Excerpt from Unshackled: A Story of Redemption and Renewal
The heat was already thick that morning when disaster struck.
I was working down in the starboard filter room when the sharp wail of the General Quarters alarm shattered the air. A fire had broken out in the starboard hangar bay. We’d been through countless drills since the start of the World Cruise, but this one hit differently. You could feel it in the way the ship jolted to life—in the way your gut twisted before your brain caught up.
I climbed the ladder fast, sealed the hatch, and locked it down tight. Then came the worst part—waiting. We had been in general quarters a lot. I was trained, equipped, and prepared for whatever came. When I joined the Navy, I knew what I was getting into. I could lose my life in the line of duty. This was par for the course—and I was all in.
Our firefighters were the best. I’d been part of the in-port team—I knew the drills, the gear, the muscle memory. The U.S. Navy didn’t play games when it came to fires at sea.
But training couldn’t silence the voices in my head. The ones that had nothing to do with the present.
That fire no one could run from triggered something I thought I’d buried a long time ago.
When I was a kid, my stepdad used to lock us in the basement. After school, after dinner, it didn’t matter. We were herded downstairs like cattle. At first, we’d do homework, maybe watch TV. But once the chores were done, the lock would click shut behind us, and we were trapped.
Sometimes, he’d leave the house for hours, and we’d just be down there… helpless. No windows we could fit through. No escape plan. No mercy.
I would become overwhelmed with fear and anxiety. What if a fire breaks out? We would perish.
My two youngest brothers were too little to understand the danger. But Marty and Greg—they knew. They felt it too. We tried talking to Mom. Pleaded with her to say something to him.
She did, once or twice. But it only made things worse. The pattern continued for years, and so did the fear. We were prisoners in our own house.
Now here I was, a grown man on a warship, sealed in another steel cage thousands of miles from home, and the fear felt just as raw. The same helplessness. The same tightness in my chest. No window to crawl out of. No way to run.
Only difference now was that I knew exactly what it was—PTSD, trauma, call it whatever you want. That fear I felt in the basement had never left me, it just waited for the right moment to resurface.
I snapped out of it. I had a job to do, after all. I was not about to get dragged down again. My mom and stepdad had rented space in my mind for years—it needed to stop. But how?
That fire didn’t just burn in the hangar bay—it lit up everything I had tried so hard to forget. After I completed my shift, word came down— no loss of life. The fire had been contained. For that, I was grateful. Deeply.
But the relief didn’t come easy. Not when the ghosts of the past had already been stirred. The fire was out, but something in me was still smoldering.
Joe Potosi 