Why I Wrote This Book

I stood on a balcony in Jerusalem in 2007, unable to stop thinking about ending my life. Twenty-nine years old, former IDF soldier, completely broken. The dream that had carried me across an ocean and through special forces training had collapsed. I didn't know who I was anymore. That moment was both an ending and a beginning.

This book began long before that balcony, though I didn't know it at the time.

I grew up between the mountains and the sea on California's central coast, in a place called Roandoak of God Christian Commune. It was my entire world: twelve acres of kingdom built on charismatic theology and spiritual abuse. We butchered chickens in circles while singing about being soldiers for Jesus. We believed we were special, set apart, chosen. I believed every word that fell from our leader's mouth.

Then, on my thirteenth birthday, a boy at a friend's house asked if I was Jewish. When I said no, he laughed and told me my mother was Jewish, which meant I was Jewish by Jewish law. He coined a nickname on the spot: "Jonajew." I asked my mother the next morning. She confirmed it like it was nothing, a footnote she'd forgotten to mention. But for me, everything changed.

I spent my teenage years reading Holocaust literature, taking on the weight of six million deaths as my inheritance. The boy who'd grown up singing about Jesus now carried Jewish trauma in his bones. When 9/11 happened, something activated in me. I had to do something real, something that mattered. Israel called. The IDF would make sense of who I was: Christian by faith, Jewish by blood, warrior by choice.

I arrived in Israel at twenty-five, and when I received my Israeli ID card, I wept openly, feeling the weight of two thousand years of history. I pushed myself through training that should have broken me. I made it into Sayeret Palsar Tzanchanim, paratroop special forces. I thought I'd found my calling. But the military exposed every weakness I'd tried to hide. I struggled with Hebrew, with entering the Israeli mindset, with the gap between who I wanted to be and who I actually was. By the time I stood on that Jerusalem balcony, the IDF had shown me a truth I didn't want to see: I'd been running from myself, not toward anything real.

I returned to America broken. I rebuilt slowly, painfully, through Bible-based therapy and by the power of what Jesus Christ did on the cross. I found work in executive protection: bodyguard for celebrities, government officials, high-net-worth individuals. Britney Spears for a year and a half. Miley Cyrus. Others I can't name. The work taught me something unexpected: my calling wasn't proving I was a warrior. It was protecting life because God values it. Service, not glory. Humility, not validation.

That was the beginning of over twenty years in security work. Executive protection led to critical infrastructure defense. Celebrities and government officials gave way to nuclear facilities. Threat assessment became my profession, not just a skill. Now I'm forty-seven, a husband and father who spends his days protecting what keeps the lights on. And I watch, with eyes trained to see what others miss, as the infrastructure for the next Holocaust gets built in real time.

October 7th, 2023 changed everything. What happened in Israel that day ripped away any illusion of safety. The hatred didn't stay over there. It's here, growing, accelerating. I see it in campus protests, in social media, in political rhetoric, in the quiet ways American Jews are being told their concerns don't matter. I know what my Holocaust survivor ancestors would recognize in this moment. And I know what my security training tells me about patterns that escalate.

This memoir is both testimony and warning. It's about a boy raised in a Christian cult who discovered he was Jewish and tried to become an Israeli warrior. It's about failure, reconstruction, and learning to see clearly only after everything you believed about yourself breaks apart. It's about the victim mentality that poisoned my life for years and how Christ freed me from it.

But it's also about what I see coming. About why American Jews need to wake up to threats they're determined not to see. About why Christians who love Israel need to understand what that love might soon cost. About why anyone who cares about truth and human dignity needs to pay attention right now.

I'm a watchman. That's what my life prepared me to be. Ezekiel 33:6 haunts me: if the watchman sees the sword coming and doesn't blow the trumpet, the blood is on his hands. I see the sword. I'm blowing the trumpet.

This is my story. This is my warning. And this is just the beginning of what I need to say.