DCOE FEATURE STORY: Brothers with a Calling: One heals through fishing, one through prayer

By Jayne Davis, DCoE Strategic Communications

Ken Morrow, president, Adaptive Fly Fishing Institute. Photo courtesy of Ken Morrow.

Before the small contingent of bleary-eyed, fellow veterans, the instructor casts his line into the dark, pre-dawn Georgian waters, angling for the prospect of success. It’s a metaphorically perfect moment.

These veterans, including instructor Ken Morrow, have come to the water with different physical and psychological health concerns to angle for their own prospects of success through fly fishing. It was only four years ago that Morrow, coping with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), used his therapeutic experience with fly fishing to serve other veterans and only two years since he founded the Adaptive Fly Fishing Institute, a nonprofit organization to certify instructors.

“Fly tying was helping me rebuild my fine motor skills and fly fishing was the only thing I could do that didn’t leave me in agony,” said Morrow.

When doctors were at a loss for ways to help with his depression, his 32-year history with fly fishing opened the door to help him heal.

While deployed between 1989 and 1992, Morrow sustained multiple closed head injuries, a form of TBI, from service-related events. It wasn’t until 2007 that he began treatment with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for PTSD, which continues today. While in service, an old knee injury caused him to develop severe rheumatoid arthritis, and damage to his neck causes pain, numbness and dysfunction in both arms and hands. Morrow also has bipolar disorder. Chronic pain, severe tremors, insomnia, depression, physical impediments and hostility consumed his life.

All that started to improve when doctors encouraged Morrow to try fly tying and fly fishing as a form of therapy.

Though unsteady at first — he would wait out the tremors between fly-tying efforts — his motivation, concentration and physical control gradually improved. The therapy took on larger meaning in 2007 when he got involved with Project Healing Waters, a nonprofit organization that uses fly fishing and fly tying to help rehabilitate current and past service members with physical and psychological concerns undergoing treatment in VA hospitals.

At first, Morrow didn’t think there was much he could do. But he knew he could teach, he knew he could get people to help him, and there was an Army hospital nearby. “Pretty soon, I just couldn’t leave it alone,” he said.

At the time, Morrow had a brother and nephew in Iraq and another brother in Afghanistan. “I couldn’t stop thinking that one of them could easily end up in one of those hospitals,” he said.

That experience led Morrow to found the Adaptive Fly Fishing Institute and expand the concept of adaptive fly fishing to educate, train and certify health care and social services providers, educators and outdoor recreation professionals in therapeutic fly fishing. He has organized therapeutic adaptive fly fishing and fly-tying programs at eight VA hospitals in five states and extended the program to civilians with special needs.

Morrow lives in Savannah, Ga., but his institute certifies practitioners nationwide and in British Columbia. The organization offers therapeutic recreation programs and retreats managed by practitioners, medical professionals and professional educators. It is also a Real Warriors Campaign partner, part of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury.

Morrow’s accomplished a lot in the last two years for veterans and civilians with special needs while tending to his own physical and psychological challenges. But he’ll probably say what makes him most happy are the improvements he saw in his brother, Army Reserve Col. Rick Morrow, who sought Ken’s brand of therapy to help him with his physical and psychological concerns.

“Rick rarely felt up to leaving the house,” said Morrow. “Now he’s close to completing a very demanding clinical chaplain residency at one of the nation’s most respected VA hospitals. I don’t take credit ... he’s done the work. But fly fishing and fly tying have been vehicles for his rehabilitation.”

“Leaning forward into life again”

Somewhere in the halls of James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital in Tampa, Fla., Ken’s brother, Col. Morrow, casts a spiritual line to residents as he listens, counsels, consoles and administers pastoral services and programming. Col. Morrow is a full-time chaplain in residence who brings with him the experience of more than three decades in the military, most of it as a chaplain with the Army Airborne Infantry and U.S. Army Special Operations Command.

Combat tours with Special Forces and in places such as Bosnia, Afghanistan and Columbia have taken their toll on him. But his spirit remains unstoppable. He might talk to his charges about a higher power, or he might talk to them about fly fishing. He has personally witnessed the transformative powers of both.

“I’ve seen Ken‘s involvement with fly fishing have an incredible effect on his healing process as well as allow him to help others in their recoveries. It’s kept him engaged while his wife was deployed in Iraq, and the ability to help other veterans has been what’s caused him to move forward with life,” said Col. Morrow.

Army Reserve Col. Rick Morrow, chaplain, when he was with Special Operations Command South in Homestead, Fla. He's now assigned to Dwight D. Eisenhower Army Medical Center, Fort Gordon, Ga. Photo by Ken Morrow.

In 2008, Col. Morrow began fly fishing treatment through his brother’s organization as part of his own physical therapy for pain management and psychological well-being. For years he’s required massive back and knee braces and a cane for mobility, consequences of multiple back breaks and other injuries from his paratrooper days. Early in his career, a latch failed on a M113 armored personnel carrier he was exiting and slammed down on his head. His pain is chronic and anguishing. Like his brother Ken, Col. Morrow copes with TBI and PTSD.

Still, he gives pastoral care to veterans, service members and families through a calling he heard at age 15. A Reserve Officers’ Training Corps graduate of University of Texas, Arlington, after two years at West Point, Col. Morrow became an Army infantry officer and deployed to Afghanistan after 9/11. The next 10 years of active duty cemented his decision to go into the seminary. He returned to the service as an Army Reserve chaplain and later accepted an assignment with Army Special Operations Command.

He is now finishing a Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) residency in Tampa and currently works with spinal cord injury and polytrauma patients, many of whom are service members. Other rotations included mental health, encompassing both drug and alcohol and PTSD spiritual care. Col. Morrow remains assigned to Dwight D. Eisenhower Army Medical Center, Fort Gordon, Ga., as a CPE-trained chaplain, and says of his long and eventful life with the Army, “I’ve been a soldier way too long to ever quit loving soldiers.”

Col. Morrow believes his service and physical and psychological considerations help the hospitalized veterans relate to him and that many of them say it makes talking with him easier to know he’s dealing with some of the same issues. “They see my Special Forces patch that to them says I’ve been there and I know what they’re going through,” he said.

Service is a subject the brothers know well.

Military service is a strong family tradition. Their dad was aboard one of the first infantry landing crafts to hit the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. Out of six children, all four boys in the family served in the military. Ken’s wife is a military police officer currently stationed at Fort Stewart, Ga.

“In our family, honor, integrity and loyalty are more than words in a dictionary,” said Ken.

To Ken, Col. Morrow is the true hero. “He is the living, breathing model of resiliency,” said Ken. “Despite years of excruciating chronic pain and PTSD, he still walks the halls of the VA hospital caring for his fellow veterans every day. I think we would be hard pressed to find a better example of a real hero.”

For his part, Col. Morrow reflects his progress back on Ken’s passion. “I’ll never forget catching my first fish in about 40 years, on my cast, with a fly I tied after taking the guide’s fly off the line. I remember thinking, I did it … I won! It was an enormous sense of accomplishment,” he said. “That’s the beauty of Ken’s organization … little victories that tell you victory is possible and bigger ones will come. Ken has a saying for those small accomplishments that give you hope. When they happen, he says it’s like “’leaning forward into life again.’”