EDITOR’S NOTE: Tuesday is the day set aside for the nation’s veterans. But in a small Minnesota town, a woman has built a retreat intended to do more than honor vets. At the Eagle’s Healing Nest, they can find renewal.

SAUK CENTRE — The vets, some yawning, others clutching packs of cigarettes, trickle into a sun-splashed room for morning meditation. Some survived war long ago, others have fresh memories of combat.

All have struggled. For some, it’s been alcohol or pills. For others, it’s post-traumatic stress disorder. Young or old, these vets have similar stories: Substance abuse. Failed marriages. Legal troubles.

“Do not feel bad about your weaknesses,” one vet reads to the others. Then the men file out to jobs in town, to the barn to feed the horses or to the solitude of small, dorm-like rooms.

So begins another day at the Eagle’s Healing Nest, the labor of love of a woman who is the daughter, wife and mother of military men. Down the winding road, past squawking chickens and statues of soldiers decorating the lawn, 47 vets who’ve stumbled in life are trying to regain their footing. The goal is to mend — then go home.

Behind every door here, there’s a story.

Dan Klutenkamper has been haunted by survivor’s guilt and feelings of hopelessness after three Army tours of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Keith Castle, a former Navy man still harboring ugly memories of Vietnam a half-century ago, is hoping to stay sober and deal with anger that has tormented him for decades.

Rick Sorquist, an Air Force vet and medic in Afghanistan, is looking for a new start after the collapse of his marriage and end of his military career led him back to the bottle.

They and dozens more — veterans of war and peacetime — share their meals, their lives and their longing for better days.

“They have each other to turn to at a place and at a pace with people who understand what they’ve endured,” says Melony Butler, the retreat’s 47-year-old founder. “They hold each other accountable just like they did on the battlefield. This is their comfort zone.”

Butler has been around vets all her life.

Her stepfather, Charles Pounds, never rebounded from the darkness of his days in Vietnam. He was hospitalized on and off for psychiatric problems. On Father’s Day in 1996, he killed himself.

About a decade later, while working as a volunteer at a family readiness program for the Minnesota National Guard, Butler saw a new generation of soldiers coming home in turmoil. Around that time, her husband, Blaine, then a Guardsman, was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Two sons also fought with the Guard. One served in Afghanistan, but it was when the other, who returned from Iraq. that the war’s toll hit home. “He called me in the middle of the night and asked me to promise him to take care of his babies,” she recalls. “He begged me to die.”

Her son got help, she says, and is now recovering slowly. But his plight got Melony Butler thinking: What if she opened a small boarding house for vets, a place where they could heal?

Her plan grew more ambitious when she leased part of a closed state-run school in this quaint north-central Minnesota community, best known for its famous son, Sinclair Lewis, the Nobel Prize-winning author. Two years ago, with personal savings and some small donations, the Eagle’s Healing Nest opened its doors on 124 acres of rolling farm fields.

Vets can ride horses, tend to farm chores, work if they want, then return at night.

Iraq veteran Tane Anderson, 44, spent two months there this year, following treatment by the Veterans Administration for addiction to alcohol and pain killers.