Seventh Gear: Sean Martin on The Measuring Post

Sean Martin sang his first opera at seven years old in a 5,000-seat tent in Mendocino. By twenty, he was an airborne infantryman jumping into Iraq on the 18X special forces fast-track contract. He came home with a Combat Infantryman Badge, the death of his best friend Jeff Bisson on his conscience, and PTSD the Army barely recognized.What the military taught him about turning on a "seventh gear" of combat readiness, it didn't teach him how to turn off. For nearly five years he white-knuckled it through the civilian world — getting fired from service jobs because the thousand-yard stare kept dragging him back to Iraq mid-sandwich, playing the card game Memory at the VA because he couldn't finish a round in 30 minutes. In 2012 he had a psychotic break that finally landed him in a VA psych ward, surrounded by doctors who told him to lay it all out for the first time.Music became the path back. Not just performing, but writing songs from inside the war he was still fighting in his head. Sean and Joe got into the loss of Jeff Bisson a day and a half before he was scheduled to become a Golden Knight, the difference between the stage and the studio, how scrupulous management cost him an entire album, and why he believes perspective plus gratitude is the only formula that pulls someone out of the deepest hole.