BROOKINGS – “Adventure Not War.”
It’s a 25-minute film that captures a piece of the past of the war in Iraq experienced by three former Army captains who return in peace in 2017 to find healing. One of them is Stacy Bare, Brookings High School class of 1996.
Out of high school, Bare attended the University of Mississippi, graduated and via the Reserve Officer Training Corps was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Army in 2000. He served in Iraq from 2006 to 2007 and returned home whole in body but wounded in soul and spirit.
“I struggled when I got home,” Bare said. “I got a graduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. A few years after that I really struggled with alcohol and addiction issues.” With those issues came severe depression and thoughts of suicide.
New mission
Invited to try mountain climbing as potential healing for his issues, Bare did.
He said that “really helped pull me into the moment. That was really important for me to live in the moment. That helped me build a new mission, a new purpose, a new identify.” His avocation became his vocation.
He has worked as a mountaineer – climbing and skiing – for the past eight years. Today, Bare is director of Sierra Club Outdoors; a brand ambassador for The North Face and Keen Shoes; and a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year for 2014.
A big piece of his work has been getting people, especially veterans, connected to the outdoors. The film follows the return to Iraq of Bare and fellow former Army captains Robin Brown and Matthew “Griff” Griffin to experience peace, healing and the culture of the country they knew only by war.
“I decided we’ve got to go for this,” Bare said. “Let’s start planning. We believed in what we were doing and thought it was a neat mission.”
“I wanted to rewrite the way I come home from war,” he added, ”to see the beautiful things that are often times masked by war.
“Iraq is a beautiful country, but my experience there was not necessarily a beautiful experience. But I did get into the community and saw the landscape that was really beautiful. I wanted to go back and view those things. And that’s what we did.”
Why a movie?
Explaining the decision to do the film, which was produced by Stept Studios and released online on Veterans Day, Bare said he wanted “to show this country to the rest of America and to show the people of Iraq that we’re not all soldiers and there to occupy and kill. It goes both ways.”
He wants the film “to show people what this country may be, to help people broaden their understanding of what the geography of Iraq looks like.”
The three veterans spent about 10 days in Iraq. In addition to getting a feel for the culture of the country, they made the first ski ascent and descent of Mt. Halgurd, the highest mountain in Iraq.
“The world is a beautiful place,” Bare said of what he hopes will be a takeaway message from the film. “Obviously, you’ve got to be smart about where you travel. You’ve got to get out and see it. There are good people all over the world.”
‘Brookings never leaves you’
Bare, 39, has been married for four years to Makenzie Selland, who is from Arizona, with extended family in South Dakota, North Dakota and Minnesota. The couple have a 1-year-old daughter, Wilder, named after Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Bare credits his “sense of adventure” to growing up in Brookings: “the Boys Scouts, Troop 29, out of Ascension Lutheran Church, the ability to run around totally unsupervised, but with the town looking out for its kids. A lot of unstructured time to just run around outside and play.
“You can leave Brookings, but Brookings never leaves you.”
The film may be viewed online at www.adventurenotwar.com. It contains adult language and themes.
Contact John Kubal at jkubal@brookingsregister.com.
