At 32 years old, Josh Nacey had everything most people spend their lives chasing: two successful businesses, a comfortable life, a family. He also had a decade-old itch he’d never scratched. Not long after 9/11, he’d walked into a recruiter’s office wanting to join the military — and the recruiter never called him back. He took it as a sign and moved on, building a construction company and a painting company instead, the trade he’d learned working summers with his dad since fifth grade. But the pull never fully went away, and eight years later, he decided to give it all up and start over as the oldest guy in the room, headed for Special Forces selection.
That decision led him through one of the hardest pipelines in the U.S. military — basic training at 32, the grueling Q Course, and eventually the Green Beret, the Army’s version of the SEALs, specializing in unconventional warfare: fighting an enemy that doesn’t wear a uniform and doesn’t stand on a battlefield. Josh became an 18 Charlie, a Special Forces engineer trained in demolitions and construction, the guy who’d be responsible for breaching a building or building an outpost from scratch behind enemy lines. It’s not a role many businessmen-turned-soldiers walk into — but his years running painting and construction crews turned out to be exactly the background the Army needed.
Nothing quite prepared him, though, for six months in the Congo. Josh’s team was part of the years-long effort to find Joseph Kony, the warlord behind the Lord’s Resistance Army, operating out of a remote outstation on the border of South Sudan with just eleven other men. There were no roads where they worked — only a helicopter, when one was available, and jungle so thick a rainy-season patrol could travel a mile and a half in a full day. He watched elephants hide from the sound of rotor blades because they’d learned what helicopters meant. He saw more dead elephants than live ones, casualties of a poaching trade fueled by guns traded for ivory. And he still remembers, vividly, flying into a village where two men had been accused of a killing — men his team could tell weren’t LRA, men they couldn’t protect, men whose eyes told him they already knew what was coming.
The mission changed when he came home. Josh describes it less as PTSD and more as what some now call “operator syndrome” — a nervous system trained for years to treat everything as a threat, one that doesn’t know how to power down just because the deployment ended. He talks about sitting in church, running through active-shooter scenarios instead of listening to the sermon. About his hands shaking too badly to keep food on a fork. About feeling like a stranger in his own house, torn between missing his team when he was home and missing his family when he was deployed — until it cost him his marriage. It took years, three different therapists, and eventually ketamine and stellate ganglion block treatments in Chicago before his nervous system started to reset. The numbers he cites are stark: special operations veterans die by suicide at a rate nearly double that of conventional forces, and attempt-to-completion ratios that suggest, when they decide, they don’t often ask for help first.
That’s the fight Josh is in now. He founded the CharlieMike Foundation — “Charlie Mike” being military shorthand for “continue mission” — and is building a new program called Mend the Drift, using fly fishing to help fellow special operations veterans find the stillness that combat never allowed them. The name comes from a term anglers use for adjusting a fly line against the current: not changing who you are, just making small corrections as the water changes. It’s as good a metaphor as any for what he’s asking other veterans to do — not to become someone new, just to learn how to adjust to a much slower river.
Episode 51 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.