Veterans Journey Home

It was very difficult to come back

and start trying to fit in.

I just stopped talking about it.

There was a big, big change

and it was hard to start relating to anyone.

How's it going Ms. Susan.

I think I have $3 I can give to you.

You can get an all day bus pass.

All right, take care.

I thought about suicide a few times.

And one time I put a round in a chamber.

I was too scared to pull the trigger,

so I just started drinking.

Come sit with me.

Sit.

I have nightmares.

I take bupropion and sertraline for the depression aspects

helping to control anger spikes and rage,

hallucinations and delusions.

Okay, good boy.

Good boy.

'Cause that image, taking a gun to my head,

it just goes like a real.

I asked God, please just kill me in a natural way,

so it wouldn't be an F-you to the people

like my parents, my sister

and anybody that actually has cared about me.

The origin of PTSD came from Vietnam vets.

- Totally. - Making a little hungry though.

Well, that's the idea, right?

And you're supposed to kind of like start freaking out.

Be like, I can't, not eating.

What's gonna happen.

And it's all mental at that point.

I really started wanting

to just disconnect from the world.

My only way to escape it was to try to drink it away

or try to numb it.

And that's when you get to a point

where you start believing that suicide is a way out.

What color you got?

Orange.

I want eight forks for five people.

Yeah, yeah.

I struggle financially and I struggled mentally

and I wanted it to end.

I was hurting because my first wife, she left me,

my oldest daughter had left.

So it was like, there was no reason for me

to even suck up good oxygen smell, go to sleep.

I wanna sleep forever.

I don't wanna wake up from this bad dream.

From the moment my feet hit the ground from Afghanistan,

The only thing that I wanted to do

was to take a fucking vacation.

And not the type of vacation where the kids

are on the shoulders with a Mickey Mouse

hats on their heads and we're bobbing through Disneyland

or Disney World and not the type of vacation

where there's a tour bus in the background

in the fucking Grand Canyon,

but the type of vacation where I could take my ass

out on the fucking land and dig a hole

and scream into it until I had put down

every fucking thing that I needed to put down.

A brother of mine said, "Mark, it sounds like the vacation"

"that you're talking about is a vision quest."

And at the time I was resistant.

I was like, "What the fucking kind of hippie"

"fru fru bullshit, drum beating magic wu wu lala stuff"

"is a vision quest?"

He was telling me, "Mark, there is a way that you can scream"

"into a hole and put the down that you're carrying."

And he said, Indigenous peoples around the globe

would welcome their warriors home

with elders meeting them outside the village.

And there was a certain series of steps and sequence

that they would follow, a war detox,

a spiritual cleansing that involves spending

a time on the land as a community

and then solo with these things called self-generated ceremony.

Ways to mark those transitions, ways to dig a hole

and put things down in a spiritual way.

Ways to mark the ending, like cracking of a snake skin

and the shedding of those things that no longer serve.

If I had not put my burdens down,

including the identity that I had for military service

and mark and claim who I am today,

I wouldn't be sitting here,

I would have blown my brains out.

And I can't help but believe that the 13

of my close personal friends who have killed themselves

post-service, they would still be here today.

Well, welcome.

My mentor, Stephen Foster, he and Meredith his wife

pretty much brought this ceremony

back towards the mainstream.

They were working at a suicide prevention center.

They just started talking about why is it

that all these people keep calling in

wanting to kill themselves?

What has gone wrong in our culture that this is happening.

And they started reading about it.

And they realized that all peoples of all times

until very recently have always had

these ancient ceremonies.

You know that your brothers and sisters

are killing themselves off at an extraordinary rate.

And many of you, I know have been on the edge yourself,

some of you many times.

So I'm just blessed and honored that you're here.

Clearly something has stirred

in a way that has prompted you to come out here,

whether it was something that you read

or something that you heard from someone else,

a friend called you on the phone.

So I just wanna thank you for answering the call

'cause it didn't come from us, it came from within.

Just a real quick overview of what we're gonna be doing

for the next 12 days.

We're gonna sit with each one of you

and talk about why you're here and get to the bottom of it.

We'll do that for two days.

And then the last day before you go out,

you'll get your spots, and then you have four days out there

and four nights and come back on the fifth day.

We'll spend that day just kind of recuperating.

And then we'll have a couple of days

for telling your stories and having your stories

listened to very deeply.

My purpose is to help create a safe container,

that's really my most conscious purpose in doing this,

is to create that space.

First off, I'm not a veteran.

When we had our first veteran fast last year,

it was phenomenal learning for me

'cause I'd already been holding these ceremonies

for quite a long time.

The wounds, they carry, this PTSD stuff

from the service is huge.

And it's precisely I can't be left alone with my mind.

And that's precisely what we're doing,

we're throwing them out there into this place

where there's nothing but their own mind.

It becomes terrifying very quickly,

but this land can take that

and it can take the childhood stuff,

it can take the time of service stuff,

it can take it all.

They can actually lay down the burden.

There's three phases to the ceremony,

severance to cut attachments at home, to separate from wife,

children, family, employment.

To separate from the things of the world back there,

the telephones, internet, distractions.

Severing from pain related to people who have harmed us,

severing from different things that we may have done

to to harm other people, severing from patterns

that I've created in my life that I wanna put in the ground

and walk away from.

It could be as simple as severing from drinking soda.

And it's complex is severing from self-loathing.

What are the things that I wanna put down?

That's what we're out here to do.

This is your initiation home.

Home here and home out there.

Last night, it was the first time I ever spent the night

in my tent alone.

And that was pretty darn scary.

You would think 61 year old guys shouldn't be afraid

of being alone in the tent, but it's either been me

and my dog or me and my girlfriend or me and my son.

There's always been somebody there.

And last night I was alone and then it dawned on me,

well, I'm gonna be out there alone for four days.

And then I was thinking about the tarp

and I was thinking about with two openings.

And those openings are ways for things to get in.

And I share a little secret with everybody.

When I was 12, I was raped by my uncle.

And when I told everybody, they thought I was lying

'cause I was 12.

And even my own parents, they took his side

because he was mentally challenged.

And I remember going to neighbor's houses

and asking them to talk to me.

But I lived in a really small town in West Virginia

and everybody just slammed the door on me

and said, "You need to go home."

"This is something that is a family thing."

Nobody would ever support me.

I felt like everybody bailed on me.

I been afraid to be alone since then.

I always feel like I have to have somebody around

so that I feel safe because back then,

I felt completely alone.

Thank you, Chuck.

That's the only way to heal this stuff, is to get it out.

And thank you.

I hit a point in my life where it was either death,