Beneath azure Hawaiian waves, taking one measured breath at a time, Rob Anderson found something he wanted to share: peace.
Anderson is the founder of Neptune Warrior, a diving nonprofit focused on helping veterans, particularly those with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), disabilities, and traumatic brain injuries (TBIs).
In 2016, he joined his parents on a Hawaii trip after what he described as a “challenging” year dealing with his own PTSD. While diving, he envisioned what would become Neptune Warrior.
“I wanted to create three pillars,” he said. “We have diving, which is the most obvious part about it. And then we have this component of community, bringing divers together. And coaching. Coaching moves you forward. When I came home, I started looking for organizations to align with. There wasn't really anyone. So I went out, and I built my own thing.”
In choosing to focus on veterans, Anderson was also helping to heal a part of himself.
“That's my story,” he said. “I've had TBIs, I've had memory loss, and I also deal with PTSD. For me, that was a calling.”
Since inception, the organization has helped more than 500 veterans.
BENEATH THE SURFACE
Anderson has been a dive instructor since 1998.
“I know how powerful diving is because it changes our rate of breathing,” he said. “It changes the way we focus on things. It's something I have found in my own journey of managing PTSD, that diving was really turning that into post-traumatic growth.”
Neptune Warrior covers pool training and open water dives.
“(We) can take them all the way up to Dive Master, which is the first level of professional diving.”
Veterans can even use their GI Bill for dive training.
“The way we train our divers is unlike most organizations,” he said. “I coined the term and process called ‘holistic diving,’ because we involve the coaching aspect and processing the experience. We'd move them from the shallow water to the deep end, where they would just play. We'd let them just feel that freedom.”
MAKING A DIFFERENCE
“I had this diver, Joey, that I kept inviting out again and again and again,” Anderson recalled. “Finally, he succumbed to my pressure. A couple of days later, I'm in the queue to board an airplane. I get a text, and it's from Joey. And he's like, ‘Hey man, I just wanted to say thank you for taking me diving.’ And so I responded back, ‘Hey man, no problem. Come out, dive whenever you want.’”
Anderson boarded the plane and noticed another text.
“‘What you don't understand is I had planned on doing the unthinkable on Sunday and instead I went diving.’”
Anderson said Joey, who had been on several deployments, had returned from his most recent one to find the apartment he shared with his wife filled with bags of his belongings and divorce papers on a folding stepstool.
“It had been a few months prior, and he'd just been having downfall after downfall; didn't have anyone to really turn to. And he had thought about doing the unthinkable on that date. Instead, he went diving.”
CREATING A COMMUNITY
“Veterans need tribe,” Anderson said. “Even if you go back home where you started at, you've been gone long enough where that's been four years, 14 years, an entire career of 20 years. You've changed, the people have changed, the scenery has changed. What we found is that there's this ‘loss of tribe syndrome’. And we provide community.”
For example, Neptune Warrior offers SIT by the Pit, where folks bring chairs, snacks to share, and wood to add to a firepit.
“SIT is a diving term for ‘surface interval time,’” Anderson explained. “It's the time that you have to decompress so that you get the nitrogen out of your system. For us, that's an opportunity to decompress from the week.”
HELPING OUT
“We are funded exclusively through donations,” Anderson said. “With equipment, with certification costs, their e-learning, their classroom training, it's roughly about $2,000 per diver. Also, people can donate their dive equipment to us, and then we turn that back and get it back in the hands of veterans.”
To learn more about Neptune Warrior, visit neptunewarrior.org or check out the “One Dive at a Time” podcast.