Chapter 1: The War Before the War
Each of us fought a war long before we joined the military.
The war of childhood survival.
That war gave us our first training on how to handle stress.
Before we ever laced up our boots, our nervous system got its first marching orders from those early experiences. That’s where it learned how to deal with what we feel: from sadness and anger to joy and excitement.
I learned to bottle up my anger and hide my big emotions. I got good at ignoring how I felt. I learned how to "behave," but not how to recognize what I needed when I was feeling too much or stressed out.
For most of us, the way we learned to handle stress as kids became the unconscious blueprint for how we handled it in the military.
I don't care how good your parents were—no one leaves childhood without a few scars the body still remembers. And if you’re like me, you might've gotten more than your fair share.
But we adapted. We overcame. We pushed forward. Indomitable.
We were soldiers.
We thought it was all behind us.
Except that it’s not.
Our nervous system is still shaped by those early experiences. The way we’re breathing right now—how much space we feel safe taking up in the room with our breath—still reflects what happened to us as kids.
The posture our spine is taking right now.
The tension we’re holding in our shoulders, jaw, and face.
All these things, and more, still follow patterns formed by how we learned to deal with stress in childhood.
Those same pathways fired back up during the intense pressure and stress of military service.
The definition I use for stress comes from Dr. Dan Siegel:
Stress is the activation of the body in response to something significant happening.
Stress can come from a wanted event, like lifting weights (“good stress”), or an unwanted one (“bad stress”). Either way, it’s what happens when life demands more from us than usual.
In the military, we often faced high-stress situations where our survival depended on others.
I remember nodding off for two or three seconds at a time while driving through Baghdad at 3 a.m. I was part of a convoy of 200 vehicles on a non-stop trip from Mosul. It didn’t matter how tired I was, I had to keep going. There was no one to take over, nowhere safe to pull over. The choice was between staying awake or risking certain death for myself, my sergeant, and my gunner up top. I was fully dependent on my chain of command for relief.
As infants, we were also fully dependent on our caregivers: parents, siblings, relatives. We couldn’t feed, clean, or even move on our own. We couldn’t fully regulate stress. We came into this world wired to reach out when overwhelmed because we're not born with a system ready to manage life's challenges on its own.
A baby can’t fully self-soothe. Left alone too long, it will die.
That's important to recognize, because some of the traumas we’ve held onto are just like that baby. These powerful emotions can't calm themselves. They need connection with others to settle.
In the military, we sometimes faced overwhelming waves of stress, fear, rage, horror, or grief. In those moments, we reached the limits of what we could handle alone.
When that happened, a part of us cried out—usually silently—for someone to bring support, relief, or care.
The degree to which we didn’t get that care is the degree to which ordinary stress turned into traumatic stress.
To be clear, most stress is manageable with the right support, whether during or after the event.
But if we're pushed past our limits without enough support, stress can become trauma.
Trauma isn't the event itself.
Trauma is the unprocessed stress that gets stuck inside us when the right kind of support isn't there.
We’re meant to face the challenges that come from protecting our people with our people, not alone. The burdens we carry from service are meant to be shared in community when we return. That’s how we’ve always survived and thrived as a species.
It’s also how our people remember what service truly costs.
That’s why, in the next chapters, we’ll explore how to rewire our stress response, both on our own and with others.
We need both internal and external support in place before we go back and face what once overwhelmed us.
Key takeaways:
- Our basic training for handling stress started in childhood. Those patterns still live in our bodies today.
- Trauma isn’t what happened to us; it’s the stress that got stuck when the right support wasn’t there.
I've found it helpful to ask myself:
How did people treat me when I was upset as a kid, and how did that shape how I handled stress in the military?
Take a slow breath and sit with that question for a moment.
Then read it once more, a little more slowly.
When you’re ready, click the link below to move on to Chapter 2: The Center of the Herd.
We’ll explore what it means to find the right kind of support.
