Adam Castillo's Finding Our Voice Collects 12 Speeches He Gave Leading the American Business Community in Myanmar Through Coup, Civil War, and Disaster
Adam Castillo is a Marine Corps veteran of Afghanistan, the founder of an American security company in Yangon, Myanmar, and the President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Myanmar (AmCham Myanmar) since April 2023. His Scribe-published memoir Finding Our Voice collects 12 speeches he delivered to the American business community in Myanmar between 2020 and 2024, as the country faced a pandemic, a coup d'etat, the longest-running civil war in modern history, a typhoon, and one of the biggest natural disasters in Myanmar's history.
From Afghanistan to a Self-Imposed Exile
Adam's path to writing Finding Our Voice began the way many veteran stories do: a homecoming with no map.
"I went into an officer program to be an officer in the United States Marine Corps, completed that, deployed to Afghanistan. Came home from Afghanistan and really couldn't get a job. Became one of these unemployed veterans that sadly at that time couldn't find his way. A very dark period in my life, a very angry period in my life."
— Adam Castillo
Adam took a leap. He used a network he'd built during a college study-abroad program in Bangkok, walked into his commanding officer's office, requested early release from the Reserves, and left the country.
"I took a leap of faith. I left America, kind of self-exiled myself from a country that just a year ago I was willing to die for. And that's kind of a larger conversation with what veterans are going through, even still today."
— Adam Castillo
He moved to Yangon, Myanmar on January 5, 2014. A former business partner had convinced him there was opportunity in the newly-opening country. He started an unarmed security company. He has been in Myanmar ever since.
The Book Is What Happens When a Leader Has to Speak Through Disaster After Disaster
Adam was a founding member of AmCham Myanmar in 2012. He didn't run for the board for years. In January 2020, when the pandemic was about to hit, he ran for a seat. He became Vice President within a year, and President in April 2023.
In the years between his election and the publication of this book, the country went through:
- The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020
- The coup d'etat on February 1, 2021, when Myanmar's military seized power
- The escalated civil war that has become the longest-running civil war in modern history since 1948
- The typhoon of September 2024
- The earthquake of 2025, one of the biggest natural disasters in the country's history
As President, Adam had to stand at the front of his community and speak through each of these moments. The book is what he said.
"It's really this collection of speeches I gave to my community to really kind of bring them back from being a lost, forgotten, and even broken people that stopped really believing in themselves. And how could I recapture that belief? Obviously there's a lot of commentary on foreign policy, political meditations, et cetera, but all of that was just an agenda to reunite belief, not just in their country again, but really themselves."
— Adam Castillo
The Larger Thesis: Why American Commerce Abroad Matters
Adam's leadership of AmCham Myanmar didn't replace his patriotism. It evolved it.
"I had come to believe that American commerce is one of the most powerful instruments of American influence abroad. Beyond our military, and even beyond the strength of the dollar, our true soft power lies in our investments, our brands, and services that carry American values into the world."
— Adam Castillo
Finding Our Voice is built on that thesis. The speeches address it from inside a country where American commerce had to fight to stay present at all.
A Memoir Written From Inside the Chaos
In Adam's words from the book's prologue:
"I didn't write this book in the safety of ivory towers, but from within the chaos itself. The insights I share in these pages were forged in darkness, amid blackouts and bomb blasts, through economic collapse and tragedies wrought by both human cruelty and nature's wrath. This is not a history you'll find in books. It is a history I endured, and now write about, not as a historian, but as one who survived it."
— Adam Castillo, from the prologue of Finding Our Voice
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