to my room and immediately texted Jarred to tell him what had happened, because, make no mistake, this was a big deal. When you’re active duty, you never see the battalion brass unless someone fucks up or something really bad happens. In all my time in the 2/75, I don’t think I ever materially engaged with my command sergeant major or a battalion officer. And if I did, I definitely didn’t do it as a peer, like I just had as a contractor.
But more importantly, the command sergeant major’s words made it clear to me that what we were doing with these videos wasn’t just goofy and fun. It was important and had value to the community. It always feels good to make people laugh, but when it reached people in that environment, where there isn’t a whole lot to laugh about, it gave everything we were doing a sense of deeper purpose. It also confirmed for me something I would barely allow myself to think and would never verbalize to others: I might actually be able to do this full-time, for a living. It was scary and liberating at the same time. Up until then, my primary concern wasn’t whether the video stuff could be successful; it was whether I was gradually fucking up both possible career paths—contractor and whatever this was—by splitting my time and attention between them.
I was about to find out.
Chapter 17
Shirts & Shots & Shows & Service
I will be the first to admit that for most of my adult life, if it didn’t involve weapons, war, or women, I had no fucking clue what I was doing. I was just faking it until, fingers crossed, I was making it. I was throwing shit at the wall hoping something would stick. Now that these videos were sticking, I started to think a little bigger about what they might be able to accomplish.
Jarred and I had already started to come up with all sorts of grand plans for the YouTube channel and the Facebook page, but it was about more than that. It was about building a platform to convey a larger message. The one thing I kept coming back to—an issue that had become really frustrating to me—was the way people in our society talk about veterans. All you ever heard about in the news or on TV shows were things like the destructiveness of PTSD or the crippling nature of survivor’s guilt.
And while some veterans do suffer from those issues, if Law & Order did an episode where a soldier killed someone, it was never because he was an evil prick who happened to be in the military (the Marines, obviously), it was because he’d done a tour in Iraq and he saw his best friend die in an IED attack and it broke his brain and then he came home and everything was different and he couldn’t sleep and it made it hard for him to hold down a job and then he got evicted from his apartment and then his girlfriend fucked his best friend and took his dog. Blah blah blah blah blah. Every veteran story was just this endless parade of horribles. What they failed to show, time and again, was my experience, which was the same as the experience of the hundreds of veterans I’ve known and served with who loved their time in the military and to this day view it as one of the most important, meaningful, enjoyable periods of their lives. No matter where you looked, there was no appetite for our stories anywhere. It felt like the forces that controlled the culture, that attempted to shape how we reckon with war and the warriors who fight it, had not built enough tolerance into the system, or put enough slack in the line, to accommodate the powerful notion that there are men and women out there who put their lives at risk to fight for others, to fight for an ideal, not because they had to but because they wanted to, they needed to. These were the forces that convinced civilians to thank us for our service on airport concourses all across America, in solemn, guilt-riddled tones, like we must have been compelled, reluctantly, to sacrifice our freedom, when in fact we had proactively exercised it to enlist and do something we loved.
As I continued to make videos, my goal was to speak to people like me. People who appreciated the gratitude but had no