DIRT MERCHANT
How Systems Build Men They Cannot Hold
About This Book
DIRT MERCHANT
When Systems Build Men They Cannot Hold.
A trauma-informed memoir about what happens when obedience is rewarded, silence is weaponized, and pain gets wired into the body.
Told through the eyes of a Marine, smokejumper, private contractor—and the son he never got to be—this is a story about what it costs to disappear in order to survive.
It’s not just about what happened. It’s about what stuck. What calcified. What nearly killed him—and what it finally took to feel again.
With field-worn insight and dark wit, DIRT MERCHANT doesn’t offer closure. It offers something harder: a raw, unflinching record of rebuilding a life where you no longer have to vanish to belong.
Who This Book Is For
For those who kept showing up when it hurt—who called it Tuesday while others called it duty. For the ones whose identity was braided into the work, then discarded when they broke.
Whether you served in the military, medicine, fire, faith, or found yourself inside a high-control group—what some called church, others called a cult—if the system asked for everything and gave nothing back, this story will feel like a mirror.
DIRT MERCHANT speaks to those carrying more than their share—PTSD, TBI, burnout, insomnia, moral injury—and offers language for what was never named. If you’ve lived it, or loved someone who has, this book is for you.
When Trauma Isn’t the Exception—But the Environment
This Isn’t Rare. It’s an Epidemic.
Half of all adults in the U.S. will experience trauma. For veterans and first responders, the odds are even steeper—nearly one in three develops PTSD. And across the globe, over 300 million people live with it—a number that’s severely underreported, especially in communities where silence is survival.
But PTSD doesn’t just follow war. It follows grief. Betrayal. Silence. It shows up in childhood bedrooms, fire camps, combat zones, and hospital wards. It hides in marriages, churches, and careers. It’s not always loud—but it’s always there.
And trauma rarely travels alone. It brings panic. Insomnia. Shame. A lifetime of bouncing from job to job, searching for safety that never seems to land. It teaches us to gaslight ourselves, to normalize the unacceptable, to speak in thought-terminating clichés just to survive the day. We learn to bypass pain with borrowed faith and call it healing. We bond to the very systems that harmed us—and then wonder why we can’t just get over it.
These aren’t personal defects. They’re the fingerprints of trauma. Of what happens when a nervous system is rewired by abuse, by neglect, by the things no one talked about—like childhood sexual violence—and the systems that kept it hidden.
DIRT MERCHANT is not just one man’s story. It’s a reckoning. A map. A mirror. It’s what happens when the institutions we gave everything to can’t hold what they built—and what it takes to come home to yourself anyway.
If you’ve lived it, treated it, or loved someone through it—this story is yours, too.
Where Their Trauma Ends and Yours Begins
If You Live With One, Love One, or Are One—This Book Changes Everything.
Veterans and first responders don’t just carry trauma—they carry silence, vigilance, and the weight no one sees. It’s not just pain. It’s strategy. And it leaks into everything.
DIRT MERCHANT cuts through the noise. No clichés. No pity. Just raw, honest truth from someone who’s lived it. If you’ve ever felt shut out, blamed yourself, or wondered what happened to the person I knew—this book gives you the why, and what comes next.
Clarity. Language. Direction.
For caregivers, partners, friends—and those trying to rebuild from the inside out.
It won’t give you peace in a paragraph.
But it will hand you the map.
Start here. Keep going. Don’t do it alone.