Veterans, active-duty service members and their families and friends marked Memorial Day weekend with a round of 18 Saturday morning.

The inaugural Operation Allies Refuge (OAR) charity golf tournament took place at the Homestead Golf Course in Lakewood, bringing together 19 teams of veterans and servicemembers in an effort to help people discuss the impacts of the moral injuries sustained during their service.

The event was sponsored by the distilleries Locke + Co and Pentilla Vodka, the latter of which was created by an ex-Marine who donates a portion of every bottle sold to the OAR foundation, according to Pentilla Vodka owner Andrew Mattson.

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“A lot of it is cathartic, just to be able to talk to guys who have been through the same thing as you and just be able to tell funny stories and be able to laugh about the times together,” said Kyle Swope, director of development and operation at the OAR Foundation. “Just by bringing veterans together to do something fun like golf, that helps out a lot more so than the traditional methods of treating it.”

Moral injury is defined as the distressing psychological, behavioral, social and sometimes spiritual aftermath that can come about when individuals perpetuate, fail to prevent or witness events that contradict their deeply held moral beliefs and expectations, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ website. It especially happens in military veterans, though people in other industries, such as healthcare, can also experience it during their line of work.

Swope and Seth Landrey, acts of service director with the OAR Foundation, said that the event was just one of many that the organization hosts in an effort to find ways to treat moral injuries sustained from combat. In addition to community events such as the golf tournament, the foundation also hosts service and humanitarian efforts, allowing its volunteers to help others in a way that gives them a sense of purpose and allows them to heal.

“Selfishly, it helps us,” Landrey said. “It’s just been a super cool thing where it’s healing, it keeps positivity going and allows us to put that back into communities.”

The OAR Foundation was created after the the attack on the Abbey Gate of Kabul’s International Airport while the U.S. was attempting to evacuate Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2021. Many who came back from the incident not only carried immense guilt for the 13 American and 170 Afghan lives lost, but also deep psychological wounds stemming from what they had witnessed during the evacuation, according to Joe Laude, the foundation’s founder.

“When we came home, one of the things I was worried about was that I felt like this operation was pushed under the rug, and essentially no one was talking about it the way like I felt like we should,” Laude said.

“It was the profound moral injury that really led me to create this organization because I knew that there was this sense of betrayal, this sense of guilt and shame about our service, and I wanted us to bring that all together as a community and figure out how we could help each other.”

For Laude, Saturday’s event showed the promise of hosting such mental health-focused events in the state, the access to which he noted he would like to expand beyond just American servicemembers.

“There is a mental health space in Colorado that understands where veterans are at, and they welcome veterans from all over the states with open arms,” Laude said.

“I’m hoping that, potentially, with the vision of OAR, we can start to bring our allies to the United States for retreats like this in Colorado. Guys from Europe, from Asia, from wherever. Those guys who are overseas who aren’t getting the help they need, they can come and get that help because they served alongside us.”

The foundation is already planning another tournament next Memorial Day weekend, Mattson said.