Crafted by Valor

Where I Got “Stuck”

I am many years past my damn breakdown—the one that made my secret public. A secret so deep I swore I would never tell. Now people know. I was in the “I’m so surprised” club. Pretty good-sized population in that club.

I guess I had really been an excellent actor, a master manipulator, supreme at sleight of hand and misdirection. I tried to keep the officials in this club to a minimum. Some big ones were certainly informed: the Brigade Commander, Command Chief Warrant Officer, Executive Officer, Operations Officer, my wife, my young teen daughter, myself—just to name a few. That was really enough members of the club, and they all had the exact same reaction: “I’m so surprised that Hastings would be the one to try to off himself. I thought he was just a machine—nothing got to him. Weird.”

You know those few people that, when they find out you just made a suicide attempt—or gesture, or whatever the hell you want to call what I did or didn’t do—the one thing that’s for sure is: “I won’t be working here anymore.”

I guess I really need to figure out what I’m going to do to earn the favor of the almighty dollar. It has to be something I don’t mind doing—something I like—maybe even love to do.

Let’s see: it has to be worth my time in terms of compensation, and they have to realize that I’m a damn mess. If I’m going to be any good at anything now that I’m going to be a civilian, I’m sure I’ll end up working with people who eventually won’t want me working with them.

I say—hell with your feelings. That’s a very tough job to find, by the way. Like, it doesn’t exist. LinkedIn doesn’t have a single listing in that category.

Still, all these years past the revelation that I’m a mess, I was pretty sure I had tamed the chaos in me. I realized—intensely, and far, far from my happy place—that I will always be a mess. I can only hope to contain the beast. The noise. The colors.

Some may know that I had a famous saying: “Hope is not a plan.” I stole it from somewhere, but when I heard it, I knew it was right. It tripped a circuit breaker for me. Action is what I need. It’s what I do when something’s broken, something’s gone awry, a nut is loose—but not behind a cyclic anymore.

The hell of it all is—there’s no fix. No action. A plan can’t be hatched. Nothing quick on the hood of a HMMWV or at a planning table deep in a Brigade-level TOC in a blown-up palace.

The only thing I can cling to now is that pesky damn hope.

I had the best luck this Mother’s Day weekend. A visitor came by—someone I didn’t know I needed to see until I gave him my first hearty bro hug that turned into a full-on bear man hug. We spent hours sharing our stories. We already understood what each other was facing.

I’m ahead of schedule. Two years of not working for the Army anymore—a rocky yet enjoyable, high-energy adventure. We both agreed that therapy has sucked. It hasn’t been aimed at what we’re truly facing, what we’re thinking, hearing, seeing, and sensing—the vibrations in our surroundings that let us know where safety and danger lurk, often side by side.

Every therapist so far has wanted us to dive into specific traumas or write about them in detail. But they never get close to understanding what I’m actually facing. I’ve got so many damn traumas looped together over so many years. It’s not just the events—it’s the time between them. It’s the reaction I’ve had, the counteraction, the grinding drive to drown out the fear, press harder, get the job done, survive another day, and bring everyone home in one piece.

We embraced the suck. We leaned into that wall of misery, grabbed our damn bootlaces, and heaved ourselves forward. I would have folded like cheap laundry without the realization that others might not make it if I wasn’t there—guiding, supervising, briefing, barking, intimidating. 

That’s what fueled my fire all the way to the finish line. That elusive finish line… as it turns out, I haven’t found that bastard yet. I think it’s still many marathons ahead. But I haven’t crossed it, not even close.

It wasn’t like the movies. There weren’t speeches or slow-motion heroics. There was repetition. There was risk. There was fear you didn’t name. I was responsible for lives, for weapons, for time-sensitive decisions that blurred morality and mission.

I saw things I can’t unsee. I did things I won’t undo. And in that space between who I was and who I had to become, something cracked.

We carried more than gear, we carried grief, rage, and guilt. Missions blurred into each other, just as the days and deployments did. The war didn’t start and stop with the rotors. It followed us into our sleep, haunted our silence, and rewired our brains into something cold and automatic.

There are things we don’t talk about, because we were trained not to, because we’re afraid they might make us unfit, because if we speak them aloud they become real. We buried them with jokes, with repetition, with bravado. But they always came back.

I remember the smell more than the sound. Burn pits. Jet fuel. Sweat that had nowhere to go in the heat, how my breath slowed while my thoughts sped up. I remember pretending I was fine because I was supposed to be fine. I was the pilot-in-command, the leader, the one who had to keep it together when it all fell apart.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that we were all falling apart. We just got good at doing it quietly. And the trauma was cumulative.

This is the weight that followed us home. The unspoken ledger. And you don’t get medals for that. You don’t hang your guilt next to your Air Medal. You just carry it, and carry it, and carry it, until someone teaches you how to set it down.

In therapy, I played the role of patient, even though I was sure this wasn’t the way to go. So I picked a trauma. One of the early ones. It fit what my Major therapist was asking; she wanted to know where I got stuck. Why I couldn’t move past a feeling, a moment, an event. Why couldn’t I turn the page?

I thought about that. About where I got stuck. And this is what came out.

Not what she asked me to do, but what spilled out anyway. And then I read it back to myself.

To Be Continued……..