After becoming the chapter president of the local NWTF chapter in 2015, I started to talk to my committee about doing an outreach event. The NWTF has three outreach programs: Women in the Outdoors, Wheelin’ Sportsmen, and JAKES (Juniors Acquiring Knowledge, Ethics, and Sportsmanship).

After discussing things and noting that our Hunting Heritage Banquet was scheduled on the Youth Hunt Weekend, we decided that a Wheelin’ Sportsman hunt would be our choice. This program is designed for physically handicapped people to try to get them hunting. Recently, mentored hunts with injured veterans had become a popular Wheelin’ Sportsman event. We had been told about another non-profit organization called Operation Injured Soldier. Their mission was to get injured veterans outdoors, either hunting or fishing. What was convenient was that you just told them how many hunters you could accommodate, the day(s) you wanted to hunt and the best hotel location. They would pay for the hotel rooms and any licenses the hunters needed.

So, we decided that our committee would be the first year’s mentors so that we did not bite off more than we could chew. As we divided the committee into pairs that would be each take one hunter, we decided to request three hunters. We requested funding from the NY chapter of NWTF to hold the hunt. The $250 of funding came from the Super Fund, a special fund that only gets funded by fundraising events within the state. We used the money to buy food and drinks for dinners on Friday and Saturday and lunch on Saturday and Sunday. We also bought each hunter a box call to take with them after the hunt.

Friday night came and the hunters met us for a cookout and campfire so we could all get to know each other before hunting Saturday morning. Unfortunately, we only had one hunter show up, so we offered to take Operation Injured Soldier’s New York program leader, a wounded veteran himself. Environmental Conservation Office Brett Armstrong brought his K9 and did a demonstration for the hunters. We sat around and chatted for awhile before heading to bed to barely sleep before meeting back up in the morning.

I was part of the group that took the OIS leader out. He was a Marine who became a firefighter after leaving the Corps. Then after 9/11, he enlisted in the Army as a middle-aged man with a family. While training to go to the Middle East, he fell during training in the mountains and injured his back. He walked with two braces so we were limited on how far we could walk, and we had to hunt from a ground blind so the hunter could sit in a chair instead of on the ground. Luckily, another committee member had permission on a property where a tom had been strutting in a field next to a hedgerow where we could drive a truck out and set up a blind.

We got in and setup early, the bird gobbled as it started to get light out. We called to him and got him to respond. After it was fly down time it became apparent that he was following hens in the opposite direction from where we were. However, two hens came in behind us and stayed next to our decoys for close to half an hour. After they finally walked off, the tom was long gone. We tried to get closer to where he was the last time we heard him but our limited mobility made it tricky. Not long after, we called it a morning and headed back to camp.

After getting back, we got news that the other hunter was successful. It was his first turkey ever harvested. The hunter was from Texas and had served in Afghanistan. While there, he stepped on a mine and lost from the knee down on one leg. When their group got to camp there was congratulations all around and picture taking. As we sat around eating lunch, we talked about hunting and what OIS meant to the hunter. Hearing him say that harvesting a turkey did not matter to him, just getting out and talking to other veterans and hunters is what mattered the most to him, really opened our eyes to what our hunt was doing for them.

In the following years, we held three more veteran’s turkey hunts and expanded into youth outreach events. Two family fishing days, a waterfowl hunt, and four youth turkey hunts to be exact.