Some moments don’t fade with time — they sharpen. For Patrick Flood, Founder & CEO of Owners In Honor, one of those moments happened in 2007, during a Medical Readiness Exercise in a rural Afghan village. His team spent the day providing medical care, distributing school supplies, and building relationships with village elders — the kind of work that serves multiple purposes at once: helping people, building trust, and gathering understanding of the community.
Hours later, walking back to base, his team came under fire.
When the Day Turns
What followed was sudden and violent — an attack, a pursuit, and ultimately the death of the young Afghan fighter who had opened fire. But what stayed with Flood wasn’t the firefight itself. It was what came after: watching the man’s fear give way to something quieter as he died, and later, watching village elders weep as they received his body — not as combatants or political figures, but as grieving fathers and grandfathers.
The same village that had welcomed their help that morning had also produced the man who attacked them that afternoon. Flood writes that what felt contradictory in the moment feels, years later, deeply human — a recognition that everyone involved that day, on every side, had been moved by some combination of fear and love.
A Line From Augustine
Years later, reading St. Augustine, Flood found language for what he’d witnessed: the idea that we are, in a real sense, carried by what we love. That insight reframes a pattern he sees often in veterans after they leave service — a grief that isn’t really about missing the mission or the camaraderie, but about losing the place where their capacity for sacrifice and devotion once had somewhere to land.
Military service, Flood argues, conditions people to measure success by the welfare of the team rather than personal gain — a relationship that’s deeply personal rather than transactional. When the uniform comes off, many veterans find civilian work well-compensated but strangely hollow, because the relationship between person and organization has shifted from belonging to something closer to a transaction.
Why So Many Veterans Turn to Ownership
Flood connects this directly to why veterans pursue entrepreneurship at higher rates than the general population. Business ownership restores something structurally familiar — responsibility for employees, customers, and communities; sacrifice made today for outcomes that may not appear for years; the role of steward rather than employee. Seen this way, entrepreneurship becomes less about wealth and more about finding another worthy place to direct that same capacity for devotion.
Flood extends the same lens to business owners approaching a sale. On paper, a successful exit should feel like straightforward reward — yet many owners feel unexpected grief, delay selling, or regret the decision afterward. He suggests they aren’t just transferring an asset; they’re saying goodbye to a relationship they spent years building and protecting.
Where the Love Goes Next
The piece closes on a broader point: transition — whether after military service, after selling a business, or after any major life chapter — isn’t really about finding a new mission. It’s about finding a new place for that love to land. Grief, in this framing, isn’t a sign that something went wrong. It’s evidence that something mattered.
Read Patrick’s full essay, “Love After Service: The Things We Carry,” on LinkedIn →
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/notes-from-operator-underground-love-after-service-patrick-flood-lckfc/
