Since military mental health is raging through Twitter I guess it is a good time to share my story. Tens of thousands, maybe more, people have read the Hooligans of Kandahar, but pretty much nobody knows what happened when I got home.
When I got back to Hood I was mentally and physically broken. I had constant headaches, intrusive thoughts, and crippling back pain. I had to be helped out of my bed to go to work every day. I fell into mentally and physical abusive relationships and ghosted my own family
My leadership thought I was faking it or was "being a bitch" they demanded to know the details of my medical appointments and conditions. Then the command would talk amongst each other about how I was such a piece of shit
I had enlisted when I was 17. The army was the only family I had known my entire adult life and I was being abused and abandoned by them. I felt totally lost, alone, and hopeless. Like most people I started to self medicate and stopped being able to function entirely
This is probably where my story would have ended with someone telling my mom I flung myself off the barracks but 1 NCO stuck up for me. 1 fucking guy who didnt even know me. He hadn't deployed with us and had met me a few weeks before
He ordered me to go to the appointments I had been skipping and confronted people when they tried to disparage me for it. After work he would visit me and make sure I was doing okay and invited me over to his house for holidays so I wouldn't be alone.
In a unit of hundreds on a base of tens of thousands there was 1 guy who gave a shit. That 1 guy who had been brought up in the same toxic shitpile of a culture as everyone else fought back against it and probably saved my life.
And I'm really happy to hear he just got selected for Sergeant Major. But for every person like him there is countless people who would have chosen to treat that person in need like a burden. I know there is a lot of senior leadership who follow me now so
If you foster a toxic culture where leadership that harms its soldiers can thrive, you are going to kill people.
