Kevin Meyers dreamed about the arm against his windpipe in the war in the Middle East. Everything became a blank void except the man at his back. Meyers was flailing, then stopped. His training kicked in and he grabbed the man’s head, giving him control; whoever had control would win this fight. With his right hand, he grabbed his K-Bar, a Marine-issued knife strapped to the chest of his flak jacket, and stabbed the man.
Meyers woke up, startled, trying to figure out what had happened. He was on his bunk in Racine County Jail’s Unit 3EE. It was night and his neighbor sat up, staring slack-jawed at him. Iraq was far away. This had become a recurring nightmare for Meyers, and he always woke up at the moment of peak violence.
Meyers is one of more than 1 million U.S. veterans facing post-traumatic stress disorder, which manifested in nightmares like this, and he’s one of about 100,000 veterans who are incarcerated.
A photo taken during his service showed a picture-perfect Marine in full forest camo, a belt of 50-caliber bullets across his shoulders and the tail end of a rocket launcher behind him. When I interviewed him multiple times in the winter, he wore prison greens and a whitening beard. Meyers comes from a military line: grandfather an Army man in World War II, great-uncle a Marine in Korea, and his dad a Marine in Vietnam.
“I always wanted to be like him,” he said of his father.
Both men did multiple tours with the Marines, both knew trauma, both took to alcohol to deal with it and both ended up doing time.
Back when I overheard Meyers chatting with another veteran at Wisconsin’s Oshkosh Correctional Institution, where we used to be incarcerated together, it was like two native speakers slipping back into a shared tongue of acronyms — SOI, RBE, MAGTF — and remembering far-off locales. Ramadi was where Meyers did his second tour. He fell in love with Snickers ice cream bars at Camp Doha in the Kuwaiti desert. And Dead Goat Road, where dead goats littered the road, was self-explanatory. When his friend left, he dumbed down his language for civilians.
Meyers was forced to face sobriety in jail. Once the numbing effect of alcohol wore off, small annoyances like someone shuffling feet or slamming a microwave door could boil his blood.
“On the street, I didn’t use medication because I was drinking heavily,” he told me during an interview in the winter. “It’s what got me through each night. It numbed everything, and mainly emotions.”
His treatment for PTSD has helped him “function like a human being,” bringing him a blessed, dull calm.
Meyers has been working on his education, which for him means learning from books, from experience and from others. When he considered how to do his time, he focused on three pillars of health: psychological, spiritual and physical. He counted his frog burpees in the hundreds and his pushups in the thousands.
He has liked helping others do more. One workout buddy said Meyers had helped him with lung capacity and heart rate.
“I do 100 pushups and he says: ‘Do 250,’” added another buddy, Mario Gonzalez.
But talking about trauma wasn’t easy. Christopher Ryan, a friend with his own mental health issues, said the two were open about seasonal depression, but there was a block when it comes to military experience.
“In prison,” Ryan said, “the trust factor makes it hard to open up.”
I asked Meyers why he had agreed to tell me about his trauma. He slapped the table: “It needs to be heard.”
