In late 2023 the men at War Horses for Veterans got a call—Trevor Brazile and Miles Baker had a Relentless Remuda horse that might fit their program.

“Ty Smith with Solo Select heard that Trevor Brazile was looking to donate a horse and wanted to know the right place for it to go,” said medically retired Marine Sgt. Jake Greenlief, who is the War Horses for Veterans Ranch Manager and Director of Equine Management.

The WHFV program was founded in 2014, three years before Greenlief completed his 10 years of service. Based in Stilwell, Kansas, its mission is to empower and equip “veterans and first responders who experienced life-disrupting trauma to recover” through exceptional horsemanship. Emphasis on exceptional horsemanship.

Any program that’s introducing people who’ve maybe never touched a horse to the experience requires good-minded horses, which War Horses definitely has. But they also have papers.

Western community connections

The WHFV Board of Directors is heavy with people of note, including Wayne Hanson, president of R.E. Lewis Refrigeration, which services the U.S. food processing and distribution industries. Hanson is also a player in the cow horse arena. 

“Wayne owns Hanson Quarter Horses with his wife, Michelle,” Greenlief explained. “They owned [$4 million sire] Mr Dual Pep. They introduced us to Ty, and Ty and Melanie [Smith] both have helped us out a lot with breedings and stuff like that.”

Through that network, Greenlief and WHFV Media Director and U.S. Army veteran Jay Williams found themselves sitting in the Relentless Remuda office in Decatur, Texas, this past winter.

“Talk about intimidating,” Greenlief admitted. “They asked, ‘What do you guys do for feed up there?’ and I [stalled]. Then I was like, ‘Hey dummy, you know what you feed your horses,’ but I was kind of just dumbfounded being around those guys.”

Despite their social anxieties, the Relentless Remuda’s “Scotch” was shipped to Kansas in December to begin his service as a WHFV horse.

The finest Scotch

Of course, Scotch isn’t a fit for everyone in the program. He is a certified Relentless Remuda graduate, possessing the kind of horsepower and talent that earned him his cheek brand. But in a program that values empowering people by putting them aboard well-trained talent, getting to ride Scotch marks a victory for the ropers who ride with WHFV.

“My favorite experience from War Horses for Veterans was roping off Scotch,” said retired Police Sgt. Greg Ziel, who The Team Roping Journal first wrote about in May 2022. “Holy smokes, that horse flies!”

In a demonstration of the power of these programs and the lives they touch, Ziel and Greenlief are examples of how one network can change the course of multiple lives for years to come. 

Working backward, Ziel roped off Scotch when he participated in a program at WHFV, where Greenlief began working in 2021. The two originally met when Ziel was acquiring his horse, Midnight, which was Greenlief’s own first horse in his path to recovery that he acquired with the help of the Charlie Five organization. Charlie Five was founded by Jeremy Svejcar, a U.S. Army veteran who found his calling after participating in programs like the Semper Fi and America’s Fund Jinx McCain Horsemanship Program, the same program Greenlief credits for saving his life.

The tough stuff

“John and the Jinx McCain program got me back on horses,” Greenlief said, referring to the program’s foreman, retired Marine Col. John Mayer. 

The SFAF discontinued the JMHP in 2024, but Mayer is continuing his mission to tap into the hearts of his fellow warriors by getting them horseback and out of their heads.  

“I was battling a lot of demons,” Greenlief said of when he first signed up with the JMHP to work cattle on the historic Kokernot 06 Ranch in West Texas’ Davis Mountains.

WATCH: The Drive to Brotherhood — Sgt. Greelief continues to heal on a 2021 cattle drive with the JMHP in Wyoming’s Big Horn mountains. Watch as he, from atop the dark paint, narrates cutting cattle from the herd (and slinging a few friendly jabs) around 17:30.

Greenlief grew up around horses but hadn’t touched them since he joined the Marine Corps in 2008. Instead, he deployed four times and when he returned stateside to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, he was training to become Helicopter Ropes and Suspensions Techniques Master. Then it came crashing down, literally.

“I’ve been on four deployments with the Marines, the infantry,” Greenlief said. “I’ve been to Afghanistan. If you remember the tsunami that hit Japan, I was there for that. There was a ferry that sank off the coast of Korea with a bunch of high school kids—responded to that. I mean, a whole slew of things and I never really had an issue with anything, I think because I was so busy.

“I kept myself busy until the helicopter crash and it wrecked me, no pun intended. I’d made it through a lot of other situations in my life unscathed and, here I was in the United States on a training mission. We were doing nighttime training inserts—repel inserts into LZs (landing zones). I was part of a Helo Raid Company, and I was riding in a helicopter, and it crashed.”

The Sept. 2, 2015, event initiated a cataclysmic shift in Greenlief’s life. As he spent the next two years recovering in the Wounded Warrior Battalion—including 28 weeks in the Traumatic Brain Injury Center—with severe balance issues, Greenlief was dealt a decision by a medical board that nearly ended him.

“They originally said it was not a service-related incident. There are a few people in my life who know this and it’s the closest I’ve ever been to suicide. My wife, CC, was the only thing that kept me alive because they were going to separate me from the Marine Corps and give me like $15,000. They said I had 0% service-related injuries.

“I was at the peak of my career doing phenomenal things, going places that were new to the Marine Corps and having a lot of fun. My career ended and I went to the Wounded Warrior Battalion where everyone, at the time, was either blown up or shot … and was feeling like I shouldn’t be there because everybody else was legitimately combat wounded, mostly.”

Credibly, Greenlief fought the medical board and has since decided that the initial decision of a few people managing paperwork shouldn’t minimize the rest of his time in service, but it’s taken years and work and grace to gain that perspective. 

A hand up

Once medically retired, Greenlief returned to his hometown and took a job with the sheriff’s office. 

“If you want to get personal, I was in a really bad spot in my life,” Greenlief said of the timing, which coincided with sincere civic unrest and, oftentimes, riots in our urban city centers. “Law enforcement was not a great transition out of the military for me. 

“In all honesty and in fairness to the law enforcement agency that I was with, I wasn’t mentally okay to take over and deal with the stress that it took.”  

After a year and a half, Greenlief burned out and took up some farming work. Feeling better, he returned to law enforcement and became a detective working crimes against children and then became the lead homicide investigator.

From the military board trying to rid its hands of Greenlief to navigating through police retaliation threats and trying to manage the chaos bred by a culture of crime, Greenlief was ready for an assist when the SFAF, which had provided support to his family through his medical recovery, put him in touch with Mayer and bought him a plane ticket—his first since the helo wreck—to Texas. Overcoming the fear he’d developed proved worth it.

“Rod Devoll came up to me at the end of it,” Greenlief said of the Kokernot 06’s foreman and wagon boss. “He said, ‘Man, you would make a good hand.’ And that, to me … it kind of felt like being accepted again.”

Ready for more roping

At Charly Crawford’s and Trey Johnson’s Horns N’ Heroes roping clinic this past November, Greenlief brought a good dose of horsemanship and cow horse know-how to the table, but he stepped into the roping arena with a square-one approach to his heeling. In a few short days, he gained enough to earn the award for Most Improved, and he also discovered an opportunity to reconnect with God.

“I think I have a better appreciation for what it is,” Greenlief said of the sport. “I have a better knowledge and way of explaining things. Most of my time was spent with Trey on the heel side and the way he explains things and how he brings it back to God is honestly the best thing about being at [the clinic].”

When Johnson was able to spend a day at the WHFV clinic this April, another door opened for Greenlief. 

“At the end of the day, [Trey] said he’d love for me to come down to the … American Hero Celebration and just spend a day doing horsemanship.”

Greenlief hopes it works out, but thinks he’ll be at this year’s AHC regardless.

“We’ve got a few guys from War Horses who are putting applications in to go down and do that and use War Horses horses to rope off of.”

Meanwhile, Greenlief will be looking for good horseflesh to purchase for a program that creates the same path to healing he discovered horseback.

—TRJ—

Thank you to Equinety for helping us share stories of military members, veterans and first responders in the team roping community.