James Hatch

What’s more powerful than cognitive therapy? Love.

There’s a question that people often ask me when I give speeches: Am I Mr. Happy Guy now? Hell no. I’m not ‘good’ now. I’m not fixed. The sadness is never fully gone. I just keep it at bay. With constant effort. And I realize that even with that effort, I’ll never be 100 percent in the clear.

You touch the dragon, over and over, until you realize that the horrifying dragon, which you’ve been fearing, actually can’t burn you.

The truth is that most of the time, we didn’t have all the intel we wanted. It was almost comical. We wanted to know everything. The more details we could plan for, the safer we felt. But certainty was an illusion. Things change rapidly. The map is not the terrain, to paraphrase De Niro’s character in Ronin.

So why did the guys in my unit and the civilians who helped me in the second war do it? For a simple reason: they’re just plain good people. They didn’t get paid bonuses. They received no medals on their chests. They just gave. Over and over. As I left the hospital down south, I knew I needed to return the favor. I needed to give something back. And that’s when it hit me. The second thing you owe to people who save your life: You’ve got to live your life fully. You’ve got to get back to being an asset.

I frequently get asked, Was there one thing that made the difference? Not one event, no. But one overarching phenomenon? Yes. Love. It was gifted to me. It was forced on me. When someone knows your deepest shame and still loves you, that’s when you feel the restorative power of family. Mine was bigger than I thought.

I realized that you don’t have to be a commando to suffer severe trauma. Life is combat. For most of us. We go from conflict to conflict, with most of the conflicts occurring inside of us. And as long as they remain that way—internal and unshared—you’re at risk.

Little did I know that I’d spend the next many years of my life grappling with my own kind of invisible wounds. And I’d come to learn that invisible wounds are the toughest, because it’s difficult to target them. Nothing is bleeding, and you can’t put a tourniquet anywhere.

When my crew went out, there were no Democrats or Republicans. We were not sponsored by, or party to, any ideology, other than our loyalty to the U.S. The earning of promotions and the amassing of clout were not on our minds. Why? Because we felt lucky. Lucky to be focused on mission and each other. Lucky to participate in something bigger than self-interest, which is when you get gifted with love. And love is what I clearly felt for my colleagues, and the dogs.

At some point, I believe there must have been a cage match in the soul of the Fly Fisherman, between self-interest and selflessness. Self-interest lost, badly.

I’m more interested in focusing on the painful and real shadows, not just the handsome shading behind our shiny medals. I live with those shadows, and carry them, and I can’t change that. So I wear them, mostly on my arm, because I don’t want them to lose their weight. It’s not morose. It’s just that it’s dangerous to try to forget them, because that gives them more strength.

Killing is ugly. And because it is, I have a serious problem with the glorification of violence. With the elevation of macho bullshit. And with the video-game-ification of war.

Touching the dragon involved touching the thing that tormented me over and over until I realized it wasn’t going to burn me. ... And you hate yourself for flawed reasons. So expose them. When you face it, the dragon that you think is going to incinerate you, doesn’t.