Crafted by Valor

Throughout most of my life, trust was something everyone had from the very first meeting.
It wasn’t something that had to be earned it was something to be lost.

And I’m certain I was lucky to be raised with that attitude.

It wasn’t a rule or lesson anyone formally taught me. It was just something I felt, something I believed.

I’ve always loved being a part of a team. In fact, for as long as I can remember, I was on a team.
Being a good teammate meant everything to me. I was never the star, and that was fine. As long as I was contributing and adding something to the group, that’s what mattered.

I first started to understand the real meaning of team during Little League Baseball.
I never missed practice. Not once.
Because the team was counting on my presence.
And I was counting on theirs.

I was a good ball player not the best, not the worst.
But I showed up, I worked hard, I did my job.
And I loved the feeling of helping the team.

Around age ten, I started swimming in AAU events.
Again, not a standout, not a natural sprinter, but I found a way to contribute.

Our team in Lander was coached by a truly great man: Bruce Gresley.
Bruce had this incredible way of pulling out that deep desire in each of us to show up, to give your all, to matter to the team.
We almost always won.
We crushed it at meets and dominated state competitions.

This wasn’t because we were stacked with elite athletes.
It was because Bruce made us believe that contributing to the team was more important than any individual win.

He has passed on now.
But his legacy?
Nineteen straight state titles.
Twenty-five titles total in his coaching career.
He had talent, sure but more than that, he knew how to instill trust and unity in a group of kids.

That same mentality carried with me into football.

Coach Chuck Murray taught us to value the team above all else.
My 7th grade year we never lost a single game.
I didn’t score a single touchdown, but I was a part of something powerful.
A strong, successful unit that trusted one another.

That theme, that culture of team and trust followed me all through school.
I was lucky to participate under Coach K in swimming at Laramie.
I was honored to suit up for John Deti in football.

Every team I was part of seemed to win.
Over and over again.

Not because we were all gifted.
But because we trusted one another.
Because we worked, every single one of us to give all we had for a cause greater than ourselves.

These early experiences were really all about one thing: trust.

I always trusted my coaches.
I always trusted my teammates.
And we all had each other’s backs.

We put the greater good of the team above our own personal success.
When that happens, when everyone buys in, then someone is always watching your six.
And when that kind of trust is flowing both ways?
Good things happen.
To the individual.
To the team.

It worked.
And it still works.
That kind of trust is still a huge part of who I am.

So it should come as no surprise that the Army fit me like a glove.
It’s just another team, a damn big one.
But one where the stakes are higher.
Where each member’s contribution could mean the difference between success and failure.

And failure?
Well, in the Army, failure doesn’t mean losing a game.
It often means someone dies.

As I navigated those early stages of my Army career, I had no choice but to trust the people training us.

That was an easy concept for me.
Especially during Basic Training.

I wasn’t some wide-eyed teenager. I was 26, a college graduate. I already had four years under my belt working professionally in my chosen field. And yet, it didn’t matter.

The Drill Sergeants made it crystal clear:
“We’ll do the thinking for you. You just do what the hell we say.”

And I was fine with that. That level of structure made sense to me. It meant I didn’t need to question. I could trust the system, trust the process.

That same dynamic carried into Warrant Officer Candidate School. But this time the expectations shifted. We were now expected to think, to take initiative.

But make no mistake: There was no way anyone was getting through that course without a little…
creative thinking.

You either learned how to think outside the box or you got buried by it.

The only thing that made anyone successful in Warrant Officer Candidate School was this:
banding together as a team.

Once again, I was lucky that I had a great team.
We leaned on each other, pushed each other, carried each other through.
We made it through that course together.
It still stands as one of the best team environments I’ve ever experienced.
I had to trust everyone and they trusted me.
And that trust?
It worked.

Flight school followed the same rhythm.
Individual tasks, yes but the success came from group dynamics.
There was no making it through without each other.
We studied together.
We trained together.
We crashed and burned together and then got up again.

We also had to place our lives in the hands of our Instructor Pilots.
Those guys had balls of steel.
Not one of us could even begin to fly these machines without them.
Even though they damn sure tried to make us.

Most of my classmates from WOCS rolled into flight school with me, we were tight, and getting tighter.
We trusted each other deeply.

After graduation, it was time to receive our first aviation assignments.
Mine was Korea.

Me and about ten of my classmates were headed to the same battalion. I was extremely nervous.
This was my first real Army unit. 

But in this world?
I was the newbie.
I was the “high school to flight school” weirdo.

And Korea?
That assignment was considered the worst-case scenario. It was like a deployment, no family allowed, just you and your gear for a full year.

I didn’t have a huge family at the time, but I was married. And now I had to leave my wife behind.

I don’t even like writing about this.
She was devastated. Way more than I expected. This whole Army thing was new to both of us, but this was my job. My commitment.

Yeah, it sucked to be apart for a year. But the end was in sight.
We’d get a mid-tour break, travel together to our next assignment, find a home. I did everything I could to make sure she’d be okay during my absence.

She insisted on moving back in with her mom, in her hometown. That didn’t feel right to me.
Something was… off.

But I did what a husband should do. I put my trust in her.

I was new to the Army, but I wasn’t a young guy.

I had been working in psychology for a while, and I knew enough to recognize when stress was piling on.
Recently married.
New job.
New lifestyle.
Multiple moves.
New friends.
And now, a long separation.

That combination ranks pretty damn high on the stress scale.
But even so, I trusted that everything was going to work out the way it was supposed to.

My new unit in Korea started out strong, another great team.

It helped that a whole pack of us new WOJGs (Warrant Officer Junior Grade) arrived together.
We worked our asses off, and we took all the crap that comes with being brand-new WO1s.
And in Korea? With no family around? That hazing could get way out of control.

But we stuck together.
We studied together.
We planned our next career moves together.
We leaned on each other as sounding boards.

We were tight and getting tighter.
Every one of us earned Pilot in Command status within that year.

I was learning how to be part of an Army Aviation team. And honestly? It wasn’t all that different from the great teams I’d been on before. There was trust. Deep, mutual trust. It felt good.

What I didn’t expect was that I couldn’t trust my own wife.

Turns out, she wasn’t doing so well in her hometown, at least not as a married woman with a soldier husband overseas.
I guess she didn’t trust that I was acting like a married man while I was gone.
Eventually, I got an email from her.
She wanted a divorce.

I was stunned.

As the truth trickled out, I learned she was pregnant.
I had been gone five months.
She was three months along.
Even without a math degree, those numbers don’t check out.

She waited all of two months after I left before she found another guy.
In that moment, every bit of trust I had in her was shattered.
And once it’s gone like that, it’s not coming back.

The divorce was quick and clean.
There was no way I was staying tied to someone who broke that kind of bond.
Not when I had been fully committed.

She burned it all down.
It hurt.
God, it hurt.

But what I didn’t know at the time was this:
That moment, that pain, would turn out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me.

My team rallied around me.

They made me work extra hard, kept me flying, kept me focused, and didn’t let me sit still long enough to wallow in personal pain.
They were my family.
I could trust them.
They were committed to me, and I was all-in with them.

It felt good, damn good, to be part of something bigger again.
A big team. An extended family. One that showed up for me when I didn’t even know I needed them.

I made a vow:
Never again.
No more relationships.
I was going to be a hard-nosed aviator. I’d go to the toughest assignments, travel the world, rely on my team and on myself.
but never, ever again give someone that kind of emotional access.

And then, of course… I learned the oldest lesson in the book: never say never.

I wasn’t looking for anything. I wasn’t open to anything. But just a few short months later, I bumped into the woman who would become my wife.

And I met her in the most perfect place imaginable: my beloved Wyoming.

It was a whirlwind romance I didn’t plan for, didn’t want, and didn’t think I was ready for.
But my gut wouldn’t shut up.
My heart kept pushing.
And for once, my brain told me to listen to those other organs.

This wasn’t part of the plan.
But the pull was undeniable. The feeling was spooky strong—that unmistakable internal nudge that said:
Pay attention. This is it.

Everyone thought it was a rebound.
Friends said it.
Colleagues said it.
Even family said it.
Hell, I worried it was.

But that inner knowing? That deep-rooted certainty? It wouldn’t leave me alone.
So I trusted it.
And I followed it.
And I have never regretted that decision.

I was right to follow that call.
I was right to take that leap of faith.

We made is 23 years before she filed for divorce, fed up with my after combat personalities.
That hurts. She crushed my soul.
But together, we brought our daughter into this world, my greatest gift.

This was how it was supposed to go for me.
This was the reason I had to walk through the heartbreak, the grind, the lessons.
So I would recognize what good really looks like.
So I would learn to trust not just others, but myself.

So I would never take a single blessing for granted.

When I experienced the near miss in the moonscape of Kuwait, I began to change, I

dropped some of my trust in others, specifically my co-pilots and my commanders. I

began to become more of a control freak, I started to think that being the star of the

team was the only way that I was going to survive or ensure that everyone else around

me survived. 

The odd thing is that I suddenly trusted myself and my skills less after

escaping a quick a violent death in the sands outside of the Udairi airfield.

I also had those feelings, eerie feelings that seemed to predict a future outcomes. I

described them as the warm fuzzy or the cold prickly. Before each mission as I was

climbing into the cockpit, I either had the warm fuzzy or the cold prickly.