Peffercorn; with the pool and the Taco Bell; with my Ranger buddies like Trey Bullock and Danny Fulton; with periods of true Rambo-esque greatness interrupted by moments of hardship and sorrow—that this was the best time of my life, and the only chance I would ever have of recapturing it, or even getting close to it, was by deploying with my rifle and my brothers. Nobody recognizes the best moment in life as it’s happening. It takes distance and time to see. But once you do, it has a tremendous pull on your heart and your soul and your brain. To me, that’s what the Balad deployment had become—and also what I was most afraid of, that my best years were behind me and that I’d be bored and unfulfilled the rest of my life as a result.
You might be thinking, “Mat, you were only twenty-nine years old, how could you possibly know that this will be the greatest moment of your life forever?” Honestly, I didn’t know. I knew that the men I served with were the greatest men I’ve ever known. I knew that no matter how successful I got or how big Black Rifle Coffee grew or how great a place it was to work or how many veterans we hired or how amazing it felt to have found another brother who was as solid of a human as Evan Hafer is, I would never have that carefree feeling again, where nothing else in the world mattered except the soldiers on either side of me. I knew I would never get to be a twenty-three-year-old warfighting badass again. But that’s life, right? The world turns and life moves forward. War ends.
Or does it?
I realized that the war we were sent to fight on behalf of America was not the only war we were fighting. Far from it. As veterans, we also fought millions of horrible individual wars within ourselves. My inner war was not with PTSD or survivor’s guilt or regret or some weird kind of FOMO (fear of missing out). My war was with war. I was fighting an addiction to war.
War was my heroin and got me high unlike anything I had ever experienced. My needle was a gun, and I was shooting into the first vein I could find. What made those two years after leaving the Rangers so difficult for me was that I had quit war cold turkey and I was suffering from withdrawal.
At the time, I called it needing a purpose, which was half-true. What I really needed was a fix.
Thankfully, I had enough of my wits about me at the time to recognize that I could not go back in all the way. I could not commit 100 percent to chasing that dragon. It would drive me insane, and then it would kill me. By my fifth deployment, I already thought I was dead. Death just hadn’t gotten the news. If I reenlisted, it would have been like sending him a text message with my picture in it. So instead, I became a contractor, which functioned more or less like my methadone. I got 80 percent of the high—enough to take the edge off—with enough mental clarity that my brain could recognize real opportunity and genuine purpose when it placed itself in front of me.
Article 15, Leadslingers, Black Rifle Coffee, entrepreneurship—that is real opportunity. Tapping into my love of music and my capacity for creativity; leveraging the leadership and team-building skills I learned in the Army; making great things that make a lot of people happy and helping veterans and their families in the process—that is genuine purpose. Being the person I always wanted to be without boundaries.
I pulled out my phone and dialed the contracting office.
“Hi, it’s me, Mat Best. Yeah, I’m done.”
* * *
—
When we got back to El Paso, I made an executive decision. I packed one bag full of guns and one suitcase full of clothes, threw them in the back of my truck, and drove 850 miles through the night to Salt Lake City where Evan lived, to relocate and commit fully to what we were building together at Black Rifle Coffee Company. Everything else I had in El Paso—all my shit, all my toys, old business, and the girlfriend I had been living with—I left all of it right where it was. It cost me, but it was still the best decision I could have made.