A letter to future, and fellow veterans...

My thoughts about life after the military and our mental health to future and fellow veterans.

Part 1. What was, and what will be.

We may not mention it, you may not ask, so I’m going to tell you now.

Leaving the military, and what comes next, it’s a process, it’s like mourning.

There are stages, sometimes they’re insidious, sometimes you won’t know where you are supposed to be, sometimes you will resist it, refusing to ask or understand why so much now is disappointing, or a cause for a fight, or why traffic prompts your previously nonexistent road rage.

There's something you should be forewarned of…you may find an absence of purpose and mission in your life, and for good reason.

Almost nothing can or will stack up to protecting this country, its constitution and what some argue, is our freedom.

Matching the camaraderie, the trust, the mission, the respect you earned, and the respect you had of others and leadership, and the tribe you were part of, is nearly impossible to equal outside of the military.

You must also consider entering the military in our most formative professional years established our baseline for what a job, a career and coworkers are.

The high demand, high expectations, the intense training, the incessant evaluation, the constant culture of integrity, esprit de corps and general self-development and becoming an accomplished professional is something that’s now ingrained in you and it’s the way you’ll see every job and environment hereafter.

It’s the standard which every thing will ever be compared to, and for that, there’s a strong likelihood everything ever to come will be less…less intense, less meaningful, less intimidating, less important, less concise, just less.

While in, you shouldered the most unrealistic responsibilities for your age and experience…almost no one else on earth is entrusted with making the decision to take someone’s life and how to safeguard your own and that of your fellow service members.

Doctors, nurses, EMTs, firefighters, and police deal with life and death situations, mostly in saving lives regardless of how those lives were threatened or caused to hang in the balance.

Almost no job as an 18-25 year old anywhere in the world requires you to exercise judgment and training in the most chaotic environment and decide who lives and who dies, or more accurately, who you cause to live, and who you cause to die.

You’re the action, the initial effort, not the result or consequence.

You managed people, assets, equipment to the tunes of millions…the 25 year old pilot flying an $80 million jet, the crew operating a tank, a boat, a submarine…you managed the flight line, the maintenance bays, the shops, the servers, networks, armory, dining facilities, buildings and infrastructure, power and communications structures.

You shouldered the entire responsibility of safeguarding thousand of lives on base everywhere in the world and preventing a threat from ever stepping foot near or on the post.

You prevented cyber attacks, you prevented attacks against personnel and assets, you prevented attacks whether personnel were inside or outside the wire and whether on foot, in a vehicle on an IED route, at sea or at port, or at 35,000 feet or 100 feet beneath the surface while in the East Asian ocean.

But the military isn’t just the people and training and ethos, it’s the culture and requirements to be exemplary. Years ahead, maybe even in working with fellow veterans, some of what you cherish now will be absent then.

It’s that the military creates an environment that demands our best at all times, that ridicules excuses, that creates and expects perfection and gives us the permission to punish, reject, and dismiss those who don’t perform or meet expectations.

The military surpasses human spirit and individual determination or individual thoughts or rationale and instead appropriately and fittingly causes us collectively to go beyond…to train harder, to shoot more accurately, to deploy faster, to win wars and to stomach whatever madness or awful circumstances are there or at home.

The military standardizes excellence. It trains everybody to that standard, demands it of all individuals and groups at all times regardless of any selfish or personal desire to the contrary.

It’s one of the only environments in which individual reasoning, logic, rationale, arguments, beliefs and desires rightfully take a second or third seat to the requirements of the mission and the team.

The military succeeds because of this.

In the civilian space, bickering due to political or religious beliefs, or gender or sex, or social striation or class, or money or relationships, or profit or cause, or favoritism or nepotism, or ego or perceived rights, causes indecision and inefficiency.

It delays programs, it halts innovation, it inserts unnecessary roadblocks to organizational success and a better community.?

An individual’s often selfish and not yet fully researched or proven suggestions and belief that their voice must be heard as part of the decision tree too often means the best existing solutions just sit idle.

In uniform, once the OPORD is issued, once the deployment begins, once the mission starts, there’s no time or reason for debate or anything else but executing the best planned mission with the most prepared team.

But be forewarned, that willingness to embrace or enjoy or want the suck, won’t always be there and not everyone will persist with such a way of living.

We may change, our friends may change, our environment may, the future may require a completely different ability to cope and adjust in order to prosper, and what we did in uniform and how we did it, even if it made us stronger or defined our intestinal fortitude, may be lost years to come.

The military required us to forgo logic and the obvious and accept that mission was more important regardless if that altered sleep, where we slept, what we ate or how much, how filthy our uniforms were or how unending our mission could be.

The military refused to acknowledge any reality or desires that weren’t immediately applicable to the mission…nothing else matters and nothing else should occupy our mind.

That five or ten year high school reunion back home, the birth of a child, that anniversary, the this or that thousand of miles away, are all irrelevant when the mission requires complete and total unity of focus...life hangs in the balance and the mission requires attention.

Give it yours and the mission often succeeds, divert yours elsewhere and it’s only by divine intervention or unknown destiny that you or your team survives.

There’s a sadness here, not in the loss of service, not in the need to adapt, but in knowing that few environments, people, circumstances will ever demand and require us to push ourselves beyond our own beliefs, our own comfort, our own way of living for the better as it was in uniform.

Part 2. Wounds become your strength.

You won’t like me for writing this.

You won’t like reading this, but I assure you, between this article and the resources I’ve shared and will continue to share, it’s the most loving thing I can do.

Your PTS, your TBI, your MST, your suicidal thoughts…they are your responsibility.

But when it comes to supporting you, everyone expects someone else to help you.

Your friends may not know how to help or who to call. Your coworkers are afraid to get involved. Your neighbors don’t know you. Your parents think your partner, spouse or military will help you. Your spouse thinks the VA or doctors or therapists will help.

Every single vet who has taken their life had someone, and that someone wasn’t responsible for that veteran’s life.

The only person responsible for the quality and meaning and success and value and fulfillment and well-being and happiness of your life, is you my friend.

The person everyone else expects to figure it out, is you.

So here’s how…

Go to the mountains. Go to the desert.

Go away. Go where no one can see you, no one can hear you, where you can see or feel or hear no one.

Reach inside yourself, further than you ever have and turn yourself inside out.

Go and walk. Walk until you want to stop. Walk until you think this entire idea is stupid, walk until your anger shouts for you to turn around.

Don’t.?Keep going.

Embrace exhaustion, then go further. Risk your normal, risk your current logic, and go further.

Keep walking.

Find your end point, and keep going.

Find your quit, and keep going.

Find your indifference, and keep going.

Only when no more movement is desired, or is seemingly impossible, and when you don’t care and aren’t interested in anything, when you’re too tired to be angry, when you don’t give a shit about living or dying, or seeing friends or family, when you don’t care about your career or money or what you think of others or what others think of you, then you can stop.

Stop and embrace this peace, accept this peace, this indifference to the past, this lack of interest in the future.

Welcome the absence of everything and the presence of nothing at all.?

There are no fears, no ambitions, no regrets, there is no hope, there is no love or hate, no joy or happiness, there is only peace, and the relief from everything that has ever been in your life and the comfort of knowing now that everything will be as it could be in your absence.

This, this is your new baseline.

This, at your weakest moment, and your most dire moment of exhaustion, this is your new strength…a place you can return to immediately, a place and time and new core that says you no longer shoulder any responsibilities of before, you no longer need be a warrior or soldier or savior or hero or liberator or provider of freedom to anyone.

Your core is now the understanding that your only responsibility is to move forward in life with a sound mind blanketed by peace and with body filled with certainty and strength and the lightness of being.

That end, that conclusion, that is indeed your new beginning.

While accepting this peace, see every hidden fear, every bit of anger or guilt or confusion or loss or sadness.

See everything clinging to your heart, your gut, your chest, your wounds…itemize them, catalog every one of them and then learn what they want you to know.

Don’t fear them, evolution has put them there for a reason. Their suppression is your sickness, learning from them is your strength.

Your survivors guilt for the loss of your teammate? Copy, live a life worth their sacrifice.

Your guilt for doing something unspeakable or wrong? Got it, begin the process of self-forgiveness, and more importantly understand that whatever sin you committed, you have every ability to now correct in others, in yourself or even for nations.

Your anger for the loss during the war??Choose advocacy or politics or causes to to ensure no nation sees such atrocities again.

Your anger for your own loss of limb, or lifestyle or innocence or belief in the goodness of humanity? Understood, time to find your new mission, a benevolent one, with others who believe that a better world begins with a decision to change and help.

Take them all, thank them all, write your lessons down, your own after action report, your own new ethos or moral compass for the future…convert those pains to insight, and then dismiss them, let them go, shed them, salute them and let them disappear into the nothingness surrounding you.

You’re free of their pain and now empowered by their hard-earned lessons.

No one can do this for you, no one wants to.

Your journey through exhaustion results in strength.

Feel what you must feel, renounce ego or logic or what is right and wrong or the injustice of it all, or how evil exists or possibly prevailed or caused you or your family or those you love harm, renounce everything and hear and absorb what must be learned.

The lesson of pain isn’t to avoid living, the lesson is how to become stronger, smarter, and better adept at life to advance your own or society’s well-being.

Our predecessors suffered much in their lives and yet created the ease and quality of life we have and enjoy today.

Likewise, accept what you must, embrace your evolution and the ensuing strength and success for advancing your life.

I say this to you as much as I say it to myself. And I practice this as often as I can.

You spent years in uniform, and years afterwards repeating toxic or burdensome thoughts and behaviors…creating direct and deeper rutted mental pathways. It’s time for those to change.

As a first step, and one with no stigma or cost, one that requires no courage, no programs, no applications, no approvals, no oversight, no public announcement, go, go see everything inside of you, learn what you must, embrace your being and continuously emerge stronger?and more self-reliant, realizing that calm, certainty, peace, an ordered mind and self-love will make you more capable than ever before and the greatest you can ever be.

That “journey of a thousand miles” does indeed begin with a single step. And your journey will be equally challenging and rewarding, equally filled with anger and elation, equally exhausting yet empowering. And yet, you’ll emerge with the greatest clarity of mind you’ve ever had and with the greatest self-assurance you can.

Everything after will be a chance to illustrate just how resolute, steadfast, robust and forged your mental health has become.

We may no longer be in uniform, we may no longer serve, but I assure you, an ordered veteran is one that can accomplish infinitely more than their past and an ordered veteran is one we all want, and indeed one we very much need here.

Much love my friend.

*****