Security Halt!
Welcome to Security Halt! Podcast, the show dedicated to Veterans, Active Duty Service Members, and First Responders. Hosted by retired Green Beret Deny Caballero, this podcast dives deep into the stories of resilience, triumph, and the unique challenges faced by those who serve.
Through powerful interviews and candid discussions, Security Halt! Podcast highlights vital resources, celebrates success stories, and offers actionable tools to navigate mental health, career transitions, and personal growth.
Join us as we stand shoulder-to-shoulder, proving that even after the mission changes, the call to serve and thrive never ends.
Security Halt!
#237 Luke’s Wings: Travel Assistance for Military Families in Need
In this heartfelt episode of Security Halt!, host Deny Caballero sits down with Fletcher, the visionary founder of Luke’s Wings, a nonprofit organization providing travel assistance to military families. Fletcher shares the emotional story behind the organization’s creation, beginning with a life-changing encounter at Walter Reed Hospital that revealed the critical need for caregiver support.
This episode dives deep into the growth and impact of Luke’s Wings, from helping wounded service members to supporting veterans in hospice care, first responders, and their families. Fletcher also discusses future goals, including new initiatives for mental health, addiction recovery, and survivors of military sexual trauma. With an emphasis on community support and the power of connection, this conversation highlights the importance of uniting to uplift veterans and their loved ones.
Don’t forget to follow, share, like, and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts to stay connected to impactful stories that inspire change.
BE A BRO! Support the show!!
buymeacoffee.com/sechaltpodcast
https://buymeacoffee.com/sechaltpodcast
Chapters
00:00Introduction to Integrative Health and Art Therapy
07:03The Journey into Art Therapy and Personal Health
14:01Trauma-Informed Care and the Evolution of Therapy
21:01Navigating Personal Challenges and Professional Growth
33:09Morning Routines and Self-Care Practices
39:11Integrating Physical and Emotional Health
52:15The Journey of Personal Growth and Travel
01:00:09Integrative Health Practices and Client Experiences
Instagram: @securityhalt
Tik Tok: @security.halt.pod
LinkedIn: Deny Caballero
Follow Fletcher on LinkedIn, on social media and check out Lukes Wings AND DONATE TODAY!
Instagram: @fletcherdoudgill
https://www.instagram.com/fletcherdoudgill/?hl=en
Instagram: @lukeswingsusa
https://www.instagram.com/lukeswingsusa/?hl=en
Website: lukeswings.org
https://lukeswings.org/
X: @LukesWingsUSA
Produced by Security Halt Media
security hot podcast. Let's go with an expert in guerrilla warfare, with a man who's the best with guns, with knives, with his bare hands, a man who's been trained to ignore, ignore weather, to live off the land. Job was disposed of enemy personnel to kill period with nutrition blatch. How's it going, man? Welcome?
Speaker 2:secured out podcast thanks for having me. It's great to be here absolutely.
Speaker 1:um, I always love to be able to give a platform to non nonprofits that are doing great things and just absolutely love your mission. I had the pleasure of meeting you guys at the SOCOM Care Coalition event last year and it always blows me away when we have nonprofits that are willing to go out of their way to make everything happen, making every possible mission occur to get our veterans, get our service members home when they're needed the most, and make that air travel absolutely the thing. That's not a problem, not even a factor to consider, and what you guys are doing with your nonprofit is an amazing mission. But today, before we get into that, I want to ask you how did you get involved with this? How did this mission first pick, uh, become, uh, uh a?
Speaker 2:thing. Yeah, so Luke's wings, the the story is in its name. Um, in 2007, in the spring of 2007, a friend of mine, sarah Wingfield, was a Redskins cheerleader ambassador, which is, you know, an NFL cheerleader. But they do more appearance work than they do on field work and she was at Walter Reed, which is the military hospital here in Bethesda, Maryland, and she was visiting the troops. So she was there with some of the other cheerleaders. She had her high heels on her feet hurt, you know, she was not really feeling the whole day. She was doing one of these appearances. And she gets to Walter Reed and she starts visiting with the troops and kind of her attitude about the whole thing changed. And she tells that story openly about how, you know, she was complaining about her feet hurting and didn't want to be there and stuff and about I don't know.
Speaker 2:A couple 30, 40 minutes into being at Walter Reed she met a service member named Luke Shirley, and so the name of our organization is Luke's Wings, after Luke Shirley and Sarah Wingfield. And, as the story goes, sarah tried to talk to Luke and Luke wouldn't talk to her. Goes, sarah tried to talk to Luke and Luke wouldn't talk to her. Now imagine a 22 year old service member you know young man, uh, wearing a Dolphins Jersey a Miami Dolphins Jersey, by the way in a wheelchair and standing in front of him is a beautiful, you know mid 20 year old Redskins cheerleader in her outfit and he's not paying attention to that.
Speaker 2:Something's obviously really wrong, right and um absolutely, and so Sarah kind of was kind of surprised, I guess, by the fact that he was being very dismissive of of her attention, and so she kept trying to break in and trying to make conversation and it wouldn't work. And then his mom showed up. And when Luke's mom showed up, that's when everything changed. One, when his mom showed up to that room, he became more present, he became more aware, he dialed into Sarah being there and they spent the rest of that that day together, um, talking and getting to know each other. And that experience stayed with Sarah. She thought about it every day until December of 2007,. Some, maybe six months later, when she and I had lunch in Silver Spring, maryland, and she told me that story and I said you know, sarah, the interesting thing about your story to me is how his mood changed when his mom showed up. Was she there for like visiting hours, you know, was she in town for the weekend, like that was obviously lucky that she showed up for you? And Sarah said no, his mom lives there, his mom is living at Walter Reed. And so we dove into that. We explored that more during our conversation and it turned out that the moms and the wives were living at Walter Reed. These service members were injured and they were through a two, three, four year recovery process and they were living there. They were marrying their fiancées at Walter Reed Hospital. Right, they were having children at the hospital, children were being born there and the first two years of the child's life experience was within the bubble of the Walter Reed Medical Campus and Building 62, which is where the Wounded were. You know, uh, recovering. That whole thing just completely blew my mind that that was how, that, how this thing was, was happening, right, and the, the context of the time, uh, the passage of time, you know the three years, the four years that they were there, you know so much happened and and and.
Speaker 2:To fast forward a little bit, what we also discovered was that these service members, they were never going back home to middle America, where they they grew up, because they were spending so much time to read that. You know that they planted roots in the in the area, right, they would buy a condo, they would buy a house, the kids would start going to school in the area and they would never leave, and so, anyway, I digress. The point of the story is that Sarah's meeting with Luke Shirley Sarah Wingfield and Luke Shirley in the spring of 2007,. And then that story being told to me in December of 2007 was the light bulb moment when I turned to my friend, sarah Wingfield, and I said you know what we should do, sarah? We should throw a party in DC at the Sydney Tavern Club, and we bring a bunch of people out and raise some money. And then we'll go to Walter Reed and we'll offer to fly the moms home. So we'll find Luke's mom and we'll find other moms and we'll offer to fly them home so that they can get some respite and they can check in with the other little kids.
Speaker 2:Because, you know, these service members are early twenties, which means that they probably have younger siblings back home, right? And so let's get the moms and let's buy them some plane tickets, let's send them home. They can sleep in their own beds, they can check the mail, they can check in with the other kids and, you know, and if there's some money left over, check in with the other kids. And and you know, and if there's some money left over, maybe we'll offer to fly some, some girlfriends, in or some wives or fiancees into Walter Reed. We'll just see what happens. And Sarah looked at me and she said can we do that? And I said yeah, man, if you know, if somebody tries to stop me from buying another American citizen a plane ticket, f them right.
Speaker 2:Like nothing's going to stop me from just buying somebody a plane ticket. So we.
Speaker 1:you know, Fletcher, that and I want to pause and reflect on that real quick. What a lot of people don't understand is the caregiver fatigue. The amount of love and compassion that you have for your, your family member, is unmeasurable. But at some point the mothers, the wives, the support structure, they need help too. And in that time period, that early GWAT time period that you're talking, a passion for helping our service members. But the ability to see a mission through and one of the biggest roadblocks was always what you just mentioned, that the DOD coming in and saying hey, you can't do that, you can't purchase that amount of money or those tickets might be too much. That always frustrated me when I heard how willing so many people were wanting to help but met roadblocks, and that's just such a frustration. When you first started this mission, before it was completely flushed out and had a complete mechanism of support, what were some of the roadblocks you were seeing on?
Speaker 2:the ground? Good question. So we threw the party at the City Tavern Club in March of 2008. And by March of 2008, I had incorporated the organization as a 501c3. C3. I had set up a contract with McNair Travel Management, which is now called Direct Travel Management National Travel Agency, because I knew that my core competency was not booking plane tickets. I figured we would raise the money, we would review the flights and then we would hand them off to a really good travel agent so that our travelers could experience what, like a CEO, would experience, where they basically had a travel agent working for them, making arrangements and doing all these things. So that was the model. And so by March of 08, we had I had set all that up a website with an application form and everything else. And then, march of 08, we threw the party at the city tavern Club. We raised 13 grand Not a lot, you know, but it was enough.
Speaker 2:And we went up to Walter Reed. We met with the Soldier Family Assistance Center and, to your question, what they said to us was look, everybody knocks on our door here at Walter Reed and they make these really lofty promises but no one really understands. They're all good ideas, right, but nobody really understands how much effort and labor and money and time, et cetera, it's going to take to deliver on what they're what they're talking about. And you know, so we have here at Walter Reed, we kind of have a trust issue with everybody who knocks on our door and offers all these things Cause. Then we, we tell our service members and our wounded warriors, you know, and the wives and the caregivers and the hidden heroes, as we call them, you know that this is available, but then if it dries up, then that's just, you know, that's no good. So I looked at them and I said you've never met me and I'm either going to make this work or I'm going to drive it right into the ground. Right, I'm going to die trying. That's just how I am. And so they're like okay, you know, bet, let's, let's, let's go for this. So we, uh, we booked 19 flights in 2008,. Uh, in and out of Walter Reed and now in 2024, we do that every couple of days and we're 18,000 airplane tickets delivered.
Speaker 2:And, um, you know, just the other day we were at a golf tournament and during that golf tournament our team was in the in the country club booking flights while the players were out on the course raising money. I mean it was crazy. And everyone came off the golf course and we made a phone call to a a? Um young lady and in the room, with all of the golfers in the room, we said pack your bags, we're going to put you on an airplane tonight. And that situation was she's 100% service disabled veteran and her husband is an active duty service member and we're flying the two of them and their two kids to her grandfather's bedside because he is dying. He had a heart attack and his heart was 10% and the doctors gave him 48 hours to live. And that golf tournament was on Monday, no Tuesday, two days ago. And so I'm guessing that the grandfather who is also a Korean War veteran, by the way, and so therefore he qualifies under our hospice care program he's probably passed away by now, but we had them all four of them on a flight Tuesday night at 7 pm, so that flight happened.
Speaker 2:But I mean, we're just doing things in real time, man. But the roadblocks, you know there aren't really many roadblocks, because what we're doing here involves buying airplane tickets, it involves putting people on commercial flights, on Delta, american, you know, united, et cetera and it involves getting people from one city to another city. There's no roadblock there. There's nobody who can tell me that I can't do that right. There's no liability, necessarily. I'm not flying people on my own plane, you know.
Speaker 2:And so we are putting most of the liability or the responsibility, let's say, on the commercial carriers and also on our travel agent who books probably 80% of our flights, with us booking the other 20% in-house. And you know we can also provide the families with some resources, contact information for other resources, like a taxi company or you know vet ticks, who you may know about. You know we'll coordinate with them so that the family can get some tickets to a ballgame or something when they're in town. But generally speaking, the reason that I wanted to start Luke's Wings was because I didn't see many roadblocks. I saw very few barriers to entry. If you will, there are some other organizations. You know you could call them competitors, but really, luke's Wings, we use cold hard cash and we book on major carriers and we can make quick, you know, changes to flights and and and things like that. So I think we're kind of unique in what we do and and I I love it. We're 18,000 flights in so far.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And the one thing that that's really intriguing is understanding the person behind the mission. Like where did Fletcher develop this tenacity you spoke about earlier? Like tell me a little bit about yourself, because that's often where we really truly understand the connection of the passion, the purpose and the mission is understanding the person behind it. Because when you sit down with a friend and you listen to their story of being at walter reed with a service member and you identify the pain points, you identify the sticking points, you're like you know what? No, we can do something about this. That says a lot about you. So they get back like where does where did fletcher develop this, uh, this tenacity and spirit? That's a that's nice of you to ask that question. I'm flattered by that question.
Speaker 2:I don't Take it back. Where did Fletcher develop this tenacity and spirit? That's nice of you to ask that question. I'm flattered by that question. I don't know, when I started Luke's Wings about 18 years ago, I was 30. And I was, like many, I guess, late 20, early 30-year-olds. I was looking for something more meaningful in my life. I had come from a background of being a consultant.
Speaker 2:I was a graduated Penn State with a double degree in accounting and international business, went into working for Deloitte and then PricewaterhouseCoopers in New York as a consultant and an auditor and you know great work and, uh, an honest you know an honest living and respectable career path and all that but by 30, you know, I was just I was kind of burned out with the whole accounting thing and.
Speaker 2:I wanted something more, and so, uh, 2007 was a year when I was really looking for for my next thing, you thing, what I wanted to be when I grew up, so to speak and I searched for that in 2007. And a lot developed in 2007. And January 2nd of 2008 was when I incorporated Luke's Wings and I also incorporated a commercial real estate company called the Ganao Group, which is still going today. So I'm in DC right now, in our office space in Georgetown in Washington DC, and in this office building we have both the Ganao Group and Luke's Wings. So I didn't expect either of the companies to survive, but they both did and fast forward 18 years. They're both alive and thriving and producing more than a million a year in revenue. And this is my life now, but it's just a matter of and this is my life now, but it's just a matter of, you know sticking with something until it works out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I got to imagine that at first it wasn't a very easy thing to try to develop from the ground up. Did you sort of build it in flight, what was?
Speaker 2:it like getting Luke's wings off the ground, so to speak. You know, we were lucky because it was front of mind, with people. It was in the 24-hour news cycle. Right, you had mentioned compassion fatigue, which, you're right, the hidden heroes, the case managers, the wives, the support network is always experiencing. But there's also a donor fatigue which happens with the public. And so you know, the red cross doesn't hammer people all year long. They they really only hammer people for 48 to, let's say, three to four days right after the tsunami or the hurricane.
Speaker 2:You know, because they know that people are really willing to give and it's very much a news cycle and then they kind of fall off the radar again. The whole. You know, asking people for money in 2007, 2008 for a military cause was pretty easy. If you remember, right after 9-11, you's when the Winter Warrior Project started and others started and they got really ahead of the game. They were there right away, but a lot of people were just throwing money at a lot of charities that had not been vetted and were not real, frankly. So there was a lot of money just being taken because, you know, people were taking advantage of the public.
Speaker 2:But in 2007, 2008, people were still willing to give to military charities. We were still at war and being in Washington DC with a pretty good network you know, personal network here in the city, it made it pretty easy a fashion show or a bar event, you know, or a gala and um, meet people and, just, you know, participate in the whole social scene, and so finding volunteers to produce events was pretty easy and that's how we started to our. The first couple of years, our secret sauce was just shaking cans outside of bars.
Speaker 2:I'll tell you a fun story One year in the first maybe four years we were doing this, we had it was St Patty's Day and so everyone was doing bar crawls and we ended up doing a thing at a bar called Public Bar downtown. I knew the owners and they said, hey, if you want to stand outside and take donations for the charity, you're welcome to do that. So we had a fishbowl and on the fishbowl it said $10 and in very fine print at the bottom it said suggested donation. And by like 11 o'clock everybody in town was hammered because they were all on bar crawls, you know St Patty's, and everyone was coming into this bar and they thought the $10 was a cover charge to get in Right. So we racked in like six grand and and, and then you could hear the DJ upstairs in the bar and he stopped and he goes hey, everybody's, you know, happy St Paddy's. If you gave a donation downstairs, thank you.
Speaker 2:And a couple of people came downstairs and they're like hey, man, I thought that was cover, you know the cover charge, I want my money back. And we thought, dude, we're making an Irish exit out of here right now. And we like just bolted and we, we, we left with like six grand in our pocket and the next day we use that to pay down our credit card because, you know, of course we were booking flights and so it was like a, you know, a one-to-one. We would put the flight charges on our personal credit card or whatever. We had our our kind of inflection point about four years into the about three and a half years into the development of Luke's Wings.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, that that those are the stories that are not only yes, it's very entertaining, but it shows that you don't have to have the perfect dream situation. If you have the passion to drive and you have some supervision from adults, you can get started and you can start helping people today. That's just amazing and there's so many stories like that with so many organizations when they first started. It's being able to keep the boat going, keep bailing the water, keep it moving further down the line, and the beauty of it is we're in 2024 and it's a well-established, award-winning nonprofit. You guys get recognized, you get awards from SOCOM. The beautiful thing is it's not only changing lives and making a huge impact. It is now a longstanding organization that has a proven track record.
Speaker 1:But with the end of the war in Afghanistan, like you said earlier, there's that fatigue. People tend to think that, well, the war's over, we don't need help anymore. Luke's wing doesn't need to be running anymore. How do you continue to advocate and promote and show the world that we still have service members in great need? There are still issues that service members are being hospitalized for, and it doesn't happen in combat. It can happen in training or in numerous amounts of rotations where we have presence all over?
Speaker 2:Yeah, how do you keep it relevant and how do you keep convincing people that it is relevant when it's not in? You know the the 24 hour news cycle, right? Well, that's a great question. So when we started out in 2008, the mission was very clear. It was to provide the love of family to the bedside of our wounded warriors who were combat injured and were now back in a military hospital and undergoing recovery. So a lot of keywords in there, right? Wounded warrior, combat injured, military hospital. So those were our qualifiers. If you weren't combat injured, if you weren't in a military hospital, if you weren't going through recovery, then you didn't qualify for a flight.
Speaker 2:Now, once we were off the battlefield, we had to think about how to expand our mission. So we did. We expanded it to wounded, ill and injured, which then covered our service members who maybe were injured during a training accident or something, but also it covered illness. So think about, like a young man coming back from active duty deployment who now has some kind of an aggressive stage four cancer which we all know is from exposure to burn pits, uranium deposits, jet fuel, et cetera. But it's not a combat injury, right, it's not taking a bullet kind of a thing. So we expanded our mission to include all of them and then, of course, we did get that question of how do you exist in perpetuity during peacetime? Well, the first answer was let's expand and create another mission called Veterans in Hospice Care.
Speaker 2:Now that Veterans in Hospice Care, now that Veterans in Hospice Care works forever, because now you're providing flights for World War II veterans care, flights for our, our last injured, which would have been like 2012, right or 2013, whatever, um. And so we provide flights to make sure that our veterans are never alone when they pass away, and we think it's the greatest salute to the, to the great, the final salute to the greatest generation that ever lived, which is our World War II veterans. We have about a quarter million of them left and we lose them about 80,000 a year. So we have two or three years to continue to make sure that they have someone with them when they pass away, and then they're all gone. But we also find that about 70% of those flight requests actually come from young men and women who have that aggressive cancer.
Speaker 2:It was a kind of a realization for us, so we do a lot of flights around that. We also expanded to create a program line, started in 2016, because we saw in 2016, 2017, 15 through 17, these weird cases where you know a police officer would be sitting in his car and some wackadoo would run up, you know, yelling Allah Akbar right and attack the cop. And it was like, well, if our service members are overseas fighting the enemy and we're providing them with our coverage and a police officer is here stateside fighting the same enemy, why aren't we also taking care of them? So we definitely rolled out a program line called the Fallen Officers Transportation Assistance Program, or FOTAP. Now that kind of got shelved for a few years and then, of course, you saw this whole defund, the police movement happening.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Yep. And so there was some internal chaos, let's say, or contradiction, you know, with, with, with the public and then with our staff internally, about, like, do we keep pushing that program line even though it seems like the public really doesn't want to even support police? And my position was, yeah, we're going to keep pushing that because I don't care what the public says. Right, our donors are, are steadfast, and I know where our donors land on this, this um topic, and so we're going to keep supporting the police. And so we did. And now, of course, you know, the whole thing comes full circle and everybody in Washington's like, oh, of course we support the police, right, and you know, um, the people who were crying for defunding the police deny that they ever said that stuff.
Speaker 1:So yeah, how quickly, everybody forgets and it's so and it's so amazing that you stuck to your guns. So many people are wishy washy and they bounce back and forth and from my side of it, being an advocate and being able to have met and worked with some amazing individuals, that here's the thing. A lot of veterans, a lot of prior military, go into those professions. They become first responders and when they get those opportunities, when they get involved in the community now they're a peace officer. They don't have the same resources they once had, and that's something that I've learned firsthand talking to a lot of police officers, firefighters, emts. I mean I was blessed being at 7th Special Forces Group. We had a P3, our performance clinic with clinicians. You have people there you could talk to about anything that you're going through. Our police officers don't have that. They are out there and they're doing the work. I mean we get the privilege of deploying and coming back home Every morning they wake up, they go out there to the most chaotic environment every day.
Speaker 1:And and it's so amazing that you were willing to sit there and say no like this is something that we should be able to to openly promote and support our officers, and I can't thank you enough for doing that, because that is something that, like you said, a lot of people flip flop back and forth.
Speaker 2:Well, you don't have to thank us, we're happy to do it. And you know we work with Montgomery County Police Department, which is my local police department. But we see you know some attack or some terrible situation on the news and we immediately go through our channels and we find you know somebody at the local police department, local sheriff's department, and we figure out how to get, get make an inroad and then support them. And I've had the honor of meeting some really cool people along the way. I had Bernie Kerrig and Sheriff Mark Lamb in my office once upon a time and we just kind of hung out and then we had them do TV commercials for us. And you know they're still good friends today. And I'll tell you a fun not a fun story, but like a good story here.
Speaker 2:So the uh, I think it was in Pennsylvania there were two state troopers and they pulled over a drunk driver. So one was just hammered drunk and they pulled her over and they were going to go you know, go through everything with her. And then they got a call that about two miles down the road there was a car accident and so they said okay, ma'am, you're going to wait here, we need to go respond to this car accident. This might be a life or death situation. We need to go down the road and deal with that and we'll be back. And so they get in their car and they go down to the car accident and they start treating that situation, treating the people in the car.
Speaker 2:Lo and behold, the woman the drunk driver, got back in her car and she starts barreling down the road. And she comes down the road and she hits the cops while they're standing there at the car accident and she kills one of them. And so we provided all the flights for the funeral to, uh, you know, to get people in for that and um, terrible situation. But you know we do work with a lot of the state troopers organizations, which is kind of one of our inroads.
Speaker 1:So yeah, and that's such an important thing to understand that our service and our communities are connected. It's that first responder tribe and the military tribe. These communities are of service to the nation. This next transition into a new administration what are some of the goals that you have for Luke's Wings? What are some of the things you guys are working on? Any new programs, anything new you're trying to bring?
Speaker 2:Well, that's a great question. So I'm really happy with our four program lines right now. The fourth one, of course, the reason for us meeting each other is our SOCOM program line, so that's SOTAP, special Operations Transportation Assistance Program. We don't ask a lot of questions, by the way, when SOCOM calls us from. Florida and they're like we have a flight request and we go. Can you tell us more about the nature of the injury and the backstory? They're like nope and we go, all right fair enough.
Speaker 1:We don't make it easy.
Speaker 2:sometimes we figure it's all pre-vetted since it comes from the care coalition, and that's all good. But in terms of new program lines, you know it's all about funding and where we can find the money. And I'll tell you where we could be supporting and we don't currently. The first is around mental health and addiction. So if we could be providing flights for service members to get to mental health you know, retreats and counseling and then also for service members to get to alcohol and drug rehabilitation centers, which are destination locations, then that would be something right and we could partner with those, those different destination locations, and say look, we can allocate a certain number of flights for you. We had people on our team who tried that, but we didn't have the funding at the time, we didn't have board approval, it wasn't properly developed the right way, and so, unfortunately, that was a little mismanagement of people's expectations. Let's say Uh, but that would certainly. There's certainly a demand for it, and what came out of that experience was that there is a huge demand because these you know these um retreat centers, um, they set up their retreat and they never really think about, well, the logistics of how do we afford to get people here Right? I'll give you an example.
Speaker 2:There's a wonderful retreat that I went to in South Dakota called Wings of Valor, where you go pheasant hunting, and these guys have this beautiful location and they bring wounded warriors out to go pheasant hunting. And they bring wounded warriors out to like reconnect. And I had the privilege of going out there with Johnny Joey Jones, who you probably know is Fox news contributor, and, uh, I went out there with him and like nine of his EOD buddies, and just what I didn't realize until I got there was that some of these guys hadn't seen each other since they were deployed right, because they're EOD techs and so a bad day at work for them is when a bomb goes off, and it's not like the bomb goes off and they lose their legs, but they have a chance to like pack their bag and say their goodbyes to their comrades. They wake up stateside a month later, right, they had no saying goodbye to anybody. So some of these guys were sitting around the fire pit at Wings of Valor for the first time together since their accidents right, since they had their bad day at work. And to hear them after 10 years or something, finally get a chance to reconnect and reconcile and be like what the hell happened over there. You know the day of kind of stuff. It was fascinating for me and I had the privilege of being there with them. But had we not been able to support them with flights for that trip, they would have never been able to get there right, they wouldn't have been able to afford it on their own. And so these retreat centers you know, if we could support them with satisfying the logistics challenge, that would be great.
Speaker 2:Some of those drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers cater to service members in military, but they just don't have the means of getting people there. So those are two things that we would love to explore. Another one which is a bit of a lightning rod is military sexual trauma. So every year you have two or three thousand service members who experience military sexual trauma. Surprisingly, it's men as well as women. You would think it's just women who are being, you know, um, assaulted you know, physically assaulted, sexually assaulted, but it's actually a lot of men too.
Speaker 2:At any rate, the concept would be that the minute that the sexual assault is reported and I guess it goes through jag or it goes through some very you, you know formal process, right the minute you reported it it has to be reported and it gets run up the flagpole really fast within the military.
Speaker 2:How cool would it be if we could plug into that and within 24 hours of a young lady, a young service member, being sexually assaulted or raped, et cetera, if we could provide the flights for the family, the dads, the moms to be there, because we do emergency flights, right.
Speaker 2:So what if our service level agreement or our goal would be to have the parents by the side of that victim within 12 hours of that attack happening? That to me would be a pretty impactful and meaningful program line to try to establish. And you're talking about 2,000 to 3,000 of those situations a year. And even if we were able to plug into 10 of them, you're still talking 200 to 300 situations where we had the parents by their, by the child's side. You know we have the funding through our cash, our cash donors and our corporate sponsors, and also, because we're a Delta partner we're on their website we're collecting about 15 million Delta miles a year. So through all of that, you know, we're able to support somewhere between a thousand and 2000 flights a year, support somewhere between a thousand and two thousand flights a year. Um, but you know those other program lines.
Speaker 2:We'd be talking about jumping to who knows three thousand, four thousand flights, doubling our number of flights and I wouldn't want to tell you if that's right until we knew we could deliver on it.
Speaker 1:So yeah, from from my, from my arena, one of the most frustrating things is when you finally have somebody that's ready to go to a treatment center and the unit can't afford a flight to send them. That is the most thing. I've driven friends to treatment centers and it blows my mind. That budget, the budget, ends up being the sticking point and it's heartbreaking. It's absolutely heartbreaking to cause. It takes long. It takes a long time to get a stubborn green beret or ranger or or you know any, say you know what, I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna go that treatment center, I'm gonna go inpatient and I'm gonna get better. And then they're excited, they get the paperwork in and then it's like, well, we need to figure out a way to get you there and, um, we just don't have money for flights and that, to me, is the most frustrating thing on earth.
Speaker 1:So I think you guys are definitely on to something that it's needed. It's so needed and it helps cut down the bureaucracy and get somebody to the care they need, because these places save lives. Oftentimes the counseling or the online counseling you can get, it's a stopgap measure. For a lot of us, it's just keeping you around, it's being able to take the service member out of the environment into a treatment facility. That really starts a healing process. So I know if you guys can make that program line come into fruition, it's going to definitely be utilized. How can people get involved? Are people able to donate their own SkyMiles to Luke's League?
Speaker 2:So if you are a Delta member and you go on Delta's website, there's an area of the website where you can transfer your miles, and I think Delta's got 25 partners to whom you can transfer your miles, and we are certainly one of them. So you just go on to the Delta website, you log in and you find us and you transfer your miles. And what I like to say is, if your miles are expiring or you got 1,000 miles which doesn't get you anything really right you can send, you can give it to us and we can collect them and put them together and once we have enough, we can book a flight. And in November and December, delta will match miles for us, which is really exciting, and they're also a corporate sponsor, so they give us hard cash, which is great. But the Delta website you can definitely give us your miles there. You can come to our website, you can make a donation on the website. It's tax deductible, of course, and I'll also mention that between now and the end of the year, we're running our no Service Member Spends the Holidays Alone campaign, which I like to call no Soldier Spends Christmas Alone, but technically it's the no Service Member Spends the Holidays Alone, and that's really cool because you can donate anything you want and help us get all of our service members home to their kids.
Speaker 2:What I like to say is, if I'm under my Christmas tree with my kids, by God our service members should be under their Christmas tree with their kids. Program is that if you donate $350, which is the equivalent of a flight then we will use that money to fly a wounded warrior home in your honor or in your loved one's honor, and we will send you a acknowledgement card and a Christmas ornament and when your loved one opens it, it says in lieu of a traditional gift, someone has flown a wounded warrior home in your honor and you get to fill out the card and so you can present it to your loved one on Christmas morning. And it's all designed so that the reveal is really impactful for your loved one. So think about, like your Korean War, vietnam War era grandfather right, don't buy him a tie, okay, do something nice for a service member and do it in his honor and then give him something that memorializes that. I think it's really fun.
Speaker 2:So we'll be sending out those cards and those ornaments right up until Christmas. I mean people will call us on December 20th and be like hey, I didn't get my grandfather anything, you know, can I still get an ornament for him? And we're like sure we'll, we'll overnight it, whatever. So we'll be in the office right up until Christmas, I mean just mailing stuff to people. But, um, we have people who will buy three of those and they give them to, like, their three cousins who all serve you know, and and, uh, people will do it every year and collect the ornaments, because every year it's a different ornament. They're all really cool. Uh, this year the ornament looks like a, um, a luggage tag. So that's kind of fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But that's how people can donate and contribute and support us and, of course, our local events, Um, and if there's a company out there that wants us to mention them somewhere, we can do that. So somebody can sponsor the ornament, Somebody can sponsor our golf tournament, our gala in DC, when we have it annually, stuff like that. But they just need to find us on our website, send us an email and we'll call you back. We'll email you back. We'll talk about you. Know the best way to to partner with you.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, Fletcher. Thank you so much for being here today. If someone wants to find you online, what's the name of that?
Speaker 2:website again. It's wwwluxwingsorg L-U-X-W-I-N-G-Sorg.
Speaker 1:Are you guys on social media?
Speaker 2:You just Google ingsorg? Are you guys on social media? You just, you google. Just google, search luke's wings or my name and it'll pop right up. But yeah, we're. You know, I don't think we're on tiktok and I think I'm not on tiktok.
Speaker 1:That that whole thing scares me, but we're definitely on uh, on uh like instagram and facebook so nice if you pause the episode right now, go to the episode description.
Speaker 1:You'll see all the links Luke's wings and this holiday season, this Christmas time. Please make it part of your Christmas list. Donate, send as much as you can or as little as you can, and help support a great nonprofit. One of the biggest things that we can do for each other is support our greater community during Christmas time. I know, when I was a young service member, I didn't have a lot of money. So if you're listening out there and you're E4 below, just send what you can.
Speaker 1:But if you're those senior NCOs, warrant officers and officers, I know you got deeper pockets. So pony up, let's help out a goodprofit that's making our community richer by taking care of our own. Uh, fletcher, thank you for being here today, brother. I greatly appreciate what you guys are doing and I can't wait to support you guys because we're going to help out as much as we can as well by putting this out there, and we're going to contribute because we want to be able to get some of our wounded veterans home for christmas as well. So thank you for being here today, man, and to all y'all listening, thank you for tuning in. We'll see y'all next time. Until then, take care. If you like what we're doing and you're enjoying the show, don't forget to share us. Like us, subscribe.
