Crafted by Valor

………….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. 

When it was that shitty feeling that something bad was about to happen, I took more time, studied my routes, discussed the rehearsed sequence with the crew, came up with new actions, thought of contingencies, tried to cover every base, do anything to erase that cold

prickly and turn it all warm and fuzzy. 

No matter how it felt prior to a mission, we always returned, we always survived. Even though that is the truth, I still had those overwhelming sensations. It felt like I knew how it was going to end, I had no idea what was going to happen, but just felt that I knew if it was a survival situation or not.

To keep myself protected, I turned to humor, dark humor. Each crew brief contained

darkness dressed in sick humor. I always briefed my crew that if it looked like we were

going down and there was nothing I could do, I was going to bury it in, kill all of us. We

would all be having a big ceremony together. There was no way I was going to have

survivor guilt, I couldn’t have that on my conscious.

I also didn’t want to be the guy who survived while everyone else died and leave some poor crew chief limping through the rest of his life.
I used to joke,
“I don’t want to be the reason some crew chief’s walking around with a busted dick, cursing my name ‘til the day he dies. My conscience couldn’t take that.”

Yeah, they’d stare at me.
Wide-eyed.
Usually the new guys.
But after a while, even they started to get it.
I’d tell them I was joking;
Or at least, I think I was.
Guess we’d find out.

Then came the ceremonious cigarettes.
“Smoke one now, you never know if it’s your last.”
Sure, they’ll kill me in the long run.
But bullets and missiles are way worse for your health in the short term.

And the cookies, God, the cookies.
I always had a big-ass bag of them with me.

People would say,
“You shouldn’t eat so many cookies, Chief. That’s bad for you.”
And I’d just grin.
“Oh, I love that you brought this up. You know why I eat cookies before every mission?”
I’d pause for dramatic effect.
“Because if I die today, I want to make damn sure I don’t go out thinking, Man, I wish I’d had just one more cookie.”

After my third deployment to Iraq, the cycle was starting to wear me thin—
build a team, send it off, start all over.
And with another Afghanistan tour looming on the horizon,
I just couldn’t stomach the idea of breaking in another Battalion Commander—
teaching them how to command my way when they thought they already knew what they were doing.

That’s when the opportunity to go to Sweden landed in my lap.

It was a rare chance. Freakishly rare.
Brought to me by my mentor, Paul Druse, backed hard by another giant in Army Aviation, Dave Pauley. Both of them CW5s. Top-tier. The best of the best. And they hand-picked me.

They told me straight:
“This assignment? This seals it. You’ll be a shoo-in for CW5.”

It was an honor.
No one else in Army Aviation had the résumé I had.
I was up there. I was in the arena. I was on top of the world.

Fast forward two and a half years, I wasn’t selected for promotion.
I was crushed.
It didn’t just hurt it pissed me off.

I had given everything to the Army for the last 18 years.
I sacrificed more than I ever thought I could; years away from my family,
countless hours, endless energy. I yelled the loudest, worked the hardest, and cared the most.

And when it was finally my turn, when I was told over and over not to worry,
that I was a lock, that I had earned it, what did I get?

Bubkis.
Nothing for Hastings.
Left out to dry.

I felt absolutely shit on.

Yes, I knew it was a 7% selection rate. But I should have been in that 7%. I earned that. I deserved that.

Every single one of my battalion commanders got picked up for O6.
Most landed Brigade Command billets.
Every XO and S3 I worked with was selected for O5, many of them went on to command battalions. And not a single goddamn company commander I worked with was passed over for O4.

How did they get there?

Because of guys like me, guys who made sure they didn’t fail.
Guys who worked themselves into the ground to make them look good.
Guys who took every punch and carried every burden to keep the machine moving.

But for Hastings?
Nothing.

It broke something in me.
All of it, the belief, the trust, the idea of the team;
it all came crashing down.

I looked around and saw what it had become.
People obsessed with low promotion rates and downsizing,
so consumed with self-preservation that the team no longer mattered.
Commanders choking us with idiotic policies just to pad their own evals.
They worked us to the bone not to build warfighters, but to punch their own fucking tickets.

Mentorship?
Now it’s just strategy, how to beat out your peers.
How to look better, not be better.

People aren’t covering each other’s six anymore, they’re planting knives in it.

And commanders?
They’re terrified to leave their desks.
Tied to their inboxes, desperate not to miss the next WARNO.
They’re disconnected, disengaged, and absolutely unfit to lead.

Trust is gone.
The team is dying.
And I don’t trust that a single one of those in command gives a shit.

But with my career flame flickering out,
I’m no longer angry.
I’m just… thankful.

Because I’m getting out just in time.

I get to walk away knowing that I was part of a real team, a team where we had each other’s backs, where we gave everything, where we sacrificed for something greater than ourselves.

We had trust.
And because of that, we had strength.

That warm, steady feeling in my chest, it’s back.
That same gut feeling I’ve trusted before.

I don’t know exactly how the next chapter plays out;
but I do know I’m on the right path.

I’m not working toward this coming deployment to Afghanistan with optimism or fire in my gut.

I’m facing it with limited resources, low manning, a brutal op tempo, and a chain of command more concerned with polishing their OER bullets than building a team that survives and thrives.

But most of all;
I now recognize something that I’ve carried, hidden and unspoken, for years:

That cold prickly feeling.
The one that creeps into your soul just before a mission.
The one that whispers, this could be it.

NVGs strapped to my face,
no horizon in sight,
just black on black on black.
Dark dust clouds swirling into my nostrils,
tail rotor barely holding,
the aircraft sliding backwards,
downward, into fire.
Into metal twisted and ground into the earth.
Into death, far from home.

I know that vision too well.
I’ve seen it in dreams, in night flights, in moments when the cockpit felt like a coffin.

But now I know I can crush that feeling.

Not deny it, crush it.

I can take that cold prickly bastard and smooth him down. I can turn him into something soft and familiar, something I can manage, something warm.

No, I’m not sure I’ll ever trust a crowd. Not completely. I’ve seen too much, learned too much about the evil that lurks in plain sight.
But I do trust my ability to read the room.
To know which crowds I can stand with.

I trust the difference between the cold prickly and the warm fuzzy.

And I trust myself to choose right. To surround myself with the ones who get it, who earn their keep through quiet courage and shared burdens.

I believe I can get back to that original feeling;
the one I had as a kid,
the one that said:

You have my trust until you lose it.
Not the other way around.

That’s how I want to live again.

And I’m getting there.