Distinctly Montana Magazine

DISTINCTLY MONTANA MAGAZINE • WINTER 2022-23 24 "You come home and you're losing teammates and it is barely even a blip on the news, and people are just worried about what the Kardashians are doing," Soderholm says. The severe physical toll these deployments take on our Spe- cial Operations servicemembers also cannot be overstated. Gunshot wounds, broken bones, and traumatic brain injuries are extremely commonplace in a job fraught with explosions and hard-hitting attacks. "I went through a program at Walter Reed at Bethesda, Mary- land, and they do brain scans and we learn we have a lot of brain injuries," Soderholm says. "The longer you stay in Special Op- erations, the more your body breaks down." BIG SKY BRAVERY: A PROACTIVE APPROACH Josh McCain, a Three Forks native, made a name for himself in the business world at an early age while living in New York City with his wife, Kristi. "I had landed a job that I thought was my dream job," McCain recalls. "I was able to scale the company and was financially re- warded for it. I had just gotten a quarterly bonus in 2015 and felt like I was on top of the world with my career when my brother- in-law came back from his 14th deployment." McCain's brother-in-law, Jeremy Keller, enlisted in the U.S. Army during his junior year of high school and went to Basic Train- ing just three months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He served 17 years of his 20-year military career in Special Operations, deploy- ing 18 times and spending more than six years in combat. But when Keller came home in 2015, McCain realized he was struggling—all the years of fighting the Global War on Terror- ism had taken a hefty toll. "I was afraid my brother-in-law was going to kill himself," McCain flatly recalls. "I started looking on Google for programs that might help him, and I found 45,000 nonprofits for veterans, but I couldn't find a single charity for solely active-duty military, let alone for those in Special Operations." McCain immediately sat down and drew up a business plan to launch a foundation dedicated to serving active-duty Special Operations servicemembers. He knew he wanted to take a pro- active approach by providing opportunities for support and im- proved well-being while servicemembers were still in the midst of their careers, as opposed to the reactive resources provided by programs established to assist military veterans. And he knew that Montana was the ideal place for weary, adrenaline-fueled warriors to find the refuge that would allow them to decompress and experience peace once again. "I ran my plan by Jeremy and he said if we could pull this off, we could save a lot of people," McCain explains. "So, my wife and I quit our jobs and we moved to Bozeman." He officially established Big Sky Bravery as a nonprofit in Sep- tember of 2015. Keller, who retired from the U.S. Army with 20 years of service in 2021 and is now the foundation's president, helped re- cruit the new program's first recipients the following year. "My brother-in-law stuck his neck out and found three in- dividuals inside his unit and told them about the program," McCain says. "WE START OUT WITH HIGH-ADRENALINE ACTIVITIES AT THE BEGINNING, THEN WORK INTO MORE OF THE HEALING ASPECTS LATER. WE HAVE TO BURN THAT CANDLE DOWN." NATE HILL OF NIVEUS PRODUCTIONS (4)

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