My name is Amos Benjamin. I was born and raised in a small town in Ohio. I joined the Marine Corps on September 11, 2006. I came from a very poor community where not many people leave. I followed in the footsteps of my older brother and grandfather who were also Marines during their life. I was in the Marine Corps for about 7 years. I deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan on multiple deployments and was medically retired from the Marine Corps in 2013 for Traumatic Brain Injury from multiple IED blasts in Afghanistan. I spent 4 months of in-patient treatment for Traumatic Brain Injury where I had to learn how to speak again. After an additional 12 months in hospital therapy I continued to deal with the effects from my brain injury. I am missing part of my frontal brain lobe brain because of this injury and also have scarring and other brain damage that effects my mood and ability to function like a “normal person”. I love to hunt and fish and I love America. My goal was to retire from the Marine Corps and that happened a whole lot faster than I thought it would. I met Jeep Sullivan through Jeremy Cabiness. Jeep and Jeremy had been involved with each other for an extended period of time and Jeremy told me about Jeep’s Organization and how much it helped him. I contacted Jeep and we spoke on the phone multiple times, and I knew in my heart, mind and spirit that I was in the right place with Jeep.
My older brother who was also a Marine, spent a lot of time together with me in the woods, hunting and fishing. When I think back at memories with my brother it was in the woods. My brother was killed in action in Afghanistan in 2009. He was disarming a booby-trapped roadside bomb when they got ambushed and the device detonated taking his life. My time in the woods at that point stopped. It wasn’t until I met Jeep that it began again. I avoided everything in my being to take part in anything that my brother and I did because frankly it just hurt too much to do it alone.
Jeep organized an event that put me back in the woods deer hunting. I went to Wall Street Outdoors in Georgia with Ricky Treadwell. It was the second time that I had been in the woods hunting in 7 years. I had a lot of mixed emotions but I was able to sit there and process every bit of emotion with no one around to judge. It was one of the most healing sits I had ever had. That whole weekend I spent time sorting through my emotions, hanging out with other veterans and learning how I was not alone. No, no one was feeling the same way I was feeling but we were all riding in the same boat. We all felt alone, isolated, lost, confused, angry, and many other things. My spirit felt rejuvenated for the first time in many, many years. It was one of the first times that I smiled and actually felt happy. It was one of the first times my mind felt rested. It was one of the first times that I felt like I wasn’t alone, and the first time that my heart felt like it was healing.
Since that time, Jeep has become like a father to me. I and my wife have grown close to Jeep, and his wife Meg, as well as Mr. Ricky and his family. My brother and my dad were the closest people to me. I lost my brother in 2009 and my father took his own life in December of 2017. Jeep has been with me every step of the way. He and many other veterans that I have met throughout my involvement with this organization have made my life feel whole again. I have gone on multiple hunts with Jeep which I never thought I would ever do again because I wanted to disassociate with everything that tied me to my past. Now, I enjoy hunting again and getting more and more veterans involved with our mission; which is to heal. You can try to put words into what this Organization, Jeep, and Meg mean to me, but no words will ever come close to making you understand. My life has changed dramatically for the better since they have been in my life and I continue to help raise money and support for other Veterans out there struggling. I look forward to many more memories shared together.