why the job paid as well as it did. It wasn’t because of the risks I had to assume, it was because of all the shit I had to eat. And let me tell you, there was a lot of it. Every day it was Two Girls One Cup, and I was the cup. It’s not that I hated this family—I didn’t, they were nice people—but I was as much a piece of scenery as I was a part of their lives. If I hadn’t carried a 9mm pistol and been carved from a solid block of American handsome, I suspect there would have been times they would have just tried to pick me up and move me themselves to eliminate any inconvenience my presence created.
It sounds more dehumanizing than it was, to be fair. The security firm prepares you for that aspect of the job. Nobody wants to feel like they’re sharing their private living quarters with four perfect strangers. The entire goal of the job is to melt into the atmosphere and make your presence known only when the shit is going down. This wasn’t Man on Fire. I wasn’t Denzel trying to protect a little girl from a bunch of narcotraficantes. Though that would have been rad. Stateside kill!
What made the job difficult was that I never had an opportunity to show anyone what I could do. I was a creative guy, I was relatively smart, I liked to play music. But in this job that guy felt so far away—like a stranger. It didn’t help that I hadn’t cultivated any of these traits since high school, and no one I dealt with on the job was interested in digging in and pulling them out of me. So, Mat, what do you like to do in your spare time? Do you have any hobbies or interests? I don’t know what I would have done if they had taken an interest, because in my mind, if I was being honest with myself, I was still a warfighter. Full stop. But was that all I was? Was that going to be what defined me for the rest of my life, this fucking war? Judging by my interactions with L.A. girls and Northridge college kids and my security firm, it seemed like that was a real possibility.
I pride myself on my work ethic. No matter what the job is, I want to go the extra mile and do the best damn job possible. In my old line of work, that meant being proficient in every weapons system, having my entire team prepared for every mission, and being in peak physical shape. In this job, it meant wiping down the windshield of the family’s Bentley so they couldn’t tell it had just passed by the sprinklers on the way up the driveway. It meant that when my boss, who was a major studio executive, invited all his famous friends over for Monday Movie Night, I helped move couches into the theater room without nicking any of the walls.
You have no idea how disorienting all this was. I was a twenty-four-year-old veteran with five combat tours in active war zones. I had led teams of actual heroes into firefights multiple times a week for months on end. I had done shit. The Army spent months, if not years, turning guys like me into perpetual motion machines of confidence, capability, and resolve. Yet after barely a year in Los Angeles, the Rambo sensibility and confidence that carried me through years of combat had all but disappeared, leaving me in a rage-filled, booze-soaked hole of self-doubt.
When you spend years within a tight-knit community fighting side by side, and you come from a long line of veterans who’ve served, it’s not uncommon to hear stories about guys you know who struggle with doubt and depression. I knew that what I was dealing with—even if I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time—was nothing new. Even the way it came about was nothing out of the ordinary. It was the accumulation of small, unexpected, unfamiliar, uncomfortable events that slowly began to take their toll. And what made it even weirder, and worse, was that all this was happening in fucking Los Angeles. I had gone directly from having one of the realest, most authentically important jobs imaginable to living in one of the fakest, vainest places on the planet.
Looking back, it’s incredibly mind-blowing how quickly that town can break you down. The