HARRISON — SELF PORTRAIT
Date and place of birth:
Nov. 12, 1953, in Kansas City, Mo.
Family:
wife Carolyn, son Jeremiah, daughter Stephanie McCullough, four grandchildren
Notable for:
Working with farmers and horses in Iraq and Jordan
One thing I would like to know more about is
horses.
You can never learn too much.
The story behind my cowboy hat is
I wear it every day. It was my identity in Iraq and Jordan.
The cowboy is iconically American and wearing it left no doubt who I was.
I wore it on all my missions; it kept me connected with home and my roots.
The best advice I ever received was
“Don’t be afraid of failing. The only people who don’t fail are those who don’t do anything.”
Something most Americans don’t know about Iraq is
it’s not all sand and desert. Iraq is considered the “bread basket” ofthe Middle East.
When I was a kid, my favorite baseball player was
Mickey Mantle.
A person I admire is
anyone who steps out of their comfort zone and tries something new.
My most prized possession is
memories from time spent with my grandchildren. Material things fade with time, but memories are long-lasting.
When I’m on a long plane flight, I like to
read a good Will James or Louis L’Amour Western.
A phrase to sum me up:
“simply a cowboy”
Fred Woehl wanted to teach, not incite a riot.
Woehl was teaching better farming techniques in Iraq, and what he wanted to work on that day was no-till wheat farming. So he said that he was going to have “a demonstration,” which his Army-assigned interpreter relayed to a group of Iraqi farmers.
Only “demonstration” doesn’t mean “presentation,” like it does in Harrison; in Iraq, “demonstration” means “riot,” the kind of terrifying violence that Americans often saw on the news during the early years of the Iraq war.
“No, Mr. Fred! No! No!” shouted the astonished Iraqis. Woehl quickly figured out a way to clarify that he wanted to teach, not torch, and the lesson continued.
Wherever Woehl is, he’s able to get his message across.
“He’s this incredibly approachable rancher and farmer who was always wearing his big cowboy hat in Iraq, and because he’s so approachable, the Iraqis were drawn to him,” says Art Gaffrey of Porterville,Calif., who was in Iraq at the same time as Woehl.
“They immediately understood this man was a man of the earth, someone [who] understood farming.”
For more than three decades, Woehl worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Service Agency, helping Arkansas farmers survive and thrive. In 2008, when the U.S. State Department was looking for Americans to teach better farming and free-market techniques as part of the reconstruction of Iraq, Woehl volunteered to go.
It was supposed to be a 12-month assignment, but Woehl did so well over there - earning the Meritorious Honor Award from Ambassador Chris Hill for the work he accomplished during more than 200 missions - that he was asked by the Department of the Interior to work in nearby Jordan.
Woehl spent an additional 16 months in Jordan, working to improve the treatment of horses, before returning home in March 2011, having been gone 28 months in all. (He returned home periodically during that time, but the vast majority of those 28months were spent in the Middle East.)
“I’m really impressed with what Fred did,” says Karen Malloy of Springfield, Va., a wild horse and burro specialist with the Bureau of Land Management. “There was a big leap in terms of the culture, in how they handle animals. Fred opened eyes over there in terms of how to treat a horse.”
When Woehl was in Iraq, he worked with Sunni and Shia Muslims, Christians and women;
he’s particularly proud of his work with women, a group that faces numerous hardships. In Jordan, he worked with everyone from tour guides to a million-dollar horse owned by Princess Alia bint Al Hussein.
It has been almost a year and a half since Woehl left the Middle East. During that time, he has worked on his farm, spent time with his grandchildren, and realized he’ll never be the stay-at-home type.
This is why he’s resuming the shows he puts on at Silver Dollar City in Branson, engaging performances that involve wild horses he has tamed.
And it’s why he has taken a position with First National Bank of North Arkansas, doing field work - going out and talking to people, which this friendly guy loves to do more than just about anything in this world.
“My dad’s always been able to talk to everyone,” says daughter Stephanie Mc-Cullough of Fayetteville. “No one’s a stranger. I give him a lot of [credit], because he has a speech impediment. He stutters, but he never lets that stop him.”
REPAYING A DEBT
Truth be told, Woehl isn’t sure he wanted to go to Vietnam.
Today he wishes he would have gone, but when he was in his mid-20s ... well, he’s not so sure.
Woehl enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1973, and he spent three years with the First Cavalry Division; ironically, he was assigned to the same division in Iraq as a civilian decades later. Woehl enjoyed his time in the Army immensely, and it opened up a world of possibilities for him.
Because of the Army, he got his General Educational Development diploma. He was able to go to Arkansas Tech University, becoming the first member of his immediate family to graduate college when he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1980.
But he never went to Vietnam. By the time Woehl enlisted, the war was winding down.
Volunteering for Iraq was “my opportunity to maybe make up for that.”
“It made a man of me, and it made me want more,” he says of his time in the service. “I feel cheated that I didn’t get to help in Vietnam. I’m a patriotic person; I wanted to do my part. That was part of the reason I went [to Iraq].”
Woehl’s life appeared to be headed on a very different path before the Army.
He grew up primarily in Baxter County, the oldest of Fred and Opal Woehl’s five children.
The elder Woehl “was never very successful,” his son says, often spending half a year working in Kansas City, Mo., so he could earn enough money to farm back in Arkansas until he went broke again.
Yet while success eluded Fred’s father, it wasn’t due to a lack of trying. Woehl and his younger siblings were instilled with a strong work ethic from a young age.
“If a local farmer needed sprouts grubbed or rocks picked up, he would hire us boys out,” Woehl recalls. “We would work and the guy would pay Daddy.
“Work-ethic wise, [I learned] ‘If there’s something to do, you do it.’ You don’t look for ways not to do it.”
Woehl traveled all over the United States as a boy - through the books he read. He has always been a voracious reader, with a particular fondness for cowboy and Western novels.
While he was a boy, they developed in him an adventuresome spirit, which iswhat pushed him to leave behind his beloved farm and go to Iraq.
“There’s a great big world out there that’s got so many diverse things you can see, that you can take part of,” he says. “People always sell themselves short. I’ve had dozens of people say, ‘Man, I’d like to do what you have done.’ I say, ‘Why don’t you?’ There’s people who talk about doing things, and people who do them. I’ve always tried to be a doer.”
TIRELESS HELPER
When Woehl got back from Jordan, he got caught up on all the farm work he had left behind.
There wasn’t a ton to do, as his wife, Carolyn, had kept the place in working order while he was gone. Within a few months, Woehl was bored.
So he took a part-time job with First National Bank of North Arkansas, giving him the opportunity to go back to the field, do appraisals and engage with people.
“He can’t sit around and do nothing,” his daughter says.
More than just being bored, though, Woehl was getting lonely.
One of the things he had always loved about his workwith the USDA was the constant interaction with farmers; it had been what made the organization such a good fit right from the start.
He joined in 1980 after graduating from Arkansas Tech. He started out as an assistant county supervisor, where much of his job consisted of counting cows.
In 1983, Woehl became the county supervisor for Logan County. Following a short stint at the district office in Danville - a job behind a desk that “I didn’t like one bit” - he moved to Harrison in 1986. (Although he was with the USDA the entire time, he began with its Farmers Home Administration; when it was dissolved in 1995, he joined the Farm Service Agency, where he held the title of farm loan manager until his retirement in 2010.)
“He did good because he was interested in the job and he’s articulate,” says RobertHankins of Harrison, the retired state director of the USDA. “You’re independent and on your own [when performing Woehl’s work], but you have to reflect well on the agency. Fred got along with all the people he worked with.”
No matter where Woehl was, the ultimate objectives of his work were to helppeople start farming and keep farming. This required him to work side by side with farmers, the sort of work he would later do in Iraq.
One thing Woehl noticed about his American co-workers in Iraq was that they were content to stay on the base and write up programs. Woehl thought this was no way to teach; you had to meet with people directly in order to figure out what the real issues were.
The Iraqi people, both he and Gaffrey say, knew some about farming, but nothing about making decisions. For decades, all the decisions had been made by the government of deposed dictator Saddam Hussein, so the very concept of figuring out what to plant - let alone something as complex as a free market - was completely alien to them.
To teach them a new way of life, Woehl was constantly meeting with farmers. He went on more than 200 missions during his year in Iraq, and whenever he left the base, it required an armed escort.
During the two weeks of training in Washington that preceded his deployment, Woehl was told by the State Department that if he could initiate one successful program during his 12 months in Iraq, he would have had a good year. Woehl came up with three.
“People who understand animals and the earth understand each other,” Gaffrey says. “You can’t fake [wisdom] to people of the earth. Fred is incredibly knowledgeable, and that comes out.”
RIDING AND TEACHING
It’s a good day whenever Woehl rides a horse.
He must be having a lot of good days lately, because he gets to ride one almost every day. Of all the animals he works with on his farm, his favorite are horses, which he says goes back to “being a cowboy at heart.”
He also loves teaching people about them. Few things give him more joy than getting his grandchildren out to the farm and teaching them the right way to ride and care for a horse.
“He loves spending time with horses and sharing his knowledge of horses,” Mc-Cullough says. “My little girl, Lillyan, she was probably 18 months old when he got her on a horse for the first time.”
For a decade, Harrison first-graders have been invited to the Woehl farm and taken on trail rides by Fred.He loves working with kids, and has taught Sunday School for years.
He also enjoys teaching adults. He has taught several agriculture-related classes at North Arkansas College, and the shows he has done at Silver Dollar City have always been educational in nature.
This year’s show, which will involve mustangs, begins Sept. 13 and runs through Oct. 27; he’ll be performing three shows a day on 33 different days. At the end, Woehl plans to adopt out the mustangs.
Few people can match his ability to handle a mustang, Malloy says. Woehl has taken in and trained wild horses from all over the country, getting them all the way through saddle training.
“He really is committed to the mustang and he knows how to handle one,” Malloy says. “He’s extremely good at explaining not just our mission but how these horses think. He knows how to communicate with a wild horse.”
Malloy says what stands out about the way Woehl works with mustangs is the gentleness with which he does it. A few decades ago, taming a wild horse was all about dominance and violence, but Woehl engages in resistance-free training, which is easier on the horse and its trainer.
“At the end, he wants the horse to be a partner, not a victim or slave,” Malloy says.
These kinder techniques are what Woehl took to Jordan. Horses were often mistreated there - not out of deliberate cruelty, but because that’s the way it had always been done.
He worked on issues like better treatment, writing up policies and procedures to make sure horses were wearing good-quality shoes and were properly cleaned. He also designed a new carriage, which he says is still in use in Jordan.
As was the case in Iraq, Woehl’s white beard, a symbol of wisdom in the Middle East, earned him instant credibility with Jordanians. His teaching style subsequently kept his students engaged.
“He’s easy-going, friendly, and so good with the public and good with the horses,” Malloy says. “I’d say he’s one of the best volunteers I’ve worked with in the horse program.”
Today, as Woehl rides his horses on his 15-acre farm just outside of Harrison, his work continues half a world away.
Crops are being grown in the greenhouses he helped raise in Iraq, using the farming techniques he brought from Arkansas, and farmers are increasingly self-sufficient. Horses, donkeys and mules are receiving better care in Jordan.
“I place him in the category of a person with the highest integrity,” says Don Dane of Olathe, Kan., a friend who met Woehl through their work at Silver Dollar City. “He’s got a heart of gold; he’s the kind of guy that will give you the shirt off his back.
“It takes somebody with some really special skills to be able to do [what he did]. There’s a lot to admire about Fred.”
Northwest Profile, Pages 31 on 08/05/2012