'500 Miles' really kind of stems out of the idea
that I wanted to share with the public about
the condition of the American veteran,
as well as the condition of the wild horse,
which is a real problem in the West and in North America.
So it's a story of the unpurposed horse
and the unpurposed human being.
You know, there's two institutions,
there's the Veterans Administration
and there's the Bureau of Land Management.
Both of them have a lot of money, a lot of program,
a lot of processes,
but the statistics on both sides of the fence are worsening.
I wanted to show that there's a key component
that exists in both those entities, that's purpose.
And how, when it's found through a process of struggle
and hardship,
that it ultimately allows people and horses
to overcome their external circumstances.
And so, to show that parallel,
I decided to make a film about it.
I took animal and human and I showed that they're missing
this key component and when found
it's a powerful combination
that provides healing for the animal and for the individual.
I grew up in Upstate New York,
I was a small-town kid.
I was on a telephone pole in Queens, New York,
when the first plane hit the World Trade Center on 9/11.
That was the situation and circumstance
that drove me to join the military.
I did 13 combat tours,
I spent over 1,100 days just in combat zones,
that's not even training.
So, when I came home there, life had changed,
things had evolved like and I was-‑I had lost my culture,
I lost my community, I lost this identity
and it really had sent me into a tailspin.
I had become a victim of everything,
I would blame the government,
I would blame all these things and why I wasn't happy.
So it was all these experiences in life
that kind of was a confluence to that particular point
where all of a sudden I realized like
I have to begin to challenge myself,
I have to begin to take ownership of my choices
in the face of adversity, in the face of hardships.
And you know, here I keep, I ran the Ironman,
I kept taking on these challenges.
I wasn't really sure at the time what I was looking for.
We watch these videos of-- we see all this stuff,
these people overcoming challenges and struggles
and we're gravitated to that.
We literally have obstacle course races
where we literally manufacture obstacles for people to go over
so at the end they can feel good that they--
you know, we have machines that you enter the obstacle,
you know, 3.0 at 1 percent incline for 30 minutes.
Right, we manufacture obstacles
because it's through those obstacles
that we learn about who we are.
What I needed didn't exist,
because what was out there for veterans--
and there's no shortage of nonprofits to help vets--
matter of fact, there's 45,000 of them in North America,
just for veterans and eight billion dollars
are spent a year on those organizations.
But the last thing that I needed
after a pretty intense Special Operations career,
operating at the tip of the spear everywhere,
doing the most elite missions possible,
was to float around in a canoe or go to the Super Bowl.
Like, I had issues, I had a family,
like I had to put my life back together.
That was the beginning of the real change in my thinking,
when my belief system started to change,
when I began to realize that like,
if I'm letting life happen to me, I'm always the victim.
But if it happens for me, then I always have a choice.
And then it's in those choices where I find actual freedom.
And sometimes the only way that you can find your own way
is by helping somebody else find theirs.
So that's why I started Heroes and Horses.
I brought some friends out
and I had been working on this ranch,
I was still contracting at the time
and I ran some pilot programs
just based on my own experiences.
And I had a friend come out,
two friends come out and one of them was in a really bad way,
hadn't come out of his house in like six months.
As a matter of fact, I remember on that trip being concerned
that he was going to do something,
like he just was in a very dark, dark place.
And I wasn't that experienced of a horseman at the time and it--
each day just got worse.
It just snowed and we were cold
and I had gotten bucked off and dragged by a horse.
But at the end of this experience
we had bonded and re-emerged
and we did it again like a month later
and that's when I started really developing the program.
And so in 2014 we launched our first full season
and it's evolved and grown a lot since then.
I knew that it had to be challenging.
Because what had really helped me wasn't the, you know,
the good days of frolicking around in the grass
on horses in Montana, which were great.
It was the hard days where I'd gotten bucked off
in the middle of nowhere and lost my horse and dragged,
or all these things that had happened.
Those were the experiences that were helping me grow and evolve.
I came up with the idea for the film in my office
and I went home for lunch
and I told my wife that I was adopting wild mustangs
and that I was going to ride them 760 miles,
it ultimately turned out to be,
and that I was going to tell the story in film
of the unpurposed horse
and the unpurposed human being and that I was leaving in April,
and that was December.
So...
I picked up the phone
and I started figuring out how you get wild horses.
I called a friend and he knew a film guy
and they had never made a film like this before
and I just started making decisions
as if the next day it was happening.
And people came around, people got involved,
people got excited.
And this film is an amazing story,
not only of just the film itself,
but of the people that came together to make it happen.
And you know, there wasn't a monster budget.
I piecemealed every single thing that you could ever imagine
to pay for this film together
and showed up in New Mexico
with a ragtag bunch of people that--
half of them had never even ridden horses.
I didn't want the film to be about
all these shocking experiences--
horses going off cliffs, being trapped in snow storms.
I wanted it to be about a metaphor for life.
There's a scene in the film where we're standing in Arizona,
I think in the Superstition Wilderness,
and we're kind of like looking at a map
and we were actually completely lost.
Of course the film doesn't show that,
but we were in like a huge argument.
We stood up there and we kind of all, like,
were at each other's throats for about 20 minutes
and then we decided like,
"Hey, you know, let's pull it together."
And we all realized in that moment,
why we were there.
Like why it mattered
and the impact that this film was going to have.
So in the face of this obstacle and this hardship,
the thing to do is not argue.
That situation right there made us all take a step back
and be like, "Listen, this isn't about us.
"This isn't about the mistakes we're making.
"This is about the impact that it's going to have
"and the lives that it's going to--
"that's it's ultimately going to affect.
"And so no matter what gets in our way,
"we're going to accomplish this mission,
"we're going to tell that story."
So Heroes and Horses, the 500 Mile Project,
it's an approach to everyday life
is ultimately what it is.
And I'm really blessed that this film is where it is today.
Because when we were making it,
there was a lot of people that told me I was completely crazy,
I was totally insane, like they didn't even get it.
But in my heart, I knew that it was something special
and I knew that, you know, it would touch a lot of lives.
No matter what I did in my career,
it pales in comparison to the amount of lives
that have been saved through this particular process.
Seventy-five percent of the guys that even apply for the program
are on more than three psychiatric-based medications,
or opiate-based medications,
so it's a real very, very serious problem.
The first person that you see when you come home from the--
no matter what your military career was,
is a 25-year-old grad student
that prescribes you medication pretty much immediately.
But there needs to be other options
before they go down the narcotic road,
before they get wrapped up--
I mean, these guys have been-- some of them have been
in therapy and counseling and this for 8, 10, 11, 12,
the war's been going on for 18 years,
122,000 vets have killed themselves since 9/11.
How come we're not saying, "Hey, what's the impact
"on an entire generation of men and women
"that have served this country
"that are killing themselves at an exponential rate?"
I think that narcotics, I think that alcohol,
I think the rush to give people an option
rather than for them to take ownership happens so quickly.
Listen, I'm not saying that there's--
never take a drug for the rest of your entire life, ever.
But what I'm saying is like, trouble sleeping?
Well, if you're smoking cigarettes
and chewing Copenhagen and drinking Monster Energy drinks
and you're 100 pounds overweight,
well, let's start there,
you know, rather than just giving people narcotics.
And those choices, they need to be presented to these guys
before they go down the pharmaceutical road,
before they go down the self-medication,
the isolation, the suicide road.
Because life is a special thing and it's a gift
and it shouldn't be wasted in the face of adversity.
So they're given a horse and a mule,
or two horses-‑a saddle horse and a pack horse
and that's their responsibility.
And they learn everything about those horses,
we don't, you know, we're not out there guiding them,
they learn how to shoe horses, they learn how to pack horses,
they learn equine medicine,
they learn how to drive trucks and trailers
and run chainsaws, they're chop--
we show them how to chop trees, chopping trees down.
Everything that they're going to need to know
to work in the agricultural industry or the ranch industry
or the equine industry or the outfitting industry.
Then they go on an 11-day trip.
They'll ride the highest, the most gnarliest mountain ranges
and they lead the trip.
They do the land navigation, the stock management,
it rotates every day and we just hang back
and we let them make those mistakes,
we let them do what they need to do.
They'll ride around 400 miles at this point,
they have ridden on horses,
and none of these guys have any horse experience,
they're from New York City, they're from Chicago,
they're from Miami.
So we want them to take these tools,
take them and apply them in a real-world situation.
We separate them away from Heroes and Horses
and simulate them getting a job and going back to work.
A lot of these guys, matter of fact,
80 percent of them are unemployed.
So four to six weeks they complete this internship,
that's the end of the program, which is about nine,
nine or ten weeks in its entirety.
These guys move on and become productive,
contributing members to society, to their communities,
to their homes, to their families.
And a lot of them have been dead for ten years,
and I hate to use that term,
but they definitely weren't living.
A guy that came through our program,
he's the only Vietnam veteran I ever, you know,
have accepted in the program.
And he called up and he was like, "Please accept me."
I said, "You're 67 years old."
I was like, "You'll die in this program."
And he goes, "I'm already dead."
And I was like,
my guy that works for me, sitting next to me,
like wondering what I'm going to say next.
And I was like,
"You're accepted."
And his stories-‑you can read all his story about it today.
And he went in and quit all the stuff,
quit all the treatment, quit all the meds
and let's not-‑ we don't have 40 years,
you know, we don't have ten years, we have today.
So we have guys that come through the program,
that when they graduate, they want to come back, right?
They've gotten jobs, they've moved on with their life
but they come back and they volunteer and give back.
So I would say the majority of all the students come back
and help in some capacity and pay it forward,
which is really important to our model.
You know, they continue that growth.
There's been guys that have come back every single year
since I've started this.
I had a veteran write me just the other day.
And I'll use his nickname, Big Foot.
He wrote me a letter and he's like,
"You know, I got home and I didn't have an apartment.
"My brother had an apartment and it was under construction.
"I spent the past two months sleeping with a dust mask on,
"saving my money to get an apartment for my daughter and I.
"But I realized at that point,
"that where I was at that point in my life
"was actually by my own design.
"And now that I've taken ownership of my choices--"
And he attaches a picture of him and his daughter
in this beautiful apartment and he bought it all furnished
and did everything.
"Was that the obstacle ultimately is the way."
And he said, "All these therapy programs,
"all these things that I've done,
"all this blame-shifting on everybody else,"
he's like, "has only just put my life on pause for eight years."
He said, "I just want to say, 'Thank you.'"
My message is that, listen, what you're looking for,
you already have, it's inside.
And we can do something, but I can't just do it.
It's going to take a movement of people.
I find value in helping other people.
And ultimately that's what's helped me find my way as well.
I wanted to change the narrative of what humanity can do
in the face of adversity.
A matter of fact the opportunity that most people are looking for
is in the very obstacle that they're facing.
You know, when I first started this I wrote a quote
and the quote is, "We're not defined by our many scars,
"but by what we do after the wound closes."
And I wrote that almost seven years ago
and it still rings true today.
So everybody has a '500 Mile' journey.
So you already have that film in your life,
but you still got to, you still got to make it down that road.
You still have to continue on,
you still have to take ownership of those choices.
And it's in the choices that you make in the face of adversity
where you'll find what you're truly looking for.
And it all along-‑it may not be what you thought.