INVISIBLE STORM

Redefining courage.

In his 2018 memoir, Outside the Wire, Kander shared lessons in courage he learned from serving in the ROTC, the Maryland National Guard, and as an officer during a deployment in Afghanistan from October 2006 to February 2007. For him, being a soldier was “the truest test of manhood,” giving him both a sense of purpose and order. “Every day I was a soldier,” he writes, “was a day I woke up and I knew exactly what I was doing and why I was doing it.” He strived to regain that sense of purpose in politics. He won a seat in the Missouri House of Representatives, was elected as Missouri’s Secretary of State, and was narrowly defeated for the U.S. Senate in 2016. Involved in ethics reform and voting rights, he founded the nonprofit Let America Vote. As he rose in stature, he was urged—including by Barack Obama—to enter the 2020 presidential race. However, as he reveals in a forthright chronicle of intensifying mental illness, years of undiagnosed PTSD sent him plummeting to a nadir of self-hatred. After he returned from Afghanistan, where he had been assigned to intelligence-gathering, he was overwhelmed by debilitating symptoms: night terrors, paranoid fear that someone would harm him or his family, volatile anger, and “unrelenting guilt and punishing shame” because he had not been involved in direct combat. By the time he sought help, he was thinking of suicide. Interwoven with Kander’s narrative are reflections by his wife, who suffered sadness, frustration, and isolation. With the support of therapists and the Veterans Community Project, both the author and his wife came to understand that his dangerous, terrifying experiences in Afghanistan—interviewing men who might kill him or whom he might have to kill—were no less traumatic than physical combat. Kander’s advice is urgent and relevant: “Either you deal with your trauma, or your trauma deals with you.

A heartfelt message borne of pain and true sacrifice.