The Battle After the Battle: Pele Hunkin's Walk Back to Herself

Some of the hardest fighting happens after the uniform comes off. That's the story of Pele Hunkin, a U.S. Army veteran from American Samoa who served from 1994 to 2013 — and who has been honest, in public, about the years she spent drowning instead of healing.

Pele deployed to Iraq, where the constant danger wore on her the way it wears on anyone who's lived inside it. Then came the blow that would have broken plenty of people for good: in 2006, her husband — a government contractor working in Balad, Iraq — was killed in an accident. She was left to raise their child alone, in the middle of a war, while still serving. She kept going. That's the grit part. Nobody hands you a pause button when your world ends mid-deployment.

But grit on its own doesn't always hold. After she retired, the weight of combat stress and grief caught up with her. She turned to alcohol. In her own words, "I turned to alcohol to ease my pain." She lost touch with people who loved her. She described it plainly — she felt like she'd lost control. We know that feeling by another name: the bitterness and the numbing that come when grit runs out of road and faith hasn't been let in yet.

Here's where the story turns. Pele got into Wounded Warrior Project's Warrior Care Network, through Home Base — a program run with the Red Sox Foundation and Massachusetts General Hospital that treats PTSD and substance use together instead of picking one. It worked, for a while. Then in 2021, she relapsed. And this is the part we want to sit with, because it's the truest part: she went back. She didn't disappear into the relapse and call it the end of the story. She returned to Home Base, leaned on health care professionals, on therapy, on the friends and family still standing beside her, and she started again.

When she talks about what actually carried her through, she doesn't name one thing. She names three: her faith, her children, and gratitude. "My unwavering faith in God played a vital role in my life," she's said. That's grit with faith in one sentence — the fight to get up every one of those hard mornings, braided together with something bigger than her own willpower to point the fight in the right direction.

As of late September 2023, Pele had reached 640 days sober. She didn't stop there either. She's since stood in front of members of Congress and their staff at the Women Warriors Summit in Washington, D.C., telling this same story out loud — on purpose, in public — so other veterans, especially women veterans who so often serve in silence, would know that asking for help isn't the opposite of strength. It's what strength actually looks like when it's honest.

We don't tell Pele's story because it's tidy. It isn't. Relapse isn't a plot twist you write into an inspirational speech — it's a real, humbling thing that happened to a real woman who kept choosing to come back anyway. That's what gets us about it. Not that she never fell. That she let faith and family pull her back up every time she did, and then turned around and used her voice to pull other people up too.

Faith. Grit. Love for the family she refused to let go of. A patriot who served her country twice — once in uniform, and again by standing up in the Capitol to tell the truth about what coming home can cost.

As reported by Wounded Warrior Project.

We'd love to hear your story too — the hard season, and what carried you through it. Tell us about it here.