Every day, I start the shift by throwing on my marking gear. It’s not as heavy as my kit in Afghanistan, just an easy 40-odd pounds with the paint. Instead of a blaze orange cruiser vest like the ones my co-workers use, I still take the old tactical vest I wore over my armor back then. The mag pouches hold the Relaskop I use to measure tree height, and the dump pouch holds my clipboard of data cards, with room to spare for the wild mushrooms and onions I collect. Add to that my four-gallon backpack paint sprayer and I’m ready to go.



Sometimes I think about the blood on the vest. You can’t see it anymore; everything I own is splattered with timber-marking paint nowadays. We use water-based paint for marking in pine stands, and oil-based for hardwoods. The water-based paint wears off of hardwood bark after only a few years. My best friend bled on me during a firefight. He had been hit in the fingertip by something minor enough to not notice, but because it was during a fight, the Army would call your family and freak them out no matter how quaint the injury. The paint manufacturer uses citrus oil, so by the end of the day, my beard smells like an orange from the overspray. We didn’t tell our NCOs he had been hurt. He’s been dead five years. He shot himself.

After spending six years overseas, I came back and couldn’t deal with the hectic lower-48 lifestyle, so I went to Alaska. When I first became a forest ecologist, I’d wanted to do research, make the world a better place through learning. But I learned quickly that none of it mattered if policymakers ignored your work. Last year, I decided I needed to be involved in direct management, and took a job in the Wisconsin northwoods. It took 18 months to finally get VA appointments for my TBI and PTS. The doctor tried several medications to help me. One of them made me certain I was having a heart attack. Thinking I was dying, I made peace with God on the floor of my one room cabin. Next time I saw him, the doctor told me to just smoke cigarettes to dull the anxiety. He said he couldn’t do anything for my other symptoms.

I spend my time working in Wisconsin’s second-growth forests, administering timber sales and marking trees for harvest. Old growth takes a long time to regenerate, so I help the process along by cutting to favor the old growth species. In a hundred years or so, I hope my grandkids will walk through the forest and think well of what I did. The next VA doctor told me he thought I was just a drug addict looking to score Xanax when he saw my medical allergies. So I chew nicotine gum like a fiend to keep the edge off.

Each forester has a signature in the trees they select to cut, and those they leave behind. The Alaska VA just threw their hands up after that and left me to my own devices. On my marking crew, I have a guy that leaves trees with cavities for wildlife like bats and birds, and a guy that prefers to leave certain species like the American basswood, which readily hollows out to make an animal habitat as well as producing a small edible seed for birds. I had to be a lab rat in a medical experiment to get care for my brain injury. Every morning I inject the hormone my damaged pituitary gland can no longer produce. Me, I prefer leaving mast species like black cherry and oak, which drop massive amounts of fruit and nuts for wildlife, as well as our forest’s old growth species like white pine, yellow birch, and eastern hemlock. Sometimes when we’re in training or office meetings, just the sound of that many people breathing and fidgeting around me drives me up the wall. Afterward, I find myself alone out in the forest, crippled by the realization that I’ll never be able to cope with close proximity to people again.