Captain Stacy Bare served in the United States Army for 12 years. When he left, he dealt with the weight of those he’d lost, and the guilt of leaving communities and fellow soldiers behind. In the video above, Captain Bare doesn’t come out and say that he struggled with the effects of PTSD, but he eludes to it – struggling with alcoholism, addiction, and depression until his passion for the outdoors took hold.
Now, Captain Bare explains he’s revisiting sites of trauma in his life and rewriting their meaning through skiing, climbing, and mountaineering, and taking fellow veterans along with him. The most recent of which being a trip to northeastern Iraq to ski Mt. Halgurd.
“We wanted to see if Iraq could be a place that could hold beautiful memories for us,” he says of this trip with fellow US Army captains Robin Brown and Matt Griffin.
The short is an incredible take on coping with trauma, and the innate connections human beings are capable of making when the auspices of war are stripped down. As you go into this Memorial Day weekend, we recommend you take a minute to watch this one.
