A Humvee on a bridge. Bombs falling. April 1st, 2003. Dagan Van Oosten is laying flat on the top of that Humvee, engaging targets in the distance. Jeremy Stalnecker, the rifle platoon commander, looks over his shoulder during the firefight and sees him there. That image, Jeremy has said many times, is where the phrase “March or Die” was born.
Twenty-something years later, both men are still in the fight. Jeremy went on to plant churches and lead the March or Die show. Dagan stayed in for the long haul. Quantico Sniper School instructor. Recon Marine. Fourteen years contracting overseas in environments that do not appear on a resume. Co-founder of Nomadic Research. Husband of twenty-five years. Father.
When the two sat down for a recent episode of the March or Die podcast, the conversation could have stayed in the war stories. It did not. It went somewhere most veterans, first responders, and high-output professionals are afraid to look. Identity.
The Tombstone Question
Dagan recounts a moment with his counselor during a treatment session. The counselor asked, “If you were to die tomorrow, what would it say on your tombstone?”
Dagan listed the obvious. Sniper. Recon. The patches. The t-shirts. All the things a Marine Corps career hangs its hat on.
The counselor pushed back. “Okay. What else could it say? You’re not even halfway done yet. Those are things you did. They are not who you are.”
That sentence landed harder than any after-action review. The accolades on his potential headstone were verbs. They were jobs he had performed. None of them were nouns. None of them named the man underneath the uniform.
Most men who serve at a high level run into this same wall. The deeper a man goes into a calling, the more the calling becomes the answer to “who are you?” The substitution is the trap. When the title becomes the identity, the day the title goes away becomes the day the man disappears.
The Machine Will Not Love You Back
Dagan tells a second story that put a finer point on the first. He was teaching at Quantico when a Sergeant Major retired. Flowers, ceremony, the whole formation on a Friday afternoon. The man was a legend in the unit. The following Monday a brand new PFC checked into that same unit with no idea the Sergeant Major had ever existed.
“This machine is never going to love me the way I love it,” Dagan says.
The institution that defines a man today will replace him on a Monday with someone who has never heard his name. That is no betrayal of the institution. That is what institutions are. They run on continuity, not memory. The badge will retire. The contract will end. The rank will pass to the next man in line. A Marine Corps does not stop being the Marine Corps because one Marine has stopped being a Marine.
The healthy response to that reality is reorientation. Build the identity the institution cannot take.
The Slow Cost of Mission-First Living
Dagan is unusually honest about the cost his career carried on his marriage and his kids.
“I didn’t do it well,” he says. “I fell into the pitfall that everything else kind of got put on the back burner.”
His wife Jen, also a Marine, carried the weight of a household while Dagan worked three months on, one month off, for years. Twenty-five years into the marriage, he gives her every ounce of credit for the family they still have. He spent the last five or six years recalibrating, doing the work he should have been doing the whole time.
Most men in mission-driven careers tell themselves the same lie. The job is the priority because the job is the reason the family eats. The lie holds for a while. Then a kid grows up. A wife learns to stop expecting. A man walks into his own home one Tuesday night and realizes nobody under that roof has been counting on him for anything that mattered in months.
Jeremy adds the principle that anchors this. “Your family gets it if you have to be away. They understand that. What they don’t get is when you’re home and you’re away.”
The discipline of presence is harder than the discipline of mission. A door kicked in is a clear task. A son asking about his day at the kitchen table is not. Most men trained in the first never learn to do the second.
The Mission Has Not Ended. It Has Changed.
Dagan’s counselor told him one more thing that hit hard. “No one is ever going to take any of that away from you.” The deployments, the qualifications, the years in the unit are his to keep. Forever. That chapter is closed and written in permanent ink.
What is open is what comes next. And what comes next requires the same mission planning he learned in the unit, applied to a different objective.
“It’s mission planning,” Dagan says. “You can literally apply the mission planning process to anything.”
Plan the next chapter the way the unit taught him to plan a patrol. What is the objective. What are the resources. Who is on the team. What does success look like at three months, one year, five years. The man whose only operational picture stops at the day his current job ends is not preparing for chapter two. He is hoping it works out.
For most men leaving the uniform or the badge, the new objective takes the shape of some form of service. Dagan calls it the antidote to the introspection that crushes men in transition.
“It’s paramount to find that new purpose,” he says. “I think you have to have a high degree of selflessness to enlist in the first place. So finding that new way to be selfless is everything.”
Service does the deeper work. It carries forward what the uniform taught without depending on the uniform to deliver it.
What Gets Carved On The Stone
The conversation between Jeremy and Dagan circles back to one thing. A man’s life is a series of chapters. The institution writes one. The next ones are his to write, and the way he writes them is what gets remembered.
For Jeremy, the anchor underneath all of it is faith. “Having faith in a God who creates you means whatever else happens in my life, there is that which does not change, that which does not move.” A man who knows he was made on purpose is not destabilized when the title someone else gave him is taken back.
The tombstone is going to say something. Most men have never asked the question Dagan was asked. Most men are afraid of the answer. The good news is that the answer is not finished being written.
What gets carved into the stone is decided by what gets done this week.
Husband. Father. Friend. The end.
Watch the full conversation with Dagan Van Oosten: https://marchordie.com/episodes/what-you-did-is-not-who-you-are/
Learn more about Dagan’s company, Nomadic Research, and the gear they build for the road.
Ready to build a life that outlasts the uniform? Learn more about the Men of Action program at Mighty Oaks.