Blind Faith

From our November/December 2025 Issue

Jason Rosa and I sat gazing up at a star-freckled sky, the faint breeze on offer keeping the mosquitoes at bay. It was not yet 6 AM on February 8, 2025, the final day of South Carolina’s waterfowl season, one open only to youths and veterans. In the flooded ricefield before us, his headlamp illuminating each splash, guide Ford Courtney threw green-winged teal decoys across the span of an acre-wide pothole as Sprig, his white-muzzled Labrador, paddled in his wake. It’s easy to think big thoughts in those quiet moments before the world awakens, and I am often given to pondering how each of our singularities is unified with those of the 8.1 billion people with whom we share the sky. I am a writer, and I likely live far too much in my head, but similar moments in far-flung places leave me convinced that, though we are all different, there are things that bring us together—and when we find them, we’ve found what matters. So it was that three men, different save for the things that matter most, waited for shooting light and, hopefully, the last ducks of the season.

Jason’s and my place in that blind was a mark of the deep generosity shown to us and 41 other military veterans by the Andy Quattlebaum and Blackwell Family Foundation (AQBFF) and the waterfowlers who had been enlisted to support our “Warrior Hunt.” Only 36 hours earlier, I had been the last veteran and guest to arrive at the South Carolina Waterfowl Association’s (SCWA’s) 1,600-acre Wildlife Education Center, in Pinewood, South Carolina, just in time for dinner. It was the first event of a weekend that would see us overnight in SCWA’s lodging before spending a day preparing for the hunt by shooting clays and pheasants. Following that, we would all head eastward to the city of Georgetown and an assemblage of historic rice plantations—collectively some of South Carolina’s finest private duck properties—for a night’s accommodation and a Saturday morning spent hunting before returning from whence we came, bettered in soul and skill alike.

After helping myself to the kind of huge spread one finds in the Lowcountry, I looked across the crowd to see a friend from my uniformed days. Retired Marine Master Gunnery Sergeant Chris Behn had reignited my passion for waterfowling almost a decade before with an invitation to join him on the Chesapeake’s expansive waters, and I was proud to have been able to invite him to Pinewood after AQBFF Executive Director Ed Dennis asked me to recommend a veteran to accompany me. AQBFF looks to serve honorably discharged veterans who rarely have experiences like the Warrior Hunt, but the organization is interested in the human behind the label “veteran.” AQBFF asks applicants why they chose to serve and what type of community service they’ve done since, and a personal interview is conducted with each applicant.

I joined Behn at a table full of people I’d never met, but after a round of “Who were you with?” ‘Where did you serve?’ and “How long have you been out?” I knew I was among friends. Except for moving to join them for stories at the edge of a massive fire pit, I didn’t rise again until I forced myself to bed four hours later.

The next morning came early. Dennis, a retired army officer, had a full day planned for us. Broken into groups of six; half of us shot sporting clays as the remainder headed to an English-style pheasant tower shoot. In the afternoon the arrangement was reversed. With so many participants of varied experience, including 14 who had never hunted, it was an excellent way to give everyone a taste of wingshooting.

Throughout the weekend, inexperienced shooters were paired with more-seasoned hunters. A member of our group gave pointers about muzzle follow-through to another member whose shotgunning experience was limited to military silhouette targets. I gave my gun to another compatriot who’d choked his too tightly for sporting clays. Though our hunting experience differed, we shared self-deprecating humor, open competition without ego and ready support for one another. Those are things that veterans, who often list “loss of connection” as a major source of difficulty upon leaving the ranks for civilian life, find critical, and the connections that naturally emerged that morning easily met a key AQBFF objective. The day was a great way to rapidly make friends, maximize each veteran’s preparation and offer the best chance to capitalize on the fact that we would be hunting some of the Southeast’s finest duck habitat the next morning.

Leaving the SCWA Wildlife Education Center in the late afternoon, I began meandering eastward. Upon reaching Georgetown, I stopped at the gate of Milton Hall Plantation and turned my eyes from the sandy driveway stretching under a canopy of Spanish-moss-draped live oaks to the bordering pine savannah where at least 15 turkeys loafed. The sign on the gate told me I’d reached the intended destination. My soul told me I was where I needed to be.

Parking at Milton Hall’s equipment shed, I met Ford Courtney and Parker Howard, the property managers and guides for our hunt. Once the group was assembled, Courtney and Howard showed us the amenities on offer, ensured we had waders and shotgun shells, and escorted us to our rooms in Milton Hall’s classic white-clapboard house—a monument to the timeless gravity of things that make life better: woodsmoke, wet dogs and ducks.

Standing at the edge of 700 acres of ricefields and impoundments, I contemplated the generosity inspiring the owners of such a lovely place to open it to Dave Mack, Nick Drake, Jason Rosa and me—four veterans they had never met and who had never met one another prior to the day before. Mack and I were relatively experienced waterfowlers and upland hunters and had been paired with Drake and Rosa, both of whom were new to hunting. Sitting with them, answering questions and getting to know one another, I thought about my military career and how much of it had been spent preparing people for—and sharing—significant life experiences. With the importance that waterfowling has in my life, it felt very similar, only blessedly more gentle.

By 5:45 the next morning, we were in an Agro tracked vehicle churning through mud and axle-deep water. Arriving at a point from which Howard, Drake and Mack pressed to a blind farther in the fields, Courtney parked our side-by-side. Accompanied by Sprig, he led Rosa and me in, wading 50 yards through waist-high water to a blind set among brush and sawgrass.

As the sky slowly lightened to the purples and grays of dawn, Rosa and I fell into the easy chat that comes with shared roots in the Marine Corps leavened with common experience in the infantry. That lineage plus the easy rapport found in a duck blind brought forth Rosa’s story, one that speaks to both the transformational capabilities of military service and the criticality of belonging—something sometimes lost in the transition back to civilian life.

Rosa told me about growing up in a tenement in the Bronx with a single mother who had him at 15. His father long gone, he recounted relying on food stamps, watching his mother beg a rental agent for somewhere for them to live within her means, and how it drove him to seek something more. “I wasn’t the perfect child,” he said, “but I tried to live like, in Spanish, they call it sin vergüenza. It means ‘without embarrassment.’ I joined the Marine Corps because, where I grew up, there weren’t many outlets for what you could do with your life, and I needed to change my world.”

In the blind our world was changing, dawn having given way to shooting light at 6:38. Ten minutes later shots erupted from our friends in the blind nearby. I hoped the activity might push some of the teal and wood ducks we had seen flying our way. It did, and we dropped low in the blind as three teal circled, then flared, feet down, committed to the spread. Courtney called, “Take ’em!” and I rose, tracking and missing the lead bird before shifting to one already turning away and connecting with a long trailing shot that sent the duck rag-dolling into the brush at the far edge of the pothole. Sprig, wonderfully mannered in the blind but single-minded about his job, was in the water and halfway to the bird before I could exhale. I looked at a grinning Rosa, a neophyte hunter rapidly becoming an enthusiast, who said, “I can’t believe I get to do this. This is the first time I’ve seen it.”

I sat to watch what I thought would be a fiery sunrise, but at 7:05 our limitless skies were closed in by gray fog shrouding the 250-acre impoundment, cloistering the pothole upon which we sat. Thus, when a flight of at least 10 teal appeared, bursting left to right from a velvet cloud before swinging and looping right to left broadside across our front, it was madness. With the ducks cupping and flaring like an artist's conception, Rosa and I stood, guns barking so close to one another that I immediately regretted forgetting my earplugs. But that thought was lost as I connected with a bird flying low and slowly enough that I could identify him as a drake, sending him tumbling into the water. I swung on a second and missed; then I looked at Rosa in the sudden quiet, shocked that we had hit only one bird between us. Sprig was in the water and halfway to the wounded drake before I could dispatch the duck. The drake swam ahead, disappearing into the brush. Sprig coursed back and forth, single-mindedly searching for the crippled bird, until Courtney called him back. Both of us knew the bitterness of causing pain without bringing it ot a conclusive end. Courtney shook his head, likely wondering how two men with a combined three decades in an organization built on “one shot, one kill” could have failed so comprehensively in such a perfect situation. But that failure was of little importance relative to the things being gained by the veterans in blinds up and down the Great Pee Dee River that morning.

The Andy Quattlebaum and Blackwell Family Foundation was born of a tragedy: the sudden loss of its primary namesake, a 22-year-old Clemson University student with a passion for wildlife conservation and veterans’ issues. Thereafter, his mother, Hayden Blackwell Quattlebaum, a successful businesswoman and philanthropist now passed herself, founded the AQBFF to support “a variety of initiatives important to Andy — Education, Conservation, Community Enrichment, Veterans, Animals and Veterinary Schools.” I was surprised that those would be signal matters for a young man until I sat down with Andy’s father and Hayden’s husband, Don Quattlebaum, a man bent on doing as much good as possible for as many people as possible. It’s an easy thing to say in a world in which attention spans are increasingly only as long as social media allows. But via the organization that bears the name of his son and his wife’s family, Quattlebaum has put complex ideas into effective reality for conservationists, educators, providers and researchers of veterinary medicine, and veterans—not least the 41 for whom he made world-class waterfowl hunting possible.

Quattlebaum is quick to pass the credit for AQBFF’s success. “Dan Ray at the Annandale Plantation is a veteran,” he said, “and he put together something similar 10 or 12 years ago. He asked if I would host a couple of veterans. Trevor Peterson and Ed Dennis came to my plantation, and we had a great weekend. My son Andy was there, and he loved these guys. After we lost Andy, we were looking at things that we could do to honor him, his memory and the things that he loved. I called up Dan, and I said, Would you mind if I stole this idea from you? I did most of it that year. [Executive Director Ed Dennis] has done a whole lot better job than I ever did.”

Quattlebaum’s drive to turn the deepest pain into something that provides a tremendous good is the essence of a hunter’s generosity. For him, sharing the outcome of his and his neighbor’s efforts with people who need the spiritual benefits found in their duck blinds is reward enough. “I love the fact that we’re able to give back to these veterans who have done so much. It’s the best feeling about this whole thing. Raising money is great. But this part of it is what’s really meaningful to me.”

As Rosa, Courtney and I sat enshrouded by mist, a spate of texts arrived from a friend hunting on an adjacent plantation. at 7:03: “On the board.” At 7:47: “Chris got a boss pintail drake.” At 8:47: “We’re headed in. Limited by 8:30.”

Then came a text from Chris Behn, the man who brought me back to waterfowling: “That was the best duck hunting I’ve ever done.”

In our blind, the hunting had been more sporadic but no less rewarding. Rosa and I had redeemed ourselves after our earlier failure, and six teal hung from the duck strap in front of us. Our nearby companions added five more and a northern shoveler, the latter headed for Dave Mack’s taxidermist. It was a half-limit for every hunter. But the limits I truly seek when hunting are meant to be broken: the limits of my knowledge, my competence and my connection with the natural world. It is a truth that connected for Rosa, who said of the hunt and his burgeoning passion for it, “You need to see a different world to see a different future. My community told me this isn’t for us. But I just don’t limit myself anymore as far as what I can learn.”

Back at Milton Hall, I encouraged Rosa to help me clean ducks. He looked dubious but took a teal to hand. I watched him undergo a transformation in real time, saying “I know it might sound cheesy, but i feel more connected to nature now. Cleaning the duck just kind of made life and all the good and bad feel more real. I just kind of feel grounded. I wish I could take that feeling, put it into bottles and hand them out to people so they could be like, ‘Oh, wow, this is what I’m supposed to be feeling.’” I could not bottle the feeling but, with our departure imminent, I could ice down fresh duck breasts for him to take home to New Jersey to serve to people who’d never had them—the ultimate output of the hunter’s generosity.

As I listened to Rosa talk about what he’d derived from the hunt and his fellow veterans, I considered how so often in the modern era, thanks to the ubiquity of global positioning satellite technology, I have no worries about where I’m going yet no idea of where I am. Sometimes we must stop and take stock. As Rosa said, “I think I kind of went numb for a couple of years. Life is just so fast-paced. The Warrior Hunt and meeting all these people helps you slow down for a little bit and really think. And it’s good for veterans, whether it’s finally getting some sense of peace or finally feeling like they’re appreciated for all their efforts or finally being able to talk to people who are like-minded. I just want to keep being a part of this foundation.” He intends to do so by volunteering his time and photographic skills at successive Warrior Hunts.

With all of the hunters in and birds dressed and iced for transport, we gathered in a tent to conduct a “hotwash.” A hotwash is a no-holds-barred discussion of what went well and what might be improved upon and is a time-honored military process critical to improving unit performance. From the participant perspective, the positives were legion. The negatives lay only in having to wait another year to repeat the experience. Given the dedication, kindness and generosity of the AQBFF staff and volunteers, next year’s event will likely only exceed the high standard already set.