General Bob Dees and Valor Farm: What Service to Country Looks Like

General Bob Dees and Valor Farm: What Service to Country Looks Like


General Bob Dees' 501C3 not-for-profit called The National Center for Health Veterans (www.healthyveterans.org) is behind one of the most impressive initiatives to heal the bodies, minds and souls of America’s veterans that I have ever heard about.  It’s called Valor Farms, and it is a healing community—a true community—of veterans facing life challenges who live and work together on 339 pristine acres in Virginia, close to Liberty University and the Lynchburg Airport.  They reside in an ever-expanding number of tiny homes, which they also help to build.  They work with horses and other animals.  They farm and sell the produce in a retail store.  They receive counseling, family therapy, additional education and job skills.  In short, they remake their lives, even if their lives of service have come to include PTSD or major depression or panic disorder or addiction.

I say, “in short,” but the program at Valor Farm is anything but “short.”  Veterans sometimes live on campus for a year or more.  That may seem like a long time, but, trust me, I have seen hundreds of veterans shuttled in and out of clinics and residential treatment facilities and inpatient psychiatry units for year after year, some of them admitted dozens of times, often without any positive results at all.  At a time when our mental health care system is shattered, giving our heroic veterans the right amount of time to heal is just what the doctor ordered. 

One of the key elements of Valor Farm is that getting help isn’t a passive process of receiving psychotherapy or taking medicine or being admitted.  Community members don’t go back to solitary rooms to sleep all day, interrupted only by the drivel that passes for group therapy in most psychiatric hospitals and outpatient venues today.  It is an active process of participating in one’s own healing (so one owns it) and participating in the healing of others (because helping others is one of the best ways in the world to remind oneself of still being a valuable human being).

For those open to it, there is also spiritual teaching and worship, because communing with God is and always will be one of the ways a person can be reminded that his or her story is not over, because the next page or paragraph or sentence or word (God’s word, instilled in Man) can turn the entire tale to the good.  Really.  Truly.  I promise you this.  Take the time, take a hand, lend a hand, open your heart and mind to letting healing happen, and, miraculously, it will.

Miracles are unfolding at Valor Farm.  Maybe that is a lot for pure scientists and psychopharmacologists to get their heads around.  That’s okay.  Traditional psychiatry has let down millions of people by pretending that prescriptions targeting the brain are the answer to all of life’s pains and problems—mind and body.  Valor Farm is about restoring veterans’ hearts and souls, too.

I know General Dees won’t be comfortable with this paragraph, but you should know a little bit about this American hero.  For one thing, he was Chairman of the Presidential campaign of Dr. Ben Carson, a man who would have been a brilliant answer to the problems America was facing in 2016 and continues to face today.  He was the also the vice director for operational plans and interoperability for the Department of Defense, Assistant Division Commander of the 101st Airborne Division, Commander of the 2nd Infantry Division of U.S. Forces in Korea, Deputy Commander of V Corps in Europe, Commander of the U.S.-Israeli Joint Task Force for Missile Defense, Executive Director of Defense Strategies for Microsoft, executive director of Military Ministry.  He was the Associate Vice President of Military Outreach and the Director of the Institute for Military Resilience at Liberty University.  Oh, and he also wrote a trilogy of books on resiliency:  Resilient Warriors, Resilient Leaders and Resilient Nations.  There’s more, but I don’t want to risk truly angering the General.

Bottom line:  If you want to give to something that matters, give to The National Center for Health Veterans (www.healthyveterans.org).  Not a dollar will go to waste.  You have my word on it.  One other thing:  You’re going to be part of remaking lives, and that is going to pay all kinds of dividends in your own life.

Keith Ablow, MD