My Veteran Story - and Why I Started This Website
I decided to interview myself, since my transition experience is ultimately the reason that I decided to start this website. It’s a long read, so I have broken it up into two parts. This first part really focuses on the emotional side of the decision to leave the military, the experience of losing pieces of my identity as a Soldier, and how I really felt as I navigated this process. The second post contains a lot more of the tactile things that I grappled as I learned how to navigate the world beyond the military.
These two posts are really my story and I have tried to be as honest as possible to reflect my experience. I will tell you right now, my experience is only my experience. There are things I have done, mistakes that I have made, and struggles that I navigate which are uniquely mine. If you are a transitioning veteran, some of this may resonate with you, other parts may not. My path is not a be-all-end-all recipe for success. It is just the path that I walked that got me to this point. So, please, season all apocryphal stories contained within as much salt as necessary. As this series grows and I share more veteran stories, I look forward to fleshing this out with people who had radically different experiences than my own.
If you want to jump straight to the second piece, you can navigate to it here.
1. When did you first feel like you were leaving the military—even if you hadn’t officially left yet?
I first got the itch to leave the Army when I promoted to Captain. I was serving as a General’s Aide and had a bright future ahead of me. I was good at what I did, loved being in uniform, and enjoyed the challenge. Ironically, being an Aide is what ruined me.
I saw a repeated pattern I couldn’t shake. General Officers were sharp, empathetic, strategic. They had common sense. They hated unnecessary complexity, called out self-licking ice cream cones, and ignored bureaucracy when it made sense to. But the officers between me and them—the Majors, Lieutenant Colonels, and Colonels—often made everything harder. They were trapped between higher headquarters, regulations, their commanders’ intent, and the reality of their units. The result? Complicated, risk-averse decisions with bad second- and third-order effects.
As an Aide, I had a view of this in real time. I saw how a Brigadier General and a First Lieutenant could both arrive at the same solution—and watch it die in the middle. I couldn’t ignore that. And I couldn’t go back to pretending I hadn’t seen it, or that I wanted to be in the middle of it.
I also never had strong relationships with my battalion commanders. I was a logistics officer, often "othered" in maneuver units. It wasn’t often a malicious thing, more that I had to earn my place, and earning it meant countering the bad experiences they had with past logistics leaders. It wasn’t until I joined a Special Forces battalion that I felt genuinely accepted, ironically. But by then, I already knew. Life above the Battalion level would crush me on a moral level.
I decided I’d stay long enough to command a company, to give my Soldiers everything I had learned. But I had a clock ticking. From the moment I realized I was leaving, I gave myself about four years.
2. What part of your military identity was the hardest to let go of—or are you still holding onto it?
Direct communication. That was, and is, the hardest.
I used to operate in a world where blunt honesty was the expectation, not the exception. In the military, especially in line units, we spoke plainly. You could disagree with someone and still grab lunch with them the same day. Conflict wasn’t toxic. It was clarifying. I had plenty of fellow Officers and NCOs who would come to me and say “You’re wrong about this” and it pretty typically led to a good discussion because we had a great bond of mutual respect and trust.
In the civilian world, directness is often labeled aggression. And I get it. I’m a 6-foot, 225-pound, bearded veteran who speaks with conviction. When I say something directly or passionately, it’s heard as a threat or anger, not a contribution. Especially in tech, where subtext and soft skills reign supreme, my default style reads as too much. Too blunt. Too intense. Look, they may be right. Trust is made of different interactions on the outside. Still human, but the path to get there doesn’t include many of the things that I relied on to build foundational trust in the uniform.
My fiancée was the first to point this out in a way that made it stick. She helped me see that communication styles aren’t just about words—they’re about power, perception, and the emotional expectations people bring into a room. A large dude who gets a bit animated about something and says “I disagree” is not exactly an invitation for feedback to conflict averse people.
So I’m still learning. Still figuring out how to be effective without being perceived as domineering. But I miss the clarity. I miss being in an environment where plain speech was a sign of respect.
“In reality, I was lost. ”
3. What did you think your transition would look like—and when did it all start to wobble?
Like all great war heroes, I thought I’d get out and become either an Operations Manager, a Consultant, or a Project Manager, because those are the only three jobs that exist. I didn’t really have any ideas beyond that point.
In reality, I was lost.
My transition was defined more by what I wanted to escape than what I wanted to pursue. I didn’t want to go into sales. I didn’t want to make a bunch of PowerPoint slides at Deloitte. I didn’t believe I could start a company. So I aimed at the jobs veterans are supposed to want, because I didn’t know what I actually wanted.
I talked to headhunters. Got pitched everything from Program Manager in Incest, Alabama, to Dollar General Manager in Truck Stop, Kansas to Medical Sales Rep in Atlanta. All technically plausible. None of them resonated, though I couldn’t explain why yet.
And then, for a moment, I thought things were finally lining up.
I accepted a contingent job offer from a government contracting firm. I’d had a great set of interviews, liked the team, and walked away feeling good. It was early. I hadn’t even started terminal leave yet, and I thought I was set. For the first time in months, I felt relief.
And then, two weeks later, I looked closer. The job didn’t exist. It was contingent; meaning it only materialized if the contract got awarded. I didn’t actually have a job. I had the illusion of one.
That realization hit hard. All that relief? Gone. I spiraled and started applying to anything and everything. I started questioning whether I’d been delusional. Started believing the headhunters who told me I was only fit for overnight warehouse roles or medical sales. Maybe I had been running from it. Maybe I was just a medical sales rep and I needed to accept it. I want to be clear here, I don’t mean to imply that medical sales reps or overnight managers are bad jobs, I mean to say that those jobs didn’t align with my definition of success for my transition, and the process of revisiting that was a difficult one.
And I was this close to giving in.
But right as I reached that edge, luck struck. A real offer came through. A veteran-operated company. A friend of a friend had vouched for me. It wasn’t perfect. But it was real. And it pulled me out of the spiral.
So, what actually happened?
I didn’t have conviction. I didn’t have clarity. I had no stable vision of what I wanted. In the absence of that, I chased what others told me I should want. And I got lucky. That’s the truth of my transition. It wasn’t strategic. It wasn’t tidy. It was messy, chaotic, and deeply human.
And that one moment between contingent hope and collapsing certainty was the microcosm of the whole thing.
You’re fine. Until you’re not. And then, sometimes, you get lucky. From there, it’s all about how you capitalize on any lucky break.
4. Was there a specific moment you realized you were no longer ‘in’? What triggered that?
Yes. My unit deployed while I was preparing for terminal leave.
After years with them, including a 20-month command and a deployment, they left, and I didn’t. They were sharpening for war. I was refreshing job boards.
That contrast was devastating. I wasn’t useful anymore. I wasn’t essential. And I wasn’t ready.
All my closest friends deployed. I stayed behind. The Army didn’t need to push me out, it just moved on without me.
And in that silence, everything hit. The identity loss. The fear. The grief. I hadn’t become anything yet. I had only stopped being something. Despite that, I still had to tell them I was confident that everything was going exactly the way it was supposed to… except it wasn’t, as evidenced earlier.
That’s one of the stranger parts of the transition, saying goodbye to your unit and needing to constantly project not just optimism, but certainty that everything is going exactly according to a plan. Everyone just assumes it, and you don’t want to be the one guy that says “this is pretty hard.”
“Getting out is the process of becoming a shitbag by way of putting yourself first.”
5. Did you ever feel like you were betraying the team by getting out? What did that tension feel like?
Not betrayal, more like I had quit. And that, in some ways, felt worse.
In some ways it was true. The Soldier’s Creed says “I will never quit,” and yet here I was, quitting. That reality didn’t sit cleanly. I had no new identity to replace the one I was leaving behind, and the one I was stepping away from had been core to my sense of self. I had made an irrevocable decision, and it directly contradicted everything I had built my internal compass around.
Now, put that up against the fact that I knew, I knew, I served honorably. I gave the Army everything it asked of me. I was a good officer. I didn’t punch out early. I finished the fight. Not everyone can say that. I can. That gave me peace. But it didn’t erase the tension.
I think that’s the piece people outside the military miss. It’s not that we think our buddies are going to hate us for leaving. It’s that we don’t know who we are without them. We don’t know how to be someone who isn’t serving the team. You get so used to being one gear in the machine that stepping out of it feels selfish, because it is selfish. And for the first time in your career, it has to be.
I say this all the time to veterans I coach through Candorful practice interviews: “I’m not hiring your team. I’m hiring you.”
Getting out is the process of becoming a shitbag by way of putting yourself first.
So no, I didn’t feel like I betrayed the team. I did feel like I had stepped away from the mission. I had removed myself from the arena. I had made myself tangibly replaceable. That feeling lingered for a long time.
Even if you still show up every day, even if you’re still sharing knowledge and mentoring others, you’re not in the fight anymore. And the Army doesn’t really have a place for people who aren’t all-in. It’s not cruel. It’s just pragmatic.
That’s the truth of the organization. Someone else always steps in. That’s how it’s designed. Next man up.
And that’s fine. That’s necessary. But when you’ve been one of the people who others counted on in a crisis and you remove yourself from that roster, it does something to you. You know it was the right choice. You also know that you’ve opted out of being useful in the way that you always have been.
And the thing is, I knew this was something I had to do for me. I knew that staying in, just for the sake of being in, would turn me into someone bitter. Someone toxic. I didn’t want to become the kind of battalion commander who was going through the motions, who didn’t believe in the mission anymore but was just doing it out of inertia or fear of change.
That’s not fair to the Soldiers. It’s not fair to the uniform.
It’s not just about competence. It’s about belief. You can’t fake belief. Your Soldiers can feel it. And if you don’t have it anymore, you owe it to them to step aside.
