Mission

To the ones who carried it home...

For two decades, I answered questions about that morning — the scramble, the order, the targets. But the story I needed to tell began after I landed. Nickel on the Grass exists to say out loud what no camera captured: some missions last hours, but their consequences last decades. I wrote it for the ones who came home carrying something they couldn't name, the spouses who stood beside them, the children who loved someone fighting a battle they couldn't see. I wrote it because the person closest to me said I needed to. I was trained to hold on, to control, to endure, to solve problems; and never let go…

Faith asked something entirely different.

surrender. not as defeat, but as trust.

At the center of this story isn't a fighter pilot. It's a man discovering that courage, discipline, and strength can only carry him so far. Eventually, he must accept grace. This isn't a film that preaches. It's a film that quietly proposes that God does not waste suffering, and that redemption often begins where our own strength ends. Take faith out of this story, and there is no story left — only a wound.

In 2022, my wife told me to apply for the Writers Guild Foundation’s Veterans Writing Project, a yearlong mentorship for military veterans. I pushed back, but she persisted. I got in.

I didn’t think I belonged there. I certainly didn’t know what God was about to do. I thought I was learning to write a screenplay. I was learning to heal. And I didn’t do it alone. Under the mentorship of working writers who gave me their craft and their patience, Nickel on the Grass became what it is. They didn’t just sharpen the script. They changed what I understood a writer to be.

What my wife knew, and I didn’t, was that I’d carried these stories for two decades without knowing what to do with them. Writing them down became something I never expected: therapy, catharsis, and eventually grace. As a Catholic, I believe God redeems what He doesn’t prevent and that He can take a wound and make it a vocation. I no longer see Nickel on the Grass as a film. I see it as a gift I didn’t know I needed.

If this story helps one veteran, one spouse, one son or daughter, one first responder, one person quietly carrying a weight no one can see, realize they’re not alone, then it will have done far more than entertain. It will have become an act of service.

That is the mission.