Invisible Storm: A Soldier's Memoir of Politics and PTSD – The Brutally Honest New York Times Bestseller About Depression, Suicidal Crisis, and Choosing Healing

by Jason Kander

My back didn’t hurt. The relief was enormous. By some miracle, at this remote forward operating base I had awoken completely pain-free. It was like reaching into my pocket and finding an unexpected hundred-dollar bill.

The military provided Jason with no mental health prep before Afghanistan and zero upon his return. Likewise there was nothing to help a reservist’s spouse deal with deployment. Nothing to tell me what it might feel like, how to become emotionally prepared for it, or even what I would have to deal with upon Jason’s return. In every other part of my life, I had been the planner who always stayed in control.

Halfway through the meal, I went to the restroom. I squatted over a hole and tried not to let any part of me touch the walls, which were frescoed with brown brushstrokes. This was the very good reason I was carrying toilet paper in my cargo pocket and why no one at that table was eating with their left hand. My thighs burned with fatigue from squatting, but in my mind I laughed at the idea of having a business lunch with people who wiped their ass with a bare hand. Oh well. It wasn’t like cowboys in the Wild West were carrying Charmin Ultra around with them either. Out here, even taking a dump was an adventure.

I wanted to say, No shit, but instead I thanked him and handed over the co-pay.

In the legislature I found my calling: ethics reform. It earned me the loathing of pretty much the entire assembly. Leadership refused to recognize me on the floor, killed any bill I filed just to watch it die, and cooked up bullshit ethics complaints against me. Even people who did support my ethics bill told me they couldn’t do so publicly for fear of losing a committee assignment or a nice office, or even a parking spot.

I’d done anticorruption work in Afghanistan and heard a lot of my contacts say some version of this: “Afghanistan is not like America; all that matters in Afghan politics is money.” Then I got to the Missouri legislature and found just one difference: nobody here worried about getting their head cut off. It was still all about money.

I remember the moment I found out my Twitter account had been verified, which may as well have been called validation instead of verification. In those early days, it wasn’t enough just to hold an office or be a staff writer at a website—it was a more subjective test that seemed to come down to “being someone who mattered.” I had been the guy who eschewed honorifics, but suddenly I was chasing this symbol. To me, that little blue check mark was tantamount to American knighthood.

Reader, let’s talk about ambition. First of all, the word is almost always used against young people—especially women.

So you lost an election? Big deal. What right do you have to be depressed? You came home from Afghanistan alive. Suck it up, asshole.

I’d finally arrived at Rock Bottom, the international capital of having zero fucks left to give.

I found myself standing on the side of the road with a smoking engine, a half-empty can of motor oil, and a rusty wrench. And I was just wrecked by depression.

Diana observed that I might be the “most famous depressed person in America.” That was a hell of a pivot in my personal brand.

The gentleman who sold her to us was familiar with my background, and he said to me, “She’s trained just like you were—she’s got those protection instincts.” That’s right. Instead of a PTSD service dog, we got a dog with PTSD.

Her number-one goal became teaching this terminator, sent from the future by Skynet, to at least contemplate a cuddle on the couch.

When I started getting help, my great-uncle John said that “therapy is about getting a master’s in yourself.” His insight was spot on.

She defined trauma as “anything that is too much, too fast, too soon, or not enough for too long.”

I’d stuffed joy and love and sadness and disappointment in a cardboard box marked FEELINGS, thrown a tarp over it, and shoved it into a dark corner of my emotional basement.

See, The Monster works like a nightmare houseguest: it moves into your brain, trashes the place, and then gaslights you into believing it was never there. PTSD convinces you that you never had it, and you’re just an asshole.

Trauma is like credit card debt. The payment is bad enough, but the interest will ruin you.

Thinking “other people have it worse” doesn’t actually diminish your own trauma, it just diminishes your power to heal. Mental health is physical health and physical health is mental health.

Native Americans made sure everyone in the tribe understood what the warriors had experienced so that the warriors would never have to feel alone in the tribe. In America today, we give our warriors a free chicken fajita rollup at Applebee’s on Veterans Day and expect them to be exactly who they were before the war.

Basically, the army wires every soldier to think “What I did was no big deal.” It’s an absolutely necessary form of brainwashing that helps you keep going.

This failure to flip the switch back to normal, to deprogram military thinking that is useful during service but potentially harmful afterward, is the reason why I and so many others kept thinking that we couldn’t possibly have “earned” our PTSD and that getting treatment for it was like “stealing valor.”