Command Sergeant Major Vincent Silva served his country for 30 years and one day before he retired from the Army.  His identity was anchored to his profession and when the re-entered civilian life, Vinny then 47, found himself adrift.  When asked how he felt about being a civilian again, he mused over how he’d been a soldier since he was 17.  Vinny last saw his father at age 10. He lived with his grandparents, while his single mother worked 2 jobs and in 1991 with his mother’s permission, Vinny enlisted in the Army. He graduated from high school and entered active duty at 17. He is a soldier’s soldier.

When Vinny retired in 2022 he didn’t know what to do with himself. He is a doer and he found retirement difficult.” Stacy his wife of 17 years remembers.   “We were empty nesters. By now 2 of our girls were active duty military  .” she recalls.  The oldest had married and was raising her family in Clarksville.  “At first I was giving him chores to keep him busy.  He was underfoot.” She laughs. “He came in from taking the trash to the dump one day, and he’d met Ron Duane.”  Like Vinny, Ron was also a retired Sergeant Major and he saw the sticker on Vinny’s pickup and gave him a flier for Healing Flames Forge.  They were offering a free blacksmithing class to veterans and Stacy encouraged him to go.”  “I went and I loved it.  It was what I was looking for.” he replied.   Stacy continued, “He was pretty excited about it .  He’d played with making knives before, but had no real instruction.  He was just cutting out steel but was missing the blacksmithing part of it. He kept going to the classes at Healing Flames and learned about steel types and the effects of heating and proper cooling and tempering.  He also got to hang out with other veterans, and he was excited over what he was learning. He’d found his clan and a purpose.”

Not counting combat tours overseas, he served five years between Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army moved us nine times in the past 20 years Vinny recalls.   When asked about his tour in Bosnia,  he described it as merely “peacekeeping.”    The Army had been home to him. He met Stacy in 2006 when he was stationed at Ft Polk, LA.   She was a single mom with custody of your two girls, ages 6 and 12.   Vinny was a single dad with custody of his 6 year old daughter.  They dated for 3 years , interrupted only by Vinny’s second tour in Iraq.  

When he got home they moved in together and with the unanimous approval of their girls, got married at Ft Polk on March 14^th 2009. Their assignment to Hawaii in 2009 was a blessing.  The family lived together for four years.   A tour in Afghanistan followed in 2012, and then in 2013 Vinny was selected for the Sergeant Majors Academy at Ft Bliss, Texas. Off they went once again.  “When we finally got to FT Campbell in 2014, we fell in love with Tennessee” Stacy said.  “We bought our “forever home” in Indian Mound in 2016, and we’d barely moved in when Vinny deployed with the 101^stAirborne for his third tour in Iraq.  “We held our breath until he came home”  she recalls.  Shortly after getting back, Vinny was reassigned to Ft Knox.  The family decided to stay put in Indian Mound while Vinny moved up to Ft Knox KY and commuted home on weekends.   “I was a geographic bachelor for the next five years”. He commented.  They made it it work.  Stacy, a self-described caretaker,  meal-prepped on the weekends, making sure Vinny had hot meals throughout the week.  “All he had to do was pop the food in the microwave”  In 2022 Vinny retired and returned to home cooked meals.  What is not spoken of in their narrative are the thee times Vinny was blown up. Twice in 2005, first in an IED blast and then taking shrapnel in the chest from a mortar round.  Six years later in Afghanistan, his vehicle rolled over a pressure plate and detonated an IED buried in the roadway. The blast blew an axle off his truck and only the mine resistant hull prevented fatalities. Vinny sustained a concussion in the blast.  

In three years since his  retirement Vinny progressed  from basic blacksmithing to producing blades of Damascus steel that are works of art. Kim Breed, a master bladesmith who writes for Blade Magazine, and a frequent visitor to Healing Flames, did a review of Vinny’s work for the magazine.  Almost overnight orders for custom knives poured in and his reputation as a knife maker was established

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Stacy continued. “I started to experiment with making handles. Vinny had been looking on-line for knife handle material. I was making jewelry at the time and looked at some of the handle designs and thought, I could do that. I started experimenting with different epoxies, maybe 5 of them until I found one that was U/V resistant, and sufficiently hard and waterproof. Most epoxies turn yellow with time and look awful,  and when I found one that did not, and was durable, it was a game changer for both of us.”   In the process of making Vinny’s knife handles Stay found a new outlet for her artistic talents.  “It was also a way for us to be together. It’s how we are, we’ve always done things together.   We wanted a simple life, a more meaningful life after the Army” said Vinny, “… and blacksmithing gave it to us,”  finished Stacy, as she reached for his hand.