“Being on edge 24 hours a day, that’s the thing that gets to most soldiers, gets to you when you come back home and you’re trying to recover from that.”

My father was Air Force so I was an Air Force brat growing up. And he wondered why I didn’t go into the Air Force, but I wanted go someplace where I could get dirty. So I chose the Army. Korea, Germany, Desert Shield, Desert Storm and then Afghanistan. When we first were going over, you know, especially the younger guys– The younger guys would say, I just signed up for college. And I would always say, no, you didn’t. You signed up to defend the nation, that’s what. That’s first and foremost, is to go when called and to do what’s asked of us. One thing I can say for soldiers though, when you’re over there, depending on what your job is, it’s being on edge for 24 hours a day. That’s the thing that gets most soldiers. It gets to you when you come back home and you’re trying to recover from that. You’re constantly on edge. You want to go fast. And you don’t sleep a lot. I didn’t sleep a lot. I still don’t sleep a lot now. I sleep very light. That’s some of the things that, you know, we come back with. So we need to build better soldiers, we need to build more combat-resilient soldiers. We need to stop being so hand-holdy.

This profession that we’re in, we kill people when called to do so. It’s a nasty profession. A lot of the senior NCOs, we are the glue that holds the fabric together. A lot of times for us, we’ve got to do a sanity check. We spend so much time trying to keep everybody else’s sanity in check or checking their psyche, checking how they’re operating.

A lot of times we don’t check ourselves because we’re constantly making sure you’re okay. And you have all these resources and counselors, but are you going to go to it? You know, and some of it’s on us. That resiliency that we built into ourselves, sometimes it’s hard to ask for help. It’s not just the military’s problem, it’s an internal problem too.

Do I go and get this help? But there’s lots of other things attached to it, there’s a stigma that’s going to come with it. Am I gonna be seen as a weak link? I’ve seen several good officers and NCOs take themselves out of positions. I feel that I can’t provide you the leadership that I need to provide you because I have this, and I need to remove myself from this situation.

Those are your true NCOs and officers that have the ability to do that. It can’t be just the outside coming in to help you. You have to have something internally. And if we build resilient soldiers, we’ll be able to do that, we’ll be able to say, I do. I can assess myself and say, I do need something. So we have to say, I need a little help. And I’ve got a plethora of places to go and get it. We just gotta do it. We all bring demons home, and demons are the enemy.

How we choose to defeat that enemy depends on the resiliency of the soldier. Leadership, us, me, you, them, we. You have to be resilient enough to deal with this. You have to recognize that there is a problem, and you have to go and execute this. These demons are your enemy. We are trained to take the enemy out. This is what we need to do. There are tons of programs out there for you to do this with. Go get help. Go seek it, go find it, and execute.