The New York Times has a great article on veterans finding camaraderie and healing around the soil of a garden at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in East Orange, NJ. It tells the story of Reggie Mourning, a Vietnam veteran who spent many years driving a truck and, in the early 2000s, approaching homelessness. A man who wears 9mm pistol rounds on a chain around his neck and battled substance abuse for many years, he seems an unlikely candidate to embrace gardening. However Mourning, like many other veterans at the VA Center, has found solace in the gardening program, which has been undertaken in partnership with Planetree. The veterans at the Center plant, weed, tend to, and pick a variety of crops — harvesting some 1,000 pounds of vegetables this past summer.

For many of the veterans, the experience has been less about growing food and more about learning about themselves. So Mr. Mourning has felt a special kinship with Josh Urban, a 30-year-old Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who also suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. He had also found himself isolated, unable to fully reintegrate into the world outside the war zone, until tilling the soil with his fellow veterans helped him make his peace with life back home.

Patrick Corcoran, who served with the Marines in Lebanon, said: “It just lowers the volume in my head. It allows me to think on a rational level.”

Image courtesy of the New York Times

Read the full article here.