From Marine to Army SMU Operator | Varpas De Sa Pereira | Ep. 382

The Team House with your hosts Jack Murphy and David Park. Welcome to episode three hundred and eighty two of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with tonight's guest on the show, varpis Dessa Pereira. He served as a Marine Corps infantry officer and then jumped over to the Army and served in a Yususaki unit, multiple deployments to Iraq, Middle East Africa, and ended up getting out of the Marine Corps and is now a clinical psychologist working at

Us, Thank you for having me.

I should also mention upfront two. He is also the author of the book Warrior Withdrawal. It's a well you tell the audience for what's your book about.

So the book is about this cluster of symptoms that I found that sort of in between this idea of adjustment disorder and post traumatic stress disorder. I haven't gone through school and looking at the diagnostics and statistics manual kind of what happened to me is like patient zero of getting out of the military. Didn't really fit in either of those diagnoses. The cluster of symptoms for PTSD. One of them is avoidance. I didn't have avoidance of combat.

The withdrawal symptoms.

So the book is about my experiences, the multiple tours that I did getting out, the struggles of getting out and then going through school and working at the VA and sort of finding a way to help veterans recognize what has happened to them, the training that they went through, that they get spit out into the world with no untraining, and then how do you manage it.

Well, we'll get a little bit more in depth on that further along in the show, but I'm going to start you off at the beginning. You mentioned to me before the show. Your first name is Lithuanian, your last name is Portuguese. Tell us about the origin story of varpis. Where did you grow up, How did you grow up, How did that eventually take you towards the Marine Corps.

Yeah, so I guess both of my parents are immigrants, both naturalized American citizens. Mom is Lithuanian by way of Canada. Her parents fled the Communists and so we're stuck in between the Nazis and Communists during World War two.

Displaced Persons camp ended up in Canada, and then it moved down.

To Chicago with this big Lithuanian population, where she met My dad, who was born and raised in Rio, went to school in Rio, became a physician, and then moved to Chicago seeking basically freedom. Like he talks about, how we don't understand this in the US. The first time he could vote, there's only one person he could vote for because it was a dictatorship. So he's like, I'm out of here. He showed up in Chicago. My parents met ended up moving to the East Coast, Massachusetts, big

Yeah.

I think it was in third grade when I realized that's not that's not the case in everybody's house. So the last name Brazilian Portuguese first name. It is a Lithuanian word. It is not a common name. It's not like Joe. It's it's literally translated to large bell.

And so I think I've joked about it before.

Like my mom was Gwyneth Paltrow before Gwyneth Paltrow was naming her kid Apple, So she named her second son Large church Bell.

Basically, well what did the first one get?

So he's got my same his dad's name, sorry, our dad's name, and our dad has a same name as his dad's name, which is not much better because it's most So he's the third yr. So he's sort of the third except he also grabbed my mom's dad's name for his middle name, so he's not technically the third. But monsieur means article of pain.

In Amazon Indian. Wow, so so we go, so.

We go like article pain large bell and then my two younger brothers, Skydris, which is like sort of made up ish name of like clear, and then my youngest brother. They were sure he was going to be born a girl, so they only chose the name Lima, which is actually a common girl's name for luck. But then when he popped out a boy, they're like, okay, well he can't have a female name, so they gave him the masculine version of Lima, which is Limas, which you can imagine basically means male fairy.

Okay, so your parents maybe need a little work on the naming conventions for the children.

Yes, my mom was not a Johnny Cash fan. A boy named Sue is not in her uh not in her eight track player, so I definitely tried not to do that with my own kids.

So you grow up speaking Lithuanian and Portuguese growing up in Massachusetts. What piqued your interest in military service? How did that come about?

So? I was actually born in Maryland.

At Thethesida Naval Hospital because my dad, in order to try to fast track his citizenship, took UH commission, got commissioned in the reserves as an Army physician. So he's immediately promoted a major as an internal medicine infectious disease specialist, and so he was sent out to UH for Dietrich.

And so my dad was in the Army.

I don't know why, but I had an affinity for the Navy, and then through high school I was pretty sure I was going to go to Annapolis. It's really the only place I applied. And then the senior year I had to have surgery, and so I was dequed for Annapolis. And then I got a scholarship to Boston University. Sod, all right, I'll do that, and then I'll go to Annapolis. You know, after the year, i'll reapply. But BU had an RTC program and so they gave me the Navy

I'm not going to go back.

And restart at zero at the academy because all roads lead to for me Aquantico as a marine. So at that point I was like, right, I'll just stay here.

So you commissioned through ROTC.

I did, and just like every other boy, basically you know g I Joe's camouflage, I did it. All square guns, water guns, Capture the Flag was my favorite thing to play. And through grade school and high school playing three sports, you know, sport every season, and then continue to do that through college.

And so you came into the Marines nineteen ninety nine, you got commissioned, and now you have to go through Infantry Basic Infantry Officer course, what do the Marines call it?

Yeah, So we do something a little bit different.

We have Officer Candidate School and then all Marine officers go then through the basic school. So independent of your commissioning program, whether it's the academy or OCS, everybody goes to the basic school and everybody shows up with no mos. So officers go to Quantico. Nobody has an mos some people have flight contracts. But then over the course of those six months, depending on how well you do, you get ranked from one to whatever it is, one hundred,

Yeah, I think the army does something similar so that you don't end up with purely just dumb asses in the infantry. Otherwise, I mean it's bad enough as it is.

I think what they try to do is they know just about everybody wants to be in infantry combat arms, and then they don't want like your logistitions to be the the lowest all of the lowest performers at the basic school, or your logos, your supply guys, because then things don't get done. As the general to say, you know, we think logistics not tactics. Then from TBS I got

That's pretty cool. I mean, it must have been exactly what you were looking for, right.

It was, And it was basically a row Schambau to determine who was going to get to go be the scout swimmer, and luckily I won. And I was only in the row Schambeau because I had already done my the maximum swim call that you could still struggled with the brick you know, part of the call for the Scouts swim of course, So managed to do it. And all of that boat rating stuff was to prepare us for a deployment at the front end of two thousand and one to Okinawa.

Did that Okinawa deployment materialize or did other things take Yeah?

No, no, no, so so two thousand and one, so we deployed. We flew out January of one sort of standard rotation. It's a thirty first Marine Expeditionary Unit sailed around Australia EUO Jima and it was only a six month tour. So we fly back around July of one and then we're on our off cycle basically, so we're looking at you in like Operation Bright Star, I think.

In Egypt SINAI.

Yeah, September eleventh happens, and then you know, everybody starts to get think that things are going to change for me. They did because so here's the funny story. In two thousand, two thousand, I was the youngest Marine officer in the first Marine Division. So if you're not aware of how we do our birthday balls, it's the oldest marine present and the youngest marine present share the first piece of cake. And of course we're marines, so everything has to be

That put my name, so you can imagine that.

Plus my name got me skylined with the General staff and so then when I came back.

When we came back from the deployment to Okinawa.

From Okinawa, the chief of Staff and the staff sect we're already like, oh hey, that guy, good to go, you know, he's a first lieutenant, Like we were to pull him up.

And I show up to my interview with the.

General General Cowdrey and the staff sex like, and the General was also like, do you want to be here?

And I'm like, hell no.

You know, I want to go to Ricon, you know, And he's like, oh, well, you know, it's exactly who you want here. You want the guys that don't want to be here, because if you wanted to be here, that would be a problem.

Reverse psychologies bullshit, they got you.

Yeah.

So fortunately for me though, that ended up being a second deployment because he's the assistant division commander and we got flown to Kuwait for four or so months as part of a a CJTF for consequence management. As far as I understand it, I think we're sort of kind of trying to build the backbone of the eventual division

What's H and S?

So hg oh okay.

Hot dogs and SODA's Company. So that was not a deploying unit, and none of us at the time, so this is like mid two thousand and two, thought that the entire divisions were going to get deployed for for a rock. So I said no, thank you to that and took a job as an executive officer for another boat company. So I found myself back in Cornado for a couple months, getting ready to set sale in January.

Of O three.

So you kind of hit.

Yeah, well basically, so set sale in January, full speed ahead. I think we had thirty six hours in Singapore, between San Diego and Kuwait. I got flown ahead into Kuwait and then it was, you know, all of February and most of March kind of waiting waiting for the green light to go.

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So what was sort of like your platoons mission and your idea of how the Operation Iraqi Freedom was supposed to unfold?

I had no idea.

I mean I was an executive officer our specific job. So we're because we're part of the new we actually got attached to a British Commando brigade, so the three Commando Brigade as they're part of their combat element, and we were tasked with crossing the border and then securing the deep water port facility of Boom Kasser. Well the four zero or two Commando the Royal Marines. I think

And then move we moved.

My battalion ended up moving further north up to Azubayr and then a little bit further north. Uh and then we got detached from the Brits because of Jessica Lynch, that whole fiasco, So we all moved north up to nazarea and uh so my battalion was part of the diversion attack to go rescue Jessica Lynch out of nazarea. Me specifically, I was probably asleep in my in my black bag while all this stuff was going on.

Were any interesting incidents that happened during that deployment though that you were involved in.

There are a few. I try not to to speak ill of other people, don't There there was one specific incident that I'll talk about this one because I bring it up in the book where we're in Azoo by year.

We're trying to figure out what are we shooting at.

I get down to the platoon that's on that strong pointing to the south, and the platoon sergeant asked me like, Hey, what's the what's the drama, sir? And I'm like, I don't know, that's why we're here. The platoon commander tells me, you know what's going on. They've got eyes on a target,

Asked to do fire mission?

I said, astitute of fire mission and they and they said yeah, but we're going to deny it.

And I was like, okay, good.

I was getting ready to walk out, but there had been some other incidents that had happened a couple of days before. So the battalion gunner, the chief one officer, it's like, no, no, you know, you tell him everything that's going on. And so I said, okay, out of out of uh just curiosity. When you call for fire, you have to give a target description. And so I said, what was the target description that my CEO gave? And he said ten to fourteen men in black with aks.

I said, okay, that's that's not what's there.

Here's the platoon commander that had eyes on it's women and kids and they're looting, and I thought that was sort of done. I thought that justice would sort of square things away. I did not expect what happened next, which was I got called in as insubordinate.

And then.

One of the other things that had come up was that that company commander had pointed his rifle at the fire support team leader, like, if you should call another fucked up the fire mission, I'm going to kill you because I should backtrack. As soon as we crossed the border, we stopped, and then we had incoming. My company commander was sure that there's no way the Iraqis could be shooting are pready had us, So he just was so sure that this was blue on blue fire.

That he was going to cause harm.

To the fire sport team leader, and he actually called the training timeout. So the fire for effect went, you know, we got away, I got away, We all ran away. So I actually had my Plateam commander's tactical notebook is as Iraqi shrapnel embedded in it, and he kind of calls a training time out, pulls the nap out on a humbie, calls all the platoon leaders and meet the humby and it's like, how did this happen? And like, we can't stay here, like if that was if that

That came up. And then back to the mortar incident.

Though, my company commander asks me like, didn't you so did you hear the call for fire on the radio? I said no, I didn't. Oh, so you didn't hear what the grid was that I called in. I said no, no, sorry, I didn't hear what grid you called it. And he said, aha, see, so you didn't realize that I had actually offset the grid. He was going to use the sixty millimeter mortars as warning shots danger close to our own troops warning shots, and he got me with that.

I was speechless.

But anybody who knows anything about fire support is like, that's just preposterous.

Yeah, that's not how the fire support center works, that's.

Not how any of that works. And your warning shots with the fifty cow already are not working. So I really wasn't sure what to do in that scenario. But he said he could work with me, or I could go to another company, and I had to weigh that decision.

It's actually.

Maybe one of the first times that I selected to or I chose to do what's better for everybody else and what's best for me. I called in my fellowcal team commanders, all the other lieutenants, and I said, what's best for me is to leave this company. And I don't think that's what's best for you, because I can. I can withstand this, and so I did.

I stayed. We go to nazarea.

Basically I don't see the company commander anymore. Fly home or sorry, I fly home, fly back to Bahrain and get on the ships and sail home. I get in more trouble for the Shenanigans that allegedly I did in combat. And at that point, it's like late two thousand and three, most if most of all of the Marines are gone from a rock and I'm like, that was it, that was my combat.

Where's where's over for us?

It's it's uh, it's standing operations now, big army time like we that was and all of my peers are like getting their awards with v and bronze stars. And all that stuff, and I get a big fed zero because of all the things that happened.

So I was like, that's going to hurt me down the road.

But no matter, I still was thinking I can get over to recon or force recon the path at that point in time for me, it was going to be through through Fast Company, which is the fleet and at tears and security teams. So I get orders there, I

And what can you tell people what the mission is of the FAST teams?

Yeah, so it's anti terrorism, whatever form anti terrorism can take. Usually it's going to be like a heightened security, heightened force protection measures. They're used for whenever there's submarines that have nukes on them, that bring out these this marine platoons to help secure those areas for refuel defuel.

They'refore deployed.

You know, when I was in Bahrain with Fast, We're on a pager to reinforce embassies to go provide expeditionary security. We come with the Fast platoons, come with a ton of skill sets to do all of that. They're kind of like a swat team, if you will, and the naval swat team.

And so the first assignment was you were going back to Iraq, you said, for this hotel was getting hit.

So the hotel was multiple you know, it was hit with a bunch of rockets. And so the concern became that what was then the Coalition Provisional Authority, which is Al Rashid Alice I think, was going to get hit and it is now the US embassy there on the Tigris. So they wanted to bring in a company's worth of Fast marines to provide better security for that place.

How did that situation unfold for you guys?

It was so drastically different from oif one like I was in the Green Zone. I mean I was eating catered food made by Pakistanis, you know, in a palace with marble floors and toilet, which was a far cry from and going two months without a shower and then and then only getting kind of a quasi shower because they brought the NBC truck and we're like, hey, you guys need to be decontaminated. Ah, the palace had a pool.

And it was different.

Uh, it certainly was a different side of the war. And and still you know, the Brown Irish was a big deal. Going from from buy from Bagdad or National to the CPA. We were rolling around and SUVs that are unarmored, and Solder City was still not really secure. But this was just it was a unique time in Lado three and into I guess a little bit earlier four there in Baghdad where you could actually go to the souk not for are from the combat searchical hospital with no body arm or no weapon.

Yeah, it was before things got dad.

Yeah, so then that changed it was basically guard duty for a few for three or four months for us. So I came home from that, we got we got believed in place so that I could come home with the platoon and then make a regularly scheduled deployment to Bahrain where we would be on the pagers for everywhere else and so on that deployment, there was an American who was beheaded in Saudi and so there was some

Yeah, I mean, what did they send you down to the Horn of Africa?

For?

Some of it was training and some of it was just to make sure the embassy there was fine. It was good to have a platoona Marines there to reinforce whatever it might be going on. And that also kind of started to make me aware of how wild west it is out there. Like they sent us down to this one range where I think it took us like thirteen.

Hours to drive.

This is out in Jibbetis, Djibouti. Yeah, so we go way down south. It's like a two hundred and seventy degree range where they're on our owns. My one assistant or one of the other platuity commanders was it was supremely afraid that we're going to get overtaken by baboons, so he wanted to make sure that the firewatch had a fully auto M four. But in my mind, I'm like, hey, we're doing this live fire training and if we have a casualty, there is no medical support. Like our case of that plan was.

This was the H fifty three's.

They're on one eighty alert, meaning that if we have something bad happens and we get on a sat phone and we call up to Camp le Monnier one and eighty minutes later, a H fifty three is flying thirty

Well this is a bit of a sidebar, but I worked on a story a few years ago and it was an Army National Guard unit in Djibouti. They were making that same trip, driving from the base out to the range through all these canyons and valleys and everything, and what none of them knew. And you know what surprised them was this huge rainstorm came through. It just poured rain and they got trapped out in the you know,

I believe it. Even with light rain didn't seem like anything. And if you're use I mean from these coasts or wherever Seattle has ran all the time, the lightest amount of rain and then we had about forty eight inches of water that we had to afford or land cruisers.

Yeah, it's wild.

Uh.

And after the fast teams, you did six months on division staff.

Yeah.

So I came back from that deployment and they told me I was a captain and I was too senior to take another platoon, and rather than you know, to suffer on battalion staff, I volunteered for her to be an individual augment with my goal to be to go on a military transition team. My initial set of orders were to be for G four logistics in Kuwait. So I check in Camp Le June with those orders and I'm like, hey, I'm a infantry guy from Fast, I don't know anything about logistics.

Can we change that.

I'm here to be a myth And luckily they swapped me for some logistics officer and put me into G three down at the division. So I deployed as a frag order writer. Within a few months, it became clear in Ramadi that that's not a really difficult job, so the intentions message writer took up the frag order writer duties and I got pulled as an ada Hi admit to go out to further West and Ambar.

With the two seven. So the second Brigade.

Seventh Iraqi Infantry Division with our three battalions and hit Adfa and Murwa.

This is two thousand and five ish.

Yeah, so I spent just about all of two thousand and five in Iraq, which is great because then I could pretend like the Red Sox were still World Series.

Champions and in Iraq was kind of like the Tutorio rating pretty seriously by this time frame, you know.

So five I think started the a little bit of the Awakening. I remember being on Camp Blue Diamond when they brought in I think the the tribes there to start negotiating with them so that we could all focus on a q i Z and a q I Am instead of you know, fighting fighting the Shia. Everybody wanted to geinst Arkaui. And then when I moved further out west, they were still fighting out in all Crime, a little bit around around Raua, but most of the there's really well,

Happening in Ramadi.

It just was not I think at the same level that it wasn't a four for me personally. It was a lot of driving on like Route Bronze, Route Uranium between all of the different Iraqi battalions, and that was also a different experience because it's you know, minimum minimally staffed v's with you break all of the requirements and minimums just to get out the door where we're basically going with nine Americans, three vehicles out to wherever it

Not enough to disable us.

And we're pretty sure that this pickup truck in front of us is the one that dropped it. So we we chase it down, we shoot at it together to stop.

It pulls over.

We have three trucks, so one goes far side security, one stays backside security, and then my truck with the fifty col is is oriented to the target. And it's really only at that moment that I realize I am the dismount. I'm the vehicle commander and the dismount, and the only other dismount is my turf who's not armed, and so I was like, oh, all right, Well we close on the truck. You know, I don't need my turp to be armed. But then when we get closer,

It's going to go.

Please stand in enfilade, you know, And I close the last whatever it is, ten meters with my nine and search these guys. I know they dropped the id through the there's a hole in the passenger side floor wall or floor, but you know there's there. I had no evidence, and so I wasn't going to detain these guys on a hunch, you know, I was. They're in the wrong place. You don't know where they're going. Their story, their cover

So we sent them on their way.

Geez, what a mess. And then after that deployment, you did the Captain's career course.

I did, went down to Benning again.

The common theme of my military career is deploy as often as possible, and they stateside as little as possible. So I took the Army's course because it's six months instead of the Marine Corps because it's thirteen months.

Went so went to.

Benning for that, finished, got my orders to back to Camp Pendleton as a company commander, and then it was a patter of a few months. Caught them on the tail end of their work up, and by I want to say, July of seven, I'm back.

In I rock.

Wow, where did you guys go? H?

So north of Fallujah is a place called Sokowa, And you know, no offense to calve guys intended beyond.

You know what your job is and your job is not coined.

So you know the five seven cave, mechanized cave, you net that's there, really did no patrolling in the AAR that I inherited. Anytime they needed dismounts, it'd have to borrow them from the marine battalions that were nearby. And so what ended up happening prior to me showing up was the cave unit would go out and they'd hit IEDs and and so they stopped patrolling, and then they would only patrol if we're oute clearance, like two to

It's a second IED.

And so now I have two down truck and we're trying to find where the trigger guys are So we're trolling through the area, can't can't quite find them, recover the vehicles best as we can leave them in place so we can come back the next day with some wreckers to pull these things out of the the one out of the canal and then the one off of the side of the canal, and as we're driving that back, we hit with another ied.

Recovering that vehicle complex ambush.

So this is sort of the unfortunate drawing of boundaries. The boundary was the canal, which was maybe ten meters across and so not my AO is where I'm getting RPG fire from, probably where the command was detonating all of these i ds. So it's like I get authorized crossbow and the rickety mud bridges didn't really look like they would hold up for us to cross, so I'm like, we're good on our side. And the fire support were

I was like, no, thank you.

We're kind of at their max range and I'm looking to hit somebody who's twenty meters from me. So what else you got sent us some cobras, and so it's cobras I could manage because I could say, hey, keep all your fires north of the canal.

Well, we're I.

Mean, we're so close that my Mark nineteen's gunner like hist his forty millimeters grenades weren't donating it, weren't were Yeah, we wouldn't hit their minimum spins to arm and my fifty cow like we as pulled the rear cotter pin everything get try to free gun that thing. He couldn't depress it far enough to hit where the bad guys were.

So you put your mind to use.

And I was like, well, shoot all your flares, shoot all our pop ups into the reeds. They catch fire, and then we'll shoot them as they're running out of the out of the reads.

They're not that flammable because they're right now.

But the bad guy, so I bad guys, you know, whatever they were, they decided to try to egress out of the area, hopped into a vehicle.

The cobra saw it, so that was the end of them.

Smoked them. Yeah, the cobra pilots don't screw around.

They do not.

After that kind of the rest of the tour just progressed in the way that you wish it would encounterinsurgency operations. So we cleared the area, got some host forces or some host nation people to stand up a provisional security force. I start working with them, partner with them. They run the checkpoints. Near the end of my tour there to give me a call like, hey, these two guys that we know are bad guys came into the area. They both suicide bombers. We took care of them. One guy

And the ROE is.

Like, no, no, that the tiny little bass plate could land on somebody and kill them. So no more looms allowed. It's like, all right, well, how long we're we waiting for EOD? Two hours? And so Finally I go out there with EOD and talking to my Iraqi counterparts there and they're like, you guys took so long.

Like I wish you would have told us you were to take this long. We were just blown them up.

Yeah. It was always like that with E O. D.

Yeah, So to me, that was success story, right, like the tour started with the wild West.

You know, we cleared it out, we took.

Our licks, we gave back, and then by the end, you know, the locals are managing their own.

Stuff and go ahead, I'm sorry, well and it it uh.

You know, you you leave thinking that everything went great, and then you know, I remember it was like three or four months later, you're like, oh, you know there's there's still id's going off at ECP five or whatever it is outside.

Of Lucia, and you, I don't know, this is kind of rare in the army. I don't know about the Marines, but you got to pick up a second company command.

I did, right, So, when I was at Benning, I went to that no form brief and kind of wanted to go to that unit, and the ass the recruiters, hey you take Marines, and they said yeah, and I was like, great, how do I join? And they said you got to be branch qualified and I said, I eat crayons. I don't know what that means. And they said, you got it. If you're an infantry guy, you got

So then I was like, all right, well what do I do now?

And what I did next was I went over from a line company to weapons company and kind of became the fire support coordinator for another deployment.

That's awesome. Back to Iraq.

Well, so we set sail.

This is two thousand and nine, and so I really don't know what we thought we were going to do. I sort of figured maybe we'd get pulled into Afghanistan or a rock. That's sort of the tendency with Marine expeditionary units is they just go to places for thirty days and ruin it for all the people that have

Like no, no, thank you.

So what we ended up doing is we got attached to the counter piracy guys outside of the Horn of Africa. Oh interesting, And in a fun fact, my ship was hit by a submarine crossing through the Straits.

And horror moves, who's submarine?

Our submarine? Oh?

No shit?

Yeah.

So I was on the USS New Orleans and we were hit by the USS grotten.

Did you have to like go to go into port for repairs after that?

Yeah?

So the USS New Orleans had to go dry dock in Bahrain, which meant, you know, you had half of battalion's worth of infantry guys twiddling their thumbs. So they ended up shipping most of us down to Africa.

Again.

Someone got relieved for that. I don't think you can crash a submarine without getting in trouble.

Yeah, the sub captain got relieved for that.

Our captain did not and in reality, like normally you think if you hit something like that, you go to general quarters, you know, to deal with all the damage. But that didn't happen. And I know that didn't happen because I didn't even wake up when the shub hit us. This is al So then I got so I got sent over to the Boxer and this is two thousand

Oh yeah, so you guys were down in the Horn of Africa when that happened. Cool, And I mean, how did it? How did that unfold from your perspective?

Well, so from my perspective, I basically had nothing to do with it, and you know, because I was just a regular guy and they're going to bring in there on fires guys, And it sort of kind of escalated that way where all of these marines in this in this youth thought like, hey, we'll get to participate in this in some fashion, and then one by one there whoever thinks that they're going to do something kind of got written off, like the recon guys who were like, hey,

This is what we train. We're the experts on this. No thank you. We got this other asset that's going to do that.

Even my buddy, the Cobra pilot, was like, well, I'm the I'm the Ford air controller Airborne, you know, like I will be the.

Guy who's flying fire support for these guys.

And he thought he was going to get to play, and then here's the you know, the unit's air controller, Like hey, they have this stuff and bringing these little birds and all of that. So he got frustrated that he wasn't going to get to do anything. And so I think the only eight Marines that ended up supporting that at all was probably the Harrier pilots sort of flying you know, with ISR over Somalia, while the Bainbridge did.

The work with the lifeboat.

So let's uh, let's circle back around here, Like now you're getting to the point where you're able to go to assessment and selection. So you mentioned that they came in and gave you guys a brief while you were down at Fort Benning and the Captain's career course. Like, I know you can't get into the details of the brief, but what what was it that kind of sparked your interest in the in this organization?

Uh so, I I had known about all those organizations.

Well, I had known.

About that organization before, mostly through I guess Hollywood and and reading Eric Haney's book. Uh it was, it's up until that no Foreign brief that it just was into my cards. They don't take marines, and marines are kind of like a bucket of crabs sometimes where if you want to go do that thing, some of the Marines are going to put you down and say, no, you can't. They'll never take you, which is why I was. I had I would not have even gone to the no

So I was like, all right, well, what do I need to do? It was always my goal.

And so the Marine Corps kind of stymied you for a little bit, although I mean again, being a company commander twice is pretty awesome. You finally come up for PCs orders and you had to go camp out in the School of the Infantry until you could go to ANS.

Yeah, so you know, because we're sometimes not able to see second and third order effects. When they told me I was not for PCs orders, I couldn't apply for ANS. Then when I was up for PCs orders, it was like, okay, well now you can start your application for ANS, and it's going to take a while. So I was like, all right, well, I have to find a job in

I and so tell us about assessment and selection.

What was that experience, Like, that's a good question.

Because a lot of ans, we relies on novelty in order to get good reads on people, So the general things that happen there they don't want to talk about. However, I will say that allegedly after I finished, the woman that I was married to at the time said would you do it again?

And I said absolutely not.

Now I'm like, of course I would do it again, right, And occasionally I will go back to help them out with ans, And it's only like now ten or fifteen the years later aultmost that I'll hear things and then in my mind I'll think, like, here's some of the cadre I talk about this candidate mess this thing up, and I'll be like, oh, that must be new. And it's only then that I realized, no, no, I also

Encode and they're throwing Like when you say novelty, they're like putting you in scenarios that take you outside your comfort zone.

Basically, yeah, so the stress phases you know everybody uses. Land navigation is a great tool because it's sort of self correcting if.

You if you have a good sense of geography.

It's a simple task that should be simple to accomplish, and it's hard because of the terrain and the distances, and so it's self correcting. Like if you choose bad routes, it becomes apparent because you don't make your times and all that stuff. So land navigation is a piece, and then there's all these other things that come up that you weren't prepared for. You didn't know you were going

And so you make it through assessment and selection and then there must be the whole train up process. It must have been pretty cool. Now you're getting to do commando's stuff right.

Well.

So so the Marine Corps had a little bit of a pause there as well, because even though I passed ans, They're like, ah, but you you still you still owe us some time here at Camp Pendleton. So I had to wait. I had to defer for a year to go to OTC. So I did and then went to OTC and it was it.

Was fantastic, Like, I mean really really hard work.

I think in a year I had seventeen non consecutive days off. It was all almost all new and all challenging, and no feedback, almost no feedback. So to me, like somebody who strives or thrives on criticism or feedback or whatever it is or validation if I'm doing it well, like that was difficult.

It's like did I do a good job or did I not do a good job?

Like I need to know what the ham sandwich is that what does it look like that you're looking for? So I could produce it and I did pretty well at the Captain's course. So it's like I know the doctrine. If what you want is a ham sandwich, I can do that.

I can do.

You know, light infantry combat brigade tactics. You're not asking for that, So I'm stepping outside of that comfort zone.

But you know, this is so nebulous, and they're like, just well, what do you think? I'm like, I don't know.

You tell me, is this a good idea or a bad idea?

I have? You know, I'm a straight leg dude.

Basically I have no concept of of you know, if this is good or not.

They're like, y, you use your imagination, Like, all right, well then we'll do it this way.

And that was usually good for them.

GOT mean apparently yeah, they like that.

They like the creativity.

Uh.

And I you know, you would learn from your classmates because some of them had had there are other courses that you can take that can help prepare you for for.

Some of that work. I had none of them, and so you know, it was all OJT for me.

And then you know, even within that that class I could see that rookie mistakes that I had made in the beginning, I was no longer making them at the end.

Is this mostly like human stuff that you're working on?

Yeah? Close target reconnaissance.

Work and what is you know, do you know what I mean? You have to have some conception of like the job you're training for, like what is the actual position that you're going to be doing.

So at A and S I had no idea. I had none, really, And then when I got to OTC, I started to get a sense of what the job would be if I was the person, if I was the operator on the ground, And they were starved for officers at the time, so it started to become a little bit more clear to me that what I was going to do is going to be.

A troop commander.

And so while while I could also be a trigger puller or humbe driver or whatever, more likely than not I would get staffed into task force positions.

And this is kind of I can't remember if we mentioned it here, but it's kind of interesting that the Marine Corps kind of suggested that you go this route instead of going to the other army unit that they felt you would have like better command time in this one.

I think it's sort of like rewind all the way back to the beginning. When you grow up speaking the three languages and your parents are immigrants, there's a preference to send you to one place over the other if you desire, So the question to me is like, do you want to be a super soldier? But in the reality is that if you go there, you're really just

I was like, let me do that.

And after you finished OTC, like, what was it like when you took this position? When you arrived there?

It was a little bit of a shock.

And so the standard line that I used when I would go forward to talk to people at the Tea sox the theater special Operation Commands is I would they would all want to be read into the unit and the SAP and all this stuff, and I would say, you know, ninety five percent of what we do and

Uh.

And we generated the list and then nothing was selected. It's like no, thank You'll.

Just have water. The other was the Syria gas attack.

Now that I think about, it was that the redline had been crossed, and then the question was I think I've just been in the front leaning rest there because we leaned so far forward. So we called in and it's like, hey, that's it's my area. What have you got that can go assess all this stuff, go find everything. So we got ready and then no call came, and then by seventy two hours later, you know, like, hey, our information is probably no longer accurate and I don't know that I can get anybody.

In there now.

Yeah, I remember when that happened, and there was some movement that they like Rangeer regiment, like they were like going to drop the hammer for a minute there, but then yeah, Obama decided not to do.

It, which is why it's interesting to hear the guys talking about it now, Like Mariskalabama, that was his time frame too, and I was I wasn't on the box in a bottom bad too, but yeah, so he allegedly gave the green light on that, and then what is unknown is there was also a German ship that was taken by Somali pirates, so the Boxer for a brief period of time had a bunch of German commandos on

This is different.

You know, it's the big deck from what I hear, and this is hearsay. The way that kind of went down is the Germans asked the President, hey, you know, what do you think. He's like, I don't know, it's your ship, and so they kind of took that as don't don't do the strike, gotcha.

Yeah, it's kind of interesting what you say about the the Chinese food menu because I've had, as I understand it, even when the President signs a finding for the CIA and it has all this stuff on there from like cyber warfare to assassination. But then it's like, hey, hold on, Skippy, you got to read the fine print down here where it says if you want to use any of this, you have to go back to the president and get permission.

Yeah, that's a fantasy. There's no Treadstone project, you know, to my knowledge, there's nobody who walks into the cafe and knows the numbers of all of the vehicles they are in the parking lots. Like I mean, if you have that kind of idactic memory, you're that autistic, then great, I mean maybe we can make use of that, but then we also don't have the charisma if you actually do a job.

Well, speaking of which, because of your background, did you ever do any work in your up sitting in a cafe smoking a cigarette speaking Lithuanian.

No.

Near the end of my tenure was the invasion of CROMEA, so of course the Baltic States got very nervous and SOCPAC hosted a few working groups, and I got sent out there since Europe was my AAR or part of my AAR, and kind of the questions came up, like well, what have you got that can help there? And I said nothing, but if you want something built there, I can build it. It's going to take you about two years, and you need to tell me now because the guy who's going to do it is retiring.

Right. Did any of that go forward as far as building like clandestine infrastructure for them.

That's my knowledge.

No, that's too bad.

There may be and you know, I just may have been on the outside of the gate by the time it started to happen.

HM.

So I take it you did two three years as troop commander and before we move on to the next thing, anything any final thoughts on that period of your career, anything that's interesting that you're able to talk about.

Not not really the only interesting things are the prices that are uninteresting. How the Marine Corps really doesn't like guys that go and become special and so uh ironically, like, as soon as I finished OTC, they're like, hey, you're going to get orders to Command and Staff School.

I was like, no, I'm not.

There's no way, Like I didn't just finish this program to get yanked into, you know, yanked over to Quantico for for Command Staff College.

And I think.

This is a problem that we often have as we have to promorphize you know, big Army or Marine Corps, like the Marine Corps has knew No, it doesn't, it is it's not an entity. There's somebody who wrote this piece of paper directing this scene to happen. I just need to go find that person and talk to them.

Having gotten out.

Now I would say, well, command of staff was still a waste of time, but I could have been my son's soccer coach, or I should have put work into who I am that's going to persist after the uniform is gone, and I didn't.

And because of that, where you getting to the point now where like you're kind of done with the Marine Corps.

Well, So in order to work for that organization, I had to be a geographic bachelor. The woman that I was married to at the time didn't want to leave her job and travel to the East Coast, so I left her and the kids just north of Camp Hamilton. And then when the Marine Corps was calling back and saying, hey, you need to go back to regular infantry, I said, that's fine. I'm more than happy to at least send me to Camp Pendleton, that's where, you know the time my wife and kids were.

And they said, no, you're going.

To go to Twin I Palms, which is the Marine's version of NTC. So at that point I was like, no, thank you, I'm just going to take again. The Obama administration offered early retirement, so I took it, and then was the I got the lived experience of how when you decide to get out because that is so contrary to the value set of the people staying in you kind of become persona non grada.

Yeah.

And even now, as I talked to veterans, I've lived on both sides of that. So if you go back to my first company commands to go into outside of Fallujah, Like I had an e sergeant that was literally the best sergeant in the division because he'd won this Super Squad challenge, he'd done his two tours. Even though we were going back to the same place, all he wanted to do is go to Texas and open up a

God bless.

Yeah.

So I went through all of the same, you know, all of the pressure that I could put on him to make that enlistment, guilt tripping him, like, hey, we're going back to the same place.

If you don't, if you don't also go, people are gonna die. You know the area.

Don't you want your guys to succeed, Like you've got to come with us, reenlist, re enlist, And good for him that he didn't. And then I realized like, oh, this is this is a problem of ours and we're a lot of what have you done for me lately?

This doesn't make sense, totally makes sense. And so it was a.

Little bit of a that seems to be common enough of a theme. If it's not ubiquitous, it's at least, you know, the preponderance of guys that it out the departure is not pretty and so that sets you into that six months to a year time frame post service where you're kind of lost. And so we at the VA that's the danger zone, I think where we see a lot of guys that start with substance abuse, major depressive episodes. Most divorces will happen within those first six

Yeah, the military kind of true to you like a leper when you're getting out. But expanding on that, so you begin the retirement process. What was your transition like out of the Marine Corps?

It was like immediate, you know, I got my orders.

Maybe maybe it was in the springtime, and so I thought in every way that I could to try to modify and change them, find.

Loopholes, you name it.

And then I think I basically had two months two separate. The other thing that the Marine Corps did, which was so awesome was they that's when they audit your record, and that's when they decided that my pay entry base date was wrong and so they had been overpaying me for fifteen and a half years and so they just stopped paying me.

What they're like, you owe the government.

We overpaid you sixty thousand dollars, so we're just not going to pay you for your last two months of service. And by the way, here's your bill for what we overpaid you. Luckily, I ended up, you know, filing.

Paperwork that said it's no pay due.

Like, hey man, I didn't intentionally, you know, defraud the government. Like I had no idea that you know, the extra five dollars you were giving me for paycheck or whatever would amount to sixty grand at the.

End of my career.

But you know, for for the months of October November, I was like, where's my paycheck?

And it just didn't exist.

They just cut you off, like mommy and Daddy say no more, your allowance is canceled.

Yeah.

So with that kind of departure, it's like, go after yourself, Marines. And for a while it was like, I will, I will never work with Marines again because I couldn't I couldn't believe it that this brotherhood would do this to, you know, an alleged brother.

But that's so went yep.

But years later, when they need you again, you're a brother. Suddenly we're family, right, We're family.

Yeah.

And uh so, you know, at the beginning, I would say as a contractor ice like I wouldn't work with marines. And then even as a psychologists like, I prefer not to work with marines except for people that I knew before I got out, And so I would work with Recon because some of my lieutenants went over there and I would do you know, if they asked for a favor,

Like what are the black ops we can do.

In in Southeast Asia? I was like none, Like they're not gonna nobody's gonna have you do that. And oh, by the way, like where's all the ope that these two guys I know before you did, like they prepped your battlefield, they gave you all of these things. Oh no, no, you know, like we're going to do something different. And it's like, oh, I see, I'm also guilty of this, Like you can't teach the marine anything. They were all experiential learners, so I can tell you to do the thing,

Right now, I'll come over. You're gonna try your way.

And what were you doing as a contractor at that time?

I would contract for my old unit, either as a tactical instructor or as a role player.

Cool. And at the same time, you are becoming acquainted with being a full time or part time dad.

Mister mom, yeah, daddy uber.

Yeah, that's how I feel now my daughter's a teenager.

Yeah, so yep. It was a drastic difference. I think I talk about it in the book how I went from briefing sack her on a kill capture mission in his aor probably early of twenty fourteen to December twenty fourteen. My only responsibility is wiping my two year olds?

But how is that going for you? You know psychologically that like, this is a big, big adjustment that you're making.

It was a massive adjustment, which is when the reasons why you know, I got drawn to write this adjustment stuff into the book Warrior Withdrawal, And you know I was trying to figure out because I mean, everything was gone basically, so the fifteen and a half years of service and no more, thank you for your service. And also,

Course, and I laughed at it. I was like, oh, yeah, that's that.

Maybe that's a problem, you know, like that they just don't care about you anymore because they had they got to keep the army keeps marching along, right as the song goes. So twenty fifteen, I was mister mom for a year. The woman that I was married to you at the time. You know, she could increase her travel, so she did do that. And then by twenty sixteen I was like, I got to do something, and so contracting opportunities came up, and as long as there are

How do I write that up? You know?

And he's like like execure, you go write it up this way that way, And we had a longer discussion about how kind of I was in this these doldrums. Having gotten out, I feel more like myself on these contracts, you know. So that's why it's like a withdrawal symptom. And he's like, you should be a psych or special operations units. Like he said, they'll talk to you in a way that they'll never talk to me, because you've been to the coronet, you've gone through a and as, you've done.

All of these things.

So I was like, all right, write me the recommendation, and I started school and then.

Six years later I was done.

Four years of academics, a year of internship, and then and then post talk at the VA.

What as what was kind of like your speciality when you went to psych school? Was it always, uh, you know, an idea that you were going to work with veterans or.

Yeah? So initially that's that's what my goal was.

I had gone through the SERGS, the FBI's Crisis Response Groups Hostage Negotiator course, because I figured I would do that well.

I did actually try.

While I was mister Mom to volunteer to be a hostage negotiator here in southern California, and I got turned down because basically that's nobody's primary gig. In fact, the FBI, there's only like six or seven or so full time negotiators.

We had one of Barry Nosner.

Yeah, for everybody else, it's a it's an ancillary duty, so secondary job, right, So for the you know, like the local townships. I was like, hey, I will, I will come to your negotiator. You know, you don't even have to pay me. I've got a pension. I just you know, this is the work that I want to do. Uh,

Left of the boom.

So, you know, with with special operations, it was all right before the i D blows up, and then before the i D gets implanted, and then before the hole is dug, and then before the i D is made, and then you know, before the guy buys the parts of the i D. That's how we get to the left of the boom and in psych school, I was like to me, that means I should be a child psychologist, so help people out before they develop all of these problems, because the adults are fully baked cakes and I don't

This was your post doc work.

So that was practical work and internship in San Bernardino County. And then when it came time for postdoc, I had gone to a buddy's retirement ceremony and paddle pass I mentioned that kind of or actually I mentioned that exactly in the.

In the books introduction out.

While I'm there, the thoughts of this warrior withdrawal piece, like that missing thing kept coming back, and I was back among all these veterans and spouses, and I was like I feel like I need to something is calling me to write this thing, and so I took a residency postdoc year at the VA to sort of flesh out my hypothesis, which was largely based off of doctor

There's nothing to do, so you just try to.

Fast forward through the deployment because there's an end date, and so if I can sleep twice as long, then the deployment's half as long, and so I'll get home as fast as I can. And then, unfortunately, when you get home usually it reverses and it's like, oh, I can't wait to be deployed right right, And so now you have a countdown to how can I get in this next deployment? And we fast forward through time with

I've described it in the past that it's like, especially for what you did, that you were part of a sub sub subculture that probably there were certain things that you were read onto that thirty five people in the entire world were read onto, and so it becomes like this increasingly small circle of like people who can relate to your experiences.

That is absolutely true, and that I noticed that last November. In this November, when I went back out to contract for my own unit, and I'm sitting at a table and it's one of the few places where I can speak completely unguarded because everybody there and there's I think less than three hundred of US or something like that

It's like I could just be me again.

Yeah, it's incredible. And one of the things you mentioned to me earlier, and I think you touched on it a little bit, was the sort of difference between PTSD and adjustment that there is this process of transition and adjusting out of that military culture which is sort of separate from PTSD. You need not have gone through some sort of traumatic combat event.

Right, So.

Had the opportunity to kind of really speak quickly through this at Austin for America. What I and the way that I do is I just go through the symptoms. So with post traumatic stress disorder, you know, as you were talking to doctor Free right now at the VA, we don't really even bother asking about the trauma. I mean, we try to get the index trauma, but the post traumatic stress Disorder checklist doesn't bother. It only asks about

Check.

I have a whole bunch of veterans that weren't. We have the same symptoms, so re experiencing. Do I have nightmares? Lashbacks?

Now? I don't have those, you know, not at all.

So it's like, okay, well maybe mine's just a little bit different. The avoidance piece, I didn't avoid at all. I had the affinity for Like I said before, I will seek out veterans. I feel more like myself when I talk to veterans. Most of my friends are veterans, so I'm not avoiding those things that might remind me

Some somatic symptoms.

The problem with adjustment disorders is usually tied to you, all right, well, six months after whatever the adjustment is gone, it's no longer adjustment disorder now, it's like it's something else. So if you lost your leg in combat, okay, well, for six months you have adjustment disorder, and then if you're still sad about it, it's like, okay, well it's not adjustment disorder anymore because the leg's gone. That's done

Why did it have to be me?

Obviously I didn't go, and they sent somebody else, and I'm sure they did as good a job as I could have, but it had to be me. And he felt the same way. And so I said, I feel like I'm an addict to patre triotism or something like that, like I'm just blindly doing this or something. I don't know why jump forward whatever it is eight years and now I'm going through the substance abuse disorder symptoms and I'm like, all of these fit me if I just instead of saying substance, you say.

Being a warrior.

So there's eleven symptoms for substance abuse disorder, And when I teach a class about warrior withdrawal, I would go through all eleven. And I don't try to define it for anybody. You say, all right, whatever causes you to feel like a warrior, or you label it for yourself is it positive reinforcement that I'm tough. Is that what I was looking for and that's why I kept climbing the spear to be in the toughest, most selective unit.

I don't know, maybe that's what it was for me.

But if you take that and then you go through the symptoms, is that, okay? Was I deploying more off to than was healthy for me? Did I continue to deploy even though it was causing me physical harm? And you know it was I deploy instead of spending time with family, as I spending more time trying to go on deployments than is necessary? Was I trying to quit deploying and I was not able to? It's like all of these are substance that's substance abuse symptoms, and then.

The final two being tolerance and withdrawal.

So for me, tolerance was one deployment not enough, Two deployments not enough? So I did oif one, two, three, four, five, six, seven into eight? Still not enough? How to go to special operations?

Still not enough?

And then the last symptom is withdrawal, which is when you take that substance away. So when you're out of the military and you're no longer active duty, you're no longer you don't no longer feel like a warrior. You have all of these withdrawal problems, which that's what I cataloged, is that's the anger management, communications issues, maladaptive coping skills, a loss of sense of self, loss of identity.

Loss of purpose.

And then as soon as we put you back into a warrior event either like a you know, a martiall hobby, like when we put you back into an MM agent, you become a law enforcement officer and so you have a tribe again, and you wear a uniform again, and you have a sense of purpose again, and you feel more like yourself. Almost all of those things go away. So it's like that's how it works with substances as well.

A job when you get out. Like, that's not quite it.

That's a little bit antiquated unless you just go ahead and identify with whatever the job is that you get next. If you stick with my substance abuse model, which is the only one that seems to fit, the solution has to be detox.

It would be good place.

So, like, you know, so they're saying, well, that's skills Bridge, isn't it, And I'm like, no, it's not, because you still pull that guy back and make him do a PFT. You still pull him back and make him do all of these other things like he's he's not out of the military, you're still in the military, or she is still in the military. And then oh, by the way, when they finish their skills Bridge, there's no guarantee that

Back at it.

And you've found some success in treating veterans in that nature.

So it's less of a treatment and more of what I try to do is increase I mean, it does, it does work, it does reduce symptoms. But more what it does I think is it increases someone's openness to therapy. Gotcha, even though we're like I don't like saying therapists, like calling myself a therapist, because there's all these connotations along with that word. Nobody wants to go to therapy. It's also why you know the second but the subtitle of my book is when BA NF the Loger meats bad

During the process of your work with VA, Like, when was it that the idea for this book for Warrior withdrawal came about?

I had started to think through the cluster of symptoms and trying to map it onto the substance abuse disorder. And then while I was working at the VA, two more things came up in my mind, one being Marsha's identity. It's like a squirre or a chart quad chart where you've either kind of know what you're going to be or you don't know what you're going to be, and then you either have gone through some things and try some things out or you haven't gone through some things

Maybe they do, maybe they don't.

Three thirties close enough.

See that that's an East Coast thing.

Yeah, so then you know, okay, well, what we aim for is for you to be integrated. Right, I'll keep those things that I like about my warrior yourself, and I will make them work in the civilian environment.

That's very hard to do.

So we end up kind of going below the water line where we're either separated, which is I only have veteran friends, I only hang out with veterans. I will only do things I'm a law enforcement office or whatever it is, and I won't engage in the civilian culture. But more often than not, and this is where we have that problem at the six months to one year mark,

Who the hell am I?

So when I added all that, sort of halfway through my postdoc year, I started the BANF groups and decided to sit down and write the book.

And I mean, I presumably the book is about all these things we've just been talking about, But I mean, what's in the book? Who did you write it for?

So I basically wrote it for the veteran who is just getting out, so that they can understand. And I didn't want to talk about myself at all. And then I was told by the publishers, like, yeah, you can't write a textbook.

Nobody's going to buy it. You have to tell your story, and I accept that as I note.

I think in the book, like at the Unit is the first time I ever got exposed to PTSD, And it's a sergeant major who came in and his his version of what happened kind of manifested as alcoholism.

And it was hard to track because the guys are.

So good that even his seventy percent was still, you know, enough to be some other guys one hundred percent until we had a catash. Until he had a catastrophic opsect issue and so he got fired and sent away. So he's talking to us about that, and it's at that point in time that I reached out so active duty to my opsite and I said.

You were there when there were a couple of suicides too in the unit, weren't you around that time frame two thousand and ten?

I don't ish not that I recall, you know, my memories all.

I don't recall the.

Motor vehicle accidents as well, But yeah, I don't recall specifically.

Either way.

Because that sergeant Major had kind of been open about it, I feel like I owe it to all the other veterans to say, like, okay, well if this happened to me as a guy who climbed all the way.

To the tip of the spear, then you know.

It's the umbrella that allows you to also then say it's okay to be sick.

That guy says he was sad, and it's okay for me to say that I'm right right.

So that's kind of the beginning part of the book is a lot of what we talked about, and then the back end of the book is kind of going through the symptoms how it's different from PTSD, how it's different from adjustment disorder, and then a little bit about the groups that I would run.

So the book is out now, it's called Warrior Withdrawal. We'll have links down the description for folks who want to check it out. Where's the best place they for people to go buy it?

Probably Amazon, Okay, it's probably the easiest. Or they can go to the publisher, Dallas Books.

And then another topic you had mentioned to me, I don't know if you want to get into it or how deep you want to get into it, about the courts being in some instances prejudiced against veterans, but like just simply for their service, that you know, this guy's a highly trained combat killer, blah blah blah.

So that's a great segue too, because I published a book, and because there are some literary devices to sort of make manifestor make it easier to understand the challenges that are going inside of somebody's head, that the book that I publish is being used against me in a court of law during my divorce.

So thinking, you know, maybe.

This was unique to me again, I reached out to some here and I realized that this is extremely common for veterans as as a community to struggle in the family court systems because my profession.

Is being used against me.

And you know, there's some attorneys are sneaky and they'll try to say like, all right, do you have a VA disability rating? Okay, well, isn't it true that you have you know, PTSD, and aren't you going to go

You know.

It's like, if you so the guy who has all of the control to manage all of this violence, that's me. I'm the least the last person you should be afraid of.

And he drives for uber.

So I'm like, okay, well we're back to that, Like, hey, avoidance and reexperiencing. These don't quite match up, and so we delve more into his personal history, and he's got an extremely awful situation in his marriage, and you know, there's events in his life that are going to cause it to come to a head here in the next year or two.

Like that may be why you're having these nightmares.

Your brain is unable to explain, you know, appending divorce in a way that makes sense. So it goes back to the last time you were ever this scared and afraid of an impending wreck, and so it plays that out in your head as a car crash.

It's unreal to me that a person that goes out and gets treatment, you know, that goes through the process to get help and has a VA disability rating, they're going in to see someone like you, they're going to therapy, and the courts see that as derogatory information that they can use against you, as if you're some sort of menace to society, even though you don't have a criminal record.

Yeah, and so we're stuck with the conundrum again. Where so again the book is written for the veteran to read to learn more about themselves, and I almost I believe that more likely than not, it's going to be the spouse that buys it or somebody that can cares for the veteran that buys it. And it's like, hey, you read this thing because this is you, and it's

It's like, that's not supposed to happen. That's not how.

Your medical record is protected. And yet you know it is a barrier to treatment. Guys will not come in, they will not admit that anything is wrong because they don't want to lose access to these things.

And so now this is just another one.

And so somewhat ironically or not ironically, and maybe working on another book to try to create a guide book for veterans and divorce to explain to them, we've just added moral injury into the Diagnostics Statistics manual. So that kind of compounds the warrior withdrawal, stuff like justice is not served or I thought I was going over to Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction and then that wasn't the case, and so in my mind it's like, well,

And that's an awful place to be so again, because most divorces.

Happen within six months of separation from the military. You have the veteran who has loss of identity, loss of sense of purposes, relying on substances, whatever it takes to get through the day, and now their spouse is accusing them of being a monster and filing, you know, to move away, and in the court this guy is crazy. He has all these guns. Uh, he's gonna go kill everybody.

Yeah, and we know what a lot of guys do. Unfortunately, right man, anything else that we haven't talked about, vorpiss that you want to make sure we cover tonight.

So I am on the board of this nonprofit called Operation Shield. It's we're trying to grow into more states. We're really only in California for now, and what we're trying to do is bridge that gap.

So catch the.

Active duty soldier sailor, airman, marine or guardian before they get out out and there's that kind of dead space between their enrollment into the VA where we can provide mental health services for them.

So Warrior Withdrawal is out now. People can find it on Amazon. Maybe a second book coming. Yeah, Varpus, thanks for sharing your story with us tonight, Sir, thanks for having me any final thoughts before we roll out of here tonight.

I would just say to all the veterans out there, you're not broken. You don't need to be fixed, just need training.

Absolutely. Thank you Varpus, and thank you everyone who watches tonight. Maybe there's a veteran in your life that you want to share this video with or get, or get Varpus's book for so we'll see all of you guys next time. Thanks for joining us tonight. Hey guys, I want to tell all of you today about a new newsletter that we're launching that encompasses both the Teamhouse podcast, the eyes On podcast, and the high Side News outlet which I run with Sean Naylor. The newsletter is gonna be once

It's really good checking it out.

The website for it is Teamhouse Podcast dot kit dot com, slash Join Teamhouse Podcast dot kit dot com slash Join. You go there and you enter into your email list or you enter your email into the little thing on the website and you're good to go and that'll be it. So we really appreciate your support and hope you'll consider signing up.

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The link will also be down the description if you're looking for it there, and

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