Chase Rowan used to jump out of planes for a living. At the age of 21, he became an Army Ranger, trained to parachute behind enemy lines to capture or kill insurgent fighters. He went on his first combat tour, to northern Iraq, in 2005.

“There’s a lot of times you think you’re not going to come back,” Rowan told me. “But you do it for your buddy sitting next to you. And because you don’t want to be that little bitch.”

He completed over 150 combat missions in hostile territory without a hitch. But two months after he got back from Iraq, while he was working at Fort Benning Army base in Georgia, an airborne training exercise went horribly wrong.

It was the middle of the night. The plane was 800 feet up. Rowan jumped, as he had so many times before—and his parachute didn’t fully deploy. His body was going 60 miles an hour when it hit the runway.

Miraculously, Rowan survived. But he had broken several bones and sustained a traumatic brain injury. In a Veterans Affairs hospital, a doctor gave Rowan a Percocet pill for the first time, and so began a lifetime of addiction.

For the first year after his injury, Rowan struggled with chronic headaches and struggled to keep his balance while standing or walking. But even after the symptoms subsided, Rowan continued to ingest any opioid he could get his hands on: oxycodone, heroin, and fentanyl. In the past decade and a half, he’s crashed two cars while high and cycled in and out of rehab. In 2010, in the middle of his first child’s birth, he snuck out of the maternity ward to go get a fix. When his wife finally left him with their two kids in early 2023, Rowan admitted, “It was long overdue.”

A few months later, Rowan said, he was ready to end his life...