A man is nine years out from his last day in uniform. He has a steady job, a wife, kids, a mortgage that gets paid on time. On paper, the transition worked. He built the career he was supposed to build. He stayed busy. He moved on.
Then a recruiting commercial plays during a ballgame, or a unit photo surfaces on his phone, and something in his chest pulls hard toward a life he left almost a decade ago. He cannot name it. He cannot explain it to his wife. He half suspects there is something wrong with him for still feeling it. There is not. He has just misdiagnosed what the feeling is.
On Episode 266 of the March or Die podcast, Jeremy Stalnecker sat down with Ryan Ackerman, president of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines Association. Ryan did four years in the Marine Corps and packed three combat tours into them with 1/5, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Fallujah in 2004, and Ramadi in 2005. He described his transition out as “a roller coaster ride without a seat belt.” This article takes the conversation apart and answers the question a lot of veterans are quietly carrying. Why do I miss the military so much, and what am I actually grieving when I do.
Why You Miss the Military Is a Misdiagnosis
Ask a veteran what he misses and the answer usually points at the institution. The Corps. The uniform. The patches. The mission. The clear chain of command and the sense that what he did mattered on a scale most jobs never reach.
So he stays loyal to the institution. He wears the gear. Every hat, every shirt, every sticker on the truck signals that he served. Jeremy named the pattern plainly in the episode. A lot of men stay “connected,” and he put that word in air quotes on purpose, to the organization. They find their identity in the Marine Corps, or the agency, or the department. The connection becomes a costume.
There is nothing wrong with being proud of where you served. The problem is what that pride is standing in for. The institution is not grieving you back. The Marine Corps moved on the day you cleared the gate. New recruits filled your billet. The unit reorganized, redeployed, and rewrote its history without your name in it. As Jeremy put it in the episode, the organization is going to move on and become its own thing without him. What he is actually missing is the connection to the people. The institution was never the thing. It was the container the thing came in.
If wearing the uniform’s memory like armor actually fixed the ache, it would have fixed it by now. It has not. That is the first clue that the diagnosis is wrong.
What You Actually Miss Is the People
Here is the real answer. You do not miss the institution. You miss specific men.
You miss the guys who were in the truck. The ones who knew your worst day and did not flinch. The ones you would have died for and who would have done the same without a second of hesitation. What a veteran grieves is not an organization. It is connection to particular people who stood next to him in difficult, transparent, high-stakes proximity, and the simple fact that he has not been that known by anyone since.
Jeremy made the sharpest point of the entire conversation here. “You’ll never be more transparent than you are with the people you serve with in the military.” Think about what that means. In combat, and in the long stretches of training and waiting around it, there is no performance left. No résumé. No image to manage. The men around you see exactly who you are because the situation strips everything else away. Most men never experience that level of being known again. Most marriages take years to approach it. Most friendships never get close.
That is why the pull is so strong and so hard to name. A veteran is not homesick for a building or a flag. He is homesick for the last time he was fully transparent with other men and fully carried by them. This is the same loneliness that drives men in every walk of life, the kind that explains why men don’t have friends anymore once the structures that forced them together disappear. The military just makes the contrast brutal. It hands a man the deepest brotherhood he will ever know, then discharges him from it on a Friday.
Ryan described what it felt like when that connection finally came back. “It was like you guys didn’t even miss an hour away from each other.” Twenty years of separation collapsed in a single conversation. That does not happen with an institution. That only happens with people.
Why Ignoring It Makes the Grief Worse
The instinct, for a lot of veterans, is to bury the feeling. Jeremy was honest about doing exactly that. When he left the Marine Corps in 2003, his response was to put the Corps “as far behind me as possible.” His reasoning made sense at the time. “The only way I know how to move forward is to not keep hanging on to what I had.” Ryan did the same thing. Leaving, he said, was like he “fell off a cliff,” and his answer was to run. He admitted it directly. “I was lying to myself. I was running. I was scared.”
Part of why so many men handle it this way is that nobody taught them another option. Jeremy described the transition process for most of his generation as a three-day class, easy to skip, focused almost entirely on résumé building and job-hunting logistics. It said nothing about loss. Nothing about separation. Nothing about identity, or how to walk into a town full of strangers and rebuild a life. As Jeremy put it, a lot of men came out the other side “just lost,” because the system handed them a résumé template and left the actual grief untouched.
Unnamed grief does not disappear. It gets filled. It gets filled with a job, with overtime, with a side business, with the next promotion, with anything that keeps a man too busy to feel the hole. Ryan built a real career after the Corps, made good friends, made his company a lot of money, and still said the truth about it. He was running. Busyness is an effective anesthetic. It is not a cure. This is one of the central reasons veterans lose their identity after service. They treat a relational wound as a scheduling problem.
The cost of leaving it unnamed has to be stated plainly, because the stakes are not small. Ryan said that 1/5 alone loses at least three to four men a year to suicide. Men who carried the burden of those battles home, kept carrying it, and eventually could not carry it any further. That is not a statistic to move past quickly. It is the reason this conversation matters.
A man cut off from the people who knew him is a man fighting without backup. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on the epidemic of loneliness and isolation put hard numbers to what isolation does to the body and mind. For veterans, the math is heavier. Isolation is not a mood. It is a danger.
If you or someone you served with is in that fight right now, the Veterans Crisis Line is staffed every hour of every day. Dial 988 and press 1, or reach it at veteranscrisisline.net. Reaching out is not weakness. It is the same instinct that kept your fire team alive.
The Fix Is Reconnecting With the People, Not Rejoining the Institution
Ryan’s turnaround did not start with re-enlisting or buying more gear. It started when he stopped running.
He hit what he called rock bottom, and from there he had to ask the question he had been outrunning for years. Where am I in my life, and what is worth living for. Once he answered it honestly, he did something specific. “I pulled the Marine Corps back in.” Not the institution. The Marines. The actual men. “I started connecting with the guys.”
What happened next surprised him. “Before I knew it, my phone starts ringing off the hook.” The first conversations were awkward, the way it always is when years of silence have to be crossed. But the awkwardness did not last. “It would quickly turn into full-blown emotional connection with your brother on the other line.” Twenty years of distance evaporated in a phone call. Ryan said it provided “that peace that was missing in my heart.”
That reconnection grew into something built to last. A small Alpha Company reunion in New Braunfels, Texas, where men flew in from everywhere, even during COVID, just to be in the same room. Then the 20th-anniversary reunion of the 2003 invasion, a battalion-sized event with around a thousand people in it. Then the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines Association itself, built so that no one from 1/5 gets left behind, no matter what era they served. That mission widened on purpose. It now reaches the Gold Star families and the families of the fallen, including the men who made it home and later took their own lives. “We must honor the families of the fallen as well,” Ryan said. “Everything must go full circle, and if it doesn’t, it’s not real.”
That is the difference. Rejoining the institution is wearing a hat. Reconnecting with the people is picking up the phone. One is a costume. The other is a cord that holds weight.
How to Actually Reconnect
Knowing the diagnosis does not close the gap. Doing something about it does. The path is unglamorous and it works.
Reach out to one specific man this week. Not a group. Not a post in a unit Facebook page. One man. Pick a name, find the number, and make contact. Ryan’s whole turnaround started with a single conversation that set off a domino effect. The first call is the hardest one, and it is the only one that has to happen before the rest get easier.
Go to the reunion even when it feels awkward. Jeremy almost did not attend the 20th-anniversary reunion. His wife told him to go, and that if he hated it he could leave. He spent the entire night on his feet talking to people. The awkwardness a man feels before a reunion is real. It is also temporary, and it is a poor reason to miss the thing his soul has been asking for.
Bring your family so they understand who you were. Ryan said his first two marriages struggled partly because he never talked about his service. Nobody in his life understood that part of him. At reunions, he watches wives and kids and parents finally meet the version of a man they only half knew. Jeremy said the same thing about his own kids. They know he works with veterans, but he rarely talked about his own time in Iraq until his daughter asked him to speak to her class. Let your family see where you came from.
Stop going silent, but stay aware of your audience. Ryan put it well. Grunts need to be aware of the room they are in. That is wisdom, not avoidance. Being aware of your audience is not the same as never speaking. Find the places, the reunions, the brothers, where you can be as raw and real as you need to be, then carry a steadier version of yourself back to civilized life.
Look for the men who are isolated and pull them in. You are not the only one cut off. Somewhere there is a man from your unit who fell off the same cliff and never climbed back. The association exists because men decided not to leave anyone behind. Be the call that someone else’s phone needs.
Build or join something with a mission, not just a hangout. A reunion is a moment. A mission is a structure that holds. Ryan and a handful of other Marines waded in waist-deep and built an association because connection without purpose runs out of fuel. Whether it is a unit association, a church group, or a brotherhood of men committed to the same fight, anchor the connection to something larger than the connection itself. That is also the surest exit from the lone wolf mentality that quietly convinces a veteran he is supposed to carry all of it alone.
If your battalion already has an association, find it and join it. If you served in 1/5, Ryan’s group keeps an open door at the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines Association. And as Jeremy said at the close of the episode, even a veteran who did not serve in 1/5 but feels lost can start there, and they will help point him to the right place.
Faith and the Cord That Holds
The pull a veteran feels toward the men he served with is not a flaw in his wiring. It is the design.
Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 says, “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up… Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” That passage is not poetry about teamwork. It is a description of how God built men to endure. A man alone gets overpowered. A man with brothers gets defended. The cord holds because of the strands, not in spite of them. When a veteran misses the proximity of the men he served with, he is missing the exact structure scripture says he was never meant to live without.
The military gave a lot of men their first real experience of that cord. Discharge did not cancel the design. It just removed the structure that was enforcing it, and left every veteran responsible for rebuilding it on purpose.
Keep Marching, Together
If you miss the military, you are not broken and you are not stuck in the past. You have just been grieving the wrong thing. You do not miss the institution. You miss being known by men who stood in the hard places with you. The Corps cannot give that back. The patches cannot. Only the people can, and most of them are one phone call away, waiting for someone to make it first.
Stop running from the grief and start moving toward the men. Reach out to one of them this week. Make the awkward call. Go to the reunion. Build the thing that holds. That is how a veteran stops mourning the past and starts marching forward again, anchored to the brothers he was designed to fight beside.
Watch the full conversation with Jeremy Stalnecker and Ryan Ackerman on the March or Die YouTube channel. Subscribe to The Forward Edge for short weekly notes on faith, grit, and forward movement. And if you are ready to stop fighting alone, join the brotherhood of men learning to live with conviction inside Men of Action.