By Chris Tetrault
For those just joining me, here’s the short version.
I served more than twenty years — nine in the Minnesota National Guard and nearly thirteen as a Minnesota Conservation Officer, or game warden (16 years in law enforcement). From the outside, it looked like a dream career: time on the water, protecting wildlife, wearing a badge that meant something.
But every uniform I’ve ever worn has carried its own weight.
If you’ve ever worn a uniform, carried a radio, or held it together for everyone but yourself — parts of this story might sound familiar.
Early in my law enforcement years around Mille Lacs Lake, the losses started to stack up. Friends and community members — people like Jeff Hughley and Steve Reis — were gone in an instant. A snowmobile accident. A suicide. Each one left a mark that I pushed down and tried to outwork.
Then came the partners. Between 2018 and 2022, we lost too many in too short a time — officers, mentors, and friends. There are many before that as well. Some in the line of duty, some to health conditions, and others to their own hand. I learned how to put on the uniform and do the job after funerals, how to smile for the public while feeling hollow inside.
By the time the riots swept through Minnesota, I was already running on fumes. Like many in public safety, I was mobilized for Mobile Field Force (riot) operations. The nights were long, the air thick with smoke and anger, and the tension cut deeper than anything I’d felt before. I didn’t know it then, but those weeks would mark the beginning of the end of my career — and the start of facing everything I’d buried.
In early 2024, I stepped away on medical leave and began intensive therapy. Once a week every week for six months straight – and more beyond that. Those sessions forced me to sit with memories I’d spent years avoiding: the calls, the scenes, the faces, the sound of radios that never seemed to stop. For the first time, I wasn’t in control of the situation — I was in a chair, talking about it.
That’s where this chapter begins: in the quiet of a therapy room, trying to make sense of two decades of noise.
When the Bucket Finally Spilled Over
There’s so much to talk about that I can’t fit it all into one blog — or two, or three, or even five. Every milestone I’ve shared has a dozen smaller stories hidden underneath. Each adds a little more weight to the next, stacking until you don’t realize how heavy it’s gotten.
That’s the thing about trauma — it doesn’t show up all at once. It compounds. You tell yourself you’ve handled it. You put it in a box, shove it on a shelf, and move on to the next call. Then one day, something small tips the balance, and everything you’ve been carrying spills out at once.
For me, that moment came on February 18, 2024.
That morning, I woke up to the news out of Burnsville, Minnesota — a massive shooting with an unknown number of police officers and firefighters down. My stomach dropped. I laid there in the chair, frozen, unable to breathe, as I waited for more information.
The thing about this line of work is that our community is small. Whether it’s a partner from a past assignment, someone you trained with, or a face you met once at a conference, everyone knows someone. And when tragedy hits, it’s never really far away. Game wardens also work all over the state and Burnsville is familiar to me and work.
At first, I didn’t know who was involved. But it didn’t matter — it felt personal. It always does.
The fear crept in fast. What if it’s someone I know?
What if it’s one of my buddies?
When I learned that the fallen were Officers Paul Elmstrand and Matthew Ruge, and Firefighter-Paramedic Adam Finseth, the grief hit me in a way I didn’t expect. I had friends and former partners who knew them well. The ripple reached me instantly — through phone calls, messages, and that unspoken pain we all recognize too easily.
Somewhere under the panic and numbness, there was still a small voice — the one that wanted to be okay, that wanted to find a way back to who I used to be. It wasn’t loud, but it was still there.
That morning cracked something open in me.
It wasn’t just Burnsville. It was every loss I’d tucked away for years — Jeff, Steve, Eugene, Sarah, Jason, and so many others — all of it flooding back at once. The images, the funerals, the folded flags, the silence after.
That was the day I finally admitted to myself that I needed help — not tomorrow, not next week, but now.
It wasn’t just my decision, though. It was also because of someone in my life who saw it before I did — my wife who saw the way I froze that morning, the way I couldn’t focus, couldn’t move, couldn’t shake the weight off.
That was the last drop in a bucket I’d been carrying for two decades. And when it finally spilled over, I couldn’t hold it back anymore.
That’s when I picked up the phone and made the call. That’s when the real work began — therapy, reflection, and trying to understand the why behind the breakdown.
The Day I Finally Stepped Back
Just two days later, on February 20, 2024, I found myself sitting in a psychologist’s office.
This wasn’t unfamiliar territory. Over the years, I’d sat across from a dozen psychologists and therapists — some through the job, some on my own — trying to navigate the mess that comes with this kind of work. But this time felt different.
From the moment I walked in, I knew I wasn’t there to check a box or get cleared for duty. I was there because I couldn’t keep pretending everything was fine.
That session was heavy. Harder than anything I’ve ever faced in uniform. There were long silences, hard truths, and tears that came out of nowhere. I had to force myself to dig deep. My armor — the one I’d worn for two decades — finally cracked. And for the first time in a long time, I was just me. No badge. No title. No expectation to be strong. Just a man who was tired, scared of what was happening inside his own head.
I’ll never forget what she said to me:
“It might be time to take a breather. Step to the sidelines for a bit — give yourself space to gather and heal.”
The words hit like a gut punch, but they were also a lifeline.
The next day, I was supposed to be at department training at Camp Ripley — every game warden in the state would be there. And all I could think about was, what are they going to say when I don’t show up?
That noise in my head was deafening.
What rumors will start?
Who’s going to roll their eyes?
Who’s going to whisper that I’m “losing it”?
And I’ll touch more on this later, but those thoughts weren’t imagined — they were earned. They were shaped by real experiences in this profession.
The autumn before, during our Mobile Field Force assignment at the State Fair, I was standing in a circle during briefing when a supervisor (the metro located LT at the time) — the one in charge of the entire operation — started talking about an officer who had recently been medically retired due to PTSD. In front of a dozen other officers, he said it was “bullshit.” His PTSD was “bullshit.”
Those words burned into my head.
I’ve replayed that moment a hundred times — not out of anger, but because I wonder how many people in that circle were silently hanging by a thread, and how different things might have been if he’d chosen compassion instead.
I remember standing there, already silently battling my own questions about my mental health, wondering if I’d ever be able to step away if I needed to. That moment sealed the answer in my mind — I couldn’t. Not without judgment. Not without being labeled.
That’s the power of careless words. You never know who’s listening, or what they’re carrying. And in that moment, those words told every one of us in that circle that vulnerability was weakness — and that message stuck.
So when it came time for me to step back, those same echoes came roaring back: What will they say about me? What stories will they tell? Will I be the next “bullshit” PTSD case?
And the truth is — that fear wasn’t paranoia. It was self-preservation in a culture that still confuses strength with silence.
That’s one of the hardest parts about mental health in law enforcement. We talk about being strong, being a team, having each other’s backs — but when someone steps away for help, the tone in the room changes. The support becomes silence. The camaraderie becomes curiosity.
I know this might rub some people the wrong way, but it needs to be said: this profession can be catty and judgmental as hell. Not always on purpose, but it’s there. We’re a bunch of A-type personalities wired for control, competition, and performance. We’ll jump into gunfire for each other, but we still stumble when it comes to vulnerability.
When I finally decided to go on leave, hitting “send” on that email to my supervisor was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
As soon as it left my outbox, I sat there staring at the screen, waiting for the fallout. Waiting for the texts, the whispers, the sideways glances I knew would come. I’d heard it all before — people talk. They speculate. They fill in blanks that were never theirs to fill.
But then something happened.
My shoulders dropped. My guard came down. And for the first time in years, I exhaled. Because I realized, I don’t care what they think.
That night — and the night after — I slept like an absolute baby. Not because everything was fixed, but because I had finally made a decision to stop running from myself. I was no longer pretending. I was finally doing something about it.
Those two nights of sleep felt like the first deep breaths in years.
And as I’d soon learn in the weeks that followed, stepping away wasn’t the end of my story — it was the beginning of understanding it.
If you’re reading this and the noise in your own head hasn’t stopped yet, please know this: you don’t have to wait until your bucket spills over. You don’t have to be the strongest person in the room every day. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is stop pretending you’re fine and take that first breath toward help.
We will see you in Part #4.
_______
About the Author: Chris Tetrault is a medically retired Minnesota Conservation Officer and veteran of the Minnesota National Guard. With over two decades of public service, he now leads Hometown Hero Outdoors, a national nonprofit supporting the mental health and well-being of veterans, military members, and first responders through outdoor experiences.
