Origin Story

Limited Duty is a status, not a sentence. It’s what the military calls you when you’re wounded but still in — not fit for full duty, not out the door. You’re kept on, restricted, healing on someone else’s clock. For a lot of us it was the lowest stretch of the whole thing: still in uniform, but sidelined, waiting to find out who you’d be on the other side.

LIMDU started there — in the in-between.

From the founder

They put it in a memo at the end. A commanding officer, doing his job, laying out in clean paragraphs why I was no longer compatible with continued service. PTSD. TBI. Marginal response to therapies. Worldwide assignability significantly affected. Every line of it was true. And not one line of it was me.

I was a Gunnery Sergeant. Before that I was a lot of things the Marine Corps made me into, and I was good at all of them. Imagery analyst at a Marine Expeditionary Unit. Intelligence chief on the NGA support team in Korea during the missile-test stretch in 2017. Senior GEOINT analyst at the Submarine Analysis Group at Pearl Harbor, the first Marine to ever hold that role. Executive assistant to the Vice Director for Intelligence at INDOPACOM, in a billet usually reserved for senior officers. Products I touched were briefed to the Secretary of Defense and to the President. That was the version of me that worked. For years, it worked.

On 31 December 2011, at a place called FOB Nolay in Helmand, that version of me took a hit it never fully walked off. I came home with a Purple Heart and a brain that had stopped working the same way. The visible part was the easy part. The invisible part is the part that ate the next decade of my life. Treatment, medication trials, therapy that worked, therapy that did not, sleep that did not come, and a marriage that ended.

I spent more than a decade after that trying everything they put in front of me. Therapy. Medication. A program in 2015 when the drinking and the PTSD had braided together into something I could not manage alone. Periods of limited duty. More therapy. Five Stellate Ganglion Block treatments for the PTSD, with mild relief. I did not quit. I kept showing up, made rank, led Marines while I was quietly coming apart.

My last billet was the most honest one. Command Substance Abuse Control Officer for 2nd Intelligence Battalion at Camp Lejeune. I ran the urinalysis program, coordinated the case referrals, advised the Commanding Officer on personnel readiness. I sat across from Marines doing what I had been doing a decade earlier. The institution put me in that chair because I knew the territory. I think they were right and wrong about that at the same time.

And it kept escalating anyway. By November 2023 it had taken me to the psychiatric ward of the on-base hospital and to thoughts I am still here in spite of. They referred me to IDES. In July of 2024 the Marine Corps and I parted ways, medically retired. Twenty-some years of being useful, and it ended with a finding that I was not anymore.

I’d love to tell you the system had a next step for me. It didn’t, not really. The next step I found on my own, the way a lot of us do, after I had run out of the doors they hand you. It took qualified facilitators, real screening, real aftercare. It was not magic. It was the hardest, most deliberate work I have ever done. What it gave back was a door I thought had been welded shut.

I didn’t heal back into the Gunny in that memo. He’s gone, and I have made my peace with that. I became someone the paperwork never accounted for. That turned out to be the strongest thing I ever did, and I did most of it sitting down.

What I do now. I work for a defense contractor as a senior training coordinator, building maritime domain awareness capability for partner-nation analysts across the Indo-Pacific and Ukraine, remotely from San Antonio. I sit on the board of The Aya Mission. I volunteer tech leadership for three other small nonprofits. I am a husband. I am a father of four. LIMDU is not my job. It is the thing that would not stay in my head.

LIMDU is for the Marine, the soldier, the sailor, the airman, the Guardian, the Coastie still sitting in that in-between, still believing the memo is the end of the story. It wasn’t the end of mine. Limited Duty was never the end. It was the pause before this.

Hurt people hurt people. Healed people heal people. I’m just trying to be the second kind now, and to leave the door open behind me.

Why clothing

Because a chest is a billboard you can’t argue with. We make heavyweight tees in small, deliberate capsules, each carrying one line — a creed, an inversion, a deep cut the people who’ve been there will catch instantly and everyone else will just read as a good shirt. No loud logos. No motivational noise. The diagnosis and the decision, said plainly enough to wear out the door.

You went on limited duty. You came back unlimited.

Built for after.