August-September 2019 • Nebraskaland 45
He told the doctors that he saw an English soldier in an old
uniform beckoning him, his mother said. Landon was sent
to a military hospital in Germany. There he began suff ering
seizures.
Separated from his friends, "he was a lost soul," Jane
said. "It was the beginning of the depression, the PTSD, the
anxiety."
In 2011, Landon was honorably discharged and returned
home to Omaha. Healthy and always outgoing with a
wonderful sense of humor when he enlisted, he was now
"a shell of his former self," a recluse who had lost so much
weight he was "basically a walking skeleton," she said.
For four years, little changed. In time, he would come out of
his room when family was over, but he didn't talk, and didn't
stay long.
"He could only take so much," Jane said.
When he became involved in Project Healing Waters in
2015, "there was a little bit of a spark," Jane said. At fi rst,
it was just as much of a struggle to get him to go to the
meetings as it was to get him to a doctor's appointment, but
after about a year, he started to open up to the volunteers and
other participants.
What really turned Landon around, Jane said, was a fi ve-
day trip in 2018 to the Freedom Ranch for Heroes in Wise
River, Montana, which hosts hundreds of members of Project
Volunteer Charles Baswell, a Navy veteran from
Omaha, teaches Scott Novve, an Air Force veteran
from Omaha, fly-casting during an outing at Bowling
Lake in Lincoln.
Mark Glover, an Army veteran from Lincoln, fly-fishes during an outing at Conagra Lake in Heartland America
Park in Omaha.
