Republished by permission from The Crucibel – The Transponder of Story – CRUCIBEL
by Annabelle Peeretti
A man walked onto a stage in Orlando and told a room full of pilots something they already knew. They had just forgotten where they kept it. Then he told them the other half—the half that keeps seventy veterans a day from getting on with life.
Rick Adams has been covering the World Aviation Training Summit for twenty-seven years. He is a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. He has seen every keynote, every panel, every vendor pitch, every lanyard-wearing delegate shuffling between sessions with a cold coffee and a conference bag. When a man like that writes that a twenty-minute presentation was “the most captivating of the week,” the sentence carries weight that no press release can manufacture.
The presenter at WATS 2025 was Dino Garner. The topic was storytelling in aviation training. The thesis was simple and devastating: before a pilot in distress reaches for the checklist, the pilot reaches for a story.
Not a procedure. Not a memory item. A story. Told by an instructor, months or years earlier, in a briefing room or a crew lounge or standing next to a jet on a cold ramp. A story about a mistake that almost killed someone. A story about the three detents of an ejection seat handle.
The Lanyard
Here is the story Garner told at WATS 2025. A photographer is in the backseat of an F-16. The pilot pushes the aircraft into a near-vertical dive, then pulls a violent nine-G turn. The photographer—bent over, crushed downward by the physics of the maneuver—has a lanyard around his neck. The lanyard is attached to a Minolta light meter. In slow motion, he watches the light meter slide down over the yellow ejection seat handle between his legs. The lanyard wraps around the bottom of the handle. The pilot unloads the Gs. The photographer hears a loud metallic click.
One click. That is the distance between a photographer and a canopy departing a perfectly good aircraft at several hundred knots.
And in that moment—not afterward, not in the debrief, not in the safety report—in the moment itself, the photographer’s brain does not reach for the ejection seat manual. It reaches for a story. A long, drawn-out story told by a technician in Life Support about the three detents of the ejection seat handle. First detent: safe, handle secured. Second detent: the “Oh, shit” position, a mechanical warning that something irreversible is about to happen. Third detent: you are leaving, and you are taking a million-dollar seat and a perfectly good canopy with you.
The click was the first detent. Safe. The lanyard had pulled the handle to the bottom of its travel and stopped. The photographer did not eject. He did not die. He sat in the backseat of an F-16 with a Minolta light meter dangling from his neck and the certain knowledge that a story told by a technician he probably never saw again had just saved his life.
Someone asked him afterward: “So what are you gonna do now?”
“Get on with life.”
The Transponder
What Garner told that room in Orlando was not a theory. It was a confession dressed as a thesis. Because the photographer in the F-16 was him.
Between 1987 and 1993, under the business name Valkyrie Fighter Images, Garner flew in the backseats of combat aircraft across the United States—from Alaska to Colorado to New York, from Nellis Air Force Base to NAS Miramar, home of TOPGUN. The full roster of aircraft he flew: the A-4 Skyhawk, A-7 Corsair II, F-4 Phantom, F-14 Tomcat, F-15 Eagle, F-16 Fighting Falcon, and F/A-18 Hornet, plus KC-135 Stratotankers and U.S. Coast Guard HH-65A Dauphin helicopters. He was simultaneously doing research in biophysics at USC. His photographs were published in hundreds of books, magazines, and newspapers, including a self-portrait of Garner pulling nine Gs in an F-16 on the cover of Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine. The Commandant of the USAF Fighter Weapons School—the Air Force equivalent of TOPGUN—wrote three letters endorsing his work and called his article on the school “certainly the most accurate of all articles written to date.” Fighter pilots who flew him praised two things: the technical excellence of his photography and his ability to operate inside closed military communities without disruption. One pilot wrote that nobody had “to worry about being on ’60 Minutes’ the next week.”
That self-portrait—a man photographing himself at nine Gs, the camera aimed backward into his own crushed face, the visor down, the G-suit inflated, the blood pooling in his legs—landed on the cover of the Smithsonian’s flagship aviation publication. It is, in a single frame, everything the transponder thesis is about: the body under extreme duress, the mind still operating, the craft still executing, the story being written in real time by the person inside it.
The lanyard story is not an anecdote. It is evidence. The human brain, Garner told the WATS 2025 audience, is designed to be a transponder of story. It receives, stores, and replays stories across multiple cognitive systems. When we hear a story, neurons in different brain regions activate—not just the language centers, but the motor cortex, the sensory cortex, the amygdala. A checklist engages one system. A story engages all of them. And when the lights go out at three thousand feet, the brain does not retrieve data. It retrieves experience. And the closest thing to experience that a student pilot has, before the first emergency, is the story an instructor told.
The best training, Garner argued, uses both. Story recall and checklist. Deeply embedded memory and structured action. Because when the moment comes, pilots need both the calm that a story provides—the sense that someone has been here before and survived—and the precision that a checklist enforces. The story tells you what is happening. The checklist tells you what to do about it. Neither alone is enough.
The Other Side of the Transponder
Here is the part Garner did not say at WATS 2025. Not because he was hiding it, but because it is a different room and a different audience and a book that was not yet published. But the thesis demands it, and so does the truth.
If the brain is a transponder of story—if it receives, stores, and replays across every cognitive system it has—then the mechanism that saves a pilot’s life in a cockpit is the same mechanism that destroys a veteran’s life after the war. The transponder does not choose which stories to replay. It replays them all. The Life Support technician’s story about three detents saved Garner at nine Gs. But the story of the school that was hit. The story of the friend who did not come back. The story of the thing that happened in the dark that no one talks about. Those stories replay too. And they replay at 0300, and they replay in the grocery store, and they replay when your child drops a plate and the sound is wrong, and they replay until seventy veterans a day decide that the only way to stop the transponder is to turn it off permanently. They die quickly or they languish for months, if not years, and just disappear.
Seventy. Not twenty-two. The real suicide number—documented by Garner in his work The Slow Weapon—is more than three times the figure the public has been given. The machinery of undercounting is itself a form of institutional violence: exclude veterans who never enrolled in VA care, exclude those whose deaths are classified as accidents or overdoses, exclude the ones who simply disappeared, and the number drops to a politically manageable twenty-two. The actual toll does not.
This is the subject of Silent Scars, Bold Remedies: Cutting-Edge Care and Healing from Post-Traumatic Stress Injuries, the second Pulitzer Prize-nominated book by Garner and Liz Fetter. Where Aeromasters celebrates the cockpit—the glory and the engineering and the nine-G turns—Silent Scars follows the pilot home. It documents what happens when the transponder will not stop replaying. And it documents the cutting-edge treatments that are finally offering a way to change the signal without destroying the receiver: stellate ganglion blocks that reset the sympathetic nervous system, ketamine therapy, psilocybin, vagus nerve interventions. Not talk therapy alone. Not medication that numbs the transponder into silence. Treatments that reach into the neurobiological architecture of trauma and alter the replay mechanism itself.
Garner is not a bystander to this science. He is a biophysicist who identified the DAMP-cytokine cascade—a molecular chain reaction in which trauma triggers an inflammatory response that the stellate ganglion block interrupts at its peak. He mapped the cascade’s timeline against the treatment protocol, proposed that the twenty-four-hour safety interval positions the second injection at peak systemic inflammation, and when the protocol was modified to bilateral blocks within two hours, twenty previously non-responsive patients responded positively. Dr. Eugene Lipov, the pioneer of the stellate ganglion block for PTSI, called Garner “the most extraordinary research collaborator I have encountered in my career” after thirty years and hundreds of collaborations. Garner produced what Lipov described as “postdoctoral-level work, produced before he has even been admitted to a doctoral program.”
The reclassification matters too. Garner and Lipov advocate for changing PTSD to PTSI—Post-Traumatic Stress Injury. Not a disorder. An injury. The difference is not semantic. A disorder implies something broken in the person. An injury implies something was done to the person. A disorder carries stigma. An injury carries dignity. And dignity—allowing another entity its true nature—is the principle that runs through everything Garner has ever built, from shark cells to fighter jets to the transponder thesis itself.
The Stage
Adams wrote that Garner paced around the stage. That detail matters. There are two kinds of conference speakers: those who stand behind the podium and read slides, and those who move. The ones who move are telling you something with their body that their words have not yet caught up to—that the material is alive in them, that they are not delivering information but reliving it. Garner was reliving the F-16. He was reliving the click. He was reliving the long, drawn-out story from the technician in Life Support whose name he may not remember but whose words were still lodged in his nervous system thirty-five years later.
That is the thesis in action. Not argued. Demonstrated. A man who nearly ejected from a fighter jet in 1988 stood on a stage in Orlando in 2025 and the room felt the lanyard tighten. Because he did not explain the story. He told it. And the brain—that magnificent transponder—did what it was designed to do. It received, stored, and began replaying the story before the audience had even left the room.
Adams called it the most captivating twenty minutes of the week. He has been attending WATS for twenty-seven years. That is not a casual endorsement. That is a man who has heard thousands of presentations saying: this one was different. Not because the slides were better. Not because the data was newer. Because the presenter understood something fundamental about how human beings learn, and he proved it by making the audience learn it in real time, in a room in Orlando, with nothing but a story about a lanyard and a light meter and the three detents of an ejection seat handle.
Get On With Life
There is a philosophy encoded in those five words that has nothing to do with aviation training and everything to do with how a person moves through a world that is constantly trying to eject them from the cockpit.
Garner has been getting on with life since before the F-16. Since a childhood that left permanent scars. Since a doctorate that produced breakthrough science at twenty-one. Since 220 security missions in countries where people tried to kill him. Since ghostwriting bestsellers for other people’s names. Since building a journal and a defense intelligence architecture and a body of work that operates at a frequency almost no one around him can receive.
The lanyard story is not about a lanyard. It is about what you reach for when the Gs hit and the world narrows to a single click. Garner reached for a story. And then he spent the next thirty-five years becoming the person who tells them—in cockpits, in war rooms, in a journal called CRUCIBEL, and in two books that together hold both halves of the truth. Aeromasters holds the glory. Silent Scars holds the cost. The transponder carries both.
Seventy a day. That is the number that does not get on with life. That is the number that Silent Scars, Bold Remedieswas written to change.
AEROMASTERS: Celebrating a Century of the American Fighter Pilot and SILENT SCARS BOLD REMEDIES: Cutting-Edge Care and Healing from Post-Traumatic Stress Injuries were published by Frontier Insights LLC and co-authored by Dino Garner and Liz Fetter. Both are Pulitzer Prize-nominated. Available on Amazon.
RESONANCE
Adams R. (2025). “Lanyards, Revolutions, Internationals and Ugly Stepchildren: Four Takeaways from WATS 2025.” CAT Magazine / World Aviation Training Summit. Published April 16, 2025. Summary: Rick Adams, FRAeS, covers WATS 2025 and identifies Dino Garner’s presentation on storytelling in aviation training as the most captivating twenty minutes of the week. Includes the F-16 lanyard incident and Garner’s thesis on story recall in pilot decision-making.
Garner D. (2026). “The Slow Weapon.” CRUCIBEL. Published 2026. Summary: Documents the true veteran PTSI mortality count of 70+ per day, more than three times the commonly cited figure of 22. Exposes the institutional machinery of undercounting.
Garner D and Fetter E. (2024). Aeromasters: Celebrating a Century of the American Fighter Pilot. Frontier Insights LLC. http://FrontierInsightsLLC.com. Also available on Amazon. Summary: A 1,100-page Pulitzer Prize-nominated trilogy documenting one hundred years of American fighter aviation. Co-authored by Dino Garner and Liz Fetter. With a Foreword by Lieutenant General Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.).
Garner D and Fetter E. (2025). Silent Scars, Bold Remedies: Cutting-Edge Care and Healing from Post-Traumatic Stress Injuries. Frontier Insights LLC. Available on Amazon. Summary: Pulitzer Prize-nominated work documenting cutting-edge PTSI treatments including stellate ganglion blocks, ketamine therapy, psilocybin, and vagus nerve interventions. Advocates for reclassification of PTSD to PTSI. Documents the DAMP-cytokine cascade and Garner’s collaborative research with Dr. Eugene Lipov.
Garner D. (2026). “The War on Everything: One Strait, Fourteen Systems, and the Bill That Hasn’t Arrived.” CRUCIBEL. https://crucibeljournal.com/the-war-on-everything/. Summary: The same mind that told the lanyard story at WATS 2025 now tracks eighty-three domains of war disruption. The throughline is the transponder thesis: convergence intelligence is storytelling with data, because the brain assembles patterns the way it assembles narratives—across systems, not within silos.
Peretti A. (2026). “The Gatekeepers of the Dead.” CRUCIBEL. https://crucibeljournal.com/the-gatekeepers-of-the-dead/. Summary: Documents the rejection of the PTSI reclassification paper by JAMA Psychiatry and Military Medicine. The institutional machinery that keeps the wrong name on the injury and the wrong number on the dead.