The Ghosts We Carry

"For forty-two years, he mastered the art of the exit. Now he's learning something harder. How to stay in the room."

A decorated combat veteran carries ghosts that most people can't see. They sit in empty chairs at breakfast, ride shotgun on long drives, stand at the foot of his bed on sleepless nights. Not metaphorical ghosts. The actual dead, preserved in memory with high-definition clarity. Men whose lives were purchased with decisions he made, mistakes he can't undo, a car spoiler torn off in a drunken blackout that sent another soldier to die in his place.

From the invasion of Iraq to the streets of Ramadi, from Special Forces selection to a mental health crisis that nearly ended everything, The Ghosts We Carry follows one man's battle against a pattern etched into him since childhood: the seductive whisper that says walk away, it's easier in the dark, you were never going to make it anyway.

This is the story of a generation raised on promises of connectivity who became the most isolated in history. Men who live in adjacent apartments, share walls thin enough to hear a cough, and can't manage more than a nod in the hallway. It's the story of a mind that never stops racing, of drinking not for oblivion but to quiet thoughts that move like "cars racing around a track, never slowing, never stopping." It's the story of survivor's guilt that follows you into every morning shower, every mirror, every tooth you brush while thinking of the man with matching teeth who died because you lived.

And it's the story of what happens when the pattern finally meets something stronger than itself.

The Ghosts We Carry is not a war memoir. It's a meditation on what war does to a man, what isolation does to a generation, and what love might do to both if you can learn to stop reaching for the door.

"The thought doesn't frighten him. It's simply there, a door that remains perpetually unlocked. He won't walk through it. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But knowing the door exists provides a strange comfort. A final control in a life where so much seems beyond his grasp."