Courtesy Photo Force Blue team members participate in sea turtle research in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Force Blue will be in Alpena this week, diving in the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, and presenting programs at the Great Lakes Maritime Heritage Center.

ALPENA — An elite team of military veterans will be in Alpena this week participating in conservation efforts with Force Blue, the only nonprofit organization in the world that retrains and redeploys former Special Operations veterans to work with scientists on marine conservation missions.

Partnering with Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, the Force Blue team will help collect freshwater acidification samples, survey marine debris on local shorelines, and dive into the sanctuary to monitor shipwreck sites and mooring buoys.

A free community lecture will be presented by Force Blue Executive Director and Co-Founder Jim Ritterhoff on Wednesday at the Great Lakes Maritime Heritage Center, 500 W. Fletcher St., Alpena. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. and the lecture begins at 6 p.m. The title of the lecture is “Creation, Collaboration, and Communication in a Hyper-Partisan Political World.”

Another free community event will be held at 6 p.m. on Saturday, when the 2024 documentary “Frog Fathers” is shown. The film is about four Navy SEAL veterans who visit the site of the bloodiest day in the U.S. Naval Special Warfare history — June 6, 1944, referred to as D-Day, the Invasion of Normandy.

“The veterans pay their respects to the fallen and try to understand the events of that day, as well as how the sacrifices made there affect their lives and legacy,” a press release noted.

The documentary, produced by World of Warships and Force Blue, and directed by Bob Whitney, aired on June 3 on Fox Nation, and it is also available on Apple TV.

In addition to the free community events, Force Blue will also be speaking with students at Thunder Bay Junior High School this week.

Ritterhoff explained how Force Blue got started. He said his background is not in the military nor marine science, but he has been a scuba diver his whole life. He worked for years in advertising in New York City. Then he had an experience that made him completely shift gears, starting the nonprofit organization.

“I met a gentleman who has gone on to become a very dear friend of mine,” Ritterhoff said in a phone interview.

That man is Rudy Reyes, a former Recon Marine.

“He gained some notoriety in the veteran community because a Rolling Stone reporter embedded with his unit and wrote a book about the invasion of Iraq through their eyes, and then that became a miniseries on HBO called ‘Generation Kill,'” Ritterhoff said. “I met Rudy shortly after he had filmed ‘Generation Kill.’ He was looking to break into acting and Hollywood, and my company had been developing a television series that we thought Rudy would be good for.”

That was about 10 years ago. They became good friends, and kept in touch. In 2015, they met up in New York City, and Ritterhoff could tell something was off with his friend.

“I saw that he wasn’t doing too well,” Ritterhoff said. “Rudy is a physical specimen. He always looks amazing, and he was still fit, but you could tell that something was wrong. He went on to explain to me that he’d been having a very difficult time with his transition out of the military, and that he’d been in rehab for eight or nine months … which was heartbreaking to me, because, like I said, he’s such a life force and somebody I really cared about.”

So Ritterhoff invited Reyes to come on a diving trip he had planned the next week with his daughter on Grand Cayman.

“Over the course of that week, the three of us saw what diving did for Rudy, and it wasn’t just diving, it was diving in a pristine marine environment,” Ritterhoff said. “We told Rudy what was happening — that it was under threat and that a lot of corals that actually had been much, much better 10 to 15 years ago … and he got very challenged by that and said, ‘We need to do something about it.'”

Ritterhoff continued, “What would it be like if we created an organization with two goals — one, obviously, to take this highly skilled, veteran workforce and put it to work for the marine scientific community that needs the manpower? But, even more importantly, allow guys like Rudy, who are divers in the military, to continue to serve and and to use that skill.”

And that’s how Force Blue began.

“I basically came home from that dive trip, told my wife, ‘We’re going to start a nonprofit. It’s going to be called Force Blue. I’m going to sell my agency, and this is what I want to do for the rest of my life,'” Ritterhoff said. “She was totally supportive.”

He said he and Co-Founder Reyes put together a team of veterans and scientists, and everything clicked.

“That was in 2017, and it turned out better than my wildest hopes could have ever imagined,” Ritterhoff said. “The community just meshed in ways that we couldn’t have expected … It immediately became this really powerful and inspiring thing.”

Force Blue is currently on a “tour of duty” to visit all the National Marine Sanctuaries.

“The Office of National Marine Sanctuaries serves as the trustee for a network of underwater parks encompassing more than 620,000 square miles of marine and Great Lakes waters from Washington state to the Florida Keys, and from Lake Huron to American Samoa,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Marine Sanctuaries website states. “The network includes a system of 16 national marine sanctuaries and Papahanaumokuakea and Rose Atoll marine national monuments.”