2 weeks Ago By Uma Raja
Editors note: Swamp Apes is a nonprofit that supports veterans by offering nature-based adventures, providing camaraderie while cleaning the environment and connecting with the land. Searching for invasive pythons affords participants peer support as well as a sense of purpose. South Florida Sun Sentinel journalists Uma Raja and Amy Beth Bennett experienced missions with them.
Tom Rahill stands in the glow of truck headlights, donning camo boots and thick duck pants, his gray hair pulled into a ponytail underneath his hat. A patch on his sleeve shows an ape proudly holding a python above its head, near a crescent moon. Darkness envelops the desolate dirt road, the stark silence punctuated only by the rhythmic chirp of crickets and the occasional cry of an owl.
While the rest of Florida slumbers, Rahill wanders into the heart of the Everglades.Rahill, a South Florida Water Management District python removing contractor, leads a team of python-hunting veterans as part of his nonprofit Swamp Apes. The Burmese python, an invasive species released into Florida by irresponsible pet owners, has been linked to the decline of mammals in the Everglades.
Searching for the snakes is a rewarding outlet for veterans who struggle with anger and PTSD, providing hope as they adjust to life after deployment.Some veterans ride in off-road wheelchairs, poking through cocoons of royal fern and cathedrals of bending sawgrass with long poles, hoping for a telltale hiss. They exchange jokes and enjoy the company of others who have served.
The moon reflects on stagnant water and the conversation transforms — being haunted by the first man they ever killed, watching a comrade die in an explosion, losing a friend to suicide years after the war.Swamp Apes currently serves 30 people, offering a revolving door of free services to any interested veterans. The program has resulted in the capture of over a thousand pythons.
Tonight, Rahill is joined by Rahm Levinson, a veteran who has been part of Swamp Apes since 2021 and became a python contractor in 2023. Levinson suffered traumatic brain injuries while deployed in Iraq — he was hit once with a pipe bomb and twice with an IED. His first night out with Swamp Apes earned him the nickname “The Natural,” and he transformed the insomnia caused by his PTSD into late nights wrangling pythons twice a week.
He’s caught just under 50 snakes.“It keeps me up at night, nightmares, just extreme levels of anxiety and frustration for almost 10 years. I was going to the (department of veteran affairs), going through therapy and one medication after another, and nothing was really helping,” Levinson said.
Levinson was self-employed as a painter while bouncing between careers and picking up odd jobs. Inspired by a television show, he researched python hunting and found Rahill’s program online.“I had a lot of anger issues.
I’ve gone to counseling for it for years, but just being constantly stressed out, it adds to anger and frustration, knowing you had a job that was so important and so meaningful and you lose that, and losing the camaraderie, it’s like losing your best friends,” Levinson said.Swamp Apes founder Tom Rahill, left, a python contractor with the South Florida Water Management District, and Army veteran Rahm Levinson pause during their search for pythons on what they call “The Lonely Island” in the Everglades. (Amy Beth Bennett / South Florida Sun Sentinel)On this night, Rahill is also joined by me, a journalist along for the ride in the back seat of his Ram 1500, a replacement after his first truck caught fire and melted in the middle of the Everglades.
I met Rahill at the Palm Beach-Broward county border at 9 p.m. on a Sunday, a segment of the Everglades known as the Holey Land.
Rahill has his own dictionary of phrases that he has deemed Rahillisms. “Jungle busting” is marching through the wilderness on foot and pushing aside foliage with a pair of gloves. Rahill turns his palms upward and extends his arms, weighing the density of the air.
This is his home, the place where he feels most alive. He can sense when there is a certain moistness in the blanket of the Everglades, a breath of life, where snakes are likely to appear.A majority of python hunting, or “pythoning” as Rahill prefers calling it, is not jungle busting.
In fact, 99% of python hunting is “night cruising” in the car.Loose python vertebrae rattle in cup holders as we traverse the bumpy road. We travel with a hefty bucket that reads PROHIBITED REPTILE and a bolt gun used for euthanizing snakes.
Levinson and I hold yellow searchlights out of the windows while Rahill drives in slow motion. The searchlight has three settings, the third illuminates the wetland in a beacon of white. A strip of canal, then rows of sawgrass and lanky brown tufts stretching endlessly into the horizon.
Rahill points out plant species: maiden cane and pond apples, leatherleaf ferns with fibonacci spiral stalks that can be eaten in times of survival. I wave the searchlight, focusing on the levees near the canal where snakes hide in the warm voids left by turtles and iguanas. The level of scrutiny required to spot a snake hidden in the vegetation is impressive.
Rahill says to look for something that doesn’t fit the contour of the land, a silhouette that contrasts the shapes and colors of the marshland.Gold and emerald eyes wink, gemstones in the grass. Spider eyes, Rahill says.
Red eyes show the leer of an alligator. Python eyes don’t reflect light, so I scout for the flicker of a white underbelly. A glisten of a snakeskin pattern off the flashlight is akin to a fleck of gold in the pan.
“Switching from hunting terrorists to hunting pythons, surprisingly, there’s some similarities,” Levinson said.Army veteran Rahm Levinson scans for pythons from the back of Tom Rahill’s truck in the Everglades. (Amy Beth Bennett / South Florida Sun Sentinel)Levinson’s injuries gave him tinnitus, a constant ringing in his ears that adds to his insomnia.
He describes the sound as the tone of a perpetual flatline in a hospital room. The only relief from tinnitus is a different sound that masks it.“The closest thing that I could find to peace and quiet now is when I go out in the Everglades and there’s the crickets chirping in the background, the wind blowing and rustling on the grass, it’s just loud enough and my ears are able to focus on it,” Levinson said.
Two important rules when a snake is spotted — don’t slam the car door and don’t move the searchlight from the python. The change in lighting will activate the snake’s flight instincts, causing it to scatter.Rahill has an endless supply of stories to entertain his passengers, from dicey black bear encounters to scraping mites off his hand with a knife after handling an armadillo.
Burmese pythons have two rows of teeth lining the top and bottom of their jaws, fangs like hypodermic needles, so sharp they’re often undetectable. A particularly bothersome infection on Rahill’s hand turned out to be a hidden tooth, rising out of his knuckle after being embedded in his skin for over a month.He has also faced blood poisoning from the bacteria in a snake bite, and even worse, had a snake defecate into his mouth as a defense mechanism, a culinary sensation he describes as surprisingly chalky.
Yet he takes every obstacle in stride, always smiling and singing songs. Seeing somber veterans enjoy life again is worth a bit of python poop.“I see a renewed sense of purpose (in Swamp Apes veterans), camaraderie and a more positive outlook on life and future,” Rahill said.
Swamp Apes founder Tom Rahill, a python contractor with the South Florida Water Management District, holds up a black racer shed that he found while searching for pythons in the Everglades. (Amy Beth Bennett / South Florida Sun Sentinel)A swarm of bugs as thick as a cumulus cloud follows my searchlight. When the truck pauses to examine an area, the gnats and flies divebomb at my face, zipping into my ears and mouth.
Thousands of bugs, but zero snakes.Three more hours pass. I am fed sophisticated snacks to keep up my morale and my blood sugar, organic medjool dates bursting with sweetness, crispy rice crackers and blood orange flavored sparkling water.
We spot an ibis and a nocturnal nightjar, a possum meandering across the road, a deer that gallops into tall grass, a frog, an eel and a rabbit. Levinson sees an otter snoozing on a flat patch of mud.Night cruising is calm and monotonous, a true test of patience.
To pass the time, Rahill shows us a draft of an illustrated children’s book he has since published, a rhyming story about a little girl cleaning her room to find different colored teddy bears.Here’s my little teddy brown. I picked her up.
I put her down. I love to spin her round and round.Here’s another Rahillism: Serpentdipity, the odds of coming across a python.
The number of snakes caught depends on temperature, season and luck. Known as hatchling bursts, young pythons rupture from their eggs in August, and in a stroke of serpentdipity, up to 40 at a time can be seen. A female python can be surrounded by two to four males during mating season, leading veterans with keen eyes to capture multiple snakes in a few minutes.
Other nights, the Swamp Apes go home empty-handed.We listen to a podcast of Conan O’Brien interviewing Quentin Tarantio, and Rahill gives me a convincing spiel on why I should watch She-Hulk.When I envisioned Swamp Apes, I imagined only the actual snake hunting, all testosterone and muscle and sweat.
But there is ample time for veterans to chat with others, to carve out quality time with people who have lived a shared experience.“You don’t don the uniform anymore, but you never take it off. It’s always there with you.
The training that we go through and that instant camaraderie, you know, it’s a little reminder when we go out there,” Levinson said.Swamp Apes founder Tom Rahill, left, a python contractor with the South Florida Water Management District, tosses a rope to Army veteran Rahm Levinson as they secure their canoe upon arrival at what they call “The Lonely Island” in the Everglades. (Amy Beth Bennett / South Florida Sun Sentinel)For many veterans, therapy involves forcing out trauma on the third floor of a soulless office building, seated in an uncomfortable folding chair and glancing at a torn poster explaining the warning signs of skin cancer, according to Rahill.
Rahill’s biggest goal for Swamp Apes is to have a certified therapist accompany veterans in the field.“With PTSD, we lose the ability to regulate and stay in the middle, it’s either extreme anger or numbness,” Levinson said. “Going into the Everglades, not being alone, having a friend like a Swamp Apes fellow veteran, we’re able to find that middle ground balance, not being angry, not being numb, but peace.
”Rahill once had disabled veterans operating high-end drones to scour for snakes. Pythons were located three out of the four days he tested the idea.“Being able to help a veteran that just came back from a deployment or went through a similar experience that I went through, they have sleepless nights, they miss their camaraderie, and it’s just like instantly you bond and start telling old war stories,” Levinson said.
“You guys have a new common goal of something you could do together like protecting the environment and catching these pythons.”Rahill speaks proudly of his wife, bringing her up every chance he gets. He boasts about her doctorate in social welfare, and Levinson asks if he has a PhD as well.
Nah man, Rahill says. He was kicked out by his father, a well-known architectural artist and an alcoholic prone to emotional and physical abuse, and dropped out of high school at age 17.He hopped in a small car from Jacksonville to Los Angeles with a friend, a doppelganger of Chief Bromden from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
” Their lofty dreams of making money betting on football ended with Rahill all alone, 120 pounds, shaggy blonde hair down his back, homeless on the streets of Los Angeles.He spent a year drifting through Venice, Santa Monica and Westwood. He went days without food, working day labor jobs and selling blood plasma.
He was confronted with the ugly side of humanity, rebuking both men and women alike who were soliciting him for sex, and being chased with a butcher knife. While Rahill is not a veteran himself, the PTSD caused by his homelessness allows him to relate to those who have served.Rahill hitchhiked across the country to upstate New York for his sister’s graduation.
He found a career pulling cable for a phone company and stumbled upon an abandoned cabin by the Appalachian Trail, perched on stilts at the corner of a lake. He built a wood stove out of a 55-gallon drum and fetched water from the lake for baths. During the day he continued his IT work, and at night he found solace in the spiritual aspects of nature, enjoying a tranquility he lacked in childhood.
Swamp Apes founder Tom Rahill, a python contractor with the South Florida Water Management District, uses a long walking stick to poke through ferns and brush on the side of a levee as he searches for pythons in the Everglades. (Amy Beth Bennett / South Florida Sun Sentinel)He moved to Florida in 1975 and discovered the python eradication program at Everglades National Park many years later, enjoying his nights on the hunt. He had a revelation out in the wetland — if python hunting helped him with his PTSD from being homeless, perhaps it could help others, too.
He founded Swamp Apes in 2009. Rahill wanted to help veterans who were thrown out of combat and into the veteran affairs system with minimal support, as many of them struggle with alcoholism and suicidal thoughts.“I call it cocooning where (veterans) wouldn’t get out of their house for a week or two weeks at a time,” Rahill said.
Some programs offer one-off recreation events for veterans such as charter fishing or swimming with dolphins. But Swamp Apes offers a consistent program, and it’s the families of veterans that benefit the most. Rahill says Swamp Apes participants have stopped yelling at their kids or picked up a forgotten passion for photography.
For Levinson, the army trained him to look side-to-side in Iraq, constantly monitoring for threats. One foot is in front of you on the ground, then you look 5 feet out, then 15, then 50. Even when veterans return from deployment, this process is instilled in them, their heads swiveling for invisible danger.
While participating in Swamp Apes, this exhausting trait becomes a useful skill. Instead of an IED, Levinson searches for gators or venomous snakes, for sharp rocks and poisonous plants.“I am a little bit less angry, a little bit less stressed, and a little bit less self-destructive at two, three in the morning, not having anything to do and not being able to sleep,” Levinson said.
“I go out there and I hunt snakes and, and it’s definitely helped me on a daily basis. I interact with my kids, my family, being a little bit less angry.”Army veteran Rahm Levinson holds a python eggshell, part of a nest of 32 hatched eggs he and Tom Rahill found in the Everglades.
(Amy Beth Bennett / South Florida Sun Sentinel)Rahill’s car chugs along as our searchlights scan the darkness. The roads appear identical, hypnotizing and soothing. There is an electric shift in the atmosphere when Levinson yells out to stop the car.
The truck lurches to a halt, the two men jumping out with incredible agility as they sprint towards the canal. The adrenaline rush is contagious. They search through the grass, desperate for the rustle of a slithering underbelly.
But the invasive python, an expert adapter, vanishes into the wilderness of the Everglades.We do catch one snake, though. A tiny garter snake with beautiful turquoise scales on its sides.
Levinson holds it up, gently admiring it as it flicks a small tongue. We laugh as we release it, watching it slip into the shadows. Tonight, like many nights out pythoning, there was no Burmese python.
But Rahill and Levinson are eternal optimists. The next time they catch a snake, they’ll appreciate it even more.“The Swamp Apes isn’t a cure for PTSD, but it’s a great alternative therapy, and one day out there and with other veterans who are like me struggling — every single day it’s a fight — one day out there helps me for weeks at a time,” Levinson said.
“And being able to help some other veterans escape from the nightmares of PTSD, I’ve found solace in being out in nature and with the Swamp Apes. It brings me joy to be able to share that with others who are struggling with the invisible wounds of war.”Swamp Apes founder Tom Rahill, a python contractor with the South Florida Water Management District, and Army veteran Rahm Levinson search for pythons from the truck Rahill calls “The Beast” in the Everglades.
(Amy Beth Bennett / South Florida Sun Sentinel).
