This video segment features my friend and training partner, Rudy Reyes. Rudy is a highly-decorated former Force Recon Marine and played himself in David Simon’s Generation Kill. He is currently putting his life back together after multiple tours of duty.

Anyone that’s known me for any length of time, knows that I lionize the work of Jonathan Shay—the psychologist who originally started working with Vietnam Vets to help them return to civilian life. One of his main contributions was the importance in crafting a personal narrative to make sense of events that seem so horrific and disconnected.

Rudy is a beautiful human being and very lucid in his issues in this interview. Please, watch it—it will change the way that you view wars and soldiers forever.

“Melodramas of moral courage provide satisfaction through the comforting fantasy that our own character would hold steady under the most extreme pressure of dreadful events. [But we must face] the painful awareness that in all likelyhood one’s own character would not have stood firm.”

— Jonathan Shay (Achilles In Vietnam : Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character)