DELUSIONS
OF GRANDEUR
A Naval Aviator, a diagnosis he refused to believe, and the fight to get his life back.
“Snacks is me, by the way. How I got that name is a story for later in this book—and I promise you it’s dumber than whatever you’re imagining.”
Chapter One
You’re going to want to know what happens next.
Chapter 1 ends somewhere over the South China Sea. The rest of the book lands in 2026. Leave your name and email and you’ll get first word the moment it releases. That’s it—that’s the whole list.
That’s all there was to it.
When the book releases, you’ll hear it here first. Thanks for riding along.
Not every big dream is a delusion.
Ryan “Snacks” Miller had the career every kid folding paper airplanes dreams about: Naval Aviator, Instructor of the Year for the entire Naval Air Training Command, aide to admirals. Then a single line on an assignment list set off a descent nobody saw coming — through a depression he hid perfectly, a mania that felt like purpose, and the locked wards that took his career, his freedom, and his family in the same season.
Delusions of Grandeur is the unvarnished story of what happened — told with the dark humor of a man who broke through a “magnetically sealed” door at a full sprint and lived to name it his Captain America moment. It asks the question no one asked him: what do you do with a veteran trained to escape captivity, when the treatment plan is captivity?
It’s also, in the end, a story about getting it all back.
Two deployments. Two patches. One night in the fog.
These are the actual detachment patches from the cruises in this book — including the 2013 USS Chosin deployment, where Chapter 1 takes place. The colors of this page come from that patch.
Start with the fog.
Chapter 1 is free, right here on this page — the whole thing. The rest of the story lands in 2026, and readers on the list hear about it first.