You will never be a real hero. You have no honor, you have no moral code, you have no professionalism. You are a homosexual man twisted by PEDs and reparative surgery into a crude mockery of an infantryman's perfection.
All the “validation” you get from the country is two-faced and half-hearted. Behind your back people mock you for being a tax dollar drain, an addict and a fuck-up. Your parents and community are disgusted and ashamed of you, your behavior and greed. Your “friends” laugh at your sleeved-tattooed roided convict look. Nice ball-cap bro. The people you "coach" and give "motivational talks" to, are only in the room because their boss forced them to. They hate your guts with a passion because they know you violated an oath to be a quiet professional, servant of the people. And now you have the gall to tell others how to follow theirs.
You will never be happy. You wrench out a fake smile every single morning, after popping your painkillers, and tell yourself it’s going to be ok, the drugs will help, the TBI will disappear, the Northern Alliance still has a chance, those 20 years of GWOT weren't in vain. But deep inside, you know the truth. You feel the depression creeping up like a weed, ready to crush you under the unbearable weight. You know you dedicated your life and health to a lost cause and performed evil while doing so. Eventually it’ll be too much to bear - you’ll buy another overpriced $2.000 pistol and die in your shower from a self-inflicted gunshot wound while blackout drunk.
Your gay lover Jose will find you, heartbroken but relieved that he no longer has to live with the unbearable shame and disappointment of being the top in the relationship with an "elite operator" who cries like a bitch about how terrible it was to fight illiterate mountain herders. He’ll bury you in Arlington with a headstone marked with your birth name, your trident, and every passerby for the rest of eternity will know that a fag with no sense of honor and no sense of pride is buried there. Your body will decay and go back to the dust, and all that will remain of your legacy is a skeleton with a hole in the head, representing a 15 million dollar lost investment your lifelong training cost the taxpayer.
This is your fate. This is what you chose. There is no turning back. The white flag of the Taliban is still up in Kabul.