A new book by Beau Beasley chronicles the recovery of 32 veterans and how fly fishing has improved their lives. A portion of the proceeds from all book sales goes to the nonprofit Project Healing Waters (PHW). In this photo, Ssgt. John “Jonesy” Jones, USMC (ret.), a former Project Healing Waters participant and now vice president of development for PHW, casts a line into the Roaring Fork River with supporter Shaun Hargrave, a Missoula-based sales rep for Boulder Boat Works. (A.J. Gottschalk photo)
October 15, 2024
By Beau Beasley
This story is an excerpt from Beau Beasley’s latest book Healing Waters: Veterans’ Stories of Recovery in Their Own Words . The book contains 32 chapters. Each chapter is the story of a service member, and tells the story of how fly fishing changed their lives. A portion of each book sale goes to the nonprofit organization Project Healing Waters.
“On behalf of the President of the United States, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a token of your loved one’s sacrifice. Semper Fi.”
Decked out in his dress blues and struggling not to cry, Gunnery Sergeant Willis “Duke” Davis handed a flag to the solemn widow grieving for his fallen sniper comrade. Next to her stood another Marine, this one only five years old and wearing a spotless Staff Sergeant’s uniform—a tiny, exact replica of the one in which his father was being laid to rest. The Marine Corps Honor Guard stood at attention as the funeral continued and others paid their last respects to a Marine who had been so emotionally devastated by what he had seen and experienced in combat, that he’d taken his own life.
Few relish the daunting task of presenting the flag to a family suffering such a tragic loss. Davis volunteered. “If I didn’t do it,” he says, “then some other Marine would have to do it. I’d just as soon it be me, since I knew him.” Perhaps Davis realizes that if his own life hadn’t taken certain turns, his wife Kara might have been the grieving widow accepting the flag.
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Gunnery Sergeant Duke Davis grew up in Alabama, which left as its mark on him and an accent as heavy as a thick coat of quality paint. Davis had already been to the Army recruiter across the room at the small recruiting station in Albertville, Alabama, when Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Leroy Pate asked him, “Are you ready to be a man, son?”
Gunnery Sergeant Willis “Duke” Davis served multiple tours of duty in combat zones and was wounded in action more than once. “Pate walked the walk,” says Davis, “and I could see what a Marine was supposed to be.” Davis laughs. “The Marine Corps isn’t for everyone. I tell folks that we aren’t like the other branches of the service. The Air Force, for example, is like a corporation; the Marine Corps is more like a cult. We are all the same, and you never really leave.”
Davis became a Marine Corps Sniper, an elite group of sharpshooters that never officially numbers more than 150, handpicked by the Marine Corps to provide security for other Marines while they are engaged in combat operations. “A Marine Sniper,” recites Davis, “is a Marine highly skilled, highly trained in field skills and marksmanship, who delivers long-range precision fire from concealed positions in support of combat operations. Period.” That “period” is crucial: A Marine Sniper’s job description is, quite simply, to save Marine lives.
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Marine Snipers operate in teams of two: one watches through binoculars for enemy movement, and the other fires a variety of lethal weapons. The team might find themselves lying in a field for days on end or sitting atop a roof providing “over watch” for Marines on patrol or engaged in house-to-house searches. In some cases they might be looking for bomb makers who plant their devices along the road or in other seemingly innocuous places hoping to detonate a device by surprise and kill as many Marines as possible. The Marines themselves rarely know the location of their own guardian angels, lest they inadvertently telegraph the location of their sniper guards to the enemy.
Davis has been deployed nearly a dozen times overseas, and half of those deployments involved combat tours. He’s served in such far flung places as Haiti and jokes that his team put Sarajevo’s infamous “Sniper Alley” under new management. But it would be the multiple deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq where he would see the most combat; those deployments haunt him both physically and emotionally to this day.
Davis found new meaning in his life after joining a Project Healing Waters fly-fishing event. Duke now owns and operates the charter service Tango Down Fishing in Naples, Florida. In the summers he leads the nonprofit organization Restoration, Inc. (restforheroes.org). He needs no reminders of his combat losses; nevertheless Davis wears a single metal bracelet with the name of a Marine inscribed upon it as a tribute to those who made the ultimate sacrifice—and to those who made it home but ended their own lives in the aftermath of their service. It has become somewhat common practice to wear such bracelets in support of our troops. At home, Davis has a box of such bracelets—mementos of friends lost to service. “If I wore them all,” he says solemnly, “I could cover both arms from my wrists nearly to my shoulders.”
Eventually his overseas deployments bled one into another. “There are so few snipers that they tend to rotate us a lot. And sometimes . . . you come back early.” A Marine “comes home early” when he is so badly injured that he can no longer remain in the field to complete his tour. In his garage is a wooden crate with his last name and rank stenciled in black on its side. “There is only one difference in the letters,” he says, pointing to the stenciled “W.I.A.” on the crate’s face, “but that one letter means a lot.” The crates containing a Marine’s personal effects and gear are shipped home when he is badly injured— “wounded in action”—or killed. “Only one letter’s difference,” he repeats, “but it’s a big difference.”
While his son Seth was at home on April 24, 2004, celebrating his 9th birthday, Duke Davis was at work half a world away. “I was in a truck with a squad of Marines and we were traveling on our way to a strategically important location in Afghanistan. This particular area we were driving through had a box canyon with plateaus on both sides. Our truck ran over an IED, and that’s when it all started going south. I can still remember being thrown from the truck; it was a pretty nasty deal.”
When Davis regained consciousness from the explosion, he discovered that the driver and vehicle commander were dead and another Marine had had both legs blown off. The truck behind them had come under heavy fire and was retreating, leaving Davis and his men exposed to withering fire from the plateaus above the canyon. He realized suddenly that he was both the most experienced and highest-ranking Marine in the group. He was in charge. He communicated his position via VHF radio to the truck behind him, which was connected by satellite phone to command.
Duke and Lefty Kreh at Beaver Creek, Maryland in 2017. Their mangled truck in flames, Davis and his Marines were in a desperate position. Some tended to the injuries of their fellow squad members while others returned fire. As shots rained down from enemy positions around them, Davis recognized that his group’s only hope was to push forward.
Their motto is Semper Fi—always faithful; Marines don’t leave a man behind. Davis grabbed an MRE (meal ready to eat) and emptied its contents so that he could gather something of what was left of a fellow Marine who had been blown to pieces. He tucked the package into a safe place and told his men to gather their comrades and prepare to move.
“We fought our way out for nearly two miles, while carrying our dead and wounded with us as best we could,” Davis says, his voice hoarse with emotion. At times those two miles seemed endless: the Marines could travel only a few yards at a time, taking advantage of any available cover available to return fire. “I’ll tell you one thing,” says Davis. “My two fire team leaders were true warriors that day, boy. I can’t mention their names but they know who they are. They saved all our lives—mine included. I wouldn’t be here today if those guys hadn’t returned fire and supported me as I led us out of that canyon.” Davis’ eyes fill with unshed tears, and his voice breaks. “Those two guys are warriors. True warriors.”
After hours of running and fighting, their prayers were answered. “I finally heard the Blackhawks coming, and it was the best thing I’ve ever heard in my life. They showed up and engaged the enemy, and things took a dramatic turn for the better.”
As the Marines placed their dead and wounded on board, Davis carefully handed the MRE package to the crew chief of one of the helicopters, explaining to him its unusual contents. The crew chief summoned Davis to get on board the chopper with the rest of the wounded; what he hadn’t realized until that moment was that blood was running out of both of his ears. Nevertheless, Davis refused to go. “I couldn’t leave my men,” Davis says resolutely. “My injuries weren’t a big deal. Besides—I was in charge.” As for the helicopters, Davis is magnanimous: “I’ll have to give it to the Army: it was sure good to see them that day. Those boys saved our lives, and I will always be grateful.”
The fight in the canyon was just one battlefield engagement; Davis has lived through countless others and been injured many times. Once after running over an IED he awakened in a field hospital and found the patients on either side of him covered in white sheets. “It’s a pretty solemn thing,” Davis intones, “to wake up and see the guys on both sides of you didn’t make it.”
This story is an excerpt from Beau Beasley’s latest book Healing Waters: Veterans’ Stories of Recovery in Their Own Words. The book contains 32 chapters. Each chapter is the story of a service member, and tells the story of how fly fishing changed their lives. A portion of each book sale goes to the nonprofit organization Project Healing Waters. Once his sniper team was providing over watch when a truck full of combat engineers ran over a hidden IED. Combat engineers build all sorts of buildings, bridges, and other structures in hostile territory to support ongoing combat operations; they might be driving a dump truck or leveling out an airfield, but they do it with machine guns in their laps. On this particular day these troops were eager to get back to base early and took a shortcut on a less secure thoroughfare. The truck struck the IED and exploded, killing all the soldiers in the truck. Davis remembers this particular incident vividly because it happened almost directly in front of him. Rushing to the truck to render aid, Davis found that an unsecured saw blade had struck the truck driver’s head, cutting it nearly in half. Not even Marines can witness such scenes and walk away unscarred.
Davis eventually returned home, becoming a recruiter himself like Leroy Pate and encouraging other to join what Davis believes to be the most elite fighting force in the world. The problem was that he couldn’t leave the battlefield behind—or more precisely, the battlefield wouldn’t leave him.
“I had horrible nightmares. At times I would wake up screaming, holding my wife down in bed and hollering, ‘It’s OK! It’s OK! I got this shit! I got this shit covered!’” He constantly relived firefights and battlefield searches for fallen comrades. One particularly gruesome nightmare recalled the horror of the day that he found what looked like a mass of damaged flesh that turned out to be what was left of the face of a Marine he knew. The memories haunted him so that he would come home from work and drink himself to sleep—when he could sleep at all, which wasn’t often.
On one particularly difficult day after some serious drinking, Davis decided he’d had enough. He stepped out onto his back porch, pulled out his pistol, placed the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. Click. Instinctively reverting to his Marine training, even in his drunken state, Davis tried to chamber another round. He placed the barrel of the gun back in his mouth. Click. At that moment, Davis fell to his knees in tears, wondering how he had come to this point and crying out to God for help. His wife Kara stood by him through everything—even nights in which she’d found him attempting to clear their home with his weapon drawn looking for enemy soldiers. “You’ll make it, honey. I know you will,” she encouraged him again and again. “I love you. We all love you. You just have to get some help. I’m here for you babe.”
Davis eventually ended up at the famed Marine Corps Base Quantico when he was selected for the Corps’ elite Gunner School. Marine Corps Gunners are weapons experts who wear the emblem of an exploding bomb on the collars of their uniforms. A mere 100 coveted gunner positions exist within the Marine Corps. Davis, 40, was doing well in this program when he suffered a severe heart attack, which his physicians believe was brought on by the stress of continuous combat duties.
On his first day at Quantico Davis had met retired Marine Jim Bensinger, at that time an assistant program lead for Project Healing Waters (PHW). He and retired Top Sergeant Marty Laksbergs held bi-monthly meetings at the base, successfully running the only PHW program on a Marine Corps base. “Jim Bensinger really went out of his way to help me from the very first day he met me,” says Davis. “I think he saw that I needed help, and that I couldn’t help myself.” The two soon became good friends, and Davis took Bensinger up on his offer to attend a PHW meeting at the base. Later that first day, Davis tied his first fly.
During the last days of Gunner School and right before his promotion, Davis suffered a second heart attack. This one nearly killed him. He was participating in PHW, was on his way to becoming an accomplished fly tier, and was scheduled to go on a PHW fishing trip to Harman’s, a family-owned retreat with log cabins along the banks of the Potomac River in Cabins, West Virginia. “I told the Doc, ‘I’ll do whatever you say, but you’ve got to cut me loose from here, because I can’t miss that trip to Harman’s with the folks in my Project Healing Waters group.’” The doctor discharged Davis, he went to Harman’s, and he had the time of his life. He also landed his very first trout there, on a fly that he had tied. It’s a moment he’ll never forget.
Willis “Duke” Davis’s fly-fishing journey may have started at Harman’s Luxury Log Cabins, located on the North Fork of the South Branch Potomac River (shown here) in West Virginia. This is where he caught his first trout—on a fly he tied. Harman’s has hosted many Project Healing Waters events over the past decade. (Ross Purnell photo) Fly tying has brought Davis tremendous peace. “There’s just something about it that’s magical. It takes the pack straps off of the stuff you are carrying around with you. Maybe not the whole day’s worth, but for most of the day it gets better. And the more you do it, the more it releases the straps, and the lighter the pack is eventually going to get.”
Davis was medically retired as a result of complications from the many injuries he sustained on the battlefield. Because of his traumatic brain injuries, he struggles with balance and memory. He has diminished hearing and lost much of the dexterity in one of his hands when it was nearly severed when he ran over yet another IED. Is he bitter? No. Instead, he is resolute that he wouldn’t trade being Marine for anything.
“When I retire, I plan on becoming a full-time fly-fishing guide. I really want to take guys from the service fishing and show them how much fun life can be—and in some way give back.” Apparently old snipers don’t retire; they continue to watch over their fellow Marines.
Duke Davis resides in Naples, Florida, where he runs Tango Down Fishing. He and his wife Kara recently launched a veteran-focused nonprofit called Restoration, Inc. (restforheroes.org ).
Beau Beasley is an investigative outdoor writer and director of the Virginia Fly Fishing & Wine Festival .