Along line of hikers trekked through the snow and up the mountainside, clad in matching T-shirts. The caravan trudged on the unrelenting grade, each hiker not wanting to fall back a step to the others, but as the day wore on, the mountain got the better of some in the party, stretching out the line.
Here and there, a hiker finally stopped, hunched over his knees and struggled to catch his breath in the unforgiving altitude. Invariably, two comrades came alongside, each taking an arm around their necks, goading their colleague onward. “None left behind” could have been written in the sky, so apparent was the camaraderie.
Lance Nutt has seen it play out time and time again. As founder of Sheep Dog Impact Assistance, a northwest Arkansas-based nonprofit that seeks to help veterans and first responders as they transition to civilian life, he has orchestrated such outdoor adventures as a way of getting vets out of their homes and back into the field. Invariably, such signs of camaraderie bubble to the surface, a reminder of former lives and past brothers and sisters in arms.
Lance Nutt, founder
“We created our outdoor adventure program so that we could schedule activities and events for us to get together,” Nutt said. “We’ve been hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, running the Spartan Race, scuba diving, skydiving, traveling to places like Yosemite, Yellowstone — anything that got people off the couch and outdoors.”
The adventures are just a small slice of what Sheepdog offers to military members, veterans, first responders and their families. The group was built on service, mobilizing individuals into disaster response crews that travel across the country to help in the aftermath of violent storms. It also offers Warrior PATHH mental wellness training to help with post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues.
It is common for military veterans to benefit from
additional support as they transition to civilian life.
Both aspects fall under a continuum of programs addressing post-traumatic growth in participants. Last year, the organization expanded to include Sheep Dog University, which trains people to be effective ambassadors for the organization to reach and assist more individuals and their families.
Nutt said the various programs are meant to dovetail into one another, allowing a veteran or first responder to eventually experience the continuum of training and support regardless of where they came in.
“I’m going to get you off the couch with an outdoor adventure, and then I’m going to introduce the idea of post-traumatic growth to you. Then I’m going to try and sell you on the idea that you need to go to Warrior PATHH,” Nutt said. “Currently, we get 70 percent of our outdoor adventure participants to go to Warrior PATHH so that we can teach them how to go home and live a productive, healthy life.”
Denise Sharpe is a typical Sheep Dog story not just for being a veteran and former first responder but for thinking she was doing just fine in civilian life. One conversation with Nutt was all it took for her to get involved, and she threw herself into volunteering, helping to spread the word about the organization’s mission and programs. She said she meant it but did not fully understand what Sheep Dog was all about until, finally, she grew tired of Nutt pushing her to fully engage in the program herself.
“Lance kept asking me when I was going to go through Warrior PATHH,” she said. “I kept making up every excuse possible because I claimed I didn’t need it. I was the resilience queen, you know? I actually built resilience programs for the Veterans Administration. I gave talks on resilience. I coached and mentored and everything else.
“Finally, I said I’d go, I thought, just to see what I’m sending everyone else to do. I showed up at the program, and about five minutes into it, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I knew that this was for me, that I’m the one that needed it. I wasn’t there for anybody else. I was there for me, and it changed my life.”
Sharpe, who now works as the organization’s director of growth and development, had become very adept at hiding her demons in an attempt to appear bulletproof and impervious to any situation. Listening to the tales of the people around her, however, lifted the weight of years off her
shoulders.
“I was afraid to show that I needed anything, and I didn’t want to admit it anyway,” she said. “I wasn’t going to admit that I had PTSD. I wasn’t going to talk about that. I wasn’t going to allow myself to do that, but I’ll tell you, once I got in there and I heard the other stories, people talking about what they’d been through and then telling what Warrior PATHH had done for them, man, it cracked my shell big time.”
****
Of everything that enters and exits a life, two things have remained a constant for Nutt: Arkansas and the United State Marine Corps.
“My mother and father were high school sweethearts at Hamburg High School in southeast Arkansas,” he said. “I was born in Crossett, and all of my immediate kin are from that southeast Arkansas area. My dad will tell you my first words were ‘Wooo Pig Sooie.’
“My father joined the Marine Corps when I turned 1, so I spent my growing up living all over the world, everywhere but Arkansas, but I have always claimed Arkansas as home, and I always took pride in the fact I was an Arkansas boy.”
Arkansas may have borne him, but in a very real sense, the Marines raised him. As an aviator for 20 years, his father was as much admired by his son as he was absent in service to the nation. That left Nutt in the care of his mother and the other military families that made up their circle wherever they were.
“My dad was 100 percent dedicated to the Marine Corps and service to our country,” Nutt said. “The good and bad in that is that as a young man, I admired him. I valued his service. I appreciated what he was doing, but it also meant that he was not around very often.
“I never liked the saying, ‘It takes a village,’ but I appreciated it in the Marine Corps because it was the fellow Marines and their families around us that helped raise me. My Boy Scout leaders, my Sunday school teachers, my coaches and, obviously, my neighbors were all Marines, you know, or the family members of one.”
Given that fact, it is no surprise that just as Nutt never let the intrusion of the Marines sway his ancestral allegiance to the Natural State, nor did he resist the call of the Corps when came his time to serve. Within 18 months of his enlisting, he was deployed to the Gulf War, returning from his first tour to attend the University of Arkansas at Monticello. After that, he rejoined the Marines for what would play out as a 30-year military career, half with the reserves, that included four combat deployments.
It was only when nearing the end of that long career of service that Nutt actually understood what came with wearing the uniform that long and how strange and foreign the world felt when it came time to hang it up for good, including for the men who had been his heroes growing up. What he witnessed would eventually lead to forming Sheep Dog Impact Assistance.
“It took me many years, until I was actually in the Marine Corps myself, to appreciate the struggle,” he said. “I saw my dad’s friends as all locked-and-cocked solid Marines. They walked the walk, but far too often, when I saw them again after they had gotten out, they had lost that edge. It was painful to watch them becoming so different from what I had always known them to be.
“Then I witnessed my father go through a little bit of the same transition when he retired, watched him kind of fall apart for a little while before he found his way back to himself and my mom. I think the key on that is having a purpose in life, and what happens when you feel like you’ve lost your identity and what you believe is your calling.”
Nutt himself experienced what many if not most of his comrades struggled with after what he calls a “bad deployment” in 2003 and 2004.
“I came home in a really bad place,” he said. “The reality for me is I thrived in combat. I thrived in deployments. I loved the intensity and the black-and-white nature of war, like most Marines, but what we weren’t prepared for, what I was not prepared for, was to come home — and then my Marines around me started killing themselves.
“So I came to this crossroads. I was home on leave in ‘05 when Hurricane Katrina happened. I was sitting on the couch, yelling at the TV, like so many other people, when I stopped and went, ‘Why are you sitting on your ass, yelling at the TV? Why don’t you get up and do something about it?’ I pulled together my dad and another friend of mine who had been a Marine and was a cop at this point, and we went down and spent three days and nights doing everything we could to help people.”
The experience was rejuvenating and led to other missions, attracting more people and forming the foundation of all the programs that would follow. Raffy Morales first came to Sheep Dog as part of one of the disaster missions and today is director of the Warrior PATHH program.
“I was in law enforcement for roughly 10, 11 years,” he said. “I got out of law enforcement, got into a bad relationship, and one thing kind of just led to another. I found myself scrolling through Facebook one night, and I found Sheep Dog Impact Assistance and reached out to Lance. He put my heart at ease and let me know I had a home here.
“I did a lot of disaster response missions, which is what drew me to the organization, because I missed the camaraderie. I missed my guys, you know, the guy on my left, the guy on my right, the girl to my left, the girl to my right. Getting back into that level of teamwork and helping a community after a natural disaster, that really did my soul a lot of good.”
In 2026, Sheep Dog is going as strong as ever, in part thanks to the support it has received from the community to help fund its work. The group’s annual Heroes Gala, of which AY Media Group is this year’s media sponsor, will feature a keynote by Rob O’Neill, conservative influencer, podcaster and the former Seal Team Six member who took out Osama bin Laden. Money raised from the event goes directly into programs that give veterans, military personnel and first responders help when they need it most.
Sheep Dog Impact Assistance in northwest Arkansas helps participants transition into life after military service through community service, outdoor experiences and mental wellness programs.
The mission of Sheep Dog is clear, but the path for many to find their way to it is not. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs reported in 2023 that nearly 6,400 veterans died by their own hands, just fewer than half of them in the southern United States. In Arkansas, 105 veterans ended their own lives, about one-sixth of the state’s total suicide tally that year. The state’s rate of veteran suicide per 100,000 people is twice that of Arkansas’ overall rate and 15 percentage points higher than both the Southern regional average and the national average.
It is impossible to tell how many others attempted self-harm or harbored such thoughts, but Nutt knows it is substantial, and that is why he continues to stand a post on behalf of those who stood watch over others.
“I coined the phrase we use today that goes, ‘Helping is healing,’” he said. “Helping others helps you heal, and I thought if I could start an organization that would give me the ability to continue serving, I thought this would be the perfect place for fellow sheep dogs to land, men and women of service. I needed it, and others needed it, and they still need it today.”
To learn more about SDIA, purchase Heroes Gala tickets or make a donation, please visit sheepdogia.org.
Photos provided by Sheep Dog Impact Assistance
SEE THIS STORY IN OUR APRIL ISSUE OF ARKANSAS MONEY & POLITICS
READ ALSO: Worried About the Introduction of Driverless Trucks? They’re Already Here.
