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By Robert "Bobby" Malone
You never forget the moment tinnitus starts.
For me, it was March 14th, 1971. A firebase west of Pleiku. I was 19 years old, feeding rounds into an M60, and a mortar landed close enough that I felt the heat on my face before I heard the explosion.
Actually, that's not right. I didn't hear the explosion. Not really. What I heard was a sound like God tearing a sheet of metal in half, and then... ringing.
Just ringing.
The guys around me were moving, shouting, returning fire. I could see their mouths open but I couldn't hear words. Just this high-pitched, screaming tone—like someone had shoved a tuning fork inside my skull and left it there.
I figured it would pass. Guys got their bells rung all the time over there. You shake it off. You keep moving. That's what you do.
But it didn't pass.
Not after an hour. Not after a day. Not after a week.
It's been 47 years now. The ringing has never stopped. Not for one second.
My name is Robert "Bobby" Malone. I'm 72 years old. I live in Knoxville, Tennessee, with my wife Carol, our dog Duke, and a noise inside my head that's been my unwanted companion since before most of you were born.
I'm writing this because three months ago, something happened that I'd given up believing was possible. And I think there are a lot of veterans out there—a lot of people, period—who need to hear about it.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning.
When I came home from Vietnam in late '71, I was 20 years old, and I had two problems: the things I'd seen, and the noise in my head. The VA was willing to talk about the first one—sort of, in their own clumsy way. But the tinnitus? They just shrugged.
"Noise-induced hearing loss," they called it. "Very common in combat veterans." They gave me a pamphlet. The pamphlet said there was no cure.
I was 20 years old, and the United States government had just told me I'd hear ringing for the rest of my life. Here's a pamphlet. Thank you for your service.
I tried to be tough about it. That's what we did back then. You didn't complain. You didn't "process your feelings." You sucked it up and got on with life.
So I did. I got a job at a machine shop. Married Carol in '74. We had two kids—Bobby Jr. and Lisa. I coached Little League. I went to church on Sundays. From the outside, everything looked fine.
But inside my head, it was never fine.
The ringing was worst at night. Always at night. When the house was quiet and Carol was breathing soft beside me and the kids were asleep down the hall, that's when the noise would just... swell. Like it was feeding on the silence. Like it was punishing me for wanting peace.
I'd lie there for hours. Staring at the ceiling. Listening to a sound that didn't exist in the real world but was more real to me than anything else in that dark room.
Carol would find me at 3 AM sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee because there was no point pretending I was going to sleep. She'd put her hand on my shoulder and say, "The ringing again?" and I'd nod, and she'd sit with me. Not talking. Just sitting. Because what was there to say?
That woman has sat with me through more 3 AM kitchen sessions than I can count. Forty-eight years of marriage, and she's never once complained about what my tinnitus has put her through. But I know what it's cost her. I've seen it in the worry lines around her eyes. The way she watches me when she thinks I'm not looking.
Tell us about it—what was it like living with that for decades?
It was like being trapped inside a room with a smoke alarm that never stops. You know how when a smoke alarm goes off, every fiber of your being screams at you to make it stop? That urgency, that agitation—imagine feeling that every minute of every day for years on end.
You adapt. Humans adapt to anything. But you don't adapt well. You adapt the way a tree adapts to growing next to a highway—twisted, stunted, leaning away from the thing that's hurting it.
I became irritable. Short-tempered. I snapped at Carol. I snapped at the kids. Not because I was angry at them, but because the noise in my head was using up every last ounce of patience I had, and there was nothing left for anyone else.
Bobby Jr. told me once, years later, when he was grown, that he used to think I didn't love him. Because I was always so distant, so distracted. Always somewhere else.
I nearly broke down when he said that. I was somewhere else. I was inside my own head, trying to survive the noise.
I missed things. I missed the quiet joy of watching my kids play because the ringing was layered over everything. I missed conversations because I couldn't hear properly—and not just from the hearing loss. The tinnitus itself made it hard to focus on external sound. It was like trying to listen to someone whisper while someone else was screaming in your ear.
I stopped going to restaurants because the background noise made the tinnitus worse. I stopped going to family barbecues for the same reason. I stopped going to Bobby Jr.'s football games because the crowd noise was unbearable.
Gradually, my world got smaller.
The VA started offering more treatments in the '80s and '90s. I tried all of them.
Hearing aids. $2,200 out of pocket for a pair—the VA covered part of it, but not all. They helped with the hearing loss but did absolutely nothing for the tinnitus. If anything, they made me more aware of it, because suddenly I could hear the world more clearly, but the ringing was still right there on top of everything. Louder than ever.
Sound therapy. They gave me a machine that played white noise, ocean sounds, rainfall. The idea was to "mask" the tinnitus so I could sleep. It worked a little at first. Then my brain adapted to the masking sound and the tinnitus punched through it. So they gave me a different machine with different sounds. Same result. Temporary relief, then nothing.
I spent over $800 on sound therapy devices over the years. I've got a drawer full of them at home. Carol calls it the "graveyard of broken promises."
Counseling. The VA started offering tinnitus-specific counseling in the late '90s. Cognitive behavioral therapy, they called it. The idea was to change my emotional reaction to the tinnitus. "You can't stop the ringing, but you can change how you feel about it."
I gave it an honest try. Twelve sessions. $150 each, because the VA only covered six and I paid for the rest myself. The therapist was a nice lady. She taught me breathing exercises and "thought reframing" techniques.
You know what thought reframing does when there's a fire alarm going off in your skull? Exactly nothing.
Medications. I was prescribed three different antidepressants over the years—not because I was depressed (though Lord knows the tinnitus gave me plenty of reason to be), but because some doctors thought SSRIs might reduce tinnitus. They didn't. What they did do was kill my appetite, make me dizzy, and turn me into a zombie. I stopped after two months.
I tried anti-anxiety medication. Alprazolam. It took the edge off the panic that the tinnitus sometimes caused, but the ringing itself? Unchanged. And the side effects—drowsiness, memory problems—were almost worse than the tinnitus itself.
Supplements. Oh, the supplements. Ginkgo biloba—someone told me it improved blood flow to the ears. I took it for six months. Nothing. Zinc—someone told me a deficiency could cause tinnitus. I had my levels checked; they were normal. I took zinc anyway. Nothing. Magnesium, B12, alpha-lipoic acid, lipoflavonoid—I've tried them all. I probably spent $3,000 on supplements over the years. Three thousand dollars' worth of nothing.
Acupuncture. $90 a session, once a week, for three months. Twelve sessions, $1,080 total. The acupuncturist was a kind man who truly believed in what he was doing. I wanted to believe too. But after three months, the ringing was exactly the same.
I added it up once. The total. Everything I'd spent on tinnitus treatments over 47 years.
It was over $14,000.
Fourteen thousand dollars, and the ringing never stopped for one single minute.
Tell us about it—what was it like emotionally, spending all that money and getting no relief?
Humiliating. That's the honest word. You feel like a fool. Like you keep falling for the same trick over and over. Some new treatment comes along, someone says "this might work," and you get this little flicker of hope—and then it doesn't work, and the hope dies, and you're right back where you started. Except now you're older and broker and more tired.
After a while, you stop hoping. It's a survival mechanism. If you don't hope, you can't be disappointed. So you just... accept it. You tell yourself, "This is your life now. The ringing is permanent. Stop fighting it."
And that's where I was for a long time. Just enduring. Waking up with the ringing. Going to bed with the ringing. Everything in between—just filling time until it was over.
Carol knew. She always knew. She'd look at me sometimes with this expression I can't fully describe—love and grief, all tangled together. Like she was watching me drown in slow motion and couldn't reach me.
Then, last November—November 14th, to be exact—something happened.
I was on a veterans' forum online. One of those message boards where old guys like me swap stories. Somebody had started a thread about tinnitus. Hundreds of responses. Most of them were what you'd expect—guys sharing their misery, comparing treatments that didn't work, dark humor about the ringing.
But one response caught my eye.
A guy named Dave—username was "DaveRecon68"—had posted something different. He said he'd had severe tinnitus for 31 years from an IED blast in Iraq. Said he'd tried everything, same as me. But then his daughter had found something online. A small device, about the size of a pen. You hold it behind your ear for 30 to 60 seconds. Uses something called NMS technology—Neuromuscular Stimulation—to calm the nerve that causes tinnitus.
He said he'd been using it for three weeks and his tinnitus was "80% gone."
Now, I've been on these forums long enough to recognize snake oil posts. Usually they're overly enthusiastic, suspiciously detailed, and there's always a link to some expensive product at the bottom.
Dave's post wasn't like that. It was short. Almost reluctant. He said he'd felt stupid ordering it. He said he almost didn't because he'd wasted so much money already. But his daughter had begged him. And it had worked.
He didn't post a link. He just said the product was called Tinnito™ by Xeviola, and to look it up yourself if you wanted.
Something about that reluctance—that honesty—got to me.
So I looked it up.
I found the product page. Read the description. It was a pen-shaped NMS device. Pre-programmed. You hold it behind your ear, it sends micro-pulses to the auricular nerve—the nerve that, when it's stuck in a firing pattern, causes tinnitus. The pulses calm the nerve down. Let it reset.
The price was $39.99. Normally $99.99, but 60% off.
Thirty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents.
I'd spent over $14,000 on treatments that didn't work, and here was this thing for $39.99.
I almost laughed. I almost closed the browser. Because in my experience, if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
But then I thought about Dave. About the way he wrote that post. About the fact that he didn't even include a link.
And I thought: what's $39.99? I've wasted more than that on a single bottle of supplements that did nothing.
I ordered it.
I didn't tell Carol. I didn't want to get her hopes up. She'd been on this ride with me too many times—the hope, the disappointment, the quiet grief of watching yet another treatment fail.
The device arrived three days later. Small box. Inside was the device—it really does look like a pen
That first night, after Carol went to bed, I sat in the kitchen—my old 3 AM spot—and I charged it up. Then I held it behind my right ear, where the ringing was worst.
I held it there for about 45 seconds.
I felt a slight tingling. Warm, not painful. Almost pleasant.
I didn't expect anything to happen. I really didn't. After 47 years and $14,000 worth of failure, expectation was a luxury I couldn't afford.
But here's the thing.
When I pulled the device away and sat there in the quiet kitchen... the ringing was different.
Not gone. Not even close to gone. But different. Like someone had turned the dial from a 9 to a 7. For the first time in as long as I could remember, the ringing felt... manageable.
I sat very still. Afraid to move. Afraid that if I blinked, it would go back to where it was.
It didn't go back.
I went to bed that night and fell asleep in 20 minutes. I hadn't fallen asleep in 20 minutes in decades.
The next morning, I used it again. Behind both ears this time, 60 seconds each.
That day was different. I can't fully explain it except to say that the ringing moved. It went from being the loudest thing in my world to being... background noise. Still there, but further away. Like it had taken a step back.
I used it again that evening.
By day three, I sat on the back porch with my coffee, and I heard something I'd forgotten existed.
Silence.
Not complete silence. The tinnitus was still there, faintly—like a television playing in a room two doors down. But the foreground of my awareness was quiet. I could hear birds. I could hear the wind in the trees. I could hear the world without the ringing screaming over top of it.
I sat there and cried.
I'm 72 years old. I'm a combat veteran. I've seen things that would break most people. And I sat on my back porch and cried like a baby because I could hear the birds.
That's when I told Carol.
I called her outside. I was wiping my face, trying to pull it together, but she took one look at me and knew something had changed. She's known me 48 years. She can read me like a book.
"Bobby, what's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong," I said. "Carol, the ringing. It's almost gone."
She didn't believe me at first. How could she? She'd watched me try dozens of treatments. She'd held my hand through every disappointment.
"Don't play with me," she said. And I could see it in her eyes—she was terrified. Terrified of hoping.
"I'm not playing. There's a device. I've been using it for three days. Carol, I can hear the birds."
She put her hand over her mouth. She stood there for a long moment. And then she came and sat next to me on the porch, and she held my hand, and she didn't say anything for a while.
When she finally spoke, she said: "You look different."
"What do you mean?"
"Your face. You look... lighter. You look like you did when we were young."
She was right. The tension I'd been carrying—in my jaw, in my forehead, in my shoulders—for 47 years... it was dissolving. My body was unclenching from a fist it had been making since 1971.
By the end of the first week, my tinnitus had dropped from what I'd call a constant, screaming 9 out of 10 to a faint, manageable 2. I was sleeping through the night. I was eating breakfast with Carol without having to ask her to repeat everything she said. I was sitting on the porch in the morning without dreading the silence.
By the end of the second week, there were stretches—hours at a time—where I simply forgot about the tinnitus. It was still technically there if I focused on it, but it had become so faint that my brain stopped paying attention to it.
Do you understand what that means? After 47 years of the ringing being the loudest thing in my life, my brain stopped noticing it.
I started doing things I hadn't done in years.
I went to a restaurant with Carol. Just the two of us, at a little Italian place downtown. I sat across from her and I could hear her voice clearly—not muffled, not competing with the ringing. Just her voice, warm and familiar, telling me about her day. I almost cried again right there at the table.
I went to my grandson's basketball game. I sat in those bleachers with the crowd noise and the buzzer and the squeaking sneakers, and I was okay. The noise didn't spike my tinnitus. I could just... be there. In the moment. With my family.
Bobby Jr. came over for Sunday dinner and he noticed the difference immediately. "Dad, you seem... present," he said. "Like, really here."
"I am here," I told him. "For the first time in a long time, I'm actually here."
I went back to that veterans' forum and found Dave's post. I sent him a private message.
"Dave. I tried the thing. You were right. I can hear the birds again. I don't know how to thank you, brother."
He wrote back: "Bobby, that's all the thanks I need. Now go tell the other guys."
So that's what I'm doing.
If you're a veteran—or anyone, really—living with tinnitus, I need you to listen to me.
I am not a doctor. I am not a scientist. I am a 72-year-old retired machinist from Knoxville, Tennessee, who spent 47 years and over $14,000 trying to make the ringing stop.
Nothing worked. Not hearing aids. Not sound therapy. Not counseling. Not medication. Not supplements. Not acupuncture. Nothing.
Until a fellow veteran on an online forum told me about a $39.99 device called the Tinnito™ by Xeviola.
It uses NMS technology—Neuromuscular Stimulation—to send tiny electrical pulses to the nerve behind your ear that's causing the ringing. The nerve gets stuck in a firing pattern it can't break out of on its own. The device interrupts that pattern and lets the nerve reset.
That's it. That's the science. You hold it behind your ear for 30 to 60 seconds, once or twice a day.
I noticed a difference the first night I used it. By day three, I heard silence for the first time in 47 years. By week two, the tinnitus was reduced by about 90%.
It's been three months now. I use the device every morning as part of my routine—coffee, Tinnito™, porch, birds. The ringing is barely a whisper. Most of the time, I don't notice it at all.
My sleep has transformed. I fall asleep within minutes. I sleep through the night. I wake up rested—actually rested—for the first time since Vietnam.
My relationship with Carol has transformed. We talk. We really talk. Not the exhausted, strained, "I can't hear you over the ringing" conversations we'd been having for decades. Real conversations. Laughter. Connection. She told me last week that it's like getting her husband back.
My relationship with my kids and grandkids has transformed. I'm present. I'm patient. I'm the grandfather I always wanted to be but couldn't be because the noise in my head was stealing everything I had.
I'm telling you this because somewhere out there, there's a veteran lying awake at 3 AM, staring at the ceiling, listening to a ringing that started in a jungle or a desert or a firebase, and he thinks it's going to be this way forever.
Brother, it doesn't have to be.
There's also a teacher, a construction worker, a grandmother, a software developer, a musician, a factory worker—millions of people from every walk of life—lying awake right now with this same noise. And they've all been told the same thing: "There's no cure."
There is a solution. I'm holding it in my hand right now.
The Tinnito™ device is $39.99. That's 60% off the regular price of $99.99. They've got bundles too—two for $69.98, three for $89.97, in case you want to give one to a buddy who's suffering the same way you are.
And here's something important: it comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. So if it doesn't work for you, you send it back and get your money. No risk. No questions.
I know you're skeptical. I was too. After 47 years of broken promises, skepticism wasn't just a habit—it was a survival mechanism.
But I'm asking you to do what I did. Take one more chance. Not because some ad told you to. Because a fellow veteran—a guy who's been where you are, who's suffered what you've suffered, who's tried everything you've tried—is looking you in the eye and telling you: this one is different.
This one worked.
Over 150,000 people have used this device. It's got a 4.9-star rating from more than 4,000 reviews. A lot of those people are veterans like us.
Dr. Emily Carter, an audiologist in London, has been recommending it to her patients and seeing remarkable results.
This isn't snake oil. This isn't a gimmick. This is real technology—NMS, the same technology used in clinical settings—made accessible in a device you can hold in your hand.
I wasted 47 years. I wasted $14,000. I wasted thousands of nights lying awake in the dark.
Don't be like me. Don't wait.
Dave told me about this, and I'm telling you. That's how it works with us. One veteran helps another. That's the brotherhood.
Now it's your turn.
Click here to get your Tinnito™ device for 60% off →
Go get your silence back. You've earned it.
Semper Fi.
