A Warrior’s Journey Home: Why I Chose Psychedelic Healing…

Part 1: The Fall

Entire Afghan Army Corps were falling back and collapsing. Entire Afghan National Army units were being wiped out, deleted from the battlefield. The Taliban was back and had taken ground at an astonishing pace. Me and the boys had been watching this happen. We traded twitter posts and received leaked intel assessments and texts from buddies still in the killing machine. It all alluded to one undeniable conclusion… Afghanistan was in the process of full-on collapse and the Taliban is about to complete a lightning takeover of the nation we had fought and bled for. Died and cried over. They were about to snuff the wick on the dream of liberty and freedom for Afghan women. I feel a deep chill run through my body, the kind I imagine when you hear the doctor annunciate “cancer” for the second time because you couldn’t comprehend it at first. I shudder and take a deep breath; tears fill my eyes and I can’t make out my daughters face. “Oh God, please, please send us a miracle”. The Afghan Government is falling, the dream of a free Afghanistan is falling, and with it, I fall into a dark spiral of pain, anger, despair and self-doubt.

In the days after my daughters’ birth, I post a message on Facebook, asking for help, for connections, for anything, for a miracle. The next few months, the first of Stella’s life, consume me day and night in a frantic effort to collect as many names, as many families, as many allies as humanly possible to send to the State Department in an effort to help provide a pathway for evacuation. A hope that some of these people may get to safety, to salvation. We build a small working group of about a half dozen veterans I had served with… men and women who are desperate to help their friends, to help their Afghan brothers escape the hell our Commander in Chief has just sentenced them to. I stay up until 3 or 4 in the morning, night after night, entering name after name into spreadsheets – matching their names with their passport photos. Shahudin age 3, Zalmay age 6, Mirhan age 7: PRIORITY US CITIZEN CHILD. Night after night, I enter their names into State Department forms and their faces burn themselves into my mind. Day after day, night after night, we work on building routes to Kabul, collaborating with friends in Intelligence Agencies on Taliban checkpoint locations. And night after night, I stare at the faces of young Americans with Afghan names trapped and left behind. In every single face, I see my baby girl. The harder I work, the more I see her. The more I work, the harder it becomes to hold back the tears. As I hold Stella in the early hours of the morning while she cries, names and faces flood my mind – Hamza age 2, Murad age 4, Salma age 5, Ashwan age 1: PRIORITY US CITIZEN CHILD. My tears silently fall onto my daughters’ face, masked in my mind by all these little passport photos, little American babies abandoned by their nation, abandoned by our President. I ask myself, “How can they not see their humanity?” I feel like I have been robbed. Robbed of the joy I was supposed to have in the first months of my daughter’s life. Robbed by morons who’ve never served and get fat and rich with their families on the spoils of this war and the next. I ask myself if the greater crime is to have exposed a generation of Afghan girls to the idea of freedom or to have never told them it existed at all – which vision of this hell hurts less? To know nothing but the Hell of Taliban rule or to know there is something different out there? I choose to believe that Human liberty is a candle that once lit, can never be fully extinguished. A generation of smoldering Afghan candles is the best I can ask for. I pray “God give them the tinder to turn the Taliban into a bonfire.” I hold on for a miracle as the anxiety builds. The clock is ticking and on August 31st, it stops. I try to breathe and focus on the moment. The moment is hell… I find myself holding back panic and a desire to scream.

The days are long and the nights longer. I wake up exhausted. After the caffeine kicks in, I feel ashamed and embarrassed. I am watching this hell live and my fellow Americans couldn’t give a shit less. It’s just another 24 hour news cycle. They’ll be wrapped up in anger about something new tomorrow. Each night I retreat to my basement and tears fill my eyes. More names, more faces, more families, more fathers begging me through broken english to help save their families. I’m filled with rage as I watch a congress and administration of hypocrites talk about freedom while damning generations of Afghans to a living hell and the best of Afghan society to death. “How could they fuck this up so badly?” I am filled with anger, with rage. The kind I haven’t felt in a long time. I lash out at those closest to me over trivial things. I feel hopeless. “He’s not mad at you,” my wife explains to my parents. “This is about Afghanistan”. In this moment, I feel like a broken man. The same broken man who returned home from the war and spent the last 6 years putting himself back together, trying desperately to return home.

I thought the war was over, I thought I was home. But I was still in Afghanistan. Still tied to the war, still tied emotionally and morally to this feeling of monumental failure. I think of all the places I’d seen there… the beauty of the Arghandab Valley in summer, a stark contrast between impassable, brutally harsh desert and the lush growth of the river valley, made fertile through generations of labor digging irrigation canals. I think of passing by mud-walled fortresses, so old they were rumored to have been built by Alexander the Great on his way to founding his Afghan city, Kandahar. In my mind, I see the fields of poppy in Helmand, I see machine gun rounds tear the earth at my feet. I see myself and one of my soldiers tucked into a small hole in a cliffside, a hasty observation post. How many other soldiers had sat in this same place? Had Soviet Spetsnaz sat here decades ago? Had men from the Empire of Great Britain sat here more than a century ago, watching a scene eerily similar? Had Alexander sent his reconnaissance forces to sit here millennia ago? We overwatch American forces negotiating with the tribal leaders in the town hundreds of feet below us. I think about how many times this same scenario has played out, century after century. How many Armies marched through these lands to meet their inevitable demise? I won’t let this war destroy me, I can’t let this war destroy my soul. I have to find a way to heal again. I know I can heal from the wounds of war, I’ve seen it before in my life. “It’s time to look at what’s next, not what happened,” I think to myself.

I had worked with a number of counselors at Duquesne University’s Military Psychology Clinic over the past 6 years and felt I had healed many of the wounds left on my soul by the war. All that work feels undone within a few weeks. Emotional scar tissue rips open as I watch a mass of humanity plead and beg to be rescued from rape, torture, and certain death. I try to act as if I’m ok in this moment. I am anything but ok. I hop in my car and try to put some miles between my mind and my computer, my spreadsheets of little Afghans. “My God, what have we done? My God, what a nightmare. My God, this can’t be happening. My God, my God, let me wake up from this nightmare!” My heart starts to beat quickly. My thoughts race. I try to grasp onto them, but they slip through, spilling out as tears. I can’t breathe, I’m going to puke. I pull the car over and sob. “My God, what have we done?” So, this is what a panic attack must feel like. “Panic attacks. Well, that’s new,” I think to myself. These wounds are being ripped open and salt poured into them as I watch our Commander in Chief lie about how his administration is doing everything they can. I smoke Marijuana constantly to try to numb the anxiety, the hopelessness, the anger, the panic, the pain. Nothing helps, nothing seems to be working and each day, I learn about new nightmares. I learn a close friend’s father and brother were beaten badly by the Taliban and need to be hospitalized. I learn of colossal new fuck-ups by the people in charge. And each day, the clock ticks. I heard constantly in the lead-up to the election about “being on the right side of history with this administration.” Well, if this is the right side of history, I’d rather be wrong. The “right side of history” crowd isn’t doing a damn thing about the horrors we’re seeing every morning, and it doesn’t seem like they even care. All this misery so the President can hold a meaningless event on the 20th Anniversary of September 11th and say he was the one who got all the troops out. What terrible cost will we pay in the future for being “on the right side of history”, whatever the hell that means.

The worst happens. And what makes it worse is, we knew it was coming. An ISIS Khorasan fighter detonates a suicide vest in the mass of humanity at the gates of Hamid Kharzai airport. He kills 12 Marines, a Soldier and close to 200 Afghans. This attack accomplishes its goal and halts all further efforts to evacuate the families now in hiding in Kabul. I am absolutely crushed. I feel like the last indignity laid upon the veterans of Afghanistan is to have had more of us killed by the stupidity of DC lawyers and their bullshit rules of engagement. The rumor mill tells us two separate sniper teams had this walking smart bomb in their sights but were denied permission to eliminate him because of the risk of civilian casualties. Imagine that. Imagine the fucking stupidity of saying something like that from an air conditioned legal office to men who must now watch their brothers be engulfed in a ball of flames and shrapnel. This wouldn’t be the last monumental fuck-up before we left. The President’s Administration would go on to trust intelligence from the Taliban and fire a missile into the car of an Afghan aid worker delivering water, killing him and 7 children. I can’t think straight, I’m so furious, this final indignity feels like too much. “How could they fuck this up so badly? How could we fuck this up so badly? How could I fuck up so badly?” I feel massive shame wash over me. I had never imagined being able to feel such great failure inside of me.

This great tragedy, this monumental failure passes from our national conscious as we move on to football season, to the MLB playoffs, to the Emmy’s, to what some vapid celebrity did this week… anything but the reality of what I and my brothers know just happened. Our friends, our Afghan Brothers, just lost their homeland. All that blood, all that sacrifice, all those lives lost for nothing. My childhood hero Rocky Bleier’s words swirl in my mind… “What was it all for? All those men, for what?” His war ended in a similar fashion and now I feel more akin to this Super Bowl Champion, this living hero of mine, than I did sitting across from him talking all things infantry a few years ago. Failure. I feel like a failure, and it creeps into all parts and portions of my life. I feel like I am a terrible father, I feel nothing but despair and can’t think about anything but Afghanistan and the people we left behind. At times I feel like I am losing my mind. How can people be carrying on with their lives like this didn’t happen? I’m having nightmares of shadows stealing my daughter from her crib. I wake up in cold sweats, I rush to her room to sob as I find her still in her crib. I check to make sure the all the doors of our house are locked 2-3-4 times. Nothing helps. Nowhere feels safe. I’m dreaming of horrors of war taking place outside my front door. I start to understand why so many Vietnam Vets carried so much anger through their lives and into their graves.

Thanksgiving rolls around and my wife’s cousin comes into town to have dinner with us. We chat about all the normal things families talk about. Then she asks me how I’m doing. I hold back tears and tell her the truth. “Not well,” I say. “What happened in Afghanistan took a real toll on me.” Our conversation turns to topics most families don’t discuss – psychedelic healing. She explains that she is leading plant medicine retreats and working with a group of psychedelic healers to provide these services. In the Army, I’d seen the good, the bad, the ugly, and the great when it comes to leaders. I respect my wife’s cousin immensely. She is a natural born leader. I love great leaders. She built a thriving law firm in Los Angeles and then sold it to pursue her passion for coaching and leading others in business. That passion helped my wife grow her own business by leaps and bounds. She is bold and brave and tells me that we should have a conversation about healing and plant medicine. I wholeheartedly agree. I’ve heard about the life changing effects of Ayahuasca ceremonies and at this point, I’ll try anything. I feel so broken and filled with despair on a daily basis.