Thread by @KrisGoldsmith85

My childhood dream of Army service became a living nightmare. At 19, my job was to document torture, death. Mutilated human faces stuck in my mind's eye. It left me incredibly vulnerable in so many ways.

I've been lucky to find other ways to serve, heal.

washingtonpost.com/national-secur…

2/ For years after I got out of the Army I had frequent, incredibly vivid nightmares of my friends getting hurt or killed. It quickly reached a point where I couldn't remember which of my friends were casualties in real life.

3/ As a way to help with my constant confusion, I kept every issue of the @MilitaryTimes, which was the only print publication I knew of at the time to print the names and photos of every KIA in Iraq and Afghanistan. I kept them stuffed in a bag, with photos I had taken in Iraq.

4/ Despite PTSD from my 2005 deployment, I had excelled in my Army career. Until the suicide attempt in 2007, when everything changed, literally overnight. Suddenly I was treated like a criminal. Isolated. My unit overseas, my support network, gone. Fighting, taking casualties.

5/ I attempted suicide on Memorial Day weekend, at the very end of May 2007. Then locked away on a mental health ward, unable to contact the outside world. Told that if my symptoms didn't clear up, I would be up there "indefinitely." I took that as a threat, a serious one.

6/ I felt like those who were charged with caring for me were out to get me.

There is nothing more frightening than being in isolation on a mental health ward in this condition.

7/ Saying that I was suddenly "fine" and no longer depressed or suicidal -- because I *believed* I'd be locked up *forever* and that it was my only way out of the mental health ward -- helped my command justify their desire to make an example out of me.

8/ In just a few weeks I was stripped of my "honorable" status, discarded, with a "General" discharge. I went from Sergeant Goldsmith, renting a house, with two cars, to living in my childhood bedroom. My military records looked like a criminal history. No education. No GI Bill.

9/ "The Government," in a very visceral way, had taken everything from me.

I had already been a conservative, Republican, Libertarian.

But the anti-big-government theories behind these legitimate political beliefs couldn't capture what I felt after my experiences.

10/ My trust in the military, in the people in charge, had been betrayed in an unfathomable way.

I wasn't just deeply hurt -- I was consumed by anger.

With bad-paper, I wasn't welcomed by the veteran community. At the time, couldn't join vast majority of vets orgs.

11/ The only vets community that was immediately welcoming was the anti-war movement, which was filled with veterans of all generations who had similarly horrific experiences. Like me, those experiences pushed many (not all) to political extremes.

12/ At first I gravitated towards the other conservatives within the group, the most extreme of whom were at that time (2008-2009) an early iteration of what we now call Boogaloo.

The Oathkeepers were just forming at this time, attempting to draw in folks like me.

13/ Having my trust betrayed by the military in my personal experience -- plus my world being shaped by Iraq, a war started on false pretenses -- made me vulnerable to a host of conspiracy theories.

14/ During the Obama/McCain election, with Americans broadly turning against the war, lots of press were paying attention to antiwar vets.

15/ My own media literacy was zilch at the time, and I was super skeptical of domestic press, which I felt were partly responsible for leading me and my friends to a war that most of America no longer supported.

16/ Being skeptical of domestic press and anti-US-government, that meant I was a Useful Idiot, doing tons of interviews with the likes of PressTV (Iran) and Russia Today (*before* it was abbreviated to "RT").

17/ A guy whose attic I spent time living in at an antiwar vets' house in DC went on to get his own fucking television show on Russia Today.

18/ That idiot was eventually arrested for publicly loading and racking a shotgun in DC, promoting a "million gun march." He intended to march hundreds of open-carrying, unlawful-militia types, veterans, across the bridge from Arlington VA to DC, to force a conflict with cops.

19/ This particular guy, and others like him, introduced me to a ton of fucking conspiracy theories, many of which I fell pretty hard for.

I watched this shitty propaganda video, "Zeitgeist: The Movie," and felt as if my eyes were opened to these vast, international conspiracies

20/ I was unemployable at this time not just because of my service records. I was a wreck. Angry. Confused. Depression, anxiety, and serious drinking binges... they consumed my life.

21/ I had been getting into fist fights at bars pretty regularly, one in 2008 left me with a broken face and TBI. Docs told me that I could have been killed by swelling and a bubble against my brain. (That had killed my best friend a few years prior after a car accident).

22/ Being unemployed for so long often meant I'd spend long periods alone. When I was in my parents' house, I was often glued to YouTube. The Zeitgeist movie gave me a ton of rabbit holes to fall down "doing my own research," finding videos aligned with my confirmation bias.

23/ What I now recognize as old anti-Semitic conspiracy theories -- were "just the facts" as laid out in Zeitgeist and similar "documentaries."

24/ This self-guided YouTube conspiracy theory journey I was taking... It made me part of a movement, I felt enlightened. I had learned the hard way not to trust institutions, so I no longer did. And it was my personal mission to evangelize.

25/ Coincidentally, WaPo also published this today -- on a veteran in similar circles who produced one of the most influential "9/11 was an inside job" conspiracy theory videos. "Loose Change" was a huge part of the disconnecting people (me) from reality.
washingtonpost.com/nation/interac…

26/ How did I get away from being consumed by a belief in conspiracy theories?

A shit load of therapy, for one. With a General Discharge I still qualified for VA services (unlike many others with worse forms of bad-paper).

27/ With a diagnosis of PTSD by the VA (which I did not get from the Army, despite months of treatment prior to my suicide attempt) I was able to start a treatment plan that addressed the chief underlying issue: I was horribly fucking traumatized.

28/ Traumatized not just by war, but by the systems that failed me when I needed help.

It look about five years for me to reach a point where I felt like I was able to take a step forward -- after reeling backwards for years.

29/ Next thing that helped me de-radicalize: having an opportunity to go to school. Though I didn't qualify for the GI Bill, I eventually learned I could go to school using VR&E, a VA program for service-disabled veterans.

30/ The antiwar movement had exposed me to folks who I was politically the polar opposite of. Though we disagreed on virtually everything, relationships were formed on the things that brought us together in the first place: war is hell and the government sucks.

31/ Though I was friends with these people, it wasn't until I got a couple semesters under my belt that I could understand them, and how they formed their opinions. Prior to going to school, the only books (and other media) that I consumed were that which fed my confirmation bias

32/ School forced me to defend my own ideas -- to drop the logical fallacies (which is impossible if you don't know what "logical fallacies" means), and ultimately, to drop the beliefs that I didn't have evidence to support.

33/ Example: It wasn't until I took Econ 101+102 that I really learned how much of an idiot I was trying to debate people on going back to the Gold Standard just because "Dr" Ron Paul had me convinced it was necessary.

34/ In school I found my passion, and a way to channel my energy, my passion, my rage, in a positive direction.

After sharing my military/veteran experience with a guy who quickly became my mentor, I was introduced to the world of advocacy.

35/ I was still pissed at the system that failed me, the government, the military. I am still pissed about those failings.

But rather than waste my energy lashing out in destructive ways, I was taught to channel it into real solutions *that would help others.*

36/ Having advocacy as an outlet -- which I couldn't have found without first going through years of therapy to learn to recognize and control my PTSD symptoms -- became in and of itself therapeutic, allowing me to feel "unstuck" for the first time since I was a teenager.

37/ Flashing forward... advocacy led to my launching a nonprofit, to my career working with veterans organizations... to serving my country without literally "fighting," as in doing violence -- but still fighting for justice.

38/ Advocacy gave me a mission and purpose, and a way to find a new, more healthy community. Advocacy led me to meet the woman who would become my wife, @Lkatzenberg (who was then the a cofounder and the managing editor of @TaskandPurpose).