WEST POINT, Ark. — The founders of Darby's Warrior Support, a hunting club, have hit on a formula that offers a unique therapy to an exclusive group: career special forces personnel.
After a decade of organizing special Arkansas hunting trips for these military heroes, the amenities are about to get a huge upgrade.
"We provide them an all-inclusive weekend of hunting and fishing," Darby's Warrior Support founder Col. Shawn Daniel said "We started with duck hunting. We've since expanded to deer hunting, Goose hunting and some trout fishing. We were really looking to serve the men and women that did the heavy lifting in our country's longest war."
Daniel can define "heavy lifting" because he used to be a part of that community. About 20 years ago, he bragged to his fellow Army Rangers about the good hunting back home in Arkansas.
"These men and women were deployed six months, home six months and repeated that cycle for the entirety of the war," Daniel said. "That's some heavy lifting, and those are the people that we're looking to serve."
The hunting trips that came from that evolved into Darby's Warrior Support. It's named for Fort Smith, a World War II hero who founded the modern-day Rangers. The "support" part of the name became apparent almost immediately.
"It's a chance to be with old teammates and see how everybody's doing," Daniel said. "It's a chance to just decompress a little bit. It's a chance to spend some time around a handful of other folks that have traveled the road that you're traveling."
Nick Neuart, like Daniel, retired from the Rangers and has now gone from special forces sergeant to special project designer. He is helping build a hunting lodge on donated property across the road from the group's White County base.
"I actually came out as a guest before I retired," Neuart said. "It was everything that I didn't know I needed."
Daniel said the plan is to build a 10-bedroom lodge that sleeps 26 people.
"We started looking for a piece of property [and] started working with an architect to develop plans for a 10-bedroom lodge that if you max out every bed, we can sleep 26," Daniel said.
In addition to the lodge, the land will feature a well-stocked fishing pond, two shooting ranges and sporting clays. It's an all-inclusive resort for a very exclusive group.
"They're not expecting to have all the bells and whistles," Neuart said. "They expect to come and sleep in a sleeping bag and roast hot dogs around a campfire. It's shocking to them in the sense that they're not expecting that kind of treatment."
When finished in 2024, it will be called Patriot Outpost. Daniel admitted that the lodge is the fantasy treehouse he always wanted to make.
"It's gonna be a nice treehouse and it's going to do a lot of good," Daniel said. "Until you've sat in a duck blind with friends and teammates that you've shared some really hard days with overseas, and watched the sunrise and the sunset, and the birds flying and landing and the sound they make... Until you've done that, don't ask why. It's incredibly therapeutic."