Mickey Willenbring: I enlisted as a 62-Bravo, which is a construction equipment mechanic. And I was one of the first women out of my entire battalion to get crew-served weapons certified. In other words, I got really big freaking guns. And fully-automatic grenade launchers.

I’ve been deployed multiple times. The big one was to Iraq. We were actually part of the initial force to go in. And I can’t even describe the chaos. There were tanks still smoldering on the road that we had to move in order for our convoys to come through.

We had just gotten through like the worst part of that and all of a sudden I see this herdsman walking his dang sheep along the road and I was just like, ’Damn, son, it don’t matter what’s smoldering or who’s in charge or who’s not in charge — the animals still need to be fed.’

It was at the end of the deployment and my luck ran out. I ended up severely injured. I got med-evac’d out and I had PTSD so badly that I could not deal with living in a city anymore.

So I started looking for a piece of land to farm. For me, I had to find my own way to heal, and that was the sheep.

The animals help. The animals insulate. I can tell my own mood where I’m going, if I’m getting too dark or if I’m going too south by how the sheep react to me. And I can walk myself back from the cliff.

There’s a Navajo saying, it’s dibé bé iiná, and it means sheep is life.’ The sheep are your children, your mother, your grandmother. They are your charges but they also take care of you.

When you’re in combat, danger can come at any particular moment from any direction.

With farming, it does have a lot of drama. But it’s also something that is about creation, about life over death rather than death over life.