Nature is healing; Shawn Daniel knows that for a fact. Spend a cold November morning duck hunting with him and a group of American veterans, and you’ll know it for a fact too, he says.
For the last decade, Daniel and other members of Darby’s Warrior Support, a local veterans’ support nonprofit, have been taking veterans from across the country on duck hunts in central Arkansas. The organization in 2022 launched Operation Nature Heals to raise the $2.5 million needed to build its own duck club.
In June, three years of planning, fundraising and dreaming came to fruition, when McCarley Construction completed its work on Patriot Outpost, a new hunting lodge built to support Darby’s Warrior Support mission.
“We’ve owned some land for a number of years, hunting land, and we’ve been using a really nice farm house in Biscoe that had been provided to us by a very generous Little Rock businessman,” Daniel says. “It’s been great, but if you’re not coming back from a duck hunt, or getting ready to go on a hunt, there’s nothing to do there.”
Serendipitously, Clark McCarley decided to lean into his passion for duck clubs a couple years ago as well. As the founder of McCarley Construction — an offshoot of his family’s 70-plus-year-old contracting firm, McCarley and Co. — McCarley has been building and renovating residential properties since 2010. Now, he’s added duck club builds to his services.
“I’ve been working on plans for my own for probably 20 years,” McCarley says. “With construction in my family, it’s kind of like leaving a legacy. … We want to be the go-to company for duck clubs.”
Patriot Outpost
Far from luxurious, duck hunting as a sport approximately matches the dictionary definition of “roughing it.” But that might not be clear to the veterans that visit Patriot Outpost, which McCarley says he poured his heart into.
“It’s a 10 bedroom, 10 bathroom, two half-bath house, with a large great room with 40-foot ceilings, a large stone fireplace. It sits right on the lake,” McCarley says. “It truly is a retreat for … service men and women.”
The new club will be operational year-round, Daniel says.
“We’ve got an 8-acre lake full of fish, a really cool dock with two boats with trolling motors, a five-stand skeet range, two pistol bays, a 200-yard rifle range, a really cool pavilion with a fire pit,” Daniel says.
Darby’s Warrior Support hosted its first visitors in June. Daniel says he eventually hopes to host everything from unit reunions and faith-based retreats to military planning conferences and corporate events at the Outpost.
“We can host a lot more people. We can sleep 23 people,” Daniel says. “It’ll take a while to build momentum and when we establish that, it’ll be full a lot.”
In the meantime, Daniel says he looks forward to introducing the club to the Searcy community, particularly local first responders.
“I want the community to own this, in terms of, if they’re driving from Des Arc to Searcy or anywhere close, they can come by, meet who we have there that weekend, introduce themselves and get involved,” he says. “You never know what friendships, connections, relationships, networking opportunities it might result in for everyone involved, and even if none of that comes out, you get to meet some American heroes who have done a lot overseas.”
Rooted in Restoration
Daniel first started realizing how healing the outdoors could be when he brought several of his Ranger buddies hunting in Arkansas.
“I wanted to introduce some friends to Arkansas duck hunting, brought them here for the first time in 2002 — and I had talked up Arkansas duck hunting. We hunted for four days — killed 17 ducks. I was personally and professionally embarrassed,” Daniel recalls.
The group planned to try again the following year; Daniel promised the hunting would be better. He was right, but it didn’t take long for the friends to realize that there was more to the trips than hunting.
“Each year, our duck numbers went up, and as our duck numbers went up, the importance of the duck numbers went down. It was just about being together, away from a military installation, and really just checking on each other,” he says.
In 2007, the men decided to share their newfound hobby with other service members and veterans. Since then, they’ve hosted “a couple thousand-plus” on hunting and fishing trips to Arkansas, and with the new duck club, “within three to four years, that’ll double.”
McCarley has had the chance to accompany some of Daniel’s veteran groups on hunts, and he says the trips have been inspiring and enlightening.
“It’s very eye-opening, hearing their stories, and then just seeing the smiles on their faces to be out in nature and get to experience what we sometimes take for granted,” he says. “A lot of them have never experienced this sort of outdoor recreation.”
Darby’s Warrior Support still has about $200,000 to raise to fully fund the new Patriot Outpost. Learn more about the organization at darbyswarriorsupport.org.
