A Love Story for the Ages — Part 11 — Bad Choices

A Love Story for the Ages

Wel­come to Part 11 of the Blog Series A Love Story for the Ages. This series is the jour­ney my wife and I have taken get­ting to the great life we enjoy together today. Now the continu­a­tion of the story.…

Bad Choices

After a few days of relax­ing at the house and recov­er­ing from the lack of sleep in Afghanistan, I started get­ting a bit stir crazy. I decided that I wanted to go out and have some “fun” with Harmonie.

At the time, my idea of fun was going out and par­ty­ing, drink­ing, and gam­bling. All of this debauch­ery is unfor­tu­nately prac­ticed by many vet­er­ans return­ing from war zones, includ­ing me. I’m not proud of this part of my life, but it’s the real­ity of what life is like com­ing home from deployments.

The stress of deploy­ments builds up and when we get home, we find any way to release the stress. The mil­i­tary has many “pro­grams” in place to help, but the stigma sur­round­ing them is so bad that nobody is will­ing to risk going to them. We all know the con­se­quences on our careers if we’re seen by them. My release hap­pened to be gambling.

It goes back to 2008, before I knew Har­monie when I had won a very large sum of money in a poker tour­na­ment. It made me feel like I couldn’t lose. After the tour­na­ment, for weeks on end I con­tin­ued win­ning at what­ever I played.

All this did was fuel the problem.

Fast for­ward back to 2009, after I got home from Afghanistan.

At first, Har­monie took it all in stride. She believed it to be just a phase from return­ing home from Afghanistan. For a while, she even came with me to the casino. Even­tu­ally, Harmonie’s dis­like for gam­bling kicked in and she asked me to stop. All this did was lead to a lot of arguments.

As gam­bling remained an issue for us, we still con­tin­ued to go out and party. We would reg­u­larly go out to bars and clubs. The prob­lem was, when we went out, I always wanted to stop at the tables. Typ­i­cally, I’d be drunk by this point, so it was impos­si­ble to rea­son with me. I just kept doing what I wanted.

I used gam­bling as my out­let for stress. I had no cop­ing mech­a­nisms in place. I’ve been through a lot and unfor­tu­nately I didn’t make wise choices to relieve stress.

The whole time we were going through all this, we were still try­ing to get to know each other. As tough as it was being apart for the length of the deploy­ment, get­ting to know each other through my gam­bling issues was just as difficult.

Obvi­ously, I’ve made a lot of changes in my life. Our lives have com­pletely changed since then. Com­ing into a rela­tion­ship with God was the best deci­sion I’ve ever made (fol­lowed closely by mar­ry­ing Har­monie). It made me real­ize that life is sup­pose to be about cher­ish­ing your loved ones and giv­ing back to humanity.

Well, my fam­ily means a lot to me and I plan on giv­ing back any way pos­si­ble; start­ing with vet­er­ans exposed to burn pits.