JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Veterans across the U.S. have often voiced that they need support, whether that's help applying for benefits, receiving mental health services or finding community with others. WFAE's Nick de la Canal takes us to the town of Mooresville, North Carolina, where a local coffee shop has become an unlikely place for veterans to receive all those things and much more.
NICK DE LA CANAL, BYLINE: A man pours coffee into a Styrofoam cup...
(SOUNDBITE OF COFFEE SPLASHING)
DE LA CANAL: ...On a busy morning inside Richard's Coffee Shop. Men and women wearing caps with military insignias sip drinks and eat biscuits. Around them, newspapers, photos, maps and flags cover the walls.
JACK WALES: Well, there's some spaces over here. There was pictures taken down.
DE LA CANAL: Jack Wales and Butch Fogg finished their meal and hoist a heavy, framed document into an empty space on the wall.
WALES: It's the charter for the VFW.
BUTCH FOGG: Yeah, this is our charter.
DE LA CANAL: They say a friend who often drink coffee with them recently died, and they reprinted the charter to include his name.
WALES: Thank you.
FOGG: My pleasure, brother, my pleasure.
WALES: Appreciate it.
DE LA CANAL: It now hangs beside thousands of artifacts filling more than eight rooms. There are helmets, medals and uniforms from World War I through the war in Afghanistan. In one room hangs a portrait of a man with piercing blue eyes and a white mustache.
WALES: He's the one that started this whole museum.
DE LA CANAL: His name was Richard Warren. He was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam who opened the shop, in part to create a community for veterans he felt weren't getting help from the government. Herman Bullard, also a Vietnam vet, met Warren in 1995.
HERMAN BULLARD: Everybody that came through the door - he wanted to know them. And if they were a veteran, he really wanted to know them, and he wanted to welcome them home.
DE LA CANAL: At the time, the shop was named for Warren's wife, Pat, in a building across the street. When he died in 2009, his patrons, including Bullard, raised money to move the shop and carry on his mission of giving veterans space to meet and help each other.
BULLARD: Not only for me personally, but a lot of veterans would probably not be here today if it hadn't been for this coffee shop.
DE LA CANAL: Every Thursday there's free coffee for service members and volunteers to help them apply for benefits. Patrons also take up collections to help veterans pay for cars, homes and utilities. Veterans like Tim Gerard keep coming back for the fellowship.
TIM GERARD: For some of these guys, it's hard to open up and get in the weeds about certain things where - when you're sitting across the table, talking to somebody that's served, they're a little more at peace. And it's easier for them to talk to these guys.
DE LA CANAL: Gerard discovered Richard's in 2022, when he was struggling with his mental health. On one of his first visits, a patron suggested he get a service dog.
GERARD: Within a week of talking to somebody and then coming, I had a pup, a 9-week-old little girl named Maggie.
DE LA CANAL: He says bringing that yellow American lab home changed his life.
GERARD: Having her absolutely makes a huge difference.
DE LA CANAL: And he's been coming back ever since. He even brought his own artifact to the shop - an American flag flown at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, folded in a display box.
GERARD: It's sitting on the table right underneath the picture.
DE LA CANAL: He left it under a screen showing pictures of customers who've died. It's his own small tribute to the people who built this place for veterans in need of company, conversation or a hot cup of coffee. For NPR News, I'm Nick de la Canal in Mooresville, North Carolina.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE O'NEILL BROTHERS' "AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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