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A Year In Service: The Warrior Retreat at Bull Run 2025 Recap

• Larry Zilliox • Season 3 • Episode 137

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Ten years can bring about significant healing. We open the doors to the Warrior Retreat at Bull Run and walk through a year where a 37-acre sanctuary, a pair of five-bedroom homes, and a brand-new Grand Lodge came together to serve thousands of wounded warriors, veterans, and families. From the weekly rhythm of guest stays and Wednesday staging to the Saturday beautification days, you’ll hear how logistics and love combine to make rest possible for those who need it most.

We revisit milestones that shaped 2025: Alvey Elementary students raising new service flags alongside American Legion mentors, the Vets for Willing Warriors car show featuring 264 cars and a small army of volunteers, and the Warrior Ride’s medic-supported routes that turned grit into a community. Food anchors the story. Our visiting chef program—comprising 126 chefs, many from elite military kitchens—brings five-star meals, simple techniques, and laughter to the table. We honor the late Jim Cole with a kitchen dedication and relive the Home Away From Home Thanksgiving dinner, where every dish, from the croutons to the main course, was made from scratch for nearly 70 guests.

Programs expanded with a purpose inside the Grand Lodge. Moral injury workshops welcomed soldiers, families, and medical teams, with plans to include first responders next year. Youth found their footing through the 9:57 Project’s Summer Leadership Challenge, and We Signed Up Two’s day of cooking, journaling, and survival skills. An elderly Veterans lunch restored connection for those who rarely get out. Along the way, partners like Home Depot Foundation and Amazon stepped up with flooring, a new mower barn, and a studio grant to bring video to future episodes. At the same time, volunteers pushed tracked hours toward 12,500 and beyond.

We close with gratitude, a nod to our 10th anniversary gala and Visiting Chef of the Year, Navy Chief Dakota Aubry, and a look ahead to season four with Rear Admiral Mike Studeman. If this story moves you, share it with someone who loves service, subscribe on your favorite platform, and leave a review. Want to help directly? Visit willingwarriors.org to volunteer, donate, or ask how you can be part of the next chapter.

Larry Zilliox:

Good morning. I'm your host, Larry Zilliox, Director of Culinary Services here at the Warrior Retreat at Bull Run. And this week we're doing something a little bit different. There's no guests joining me. I just wanted to go back and do a kind of recap of all things Warrior Retreat at Bull Run for 2025. Just sort of go over what happened at the retreat, all the different awesome events we had, and kind of give you an overview of what the year looked like for the staff and the volunteers and the guests who came to the Warrior Retreat. So for those of you who are new and have not joined us before, uh the Warrior Retreat at Bull Run is a project of Willing Warriors, a 501c3 nonprofit based in Haymarket, Virginia. Its primary program is the Warrior Retreat at Bull Run. And the retreat itself is a $6 million, 37-acre estate, has three homes on it. Two of the homes we use to invite wounded warriors and their families out from Walter Reed, Fort Belvoir Community Hospital, or any of the soldier recovery units around the country. Also from various branches, uh such as the Navy Safe Harbor Program, the Marine Corps Soldier Recovery Unit at Camp Lejeune, uh Air Force, AF-2, any number of uh wounded warriors are invited to stay for five nights. Uh each of our two houses that we use to host wounded warriors and their families, our five-bedroom. So we encourage them to fill it up. Mom, dad, aunt, and uncle, grandma, grandpa, anybody who would make their stay more impactful. That could be battle buddies, um, friends, relatives. And we do about 37 guest days a year in each house. The families check in on Friday and check out on Wednesday. Then on Wednesday, we have volunteers who come in and clean and sanitize. And then a staging crew that comes in and gets the house ready for the next guests that will check in that next Friday. We have an op tempo that runs three guest days in a row and then we take a week off. During that week off from March through November, on the Saturday that we're off, we do what we call beautification day, where from Saturday from 9 to noon, we have help from the community. They sign up to come out and help us with a bunch of projects that we just don't have the bandwidth to do. So they'll come out and paint, they'll come out and weed, put down mulch, um, just a whole bunch of projects. And we typically have anywhere from 75 to 125 community members that come out and support us. It's uh it's a lot of fun, and we really appreciate uh the help. I mentioned three houses. We have the Lang House, the original house, 11,000 square feet, 31 rooms, about 9,000 square feet is used by the warrior and their family. We have about 2,000 square feet for offices and conference room. And it's a five-bedroom home, so up to 10 guests in each house. The house was uh we we just had our 10-year anniversary. So this last uh um Memorial Day was our 10th anniversary celebration. Um then the second house we brought online, the Lang House, we started in 2015 hosting Warriors and their families. And then the Penn Fed house, which is a little bit smaller, but also five bedrooms, so about 4,800 square feet. That we brought online in 2019. Uh that was built for us. Uh, we received a grant from Penn Fed Foundation, as well as other the Northern Virginia Heavy Contractors Association number of private donors, and that doubled our capacity, and we've been running the two houses ever since. And then in 2024, May 2024, we brought online the uh third house on the property, which is the Grand Lodge. Again, uh we received a sizable donation from the Penn Fed Foundation, about $500,000. And then we matched that and raised additional funds for about a $1.3 million Grand Lodge, which is six bedrooms, and we use that to host programs and different events that we have here on the property. This year we've we've managed to really touch a lot of warriors and a lot of families. Um we've hosted uh 3,233 warriors, families, and veterans for different programs as well as guest days. And uh we've been busy, to say the least. Um for us, uh the winter, of course, is the slowest time, but things start to ramp up in the spring. Really get going um May 1st, which is really one of our fun, exciting events. We have a close association with uh elementary school nearby, Alvey Elementary, and the military children there um collect donations for us, raise money, and purchase service flags for us. So on the property, we have a uh American flag in our memorial garden, and then around a uh horseshoe area in the front yard are service flags, and we have um each branch as well as our our own flag, um, willing warriors flag. And we take those down in the winter because the just the wind and the weather just rips them apart. It's very windy up here on the hill. But then on May 1st, we invite the kids from Alvey Elementary to come out and raise the flags that they bought for us, and they come out before school starts, and we pair them up with um some crusty old guys from my American Legion Post, 1799, here in Haymarket. And together they um we have a bugler and they raise the flags uh together. It's a lot of fun, and the kids and the families have a great time, and we really look forward to that. And we'll have the flags up then through the rest of the the year, um, till right after uh our home away from home dinner in November and we'll take them back down again for the the winter. But in May that we had uh our 10th anniversary event, um we opened our doors uh we had a ribbon cutting on the uh uh uh Langhouse, the original house, July 4th of 2015. And so this year, um um in May, we had our 10th anniversary uh event and had a lot of people on the property. It was really great to see um people we haven't seen in a long time, uh some former guests who would come back to uh to celebrate with us. One of the exciting things for me as the director of culinary services is we dedicated the kitchen in the Langhouse to Jim Cole. And Jim was my very first volunteer sous-chef who would help our visiting chefs when they came to do prep work and and cook and do whatever was needed in the kitchen. So while the chef came to to make the warrior a great dinner. And um unfortunately during COVID, Jim lost his battle with liver disease. And this year, during our 10th anniversary, we dedicated the kitchen and the laying house to him and the Jim Cole kitchen, and we had a wonderful photo of him in there with his apron and a little plaque. And um, we unveiled that during the uh anniversary ceremony. His his children came um from Maine and sister from Washington stayed and unveiled that, and it was just uh really great day. We missed Jim a lot. We definitely do. We had our Vets for Willing Warriors event in July, and this is our annual car show that we do. Um this year, as big as ever, we had 264 cars. There were 865 people on the property, including our volunteers and visitors and and people showing their cars. Um, we had 131 volunteers actually for that particular event. So our events are um we we rely on our volunteers heavily, whether they're parking people, uh, whether they're giving tours, whether they're cleaning up, whether they're setting up, it takes a lot. In fact, just that event, which is really doesn't take as much as some of the other events, uh, was 646 volunteer hours just to get that that uh event off the ground. But we also want to give a shout out to the Knights of Columbus here in Haymarket, Gainesville. Um, they volunteer to provide all the food, the hot dogs, hamburgers, and go ahead and uh cook that all up and offer it for free or donation to uh everybody who comes that day. So we really appreciate the Knights of Columbus and what they do for us on uh during the uh uh Vets for Willing Warriors event. Now, next year I will note that we're moving it from July because it's just incredibly hot, and we're gonna move it to May. So look for that. Uh it's gonna be on our webpage, and you'll be able to see the events coming up. And that one, if you want to come out for that, it's a lot of fun. That one will be in May uh 2026. Then we had our 10th annual, I believe it was our 10th annual warrior ride, which is a bicycling event. That's not here on the property, that actually takes place at uh a brewery nearby. But uh this year we had uh there's three or four different courses that the riders can take. A mountain bike course, there's also like a 13 mile, a 25 mile, and then a big 60-plus mile route. Uh, we had 277 cyclists. Uh again, it takes a lot of volunteers, 196 volunteers, just to pull that one-day event off. Whether they're planning, setting up, moving stuff. We have volunteers all along the route. Uh, we have three rest stops. There are volunteers at each rest stop, there's an ambulance at each rest stop, there are ham radios at the rest stop and all along the route to track the riders. We also have a whole team that can go out and pick up the riders and pick up trucks and bring their bikes back if they have trouble. There's um bike shop people at the start who can tune up bikes. We have a massage therapist at the start to tune up riders. And it's just uh an amazing event. We have uh they ride, come back, they get a ticket for uh a beer, and uh a mission barbecue lunch. So it's a great event that's uh September of every year. We ride and have a lot of fun. November is our annual gala, and this was our 10th annual gala, and it was uh wonderful. It's really an event to celebrate the the warriors and what they uh what they do for our country and for us, and uh it's just another way for those people who like to come to the gala and donate to see what we do and to hear firsthand from a number of different warriors who spoke about their stay. And um it's really, really a fun night. Uh, we do we also give out during the gala our visiting chef of the year award. In 2025, our visiting chef of the year was Navy Chief Dakota Aubrey. He is a uh chef for an admiral, and uh he's just a trooper. He's he's been out to the retreat 10, 11 times to make dinner this year for different warriors and their families. I should take a minute to tell you a little bit about the visiting chef program, which is what I manage and oversee. Um I have about 126 chefs that volunteer to come out to the retreat on either a Saturday or Sunday. We do it a dinner for each house, and the chef comes out, makes an extraordinary meal for the family. And uh 85% of my chefs are military chefs, from the chefs and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs residents to the Navy chefs at Presidential Food Service at the White House, to the Navy and Coast Guard chefs at the Naval Observatory that cook for the vice president all the way down to the Marine Corps chefs and uh just they love to come out to the retreat, and it's a great way for them to give back. It also is a great program because it introduces our our warriors to food that they most likely won't encounter on their own. A lot of the restaurant chefs that come out, the warriors just can't afford to go and spend that kind of money to eat in their restaurant, so we bring that five-star culinary experience to them. Um they almost always say it's the best meal they've ever had, and they have a lot of fun. We try to get them into the kitchen and show them techniques, how to cook. It's uh it's not rocket science, it's salt, fat, acid, and heat. It's good ingredients and simple techniques, make wonderful dishes, and uh everybody has a good time. And it's it's a lot of fun. It's one of the highlights, I think, of the the stay. And we also have a number of other things that the families can do while they're staying at the retreat. So there's there's all sorts of activities. A massage therapist can come in. Each family gets a photo shoot while they're there at the retreat, so they have great memories of their time at the retreat. Each family can pick a number of different activities. They can go to a shooting experience with an original SEAL Team Six member, they can go to an antique automobile restoration facility out in White Post, they can go swimming, horseback riding, uh tours, they can go to concerts at the Hilton Center. If there's something playing there at the time they're staying, we can easily arrange to get tickets. So um the guest day coordinator, which is a volunteer position that works with the family to arrange all this and get an itinerary together for them and get everything squared away with the vendors and so that they have a place to go and they inspect them and they everybody has a good time. Uh they work with the families for weeks, if not a month out, to to make sure that they have uh an amazing stay with us. And again, that's that's all part of what the volunteers do. Here at the Warrior Retreat, we just have six staff members. We have one full-time staff member, our executive director, and then five of us are part-time who work full-time. But uh it's a it's really uh a great, great job to have, I gotta say. I'm not complaining by any measure. It's an amazing place, and we're just very fortunate that the community trusts us and gives us the ability to give this gift back to the warriors because it is, you know, millions of dollars has gone into this facility to make it a very special place for our wounded warriors and their families. Uh rounding out our our events, we've got the after the gala, we have my favorite event of the year, which is our home away from home dinner. So we have hosted the home away from home dinner for 10 years. The very first year we did it, it was crazy. We had about 25 warriors that we found at the hospitals and mostly single guys and ladies. And we said, come on out the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and we'll we'll have a home cooked Thanksgiving dinner. And that was a bunch of volunteers and and myself and staff who put together dishes and got a turkey and roasted it, and and it was pretty basic, actually. And then as we went on, our uh volunteer executive event chef, Ken Gardner, put together uh a more substantial meal, and that grew and grew, and we brought more chefs on. And now that we uh are in the Grand Lodge and we can use the activities room in the Grand Lodge, we were able to host almost 70 warriors and family members this year in November. And uh we had three days of cooking and preparing food, and and then on that Sunday before Thanksgiving, we hosted that dinner and uh it was amazing. We had smoked turkey and roasted turkey and ham and about 10 different sides, everything's made some scratch. We had about 20 chefs in on Saturday, all taking a dish and knocking it out, and we make the croutons from scratch, we make the salad dressing from scratch. Uh, everything, everything that went on that buffet table for everybody was made from scratch. And we also want to give a big shout out to I-66 Express who uh sponsored the dinner. They gave us a donation of $5,000 for food, and we used uh almost all of it, making a scratch dinner for about $100 when you consider the not only the volunteers that we feed, but uh we like to overcook um because we want to give everybody a um take home container so they they can take it back and either share it with somebody who couldn't come or next day's lunch. You know, uh it's just uh an awesome, awesome dinner and time. And uh we had about 30 volunteers for that. Also, we had some great special guests. We had um Commissioner Chuck Singler and his wife, gay. They uh came for the second year in a row. And it's great to have the commissioner of the Virginia Department of Veterans Services show up and talk to the veterans that are there and the active duty that may become veterans and want to stay here in Virginia and know that they can count on the Department of Veterans Services here for help if needed. And uh he makes it a point to talk to everybody, every soldier, every veteran that's here. Um, he really does love to come out and and really talk to uh these warriors and find out what their needs are. And uh, we are always so happy to have his support. Uh, we also had a uh special guest by the name um uh Whithold Brick was a World War II survivor, and he was born in Poland, and he fought in the Wausau Uprising and with the Polish resistance until he was captured and interned in a Nazi uh camp. And he was 102, and soon to be 103, and it was very exciting to have him there. He he uh had a great time and his daughter Michelle um brought him out. It was great. Um, so it was really a fun, fun day. December, we have holiday parties at Walter Reed in Fort Balfour. They are a lot of fun, the Walter Reed one, especially. We give a lot of stuff away. And then You know, we're we kind of have a little lull in January where we things slow down for us and we take a little bit of a breather and uh and then get right into the new year. Uh we got a host of programs. The Grand Lodge was built for programs, for groups to come in and do events. And some of the groups that come, like Mighty Oaks or the American Warrior Association, they take up all three houses where they bring in a number of veterans for counseling or different types of programs and use the Grand Lodge for their training and for dining, basically. Uh, we will do um our own programs. Uh we do a moral injury program in 2026. We're going to expand that program, not only from for veterans and warriors, but also our first responders in the community. And we sort of look at that as a way to give back to the community to say, you know, thank you for your support. And here is a program that we have that we feel could benefit your uh first line firefighters, police, EMS, emergency room personnel, what I like to refer to as the warriors within the wire. Um, those that are doing a job that is extremely stressful and dangerous, and many have issues with moral injury. And so we're looking forward to expanding that program in 2026. But we also do host moral injury programs by the chaplains from the Soldier Recovery Unit at Fort Belvoir. We bring out soldiers for one week, a group, and then family for another, and then cadre or the medical personnel that work with the warriors. And that was a very successful program in the last couple of years. Uh, we did an elderly veteran lunch where we hosted an afternoon of fun and uh food for um about 30 elderly veterans, many with mobility issues, and don't get out much. And so we were able to uh work with a couple of nonprofit VSOs in the area to get them to the retreat and have a fun time. And it was really a great day. And we're looking forward to doing that again next year. We partnered with an organization called We Signed Up Two, which is a really fun nonprofit. And it was started by two teenage girls who actually were guests here in 2018 with their father, and they decided that they needed to create an online space and an organization that supported children of wounded warriors. And it's called We Signed Up To. And we hosted them about 10 of these young people out for a day. Uh, they wanted to have a cooking class, a journaling class, and a survival class. And we were able to get all of those uh for them for that day, and we're looking forward to hosting them again as well. And we also did a uh summer leadership challenge for teenagers when we partnered with the 957 Project, which is a nonprofit that has a curriculum that teaches uh young people about 9-11 and uh the war on terrorism, and they come out for a day uh for a week. It's a day camp, and each element of that course is taught by a veteran. And the veterans stay in the Grand Lodge, the instructors, and then the kids come for the day, and uh it's a really, really great program. And we had a lot of fun doing that. Kids are amazing. They all have to pick a project where they support their community, and uh they really do an amazing job just thinking about it, really. It's uh it's really it, it's it's really great to see these kids and what they come up with as a way to give back. But we'll uh get again, we're gonna be looking at doing that again, looking forward to doing that again in 2026. We at the retreat really understand that we couldn't do what we do without our volunteers. We have a core group of volunteers that are absolutely amazing. They come, they show up every week, they do staging to set the house up for the next family coming in. They do grounds team work. I mean, we have some amazing veterans who are on our grounds team, and they're out there mowing the lawn in pretty hot weather sometimes in the dead of summer. And uh, you know, they they do an amazing job. We have a team that uh works the garden, master gardeners and volunteers. We have a huge vegetable garden. We can provide all sorts of fresh vegetables for the families while they're here and the chefs. We have volunteers that come and work just events like the bike ride, like the gala, like the Corvette show. We have a volunteer who comes twice a year, just once to set up Christmas trees in December and again to take them down in January. And Maureen, that's all she does. We don't see her for the rest of the year. We have a volunteer who rarely comes to the retreat, but she has an amazing pool at her house nearby, just a beautiful pool, and we call it Bonnie's private pool. And during the summer, the families can go over there. She works from home and they can swim. And she invites them over, they have a great time, and uh that's her way of contributing. And we have hundreds and hundreds of volunteers that uh really, really uh do the work. And when you when you think about um this year alone, uh we are closing in on 12,500 volunteer hours that we are able to track. There are sometimes people that come and volunteer and do things that we don't get to track all their hours. You know, we get a lot of groups that come out, companies that bring their employees out to help us. Um Home Depot Foundation is one. Um they bring their people out and do amazing work on the property. We're thankful for their um contribution of the flooring in the Grand Lodge when it was being built. They just worked with Tough Shed to get us a $25,000 uh mower shed. Barn, actually, is what it looks like to me, um, which we really needed because we were storing our mowers in a ratty uh pole barn that was just coming apart at the seams. And this uh this really is gonna help us um maintain our our mowers. And we our grounds team goes out. Wow, on a Wednesday, they're out with four zero turns for hours mowing the lawn. We we've got a big property and they make it look beautiful. Also, a shout out to Amazon, another of our big donors. Um, they have uh committed to a grant we'll receive here shortly to build a uh a small little studio in our offices, and it's a $20,000 grant for the build-out of the construction as well as equipment to think we'll move from audio only over to video as well, and put out some episodes that'll be video, and you'll be able to see our guests. So we're really looking forward to that coming up in 2026, and we really appreciate the support of uh Amazon in that grant, that's for sure. Um uh direct everybody to the webpage to it's willingwarriors.org or g. You can see ways to volunteer, ways to donate. You can see all the different programs that we have. And certainly if you have any questions, you can email us through the webpage or we really want to hear from you, especially if you want to volunteer. We can find something for you to do. There's no no doubt about that. We need volunteers for everything, really. Um, when you think about it, we we we give out thousands of cards, handmade cards by church groups and kids each year, but we have to go through all those cards. Some of them are not appropriate, and it's not not that that's done for mean reasons, it's just some of these younger kids don't understand uh what warriors are going through and exploding tanks, things like that. We just kind of weed out. Um, so everything takes man hours. Uh, we have a a great team of um handymen. One handles everything inside the houses and one that handles everything outside the houses. Um, we have 21 acres of hardwood with five trails that need to be maintained. We also have um a volunteer who manages all our Eagle Scout projects. We're most likely the private property in the country with the most Eagle Scout projects. We're sitting right now at about 74. And uh so we we have a lot of uh a lot of support from the community. But please, if you're interested in donating or volunteering, reach out to us, go to the webpage willingwarriors.org, check it out, and if you have any questions, you can email us or give us a call. We're happy to uh to talk to you about whatever whatever position you'd like to volunteer for or whatever any questions you might have. That's gonna be it for this year. We're wrapping up and I want to thank all of our listeners. As crazy as it seems, five percent of our listeners are in Europe, which is a big surprise to me. But wherever you are, I really appreciate you taking the time to listen and uh to meet our guests that we have, and hopefully we've uh been able to bring some useful information to you and introduce you all to veteran service organizations and individuals that are giving back and and uh are contributing in ways that uh can help. And hopefully, uh certainly if you need help, we've maybe found a resource for you. Um season four starts in January, and uh I'm excited to to say that my guest for season four, first episode is gonna be uh Rear Admiral Mike Studeman, who is uh retired Navy intelligence officer, and uh he has a new book out, it's a great book, and we'll be talking to him uh in uh the very first episode of season four. So uh until then, we really thank you for listening. Uh, you can find us on all the major podcast platforms. We're on YouTube and

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Larry Zilliox | Veteran Podcast Host

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