The Bridge That Was Never Built

By Jonathan Rowe

I came home from my second deployment to Iraq in 2008 with a wedding to plan. Vanessa and I were getting married that June. A week after I redeployed, I had a transient ischemic attack, a TIA. I spent two and a half weeks in the hospital. I made a full recovery, and I haven’t had a stroke since, but from that point on I was in and out of hospitals, test after test, trying to figure out why it happened.

I was a tanker. M1 Abrams. I drove on both deployments with the 3rd Infantry Division out of Fort Stewart, Georgia. During my second enlistment, I signed on for four more years, and part of that deal sent me to Fort Knox instead of keeping me with a rapid deployment unit.

Fort Knox was the first time I had to sit still. After back-to-back deployments, the silence did something to me. When you are deployed, you live in a particular state for months on end: the mortars, the daily stress, the things you see and do. It changes the tempo of your life. I don’t think I understood that until I had to stop.

My platoon lost Pfc. Wesley Riggs in that first deployment and my lieutenant, 1st Lt. David Giaimo. Those events still weigh on me. I am still working through them.

In 2009, in a depression I didn’t have words for, I tried to kill myself. I didn’t use a gun. I was on so many medications that I tried to overdose on them while I was on guard duty. I blacked out, drifting in and out of consciousness, and they took me to the hospital, pumped my stomach, and sent me to an inpatient facility in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, just outside Fort Knox. Thirty days of intensive inpatient mental health care. That is where I was diagnosed with PTSD.

It was a dark time. I didn’t know what I was going to do or who I wanted to be. I didn’t want to live. What pulled me out was time and conversations with my family, my wife and the people who loved me, and working through what was weighing on me, from childhood and from Iraq both.

I was medically discharged in 2010. I didn’t want to get out. I wanted a different job, something other than the one I’d had. But between the attempt and other incidents where I had threatened people, they wouldn’t let me carry a weapon anymore. In the military, everybody carries a weapon. It is part of the job.

When I was separating, everything came at me all at once. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t know where I was going to live. I had no plan.

I barely remember TAP, the Transition Assistance Program. I don’t think SkillBridge existed yet. What I do remember is sitting through some kind of transition class and building a resume. But I was a tanker, a combat MOS. There are not many civilian translations for driving a tank, so you end up padding a resume with things you hope a hiring manager on the other side can somehow interpret into a job. My first job out was security. It was the first thing that looked like an opportunity.

My wife had a degree, and I decided I needed one too, something to fall back on, something for my family. I found out about my education benefits almost by accident. When I went to enroll, the school asked if I was a veteran. I said yes, and they told me I might have benefits I qualified for. That was news to me. I had Post-9/11 GI Bill eligibility from my second contract. I started using it.

The VA disability process was another education. Because I was medically boarded out, I had follow-up appointments, and I had no idea how important the VA medical exams were. I missed one while I was still in. Nobody tells you those appointments are different from every other appointment you have ever had. You can’t just reschedule. Missing it affected my rating. It took a buddy who had gotten out a couple of years before me to sit me down and explain it. That was an eye-opening moment: somebody handing you knowledge the system never gave you.

That became the pattern. It took me years to understand that the resources are out there, but nobody advertises them. The onus is entirely on you to find out what you qualify for and track down the right person to access it. Nothing comes to you automatically.

Here is the disconnect as I lived it. The military is a complete ecosystem. Finance, medical, dental, housing, food, purpose: everything is at your fingertips, and your job is somebody else’s job. If you need something handled, there is a person or a department for it. Then you leave, and all of it is gone. Overnight, your finances, your health care, your housing, your family’s stability, your education, all of it is on you.

And they trained you to be a soldier, not a civilian. The military teaches you loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, personal courage. It teaches you to show up, follow direction, and execute. When you are in, being told what to do is the whole structure. Out here, nobody tells you anything. You have to tell yourself what to do, and why. Service members becoming veterans are used to being handed the mission. The civilian world doesn’t issue missions.

They hand you the VA benefits book when you get out. Very few people read it. TAP is supposed to happen 365 days before you separate. Very few people do it on that timeline, especially in the junior ranks. I was medically discharged, and I still had a job to do right up to the end. I got caught off guard. It was not anyone’s fault. It is just the gap between being a service member and being a veteran. That bridge has yet to be built.

It took me about eight years to figure it out. I went to school and became a mechanical engineer, graduating in 2018, because I needed something that would feed my family. I had always known I wanted to be an entrepreneur, so I went back for my MBA to understand business from the foundation up. I finished at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business in May of 2026.

I am at a point now where I can see the whole thing from thirty thousand feet. And I know what I am going to spend the rest of my life working on: helping veterans like me make that transition. Because it is not just about landing a job, or finding housing, or using your education benefits. No two veterans are the same. But we all have the same fight.

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Jonathan Rowe is an Army veteran and the founder of Tuch, a coaching app that runs entirely on a separating service member’s phone. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife Vanessa and their two children.

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.