Discover Courage: Fly-Fishing Retreats for Special Ops

This article originally appeared in the June-July 2014 issue of Fly Fisherman.

Editor’s Note: Discover Courage is unfortunately no longer in operation, but this story still deserves to be told. There are many worthwhile veterans’ organizations in operation that deserve your support, such as Warriors & Quiet Waters, Project Healing Waters, and Veterans Expeditions.

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What Jay Manty remembers most is the one that got away. It was a man—not much older than a boy, really—working on the support staff for Manty’s team of Navy SEALs. He was driving a truck in Iraq, headed into the danger zone, again. That’s what they all did—the SEALS and their support staff. They went into the most life-threatening places in this war-torn hellhole, rooted out the bad guys, then tried to zip ’em.

The driver was part of a fast-moving motorcade when, at the last second, he saw a little girl running out into the street. She came out of nowhere and didn’t stop. And this man behind the wheel of his truck, doing his duty for his country, he ran over and killed her. She was three years old, the same age as the man’s daughter back home.

It was an accident. But something broke in the man right then. You could see it in his eyes, that vacant stare. He served in several additional deployments. He never quit. He had taken the oath. But he was never the same.

Manty was well on his way to becoming the command master chief of SEAL Team 2 then, the highest SEAL rank for an enlisted man. He was renowned for his ability as a sniper, and he was a natural leader, a coach, a mentor to his men. He could see that this man was suffering. He reached out to him, listened to him talk for hours on end about the demons swirling around in his head. Manty repeatedly pleaded with him to get professional help. But he refused. Special ops are trained to figure it out on their own and never give up. Seeking outside help was a sign of weakness, a betrayal of duty.

The man came back home a few years later and tried to assimilate back into his life as a husband, father, and citizen. Manty called him constantly, still pushing for him to find help, but he never did. And one day, he just disappeared, fell off the map, slipping out of Manty’s grasp like an early morning dream. Jay Manty has been haunted ever since.

That man is one of the main reasons Manty founded Discover Courage, a nonprofit specifically designed as a recovery program for active and retired special ops members (like Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, and Special Forces) and their support and technical staff, a group of military personnel who he believed needed something special to address their unique needs (see Editor's Note above). That something special? An immersive eight-day trip on Oregon’s Deschutes River, fly fishing for steelhead.

“At its basic level, Discover Courage just helps these guys take the wrap off,” says Manty, who retired from active duty in 2009 after 20 years as a SEAL. In naval terms, the “wrap” is the rope around a capstan. Wind on too many coils, and things get super tight. But take a wrap off, and you get a release of tension. “We want a participant’s biggest decision out there to be choosing which fly to tie on the end of their line,” he says.

Manty knows what you’re thinking: Really? Another veterans’ fly-fishing nonprofit?

But this one is different. It is only for men and women who served in special ops. There are no members of the media present during the eight-day, semi-private retreat. The only people there are the “clients,” a handful of fly-fishing industry professionals including guides, and some healthcare professionals (both physical and mental-health specialists).

The men and women come alone, without their families. The first four days are used for instruction. The participants learn how to Spey cast, and tie flies to use on the river. Then they spend the last four days on a float-fishing/camping trip.

“What we want to do is to give these guys an opportunity to be somewhere where they don’t have to be on guard, where someone else is watching their backs, where they are around people with shared experiences, and the only competition is a friendly one,” says Manty.

What also makes Discover Courage different is its specific purpose. “I wanted to focus on the community that I am a part of,” says Manty. Members of the special ops have special needs, especially when they end their deployments, Manty says. And he should know.

Defeating PTSD

Manty is 51 years old, compact, and still in good shape. He has a few wisps of white in the short black hair that frames his face. His twinkling eyes contain a bit of bust-your-balls mischief.

Manty was an orphan from Korea when a family from White Bear Lake, Minnesota, adopted him. “Just a bunch of Scandinavians, some Germans and Irish, and me,” he says. He dropped out of high school and played in a band and practiced martial arts. “I was a lost soul,” he says. He met a Sioux Indian man who told him if he stayed on his current path, he’d end up “dead or in jail.” He also mentioned a possible path out: the Navy SEALs.

Manty first became a diver in the Navy before joining the SEALs in 1989. He was deployed in top-secret missions all over the world, including three stints in Iraq. He became the command master chief of SEAL Team 2 in 2007.

Special ops members like Manty have justifiably earned their places in American hero lore, particularly in recent decades as conflict has moved away from traditional battlefields, and the U.S. has relied more on small, highly trained mobile tactical teams. Just becoming a SEAL requires an enormous amount of mental and physical strength, and an incredible tolerance for pain. Potential SEALs go through intense training in hand-to-hand combat, high-altitude parachuting, and underwater demolition. The training is notorious for its attrition rate, which approached 90 percent during the time of Manty’s enlistment. Plenty of people like the idea of becoming a SEAL. Very few actually see it through to fruition.

But as tough as the training is, the actual fieldwork is where the true danger lurks. SEALs and other special ops have played major roles in Grenada, Panama, and Somalia. They’ve been at the forefront of the significant fighting in the Middle East, both Iraq and Afghanistan. SEALs saved Captain Richard Phillips of the MV Maersk Alabama after his ship was hijacked by pirates. And, of course, it was SEALs, operating under the banner of Neptune Spear, who killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011. (Manty refuses to disclose whether any of these guys have been on a Discover Courage trip, and for security and privacy reasons, no photos of any special ops save Manty himself are shown in this article.)

What the special ops members go through, from training to the actual combat, is difficult for us civilians to even truly understand. They are under a constant state of stress for the entire length of their service. They can be deployed on short notice, so they must always be mentally ready. During their deployments, they see things no one should ever have to witness: children massacred, people burned alive, friends dying in front of them, sometimes in their arms.

“I’m not a doctor, obviously, but it’s my guess that most, if not all of us, have some form of PTSD,” says Manty.

And he’s likely right, especially given the definition of post-traumatic stress disorder by the noted psychologist, Jonathan Shay, who describes it as “the persistence into civilian life, after danger, of the valid adaptations you made to stay alive when other people were trying to kill you.”

PTSD may be even worse for special ops combatants who often witness death close up. “It’s hard to detach,” says Manty. “You end up dehumanizing it, but it’s so conflicting. You come home and are holding your two-year-old in your hands and thinking about some guy you killed.”

PTSD remains, for now, hard to diagnose accurately. And it may even be harder to treat. Symptoms include depression, insomnia, and terror flashes. Drugs like lithium, prazosin, and Zoloft are sometimes prescribed, but they are rarely enough to chase away all the anguishing private wars that follow these men and women home.

SEALs and other special ops members also face another hurdle: Their self-imposed code of courage, instilled within them from the first day of training, inhibits them from seeking help. To special ops, reaching out to others for help means weakness, or signifies defeat. Discover Courage is Manty’s attempt to rectify this. “That’s what I did for 20 years—take care of my guys,” he says.

Manty originally got into fly fishing in the 1990s after he shattered the bones in both of his legs in a parachute accident. As part of his rehab, he joined a friend casting poppers for bluegills. He got deeper into the sport as he neared retirement.

“I liked that it was a nonhostile way of stalking and pursuing prey,” he says. And it was on a fly-fishing trip to the Deschutes with his friend, Way Yin, a spinal pain doctor and Spey-casting expert, that his idea for Discover Courage got its legs.

Together they set up the nonprofit in January 2013. Industry response—mostly in the form of in-kind donations—was overwhelming. Scott provided fly rods, Redington sent waders, and each of the board members of the Cortland Line Company donated cash to the cause by writing personal checks and donating product that amounted to $21,000.

These were just three companies among many. “Everyone jumped in and said, ‘how many do you need and when do you need it?’” says Manty. He worked out reduced rates for a lodge at an undisclosed location, and local guides pitched in to help as well. (Neither Manty nor Yin is paid for their efforts. Manty’s day job is running an information technology consulting service in Virginia with his wife.)

Discover Courage hosted its first two events in 2013. A total of 10 special ops members attended, both active and retired. The idea was to keep it small, so that the ratio of professionals to anglers would stay at two to one. Macauley Lord, a FFF casting instructor, came along. So did Jim Bartschi, president of Scott Fly Rods.

Everyone on the trip signed nondisclosure agreements to create an atmosphere of insulated trust. During the trip, each angler was rotated around to fish with someone new each day. The idea was to keep it casual and not force any conversations. Fly fishing would break the ice. “I was absolutely floored by the experience,” says Bartschi. “You could really see a profound positive transformation in these guys after the week.”

Manty says some of the guests were initially skeptical of the event. “It took them 48 hours to relax,” he says. But then they got into it, totally detached from the world (cellphones don’t work there). One participant told Manty that he initially didn’t want to go.

“He remembered me as master chief Manty, and he thought I was a prick,” says Manty. But he soon discovered that Manty, though still a mentor, was no longer his master chief. He later told Manty that the trip was a “life-altering event.”

Another participant, for the first time, opened up to a therapist who was along for the trip, and a chaplain (who happened to be Macauley Lord). One former SEAL who had Hodgkin’s disease, lung cancer, and diabetes was literally carried down to the river by his “brothers.” Says Manty: “That guy fell in a few times, but he had the time of his life and ended up catching the biggest fish of the trip, a beautiful native 12-pound steelhead.”

Manty says the trips work like something special ops are used to—a sort of mini-deployment—but one in which they can drop everything and just concentrate on the mind-clearing hookup with a steelhead.

The idea, too, is to set up a network within which they feel comfortable, to bond on the river, and know that anytime they need to talk, someone is there for them.

Manty says five Discover Courage trips will run in 2014 and 2015. The fundamental question he hopes to answer for the participants sounds like a Zen koan, but is one these men and women—who have seen so much in their lives—all intuitively understand. “Who are you once you stop being who you are?”

Manty hopes these anglers will not be like the one he lost, so many years ago. “Is fly fishing going to save your soul? No. Does it give you purpose in life? Probably not,” he says. “But it helps quiet your mind, it helps you live in the moment.” And, he hopes, it will help someone discover the courage needed to carry on.  

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Monte Burke is a staff writer at Forbes, where he has written more than 100 profiles of chief executives, sports figures, and entrepreneurs. He has also written for the The New York Times, Outside, Men’s Journal, Audubon, and many other magazines. He is also the author of the book 4th and Goal: One Man’s Quest to Recapture His Dream (Grand Central Publishing 2012).

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