I got out of Nashville quite late this past Monday, so I was heading into a long trip up I-65. It turned out not too badly, though, all said and done. Eastside Indianapolis should probably be farther than four-ish hours away from Northside Nashville, but the weather was great, the truckers were anything but reserved in their speed, and I was listening to interesting ideas about trauma and the brain (spare me what you’re thinking), so the destination was achieved with minimal consternation: my first time back to Indy since the move this summer, a quick one, in and out, for a conference at which I presented on Wednesday. I’d planned on keeping a low profile, hoping to catch up on dictations (thanks to the miracle of Citrix and an iPad) in quiet, quiet, quiet.

Silouan had other plans, however. Not so much as to the low profile. More as to the quiet.

Great name, Silouan.  Check it out on the Fount of All Knowledge, i.e., Wikipedia. Apparently it’s the Russian version for Silvanus, Latin for Silas, the companion of Saint Paul (as in “old time religion” and “good enough for Paul and Silas, good enough for me,” remember?) Middle English is Selwyn. Greek is Σιλουανος,  Silouanos.

My nerdiness embarrasses my children to no end.

Silouan Green is a Marine’s Marine. Think Jethro Gibbs on NCIS, raise him up a couple of inches, replace the graying brunette with closely-cropped sandy-brown—more spare on the top, granted, but certainly no worse for the wear, trust me. He strode onto the main stage of the conference as if he were just checking on the house before heading out to the lake, blue dress shirt, open-collared, slate-gray khaki’s, flat front (what else? why waste the cloth?) His voice didn’t command attention, just claimed it.

Our Marine’s Marine grew up in small-city Indiana before heading to college down here in my new neighborhood, Vanderbilt. Math major, officer candidate school, top graduate. Getting the picture?

So what else to do other than to become a Marine pilot?

In case you’re wondering, it’s no walk in the park to become a Marine pilot.

That he did, though, très à la Gibbs, with fervor and (I have no doubt) aplomb. Fly, he did as well. Until the day his plane’s engine caught fire on take-off.  And he and his fellow pilot were ejected from the aircraft. And his fellow pilot didn’t make it. And he sort of did.

To say that Silouan mesmerizes as he tells his story of trauma and recovery is to be unfair both to him and to Mesmer. In no way does he resort to the cheap parlor tricks of some reformed huckster, lulling listeners into an emotional trance with the prosody of his voice, the alliteration of his words, luring their souls onto the stage, syllable by syllable, only then to slap them to attention with an emotional zinger, a climax leading to a denouement of the audience’s tearful adoration of the bravery of this “suffering soul” who has overcome nevertheless, whether by the grace of God or the force of Will (or both).

Hardly.

Instead Silouan let me sit in my chair, body and soul, and brought himself to me. His energy, his candor, his roughness, his softness, his him: with each anecdote, each exhortation, all of it filled the room, never demanding I join it, always inviting me to. Here was a man whose military career had meant so much to him, he’d spent nine months sleeping with a loaded gun to his head, each night granting himself the option of allowing the Corps the luxury of not having to pursue his (forced) medical retirement any further. Here was a man who, through grace and through love, finally decided to give Life another chance instead.

When I got back home to Nashville, I could describe him to colleagues in only one way: an utterly disarming mixture of unabashed cockiness and true humility.

So why write of him, you ask?

First, I’m more than willing to offer him free advertising. If you’re looking for a veteran who’s suffered not only the loss of a friend, of his health, of his career, but even more the loss of his very identity, a veteran who has re-found and reformulated that identity in spite of an exhausted body and soul that had been doing what they could to thwart him, a veteran who is willing to speak to anyone who will listen about despair and hope in a way that will never leave you the same—check out www.silouan.com. Get him to come speak. Advertise well. Prepare to walk away different from how you arrived. Period.

He has also put together an excellent study guide to help traumatized individuals to re-find- and reformulate their very own identities, www.theladderupp.com.  I’m planning on using it with every soldier who comes to our facility.

Even more, though, I write of him to honor his pain, to honor his continuing recovery, and to remind everyone—veteran, family member, friend, mental health professional, human—that Life can bring down even the unabashedly cocky, the competent beyond your wildest dreams, the golden boys and girls who will do what you could never hope to do better than you could have ever dreamed of doing it and that Life is nonetheless still willing to give them a humble second chance. Or three.

If Life will do that for them, it’ll do it for all of us.

Semper fidelis, the Marine’s motto, “always faithful.” Silouan is certainly that. But like most of his fellow Marines, soldiers, and the men and women of the Navy, the Air Force, and the Coast Guard, it doesn’t stop there. Semper paratus, so says the Coast Guard, “always ready”: that, too. Semper fortis, “always strong”? As much as any person can be on any given day, sure. Semper humilis, “always humble”? What if we think of the humble as those who are not so much lowly as they are grounded, down-to-earth, unafraid to look up and acknowledge something, some ones, Someone higher?

So let’s just make it easier on ourselves, shall we? Semper Silouan. Enough said.