From flying gunships in blinding sandstorms, to scaling buildings in Baghdad in the dead of night, the Marines made certain I was prepared for the challenges of being a warrior.

Until I came home.

There was no preparation for coming home. The trials of life after war would prove to be just as deadly as those of combat, but they weren’t openly discussed.  I was not alone in assuming that those challenges only happened to others. They wouldn’t happen to me.

I was fine because I said I was fine.

Then my younger brother crashed in Afghanistan, and my reaction proved me a liar. For the first time, I saw the minefield in front of me, and understood the dangers—for me and my family—of blundering into it without a plan.

So, I turned to writing to figure it out.

After Action helped me discover the most deadly of my personal mines—the ticking time bomb of persistent unease that followed me home from Iraq—and set me on a path to defuse it. 

Then, I captured the hard-earned lessons from my own journey in Continuing Actions: A Warrior’s Guide to Coming Home. There’s no hand-holding or re-aligning of chakras in here, just no-nonsense advice for veterans who want to plot their own course to a healthy, vibrant, and meaningful life after war.

Taken together, these two books offer a means for warriors to honestly examine their own journeys, and overcome the inevitable challenges of coming home. There is a lot of help out there for veterans, but we should start by helping ourselves, first.