Back In the Game: Hunting trips aimed at healing combat veterans' spirits

On a recent day in South Texas, a fresh-faced Marine from Kemp, Texas, sits at a local rancher’s dining room table, talking about hunting and fishing. Sitting in a wheelchair, he also recounts in his steady Texas drawl how he lost his legs June 27. Lance Cpl. Jeff Knight, 23, was on his second tour in Afghanistan when the blast from an improvised explosive device sheered off both legs at the knee. It was just two months before his birthday, and Knight, a combat engineer, had been sweeping for mines during a patrol. The recounting is one of the few moments in the conversation in which his hint of a smile fades and his tone becomes serious. With his black cowboy hat propped on the table nearby, and the black gloves that help with his grip still on his hands, Knight talks not only about what happened to him, but also about the need to move forward. “The only thing you want is to just have what you had back … There’s nothing like getting just a little glimmer of that sense of normalcy,” he says. And that is just what Knight and others are doing in South Texas, as participants in a hunting and fishing excursion sponsored by the nonprofit Combat Marine Outdoors organization...more