The deployment was almost over. My boss was coming along with us. He had already been out with every other team but due to various reasons hadn’t made it out with us yet. He had talked the team out of our more aggressive instincts to stay for a day mission and to only hit the village for the night. It was 2019, we all knew Afghanistan was for nothing at this point. He didn’t want to see anymore of his guys killed or wounded. He was always the big brother in the room.
The night of the mission we conducted our final rehearsals and joked. Everything seemed normal. I distinctly remember asking him how he felt about this being his last mission. He was about to return home for a course and then was slated to retire.
Shortly after midnight that same night, he was dead. The medics couldn’t keep him alive; a trauma surgeon couldn’t have. We had inadvertently killed a young child hours prior. I had no time to process losing such a mountain of a man and an innocent child. We still had to get him and another wounded servicemember out of the valley. We had to get the rest of the boys back to base. I shut down my emotions, just like I learned from a cold mother.
When we got back, I focused on taking care of the guys. I tried to shut down my own racing thoughts by looking after others and planning whatever came next. I thought if I showed weakness the team would break. I tried to avoid my feelings and thoughts of inadequacy, guilt, shame, and sorrow through striving to achieve even more. I learned this at 13 when my father abandoned me and now practiced it through trauma as a 33 year old special operator. But no trophy would bring my father back just like no perfect mission or firefight would vindicate my guilt and shame. I started to lust for death as a way out of the misery of my own thoughts and guilt.
I deployed again, without any intervention. The deployment was the worst of my life, not because we were fighting but, because we were not fighting. I drank myself to sleep nightly. I cheated on my wife. I had no will to live, but too big of an ego to ask for help. I wanted to destroy my life or end it. I felt unworthy of anything good I had.
After I returned from that deployment I left a team. This crushed me. My ego, social network, professional identity, and everything I had known as a grown man was left behind. To make matters worse, my tempo of leaving increased. On a training exercise I came close to ending it all. After repeated nights of heavy drinking and abusing pills, I woke up in piss-soaked sheets, depressed that I woke up. Still being drunk, I began to fantasize about putting a weight belt on and swimming to the bottom of the ocean. This way nobody would find me, and I wouldn’t hurt anyone else. That was my fucked-up thought pattern. I had no live ammo, so I searched through my gear hoping to find one leftover 9mm round. After not finding one and seeing myself as a coward for not being able to drown myself, I was a combat diver after all, I made a phone call. Maybe living would be worth it for my kids.
I was showered with support. I received phone calls from the Group Command Sergeant Major, the Group Behavioral Health Officer, a psychologist from Tripler Army Community Hospital, and multiple teammates. I had a moment of reprieve. However, I didn’t have it in me to tell my therapist how suicidal I was. If I told her that the only reason I was there was because I was too much of a coward to drown myself and didn’t have any ammo, I would be non-deployable. So, I kept leaving and kept withholding from her. I feared letting people down by becoming non-deployable. My fear of disappointing my tribe was greater than my fear of death.
This toxic cycle ended, not because I was man enough to end it. It ended on circumstance. My marriage was ending; I was drinking myself to sleep at work nightly. A friend recommended me to an organization that treated special operators with psychedelics. I went as a fuck it, it can’t hurt. Ayahuasca saved my life. It gave me the capacity to use other mental health tools to heal my inner child.
While my marriage didn’t last, my life did. I wake up every day now and try to live the way the brothers we lost we want. I found hope through psychedelics, therapy, TMS, meditation, and breathwork.