Widow using horses near Joint Base Lewis-McChord to heal others

Yelm widow uses her horses to help returning war veterans heal
THE OLYMPIAN • Published January 08, 2012

An Army Iraq war veteran loses it and shoots several people in Skyway before fleeing to Mount Rainier and killing a park ranger. A former Army Ranger stabs another man outside an Olympia bar and receives a 10-year prison sentence.

Joint Base Lewis-McChord records a record number of suicides in 2011 and opens up a 408-bed barracks for its Wounded Warrior Transition Battalion. Combined with the Air Force’s Medical Flight, the number of JBLM soldiers and airmen suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury often swells to around 700.

The ruins of war are all around us in the South Sound, so how humbling would it be for a solider to say to you, “I was going to end my life, and now I’m not, because of what you did for me”?

Debbi Fisher of Yelm hears that almost every week.

Fisher lost her husband of 30 years, Randy, to a head-on car crash in 2006. He was a lieutenant colonel stationed at McChord Air Force Base, having served for 28 years.

To recover, she turned to the couple’s seven horses on their 5-acre farm. But her husband’s horse, a 16.3 hand, 1,500-pound giant named Root Beer, was riderless. So Randy’s superior officer rode with her every day for 30 days.

That experience of healing through horsemanship took three more years to gel, but Fisher retired from her 20-year career at U.S. Bank in 2009 and took what she calls a “step of faith.”
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Rainier Therapeutic Riding