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FIRED UP FOR A GOOD CAUSE
In a video that’s been viewed almost 8,000 times, Joe Hogge, wearing a camo shirt and dark sunglasses, speaks into his camera and from his heart. His world has been rocked by the suicide of a local veteran - someone who lived nearby and had visited his 12 Fox brewery on at least a few occassions.
“This is just sticking with me, and I can’t shake it,” Joe says. “Who do we reach out to? We keep it all inside, because that’s what we do, we’re veterans. We keep it inside, we push it all down, bury that shit until you just can’t do it no more. Then it’s too late.”
He told his viewers that he was going to open up his brewery on Monday nights for veterans and first responders to come out for support. He called it Fireside Chats, after an idea he got from a friend. And he set the inaugural date for Monday, Jan. 30, 2023.
“It’s open to anyone who wants to come and talk,” Joe says in the video. “Right now, I’m here, and you can call me anytime. You can come up here to Fox, and we can have a beer, we can not have a beer, we can sit in the corner. Whatever. I just can’t let this one go, and I need to do something about it.”
But days before the first event, the weather forecasts turned dire. Stacey Hogge, Joe’s wife and business partner at 12 Fox, urged him to cancel due to the incoming storm an event now locally referred to as the Icepocalypse. But Joe refused.
“I said, you don't understand, I put the word out to these vets and they don't care about the weather,” Joe said, during a recent Monday night at Fireside Chats. “They're gonna drive here anyway.'
At that point, the tap room at 12 Fox was not enclosed - it was open to the weather.
“I had six patio heaters, two between each table, just to keep that little group area warm,” Joe said. “So I opened up and I bought some pizzas and just came in. I'll never forget, because it was 28 degrees that day, and 28 people showed up.”
One of those was local Justice of the Peace John Burns, who most of the members simply call “Judge.” As someone who is a veteran and who currently deals with death as part of his job in the precinct, he sees the need on both sides.
“There's a lot of these people, men and women, who've been in horrible places. They have had to live through things that people shouldn't have to look at, or see, or be involved with,” Judge said. “First responders see awful nasty stuff too. Those guys and women have to deal with the suicides, have to deal with the horrible accidents, and that takes a toll on you.”
He said Fireside Chats routinely has between 30 and 40 people on any given Monday.
“We have a great turnout and people really care about each other,” Judge said. “Usually people come here once or twice and then they're hooked, they just keep coming back.”
Judge is retired Navy. He was on active duty for five years, beginning three months after the Vietnam War. Then he went into the reserves. He was never in a combat zone, and he never got shot at. Still, he said he has a selfish reason for being involved.
“In a little over six years of being in my job, I’ve probably responded to 30 suicides,” Judge said. “I get called when they (first responders) give up, when they stop trying to do CPR. So that's something that I don't ever want to have to deal with.”
He said that in the last two years, there have been a couple of people in the group who were on the edge, and got pulled back by calling or contacting somebody and sitting down and working through it.
“So that in itself is just an incredible benefit,” Judge said.
With some help from Judge, Joe and Stacey have recently finished the paperwork for Fireside Chats to become a 501 3(c) nonprofit organization. Joe is gearing up to go out and tell people about the group and try to find more support, especially for alternative treatments for PTSD and other health issues. A lot of that started after he had his own medical emergency.
“Two months after I started Fireside Chats, I had a heart attack,” Joe said. “I almost died. It was that close.”
He spent nearly four months recovering, a period he calls his “Groundhog Days.” Every day looked the same - wake up, take medicine, eat, take more medicine, go to bed. During his recovery, he started getting more into holistic medicine, meditation and diet, and he started bringing that to the group.
“I let my hippie out. I know some people don’t like that word for it, but I don’t know what else to call it. You know I've never had long hair in my life until I turned 50,” Joe said. “But there's alternative ways to do this - learning to meditate, sound therapy, all these different things.”
His goal is to have a wellness therapy center, where they offer a variety of different modalities that veterans can learn to use, with a little bit of training.
“And they can come and use it whenever they need to,” Joe said. “It's here. No cost. That's the goal.”
Lynn Krug is an Army veteran who served six years in the military, including time in Bosnia. Like Joe, she believes that there needs to be more treatment options for vets, especially when it comes to PTSD. Over the last several years, she has had the opportunity to explore psychedelic programs for veterans through a couple of different groups, including one called Heroic Hearts.
“I had just gotten to a point in my life that I was like, well, I guess this is as good as it gets. I don't have anything to lose. Why not?” Lynn said. “So I signed up, and within two months, I was heading to Peru to go do ayahuasca with a bunch of special forces guys that are all out of the military.”
She said nothing could have prepared her for how bad it tasted. Twenty minutes later she was purging, throwing up, and then the hallucinations started. The group repeated the ritual for two more nights.
“It did more for me in three nights than the 11 years of actively working on my mental health with the VA,” Lynn said. “It felt like it sent a scud missile in and just took away things that didn't belong to me anymore, like guilt and shame and depression.”
It’s been about a year since Lynn started attending Fireside Chats. She said she was very nervous to go to her first 12 Fox meetup, because she expected to find a bunch of old Republican white men.
“I was very happy to see that there were people of color, younger people and females there,” Lynn said. “And I wasn’t the only gay person.”
She said the group has given her community within Dripping Springs.
Robin Rachelson*, who has been an EMT for 10 years, agreed.
“I love my peer group, but there are many things they don't understand,” Robin said. “I was looking for a community of people who had similar past traumatic experiences. I have found that and so much more through Fireside Chats.”
She said there aren’t always a lot of resources available for first responders, even though they have many of the same long-term complications as veterans. With this group, she feels heard and supported, especially at times when she is really struggling.
“On the bad weeks, it's a community that meets you where you are and does everything they can to lift you up,” Robin said.
Army veteran Brandon Mendoza said that was put to the test for him one day not long ago, when he had what he now understands was a full blown panic attack.
“I had never experienced that before. I had to leave work,” Brandon said. “I put out the SOS, and within minutes, Judge is calling me, ‘Hey, where are you? What's going on? Do you need me to come get you?’” Several other guys were reaching out to check on him as well. Brandon said that kind of support is what keeps him coming back.
“And I can tell you right now, cops, firefighters and EMTs deal with the same issues that we deal with. It's just a slightly different color,” Brandon said. “Instead of green, they are blue or red. And they need just the same amount of help that we do.”
Blake Holbrook, an Army infantry veteran and Purple Heart recipient, said when he returned home from Iraq he was a “poster child” for post traumatic stress. He is one of the people who saw Joe’s original video and came out for the first night of Fireside Chats.
“I moved to Dripping Springs with my wife in 2022. I didn't know anybody here, and I was isolating a lot,” Blake said. “When I saw Joe's post, I was like yeah, I need this, because I'm just regressing at this point.”
Blake said he’s lost several friends to suicide, and he’s been through a lot of struggles himself.
“Between 2008 and 2011 I was on my way to being in a suicide statistic,” Blake said. “There were a lot of years there where I should've just asked for help, but I was stuck in that military mindset of not doing so.”
Blake is the founder of a nonprofit called VetRecOutdoors, which aims to facilitate peace and purpose for veterans through nature. He said that this newer generation of veterans is looking for something different, and that’s what Fireside Chats has provided.
“It's changed my existence in Dripping Springs,” Blake said. “I made lifelong friends out of Fireside Chats pretty much within the first two weeks. It's just made the community home to me.”
Another member of the group is Mike Brown, a retired colonel who spent 27 years in the Army. His specialty was dealing with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. He was actually in the Pentagon on 911, when the jet hit. He said one of the most valuable parts of Fireside Chats is just meeting others.
“I know we all have issues, and some people have some really major issues that they have to deal with,” Mike said. “Sometimes it's just having a phone number to call or knowing somebody that you could talk to.”
Mike, who is also involved at Patriots’ Hall, said he heard about Fireside Chats from another veteran and decided to come and try it.
“It's just a great group of people,” Mike said. “I love their mission, their spirit to help others. For some people it’s just all talk, but for Joe and Stacey, it’s through their actions.”
That’s a message that was repeated over and over, by every person interviewed for this story. And that night, as people made their way to their cars, every one of them made a point to stop and say goodbye to Joe.
“What they don't know is that it's good for me. It fills this,” Joe said, tapping his heart. “Without these guys I probably wouldn't have made it. I would have given up. They saved me just as much as I saved them.”
*not her real name
