American farmers offer solace to war veterans

Published Date: September 07, 2007
NEW YORK: Matt McCue had a moment of enlightenment in Iraq while guarding the back door of a house where
his fellow soldiers were hunting Saddam Hussein- he bit into a sweet lime and discovered an interest in
horticulture.

Now he's part of a movement seeking to help returning US veterans find peace in civilian life by tilling the land.

You take someone who has been walking around the street looking for insurgents, who's basically trained to
capture people, to kill them ... you can't put them in some ordinary job and expect them to grasp on to it," McCue
said.

To go from that to watching things grow, to taking care of life, has been a very important step for me," he said by
telephone from Niger in West Africa, where he is a Peace Corps volunteer teaching agriculture.

It's beautiful to go to that nurture mode," he said, recalling how his curiosity was sparked by the produce in
farmers' markets in Iraq. "I had no idea there was a variety of lime that tasted like that.

McCue will be in New York this weekend for a forum on the impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on rural
communities. Organized by a group called Farms Not Arms, the forum is part of the buildup to Sunday's Farm
Aid concert, a benefit for family farmers that was first launched in 1985.

McCue, who grew up in the suburbs of Albuquerque, New Mexico, said it was hard to leave his field of millet,
sesame and beans in the village of Garbey Kourou, even for a short trip. He is hoping his story may be an
example to others.

William O'Hare, senior fellow at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, analyzed US military
casualties in a report last year and found the number of war deaths of soldiers from rural areas was
disproportionately high.

About 19 percent of the soldier-age population live in rural America but they account for 27 percent of the deaths,"
O'Hare told Reuters. He linked that to a scarcity of jobs in poor rural areas where people were less likely to go to
college or work full-time jobs, making a military career more appealing.

One of the biggest names associated with Farm Aid, musician Willie Nelson, has long been an anti-war
campaigner and Farms Not Arms says it opposes the war in Iraq.

But McCue and others involved in Saturday's forum said they were politically neutral and focused on how farmers
can work with veterans to their mutual advantage.

Our farmers are in trouble right now and so are our soldiers," said Nadia McCaffrey, whose son Patrick was
killed in Iraq in 2004 -- one of at least 3,750 US military deaths there since the March 2003 invasion.

She founded a group called Veterans Village to help soldiers returning with post traumatic stress disorder and
other problems. The group plans to set up a self-sustaining organic farm in North Carolina for veterans.

The farm is going to be a safe place for them to be," said McCaffrey. "Many of them thought they were going to go
back to life and put the war behind them but it didn't quite work this way.

Saturday's event will mark the launch of a politically neutral group called the Farmer-Veteran Coalition to provide
farm jobs, training and land for veterans, organizers said.

Steve Ledwell, a US Navy veteran and recovering alcoholic and drug addict, runs a shelter in New Hampshire
called the Veterans Victory Farm which houses up to 19 veterans.

Getting back to the basics of farm life is very therapeutic," Ledwell said. A similar facility for as many as 200
veterans is planned for Long Island, New York.

When McCue looks back on his time in Iraq, he likes to recall farmers passing through checkpoints to take their
crops of watermelons or pomegranates to markets that continued to function despite the violence and chaos.

I realized there was a power in that," he said. "There are more soldiers in the United States than farmers at this
point. Five years down the line maybe it won't be rare for vets to take this path." --- Reuters

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American farmers offer solace to war veterans