A GOLD SEAL Read and a PERMANENT Place with My “Lifeboats”

🎻 Music Credit: “Launch (Epic Orchestra)” by Mathias Fritsche

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Some connections arrive before the first word is ever spoken. They exist in the shared terrain of struggle, silence, and the decision to keep going anyway. That’s how it felt when Stevo’s work reached me — like recognizing a brother I had somehow always known, even though we had never met.

William A. (Stevo) Stephens Jr. wrote The Broken Mirror from the same unarmored place most men are taught to bury. He didn’t write it to impress or to perform healing. He wrote it because the silence around trauma, transition, and fatherhood had become too heavy to carry alone. This book doesn’t offer polished lessons or easy redemption. It offers something far more valuable: the unflinching record of a man willing to look at his own broken pieces and name them without shame.

One passage in particular landed with the force of lived truth:

“This book is also an apology to my daughter, a two-time world champion, for the years I lost to heavy medication when I didn’t even recognize her.” ~ William A. (Stevo) Stephens Jr.

That single sentence reveals the soul of the work. It is not just an apology — it is an act of radical ownership. Stevo doesn’t ask the reader to excuse what war and its aftermath cost him. He simply tells the truth about what it cost the people he loves most. In doing so, he gives every reader permission to face their own wreckage with the same honesty.

When I asked Stevo to write the foreword for my book, You Can Always; Begin Again, he accepted immediately. What an honor. In that moment, any remaining distance between us disappeared. Two men from different branches, different paths, and different chapters of life chose to stand in the same truth: that real strength is found not in pretending we are unbroken, but in the courage to name our fractures and keep moving forward anyway.

Stevo’s willingness to do this work proves something essential about who we are as human beings. We are not as separate as we sometimes believe. The same forces that break us — war, trauma, silence, the slow erosion of presence in the lives of those we love — also have the power to connect us when one person is brave enough to speak first. His words did not just reach me. They reminded me that the deepest bonds are often already present, waiting only for the moment we stop pretending and start telling the truth.

Because of that courage, I am placing The Broken Mirror on my Lifeboats shelf — the small collection of books I keep for the moments when the old weight returns and the way forward feels uncertain. More than that, I am awarding it my Gold Seal. Not as decoration, but as recognition. This is the kind of work that doesn’t just inform. It accompanies. It walks with you through the valley and refuses to let you believe you are walking alone.

Stevo has given us more than a book. He has given us proof that even in our most shattered reflections, we can still choose to become the light someone else needs. For every veteran still carrying what they cannot yet name, for every father trying to repair what was strained, and for anyone who has ever wondered if their broken pieces could still be made whole — this book stands as quiet, steady evidence that the answer is yes.

Thank you, Stevo. For your immediate yes when I asked you to write the foreword. For the honor of that trust. And for reminding us all that the most meaningful connections often begin long before we ever meet — in the shared decision to face the truth and keep going anyway.

It is up to us. Always has been.

— Kevin J. (KJ) Carleo, Gunnery Sergeant, United States Marine Corps, Retired

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