There’s this weird space I exist in that comes from not trusting, and it’s built on that. But I will at times take on external structures — jobs, tasks, roles — that lend some assurance to me. Like enlisting in the Army. I assumed the United States Army had it figured out, or as best as possible — that they’d tried all the other ways and narrowed it down to this one, through decades of trial and error, determinism and experience, learning as they go — the product always being the best it can be given the stature of the structure I’m using as a metric. So I adopt, arbitrarily, the Army’s metrics as my own. Who a good soldier is — I look for who is effective. In the meritocracy of the military, I look for who is performing. I look for the things the military looks for: cognition, teamwork, ability to accept feedback, discipline, trust. I adopt those as functional, almost universal standards. What’s expected of the best becomes, in my mind, universal, so I adopt it — maybe out of laziness, so I don’t have to come up with my own.

Then, shown by the organization — this external structure I’m using for standards — I hold on to those intangibles, but the organization itself shows me the door repeatedly, because its actions conflict with what it espouses, recruits for, promotes.

It’s a weird thing — to not trust, and then adopt external standards as my own. Maybe that’s a maladaptation. Maybe it was useful at the time. I take those standards — in this case from the military, what they look for in me as a soldier and a medic — and apply them to all soldiers and medics. That’s the gold standard, with levels within the hierarchy — gold, silver, bronze.

So the guys who meet that standard, in whatever experience I’m going through, I hold to it. And I’m also looking for guys operating at a different, more intuitive level — who I can speak and communicate with freely, give honest feedback to, want feedback from, someone I can trust. I find those people and gravitate toward them, learn from them, emulate them — the way a child does, or a monkey would — and keep moving, always refining what I’m adopting as standards, as I gain more skills, experience, education, maturity.

But I get caught up again — maybe from that same lack of trust — because within an organization whose standards I hold, revere, aspire to, and hold others to (silently, most times), I’m looking for the ways it will let me down. Inevitably. Looking for where it breaks that trust, fails to hold the standard, fails to push for more — whatever fault I can find, I grab onto it.

A friend once asked if I just have a hard time finding the positive, or only focus on the negative. I do. As a provider, I’m always rehearsing tragedy — have been for decades. Personally, tactically — not that I’m ever in a tactical situation, but that’s another weird thing, holding things as sacred that need protecting. I’ll come back to that — lost the thread.

I rehearse tragedy in some way all the time, and because of that I’m always looking for the negative. I find anomalies better than I find patterns — skipping from one good thing to another just doesn’t happen in my brain. The good things, honestly, I don’t really hold onto, beyond noting that they don’t give me the feedback I need. Even when it is the right thing, the timing feels off — or I soon realize I could’ve done it better, differently, or, with today’s technology, redone the scenario altogether. Constantly mental-gaming different scenarios, trying to lock down as many details as possible. Going down a different rabbit hole with that right now.

But the point is — it’s a paradox. I don’t trust, yet I use institutional trust, and within those institutions I find individuals who embody the best of all of us. I find those people, and I’ve been fortunate to keep them in my life as friends.

What matters, regardless of the structure you’re in or outside of, is the people — the relationships carry more value. But they also, like in every superhero movie, let you function more effectively — more minds, pointed feedback, amplified ability to execute.

So this was about that paradox, and what I pulled from it. I’m still doing it. If there’s another way people have operated, I’d be curious to understand it.

I am 40, awoken again, this time somewhere around 3am, the last call was two or three hours ago. Same address, same guy, same problem — peripheral neuropathy. Legs and hands can become numb, so you lose sense of where they are in space, losing strength and control from time to time, either sending him to the ground, or preventing him from standing back up on his own, or even being able to pull himself up.

We’ve been to this guy on other days, for the same reasons. He’s aging, living alone, losing agency and independence every time he can’t get himself up off the ground. He used to stay on the ground when he fell, either unsure of who to call, or not wanting to, or simply unable to get to a lifeline. Eight hours the first time he was down. Six hours the second time. Three hours the third. He’s adapting, at least — he’s hearing us tell him to keep a phone on him, call us anytime, don’t call security, don’t call friends, call us immediately. It’s why we’re here.

It’s 4:27, and we’re heading back.

I am at home, with three young kids and a wife. The oldest wakes us up as he crawls into our bed.

I am 21, and a medic in Iraq. I am awoken by the shuffling of gear and quick feet.

I want to help others, but I keep coming back to the idea that there are better ways to do that. More effective, potentially. More in quantity. More reach, more impact. I don’t want to keep doing it this way — even if it’s the best way to keep carrying on for them, I am mentally and physically not willing and able to keep doing it.

This man that we’re helping up — that’s helpful, sure, in the moment. But it also ignores the other ingredients that brought us there last night, and again this morning, and again.

He could have been doing just fine living on his own. But unfortunately, now he shouldn’t be alone, not with neuropathy. Compounding, already isolated, with intermittent and increasing falling, with the inability to get back up. This doesn’t seem to be going in but one direction.

In reality, this man will have to admit — or someone who helps him will have to decide — that he’s not able to live alone with this condition, and that he’ll have to modify his life permanently going forward. The timing of that reality is unfortunate, but the real challenge is in the adjustments now flooding the situation, adding stress to everyone involved — those suffering, and those trying to help.

This man happened to be a WWII veteran. He told us repeatedly how professional we were when we came to help him. He followed up those statements with context of who he used to be; flying combat sorties from an aircraft carrier in his 20s - he knew professionalism, he probably helped define it at one point.

The part that stays with me is that I am somewhere in between what we both used to be, in our 20s, and where he finds himself now. How long can I pretend to be the one in control? How long can I be of assistance?

I’m late today. What follows isn’t finished. I decided to publish it anyway — as itself, and as a window into how any of this actually gets written.

Air comes in as I breathe — that’s the only thing I’m sure of in this moment. This moment is a lifetime. In the sense of relativity: so much is happening inside it that as it unfolds, it feels like an eternity. And a lifetime in the sense that I will relive it, unconsciously, for years.

The air is in. I’m still breathing. I’m still alive. I’m dizzy with sensory overload — surveying the scene for safety, triaging in my head if not out loud, working with my hands to affect the situation, quickly, positively, effectively. All of it, in that moment and in each one after. The load — allostatic, acute, whatever you want to call it — stays until the call is done. Urgency. Calm effectiveness. Uncertainty. Confidence. The ability to keep adapting. All of it juggled at once, while everything else is happening too.

We made our way to them. Now we’re breathing the same air they are. We’re here to help. Out of the vehicle, scanning the ground at our feet, then five feet out, then twenty-five, surveying, scanning for threats. Reacting to contact when we have to, still moving toward the downed. The moon-dust sand lines your airway as you move, survey, triage — clouds of it kicked up, unavoidable, finding a home in your sinuses.

Adrenaline starting to run. We tear open trauma kits and apply what we have to whatever we can identify. One lower leg is gone — just space now, where a working leg was 120 seconds ago. Tourniquet and dress it. Shrapnel, burns, all over — skip that for now, that’s a surgical problem, and only matters if he’s delivered alive and stays that way.

Next man. Multiple wounds. Passing over anything that isn’t life, limb, or eyesight. Massive bleeding, then airway. His legs look like firecrackers that went off from the inside — still there, still recognizable, barely. Tourniquets above each wound. Reassess. I’ve heard the tourniquet hurts worse than the wound — from guys who’ve had both, from providers who’ve watched both. Theory, practice, secondhand and first. From where I stood, the wounds were worse to look at. The violence of it. How it’s delivered and received. The long shadow of it — physical, psychological — impossible to calculate in the moment and harder to live with after. Tourniquets on both legs. Morphine — where? Upper body. Intramuscular.

While we work the second guy, I catch up the senior line medic — patients treated, what’s still needed. First sergeant already working the nine-line, pulling these guys out, back to the nearest FOB for real care.

He takes in the frantic pieces — patient by patient — and turns them into a clean nine-line, relays it up. Team leaders and squad leaders marshaling toward the perimeter, pushing back whoever decided this was the moment to hit us after the IED.

Then we wait for the birds. Our guys pushing the line back while we work the scene. Another squad securing the vehicle the IED took out — still burning, rounds cooking off inside it. Water bottles, handfuls of dirt, thrown at fire that was already past our reach.

That’s where it stops. Not because the story stops there. Because that’s where the memory runs out today.

Here’s the part I almost didn’t publish.

Everything above came from experience, filtered through memory, filtered through years of retelling it — to myself, out loud and in my head — until I’m not always sure anymore where the memory ends and the retelling begins. Details from other days bleed into this one. Some things I’ve added without meaning to. Some things I’ve dropped the same way. Sometimes it lines up with what happened. Sometimes it’s close. Sometimes it’s not. I’m trying, as accurately as I can, to hand you something true — knowing the tool I’m handing it with isn’t perfect.

And under all of that, there’s a second thing running the whole time I’m writing: some part of me thinking about how I come across in it. Not performing, exactly. But aware. Aware of how this reads, what it says about me, what it’ll mean later — long after the moment itself is done being lived.

I don’t have a clean way to resolve that. I’m not sure it resolves. What I can do is keep showing up to the page with what I have, incomplete as it is, and trust that it’s worth something even unfinished.

As Sarah Hale put it once - “I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”

I started these coloring books as a memory aid.

Sometimes I run the engine on my rig — pump operator, the guy who has to get pressure and water to the right line without thinking twice about it under pressure. Somewhere along the way I started coloring pump panels and rig layouts just to keep the sequences in my hands, not just my head. That was the whole beginning.

It grew from there. I wanted my kids to have heroes that looked like the people actually doing the work — firefighters, medics, the guy driving the rig — not just cartoons. I wanted a way to keep the guys I served with present for the next generation, without turning it into a recruiting pitch. And coloring turned out to be a good, quiet way to say something I couldn’t always say out loud.

Six books came out of that. Lowcountry and Bluffton-Hilton Head, for adults and for kids. A firefighter book. An Army medic book. And “Stronger Every Day,” the fitness one, also in adult and kids versions. All six are live in print on Amazon.

Here’s what’s new: they’re now available as digital downloads too, for $4.99 each — no shipping, no waiting, print them yourself or color them straight off a screen if that’s how you roll. And because most people don’t want to buy six separate things, they’re also available bundled — Lowcountry together, Stronger Every Day together, the medic and firefighter books paired, a kids-only bundle, and the full six-book set for anyone who wants the whole shelf at once.

I don’t have a big audience yet. A five-dollar impulse buy is a much easier yes than a twelve-dollar one, and I’d rather more people actually get these in front of their kids than protect a price point nobody asked me to protect. The print books stay at $12.99 on Amazon if you want something physical and durable — spiral-bound options are coming for that too. The digital versions are for people who want it now, want to print copies for a classroom or a firehouse, or just want to try one before deciding if they want the rest.

None of this changes why I made them. I still think about the guys who didn’t come home, the guys who did but are still gone, and I still want my kids — and other people’s kids — to grow up knowing what service actually looks like, without me having to explain it in a way that sounds like a pitch. A page they can color while I tell them a story does that better than most conversations I know how to have.

If you’ve been meaning to grab one of these, or you know any kids, a fire department, a CrossFit box, a classroom, or a veteran’s family who’d use them — now’s an easy time to start. For the next two weeks, the full six-book digital bundle is $14.99 instead of $19.99. After that it goes back to normal. Everything’s linked below.

Gumroad — all titles and bundles Amazon author page — print editions

Thanks for reading, and for coloring.

I woke up in a holding cell. Again. That word — again — is doing so much work in that sentence it should get hazard pay. Because the bottom, contrary to every recovery pamphlet ever printed, is not a floor. It’s a trapdoor. You fall through one bottom and there’s another one waiting under it with a fresh coat of humiliation on it, and the lights in these places are never designed to be turned off, because the state has decided that men like me, on nights like that one, don’t get to have darkness. Darkness is a privilege. You lost that privilege around the third arrest.

The concrete does not warm up. I want to be very clear about that for anyone taking notes. You can lie on that floor for six hours and it will still feel like it just came out of a freezer, like the building itself is unimpressed with you and wants you to know it.

Other men in the cell. Nobody talking. That’s the etiquette in there — everybody’s guilty of something, or claims not to be, and either way conversation is a liability. I’d been in one of these rooms before, more than once, and let me tell you the shame of a repeat offender is an entirely different animal than the shame of a rookie. First time you get to tell yourself a story — bad night, bad luck, one-off. By the third or fourth time the story’s gone and all you’ve got left is the math. And the math does not flatter you.

A friend sprang me. My defacto attorney, like some kind of tragic on-the-job training program. On the drive home, radio off, windows up, he finally said the thing.

“It’s okay to fuck up. It’s not okay to be a fuck up.”

I want to tell you I understood that sentence immediately, that it hit me like scripture on the road to Damascus. It didn’t. It just went in sideways, quiet, and set up camp somewhere behind my sternum and refused to leave, the way the good ones always do — not loud, just permanent.

Forty-eight hours later my girlfriend, now my wife, sat me down at the kitchen table, and here’s where everybody expects the ultimatum, the big cinematic if-you-don’t-change-I’m-gone — and I need you to understand that is not what happened, because reality is almost always stranger and less satisfying than the movie version. She didn’t threaten me with anything. She just informed me, calmly, like she was reading me a weather report, that she was done with what had been. Past tense. Filed. Closed. And that she — personally, unilaterally, with or without my participation — was ready for whatever came next.

Notice she did not say ready for what comes next with you. That clause was conspicuously, deliberately absent, and I’ve come to believe that absence was the most honest thing anyone had said to me in years.

So there it is: two conversations, from two people who’d apparently decided they loved me too much to keep managing me. No thunderclap. No burning bush. Mostly what I remember feeling is the leftover fluorescent buzz still rattling around my skull like a trapped fly, and underneath that, a tiredness that had nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with being a professional disappointment. But something got flashed into the hardware in that forty-eight-hour window — installed without a user manual— and I wouldn’t know it was running until months later, looking back at the wreckage, trying to locate the exact minute the old guy checked out. Never found it. There isn’t one.

This is where I take issue with how everybody tells these stories. Every single one of them wants the mirror scene — bathroom light, bloodshot eyes, single tear, epiphany, hard cut to a training montage. That is a lie sold to you by people who’ve never actually changed and need the narrative arc anyway. Real change doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t hold a press conference. It happens the way rust happens — slow, invisible, structural — while you’re in a car, on a couch, half-listening to somebody you love tell you a truth you’d rather not hear, and you don’t feel a thing until one day you try to stand up as the old version of yourself and discover the load-bearing wall isn’t there anymore.

I was lucky, and I don’t pretend otherwise. Lucky the friend told me the true thing and not the comfortable thing, which cost him nothing and could have cost him our friendship. Lucky the woman across that table loved herself enough to be finished, because her being finished is why I got to be finished too — I didn’t engineer one molecule of that, I just had the good fortune to be standing near people who wouldn’t let me keep being the disaster I’d made myself into.

So if you’re mid-transformation right now and you can’t point to the day it started — that may not be a hole in your memory. That’s just what the inside of the process looks like, and it is not required to be photogenic. Find the people who’ll tell you the true, ugly thing and then have the discipline to shut up and let you decide what to do with it. And stop waiting on the mirror scene. It’s a myth, same as most of the good ones. The update’s already running under everything you’re doing right now. You may catch it later than you’d like. Same as I did.

“The effort is over. The community remains.”

That line’s the whole point of the book, really. Thirty pages like this one — barbells, box jumps, burpees, and the quiet minute after — drawn from actual training, not stock art.

This page is free. Print it, color it, keep it.

If you want the rest of the set: jakewave053.gumroad.com/l/stronger-every-day — $7.99.

Forty-eight hours before a shift, I already know who I’m working with. That’s usually enough time to ruin the forty-eight hours.

My mind starts scouring for exits. Quit the career. Do something else for income. Somewhere in there, I catch myself trying to imagine any other way to make a living.

Here’s the trap in the schedule itself: it’s built to keep you just rested enough to show up, and just tired enough that you never modify your life. Twenty-four on, forty-eight off looks like freedom on paper. In practice it’s just enough rope to keep you in the loop, and not enough to climb out of it.

So sure — what else could I do? Anything, theoretically. That’s an idyllic place to start a sentence from. It’s not where I actually live.

The two guys on my schedule right now are competent. I want to be precise about that, because precision matters more to me than venting does. I haven’t watched either of them do anything reckless, lazy, or stupid on a scene. One’s younger than me, one’s older. Different in different ways. If I stepped back far enough, I might see we’re more alike than I’m capable of noticing right now. But I wouldn’t have picked them. Not for my team, not for my shift.

They’re not my guys.

I don’t want to sit around feeling sorry for myself over this, and I really don’t want to start quietly celebrating my own hardship, turning it into identity. But negativity doesn’t ask permission. It builds the way an anode rod corrodes inside a water heater — sacrificially, invisibly, whether or not you’re doing anything to stop it. You don’t see the rod dissolving. You just eventually get rust in the water.

Am I supposed to weather these personnel changes, or will they actually take something from me? Because it doesn’t feel like a preference. It feels like an affront — personal, specific, aimed at me, even if nobody else on the floor would describe it that way. I feel unmoored without consistency. Not inconvenienced. Unmoored.

Here’s the mechanism, as best I can name it: with people I trust — implicitly, tested-in-fire trust — I can do better than my own limitations. I can lean into their strengths, work around their weaknesses, borrow from what they’ve survived. Trust is load-bearing. It’s the thing that lets me stop carrying everything myself.

Take an unfamiliar guy and drop him into that same 24 hours, and the implicit confidence disappears. In its place: wonder, then doubt, then something closer to contempt — not for him, for the whole system that put us together. To me, on paper, an unfamiliar crew makes every shift into an unsolved disaster waiting on the horizon. Something coming that I won’t be able to handle, that will finally expose me for whatever I secretly am.

That fear has a birthday. It’s decades old. Something got planted a long time ago, and it’s been feeding quietly in the dark ever since — using every mistake I’ve ever made as fuel, one at a time, patient about it. This isn’t software I installed. It came factory-loaded with whatever operating system I’m running. And most days, it’s the loudest process on the machine.

I know this because I’ve watched it run before. This exact program — can’t trust them, can’t see myself doing the job beside them, therefore can’t do the job, therefore shouldn’t apply — is the same one that kept me out of emergency services, out of medicine, out of the fire service, for years after I came home from the Army. Not because I couldn’t do the job. Because I couldn’t picture doing it next to people I hadn’t yet earned the right to trust. So I didn’t try. That loop, left unchecked and unfact-checked, cost me actual years.

I eventually did the job anyway. I’m doing it right now, in fact, forty-eight hours out from a shift with two guys who — by every honest measure I have — are fine at what they do.

I’ve watched this movie before. That’s probably why it bothers me more than it bothers the guys standing next to me.

When I was leaving the Army, in 2008 and 2010, I watched tacit knowledge start getting shoved aside to make room for data. The men who actually knew how to do the job — who’d learned it in the dirt, over years, and knew how to hand it down to the next guy — started losing ground to the ones who knew how to talk about the job in metrics. The bureaucrats elbowed their way in. Things became data-driven. Not data in service of the work — data as the whole point. Context got thrown out so a clean number could be captured. I got out before I had to watch how that story ended. Friends that are still in have detailed the additional streams of data that'd been prioritized over humanity in cases, and over tactical relevance.

Now I’m watching the opening act of it again, in the fire service. And it starts the same way.

Firefighting was a meritocracy. It was built on whether you were good at the job — well-rounded, effective, able to do the work, able to train other people to do the work, able to keep doing it across a whole career. That was the currency. Tacit knowledge and experience. The kind of thing you can’t put on a spreadsheet because it only lives in the hands and the gut of someone who’s done it a thousand times.

That currency is being quietly traded out for another one. What’s coming in its place is an arbitrary third party we’re outsourcing our own judgment to. Accreditation. An outside body that tells us whether we’re doing it right, using measures it decides matter. And feeding that body isn’t free. It costs money to apply. Fees. Site visits. Planning. Personnel pulled to manage it. Overtime to cover them. Whole positions created inside the organization for no reason other than to keep the external structure fed.

To what end?

If it’s so valuable, ask why it isn’t being adopted everywhere — it’s exclusive precisely because most departments look at it and pass. And if it actually did what it claims — teach us to reflect, use our information honestly, and improve — then explain the rest of the picture to me. Explain why we’re losing more people than ever. Why the investigations. Why the turnover keeps churning through the higher ranks. Those aren’t the symptoms of an organization getting better. They’re the symptoms of one measuring itself to death while the thing being measured walks out the door.

It’s a man hoarding data like Scrooge McDuck hoarding gold coins — diving into the pile, counting it, in love with the having of it — while forgetting the coins were only ever supposed to buy something.

Here’s the part that worries me most, and it’s the part the numbers can’t reach. The people this lands on are craftsmen. Blue-collar, hands-on, good at a hard thing. By design, they are not built to fight an opponent who’s armed academically and bureaucratically. They’ve spent their lives getting good at the job, not at boardroom knife-fighting, and a lot of them have never once encountered this particular kind of underhanded chicanery. They don’t see it coming, because it doesn’t arrive looking like a threat. It arrives looking like a form to fill out.

I can’t prove all of this yet. I’d have to go find the data to back my hunches — and I know the irony of saying that in this particular essay. But I lived through the first version of it in one institution, and I’m standing inside an early version of it in another, and I’d bet the trajectory is the same. It doesn’t get better before it gets worse. That’s the whole reason I’m writing it down now, while it’s still early enough to be called a warning instead of a eulogy.

There’s a lie buried inside every war, and I carried mine the whole way without ever once saying it out loud.

It isn’t the obvious one. Everybody knows about the naive certainty of victory — that we’d win, that of course we’d win, that winning was a foregone thing and only the details were in question. That lie gets written about plenty.

Mine was quieter and stranger. It was the belief that this was the last one. Not the war. This clash. This fight. This particular violence, on this day, in this place. That it was going to be the end of it — of all of it — and that after this we’d be through.

I didn’t know I believed that. It wasn’t a position I’d taken. It was a thought that showed up, uninvited, in the middle of something loud.

And then it showed up again. And again. It became a series — the same thought arriving each time, on each street, like a promise being reissued to me. This is the one. Get through this and it’s somehow finished.

Eventually I understood what I was doing. That’s the part I only see now, from here. It wasn’t optimism. It was a bargain. If this one is the last one, then the cost of it is worth paying, because the cost buys an ending. Every man out there is paying for the same thing, and the thing we’re buying is no more of this. You can bear almost anything if you believe you’re buying the end of it.

But there is no end being sold. That’s the whole trick of it.

So the thought curdles. It has to. When you’ve told yourself a hundred times that this one is the last one and it never is, the belief doesn’t die — it changes shape into something I don’t have a clean word for. You stop expecting the ending and start needing one. You start looking for it. Somewhere in there, a part of me quit hoping the violence would stop and started hoping the next one would be big enough to finally finish the thing, and I want to be honest that I don’t fully know when that turned, or what it made me while it was turning.

That’s the perversion. Not that I wanted an end. That I came to need the war to give me one.

I don’t think I’m alone in it. I think it’s one of the oldest lies there is — that this particular violence, at this particular hour, will be the one that ends violence. The country tells it to itself. Men tell it to themselves in the dark, in the dirt, at twenty-two years old, with no idea they’re saying anything at all.

I came home. The fighting didn’t end. It just stopped being mine.

I am exactly who the military is for. I am exactly who the fire service is for. I’m exactly who the schools were built for. I check every box these institutions say they’re looking for. And I don’t want anything to do with any of it anymore.

I’ve been sitting with that one. Why?

It isn’t that I can’t do the work. I can still do the work. It isn’t that I stopped believing the work matters — I don’t know I could stop if I tried. It’s something else, and it took me a while to be willing to say it plainly.

There’s a lot of talk about how few people can do these jobs now. Fewer bodies that meet the standard. Fewer people willing to trade their best years, their schedule, their health, for pay that never matched the risk. All of it’s true. I’ve watched the pool shrink from inside it — I started applying and testing for the fire service around 2015, tested more than once, at more than one department, and even in those few years I watched the bar itself move under my feet.

But here’s the part that actually scares me. I’m not one of the ones who washed out. I’m one of the ones who made it — qualified, willing, still standing — and I want the door. If the problem were only that fewer people can clear the bar, that’s a recruiting problem. When the people who cleared it start looking for the exit, that’s something worse. That’s the foundation walking off the site.

Some of why, I can name. The deal these jobs were sold on — take the role nobody else wants, and in exchange you’ll be taken care of, especially later, when the work has taken its cut out of your body — that deal is being quietly unwritten. Not all at once. A little at a time, long before I got here, and still going. You find out the job causes cancer around the same time you find out the thing that was supposed to cover you for it is thinner than what you were promised. So you do the math. I’ve done the math.

And under the math there’s something I can’t shake. If you’re a group of people who will always need certain members to trade their best years for the good of the rest — and that need never stops climbing — then you should be bending over backward to want the right ones, and to keep them. To make the trade worth making. Instead it runs the other direction. The ones you need most are handed the least reason to stay.

Last week I wrote that I raised my hand freely, and that the meaning lived in the willingness, not the outcome. I still believe that. But I raised it for something I assumed would go on being worth raising a hand for. I’m the living proof of what these institutions say they’re built to attract — and I’m standing here looking at the door, asking why.

I don’t have the clean answer. I just know that when the person a thing was made for stops wanting the thing, the problem isn’t the person.

Twenty years on, the question finds you anyway.

Sometimes it comes from another guy who was there, or close enough. Sometimes from someone who wasn’t born yet when we crossed the berm. They ask it carefully, the way you’d touch something you suspect is still tender. Was it worth it. Was it justified.

I watched the same ground we bled for change hands more than once after we left. The maps got redrawn. The towns kept their names while everything underneath them moved. And if you measure the war by what that ground looks like now, you can talk yourself all the way into believing the whole thing was a waste. A lot of men have. I don’t blame a single one of them for getting there.

The grief doesn’t spread out evenly, either. That’s the part people on the outside never quite see. The country sent a thin slice of itself to do this, and when the cost came home, it came home to small places — a few streets, a few families, the occasional small-town high school that buried more than its share. When a loss like that lands on a community that size, it doesn’t dilute. It concentrates. It’s heavier precisely because so few people are carrying it.

So I understand why guys are still asking. I’ve asked.

But I’ve made a kind of peace with it, and the peace doesn’t hang on the answer history finally settles on.

Here’s where I landed. It doesn’t matter whether the cause proves out twenty years later. I know how that sounds. I’ve turned it over enough times to be sure I mean it. The verdict was never the thing that was going to redeem us or condemn us, and waiting on it is a way of handing strangers the authority to tell you what your own choice was worth.

What matters is the inception. The moment we stepped up.

We volunteered — each of us, on our own — to do what was deemed necessary to preserve our way of life. We didn’t get to read the end of the story before we said yes. Nobody does. You answer with the conviction you have at the time, and you go.

In that light, the cause was justified. Not because the maps proved us right. Because we were willing. Because when our way of life asked something of us, we were the ones who raised a hand and meant it.

Our part was fulfilled. That part, at least, no later chapter can take back.

I work one day out of every three.

That’s the part people can’t hold onto when I explain it. Not nights, not weekends — a third of my life, built around a rig and a set of tones. Twenty-four hours on. Forty-eight off. On paper it averages out to something reasonable, fifty-some hours a week, a number an administrator can write in a box.

The box doesn’t have a line for the third birthday in a row you caught from the station. It doesn’t measure the smoke still in your hair when you finally get home, or the way a kid learns, without anyone teaching them, not to expect you on certain mornings.

I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel sorry for me. I chose it. Most of us did, and we’d choose it again tomorrow. I’m telling you because the number is a lie of omission — and lately the whole field is being run by people who believe the number.

The fire service used to be a craft. You learned it the way you learn anything real: beside somebody who already knew, on a floor that was actually on fire, making the call with your hands before your head caught up. The good ones read a building like a sentence. They knew what a ceiling was about to do by the sound of it. None of that fit on a form, and that was fine, because nobody was trying to put it on one.

Now everything goes on the form.

The craft is being audited into something else — measured, tracked, credentialed, broken down into competencies that can be checked off by someone who has never pulled a ceiling in their life. It’s being remade by people whose actual job is to count it. And here’s the thing they don’t understand about the work, the thing you only learn standing in it: the most important parts of this job were never the parts you could count.

That blindness wouldn’t matter so much if the stakes were small. They aren’t. Because while the people upstairs got better and better at measuring the wrong things, three things happened to the rest of us — to the body that does the work, the family that waits on it, and the promise that was supposed to make all of it worth the cost.

Let me tell you about all three.

The body

Start with the comforting version, because it’s the one everyone reaches for.

The story we like to tell about firefighting is that it got safer. Better gear. Better training. Better tactics. We don’t lose people to flashover and collapse the way the old salts did, and the public pictures the danger the way it pictures everything else about this job — the dramatic version. Flames, a roof coming down, somebody carried out over a shoulder. That’s the death people imagine when they shake my hand and thank me.

That death is real. It’s just not the one most of us need to worry about.

The thing that kills firefighters now mostly waits.

Cancer is the leading cause of line-of-duty death in the American fire service. Not the roof. Not the flashover. Cancer. The International Agency for Research on Cancer — the people whose entire job is to rank what gives you cancer — classifies the occupation itself, the act of being a firefighter, as a Group 1 carcinogen. That’s the top shelf. The same category as asbestos. The same category as tobacco. They didn’t put the fire on that list. They put us on it.

It got that way for a reason. The house I run into today is not the house my predecessors ran into. Everything in it is plastic now — the couch, the carpet, the kids’ toys, the walls themselves. When that burns it doesn’t burn like wood. It burns faster, hotter, and meaner, and it throws off a chemistry that wood never did. A generation ago you might have had seventeen minutes to get out of a room before it flashed over. Today you have about three. We are running into a more poisonous fire than anyone before us, and the math of the schedule means we’re doing it again and again and again.

Here’s the part that still gets to me, as someone who spent years learning how to keep people alive. The gear they issue me to survive that fire — the coat, the hood, the boots — is itself made with PFAS. Forever chemicals. The ones linked to cancer. The armor is contaminated. I put on the thing that is supposed to protect me from the poison, and it is part of the poison.

And I carry it home. Not as a figure of speech — actually. It’s on the gear, in the cab of the rig, in my hair, soaked into the band of a hood that was never going to protect my neck anyway. A medic learns early what skin will let through. So I strip out of my gear and my clothes before I ever leave the station — I won't carry the day home on my body if I can help it. But I know better than to think it's enough. Some days the most dangerous thing coming through my front door is still me.

Cancer isn’t even the whole bill — and it isn’t the fast one. Cancer is what takes us slow, years out, off the clock. The hearts go on the clock. Close to half of the firefighters who die on duty — on the scene, or inside of a day — die of cardiac events: the load, the adrenaline dumps at three in the morning, the years of asking a body to go from dead asleep to full sprint on a tone. The job runs the body like a tool and then sends the invoice late.

Which is exactly why none of this shows up where it should.

A firefighter who dies in a collapse dies on the clock. He is a line-of-duty death — a number, a flag on a casket, a thing the department has to account for that year. A firefighter who dies of the cancer he earned on that same floor dies eleven years later, in a bed, retired, off the books. The file closed the day he turned in his gear. The harm didn’t go anywhere. It just moved past the edge of what anyone is counting. The danger didn’t drop. It went somewhere the metrics don’t look. And an institution that only believes what it can measure has decided, in every way that matters, that it simply isn’t there.

The family

There’s a number for the schedule too, and it’s just as polite as the rest of them.

Fifty-some hours a week, averaged out. That’s how it’s described in the briefing, in the recruiting pitch, in the contract. It sounds like a long week at a demanding job. It is not a long week at a demanding job.

I work one day out of every three. Run the year honestly and it comes to around a hundred and twenty shifts — a hundred and twenty times I leave in the dark and don’t come back for a full turn of the clock. That’s roughly forty percent more hours on the job than someone working a normal week puts in, every year, for as long as I do this. Stack it across a career and you stop counting in hours and start counting in years — whole extra years of a life spent at work that a desk never asks for.

But hours are the polite way to count it, same as everything else. Hours don’t tell you about the nights. A hundred and twenty nights a year I sleep somewhere that isn’t my house. Over a career that’s thousands of nights — count them straight and it’s most of a decade of nights, gone, spent a few miles up the road in a bunk waiting on a tone. My kids learn the rhythm of it before they can name it: the mornings I’m not at the table, the way a piece of their childhood happens while I’m on the other end of a phone I might not be able to answer.

I want to be careful here, because this is the place the essay could turn into a complaint, and it isn’t one. I knew the shape of this when I signed. So did my wife. We decided it was worth it, and on most days I still believe that. But there is a difference between a cost you accept and a cost that’s been quietly understated to you, and the field has gotten very good at understating this one. “Fifty-six hours” is a number built to let everyone look away from what the schedule actually removes from a house. The department gets the labor. The family eats the absence. And nobody writes the absence down anywhere, because absence is the one thing a timesheet was never built to record.

The promise

Every hard job runs on a bargain. Ours was always simple, and it was the thing that made the rest of it make sense: give the department your body and your decades, do the work that wears you down in ways nobody sees, and at the end there’ll be a pension waiting — enough to let you stop before the job finishes the job. That promise is the reason a sane person signs up for a career of this. It’s the square at the bottom of the page that makes the math close.

They’re erasing that square and drawing a smaller one.

In South Carolina, a firefighter who joined the system before the summer of 2012 can retire at twenty-five years. A firefighter who joined after — me, hired in 2018 — owes twenty-seven. Two more years. Two more years of the smoke, the three a.m. tones, the carcinogen I wear and carry home, before the state agrees I’ve done enough to collect what I was promised. And it isn’t only the two years. The older tier kept things my tier quietly lost — up to forty-five days of unused leave they can fold into the very number their pension is calculated on, sick-leave credit toward their years of service — the kind of small mercies that don’t sound like much until you’re at the end of a long career counting on them. Same uniform. Same fires. Worse deal. Handed not to the people who built the system, but to the ones who showed up later and weren’t in the room when it was decided.

Sit with what that means stacked against the rest of it. The job got more dangerous — quietly, in the body. The science caught up and spelled out, in plain numbers, exactly how it’s killing us. And in that same window, the institution’s answer was to ask the next generation to do it longer for less. They are requiring more years of a career that is provably harder on a human being than it used to be.

Maybe the books demanded it. I’m not a pension actuary, and I’m not going to pretend the money is simple. But I know what it feels like from inside the coat: the finish line moved, and it only ever moves one direction, and it always seems to move for the people who haven’t reached it yet.

And it didn’t stop at the pension. The same hire-date line runs straight through the health coverage. Cross it, and you owe more years on the job before the state will help pay for your insurance in retirement — more time running into fire to earn less of the thing that’s supposed to keep you alive after the fire is done with you.

But the pension and the insurance tiers are the version of this that comes with paperwork. There’s an older story in this district that doesn’t.

When I came on, the senior guys were still talking about it the way you talk about something that happened to your own house. Somewhere before my time, retired men from this district — men who had already done the full career, already kept their entire end of the deal — had their retirement healthcare taken from them. Not the new hires. The ones who’d already finished. The ones who’d already earned it.

I can’t hand you the memo. I don’t know for certain if it came from the county, or which room it was decided in — and that’s part of what I’m trying to say. These things come down from somewhere above the floor, and by the time they land on the men they fall on, there’s no one left standing there to answer for it.

But I can tell you about the men. I didn't know them myself — I came on after they were already gone from the job. The guys who trained me knew them, and still say their names. They gave twenty, twenty-five years to other people’s worst days, and somewhere near the end of it they were told the coverage they’d been promised was simply gone. A couple of them have died since.

I can’t prove to you why it happened. I only know that it did — and that it was one of the first things the old-timers told me when I walked in the door: don’t count on anything in writing outlasting the people who signed it.

Put the three together and you don’t have three problems. You have one.

A job measured by people who don’t do it. A danger that went exactly where the metrics don’t look. A family absence no timesheet records. A promise rewritten in a room none of us sat in. The same thread runs through all of it: an institution that has decided, in a thousand small administrative ways, that what it can’t measure isn’t real. The cancer that arrives eleven years late. The thousands of nights. The bargain that was supposed to make it square. None of it fits in a box on a form, so the form behaves as though none of it happened.

But it happened. It’s the realest part of the job. It doesn’t fit precisely because it’s the part that costs the most.

I think about the rookie coming up behind me — some kid who hasn’t pulled his first ceiling yet, who still thinks the danger looks like flames. Somebody is going to teach him this work the only way it can be taught, standing next to him on the worst day of a stranger’s life. I hope it’s someone who still has the craft and not just the credential. And I hope that by the time he’s my age, somebody has finally figured out how to count the things that actually count.

I’m not holding my breath.

But I’ll try to teach him anyway, because that’s the only way it has ever been passed down — hand to hand, in a language no form has ever managed to hold. Then I'll drive home, scrub off what I can, and in two days I'll do all of it again.

On June 18, 2007, nine Charleston firefighters died in a burning furniture warehouse up the coast from where I live. Nine men went to work and didn’t come home. It was the deadliest day for American firefighters since 9/11 — a distinction it held until the Yarnell Hill Fire took nineteen in 2013.

We know how to honor that kind of death. We have a whole machinery for it — the bell, the bagpipes, the flag, the wall with the names. And we should.

We run toward.

The tones drop and we go. Somebody is having a bad day — a wreck, a fire, a chest pain at three in the morning — and we get up and we go at the thing everyone else avoids thinking about. I’ve been doing some version of this my whole adult life. I was a medic in Iraq before I ever pulled on bunker gear. Running toward other people’s worst moments is the only profession I’ve ever had.

Here’s the part we don’t put on the wall.

The fire isn’t what’s killing most of us anymore.

Cancer is. Occupational cancer is now the leading cause of line-of-duty death in the fire service, and it isn’t close. Two decades ago it accounted for about two-thirds of our line-of-duty deaths. In recent years it’s climbed past three-quarters, pushing toward eighty percent. We carry a nine percent higher chance of being diagnosed than the people we protect, and a fourteen percent higher chance of dying from it. The reason is in the smoke. A house full of synthetic, oil-based everything burns hotter and faster than the houses our predecessors fought — three minutes to escape now where there used to be seventeen — and all of that off-gas gets into our gear, our trucks, our lungs, and follows us home. Everybody knows. The answer is always the same: change takes time and money.

And then there’s the death we count least of all.

More of us die by our own hand than die in the line of duty. That’s not a figure of speech. It’s the count. In 2024, at least a hundred and twelve firefighters and EMS workers died by suicide, and because most go unreported, the real number is higher still — more than every other line-of-duty cause combined. Our suicide rate runs higher than the general population’s. The line has been climbing for twenty years.

It makes a brutal kind of sense if you know what the job does to a person. About one in five of us will meet the criteria for PTSD at some point in this career. For civilians it’s closer to one in fifteen. That one-in-five number is the same rate they find in combat veterans coming home from war. I know, because I’m both. I carried it back from Iraq, and I have watched the job hand it out again — one bad call at a time — to men who never deployed anywhere.

I’m not writing this from the outside.

I’ve been in therapy for eighteen years. Sober for eleven. I’ve tried more than twenty different things to treat what came home with me — some that worked, some that didn’t, some I quit too early, some that were just not good. If all of that taught me anything, it’s that doing the work isn’t one thing. It isn’t a box you check and move on from. It’s a list that keeps growing, and you stay on it the rest of your life or you don’t make it.

So when I say this profession won’t do its own work, I’m not guessing. I’m the guy doing his.

And the systems built to catch us have been slow to the point of insult. South Carolina — my state — was one of the last two in the country to offer firefighters any cancer protection at all. We didn’t get even a limited benefit until 2020. We added a stroke presumption one month ago. And right now, this session, our lawmakers are still deciding whether a firefighter’s diagnosed PTSD should count as a workplace injury. Still deciding. As if the question were hard.

Here’s the part I have to be honest about: I haven’t solved any of this either. I’m still in it. I don’t always make the call I tell other people to make. The men who need help the most are the ones who’ll never raise a hand for it — and I understand exactly why, because the same armor that lets you walk into a burning building is the armor that won’t let you admit the building is burning you down. We built a culture that rewards the man who feels nothing. Then we act surprised when he feels nothing — right up until the day he feels everything at once, alone, and we lose him.

So if you’re the one carrying it right now — reading this in a recliner at the station at two in the morning, telling yourself you’ve got it handled — hear me on one thing. You don’t have to wait until you can’t. That’s the whole reason I wrote this.

Don’t wait until you can’t. Please.

Most Tuesdays I sit down here and hand you the heaviest things I carry. This one is lighter. Stay with me anyway.

It started with a pump panel.

As a driver-engineer I have to keep a lot in my head — pressures, gallons, the math of moving water where it needs to go, and fast. I’m not twenty-two anymore. The way I memorized things back then doesn’t hold like it used to. So I started drawing it. Coloring it. Turning the panel into something my hands could trace until my head caught up. It worked. It also did something I wasn’t expecting — it quieted me. The part of my brain that never fully stands down found a place to sit.

Then I started doing it with my kids. They didn’t know it was studying. They just knew Dad was at the table with the crayons, and that was enough to pull them into the chairs next to me. We’d color. We’d talk. It became one of the few things we do where nobody’s in a hurry.

And somewhere in there I looked at what they were coloring the rest of the time. Cartoon characters. Movie heroes. Men in capes who never existed.

I thought about the men I know who did.

Some of them are gone.

I wanted my kids to be able to look up to them. To know their faces. To color them in, green and tan, and ask me who they were. I wanted to keep them here, on the kitchen table, where my children could reach them. That’s a selfish thing to want, maybe. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t.

So I made an army medic coloring book — one I could sit down with myself. One I could relate to. My son colors the medic, and I get to tell him: that was me, once. That’s what I did over there. There are things from those years I don’t know how to bring up cold, across a dinner table, to a kid. It turns out I can bring them up with a box of crayons between us. The page does the asking for me.

I came up through service. The Army, years working for veterans after that. Now the fire department. Long enough to watch the idea of service get thinner — quieter, less honored, harder to point to. I’m not trying to recruit anybody’s child. I don’t want to put a job in front of them. I want to put the idea in front of them: that giving yourself to something bigger than you is a way a person can choose to live, and that it matters.

My kids take the world in differently than I do. They have taught me — are still teaching me — that a message doesn’t always come through the front door. Sometimes the words bounce off, and the same thing, drawn, lands clean. They’re the reason I think about how a thing gets said as much as what it says. A coloring page is just another way to send it. Some of the most important things I have to give my kids may have to travel exactly like that. Sideways. Quiet. In a form small enough to hold.

So that’s what these are. Not products, really. A way to sit at a table with my kids and hand them something real to look up to.

If you’ve got a medic or a firefighter in your life, or a kid who watches one walk out the door for a shift, they’re on Amazon now. [ Army medic coloring book ] · [ Firefighter coloring book ] Sit down with them. Color one in. Talk about them.

I wonder sometimes what it’s like inside the head of someone who never served.

And I don’t mean that the way it sounds. I’m not talking about the military specifically, or war. I mean someone who just — didn’t. No volunteering. No mission work. No teaching, no coaching, no community anything. No trade that feeds into something larger than themselves. Someone who looked at every available door marked give and walked past all of them.

What does that feel like? What does a life organized entirely around the self actually look like from the inside?

I think about this, and then I have to stop myself. Because the more honest question isn’t about them.

It’s about me. Why do I measure people this way? Why does service — in any form, at any scale — sit at the top of my hierarchy? Where did that come from, and is it even mine?

I didn’t choose service. Not really.

I enlisted. I became a medic. I deployed. I came home, eventually became a firefighter, and somewhere in there I started a veteran-focused nonprofit, coached CrossFit, and kept showing up for whatever was in front of me. If you map it on paper it looks like a man with a calling.

That’s not what it was.

I was running. Most of my life, I have been running — away from what I didn’t want to become, away from some version of myself I could feel forming and didn’t like, away from what I thought was wrong. I wasn’t running toward service. I was running, and service was just where I landed. It happened to be where what I needed was waiting — structure, purpose, clear outcomes. A job where I could see exactly how things worked and know, without ambiguity, when I’d done it right.

Medic made sense to me that way. The feedback was immediate. The stakes were real. There was no pretending.

I fell into service the way some people fall into faith — not through a decision, but through a collision. It was just where I was when I stopped moving long enough to look around.

And then I started to prize it. Hold it as a standard.

For others, and for myself. Which is where it gets complicated.

I hold ideas about what a man should be. Standards I didn’t write down anywhere but carry around like they’re law. And I fall short of them. Not rarely — regularly. Which means I’m walking around measuring people against a ruler I can’t quite reach myself.

So what does that make it? A value? A mirror? An indictment?

I don’t fully know. What I know is that everything I value came from somewhere. Pain, mostly. Devaluing something because it cost me. Updating what mattered because what I thought mattered before led me somewhere I didn’t want to be. It’s a loop. It’s always running. You learn something, the loop updates. You get hurt, the loop updates. You watch someone you respect make a choice you don’t understand, you sit with it, eventually it informs something — and the loop updates again.

The problem is the loop is always running on incomplete information. We’re always measuring character against conditions that are already changing. What I needed in a person at 22 in Iraq isn’t what I need now at 41 in a firehouse in Bluffton. The measurements shift. The things worth measuring shift.

So why do I keep measuring at all?

Because I’ve seen what’s in the room when people stop.

I’ve seen what happens to institutions when the people inside them decide the trade isn’t worth it anymore. When the standard softens because accountability is uncomfortable, or because it’s easier to rubber-stamp than to require. When seniority gets confused with competence and years in service get mistaken for experience. I’ve watched it in the military, watched it in the fire service, watched it happen slowly enough that you don’t notice it until you’re already inside something that used to be a different thing.

And I think that’s where the measuring comes from. Not from arrogance — or not only from that. From watching what disappears when nobody does it.

Service — real service, not the performance of it — requires a specific kind of person. Someone willing to trade. Time, comfort, the years you’ll never get back. That trade only makes sense if what you’re trading toward means something. If it’s recognized. If the institutions built on it actually reflect that they understand what they’re asking.

When they don’t, something corrodes. The people worth keeping leave, or get pushed out, or stop raising their hand. The ones who remain start to wonder why they bothered.

I’ve felt that. I still feel it sometimes.

I’m proud of my service. Not in the way I thought I would be when I was younger — not in the flag and ceremony sense. I’m proud that I survived it. That I have confronted, over and over, things that could have ended me in every sense of the word, and I’m still here and still functional and still trying. That part I own.

But I don’t think the service itself made me who I am. I think I would have found some other hard thing to run into. I needed the collision more than I needed the uniform.

What service gave me was a frame. A way of understanding what effort looks like, what sacrifice means in a concrete way, what it costs to show up for something larger than yourself over a long enough period of time that the novelty is gone and it’s just the job. That frame is mine now. I can’t take it off.

Which is maybe why it’s hard for me to understand people who never put one on.

Not because they’re wrong. Not because I think everyone should serve. But because I don’t know how you build a frame for the world without something that required you to show up when you didn’t want to. Without something that cost you enough to teach you what things are actually worth.

Maybe you can. Maybe I’m measuring through a lens borne specifically by my own experience and calling it objective.

Probably that.

The loop updates.

I’m still running it. Still trying to figure out what I actually value versus what I inherited versus what pain taught me to avoid. Still holding standards I sometimes fall short of, wondering if that makes me a hypocrite or just human.

What I keep coming back to is this: I didn’t choose service consciously. But I’d choose it again. Not because it was noble — it was a lot of things before it was noble. But because it made the feedback real. It put me in rooms where the stakes were actual. It forced me to figure out what I was made of before I was ready to know.

That’s worth something. Maybe everything.

I just can’t always tell you exactly why.

I was living outside Cleveland, working at Bank of America, in a bad place — geographically, financially, emotionally. I was seeing a therapist at the time, and within 24 hours of finally saying out loud that I was struggling, Tim showed up. He was from a local nonprofit called Ghost Rider Foundation. He listened to me explain my situation, and then he handed me a check.

That was it. No lecture. No conditions. Just help, offered plainly, from one person to another.

That moment branded me. I don’t know a better word for it. It left something in me that felt like a debt I couldn’t repay directly, only forward. If I was ever in a position to help another veteran, it wasn’t optional. It was a responsibility.

Years later, in Hilton Head, I co-founded a nonprofit called Honor Our Heroes. We raised money, gave grants, got on the local news, partnered with Palmetto Bluff, ran events. The first time we helped anyone, we helped an Iraq veteran named Jared who farmed oysters in the May River — we helped him get the equipment he needed to keep going. We went to Palmetto Bluff, with Jared. We took pictures with the executive chef at Palmetto Bluff and Jared on the riverbank. We donated to preserve military history on the island. We did some necessary and good work.

Palmetto Bluff, Bluffton. The first time we helped anyone.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I started drowning.

Not in the work itself — in what the work let me avoid.

The mentality became insatiable. I couldn’t do enough, or fast enough, or well enough. There was always another veteran who needed something, always another dollar that could be raised, another event to plan, another detail to worry over. I used the mission as cover. If I was exhausted or irritable or short with the people closest to me, I could justify it. I was helping veterans. The cause absolved me.

Except it didn’t. I was letting things get to me, then using them against the people around me, and calling it necessary. The good in me was being consumed by something I couldn’t name at the time. I was looking the other way, and calling it dedication.

I was the one in need. I wasn’t willing to say it out loud.

It took stepping back to see it clearly. I stopped actively fundraising. We exhausted our remaining funds responsibly — donations to other nonprofits, direct grants to veterans who found their way to us. I stepped down.

I’d spent years trying to repay what Tim had done for me, and I’d spent years avoiding the thing Tim’s gesture had actually modeled: that asking for help, or accepting that you need it, isn’t weakness. It’s just honest.

The nonprofit is technically still alive. The IRS paperwork is in order. There’s no money in it, no active fundraising, just a name and a status sitting dormant, waiting to see what comes next.

What came next, eventually, was this. Writing. Telling the truth on the page every week, which turns out to require the same muscle as telling it out loud to a therapist in Cleveland — the willingness to say I’m struggling before someone hands you a check, or before the good in you gets consumed by the thing you’re using to avoid it.

Tim helped me because I finally said I needed help. I’m still learning to do that. I probably will be for a while.

If this landed for you, send it to someone who might need it.
Tim, I cannot thank you enough.

Twenty years ago I would have laughed at the idea of writing any of this. I would have thought it was weak — opening up, sharing discomfort and vulnerability with people. Volunteering information about myself. Trusting strangers with the parts of me I barely trust myself with.

Twenty years ago, the only courage I understood was physical. Show up. Endure. Take the hits. Keep moving. That kind of courage has a simplicity to it that I miss sometimes — it doesn’t require you to think, only to act. It doesn’t ask you to feel, only to function.

But there’s another kind. And the older I get, the more I realize it’s the one that actually costs something.

I think there are two courages — physical and moral. Maybe there are more, but these are the two I’ve lived inside, and the two I keep coming back to.

Physical courage is the one everyone recognizes. It’s enlisting during two wars. It’s kicking in a door in Baqubah. It’s running into a burning building at 3am because the tones dropped and someone could be trapped. It’s tangible, visible, and the world rewards it — with medals, with respect, with the identity of someone who does hard things.

I’ve leaned on physical courage my entire adult life. I enlisted at 19. I deployed to Iraq at 21. I became a firefighter at 33. I have spent 22 years choosing to be physically present in situations that most people would avoid. That’s not a brag — it’s a pattern. It’s what I know how to do. When the world gets complicated, I go where the stakes are mortal, because at least there the rules are simple. Stay alive. Keep others alive. Everything else is noise.

Moral courage is different. Moral courage is saying no to someone whose approval you want. It’s saying what you’re actually thinking when staying quiet would be easier. It’s admitting you were wrong — to your wife, to your kids, to yourself. It’s vulnerability without armor, without a rank structure, without a team around you to share the weight.

Moral courage is writing this.

For most of my life, I chose physical courage because moral courage terrified me. I could take mortars in Mosul — sit on the kitchen floor, my back against sandbags, watch the older guys not react, and decide that I did not need to react either. I could drive the MEV into a firefight, dismount under fire to put out a burning Stryker, treat casualties in a field while rounds snapped overhead. I could do all of that and feel, if not comfortable, at least functional, maybe even competent in some capacities. At least like I belonged.

But tell my wife what I was actually feeling? Admit to my kids that I’m scared? Say out loud — to anyone — that I’ve been in therapy for 18 years and still don’t have it figured out? That was harder than any of it. That required a kind of courage I didn’t have for a long time, and still don’t have enough of.

Physical courage lets you hide. That’s the part nobody talks about. You can spend a lifetime running toward danger and everyone will call you brave, and the whole time you’re running away from the thing that actually scares you — which is being known. Being seen for who you really are, not who your job or your uniform or your record says you are.

I hid behind physical courage for years. I hid behind the deployment. Behind the fire department. Behind the idea that showing up to hard jobs was the same as showing up to hard conversations. It’s not. They’re not even close.

I want my kids to understand both.

I want them to know that physical courage matters — that there are moments in life where you have to step forward when everything in you says step back. That the willingness to endure, to sacrifice comfort for something larger than yourself, is a real and necessary thing.

But I also want them to see that moral courage is the one that sustains you. Physical courage has a shelf life — my body won’t do this forever, and the fire service and the infantry both have a way of wearing down even the strongest people. Moral courage doesn’t expire. It grows. The more you practice saying the hard thing, feeling the hard thing, being honest when dishonesty would be easier — the stronger it gets.

I think of these courages like fires. Embers that need to be kept alive and fed. Not ignored, not left to burn out, especially as the world moves faster and pulls us further from the things that actually matter — character, integrity, being present with the people you love. These embers can guide you through some scary, lonely, and dimly lit paths. I’ve been on those paths. I’m still on them.

The stronger these two courages are within you, the lesser the storm outside.

There’s something else I’ve come to understand, and it’s taken me most of my adult life to get here.

For a long time, I was willing to die for what I believed. I was willing to die for the war, for the cause, for the guys next to me. That willingness became a reflex — I used it to push limits, to take risks, to operate in spaces most people wouldn’t go. I was committed to the idea of not making it to old age, and I used that commitment as fuel.

But willingness to die is not the same as willingness to live.

Learning to stay alive — choosing to live fully, for the people I love, for goals I can barely articulate — that has been the harder fight. The willingness to die was physical courage dressed up as something noble. The willingness to live is moral courage, every single day, in every small decision to stay present instead of checking out, to feel instead of numbing, to show up to the life I have instead of mourning the one I expected.

The paradox is that both are necessary. There are still moments that require the willingness to sacrifice. But the default — the daily practice — should be the willingness to sustain. Not eliminate. Sustain.

I was shaped by nature and time, like the Grand Canyon, to move away from the willingness to die and toward the willingness to live. That shift didn’t happen in one moment. It happened over 20 years of therapy, of sobriety, of fatherhood, of writing things down and putting them where other people could see them.

These writings are my moral courage offerings. Every Tuesday, I sit down and pull something out of myself that I spent decades keeping hidden. That’s not easy for me. It’s not natural. Everything in me fights disclosure. But I keep doing it because I realized something: I am haunted by what I haven’t said. And I don’t want my kids to be haunted by the same silence. I realized too that a lesson learned but not shared is the same as having that lesson suppressed, or not learned at all.

If you’ve spent your life leaning on one courage and avoiding the other — physical or moral — you’re not alone. Most of us default to whichever one feels safer. For me, running into a burning building was safer than telling my wife I was struggling. That sounds insane when I write it down. But it’s true.

The work is building both. Not one at the expense of the other. Both. And the one you’ve been avoiding is probably the one you need most.

Which courage comes easier for you? Which one have you been avoiding? I’d like to hear about it.

A quick note: I've been writing here every Tuesday since January. No breaks. In the coming weeks, I'm going to be opening paid subscriptions — not to gate what I'm already doing, but to go deeper. More on that soon.

I held the morphine and froze.

That’s the version I’ve told myself for 18 years. That’s the story that plays on a loop — the one I’ve used against myself daily, for most of the time since. I froze. I failed. I wasn’t good enough.

Here’s what actually happened.

We were in Anbar Province, sometime around November 2006. Our battalion had been sent out to find a downed American jet and recover the pilot’s remains. It was a mission that felt off from the start — we were in an area that hadn’t been patrolled regularly, which meant the enemy had time to dig in. The terrain wasn’t familiar. The mission felt disconnected from everything else we were doing. But orders are orders.

One of our mortar platoon Strykers hit a deep-buried IED.

The blast disabled the vehicle, incapacitated the guys inside, kicked the Stryker off the road, and set it on fire. We executed defensive maneuvers. Medics were called up. Guys were pulled out, carried out, climbed out, staggered out, crawled — whatever it took to get clear of a burning vehicle.

We parked the MEV off the road and set up a casualty collection point. Patients were triaged. And then we went to work.

There was a young kid from the mortar platoon. He was hurt the worst. Tourniquets on both legs, at least one arm. Multiple medics were on him — myself, Frago, and at least one or two others. We were kneeling over this kid in a field, assessing, treating, trying to keep him alive long enough to get a bird in.

I had the morphine. I was ready to stick him. This was my job — I’d trained for this, practiced it, visualized it. Deliver the meds, give him some relief, keep working.

I looked at my side of his body and couldn’t find a place to stick him.

His nearest leg had a tourniquet. His nearest arm had a tourniquet. The places we train to administer — the big muscles, the accessible limbs — were either gone or tied off. I held the syringe and my brain went to a place it shouldn’t have gone. Not panic exactly. More like a gap — a half-second where training should have filled the space and didn’t.

One of the medics across from me saw it. He saw me holding the morphine, saw that I wasn’t moving, and made the same assessment I had — there was no good site on my side. He put his hand out and said he could get the stick from his side. I handed him the syringe. He administered it. We kept working.

The kid got his meds. We relayed the 9-line. We were taking small arms fire — direct and area. The evac bird couldn’t land because of the volume and accuracy of incoming fire. We had urgent surgical casualties on the ground that we were not equipped to handle long-term. The infantry guys closed in on the source of fire and eliminated it, which gave us the window to land the bird and get the patients out.

The kid lived. He lost both legs.

We stayed in that area the rest of the day and into the night, waiting for a wrecker to come recover the burnt-out Stryker. We tried to put the fire out with plastic water bottles and dirt. It wasn’t enough.

That half-second with the syringe — that’s what I carried home.

Not the IED. Not the fire. Not the kid losing his legs or the small arms fire or the bird that couldn’t land. The half-second where I held the morphine and didn’t stick him fast enough.

In my head, the story became: I froze. I couldn’t do my job. I hesitated at the moment it mattered most, and someone else had to step in because I wasn’t capable. I’m not a real medic. I never was. I was in over my head the entire deployment and this moment proved it.

I told myself this story every day. For years. It became the evidence I used to prosecute myself — proof that I didn’t belong, that I couldn’t handle it, that the guys deserved someone better.

Years later, I was doing Cognitive Processing Therapy through the VA. Twelve weeks of sessions with heavy homework between them. The therapy ultimately wasn’t the right fit for me at that time — it stirred something I wasn’t equipped to process while also being a functioning husband and father. I dropped out.

But before I did, I learned one thing that changed how I carry this memory.

The therapist taught me to stress-test the beliefs I’ve held about myself. The ones I’ve carried for years, the ones that feel like facts. The test is simple: Is this 100% accurate, honest, and true?

So I applied it.

I froze. Is that 100% accurate? I held the morphine for a half-second while I assessed the patient and determined I didn’t have a viable site on my side. That’s not freezing. That’s triage. That’s a medic doing what medics are trained to do — assess before you act.

I couldn’t do my job. Is that 100% true? The patient got his morphine. The medic across from me saw the same problem I saw and had a better angle. We communicated. We adapted. The kid got his meds and got evacuated. The system worked the way it was designed to work — multiple medics covering each other. That’s not failure. That’s the point.

Someone had to step in because I wasn’t capable. Is that 100% honest? Or is it more honest to say that a team of medics worked a mass casualty under fire, adapted in real time, and kept a kid alive who by all rights could have died in that field?

I’ve talked to the other medics who were there. They don’t remember my hesitation the way I do. Some don’t remember it at all. The moment that I’ve used to define myself for nearly two decades barely registers in their memory of that day. They remember the IED, the fire, the casualties, the evac. They don’t remember the half-second where I held a syringe and looked for a place to put it.

That’s the thing about the stories we tell ourselves. They feel like the whole truth because we’ve lived inside them for so long. We rehearse them, refine them, build entire identities around them. I am the medic who froze. I am the guy who wasn’t good enough. I am the imposter who got lucky.

But when you hold those stories up to the light — when you ask if they’re 100% accurate, honest, and true — most of them crack. Not because nothing happened. Something did happen. I held the morphine and couldn’t find a site on my side. That’s real. But everything I built on top of that moment — the shame, the inadequacy, the imposter syndrome — that’s not what happened. That’s what I decided it meant.

I still think about that kid. I hope he’s okay — as okay as you can be after losing both legs at that age, in that place, for reasons that still don’t make complete sense to me. I hope he found his way to some version of a life that feels worth living.

I still think about the morphine. Not every day anymore. That’s progress — 18 years to get from daily to sometimes. From a verdict to a question. From “I froze” to “did I?”

If you’re carrying something like this — a moment you’ve replayed so many times it’s become gospel, a story about yourself that you’ve never questioned because it feels too true to challenge — try the stress-test. Ask yourself: is this 100% accurate, honest, and true?

You might find that the version you’ve been punishing yourself with isn’t the whole story. It might not even be the right one.

If you’ve carried a moment that defined you — and later realized the story you told yourself about it wasn’t the whole truth — I’d like to hear about it.

While I was home in Ohio, our unit moved from Taji into Baqubah.

Baqubah had been labeled “mini Iraq” — a concentration of enemy forces from at least a half-dozen groups, operating in an area without sustained US presence. The battalion walked into what was, at minimum, a brigade-sized fight. And I was in Ohio, eating real food and sleeping in a bed, while the guys I’d spent nine months with were taking casualties in a city I’d never heard of.

I remember hearing about it and immediately feeling a mess of things I couldn’t separate — confusion, fear, guilt, and something close to shame. Not because I chose to go on leave. Everyone took leave. But because something significant happened without me there, and in the tribal math of infantry, if you miss the fight, you’re not quite one of them anymore. You have to earn your way back in.

I felt like a spectator. Not an investor. I felt impotent, and fearful for the guys’ well-being, and angry at myself for not being there, and relieved that I wasn’t — and then angry at myself for feeling relieved.

When it was time to leave Ohio, I said goodbye to everyone. Not goodbye as in I’ll see you again. This was different. This was the goodbye that tacitly acknowledges this could be the last one. I said goodbye to my family, and friends. And I left for what we all understood might be the last time we saw each other.

I made it back to Camp Taji, where we still had a handful of guys watching equipment. I spent a few days waiting for transportation into FOB Warhorse, our forward base near Baqubah. By the time I finally got there, the guys were spinning up for a mission.

I wanted in.

Not because I wanted the action. Because I already felt like I was outside the group. I’d missed a whole act — the move, the first contact, the casualties. Now here I was, freshly back, and there’s a mission going out. This felt like my chance to prove I still belonged, that I’d earned my spot, that I was willing to be tested to keep it.

I went to Frago.

Frago was our senior line medic — my boss, my mentor, and the person I’d been attached to since late 2004. Most of our time together I drove the MEV, he ran the medical operations. We lived in that vehicle together for years. If there’s a person on this planet whose judgment I trust with my life, without hesitation, it’s him.

I told him I was ready to go out. Fresh, rested, back from leave — let me take this one.

He said no.

He wanted to bring me up to speed first. Wanted me to get some rest before I went outside the wire. The war had changed while I was gone — the tempo, the intensity, the geography. He didn’t want me walking into Baqubah with a Mosul mindset.

So another medic went instead.

That night, Jesse Williams was shot in the head.

The medic who responded did everything he could. But for a headshot — there’s not a lot anyone can do to hold a head together. Jesse didn’t make it.

Jesse was on his second deployment with 5/20th Infantry. He’d been wounded during the first tour — took a Purple Heart in October 2004. He was one of the stop-lossed guys, held past his contract because the Army needed experienced bodies. He’d already done his time. He shouldn’t have been there.

And now that medic has to carry it. The guy who showed up, who did everything right, and still couldn’t save him. That’s a weight that doesn’t lift. I know because I’ve carried my own version of it. But his is his, and I think about that.

Here’s what I didn’t understand for years: Frago wasn’t just managing the rotation. He was protecting me.

That night wasn’t an isolated decision. It was a pattern I only recognized in hindsight, looking back across the entire deployment. Frago made dozens of small calls — who went where, who covered what, who took which mission — and threaded through those calls was a quiet, deliberate effort to shield certain people from certain things. Not from combat. From the specific situations that would cost the most to carry afterward.

He couldn’t have known Jesse would be shot that night. Nobody could. But he knew I wasn’t ready. He knew that walking into a new battle space, in a new city, hours after stepping off a transport, with nine months of adrenaline and two weeks of stateside softness fighting each other inside me — that was a recipe for something going wrong. Not tactically. Inside me.

He said no, another medic went, and Jesse died, and that medic has to live with what he saw. And I have to live with the fact that I wasn’t there, again — which is its own weight, its own guilt, its own imposter syndrome. But it’s a different weight than what he carries. Frago knew that. He made a call.

I’ve spoken to the other guys about some of these moments over the years. About the rotation decisions, about who went where. And the more I’ve talked to them, the more I’ve seen it — a pattern of quiet protection that I was too close to recognize while it was happening.

I still talk to Frago every week. We met near the end of 2004. I’m writing this sentence twenty years later, and he’s still the first person I call when something breaks open inside me.

There’s a version of my life where he said yes that night. Where I grabbed my kit and went out and was the medic kneeling over Jesse with a headshot and nothing in my bag that could fix it. I don’t know what that version of me looks like today. I don’t know if that version makes it to 41.

Frago does. He’s thought about it too.

The thing about being protected by someone is that you don’t always know it’s happening. The best protection doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly rearranges the variables around you while you’re too busy surviving to notice. And then years later — maybe a decade, maybe more — you look back and see the shape of it. The pattern. The hand on your shoulder that you didn’t feel at the time, steering you one direction instead of another.

I didn’t thank him for years. Not because I wasn’t grateful, but because I didn’t know. I didn’t see it. I was too busy feeling guilty about not being there, too busy weaponizing my own absence against myself, to realize that someone who loved me had made sure I wasn’t there.

That’s what brotherhood looks like when nobody’s watching. It’s not the firefight. It’s not the dramatic moment. It’s the quiet no. The rotation decision. The guy who sees something coming that you can’t see, and steps in front of it without telling you.

Frago, if you’re reading this — I see it now. All of it. Thank you.

If someone has quietly protected you — in service, in life, in ways you didn’t recognize until later — I’d like to hear about it.

Pool Table

We were in Baghdad. I don’t remember the mission, or why we were in this particular neighborhood, or what day it was. What I remember is a pool table.

We were walking through a courtyard between buildings — our first sergeant, a couple other guys, and me. Baghdad courtyards are all the same — trash, feral animals, rubble, people going about their lives in the middle of a war. And sitting in the middle of this one, like it had been waiting for us, was a pool table. Red felt. No idea how it got there or who it belonged to.

First Sergeant loved it. He was an old school Ranger — multiple combat jumps, Grenada, Iraq the first time around. He had his eccentricities firmly in place by the time I knew him. He was older for infantry, set in his ways, and when he saw that table, he wanted to play.

So we did. In the middle of Baghdad, in the middle of a war, we played pool on a table with red felt in someone’s courtyard. I don’t remember who won. I remember how surreal it was — the sound of the balls cracking against each other while the city hummed with its usual mix of chaos and indifference around us. It was one of those moments where the absurdity of everything we were doing became impossible to ignore. We were playing pool in a war zone. Nobody was shooting at us. The sun was out. For ten minutes, nothing was trying to kill us.

I probably have photos somewhere. That memory has stuck with me because everything about it was wrong in the best possible way.

Swords

At some point during our time around Baghdad, we went to Saddam’s old parade grounds. The Swords of Qādisīyah — two massive crossed sabers held by fists modeled after Saddam’s own hands, arching over a road where he used to review military parades from a grandstand.

We went for a reenlistment ceremony. Helicopters flying overhead, a big production. Then we got to walk around. We stood where Saddam used to stand — the same spot from those famous photos of him in a beret, firing a rifle into the air while his army marched past.

We took pictures. Guys were grinning, posing, doing the tourist thing in a dictator’s backyard. Our MEV had a flat tire, so while the ceremony happened, I was changing a tire in the shadow of those swords. Frago and Hirano were with me.

I think they’ve torn the swords down since then. I should look into why. But standing where he stood, in a country we were occupying because of what he did and what we were told he had — there was a strange weight to it. Not pride exactly. Not anger. Just the layered absurdity of being a 22-year-old medic from Ohio, changing a tire under a monument to a dictator we’d helped remove, while guys reenlisted to keep doing this for another few years.

Smells

There are times when I smell something familiar — cheap coffee brewing early in the morning — and it takes me somewhere. Not to a specific place. Nothing distinguishable. Just a feeling, followed immediately by a dull, worn discomfort. The unknowns, the confusion, the ache in my stomach from a pot of bitter, acidic, delicious coffee. That coffee was keeping me alert, which meant it was keeping me alive.

Most often I’m transported somewhere else by smells early in the mornings, when I’m alone and everything is still quiet. Maybe my sense of smell is sharper because of the reduced ability to see in the dark. The world is smaller at 4am, and the smells are strong.

I smell things constantly. I smell clothes to test them before I wear them again. I smell rooms as I enter them. I smell my kids’ hair whenever I can, and I kiss their heads as I do it. I smell soaps, whenever possible. I like having my nose draw in information and give me additional context.

I appreciate things that smell good, and I like to soak in a smell. It helps me appreciate life and the little things in it.

Maybe this is my way of stopping to smell the roses. I just never thought about it that way until I wrote it down.

Hot Water

Just two years ago, I was 39 years old, and I realized that hot showers are actually nice.

For the first time, I was taking a shower and I progressively made the water hotter. Not scalding. Just hot. And I stood there and let it hit me and thought — oh. This is why people like this.

I don’t know what that says about the first 38 years. I don’t know if it’s a combat thing or a me thing or just the slow process of letting yourself feel something you didn’t know you were avoiding. But it was new. At 39. A hot shower.

Fruit

My appreciation for fresh cut fruit is a direct result of the few times we were able to get it while deployed. It sounds ridiculous — it is ridiculous — but when your world shrinks to MREs and chow hall slop and whatever the local bazaar is selling, and then someone produces fresh watermelon, it rewires something in you.

It branded me. My mouth still waters thinking about it. I still eat fresh cut fruit nearly every morning when it’s up to me. Watermelon in my oatmeal. I know that’s weird when I say it out loud, and I know it’s weird by other people’s reactions. But other people put blueberries or raspberries in their oatmeal and nobody blinks. I put watermelon in mine because a few mornings in Iraq, someone cut open a watermelon, and it was the greatest thing I’d ever tasted.

I wrote a whole essay about this a few weeks ago. But the short version is: the war taught me to notice fruit. That’s not in any VA pamphlet. That’s not a symptom or a diagnosis. It’s just what stayed.

The big stuff stays too. Firefights, losses, the sounds you can’t unhear. But the big stuff gets talked about — in therapy, in writing, in the conversations we have at 2am when the walls come down.

Nobody asks about the pool table. Nobody asks about the smells or the watermelon or the moment you realized at 39 that hot water feels good on your skin.

But that’s what stays too. The war didn’t just leave me with weight. It left me with an ability to notice things I would have walked past before. A pool table in a courtyard. The smell of cheap coffee. My daughter’s hair against my nose.

Maybe that’s not a fair trade. But it’s what I have.

If you’ve carried something small from your service — a taste, a sound, a habit nobody else understands — I’d like to hear about it.