Editor’s Note: This story was published in partnership with San Quentin News and was written during a writing seminar for incarcerated veterans in April hosted by The War Horse at California’s San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. Tens of thousands of military veterans are incarcerated across the United States, and these stories are intended to shine a light on their unique needs, challenges, and experiences. Learn about the seminar here.
I shove the throttles to the firewall and nudge the control stick forward. I feel myself lighten in the ejection seat as the jet’s wings unload. The airspeed needle starts racing across the dial. There — right at 300 knots — I pull back hard on the stick. The wings dig a huge bite of air, and my butt is smashed down into the seat. The G suit inflates, squeezing my stomach and legs like an anaconda.
As the jet’s nose slices into the vertical, all I see is sky … burning blue everywhere. Airspeed rapidly scrubs off as I trade velocity for altitude. Halfway into this aerobatic loop, I relax the stick back pressure to float my upside-down craft across the top of its curving arc. A gentle hand is needed here in this precarious stage of low airspeed; demanding too much stick will snap me into a spin. An unrecoverable spin.
I crane my neck back, searching for my home planet. There it is — the horizon falls into view as Earth fills the top of my vision. Four beats later, the jet becomes a nose-down lawn dart. The canopy is covered with an image of terra firma. I’m zooming in on this image. I’m strapped to a dirt-seeking missile.
Airspeed rapidly builds. I increase stick pressure. The G-meter climbs. I begin a silent grunt, working hard to keep blood pressure in my brain. If the lights go out now – with the jet’s nose still 45 degrees down — the ground is gonna get pockmarked with a smoking hole. I don’t want that for Mother Earth.
Finally, I feather out my control stick pressure to level the aircraft at the exact same altitude, same heading, and same airspeed as I began with. Maneuver complete. A perfect capital “O” scribed across the sapphire sky.
Much practice is needed to gain this penmanship prowess. And what I just described happened only in my mind. I was on a “chair flying” practice sortie.
When I attended Air Force pilot training in Texas in 1990, I went chair flying almost every day, rain or shine. I mentally flew every maneuver planned for my next sortie: imagining what the flight instruments will read, sensing what the seat of my pants will feel, envisioning what I’ll see outside the cockpit. … maybe a spinning horizon? Or maybe it’s a night sortie. Cloudy. Moonless. Black is up. Black is down. Black is all around. That’s the situation JFK Jr. found himself in one July night in 1999, flying over the Atlantic on his way to Martha’s Vineyard. He didn’t make it.
The first 10 times your life goes upside down in an aircraft, it’s disturbingly disorienting. When a spinning Earth suddenly fills your windscreen, you can’t pull off on a roadside shoulder to look at a map and have a Snickers. You gotta figure things out — like now. And if you haven’t mentally prepared for these moments, your lifespan can suddenly become a prop bet at Caesar’s sportsbook.
I never liked those odds, so I did everything possible to avoid a “first encounter” with upside-down situations in a real jet; I first flew my chair into the teeth of those challenges — several times — before ever playing for keepsies.
And here’s something cool: Your basic standard chair costs, what, like a hundred bucks? And it will give you a service life of 10,000 butt hours. So we’re talking pennies per hour to slide that chair, a number that Pentagon spreadsheets can’t even accept.
But how good can chair flying be, really? It’s very low-fidelity compared to multimillion-dollar, full-motion flight simulators — hardware the Pentagon is much more familiar with. It’s kinda funny how it turns out. The primary hardware for chair flying is your mind — your imagination. And it’s capable of producing super high-fidelity situations. You’ve had nightmares, right? It turns out that when you put a mental load on your imagination to supply the scary situation–instead of outsourcing that to a computerized simulator–the lessons you take away are more ingrained. The grooves get cut a little deeper.
And then there’s this: Chair flying can be adapted to all kinds of life situations. The software isn’t limited to flight ops.
Thirty years after my jet-flying days, I suddenly landed hard inside the concrete walls of San Quentin State Prison. Twenty-six years to life for murder. A terrible crime with horrible ripple effects. Something I will never be able to fully amend.
Looking up, I saw the fleeting contrails of my former life … wisping away in the sapphire sky. Gone were my three-dimensional life choices. Only one choice seemed to remain: to be or not to be?
A New Mission
Before becoming incarcerated, I knew, like most people, that addiction was a massive issue inside prisons. To address this, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation provides addiction treatment services. And to staff those services, the department offers a training program for inmates to become state-certified addiction counselors. I needed to find some purpose. I needed a reason to be. I signed up.
In this training program, I learned how addiction is a stubbornly complex brain disease, with biological, psychological, and social causative factors. Scientists are continually deciphering new genetic influences and unraveling their mechanisms of action.
For many people who don’t suffer from addiction, the disease’s complexity is too much to grope; it’s much simpler to just look down on addicts as vermin, infected with moral turpitude. I think I used to do that. It was a cheap way to improve my standing — simply point out who’s worse.
Now I know better. Now I know that addicts aren’t just throwaway people. I know that when they receive quality care, a great many of them progress toward recovery. I’ve seen hundreds of live-flesh examples while working as an addiction counselor over the past seven years.*
I’ve also learned that addiction counseling is a craft, not unlike carpentry. Not unlike screenwriting. Counseling practitioners approach their scripts in a variety of ways, each putting a different spin on the hero’s journey. It took me a while to learn that my job wasn’t to write the story. It was to listen to other people’s stories. Maybe help them write different endings.
My initial approach to counseling was laser-focused on teaching people how to recover. I was didactic. And super effective. Or so I thought. Later I morphed into more of a coach, pumping my clients full of the motivation they were missing. You can do it!
Eventually, after three years of lecturing and advice-giving, I recognized that my own hubris was stealing center stage. I finally started asking my clients, “What do you want?” instead of telling them what I wanted for them. I finally let go of the control stick.
When people are in the throes of addiction, they don’t normally tell me they want to achieve sobriety. Not at first. I became OK with that. Most addicts, when first entering treatment, will express a desire to get “better control” of their substance use. They want to be better pilots, maneuvering their addictions with more skill. I don’t press. I don’t judge. I just listen.
Soon I ask them about their goals, and they invariably have a lot to say; not so many people have been curious about them. They want to regain their freedom, reunite with family, gain stable employment, do some traveling, and maybe even buy a home one day. Crazy, huh? The glow of the American dream still smolders in the ashes of their current lives.
For weeks I just listen to my clients. Empathize with their plights. Validate their hopes and dreams. Eventually they start to give me little peeks of the ugliness. They let me see them without their makeup. They need another human to know the desperation of their daily struggle. Then one day, after the roots of trust have found purchase, I confront them with the problem they’ve been so deftly avoiding.
“How are you going to achieve all those goals, given these constant negative consequences that keep setting you back?”
“Um … I’m gonna have to try harder, I guess.”
“Try harder. How?”
“Try harder to get my use under better control.”
This control they seek is a mirage. Deep down they know that. “Hmm,” I say. “But you just told me how you’ve been trying to get things under control for five years now, and it’s only getting worse.” Like the “gotcha” host of a Sunday morning politics show, I play back several snippets of their own words — showing the undeniable incongruity of their current lives and their stated goals. There is no escape.
“So what do you think your options are at this point?” I ask.
“I’m gonna have to quit using. Get sober.”
“Yeah. That’s definitely an option. What other options do you have?”
“I don’t think I have any other options.”
“I can think of at least one,” I say.
“What’s that?” Their attention is rapt.
“You could continue coming back to prison, with little minivacations of freedom in between your sentences.”
“What?!” They look at me like I’m nuts. “Why would I ever choose that?”
“Oh, I don’t suggest you’d ever choose that option, I only suggest that you could accept it. That you could resign yourself to it.”
“I would never accept that. Never.”
They’re more than a little insulted at my suggestion. And just like that, they’ve taken their first baby steps of change. On their own. Without being told. I didn’t move the control stick or push their throttles. I only stoked their pride, blowing on the embers still glowing inside them.
Now, after the client has finally crossed this rubicon — vocalizing a commitment, out loud for others to hear — we finally start having some real conversations about change. What people and places do you need to avoid? I ask. What daily rituals do you need to replace?
“You’re gonna have to turn your life upside down, so I want you to practice — with your full-fidelity imagination — what it will sound like when you say, ‘No thanks.’ Hear those words ring in your ears. Then imagine, deeply, what it will look like when you walk straight past the old hangout spot. And imagine how your body will feel when you jog five laps each morning.
“These things are going to feel crazy at first. But we’ll keep practicing. Have a seat in this chair and let’s get your life upside down.”
This War Horse reflection was written by Todd Winkler, edited by Kristin Davis, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Abbie Bennett wrote the headlines.
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