Warriors of Camp Southern Ground

Michael Hoherchak

Mike is a Warrior Week alum who joined the Army at 23. One of his last deployments took him to southern Iraq – where, during detainee operations, he unexpectedly met Saddam Hussein’s cousin. This is his story.

“Do not always prove yourself to be the one in the right. The right will appear. You need only give it a chance.” – Charles Henry Fowler

My transition out of the military did not go well. My pre-separation plan completely fell apart and I didn’t have a backup plan because I thought it was bulletproof. I really bought into “burn the boats” mentality. Add on the emotional transition challenges since I was stop loosed. So, when I returned from deployment, 3 months later, I was a civilian. Lost in the sauce was an understatement. I did what we do best in the military and started compartmentalizing everything so as not to feel anything. That coping strategy turned into years of disassociation and emotional numbness. I looked good on paper, but I was dead inside. Just a shell of myself, checking the boxes of life, thinking status, money and achievement would “fix” me. It didn’t, of course.

Over the last 6-7 years I’ve been on a strong personal growth and development journey. What worked best for me has been a combination of things that has built on each other, but one thing in particular that has been a game changer has been my study of long form breathwork and somatics. After years of being a practitioner and learning from some of the top breathwork facilitators in the world, I launched a coaching company teaching vets and first responders how to release stuck trauma and emotions and help them live life by design, rather than by default using primarily the breath.

Warrior Week had a massive impact in that one of the exercises we did, forced me to look at my relationship with asking for help. Especially as former military, we get indoctrinated into “staying in our lane”, putting our head down and getting to work and figuring it out. It’s even in the NCO creed “Officers of my unit will have maximum time to accomplish their duties; they will not have to accomplish mine.”

This makes a unit cohesive, but that mentality doesn’t work the same way in the civilian world. So, for a long time I succumbed to the lone wolf syndrome and that particular exercise in Warrior Week really made me take a hard look at where I should have asked for help and even accepted help from others when it was offered. Of course I can’t change the past, but I can now be more aware of this in the future to be more receptive to help when needed.