Touching the Dragon
And Other Techniques for Surviving Life’s Wars
Big Ideas
“When I was shot in Afghanistan during a mission to rescue Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, one war ended for me and another began. I’d served as a member of Naval Special Warfare for most of my twenty-five years and eleven months in the Navy. Because of our training and skill sets, and because of atypical psychological hard-wiring, people in my particular unit are comfortable and clear-headed in situations where panic is probably the more natural response. I’d always felt my ability to work and focus was enhanced, not diminished, by things going sideways suddenly. But when that lucky shot from the panicking enemy hit me, things went sideways in a new way, a way I was less well equipped to handle. I was forced to stop operating with my unit and reintegrate into a society that I had spent two decades defending, but in which I didn’t feel I had a place.
Stepping off the Speeding Train caused me to lose my mind. I had almost always been an asset—to my team and my country. Now, all I could think about was the fact that I was a liability. I no longer had a sense of purpose, I wrestled—poorly—with a tough question: What do you do when you’re suddenly divorced from your calling? In need of help, but unable to ask for it, I despaired, abused alcohol, and became suicidal. At one point, I even unfairly involved my wife in some pathetic gunplay.
It took a courageous, no-bullshit group of people who inserted and sometimes forced themselves into my life to get me to the point where I was equipped to receive help, and also to help myself. These people make up a chain that I credit with saving my life and my mind—a chain that starts with the friends in the firefight who risked their lives to save me on the battlefield, and runs all the way through the field hospital doctors, stateside surgeons, volunteers, fellow veterans, psychologists, and family that are still there for me today.
How they saved me—at war, and at home—is quite a story. People will rightly assume that I saw amazing things as a warfighter. But I saw equally amazing things as a recovering person.
In gunfights, what made us potent was not the gear, guns, and macho nonsense that movies and video games sensationalize. It was drive, professionalism, and love for each other—the same traits I saw in the segment of society that saved my life and repaired my spirit after I was shot. The difference is, the heroes of my second war will never get medals for the work they did.
So let this be their tribute.”
Jimmy Hatch is a retired member of the Naval Special Warfare Development Group—also known as SEAL Team Six.
I met Jimmy through a mutual friend who introduced us via text. I actually missed the text during a micro-sabbatical when I didn’t turn on my phone for a month.
I replied three months after the original introduction. Within about three hours of my text reply, Jimmy and I were on FaceTime. Within about three minutes of that call, I knew I found a new soul brother. I was buzzing after our 90-minute chat.
I bought his book that night. I received it 36 hours later. I read it within the following 24 hours. It’s PHENOMENAL. And, here we are.
It’s hard to put into words just how powerful this book is.
Anderson Cooper has interviewed Jimmy and has become one of his biggest fans and supporters. His testimonial is on the cover of the book. It’s an absolutely brilliant summary.
Cooper tells us: “Jimmy Hatch is heroic, not just for what he has done on the battlefield, but for breaking the silence surrounding the battles many service members face when they return. He is a warrior who read Neruda and Epictetus by ChemLight on blacked-out helicopters on his way back from secret nighttime missions in faraway lands. He is a writer whose descriptions of the ‘clean, shining edges of time’ he experienced on the battlefield haunt me. He is a survivor and though some of his wounds are visible, his deepest wounds and his greatest strengths are only revealed in the pages of Touching the Dragon. There are plenty of books full of wartime exploits, but I haven’t come across any book that reveals with such honesty and openness the ‘second war’ that Jimmy and other special operators must fight when they come back to a society that seems so alien to them, a society completely divorced from the purity of combat.”
As you’d expect, the book (get a copy here) is packed with Big Ideas. I’m excited to share some of my favorites. Let’s get to work.
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.
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.
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.
Get the BookAbout the authors
James Hatch
