And they give the cadet five or 10 minutes to plead their case before deciding if they’re in or they’re out. My classmate walked in and said, ‘You’re right. I don’t polish my boots, I don’t press my uniform. I’m not doing well academically, and my peers don’t say good things about me. But Shawn Daniel has a fake ID. What are you going to do about that?’” Holding fake identification was an honor code violation; it was seen as a form of lying.
“The commandant at prep school at the time pulled me into his office and he had tears in his eyes. He was like, ‘You are exactly who we want to send to West Point, but I have to separate you. I have to maintain the standards.’ Two and a half weeks later I was separated.”
Daniel, still enlisted with the National Guard, began the 13-week basic training he’d skipped to go to prep school. Nine weeks in, his phone rang and his father, a one-star general named Jim Daniel, asked him a question that would alter the course of his life: Did he want to go to Ranger school?
“Hell yeah I want to go to Ranger school,” Daniel says.
“He’s like, ‘All right, June 25. You’ve got a slot.’ Meaning, I’m graduating from cavalry scout training on the 16th of June and on the 25th of June I’m starting Ranger school. Most of the guys going to Ranger school have been in the Army at least 18 months and have gone through a pre-range of programs.”
Daniel faced additional challenges. He’d already enrolled at the University of Louisville and classes were set to begin shortly after the 58day Ranger training. And even though candidates could “recycle” any failed part of training — and many do — the 19-yearold’s mind was made up. No more humiliating phone calls home, no more backtracking, no more failure.
“From that point on I was like, it’s a Ranger tab or a body bag,” he says. “I had some pride to reclaim in my family. No question my dad loved me, but I had disappointed him getting thrown out of the prep school.”
Daniel finished his training, reported to college and a year later, having proved his academic chops, took another run at West Point. This time, his accelerated list of accomplishments was buttressed by the unqualified recommendation of his superiors back at prep school. He at last reported to West Point, where by senior year he would attain a cadet’s highest honor, serving as First Captain for the Corps of Cadets. He graduated with wisdom and experiences well beyond that of his peers, ready to serve in the most dangerous places in the world.
He would find all that he sought, and more.
ALL THAT HE COULD BE
The years following West Point filled a dossier that is the envy of any career military man. In all, Daniel was assigned to Korea once, deployed once to Iraq and deployed seven times to Afghanistan, with the distinction of leading the first troops to parachute into Afghan territory in October 2001 … an act signifying the start of Operation Enduring Freedom.
Along the way, he earned Along the way, he earned the Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit, four Bronze Stars, Meritorious Service Medal, Master Parachute Badge with gold combat star and Air Assault Badge. No Purple Heart, though; he’d never been wounded by the enemy despite multiple encounters with IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and a hairy firefight during a suicide bomber attack on a base north of Kabul.
All of which made Daniel an unqualified star in his chosen profession. But when your chosen profession exists to kill people and break things, success inflicts its own kind of wounds. By 2013, the cumulative toll on his body and his psyche led him to a dark place, struggling to heal himself.
“That was the beginning of a slide,” he says. “What have I done to my body? Driven it like a rental car for 20 years. What have I done to my family, moving them every year or two? What have I done to my kids? Where have I failed my soldiers and how many lost lives can be directly attributed to decisions I made?
“And the final piece of it was, what have I done to other human beings? We can call them Taliban, we can call them Al Queda, we can call them Bozo the Clown, I don’t care, we killed them. They were lying there dying and we shot them again. They were screaming for their wives, they were screaming for their God, they were screaming for their kids, they were screaming for their parents. I don’t know who they were screaming for, but they were human beings and we killed them and we pounded our chest and said, ‘America!’ How do I take all of that and reconcile it with what I learned in Sunday School as a kid?”
A retired general read the signs on him and casually recommended a program called Home Base. Daniel took his advice, but nearly walked out on the first clueless therapist they placed him with. A caseworker intercepted him on his way out, convincing him to give it another try.
“Next thing I know, I get this email from a guy named Steve Durant,” he recalls. “I open it up and here’s this bald-headed dude with a patch over his eye who got it gouged out in a rugby match, 60 years old. I’m like, this could be entertaining. I went into his office once a week for nine months and that man saved my life. I still talk to him today.”
PAYING IT FORWARD
Through Darby’s Warrior Support, Daniel sees the same struggles in the men who come to hunt that his superiors saw in him. His most fervent hope is that the organization provides an on ramp to organic conversations about what each is going through and the demands of defending freedom, misunderstood by all who haven’t been there.
“Special operations guys deploy far more than conventional force guys,” he says. “It’s 110 days deployed, 220 days at home, 110 days deployed. Just keep rewinding. Special forces guys, six months at home, six months gone. Delta guys, who knows? There’s no off-tempo for them. The goal is to have a dwell time of one-to-one — a day deployed, a day at home — but we aren’t even close. A day deployed, 0.25 days at home.
“And these guys are running, running, running, just like I was. So, they’re wounded — they’re deeply, deeply wounded — and they have no idea. And one day it’s all going to catch up with them and they’re going to find themselves in a very dark place, like I did.”
Nickolas Neuert, a 12-year Ranger veteran with eight deployments who now serves as the organization’s operations manager, first encountered Darby’s Warrior Support on a weekend hunt not knowing how much he needed it.
“I didn’t realize I was struggling as much as I was,” he says. “When I got invited out for the first hunt, I had a lot of stress I was carrying and didn’t even realize I was carrying it. I came out for the hunt and it was revolutionary how the walls came down. It didn’t have anything to do with the hunting itself; it was literally sharing the morning in the blind with the guys who shared the same experiences I did. It made me a believer.”
HIGHER ACT OF HEROISM
For Daniel, altering the lives of hundreds of servicemen just like Neuert is enormously satisfying and represents a higher act of heroism than can be captured in any medal or award. He wants to save at least one life for every one lost by his hand or under his command.
“I’d like to expand the DWS mission,” he says of the future. “I think the boys desperately need it. Some of them know it. Many of them don’t. I want to do everything I can to help them successfully negotiate it because I don’t want to hear or read another email about another teammate we lost to suicide. I just want to serve as many as I can and bring them out here and love on them and share my story.”