An Iraqi boy bled from his abdomen as Christopher Bullis, who was then 21 years old, laid the teenager down, scrambling to patch the gunshot wound. Bullis trained in first-aid scenarios with the military for three years, but the dying boy made doubt fester.
“I wasn’t sure if I was going to be good at my job,” Bullis said, his hands shaking.
While unsure if the teen survived, Bullis said that day was the first time he realized his skills could be valuable. Now, 20 years later and out of the military, Bullis continues his search for fulfillment as a sophomore political communications major at UT.
“Understanding who you’re talking to and having a lot of empathy in communication, I think, is super important,” Bullis said. “The more you can understand people, the more empathy you have.”
Childhood
Bullis said he grew up in a quiet, quaint suburb of North Andover, Massachusetts. Bullis, however, struggled to sit still in class.
“I want to be perceived as this likable person,” Bullis said. “So, when I’m losing focus and not able to be serious in a moment, I will try to be funny or charismatic, charming, something to kind of take focus off of the fact that I’m not good at this.”
Doctors diagnosed him with ADHD in third grade. By the time he reached high school, his attempts to crack mid-class jokes made him the “annoying dude” in high school.
“I knew for a fact that I wasn’t gonna be any good in college,” Bullis said. “I didn’t want to do school. Nothing appealed to me about sitting in a classroom and learning. So I think (classroom learning) steered me away from the traditional route that most of my friends were taking.”
Bullis marched through school without a plan until Sept. 11, 2001, when he watched the World Trade Center’s north tower collapse on a library TV. Two months later, he signed a contract with the Navy.
“Subconsciously, I knew that I had to do something to fulfill myself in a certain way that allowed me to feel a sense of purpose,” Bullis said.
With basic training ahead, Bullis spent his free time in the gym, which he said was an attempt to prove himself. However, Bullis’ overtraining gave him a hernia, which delayed his enlistment for two years.
Instead of living the meaning-driven life he searched for, Bullis began working at a glass framing company his uncle worked at, and lived off greasy foods and cigarettes.
“(I had) to smoke back-to-back cigarettes so I didn’t fall asleep on my way home from work, get home at like 6 (p.m.), eat dinner and then pass out,” Bullis said. “Just thinking about that over and over again was super depressing. At the time, too, my friends were in college.”
While he watched friends enter college, Bullis lost his job in less than a year — he was fired after a trucking accident. Bullis had to move in with his mother again and spent his evenings at Saint Anselm College, getting drunk with his high school friends.
“I felt like I wasn’t going to really amount to much,” Bullis said. “I felt like, ‘If I can’t do this, what can I do?’”
Two days later, Bullis answered a call from his mother’s landline.
“We (can) take you today,” the U.S. Armed Forces recruiter on the line told Bullis. He agreed immediately, desperate for a meaning. By chance, Bullis also found welcoming.
“You can be kind of vulnerable,” Bullis said. “Because you know that you’re a part of something that’s bigger than you. I think that it makes you feel so welcome and so deeply connected.”
Army
Bullis accepted the only department the Army offered him: medical. He graduated from basic training in 2003 and entered medical training. Bullis still failed his first two exams required to become a combat medic and spent double the time needed in Advanced Individual Training.
His girlfriend at the time spoke sense into Bullis when he considered quitting.
“She was motivating (in) helping me realize, ‘Hey, this is a big deal. You need to get your shit together,’” Bullis said. “‘You can’t just be this class-clown-type character for the rest of your life. This stuff is serious and it matters.’”
Bullis passed his third exam after seven months of training. In 2003, he deployed to a South Korean military base before transferring to another unit in Fort Lewis, Washington, the next year. His unit deployed to Iraq in 2006 during the troop surge in Baghdad.
Unlike South Korea, Iraq was bloody. In Baghdad, Bullis faced his first combat injury when an Iraqi teenager took a bullet to the stomach. With a kid bleeding in his arms, Bullis had to act.
“I had some doubts leading up to that,” Bullis said. “How I did in that specific incident was very validating and helped me realize that I was, in fact, capable of doing something so challenging.”
Bullis went on to perform dozens of emergency treatments, including patrols blown up by improvised explosives and Iraqi children caught in rocket cross fire. But Bullis especially remembered the night a medic pulled him from his bunk to chat with a struggling soldier outside.
“It was very ominous, like, ‘I’m sorry.’” Bullis said. “And I’m like, ‘What are you sorry about?’ And then I flicked my cigarette out into the trash. As soon as I moved to do that, he leaned over the barrel of his M4 and shot himself right in the chest.”
Other medics ran to the slumped-over soldier and helped Bullis carry him to the trauma bay. Bullis placed the chest seal over the bullet wood and took vitals. A helicopter airlifted the soldier and he survived.
“What I like to believe is that it was a cry for help,” Bullis said. “He knew that if he came to me, I would be able to save him.”
Bullis’ hands still tremble when he retells the story, but he said the soldier’s cry for help instilled an empathetic philosophy into Bullis that followed him when he returned from Iraq in 2007.
“It taught me that I am somebody that people can trust in those types of situations, when the world is kind of caving in around them,” Bullis said.
Bullis moved in with two friends and lived on the cash he’d accumulated from unspent paychecks on deployment. But in mid-2008 he got a MySpace message from a woman he met in Boston — she was pregnant with his baby.
“I was like, ‘Alright, this is the moment where you get to show up and be the good guy and be a dad,’” Bullis said.
But before he could show up for his son, Bullis deployed to Iraq again in 2009. Bullis said leaving his son weighed down on him, but he felt he had to answer a higher calling as a medic while supporting them financially.
“I was good at (being a medic),” Bullis said “I think that because I was good at it, it made me more self-assured that I was on the right track doing the thing that I was supposed to be doing.”
Ten months after he returned from Iraq in 2010, Bullis deployed to Afghanistan as a command squadron medic. Pent-up trauma caught up when he returned in 2012, as crippling anxiety prevented him from leaving the bed, which he later understood was PTSD.
“Not really having time to deal with anything that happened to me in the second deployment, and then going into this incredibly high purposeful job,” Bullis said. “It all just crashed in that moment when I didn’t really have anything to do.”
In his recovery, Bullis attended therapy services, but his chats with the military chaplains stuck with him. Rediscovered faith and reflection began to redefine what fulfillment meant to him.
“I started to really do a lot of deep self-reflection and try to put myself in better alignment with God and what God wanted for me,” Bullis said.
While Bullis reconnected with his Christian faith at church, he grew distant from the military. Serving as drill sergeant, then a holistic health instructor, Bullis said he was unable to motivate soldiers the way other leaders did, coming from a generation who enlisted after Sept. 11.
“It felt like the lessons that I learned during my formidable years in the military were no longer really applicable,” Bullis said. “So it was just like this weird feeling, like, ‘Nobody cares about you anymore,’ kind of thing.”
Retirement
After 20 years and one day, Bullis retired from the military in 2023 and picked up work as a holistic health trainer. Mat Vance, who served with Bullis in Iraq after he earned a communications degree, warned Bullis retirement could be challenging.
“When [Bullis] was talking about getting out, retiring, going back to school, I said, ‘You got to put your foot in as many doors as possible until you find the right one that fits,’” Vance said.
Bullis married his wife in 2022, and had his daughter in 2024. Vance’s encouragement, mixed with his second chance at fatherhood, pushed Bullis to enroll at San Antonio College before transferring to UT.
“In order to be a good father and to be a good husband,” Bullis said, “I need to feel my own sense of fulfillment and realize my potential and feel satisfied and satiated by the work that I’ve committed (to doing).”
Bullis said he intentionally chose UT for its political communications pathway, as he looked for a career to transfer the leadership skills he gained in college. While unsure of his career post-graduation, Bullis said he values the lessons he’s gathered at UT so far.
“I understand that it’s an incredibly important piece to the process of becoming who I want to be,” Bullis said. “It allows me to look at things a little bit holistically. Every interaction that I have here is as meaningful as the classes that I take.”
UT has roughly 650 veteran students that UT’s Texas Veteran and Military Student Experience office guides through community building and college resources, which can be difficult for veterans leaving a structured military life, according to VMSE Associate Registrar Edward Goodroe.
“And all of a sudden, you get exposure to this higher education space, and you go, ‘Where do I go? What do I do?’” Goodroe said. “We try to provide that guidance and structure for them.”
Like Bullis, about 6% of student veterans are between ages 40-46 and less than 1% study communications, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Since his first day of class, Bullis said he knew he would stand out.
“It’s kind of lonely when you’re the only old guy in a sea of 18, 19, 20-year-olds,” Bullis said. “There was still a feeling like I wanted to fit in, and I wanted to feel like I belonged here. I wanted other people to feel like I also belonged here.”
Bullis wore gym shorts and t-shirts, trying to mimic his perception of college-student attire. As he made friends though, Bullis returned to his regular khakis and button-downs.
“I was able to do enough to establish a rapport with the kids that I was in class with, like, ‘Alright, you now know that I’m not a professor,'” Bullis said. “It probably took about three weeks for the shelves to kind of come off and people to realize that I’m just a dude.”
Bullis discussed rejoining the Army with his veteran friends, but said he feels undecided if he’d actually return, as he has found more sources of fulfillment in his life. Now, he hopes to inspire others to do the same.
“Really reconnect with yourself,” Bullis said. “You’ll realize that there’s a lot more to life and that you can pursue things that are challenging and gratifying and that will bring you not just financial success, but family success and life success and bring deep fulfillment.”
