Editor’s note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.
I’m not unique. Special to no degree whatsoever and adamant that I don’t deserve the success I’ve had in life so far. If life were fair, my stupidity and naivety would have been punished long ago. But it isn’t, and they weren’t. Instead, promotion and pay raises followed me to each duty station. Commendations, awards, and a “career with unlimited potential,” I was told, lay on the path before me. I told them I was happy, and I think they believed me.
Then one day, I tried to kill myself.
In hindsight, it was half-hearted at best. But my indifference to the outcome was surprising. Regret set in quicker than I expected. It is a strange feeling to have your body fight so soundly against death. A mind that ponders exit while the body screams stay. I awoke later, confused by what I had done.
I sought help. It didn’t. Things got worse.
The white noise and pills that once drowned out the world and helped me sleep were no longer sufficient. Instead, I watched traumatic videos. It made me feel mostly revulsion, but that was something. I made more determined plans, but guilt ultimately got the better of me.
I eventually spoke up, confessed to the flight doc, and was quietly grounded. Soon after, I was no longer in the Marine Corps. Relatively speaking, they made quick work of me.
Active-duty service members and veterans thinking of harming themselves can get free crisis care. Contact the Military Crisis Line at 988, then press 1, or access online chat by texting 838255. People who are not in the military can also call 988.
A few years later, I became silent. I took myself apart, piece by piece. I stopped returning calls from friends. I drank through family dinners until no one invited me anymore. I began to resent my wife for not understanding what I didn’t have the heart to tell her. I convinced myself I was pursuing happiness, but that wasn’t true. My actions felt closer to finally admitting how much I hated myself.
In the aftermath, a few things became clear. I am not happier alone — usually just the opposite. I felt more like a prisoner after his execution, longing for the walls of his former cell where at least the boundaries of misery were known. All that time spent prying myself out of relationships only pushed me further from what I lacked: self-compassion. Some people I genuinely needed to remove from my life, though others I abandoned without cause. I had laced my life in barbed wire and wondered why no one reached for me.
At some point I learned I was not alone. I was not the first to have such thoughts, to take such actions, to need help. I was one of many. The realizations were important, and I felt compelled to share them. I had something to say.
I gathered my dilemmas and took them to a publisher. Tales of a troubled fighter pilot, life in disarray. How could she not see how important my story was? But after pointing out the obvious inadequacies in my writing, she had one question that cut deeper than the others: What makes your story different?
“The ‘woe is me’ trope is done,” she said. “It has all been said a thousand times before.”
I packed my belongings and left. I had no answer for her. She was right. I wasn’t different. I didn’t earn medals for anything I considered heroic or survive against impossible odds. I didn’t save anyone. I certainly didn’t spend months lost at sea, though I was lost in other ways.
I’m not a survivor of foreign wars or combat wounds. I’m a survivor of my own mind, of an overused dialogue. How could I expect a publisher or potential readers to care about a topic that the Marine Corps itself relegates to an afterthought? In 2021, while attending Marine Corps University, a major general offered a solution to the active-duty suicide crisis with the confidence of someone who’d never considered it himself: Stop giving money to the families. Stop paying Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance or death gratuity. Remove the incentive, he said, and you remove the problem.
We all know the statistics. Consistently, veterans commit suicide at higher rates than nonveterans. Active duty is the same. In the first three months of 2025, 117 active-duty service members and reservists killed themselves or were suspected of doing so — more than one a day. It is a phenomenon so routine that the Department of Defense publishes quarterly reports. In 2022, the DOD found that nearly 18 veterans died by suicide each day. Another report claims that, on average, 24 veterans died per day between 2014 and 2018.
We learn these numbers and nod along knowingly, as if they capture the weight of waking up each morning unsure of why you bothered. As if data could explain the particular exhaustion of pretending to be well when someone asks how you’re adjusting to civilian life. Sure, the numbers are useful, but they are also insufficient. They tell us how many, but not what it feels like to be one.
There is no universal description. For me, it was not a choice to feel this way; it was a presence in my mind that refused to allow anything else. Forcing me to look in the mirror each morning, ready to point out my flaws. Reminding me that smiles belonged to others, happiness was impermanent, and my life wasn’t worth fighting for. A presence that explained, in no uncertain terms, how I deserved it.
Cruelly, it did not dull my awareness. I sensed how people changed their interactions with me, how their questions shifted to mundane topics, afraid of saying something that might “upset” me. I became aware of how the mention of my name prompted whispers.
I watched friends and family calculate the risk of inviting me to gatherings, how they exchanged glances, how their worry hung in the air like a thick fog. I became a walking reminder of how fragile everything was, how quickly dreams turn into nightmares. A situation impossible for them to understand, not having lived it themselves.
The isolation compounded the original wound. In those moments, I felt betrayed. The very people who might help treated me like something damaged, breakable, dangerous, or other. Their discomfort with my pain became just another burden I carried.
This is where statistics fail us most completely. They can’t measure the cumulative weight of being treated like a problem to be managed, rather than a person to be understood. To be handed from one doctor to the next, each trying to remove you from their books. Responding to questionnaires, filling out forms over and over, being repeatedly asked, “Why are you depressed?” Being told you have an adjustment failure, rather than acknowledging that some things are so fundamentally wrong, the healthy response is to struggle with them.
When the publisher asked me what made my story different, she missed the point entirely. The story that needs to be told isn’t about rising above, overcoming, or finding redemption in suffering. I don’t believe in any of that.
The story we need is about an ordinary Tuesday when you realize you’ve been holding your breath for six months. It’s about trying to fix your toilet at 3 a.m. because you’re unsure if it’s broken, but you can’t sleep and want something to do with your hands. It’s about using your pill bottles as maracas, desperate for someone to laugh along with you. It’s about saying “Livin’ the dream,” because you don’t have an explanation for the truth.
Maybe that’s what makes this story different. Not that it’s mine, but exactly because it isn’t. It’s a story too many people experience, and too often they experience it alone. It is a story worth telling. Not because my experience was exceptional, but because it’s heartbreakingly common. The publisher wanted extraordinary. What we need is honesty.
This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Rosemarie Ho, and copy-edited by Mollie Turnbull. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.
Evan Slusser is a former Marine Corps pilot and current doctoral student in political geography. He has undergraduate and graduate degrees from Virginia Tech and the University of Arizona, as well as time attending the Marine Corps University. After a decade of service, he now resides in North Carolina and spends his free time gardening and birdwatching. Neither at which he is remotely successful.
