In 2012, a blast in Afghanistan ended his military career.
The return home was brutal—years of surgeries, physical pain, and the collapse of identity. He spiraled into drinking. Until 2014, when he quit cold. First for his wife and kids. Then for himself.

“At first, it was about being a better husband, a better father,” he says. “Eventually, it became about being a better me.”

Sobriety gave him space to confront what had been buried: trauma, anger, grief. He calls it the hardest and most rewarding thing he’s ever done.

There’s one memory that stays with him. Outside Baghdad, after two firefights, his team tracked a fleeing insurgent into a neighborhood.

They knocked on a family’s door at 3 a.m. The family was seated in the living room, frozen. The mother’s eyes kept flicking to her right. Behind her stood a man with a knife pressed to her back.

“We were two feet away,” Don says. His team managed to disarm and capture the man without firing a shot. The family thanked them, but Don saw the dread in their eyes. “They had to live there after we left. We went back behind our walls. They had to deal with the fallout.”

That night changed his view of war. “Liberation is never simple,” he says. “For civilians, the war doesn’t end when the soldiers leave.”

It deepened his compassion for displaced people. “In the kinetic moments, everybody suffers. Afterwards, it’s the refugees who carry the long shadow.”

He sees a shared thread between veterans and refugees. “Both are changed forever by forces they didn’t control,” he says. “It’s not whole cultures or religions causing this. It’s a few bad actors with a lot of influence. Humanity is the same everywhere. Love is love. Grief is grief.”

Now eleven years sober, Don is channeling that same drive into healing work. He’s rebuilding his life through study and service, training to become a clinical social worker at the VA. 

“I want to be the clinician I needed,” he says.

To give people what war almost took from him—the belief that they can come home to themselves.