Joshua Peters was 19 years old and six months into a war when an IED blew up the Humvee he was riding in near Balad, Iraq. Shrapnel tore through his left foot and right thigh. He bled from an artery in his foot for 45 minutes and somehow did not need a transfusion. What followed was a decade of PTSD, a misfired prescription, a marriage a month in, a career identity that had to be rebuilt from scratch, and a slow climb into the IT compliance consulting work he does today as owner of Key Consulting KC.
What You'll Hear
- Why Josh joined the Army at 17, right before 9/11, and why the delayed entry program kept him home another year
- What his Civil Affairs unit actually did in Samarra, from restoring clean water to running psychological operations alongside the playing card deck
- The July 14, 2003 IED blast that put shrapnel through his foot and thigh and started a traumatic brain injury he didn't understand for years
- Being isolated at Fort Sam Houston in a room where staff wore full hazmat suits because doctors weren't sure if the shrapnel carried depleted uranium
- The H and R Block phone call a month after his wedding that sent him straight to the VA and led to a PTSD diagnosis
- How a 2020 week in Puerto Rico stacked a T-Mobile job, a full ride scholarship, and finding out his wife was pregnant after 15 years of trying
- Finishing a bachelor's degree in 20 months, 4.0 and summa cum laude, while working full time and raising a new baby
- Why getting laid off from T-Mobile was the push he needed to go all in on Key Consulting KC
From enlistment at 17 to Civil Affairs in Samarra
Josh grew up around the military. His grandfather served, his great grandfather served, and an uncle was in the Air Force. He joined the Army at 17 with his parents' consent and planned to be a lifer. A speeding ticket put him on probation and bumped him to the delayed entry program, so he was still in high school when he watched the towers fall on TV and realized he was going to war.
After basic and AIT, he was assigned to Civil Affairs. He describes the unit as the people people, sometimes jokingly called greenpeace with guns. Their job in Iraq was to restart the country after the initial war. They turned on a brand new water treatment plant that had never been used because the previous regime did not supply the salt needed to run it. They took control of the dam on the Tigris and gave the city full-time electricity instead of the one hour a day Saddam had allowed. They paid teachers, got hospitals open, and reopened schools.
Josh deployed to Iraq in March 2003 and was stationed in Samarra. The big-battle fighting was already over by the time his unit rolled in. What replaced it was nightly harassment fire from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m., one or two fighters with a rocket or a mortar, often financed by whoever could hand out a twenty dollar bill. He talks through what happened with the deck of most-wanted playing cards and how Civil Affairs worked hand in hand with Psychological Operations, the same unit Sam's brother served in.
July 14, 2003 and 21 days without clothes
On July 14, 2003, Josh's team was driving back from Balad when an IED detonated next to their Humvee. Shrapnel went through the tailgate and through the arch of his left foot, breaking bones on the way across. Another piece caught his right thigh. He bled from an artery in his foot for 45 minutes. He never needed a blood transfusion. He also hit his head hard enough to give himself a traumatic brain injury that he did not fully understand for years.
Medics cut his clothes off in the field. He would not wear clothes again for 21 days. He was flown from Iraq to Germany, from Germany to Andrews, and finally to Fort Sam Houston in Texas, on a stretcher under a wool military blanket while other passengers stared at him. When he landed, staff pulled him into a sealed isolation room because they were not sure whether the IED had been packed with depleted uranium from salvaged tank rounds. Everyone who came in to treat him wore full hazmat suits. He spent a day as the only person in the room without protection of any kind.
He was 19 years old. He was the youngest member of his unit and the first one injured, and the thing he remembers worrying about in the moments after the blast was a borrowed Good Charlotte CD he thought was ruined.
The H and R Block call that named the problem
Josh came home to North Carolina for physical therapy and then back to Missouri with almost no structure waiting for him. He got married in November 2004. A month later he started a job at H and R Block as an IT guy, but everyone had to do a week of phone training first. His first call on the phones was a man named Mohammed yelling at him in Arabic about his taxes.
Josh did not get through the call. He asked his manager to excuse him, walked out of the office, drove himself to the VA, and pushed open the door of a counselor he had met once. The guy he was yelling at about needing help turned out to be exactly the right person. Josh was admitted to the psychiatric floor of the VA for about a week. They pulled him off Prozac, which carries warnings about amplified suicidal and violent thoughts, and started him on something else. That was when a doctor finally put the letters PTSD on what he had been living with for a year.
He is direct about what he wants veterans and their families to hear. Talking about the trauma is what helps. He understands the stigma, the career fear, and the organizations that use wounded veterans as marketing. He still says the way out is through. If it stays locked up in your head, he says, it will kill you.
Eleven years of spiral and the choice at the bottom
Josh describes an 11 year period after the injury that kept getting worse. Flashbacks. Constant adrenaline. Always scanning the exits. A smell of asphalt would put him back in Iraq. He uses a picture to explain it: every small thing your brain learns to flinch from over a lifetime, a hot stove, a slammed finger, a broken glass, builds up a defense system that works fine until a massive trauma hits. When that happens, every one of those small defenses rushes forward at once to block the big thing, and none of them ever get put back. The switch flips on and stays on.
He does not soften how close he came. He talks plainly about how, at the bottom, the mind starts telling you shortcuts that are not actually shortcuts. What pulled him back was a choice he had to make himself. He frames it as get bitter, stay bitter, or get better. He could not stay where he was and make it in the world.
After he made the choice, the people in his life could actually help. He credits his faith, his wife, his dad, his pastor Randy at Lyft KC Church, and a growing circle of friends. He also credits a moment snowboarding in Colorado with a triple amputee Iraq veteran who was going down the mountain on prosthetic legs and one prosthetic arm. That day, Josh took the word can't out of his vocabulary.
One week in Puerto Rico that rewrote the next five years
In 2020, inside the year most people remember as a bad one, Josh and his wife were in Puerto Rico on a trip paid for by a side business he was working on. In a single week he landed a full time job with T-Mobile, got a full ride scholarship to Colorado Technical University, and found out his wife was pregnant with their son after 15 years of trying.
He started school in January 2021 and finished a bachelor's degree in business administration with information technology and data analytics in 20 months, graduating 4.0, summa cum laude, and speaking as valedictorian. At the same time he was working full time, he and his wife bought a house, and their son was born. He had tried college twice before and failed both times. This time the switch was flipped the other direction.
At T-Mobile he moved into a senior analyst role in compliance and realized the work he was doing was in heavy demand and short supply. The big four firms were hiring new graduates with no experience and paying them well because they could not find people. Josh saw an opening, not just for a better job but for a business of his own.
Layoff day, Key Consulting KC, and never quit
Josh had registered Key Consulting as a business more than seven years ago and worked it on the side off and on. A full time job and a growing family meant he never got to put everything into it. That changed in February when T-Mobile laid him off. He signed the severance paperwork the day before recording this episode. He describes the heat rising in his chest when it became official, and then he describes moving through it and getting on with the work.
Key Consulting KC focuses on IT compliance consulting for small and mid-sized businesses. He gets companies ready for SOC 2 and other audits, writes policies and procedures, trains staff on emerging threats, and runs the cybersecurity look-and-overhaul work that enterprises pay the big four millions to do. His angle is to bring that enterprise level playbook down to companies that would never be able to afford the mega corporation price tag.
Josh closes with two things. First, a nod to the people who put him here. His wife, who anchored him through the worst and best years. His dad, whose work ethic he inherited. Pastor Randy. Lindsay Howerton, a past guest of the show who opened a door to his first big client. Sam, who he says plays both the angel and the devil in his ear, cheering him on to jump and then asking about parachutes once they are in the air. Second, the line he lives by. He has taken can't out of his vocabulary and he does not quit. Anyone can get blown up, he says. The harder part is what you decide to do afterward.
About Joshua Peters
Joshua Peters is the owner of Key Consulting KC, an IT compliance consulting practice in Kansas City focused on SOC 2 readiness, policies and procedures, security training, and risk work for small and mid-sized businesses. He is a US Army Civil Affairs veteran who was wounded in Iraq in 2003, and a 4.0 summa cum laude graduate in business administration and information technology. Before going full time in his own business, he was a senior compliance analyst at T-Mobile.