Recalibrated

The silence of a rural road in Helmand Province is never actually silent. It’s a heavy, vibrating pressure, the kind that makes you hyper-aware of the exact placement of your heels and the rhythmic, electronic hum of the metal detector in your hand. As a Route Clearance specialist, my world was roughly six feet wide. Anything inside that sweep could end everything. Anything outside it simply didn’t exist.

My job was to find bugs in the road. The IEDs. Before they found my unit, before they found the locals just trying to get to a market. It was the ultimate high-stakes QA. One missing edge case didn’t result in a crashed server. It resulted in a funeral.

But the job was never just about the wires in the dirt. It was about the people who lived at the end of the road.

The Tea and the Bread

The sweep didn’t end cleanly. It went from intense pressure, the kind where you are crawling up to a patch of dirt with a knife, willing your hands to stay still, knowing that the next few seconds could be your last, straight into a wave of physical exhaustion the moment the all clear was given. And then, almost immediately, back to hyper vigilance for the next stretch. There was no off switch.

When we reached a village, the first sign was usually a child. Out playing, spotting us coming, and then gone. Running to let people know. What happened next told you everything you needed to know. If the elders came out to meet you, you were probably fine. If the fighting age males disappeared, if the children vanished, that was a different kind of signal altogether.

But when it was the elders, and it usually was, you sat. Full kit, rifles laid to the side, helmets off, on cushions around a low table. The commander would give the nod and you would shift gears for the last time that day, from soldier to guest. And that is where the tea and the bread came in.

I remember the moments after the sweep was finished. Sitting on the ground with village elders, sharing hot tea and fresh bread that tasted better than anything I have had since. I remember the children, their energy a stark contrast to the gear we wore, and the afternoons spent teaching them ridiculous dances just to see them laugh.

We weren’t just clearing a path for patrols. We were clearing a path for them to go to the market, for their lives to happen. That was the ground truth. It wasn’t all violence. It was a deep, human connection forged in the middle of a conflict.

The System Crash

We were escorting US Delta soldiers back to base as the sun was going down. Half an hour into the journey, the lead vehicle was hit. A massive IED, under the passenger side wheel. I was sat in the passenger seat. I had been on top cover all the way out, standing, scanning my arcs. On the way back I switched and sat down. I had started to nap.

I woke up to the explosion. The cab was full of dust. The guy on top cover had been thrown clear of the vehicle. The guys in the back had the contents of the tool and ammo boxes fly up through the top hatch and bury them. A friend of mine was sat there holding a grenade, asking if it was safe. My commander was on the roof. The driver was shaken. I had flown up, taken the dashboard clean off with my right knee, and hit the roof head first. I was the last one to respond. Everyone was calling my name. On the fifth call I came to, half awake, knocked out somewhere in the middle of it. The first thing out of my mouth was “where are my cigarettes.”

I tried to move and my leg gave way. So I spent the next four hours leaning on one leg, back on top cover, scanning my arcs, making sure there wasn’t a secondary attack coming. The pain was there, but the job wasn’t done, and being on high alert removes everything else. It wasn’t until we were loading the vehicle onto the recovery truck, and I climbed into a US vehicle to get back to base, that it all hit me. The adrenaline dropped, the focus was gone, and there was nothing left to do but feel it.

The transition from the battlefield to a surgery recovery room in England wasn’t the clean hero’s return the movies promise. It was a chaotic system crash. My body was broken, and my mind was stuck in a high-alert loop.

PTSD isn’t just a memory. It’s a faulty algorithm. Hyper vigilance with no exit condition. I was home, safe, surrounded by four walls, but my brain was still scanning the carpet for wires and the doorways for tripwires. I was out, but I wasn’t back. I felt like a piece of hardware with corrupted firmware. Physically present, but functionally useless.

Root Access

During the months of surgeries and rehabilitation, I found Linux.

I didn’t turn to IT for the salary. I turned to it because the terminal didn’t care about my tremors or my flashbacks. It was a world of binary. If this, then that. In a life that felt completely out of my control, a CLI offered absolute order.

If I typed a command and it failed, there was a logical reason why. It wasn’t a bad day or a lapse in judgment. It was a syntax error. Solving those errors became my new physical therapy. Every time I fixed a broken dependency or configured a server from scratch, I was proving to myself that my brain wasn’t actually broken. It was just being recalibrated.

It was a slow realization. Piece by piece, I found I was still in there. The level of control, the permissions, the fine line you walked between root access and breaking the entire system, it reminded me of route clearance. One wrong move and everything stops. But when you get it right, the path clears and the system runs.

But with that realization came something else. Survivors guilt. The knowledge that I made it out, that I was sitting in a recovery bed learning Linux while others didn’t make it home at all. Root access wasn’t just about regaining control of the terminal. It was about finding a way to live with the fact that I still had access at all.

The 3 AM Logic

The real pivot happened because of a single point of failure: a lost USB drive.

I carried my music on a USB stick. It was my tether to normalcy. When I lost it, I didn’t just lose mp3s. I lost the one thing I felt I had any real control over. So instead of buying a new one, I decided to build a way to never lose it again.

I taught myself PHP to build a personal streaming service. I remember the frustration. The late nights where the code wouldn’t execute, the 3 AM logic where you’re staring at a semicolon and questioning your entire existence. But that frustration was clean. It was better than the noise.

The moment I hit refresh and the music played through the browser, it wasn’t just a technical win. It was the first time since the blast that I felt like a Specialist again. I had identified a problem, cleared the path, and delivered a solution.

The Second Mission

As I moved from self-taught Linux admin to software engineer, I realized I had brought something with me from Afghanistan that most people in this industry never develop.

In tech, people panic. Servers go down, deployments fail, and P0 incidents send teams into a tailspin. I usually just sit back and breathe. When you have spent your mornings looking for IEDs in the dirt, a 2 AM production outage isn’t a crisis. It’s just a puzzle. I have been in tighter situations. I know that panic is the enemy of the solution.

Eventually, I got to the point where I could say I made it. And by then I was constantly self-reflecting, looking back at the journey. I realized it didn’t have to be as hard as it was. All I needed was a mentor. But at the time, I probably wouldn’t have taken the help even if it was offered. The learning was a distraction. Instead of being alone with my thoughts, I was alone with a problem to solve, and sleep only came from mental exhaustion.

Now I offer that help to others, whether they’re ready to take it or not. Because I know what it looks like when someone is grinding themselves down in silence.

But the most important part of my journey isn’t the code. It’s the mentoring of others, unaware of the help being offered.

In the military, we looked out for one another. In tech, I see too many people suffering in silence, grinding through burnout or imposter syndrome because they think struggling is a sign of weakness. I have become an advocate for what I call the daily standup of the mind. I tell my juniors and my peers: quiet suffering doesn’t solve the bug. If you’re stuck, you speak up. If you’re drowning, you reach out. We clear the path together.

Recalibrated

I am not recovered. I don’t think you ever fully clear the mines from your own head. But I am recalibrated.

Today, my sweep is different. I scan codebases, I audit infrastructure, and I mentor the next generation of engineers. People in tech talk about mission-critical systems and high-pressure deployments. I usually just nod. The stakes are different now, but the mindset is identical: meticulous scanning, identifying hidden threats, and clearing a path so that others can move forward safely.

Even now, on a random Tuesday, I sit at my clean desk in my ergonomic chair with a hot coffee, open my terminal or editor, and the hyper vigilance kicks in. Not like before. Less life threatening, more problem solving. It’s an instinct now, not a situation. Hyper vigilance to what’s going on, what needs my attention, what problem needs solving. My day to day is all about developer education. Making mentoring, education, and helping others my full-time job.

The tools have changed. The metal detector became a mechanical keyboard. But the mission is the same: find the hidden threats, keep a cool head when the pressure rises, and clear the path so that everyone else can get home safe.