ARMY RANGER, 2003-2013 — The day I stopped chasing the door

Eleven combat deployments in ten years. I don't know how to talk about that without sounding like I'm bragging or asking for sympathy. I'm doing neither. I got out in 2013 and spent the next four years trying to be in the door without being in the door — security contracting, then law enforcement, then a corporate security gig. Each one was thinner than the last. I was looking for the rush and the team and the mission and finding diminishing returns of all three. What ended it wasn't a breakdown. It was a quiet morning in Tampa where I realized I'd been chasing the same hit for so long that I'd forgotten what I'd been like before I was that person. I went to the VA. I asked for a referral. I got into an intensive outpatient program at the Warrior Care Network site at Massachusetts General — three weeks of structured treatment for combat PTSD. It's not gone. I don't think it will ever be entirely gone. But I am no longer chasing the door. I have a small business now. I have a fiancée. I sleep most nights. That is enough.