I Wrote a Novel to Keep Myself Alive

By Reid Cross

Years of service. Real missions, real stakes, real brotherhood. Then you wake up one morning and the mission is gone.

I entered the Army with one goal: to be a good enough leader to command a Special Forces detachment. It was my guiding light for the entirety of my time as an infantry officer. The way I saw it, taking care of your men, leading by example, shouldering the burden, and performing when needed were integral parts of being an effective leader anywhere.

I was never a “company man.” I didn’t care about OERs or the “kingmaker” positions. I cared about being good at my job and earning the right to assume the role I coveted so dearly. When I finally attended Special Forces Assessment and Selection and later graduated the Qualification Course, I finally got to live out my dream. Four years as a detachment commander on an SFOD-A gave me a sense of purpose I never knew I needed. Leading them in combat gave me even more.

Then I transitioned from active duty to the National Guard. Not because I wanted to or because I was ready to, but because I had to. For once in my 12 years of active service, I made a decision that so many of us struggle with: putting the family before the job.

When you do that, nobody tells you about the void that is left behind. Years of waking up with a clear understanding of my role vanished overnight. The structure was gone. The purpose that defined every decision I made for over a decade just … stopped.

Forced into a corporate environment I wasn’t designed for, I started spiraling. Anyone who’s made that transition knows what I mean. I listlessly meandered through Microsoft Teams meetings and quarterly earnings hype meetings, trying to adapt to a world that was diametrically opposed to everything I had done up until then. I turned to the bottle to try to drown out the thoughts that crept into my head. The kind of thoughts that make you question whether waking up the next day was worth it. The booze only made those thoughts more prevalent.

I didn’t know how to ask for help. I didn’t feel like I deserved it, to be honest. I knew guys who had been through far worse than I had and been in longer than I had, and I didn’t think my struggle warranted anything. Alone at a crossroads, I had to make a choice. Find a new purpose or succumb to the darkness.

So, I wrote a novel.

Writing saved me. I don’t say that for effect. I mean it clinically. Having a mission when I didn’t have one kept me moving forward when I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

Nation Fall is a military thriller about a former Green Beret named Bennett Cook who loses everything to a surveillance state that thinks it’s already won. It’s fiction. But the rage Bennett feels, the loss of purpose, the determination to fight back when the walls seem like they’re closing in, all of that came from somewhere real.

What I didn’t expect was for the book to hit. Four days after launch, it reached #108 in Military Thrillers on Amazon. Nineteen reviews, all five stars. Readers from all walks of life, including veterans, civilians, and people who’ve never served, are messaging me saying it resonated. That the themes feel uncomfortably real right now. For a guy who self-published this as an outlet for his demons, that means a lot.

I’ve spent 13 years inside systems most Americans never see. I’ve seen corruption and depravity overseas that I never thought imaginable. I wrote Nation Fall because silence felt like complicity.

I’m still in uniform. I publish under a pseudonym because I have to. I can’t show my face. But I can tell you this. Years in war-torn and failed states showed me how fragile what we have here really is. I’ve seen what it looks like when institutions start serving themselves instead of the people they were built to protect. Nation Fall explores what that could look like here.

Bennett Cook knows it too. And he’s a lot less patient than I am.

The transition crisis in our community is real. The suicide rates are real. The loss of purpose that follows the end of service is something we don’t talk about enough. Not in the ways that actually help, at least.

If writing a thriller in my off-hours between SF Guard life and the corporate grind kept one more service member from making a permanent decision during a temporary crisis, then every hour I spent on it was worth it.

If you’re in that dark place right now, the silence where the mission used to be, just know that you’re not alone. Find your next mission. It doesn’t have to be a novel. It just has to be something.

Mine happened to become a book that’s now sitting in the top 150 of its genre on Amazon.

Nation Fall is available now. I’m Reid Cross. And I’m still in the fight.

Check on your friends.

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As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.