an issue. Even though he could function during the day, every night he drank himself to sleep. By the time he returned from that deployment, he was suicidal. Seeking help, he was faced with a choice between staying in the military or leaving to work on his mental health. He retired. “Recovery from everything took quite a few years. I couldn’t go to a store. I couldn’t drive in traffic. I had to change times when I went to certain locations, and there were certain locations that I just couldn’t go to. I stayed in my house a lot. I was isolated. It took a long time for me to be close to functional.” Then Turner found golf when a friend sold him a set of clubs. “I picked my clubs back up again. After I went through it, it was the first time in a decade that I felt alive. I didn’t have any hobbies. I didn’t want to be social. I was isolated for pretty much a decade. PGA HOPE totally changed my life.” Turner was at the Veterans Affairs clinic in St. George, Utah, where he works as an Intermediate Care Technician, and saw a flier about the PGA HOPE program at a nearby golf course. He was asked to recruit Veterans to attend, but didn’t feel right about asking Veterans to do something that he hadn’t done himself. He said of his first PGA HOPE experience, “I picked up my clubs again. It was the first time in a decade that I felt alive. I didn’t have Ohio Golf Journal
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