317: What if you found peace in the fog of war?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. You have to go far deep into hell to find heaven. Had to have the trauma. Had to have the hurt. You have to have the pain. You have to have the pain. It's painful to grow.

And for something to grow, something else must die. Over and over and over. The seed, the sprout, the bud, the flower, back to fucking dirt. I'm sure it all hurts every step of the process. So everything that's happened before now was a necessary evil to achieve this state. From Wondery, I'm Wit Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 317. What if you found peace in the fog of war?

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Quote today at progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Comparison rates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. I am of Filipino and Thai descent. I'm a first generation American. My dad is from the Philippines and my mom is from Thailand. Backstory on my mom is my mom is from Thailand. So in Thailand, you can have multiple marriages.

But it sounds like most of the finance stuff stayed with the first marriage. And if you could afford anything else, it would take care of the second marriage. So my grandmother was the second wife in this three-way marriage, has three kids. And for a couple of years, this is all good. And so the first wife one day is like, I'm not having this no more. I want my husband back. The first wife was no longer good with the deal. So to get her husband back, she takes the three girls and kidnaps them.

So my grandmother's biological daughters were kidnapped by the first wife, my mom's stepmother. So for three years, my grandma's trying to find her daughters. She can't. Daughters are gone. I can't find them. At this time, my grandfather was a GI who's in the army for the Vietnam War, gets out of the army, joins the Air Force, and she meets him. And she ends up being his laundry lady. So they meet, they fall in love, and he brings her back to the States, to California, to

The girls were still in Thailand. And as my mom starts growing up, she's a tough kid. She's the oldest of three girls. And so she's the rebellious teenage daughter. So with my mom being kidnapped and taken from her mother, she's a bad teen because she's never had a mom. So my grandfather sends her like, you're out. I'm done with you. I can't handle this shit. You're out. They send her off because he can't take care of her and sends her to California. So they ship her off.

And she came here probably freshman year of high school. She doesn't speak any English, but she makes a friend, Maggie, which is my dad's younger sister. And that's how she meets my father. The way my father describes his childhood, very poor, very hard. He describes himself as a bad kid in the Philippines, always getting into shit. And they were farm workers. My grandfather, his father, was a bodybuilder way back in the day.

That career led them to go to Hawaii for the first time and leave the Philippines. He had a daughter there. They worked the sugar cane fields. And he came here probably around the sixth grade. And when he came here, he was a migrant farm worker working the fields in Salinas. The kind of personality my father has, not educated by any means, but hyper intelligent. Like this guy can figure out the solution to any freaking problem, can build anything. I think by today's standards, he'd probably be considered like on the spectrum.

He's that smart that like patience and tolerance when other people don't get it, like just drive him through the roof. And being that smart, when you don't get it, he can't compute. And there's no other perspective than his own, which can make it very terrifying as a little kid. He was a very angry man.

I attribute that to maybe having to work so hard and so much. He had three jobs to support us when we were kids. Truck driver, apartment manager, working nights, then coming home working straight to the days. And I think his threshold was just toast when it came to kids. She's very quick-witted. She talks shit nonstop. She's hilarious. But I think what affected her the most was the marriage to my father. I remember the fights and the yelling and the screaming.

Was he abusive to her? Absolutely. So when he was home, he was mean and putting hands on her. And then he was just gone. She was a stay-at-home mom and she felt trapped. I believe she still struggles with PTSD from him today. I don't remember them saying the word divorce, but all I remember is one day my mom was gone. She had left back for Thailand for years. So one day she was gone

We moved houses to a different house in Sassoon where my dad's mom can take care of us. And every other weekend was allocated to my mom's mom, my grandma, picking us up and bringing us to Sausalito for the weekend. And I remember asking where my mom was and she said, well, she's in Thailand. So living with my dad after my mom left, it wasn't even like living with him. He drank a lot, a lot.

And probably a couple of years living in Fairfield, he meets my stepmom. They get married and decide to move to Pleasant Hill because she was living in San Francisco. So it was like a halfway point. And now it's just me and my sister in this apartment, night and day. There was no one, like no one at the house, no one making sure like you did your work or checking on you if you had a good day or it was just nothing. You were just there. It was like a prison.

When my mom came back from Thailand, she moved in with my grandma in Sausalito. And it's still maintained. We just saw her like every other weekend. If that, for the remainder of high school. There was no like mother-son bond. The way a lot of Asians show love is like they feed you until you're sick and they give you money. Emotions aren't really things that they dealt with. They didn't get it, so they don't know how to give it. Growing up alone without a mentor or a guide,

I started to gravitate towards the kids that look like me. So if you're Mexican, if you're black, if you're Filipino, I think when you grew up as a first-gen Asian American, like you don't really fit in this realm because you're not white or black, but then you don't fit in that realm either. So most of us had to like wear a mask. And I remember like it was like to a heightened level of the amount of interest I had in females just because I wanted that warmth.

I think filling the cup with the girls was less sexual and it was more so just comfort, just comfort, just warmth. Was there an attraction to beauty? Yeah. But did that really matter? No. I just wanted to spend all my time every day with a girl. And that carried over to high school where I had gotten into a serious relationship early on and spent all my high school career with her.

We ended up getting married and that was my first marriage. I think a lot of people that come from really shitty childhoods, the quickest ticket out of a shitty childhood is the one-way ticket into adulthood. So that was military. It was marriage. It was getting the fuck out. I knew I'd want to be a soldier probably like age four. I knew it. My grandfather was a veteran, had all his Vietnam shit all over the house. In the basement, there was photo albums and gear, all kinds of stuff. I was fascinated. I'm like, this is wild.

you know you're five years old you open this photo album there's body parts and like what the growing up alone and having those kind of influences but then being stuck watching movies day in day out with no one to hang out with like don't want to do anything with right i had kind of manifested this weird ideal of what a man or a hero was like my favorite movie was like commando from the ages like five to like ten i couldn't get enough of that

My father was against it. He's like, I'm going to disown you if you join the army. I didn't come here and work this hard so you can go in the military. But it was just something I knew I was going to do, which then made high school kind of a joke. Because I'm like, you know what? None of this matters. I know what I'm going to do regardless. So at this point, we're just killing the clock. My mom was always super supportive of what I wanted to do in my life. So even though we didn't have the greatest relationship, when I was 17 and a half, she agreed to sign a waiver so I can enlist and go.

It was May, May of 2001. I go through maps. I sign my contract with my waiver. I'm like, this is it. The deal is done. I'm going to the base. This is the life. This is what I wanted to do. And three weeks into basic combat training, 9-11 happens. Shit had suddenly got real where I thought I was just gonna get some money for college and kill some time. No, like we were in a full-fledged war. I wasn't aware of like the stages of grief when the attack happened, but I definitely went through them.

And I think for a long time, anger was like the happy place because being angry felt better than being sad. Feeling angry allowed me to perform action rather than being stuck in apathy. But anger is finite. Anger is just like the initial push on the gas pedal. And when you're 18 and you're an infantryman and suddenly the call to war has been summoned, suddenly you're all in. Everything shifts. First you're scared, then you're angry, and then you're like, fuck it, let's go.

So suddenly like we had purpose. We wanted to go to war. You're excited. What is a fireman without a fire? Well, what's a football player without the Super Bowl? What is an infantryman without a war? You know, it's like your destiny. It's a weird thing. Now, like I wasn't just wearing the uniform. Now I was it, right? I identified with everything the army valued. I identified with my purpose. It's cult-like, right? It has to be.

If you are going to be the first one in the door to jump on the grenade, yeah, you have to full on accept what it is that you are. I remember going through the training, basic, AIT, which is where you got your job training, fucking war on terror. Oh, this and that. Oh, this is happening. Threat con level, bravo, Charlie, alpha, just every day. And you just got hungrier and hungrier and hungrier because that's what they fed us. The fall of 2003, we deployed to Iraq.

First stop was Kuwait. And we get there with all our shit. None of us had been anywhere, probably with the exception of our first sergeant at the time. And there's nervousness, there's excitement, there's a lot of fuckery. I never thought that going to war meant coming home. I saw it as one-sided because from what they always told us is that we were the tip of the spear where the rubber meets the road. So that was like ingrained, like this is what we're doing.

When I thought about Iraq, I thought it was going to be like Black Hawk Down, right? Just this intense amount of fighting all day, every day. We get there, it's a desert, it's hot, it's sandy, and there's a lot of waiting. A shit ton of waiting. We stage up all the vehicles for the brigade, just lines and lines and lines of strikers mixed in with logistical vehicles for our fuel and our food and our bullets.

It's kind of like D-Day when you're sitting there lined up in chocks and there's like hundreds, thousands of vehicles on the border of Kuwait were even pushed through into Iraq. And no jump today, sometimes you'd form up and then not go. The anxiety was nonstop. Like hurry up and wait. It's not a joke. It's a real thing.

And I remember like lining up and as we start to make the push, it's almost surreal. It feels like a movie, but there was genuine excitement to go to battle. Like we all were, we were hungry for it. The beginning wasn't exactly what I thought war was going to be. I didn't realize that because it was the fall headed into the winter, the enemy pretty much goes dormant. Like they don't have cold weather gear like we have. So they just go hide. So we go through Samara and

do a bunch of raids and like nothing. All right. And then we go to Missoula, nothing. And then go to Tal Afar. And the place in Tal Afar that we took over was from the 101st Airborne Division. So they had like a division there. We were going to replace that with a brigade. And we were going to staff that city with a company. So a company's worth of men is like 140, 150 dudes. The city was about 200,000 people.

So we had a big base and then we had a combat operation post inside the city, smack dab in the city, renamed Rock Base. So that's where we would live. We would conduct security on ourselves. We would do our own logistics operations. We'd go back to the FOB, get our supply, come back. And then we'd do our missions. So there's three platoons, we rotate in threes. Security, logistics, operations. Rock Base is like literally where I cut my teeth in combat.

If you get sick of the way someone breathes or farts or talks, chews their food, it's because you've spent 24 of the last 24 hours with them for a year. So the story that sticks with me the most out of all this time in the military or combat was the day ECP-2 happened. ECP stands for exit control point. There were two of them at this base.

ECP-1 was for just foot traffic. And ECP-2 is where vehicles would go through. There's strikers, water, sewage, supplies, stuff like that. So we had just gotten through the winter. Spring was starting. And it was our week of security for the FOB. So it was our week to man the towers, man the gates. And it was probably day three of security. We were doing 12-hour shifts, just standing there. And this is after months of nothing, just nothingness.

Back then, I wore nine magazines on my chest. I had two on my rifle. I was at 11, 11 magazines. And I probably had like 12 M203 rounds on a belt. After months of like nothing, that day I'm like, I'm not wearing this shit. My fucking back hurts. And I leave it. I leave it. So I go out to ECP-2 and it's me and my buddy Corporal Bell, us two. And I remember it was probably midday around lunch. And I pull out of Miami, which is like the Arab fucking Marlboro area.

I pull out of my Emmy and I lean back and I take a pull off my cigarette. And just out of the corner of my eye, I just see something just fall. What the fuck was that? And I remember screaming like grenade. And I scream grenade. It blows up. And another grenade comes in. There's two. I pop up and I look across the street and there's a three man RPG team staring at me. So I put my sight on the guy holding the RPG and I just started gauging. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

Bell hasn't come to me behind this barrier. He's laying there and he's screaming for help. He's screaming for me. He's like, Sagamon, come fucking help me, man. Come help me. I'm like, bro, I gotta, I gotta fucking return fire, man. So I'm engaging this three-man team. Dude falls. I'm on the radio. Like, hey, SOG, Sergeant of the Guard. I need help. Nothing. Nothing. I'm engaging this team. Another guy picks up the RPG. This time he fires it.

And we talked about the anxiety like pre-incident, how the waiting can drive people crazy. But when the bell finally rings, it's kind of like the entire time dimension stops where we see it as kind of linear, but it just like collapses. So I'm engaging this team, but everything's happening in slow motion where I can see the tube. I see the rocket coming out of the tube and I'm watching it come at me in real time. And I'm just engaging the

Until it gets close enough and I just duck. Boom. Goes off. I get back up. I'm reloaded. I'm engaging again. Another one down. Another RPG comes from around the corner. This happens a total of three times where I've watched three rockets come at my face, but I can see it traveling at me with the smoke coming out behind it. Bell is still screaming my name. And up above and behind me is a tower.

In the towers, we had big 7.62 machine guns. And the other two, we had SAWS, so 5.56 machine guns. And when a young guy from Alabama, it just froze. It just froze and watched the whole thing. You can train as much as you want. It doesn't matter if you're a cop, a soldier, or a firefighter. On any given day, you might not be able to perform. And that was his day. It might have just been too much for him to see. I don't know.

He's supposed to be covering for us. And if he would have just opened up and sprayed that 7.62 right there, like it would have just been done with. It would have been over, right? But he didn't. In the midst of this firefight, no one's coming out to help us. It's just me. It's just me with my M4. I probably go through six or seven magazines and no one's coming out. And I'm still taking fire. I'm like, what the fuck?

While all of this is going down, the other ECP-1 is getting attacked and they're engaging. And then the school across the street were two snipers. So behind me was a gate where the reinforcements were supposed to come out from. But every time they went to the gate, they'd get lit up and have to go back in. I feel like this incident maybe lasted 30 minutes. So when it was all said and done, and when I looked around to see the damage that was caused by the RPGs and the gunfire, it's a miracle that I'm here. I can't explain it.

But the thing that stuck with me the most for so long was Bell's screams. Because he was screaming for me. He was hit. He was hit in the face with shrapnel. That fucked me up for a long time. After this incident, it was spring. The weather was getting better. So the enemy is getting more active in the city. It wasn't long after that, we started taking regular heavy attacks where lots of mortar fire every night.

Everyone would be in their racks and these start taking some incoming and then all of us would run out and we'd get back to back and start launching two or three rounds whenever we could outside the walls just to get them to shut up. As a rifle squad leader, I was in charge of six people and a lot of times I was the point man on patrols. And I found that like being responsible for these people was like a lot for me to bear.

I couldn't bear to be in charge of people. I didn't like it. Making the decisions for them was significantly harder than just making it for myself. We lost someone in that deployment not too long after. His platoon was on a patrol and they took an RPK, which is like a, it's a Russian grenade that looks like a bowling pin. They threw it and he was in the hatch in the striker and damn near blew him in half.

And that was hard. Like we were so close knit, like 140 Spartans living together in like a couple of buildings and you barely had time to grieve. Right. But it got even more real. Like, fuck man, he's 20. I'm 20. He's an E4. I'm an E4. Like, holy shit. This is real.

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In combat, you see the absolute best and worst of humanity at the same time. The worst is like, they're literally trying to kill you. And they're killing each other.

But we will go to no ends to protect each other from that. And that's the beauty in it, right? When Jake died, we had a ceremony and like a little bit of time to grieve. But then it was like, fuck it. It's game on, man. We're going to raid every building in this city. And we were angry. I felt like there was this alternate reality where whatever we were doing had no permanence. Like this wasn't forever, even though sometimes it felt like forever.

But then it almost made me fearless in battle because like when engagements would happen, everything would go so slow that like I didn't have the fear of getting hurt or dying. In combat, I had traded all of my emotions for anger. Give them all up. I don't want to be lonely. I don't want to be sad. I don't want to be depressed. I'm just gonna be fucking pissed off. The nightmares didn't come till I got home. I remember going home, ceremony, everyone's waiting,

And the first week that you're home, you have to go to these classes, these briefings. And it was three days of PowerPoints telling you what to be on the lookout for. The spike in DUIs, drugs, domestic violence, and what to do or what to be aware of. And it was a trip, right? Because you go from the Wild West for a year. No rules except the rules of engagement. You're living that Spartan life. That's it.

And you come back and there's rules, there's regulations, there's speed limits. You've got to choose what clothes you want to wear today. Life is easier there. I literally just eat, sleep and fight people. And it was very jarring to come back to like different means of communication and different songs at the club. You're like, what the fuck is it? Why is everyone dancing? Why is everyone hyped up? What is this? Because when you leave, time freezes for you. But life goes on.

You come back, you're pissed off that everyone's been partying. You're pissed off that you've lost some friends. A part of you just wants to go back. You don't want to be at home. You don't want to deal with the mundane. You don't want to walk your dog or cut your grass. You want to fight with your wife. It took a year to certify us to go to war, but they gave us three days to certify us to go back out into the wild of civilian life.

So yeah, shit did hit the fan and it was worse on this side than it was in combat. So coming back from the first deployment, we had a house in Washington because we wanted to live off base. We didn't have any kids and we shared a home together. She was a waitress at a local pub and we had cheated the entire deployment with anyone I could find at the base. And coming home, it was the same thing.

All the guys every night, every weekend would like, we'd always be together because we were always together across the pond. But it was like a darker, heavier energy that we'd all get together. Like the drinking was for a fucking purpose. It was to get fucked up. You know, we would hate being around each other, but couldn't function if we weren't together. It was a weird push pull kind of thing.

I was never like a drinker. I'd drink with the guys, I'd drink when we went out, but I would never just go home and sit and just drink. But when I got home, that's all I wanted to do. As soon as the due date was over, I would drive straight home, blast the Tupac, and just open up the bottle of Maker's Mark or Crown and just sit. And just sit and get fucked up. And this was daily. I think the rage started before the nightmares. I wanted to fight everybody and everything.

I was having such a hard time adjusting that like if her hair was different or the house was different, it would set me off and we'd fight. I remember having to go to anger management because I was so fucking mad all the time. I was like destroying the house. That never hit a woman, but I beat the shit out of my house. That was my first dive into like mental health was draw some pictures and like figure out why you're angry. I didn't know why I was angry. All I knew was I wanted to get back, right? I wanted to get back because I think life was too much.

Yeah, regularly I would have these nightmares of not being able to kill enough things. Just wave after wave after wave, no matter how many targets I engaged, no matter how many targets would drop, I just couldn't kill enough. And then when I couldn't kill enough, I was starting to have these sleep terrors to where in my mind, I knew that I was asleep. So in my mind, I was screaming at the top of my lungs. So we had about 10 months home from the first deployment to the next deployment.

But I remember going back and this time we were back in Kuwait. This is the second deployment and this is 2006. And we get there and then they tell us like, you guys are going to Baghdad. So at the time, Baghdad is probably the most dangerous place on the planet. The first deployment was definitely more kinetic where your training, your aggressiveness can like definitely keep you alive, right?

But then the second year, they were better. Their bombs were better. The IEDs were better. We had this battle fatigue. So a lot more toll mentally in the second round. There weren't really any IEDs in 2003 and 2004. But in 06 and on, those things were all over the fucking place. The second tour was tough. I remember going on patrol and we get to these marshlands and the smell, this rotten, pungent smell that was just heavy in the air.

So we were told there's a weapons cache in this area. So we start clearing building to building. We don't find weapons. We start finding bodies. So this was a mass burial site for whoever was killing who. I don't know. And the first building that I took to clear my first sergeant comes out. They don't go in there. He's ghost white throwing up. I'm like, what the fuck? And I go in and I trace my attack light because I see something in the ground. I see some dirt and I see a torso and I see a body.

And then I see a face that's like half eaten off or half rotten. And around this time, the radio is just pinging. Everyone's fighting shit all over the place. So those years, there was more civil war going on. So the Sunni and the Shia were fighting each other. It was super common for people to torture each other. And it was like a scene from Saw. And I remember part of that mission was to get these bodies out the dirt. That smell, it wouldn't wash off the shovels, your hair.

Like it was stuck. It just punches you in the face. You don't forget it. I remember halfway through the second deployment, Baghdad kind of settled down. And I remember we went to a city called Diwania, which is just south of Baghdad because the Mali militia, I guess, was building up down there. So we had left to go find these guys. And as soon as we hit the border of the city, we started taking fire. And it feels like 12, 16 hours of just engagement.

It's from all sides, all corners. We started taking buildings. We started engaging enemies. We're fighting for so long that we're literally just passing back and forth belts of ammunition and just like, hey man, do you want to fire this thing? Have you fired it yet? No? Go ahead. Have some. Get at it, you know? And after the fight, we go back to the camp. And that's where the chaplain pulls everybody in and is like, hey, by presidential order, you guys have all been extended 90 days. And the wind was just sucked out of the room. Three more months in this fucking hellhole.

So we were just burnt the fuck out. Like you can't stay vigilant for that long, right? I think we took most of our casualties after that 12 month mark. My mindset was that I'm going to get old and die in this fucking country. There was no way out. And when he told us that, I remember going to the phone center and calling my ex-wife. And I told her like, hey, let's just get divorced because I'm not coming home. So I did seven years of active duty as an infantryman. And when I got out,

of my active duty service. It was my ex-wife at the time that gave me an ultimatum. She's like, I'm done with this. It's either me or the army because I'm not just going to wait for you anymore. And back then, it's all I wanted to do, right? From AKH5, I'm like, I'm here. But I kind of feel bad that I haven't been here. It's not fair. Even though I was cheating the entire fucking time, I still felt like I owed it to her to get out. So I took the middle ground. I joined the reserves because you just go teach basic training.

And that is absolutely where I'd realized like my PTSD was through the roof. And it's probably the most notable in my irritability, in my hypervigilance. I'm out of active duty, but I can't walk down the street without sizing up every single person that walks by me. Or it's like the terminator. I'm like, all right, he's 5'7", he's a buck 50. Looks like he's not really carrying anything. And this is over and over and over to where going out to a restaurant and like

What seat am I sitting in? Is it facing the door? Or is that guy talking to my wife? Why is he talking to my wife? Or the constant deconstruction and reconstruction of like projects in my house, in my career. The mind was like always on, always full speed all the time. I would stack the plate so full that like there wasn't time to deal with anything. And if there was downtime, like, holy shit, I was, I was terrified of that.

And everywhere I go, a different woman has fallen in my lap. I was leading all these separate lives to where if it was a girl at work, if it was a girl at drill, for a long time, I had an affair with her best friend, like her absolute best friend, right? And it's more the thrill of like the initial chase than it is the actual act. It made me feel alive, right? It's something I'm not supposed to be doing. No one's supposed to know. It's forbidden, right?

But then that was it. Because the outcome is always the same, right? You get to a place where you're like, shit, I'm an idiot. I'm not a good person. And I think that was my biggest problem with my PTSD. Some people gamble. Some people drink a lot. Some people get really violent. For me, it was women and sex. And I never wanted to be with any of them. It was just like, how far can I push this fucking needle?

How have I become the thing that like I fucking hated when I was a kid, but now I'm it. I'm a creature of violence and scandal. Like what the fuck? The justification was because of how I'd grown up or because of all the things I'd seen in combat. I'm allowed to do these things, but it never made me any happier. It made it worse because

And then to know that the root of all this was just that I was a coward. I was too afraid to stand up for myself and say what I wanted to myself so I could tell my ex-wife that I really didn't want to be married. I was so afraid of that conflict and of hurting her that I did things on the side that have hurt her tremendously more. And the sad part is she didn't even know it. It was that kind of fucked up.

I couldn't say what I actually wanted. So I had to go live the life that I actually wanted in secret. I never really knew who or what I wanted to be outside of the military. I didn't know what a happy relationship looked like, a healthy home looked like. Life was a lot of suffering up until that point. And I thought that's all it was. I thought you worked hard and life sucked and everybody cheats and everyone's miserable and everyone blows their money.

Everyone has trauma and it's all our own forms. It's all personal. And for me, I took it as an excuse to do what I want only because it was what I've known. If you don't know that things could be different, how could you dream that it would be different? I just assumed that like this is what life was. The possibility of even like imagining the alternative didn't exist in my realm. I had seen the worst of mankind as a kid and in war.

This is all we want to do. We're fucking humans. We want to take from each other, kill each other, fuck each other. That's all we're here for. I thought it was a great lie. I thought happiness was a great lie. So even though I was doing all this dirt, there was always this thing inside of me that knew like it was wrong or knew like it doesn't have to be this way. So after being out for a while and the bubble had burst, I was literally cleaning houses for work.

For like four years, man. Trash outs, evictions. I'm super thankful to have had the work, but it was not fulfilling. It was sad. When I decided to make a career change, I went to EMT school at night while I was doing construction in the daytime. In EMT school, you're going over assessments and like medical shit. And I remember getting to the part of mental health and reading the small two paragraph part of PTSD. Holy shit. I think I've got it.

So that was like the first light bulb. Bing. I'm like, I need to go to the VA. I'm done. I need fucking help. The first meeting I went to, they referred me to like a group therapy thing, right? Where you go and it's a free dinner and all these veterans are talking. And we start around the table. Oh, I was a carpenter in Iraq. I was an engineer in Iraq. I was a comms guy. And what I should have found comfort, I was repulsed. I was like, what the fuck are you guys bitching about? Ain't none of you here had to fucking kill somebody.

and you're fucking homeless and you complain about your PTSD, this is where I was at the time. Like my trauma is bigger than yours. Fuck you guys. And that's how it works. Like it's fucked up.

You're so functional that you think you don't have it to where like, huh, I can hold down a job. I can keep all these secrets, maintain a marriage. I'm not fucked up. I'm okay. You know, I'm not crying every day. I'm not on the streets. I'm not drunk. It's a mind fuck to where did I even go to fucking war? Like what the fuck? Right. I start getting on meds, right? I think I'm on like my third psych med. I was like 13 to the VA at one point.

SSRIs, NSRIs, antipsychotic, antidepressants, sleeping pills. If they gave you one and your brain felt better, your penis wouldn't work. So they give you another one for your penis to work and your brain doesn't feel better. It's this constant effect of things.

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Well, this is where I meet my wife today. I'm working in this hospital and I'm there a lot because I'm working there as ER tech and I'm working there as an intern. And I meet her and it's like instantaneous. I'm like, no, you're here to do the right thing. No, uh-uh. I thought it was just the old me coming back like, hey man, come on, let's go. So it's strictly platonic. I'm doing the right thing. I'm in therapy as all this is going on. So I'm working there for a year.

And I just see her every Wednesday. I'm not inappropriate, not crossing the line, doing a good job. One night, a year later, we clear the ER. So she gets to go home early. That night, for whatever reason, she asked me like, what's that tattoo mean? So I tell her, right? So we start texting. It took about a month or two of us just talking to where I had this sudden knowing that's the life you're supposed to be living. You're supposed to be with her. That's the one. And every time I went home, I had felt like I was cheating on

on her. It took about a month of us just talking before we ran away together. It was the first time in my life I'd ever like had spoken up for myself or just said like, this is what I want.

If you don't grab the fucking rudder, man, life is going to take you wherever the fuck it wants. And then kind of up until that point, to my thirties, that's where it had taken me. Wherever the fuck it wanted me to go. And I run away with this human being. I run away with this stranger. No idea what the fuck was going to come next. But I knew like, I don't know if we met in a different life, but like, this is, this is it. This is love. Like, this is what love feels like. Holy fucking shit. It was the best day of my fucking life. I had felt free.

In the very beginning, I was like, there's some shit I got to tell you about me. And I need you to understand who it is that you're getting so that you can make a real decision about whether or not you want to move forward. So for the first time in my life, I came fucking clean about everything. And I wasn't embarrassed. It felt good. She's coming out of a bad relationship herself. Similar trajectory on like a traumatic childhood and past and upbringing.

I told her about PTSD. I told her about the infidelity. I told her about my mental health. And at the very beginning, I said, I'm on these meds. I won't fucking off. It's going to be painful. I need you to just fucking bear with me. So I go off cold turkey, getting divorced. We're getting married. We're buying a house. We're having a kid like pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. We had packed in 10 years of life in like one year. And it was the greatest year of my fucking life.

About three years later, she had three kids when we met. We had two more. We had two more boys, right? And I had gone through career changes, multiple fire academies, multiple departments. I was busy, like really busy, but all for like towards a goal, towards a purpose. I didn't have time to like sit, let alone deal with my demons. So when everything kind of starts to settle, I noticed that like some thoughts are coming back. Suicidal ideation, depression, depression.

thoughts of infidelity coming back. I'd been faithful to her the whole time. First time in my life, I've never cheated on her. I'd go to work and the anxiety was back. Just waiting for a call, waiting for the tones to go off, not knowing what the tone was would drive me through the roof. I was having insomnia. I wasn't sleeping. And we go on a date. And at this date, she point blank tells me like, you're fucking depressed. I'm like, huh? I pull out my phone. I look up depression. I'm

Yeah, I'm absolutely depressed. But this time I can't explain it. I've got the house, the dog, the kids, the career, the truck. I have everything like from the outside looking in, like looks pretty good. Like what the fuck is wrong with me? So I called the vet center and say, Hey, I need help. This is my background. This is what I'm going through. Is there anybody that can see me? And his name was Jesse. We meet and he's probably the fourth provider I've had in my life at the time.

Difference is, he's a veteran. He's been to combat. For the first time I feel safe enough to tell him everything that I've been going through. We clicked right away and I realized he wasn't there to give me any answers, but he was there to ask me questions that I didn't think to ask. And I'd realized that the difference between therapy in this lifetime versus the last one was this lifetime I have something worth fighting for. I've got a purpose. I've got the love of my life and our children.

There is no fucking failure here. There's no plan B. So I've got to go all in or like it's over. So I'm seeing him once a week and I'm doing every fucking thing in the book possible to rewire the synapses in my brain. I haven't written anything in years, but I start journaling every day. And when the first couple months I start going back and I reread them, I can see my pattern. I can see my four week cycle.

the decline, the ascension, the decline. I can see it all. I start to see my algorithm. My loop started when I was probably five years old. I'm doing all this for you. God damn it. Why am I working so much? Why am I fixing this and picking up that overtime? Why, why, why, why? Putting so much on the plate and putting everyone on your back to where when I would feel they weren't putting as much effort in as I was, even though they probably were, that was my excuse.

That dialogue in my head would send me back to the five-year-old me listening to my dad screaming at my mom. I worked so hard for this family. I do so much for this family. I'm just fucking tired. That was my loop. And that loop was the excuse to do all the things I had been doing all of this time. So the busier I got, the stronger that reason was to be a fucking asshole.

In this life, there was no destroying of the house. In this life, there was no cheating. But in this life, getting to the realization that I want to watch the world burn, I knew what was coming if I'd gotten back there, right? I knew that. And strangely enough, because I told her about all the things that I'd done before, she was able to pick up on me not being me. And because she knew what I was struggling with, I think she was very aware of where I was headed.

More so on the suicide part than the cheating part. It was never like, you're going to cheat? No. It was always like, you need help. You need fucking help. Suicide for me has just been something that's been around since I can remember. I always thought that was due to loneliness of not having a mom or dad. I thought it was due to a lack of love. And then as I got older, I thought it was due to PTSD. Never like a plan, but definitely vivid images to know what I was going to do if I was going to do it.

I'm about 37, 38 years old. I've got my algorithm. I know how to build the mirror. I know how to make it super clear. I know how to look at it. I start reading books. I was never a reader, but I start deep diving into everything I can find on mental health, PTSD. One of the first books I really dive into is How the Body Keeps Score. And the first part's talking about childhood trauma. I'm like, yep, copy that. And then when I get to a part about yoga and Qigong,

I started reading this stuff like yoga and Qigong. What the fuck is this shit? I could never do yoga. It was hard to be still. It was hard to be uncomfortable. But when I started reading about Qigong, I was like, all right. So I started doing Qigong regularly. It makes me feel good. It shuts my brain up. And most of my Qigong happens to be at work. Why? Because there's no alcohol at work and there's no kids. I have the bandwidth to just do this shit.

And when you start doing something like that at work at a firehouse and someone walks in on you, it's like they walked in and caught you jerking off. Like, whoa, what the fuck are you doing, man? I'm like, I'm just doing some breathing. Like, it's all good. Come on in, bro. It's okay. So I start practicing this stuff, right? And I'm at work one night. I can't sleep. And instead of letting the frustration of insomnia get to me, I'm like, fuck it. I'm going to do Qigong on my head.

So I lay down, I start my box breathing, I start doing my body scans, and then I'm doing the Qigong, right? I'm doing the shit in my head. I know what rock I'm standing on, the shoes I'm wearing, I'm tracking my breath. And then suddenly it fucking happens. I go from Qigong mentally to I think I'm in fucking space.

It's dark. It's purple. I don't know what the fuck's going on. It's kind of milky looking. I think I hit a deep meditation for the first time ever. I didn't have an intention and I didn't expect it. And it was hard to articulate for a long time of what was happening. So I'm in this fucking place where it's more like space, but it's dead quiet. There's no feeling, but just like vastness. So another week, another shift back at work.

Start doing Qigong in my head again, relax the body. The mind's still awake. And I hit it again. Boom. This time it's faster. And this time I set an intention to go in. Let's just go in, see what happens. So I go in and it's almost like traveling through a fucking portal or a wormhole. It feels intense, but you're not moving. And then I end up at like a fucking blockbuster. And there's like a kid thing that's like in there waiting for me.

He's like black and starry, but he moves like my three-year-old son at the time. He's just fucking happy out there. But there's no words, but we're communicating by some kind of knowing or a feeling. And he grabs my hand. And then I realized it's fucking me. I tell him without talking, like, it's me. We're good. And I love you. I love you. And he takes me through the aisles of all these fucking DVDs. He starts playing them. And then we're not in the blockbuster.

Now I'm in this theater and he's sitting with me. Same thing, happy as fuck that I'm there. He starts playing all these movies of my fucking life. The good, the bad. And it's going backwards in time from like kids to toddlers to born to back in my wife to when they were conceived. I could see my wife going from now to younger. I can go back to myself when I was little and it goes back forward.

And then now I can see myself, but I can see them, but I can see how they look at me. And I see that how they look at me is based off of my actions. And that's why they look at me. It was the craziest shit. And when it was done, I tell them again, I love them and I'm going to go. So we kind of say goodbye. I'm going back and I'm still at work. And it was like from that point, a lot of things started to shift.

So after I left the midnight blockbuster, I woke up and it was probably one in the morning. I was like, what the fuck is going on? I immediately grabbed my iPad and I wrote all this stuff down because I didn't want to lose it. I thought I was losing my mind. No shit. My wife thought I was becoming bipolar. People at work thought I was taking acid. Things were starting to change at such a rapid rate that I didn't know what was going on.

Another night, again, on shift, no alcohol. I'm having this dream and I can't kill enough people again. They're like black. It's coming waves and waves and waves. But this dream turns up differently. In this dream, I finally kill him. I shoot him. I stab him. And then as the blood starts to ooze through his face, because there's like a mask on, he starts to bleed, I wake up.

I wake up and I'm not in bed. I wake up and I'm on the floor between the bed and the wall in a chair. I don't know if these dreams have anything to do with making peace with having to kill people or watch people die. That, I don't know. What I do know is that since that dream, I have not had that nightmare ever again. And what I do now as a firefighter paramedic

is the odd end of the spectrum of what I did in the military. So as a grunt, I was the cause of death. As a firefighter paramedic, I am trying to stop it with every measure that I can. So my purpose in uniform is totally different. And that brings me peace. I don't know why things suddenly appeared different, but I just knew that they did. I knew that any excuse given before me wasn't going to cut it.

I knew that anywhere I wanted to be or any life I wanted to build was now suddenly possible. It was just a knowing. None of the shit that happened before even fucking matters. Dad beat mom, mom cheating on dad, mom running away, dad just working his ass off all the time, killing people, trying to be killed, bad marriages. None of it matters. They happened, but none of it matters today. If I let that be the excuse for how I operate in the world,

That's my fault. I own that. From what started with like YouTube, yoga, and Qigong, I meet an old friend that happens to be a master. And then I go on this year-long program to study medical Qigong to like figure out the whys. Why did these things happen? It's cool that it happened. It's fun that it happened, but why?

So it's been a year-long apprenticeship into this mystery school of how to control your nervous system, your autonomic nervous system, to stop the wheel of emotion and see things for what they are. Life does happen. Life happens in the unknown. But if we control what we can with a sail and a guide, we can still get to where we want to be, even though it might take a little longer. Once you know that everything is within your control,

Life is limitless. The examples I had growing up for what a marriage and a household look like, again with the don'ts or the nots, right? My life is a complete opposite reflection of that, where my wife is my best friend, I'm heavily involved with my kids, and I enjoy what I do. I might be tired, but I don't resent them because I have to go do these things. I don't resent putting them on my back. What I learned about myself and my journey is that

We need to take ownership and accountability of our actions to include our past so we get to choose how to move forward. Everything matters. Everything's connected. How I drive home dictates how I am when I get home. And what I do when I'm home dictates how I perform the next day. How I take care of myself is how I will take care of other people. I don't feel bad about the things that I've done at all.

I don't have regret, right? I can't change the past. So was I a piece of shit? Absolutely. Was I an ungrateful human at times? Absolutely. Was I a mean person at times? Yeah, absolutely. But I can't change it. Having regret is like having a desire to go back and do it again. I don't have a desire to do it again. And understanding that today is the cause and tomorrow is the effect. And that is how I stay present. It was letting go of identities of things I thought made me

the angry veteran or the over valorous firefighter. The ego death is the change of all the habits that you had that made you who you were. Today, I wouldn't recognize me then. I've found my inner peace by maintaining the practice. A flexible body is a flexible mind. A strong body is a strong mind and vice versa. It's true, but I've had to let go of a lot of people along the way. Friends, family,

Every day, you just got to look back at who you were yesterday and figure out if that was good or not. And if it wasn't good, just do better. It's a constant practice of presence. For a long time, I didn't understand what love was. Just something you say, right? I love you. But love is the absolute highest emotion we can feel. It's a knowing. It's unconditional. I didn't think it existed. I thought you're born, you grow up, you go to work, you die.

But love is what's going to get you out of bed. Love is what's going to not allow you to quit. Love is infinite and it's all encompassing.

Once we have love, once we feel love with ourselves, we can finally give it back, give it to others, right? But a lot of us, when we're not feeling it deep inside, we can't give it away. We're trying to get as much as we can for ourselves. But then once you start to give is when you really start to get, and that's what's fucking crazy. And that's how love works. You've got to give it and it just comes back.

If you never had it and you find the real thing, like holy shit, I will go to hell for this. I will go to battle for this. I won't fucking quit even if it kills me for this. That's love. It's that fucking precious. We need the hardship to appreciate the love. Oftentimes on the vision quest or the soul journey, they talk about having to go deep into hell. You have to go far deep into hell to find heaven.

Had to have the trauma. Had to have the hurt. You have to have the pain. You have to have the pain. It's painful to grow. And for something to grow, something else must die. Over and over and over. The seed. The sprout. The bud. The flower. Back to fucking dirt. I'm sure it all hurts every step of the process. So everything that's happened before now was a necessary evil to achieve this state. I still struggle with depression. It comes and goes. And it's like a fog, right?

The beauty in it is knowing what tools I have, where they are, and which job they're used for. So at first it's like, fuck man, I'm fucking depressed again. Like, God damn it. But then I get kind of excited. I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna kick you right in the fucking dick. Cause like, we're just going to do this shit and then you're going to go away. So the challenge brings me back to like the basics. I know that as long as I maintain the practice, whether it's a few days or a week or a month, it goes away, right? It's non-permanent.

So what do you do when it rains? You grab a fucking umbrella. What do you do if it's fucking hot? You put the sunblock on. The emotions are just the flavors we give to life. I think we get stuck on like being emotional, but it's just a part of life. The machine that takes you and breaks you down and erases your identity. That same structure can be used to get you to your awakening. It's just discipline. That's it. You set the schedule.

Alright, wake up, stretch, eat, reflect, workout, be still, be kind. If you practice enough, like, fuck man, you're a master. The same thing that makes a killer can make a lover. And that's kind of all there is to this.

Today's episode featured Matthew Sagabatan. If you'd like to reach out to Matthew, you can email him at matthew.s-a-g-a-b-a-e-n.sr at gmail.com. If you'd like to read more about Matthew's journey, you can find his book, What Now? A Mental Health Memoir, on Apple Books. You can find the link in the show notes. ♪

From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on the Wondery app to listen ad-free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host, Witt Misseldein.

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Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wondery's podcast, Against the Odds. In each episode, we share thrilling true stories of survival, putting you in the shoes of the people who live to tell the tale. In our next season, it's July 6th, 1988, and workers are settling into the night shift aboard Piper Alpha, the world's largest offshore oil rig.

Home to 226 men, the rig is stationed in the stormy North Sea off the coast of Scotland. At around 10 p.m., workers accidentally trigger a gas leak that leads to an explosion and a fire. As they wait to be rescued, the workers soon realize that Piper Alpha has transformed into a death trap. Follow Against the Odds wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app.