Nick Black’s parents were in the intelligence community. Growing up, he spent nine years in various parts of Africa, followed by four years in London, England, before coming back to the States to attend high school. When 9/11 happened, Nick made up his mind that he was going to serve. He attended Johns Hopkins University, played football, and joined the Army ROTC. He went on active duty in 2007, as a field artillery officer. He got out in 2011 and did two years of North Carolina’s Army National Guard.
Every morning, starting at 4:30 a.m., two sadistic captains work hard to try to kill us all the way up until 8 p.m.
That’s the goal of Ranger school. There’s sixty-five of us vying for seven slots.
It’s the hardest physical thing I’ve ever done in my life, and I’m not good at it. I always come in last in everything. I’m so far behind everyone else.
Four months later, after weeks and weeks of pure hell, I’m one of eight left. And now it’s time to face my personal physical fitness nightmare: dead-hang pull-ups.
I’m horrible at them. I played college football, and we never did a single pull-up. Now I have to do twelve of them.
I manage nine.
I fail.
I’m not going to Ranger school.
It’s 2007. I request that they send me to war. They say I’m needed in Afghanistan.
I arrive in the middle of the night at a base somewhere on the border of Pakistan, to serve with the 173rd, one of the Army’s most prestigious brigades. Because I tried out for Ranger school, I’m two weeks late—and I’m the only leader who doesn’t have a Ranger tab, which is really hard for me.
The next morning, I wake up to beautiful snow-covered mountains.
“You’re going to Attack Company,” I’m told. “There in those mountains. They just got in a four-hour firefight last night.”
Holy shit. What am I going to do here? I’m a twenty-three-year-old newbie field artillery officer who is going to have to call for fire on the enemy, and the only training I have is what I’ve read in my field manual.
I decide to seek out one of the NCOs. My dad, who worked in intelligence, gave me a great piece of advice: As soon as you show up, go find the NCO you’re paired with, talk to him and earn his respect, and then everything will work out for you.
I’m six foot three and a big dude. The staff sergeant stands six foot five, and with his shaved head and tattoos, he looks like a Russian mobster. The guy’s neck is flexed, and I know he’s going to tear me a new one the moment I’m done speaking.
I quickly gather my courage and say, “My name is Lieutenant Nick Black. I’m not quite sure what I’m doing, and I’d truly appreciate it if you’d help me.”
That big dude just looks at me.
Melts.
“All right,” he says. “First of all, sir, your kit is all fucked up. Let’s start with that.”
He gets me trained and up to speed. Takes care of me. We become partners.
I soon discover I’m surrounded by an incredible group of guys. There’s 120 of us, and all I can think about is that I don’t want to let any one of them down. I don’t want to screw this up.
I run into an acquaintance after my tour, a guy about my age—twenty-three—and when I tell him I’ve just gotten back from Afghanistan, he asks, “Did you join the Army because you couldn’t get into college, or did you just want to do this?”
I’m taken aback.
“Where did you go to school?” I ask him.
He tells me. It’s some horseshit liberal arts school in the South.
“That’s cool,” I say. “I went to Johns Hopkins.”
“Then why would you want to go in the Army?”
My parents have dealt with this sort of thing—people coming up to them and saying they’re so thankful I went to war so their kids wouldn’t have to go overseas and fight. There’s this weird segment of the population who can’t understand why college-educated people like myself would want to willingly go overseas and risk their lives to fight the fight. They can’t comprehend what it means to live a life in the service of others.
We drive somewhere, dismount, and then walk up the mountain to an overwatch position to observe a bunch of Taliban guys, we’re told, who are clearly up to something.
I spend a good chunk of my first day walking up a big, deep shale-covered mountain while carrying nearly a hundred pounds of gear. It’s brutal, hotter than hell. Same with the second day, when we take a watch position and observe a village.
Nothing happens.
On day three, nothing is happening—and we’re running out of water. Then, as the day starts to wind down, we start taking on rockets from a kilometer or two away. They fly over our heads while we take small arms fire from another mountain range, maybe three or four hundred meters away. The gunfire isn’t all that effective, and we can’t see the guys shooting at us.
We assault our way back up the mountain, which is exhausting, and when we finally reach the top we see where the incoming rockets are coming from. The company commander looks at me and says, “Time to do your thing.”
I crawl up to my position, thinking, Oh, God, I don’t know what I’m doing.
Which is why I brought along my field manuals.
The company commander sits next to me, watching as I take out my manuals. I’m fresh out of school, and I need the manuals to make sure I get the math right.
After I make the necessary calculations, I call in the artillery.
The artillery comes in and, thank God, shoots all the targets.
It gets dark.
Then pitch-black.
We’re at the top of the mountain and we have zero illumination—and zero water. We haven’t had any all day. And now we’ve got to make our way back down the mountain, dehydrated and in the dark.
It’s brutal. I’m so parched, I don’t even have saliva in my mouth.
I misstep and fall off a ten-foot cliff.
I hit my head and pass out.
When I regain consciousness, I find one of the NCOs sitting next to me.
“How long have I been out?” I ask.
“Three hours.” He helps me back down the mountain.
The base is completely isolated. We can’t drive anywhere (there aren’t any roads—and even if there were, there isn’t anyplace to drive), and because the area is so remote, there’s no resupply route, so no one is coming to help us.
Sometimes a Black Hawk will come screaming by to kick out body bags full of water. But because they’re being dropped from fifty feet up, they hit the ground and explode, and we’re left trying to cup in our hands whatever’s left to drink.
We’re alone—120 guys from random parts of America, all under twenty-five. It’s like we’ve been left on an island to fend for ourselves. In a lot of ways, life has never been simpler. I’ve never felt more invincible, or had tighter bonds and connections with the people around me, guys I completely trust—and yet, at the same time, life is bad. Humans hunting other humans.
During my long fifteen-month deployment, I’m a part of long, grueling missions hunting bad guys on the mountains. Every time I go out, my rucksack is packed with ammo, high-calorie protein bars, and high-calorie electrolyte powder to mix in my water.
We’ve taken over a little ranch compound, with walls made of brick and mud, located three hundred meters away from the Pakistan border and about twenty kilometers north of our main base. This place is supposed to be this really big infiltration route for the bad guys to come into Afghanistan.
We have an observation post on the nearby mountain, about thirty meters away from the Pakistan border. For two months, we rotate guys in and out, about fifteen at a time, and aside from a couple of scrapes, nothing big happens.
Then one night, when I’m at the observation post, I wake up at around 2:00 a.m. to what sounds like a popcorn machine going off.
The entire mountainside is lit up with gunfire from RPGs and machine guns.
We start going at it. One hour turns into three and then six, and the enemy is moving closer and closer and a lot of us are running out of ammo. B-1s and A-10s come on station, fly in and unload everything they have, and fly away.
The enemy comes through the wire. They’re literally getting into our perimeter, and a group of them is trying to overrun the observation post. Our guys hold fast. The leadership of the staff sergeant, the way we all come together—it’s incredible. Despite the circumstances, I’ve never felt such an intense level of satisfaction.
By some miracle of God, all fifteen people on the observation post make it out alive. We’re all going home.
The week after I get back, I find out that one of the three intel guys attached to us in Afghanistan killed himself. Two exits before Fort Bragg, he pulled off and shot himself in the head.
I can’t reconcile that. How do you make it through fifteen months of combat only to come home and kill yourself two weeks later?
I have another eye-opening experience when a good friend of mine from Johns Hopkins ROTC sends me an email with a startling statistic: the numbers of service members we’ve lost to suicide is far greater than the number of service members killed by the enemy.
How the hell can that even be possible?
I don’t know, but it pisses me off so much that I start a nonprofit called Stop Soldier Suicide. Through years of grinding, suffering, and just trying to do the right thing, my staff and I are fortunate enough to have built it into an organization where I no longer have to take phone calls in the middle of the night from veterans in need.
But we have to get all the best minds in the room, come up with a solid plan of action to reduce the national average of veteran suicides, attack this problem, and then go out and do it.
I want to see a day when veterans have no greater risk of taking their lives than any other American.