Clifford Bauman spent 34 years in the U.S. Army, including recovery work at the Pentagon in the days after September 11, 2001. Years later, that service — and a guilt he carried privately for over a year — nearly cost him his life.

Bauman shared his story this week on “The Transform U! Live Show,” the veteran-focused interview series hosted by Marcus Hart, in a conversation that moves from the wreckage at the Pentagon to the exact moment, in his brother’s house in Kansas City, that Bauman attempted to take his own life.

“I went from the most happy-go-lucky guy in the world to almost completing suicide — in a year,” Bauman told Hart. The guilt, he said, came from the recovery work itself: pulling cell phones from the wreckage using an improvised signal-tracking method, and carrying, for over a year, the weight of not finding anyone alive.

What changed the trajectory, Bauman said, wasn’t a dramatic intervention — it was a doctor who, instead of lecturing him about his drinking, asked a single gentler question: “Is it possible for you to drink one less?” And it was a friend, later, who told him plainly: “Sometimes bad things happen to good people. You did all you could do. That was your best.” Bauman said that sentence is what finally broke through the guilt he’d been carrying since 2001.

Bauman now hosts his own show, “The Mental Health Warrior,” featured on Veteran Trash Talk and Wreaths Across America Radio, and is the subject of the Emmy-winning documentary series “Surviving Suicide,” streaming on the Able Channel and Roku. He closes every episode the same way, he said: “We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.” A phone call, a text, a small kindness — that’s often enough.

The full conversation is available now on YouTube: https://youtu.be/YnmNLI5Tl9U

If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by call or text.