Had I read The War Horse Fellow Handbook, I would have known that the program was for veterans “who want and need to tell stories from their time in service.” My book is about soccer in the Middle East. There was also this essay, however, which originally was due back in April. When I pitched the idea to my editor, I had grossly underestimated how much soul-searching would be required. Turned out, I had no clue who I was. For months, I wrote in circles around myself, devoting tens of thousands of words to a panoply of irrelevant topics, everything from the Indian Wars and Irish gold miners to primitive cave drawings and driving conditions in West Texas. Some drafts read more like suicide notes. The wheel-spinning took a mounting toll. As my father put it: “This has gone way beyond what you can handle and everyone around you can handle.” But I refused to let go. Even as the debt piled up and my relationship fell apart, even as more lucrative opportunities fell by the wayside, I kept at it, slogging toward a fading dream, determined to prove to myself that I still had it, that I hadn’t lost my mojo, that I hadn’t reverted back to the guy I was before the Army, the guy who always gave up, who expected others to shoulder his burdens, who was doomed to fail. Now, standing in a room full of people who would happily help get me over the finish line, I wanted to turn back in the other direction.

As introductions began, I was brainstorming excuses when one fellow, an Air Force veteran named Jen, said something that caught my attention. She had worked in a combat-support hospital near Kandahar City in 2010. The story she had come to Virginia to tell began with her and her colleagues running across the hospital landing zone to a Black Hawk full of dead American soldiers. I noted some familiar details in her brief description of the casualties as they appeared when the helicopter crew chief slid open the cargo door — the missing heads, the charred flesh. She mentioned that only one of the bodies was still wearing a name tape and that someone asked what it read. “Carver,” she said. “He had beautiful green eyes.” At which point I volunteered to introduce my story next. “Those were my guys,” I began. “I put them in that helicopter.”

Five days later, when it was time for everyone to go back to wherever they came from, back to our respective ecosystems, nobody wanted to leave. We exchanged emails and phone numbers and promised to stay in touch. All of us had done this dance before. Military life is full of hard goodbyes. But you are always looking forward to something: block leave, the end of a deployment, reuniting with friends and family, retirement. Then you get out, and you can’t stop looking back. That’s why we had gone to Virginia — to figure out how to carry the stories. To unstick ourselves from the past. Because moving on isn’t the same thing as running away. That was my takeaway, at least. I realized that along with the traumatic memories, I had also buried the side of me who can cope with them. It was liberating to be in a place where war and its repercussions aren’t kept shrouded in mystery. And humbling. I remembered why I got into journalism in the first place. War is a failure to communicate, and nothing good comes from veterans’ keeping quiet about it. I am proof of that.

Over these past several months, I have gotten to know my grandfather better than I knew him when he was alive. And I can see that his depth perception became discombobulated somewhere between the world he saw ending beyond the window of his cockpit and the one he found himself in when it didn’t end. He squeezed every ounce of energy into life immediately after the war — and then life kept going. The formula was unsustainable. I recently came across photographs of him that I had never seen. In one, he appears alongside my grandmother in his Class A uniform, smiling wide with a martini in one hand and his straight black hair greased and parted. They look genuinely happy. As far as I can tell, he never saw the point of getting sober. “I hate this place,” he once said of the nursing home where he resided, adding an expletive for emphasis. That is the only conversation between us I can remember.

I’m told he started drinking during the war to calm his nerves. A B-24 was no easy machine to handle, especially under constant fire. As the author Stephen E. Ambrose noted in his book “The Wild Blue,” at higher altitudes, the bomber became a literal icebox, with temperatures plunging so low that the pilot’s oxygen mask would freeze to his face. My grandfather also wore an oxygen mask the day he died. But there wasn’t a bottle within reach. I went to see him several days before he died. He looked small and skeletal in his nursing gown. His eyes remained wide open and fixed on the ceiling for the duration of our visit, and periodically he would gasp, and spittle would fly from the hole in his throat. Thinking back on it now, as I sit in the apartment that I shared with Sara for more than three years, typing at my kitchen table, which will soon no longer be my kitchen table, and eye the suitcases waiting for me by the door, I see the crossroads that lies just ahead and see that vision of my grandfather looming at the end one of them. But at least now I can see that the other road goes somewhere better.

Adam Linehan is a freelance writer and journalist. He served as a United States Army medic and was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.