The first I saw of Dave Carlson was his back, in a prison jumpsuit on Sept. 3, 2015. Carlson had been calling me from the cellblock payphone for a few weeks for an NPR story about incarcerated combat veterans and PTSD.
"Jail is the least therapeutic atmosphere you could probably ever imagine," Carlson had told me over a scratchy phone line. "You come in one way and you leave three times worse."
Now I finally got a look at him, while the judge decided if Carlson could walk free — or stay locked up for up to six more years. He was 31, and the only Black man I remember seeing in that courtroom in Waukesha, Wisc. Nearly done with a four-year sentence for robberies and drug offenses, he was facing additional charges for crimes he'd committed inside prison.
Carlson served two combat tours in Iraq, and none of his military buddies could make sense of how he'd wound up sitting in the dock.
"When it came to how to lead and how to represent yourself, David was definitely on the list of people that I held in an iconic standpoint," National Guard Sgt. David Rock told me that day. They had met in 2007 on Carlson's second deployment.
Three other Iraq buddies filled a back row in the courtroom, along with Carlson's family.
Their stories of his strengths and virtues, and Carlson's thoughtful interviews on the phone from jail just didn't square with the long rap sheet the judge was reading off: felony operating under the influence, felony bail jumping, battery by prisoner while incarcerated.
"So the maximum exposure here is 12 years today with six years of confinement," Judge Donald Hassin concluded. Hassin himself had served as well, in Vietnam, but it wasn't clear whether that was going to help or hurt Carlson's case.
" Mr. Carlson, this criminal justice system, frankly, has bent over backwards and going through a lot of hoops in an effort to maintain you in the community. And frankly, sir, the response to all that has not been good," the judge said.
I was there in Waukesha to cover Carlson's sentencing as part of my first-ever domestic job as a reporter after covering wars in South America, Africa and then Afghanistan and Iraq for 15 years. I'd pitched NPR on beat following vets and the Department of Veterans Affairs as a new generation navigated the return to civilian life. But I'd had personal reasons too: I wasn't sure how to make a meaningful life back home after the urgency and all-consuming lifestyle of war reporting. Many veterans had the same question as I did: How do you get over war? Covering Dave Carlson's story would help provide an answer — but it would play out over 10 years of conversations, of dark difficult times and moments of remarkable triumph.
Mentorship and moral injury
Carlson grew up rough, around violence, drugs and prostitution in Milwaukee.
"My dad was a crackhead and a pimp," Carlson said "Nothing but violence, guns, like all kinds of stuff like that, drug dealing."
To impress his older brothers — his role models — Carlson had done a string of crimes. At 15 he'd been sentenced to juvenile detention and lived there until his grandparents adopted him and moved him up to Rice Lake, Wisc. Things turned around for a while. Carlson did well at school and sports and won a college scholarship. But on his own in college, drinking became a problem and he felt himself slipping. The military offered a way out, but the Army wouldn't take him because of his juvenile record.
"It was the National Guard recruiter who was the one that was willing to do the extra work to get me in," says Carlson. The country was still reeling from the 9/11 attacks, but a surge in military recruiting had run into the reality that the Iraq war would be long and bloody. Guard units started activating for year-long combat tours. That was fine with Carlson.
"I was like, I'm good at this. Like, I can do this, and I feel … a type of like purpose with this," he said.
His Wisconsin National Guard unit arrived at a small base outside Dhuluiya, Iraq, in 2004, just as the war entered its bloodiest years. His unit got assigned to mostly standing in watchtowers and securing gates. But Carlson wanted to do more, and he started asking around the active duty army units to volunteer for patrol.
"I bounced around different squads, going out depending on my schedule. I would pull guard duty for like eight hours and then I would go on mission with them. Or I would get dropped off after a mission and then I'd go on guard duty," he said.
One of the sergeants he'd ask to take him on missions was Alwyn Cashe. Cashe would later be recognized as one of the greatest heroes of the entire Iraq war. But at the time he was just the guy Carlson had to pester about going out on patrols. Carlson remembers himself as a "snot-nosed" private, sometimes waking-up Sgt. Cashe to ask for permission to go out.
"And he put up with it," Carlson said.
Eventually, after Carlson had volunteered for enough extra work, and kept his cool through enough gunfire, the squad leaders started to invite him to come.
"I've felt like my entire life to anybody that accepts me, I just give a fierce loyalty to them. And so that was, it was like the best thing in the world," he said.
Toward the end of his tour, though, a unit requested Carlson for a patrol and he heard his commanding officer say no — no more guardsmen for patrols. After a whole year, he just wanted to bring all his troops back to Wisconsin alive. That might sound reasonable to families back home, but not to Carlson.
"For you to make it home and be able to say that you brought everybody home, you're willing to deprive this other company?" Carlson fumed, and felt he was being made to betray the soldiers he'd built a bond with.
Days later, on Oct. 17, 2005, Sgt. Cashe got ambushed.
The initial explosion disabled his Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and somehow soaked Cashe's uniform with diesel fuel. Pulling a soldier out of the burning vehicle , Cashe was set aflame. On fire, he returned to the Bradley again and again, hauling seven of his men out while bullets flew around him.
Cashe boarded the medevac last. It took three weeks for him to die of the burns that covered his body. Years later Cashe was finally recognized with the military's highest award — one of only eight people to receive the Medal of Honor during the entire Iraq war, and the first Black recipient since Vietnam.
But at the time, back in Dhuluiya, Iraq, all it meant to Dave Carlson was that he had failed to go on a mission where he might have helped — or even died in place of one of the other men. Carlson redeployed home to Wisconsin, haunted by nightmares.
"So I was just in a really bad head space. I think part of the nightmares were about the fact that there were people still over there dying. Every day I was tormented, feeling like a coward, just not feeling like it was right," he said.
A second deployment to Iraq in 2007 assuaged his guilt but cemented what the VA would later diagnose as PTSD. Returning to civilian life Carlson fell into several years of drifting, sometimes homeless, racking up theft and drug charges. By 2012 he landed at a maximum security prison north of Milwaukee.
God and the Devil in Solitary
I started talking to Carlson by phone at the end of his nearly 4-year prison stint. We compared notes on our times in Iraq, and there was a lot of overlap. When he arrived on his first deployment, I'd been embedded with Marines in Fallujah to the southwest of him. Around when Cashe was ambushed I'd been embedded with Army Strykers to the north, in Mosul.
Carlson opened up about some of the darkest days of his life there in prison. With his mind still tortured by PTSD, he'd gotten so angry and depressed that he had plotted a suicide attack against the prison guards. He planned to make a shank and then slice his own throat in front of the guards' window and bleed out, just to give them the sort of PTSD nightmares that tormented Carlson. He went back into combat mode, and devised military tactics for fighting in jail cells — like dropping a slick of baby oil in front of his cell door, so any assailant would slip on the way in.
His violent behavior eventually got him put in solitary confinement. Alone, with nothing but the screaming and banging from other prisoners in solitary cells, Carlson said he hallucinated that the devil was locked in the hole with him.
"There's no TV, there's no radio, there's none, none of that stuff. And dealing with that was very hard for me. It really took me outta that hole and really a completely new perspective that I've never had once in my entire life," he said.
"It was either kill myself or, or come to God, basically," he told me from prison. He started reading the Bible and found comfort and meaning in Christianity, and a message that he needed to serve again.
"I think that for the chances that I've been given to even be worth it at this point, I need to go out and help others. I can't just go out and enjoy my life, I need to go out and selflessly pursue helping other people that are in my position. I feel like I can maybe help prevent them from going down the same road that I did," he said.
Before he could do that, he needed to get out of prison. That's what he hoped was going to happen at that sentencing hearing in Waukesha.
Judge Hassin thought otherwise.
"I'm looking at a fine young man sitting here in front of me today that I'm gonna end up putting in prison for a little bit," the judge said, "The sentence today is two years on each count."
At first that sounded like four more years in prison, and Carlson's Iraq buddies exchanged worried looks. But then the judge explained it was concurrent with time served, so Carlson would actually be out in a couple of months, with 12 years of extended supervision and 3 years of probation.
"I'm giving you the challenge, sir, of leaving the state prison system here in a fairly short period of time. But you know what? You can do it. You're very capable of it, Mr. Carlson. These guys behind you believe that you're capable of it today as well or they wouldn't be here, right?" said the judge.
Carlson quietly answered, "Yes, sir."
"OK. So to them, you owe something too, right?" said the judge.
A few hours later on the jail payphone, Carlson was elated.
"At the end, he called me a fine young man, and honestly, it wouldn't have mattered what sentence he gave me. That meant that meant a lot to me. I think that through all of this, that's all I've been looking for is just for people to see that I've meant well, and that I went down the wrong road," Carlson said.
A free man
Dave Carlson walked out of jail, a free man, on Dec. 30, 2015. He moved into an apartment his grandma had rented for him, and hunkered down. I called him up two weeks after that, and he sounded a bit bewildered.
"It was like shell shock at first. The first couple days were really bad. It took about a week before I could get my bearings and stuff. Just trying to act like I'm back in the world and life is life now, you know?" he told me.
Even though Carlson had been stateside for seven years at this point, he'd been in prisons or institutions for much of that time. When I checked in on him again after a couple of months, he sounded better. He'd met a woman at one of the two gyms where he'd been teaching boxing.
"It's nothing super serious. We do a lot of workouts together and stuff," Carlson said.
It would get serious though.
"I will never forget the day that he walked into this gym," remembers Alicia Carlson, who is now Dave's wife. She didn't like him at first, but he made an impression.
"He had on high-top Jordan tennis shoes, a sweat-like tracksuit and just serious, like the most serious person I've ever seen," she said.
There was a stretch before I checked in with Carlson again. And things had changed. He and Alicia were married and had a baby boy. But they'd already been through a lot, and Carlson had slipped.
Just as he and Alicia started their relationship, Dave Carlson's best friend from his criminal days was murdered. That, along with his continuing PTSD combat nightmares, was enough to knock Carlson off course. Alicia realized something was off one night when Dave decided he'd have a drink with dinner.
"I don't know if this is Pandora's box opening or what just happened," Alicia told me later.
She said it led to many months of relapses. That's not uncommon for recovering addicts, but Carlson didn't have any leeway. He was still under supervision by the court, one drunken traffic stop away from getting hauled back to prison.
Right after their baby was born, Dave plain disappeared.
"I had a brand new baby. He was completely out of his mind," said Alicia.
Alicia finally tracked him down to a motel in a rough part of town. She found him, drunk and snorting cocaine off of a desk.
"I wanted to die," Dave remembers. "I didn't want to take on the responsibility of being a dad. I knew that I was gonna suck at it and I was gonna teach my kids all kinds of bad s***. So maybe my dad, it was best that he was not in my life for the majority of it, because maybe I would've just been even worse off? And maybe I'm gonna do that to my kids."
Alicia marched him to an inpatient rehab at the VA in St. Cloud, Minn.
I was always hoping Carlson was going to make it. But by then I'd been reporting on veterans for six or seven years, and I'd seen lots of them fail. Suicide long ago outstripped combat as a killer. More than four times as many Iraq and Afghanistan war vets have taken their own lives than died in both wars. The stress often ricochetted on to military families and spouses, like Alicia. But she wasn't ready to give up on their marriage.
"It was like, I'm just gonna do whatever I need to. I want to get David back on the rails because I feel like if I can get him help — he has so much potential. This is just a part of his story. I believe that he has so much more to offer this world and he's here for a reason," Alicia said.
Maybe it was holding his new baby in the peace and stability of the VA hospital. Maybe it was Alicia's dedication, or Dave's growing sense of serving God. Most likely all those things, but Dave Carlson finally found a way to turn all his anger and trauma and energy in a direction more suited for life outside of war.
"There's a quote about 'I would rather be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war," he told me. "It speaks to being able to defend yourself, to be able to do harm, but then having the discipline, having the empathy, having the compassion to not do it," he said.
After Dave came home from rehab, Alicia said, little good things kept happening. She finished grad school, and they bought their first house with a VA home loan.
"And then he got into law school and that was just like, whoa, like I can't believe this is happening," she said.
In those years our phone conversations got to be less like interviews, as we compared notes on becoming new fathers, and discussed the wars that were still ongoing. Carlson was one of the people I talked with after my close friend, NPR's photographer David Gilkey, died in a Taliban ambush in 2016. Carlson got it; he mostly just listened.
Put to the test
We kept checking in by phone, and then by Zoom, as big things happened in the world — a pandemic and racial justice protests. Carlson seemed to be on track. He and Alicia had a second baby — another boy. And they'd started a company to mentor troubled youth. Finding a new mission, and for veterans feeling a sense of service, is one of the best ways I've seen people get over war and PTSD. Carlson knew these kids looked up to him because he's strong, and because he'd fought at war. But he wanted to teach them a different lesson about fighting than the one he grew up with.
"I thought, then, that the value was the actual violence — being able to do that violence to other people. It just needed to be deserving people that you did the violence to, which is backwards. Now I fully believe and know that violence of any kind is wrong. It's the least effective way to do anything," Carlson said.
Carlson was trying to live that way — a warrior in a garden. His work with troubled youth and other social services sometimes brought him into volatile situations though. That's what he described to me on a call in 2023.
Driving home one evening, Carlson said he got a troubling message from a colleague who worked in domestic violence. A woman had texted her, saying that her husband planned to rape and kill her. The husband, a felon, had posted pictures of himself online with weapons.
Carlson turned around and went to get his colleague, and they drove together to pick up the wife and her children. They planned not to go inside the house, especially since Carlson was still on probation.
"So we get to the front of the house. And there is a door open on the car, and no wife out there," Carlson said.
His colleague jumped out of the car and ran into the house.
"I'm yelling at her like, stop, stop, stop!" Carlson said. So much for the plan.
"And so I go in after. And I'm playing in my mind … like a flashback to Iraq. My brain is now processing this as if someone has just kicked the door, and I'm second-man-in," he said.
In Iraq that had meant: one soldier kicks in the door, and the second-man runs into a dark, unknown house that might be full of armed men. Back then his mindset was kill or be killed. Now he was rushing into a domestic dispute in an American city.
"The wife is in the corner, like cowering in the corner. I get in between the wife and the husband," he said.
The husband was a larger man, but Carlson rushed at him, hoping he wasn't armed.
"I grabbed the hand that I couldn't see any longer while at the same time grabbing his neck," said Carlson.
They crashed down the hallway and rolled on to the floor. "I think I put one leg around, like a hook in jiujitsu around his thigh, and I'm peeking around his head trying to see if there's anything in his hand," he said.
Despite his memories of house-clearing in Iraq, Carlson wasn't having a PTSD flashback. He wasn't having a relapse. Instead he was keeping it together and using the skills learned as a soldier.
The man's hand was empty. Carlson wrapped his giant arm into what's called a rear-naked choke hold. A nd then it was done. He told the husband to stay down, and he did.
The wife and kids were safe. The police arrived, and Carlson told them he had been involved. He called his probation officer. He figured he was going to jail.
"I went straight to the gas station. I bought six hard boiled eggs. I ate six hard boiled eggs, went to the courthouse and then waited," he said. As an ex-con, he knew the drill.
"I thought for sure I was going to jail! You get hungry as hell in jail. So… fill up!" he said with a laugh.
This time when Carlson ended up before a judge though, he knew what to say. And he didn't go to jail. He went home and he kept on studying for his law degree.
Then this past spring I called Dave Carlson not for an interview, but to plan a trip to go see him in Wisconsin for his law school graduation.
Two questions
I stopped by Carlson's house before graduation, with that same original question in mind: How do you get over war? When we sat down to talk, though, he surprised me with a question of his own: Why have you been interviewing me for the past 10 years?
Somehow, even a decade in, I didn't have an articulate response. But Carlson knew the answer, and he told me. "Your recovery depends on the person you work with, with their recovery," he said. It's a concept he learned from Alcoholic Anonymous.
"I think you're part of this, you're part of this network. The same way I'm a part of your recovery, you're part of my recovery."
He's right.
I went to war as a correspondent, not a soldier. But I spent 15 years reporting on senseless death and destruction, and I lost friends along the way. Talking to Dave Carlson and telling his story, and other veterans' stories on NPR was the best possible thing I could have done to move forward with my life. Doing that for all these years had helped me digest what we'd all been through, and slowly redefine myself with a new purpose back here at home.
As for my question about how Carlson could get past the war, the answer seemed clear as we sat in his house in Eau Claire, big enough for his three boys to have their own bedrooms. He and Alicia seemed happy walking the kids to a playground just down the street. In my mind his odyssey is over, home at last. But that's not how he sees it. Carslon said he's still just keeping the wolves at bay.
"I mean honestly like, I don't think it's ever safe," he told me.
"But I think that if you can build the community that you have, the network that you have for support and that network is stable, I think maybe you can relax a certain amount. Because somebody's got your six, right?" he said.
"Right now I think that I'm trying to tighten up my sector of fire. So that when I do relax, I can just enjoy those relationships and my family can thrive without there being some impending danger looming just ahead."
I left his house in Eau Claire with a more tempered view. Still I hope that some day soon he'll be able to let his guard down, relax, and feel safe, maybe even a little proud.
I just spoke to Dave Carlson last week, and he was at the courthouse again. He passed the bar, and he's now a practicing attorney.
Copyright 2025 NPR
