Aaron Hinds knew what he wanted by the time he was fourteen years old. Raised on dirt roads outside Augusta, Georgia, and shaped by a Vietnam-veteran grandfather who taught him to throw knives and never quit, Aaron chased the fight from the start, even turning down a Navy SEAL contract and a Navy nuclear program because the timeline kept slipping. He walked into an Army recruiter’s office and asked for one thing: infantry. By February 2012 he was at Fort Benning’s Sand Hill, where he earned a reputation for refusing to take the misery seriously and having absolutely no quit in him. That reputation followed him to Fort Drum and the 10th Mountain Division, where deploying to Afghanistan wasn’t a given. It was a tryout. With limited slots, his unit endured weeks of grueling smoke sessions designed to find out who would break, and when the orders finally posted, grown men wept over the names that weren’t on the list. Aaron’s was.
In late 2013, Aaron landed at FOB Shank in Logar Province; a base so frequently targeted that soldiers simply called it Rocket City. His platoon rotated between patrols, quick reaction force duty, and a small observation post, walking through villages during Afghanistan’s notorious “fighting season” and, in Aaron’s words, hoping somebody picked a fight. Somebody did. He describes the surreal frustration of rules of engagement that forced his platoon to watch a rocket launched from behind a held-up blanket fifty yards away, the local farmer who had his hand cut off by the Taliban simply for warning the Americans, and the first time rounds snapped over his head, a moment that made him furious rather than afraid. His platoon’s biggest firefight, a 45-minute engagement capped by a B-1 bomber’s deafening show of force, was even captured in Ricky Schroder’s docuseries “The Fighting Season,” along with Aaron’s now-legendary deadpan response to the bomber overhead: “I don’t know, man. I don’t fly planes.”
But the most powerful part of Episode 45 isn’t the gunfire. It’s what Aaron says about coming home. The Army spent years training him to go to war, he explains, but almost no time teaching him how to return; how to dial back from maximum effort, how to manage the anger that rides shotgun in civilian life, how to grieve the brothers he lost not overseas, but here at home, to drinking and suicide. Aaron is candid about hitting his own low points, and about the people and organizations that pulled him through: a boss who refused to let him leave until he applied for help, a therapist he found through HickStrong, and his service dog, Ace, placed with him through Healing for Heroes, where Aaron later spent months volunteering and helping train dogs for other veterans.
What emerges by the end of the conversation is a philosophy Aaron has earned the hard way: “It’s free to be an asshole, but it’s free to be nice too.” The war taught him that his mind gives up long before his body does, and now he’s pointing that engine at what’s next, from developing a training program for police and SWAT teams to starting from scratch in a cybersecurity course. “I can do great things and I can do terrible things,” Aaron says, “and I have to decide which one I’m gonna let control my actions.”
Episode 45 of Ask A Vet is available now on YouTube, Spotify, and everywhere you get your podcasts. If you’re a veteran who’s struggling, dial 988 and press 1 for the Veterans Crisis Line — and as Aaron’s story proves, reaching out works.