Veterans Express Gratitude to Project Healing Waters Sponsors and Volunteers

By Jim Kissane

As an experienced rod builder, Ken Hicks (right) offers help to Ben Fields, who is building his first rod for entry in this year’s Project Healing Waters National Rod Building Contest. Hicks, who was once in Fields’ shoes, was a first-place winner in the 2016 contest.

The Greater Kansas City Program will be represented by a record number of participants in the 2018 Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing rod building competition. Eighteen Veterans in our local program began working on their rods in January, including seven first-time entrants, crafting their projects in the hope of being among the winners announced in May.

You can meet a few of the Greater Kansas City participants in profiles posted on the national Project Healing Waters website (http://www.projecthealingwaters.org/news-media/).

I wrote the features with a dual purpose in mind. First, they put names and faces to participants in the Rod Building Contest and in Project Healing Waters. There are more than 200 PHWFF programs nationwide, and some 900 participants in this year’s Rod Building Contest. The crowd becomes more personal when you know the people in it, and soon they become friends. In the articles, they share stories about their service and their adventures with the rods they’ve built.

Also, the articles give the participants a way to express their thanks to the organizations that support Project Healing Waters and sponsor the Rod Building Contest – the Bob Woodruff Foundation, the Disabled Veterans National Foundation and the Hook & Hackle Company. The rods these Veterans have built represent treasured memories and camaraderie, and the gratitude the participants feel is genuine.

Project Healing Waters participant Ken Hicks displays the bamboo rod he built at Bamboo Bend Handcrafted Healing. Hicks earned the trip as one of the winners in the 2016 National Rod Building Contest, and wanted sponsors of the contest and the Project Healing Waters to know how grateful he is for their support.

The idea behind the features came from Ken Hicks, a participant in the Greater Kansas City Program pretty much from its beginnings. Bob Barnett, Greater Kansas City Program Director, and Mike Davis, Outreach Coordinator, “recruited” Hicks at a meet-and-greet when our program was in its infancy. Until then, Hicks hadn’t fly fished before, let alone built his own rods.

“Never,” he said. “I hadn’t even fished since I was a kid. Then I met Healing Waters at the DAV (Disabled Veterans), met Bob and Mike and started with Kansas City at the beginning. I’m still as excited about it now as I was then.”

That was five years – and five rods – ago. Six, if you count the bamboo rod he built at Bamboo Bend Handcrafted Healing, an organization in Grayling, Mich., that offers a bamboo rod building program for Veterans. Hicks earned that opportunity thanks to his first-place finish in the 2016 Rod Building Competition. It is experiences like that which made him want to express his gratitude to those who support Project Healing Waters.

Ken Hicks built this bamboo rod in 2017, on a trip he earned by virtue of his first-place finish in the 2016 Project Healing Waters National Rod Building Competition.

“We were all housed together, so we got to know one another,” Hicks said of his week at Bamboo Bend with eleven other Veterans. “In the evenings, we’d be telling war stories, fishing stories and whatever other stories we had to tell. We became life-long friends. I was well-blessed to be able to go.

“I’ve been fortunate enough to go to Montana to fish the Big Horn River, and to go on the outings we have here in Missouri. I’m just so grateful to all our sponsors and volunteers, who give of themselves in time and treasure. To me, it’s very humbling.”

Hicks served in the U.S. Army, including a tour in Vietnam in 1968-69. “We were up on the DMZ,” he said. “So I found me a hole and set in it for a year.”

Project Healing Waters has lived up to its name, helping Hicks and his fellow Veterans find peace in the tranquility of fly fishing.

“I’ve learned a lot – how to fish, tying flies, making my own rods,” Hicks said. “It’s one of the hobbies my wife doesn’t discourage. The camaraderie, seeing and talking to Veterans – it’s a pleasant stopover on this journey.”

Prior to joining Project Healing Waters, Ken Hicks had never tied a fly or built a rod. “I’ve learned a lot,” he says.