Doubling Down...
...on Talking About How War Reporting Changed the Course of My Life
I was down more than $11,000. I had been glued to the video poker machines in the high-limit room at Maryland Live Casino for the better part of eight hours.
It was far from my longest session.
I had been getting killed all day. I was playing on average $30 a hand. I had spent some time on each of the five video poker machines and not one was giving up anything. I was chasing it.
It’s a sickening feeling to feed stacks of hundred-dollar bills into a remorseless machine that has your financial fate in its hands. All I could do was keep going in the hope that eventually things would turn—the machine would revert to the statistical rate of return and give back enough that I could walk away with an acceptable loss.
That in a nutshell is the gambler’s fallacy. It’s a dangerous headspace.
That is the first half page of my new book, Doubling Down: A Memoir of War, PTSD, and the Dangerous Bets We Make.
It’s a story I’ve been wanting to tell for some time, but it was somewhat accidental that it turned into a book—an e-book for now—that’s coming out in a couple of weeks.
When I wrote Passport Stamps, I spent a few months planning the process. I got my finances in the best order I could, then quit my job and moved to Cape Cod in early 2021 with the expectation of devoting a year to the project. I didn’t have a deal or funding for that book. It was just something I had to write at that point in my life.
Doubling Down did not start out as a book project. A couple of years ago, I decided I wanted to write a long-form magazine essay that expanded on some of what I mentioned in passing in the last chapter and epilogue of Passport Stamps.
I briefly wrote about how in the years after I returned from Afghanistan I struggled with gambling, an abusive relationship, and loss of self and sense of purpose. In mid-2024, I drafted an essay about those experiences. I revised, rewrote, and revisited it every few months, and never quite felt like I had nailed it. I submitted a few different versions to publications that specialize in long-form writing and didn’t find a home for it.
The more I tinkered with it, the longer it got (phrasing?). It was around 5,000 words when I put it aside late last year.
This spring, a friend convinced me to start writing a script for a TV series based on Passport Stamps. When I sat down and thought about what that might look like, I realized that my gambling story was essential to the narrative.
With that, I returned to the essay and unloaded everything: the unvarnished details of my journey from war correspondent to high-rolling, high-risk gambler, and everything that went along with it. It reached more than 20,000 words, a little short for a typical print book. I thought about serializing it on Substack or possibly putting it out as an e-book. I ran the idea by Madville, my publisher for Passport Stamps, and they jumped at the idea of putting it out as an e-book.
After a few more rounds of editing and feedback and revising, it landed at close to 28,000 words, about a quarter of the length of Passport Stamps. Thus, it’s somewhat of a short sequel or long coda to that book. The upside is, it’s a fast read—early readers have read it all in one go because it’s hard to put down once you start.
But in some ways, Doubling Down is the most important part of the Passport Stamps journey. It’s the “painfully gripping”—as my friend and fellow NPR traveler Jason Beaubien described it—tale of the not-so-secret life I lived after I returned home from Afghanistan with a head full of weird thoughts and no new job, partner, or reentry counseling waiting for me.
My adrenaline-hooked system determined that there was a casino not too far away in Maryland. What started out as something to kill time and fight boredom turned into a substitute for the physical and emotional danger that had been my daily bread for the better part of eight years.
Thus, it was a fait accompli that I would get sucked into high-limit gambling and all the trappings of the “comped” meals, drinks, parties, concerts, hotel suites, and the ego stroking that went with being a high roller. There was just one problem, I didn’t have the financial resources of the typical high roller.
That set in motion a decade of riding the ups and downs—five-figure jackpots followed by losing streaks that resulted in selling cars and taking out loans, and back and forth. Unlike a drug or alcohol problem, my gambling was legal, public, and socially acceptable—if not outright entertaining for friends and coworkers, at least for a while. I showed up to work every day and performed at the highest levels regardless of whether the casino or I won the night before.
Doubling Down is not pretty. It’s not uplifting. It’s brutally honest—my stock in trade as a storyteller. I hold nothing back about how I believe I needed formal care and counseling when I returned from Afghanistan, and in the absence of that, I was an easy mark for a predatory industry that loves risk takers like me. I was also vulnerable to the appeal of a partner who also was not the healthiest pursuit.
What I hope is that this book furthers conversations I started with Passport Stamps about mental health and journalism, about what organizations owe to the people they send on dangerous assignments, and about how hard it is to come home and try to fit back into so-called normal life.
Also, it is a stand-alone work, so you don’t have to have read Passport Stamps for it to make sense, but it of course makes even more sense when you have taken the full journey with me.
Doubling Down is available now for preorder through Madville Publishing and will soon be available on your favorite e-book platform.
