“The Flywheel”

A Marine’s reflection on a quiet moment that said everything

It wasn’t a meeting I planned for.

I was at the James A. Haley VA that day, not as a leader, not as an executive, but as a patient. A Marine. There for a CT scan. Just another vet navigating the same system I help lead.

As I walked out of the imaging department, I spotted him, off to the side, seated on a bench just beneath the overhang. No phone. No headphones. Just still. But not relaxed.

It’s a stillness I know too well. The kind where your body is back home, but your mind hasn’t caught up yet. That kind of readiness never fully leaves you. Marines recognize it in each other before a word is spoken.

I nodded. He nodded back.

I sat down beside him.

No titles. No rank. Just two Marines, older now, but still carrying something.

After a few moments, he broke the silence.

“You ever feel like something inside you just... won’t stop spinning?”

I didn’t have to ask what he meant.

He called it the flywheel.

He said, “In combat, you’re trained to move fast, precise, alert. You push fear down, bottle it up. That momentum keeps you alive. But when you come home... no one tells you how to slow it down. The war ends, but the wheel doesn’t.”

I could feel the truth of it in my own chest.

He said he tried civilian care. Nice enough people. But the moment he started to describe what was really going on—the look he got back made him feel even more alone. “I stopped going,” he said. “Felt like I had to convince them I was worth helping.”

Then he came to VA.

He told me, “They didn’t make me explain myself. I didn’t have to translate my pain into clinical language. My therapist, she knew. My doc didn’t flinch. They saw it in my posture, my eyes, my silence. They didn’t just treat my symptoms. They treated me.”

His voice cracked a little when he said that.

“I’m not fixed,” he said. “But I’m not spinning out anymore. That flywheel… it still turns. But now it’s got rhythm. Direction. It’s not fighting itself anymore.”

We sat there in silence for a moment. The kind that doesn’t need filling.

And in that space, I was reminded of something I don’t ever want to forget:

This is why VA exists.

Not just to care for veterans, but to understand them. To create a space where no one has to explain why they’re anxious in the cereal aisle, or why they haven’t slept in three nights, or why they avoid fireworks in July.

No other healthcare system is built for that. No one else is designed to meet them with both science and soul.

Because healing from war is not just about medicine, it’s about meaning.

It’s about being in a place where you are more than your chart. Where your silence is not mistaken for disengagement but understood as a form of survival. Where a Marine can sit next to another Marine and feel, maybe for the first time in years, safe.

That conversation didn’t last long.

But it didn’t have to.

It was a reminder from one vet to another, that this work isn’t about policies or metrics or press releases.

It’s about that bench.

That moment.

That flywheel.

And the quiet, patient, extraordinary care that slows it down, until one day, it doesn’t spin out of control… it turns toward healing.

That’s what only the VA can do.

And that’s why we show up.