Why am I so angry after the military?

Maximilian Uriarte was fixing image files. The Marine Corps infantry Veteran who created Terminal Lance had rebuilt his website and was replacing every old comic strip with a sharper copy, which meant rereading all of them, back to 2010. He had drawn them to be funny. Years later, that is not what he saw.

“I found that the early days of Terminal Lance were very angry. Having been an infantry Marine coming back from two deployments in Iraq, there was a lot of anger there that I was working through.”

Hear it at 24:43

He had not known it at the time. He thought he was making a comic strip.

That is how it goes for a lot of people. You do not feel angry. You feel right, and surrounded. In interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit, nine Veterans talked about anger they carried out of the service or into it. They do not agree on where it comes from, and one or two are not sure they want it gone.

You are not imagining it

Researchers with the Millennium Cohort Study, the military’s long-running health study, followed 3,448 service members across the day they left. Their paper, published in JAMA Network Open in 2022, found that about 16 percent reported what the authors call problematic anger two years before separating. Two years after, it was about 31 percent.

So the number goes up after people get out. The paper counts it. It does not tell you why yours did, and neither will we. Here is what nine people said about theirs.

Where they picked it up

For Clayton, an Air Force Veteran and founder of Red Tails Racing, it was paperwork. Two personnel offices could not agree on whether he was a senior airman or a lieutenant, the record never got fixed, and he says he went years unable to make rank.

“Once I got out, I was so angry and I had so much animosity for something that was completely outside of my control, my commander’s control.”

Hear it at 26:35

He blamed the commander anyway. Only later did he work out that the problem sat in an office in another state, where nobody in his unit could reach it. “I blamed them a lot and I had a lot of animosity. So that first six months out of the Air Force was really hard.” Hear it at 27:03

For Billy Wiland, a Marine Corps Veteran who is now an attorney and gym owner, it was the work itself. He ended up in Afghanistan on a contract, and he will not say much about what the job was.

“I left Afghanistan with a real, I guess, a bitterness towards America.”

Hear it at 4:57

“I came back as a hater. I hated my country. I hated what I did. I hated what they did.”

Hear it at 5:14

He says what came next cost him his marriage and ended in an overdose.

For Juan Valdez, a Marine Corps Veteran and Purple Heart recipient who works with Wounded Warrior Project, part of it was simply that he hurt. He got out in 2013 and landed in Boston.

“I was in a lot more pain back then. I had to walk with a cane. And I was just an angry little Chihuahua.”

Hear it at 20:10

And for Raivadus Gill, an Iraq combat Veteran and founder of Operation Battle Cry, it was there before any of it. He says he stepped off the bus at basic training with a chip on his shoulder and a drill sergeant in his face, and found himself crying the kind of tears that come right before a fist.

Paperwork, a war, a bad back, a childhood. Nobody issued it. Everybody signed for something different.

What it costs

Valdez tells the Chihuahua line as a joke. Then he stops joking. Asked what the biggest gap was between him and the civilians around him, he thinks about it and turns the question around.

“I realize that I didn’t give people a chance.”

Hear it at 21:12

“The difference wasn’t in them. It was in me.” Hear it at 21:16

“Cheeks” Aguillon, a U.S. Army Veteran and former chaplain assistant who now serves on the Vegas Veteran Voices board, spent his service as the person other soldiers talked to. Listening was the job. Then he got out.

“I love talking to people, but I hate being in bars now. I hate being places that are loud. I have very little patience for people.”

Hear it at 1:24:20

He says part of fixing it was being honest that he needed care, and that the hard part was naming what was wrong when he was sure he was fine.

Steve Ulman, a U.S. Army Veteran and actor, was already clean and sober when an acting coach told him he needed to learn how to be happy. Ulman asked whether he meant on stage or in life. The coach said, you tell me.

“I went down this whole journey of figuring out how to be happy and I realized that anger was my only way of expressing things.”

Hear it at 2:29

One emotion, doing the work of all the others.

Is it fuel or is it a bill?

Here the room splits.

Uriarte turned his into a comic strip that a great many Marines have laughed at. He says putting it out in a way people could laugh at was his way of dealing with it, even though he did not see it that way then.

Jason Lee Morrison, a Marine Corps Veteran, Recon Marine, writer and poet, will not call the frustration a defect at all. His picture of the Veteran stuck in civilian traffic:

“You can’t drive your golf cart very well. That’s because you’re a Formula One race car driver and it’s pissing you off that you’re now driving the stupid little golf cart. It’s not because you’re bad at life.”

Hear it at 4:28

And in our interview with Lucky Lopez, an Army National Guard Veteran who built a car business, the talk turned to what keeps a person going. The answer came with a laugh: “Just pure unadulterated rage.” Hear it at 8:37

Against that, put the bills already on the table. Clayton says that once the anger burned down, what was under it was depression and one question he still cannot put away: what his career would have been if the paperwork had gone through. Wiland’s came home with him and his marriage did not survive what followed.

Maybe both are true and the difference is where it points. Uriarte’s went onto paper. Nobody in these interviews described anger aimed at the people in the house as fuel.

What turned it down

Not one of them says somebody talked them out of it. What they describe is smaller than that.

Gill, on that first day with the drill sergeant, heard another drill sergeant whisper in his ear, begging him not to swing. And then he thought about his daughter.

“I was so angry. Then all of a sudden, this poof and I became light.”

Hear it at 39:56

He finished basic. Later he went to Iraq, was hit by two IEDs, and says he had every reason to be mad at a whole country. He kept a different rule: “Let’s do what we came to do. Be decent. Try to be as decent as we can about it and get the hell out of here.” Hear it at 55:09

Letoi Adams, a U.S. Army Veteran and adaptive athlete with Paralyzed Veterans of America, found hers in a hospital bed years after the Army, when a cancer diagnosis took the use of her legs. Her anger was at that, not at her service, but what she did with it will sound familiar.

“I really don’t want to be bothered with anybody. I’m angry on the inside.”

Hear it at 4:48

She pushed friends and family away. Then a woman walked into her room and asked what she could do to put a smile on her face. “It took me a couple weeks to realize my anger is not going to do me any good.” Hear it at 4:52

For Ulman it was a coach who made him practice other feelings on purpose. For Clayton it was time, and learning who actually held the pen. For Valdez it was looking back and seeing his own part.

A whisper. A daughter. A stranger who would not leave the room. That is what nine people told us, and it is not a treatment plan. VA has its own material on anger and trauma, which begins from the plain statement that many people feel angry after a trauma, and the places below are staffed by people whose work this is.