BRANFORD — When Michelle Mullin first started coming to Take A Vet Fishing outings, she was “a rattling shell of a human being,” she said.
Mullin, who’s from Plainville, was deployed in Iraq for 11 months as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. She returned in 2006. Three months later, the sound of air raid sirens on an intercom system triggered a full-on panic attack and the onset of PTSD, she said.
“This program basically singlehandedly was able to give me the environment to recover and to be social again,” she said, amid 40 of her fellow veterans perched on rocks and chairs, fishing poles in hand, at a recent Take A Vet Fishing event at Killam’s Point in Branford.
That pretty much sums up the mission of TAVF, which started as an outreach program by the First Congregational Church of Branford in 2007 as a way to engage and provide fellowship to disabled and recovering veterans.
“The idea was to get them in the open air for a relaxing day of fishing and provide everything, including equipment, food, and drink,” said board member Bob Reinwald, as the heady aroma of burgers on a grill wafted through the balmy air. In 2017, TAVF celebrated its 5,000th participant.
The burgers were part of the generous spread of food provided by the Branford Rotary Club, a sponsor of the event.
“What you get here that you don’t get anywhere else is a sense of safety, being around other veterans,” Mullin said, as her service dog, Rocksha, an American bully, settled beside her. “Outside of here I basically never drop my guard, but here I can have people sneak up behind me and I don’t jump.
“If you show up and you’re not okay and you just feel like you need space, you’ll catch a ‘hey,’ and then people will just leave you alone.”
Jim Manone ambled over, petting Rocksha and showing Mullin photos of his dogs on his phone.
Manone served in Da Nang in South Vietnam from 1965 to 1968 with the Third Army Division. He played in an Army band, boosting morale of the troops and playing taps at funerals, he said.
“I saw a lot,” he said. “A lot of damage and pain.”
“These people, these volunteers, they go out of their way to make us feel comfortable,” Manone said. “You can tell by the food, by the breakfast, they come around constantly, ‘can we get you anything?’ ‘can we get that pole out for you? can we bait it for you?’”
Manone said he learned about the program from Harris Towne, a Disabled American Veterans driver who transports him from his home in Danbury to the VA in West Haven.
“One day, Harris asked me if I fished. I said no. He said ‘would you like to fish?’ I said sure,” Manone recalled.
Towne, an Air Force veteran, said that drivers for the DAV, which provides free transportation to VA medical facilities for injured and ill veterans, make it a point to spread the word about the fishing program.
“It really helps them out,” he said. “Some of them have PTSD and this soothes their nerves. On the way home, they tell me, ‘Harris, I enjoyed myself so much, I forgot all of my problems for the whole day.’”
Towne said he got involved with TAVF in the midst of trying to help his son.
“He was in the military, the Army, and suffering from PTSD, and I constantly tried to get him to go, and he only came to one event, and unfortunately last year he succumbed to it,” he said. “If he had come more often, maybe it could have changed things.”
The benefits, he said, go beyond enjoyment and relaxation. “There’s people who have gone through the process and they may have some ideas on how to navigate the system to get what they’re entitled to,” he said.
Over by the rocks, there was a whoop. Riyad “Rudy” Faris, a rising senior at Branford High School, was helping a visually impaired veteran reel in a fish. Since 2007, TAVF has been partnering with the West Haven VA Eastern Blind Rehabilitation Center to introduce visually impaired veterans to fishing and fly tying.
Faris said he was working at Camp Totoket, a weeklong camp for at-risk youth and refugee children at Killam’s Point, when he met Reinwald and learned about the TAVF program. He’s been volunteering at outings ever since.
He described the experience as “fun and challenging.”
“Helping the blind vets bait their hooks, they’re sharp hooks, and one wrong move, and they might get injured,” he said. “But it’s a great thing when you see how they’re enjoying themselves.”
On the deck of Killam’s Point Conference Center, where volunteers were serving hotdogs and hamburgers, Joe Arnsen relaxed with a group of DAV drivers.
Arnsen, who was ALS, has been involved with TAVF since 2008. He said he had just gotten a motorized wheelchair from his wife and kids and this was the first place he wanted to go.
“When you get a minute, you go out there and look at all the smiles on all those veterans’ faces,” he said by way of explanation.
He said the program is not just for veterans but also for the volunteers.
“Spending a day out here just makes you feel so good inside,” he said, as a seagull swooped above the sparkling waters.
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