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This isn’t the fight they’re used to. These six anglers are Special Operations soldiers. Active duty. They’ve been all over the world, doing all manner of necessary things that few of us wish to consider, but they’ve never been here: off the coast of Morehead City, on the fighting deck of a sportfishing boat, with dolphin in the prop wash and an Atlantic bonito on the line.

There’s been a long lull in the action, but now the back deck of Accordingly IV, a 76-foot Viking sportfishing boat, is a scene of controlled chaos. One man helps keep the angler square to the bonito, which has the rod bent and the reel singing. Other anglers are frantically reeling in lines to clear that water for the fight. All around the boat, flying fish break from the sargassum-splotched ocean surface like flushing quail.

“Keep cranking! Keep cranking!” someone hollers. “Now he’s running toward you!”

It’s an intense scene, but this group is here less for the adrenaline than for a dose of relaxation and relationship building.

All around North Carolina and beyond, there are opportunities for veterans and wounded soldiers to team up with volunteer anglers and hunters to make memories in the outdoors. For active-duty soldiers, not so many. And for Special Operations soldiers specifically — Army Rangers, Green Berets, Navy SEALs — fewer still.

Last year, Operation Resolute placed a group of military personnel aboard the Morehead City-based Triple S.  photograph by John Mauser

On this one weekend, Operation Resolute, a nonprofit based in Hyde County near Belhaven, has arranged for more than 100 soldiers to board 18 sportfishing boats for a day of offshore big-game fishing. Operation Resolute partners with military chaplains to provide fishing and hunting trips, family weekend adventures, and even marriage retreats. They are times of camaraderie and too-rare relaxation for men and women who live much of their lives on full alert.

Relaxation, that is, until the fish show up for the party. When the bonito rises to the ocean surface, sunlight flashing on its flanks, whoops and hollers go up from the group. It may be a single angler working the big reel, but life with this group is all about the unit. Shoulder to shoulder. One person’s victory is every person’s victory.

• • •

“I’m a medic, so I’ve got the Band-Aids,” one of the men tells me, grinning. He looks around the back of the boat and gives me the who’s who. That’s the combat communications guy, he says. That’s the bomb-and-explosives guy. That guy, we can’t really say what he does. That guy has long hair and tatted forearms and a brilliant smile. His demeanor is more surfer than hardcore soldier. And then it hits me: He has the easygoing, all’s-good vibe of someone who could melt into the background of only-God-knows-where, and nowhere that’s on anyone’s vacation list.

The chance to connect with their soldiers for an extended period is a blessing for the chaplains who work with Operation Resolute. “We rarely get a five-hour car ride with our soldiers to talk about how they’re doing,” says U.S. Army Captain Corey Reeder, a battalion chaplain posted at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. “We get four and five minutes here and there. A trip like this is a few months’ worth of opportunity compressed in a day or two, and we can connect with people who often aren’t as open to deeper face-to-face talks. They’d rather be shoulder to shoulder.”

The chance to connect with their soldiers is a blessing for the chaplains.

I have very little direct experience with the military. My brother served for a few years. My father was in the Air Force before I was born. But largely, the military has been the great “other” to me. A nation within a nation. A warrior nation within a civil society. Each with its own culture and expectations. And each dependent on the other. It’s a bit unnerving for me to mix and mingle with a crew like this.

I’d explained this the night before to a group of soldiers staying at my house in Morehead City. An intelligence analyst nodded. “I get that,” she said. “It is a different world.” She told me that she spent an early career as a photojournalist, then a decade as a wedding photographer, before joining the military. “I wanted to enlist earlier,” she said with a smile, “but each time I talked about it, my mother would cry. But I’ve known I’ve wanted to do this since I was a little girl. I’ve known I wanted to do something …” She searches for the word, then finds it: “Bigger.”

That kind of perspective permeates the group. On the boat, plowing through growing seas, one fellow is struggling to keep his feet. He’s rubber-legged and grabbing handrails. He looks around and laughs. “Man, this is hard!” he says.

Those on the Operation Resolute fishing trip traveled to the Gulf Stream for a day of reeling in mahi-mahi.  photograph by John Mauser

He finds a seat, and I slip in beside him. He’s the bomb-and-explosives guy, he tells me, called in to defuse the infamously devastating Improvised Explosive Devices whenever they were discovered on the battlefield. He’s had eight traumatic brain injuries — “three of them pretty bad,” he says. He suffers from vertigo, and has to be careful when he closes his eyes because he might fall over. But he’s nearing retirement, looking forward to the future. I ask him: How aware of the risks were you when you went into the explosives field?

“Oh, very aware,” he replies without hesitation. He knew the potential costs. And he was completely comfortable with them.

In 62 years of breathing freedom on this planet, this was the most powerful intersection I’ve ever had with the forces protecting that freedom. With the bonito caught and in the hold, I look out at the soldiers, sitting and standing calmly, eyes on the lines that disappear into the blue water behind us.

Every one of them, shoulder to shoulder.