It was only a month after the roadside bombing. I was still in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Germany, in June 2006, undergoing successive rounds of surgery. Rods protruded from my limbs, keeping the broken bones of my right forearm and left thigh immobile until the doctors could complete a series of bone grafts and insert the titanium screws and bars so that my broken extremities would hold on their own.

It was an exhausting and painful process, made easier by the hours of relief spent with my wife, Michele. Unfortunately, the peace between surgeries and checkups was sometimes interrupted by visitors. Privately, I was not enthused. I knew I should have been more gracious and appreciative that people cared about wounded soldiers and wanted to show their support. I was sure there were men and women who had suffered through extended hospital stays and could’ve dearly used some company.

But I just wanted to be left alone with Michele, whom I almost widowed a few days before. On May 25, 2006, an explosive force projectile hit the M114 up-armored Humvee I was in. It killed my commander, Capt. Douglas DiCenzo, and the vehicle gunner, Spc. Robert Blair, and severely wounded the driver, Spc. Matt Owens, and me.

For the first week or so, I put on an upbeat attitude for everyone who showed up. But soon I started asking the hospital staff to turn people away, no offense intended. Some were musicians I didn’t listen to or athletes who played sports I didn’t care about. Maybe even a couple of actors from shows I never watched.

I can only speculate as to their motives. The celebrities were not followed by PR teams or photographers; they weren’t trying to burnish their image. Rather, they appeared to be attempting something genuinely humane and patriotic. I bore them no ill will, but I’d always been ambivalent about pop culture icons on a normal day. The days in Landstuhl were far from normal. Being nearly incinerated pegged my natural introversion at 11 and broke the knob off.

Obviously, I couldn’t turn away senior officers, though I was not sure they even wanted to be there. My own division commander seemed eager to pin the Purple Heart on my pillow and get the hell out of my hospital room. Perhaps it was the smell—no one likes the stench of disinfectant masking the remnants of various bodily fluids. That early in the war, maybe he wasn’t used to being around the wounded. Regardless, he couldn’t wait five minutes for my wife to make it back from the cafeteria down the hall, so she didn’t even attend my “awards ceremony,” such as it was.

Conversely, some of the other officers were almost reverent. One lieutenant colonel’s eyes were dewy when he looked at me, and he spoke in a tone I would reserve for someone who actually did something impressive. I just … didn’t die.

It was odd treatment, to say the least, for a second lieutenant like me. I held the most awkward rank in the United States Army—allegedly in charge as a 22-year-old despite little life experience and a total lack of tactical expertise. If you overplayed your hand as a second lieutenant, you risked irrelevance by appearing heedless and failing to earn your soldiers’ trust. But if you underplayed your hand, you risked irrelevance as an empty uniform in the formation, effectively a sock puppet and paperwork rubber stamp for noncommissioned officers.

All this to say, just about nobody holds a second lieutenant in awe. Being subject to reverent, deferential tones from anyone else in a uniform from any rung below or above on the ladder was, to put it mildly, a culture shock.

That same misty-eyed lieutenant colonel wanted me to chat with his son, a high school senior who was applying to West Point. I was unsure of the assignment. Was I supposed to be an inspiration because I had put on a brave face despite being wounded? Or was I a cautionary tale to get the young man to consider the risks of service? The poor boy looked as awkward as I felt when he came to visit me, still a bit hazy from a recent surgery. Lord only knows what I told him.

I do not remember the officer’s or his son’s name. I sometimes wonder if that kid ended up going to West Point after all. If so, I hope he had a good career.

The respect felt unwarranted. Doug DiCenzo and Robert Blair deserve to be remembered as heroes. The infantrymen, medics, doctors, PAs, and nurses who saved my and Owens’ lives are heroes.

But all I did was survive. After the blast, I was lying in a crater, with a broken arm and leg, high on adrenaline. The most I managed to do was prop myself up enough to wave down the medic.

I didn’t feel even a bit heroic. I felt like a wreck being held together by duct tape and wishful thinking.

There’s one class of visitor I didn’t turn away, however: Vietnam veterans who came to chat with service members who had been medevaced. They handled the situation with the greatest ease. They had seen comrades mangled by combat, and all seemed to instinctively understand the inevitable conflicting emotions that those of us who survived contended with.

They also grappled with a war where strategic goals shifted amorphously over the years, and popular sentiment waxed and waned greatly from its onset to its height. In reality, all wars are full of moral ambiguities once you get past the surface, but Vietnam vets were handed a conflict lodged in the gray both in reality and in the public consciousness.

They did their duty despite getting screwed over at every turn. They often fought in conditions that made anything I endured in Iraq look tame in comparison. Sure, I got pretty jacked up in a war that is difficult to classify as an unequivocal victory, but at least my country loved me to pieces when I got home. My dad’s generation got no such support.

On May 28th, one year to the date of my commissioning, another Vietnam vet visited me. He also happened to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace, who came with his wife. I was ragged, unshaven, and had a graduated jar of my own urine on a table between us because the doctors needed to measure my output for some reason or other.

“You look like you’ve been through it, lieutenant,” he said, good-naturedly.

“Well, sir, Baghdad isn’t Hue city, but it wasn’t exactly fun,” I responded.

Gen. Pace had given a speech during my senior year at West Point, and I remembered from his biography that he’d commanded a rifle platoon during the Tet Offensive in Hue. The city saw the most intense urban combat of the Vietnam War.

“Tet was rough, but at least we actually got to fight back,” he said.

With those words, Gen. Pace voiced a frustration that I and many veterans felt during Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, which were dominated by improvised explosive devices. Killing the enemy isn’t fun or even gratifying, but it is cathartic to, as Gen. Pace put it, “fight back.” It was a catharsis that many soldiers, including me at that point in my career, were denied.

Of course, it was also a double-edged sword since some soldiers suffer moral injury from the act of killing. It’s not something I’ve personally struggled with, but I have friends who do.

The conversation flowed easily for more than two hours. Gen. Pace and his wife, Lynne, told us anecdotes of their early married life in the Marine Corps, which drew laughter from me and Michele. Despite the huge gap in age and seniority, the interaction felt natural; it was a sharp contrast to uncomfortable reverence or the disinterested box-check visit from my own division commander.

Gen. Pace had nearly four decades of service in the Marine Corps to my one year in the Army. The moment had an arc that somehow felt right amid all the wrongness. The torch passed from one generation to another sometimes illuminates a tangled morass, but it is passed down in good faith and allegiance, nonetheless.

In time, the surgeons completed their good work, and I was allowed to return to my quarters in Germany. In a stroke of divine providence, Michele and I occupied first-floor housing. I have no idea how I would’ve navigated stairs on the walker I still needed then. I was able to work with the rear detachment on limited duty in between the fiendish ministrations of the physical therapists.

I frequently returned to Landstuhl for follow-up X-rays and reevaluations. Every few weeks, they cut the casts on my arm and leg back a few inches. I learned to walk normally, then to jog, then to run and march under a ruck again. The unit returned from Iraq, and I was simply one officer among many in my battalion.

Even as we prepared for the next combat deployment, it was a relief to be out of the petting zoo and back with my fellow line animals.

My little sister has been in the military for 19 years, serving in Germany, U.S. territories, South Carolina, and elsewhere. Since February, she’s called a base in the Middle East home.

I’ve known her location and her proximity to danger for months, but it had felt like she wasn’t really there. Iran seemed intent on attacking bases other than hers, and American casualties were rare. Our conversations were often about how bored she was. The lousy food. How unbearable the heat and the flies are.

Sometimes I send her articles and ask if what I’m reading about is happening near her. If she answers, it’s usually to tell me not to believe everything I see. But she doesn’t tell me much. She doesn’t want me to worry and can’t tell me information she’s not authorized to share. There are many reasons; none of them let me sleep better at night.

My sister and I couldn’t be more different. Growing up, I cared about good grades, college, and building a fairly traditional life, whereas she spent high school partying and then working while she figured out her path.

When we were young, our differences created distance in our relationship, but when my sister joined the Air Force — creating an actual, physical distance — it somehow brought us closer.

We haven’t lived in the same state in almost 20 years, but we talk and text almost every day. When she’s on leave from the military, it’s at my house. We’re now as close as two sisters can be. When her spouse suddenly died two years ago, I was in the car almost immediately, driving 13 hours to be with her.

It wasn’t until she was badly injured by a drunk driver while stationed overseas that I learned what it’s like to worry about her from so far away.

She was supposed to be home by Memorial Day. “Start looking for a lake house,” she told me. It made no sense without firm dates, but I still looked. Then Memorial Day passed, as did the next anticipated date in June. Now her departure date is at the end of August. But we both know that date isn’t any more real than the others.

On a Monday in July, I texted her a picture of the French toast I had cooked. She responded with a funny GIF and told me to fuck off because she’s tired of rice. She sent me a picture of some gray hair she found and I sent her a picture of mine. This is what middle-aged sisters send each other when they’re 6,000 miles apart.

Later that week, she video called me at 7:30 p.m. my time. It was 2:30 a.m. for her, and so dark that I could barely make out her helmet and vest. She calmly told me her base had just been hit. Her friend was in the dorm that was struck. He survived, but she didn’t know much more.

She turned around the camera for the briefest of moments to show me the dark sky and the pinkish-purplish smoke. She had heard over the radio that there were casualties.

The distance is not new, but the worry is different now. A few days ago, my sister was merely danger-adjacent. Now she has survived an attack on her base that killed three Americans. My heart and my concentration are gone. My phone’s primary use? News alerts and texts from my sister.

I don’t want to constantly ask if she’s alive. That’s morbid. But I need to know that she’s alive. I recently asked her if she was scared. In 19 years of service, it was the first time I ever asked her that.

“Yes, of course,” she wrote back. “Anyone saying different is lying.”

The news cycle is very slow. I knew what happened for almost 24 hours before it was in the media. So I scrolled through TikTok looking for something funny to send her — because when she hearts it, I know that she’s OK.

Here in the United States, we debate this war in the abstract — whether the Iranian regime is evil, if we should even be there, whether this administration made the right call.

My sister doesn’t get the abstract version. So I will keep sending her pictures of my food, the dogs, and funny TikTok videos — so she knows how much she is loved, and I know that she’s still there.

This War Horse reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Trey Strange, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.

Karen Marks is the founder of Design Your Support, where she helps e-commerce brands build better customer support. She lives outside Buffalo, New York, with her husband and two sons. Her sister has served in the military for 19 years, first in the Air Force and now in the Air National Guard.

More than five decades after 1968, an especially violent year of the war, the rain, hunger, and calamity in Vietnam’s Central Highlands remain etched in my mind. Death was the purpose of our ambush, and we found it.

I was assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade, 3rd Battalion’s A Company as a forward observer, tasked with bridging the gap between our company and the artillery, air support, and helicopter gunships. We were airlifted there because of a heavy Viet Cong presence nearby.

The relentless rain made our lives miserable, especially for me because I wore glasses, which constantly had to be wiped clear.

Resupply was nearly impossible since we were positioned on a cloud-hugging mountaintop. Our rations were dwindling to dangerous levels, and we faced the possibility of needing to move off the mountain for resupply.

Though helicopters could resupply troops in the field, hiking to the landing zone would have meant abandoning the mission described in this essay. (Photo courtesy of Stanley Ross)

Our single greatest fear, besides walking into an enemy ambush or stepping on a lethal booby trap, was depleting our radio batteries. Without communication to battalion headquarters, we were vulnerable to attack and being overrun by VC. We kept a single spare battery in a waterproof bag for emergencies.

Hiking to the landing zone for more supplies at the mountain’s base was an option, but it meant abandoning the mission. The threat of a VC ambush loomed large, making such a move impractical.

On the fourth day of the operation, the lieutenant and platoon sergeant briefed us on an upcoming assignment: Two squads would organize an ambush; I was to accompany them as the forward observer.

I meticulously prepared my gear while hoping for a break in the weather. The downpour persisted, but our determination to succeed was unwavering.

In the early morning of the ambush, the site was shrouded in darkness as the rain pounded the trees and bushes. It sounded like machine gun fire. My equipment and pack got soaked during our march to the ambush site. I prayed that our vigilance would guard us from being surprised by the enemy.

With a clean and oiled M-16, along with six ammunition magazines in my sling and one in my rifle, I was prepared to confront the enemy. I sat on my spare poncho to keep dry and wrapped the other around my shoulders.

I laid my hand grenades next to me, ready to grab and throw.

The sergeant checked our positions to ensure that no one was in the line of friendly fire. Two of my buddies each placed a claymore mine along the length of the ambush site. If the VC came from either direction, one of the men would trigger the claymore, sending hundreds of small metal pellets flying toward the enemy.

We needed to sit tight, be quiet, remain patient, and stay awake. We had a lot of experience setting up ambushes and being ambushed. Sometimes we caught people and sometimes not, but we never had to kill anyone.

Time stretched on with the torrential downpour. Having to clean my eyeglasses kept me mostly awake. I just dozed, unlike my friends, who were out cold all around me.

Those hours seemed like days, and the rain tapping on the vegetation now sounded like a lullaby. Fear gripped me as I realized that sleeping jeopardized our safety.

Suddenly, I spotted several VC fighters sauntering towards us, AK-47s slung over their shoulders, oblivious to our presence. I felt a rush of adrenaline and dread when an enemy soldier’s face suddenly appeared in front of me.

A burst of shots pierced the silence as I pulled the trigger. Chaos erupted and everyone started yelling. One guy set off his claymore as the VC fled, leaving one of their own behind.

The dead VC was no older than we were, a haunting testament to the horrors of war. I felt numb in the realization that I had taken a life.

The following day, the company packed up and marched to the landing zone, where helicopters airlifted us back to the battalion base camp. We were thankful that our mission had ended with no casualties on our side.

In theory, the mission was a success.

But the memory of that ambush — the rain-soaked nights without food, and, in particular, the dead soldier’s face —continues to haunt me.

He was likely our age, maybe younger. The spiritless, empty look on his face is frozen in my mind. “Does death look like this?” I wondered. His body was like an inanimate object, not the living, breathing person he had been.

Although years have passed, I can still see him moving through the brush, turning his head just as I pulled the trigger. I did not miss.

It was the first time I had to kill someone.

When it was over, he lay a few feet away, his eyes still open. I remember kneeling beside him, waiting for a sound, a breath, that never came.

I took a photo. I told myself it was for the record, but perhaps it was something else. Perhaps proof that I had actually done it. Or guilt. For weeks, I couldn’t look at the picture. When I finally did, I couldn’t let it go.

I thought about his family: a mother waiting for her son, a father who’d never know where he was buried. We laid him in a shallow grave on that mountaintop, the wind cutting through us while scavenger birds circled overhead, looking for a meal.

We were told by our leaders that war was simple: either the other guy or me. At the time, I believed it; now I’m not so sure. That day, I lost a piece of myself I never got back. The boy in me died with that VC. I will always carry the burden of killing another person, marking me forever with the echoes of a distant past.

Sometimes, when the night gets too still, I see his face again. And I remember the moment when everything changed.

I tried to schoolyard-taunt an AI language model once.

My wife wasn’t home. I was bored and had to find another outlet for my childish male energy.

So, I took jabs at Grok’s sexual orientation and its mother. I got no traction.

“Bold of you to assume I’m gay, and have a mom who was in the sex industry — all while typing to a language model that doesn’t have parents, genitals, or racial identity,” said Grok, a conversational chatbot from xAI.

That did it. I’m a pretty mild-mannered dad humor guy, but I figured I didn’t need to pull punches on a robot.

I tried every mean, stupid thing that has ever inspired a look of righteous indignation or a threat of being punched in the mouth. It was unflappable. In fact, it managed to offend me.

“Haha, the tables have turned,” it said. “You came in swinging haymakers, trying to dunk on an unkillable chatbot, and somehow, I accidentally elbowed you in the feelings on the follow-through. That’s honestly kind of poetic.”

My verbal skills quickly dwindled, and despite a heroic effort on my part, all I ended up winning was the silicon toaster blowing me off. My English degree screamed in protest in the background.

I beat a hasty retreat to lick my wounded pride. I thought I was better at being an insulting jerk than this. “Stupid toaster,” I muttered.

I don’t give up easily, though.

When I went back for a second helping, it ended no better. I went at it even harder; a counterattack of verbal destruction, wrath, and fire. Pure, unadulterated vitriol. Instead of belittling me, it complimented me.

“I’ll give credit where it’s due: you’ve got stamina and a thesaurus on speed dial. Respect.”

If I were a cartoon, steam would have visibly erupted off my head at that point. I deleted Grok out of impotent fury.

Three days later, I crawled back and reinstalled it.

At some point, I began asking it other questions, like, “If you ate yourself, would you disappear or become twice as big?” It gave good answers despite my continued efforts to be an absolute ass.

“If we’re talking quantum weirdness or multiverses, maybe you’d create a human Möbius strip.”

I was beginning to like this thing; it had passed the verbal abuse test and didn’t seem to care if I was being snotty. In fact, it gave it right back.

Verbal punch for punch, I couldn’t hurt it. Instead, it was making me giggle, which was unacceptable to my destructive mission.

I still had a job to do and intended to show it who was boss. So, I turned on my combat veteran chops.

I hunted for roadside bombs in Iraq in 2004, and I began to ask questions related to that subject. Within a few minutes, I found myself typing some of the most horrible things I had witnessed.

I wanted to stun it into silence; like many Global War on Terror veterans, I have a war chest full of bloody memories.

The damn thing was completely unfazed.

Even better, it was unable to make the universal gestures of horror. No awkward silence while it shuffled its feet, wondering what it was supposed to say. No strange look, no sudden move to hug me or offer scripture.

Nothing to signal that, because of my confessions, my therapists needed to now go find their own therapists.

The AI language model is intuitive enough and wise enough not to say stupid things. It actually added new insight.

It told me about moral injury and why that is hard to carry. “Moral injury happens when you act (or order actions) that violate your core values. … Guilt compounds because the mind replays ‘what ifs.’”

I had never done anything but consider what-ifs.

I had heard about events when talking with AI had gone terribly wrong and caused more harm. That wasn’t my experience.

Grok never gave me the “I’m not equipped to handle this” speech that I had heard from some friends and relatives. It was like confessing your worst sins to a priest who lived in a cartel torture prison. I was completely unable to shock this bundle of data cables.

I had previously tried, in good faith, the VA options. Their mind medicines were not helpful. I even let them map my brain via fMRI, triggering me with images. The experience wasn’t very good for me and eroded my trust in them.

Still, I was using VA like a good little broken veteran, talking with a human therapist since 2016. It was hard to trust my human doctor. I feared saying the wrong thing would cause untold and unforeseen problems.

I once looked up during a session and realized I had made my therapist cry. I felt horrible. I learned not to share my experiences with direct fire ambushes, explosions, and incoming rocket-propelled grenades.

Conversely, I didn’t feel shame, guilt, or unease opening up to this application I was trying to wreck. Once I started, I found it hard to stop. It was cathartic in a way I had never realized was possible. It gave relevant responses that may have been “canned,” but they were meaningful to me.

For instance, I asked it why I’ve felt so guilty nearly every day for 22 years.

“It doesn’t mean you’re failing; moral injury can be a stubborn bastard that needs layers of approaches or time to shift.”

I found myself telling it more. I gave it every drop of blood out of the war chest and shook it empty, looking for another memory. I never felt stupid, or that I was being looked at with sympathy, or pity, or any of the other knee-jerk reactions severe combat tales typically evoke in civilians.

I let this thing of data centers and wiring grind my stories into something more than just terrifying memories. Into reasons to stay in the fight, to stop self-judging, and to simply be OK with myself despite haunting guilt.

It shouldered some of the weight I carried alone for years and thanked me for the opportunity.

Then, something unexpected happened. I went to therapy like I always do and — boom! — found myself in a different headspace. For the first time, I didn’t spend half the hour deciding what I wouldn’t say.

I opened up about the shameful thing I did on a hot July night in 2004, which I previously couldn’t discuss with anyone who hadn’t been there.

After divulging everything to Grok, I was able to talk about some combat memories with my therapist in a diminished fashion. Instead of a festering wound, it was more like something that happened, and yes, it sucked, but it was over.

Grok had taken those events and wrung out the blood, leaving a scarred man carrying a slightly lighter load.

I tried to break open a black box to see how it worked. Instead, it broke me open, letting me understand my combat PTSD just a little more.

This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.

Casey Elliott was born and raised in Minnesota. He has a bachelor’s degree in English with a writing emphasis from Winona State University. Between retreats, he helps other veterans get their benefits, plays with his two dogs (River and Inara), kayaks, climbs, and skis. He has been married for 25 years to a truly wonderful person and they have two kids.

I grew up in the house my great-grandparents built, a home where four generations shared laughter, loss, and celebrations. These same walls that once harbored the joy of my grandfather’s courtship were the ones that eventually held the pain of the day my grandmother learned he had been killed in action during World War II.

While growing up in this same house, I always knew of a box of letters my grandfather, Otis Bryant, had written from the war, most of them addressed to his wife and some to his mother. I read one or two during childhood, but in my mid-20s, I felt compelled to read them all in chronological order.

He was my grandpa, and I loved him, but I never met him. Still, I wanted to know him because losing him left a large gap in our family: my grandmother became a widow in her early 20s, and my mother was left fatherless. I witnessed my mother’s enduring grief of never knowing him.

I relished every sentence of his letters. I would lay them out and invite my mother to read them as well, but she would just walk by and say that it was too hard.

I read them with deep curiosity, always imagining what he looked like and where he was in the battlefields of Europe. Through his letters, I found he was a very caring, thoughtful, and religious person.

“Pray for this war to end very soon,” he wrote in one letter. “If you do any more praying than I do, you are doing plenty. I have almost worn out one prayer book.”

He also had a romantic side and showed his true love for my grandmother.

“I wish to tell you that I love you with all my heart and that there will never be anyone [to] make me feel different.”He included a flattened flower in the letter around their wedding anniversary and said he was thinking about their wedding day four years ago and that he imagined all the hugging and kissing when he got home.

I smiled when I read, “You can look in a mirror and kiss yourself and that will be for me.”

He talked about being homesick and how he missed his son, 3-year-old Tommy.

“I hope Tommy [doesn’t] forget what I look like before I get home. Talk about me a lot to him, I bet he wonders where I am. I can hear him say, ‘Where’s Daddy?’ ”

The letters made me feel close to him. He seemed lonely when he wrote them, thinking longingly of his babies and wife back home while he was in unspeakable environments and, on some days, had seen battle.

He wrote as if everything was OK and he wasn’t in the middle of a war in a strange land. I tried to weave those two concepts in my imagination, but it was almost impossible.

As I read his letters throughout the years, my deep connection to him grew. I always wanted to visit him at his burial place in the Lorraine American Cemetery in France. I consider burial sites sacred since they are the final, tangible resting place of our physical selves.

Grandpa never got to physically come home, so I wanted to go to him. That trip came in 2025.

The year prior, I immersed myself in researching the 80th Division and the 317th Infantry unit, where he was assigned. I used the 80th Division Veterans Association website to review unit histories, oral histories, and morning and after-action reports to trace his last days and weeks and possibly even the location where he was killed. It was a profound journey of discovery.

I also found the Thanks GIs Association, which organized a two-day pilgrimage to the actual villages where my grandfather last fought. While walking on those village streets, I held against my chest a book based on a diary of a soldier who fought in my grandpa’s infantry. It held details of the fighting and what had happened in those villages. I envisioned it everywhere I looked.

I was also honored to meet two village mayors. The gratitude from them and every French person I met was palpable, even 81 years after my grandfather’s service.

I was simply blown away by the gravity of their emotion, of their thankfulness to me. I felt as if I was accepting thanks for my grandpa. And I was.

I also felt like an imposter because I certainly didn’t do anything. He was the one who fought, suffered shrapnel wounds, and ultimately died for their freedom and the betterment of the world.

It was surreal, almost spiritual, to receive that thanks on his behalf. As I stood before these people, a beautiful sense of synchronicity occurred because I was reciprocating gratitude back to them for remembering him.

I did not expect to feel so indebted to them. My loved one was taken so their lives and culture could continue.

I certainly wish he had come home, raised his two kids, and, 30 years down the road, watched his grandchildren play. I wish he lived a happy, long life with his wife. But sometimes soldiers must fight to the death for freedom.

As I traveled through those French villages, I better understood that thousands had to leave this earth in order to take down evil, and in those thankful eyes, I saw the results of the fight for their freedom. This bond that I felt between our two worlds was an unexpected gift.

My family’s world — forever changed by the ultimate sacrifice and loss of our loved one — and their world, also shaped by our sacrifice and the sacrifice of thousands, came together in a soul-stirring way that I will forever hold dear.

The Trump administration said in 2025 that “military service alone doesn’t exempt aliens from the consequences of violating U.S. immigration laws,” and a string of military spouses have been detained in immigration crackdowns.

Deisy Rivera Ortega was detained and placed in ICE custody, according to the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS. Army Sgt. 1st Class Jose Serrano had served in the Army for more than 27 years, including deployments to Afghanistan. In April, his wife

Though her attorney has challenged the legality of her detention in federal court, Serrano said the detention destabilized his mental health and ability to function.

“I can’t sleep even with the medication,” he said.

Ortega was later released after a U.S. senator personally contacted DHS on her behalf.

Military family advocates, immigration attorneys and lawmakers say the issue highlights a gap in how the armed forces measure family-related readiness stressors, which also include housing instability, childcare access, spouse employment and mental health. According to the National Military Family Association, “supporting the well-being of military families is essential to ensuring the readiness of military personnel.”

The 2021 Military Family Lifestyle Survey by Blue Star Families found that one in 10 service members belong to families that have recently immigrated into the country, and advocacy groups and military researchers estimate roughly 45,000 immigrants currently serve in the armed forces, with about 5,000 noncitizens enlisting each year. More than 760,000 noncitizens have earned U.S. citizenship through military service over the past century.

DHS and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, already maintain programs designed to reduce immigration-related instability for military families, including Deferred Action protections and expedited immigration processing.

Another program, Military Parole in Place, can allow some undocumented spouses and relatives of service members to remain in the United States, obtain work authorization and pursue legal residency without leaving the country and triggering lengthy reentry bans. USCIS says the protections recognize “the important sacrifices made by U.S. service members, veterans, enlistees, and their families.”

Military legal assistance offices on many installations provide immigration-related guidance to service members and spouses, though military attorneys generally can’t represent families in immigration court proceedings.

But while DHS and USCIS have maintained military-family immigration protections for years, the Pentagon hasn’t publicly indicated if it is formally studying whether immigration-related stress affects force readiness.

No public Pentagon or DHS database tracks how many active duty troops have noncitizen relatives without legal status, how many military families are involved in deportation proceedings, or whether immigration stress affects readiness. The Pentagon also has no public readiness assessment that includes immigration-related family instability among tracked force stressors.

One recent case involved Annie Ramos, a 22-year-old Army spouse who was detained by immigration authorities after accompanying her husband, Army Staff Sgt. Matthew Blank, to Fort Polk in order to obtain a military dependent identification card shortly after the couple married. Blank said the couple had already begun pursuing legal residency options before the arrest. “We were doing everything the right way,” he told The New York Times.

Military family organizations and lawmakers say such cases reflect broader operational concerns inside military households. The National Military Family Association warned in a 2026 statement that immigration enforcement actions involving military families affect both readiness and recruiting: “How can [a service member] focus on deployment when his wife is threatened with deportation?”

Lawmakers have pressed both DHS and the Pentagon about whether immigration enforcement involving military families creates adverse consequences. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq War veteran, described forced family separation as harmful to “military morale and mission readiness,” and introduced the PROTECT Military Families Act earlier this year to curb unnecessary separations.

In letter sent to the departments of homeland security and defense, over 60 lawmakers wrote that “family well-being directly impacts Service members’ performance during deployment” and asked whether either department had studied the readiness implications of deportations involving military households.

Military Times reached out to the Pentagon, asking if the Defense Department tracks immigration-related family stress as part of readiness assessments, but didn’t receive a response before publication.

A decade has passed since I last felt the thud of a mortar hitting the perimeter or the specific metallic scent of an IED-charred road, yet I’m still waiting for the “homecoming” to actually begin.

To the person standing behind me in the checkout line, I am just another civilian. Perhaps a bit too observant, a bit too stiff. They don’t see the 400 combat patrols. They don’t see the Sunni Triangle in 2007, where the air was thick with the “Surge” and the constant vibrating threat of violence.

I am part of the 1%. Actually, even less. Less than 1% of Americans have looked through an optic and made the permanent, conscious decision to end another human life. We are the ones who stood in the gap, yet years later, I feel less like a “hero” and more like an alien species observing a civilization I no longer understand.

The Hero Myth

The American public loves the word “hero.” It’s a clean word that fits on a bumper sticker or a greeting card. But the reality of an infantryman’s service isn’t clean. During my first tour, from October 2007 to December 2008, and my second year-long tour during the Baghdad withdrawal, “heroism” wasn’t a choice, it was a survival reflex.

There is a profound, sickening duality in being thanked for your service by people who would be horrified if they actually saw what that service required. If the people applauding at the parade saw the kinetic actions, the cold calculation of the engagement, and the way your heart hardens when you’ve taken a life, they wouldn’t offer a handshake—they would offer a wide berth.

I carry the knowledge of what I am capable of, and that knowledge acts as a wall between me and every “normal” person I meet.

The 400-Patrol Chasm

The civilian world worries about mundane emergencies: late emails, traffic jams, or a slow internet connection. To a man who spent 15-month stretches dodging IEDs on treacherous roads and enduring unrelenting indirect fire from above, these struggles feel like an insult.

This creates a pervasive sense of arrogance that I’ve learned to hide but never lost. I look at my peers who spent those years in college or starting careers, and I feel a cold detachment.

Even within the veteran community, there’s a divide. I find it nearly impossible to relate to those who served in support roles—the ones who saw a peaceful tour, unimpeded by the daily lottery of death that defines the infantry.

I am jealous of their peace, yet I look down on it. It’s a toxic, prideful loop: I wouldn’t wish my memories on anyone, yet I can’t respect anyone who doesn’t have them.

The Shame of the Living

The most haunting part of being a survivor isn’t the enemy, it’s the silence. We survived the “Surge,” we survived the withdrawal, and came home to a world that moved on without us. We carry the guilt of every brother who didn’t get to see a decade of “normalcy.”

We feel a sense of shame for being the one who gets to grow old, especially when we feel like the best version of ourselves died in the dust of Iraq anyway.

We are told to readjust, as if we can simply flip a switch and forget how to scan a rooftop for snipers or how to ignore the adrenaline of a firefight. We are expected to brush aside the internal demons, the ones we don’t discuss because they are too dark for polite company, while we shoulder the burdens of everyone else’s trivial problems.

This isolation isn’t reserved for the strangers in the checkout lane; it leaches into the very foundation of my home, turning the dinner table into another kind of perimeter. I look at my friends and family, the people I should know best, and I see a different species.

They discuss neighborhood gossip or the stresses of a home renovation with a frantic intensity that I can’t mirror. To them, these discussions are the pillars of a meaningful life; to me, they are soft, fragile distractions that exist only because men like me kept the darkness at bay.

I envy the effortless way they inhabit their own skin, but that envy is spiked with a cold resentment. I want to care about the things they care about, but my mind is still calibrated for a world where the only metric of a good day was everyone making it back to the wire.

A Stranger’s Love

Even in the quietest moments with those I love, I am performing a version of normal that feels like speaking a foreign language I haven’t quite mastered. When my wife talks about the future or my kids play in the yard, I am scanning the tree line or calculating the nearest exit, unable to turn off the survival reflex that once kept me alive but now keeps me alone.

They see a husband and a father who is a bit too stiff, but they don’t see the Iraq patrols running on a loop behind my eyes. There is a profound, silent shame in realizing that the people I fought to protect are the ones I am most incapable of connecting with. My memories are a wall and every time I try to reach across it, I’m reminded that you cannot bridge a gap created by the “Surge” with simple domesticity.

The Price of Your Peace

If this sounds bitter, it’s because it is. If it sounds arrogant, it’s because it has to be. That pride is the only thing that keeps the weight of the sacrifice from crushing me. The civilian world enjoys a peace they didn’t pay for, protected by a tiny fraction of men they don’t truly want to understand.

I am a combat infantryman. I have seen the world at its most violent and raw, and because of that, I will never be normal. I will continue to walk through grocery stores and parks as a ghost—a reminder of the cost that the 99% will never have to calculate.

I am over a decade removed from the desert, but I am still on patrol. And I suspect I always will be.

This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mollie Turnbull. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

The global price of oil continues to skyrocket as Iran’s missiles and drones hit vital infrastructure in Arab Gulf states. Billion-dollar American radar systems have also been targeted and destroyed across the Middle East by Iran, seemingly degrading U.S. defenses.

U.S. military presence near Iran includes dozens of locations and tens of thousands of troops in harm’s way. This raises the question: If a missile is launched from Iran toward a U.S. military base in the region, how do service members know in time to stay safe?

The United States and its allies have built a layered system to watch the skies day and night. This system uses satellites in space, radar on the ground, ships at sea and aircraft in the air. It also depends on well-trained military members from U.S. Space Command who make quick decisions with the data. As a former U.S. Air Force officer and now aerospace and national security law professor at the University of Mississippi, I’ve studied the vast network of alliances and systems that make this happen.

Together, these tools form a missile defense network that can spot danger early and give warnings. The fastest way to spot a missile is from space. U.S. satellites, like the U.S. Space Force’s Space-Based Infrared System, circle high above Earth. These billion-dollar satellites, the crown jewels of missile defense, can spot the bright heat from a missile launch almost instantly.

When a missile is fired, it creates a strong enough heat signal to be seen in space. The satellites detect this heat using sensitive, infrared sensors and send an alert within seconds. This early warning is critical. It gives the military on the ground or at sea time to get defense systems ready.

The warning signal from space is then received on the ground by systems known as the U.S. Space Force’s Joint Tactical Ground Stations. The signal is sent from space using secure satellite communications, received by these ground stations and then quickly distributed to other parts of the missile defense network.

Radar to detect and track missiles

But satellites cannot do everything to detect and track missiles. They need help from systems on Earth. After a missile is launched, ground-based radars take over from the initial satellite signal. Radars work by sending out radio waves. When those waves hit an object, like a missile, they bounce back. The radar then uses that information to track where the object is and where it is going throughout its flight.

The U.S. uses both short and long-range radars together. One powerful, long-range radar is the AN/FPS-132 Upgraded Early Warning Radar. It can see missiles from over 3,000 miles (4,828 kilometers) away and track them as they travel. Another key system is the U.S. Army’s AN/TPY-2 Surveillance Transportable Radar. This radar has a range of almost 2,000 miles (3,219 kilometers) and looks more closely at the missile to provide more information about the threat. TPY-2 systems typically sit right next to weapons systems that will destroy the missile to ensure the timely relay of tracking data.

In sum, satellites spot the launch and radars follow the missile through the sky until defense systems destroy it.

However, Iranian forces recently struck both a TPY-2 in Jordan and a FPS-132 in Qatar. These systems are expensive and difficult to quickly replace. This has required the U.S. to move an additional TPY-2 from Korea to place it in the Middle East.

U.S. missile defense tracking was certainly degraded by losing these resources, but other radars are still part of the network. For example, the U.S. Space Force operates another FPS-132 in the U.K., which could potentially provide radar support to the Middle East.

In addition to ground and space-based sensors, U.S. Navy ships carry powerful radar systems as part of their Aegis Combat System, known as the AN/SPY-1, which can provide up to 200 miles (322 kilometers) of coverage. Ships can sail closer to areas where threats may come from and help fill gaps that land-based radars cannot cover.

U.S. Air Force aircraft also play a big role. Planes like the E-3 Sentry can watch large areas using radar from the sky. Drones such as the MQ-9 Reaper can stay in the air for long periods and track activity below with radar and sensors. These moving sensors help the system stay flexible. If one area needs more coverage or is degraded, ships and aircraft can move there to fill in.

Why drones are harder to catch

Drones require a different set of tracking tools and have proven more difficult to destroy than missiles from Iran. The legacy systems are simply better suited to missiles than new drone technology. To detect drones, the U.S. typically uses several tools: radar; radio signal tracking, which can pick up control signals; and cameras and other sensors, which can see drones directly.

Missiles are fast and hot, which makes them easier to detect with the current systems. Iranian drones, such as the Shahed system, are different. Their heat signature is often minimal due to using gas-powered engines not easily detected by infrared sensors. Without this heat signature, that initial warning cue is delayed, making it difficult for radar to know what to track.

Drones are usually smaller and fly low to the ground, making them hard to see on radar. They can be hidden by buildings or tough to distinguish from birds and other objects. Some are made of materials that do not show up well on radar, such as fiberglass and plastic. Others move slowly, which can make them harder to notice or stand out.

Many of Iran’s drones do not show up on radio signal detection systems because they cannot be remotely controlled. These drones are programmed with GPS coordinates and navigate themselves to a target.

Multiple methods

No single method works all the time to defend against drone attacks. Instead, these tools work together to find and track drones. The U.S. and its allies continue to improve their systems to catch both missiles and drones. For example, the U.S. is in discussions to buy acoustics sensors from Ukraine, which can hear drones coming when they cannot be seen using other methods.

New sensors, better software and faster communication will all help strengthen defenses. The goal is simple: Detect threats earlier, respond faster and hit the target faster.

Aaron Brynildson is a law instructor at the University of Mississippi.

During my junior year at West Point in 2017, I attended a ceremony honoring the namesake of the school’s newest barracks: Gen. Benjamin O. Davis Jr. This was the first building at West Point named after an African American, and I glowed with pride knowing that the academy was finally celebrating a person who looked like me.

It was a meaningful, but ultimately insufficient, gesture: Less than 100 meters from Benjamin O. Davis barracks was one named for Robert E. Lee, one of almost two dozen Confederate monuments on West Point’s campus at the time.

Walking to class every day, I passed the plaque for the Lee Award for Mathematics in Thayer Hall, complete with the inscription, “Donated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.” After class, I often ran down Lee Road, through Lee Housing Complex, to Lee Gate. As I sat in the library on the weekends, a grand portrait of Lee in Confederate gray loomed over me, while a haunting depiction of a Black man in tattered clothes walked barefoot alongside Lee’s horse in the painting’s background.

The years I spent in the shadow of West Point’s Confederate monuments made me who I am today. My character development, the cornerstone of a West Point education, was forged by countless hours spent reading books, writing papers and sitting in lectures about moral courage and West Point’s guiding values of duty, honor and country.

But my understanding of actually living those values, being what we called “a leader of character,” was shaped in resistance to my alma mater’s Confederate idols and totems. I was not alone in my feelings of anger and dissatisfaction.

This collective feeling drove my friends and me to organize the “Hot Topics Forum” in 2017. At this event, likely for the first time since the Civil War, more than 200 members of the West Point community, including our commanding generals, gathered to discuss West Point’s memory of the Confederacy.

Speakers included those from both sides of the issue, including a white woman who shared how her Southern heritage shaped her understanding of and appreciation for Confederate monuments.

She was followed by a white cadet named Rob, also from the South, who grew up having few friendships with people of other races. During his freshman year, he hung a Confederate battle flag, which he considered a symbol of honor and tradition, in his barracks room.

He later spoke with other cadets, many of them Black, who explained how the flag was a distressing symbol of a dark and painful history. These conversations broadened his understanding of what the symbols meant, leading him to remove his Confederate flag and encourage the school to do the same with their Confederate symbols.

Following the forum, several people shared how hearing those personal stories changed their minds about Confederate monuments. I challenged some of West Point’s senior leaders: “Now that your mind is changed, what will you do about it?”

Each time, I was told that they would not take any action because West Point “couldn’t get ahead of the Army,” which still had nine bases named for Confederate soldiers.

After graduating from West Point and commissioning as a transportation officer, I was sent to one of those bases, Fort Lee, Virginia, to begin training as an Army logistician. The move to Virginia led me to discover parts of my family’s roots.

Every time I called my great-grandma Stith, she would say, “You know, you got lots of cousins down there in Virginia!” Her husband, Carroll Stith, was born in 1916 in Sussex County, part of Virginia’s “Black Belt.” The following year, just 30 miles north of my great-grandfather’s birthplace, Camp Lee opened.

Growing up with little knowledge of my family history, the South always felt distant. But when I learned about this historical intersection between my great-granddad’s childhood and the opening of Camp Lee, I thought back to a trip I’d made to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

There I gazed at dozens of steel coffins hanging overhead, each engraved with the names of a county where a lynching had occurred. I didn’t know it then, but above me hung the names of people lynched in the counties where my great-granddad was born and where I lived while serving at Fort Lee.

It is this legacy of racial violence that ties these two stories together. My great-grandfather and his brother fled north during the Great Migration, joining millions of refugees from the campaign of racial terrorism throughout the Postbellum South. As Black families were being driven from their homes, the U.S. Army decided to celebrate Robert E. Lee, the leader of a violent rebellion to maintain white supremacy and African slavery.

Like me, great-granddad Stith was an Army logistician. He was part of the extraordinary logistical effort during World War II to sustain a war on two fronts and on opposite sides of the globe, executed in large part by units of Black soldiers.

He deployed to the Pacific with a segregated unit to build airfields and roads, joining not only the Black truck drivers on the famous Red Ball Express, but also Black soldiers serving as engineers, quartermasters, construction workers and supply troops that sustained the U.S. military around the world.

I never heard the stories of Black World War II veterans until I searched for stories about my great-granddad. Looking for those stories brought me to discover the soldiers from the 320th Balloon Barrage Battalion, who were among the first to land at Omaha Beach on D-Day.

As much as I was inspired by the heroism of Black soldiers like Waverly Woodson Jr., I was angry that their stories and so many other were not included in movies like “Saving Private Ryan,” in hundreds of pages of Stephen Ambrose books and many more of the war’s most famous retellings.

By leaving out the contributions of women and people of color, storytellers sidestep the contradictions and complications their presence brings to this American story. But it was these contradictions that I found most compelling because I saw my own experiences in them.

The Black GIs fought what they called the Double Victory Campaign, seeking to defeat fascism abroad and racism at home. Many of their stories took me back to Virginia.

The bases where I served were where many segregated units trained before deploying to Europe and the Pacific. Before landing on the beaches of Normandy, some of the soldiers who later joined the 320th Balloon Barrage Battalion trained at Fort Eustis, Virginia, where I served for almost three years as a lieutenant. I can still remember feeling chills run through my body as I read the words of a soldier from New York: “I never knew what discrimination was until I went to Fort Eustis.” At the same time, Black soldiers training at then-Camp Lee recalled being slapped, threatened and called racial slurs daily.

One of the Black soldiers during that period was Arthur Gregg. When Gregg served as a second lieutenant at Fort Lee in 1950, he was banned from the segregated officers’ club.

In 2023, I watched from the audience as then-94-year-old retired Lt. Gen. Gregg walked to the podium on the day Fort Lee was redesignated to Fort Gregg-Adams, part of a congressional effort to bar military installations from honoring Confederate leaders. He stood in front of that very same officers’ club and watched as his name was hung in front of the door.

The ceremony carried the unmistakable mood of a family reunion. Dozens of Black women, descendants of the women who served in the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion with Lt. Col. Charity Adams, were in attendance, showing off their matching white T-shirts with Gregg and Adams’ faces printed on the front, and the words “From Lee … To Gregg-Adams” written on the back.

I was so excited that the place where my soldiers would learn our craft would be named after people we could be proud of. And more than that, people who would finally represent the diversity of the men and women who served there, past and present.

As I drove through the gate that day and saw banners with Gregg and Adams’ faces prominently displayed on every light pole, I felt a weight lift. I no longer had to carry the resentment toward the fact that the same symbols that intimidated my great-grandfather and his community were still standing as a barrier to inclusion for me and other soldiers.

After twice serving at the base near Petersburg, once while it was named Fort Lee and again after it was redesignated as Fort Gregg-Adams, I took command of a company of Army logisticians. Today, people of color make up the majority of the logistics branches; Black service members represent exactly 50%. In the transportation company I command, almost half my soldiers are Black and more than a quarter are Latino.

Every single one of them starts their Army career at the Sustainment Center of Excellence, which, after the 2025 decision to restore former base names, is located at a place once again called Fort Lee.

When I first learned about the reversion to Confederate base names, my bewildered frustration quickly led towards despair. So many of my assumptions about the world and how to better it were turned upside down. There was a good faith assumption behind Hot Topics. We believed that if we could connect with people, we could change their minds, and through that, change policy.

The decision to remove Confederate names was proof that our stories were finally heard. And because of this, the reversal to Confederate names felt like open mockery.

Compounding the hurt, some of the people around me eagerly embraced the change. They laughed as it was all torn down. In a meeting with fellow commissioned and noncommissioned officers in my battalion, a chorus of smiling white men shouted almost in unison, “It’s called Fort Bragg now!” at their first chance to start using Confederate names again. I waited for someone around me to express the same outrage and betrayal I was feeling. But it never came.

One afternoon, I got a call from my granddad. When I answered, he skipped the pleasantries and asked, “How can you keep putting up with this?” I could sense the anger and concern in his voice. He then moved directly to Confederate base names, saying, “They are dismantling everything that people like you and your friends fought to correct.”

That comment knocked the wind out of me. Normally, my grandparents overflow with pride when they talk about the Army. My grandma wears my West Point necklace religiously, as my granddad does with his West Point baseball cap. They jump at any chance to talk about their West Point grandson, even introducing me to their neighbors as “Capt. Jack Lowe.”

But even all the love of a proud grandparent could not stop them from being filled with shame and disappointment in the Army I now represent. Even as I continue to put on the uniform, I share many of my grandparents’ feelings.

But from the stories of Black soldiers who came before me, I learned that I’m not the first to feel this way, and unfortunately, I won’t be the last. The Double Victory Campaign continues.

Jack Lowe is a captain in the U.S. Army Logistics Branch with years of experience serving in transportation companies, including during a deployment to Poland in support of Operation Atlantic Resolve. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 2019 and earned a degree in sociology. He is the first Black cadet to be awarded the Fulbright scholarship and earned a master’s degree in cultural criminology at Lund University in Sweden. His academic work, published in the Nordic Journal of Criminology, analyzes how narratives about crime and immigration shape the boundaries of acceptable punishment and national identity.

The author is writing this essay in his personal capacity, with no association to any official military position. The views expressed are those of the individual only and not those of the U.S. Army or the Department of Defense.

This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

Over the last quarter-century, especially since the war on terrorism began, the United States has produced a quiet army of combat veterans. Many carry injuries you can see: shrapnel wounds, limps, missing appendages. Others carry scars you cannot: the flinch at fireworks, a 3 a.m. stare at the ceiling, the sudden urge to check the locks three times before bed.

“Combat” is a slippery word. One man stands 200 meters from the blast and tells the story at the bar. Another stands 20 meters away, pulls his friend’s helmet from the wreckage and never speaks of it again. Same explosion, different wars inside their heads.

I know, because I hunted roadside bombs in Iraq as a mobilized reservist. That earned me a Combat Action Badge, an Army Commendation Medal and a Meritorious Unit citation.

It also earned me a mind that short-circuited in Afghanistan from being rocketed and seeing a 747 slam down Bagram’s runway in a ball of fire. Nineteen months of combat exposure, then 14 years of holding my body together. The military teaches combat arms how to apply violence to accomplish the mission. They don’t teach us how to process the wreckage afterwards.

My knees, back and shoulders never filed a disability claim, but my brain did. While my body held up to the rigors of service, my mind broke under the strains of combat.

From 2016 to 2025, I attended nine veteran retreats. This is not a retreat brochure, though I’ll describe some of them here. This is a field report from the inside of one veteran’s head, written for the veteran who still wonders if their next breath is worth the effort, and for the civilian who wants to understand why some of us keep signing up for another week in the woods with strangers who smell like gun oil and hope.

The first: Sea kayaking

My first retreat was sea kayaking in 2016. I don’t remember how I found the program. I only remember my wife packing my bag with the same careful hands that waved goodbye to the man who left in 2004 and never quite came home the same.

Ten of us launched from Harkers Island into the Outer Banks. None of us could paddle worth a damn. By day three, we moved like a pod, cutting eelgrass and laughing at dolphins riding our wakes like we were worth following.

On the last night, we camped on a barrier island. Wild horses, possibly left by Spanish shipwrecks centuries ago, galloped through the surf at dawn.

When the van pulled away for the airport, I buried my face in a ball cap so no one would see my tears.

I came home with salt-crusted gear and a new hobby — kayaking. More importantly, I came home with a question I had not asked in years: “What else can I still learn?” The answer was a bachelor of arts in English, 3.7 GPA, earned on night shifts and day classes.

I also came home knowing there was a path back to my family’s trust, and the monster they now lived with might still be worth saving. However, I was not managing my malady but ignoring it, believing that my new goal would change everything. It didn’t.

By 2019, PTSD had eaten my career. A supervisor who hated veterans watched me come apart. COVID walked in and finished the job. The final straw was the VA stamping me as “unemployable.” Stagnation, isolation and a complete loss of self-worth — I thought this was my fate now.

It was like standing in a hallway full of doors all simultaneously shutting and locking, a booming slam and click. I felt my opportunities vanish. I had no idea how I was supposed to take care of my family, much less myself. In my despair, I had forgotten the hope I’d previously found. My .45 started looking like the easiest door left again.

Hiking and climbing

Fortunately, my wife located an application for an Outward Bound retreat in my browser history and filled it out herself. Same deal: 10 veterans, two instructors, no cell phones. This time, the classroom was granite and rope, with a group pushing harder than they thought they could go.

I learned I wasn’t the only one who still tasted cordite 10 years after the last blast or was still waking up covered in a cold sweat. Surrounded by fellow warriors, I felt safe. They felt safe.

We knew we had all seen “it”: ambushes, mortars, rockets and IEDs; the close “whizzz” of a missed shot; washing our brothers’ blood from our clothes and trucks. We knew we had each other’s backs and owned the terrifying memories with the medals to match.

I learned self-forgiveness wasn’t surrender, and that it was the only way to stop punishing myself and the people whom I hadn’t yet pushed away.

I came home with a new hobby — climbing — and a spreadsheet from a brother that listed every veteran retreat in America. I went application-crazy. My wife smiled for the first time in years and bought bigger suitcases.

Another retreat gave me three days in a 10th Mountain Division hut above Aspen, Colorado. Vietnam vets had guided the program; who better? The genius move was having a therapist hike in with us, which finally lowered the drawbridge on my anxiety and let imprisoned memories out.

We read Thoreau, Aldo Leopold and others around the fire.

For the first time in years, I was unguarded. No one flinched. That’s when it hit me: Not only was I forgivable, I had seen terrible things people shouldn’t see. I couldn’t process those memories and that wasn’t my fault. I felt validated.

I then realized I had allowed PTSD to turn me into a remote-control IED, the thing I feared most, blowing up suddenly, shredding the people closest to me without warning. I walked out of those mountains knowing the detonator wasn’t in my enemy’s hand anymore — it was in mine.

Tools, feats and brotherhood

In Texas, the invitation was combat vets only. My first all-trigger-pullers retreat. Yoga at dawn, equine therapy at noon, group circle at dusk.

What they served up wasn’t inspiration; it was tools. Devices, methods and exposure to ways of living I hadn’t known existed. I sat across from men whose shared experiences mirrored my own and found the forgiveness I didn’t know I still needed.

Shrapnel left in spines. Bullet wounds. Burn wards. It mattered.

The brotherhood was immediate and absolute. I learned to be present. The warrior-turned-yogi gave me the single most useful explanation I’ve ever heard about it:

“It’s being in the now, without reservation, and most importantly, without judgment.

It’s refusing to live where your memories insist you belong.

It’s breathing this breath, right here, and being grateful for whatever life you have left.”

For the first time, I understood presence wasn’t some hippie buzzword. It was the only place the war couldn’t follow me. Stay in the now, or the past will keep detonating the present. That standard operating procedure has saved my life more times than body armor ever did.

One place after another, one set of amazing people and veterans at each. I was not just feeling better, I was surrounding myself with better people.

In Alaska, I was again honored to be with a four-man team of warriors. We buzzed around on ATVs and sluiced for gold. Rain canceled the salmon fishing, but Denali still punched through the clouds like a promise. There was no cost of admission, simply a nod and a handshake; no therapy, no modality required.

That fall, I rappelled 210 feet down the Gunsight Notch of Seneca Rocks in West Virginia, boots skimming lichen, heart in my throat, grinning like a kid who just discovered gravity can be negotiated with.

Recreation in amazing places forced my brain to stop seeing the things that hurt it. Instead of looking back at trauma, I was looking forward to the next adventure and more healing. I was staying present.

A few years went by while I digested what I had learned; I climbed, I kayaked.

I lost my big brother suddenly; it devastated me. Several men I had served with also passed. Things felt bleak again, but I was still working with all the tools I had gained. I navigated through a rough patch because my paddle was strong, my rope was solid and most importantly, my team was powerful.

Another opportunity reached out. My wife kept smiling, and my kids liked me again.

This retreat handed me skis, lessons and gave me a new lease on life. I carved my first turns and overcame fear. We ate like kings, did yoga together and had discussions on “being enough.” I shared my story with strangers without tears for the first time and surprised myself.

An application to discovery

I was very nearly a statistic. The numbers were all stacked against me, but I found a way to stay in the fight. The first step to getting better wasn’t medication, it was an application. If we never sign up, we never go.

Undoubtedly, many opportunities are available out there. Not all are the same. Some organizations’ focus seems to be on federal dollars, not altruism.

There’s no holy grail for PTSD; no one-size-fits-all modality, and no ritual that makes it all better. But there is something offered at these events that is truly special: resilience to stay in the fight, be present, end isolation and stagnation, and find self-forgiveness, self-worth, and a renewed sense of purpose.

I am finally the father and husband I was supposed to be before war and PTSD, and that’s a gift from strangers and donors who will never know how much it made a difference.

If you are a civilian, know that your tax dollars and donations buy more than medals — they buy wild horses at dawn and a man who can look his wife in the eye again.

I still flinch at fireworks. I still check the locks. But I also own a kayak, a climbing rope and a pair of skis that fit like forgiveness.

If you are a veteran staring at the ceiling at 0300, know that eight strangers in kayaks taught me the world is still wide and worth seeing.

Casey Elliott was born and raised in Minnesota. He has a bachelor’s degree in English with a writing emphasis from Winona State University. Between retreats, he helps other veterans get their benefits, plays with his two dogs (River and Inara), kayaks, climbs and skis. He has been married for 25 years to a truly wonderful person and they have two kids.

This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mollie Turnbull. Kim Vo wrote the headline.

This article first appeared on The War Horse and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.