Jesus, I sound full of myself. Specifically, full of my own dick and balls. How I can still stand up straight after all those years of contorting myself to suck myself off, I have no idea. Moving on.
* * *
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In early 2015, I finished a deployment that included the closest call I ever had as a contractor. It wasn’t any kind of direct engagement like I’d had back in my battalion days. The closest, scariest calls never are. This was more like one of those “but for a totally unlikely, totally lucky series of small events, I’d be in a million pieces all over the desert right now” scenarios. I never saw the threat. The threat never saw me. But we were on a 100 percent collision course, and the only thing that saved me were those lucky, random intervening events.
For some reason, that got to me. I wasn’t rattled, I was just frustrated with myself. What the fuck am I doing? I am going to die out here, with everything good I’ve got going on back home, and I’m not even gonna see it coming. Why? Fuck this shit.
One afternoon that spring, we found ourselves at a ranch just outside of El Paso owned by some kind of world-renowned horseshoer who was raising horses and bulls. Why we were there, I still have no idea. There was some kind of business rationale, I assume. In our infinite wisdom, we figured why not take this opportunity to test drive Jarred’s new drone camera while I attempted a skill I’d never tried before: maneuvering a temperamental 2,200-pound beast around a meadow with a series of subtle hand and foot gestures. The horse, however, was not so great at handling that drone, which sounded like a massive swarm of angry bees as it flew directly over our heads. I tried to pull back on the reins to settle her down (apparently this is not the right move). She was intent on getting me the fuck off her back, so she ducked her head and front legs and then reared back to fling me out of the saddle like I was a sack of shit in a trebuchet. I hit the ground hard. I broke my arm, nearly exploded my knee, and smashed my face. My beautiful, beautiful face!
Wanna guess what my first thought was as I rode to the hospital to get myself un-Humpty-Dumpty’d? Whether I would be able to make my next contracting rotation. I was supposed to be back at the qualification school in four days for training and to get recertified. I called my contracting agency.
“Hey, just so you know, I just took a bad spill. My knee’s fucked, my arm’s broken, and I need stitches.”
“Omigosh, Mat. Are you okay?” said the woman from the contracting office.
“Yeah, yeah. So if I can shoot with one hand, can I still come?” There was a long pause.
“Jesus, Mat, worry about your health and safety!” she finally said.
“No, I know,” I replied, briefly registering that what I had just asked was certifiable. “But can I still go if I only have one arm?”
At the time it didn’t seem like too crazy of an ask (at least to me it didn’t). It was my left hand that was hurt, and I’m naturally right-handed, so technically I still had my dominant side. If the hand was fractured, I figured I could just wrap it and go through the qualification course like that. NFL linemen do that all the time when they suffer a hand fracture. Jason Pierre-Paul blew half the fingers off one hand with fireworks, and he still played! I wasn’t trying to be a macho tough guy. I really didn’t want to miss this opportunity, because if you miss training one time you can get hard-pressed out of a job, and that was what I was worried about.
The people at the ██████ were cool about it, and they didn’t make me feel like a crazy person for asking if I could still come. They just said that the next job date was eight weeks out, and with how long it takes for a bone to heal, especially if you have to get pins put in, and then have the cast removed, and maybe go through rehab after that, it wasn’t going to work. I would have cut my goddamn cast off if that was all there was to it, but that clearly wasn’t the case here, so I postponed my recertification.
When my business partners found out that I’d broken my hand and my face and it had put me out of commission, they were happy, those fuckers. It meant that I would be stateside for an indefinite period of time, during which I could dedicate all of my focus to our businesses, particularly Black Rifle Coffee, which was beginning to catch massive steam.
Slowly, everything began to change. Every day I was more excited about all the stuff we were doing. Making videos and selling quality products to quality people is actually a lot of fun. And making money not dodging bullets is funner. Yes, funner is a word.
A few weeks later, we were in North Carolina for a big bar event at Fort Bragg to promote Leadslingers Spirits. The place was packed with active-duty military, guys from Bragg, guys from Article 15 and Ranger Up who were just then starting to work together on Range 15, veterans from all over the region, and assorted people from various parts of the government, including these two guys who introduced themselves by name and not by profession. After a few minutes our conversation went from fanboy to full bro, and they let it slip that they were actually instructors at the qualification course where I was scheduled to be in four days’ time to recertify in preparation for my next contracting gig.
Yep, I was going back. But that’s not what you should be focused on right now. You should be worried about the same thing I was: the people who were about to critique my professional skills, grade me, and make an official determination about whether I was still fit to do my job as an “operative” were fans. This was incredibly disconcerting, because it could go one of two ways, and neither of them was very good. They could treat me like a VIP and take it easy on me, or they could have super-high expectations that bordered on hard-ass one-upmanship and try to teach the Internet dude a lesson. In either case, it would have been much better to be anonymous.
I had been dealing with being recognized overseas for a while. The incidents had increased over time, but rarely did they get too egregious or uncomfortable. This was the first time that my personal life and my professional life had blended and fused so completely. I did not like it. Instantly, I lost interest in going back for recertification or even deploying at all. People could legitimately get hurt if this kind of fuckery were allowed to take place, and I hated that I might play a part in that. It was tremendously upsetting to me.
I spent the rest of the night drinking until I couldn’t feel my feelings anymore. The next morning, Jarred and I nursed our hangovers over a batch of mimosas at some shitty restaurant. I vented to him.
“I honestly don’t know how to manage this, Jarred.”
“Fuck it, quit.” You can always count on Jarred for the nuanced approach.
“It’s not that easy,” I said, and then I laid out all my reasons (translation: excuses) for staying in. Then we walked through all the actual reasons why quitting wasn’t just easy but the sensible thing to do. I was ready, but there was still a Darby Phase river of bullshit to wade through.