A 20-year Army engineer officer who survived a near-suicide with a Glock 19 in his hand, spent decades walking away from the faith his mother gave him, and retired as a lieutenant colonel to open a barbecue food truck — not because it made sense, but because God told him to.
Army lieutenant colonel Chris Loschiavo spent 20 years in uniform, a loaded Glock in his hand one January night, and nearly two decades denying it ever happened — until God finally got his attention for good. In this honest conversation, Chris traces the long arc from suicidal isolation in Fayetteville to retirement, a barbecue food truck, and the first real peace he has known in 25 years.
Chris Loschiavo grew up in the church because his mother made sure of it. Sunday morning, Wednesday night, no discussion. Her father had been a Southern Baptist preacher in rural Kentucky, and she carried that foundation into every house the family moved through. Chris was saved at six and baptized at twelve. By the time he left for Mississippi State, he had everything he needed to walk in faith — and almost none of the desire to do it. He wanted combat. He wanted to be Dick Winters from Band of Brothers. God had other plans, starting with a coin toss that made him a Quartermaster officer — his twelfth choice.
That coin toss started a chain of redirections Chris spent years resenting and eventually came to recognize as the architecture of a life he couldn't have designed. The Quartermaster assignment kept him stateside when his friends deployed in 2006, which put him in front of a tasking that sent him to Kandahar as a first lieutenant doing work two ranks above his pay grade — which led to a branch transfer into the Engineer Corps, which became the career he actually had. He would spend two decades learning, in hindsight, that God's hand had been in every one of those maddening detours. But in January 2007, none of that was visible.
"I sat with a bottle of red wine and pretty much polished that off. I kept a loaded Glock 19 in my house as a home protector. And I just said, I'm done. So when I got the pistol, came back, sat down, and had it in my hand, looking at it... Then I started thinking about my parents. And then started thinking about family and friends that would have to deal with that. And in the midst of all that, I just looked up. My Bible's on the counter."
He put the gun down. He picked up the Bible. He did not follow through. And then he buried it for ten years — so completely that every time a soldier attempted suicide, his response was to call them weak and selfish. It took a military psychiatrist in Korea, asking the standard intake question, to crack it open for the first time. He told her the truth. He wept in her office. She diagnosed him with depression and PTSD he had been carrying since at least his junior year of college. Something in him began to soften.
The military kept moving him. Germany, Fort Lewis, Korea, Belgium. Each assignment brought new strain and new evidence. A flood in Belgium moved his family through five hotels and into a castle whose owners handed him the keys with one rule: don't touch the wine. In that same village, he discovered that his old Army battalion had defended the town during the Battle of the Bulge — and that his predecessor's first command post had been his own house. A US Army Belgium cup was found inside a wall during renovations. He stopped calling it coincidence. He started calling it what it was. When he finally turned in his retirement packet in January 2024 — declining three battalion commands and the professorship at his own alma mater, everything he had worked for since September 12, 2001 — he did it because he believed God was calling him to walk the faith he had been talking for years. He runs a barbecue food truck now. It is not paying him yet. He says he has never been more at peace.
"I denied it, for 10 years, to myself. So much so that every time a trooper would commit suicide, my response was always: you selfish, weak person. I had buried it so much."
"Unless you've been there, unless you've been through it, you're not going to understand it. The Lord has softened my heart towards others through that experience. I no longer look at it as you're weak or you're selfish. I look at it as: how can I help you?"
"In 10 days, you're not a soldier. You're not an army officer. You're not a lieutenant colonel. You're not a leader of soldiers anymore. What are you? That was like: I don't know who I am."
"Our identity is not in what we do. Our identity is who we are in Christ. And that is the identity that matters. All the other stuff should support that identity."
"Your talents and gifts are not meant for you. They're meant for others. What good is a testimony if we just keep it to ourselves?"
"The more that I have turned over control and just let go, the more freedom and peace and comfort has come over. Doesn't mean I still have bad days. But I feel like I'm better equipped now."