"Sitting by the Side of a Pond... with a .357 Magnum"

Note: The person described in the following story as Curt is not named Curt.  Everything else is accurate.

September 2002

To say that my path from the military world to the civian world was bumpy puts in mildly.  The medical discharge was followed by a flurry of resume send-outs then an empty mailbox.  I limped around a construction site for a few months before Shane's accident, then I worked at a residential treatment center for seriously emotionally disturbed children.

A well-placed donkey kick from a ninety pound, thirteen year old female patient while I was helping stop a mini-riot on our wing led me to the emergency room and another career path.  Unfortunately this one was with an environmental subcontractor with huge ambitions and no capitol.  The work was steady though the paychecks were not.

By September I was happy to head down to Utah to help a subcontractor get their equipment ready for a water treatment pilot project.  Curt was the president of the company and we hit it off well.  The company only had one other employee and a few contractors.    They were a small rag-tag outfit that more than made up in gumption what they lacked in polish.  In short, my kind of crew.  They'd developed a pretty wild electric water treatment technology and we had to get their trailer finished up to drag  up to Montana to pull of the pilot before the cold hit.

It was random work and we weren't well equipped.  I spent one hot afternoon fourteen feet above the ground unloading a 6oo lb. bag of zeolite into massive canisters with a cooking pot.  Something about that display of both stupidity and fortitude moved Curt to offer me a job.  A man with better options and more foresight would have said no.  I shook his hand.

After the project finished up in Montana, I moved back down to Utah to a little trailer in the desert.  Each day I helped work on a technology that I thought would change the world.  I'd developed a major concern about upcoming water shortages while I was at West Point and this seemed like developing Curt's water treatment technology was tangible way to help minimize the impact of that future scarcity.  It's cheesy, but I thought I'd found my life's mission.

Curt's mind amazed me and I felt honored to be involved with trying to bring his ideas to life.  He was a wild-haired Mormon visionary and I was the Copenhagen chewing second man trying to figure out how to bring the vision into reality.  Every week brought a new challenge and we were short of just about everything but creativity and ambition.

Somewhere over the course of the next year, our progress on the technology slowed.  We were close never quite ready for prime-time.  We'd prep and then test, rework and then test again.  It was exactly what we needed to do, but I was worried that it wasn't happening fast enough for our investors and my love affair with the Utah desert was over.

One June afternoon in 2003, I found myself hotwashing out used septic tanks in 114 degree heat for our next test.  I blasted the scalding water against the grimy plastic for five or six hours before coming to the conclusion that it was time to go back to school.

August 2008

Five years later, I'd completed with law school and spent two years as an associate in a law firm before taking a part-time job as the Executive Director of NAMI Montana.  Once again thinking I was going to change the world, but it couldn't have been much different than trying to develop new technology under the desert sun.

It had taken a while, but Curt and his company had finally flourished.  They used the water treatment technology as a path to transition into plastics recycling.  The company was opening a plant in Burbank and the cash flow projections were jaw-dropping.

Curt and I had stayed in touch over the years and he'd even offered me a position with the company the previous fall.  We talked every couple of months and he'd update me on the company that we'd brought out of infancy together.

I hadn't thought about Curt in a while, but images of him kept coming into my head one August day as I worked in the NAMI office.  I tried to focus on prepping for our upcoming Walk fundraiser, but I just couldn't get him out of my head.  Eventually it was just too much, I wrapped up my half-day and walked home intent to work on some other projects.

But still I couldn't get Curt out of my head.  Finally I broke down and called him.

"Hello?" I heard his startled voice answer on the other end of the line.  "Matt?  That's weird we never get reception up here."

I said hi and tried to strike up a conversation.  I had no intention of telling Curt that I'd been dwelling on him all day and finally called just to get him out of my head.

Something was wrong.  "Curt, what's going on I asked."

He sighed.  "I'm sitting by the side of the pond up at our ranch with a .357 Magnum in my hand.  It's all falling apart.  I'm going to lose everything: my business, my family, everything.  I'm trying to think of a reason not to kill myself."

I spent the next hour talking him down.  I was in way over my head and knew that I was doing everything wrong, but somehow a combination of mindfulness exercises to shortcircuit the anxiety/depression and telling him for the first time about my near brush with suicide a decade before was enough to get him to put down away the gun. 

March 2011

Over the course of the next two and a half years, Curt really did lose everything.  His business, his property, and eventually his family.  They all fell like horrible dominoes.  I know that he could have done some things differently, but the complete collapse was more than one man could ever bring on himself.  It's just a brutal mystery why some struggle so hard through so much. 

Curt's been tested in a way that I hope I never have to be.  The fact that he continues struggling forward is an incredible accomplishment.  Curt had a job interview last week with a water treatment company in Colorado.  It's too early to know whether he got it, but I pray that it's his time to keep moving forward again.

End Note: I had a family member commit suicide about a year and a half before I called Curt on that fateful day.  I've also had a family member try to commit suicide twice in the years following that call.  I can't begin to fathom why I was summoned to contact Curt and not the others.  It's too sad to even try, but that doesn't change the facts around the phonecall to Curt.  

A French Saint's Prayers for America's Heroes

Note: Catholic’s regularly ask saints to pray for them or others. While this practice isn’t followed by Protestants, it’s fundamentally no different than asking anyone else for their prayers. This is a story about how one of those prayers was answered.

In early March of 2007, our family lost my stepbrother to a PTSD suicide. Chris had been back home from Iraq for about a year and a half. He was a good kid that became a great man, but the traumatic stress injury he sustained in Iraq was too much for even the brave Humvee machine gunner to defeat.

The suicide was precipitated by an Other Than Honorable discharge that he received in the mail. Other Than Honorable discharges are typically given to service members convicted by a civilian criminal court and incarcerated or if the conduct leading to that civilian conviction brings discredit upon the military.

Chris’s only crime was that he didn’t attend his monthly National Guard drills, because of his debilitating PTSD. To this day, it’s still hard to imagine how that discharge ever went through. It was the most damning piece of evidence that our military didn’t have a process to effectively care for its heroes returning home with PTSD injuries.

The most basic question was why hadn’t Chris’s unit sat him and all the other returning soldiers down in front of a mental health professional for a PTSD screening? If they’d identified the injury, they could have directed him towards treatment. Instead, they left it up to his battalion who either missed or ignored the red flags for PTSD and flushed him out of the service.

A few days after Chris’s death, his family stood in his mother’s kitchen and decided to tell Chris’s story to try and prevent other families from having to go through the same tragedy. As a veteran and attorney, I took the lead.

The first week after a tragedy is critical to any effort to force a systemic change from that event. You either harness the wave of media attention that the tragedy inspires or you let it slip by and lose the opportunity.

I spent that week talking to staff of the politicians that could force the National Guard to implement changes in their systems of caring from returning service members. I also talked with the local media. I seemed cut and dry.

I was wrong. The papers came out at the end of the week mourning the tragic death. There was no mention of the discharge, that the military had failed in its duty to care for an injured soldier, or that the system of care could be improved. In short, I failed.

I met with a retired general and another seasoned member of the state government that Sunday. They drew the same conclusion. It was over. The attention would go back to the state’s budget or some other issue and nothing would be done.

I was dejected. I’d failed Chris while he was alive and then again after his death. On my way home, I stopped by the grocery store and picked up a dozen roses for St. Therese of Lisieoux. The little French saint had worked miracle after miracle for our family from curing my grandmother’s infant paralysis to helping me pass the bar exam after I’d spent a summer focusing on the wrong material.

St. Therese loves roses and the only thing I could think to do was to buy her some roses as a way of asking/thanking her for praying to God for a miracle to fix my failed attempt to make something good come out of Chris’s tragic death. I set the roses on the passenger seat of my car and began to drive home. By the time I pulled into the driveway, a barebones plan had popped into my head.

I put the roses on the table. Prayed again and began typing…

I couldn’t have imagined how powerfully that prayer was answered. Eighteen months later, the State of Montana was recognized as the best state for caring for its service members returning home from combat. The foundation for its program was multiple, staged face-to-face mental health screenings for every service member returning from combat. One year later, Congress required a similar screening mechanism be put in place across the military. The Department of Defense is currently working to implement it.

According to the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the program has the potential to save more lives than armored Humvees.

January of 2009

I walked back into the caboose of the Inaugural Train. Soon-to-be President Obama introduced me to his wife Michelle and told her about some of the things we’d accomplished after Chris’s death.

I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out two religious medals. I gave a St. Michael medal to Michelle and told her to ask him to defend her family.

I handed President Obama a smaller medal with the image of St. Therese of Lisieoux, the little Carmelite nun that died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four.

“It wasn’t me,” I said. “It was her.”

End Note: I think it’s important to point out that praying for this does not always fix all of our issues in this damaged world. I know this too well tonight as this is the first night that I do not have my children due to an impending divorce. Prayers are not always answered how or when we want them to be, but that doesn’t change the fact that a miracle occurred after I asked St. Therese to pray for better care for our returning heroes.

Drop Your Hammer

February 2002

I lowered a spinning saw blade down through gray siding. It was cold and I had no idea what I was doing here.

For all of my life, I’d generally thought that God had a plan for me and if I waited long enough it would become apparent. I watched the excess siding fall into the snow and decided that it was pretty clear that that was no longer the case.

An injury in Ranger School had led me out of the Army and my military resume was a square peg in the round hole of the civilian job market. I was the weak Number Two Man in a two-man construction crew. To be a successful carpenter requires an innate understanding of how material objects can fit together in a beautiful manner. I couldn’t even find the puzzle, much less put it together.

I was the cut-and-carry guy while Shane, my boss, worked his magic. One look at my hammer made it clear how bad of a cut-and-carry guy I was. It was monstrosity of gleaming metal and dull wood. The metal gleamed because it was so huge that I could barely swing it.

The clerk at Big R Ranch Supply who was helping me picked out tools had asked me how big of a hammer I swing. My cocky reply of “as big as you’ve got” left me with a brutal tool that would have been more useful prying someone out of a crashed car than framing a house.

Four years of West Point in order to be the worst construction worker in Helena, Montana? I’d given up on a divine plan, but I did need the ten bucks an hour. I picked up the cut of siding, walked over to the house, and raised it up to Shane.

Over the next two days we finished up the siding. The snow had melted then it froze and snowed again. Shane was up on the roof sweeping off snow so it wouldn’t melt and send water down onto the still-new masonry.

I was busy trying to look busy until Shane gave me another task. That generally involved carrying things from one part of the construction site to another part where they might be more useful.

I set another bundle of siding down by the saw. I heard a voice say, “Take off your hammer.”

I looked back at Shane, but the voice wasn’t his. He was still sweeping the snow off the roof. I glanced down at my hammer and then looked forward at the saw.

“Take off your hammer,” said the strong feminine voice.

I looked around again, but the voice wasn’t coming through the cold air. I protested internally. I can’t take off my hammer. I’m a bad enough construction worker anyway. I don’t need to point it out by gallivanting around without a hammer.”

“Go to the ladder.”

I didn’t want to disagree twice. I walked over to the metal ladder and looked up at Shane swiping the little green broom back and forth. The fresh snow tumbled off of the roof and onto my face.

I silently cursed the voice and wished my knit cap had a visor.

“He’s coming down.”

My head snapped up. I watched Shane stretch the broom wider then he grunted and slipped. The grunt turned into a yell as his body slid over the icy shingles. This lower body launched into the cold air. Shane grabbed for the edge of the roof, hoping to stop his fall. The feet pendulummed down towards the house and he fell again, now headfirst towards the concrete below.

I took a step to my right and lifted my hands, remembering the words of a military climbing instructor – brace don’t catch. I planted my hands against his dropping shoulders. I somehow remembered the hammer and shifted my right hip away from his falling body. Shane’s full weight hit me and plowed us both into the concrete.

I thought he died. Shane was unconscious. Blood soaked out of the hood of his sweatshirt. I called 911. Shane started breathing again. I tried to comfort him as the paramedics came. “It’s going to be alright. You’re going to be alright…”

I broke down after the ambulance pulled away to take him to the hospital.

Shane ended up with a concussion, broken collarbone, and a few broken ribs. They said he probably would have died if he hadn’t landed on me. Shane’s wife still has a husband and his kids still have their father.

I didn’t know how to say it at the time without sounding crazy (clearly I’m not worried about that anymore), but I knew that it wasn’t me that saved him. If anything, I probably botched my role. In better hands, Shane might not have even hit the ground. Thank God, I remembered the warning about the hammer. If I hadn’t have turned my hips, it would have went right through him.

I’ve wracked by brain for almost nine years trying to figure out the events of that day, why I received that warning, and why I haven’t had the same warning for other loved one that I’ve lost. I don’t have any hard answers, but I do have my own conclusions and hopefully I’m more courageous about telling them than I was about telling the truth about what happened then.

The only undeniable conclusion that I’ve come is that if a voice ever tells you to take your hammer off your tool belt - do it. Keeping your job is about to become the least of your worries.