From Marine Raider (MARSOC) to Deep End Fitness. Prime Hall
A Veteran's Forced Medical Separation and Life After Service
Prime Hall was sitting at a picnic table in Afghanistan, eating a bowl of cereal, when an explosion threw him backward. An Afghan Special Forces member inside the compound had opened fire, launching RPG after RPG at the people he’d been assigned to fight beside. Hall couldn’t see at first. Then came more explosions, severe concussions, dead partners, and the instinct to get back into the fight as quickly as possible.
That moment is part of his story, but it doesn’t explain all of it.
Hall’s path began around the water in South Texas, continued through a difficult childhood, military school, arrests, enlistment waivers, disciplinary failures, combat deployments, and service as a Marine Raider. It also includes the injuries he concealed, the medications that left him feeling like a weakened version of himself, and the medical separation that removed his identity almost overnight.
His civilian life required a different kind of work. He had to learn how to receive help, trust people outside the military, surrender what no longer served him, and build a new mission through Deep End Fitness, the Underwater Torpedo League, performance coaching, and Permission to Heal.
This is a story about toughness, but also about what toughness can cost when it becomes the only available response.
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Growing Up in South Texas and Finding a Path to the Marine Corps
Before the Marine Corps, combat deployments, and the Marine Raiders, water was already part of Prime Hall’s life.
He grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, near North Padre Island, and spent considerable time with his maternal grandparents near South Padre Island. His grandmother introduced him to swimming when he was very young.
Prime wasn’t a competitive swimmer. He wasn’t on a swim team, and he didn’t begin with technical instruction or performance goals. He was a kid who wanted to spend the summer doing tricks from the diving board, playing underwater games, fighting over pool toys, and staying in the water as long as possible. The pool became a place where he could let go.
The ocean never gave him quite the same feeling. It had currents, waves, and conditions that required attention. A pool was controlled. He could float for an hour and feel as if he’d been given an entire weekend to recover. Long before he understood breathwork, stress regulation, or water-based performance training, he knew that being in a pool changed how he felt.
His childhood also contained experiences of physical abuse and his maternal grandparents became two of the most stable and influential people in his life. They took Prime and his cousins on trips throughout Texas, Las Vegas, and Mexico.
His grandfather was an architect known for work influenced by 1800s Mexican colonial design, which required regular travel to San Miguel de Allende for wrought iron, staircases, artwork, and other specialized materials. Hall sometimes traveled with him through Mexico and watched him navigate difficult roads, questionable encounters, injured people, and situations that might’ve intimidated someone less experienced.
The grandparents also gave Prime substantial independence. Beginning around age 13, he could be given money in San Miguel de Allende, told when to return, and trusted to manage himself. Those experiences exposed him to another culture, but they also developed street awareness and personal responsibility.
The lessons continued on construction sites.
Hall’s grandfather placed him alongside experienced laborers who didn’t care that he was the owner’s grandson. Some challenged him or tried to intimidate him when his grandfather wasn’t present. Prime learned that he couldn’t allow himself to become an easy target. At the same time, he learned how to turn conflict into productive working relationships.
One assignment involved Hall, one worker, approximately 10,000 pounds of discarded concrete, a flat wheelbarrow, two shovels, and a jug of ice water for each man. His grandfather dropped them off in the morning and returned around five that evening. The concrete had to be moved down a hill to help form a retaining wall.
There was no ceremony when the work was finished. They’d completed what needed to be done, so they went to dinner.
His grandparents tested him in less physical ways, too. At amusement parks, they’d give him a limited amount of time and tell him to ride as many attractions as possible. It was his responsibility to figure out how. Hall found creative ways to reach the front of lines, then moved immediately to the next problem.
After watching Catch Me If You Can, his grandfather told him that the main character’s ability to enter unfamiliar situations and figure things out reminded him of Prime.
That confidence remained even when Prime got into trouble. His grandfather had to pick him up rom jail a few times, but Prime didn’t receive the furious reaction he expected. Instead, his grandfather kept telling him that he was going to become successful.
Home provided far less consistency.
Prime's parents divorced after eighth grade. His mother moved away, and Hall initially stayed with his father because he wanted to remain near the friends he’d grown up with. The family home was sold, and they moved into a condominium, and then his father eventually moved in with a girlfriend.
Hall remained in the condo, by himself.
His father checked on him occasionally, but Prime described himself as living alone for approximately two years. He spent nights by himself, got himself to and from school, and established whatever rules he thought he needed. He was still a child, but he was functioning without the structure or supervision a child should’ve had.
His grandparents discovered the situation when they arrived to pick him up one summer.
During a trip to San Antonio, Prime saw students from Texas Military Institute walking through a mall in uniform. Prime told his grandparents that he wished he could do something like that.
They lived near Marine Military Academy in Harlingen, so they quietly arranged a tour.
The campus represented something entirely different. It was secure. There were regular meals, a gym, a strength and conditioning coach, other young men around him, and adults responsible for maintaining order. When the tour ended and Hall was asked whether he wanted to attend, he was ready.
Only a small number of students had volunteered to be there. Others had been sent after getting into trouble. Prime encountered wealthy international students, young men connected to cartels, and students who already had criminal experience. Friendships weren’t optional. They provided mutual protection in an environment where showing weakness could invite harassment or attack.
Prime only attended for his junior year, learned the uniforms, marching, rank structure, and what he later called the “theater arts” of military life. He then returned to his previous high school, graduated, and began college.
The structure didn’t last.
He continued getting into trouble and eventually talked with his grandfather one night. Prime told his grandfather that he was lost. He had energy but no purpose, direction, or positive place to put it.
His grandfather reminded him that he’d done well at military school and suggested the Marine Corps.
Prime didn’t think enlistment was possible. He had drug charges, other misdemeanor-related problems, and periods when he’d been incarcerated for months. His grandfather didn’t accept that as the final answer. He went to court, worked with judges, accompanied Prime to recruiters, and helped him pursue waiver after waiver.
Hall first approached Marine recruiters in 2003. It took roughly a year and a half of repeated MEPS trips before he was finally approved. In November 2005, the young man who once believed the military wouldn’t take him left for Marine Corps boot camp.
Marine Corps Boot Camp, Discipline, and the Road to MARSOC
Even after arriving at boot camp, Prime didn’t trust that the Marine Corps would let him stay.
He’d spent so long expecting another waiver problem or administrative barrier that acceptance didn’t feel real. He waited through nearly the entire training cycle for someone to tell him a mistake had been made. It wasn’t until he was near the end of boot camp that he believed he’d actually become a Marine.
He hadn’t been allowed to choose his MOS. The Marine Corps assigned him to artillery because that was where it needed personnel. Later he transferred to the infantry and a sniper platoon.
Boot camp felt familiar in some ways. Marine Military Academy had already exposed him to uniforms, drill, physical punishment, and institutional life. He enjoyed being singled out for physical tests. A few hundred pushups or a long period of exercises didn’t intimidate him.
What surprised him was how much of boot camp depended on yelling.
At military school, disrespect could lead to an immediate physical consequence, even if the drill instructor wasn’t the person who delivered it. Hall entered boot camp and tested the boundaries. He acted weak, moved slowly, or failed to respond correctly so he could see what the drill instructors would do.
They yelled, but they didn’t hit him.
That distinction shaped his early reaction to Marine Corps authority. Prime respected capability and direct accountability more than rank alone. He struggled with leaders who used rank to speak to people in ways they wouldn’t have attempted without the uniform. In his mind, a warrior culture should’ve been willing to remove the rank and settle certain problems directly.
That attitude carried consequences.
For roughly his first three years, he couldn’t keep rank. He’d earn a promotion, get into trouble, and lose it again. Prime had ability and drive, but he hadn’t yet learned how to operate inside the institution without fighting it.
Then his stepmother was killed in a car accident.
Prime received a Red Cross message and prepared to return to Texas. His family expected him home. He put together what he needed for the airport and believed he was leaving. His leadership went back on their decision to let him go.
They told him they couldn’t lose him for training that afternoon and instructed him to change back into his gear. Prime was serving in a sniper platoon, and he understood the event as a type of hazing or test. He later learned that a verified Red Cross message should’ve allowed him to go home.
Something changed in him that day.
He didn’t have the emotional vocabulary to explain how deeply the decision affected him. He couldn’t tell the people around him that their actions had broken his trust or that part of him felt as if it had died. Instead, his response became, in effect, Prime against everybody.
Alcohol made it worse.
Even small amounts could lead to blackouts. Hall would wake the next morning and hear that he’d confronted police officers, base guards, staff duty personnel, or other Marines. The behavior felt disconnected from the person he believed himself to be. He described it through the image of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but the consequences still belonged to him.
During his first deployment with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, an expected six-month rotation stretched to approximately one year. Hall spent most of it on restriction because of earlier misconduct. His approved movements were largely limited to work, the chow hall, a run, or the gym.
Near the end of the deployment, he finally regained his liberty card. Camp Hansen Fest was taking place in Okinawa that weekend. Hall drank, blacked out, and confronted the staff duty Marine with whom he’d already had repeated problems aboard ship.
The Marine gave him several opportunities to stop. Hall squandered each one.
He woke up the next morning with his first sergeant and the rest of his chain of command standing inside his room. He couldn’t remember what had happened. More than a year of hard work toward rebuilding his standing had disappeared in one night.
This time, Hall recognized a variable he could control. He stopped drinking.
The Marine Corps initiated administrative-separation proceedings. A staff sergeant intervened by taking Hall to medical and pushing the matter toward anger-management treatment. Hall completed the course and received a certificate. His conduct could now be addressed as a treated medical issue rather than only a behavioral failure.
He was given another opportunity.
Restriction had already shown him where he could place his energy. Physical training was the only part of the day that felt like freedom. Prime began devoting himself to it.
The change became visible during long infantry hikes. Marines often returned exhausted, cramped, and sprawled along the ground. Prime helped others during the movement, including Marines who outranked him. He carried packs, carried weapons, and pushed people uphill. Once the unit was released, he changed clothes and went directly into another workout, sometimes driving to a trainer’s home in San Diego for several more hours.
He wasn’t rebuilding his reputation through promises. The people around him could watch it happening.
Hall began receiving meritorious promotions. His earlier conduct still followed him, and some leaders resisted rewarding a Marine who’d created so many problems. Others argued that ignoring his current performance would be a greater mistake. Over time, he advanced back toward the peers who’d moved ahead while he was being reduced and restricted.
A supportive officer eventually told Prime that he didn’t fit where he was. Instead of using that observation to dismiss him, the officer encouraged him to pursue Marine special operations.
Another early assignment quietly prepared him for what came much later. Within his first several Marine years, Prime attended the water-survival-instructor course. He later worked at a Camp Pendleton pool with Don Tran and Andrew Campemore while they waited to begin Raider training.
The assignment was supposed to last a month or two. Their intended class filled, and they were moved to the next one. They remained at the pool for almost a year.
They trained constantly and taught basic water qualifications to thousands of Marines. At the time, it could’ve looked like a delay. In practice, it gave Prime an enormous amount of coaching experience and showed him how people respond to fear, pressure, breath restriction, and water.
Before he could begin the Raider pipeline, Prime still had to deploy to Iraq. His company commander understood that disciplinary paperwork could end the opportunity. He told Hall that the only thing likely to stop him from going to MARSOC was new paperwork, so he intended to make certain Hall wasn’t unfairly given any.
That support mattered. Prime still encountered leaders who tried to create problems for him, but he had direct access to a commander willing to distinguish legitimate accountability from petty institutional behavior.
At Camp Ramadi, near the end of the Iraq deployment, the unit received a new platoon commander. He was an intelligence officer rather than an infantry officer and wanted to compress his infantry experience into the final weeks of the deployment. The exhausted Marines resisted, and Prime was the most outspoken.
During an end-of-deployment squad competition, the Marines ran through weapons assembly, map work, physical stations, and other tasks in extreme heat. The final event involved grappling against fresh members of the leadership.
Prime was paired with the officer.
Military school had included constant informal grappling. Hall had also advanced through the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program and believed he’d reached approximately a brown belt. He repeatedly submitted the officer until the event ended.
Their conflict could’ve ended Hall’s MARSOC opportunity if the officer had successfully generated paperwork against him. Instead, Hall completed Iraq with his Raider path intact.
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Raider Training, Afghanistan, Combat Injuries, and the Career He Lost
Raider training lasted close to a year. Prime estimated that roughly 100 people began with his group and about 12 of the original group remained at the end.
He didn’t describe those survivors as brilliant operators. They were people who refused to quit and kept finding ways forward after they’d been worn down. That lesson became part of Prime’s strength, but it would eventually create a different problem. He became someone who didn’t know how to stop, surrender, or release anything.
Water remained central.
Prime became part of the first Marine Raider dive team. The team used underwater football as a water-confidence exercise while preparing for dive school. Early versions involved carrying a 45-pound weight across the pool while another team tried to stop or steal it. A dive brick made the game more dynamic. Eventually, the Marines used underwater torpedoes, creating a three-dimensional environment in which pressure could come from any direction.
The game shifted attention away from fear. Instead of thinking only about air, players concentrated on scoring and supporting their teammates. Hall watched people build water confidence faster because the challenge had become a shared mission.
Everyone on his dive team passed.
His later deployment to Afghanistan provided a far less controlled environment. Prime’s team lived in an enemy village where attacks could occur every day, every other day, or several times in one day. Other personnel sometimes visited the position, exchanged fire, and left with a Combat Action Ribbon. Prime and his teammates lived there.
The deployment accumulated serious casualties. His team leader, Derek Carrera, was wounded and paralyzed from the chest down. Another teammate was shot through the neck. Afghan partners were killed.
At one point, Prime traveled to Camp Leatherneck to collect personnel coming to the position. Among them was the officer he’d clashed with and repeatedly submitted during the Iraq deployment.
The earlier conflict no longer mattered.
Rank didn’t matter either. They were entering an environment where people had already been wounded, killed, and sent home. Prime’s priority was getting everyone through the deployment. He and the officer worked together without carrying the previous grievance forward.
The officer later walked outside to urinate and was struck by the effects of a recoilless rifle round that landed nearby. The incident reinforced how little space existed for old resentment when immediate survival demanded cooperation.
Hall saw the same change occur between Americans and Afghans.
The groups didn’t always work smoothly together. They came from different religions, cultures, countries, and expectations. Then they entered situations where they were surrounded and believed there was a significant chance they wouldn’t survive. In those moments, the differences disappeared.
Through an interpreter, Afghan partners told Prime that whatever had happened before no longer mattered. They were together until they got out.
Prime became particularly close with members of the Afghan local police and Afghan Special Forces. The first Afghan Special Forces team assigned to his position initially appeared undisciplined. The men spent time in their underwear, complained, and resisted missions. Under serious pressure, however, they became committed partners Prime could trust.
That team rotated out midway through the deployment. A replacement team arrived with long beards, stronger discipline, and the ability to run ranges. Prime quickly placed them in positions where they trained Afghan local police.
Approximately a week later, one of those Afghan Special Forces members attacked the compound from a tower.
Prime woke up because someone arrived at the gate. After dealing with the visitor, he went inside, poured a bowl of cereal, and sat at a picnic table. An explosion threw him backward.
He couldn’t see at first and experienced a panic response on the ground. The attacker continued loading and firing RPGs, eventually launching approximately 12 rounds throughout the compound.
Prime moved first into the interpreters’ living area and then into the operations center. The attacker was positioned directly above it. RPGs struck down onto the building, producing the most severe concussive force Prime remembered experiencing.
Inside, Hall and the other Raiders became delirious. Camera feeds showed the compound burning and destroyed. They initially believed an enemy mortar team had their position completely dialed in. The explosions were landing so consistently that they thought they were dead.
They began laughing. It was the coping response available in that moment.
A radio transmission finally reported that an interpreter believed an Afghan in the tower had turned against them and needed to be killed. That information reduced the size of the problem. They weren’t trapped under accurately placed enemy mortars. The threat was inside the compound, but it could be isolated.
Several Afghan Special Forces members were shot during the attack. Their captain attempted to expose himself long enough to engage the attacker and was shot in the head. Another Afghan responded according to the team’s reinforcement plan, ran toward the tower, and was also shot in the head.
The remaining Afghan team left later that day or evening. Prime never saw them again.
Prime and several teammates suffered significant concussions and were medically evacuated to Camp Leatherneck. They wanted to return almost immediately. The compound required outside Army personnel to help maintain security in their absence.
Their standard for injury had been shaped by the people around them. Captain Lampert, their executive officer, had lost both legs above the knee on a previous deployment and returned to full operational service. Prime and the others still had their arms and legs. They believed they needed to go back.
Within a few days, they did.
Prime remained for the rest of the deployment. An Afghan local police commander later gave him a Koochi mountain dog. Prime arranged to bring the dog to Texas, where it lived from 2012 until its death in 2025.
He also maintained relationships with Afghan interpreters. Years later, even without regular conversations, the connection remained. Prime continued working to help one interpreter obtain citizenship.
Afghanistan changed his understanding of war. Looking back, he said it would be difficult to convince him to fight another one. He saw how quickly years of work and sacrifice could be undone. What his team built over seven months could disappear within hours after forces withdrew.
People had died. Others had pushed themselves beyond ordinary limits. The larger project remained unsustainable.
Hall didn’t erase the value of what happened to the people who served there. Afghanistan had also become an intense environment in which they learned what they could endure and who they could become. Both realities remained present.
After Afghanistan, Prime deployed to the Philippines in an intelligence-oriented role without combat. The back injury originating with the RPG blast followed him, although he refused to treat it as permanent.
Movement helped him avoid confronting the full extent of the problem. Sitting through long intelligence courses made it harder to ignore. He experienced spasms, cramping, and persistent pain. After lifting weights, he often needed to go directly to yoga in an attempt to manage his body.
Prime later attended advanced Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape training in Spokane while preparing for another Philippines assignment involving embassy work. Near the end of a confinement exercise, his back failed while locked inside a cage.
He called for Motrin, a stool, and medical assistance. Instructors initially believed he was continuing the scenario. Prime had to declare that he was speaking administratively because he couldn’t stand or walk.
He completed the course with assistance. Because the injury occurred during the training, protocol required an MRI. Prime’s unit had previously limited him largely to physical therapy, in part because imaging could expose a broader problem.
It did.
The MRI showed that his L5-S1 was severely damaged and affecting the nerves. Follow-up examinations began identifying additional problems, including blast-related damage to his right ear and the source of recurring pressure issues. Conditions he’d hidden or minimized since August 2012 were now documented.
Within a short period, Prime moved from preparing for another deployment to limited duty and the beginning of medical retirement.
Medical Separation, Veteran Transition, Deep End Fitness, and Permission to Heal
Prime went to work expecting to deploy again to the Philippines.
Instead, he was called into the medical officer’s office. The officer knew Prime was trying to find a way around the restrictions and deploy while managing his medications. Prime was still holding onto the possibility that he could remain operational.
The officer ended that possibility directly.
Hall was told he was finished. He wasn’t returning to his team after the meeting. He was reporting to S3, where he would remain until his medical separation was complete. Deploying him would signal that he was fit for duty, and the officer didn’t believe that was true or fair to Prime’s family.
Prime walked out knowing that the life he understood was no longer available.
His teammates initially resisted the decision. Within days, however, they returned to all-night work and operational responsibilities while Prime worked a more conventional schedule. The machine kept moving. He began noticing that people treated him differently.
A senior Raider he respected gave him a blunt assessment. Even though Prime had been a high performer, his medical problems made him a liability.
Prime had spent years fighting through barriers until he’d become an operations chief with intelligence experience and enough confidence to enter unfamiliar situations and contribute. Just as he felt his grip on the profession was strongest, it was removed.
He was medically retired in July 2017 after just under 13 years. He entered the Temporary Disability Retired List, a two-year evaluation process that could determine his permanent retirement status but wasn’t a realistic route back to active duty.
The medical system added another layer of strain.
As a temporarily retired Marine, Prime remained obligated to attend scheduled appointments. He’d arrive at the naval hospital at Camp Pendleton, wait three or four hours, and then be told that he hadn’t been registered correctly and needed to return another day. It happened repeatedly.
At the same time, he went from taking no medication to taking eight or ten prescriptions. Morning doses left him nodding off on the couch at eight or nine o’clock. His wife would find him struggling to stay awake. Prime remembered the Marines who fell asleep during important briefs and were jolted awake by the people around them. Now he’d become that person during ordinary life.
Antidepressants created particularly serious side effects. Prime reported the problems, stopped taking particular medications, and was placed on others that produced similar results. He felt like a zombie, mentally dulled and weakened at the same time that his professional identity was disappearing.
He also carried the knowledge that multiple friends had died by suicide after returning home.
By the time the military notified him that his retirement rating might be reduced, Prime was already near his limit. He could undergo more testing and continue within the system, or accept a relatively small payment and end the process.
He took the paperwork to legal assistance and asked one question: If he signed it, would he ever be required to attend another appointment?
The answer was yes.
Prime understood the financial cost. Continuing could’ve provided a larger payment for the rest of his life. He also believed that another failed appointment might push him into an act that ended with someone hurt or with him in jail.
In the Summer of 2019, he signed the paperwork.
Outside of one later appointment involving his neck, he largely stopped using the naval-hospital and VA systems. The breakdown drove him toward other options, including stem-cell treatment, rehabilitation, Eastern and Western practices, emotional-intelligence work, and healing approaches he hadn’t previously known existed.
The injuries brought humility. Before them, Prime could look at someone struggling and wonder why the person didn’t simply perform. Afterward, a certain light or sound could ruin his day. Back pain could make an ordinary movement impossible. He now understood that another person might be carrying something invisible.
Civilian relationships required another adjustment.
Hall left the Raiders believing he didn’t want to spend time around “normies.” He was closed off, resistant, and distrustful. Over time, he recognized that the judgment reflected his own limitations. He couldn’t know what another person might teach him if he dismissed that person before the conversation began.
He began working from what he calls a beginner’s mindset. He attended emotional-intelligence programs through Choice Center in Las Vegas and entered situations that felt more uncomfortable than military training.
During one exercise, Prime stood in a circle while people told him positive things they saw in him. He wanted to cry and leave the room. Gunfire in the parking lot would’ve felt easier.
He realized that he knew how to give but not receive. He coached, served, supported, and sometimes refused payment when people tried to compensate him. The exchange was incomplete. Learning to accept praise, assistance, money, and acknowledgment became part of his recovery.
His daily practices became simple and deliberate. He uses a garage gym for movement and blood flow, listens to sound-based recordings, and selects engraved intention stones carrying words such as gratitude, courage, friendship, focus, or strength. The stone stays in his pocket and gives him something to revisit throughout the day.
Water became a new mission.
Prime, Don Tran, and Rick Breer created Deep End Fitness and developed the Underwater Torpedo League from the underwater football they’d used in the Marines. The game evolved from heavy weights and dive bricks to torpedoes, milk crates, and miniature hockey nets.
The civilian name had to change because people kept asking where the football was.
The larger purpose extended beyond sport. Water strips away performance and image. A person standing poolside in a bathing suit, preparing to leave the air source, can’t maintain a false persona for long. Breath restriction demands presence. Ego and forced competition usually make performance worse.
Prime saw the same pattern while training professional athletes, including UFC fighters, Olympians, and Major League Baseball players like Fernando Tatis Jr. Athletes who arrived insisting on a personal record often performed poorly. When they released the expectation, supported someone else, and trained with a clear intention, personal records sometimes followed.
Deep End Fitness and UTL grew into communities built around what Prime calls a circle of trust. Participants identify why they’re present, state their intentions, and share accountability before and after training. The combined audience grew beyond 1.5 million, UTL expanded internationally, and ESPN expressed interest in its tournaments.
Prime also helped establish a memorial at Park Semper Fi in San Clemente after 1st Raider Battalion moved to North Carolina. The original unit monument moved with it, leaving West Coast veterans without a nearby place to visit their fallen teammates.
Prime sometimes stops at the new memorial while commuting between North San Diego and Orange County. The visit changes the direction of a difficult day. He imagines the men telling him to live his life and enjoy the time he still has.
That outward focus became one of his most practical tools: “When in doubt, focus out.”
If Prime feels stuck, he looks for someone else he can help. He might call a cousin, support someone dealing with medication, or assist a homeless person along his route. The action doesn’t deny his own difficulty. It gives him a way to move.
He also had to reconsider the command never to quit.
Raider training had taught him to continue when almost everyone else stopped. Civilian life showed him that refusing to quit could become destructive. Some friends entered prestigious post-military careers, became miserable, and couldn’t give themselves permission to leave. Some didn’t survive.
Prime distinguishes quitting from surrender. A person can release a job, identity, medal, grievance, or attachment that no longer serves the life being built. If selling candles at a farmers market creates a meaningful and happy life, Prime supports that more than a prestigious title that leaves someone trapped.
His conclusion is direct: Success is only real if the person living it is happy.
Prime and Bethany Marshall spent approximately four and a half years writing Permission to Heal. Its original working title was Unlocking Flow, reflecting the swimming principles of increasing propulsion and reducing drag. The final title required more vulnerability.
Prime understood the stigma attached to special operations veterans writing books. He didn’t want to place himself into that category simply to tell stories. Friends continued dying while the book was being written, however, and each loss strengthened his reason to finish it.
He wrote for the version of himself who had been struggling and for the friends who hadn’t made it through transition. He wanted the book to provide practical tools for breaking through mental and physical barriers, adapting, and finding enough traction to reach the next place.
His work also appears in Air Hunger, a documentary examining breathwork in performance, depression, healing, and clinical settings.
Through all of it, Prime remains a self-described introvert. He’d often prefer to stay home. He has resisted podcasts, rescheduled appearances, and faced concern from family members who didn’t understand why he was speaking publicly, attending therapy, or entering unfamiliar healing environments.
He continues because silence carries its own cost.
His final advice returns to relationships, language, and connection. Don’t isolate. Build a new tribe without assuming the old one must disappear. Keep people close who’ll hold you accountable. Examine the words used internally and with others. Recognize when another person’s fear is being projected onto your decision.
Most of all, don’t confuse survival with meaning. Surviving a career, deployment, injury, or forced transition doesn’t automatically tell someone how to live afterward. Meaning has to be assigned, strengthened through relationships, and supported by a mission that still matters when the uniform is gone.
Closing
Prime Hall’s life doesn’t offer a clean argument that hardship automatically produces growth. Some experiences injured him. Some relationships saved him. Certain forms of toughness carried him through military school, disciplinary failure, Raider training, and Afghanistan, then became liabilities when he needed to stop fighting long enough to heal.
That distinction matters for veterans, first responders, and anyone approaching a major career transition. The traits that make someone dependable inside a demanding profession don’t always transfer cleanly into civilian life. Loyalty can become isolation. Discipline can become rigidity. Compartmentalization can become emotional silence. Refusing to quit can keep someone trapped long after the mission has ended.
Prime’s answer isn’t to reject the person the military helped create. It’s to keep developing that person.
The water, the coaching, the memorial, the intention stones, the emotional-intelligence work, and the book all serve different purposes. Together, they point toward the same unfinished task: building a life that isn’t sustained only by survival.
For Prime, that work begins with relationships, continues through honest accountability, and becomes practical whenever doubt turns outward into service.
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