“This guy,” said Travis Schneider, pointing toward the big brown eyes of his service dog, Gibbs, a white Labrador retriever.

And sports.

These two things have made Schneider’s life tolerable since he left the Navy in 2012. The former gunner’s mate lives with severe post-traumatic stress disorder and a mild brain injury after nine months in Iraq in 2008.

“I would probably be six feet under,” said Schneider, 41, who at one point in the past two years lived in his truck in Imperial Beach.

Read more at Sports Becoming Popular Therapy for Vets (U-T San Diego
September 2014