Excerpt from “Out of the Darkness: How a Special Operations Marine Found the Light”.
“Handing over my badge left me with a huge sense of relief, a feeling I rarely experienced in between taking on extra tasking, responsibilities, or deployments lest I risk letting others down. The weight left my body at once, as if a two-thousand-pound laser JDAM had released from my shoulders when a shift cold call rerouted it back to the parking lot for attachment to another Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) entering those gates.
I deeply appreciated the Marines alongside whom I had worked all those years, each of us sworn to protect America against her enemies. The longer I had served, however, the less our missions had begun to seem like protection. Deployments in places that had no solid end state, a lack of leadership, and no direction, beset by individual agendas, only made the problem septic. It was hard to believe that in four short years at the Command I had transformed so much, in good ways and in bad. I had concurred alcoholism, had finally admitted that I had Post Traumatic Stress (PTS), had been diagnosed with multiple Traumatic Brain Injuries (mTBI), and had finally admitted that it was time to pass the torch—that medical retirement was my best option.
Stephanie was deeply supportive of the move, no doubt relieved that I would no longer be deploying to places described only as classified—and, moreover, that I would be able to get the medical attention that my body and mind so desperately needed. This would not be the last time I would have to travel away from my wife, but my future departures would not be for deployments overseas. I would never have to kiss my son—who at twenty days old didn’t even know who I was—goodbye while wondering when I would see him again. I held his small bare body to my chest as his mother slept, and the only things on my mind were family, moving back to Maine to build a life for ourselves, and staying as far as possible from the military and the government. I wanted back my freedom—and a simple life.
Looking back on the fourteen traumatic years that had led up to this moment, I felt as if I had been jolted awake from a surreal dream in which I had confused what was actually real. I didn’t know who I really was anymore: I had deployed so many times, had experienced so many traumas, that my mind hadn’t even begun to process it all. Now I would have to face my biggest fear head on: What would happen next? When I left the military and moved far away, into the mountains of Maine, would I fall apart and end up like countless other veterans who had had trouble coping once the realities of civilian life hit? Only time would tell, but I knew one thing: I could not afford to do this any longer. Either path might end in death, but I wanted to follow the path that put me with my family, doing something I loved—farming—and walking close to God as a husband and father.