Erich Orrick grants wishes for a living.
Yes, really. And no, Orrick not a genie.
But the disabled vet and single father of two from Indianapolis who served in the Army for two decades, now works as a volunteer and board member for Wish For Our Heroes.
Wish For Our Heroes is a nonprofit that grants wishes to active-duty military members who badly need a hand. The charity has helped an Army Staff Sergeant who lost everything due to an apartment fire, assisted a Marine with mounting medical and legal bills, covered expensive car repairs, and given gift cards to military kids for Christmas.
On the Wish For Our Heroes’ website, Orrick says his goal is to “champion the needs of the typical ‘Joe’ in the military who gets the least amount of praise, pay and often needs the most to make ends meet.” He has dedicated his life to helping other military members — running the Indiana branch of the charity out of his garage.
The tables turned on Orrick, however, when professional punter Pat McAfee of the Indianapolis Colts decided that Orrick deserved a wish come true himself — despite not even making one. Through the years, McAfee has supported Wish For Our Heroes by donating football tickets, by giving money and by serving as a volunteer himself.
“That guy is an absolute legend. He’s the most selfless person I’ve ever met in my life,” McAfee told Dana Hunsinger Benbow of The Indianapolis Star.
Along with fellow Colt Coby Fleener, McAfee hatched a plan to lure Orrick away from his house for a weekend meeting in Chicago connected to the nonprofit. And while the meeting was fake, what McAfee and Fleener accomplished while Orrick was away was very real.
They redecorated his home with help from HHGregg, an electronics store — outfitting it with new appliances, television and furniture, and providing organization that any parent of two can use. (Orrick is a single parent to two daughters.) They also donated $5,000 to Wish For Our Heroes.
“I hate being in the center of all of this,” Orrick said. “I feel very guilty to have gotten so much when there are guys that need it more than I do.”
Orrick, selfless to a fault, told ABC News, who also covered the story, “I don’t want you to miss the story here, that there are a lot of soldiers who really need help.”
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Tag: disabled veterans
This Service Dog Has a Mission Beyond Helping Just One Vet
For the past several years, we’ve heard a lot about veterans suffering from PTSD after returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan. And we’ve heard the stories about the various (sometimes interesting) methods to help them — from biofeedback to gardening to nudity. But one approach that’s helping thousands of soldiers is a basic one: Pairing them with man’s best friend.
Jake Fish of Port Angeles, Washington, was medically discharged from the Marine Corps in 1997. But in recent years, he continued to struggle with PTSD. Coming to his rescue was the service dog Megan, a two-year-old golden retriever, who was trained by the local nonprofit New Leash on Life.
New Leash on Life trains dogs and puppies left at the Clallam Humane Society to become service animals — ultimately providing them to veterans and people with disabilities.
Fish told the Peninsula Daily News, “The biggest thing about having Megan is that I’m not lonely. She gives me a feeling of companionship. I also know for a fact that she lowers my stress levels. She puts me in a good mood when I don’t want to be in one.”
As soon as Fish was paired with Megan, he began bringing her to the Northwest Veterans Resource Center, where he volunteers to help other vets access their benefits from the VA. Megan decided to volunteer for duty, too.
“Vets will come into the office, and we’ll start going over the paperwork, which means talking about all the vets’ pain and issues they have. It can get kind of tense,” Fish said. “Megan will get up from behind my desk and go to the person, and they just relax. She’s so happy and soft, they forget what they’re talking about that happened to them when they’re petting her. She lessens their anxiety of talking about stuff.”
“I feel like helping others as a service officer is a continuation of my duty,” Fish said. Megan clearly has figured out that helping more than just her veteran owner is a continuation of her duty, too.
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When a Wounded Veteran Needed to Get Back on His Feet, This Toy Helped
Who better to know what a veteran needs to recover after being injured than a fellow wounded soldier?
Back in 2010, while Dave Flowers was recuperating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, following the loss of his leg and several other injuries, he began playing the Nintendo Wii Fit at the suggestion of his physical therapist. “Within about nine days of just playing that thing every single day, not even very long, just a couple hours a day, I was able to start walking with a walker, and then a few days later just two canes,” he told Michelle Basch of WTOP.
Because the game helped him find success, Flowers created the program Wiis for Warriors to provide free Wiis to other vets.
Flowers won a Bronze Star Medal for his valor in Afghanistan. In 2009, when he was a Staff Sergeant with the 455th Air Expeditionary Wing at Bagram Airfield, he was clearing a weapons cache site with his team when he stepped on a mine. His left leg was shattered and he lost his right leg below the knee, but he prevented fellow soldiers from being injured when he fell back into the hole the blast created.
Flowers’s selflessness doesn’t stop with his actions on the battlefield or Wiis for Warriors. Now living in Mississippi, he started the Dave Flowers Foundation as a way to honor and assist wounded veterans of a prior generation who served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
“I know for a fact, told to me by my surgeon, if it wasn’t for the field medic tactics generated during Vietnam, I wouldn’t be alive,” Flowers told Patrick Ochs of the Sun Herald. “I kind of feel like I owe those guys a little bit…When you’re told that in Vietnam they would have stepped over you because they couldn’t have saved you — they developed those techniques because of the people in Vietnam.”
Flowers’s goal is to help older veterans in southern Mississippi with any needs they have that aren’t covered by VA benefits. He notes on the foundation’s website that some older veterans are reluctant to ask for help because of pride or past negative experiences when seeking assistance.
“I’m alive because of a different generation,” he told Ochs. “You have to help them.”
We couldn’t agree more.
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Helping Veterans Is As Easy As Drinking This Beer. Seriously.
In the summertime, the most exertion many of us are willing to commit involves turning over some hamburgers on the barbecue. But a new brewery with a special mission is making helping veterans as easy as cracking open a bottle of beer.
Navy veteran Paul Jenkins and Marine Corps veteran Mike Danzer founded the Veteran Beer Company in 2012 with the goal of easing the veteran employment crunch by creating a company that would employ veterans and generate profits that could be donated to charities that help veterans. They began selling their two varieties—Blonde Bomber and The Veteran—on Veteran’s Day in 2013, and the company has been expanding ever since.
“We only anticipated to sell about 2,000 cases our first year,” Josh Ray, regional director of Veteran Brewing Company told Nicole Johnson of Valley News Live. “After four months, we did over 30,000 cases, and we’re pretty close to approaching 60,000 cases right now.”
Beer drinkers can now find Veteran Beer Company’s brews for sale in Indiana, Illinois, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Ten percent of the profits go to veterans’ charities, and the rest is channeled back into the company. Veteran Beer Company, which brews its beer in Cold Spring, Minnesota, employs only veterans, and plans to hire more vets as it continues to expand.
“Some of the things that veterans are promised aren’t really always followed through on,” Ray said. “With this, it’s really our opportunity to give back.” And anyone planning to buy a six pack to celebrate a lazy summer afternoon can give back too.
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3 Organizations That Assist Veterans Build and Grow Their Startups
It goes without saying that being a member of the armed forces provides you with valuable experience and skills. And as it turns out, it gives you a bit of the entrepreneurial bug, too.
The men and women returning to the U.S. from military service are 45 percent more likely to start a business than those with no military service, according to a Small Business Administration report.
Here, three of the best organizations, according to Task & Purpose, that have mobilized in recent years to assist veterans in the transition from active service to civilians with promising entrepreneurial endeavors.
Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities (EBV)
Post-9/11 veterans who have sustained service-connected disabilities can apply to this program to enroll in a hybrid online/in-person entrepreneurship bootcamp — for free. Participants first complete a self-study curriculum online, and from there, they move to a nine-day residency at one of the eight universities that host the EBV program. After the residency, enrolled veterans continue to receive mentorship and advice from EBV’s network of experts.
EBV got its start at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management in 2007, and after a successful first year, seven more schools signed on to host the program on their campuses. Over the life of the program, EBV has seen more than 700 matriculating veterans, whose new business ventures have collectively created 670 new jobs, according to the EBV website.
Techstars Patriot Boot Camp (PBC)
The Patriot Boot Camp is an offshoot of Techstars, a tech-startup accelerator with locations in six U.S. cities and London. Active military, veterans, and their spouses are the groups PBC was designed for.
PBC’s annual three-day workshop calls upon experts from the Techstars network to offer education and mentoring to would-be entrepreneurs at no cost, and on the final day, the program allows attendees to practice their business pitches. PBC received much of its funding from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
VetCap from VetsInTech
VetCap (short for “capital for veterans”) seeks to provide its members with just that: Connections to investors with the capital necessary to nurture fledgling businesses. The first VetCap event was held this May in San Francisco, with over 70 vets in attendance, according to the program’s website.
The nonprofit’s plan going forward is to roll out workshops across the U.S., not all of which will focus on tech, reports a Forbes article on the new project.
If you or someone you know is a veteran or an active service member with entrepreneurial ambitions, take note. These organizations are devoted to seeing those dreams realized.
When a Veteran’s Wheels Stopped Turning, These Police Officers Got Him Moving Again
Pushing a non-functioning 300-pound motorized scooter an entire mile doesn’t sound like the easiest task. In fact, it sounds downright quite difficult.
Yet that’s just what some San Diego police officers did Memorial Day weekend.
Officers Eric Cooper and Milo Shields were out on patrol Sunday afternoon when they spotted a man on a scooter that had stopped working.
The stranded scooter driver, 67-year-old Gilbert Larocque, is a veteran disabled from injuries he sustained in combat as a door gunner in the Army during Vietnam. As a result, he relies on the vehicle to get wherever he needs to go.
Once the officers determined the scooter’s battery was dead, they considered driving Larocque to his home in the Hickman Field Trailer Park a mile away — but then he’d be stuck without his wheels.
So the officers decided to push Larocque home on his scooter, as you see in this video. “We thought it was going to be like pushing a shopping cart, but we were fighting against the transmission the whole time,” Cooper told Lyndsay Winkley of U-T San Diego.
“Being a veteran myself, I was gracious for his service to our country. The least I could do was push him,” Shields told Monica Garske of NBC San Diego.
“We think about veterans one day a year. We should think about them more,” Shields said.
Still, the officers are confident that it doesn’t take a cop to help out a citizen. “I have no doubt that other citizens of San Diego would have stepped in and done it if we had not,” Cooper said.
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Meet A Disabled Veteran Jump Starting Soldiers’ Cars — and Their Lives
A little help can go a long way for those in need — especially if they’re veterans struggling to find jobs and readjust to civilian life.
Which is exactly why North Dakota Air Force veteran Larry Mendivil is offering free car repairs to any soldier who needs them. Mendivil knows his way around a socket wrench — he served as a senior airman with the 319th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron at Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, and now he’s applying the fix-it skills he developed there to four-wheeled vehicles.
Last year, he started the Miracles for Vets out of his home’s garage. The nonprofit raises money to fund car repairs and collects donated parts and tools, while several professional car mechanics offer their time and skills to make repairs.
What inspired Mendivil to help other vets? He suffered a disability related to a refueling accident, so after he returned from Iraq in 2007 unable to reenlist, he set out to help other service members — following the Air Force motto of “Service Before Self.” “Even as a disabled veteran everyone has a chance to make a difference,” Mendivil told Xavier Navarro of 319th Air Base Wing Public Affairs.
Over the next two weeks, Mendivil and his crew of volunteer gearheads are rotating to different garages in Harrisburg, North Dakota that have agreed to let him use their space and tools.
Mike Lewis, the owner of Ducks Auto Repair — where the Miracles crew was based last week — was glad to help the cause. “The veterans deserve to have some kind of positive reinforcement when they get back. They’re struggling to readjust from being overseas, they need somebody to help them out,” he told Eames Yates of Fox 43.
Mendivil told Austin Ashlock of the Grand Forks Herald that after he left the service, “I struggled a long time until Veterans Affairs was able to help me out. I was actually homeless for a little while.”
Making it even more special that the first thing that Mendivil did after getting back on his feet was help others.
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When This Vet’s House Started to Crumble, Home Depot Stepped in with a $20,000 Renovation
Many of us have heard of the pervasive problem of homeless veterans, which the National Coalition for the Homeless estimates number between 130,000 and 200,000 on any given night. But what about vets who own homes, but due to disability or financial troubles, can’t afford to maintain them? Staff at the City of Miami Services Office became concerned about this issue and partnered with Home Depot to provide grants to renovate vets’ homes that badly need it.
The first to benefit from this program is Army veteran George Carswell. Disabled due to his service in Vietnam, Carswell lived with his mother Minnie Lee Spann in the home she purchased in 1964. Since her death, Carswell hasn’t had the funds to keep up with the maintenance, completing no significant repairs since 1978; the home was in danger of collapsing.
That’s when Home Depot stepped up and donated $20,000 to make the necessary improvements. Local Home Depot store manager Alberto Contreras even came out to work and personally oversee the renovation. “The house was in deplorable conditions and not livable,” Contreras told Carma Henry of the Westside Gazette. “If the house wasn’t repaired it would’ve been demolished.”
Not only did the volunteer workers stabilize the home, they beautified it, with new paint, windows, doors, sod, and a rose garden planted in the memory of Carswell’s mother.
The partnership between Miami’s Veterans Services Office and the Home Depot aims to help four more veterans with similar repairs this year. Miami mayor Thomas Regalado said, “My goal is to ensure that our Veterans are treated with the respect and dignity they deserve. We are trying to get them the services they need.”
One way to reduce the number of homeless veterans is to prevent vets from becoming homeless in the first place, and the generous people behind this home repair effort in Miami are doing their best to achieve that.
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Veterans Receive Donations From an Unlikely Source: A 12-Year-Old Girl
Whereas most teenagers want clothing or a new smartphone for their birthday, Katy Sell wanted something, well, let’s say, quite different, for her 12th birthday. She wanted to help U.S. veterans.
After Katy’s mother challenged her to do something kind for others on her birthday, Katy, who lives in Deubrook, South Dakota, came up with a bigger idea than her mom ever imagined: She decided to donate all of her presents to the California-based Big Paws Canine Academy and Foundation, a nonprofit that trains service animals for veterans and has a Midwest branch in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
According to the Big Paws website, Katy and her mother Julie Sell, a Navy veteran, were homeless seven years ago. It was that tough experience that gave them extra motivation to help others.
When people heard about Katy’s generosity, her school friends and many others chipped in additional donations to help the nonprofit. At Katy’s birthday party, several veterans brought their service animals to meet the generous teen and her friends. Ricky Crudden told Denise DePaolo of KSFY, “I lost the use of my legs due to a stroke because of COPD.” Big Paws matched him with his service dog Tracer. Crudden said, “He saved my life. He woke me up in the middle of the night.”
During the party, one veteran received the dog he’d been waiting for — giving Katy the experience of seeing the first moments of a new relationship. “It gives me a good, tingly feeling inside because I know I’m helping a lot of people,” Sell told DePaolo.
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The New Target for These Soldiers? Child Predators
Undoubtedly, dedication and intelligence are two important attributes to bring to a job — and they’re certainly something that our service members possess.
A new program aims to make good use of these characteristics as it employs 14 wounded veterans as federal agents in the Human Exploitation Rescue Operative Child Rescue Corps (H.E.R.O. Child Rescue Corps), which is a part of the office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. These vets will work to prevent and solve child trafficking cases.
Just last week, the program’s first graduating class participated in a child rescue retreat in Memphis, Tennessee, where they used their smarts to study techniques to catch child pornography producers and traffickers.
The H.E.R.O. Child Rescue Corps came about when the National Association to Protect Children asked Immigration and Customs officials if they could retrain wounded veterans to work as analysts tracking child predators. Private donors funded the $10 million program, which trained the former soldiers before dispatching them to field offices throughout the United States, where special agents will supervise them in investigations.
“In 2013, when we presented the idea to top officials at Homeland Security, they said ‘Yes.'” Grier Weeks, executive director of the National Association to Protect Children told Jonathan A. Capriel of The Commercial Appeal. “It was the fastest any of us have ever seen the federal government move.”
Justin Gaertner, who lost both his legs to an IED (improved explosive device) during his third deployment to Afghanistan in 2010, is newly enlisted in the H.E.R.O. Child Rescue Corps. During the training period, he said, “I spent three months in New York assisting in 30 operations which led to 80 arrests of child pornographers. We rescued about eight children from the hands of sexual predators.”
Homeland Security special agent Kevin Power, who mentored the H.E.R.O. interns, told Capriel, “Their military discipline makes them really good for this work. Computer forensics is meticulous and methodical. These guys don’t cut corners, and they don’t question the ordered process you have to go through every time.”
As for Gaertner, not only does the new job allow him use his skills, but also, he has a new career in which his disability doesn’t matter. “The opportunity to put people behind bars who hurt children, is a big reason why I choose to do this,” Gaertner said. “I have an eight-year-old sister who I want to protect.”
We’re sure that Gaertner’s young sibling is just one of the many things motivating him each and every day.
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