From the field
Written by veterans about transition, mental health, and life after the uniform. Plain language. No marketing. No spin.
Used my Post-9/11 GI Bill to finish a bachelor's in business administration at a state university. Graduated. Got a job. Hated the job. Decided I wanted to go to nursing school instead. GI Bill was exhausted. I qualified for Veteran Readiness and Employment (VR&E, Chapter 31) because of my service…
Filed an initial VA claim in 2014 for back, knees, tinnitus, and PTSD. Rated at 30%. Most of the rating was for tinnitus and a single knee. The back and the PTSD were both deferred and ultimately denied. I appealed. The first appeal was a Higher-Level Review. Denied. The second appeal went to the …
My husband was an Army turret gunner in Iraq. IED in 2008. Severe TBI. He was 24. I was 22. We had been married for nine months. He came home seven months later from Walter Reed. He could walk. He could talk in short sentences. He could not hold a job. He could not always remember what year it was…
My brother took his own life in 2022. He had been Army, two deployments to Iraq, separated in 2014, never enrolled with the VA. He left a wife and two kids. The kids were eight and five. The year after he died was the worst year of any of our lives. My sister-in-law went catatonic for three months…
My father was a Marine in Vietnam, 1968-1969. He came home, married my mother, finished college on the GI Bill, raised three kids, retired from a state government job, and died in 2023 at 76. He was diagnosed with PTSD at age 73. I am writing this as the adult child of a Vietnam veteran whose trau…
We met in 2010. He was Army, just back from his first deployment. We got married eight months later. He deployed again in 2012, then 2014, then 2016. By 2018 he had been gone for three of our seven married years. The deployments were hard but they had a shape. You knew the departure date. You knew…
Twenty years in. Drank the whole time. Career stayed intact until about year fifteen, when I had a DUI scrubbed off my record because a senior chief liked me. Career stayed intact after that too. I retired clean on paper and started drinking harder. Three years post-retirement my wife gave me a ch…
Six combat deployments. Three Joint Task Force rotations. Diagnosed with severe PTSD in 2017, three different evidence-based therapies (Prolonged Exposure, Cognitive Processing Therapy, EMDR) over four years, all with partial but not durable response. I entered the MAPS-sponsored Phase 3 trial of …
Eight years as a military police officer. Two deployments. The second one ended badly enough that I left the Army on a medical separation. I had cycled through standard talk therapy and medication for three years with limited progress when somebody at the local VFW post mentioned a free equine ther…
I had been to two VA Medical Centers and three community providers between 2014 and 2021 and concluded that mental health care was not going to work for me. The bureaucracy at the VAMCs and the lack of military fluency at the community providers had each been frustrating in different ways. A buddy…
Two tours, medical separation in 2013 for PTSD and a knee that had had four surgeries. Applied to K9s For Warriors in 2019, got matched in 2021. Three-week residential training in Florida. Came home with a Labrador named Otis. Year one with a service dog is harder than the brochure makes it look. …
Twenty-two years in the Navy, Surface Warfare. The job runs on watch rotations — six on, six off, eighteen on for surge — and by the time I retired I had not slept a normal night in fifteen years. I assumed it was permanent. VA primary care prescribed me ambien. It worked for about three months, t…
Three tours, infantry, ETSed as a staff sergeant in 2016. Took me until 2022 to get into intensive treatment. I had been doing weekly therapy through the VA for four years and was treading water. My therapist suggested an IOP — intensive outpatient program. She referred me to Home Base at Mass Gene…
Two tours in Iraq, separated as a sergeant in 2011, never enrolled with the VA because I had heard the wait times were brutal and I could function. Functioning meant working a sales job, drinking every weekend, getting divorced, and not sleeping. My second wife found Cohen Veterans Network on a Su…
Eighteen years in the Army Reserve. Civilian career in software. Three years ago I decided to apply for federal civilian jobs to use my veteran preference and to consolidate my federal service for retirement. USAJOBS is a different operating system. You cannot just upload a resume. You have to wri…
I enlisted in October 2001. I was 18. I had watched the towers fall on a TV in my high school cafeteria and I had signed papers by the end of the month. Twenty-five years later, I am retiring. Two tours in Iraq with Marine units. One in Afghanistan. Eleven years of shore tours in between, mostly a…
Twelve years as a JAG officer. Trial counsel, defense counsel, operational law, two deployments providing legal support to ground commanders. Got out as a major to do family law in a small firm in Texas. First three months in private practice were a credibility tax I had not been prepared for. Cli…
Special Forces medic, three tours, retired as a sergeant first class. Always wanted to run my own outdoor outfitter business in the Pacific Northwest. Used the VA Home Loan to buy a house with a barn I could convert. That part was easy. Then I needed working capital to buy inventory: kayaks, climb…
Enlisted out of high school. Commissioned through the Enlisted Commissioning Program. Retired as a captain after sixteen years. I had a high school diploma and a bachelor's I had finished in online classes between deployments. I applied to a master's program in public policy at a state school. I g…
Two tours in Afghanistan as a medic with an infantry battalion. Got out in 2016 wanting to do trauma work in a small town. Moved home to West Virginia and tried to figure out how to convert what I knew into a state EMS license. The conversion is harder than people think. The military trains you to…