It's just a name tag? Right? Or is it?

  Everyone has a story. Mine involves a truck, an addiction, and a mission to help our industry. It's a journey that testifies to resilience and overcoming adversity. However, beyond that, there is a narrative that sheds light on the experiences of children like me, whose struggles are often misunderstood due to their complex past. It's also about defying the odds, finding love, and extending that love to others when it's scarce in their own lives. 

Long before I thought about trucks or found myself navigating the streets of Buffalo, NY, at the tender age of 12, my story had already begun. This is a story about compassionate parents who, in their flawed ways, pushed their children down a path of hate and mistrust. For years, I wondered why my parents harbored such hatred toward me. Was it my mother’s struggles with deceit, promiscuity, and alcohol, or was it the turmoil within their marriage that fueled the resentment and a need for an escape using their children?

I look back now on my own life and can see the patterns of my own mistakes and my lack of understanding on how to correct them, only to find that drugs were also my outlet at those times. 

Later in life, as a young eighteen-year-old male, I saw the Marine Corps as a way to channel my trained inner hate. I saw the Vietnam War as an outlet for that hate, only to go there and find that hunting, killing, and drinking was my game plan until I saw way too much, way too often, and the brain shuts down, and the battles begin.

Only combat soldiers know what combat soldiers know because you can’t read it in a book or even teach it. There's no manual on how to become a civilian after you almost lose your life time and time again and then try and laugh it all off. There is no relief from the flashbacks or the feeling of your eyes on the doors in every building you enter, and the 360-degree sweep that people now comment on.

Most soldiers who deal with PTSD have had over 25 jobs and 25 failures. Some made it, some chose drugs, and some chose a 45. Drugs showed me how to lose job after job until one day, by accident, a job saved me. 

Driving.

Here's my story and how driving saved me, and how a truck can save an industry, and how I want to get just one more veteran that has PTSD behind the wheel of a truck before they make the wrong choice. 

I understand the deep connection that truck drivers have with their vehicles, as I embarked on a journey in 1994 to design my own truck. I had been sober for over 3 years, and I knew driving was a way to stay that way, so I went forward. It took me over six months to gather all the necessary part numbers, from the engine to the transmission, and even the twenty-gauge dashboard lights and comfortable seats. Whether you're a company driver or an owner-operator, and if you have the pleasure of building one and then sitting in the driver's seat for the first time, that truck becomes a part of you, and I was filled with excitement and anxiety waiting for the call to come and pick her up. 

That call came, and my wife and I were now in Canada and ready to pick her up. Nothing describes the feeling you get when you're on that factory lot, and they tell you she's coming off the line in a couple of minutes. Then I saw her. WOW, she was beautiful and coming right to me, and the nightmare began. 

You see, I though most people who know me did not know I had a secret to hide, one I have to battle with every day of my life because I came out of Vietnam with PTSD, and it affected my life's accomplishments, but they all knew. Most men and women who fought that war never left it. We came back with a sense of both failure and accomplishment, and here I was, seeing something I had designed, and she was beautiful, and yet I surely didn't deserve her. 

I walked around her for the next few minutes, touching and talking to her and wondering if we would get along and if she was really going to be a part of me. She became real when I first took that seat, and we instantly became one.

Most people would say it's only a truck, but not me! Because for the first time, I had accomplished something, and I could touch it.

The company policy is to drop her off at the sold site, which is about a mile away. So, I returned the keys to the salesman, and we followed her over. Unfortunately, we only made it about a half mile because there was a scale outside the factory lot, and they gave her a ticket for an overweight front axle. 

With a mind full of failures, I stood there thinking, "Just quit". This was your fault because you really don’t deserve this truck, you designed her wrong. I now needed to learn to accept success, so I let Western Star handle this situation because I had no control over it. Twenty minutes later, I was in her seat, and we were off to Oregon to meet the guy building our 120-inch sleeper.  

We designed the truck with a large sleeper because we were targeting the oversized load market, and you were often far from a travel center because of the oversize loads you carried.

 So, we checked out a company in Oregon that claimed to have experience creating and building them. The company appeared legitimate until we arrived and discovered that he had only completed half of it, and he wanted more money and time. 

What hits soldiers like me when dealing with stress is the uncertainty of how our stress will function and how we will handle the reality of us just quitting again and getting some drugs. So, I backed away because my wife knew what to do. 

Two weeks later, with the state police and the final payment in hand, he put the unfinished sleeper on, and we went to retrieve the 48-foot Trail King drop-deck trailer we had ordered a month before. 

With the time lost due to the sleeper guy, we were a little behind, but Terry already had a load that we needed to pick up in California, so we headed off to work without any supplies. Here is where you can learn about truck drivers, our industry, and the hearts of drivers, as we did not have the necessary equipment to secure a load. However, that was not a problem with the drivers, because we had everything donated when we arrived and didn't even know some of the drivers' last names. 

I haven't seen that since Vietnam when the guy beside you shared his limited food and water supply on a three-week mission.  

Over the next few months, we completed the sleeper and finished it with two La-Z-Boy recliners, a Corian countertop featuring a stove, refrigerator, cabinets, and a microwave oven. It was a great ride. Oh, did I note—there was no such thing as a large car Western Star show truck at that time. In fact, we were not even allowed in the Shell Rotella Calendar show that year because we were from Canada.  

Sometimes, you pick a job where your disability won't be noticed, and you can handle the disability properly without answering a lot of questions. Truck driving allows that. Driving kept me calm. My wife hated that she could not listen to the radio when I drove because it was the sound of the cat engine that kept me calm. People and crowds become a problem with soldiers suffering from PTSD, but I had an ace in the hole-> my wife <- she was the people person and the navigator for all our loads, and we did well. I knew and talked to very few people. 

Even when you think you have all your ducks in a row, the next door that opens might be your last, and when it did open, I didn't expect the outcome. A lot of men and women in Vietnam were exposed to Agent Orange, and at that time, the government said it would not cause any health problems. That might not have been the truth because, in January of 2000, I found out the hard way that it had been eating at my lungs for years, and it put me in an unconscious state lying on the ground on a Monday afternoon.  

After surgery, I now had a left lung that was compromised and only 25% effective. However, it gets even better, as the doctor then added some other extraordinary news.

You might have some heart problems too, and over the next years, I found out my heart, like my lungs, had serious problems, and into the operating room I went, only to find that two of the six arteries were not even working. 

Thank you, Agent Orange. 

Over 35% of men and women who got sprayed died over the next ten years. It took the government 20 years to acknowledge the existence of a problem.  

Sitting in our living room, I knew my truck was ready to go, but medically, I couldn't, and it brought a lot of questions I had no answers for. I now had to make some difficult decisions. Selling something you created and loved having was like a stab in the heart. For over five years, we never let each other down, and when I needed her most, she seemed to know what I needed and brought it forward in another gear. But now I looked across the yard and I was thinking of selling her.   

I did not know the buyer because it went to a dealership, and it was a few weeks later that the sale drove me to tears again. She was sold to an oil rig company, one that I knew couldn't care less about equipment. Now, all that came to my mind was how could I have done that to her? All I could think of was what she thought and how she thought that she had let me down. 

After all, she was just a truck. Right? 

Six weeks later, after the surgery was completed, I was out of bed and able to walk around. Looking out the window was the hardest thing to do because I knew she was not there, and it brought back the failures of my life. 

Over the next few years, I would see her go by and I would say hello each time and told her that I was sorry for what I did. I should have kept you, but for what reason? It was two months later that I discovered she had been sold again to a company out of state. 

I let her down, and now she is truly gone. 

Vietnam vets carry this type of guilt in their own lives all the time because of their assumed failure in that war and selling her was just another failure added to my life. But sometimes what you think and what actually happens are totally different, and this story begins to prove it.  

Does God really exist? ---> Finish reading and find out. 

Fifteen years later, I was coming home from Oklahoma City on I-40 West. As I crossed the Caddo bridge, my eyes saw something I could not believe.  

My truck was just sitting there. 

She was sitting in the field of another oil rig company, and a "For Sale" sign was on her. Could it be? I pulled off and went right to her, without even telling their office I was there. Here, she sat, sad, lonely, unkept, and broken, just like me, but somehow, she knew I was there. I just rubbed her with tears on my face and opened the driver's door to look inside, only to see what I expected. A beaten, torn down, and destroyed interior with very little life left.

But wait. I couldn't believe my eyes, and I slowly reached over to touch it, making it real. On the dash was my name tag that Western Star puts on custom trucks, and it was still there. Fifteen years of neglect, and no one tore it off. 

Why?  

When the sales guy came out and saw me, he couldn't figure me out. I just looked at him with tears and said I built her twenty years ago, that's my name there. I talked about her like a proud father, and he said it was a great truck, but it was probably going to be sent to Mexico this month, it was too expensive to fix. I asked what they wanted for it, and he said it had about $20,000 worth of parts on it, and that's what they wanted, and I had no way of getting that type of money.  

We talked for a while longer, and then I went with him into their office and talked about how I started a non-profit company to help drivers deal with some of their health issues, and he mentioned they had a worker who had just had a heart attack. I offered them some programs for free to help their company address these issues and said goodbye, only to look at her again and let the tears fall. 

People say what goes around comes around and I believe that more than ever now. I also believe God works in mysterious ways, as I never expected what happened next. 

Knowing I would never see her again was hard to deal with. So, getting a call from the salesmen again sent me back a bit. I thought I had finally lost her, but he said that since I was willing to help them that day, they were going to donate the truck to me, and twenty-four hours later, she came back home. 

Over the last year or so, I wondered what to do with her; just having her was a joy, but she was still broken.

But I also knew she came back for a reason, and I now know why. 

I was overjoyed to have her home and truly enjoyed showing her off in the yard a few times, but she was still broken, and I had to fix her. I had to fix her because I knew she didn't come back to just me (against all odds) without a good reason and it wasn't until after I had almost died of a heart attack that I understood why she was returned to me…we (my truck and I) had a story to tell to other veterans and our industry and how driving saved my life. 

Our story begins with another chapter of a truck and the journey it had with a friend, Gary Collins, and his willingness to help me reveal its neglected condition at the Mid-America truck show. 

People couldn't believe or understand why we were showcasing this broken-down and neglected 1995 Western Star truck at the Mid-America Truck Show—well, not until they read the story behind why this truck needed to be shown. 

After this show, a company came up to help do just that, and a new journey began.

Everything gets COVID, and a nation falls apart. As America fell apart, so did our mission. For some reason, I didn't notice the workings of a company that, in three short years, could not fulfill its promises of a new and shiny Western Star truck. Instead, it was completely destroyed and scattered all over the company's junkyard lot. Their eyes were more significant than their commitment to their word. For over three years, she sat there, and no one came to help. But now she was totally stripped down to her core.   

As a veteran, I trusted another, and that mistake haunts me now because, at one time, she could have been completed, but now, as her vacant frame sits there in the rain, her parts all rusted I ask.

What is the sadness of my failures? I don't know. 

I now ask myself. Should I quit and as a Marine veterian my answer is. 

I don't think so !!!!