I spent years watching the Army do what it does well: turn civilians into soldiers. What I didn't see until I was on the inside was what it does poorly: turn them back into civilians when their watch is over.

PTSD from multiple combat deployments is commonly discussed, but there is a subset of soldiers still committing suicide in record numbers that are rarely touched. I'm talking about the ones who served in the post-9/11 Army without ever leaving the country. The private who missed morning formation three days in a row because he was trying to find answers to his purpose void in the bottom of a bottle of bourbon. The stud specialist who broke his leg on a jump a month before going to selection. The soldier whose numbers looked fine on paper but whose eyes were somewhere else entirely.

I saw this as a Special Forces medic. You get trained to assess the body. But you also learn to read people, and what I read day after day was a quiet crisis nobody was tracking.

When I got out, I thought someone would write about it. A journalist. A researcher. Someone with credentials I didn't have. I was also afraid of the stigma in the SOF community of writing my own story. Instead, I found a wall of silence around soldiers who never made it into the statistics because they'd never technically qualified as a combat casualty.

So I wrote a novel.

"Now What?" follows Reed Thomas Jr, a lower enlisted soldier navigating depression and the institutional failures that leave him with no clear path forward. It's fiction because fiction can reach a 22-year-old private who would never pick up a self-help book. Fiction doesn't require the reader to admit anything. It just asks them to follow a character.

If you recognize any of the characters in this book, if you served with them or were them or lost them, that's why I wrote it. You are not alone in this.

"Now What?" is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback: https://amazon.com/dp/B0FSFYY7VB