Our View: Where Purple Hearts meet white water
Our View: Rafting on the Colorado River, wounded Marines learn they can do more “than they realize.”
Early Friday morning, 24 river rafters will board buses in Flagstaff for a three-hour ride to Lees Ferry on the Colorado River.
Except for the odd artificial arm or leg, or the collapsible wheelchairs piled in the back of the bus, they are a nondescript bunch.
You would hardly know these young people hauling gear into the waiting inflatable pontoon boats for a 10-day river trip through the Grand Canyon had sacrificed, on behalf of their country, nearly the last full measure of their lives.
Sponsored by the Grand Canyon River Runners Association, 24 active-duty wounded warriors — all Marines on this trek — are on their way to an adventure of a lifetime, a trip through the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River.
It is planned to be the first of an annual series of expeditions sponsored by the association of professional river-runners. On this first trip, the outfitter is Arizona Raft Adventures.
Little about a river trip through the great canyon is passive or placid. The vets will ride through dozens of rapids, many of them heart-stopping. They will bucket-brigade gear on and off the big rafts at their camp sites. They will make and break camp.
And they will eat sand, sweat, freeze in soaking river spray and experience the isolated magnificence of one of the seven wonders of the natural world. In short, they will really live.
This is a tremendous endeavor sponsored by the river runners group, which spent 100 percent of donations raised to paying the $3,500 per person cost of the trek.
The Marines are members of the Wounded Warrior Regiment, which provides services and care for wounded, ill and injured Marines as they prepare either to return fully to active duty or transition back to civilian life.
As Marines themselves describe the trip, this is where Purple Hearts meet white water. And as organizer Hank Detering, himself a wounded Marine, observed: “They will learn they are capable of doing more things than they realize.”
Which is always the goal. Semper fi, Marines. And bon voyage.