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The obvious next choice was to become a PMC (private military contractor). It is the immediate next step for a lot of special operations guys when they get out. Two of my Ranger buddies, Trey and Josh, who got out around the same time I did, went straight into contracting. The agencies love to grab up guys like them as early as they can, because their ideal candidate still has his security clearances and an up-to-date understanding of the area of operations he’s likely to be working in. The smoothness of that transition from public to semi-private work is very enticing for most special operations guys who do it, and for those who are less enticed, the fact that contracting pays a fuck-ton of money helps bridge the enthusiasm gap. How could it not—you’re doing a similar job in support of the same cause, but now you get to wear civilian clothes, eat way better food, and make three times as much money as you did before. It’s kind of a dream gig.
I wasn’t interested. I mean, I was, but at the same time I also wasn’t. When I left the Army, I was certain that I could go back to civilian life and be a normal twenty-three-year-old. I could slide right into the flow of normal daily life and go with it like everyone else out there who hadn’t gone through the kind of shit my buddies and I had in combat. And I stubbornly still felt like that was true, even if the drinking and the spending and the rage argued to the contrary. It was L.A. that was the issue, not me. It was entitled college kids with stupid ideas who were the problem. I knew what time it was, if you know what I mean.
The next day I went to the one place that every young, impressionable, know-it-all college dropout turned to in the mid-2000s when they were looking for a temporary solution to a much longer-term problem: Craigslist. I spent hours scouring the site for any kind of job that seemed exciting, and I learned a valuable lesson in the process: Casual Encounters is not where you look for easy one-time gigs that pay under the table, no matter what your brother tells you. You might very well get a job, but it’s almost certainly going to be of the hand, blow, foot, or rim variety.
Eventually, I stumbled on something called “Executive Protection.” It was interesting because it paid well. It was exciting because, while it supposedly leaned on some of the skills I spent years honing in the military, it was definitely not PMC work. In that sense it was comfortable and familiar, and it allowed me to keep telling myself that my struggle to acclimate was the climate’s fault, not my own.
I put out feelers to all the private security firms in Southern California that I could find and eventually landed with one in downtown Los Angeles. I had to sign an NDA when I was onboarded, so I can’t tell you exactly who hired me, but what I can tell you is that being able to tell their clients that they were sending over someone who was former special operations was a huge bonus for this particular firm, which specialized in round-the-clock protection for wealthy families and high-dollar executives who regularly did business in countries that don’t like to play by the rules.
Initially, I picked up one-off gigs here and there. I’d do security at red carpets or accompany an actress to an event after her stalker got released from the hospital. Nothing too weird, at least by L.A. standards. Eventually, I was assigned to an extremely wealthy family in Beverly Hills as part of a four-man detail that would rotate in twelve- to eighteen-hour shifts depending on what the family was doing any given week.
It took me a couple of months doing my best impression of a floor lamp to realize why the job paid as well as it did. It wasn’t because of the risks I had to assume, it was because of all the shit I had to eat. And let me tell you, there was a lot of it. Every day it was Two Girls One Cup, and I was the cup. It’s not that I hated this family—I didn’t, they were nice people—but I was as much a piece of scenery as I was a part of their lives. If I hadn’t carried a 9mm pistol and been carved from a solid block of American handsome, I suspect there would have been times they would have just tried to pick me up and move me themselves to eliminate any inconvenience my presence created.
It sounds more dehumanizing than it was, to be fair. The security firm prepares you for that aspect of the job. Nobody wants to feel like they’re sharing their private living quarters with four perfect strangers. The entire goal of the job is to melt into the atmosphere and make your presence known only when the shit is going down. This wasn’t Man on Fire. I wasn’t Denzel trying to protect a little girl from a bunch of narcotraficantes. Though that would have been rad. Stateside kill!
What made the job difficult was that I never had an opportunity to show anyone what I could do. I was a creative guy, I was relatively smart, I liked to play music. But in this job that guy felt so far away—like a stranger. It didn’t help that I hadn’t cultivated any of these traits since high school, and no one I dealt with on the job was interested in digging in and pulling them out of me. So, Mat, what do you like to do in your spare time? Do you have any hobbies or interests? I don’t know what I would have done if they had taken an interest, because in my mind, if I was being honest with myself, I was still a warfighter. Full stop. But was that all I was? Was that going to be what defined me for the rest of my life, this fucking war? Judging by my interactions with L.A. girls and Northridge college kids and my security firm, it seemed like that was a real possibility.
I pride myself on my work ethic. No matter what the job is, I want to go the extra mile and do the best damn job possible. In my old line of work, that meant being proficient in every weapons system, having my entire team prepared for every mission, and being in peak physical shape. In this job, it meant wiping down the windshield of the family’s Bentley so they couldn’t tell it had just passed by the sprinklers on the way up the driveway. It meant that when my boss, who was a major studio executive, invited all his famous friends over for Monday Movie Night, I helped move couches into the theater room without nicking any of the walls.
You have no idea how disorienting all this was. I was a twenty-four-year-old veteran with five combat tours in active war zones. I had led teams of actual heroes into firefights multiple times a week for months on end. I had done shit. The Army spent months, if not years, turning guys like me into perpetual motion machines of confidence, capability, and resolve. Yet after barely a year in Los Angeles, the Rambo sensibility and confidence that carried me through years of combat had all but disappeared, leaving me in a rage-filled, booze-soaked hole of self-doubt.
When you spend years within a tight-knit community fighting side by side, and you come from a long line of veterans who’ve served, it’s not uncommon to hear stories about guys you know who struggle with doubt and depression. I knew that what I was dealing with—even if I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time—was nothing new. Even the way it came about was nothing out of the ordinary. It was the accumulation of small, unexpected, unfamiliar, uncomfortable events that slowly began to take their toll. And what made it even weirder, and worse, was that all this was happening in fucking Los Angeles. I had gone directly from having one of the realest, most authentically important jobs imaginable to living in one of the fakest, vainest places on the planet.