At St. Andrews, an Iowa Alumnus Guides Veterans Out of the Rough

In winter 2008, Don Snyder left his Maine home for a trip to Scotland, motivated by a pledge to his son and a hope that a change of scenery would help him shake off a “darkness” that had descended upon him in middle age.

PHOTO: COURTESY THE CADDIE SCHOOL FOR SOLDIERS Association Since its founding by Iowa alumnus Don Snyder in 2019, more than 30 military veterans have participated in the Caddie School for Soldiers in St. Andrews, Scotland.

Three of his four children were grown and gone, their empty rooms a daily reminder time was ticking away. After graduating from the Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, Snyder (86MFA) had written seven books and a screenplay for a movie starring Gary Sinise. Reassessing his life’s work at 58, however, he felt none of it had matched his ambition.

But the thing that gave his darkness a “weight,” he says, was a discovery that his mother, who died 16 days after giving birth to him and his twin brother at age 19, had known the peril of taking her pregnancy to term. Researching a memoir of his parents’ brief love affair, he learned she had sacrificed her life so her sons could live. He was still haunted by the loss.

In Elie, a small coastal town north of Edinburgh, Snyder wrote in the early morning and walked the town’s golf course during the day, toting a bag filled with rocks from the North Sea shoreline along with his clubs. He was training to be a caddie to honor his commitment to carry the bag of his son, Jack—a golfer at the University of Toledo—should he make a professional tour. Snyder’s six-week stay eventually turned into six months when he got a job at the nearby Kingsbarns course, not far from St. Andrews, golf’s famed birthplace. He felt his spirits begin to rise on the “loops” he took each day and in the camaraderie of the clubhouse.

“It was the brotherhood of my fellow caddies that lifted me,” Snyder says. “I looked forward to seeing them each day. And it was also the chance to leave behind my own story and enter the story of the person at my side who I was caddying for.” 

Jack later decided to not pursue a golf career, but Snyder thought about his experience as a caddie in Scotland years later when he read about soldiers who returned home and struggled to readjust to civilian life after deployments in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. A Brown University study in 2021 found that 30,177 U.S. soldiers had died by suicide since 2001—compared with 7,052 who died in fighting in post-9/11 combat.

Thinking of the benefits he got from caddying, Snyder opened the Caddie School for Soldiers in 2019 in St. Andrews with help of sponsors including the Kohler Co. More than 30 soldiers have graduated from the month-long residential program, which helps veterans from the U.S., Canada, and United Kingdom work through physical injuries and post-traumatic stress by training them to be caddies. Snyder is working to raise a $4 million endowment to expand the school, which now has a permanent 10-bedroom home at St. Andrews. This year he hopes to bring the first female veterans through.

“You have to find some way to believe in yourself enough to keep going, to keep trying,” he says. “That’s really the battle that we face with the soldiers when they first arrive. You can look in their eyes, and you can see that they’ve lost their belief in themselves, in their own value. You have to build that back into them.”

PHOTO: COURTESY THE CADDIE SCHOOL FOR SOLDIERS After their month-long training, many program participants go on to caddie professionally at some of the world's top courses.

A Sense of Purpose

You might think of caddying as a quaint vestige of the past, a service that outside of the professional tours has been replaced by golf carts—or perhaps something the sons of dentists do at their local country clubs. You wouldn’t be wrong. More than 90% of caddies in the U.S. are teenagers, according to the National Golf Foundation.

But that type of caddying is just carrying bags. The caddies Snyder’s program produces are the sporting world’s version of a military officer. They navigate bunkers and other hazards, breathe confidence into their charges, and plot strategies of attack. Each day, they are motivated by a mission: to get their golfers around a course in the fewest strokes possible.

Soldiers who come through the program have faced real hazards, of course. They’ve lost limbs, suffered concussions, torn muscles and ligaments, and sustained other injuries that continue to cause pain. Most have friends who died in combat and, like Snyder with his mother, struggle with survivor’s guilt.

Yet participants say that in caddying they find a sense of purpose that reminds them of the service. In some cases, the graduates also find a new way to make a living, one that’s outside in lush, verdant settings and presents new challenges each day.

Luke Cyr says he still felt unmoored when he joined the school in Scotland last year. Just a few days before arriving, the Canadian Armed Forces veteran had completed an eight-week stay at a treatment facility after he attempted to take his own life. By then, he had been out of the service for nine years, but the mental wounds he managed to suppress in school after his service and then as a personal support worker eventually began to surface.

“You don’t feel normal around anybody else,” says Cyr, who served 13 years, including deployments to Bosnia and Afghanistan. “You just go shut yourself away and eventually just find a comfortable spot alone.”

At the school, Cyr swapped stories with his classmates at night and learned the finer points of caddying by day. Soon, he felt an old sense of service and mission return. “The better you do, the better he does,” Cyr says of the relationship with his golfer. “You meet someone who normally shoots 91, and then you get them around [the course], and they shoot an 83; I mean, they’re looking at you like you’re some kind of messiah.”

A Simple Act

In conversations with the soldiers, Snyder has found that their struggles often lie in the shallowness of the relationships they develop in civilian life, as opposed to the intense bonds they had in the service. One soldier told Snyder that their conversation was the first time in a month that someone had talked to him without looking at their phone.

Graduates of the program say they begin to feel better almost immediately when they arrive in Scotland and begin to swap stories around a dinner table with five other people who share similar experiences. Snyder limits each group to six soldiers, and veterans don’t have to be golfers to apply. The program, which is led by a professional caddie on the Duke’s Course above the town of St. Andrews, is free for the participants.

Sean Sutherland completed seven tours in 14 countries, including in Bosnia and Afghanistan, during his military career with the Canadian Special Forces. He suffered several concussions but says his PTSD has more to do with the friends he lost in combat. “You have to accept that you can’t save everybody. That was the hardest thing,” says Sutherland, who owns a carpentry business and now also serves as a mentor at the Caddie School. “We talk about all of this stuff in Scotland for 30 days. It’s sharing it with six other guys who are just as f----- up as I am, or worse.”

The sense of fellowship extends to the golfers they take on too, Sutherland said. “The spirit of walking around that golf course—it’s serene, quiet. You have the birds and the bees flopping around, and you’re walking with this person. It’s powerful.”

Steve Ogilvie has served 24 years with the Canadian military in places like Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. Post-traumatic stress from his service nearly fractured his relationship with his wife, who had asked him to leave their home, separating him from his 2-year-old son.

But Ogilvie says he felt revived by the open air and the simple act of walking with someone and sharing stories over a loop. “You just feel that brotherhood, like the fire team partner that you had in the military, I have this in a golfer now,” Ogilvie says. “It’s the two of you; we’re going to get through this course together, and we’ll finish these 18 holes and maybe go to the 19th and have a drink and celebrate the round.”

Since returning home from the program, Ogilvie has reunited with his family in a new house and—in what is perhaps the ultimate measure of his mental health as a Canadian—is back playing hockey again.