Spirits Aligned

Marvin Talayumptewa, high priest of the Hopi Tribe from Second Mesa, Ariz., stands before 20 Marines, three Navy corpsmen, three river guides, retired Marine Lt. Col. Hank Detering and me, the token Army veteran representing The American Legion and Operation Comfort Warriors. 

We’re on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, just north of its confluence with the Little Colorado, a sacred place of origins to the Hopi and other native peoples. The priest explains that when a Hopi youngster would go on a vision quest he would walk from the reservation nearly 17 miles, eschewing all food and water until he reached the canyon whose walls he would mine for salt.

“This is where we came from, all of us, the Hopi,” Talayumptewa explains to the veterans and river guides, a semicircle of his fellow Hopis behind him. “When I heard you on the boats yelling to us, it was not just you that I heard, but the voices of all your fallen ancestors and friends. You spoke in one voice, from one group of warriors to another.”

He explains his religion, and his status as the elder and One Horn priest who takes “young bucks” to sacred places so they’ll better understand their spiritual heritage. The river represents the spot where the Hopi entered the fourth world, where they live today, Talayumptewa explains. He says it possesses great powers.

“Take all your fears, all your loneliness, anger, all the bad inside you ... and give it to the river. The river will take it from you, wash you of all the evil, and leave you in a better place.” 

The priest steps into the raft and asks us to hold hands. We do so, in silence. He prays in a language none present except the Hopis understand. Everyone feels the power. Before we push off, he marks each of our sternums with sacred clay (a hematite ochre substance used in Hopi religious rituals) and says a prayer over everyone. “May your journey be safe, and may the river cleanse you.” 

The 226-mile, 10-day Grand Canyon Warriors Rafting Trip involves camping, hiking to historical sites and waterfalls, and rafting through some of the fiercest rapids in North America. We would, in fact, be safe. And two days later, we would wash away all our negative energy in the Dubendorf Rapids, which are equally capable of drowning us as they are of cleansing any internal demons. But cleanse us the rapids did.

The Grand Canyon’s epic beauty comes from the various rock strata seen inside it. It is a trip through time, the various geological epochs marking our descent in curving lines of rock.

Amity Collins has been a Grand Canyon river guide for eight years; she works as a substitute teacher during the winter months. As we make our way in, she recites a simple mantra: “Know the canyon’s history. Study rocks made by time.” 

Eventually, even the most geologically uninterested traveler can repeat her words and understand the rock strata represented by each one. In order of appearance, the canyon reveals the Kaibab Limestone, Toroweap Formation, Coconino Sandstone and Hermit Shale (Know The Canyon’s History), followed by the Supai Formation, Redwall Limestone, Muav Limestone, Bright Angel Shale and Tapeats Sandstone (Study Rocks Made By Time).

Along the way, Collins points out local flora (honey mesquite, catclaw acacia and exotic tamarisk, to name a few) and fauna (goats, sheep, eagles, ravens, hundreds of seminocturnal bats and, most frighteningly for me, rattlesnakes).

Leading us is Jon Harned, a guide for Arizona Raft Adventures, which facilitated our trip. Jon has been on the river since he was 19, a span of nearly 27 years, and it’s obvious in his casual knowledge of every campsite, hiking trail, ruin and landmark. In a coincidence, Jon’s wife was serving as river guide for the Hopis when our groups met on the riverbank. 

I ask Jon how often Hopis share their sacred prayers and the protective markings with other travelers. “I’ve been down this river hundreds of times,” he responds with awe in his voice, “and this is the first time I’ve ever seen such a thing.”

Owen Ludwig is the third of our guides. A gregarious Mainer with an infectious laugh, he plays guitar every night, talking about previous trips and eating the meals – salmon, steak, pork chops and other delicacies – we prepare. During days on land, Owen leads hikes to see fossilized footprints of prehistoric mammals, or brachiopods embedded in the shale walls. But he seems most at ease leading the paddleboat through rapids larger than any others in the United States. 

The last thing most of us hear before facing each of them is, “Oh, this doesn’t look good ...” which inevitably trails off into his hallmark giggle. 

Detering, a Vietnam veteran, came up with the idea of a Grand Canyon river rafting trip for wounded veterans. He felt the experience could be therapeutic, and the camaraderie a benefit to all. 

“People say the Grand Canyon is like a cathedral without a roof,” he told The Arizona Republic as he watched a group of veterans check into their hotel. “This can be a life-changing trip. But they’re going to come back feeling like they can do a lot of things, probably more than they realize. I wanted them to feel that. And they’re going to come back with amazing stories.”

Detering joined the Marine Corps at 19 as an aviation cadet and then went on to be a pilot. Today, at 70, he looks 40. During the Vietnam War, he flew 100 missions in A-4 Skyhawks and another 150 in A-6 Intruders. He also spent time on the ground with the troops as a forward air controller. He retired in 1985.

Not long after, Detering took up an offer from his daughter to raft the Colorado; she was the guide. That trip led him to volunteer as an assistant guide or “swamper,” helping with everything from setting up camp to preparing food. It was then that he had an epiphany about a trip for Marine Corps veterans. 

“Two years ago, I was on a panel that was asked to discuss what we could do for returning veterans,” he says. “I came away feeling that I had to do something more than talk about it, so I proposed this trip to the Grand Canyon River Runners Association (GCRRA) board. All the board members know that rafting through the Grand Canyon can be a life-changing experience, and we hoped that this trip would be just that for some of our Marines.”

A member of American Legion Post 491 in Kennett Square, Pa., Detering says he’s especially grateful for funds provided by the Legion’s Operation Comfort Warriors (OCW) program. It paid for pre- and post-trip lodging and dinners while GCRRA covered travel expenses. 

“OCW also paid to get some of the guys equipment, something we desperately needed,” Detering adds.

For all the aesthetic beauty and grandeur of the Grand Canyon, the spiritual journey is what stuck with the men. 

Five months after the trip, I met up with Paul Coppola of Sandown, N.H., and Ryan Groves of Columbus, Ohio, who took the Grand Canyon trip with me last summer. The timing couldn’t have been better: our meeting gave Ryan a chance to visit the grave of his best friend, Tim Gibson, a Marine who helped retake Fallujah only to die in a helicopter crash in January 2005. He’s buried near American Legion Post 98 in Merrimack, N.H., which hosts an annual softball tournament in Tim’s memory.

Ryan wears a bracelet engraved with Tim’s name and the Marine Corps emblem. His fallen friend is never far from Ryan’s mind.

We met with other local friends of Tim’s and visited the cemetery together, talking about our physical and emotional journey through the Grand Canyon, one of the planet’s most inspiring places.

On the first day of that trip in late August, we broke into groups of six, each assigned one of four daily tasks to accomplish, with two days off: prepare the water (using various chemicals and a filter), set up latrines, cook food and wash dishes. My group included two Navy corpsmen, Manny Gonzalez (a young Legionnaire from Post 422 in Rialto, Calif., who had astounding stamina despite the 40-pound medical bag he carried at all times) and Jamie Havig, who served with the Marines’ 1st Recon Battalion at Fallujah, Najaf and Ramadi (his running commentary and banter amused everyone). Marine Corps veterans Dave Gill and Levi White rounded out our team.

Paul Coppola is a 27-year-old Legionnaire who served with the 2nd Combat Engineer Battalion in Afghanistan. Nowadays he helps run Ilneva Farm in East Kingston, N.H., which gives him a chance to be outdoors and work with animals (chickens, goats, cows and horses roam the property). Deb Marston, who owns the farm with her husband, Bob, was thrilled to bring Paul aboard. She brags about him, sharing pictures on Facebook of “our beloved Paul, who works every day to overcome the damage from traumatic brain injury.”

Paul’s parents encouraged him to go to college after high school, but he struggled academically. Finally, he got their blessing to enlist in the Marine Corps. 

“My desire was to be an EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) tech,” he told me while we were on the river. “I didn’t want a job where I sat in an office. Ever since I was young, I had a desire to be in some combat role.” 

In March 2011, Paul got his wish, deploying to Afghanistan’s Sangin province, site of some of the war’s heaviest fighting. Two months later, on May 2, the day Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs in Pakistan, a suicide bomber on a motorcycle attacked Paul’s unit and detonated explosives just 10 feet away. 

“When you were in Sangin, you always knew something could happen,” he says. 

Paul and several other Marines were knocked to the ground, and while no one was injured, he soon began suffering crippling headaches and balance problems. He considers himself lucky that the 40 pounds of C-4 explosives in his backpack did not ignite. On June 30, he survived another blast that wounded one Marine and killed another.

Eventually Paul returned to the United States to  specialized treatment for traumatic brain injury. 

“I wanted to honor my friends who had passed, so I got a hero bracelet for Lance Cpl. (Robert) Greniger, Lance Cpl. (Joshua) McDaniels, Lance Cpl. (Ronald) Freeman,” he says. “It was a way to pay tribute to them and to more or less remind myself what I have to fight for, and why I need to do well, be successful and keep my head straight.

“When Marvin (Talayumptewa) was speaking to us and praying over us, he kept reiterating that whatever trouble we had brought into the canyon we were going to leave in the canyon. For a lot of us there, it was injuries we had sustained or friends we had lost. I immediately started thinking about my friends who had died and people I had seen injured.”

Several days later, guided by Owen, our group’s raft entered the Dubendorf Rapids. While they didn’t appear right off to be the worst of the rapids we’d faced, random waves struck from nearly every direction. Seconds later, the raft tipped over, and we were thrown into the cold, violent water. 

“After I surfaced and got back on one of the larger boats, I looked down and realized I didn’t have my hero bracelet on anymore,” Paul says. “The whole point of us being there was to heal together and to leave our troubles and ailments in the canyon. It just seemed so ironic that my bracelet was lost at what was essentially the most emotional time of the trip for me. It was kind of that feeling of being in combat again, where you are fighting for your life and you don’t know what the outcome will be.

“I didn’t want to lose that bracelet in any other place, because at that moment I was the closest I’ve been to my friends since I lost them. It was almost a relief, in a way, knowing that I could almost reach out and touch them. The fact that I lost my bracelet and now it is sitting, hopefully pristinely, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon is just surreal.”

Ryan, too, was struck by the spiritual power of the canyon. A member of American Legion Post 331 in Ravenna, Ohio, he served as a sergeant with the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, in Iraq. 

“I went to college right out of high school and played football for two years at Mount Union,” he says. “I studied pre-law. I wanted to be a lawyer.” 

Then he broke his ankle and felt lost without sports, like he hadn’t yet become a man. Belonging to a family that had several who served, the choice of what to do next was easy: join the Marine Corps. He reported to his unit Sept. 11, 2001, and soon realized what was coming. “When I saw the planes hitting the buildings, I knew we were at war,” he recalls.

Ryan and his childhood best friend, Carl Dorris, were assigned to the same unit. “Carl and I had a weird feeling inside us that we needed to go do something. Now it made sense. It was almost like we got the message before anybody else.” 

He hoped to make a career of the Marine Corps, but the First Battle of Fallujah changed his plan. 

“I was standing next to the Humvee talking to my driver when a rocket or an RPG landed at my feet,” he says. “At first, I thought I was paralyzed. I couldn’t move. Both my arteries were severed, so I was just gushing blood.” 

Semicoherent, Ryan ordered his men to get a tourniquet on him and get him to the hospital. One of the corpsmen who treated him at the scene was Michael Driver of Oregon, who – by sheer coincidence – was also on the Grand Canyon trip and saw Ryan for the first time since that day.

He underwent surgeries at Fallujah, Baghdad, Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and Bethesda Naval Hospital. One leg was amputated, and doctors thought the other would have to go, too. Coming out of a medically induced coma, Ryan remembers feeling afraid and alone. “I’d wake up a lot screaming, thinking we were under attack and looking for my weapon,” he says.

Doctors were able to save Ryan’s other leg by detaching his ankle from his calf and reattaching it above the knee. 

“The medical treatment I received in D.C. and Bethesda was exceptional,” he says. “I knew they didn’t have a lot to work with, and were seriously trying to convince me to get rid of the other leg, but I wanted to fight for it. You can always get rid of it, but you can’t put it back on.” He now uses a prosthetic, which works well for him.

Ryan went on to graduate from Georgetown University and Ohio State University Law School.

“The biggest takeaway I have from the Grand Canyon trip was me figuring out my limits again,” he says, looking back on the adventure. “I’ve gotten stronger. You know, I couldn’t walk great right away, essentially learning to walk again at Georgetown. So I never knew I was even capable of doing the hikes, and the swimming and the rafting. My biggest concern was losing my (prosthetic) leg. 

“I can still do some of this stuff. You know, I can’t run fast or jump high, but I can still do a lot of this active stuff, and being somewhere that powerful made me powerful, too,” he adds. “What was neat about our trip was that it was a bunch of warriors, and we understood each other, and
I didn’t really have to ask for help.” 

Of his Grand Canyon journey, the prayer session with the Hopi priest touched Ryan most. “By that time, we understood this was a powerful place,” he says. “Up until that point, we’d kind of been warned to steer clear of the Hopi, as you might expect; it’s a sacred place for them, and we didn’t want to offend them. When we found out that they invited us over to say hi, that was mind-blowing.

“Marvin explained why they were welcoming us ... it’s because we are warriors like they are warriors, and our spirits are aligned,” Ryan says. “Marvin had us lift up our shirts and put the sacred clay on our hearts and said a little prayer for each of us. When we got blessed by Marvin, I felt like it was somewhat of a new beginning ... like I was supposed to be on this trip. To say that I respect the native people and their faith is an understatement.”

As the Marines’ boat neared the Hopi on the river, Jon taught them a Hopi war yell, and at the count of three, they all bellowed it out. 

“When we were all in a circle holding hands before the prayer, Marvin told us that when we did the yell he didn’t just hear us yell – he heard all our fallen brothers at the same time,” Paul recalls. “For a lot of us who are carrying baggage – especially me, with the memory of four of my friends who died and a friend who lost his leg, and the memories and nightmares, and just dealing with that on a daily basis – to hear someone who didn’t know a single one of us but respected us enough that he wanted to bring us into their purpose for being on the river ... it was just unbelievable. After the blessing, it was like a weight was lifted off everybody’s shoulders. We were able to open up after that and talk about our own personal baggage, and we did just that.”

As for Ryan, the trip showed him just how much he can do. “I was really sad seeing the Grand Canyon getting further and further away in the rearview mirror,” he says. “So I contacted another river guide and went back a month later.”

The first time we flipped the boat, in the Dubendorf Rapids, Ryan had taken off his prosthetic leg because he knew he’d lose it if we went over. “Right after we were blessed, something inside me just told me to chill out. Chill out and swim. When we were with Marvin, he referenced (the Hopi) belief that the river essentially washes away the bad things in your life. That’s why they go down there. It’s spiritual for them, and they come out stronger. So when we started to flip, I accepted the fact that I would go in the water, and all I thought was, ‘Relax, we’ve been blessed.’”

The hikes were long and grueling in the canyon. With one leg, Ryan was concerned he might hold up the rest of us. Paul viewed it differently. 

“Almost immediately, we started looking up to Ryan,” he explains. “Everyone was there dealing with some type of injury, but none of us were dealing with an injury as physical as Ryan’s. When you are on the verge of passing out on a seven-mile hike, on a ledge 300 feet over the water, and you look behind you, and here’s this guy missing one leg, and his other leg is fused at the knee so it can’t even bend, and he’s not even breaking a sweat – this guy’s unbelievable. 

“That, most of all, carried other people to be able to say they would do a certain hike or make it to a waterfall. We all decided that if we were going to go do something, Ryan was going to do it with us. We were all going to do whatever we could to make sure that Ryan was going to experience every part of the trip that we could possibly let him.”

Paul and Ryan say they’re grateful to The American Legion for helping make the trip possible. “Being a married man and having a newborn, paying for a trip out to the Grand Canyon wasn’t necessarily in my budget,” Paul says. “We were very fortunate that The American Legion had set up to pay for other things and allow other funds to be used for all our flights.”

Ryan, who came from a Legion family, agrees.

“My grandfather and all my uncles were members of The American Legion, and that’s how I became a fan,” he says. “I went into my first post when I was probably 12 years old. I hope they continue to help veterans (with the Grand Canyon trip), because until you go down and see it and meet 24 new brothers, words can’t do the trip justice. If you are thinking about donating to a cause, I don’t know if there is anything better (than Operation Comfort Warriors). Once you get through this, you feel like you can do more than you did before, and you have several new friends to help you through it.”

Jon, our guide, won’t forget the group’s last night on the river together. 

“Everyone was anxious,” he says. “We were regretting that the trip was ending. Some guys were singing at the top of their lungs into the canyon night. Others were crying as they shared the gruesome realities of things they had experienced. No one was untouched. The Grand Canyon has this effect on people. It opens us up like a can opener. Our heads, hearts and souls are open and exposed.”  

Mark Seavey is a writer, editor and blogger for The American Legion National Headquarters, and a combat veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom.