Marine combat Vet Jon Hancock shares his incredible journey of redemption and walk across America

Hey, thanks very much for having me. Really, it's an honor to be here, and anytime I get to share my story and help veterans out, I'm always down to do it.

Thanks brother, thanks for having me, man.

Yes, I'm down in Tucson, Arizona. So we got the monsoons rolling through, so we got some pretty good thunderstorms, so we're breaking up some of this heat right now. So that's always nice.

I was a Navy brat, and so I was born in Honolulu and then moved all over the world. My dad was an XO on submarines, and so we were all over the world, and then finally kind of moved into Maryland, and I called Maryland my home because I did all four years of high school there. But I think I was 10, maybe even younger, and I saw a Marine in upper rice lip in the commissary in England, and I saw this just mountain of a man, and I looked at my dad and I was like, 'Who is that?' He goes, 'Oh, it's the Force Reconnaissance Marine. Those are the most badass things on the planet.' And I was like, 'Well, that's what I want to do then. I want to be a Marine.' And from that day forward, it was just I want to be a Marine. I got to high school and the recruiters are in the cafeteria. I'm in ninth grade and I'm like, 'Hey man, I'm all right, let's join. I want to go right now.' And they're like, 'All right, slow down there, spark plug. Graduate high school first and then we'll talk about it after that.' So I graduated high school and I think two weeks later I was standing on those yellow footprints. I served in 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines from 2001 to the end of 2004, and then laterally moved, got a new MOS and went to the 0211 field, became a Counterintelligence Human Intelligence Specialist, did another almost five years there, and got out at the end of '09.

That is correct. Sand fleas and swamps, man.

Well, I had gotten out of the Marine Corps at the end of '09 and went right into University of Maryland. I was double majoring in Arabic and Russian. I already spoke those languages, so I was going to kind of phone it in. But as I kept going through class, I was having a lot of problems assimilating and dealing with coming back from eight tours in combat and then listening to these college kids just spout this nonsense. I couldn't align with it, I couldn't listen to them anymore, and I found the bars instead of going to class. So I was drinking a lot. There's the first DUI, then there's a second one almost a year to the day after the first one. After that second one, for some reason the cop didn't arrest me and he dropped me back off home, and I decided I was going to end it that night. So I went in and I looked myself in the mirror and I said, 'Hey man, you're a big piece of junk. You've kind of degraded your name, your family's name, the Marine Corps name. You don't need to be here. You're not a good father, you're not a good son, you're not a good friend.' So I started emptying pills into my stomach. And as those pills started to take hold, I was realizing that I was dying and I didn't want to do that. So I hopped in my car, which was about 400 meters from my house at the time, drove to the Baltimore VA Hospital from College Park, Maryland. It's about a 45-minute trip. I made that trip in about 17 minutes. I was cooking. I broke every law on the road to try to save myself. I got to the emergency room, told them what I had done, immediately they whisked me back into some room, and there it is: tubes, nodes, and then I'm handcuffed to a bed. It was all pretty bad. So I wound up in the psych ward in the Baltimore VA Hospital. I was there for about five or six days. As I was sitting there, I think it was one of the last days I was there, on the news there was a guy named Mike Feely. He'd started something called Legacies Alive, and man, he was just an inspiration to me. He had been walking one kilometer for each person being killed in Iraq or Afghanistan since the '01 kickoff, and he was ending at the Army-Navy game at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore in about a month after that. He was going to end at halftime, and it just spoke to me. I got out of the psych ward, realized I wanted to do this, realized I wanted to go meet with my brothers that I served with in the Battle of Ramadi, meet with the Gold Star families of the fallen, and kind of tell them what I had done. Maybe this was almost a penance walk for me, if you will. In the beginning, I'm kind of trying to tell people that I'm sorry, reaching out for my own sanity, my own help. So I got on a mountain bike because I didn't know how to do this. I was 308 pounds. I had been eating and drinking my feelings for years. So I got on a mountain bike and I rode my mountain bike for like 10 months and went from 308 to 198 pounds, and then said, 'Okay, now I can go walk across the country.' So September 11th, 2015, 1:15 in the morning. There's no significance for that time, I was just super excited to go and I couldn't sleep and I was like, 'Screw it, I'm just going to go now.' So I started walking. 5,807 miles later, 19 states, seven pairs of shoes, I ended December 12th, 2016 at the Camp Pendleton 5th Marines War Memorial Gardens.

Yeah, absolutely. It is absolutely about growth and it is absolutely about camaraderie, and it's very real, it's very raw, it's uncut. I don't hold any punches. I needed to tell you what I was going through in the most raw way I could so that people could understand it. I hope first and foremost that it helps veterans, that they understand that they're not alone. Here I am telling people what I've done, and I've come out on the other side. It's possible. It's just one foot in front of the other. For the civilian side of the house, I really hope to be this bridge to gain some understanding, bring the civilian population into the conversation so we can actually make changes here, and understand that the epidemic of veteran suicide is out of control. It's something that needs to have a larger spotlight. We're done with the awareness thing. I'm done with it. What I'm doing now is I'm trying to change things, and I need people to help me change it, and the only way I can do that is by talking about it.

You're right, man. Honestly, it's that first step, that first telling the first person, and it just gets easier from there. You tell two or three people that really listen, you're gonna start changing, you're gonna start feeling better about it. You can't hold this stuff in. You can't bottle this in for years. That's not how the human condition works. We need to speak about these things. So if I've got to lay myself naked on the altar of humility and say I'll go first, guys, then I have to. If that helps somebody else, then that's what I'm doing.

I had quit everything I'd tried after the Marine Corps. I'd quit college, I'd quit jobs, I had quit relationships. I just quit everything, and that was my MO, and I didn't want to do that anymore. I was about two weeks into the walk, I was down by Fort A.P. Hill, I-301, and I wanted to quit, man. I didn't know what I was doing. So I called my mother and I told her I just wanted to quit, and she goes, 'You know, I can come pick you up. You're about three hours away.' And I was like, 'Man, I've been walking for two weeks and I'm only three hours away? I'm never gonna finish this thing.' But right there, I was given this opportunity to quit yet again, and something in me said, 'Don't do it. Don't quit.' So I hung up after about a two-hour conversation with my mom, I just kept walking. I got down to Virginia Beach, started meeting with some of the boys that were down there, and then just kept going. I just decided I was just going to empty my gas tank. What I didn't realize was that my gas tank was never going to be empty, because every meeting that I went on, every time I met with somebody, another brother, another Gold Star family, it just reinvigorated me, it just gave me more strength. And I just kept going. You always want to quit when you're out in the middle of the sand hills in Nebraska and there's nothing around for 190 miles in any direction. But then you're like, 'Okay, so I quit. Well, then I still gotta walk 190 miles to the airport.' In that time, you're just continually going over all your memories. It became almost like this ambulatory cognitive behavioral therapy for me. I was accessing all these memories that were so debilitating to me earlier and would cause me to want to go drink just to kind of quell them. Now I was using physicality, 30 miles a day with 70 pounds on my back, as the form of therapy to really process those memories. I'm able now to remember these memories because I'll always have them, but it's how I access them, how you allow them to be in your life. I realized later on that I could now access these memories without them being so debilitating, and I became kind of a mouthpiece. I would just start speaking about them and telling other people about it, and that really was the therapy for me.

Yeah, brother. She's a huge fan.

They meant everything, and it was the whole reason I started this thing. I wanted to go help them, I wanted to see them. No time passes, because you leave the Marine Corps, you scatter to the winds, you go and move on with your life, and then you see each other again ten years down the road and it's like no time has passed at all. You pick up right where you left off. It was absolutely one of the most cathartic things I had done. And then to meet with these Gold Star families, a lot of them I've never met before, and to understand what they're struggling with, the daily grief that they go through, and then to be able to be there for them, to listen to them, to share weird, stupid, and sometimes dirty stories about their boys that they absolutely want to hear and that they didn't know before. That's the amazing thing about a Gold Star family: they don't care what it is, they want to know about it, and they want to hear everything they can about their sons and their daughters. For me to be able to provide some of that and just provide comfort and support, I realized very quickly that the support network that we have is far greater than I've ever actually imagined. I don't have one mom, I got 34 moms, and it's absolutely amazing.

Just go do it. Just grab a rock, grab a flag, and let's go do it, man. I'll join in next week.

I think the toughest part was really the isolation, being out and having to leave from a brother's house and say, 'All right, brother, I love you, see you later,' and then just walk away from his house and start this process all over again. That was tough for me. But I realized I was strong enough to do it, and as I was continuing to do it, that was also one of the most rewarding things for me: to be able to finally grasp back on life and really fight back those demons and win. That was really what it was for me. I was winning again, and I was causing myself to change, and that's all I wanted to do. I wanted to shed the old skin. When I got done, when I ended at Camp Pendleton, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, the entire active duty battalion was there. They lined the street of the road and then they walked in with me. It was humbling to say the least, man. That was another really rewarding piece of that for me: to show these new Marines, or active current Marines at the time, that you're gonna be faced with challenges on your way out the door, but you can overcome them. I wanted to show that to those guys. Plus, I'm an older guy now, so I wanted to show them I could still hang.

Brian Morrison, the filmmaker, he contacted me when I was about 1,300 miles into the walk already. He contacted me down in Slidell, Louisiana. I'd already walked all the way down to Miami and kind of traced the Gulf into Louisiana. He calls me and I thought he just wanted to do some interview, and as I'm talking to him I'm realizing he wants to document this. I went to bed that night and I slept on it. I took a hotel for that evening because I had been taking a hotel once a month just because I wanted a shower and a nice bed, since I'm sleeping in a tent on the side of the road the whole time. I slept on it and I woke up and I just had this epiphany: 'Johnny, you keep saying you want to help all these people, keep saying you want to do this. Well, then let this guy tell your story. Let this guy in and really give him the story.' So I flew back for a VA appointment that I couldn't miss, so I halted the walk for like three or four days. I flew back from Lubbock, Texas into Maryland, went to the VA, met with Brian, we did a two-hour interview and we kind of felt each other out on camera, and I was like, 'Okay, yeah, we can do this.' So he would fly out another seven or eight times after that, and he would meet with me for a week, sometimes eight or nine days, sometimes two or three days, and he would just film as much as humanly possible. Then he took it upon himself to go fly around the country and meet with all the people I had already met with to get those interviews. So I didn't have the camera on me all the time, but when I did have the camera on me, I forgot about it because I didn't change. It wasn't like I was acting. This is who I am, and you're gonna get me. So sure, roll the camera. As my boys started coming into screen and they started being on camera, at first it was a little weird for them, but they would talk to each other and after the first couple they'd call other guys and say, 'Hey, how was it?' and they're like, 'Don't even worry about it, it's John, it's all good.' The only question that ever happened by any of my boys about Brian was, 'Is the dude on the level?' and I said, 'Yeah, absolutely, and I trust him implicitly. If he screws this up, we can bury him out back somewhere.' But he didn't. We'd always said, 'If this documentary sucks, at least we have something documented.' It turns out that it doesn't suck. I looked on Rotten Tomatoes yesterday and we're sitting at 100%, so I guess we're doing something right.

Yeah, absolutely. That's really how it works anyway.

If you're struggling, first off, you don't do this alone. For the ones that are really at the end of the rope right now, call your brothers, call your sisters. Start there. If you don't feel comfortable doing that, check in somewhere, man. If you're at the end of your rope, you've got to do something here, because you are needed, you are wanted, you are deserving of a good life and peace. But you have to fight for it. You have to fight some of these demons that you hold on to, and you have to get rid of them. The only way to do it is to go back to war with them, and you don't do that yourself. You do that with your brothers and your sisters that you trusted in combat. So do that first. As we continue to grow, as we continue to show each other what we're made of, I think bringing back these reunions, getting together more and more, that'll help. For the active duty military component, especially the leadership, I think it is incumbent upon the leadership now to be very open with their soldiers, airmen, Marines, guardians, all of it. Allow them space to communicate what they're going through, because military's tough, absolutely it is. We kind of pride ourselves on being these silent and quiet professionals, but inside that quiet professionalism, I think we need to have avenues to speak out and to relay what we're going through.

That was hard for me for a long time. Forgiveness was something I didn't think I was worthy of. So it took a long time for me to start to forgive myself for things I had done, things I hadn't done, the monster I had become later. That is a key point: to absolutely start to learn to forgive yourself. I don't know how to do that for everybody, but I can tell you if you get outside and you walk around somewhere, go walk on a trail or something, doing physical activity will help.

Mary brings up a really good point here. This film is absolutely about the military, it is absolutely about my service and what I did afterwards, but there are so many different people from so many different walks of life, civilians who have never served, who align with this film and can understand it and see through the military piece of it to understand this is a human story. All of us suffer through some sort of trauma, and it is incumbent upon us to deal with it together.

That's awesome. I will give you a warning: bring a box of tissues with you. I don't think I've met a single person that's got through this movie with a dry eye. So sorry about that in advance, but not sorry.

As we continue to push through, especially for the GWOT veterans, the Global War on Terrorism era veterans, guys have been fighting for 20 years now. We struggle with 'thank you for your service.' We make fun of it. We don't make fun of you for saying it, we make fun of us for how we reply to it. For the combat side of the house, it's, 'What are you thanking me for? You thanking me for volunteering and going to combat, killing a kid, watching my buddy die?' And on the non-combat or supporting role side of the house, 'Are you thanking me for never getting to go and complete the job or complete the mission as I thought it would be?' So it's really difficult for us to wrap our heads around 'thank you for your service.' I think we get rid of it all together. I think we bring back 'welcome home.' Vietnam didn't get it, and I think that's absolutely a travesty. But I think we bring back 'welcome home' and start to create this homogenous society again, because when you say 'welcome home,' you immediately bring that veteran back into the fold of society. You give them the opportunity to feel part of something versus the derision and anonymity that sometimes we do feel. When we bring back 'welcome home,' we then start bringing back the idea of positive growth and community and involvement, bringing veterans back together inside a community so that they can flourish.

Yeah, and anybody else, just to help keep the movie going and get it to more and more veterans. I know a lot of people have seen it, but I hope that more and more veterans, I want every person in the military that's ever served and everybody in every active duty service component now to be able to see this film. So the continued word of getting it out, that's the help. I don't make a dime from this, so there's no financial gain for me here. All I want to do is help people, man.

Yes.

No F-bombs at all, man. I'm shocked. You're still on if you want to let it fly.

Thanks so much. Welcome home, John.