Jocko Podcast 339: Winning The War After The War: Braxton McCoy. Insurgents, Addiction, and Lies

2022-06-24T13:27:27Z

Underground Premium Content: https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Join the conversation on Twitter/Instagram: @jockowillink @braxton.mccoy @echocharles After being wounded in The Glass Factory S-Bomber incident, Braxton McCoy Fights his way out of the darkness. How to stay on THE PATH JOCKO UNDERGROUND Exclusive Episodes: https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Jocko Store Apparel: https://www.jockostore.com Jocko Fuel: https://jockofuel.com Origin Jeans and Clothes: https://originmaine.com/durable-goods/ Echelon Front: https://www.echelonfront.com

AI summary of episode

And I don't know if they were doing that to prep me, because they weren't sure how much my hand would ever work again, and that, I mean, that could honestly be possible, but I don't know if, so I'm saying, I don't know if it's routine, I don't know if everybody does this, but they brought me all these aids that I was, you know, trying to learn how to do shit with one hand, which, anyway, that was like I was passing my time, that in watching like dukes of hazard, on dovety, thing, and sign filled and shit. Well, my, my, the officer that was in charge of us brought, brought like a full on mosquito net like you see, I don't know, like maybe in some British colonists who were in like Africa in like 1875 or something. So I had a spiral fracture here, and they just put a plastic, almost like, I almost like the stuff motocross guys where, you know, I was like, I didn't really, I don't know that really didn't anything, but other than like remind you your shit was broken. But it's like, you know how, it's almost like a more advanced version of the simple idea of like, you know, the classic, like, oh, they didn't invite me to the party, even though I didn't want to go. I mean, you're like, you can point to like, let's say like this, if you were to ask an American to describe what it means to be American, they're going to talk about shit like four to two perseverance, loyalty, dedication, love of family, country, you know, spirit, right? Yeah, I think it's also true, like any time you're doing anything hard, like if you're ready to quit, you can find something, you know, like find some other reason, it'll put, like your ego is just only so big. But what the the part like how he he's talking about like the alcoholism and then like his anger at this anger that for some reason, like the way he put it was like that's so true. Does it like, like after about of like physical activity does it like act up like right after whatever? And my turps like, hey, there's 50 cows pointed at him and like, like, hey, and so finally, I just like, well, I just like aggressively approach him. I was like, I felt not, I mean, in a way more into it, but more like you can connect, like I connected with it a lot, like a lot more than the normal I guess given the circumstances, you know. Where and he was saying that I don't know if he said it on air, but he was saying I think it was before we were recording and he was like, hey, people in school or people like teachers and stuff in school, people when you're young, they don't tell you that drugs are like kind of good. Didn't that, you know, wasn't like in the best marriage at the time, which how could you be, you know, and you like how could you marriage be good when you're behaving like this every day, right? Like even like painkiller, I took the all that oxy, like, not more, but like you know the ones that give you food surgery. So he's like coming on Friday and meanwhile, my primary care physician told me he's like, man, you know, if you try to get this removed, you're being a cable, you could rupture, you know, like there's no way to plug that. Yeah, I understand, but like, not everyone's like that straight up, where just because like, especially cake, now, she's kind of a reserved, like, person. So I've been working on that for a while, and then, you know, like I say, right coats, and then I run this bunkhouse deal where I take guys out once a month, train on different things, and like last weekend we were doing some advanced home defense training in Utah with a green parade dude working on in suit houses and stuff like that. and it's just like sitting doing radio shit and like in a, like, a office and stuff and like, no, I'm not about it. Like almost like not that I necessarily felt all of that, but it was like I felt like I can see how that could be. And then my intel guy, or my talk guy, came in like, while I'm saying that, and they're like, sort of just to let you know, troops and contacts in the guys, and he has like, I said, sir, make that 24 times in a row. You know, I've said before like, when people get in these modes and these situations, like, they're like a storm cloud around their head that they think is the whole world. And then like you said, you know, you're right about in the book, you can hear doctors talking, you're like partially coherent, you're tired, you're just like in and out of sleep. And on that stoop was these sandals all laid out and like succession, you could tell us like, Dad, Mom, you know, son, older daughter, and then baby daughter with like these little two inch pink sandals. When we hit that ID, it's kind of like, you know, bathes and fire in some ways, like you to see all, like, what this war is really about to be for the next year. And I'm like, okay, cool, you know, I'm cool, but I, you know, I'm not going to like, I didn't text at that moment in time, right? But so the, what was occupational OT, occupational therapy, they bring like these tools, and you learn how to like pull a sock over this kind of conical shaped thing, and it's got a couple of strings hooked to it, and throw that shit at your foot, and so you can pull like your own sock on and get started, or yeah, That's like you know, the devil's like spirit coming down and like touching people in the jam in a mop because it's true. I think he said about the ego, which like, conceptually, it was like a lot of times, like you'll say this, what he said, this very specific thing where he said, although army should have kept me in, even though he knew he couldn't admit it. You're seeing saying, so it's like, they felt like, apparently that was almost like a gamble, you know? I know that, you know, I talked to Johnny before we ever put this out and he's like, yeah, man, I see, I remember, you know, you know, sans this or that detail. He's like, he's like, I was to you in like minutes, you know, I'm not even remember any of that. So they're like, well, he's, you know, making it like one of them just like why risk it now. So again, in your mind, you think you got to build up like yourself, but bro, I mean, anybody that's there looking at you like, hey, man, you obviously, freaking, you know, got after it. She was like, you know, she should do a video, like showing like how discipline go. Like I'm like a brainwashed by Hollywood, you know, on reading it like, Sometimes the down is way lower than the up, and that's one of the things that makes it powerful is it's freaking, and it's like realistic, and it also makes it powerful because like every time I read something, and I'd be like, So all of our hasties were like water up to our chest and still have like that, you know, in fact, what, uh, one time during night guard, my body, you know, we had your ankles in a locked in hasties or whatever. It felt like the two genres of Iraq Warbook were either like heroism or super whiny, crybaby shit and then just the heroism stuff is great and I mean, every culture has always done that's great and I should continue but like the super whiny bitch that we just, there's no reason for that. It's dependent, like, we're doing like prisoner transport, then that would be like a two day boring ass thing, same kind of thing with log packs. So when I'm thinking, you know, even going out, like going outside the gate, going outside the wire, walking out there, trying to capture what it's like. And because like, I guess the way like it's damaging that blood vessel in there and it's releasing protein because I guess the way that it's like a heart attack is protein in your bloodstream or certain type of protein in your bloodstream. As far as the suicide bombing, I don't think, not really, it's hard, it's really hard to know because I, I got into psychology for a minute, and now I know that your, your brain often like rewrite stories back or backfills, you know? Of course, they kick, like, so a lot of times they'll break their backs like stud horses, they'll get up on their hind ends like this and flip them break their necks or backs and buy it and kick and I mean, they can kick. So I came home and got, you know, long Google start looking and look like probably right like you probably couldn't get it out. The muscles are not firing properly, and then my right quad at a real good hole through it, and that one, even my physical therapist that I got later on is a civilian was not quite sure if that femoral or Xemia, which had as that, anyway, if the actual head of that part of the quad would ever fire again, because it was just not, like the muscles were not going around the way they should have, that it does kind of now, but so there could have been like some muscular damage involved, I mean there was muscular damage involved, but that could have been part of it too. That's another thing that's interesting about this book is you can tell a freak it, you can tell it's not a Hollywood movie, because in a Hollywood movie it's like there's some point where everything turns, and everything's like good now, you know, they write the book with that perfect story arc, and disay in a perfect story arc. Because I was like, and especially like as a young open micer and then you progress like a middle act and stuff here, you're just really reaching for stuff. So anyway, I feel like I got kind of, but it worked out, you know, I'm not trying to complain, but I do feel like he was a little near to some salty. You know, so I think if you're, if you're one of these people that's going through addiction and you're, uh, what they call like functionally addicted, whether it's heroin or, like there's only handful of drugs that people can really do it on alcohol mostly. But the weird thing is it didn't feel like it didn't feel any like we even he described like euphoria. Yeah, and the craziest part about those plates is I didn't realize this until one of my engineer buddies came over the other day and he was like trucking them out and put them on my counter and it's like warped like wobbles. And this one part that I think he like nailed was when he was like something about the existence of the devil where alcohol and drugs are like his tools. You just gotta find something to force you, you know, like for me, it's like I'm going to go home and tell my buddy that I pulled that bull out of that canyon. Yeah, it's like a big cage like you're saying almost like a series of halos. And he, he looked like, when you, if you ever slaughtered bull when you shoot him, and that's almost like their legs come up and they hit the ground like a cart team. I mean, you're certain extending the good time like way past like the plant and just, you know, and we're just, they were doing that quite don't memory lane talking trash. And it sounds like your hand was just like, it's like, I can't, well, I look at your hand. So this guy like basically is pointing his what point is AK at everybody, you know, he's getting ready to freaking looks like he's getting ready to start shooting people. Watching Recon take that down was pretty cool, but like we just did normal like day to day, trying not to get blown up, you know, try to shoot the people, the need to get shot and not the ones that don't. If I die, it's kind of like, I mean, I don't, you know, I'm not really going to like care too much. and I really like they could put like nails and just random like bolts nuts just any metal crap that'll freaking rip you apart. I mean I'd like seen this kind of stuff done as a kid like you'd see people you know you'd a party. I mean, it was interesting, you know, once you cross those gates in there, it's like oil wells on fire and stuff and bowl of whole cars here and there scattered, but there's really not like anything going on in the South by rack. And even I think some, you like you look at guys when they're getting ready retire from them, you know, I feel like everything's gone. Yeah, I mean, while my IT bands are still like, you know, your IT bands are like, suppose we won't band right It's hard, and it's not like you're making progress, but the progress is so slow that you still feel like you don't even know how much you're going to be able to heal.

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Episode transcript

[00:00:00] This is Jocopotcast number 339 with echo Charles and me, Jocopo-Willink, good evening echo.
[00:00:06] Good evening.
[00:00:10] I woke face down in blood soaked sand.
[00:00:16] The world spun around me.
[00:00:17] What little sounds I could make were muffled and indistinct.
[00:00:22] It was like I had been twirled around on old tires, swing,
[00:00:25] then flung into a swimming pool.
[00:00:27] I couldn't gather my wits anymore, then I could get my bearings.
[00:00:30] The harder I tried to get a handle on the world around me,
[00:00:33] the more slippery my grip became.
[00:00:36] My eyes strained to adjust to the scene.
[00:00:38] Pain sunk its fangs permanently.
[00:00:42] We have just been hit by rockets I assume.
[00:00:45] This must be a coordinated attack.
[00:00:47] My confusion turned to panic.
[00:00:49] Oh God, oh God, please God,
[00:00:52] the sounds that surrounded me became clearer.
[00:00:55] I could decipher some individual words,
[00:00:58] but they seemed only to add uncertainty.
[00:01:01] Who is groaning?
[00:01:02] I heard gurgling as someone tried to force air through a blood filled throat.
[00:01:06] The wounded and dying were bellowing in both English and Arabic.
[00:01:12] Screams of death filled the air.
[00:01:15] Rage filled our hearts.
[00:01:17] Medic, medic, all the walk bar.
[00:01:20] I brought myself up as much as I could.
[00:01:25] The intro to that I was able to manage was not enough to make a significant difference in my field of view.
[00:01:32] I thought I heard the reports of rifles.
[00:01:34] Is that AK fire?
[00:01:35] I need to start helping my guys.
[00:01:37] I fought to myself.
[00:01:38] We're being ambushed.
[00:01:41] Shock was setting in.
[00:01:43] I desperately tried to locate my weapon and return fire,
[00:01:46] but I was totally unable to move.
[00:01:48] I wanted to figure out why, but I couldn't get my body positioned in a way that would allow me to look toward my legs.
[00:01:55] I could see both of my arms and my chest.
[00:01:57] My arms were definitely broken.
[00:01:59] Osmosis was spreading blood throughout the sleeves of my uniform,
[00:02:03] but I could still move them sort of.
[00:02:08] I brought myself up again onto my side and peered down toward my legs.
[00:02:12] But when I finally looked downward in the direction that my legs should have been,
[00:02:16] all I could make out was thick, black, blood, and a pile of muddy entrails.
[00:02:23] I'm cutting too.
[00:02:24] I set a loud, unsure whether I was talking to the dying men around me or to myself.
[00:02:30] I ran a bit of organ through the fingertips of my left hand.
[00:02:34] I was certain that it once belonged to me.
[00:02:37] Where did it fit in this mess?
[00:02:39] I searched the jumbled human remains that rested underneath me
[00:02:43] and wondered exactly where this little organ went, but I couldn't complete the puzzle.
[00:02:50] My mind drifted.
[00:02:52] Distractedly, I wondered what was going to be like to die.
[00:02:58] Certainly there would be no way to save a man who had been cut in half.
[00:03:04] Oh God, oh God, oh God, the screams filled my ears again.
[00:03:08] I'm hit.
[00:03:09] Johnny, medic!
[00:03:11] Was that me yelling, I wondered?
[00:03:14] I tried to look for the frantic American voice, but all I could see was dark red sand.
[00:03:19] Lims which had been flung from their torso's bloody men writhing on the ground,
[00:03:24] begging for death to end their suffering, and hundreds of empty sandals.
[00:03:31] Lying there, still rubbing that piece of what I believed to be a pancreas between the tips of my fingers.
[00:03:37] I again contemplated what was going to be like to die.
[00:03:43] Was I going to cross over into some other dimension and meet Jesus like I had been taught my entire life?
[00:03:50] Or was it all just going to go black, like slipping quietly into a slumber?
[00:03:57] A sleep that one never comes back from.
[00:04:01] Please, don't let this be my final resting place I thought.
[00:04:05] Not this shithole.
[00:04:09] Not now.
[00:04:16] And that right there is an excerpt from a book that is called The Glass Factory, written by Braxton McCoy.
[00:04:28] And the shithole that he was referring to was a shithole that I'm familiar with,
[00:04:34] a place called Ramadi Iraq, and the title of the book, The Glass Factory,
[00:04:40] is a title that anyone who served in Ramadi instantly knows.
[00:04:46] And I have talked about the glass factory on this podcast a couple times.
[00:04:51] I've talked about it on the unraveling podcast as well.
[00:04:55] The glass factory was the place of a horrific attack,
[00:05:00] where suicide bombers detonated themselves at a police recruiting event,
[00:05:06] killing over 50 Iraqi police recruits,
[00:05:11] and also two Americans.
[00:05:19] The Americans that were killed, Lieutenant Colonel Michael McLaughlin,
[00:05:23] of Mercer Pennsylvania, and Sergeant Adam Can from Davy, Florida.
[00:05:31] And there were scores of wounded Iraqis and Americans as well.
[00:05:38] Many of them severely wounded.
[00:05:40] One of them was a young soldier, who's also the author of this book, Braxton McCoy.
[00:05:49] And it is an honor to have Braxton here with us tonight
[00:05:54] to talk about his experiences in war,
[00:05:58] and perhaps more important, his lessons learned after the war,
[00:06:05] and how he followed the path toward the truth.
[00:06:11] Braxton, thanks for joining us, man.
[00:06:14] Thanks for having me, Jalco.
[00:06:15] Great to meet you, and I know you sent us this book a while ago, years ago.
[00:06:23] And somehow I get sent hundreds of books actually,
[00:06:29] and I just slipped past my radar and it wasn't until I was on Twitter,
[00:06:34] and I think someone tagged you and me and said,
[00:06:40] hey, Jalco was just talking about the glass factory on the podcast.
[00:06:43] And you came back and said something like,
[00:06:47] he got it mostly right, couple errors, which, you know, of course,
[00:06:52] I said, minor errors though.
[00:06:55] But, you know, of course, I know I'm not going to know everything.
[00:07:00] I don't ever claim to know everything, but as soon as I saw you had a book called The Glass Factory,
[00:07:04] that you were wounded there, you know, I said, hey, man, you said,
[00:07:08] you know, you said, hey, do you want this book? And I said, absolutely.
[00:07:12] And let's talk about it on the podcast. So here you are, man.
[00:07:16] Thanks for coming down.
[00:07:18] Yeah, thank you. It's really kind of crazy to be here.
[00:07:21] And you read my book is kind of weird.
[00:07:24] Man, it's a great book.
[00:07:26] And I should start off by saying this, you never know what you're going to get when you read a book.
[00:07:30] And I think one thing that one thing that you can measure a book by is how vulnerable someone is willing to be in order to convey what happened to them.
[00:07:48] And this book is raw.
[00:07:51] And you talk about things in this book that I know had to be hard as hell to write.
[00:07:56] And that's one of the things that make it so powerful.
[00:07:59] And the other thing that makes it so powerful, even though, look, it's a book.
[00:08:04] Definitely there's a chunk of it that has to do with war.
[00:08:08] And there's a chunk of it that has to do with the struggles after the war.
[00:08:13] But the most powerful part of the book is you figuring out how you needed to live in a proper way.
[00:08:24] And it's just an epic book.
[00:08:29] It's an outstanding book.
[00:08:31] And so anybody that is listening right now jump on there.
[00:08:35] We'll have it on our website and go go buy this book immediately.
[00:08:40] We're going to read some of it today.
[00:08:42] There's no way I could read the whole book.
[00:08:44] I know that you're working on an audio book right now.
[00:08:46] So eventually you'll be able to buy that.
[00:08:48] But you know, actually never mind the audio book for now.
[00:08:51] The cover of the book is awesome.
[00:08:55] And what's the deal with the cover?
[00:08:57] I read a little bit about the cover of the book.
[00:08:59] But where did come from?
[00:09:00] The guy who designed it was a medic there.
[00:09:02] There was at the glass factory with me.
[00:09:04] And we, I told him I wanted it.
[00:09:07] I told him I wanted it to be.
[00:09:09] Look like the windows, you know, the brass over the windows over there.
[00:09:12] And the copper stuff.
[00:09:13] But with the, I wanted the buffalo on there.
[00:09:15] So he kind of worked it in.
[00:09:16] Yeah, so it's a very distinct cover and plus it's well, this version is hard cover.
[00:09:24] So there's still hard covers available.
[00:09:26] There's like maybe 300 you can get on my website.
[00:09:29] Those are as good as God.
[00:09:31] Those are as good as God.
[00:09:32] Anybody that if you can get one of those 300 get it order what's your website?
[00:09:36] So people can write some of code.
[00:09:38] Bracks of McCoy dot com.
[00:09:39] So there we just sold all those 300 books.
[00:09:42] And then the other ones are available on Amazon.
[00:09:43] Those are soft cover. I'm assuming.
[00:09:46] Yeah, and we actually, you know, without getting goofy political or ask about, we try to work on getting another print run and white paper stock is short on everywhere.
[00:09:55] So, or at least publishes that we had before and then we try to use a different published publishing company out of Idaho and they couldn't do a check.
[00:10:03] We might have to talk to other publishing companies that other people know like mine.
[00:10:07] I figure what we can do.
[00:10:09] All right. So
[00:10:10] So, again, that is a very interesting book.
[00:10:15] And one of the things that's interesting about the book is it basically starts off with the attack on the glass factory.
[00:10:23] But and and it doesn't you have flash some flashbacks throughout the book, pertinent flashbacks, but there's no detail.
[00:10:31] There's not much detail on how you grew up and probably that's the next book you should write.
[00:10:36] Is just some of the experience that that made you who you are, but before you write that book since you're sitting here, let's talk a little bit about, you know, how you did grow up and where you came from and how you ended up being who you are.
[00:10:50] So, where did you grow up?
[00:10:52] I grew up in, well, I lived before you saw a solid valley started to get expanded. There was a place called the Rose Canyon estates up.
[00:11:00] There's a bunch of just small rants and ranchettes up south of Salt Lake. It's now kind of all the same valley, but back then it was like, I don't know 25 miles a town or so, then I'd go to school every morning.
[00:11:12] And we had just a little horse operation out there. My mother and father divorced, so my mother married my stepfather when I was four.
[00:11:20] And so we were, you know, pretty much been in my life.
[00:11:23] So what's going on in the horse ranch?
[00:11:25] The boy were you doing? When I was a kid? Yeah, man.
[00:11:30] Feeding in water and hitting golf balls and shooting arrows into the haystacks and shooting rabbits and lizards and man, I'd get home from school and get my chores done and go grab a backpack and throw a water bottle in there and get my baby going and just head up in the mountain because there's nobody behind us.
[00:11:48] And there's this crics called yellow fork and you can go up yellow fork all the way up and just shoot every bird known now.
[00:11:55] I must have smoked 500 wood peckers.
[00:11:58] There my grandpa had a thing for song birds. He just loves song birds. And I kind of get it now as I age. I like having them around my place too. So if I got caught shooting song birds, I get big trouble.
[00:12:10] But woodpeckers all day all day.
[00:12:12] Did you step that having a military experience? No. No, his father's father was a he grew up on ranch in Sipio, Utah, which is where we ended up moving when I was 13.
[00:12:25] But he, a right after we were to, I guess, he joined the Navy and ended up at air traffic control or eventually ended up air traffic control out here at top gone.
[00:12:34] And then he got out and came home to the ranch and sold it. He said, and they want to do another day of farm work in my life.
[00:12:42] And moved up to the city and he was a air traffic control for Delta Airlines or something. I don't know, so I came to Nashville for years and then he ended up moving back after he retired.
[00:12:54] And what about your mom? What did she do?
[00:12:56] She was, she worked for Siskail as like a food sales rep for a while and then she went to, and to real estate. Now she's real estate broker.
[00:13:05] And what, what grandfather, the grandfather that you read about in the book, what primarily, what was his background?
[00:13:12] He was a marine and then a plumber. He's a plumber my whole life. Just big time outdoors when he was all, like everything,
[00:13:19] everything was on in fishing. I mean, work working just so he could get out and fish with his grandkids mostly.
[00:13:25] Dude, I got pictures of me on my two years old and his cow will have the damn dear leg in my hand, and I blocked around here, can't.
[00:13:31] Like that was his jam, so that was my mother's dad.
[00:13:36] And then you said you moved from one ranch to another ranch when you turned 13.
[00:13:40] Yeah, we moved down and we sold, we sold out up there and then moved down the CPO Utah.
[00:13:44] And my stepdad had about 40 head of horses down there and yeah, roughly 40 head. And then he's an electrical contractor and he'll make ends meet.
[00:13:53] And then the horse market went bust pretty hard back in 20, 2000.
[00:13:59] I don't see what was that, 2002 maybe?
[00:14:03] I can't remember the first time. Anyway, when they passed the No Kill Bill.
[00:14:07] Yeah, I can't remember it's two on two or two on four. And anyway, it hit hard. I mean, there was gear horses on the market for nothing.
[00:14:16] People were just taking their horses out and turning them out in the desert and stuff like going live for you.
[00:14:21] I mean, those horses just died.
[00:14:23] Yeah, no one did what they do.
[00:14:24] No, I, the reason I said, oh, yeah, because I read an article about that not too long ago, but how people were just letting their,
[00:14:29] I guess they're domesticated horses go, you know, and they're not ready to survive out there.
[00:14:34] Well, especially most everybody has gillings and no, no wild horse herd is going to let a gilling in.
[00:14:42] I mean, the studs are just going to kill them. It's not a mayor and it's, you know, it's a unique and he doesn't need that around.
[00:14:48] So I mean, if you maybe mayors could make it, but even then it's doubtful their hooves are not, there's not bill for anymore.
[00:14:55] You know, it's really brother. How does the horse kill another horse?
[00:14:57] Of course, they kick, like, so a lot of times they'll break their backs like stud horses, they'll get up on their hind ends like this and flip them break their necks or backs and buy it and kick and I mean, they can kick.
[00:15:12] The horse kicks another horse and they had to kill it easy for sure. I don't horse kill one of my cows last fall.
[00:15:17] Okay, to at least that's how we can figure out. To cows, find the next day.
[00:15:21] So it was horse around there.
[00:15:23] So now you were, you were pretty into sports too, right? When you were going, when did you start like wrestling and why don't they sports?
[00:15:31] You play. I didn't start wrestling until I was a freshman at high school.
[00:15:35] I played baseball growing up, but this in box and my family's friends with Jim Fomers, family friend, our gene Fomers.
[00:15:41] So I was a family friend growing up and so to the low, getting punched in head for a bit.
[00:15:45] And then I got in, it was, I think there was like a middle school. That's what was. It was a middle school PE, you know, where you'd go through like all the different sports.
[00:15:57] So like bad, bad, and then shit like this. And then it was like a wrestling section.
[00:16:03] I was like, man, I like this. So we're all compared to bad bit.
[00:16:06] Yeah, that's right.
[00:16:08] So then my mom signed me up at the tree house with Eve on even off for a while.
[00:16:12] That was in Trapear Utah. I was like maybe an hour drive and saw us taking his classes for a bit like cam Jones and some of these other studs from high school wrestling studs and came one risk.
[00:16:24] And then then we moved and I went, I don't know, I wrestled that first year at Riverson High School.
[00:16:30] And then after that I went, moved down to film more.
[00:16:34] Did you still wrestling?
[00:16:35] Yeah, I said, yeah.
[00:16:37] What year was this? What year did you graduate from?
[00:16:38] I was 23, how did you do wrestling and did you make the state or anything?
[00:16:44] Yeah, yeah, I won districts my senior year. And then at state, I ended up, I was, man, it sucks.
[00:16:50] But I got super sick. I had to drink, I got my wrestling coach.
[00:16:55] I just still talk about this all the time. But I was weighing in with a gallon jug of water, trying to get up to weight.
[00:17:01] So I was wrestling at 89 and I just was a bar.
[00:17:04] I just didn't weigh enough. You know, you got to make the 160 weight. I wasn't making it state. Well, plus two pound lounds.
[00:17:11] So I struggled that year.
[00:17:13] That's still pretty impressive that you only started wrestling your freshman year and you made it to state your senior year.
[00:17:19] Yeah, I'm impressive, man. My junior year, I think I was probably better wrestler.
[00:17:24] I got in trouble.
[00:17:26] I was coming to it.
[00:17:28] And what did you do to get in trouble?
[00:17:30] This is where the goods don't work.
[00:17:32] I don't want to be bad. So, I got, me and my stepdad got in the fist fight.
[00:17:40] And I got kicked out.
[00:17:42] We, me and I had butted heads since I was little big time.
[00:17:47] And I ended up we got in a pretty good scrap.
[00:17:51] And anyway, we couldn't live in the same place as anymore.
[00:17:54] So I went to live with my other grandpa on Salt Lake.
[00:17:56] And I went back to Riverton that year.
[00:17:57] I was like, I was like, I'm just not going to school.
[00:18:01] And my dad, my whole life, my biological father was like in and out of jail and stuff.
[00:18:05] And in that prison.
[00:18:07] So what?
[00:18:11] What was he doing?
[00:18:13] Man, I don't know.
[00:18:15] I get stories.
[00:18:17] I don't know what's.
[00:18:18] I know at least one thing was a white card thing.
[00:18:20] I know there were some violent things.
[00:18:22] But I don't know what, you know.
[00:18:23] I don't know. I don't know.
[00:18:27] So he, he was out for a minute.
[00:18:30] And so I was like, well, I'll just live with him then.
[00:18:32] And that was about I did that lasted for like, man, he was out for like a month or something.
[00:18:36] And then being a stepdad's like, I got tough, like a really tough job.
[00:18:40] Yeah, and he's man, he's, I don't want to sit and he had some issues of his own.
[00:18:46] So, man, like whiskey bottles and damn grain bins.
[00:18:48] Yeah, I can be out trying to feed horses. You're like, oh, there's a rich and rare.
[00:18:53] So, yeah, I can.
[00:18:56] When did you, so you were hunting your whole as grown up your whole life?
[00:19:00] Oh, yeah.
[00:19:01] Bo hunting, too.
[00:19:02] I started bow hunting in about 14.
[00:19:04] Okay.
[00:19:05] Because in Cody has been going to me into it.
[00:19:06] He's actually, I think last week, I think it was.
[00:19:09] He went try it out for the world team.
[00:19:11] Dang for, uh, stick bow.
[00:19:13] Dang.
[00:19:14] Yeah, he's pretty solemn.
[00:19:14] At what point did you start thinking about joining the military?
[00:19:18] Uh, you know, gee, I joined shit as a kid.
[00:19:22] I always thought about it.
[00:19:24] But I was, you know, what I thought for sure, I was going to go into military.
[00:19:28] But then there was nothing going on.
[00:19:30] I don't understand why anybody would join without a war.
[00:19:34] So, then I was just, you know, for so I went through a stretch where I thought I won't do this.
[00:19:39] And I was an F off and just riding bulls and just being dumb and party and then every other thing that young Cavaliers do.
[00:19:46] Jason girls and such.
[00:19:48] And then, uh, nine eleven happened.
[00:19:52] And I was, this is when I was actually at Rivers and High School.
[00:19:55] So you're a sophomore maybe?
[00:19:56] So I've just started your sophomore year.
[00:19:58] Yeah, sophomore year.
[00:20:00] No junior year.
[00:20:01] Yeah, so you graduated in then, oh, three.
[00:20:03] How's it junior?
[00:20:04] Because I was at Riverside because my sophomore year I was at Miller.
[00:20:06] Yeah, and we were slept in school.
[00:20:11] And what you know, it was like the first period of the day.
[00:20:14] But we were all over it.
[00:20:15] My cousin's house and one of the kids was there's a, uh,
[00:20:18] I can't remember if he's from Pakistan or whatever.
[00:20:21] But anyway, the friend of ours from Middle East and he was there with us, you know,
[00:20:26] walking the stuff, go down and I feel like that always kind of helped me.
[00:20:30] Like view things differently.
[00:20:32] Because he was still a buddy.
[00:20:33] You know, but we saw the towers come down.
[00:20:37] I was like, man, I don't know.
[00:20:39] I don't know if I got over there, you know.
[00:20:42] So I finished up school and then, uh, well, actually I enlisted as a junior.
[00:20:45] I was first, uh, recruiter that talked to me.
[00:20:47] I'm just enlisted.
[00:20:48] I was going as soon as over.
[00:20:50] And you just, the first recruiter you talked to was an Army recruiter?
[00:20:54] Yeah, that was that.
[00:20:56] Yeah, I didn't know crap.
[00:20:58] And my grandpa didn't really like Marine Corps very much.
[00:20:59] And the only thing he says, I'll kill you if you join the Marine Corps.
[00:21:02] He told me that.
[00:21:05] At least a dozen times growing up.
[00:21:07] Uh, and so I thought, well, it's not the Marine Corps.
[00:21:10] Did your grandfather fight, or maybe, which war?
[00:21:14] No, he, he, he split Vietnam and, uh, Korea.
[00:21:18] And then his brother, his two little brothers went over Vietnam.
[00:21:22] And I think he was bitter about that.
[00:21:24] I mean, I'm never, I never asked him why he had the Marine Corps.
[00:21:26] So I really don't know. I'm, I know he had a tattoo of a bulldog over here.
[00:21:31] And when he was older, he used to say, I say, Grandpa, when I was little and he was older.
[00:21:35] Say, Grandpa, what's that? You know, he said, it's a picture of your grandma.
[00:21:39] So you, did you know what kind of job you were having the Army?
[00:21:45] Did you even know that the Army had to job, sir?
[00:21:48] No. Well, I mean, not really.
[00:21:50] No. So he shows me this video, okay.
[00:21:53] Who's the recruiter?
[00:21:54] Yeah. I almost want to say his name.
[00:21:57] But he, uh, he's not a bad guy. He just did bad things.
[00:22:01] So he shows me this video and he's like, check that out.
[00:22:05] These dudes like jump now to points and shit. Oh, yeah.
[00:22:08] That looks bad.
[00:22:10] He's like, this way going to do him like hell. Yeah.
[00:22:12] And he's like, see that one guy?
[00:22:13] And it's like the, I'm assuming to the echo, the 18 echo or whatever.
[00:22:16] And he's like, see, I got with that radio.
[00:22:19] He's like, he gets paid six extra grand to join.
[00:22:21] And if he carries that radio, I mean, that's not exactly how he said it.
[00:22:25] But he's like, you get a signing bonus.
[00:22:27] And all you got to do is carry the section 20 pounds a gear or whatever.
[00:22:30] You know, he's like, you're tough enough.
[00:22:32] Carry 20 extra pounds. Oh, I'm like, oh, yeah.
[00:22:33] He's running that racket before.
[00:22:36] Yeah.
[00:22:37] Played psychological warfare. You're tough enough, right?
[00:22:39] Yeah.
[00:22:40] Oh, this is just, yeah.
[00:22:42] It's still frustrating.
[00:22:43] So I'm not going to hate the guy and work down.
[00:22:45] So, so what did you enlist as?
[00:22:47] Did you have an MOS when you enlist?
[00:22:48] Yeah, as a calm job.
[00:22:50] There's a 31 series calm jobs.
[00:22:52] 31, uh, you know, if they changed it, but I think it was a 31 uniform.
[00:22:55] It's time.
[00:22:56] It has, like, signal, something.
[00:22:59] I honest to goodness did not a single thing.
[00:23:02] I had, I had dudes.
[00:23:05] I could barely feel a single hour when we were over there.
[00:23:08] I didn't know shit.
[00:23:09] In fact, one time I was dating a girl and she was like, what's the smartest thing you ever did when you were over there?
[00:23:14] And I was like, what's the thing?
[00:23:15] Like, the most brain power.
[00:23:18] I was like, I set up a tax at one time on this island.
[00:23:22] And I was like, I was thinking about my, oh shit, I just carried it.
[00:23:26] But I really, you know, you didn't even say it.
[00:23:29] But really, in my head at first, I had thought it to it,
[00:23:32] but then I remember I gave it to Adam.
[00:23:37] And you joined the National Guard, right?
[00:23:39] Yeah.
[00:23:39] Did you know the difference between the National Guard?
[00:23:40] No, I don't, I swear to you, I think maybe 20% of kids at that time had any idea what was going on.
[00:23:48] So like, small town Utah has a bunch of those National Guard recruiting stations.
[00:23:53] They don't know. You inform size the same thing, you know, shit.
[00:23:56] Unless you have like a family member that's in or something.
[00:23:59] And then that's different.
[00:24:01] Which my buddy who I enlisted with had a family member that was in.
[00:24:04] Did they tell him what was up?
[00:24:06] Did he know what was going on?
[00:24:06] Here's what I think happened there.
[00:24:07] His brother-in-law, really good dude.
[00:24:12] I think was like, let's not get you guys sent over into a meat grinder.
[00:24:17] God, I think that's, if I had to get a little did he know.
[00:24:20] Yeah, right?
[00:24:22] And you know, it's funny. The guard thing works out better for me because how did I been in an active unit with that shit,
[00:24:28] MLS, I wouldn't have never did anything.
[00:24:30] I don't even stuck in a freaking com cage the entire time.
[00:24:33] So, it kind of worked out.
[00:24:34] Yeah. So, did you go to boot camp in between your junior and senior years now?
[00:24:40] So you had to fully graduate.
[00:24:42] Yeah. You fully graduated.
[00:24:44] Delayed entry and whatever they call them.
[00:24:46] And you fully graduated.
[00:24:49] At what point did you know that you were going to be activated and sent to overseas?
[00:24:53] I volunteered for it.
[00:24:55] So I got to, so I went through basic training and then what did you think when you got to basic training?
[00:25:00] I'll tell you.
[00:25:01] So my recruitment. So I always tell people, like, when you get to boot camp, you're not going to like me anymore.
[00:25:09] There's going to be two to three weeks where you're like, jocco, I hate that guy.
[00:25:13] If I ever see him, I'm going to take a swing out of, because no, my almost no matter who you are, when you get to boot camp,
[00:25:19] you think,
[00:25:21] Oh, this was a mistake.
[00:25:23] Yeah, especially them first three weeks, but then toward the end, it starts to become right.
[00:25:26] You're like, this is cool. And so I went to Fort Bending, but pokeside Fort Bending.
[00:25:32] And again, wake up every morning screaming infantry in all this shit, you know, and then so my recruiter had also he put me through maps with the airborne physical and all the stuff.
[00:25:44] Tell me how to airborne on my contract, all this shit.
[00:25:47] I get in the boot camp and, you know, like two weeks before when you're at Bending, they call up.
[00:25:52] And they're together with the airborne on your contract coming here and line up.
[00:25:54] I come on up, you know, I go in there and he's like, what the fuck are you doing?
[00:25:59] I'm like, what are you talking about? He's like, you ain't no fucking airborne in your contract.
[00:26:04] So, it wasn't even in your contract. He went as far as to put me through the airborne physical, but it wasn't in your contract.
[00:26:12] Yeah, like why go through the physical? It's not like, no one else does.
[00:26:15] So anyway, I feel like I got kind of, but it worked out, you know, I'm not trying to complain, but I do feel like he
[00:26:20] was a little near to some salty.
[00:26:24] I think like, been to almost 20 years later about this.
[00:26:27] But when you're going through boot camp in the national guard to be reserved, you must also, that's like, make it a little bit more comfortable.
[00:26:36] Because you can find some comfort in the fact that like, God, well, at least I didn't go active duty.
[00:26:41] Whereas if you're active duty, you're like, oh, this is the rest of my, this is the next six, four years of my life is to be in the surrounded by these crazy people, young and screaming.
[00:26:48] Because you think that's what the military's like when you go to boot camp.
[00:26:52] Yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean, I guess, but I just want to go to the warm, man.
[00:26:56] So, as soon as I got back to my unit after I, T, you know, stuff.
[00:27:00] So you went to boot camp, AIT, were you kicking ass in AIT since you killed so many freaking woodpeckers growing up?
[00:27:06] Or you like, no, I just wanted you, were you marksman and expert and all that stuff?
[00:27:10] I mean, I shot fine, you know, I don't think I was, but the, the triggers on those were really hard to use to them, 16 trigger first, but I mean, I shot fine.
[00:27:18] What about, what about just like being out in the woods and just feeling good about all that?
[00:27:23] That was great.
[00:27:23] Yeah, you kind of kick ass in the bet AIT.
[00:27:25] Yeah, especially like the FTX stuff.
[00:27:28] I mean, it was like nothing, man.
[00:27:30] It's like all these dudes are all worried about like three days in the mud.
[00:27:34] It's like camp, man.
[00:27:35] The only time it sucked is when it, uh, it banning on our final FTX at rain, which I think is true for like almost anybody that goes through banning, but it rained for like the entire time.
[00:27:47] So all of our hasties were like water up to our chest and still have like that, you know, in fact, what, uh, one time during night guard, my body, you know, we had your ankles in a locked in hasties or whatever.
[00:27:56] Oh, he was, he was sleeping and I was up and it was his turn I turned around and there's a wolf spider like this big. She might put that sucker on us.
[00:28:05] That's right.
[00:28:07] Yeah, I just tapped him.
[00:28:08] It's eyes are like, you know, you can't make noise, no.
[00:28:12] I was like, trying to get it off of you.
[00:28:15] Anyway, yeah, um, I wasn't Fort Lewis Washington.
[00:28:19] I was going through sealed tactical training, which is what, what you do in your new guy.
[00:28:22] And then we, there's some pretty heinous mosquitoes where we were and I had learned to carry a mosquito. I would just carry like a, like a, you won yard square of mosquito netting.
[00:28:37] And that way, if we laid up, I could just take that thing out and just put it underneath my floppy hat and and talking to my collar and be good to go.
[00:28:44] Well, my, my, the officer that was in charge of us brought, brought like a full on mosquito net like you see, I don't know, like maybe in some British colonists who were in like Africa in like 1875 or something.
[00:29:03] You know, this big giant screen with the wicker bands around it pushing it out and so we're in this layup position.
[00:29:11] And this other friend of mine didn't have any net and a lot of guys actually didn't have any net.
[00:29:16] And so my buddy was sitting there catching mosquitoes and putting them into this.
[00:29:21] While he was sleeping catching mosquitoes, and with the mosquitoes, he actually trapped his eyes.
[00:29:26] He woke up for the morning.
[00:29:30] I got to kick out of that one.
[00:29:32] That's brutal.
[00:29:34] Uh, what were you to say though?
[00:29:36] So you, you put the spider on the, oh yeah, yeah, it just is just funny to watch and spas out when he knew we could have made no one.
[00:29:44] You know, you skit this mosquito was better though.
[00:29:51] So you feeling good at AIT and the war is in full swing right now, right? So what year is this?
[00:29:57] This is G 2002 and three. I don't know. What was that?
[00:29:59] It was at the unforged two and three probably getting and you said you graduated in 2003 and you went right to boot camp.
[00:30:06] There was a couple months break because I was doing concrete.
[00:30:10] So I did conquer. So I must have went to boot camp around October.
[00:30:15] So it's probably 2004.
[00:30:17] Well, that would have known because no, because well, maybe it was. I can't remember. I'm sorry.
[00:30:23] I'm just trying to think time phrase time frame what was not.
[00:30:26] No, I couldn't even record it. Because we shipped.
[00:30:32] Oh, shit. Maybe I'm sorry. I keep doing this now. I'm thinking we shipped out on January.
[00:30:38] 21st of 2005 for a right. So probably was 2004.
[00:30:45] Yeah. So you got when you got done with it. It's like 2004. So the war is going, but it's not gotten crazy yet in 2000.
[00:30:54] No, it's still like pretty low level conflict happening in Iraq.
[00:31:02] Then you got them with AIT. Then what happened? Did you go home and you would get attached to your unit?
[00:31:09] But you didn't deploy right away. Did you?
[00:31:11] It wasn't very long. I can't remember how long. It wasn't very long at all. I went to the first drill thing.
[00:31:18] And I was like, this is horrific.
[00:31:20] What going to drill? It was just.
[00:31:25] I didn't do it was terrible. Because you wanted to be.
[00:31:29] Well, it's also just, yeah, and it's just like sitting doing radio shit and like in a, like, a office and stuff and like, no, I'm not about it.
[00:31:39] So as soon as there was somebody to point and they said they had, so I was in drill.
[00:31:46] I can't remember which iteration drill was, but I was in drill.
[00:31:51] And they said they had someone downstairs doing SRP to go or it wasn't SRP.
[00:31:57] What's the SRP?
[00:32:00] It's like, we're getting all your checking all your paperwork vaccination.
[00:32:05] Let's get this to go out. I can't remember the right. That's right. I can't.
[00:32:09] But anyway, they were downstairs doing that crap.
[00:32:10] And they said that they had slots. And so I went and talked to my first line later. And I was like, I want to go, you know, I want to go on this.
[00:32:19] And he was like, fine, you know, so he let me go down there and go.
[00:32:24] How long did they do extra training?
[00:32:27] Yeah, who did they attach you to get ready to deploy?
[00:32:30] Groundski's 28th ID.
[00:32:31] They sent us to, so after we, yeah, and so that was actually, yeah, so we went straight from there to from Utah to Mississippi.
[00:32:42] Just know what the hell is going with that?
[00:32:44] Camp Shelby. And we did a couple months of camp Shelby.
[00:32:48] And then we did a month rotation to NTC.
[00:32:51] And then we shipped.
[00:32:52] And how was that? Did you feel like you were getting pretty well prepared?
[00:32:55] Yes, well, because by then they put us, they stood up an actual PSDL.
[00:32:58] And so we had a separate training cycle.
[00:33:02] Same cycle, but separate training pathway.
[00:33:04] So other than like company live fires and stuff like this, we were all getting spun up by.
[00:33:10] And mostly, OCs were like Rangers because they were the only ones that really been doing PSD for real.
[00:33:15] So we had good OCs. I felt like in training was pretty good.
[00:33:19] It was better training that I got anywhere else.
[00:33:21] So you immediately got attached to a group that was going to be doing PSD, which is personal secured detail.
[00:33:25] That's where that's what they told you your job was going to be.
[00:33:28] Yeah, they pulled from within the unit and developed a PSDL because they didn't have one.
[00:33:34] And then you went to, you ended up going to NTC, which is in front of Irwin, California,
[00:33:40] which is freaking awesome training.
[00:33:43] They have whole city set up, villages and role players and pyro techniques.
[00:33:48] Did they have all that stuff for you guys?
[00:33:50] Were you feeling pretty good about it?
[00:33:51] Yeah, we were living in those circus tents.
[00:33:55] That part's not fun.
[00:33:57] Yeah, the training was good. I feel like, yeah, but the two uniforms for like 30 days in that circus tent was not my favorite.
[00:34:03] Now, at this time, Ramadi is start, do you know when you find out you're going to actually tell Ramadi, like you don't know, day before we should.
[00:34:11] Get stuff.
[00:34:13] They were just kept telling us, take this training series, man, because you might have to use it, you know, that kind of stuff.
[00:34:18] You'd hear like grumblings, SUNY Triangle, you'd hear this kind of stuff.
[00:34:23] Okay, you're ready to rock it wrong.
[00:34:26] How old were you at this point?
[00:34:28] Yeah, hell, yeah.
[00:34:30] You just young and dumb man.
[00:34:33] Yeah.
[00:34:34] So then you get done with that.
[00:34:36] Now it's time to leave.
[00:34:38] Do you freaking blow it out before you went overseas?
[00:34:41] Yeah, we, yeah, we spent some time with you.
[00:34:44] I'm always in for a minute.
[00:34:48] Yeah.
[00:34:52] And when you, when you're leaving, what's your, what's your parents saying?
[00:34:58] What's your mom saying?
[00:35:00] Oh, my grandfather saying, are they worried sick?
[00:35:03] Yeah, my mom for sure was my grandpa just didn't say much.
[00:35:06] Honestly, he really never did about any of this, but my mom was definitely terrified the whole time for sure.
[00:35:14] She wasn't happy and.
[00:35:16] I just kind of laughed a little bit about no watch.
[00:35:20] Because I'm thinking you're 90, like there's nothing else in the world you want to do and your mom's just horrified by the whole thing.
[00:35:27] Sorry mom.
[00:35:28] And honestly, as father now, I got three boys now.
[00:35:31] I've a daughter and three boys and I think about it all the time.
[00:35:33] I think it must be much, much worse to send a kid off to war than to go to war yourself.
[00:35:41] Yeah, it would have to.
[00:35:42] And I've also always felt that it would be worse like when I was overseas, I think it was worse for my wife than it was for me.
[00:35:49] Because I know what's going on.
[00:35:51] Yeah.
[00:35:52] If I die, it's kind of like, I mean, I don't, you know, I'm not really going to like care too much.
[00:36:00] I mean, I guess I would be bummed for that.
[00:36:03] But, but, but, you know, my wife is going to be, you know, stuck with all these kids and everything.
[00:36:09] So I don't know.
[00:36:11] I always felt like it was much harder for the people that are staying home than it is for the people that are going overseas.
[00:36:16] Yeah.
[00:36:17] But worse even still for kids, I think.
[00:36:20] Like the children of.
[00:36:22] Yeah.
[00:36:23] Yeah.
[00:36:24] I think my kids were actually too young to even understand.
[00:36:26] They were.
[00:36:26] And between the ages of like, I guess seven and three.
[00:36:34] Is that right?
[00:36:36] Yeah, seven and three or something like that.
[00:36:39] So I don't think they really even comprehended.
[00:36:42] And I don't know.
[00:36:44] You know, like one thing with me is I never, I never like wore a uniform home.
[00:36:48] In the sealed teams, you just don't, you just, you know, you got all your shit at work and you just put your uniform on and you get there.
[00:36:53] When you get done, you've promised shorts and a t shirt and flip flops and you go home.
[00:36:57] And your kids just don't even know what's happening.
[00:36:59] They don't understand any of it, you know.
[00:37:02] They just think you just go to work sometimes and you travel.
[00:37:06] I don't know.
[00:37:06] I don't think my kids really connected it too much that they were that I don't think they had the mental capacity or understanding to actually worry.
[00:37:15] I don't think they worried at all.
[00:37:16] I don't think they worried one second.
[00:37:19] Not like my wife did.
[00:37:20] Especially when she's going to, you know, going to hospital visit guys and stuff like that.
[00:37:25] I guess when the kids are a little bit older.
[00:37:29] Yeah, you're probably right about all that though.
[00:37:31] Yeah, he's like, when I think even now when I go hunting for a week or so,
[00:37:35] I probably worry more than my kids are missed my kids more than they miss me.
[00:37:38] Yeah, yeah, yeah, my buddy, Dave.
[00:37:42] You know, he's got young kids right now and he was talking to me.
[00:37:45] He was talking to me, he's like, I don't know how you, how do you went on deployment.
[00:37:50] He feels bad when he goes on a work trip for a week, you know.
[00:37:54] And I get it, you know, and maybe it's because, you know, he's older than I was at the time.
[00:37:59] And I guess I had that like kind of mindset that was a little bit maybe not super good.
[00:38:10] So you find out a day before you find out you guys are going to see.
[00:38:13] It was it was either like a day or two before one long time. I mean, I don't think it was a week.
[00:38:18] Did you know anything about Romadi? Yeah, I mean we were watching the news.
[00:38:22] And yeah, Feliz did happen about eight months or so before something like that.
[00:38:28] Maybe four year.
[00:38:30] One was found if you were in May.
[00:38:32] Yeah, something like that.
[00:38:34] So yeah, about a year before Feliz did happen.
[00:38:37] So we had, you know, we got some idea.
[00:38:39] Uh-huh, then ever, all the bad guys pushed into the Romadi at that time.
[00:38:44] Yeah, I mean, he's such a story with always.
[00:38:46] Yeah, I think it was pretty accurate.
[00:38:48] Just when you look at the level of violence from Felizja and then the level of violence in Romadi at that time,
[00:38:54] it definitely flared up a lot.
[00:38:57] Do you guys just fly over in like a C 17 or something? How do you get over there?
[00:39:01] No, we flew over in like Delta or something.
[00:39:04] I was like a civilian jet to where to coate.
[00:39:07] Yeah, we flew into Coate.
[00:39:09] We went from Mississippi and then fueled up in Maine and then from Maine to Shannon Island and then from Shannon Island to Coate.
[00:39:18] And then you get to Coate.
[00:39:19] Now they throw you on C 130s and bring you into Romadi or how I drove up.
[00:39:24] Yeah, we were all unit.
[00:39:26] No, they flew them up, but our team was security for the log pack and all that.
[00:39:31] And all that.
[00:39:32] So we drove the Sardines through Navstar.
[00:39:35] And so now it's 2005.
[00:39:41] Yeah, now it's 2000, but what month?
[00:39:44] I think May.
[00:39:45] No, June is June, I think.
[00:39:47] June of 2005.
[00:39:49] You're rolling up.
[00:39:51] So that's the freaking transit right there.
[00:39:53] Yeah, because speaking of the SUNY triangle, you're going right through that.
[00:39:57] Yeah, so yeah, so yeah, the first day was not.
[00:40:02] I mean, it was interesting, you know, once you cross those gates in there, it's like oil wells on fire and stuff and bowl of whole cars here and there scattered, but there's really not like anything going on in the South by rack.
[00:40:15] So for the first day, the first nine hours, I can't remember if it was, so we left burying is where we rolled out of and Kuwait.
[00:40:23] And the, was it Scania might, we might have been the first stop.
[00:40:27] I think Scania was the first stop.
[00:40:29] Anyway, so throughout that and like nothing happened.
[00:40:32] And then, but other than, you know, just kind of taking in the culture and it is, it is a for real culture track.
[00:40:37] Like southern Iraq, you know, anyone who's spending time in Mexico, you've seen poverty that's different than poverty in America for sure.
[00:40:44] Like, but the poverty in the South by rack is a whole new level.
[00:40:48] I mean, dudes like still in pieces of tarps from Americans, just like patch holes in their tents and stuff.
[00:40:54] So that was kind of a shock.
[00:40:56] And then, you know, kids coming up asking for water and food and this kind of shit, you know, that was like new.
[00:41:02] Or if you get slowed down somewhere dudes want cigarettes, tapping on anyone know.
[00:41:07] You know, like, so it was, it was interesting to sort of, it was kind of, and in some ways it was good to get acclimated,
[00:41:14] but nothing really happened on that first two days and then on day three, we ended up hitting,
[00:41:20] we didn't, we didn't detonate, we didn't end up discovering an idea, the lead truck did, and this was between Flusion and Baghdad.
[00:41:27] And so I was like our first rule experience with doing anything for real in country, you know.
[00:41:33] How many vehicles, like, just estimate, like how many vehicles are in this log pack?
[00:41:37] Is this like a 40 vehicle?
[00:41:39] I could have been more sensitive.
[00:41:41] Yeah, it took like six hours or so, I can't remember, three hours, it took hours and hours if you, you know, all these, I can't take a long time.
[00:41:49] Oh, man.
[00:41:52] So when did you finally pull into Ramadi? How many days did it take you to get there?
[00:41:57] Three days you pulled into camp Ramadi.
[00:42:01] And they, what's that like, maybe settling in, you've get moved into a barracks or, where did you, where did you guys stay at?
[00:42:08] No, yeah, city.
[00:42:10] No, they didn't have any of that yet.
[00:42:12] There was a big, there was a big MWR building at the front and then just put us up in that, you know, where they had that boxing.
[00:42:18] And that stuff in there.
[00:42:20] There's put us up in that in Cots for a week or two, I can't remember.
[00:42:25] But it was easier, I think it was easier for us in some ways to transit, for the people that were going to go outside the wire.
[00:42:31] I think it was easier for us for the first, like, mentally for that first week because when we hit that, when we hit that, you know, when I say hit it didn't detonate.
[00:42:41] When we hit that ID, it's kind of like, you know, bathes and fire in some ways, like you to see all, like, what this war is really about to be for the next year.
[00:42:52] You know, it's like middle of the night.
[00:42:55] The Marines that were helping us, they came, you know, tapped on the door and like, hey, we need help.
[00:43:01] You know, you want to go and go hell yeah, I want to go.
[00:43:04] So it's like, 84, you know, like, let's go.
[00:43:08] And so it was me and Johnny and these two Marines went out up this debt cord.
[00:43:14] So what they they'd found an ID and, you know, it's, honestly, after I'd been there for a while, looking backwards, it's a very obvious set up, right?
[00:43:23] There was an ID and then the students prayer rug and as drivers license was just left there, you know, it's like, or is ID cord, no drivers license.
[00:43:32] So we were told, we don't have time, you know, EOD can't make it, whatever, just trace that debt cord.
[00:43:40] And if it goes into the house, because it was going out into this compound, you know, all of the old true type stuff.
[00:43:46] So like, if it goes into the house, just frag the house and come back and also like, oh yeah.
[00:43:52] So, like, how the so-free gets to hope.
[00:43:55] So we hit the edge of this compound, you know, undernought this is you.
[00:43:59] And then two Marines and your buddy Johnny, yeah, my first line later, it's not sure.
[00:44:03] And well, I guess he stayed my first line later, but as before I got promoted.
[00:44:07] And it was, you know how they'd have those big, obviously, you know, but they'd have those walls, you know, senior block walls.
[00:44:13] Well, this one had a gate that was locked and then you could see there's a hole in the sides where I'd go or just go through the hole.
[00:44:21] So we go around and as we come around that hole, you get here a generator running.
[00:44:27] I just assumed that it was in the back or something, but you could hear a generator running.
[00:44:31] And then this dog starts barking like this little yappy dog.
[00:44:35] And we're like, in my mind, the only thing we got going for is right now, just four men is that nobody knows we're here.
[00:44:43] You know, with this compound, you don't exactly want to take plunging fire on this compound.
[00:44:47] I'm just four dudes very badly.
[00:44:49] So now I'm like, I can't wait to blow that f and dog up, man.
[00:44:51] I'm trying to hit that dude with my frag.
[00:44:57] I'm thinking that as we're coming around toward the front of the, toward the front of the home.
[00:45:03] And then once we take the right, you know, so we just go in the house here and then take a right towards the actual front and you could see the debt court going into the house.
[00:45:11] And I was like, oh yeah, man, this is, it's about beyond.
[00:45:15] So we go around the debt court and then there's a black kind of a half ass like a stoop, not a true porch, but I could stoop.
[00:45:19] And on that stoop was these sandals all laid out and like succession, you could tell us like,
[00:45:27] Dad, Mom, you know, son, older daughter, and then baby daughter with like these little two inch pink sandals.
[00:45:35] And then I had a little sister, I just still do, but I was very close to her at the time.
[00:45:41] She was like six or seven at that time.
[00:45:43] And man, that hit me like a free train, you know, like whoa.
[00:45:47] You know, it's not, it's, you know, just killing bad guys all the time, you know.
[00:45:51] So what ended up happening?
[00:45:53] We went all the way around.
[00:45:55] It ended pretty good.
[00:45:57] Actually, we went all the way around and the debt court came out and went into his orchard and the back.
[00:46:03] So we traveled through it a little bit and then one of them reen said,
[00:46:07] Hey, I'm gonna pull a pin flare out or pop a pin flare and Johnny didn't hear him.
[00:46:11] So I'm like, over here, like in a small echelon and Marine pops off.
[00:46:15] Pin flare and Johnny just hits the deck.
[00:46:17] You know what I'm saying?
[00:46:19] So I got a good kick out of it.
[00:46:23] But we stopped there for a minute.
[00:46:25] We just see that the decor was going out somewhere and there was two dudes up in another home on a balcony, smoke and cigars, you know, with AKs.
[00:46:33] It was like, well, anyway, depending on situation, but we went, you know, we didn't know that.
[00:46:41] We didn't know that.
[00:46:45] But the thing is like, almost guaranteed those dudes are waiting to see what we would do.
[00:46:49] Almost guaranteed they were the ones who set it up and everything.
[00:46:53] And I mean, what are you doing smoking cigars on your deck at two, four?
[00:46:57] Yeah, you can't, you can't even answer that question because they would be doing the most wild, crazy, like, sunset.
[00:47:05] So things that you ever have imagined in a million years, you know, like, like, for instance, 240 in the morning.
[00:47:13] I mean, I had a guy approach a target one time and my turps yellin at him and the guy's like, got carrying a box with him.
[00:47:19] And he's walking towards, we're assaulting a target.
[00:47:21] This was in baguette where assaulting a target and this guy's walking up, looking super suspect.
[00:47:27] And my turps like, hey, there's 50 cows pointed at him and like, like, hey, and so finally,
[00:47:33] I just like, well, I just like aggressively approach him.
[00:47:37] And, no, we told him to put the box down so he sets the box down on his feet.
[00:47:41] And I get over, so I go like, grab this guy and as I'm going to grab him, he like pulls something out of his pocket.
[00:47:49] And I'm so close to him, I had my weapon.
[00:47:51] I like smashed his hand with my weapon and he dropped this little remote that he used carrying.
[00:47:57] And yeah, it sounds all cool.
[00:47:59] Here's the deal, though.
[00:48:00] This dude was drunk. Once we got to the bottom of it, he was drunk.
[00:48:04] And in the box was a video machine and he had been over his buddy's house to watch him porno
[00:48:08] and getting drunk with his buddy.
[00:48:10] You know, I am a smoked him.
[00:48:12] You know, you got to deserve it.
[00:48:14] They do some dumb shit, man.
[00:48:16] And so you never know.
[00:48:18] So what you're saying is since you had a little bit of experience driving up there,
[00:48:22] the guys that arrived via air were sort of had to get used to going out in town.
[00:48:27] Yeah, they didn't experience the end of the culture.
[00:48:30] You know, or at least even not necessarily that we experienced, but even get a taste of.
[00:48:34] So their first time interacting was maybe not the best day.
[00:48:37] You know, and we got to have kind of ease into it a little bit.
[00:48:40] So then what was your date?
[00:48:42] What was your mission?
[00:48:43] So your mission as a PSD guy was to protect people, you know, important people,
[00:48:48] whether that's a batain commander, a brigade commander, support,
[00:48:52] I don't know, support EOD cleanances.
[00:48:54] That was basically what you were doing.
[00:48:55] Yeah, and well, yeah, but then,
[00:48:58] come in, the, our principles never really left.
[00:49:02] So we ended up just doing whatever came down.
[00:49:05] Lots, lots of QRF stuff, lots of EOD support.
[00:49:09] Quite a few like log packs, those are the most miserable missions on the entire.
[00:49:14] You can get drive all the way around Lake Havana.
[00:49:16] And absolutely nothing's going to happen except for you getting smoked with an ID.
[00:49:20] And like there's just, yeah, those were terrible because they're boring.
[00:49:24] And it's just like a crapshoot.
[00:49:26] Yeah, boring and waiting to die at the same time.
[00:49:28] Yeah, it's like the worst.
[00:49:30] So that's like mostly what we were doing.
[00:49:33] And then we, you know, few raids come down here and there and need somebody.
[00:49:37] We go to that stuff.
[00:49:38] What was your opt-emple? Like, it's varied a lot.
[00:49:42] Yeah, it's just varied a ton.
[00:49:44] It's dependent, like, we're doing like prisoner transport,
[00:49:47] then that would be like a two day boring ass thing,
[00:49:49] same kind of thing with log packs.
[00:49:51] But then if we were back home and there was not that going on,
[00:49:54] then we might have a little higher opt-emple.
[00:49:56] You know, the sweat was coming in and out.
[00:49:58] But you were basically work, would you say you're working every day?
[00:50:00] Yeah, for sure.
[00:50:01] Definitely working every day.
[00:50:02] Yeah, yeah, for sure.
[00:50:04] Rollin' out.
[00:50:05] I don't think they'd get out of the day.
[00:50:06] Yeah, I don't think we ought to die off.
[00:50:08] And so they brought in, I don't know if they just, you guys probably not.
[00:50:12] But they ended up bringing in shrinks.
[00:50:15] I can't remember what month, it might've been December.
[00:50:18] I can't remember what month it was.
[00:50:20] Anyway, they ended up bringing in shrinks to, like,
[00:50:23] that the army would start to have a problem with PTSD stuff on that home,
[00:50:26] whether it's still kind of PTSD aspect, then I think.
[00:50:29] And so they brought in these shrinks.
[00:50:31] And it was like, if you've done this many missions outside of the wire
[00:50:34] in this amount of time, then they were pulling you off the line
[00:50:37] and putting you, like, on a guard tower for how long, two weeks.
[00:50:41] And enough for one.
[00:50:42] Yeah, and when they did that with us, I was told my first son
[00:50:45] of my top business, the steepest should have ever heard of my life.
[00:50:48] You can't, I mean, yeah, you don't want to come in and just get soft, you know.
[00:50:55] Yeah, I think so.
[00:50:57] Yeah, and then also, you might start to not want to go back out again
[00:51:02] because, you know, you get that, you get time to think about it.
[00:51:05] And haunt, yeah.
[00:51:07] Was there any missions that you did that stood out to you that were particularly
[00:51:14] interesting or important missions?
[00:51:17] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:51:18] And so, you know, I was not really, man.
[00:51:19] And we did, I, how's the normal door guy, man?
[00:51:21] And I'm doing a lot of cool stuff.
[00:51:23] We did a raid with, we just supported first Marine Recom, one time on a raid
[00:51:27] between Ramadi and the Syrian border.
[00:51:30] They, someone, once we got predator drones, they discovered this compound out there
[00:51:34] that nobody even knew existed.
[00:51:35] It was like, I'm sand dunes.
[00:51:36] I think called it Big Wally Farm, I think.
[00:51:39] I hope that's not, and that's something like some classified shit or something
[00:51:43] I don't think Big Wally Farm could be that kind of stuff.
[00:51:49] If it is, they need to work on their freaking classification.
[00:51:52] Well, I know, that's what we call it.
[00:51:53] Okay, they did it.
[00:51:55] So, yeah, I mean, that was cool.
[00:51:59] Watching Recon take that down was pretty cool, but like we just did normal
[00:52:03] like day to day, trying not to get blown up, you know, try to shoot the
[00:52:07] people, the need to get shot and not the ones that don't.
[00:52:12] I mean, just really it was kind of, that's why when I was writing the book,
[00:52:16] you know, I had just like a very basic normal guy as soldiers story.
[00:52:22] So I don't think there was any, for me, it didn't seem like there was any sense
[00:52:26] and going into all these little minor, you know, this day we got shot out here.
[00:52:30] Like first time I took sniper fire was for sure memorable.
[00:52:33] In fact, I'll tell you that's really, really quick.
[00:52:35] We were out on during a trip to Recon.
[00:52:38] It was just outside of the Northgate.
[00:52:41] So before they had fortified that, we just had a, we just had like a big
[00:52:45] Texas barrier up there.
[00:52:47] And we were just sitting there waiting, I can't remember where the heck we were going,
[00:52:52] but we were staged to go somewhere.
[00:52:55] Yeah.
[00:52:56] And anyway, we'd take two, one round first and then another round,
[00:53:00] but it goes right over my gunner's head who was sitting in the
[00:53:04] Humvee on the gun, you know, but he's just daydream and, you know,
[00:53:08] he goes right through, they had a piece of camel netting.
[00:53:11] He goes right through the camel netting and he hit.
[00:53:14] And he, he looked like, when you, if you ever slaughtered bull when you shoot him,
[00:53:18] and that's almost like their legs come up and they hit the ground like a cart
[00:53:21] team.
[00:53:22] That's like what he did.
[00:53:23] We thought he was dead, man.
[00:53:24] Like he just piled up in that Humvee.
[00:53:28] And so I was like, where's the shooting from?
[00:53:31] Where's the shoot from?
[00:53:32] And I was like trying to find where he's coming from,
[00:53:34] but also not keep my head out for, you know, five minutes at a time.
[00:53:37] So like moving from side to side up and down, just trying to
[00:53:41] peat and then finally I said, the only thing this could be is this covert.
[00:53:44] Like there's nothing else to get possibly be.
[00:53:47] So we radio up and we radio up, mora, okay, we're going to go get this,
[00:53:53] you know, this is, this is, we're going to go check this covert.
[00:53:56] It's the only place we can figure that we get shot at from.
[00:53:58] Now, it's also possible that he was just like out in the desert somewhere.
[00:54:02] I'm shooting further than we thought they were capable of.
[00:54:04] But when you see a handful of Iraqi shoot night, it was like, they case with no front sight post.
[00:54:08] You think they're pulling off the 1100 yard shots.
[00:54:12] You're looking at that covert that's 200 yard shots.
[00:54:15] There he is.
[00:54:17] So we, the captain is like, I want to go out with you guys.
[00:54:22] I'm like, oh my gosh.
[00:54:24] Okay.
[00:54:25] So we wait and we wait, it had to be 15, 20 minutes had to be.
[00:54:30] Wait and for the captain to show up had to be.
[00:54:32] Could have been longer.
[00:54:34] So by the time he gets there, we're all talking.
[00:54:36] I don't know why his dude's still there.
[00:54:38] There's no freak way.
[00:54:39] He's just in a lay there for 20 minutes.
[00:54:41] Like, he's, they're dumb, but they're not that dumb.
[00:54:44] So the captain gets there and we roll out and he's like, okay, you know,
[00:54:48] we've got truck here, truck here on the side of the covert.
[00:54:52] And I was like, I'll go in and I pull the flash bang out.
[00:54:56] And he goes, we don't shoot till that flash bang in there.
[00:54:58] And I'm like, what are you talking about?
[00:55:00] You XO or XU mean, ID in there.
[00:55:02] No, it's like, okay.
[00:55:04] He's like, why won't you set this ID off over standing on it?
[00:55:08] And I was like, dude, I'm not going in that without throwing a bang or something.
[00:55:12] I think I'd much rather have the flash bang set the ID off.
[00:55:16] Then my goal is, yeah, I know.
[00:55:18] It's like, it's not happening then.
[00:55:20] And he goes, if you throw that flash bang in there,
[00:55:24] I'll write you an arc of 15.
[00:55:26] And I said, get your fucking hand out.
[00:55:28] I'm swear, I know it sounds pretend I swear, God.
[00:55:32] It's like throw it in there and the side you know, it's true,
[00:55:34] it's true.
[00:55:34] It's true, it's stuck in there.
[00:55:36] And I jump off.
[00:55:36] Johnny comes in, I mean, we're going in and I panicked myself.
[00:55:42] It's like, saw my own banger.
[00:55:44] And I thought it was UXO.
[00:55:45] So I was like, UXO, UXO, UXO, trying to back out and Johnny's like,
[00:55:48] what?
[00:55:49] Like UXO?
[00:55:50] He's like, sure's my fucking fire back.
[00:55:52] Yeah, I'm like, I'm exposed to unexploded ordinance.
[00:55:56] So he flew his flash bang in there.
[00:55:58] It went off, but there's still like little chunks of it.
[00:56:00] You know, better sit there.
[00:56:02] He's not that dumb.
[00:56:04] Backed out to get his freaking article on it.
[00:56:06] Yeah.
[00:56:08] Yeah.
[00:56:09] Yeah, that's classic.
[00:56:10] He, and that captain was good dude.
[00:56:12] He just, I don't know what he was thinking on that one.
[00:56:14] He didn't write me an arc of 15.
[00:56:16] Yeah.
[00:56:17] I mean, man, it's hard.
[00:56:18] I'm assuming that he was fresh in country as well.
[00:56:21] Oh, yeah, he was young, man.
[00:56:22] You have no idea of like, what's going on when you first
[00:56:25] get in country, you have just no idea.
[00:56:28] It's hard.
[00:56:29] And a young guy like, he was a 25 or something.
[00:56:32] 24.
[00:56:33] Yeah, I don't know how old are they.
[00:56:34] Roughly when they got something like that.
[00:56:36] Probably maybe 28, maybe 26.
[00:56:38] Something like that.
[00:56:39] But yeah, he's not all takes four years.
[00:56:41] Takes four years to make captain or a make-o-three.
[00:56:45] So he might have been 20.
[00:56:46] Yeah, so he's like 24, maybe 25.
[00:56:48] Yeah.
[00:56:49] Yeah.
[00:56:49] And he doesn't leave wires, you know.
[00:56:51] He's running a battery.
[00:56:53] Like he's a, you know.
[00:56:56] You know, just on what you said earlier about hey, you were just a regular soldier.
[00:57:00] All of my guys, we all just, we all looked at you all like,
[00:57:05] damn, because you guys were out going out there like you said,
[00:57:08] every single day you're going out there to do random searches of culverts
[00:57:13] where you were just taking fire from.
[00:57:14] Just like shit like that on the daily basis.
[00:57:17] And we just held all of you guys in the highest regard.
[00:57:22] For what you guys were doing every single day.
[00:57:25] You know, we'd come back and we'd go out and open come back and we had good
[00:57:29] chow and a place to chill out a little bit.
[00:57:32] And if a guy was like tired, it was like, okay, you know.
[00:57:36] And you guys just getting that task every single day.
[00:57:40] There's another thing I've talked about where it's like,
[00:57:44] I don't know which one of these, there's a different psychological impact.
[00:57:49] A lot of times army guys like we'd be working with army potins and they're like,
[00:57:52] oh, this is what we're going to task to do.
[00:57:54] But we're going to go out and patrol this area.
[00:57:55] We're going to go out and clear this block.
[00:57:57] We're going to go out.
[00:57:57] They're just getting tasked with what they're going to do.
[00:57:59] They don't have any real saying it.
[00:58:01] And we had a complete complete control.
[00:58:04] Like, oh, this is what we want to do.
[00:58:06] Then we'll go do it.
[00:58:07] If we didn't want to go do it, we wouldn't go do it.
[00:58:09] Like pretty much, we just made up what we wanted to do.
[00:58:12] And there's pros to that because you know,
[00:58:16] you can say, hey, I don't think this is a good time to do that.
[00:58:18] But it also when something happens, it's 100% because you said,
[00:58:22] hey, this is what we're going to do.
[00:58:24] So there's a different psychological impact
[00:58:27] depending on who you are of how it ends up in your brain.
[00:58:31] Because for us anyways, on that deployment,
[00:58:34] we did what we wanted to do.
[00:58:36] We picked and chose exactly what we wanted to do.
[00:58:39] We watched army guys get in task.
[00:58:41] Hey, you're going to go out.
[00:58:42] You know, that road you got ID it on yesterday?
[00:58:44] Yeah, you're going down it again today.
[00:58:46] You know, the one you got ID two times before that,
[00:58:49] you're going down that one as well.
[00:58:50] And guys just had to grit their teeth and oftentimes,
[00:58:54] just that was the mission that go executed.
[00:58:56] We had more flexibility, but then again, like I said,
[00:58:59] that means when something does go wrong,
[00:59:01] there's only, it's 100% on me as,
[00:59:04] that's my mission.
[00:59:05] I'm a proven it. Let's go.
[00:59:07] But yeah, you guys, you know, you talking about you just being a normal,
[00:59:11] oh, I didn't do it, didn't do much, there's no big deal.
[00:59:14] Going out there every single day into that city is,
[00:59:18] freaking salute to all you guys.
[00:59:22] How often would you say you were taking contact when you guys
[00:59:25] go out?
[00:59:26] We didn't, a lot of guys got away worse than us.
[00:59:30] We didn't take a lot.
[00:59:32] We really didn't take a lot, because we would also end up
[00:59:35] on dumbass, like a log patch, you know,
[00:59:37] like I'm saying. So then we're way out and,
[00:59:39] to quantum, but even on stuff like that,
[00:59:41] it's like ID every single time, every other time or something.
[00:59:45] But in town, I mean, I don't know if,
[00:59:49] I don't know if anybody didn't at least get shot at,
[00:59:52] everything like, you couldn't, you sure as hell could not go down
[00:59:56] route Michigan and not at least have someone to shoot at.
[00:59:59] I had some guys over at Eastern Remadi,
[01:00:03] and I was briefing the kernel of the siege of so-and-of awesome guy.
[01:00:08] And I was just briefing them on what we were doing, how we were doing it.
[01:00:11] And I said, you know, sir, my element that's out in Eastern Remadi,
[01:00:16] they've been contacted by the enemy the last 23 operations in a row.
[01:00:21] And then my intel guy, or my talk guy,
[01:00:24] came in like, while I'm saying that,
[01:00:26] and they're like, sort of just to let you know,
[01:00:28] troops and contacts in the guys, and he has like,
[01:00:30] I said, sir, make that 24 times in a row.
[01:00:33] So yeah, you were going to definitely going to,
[01:00:36] and enemy was there. Yeah. Yeah.
[01:00:38] The enemy was definitely there.
[01:00:39] Well, it didn't help that everyone was just
[01:00:41] retaken the same ground every day.
[01:00:43] I mean, and every, every idiot on the line was saying it,
[01:00:47] you know, this makes absolutely no sense.
[01:00:50] Well, what we doing, you know,
[01:00:52] we eventually ended up starting setting up cops and stuff like this,
[01:00:55] but in the beginning it was just essentially a glorified presence,
[01:00:59] but for a long-term presence at the troll.
[01:01:01] It's just very stupid stuff.
[01:01:03] But yeah, I mean, like I say, other guys are doing way more than we were to,
[01:01:06] so I way more or so.
[01:01:08] From a leadership perspective,
[01:01:10] would you see from the good leaders that you work for?
[01:01:12] Would you notice about what made you want to follow?
[01:01:15] Integrity is huge.
[01:01:20] When somebody is from a leadership perspective,
[01:01:23] I actually maybe integrates not through the right word.
[01:01:26] Yeah.
[01:01:27] If when you start seeing your, like your brass bullshit in you,
[01:01:34] you know, it's, I mean, it's really hard to get that trust back.
[01:01:38] Like just don't bullshit.
[01:01:39] It made tell me what it is.
[01:01:40] I mean, I don't want to name anybody here,
[01:01:42] even tell certain stories, but there was a couple of words like man,
[01:01:45] what are you doing?
[01:01:46] You know,
[01:01:48] and here's this a little warning for leaders.
[01:01:52] If you think that your frontline troops don't know when you're lying to them,
[01:01:56] you're so wrong.
[01:01:58] You tell that frontline troop that,
[01:02:00] hey, they'll know,
[01:02:01] this is no, don't worry,
[01:02:02] because we're going to do this later,
[01:02:03] or this is what's really happening.
[01:02:05] Everybody can see right through it.
[01:02:07] So if you're lying to your people,
[01:02:09] they're going to know you're not smarter than them.
[01:02:13] They know exactly what's happening,
[01:02:14] and you can't bullshit these guys.
[01:02:16] So don't try and do it.
[01:02:18] Yeah, like one time,
[01:02:19] one of them came up with this plan,
[01:02:21] I don't want to say it,
[01:02:22] but you call it the operation decoy.
[01:02:25] And we had a patchy gunships for the day,
[01:02:28] but it was like,
[01:02:29] so it was a two weeks out or something.
[01:02:31] And the plan was that our team will just take our trucks
[01:02:36] and roll through until like I do,
[01:02:38] as we went off.
[01:02:39] You know,
[01:02:40] my hopeful you see him, right?
[01:02:41] But,
[01:02:42] well, I listen to him.
[01:02:44] You're going to lead vehicle bitch.
[01:02:47] You're like, what is this?
[01:02:49] You know,
[01:02:50] like you just happy you got some helicopters?
[01:02:52] Yeah,
[01:02:55] yeah,
[01:02:55] we end up not having to do that one,
[01:02:56] but that was legitimately the plan.
[01:02:58] And yeah,
[01:02:59] my NCO is like,
[01:03:01] you can bust me,
[01:03:02] we're not doing this.
[01:03:04] Check.
[01:03:06] With that,
[01:03:08] that kind of covers some of the stuff leading up to anything.
[01:03:12] That's you want to cover leading up the glass factory?
[01:03:14] No, that's fine.
[01:03:15] All right.
[01:03:16] Let's get into this book, man.
[01:03:18] Again,
[01:03:19] book is called the Glass Factory.
[01:03:20] You're going to hear me read parts of it that it is got.
[01:03:25] It's great.
[01:03:26] It's great story.
[01:03:27] You're a great storyteller,
[01:03:29] but the internal dialogue that's going on in here
[01:03:32] of what your thoughts are,
[01:03:34] the progress you're making as a person is,
[01:03:38] it's just an outstanding book.
[01:03:40] So get the book.
[01:03:41] Here we go in.
[01:03:43] The glass factory
[01:03:45] starts like this.
[01:03:46] The whole recruitment push had gone smashingly thus far,
[01:03:49] but we were on our fourth day of this same drive,
[01:03:52] and we had already hugely surpassed
[01:03:54] our initial goal of 200 new recruits.
[01:03:57] The men of Ramadi had lined up in droves for the opportunity
[01:04:00] to become one of the guys chosen to fly to Jordan
[01:04:03] for the high speed training the US government.
[01:04:05] They funded for them,
[01:04:06] and later returned to their hometown to clean it up.
[01:04:09] In fact,
[01:04:11] we had processed hundreds of candidates already.
[01:04:13] The catch was,
[01:04:14] this was going to be day four of this particular mission,
[01:04:18] and we had only been promised three peaceful days.
[01:04:23] The problem was all the spots that we had for these future
[01:04:27] Iraqi police had been filled days ago.
[01:04:30] This was all just for show.
[01:04:33] No one on our team felt like it was a good idea
[01:04:35] to put ourselves at risk for almost nothing,
[01:04:37] but we were soldiers,
[01:04:38] and that's just part of the job,
[01:04:40] or so we are told.
[01:04:42] When we got into our home via Crack to Joke,
[01:04:45] well, let's go get blown up boys.
[01:04:47] I was just trying to cut the tension,
[01:04:50] probably more than any others,
[01:04:52] but I'm not sure it had the desired effect.
[01:04:55] Actually,
[01:04:58] talking to General Gronsky on here,
[01:05:00] he talks about the fact that,
[01:05:02] as he looks back, he's like,
[01:05:04] I,
[01:05:05] four days and no, didn't need it.
[01:05:07] Chin and none.
[01:05:08] You know, that's what he feels.
[01:05:10] That's what he said.
[01:05:12] And you know, you're in a,
[01:05:14] I mean, hindsight's always 2020.
[01:05:16] Well, I know why I did it though.
[01:05:19] The thing that was frustrating for us was
[01:05:23] day two,
[01:05:24] they had shot us,
[01:05:25] I mean, they missed wildly,
[01:05:27] but they shot us with rockets,
[01:05:28] and then day three,
[01:05:29] and that's just,
[01:05:30] I mean, maybe they were just shooting a camp for a long,
[01:05:32] like I said, they missed wildly.
[01:05:34] Day three, two dudes sat at the bus stop
[01:05:37] for like four hours,
[01:05:38] and we reported it up.
[01:05:39] And I mean,
[01:05:40] first of all,
[01:05:41] what are they waiting for?
[01:05:42] You know?
[01:05:43] So anyway, we reported that up,
[01:05:45] and, but the reason that you know,
[01:05:46] to defend Gronsky here,
[01:05:47] the reason that he went on with it is we had
[01:05:49] guys process and queer up until like midnight.
[01:05:52] And it was dark,
[01:05:53] and we turned away a couple hundred people got it.
[01:05:56] So he didn't want them to feel like they didn't have the opportunity.
[01:05:59] Even though no one was having the opportunity by then,
[01:06:02] but just the show of that,
[01:06:03] at least that's,
[01:06:04] that was my take.
[01:06:05] And then just from a strategic perspective here,
[01:06:08] the goal was to have the local people
[01:06:11] from Ramadi,
[01:06:13] join our Ramadi police,
[01:06:15] and then police up their own city.
[01:06:17] So they could,
[01:06:18] they could fight against the insurgents there.
[01:06:20] And as you said,
[01:06:21] there's hundreds of them that showed up.
[01:06:23] So that's pretty awesome.
[01:06:24] That's a pretty great feeling.
[01:06:25] And as all those people are showing up,
[01:06:27] you want to help them.
[01:06:28] And the call was made,
[01:06:30] trying to get these guys in there.
[01:06:32] You actually,
[01:06:34] and again,
[01:06:35] I'm not reading the whole book right now,
[01:06:37] let people get your audio book,
[01:06:39] but you had an uneasy feeling about this up.
[01:06:41] Yeah, the audio.
[01:06:42] Yeah,
[01:06:43] In fact,
[01:06:44] you wore like your winter,
[01:06:46] your shitty winter warfare boots, right?
[01:06:48] Those boots sucked.
[01:06:49] Yeah.
[01:06:50] Because you knew they're going to get cut off you.
[01:06:52] So I mean,
[01:06:53] that's what you're thinking anyway,
[01:06:55] you know,
[01:06:55] at least if you're going to live,
[01:06:57] I want to keep my good boots.
[01:06:59] Yeah.
[01:07:00] I mean,
[01:07:01] there was just too many things.
[01:07:03] And then I do,
[01:07:04] I don't know if it's promenation or what,
[01:07:06] but you,
[01:07:07] I just felt like I knew,
[01:07:09] just knew.
[01:07:12] Fast forward a little bit.
[01:07:13] We put our team members in their places inside the glass factories walls and went out of our selves.
[01:07:18] I was all the commas we walked out the gate,
[01:07:21] not that I generally feared being among Iraqi people.
[01:07:23] It's just in a situation like this where you're surrounded by roughly a thousand men,
[01:07:27] whom you have no ability to directly communicate with,
[01:07:29] things can spiral out of control very quickly.
[01:07:32] The otherwise peaceful crowd could be overtaken by the chaos of the mob and an instant,
[01:07:36] and that should be frightening to anybody.
[01:07:38] Up and down the line of Iraqis,
[01:07:42] we walked checking the crowd for threats as we went.
[01:07:44] We stopped frequently to interrogate Iraqis who looked eager,
[01:07:47] agitated or uncomfortable.
[01:07:49] Honestly, most of them look nervous and unsettled,
[01:07:52] which was perhaps the most reasonable way to feel in that moment.
[01:07:55] These guys knew they were endangered just as well as we did.
[01:07:58] After all, they lived in the city that we fought in.
[01:08:01] The danger of terrorist attacks had become just another part of daily life
[01:08:05] to the citizen of Western on bar province.
[01:08:08] At one point a man approached us unheasily,
[01:08:11] instantly causing my blood pressure rise.
[01:08:13] He stood close to me as he began to talk too close.
[01:08:16] Back up, I said, he has something to tell you,
[01:08:18] Carlos and Carlos is the nickname that you guys gave to your interpreter.
[01:08:22] Carlos leaned in and told me defensively,
[01:08:24] grenade, you found a grenade or interpreter,
[01:08:26] continued the conversation, yes, the man responded.
[01:08:29] A grenade with a wire, Carlos relayed to us in English.
[01:08:33] You got to be shitting me, I said, there's a fucking trip wire out here somewhere.
[01:08:37] Ask him where the hell it is, Carlos.
[01:08:39] Carlos turned to the man and asked, but we,
[01:08:42] but they were having a hard time communicating because the guy was so scared.
[01:08:45] It was like watching a kindergarten,
[01:08:47] Taddle Tail on his classmates on the playground.
[01:08:50] God dammit, we are out here in a crowd of 1,000 unpredictable Iraqis.
[01:08:54] And there's a fucking booby trap somewhere I said aloud,
[01:08:56] but to no one in particular.
[01:08:58] So there's a, there's just, and I'm only, again,
[01:09:04] I'm only reading chunks of this thing,
[01:09:06] but this is a rough situation to be in.
[01:09:09] How many people you guys got?
[01:09:11] Like, we had 12 of that day.
[01:09:13] And then, yeah, we had 12, and then they had the 1,7-Duce had an Abrams on the road.
[01:09:20] And then the rain's had a little bit of security.
[01:09:24] I mean, we probably, anyway, our team had 12 people.
[01:09:27] How many total coalition forces?
[01:09:30] Probably 40 of that.
[01:09:31] And there's a thousand.
[01:09:33] Yeah.
[01:09:34] Something like that.
[01:09:35] Yeah.
[01:09:35] Something roughly.
[01:09:36] I mean, you know that, that joint recruitment checkpoint of the road
[01:09:39] by the bridge from the glass factory?
[01:09:41] I don't know.
[01:09:42] It's like, it's got to be,
[01:09:45] a third, it's got to be a third of a mile or so,
[01:09:48] maybe even a half a mile.
[01:09:49] Or maybe it's a quarter.
[01:09:50] But anyway, you know, they might have changed too.
[01:09:52] Yeah, yeah, they could have took it out.
[01:09:54] That's true.
[01:09:55] Anyway, they were lined up down there to like, down there, to their 3D.
[01:09:59] I got pictures of it.
[01:10:00] I should say.
[01:10:01] There's a lot of people there.
[01:10:04] So, your, at this point, you're trying to locate the ID.
[01:10:09] You're kind of like, you're focused on that.
[01:10:10] You've got, of course, you can't just totally focus on that.
[01:10:12] You've got to list other guys walking around.
[01:10:14] You're asking questions.
[01:10:17] And then going back to the book, I heard a strange sound to my left.
[01:10:21] Followed by the report of rifles and bursts from the machine guns,
[01:10:25] set atop the Abrams tank that had been positioned to a block of street.
[01:10:29] I dropped to an E.M.A.G.N. to scan for targets.
[01:10:31] Bang, bang, bang, crack, crack, crack, crack, the round sound and off as they hit struck their target.
[01:10:37] Men began shouting in two different languages.
[01:10:39] The confusion of combat sets in rapidly.
[01:10:41] I rackies were running around frantically, screaming in high pitch tones and flailing about in the streets.
[01:10:46] Other stood frozen as if in fear and curiosity had stiffened them.
[01:10:50] Still scanning for a target that I could possibly identify and engage,
[01:10:54] but becoming up with none, I was getting worried that I was missing some obvious ambush coming from the buildings to our south.
[01:11:00] Then I saw it.
[01:11:02] A semi-truck had crashed through our perimeter a few hundred meters away.
[01:11:06] Our fellow soldiers and Marines had immediately recognized the threat and eliminated it before.
[01:11:11] It could do any more damage to our position.
[01:11:14] That's one hell of a v-bit I fought to myself.
[01:11:17] The acute problem had been solved, I hoped for all I knew that thing might be filled with explosives.
[01:11:22] But an even larger threat now loomed, a terrified mob.
[01:11:26] Civilians were running around horrified shoving each other, climbing over the jersey barriers,
[01:11:31] screaming, lost in the confusion of the moment.
[01:11:34] It did not take long to decide that we could not allow them to get any more riotous.
[01:11:40] It was time to start wrangling non-combatants.
[01:11:43] Johnny was within a year shot, so I asked him what the new plan of action was.
[01:11:47] He radioed the talk and briefed them on the current situation.
[01:11:50] Our commanding officers verified that reinforcement troops were now in route.
[01:11:54] All we could do in the time being, is keep the Iraqis contained until we had enough help to reorganize them.
[01:12:02] So there's a big vehicle approaches.
[01:12:05] Machine gun on the tank, the co-ax or something stops that vehicle.
[01:12:10] Yeah, we had a machine gun set up in a position that kind of blocking position too.
[01:12:17] So that was the end you could be hitting the engine block and disabled it.
[01:12:21] And it ended up turned out, it was just the Iraq, you mean the Iraq, you mean the Iraq, you mean you just drove through our constant pain of the war.
[01:12:28] But you can't, I mean a situation like especially when we were told all morning that's a VBA.
[01:12:33] Yeah, and by the way, that means there's constant wind, that means there's signs in Arabic that say don't pass here deadly force will be used.
[01:12:41] There's several layers of that stuff, which is why I was saying earlier like you could never imagine that someone would do that.
[01:12:49] And oftentimes also there, well, and in this case likely true, probably a distraction to get people distracted from what else was happening.
[01:12:58] Maybe they'd have time to build a VBA, and so they just sent this guy in there to start the distraction, which is what it looks like to me.
[01:13:08] Going back to the book, we started yelling at the civilians to get back in a line as Carlos translated for us.
[01:13:14] A few listened, but most pretended not to hear what he was saying or just playing to afraid to move.
[01:13:19] We ratchet it up our anger, little and look them dead in the eye and let them know we were still in command of this circus, but it was a little use.
[01:13:26] Whether we wanted it to be or not soon became apparent that we were going to have to be more forceful.
[01:13:32] Some of the men had to be physically dragged off of the tops of barriers.
[01:13:37] Some had to be shoved, others conformed when they saw that we were no longer messing around still others ran away and escaped the scene altogether.
[01:13:48] Fast forward a little bit.
[01:13:49] Two of our new marine friends were there asking whether we wanted them to get their dogs. Roger.
[01:13:57] Please do.
[01:13:59] These two marines were canine handlers and by reputation damn good ones.
[01:14:03] One of them was Sergeant Can.
[01:14:05] He had already deployed to Iraq before.
[01:14:08] This round for him had started at a small base out in western Iraq near the Syrian border, but that area lacked the action he long for.
[01:14:16] So he had requested transfer to the hottest area of the fight, Ramadi.
[01:14:20] He was a true badass war fighter and in my experience the military has no better tool for safely changing the minds of stubborn Iraqi men than a canine warrior at one den of a leash and a coxure marine at the other.
[01:14:36] So you got dogs on station now.
[01:14:41] At one point you sort of lighten your load a little bit.
[01:14:47] What did you go back into the gate to do that?
[01:14:50] Yeah, yeah.
[01:14:51] It's to the man gate and just started to awful.
[01:14:53] Because there was so many grab hands going on we were so undermaned and I started worrying about especially my smoke up here getting hit with a flat.
[01:15:02] You know, I just didn't want to burn the shit on my face.
[01:15:05] So I started to awful and stuff and then I chose to keep my shotgun which I still it's still weird to me that I but I didn't know like my shotgun is what I really needed in the moment for the crowd, but you know what if we had to push out and anyway I talked about that a little bit there.
[01:15:22] So it was I mean if you had to push out maybe you got to go back and get your rifle around like,
[01:15:27] you know, but you but you made yourself a little slicker is basically what you did so you could do more crowd control without worrying about one of these guys grabbing something.
[01:15:39] There's some Iraqi policemen with you.
[01:15:42] Yeah, and these guys started getting they started getting hyper aggressive.
[01:15:48] That was the best one we had by the way.
[01:15:51] I don't know, this one, this one that's going off here here. So this guy like basically is pointing his what point is AK at everybody, you know, he's getting ready to freaking looks like he's getting ready to start shooting people.
[01:16:04] Well when I found him they had him in circled and he was in the center of circle and they were hauling back and forth.
[01:16:10] I don't know what they were saying.
[01:16:11] And then I same jack around that.
[01:16:27] He was scared. You know, they they don't respect other Iraqis and there's a really weird customary thing.
[01:16:34] I don't know if this was throughout the whole of Iraq, but for sure in Ramadi where they're really like not afraid of AKs.
[01:16:42] You plot a pistol and those mofos get all kinds of like, you know, it's a attitude changer.
[01:16:48] And I've always heard that maybe it was because of like hit squads and stuff like that.
[01:16:53] But yeah, so if you just have like an AK point now, I'm like, man, I've been doing that to my brothers since we were five, you know.
[01:16:59] I'm not even, I'm not even worried about it, you know. So he was like jacking that round in to be like, no, I'm seriously going to shoot you.
[01:17:07] So then all of a sudden, hey, I heard yelled in a forwardative and powerful, new American voice.
[01:17:13] We don't fucking act like that around here. That's Saddam's tactics. We don't pull that shit.
[01:17:18] Lieutenant Colonel Mack had arrived and he was not pleased with the behavior of Iraqi comrade.
[01:17:24] Apparently Colonel Mack had heard that things were getting out of hand and had decided to gather up his personal security detail and come see the mission through.
[01:17:32] With the help of Max team, the dog handlers, we began to, and the dog handlers, we began to regain control of the crowd.
[01:17:39] We separated civilians into three lines heading east and west along the large concrete wall that formed the outer border of the glass factory.
[01:17:49] Fast forward a little bit the entire morning, my good friend and medic whom we affectionately called Z had been pounding me to have him relieved of his post.
[01:17:57] He was manning our 50 caliber machine gun within the walls of the glass factory, which we had set up to defend us from the crowd and from potential attacks.
[01:18:05] For me though, the problem at hand was a personal one. Z was, so he's like requesting, yeah, he didn't get out of there.
[01:18:13] He even honoured me for an hour by then. And your basic thought was, don't come out here. You just want to put a he's the medic if something happens. You don't want him to be involved in it.
[01:18:23] So you're, you basically, you're basically like, okay, just a minute, just hold on and you're basically just trying to put it off until the, yeah, I mean, I told him no for hours and he just wouldn't shut the up like,
[01:18:35] I'm just giving me a second, giving me a second, giving me a second. I thought I'm trying that tactic slow roll them.
[01:18:44] Fast forward a little bit. Hey, corporate McCoy get over here, Lieutenant Colonel Mac yelled at me. I'll be right back. You know what to do. I told Rick before I jogged over to the Colonel. And again, this seems a little bit like still did when I read it. Maybe you don't recognize all these characters. That's because I'm not reading the whole book. So by the book.
[01:19:00] Hey McCoy, you got any dip, yes sir. Mac was a commanding but warm leader. You could not help but feel a little stronger when you talked to him. He was straight to the point. It would, and I would not use the word friendly per se, but he was certainly not the typical overbearing massively insecure,
[01:19:17] or a cure, or a margin that some officers or even NCOs for that matter can be. He was a warrior. I manned you respected and admired. He went on to give me a new set of instructions that I cannot quite recall and then sent me off.
[01:19:31] Each of us heading back to our positions about 50 meters apart. When I got back to Rick and student front of him with my back turn to his direction and picked up instruction, right where I had left off.
[01:19:43] Then Z called me on the radio again to say he was on his way out there because he had found relief. I reached up with my left hand to key the microphone on my left shoulder and bent my neck to respond. Raj, see you out there.
[01:19:58] Suddenly there was a loud bark followed by a violent growl coming from somewhere just in front of me. I peered under the brim of my helmet to figure out what was going on. Next still bent to the radio mic.
[01:20:14] When I racking man in the midst of the first line by the arm and began to shake him violently, sergeant can through himself at the guy, boom, boom.
[01:20:27] I was rumbled out back to back accompanied by two rapid white flashes. A burning, staying sensation shot through my entire body. It was as if I had been struck by lightning. I felt my muscles and bones contoured fiercely, almost like they had flexed in succession so swiftly that their mere compression had been enough to shatter my skeleton.
[01:20:52] Then followed an unimaginable pain. It felt like every nerve and my body had been set ablaze at the same instant. Then blackness.
[01:21:13] It's a pretty good memory of that. Surprisingly up into that moment I think I have a pre-solid handle and then afterwards it's a little looser for a period.
[01:21:28] When Johnny and I talked about it, he had said that he thought he got to me within a minute or so, which is totally plausible given the distance.
[01:21:42] My mind seemed to be quite a bit longer. After getting your head bailed around, my side call told me that the reason that that's not uncommon is for leading up into something.
[01:22:00] It's called a flashbowl memory or something like this. You're brain-like imprints. Like a one moment in time. Like apparently this often happens to people in violent situations.
[01:22:13] I think it's called a flashbowl memory. It's only as accurate as I can be. I'm sure there's mistakes.
[01:22:24] I've got friends that got blown up and they don't really remember anything. Maybe 15-20 minutes before it happened and then just blank until they wake up in a hospital somewhere.
[01:22:41] That's from that moment that's where I started the podcast when you wake up in the sand and covered in blood.
[01:22:57] Going back to the book here, fast forward a little bit. You say when the blast went off, they'd thrown dozens of men including me, some tens of feet. When we had all landed, I met up at the bottom of one of the piles of dead and wounded.
[01:23:12] Johnny pulled the bodies off me as he continued to shout. Corpse is lifted one by one. I believe there were three bodies on top of me. The weight lesson. I could move a little more freely. Then when one of the corpses was pulled off of me, I saw the mangled parts which had blocked the view to my own hips leave with it.
[01:23:32] The first time since the initial blast my waistline was exposed, I was able to see that my hips and at least the upper portion of both of my legs were still intact. I had not been cut in half after all. Great news in the darkest of moments.
[01:23:46] But I still could not see below my knees. Johnny grabbed my body and rolled me over. I realized my legs were still fully attached and fully articulated from feet to hip. The pain was extraordinary, but things were looking up.
[01:24:00] My friend kept on talking to me as he patched me not my now exposed wounds. He assured me that both of my legs were still there and that they were not missing any joints.
[01:24:10] Which I thought I saw with my own eyes, but his reassurance sure didn't hurt anything. He did his best to keep me calm and relaxed. I did my hardest to tough it out for him.
[01:24:21] On every mission I wore no-mex gloves, which I had the fingers cut out of early on deployment. Because my right hand was so mangled to Johnny and Lyle, another soldier who had, who was helping administer first aid, fought it best just to get the bleeding stopped.
[01:24:36] So they bandaged my hand right over the top of the glove. They had my right hand elevated and bandaged it up by the time I saw it, but both bandages and the glove quickly ran through with blood.
[01:24:48] There was a three-inch long gash across the top of my right forearm just above my wrist. It had been opened up so wide that it revealed the bright white bones and my warm and pink muscle fibers, which twitched on either side of the wound as it bled.
[01:25:06] There were approximately seven holes in that arm and eight more in my left. They were all leaking.
[01:25:12] Hot thin, but looking blood, traced gashely lines down each arm from shoulder to hand. I had still yet to see what my legs look like under my uniform, but it was obvious that even though all of each leg was still attached, the situation was dire.
[01:25:27] Every time I shuttered, convulsed or was burnt by someone else, I grunted him moaned in agony. Otherwise, I either gritted my teeth to get a handle on the pain or babbled in co-herently. I'm sorry Johnny, I'm trying not to be a pussy, but this shit really hurts.
[01:25:43] I know it does, bro, you don't have to apologize. When Zee, our medic finally reached us, he looked over at me and said, Mac, I've got to go help a Marine. He's worse off than you are. I'll be back as soon as I can. His voice was stricken with panic.
[01:25:57] I heard it, but I felt a deep sense of pride at how well my friend and teammate defeated that trepidation and did his job right. Zee stood up and hustled over a sergeant can side to begin treating treatment on him.
[01:26:10] Zee was worried about my future as any close friend would be, but a basic army medical procedure had a very strict rule of progression. A medic is to start with the American who's most gravely injured.
[01:26:24] You got a, one thing that's cool about this book, you got a bunch of footnotes in there where you'd kind of just add some detail and I don't know how many of them are going to read, but this one is pretty, pretty cool, pretty interesting anyways. I just want to read you right this point.
[01:26:39] I'm not upsetting to watch a close friend walk away while I was currently on the brink of death, especially since he left to go help a warrior who had almost surely already passed away. But that's not how I felt it all. All I remember feeling was a deep sense of respect in the strength of character that my friend had just displayed.
[01:26:56] He had been forced into an extremely uncomfortable and complex situation with nearly no time to think it over and he had demonstrated the courage to put personal loyalty's aside and do the right thing.
[01:27:08] Just imagine a world we would live in if more people have that kind of fortitude.
[01:27:14] Yeah, because he's like your boy. And he has to just be like, hey, I'll be back, man.
[01:27:26] And my buddies that were there trying to pat, you could sell just from reading out, they're not exactly medics, if you couldn't get ants to quit bleeding. I mean they're doing the best. They're just like wrapping gauze over, you know, you got to hold all the way through my hand right here and then all the way through my nuckle and my thumb and I mean I can even move my finger.
[01:27:48] So it's like this is all mangled and they're just like wrapping gauze around like we're going to work out or something. I mean they're trying, but you know what I'm saying. And then like this one appeared, you know, that was all opened up.
[01:28:00] They were just like wrapping that, you know, and that was from just a ball bearing and just ripped the, you know what I mean. So they just didn't really know what they're doing.
[01:28:09] And so it's not like saying could what I'm saying is not like saying couldn't see that morning first looked, you know.
[01:28:15] And the one thing I can't remember if I wrote about it, but I will say is the compartment syndrome part, which maybe, which maybe you might read, but with the, with the legs sucked up probably say my life really,
[01:28:31] because like creating an internal eternity on your femur. So at least my blood my legs were not bleeding as badly as they could have been. Tell us about that compartment syndrome. So when your femur's break, especially if they break in multiple places, but if any, any time they break your femur's always at risk of a compound fracture anytime that breaks because your glutes and your quads are just strong.
[01:28:56] So my femur's are broken multiple places, so they just folded like, you know, almost, they just folded up anyway, and they went beside each other like this and then you're just cutting all kinds of blood vessels in there and potentially arteries and all of that.
[01:29:11] So that creates some internal swelling and pressure and then you get like blood that gets locked into in between to, like the, it can't go above or below that spot. So it's like a blood that's trapped in an area, but it's almost acting like a turning to it.
[01:29:32] Yeah, you basically you got lucky in the fact that you had compartments in trouble that's swelled around your arteries and shut some of that bleeding down because otherwise.
[01:29:44] That this point sees back working on you. And you say, my clothing all removed, I could finally see the multitude of holes in my legs clearly see began to patch what he could, but they were even worse condition than my arms were each leg had more than 10 different holes in it.
[01:30:03] Some of which were nearly two inches in diameter, most were not that big, they were the size of, they were about the size of a small marble on average, but they had gone straight through both sides of my quadriceps.
[01:30:15] At this stage, the wounds were not pumping out as much blood as one might have expected. There's more like a steady leak.
[01:30:24] As I lay there watching them bleed for a while thinking of myself holy shit, saving private Ryan really got it right. These wounds look exactly what they do in the movie.
[01:30:34] So they are now packing you up and they're trying to get you on to a damn litter. Eventually they get you on the litter.
[01:30:50] Now, each time the truck would bounce in and out of pot holes, my bones would rattle and rub together. The pain at this stage was so intense that when combined with my heavy blood loss it caused me to pass in and out of consciousness.
[01:31:04] But because of the condition I was in, is doing everything in his power to keep me awake, Mac, Mac don't you go to sleep, he yelled, I'm on to responses best I could and then forced my eyes open.
[01:31:15] Hit this is fun. When we finally reach the rear entrances of camp or body we ran into a whole new set of problems.
[01:31:23] Our own soldiers ineptness, we rolled up only to be immediately stopped by the soldiers who ran the gate. They would not let us in because we did not have a convoy number.
[01:31:33] Can't make the shit up. Yeah, Z was losing it. All those boys at that point.
[01:31:45] Back and forth our driver argued with the gate guards until eventually Z standing in the bed of the truck lost his cool. We don't have a fucking convoy number.
[01:31:51] I can't let you in without one. This isn't a fucking convoy you idiot. We got a wounded American here.
[01:31:56] Eventually the soldiers at all can get let their better sensibilities take over. We allowed to enter our home.
[01:32:03] In the the e-vac that we were using by that point, MetaVac was a five ton.
[01:32:08] You know, it's like, so that's where you run you're in the back of a five ton. Yeah, that's a comfortable.
[01:32:13] It's like riding on a brick with wheels.
[01:32:16] It was like the litter stretched between those two benches. Yeah, it was misery. And then some sort major how this, you know, pride idea was going to.
[01:32:27] You know, too many guys were rolling over. I got I never heard of a single person rolling over.
[01:32:31] I remember maybe they did. But anyway, he put speed bumps all the way down. So it was like speed bumps all the way to the dam Charlie met each one of those freaking personally built for breakfast.
[01:32:43] I guess sometimes I wonder if any of those guys ever read some of those late. These kind of books that got later on, you know, and just think, man, maybe that was stupid.
[01:32:53] Well, what I first got to Baghdad, this is like 2003.
[01:32:58] And there are all these pot holes on like the road around the base and like deep poles are kind of jacked up.
[01:33:05] And then they filled in all the pot holes and then they built speed bumps.
[01:33:10] I was like, well, you had it. And you filled it in. And now you build speed bumps. Come on, man.
[01:33:17] Um, going back to the book, I began to pass in and out of consciousness so frequently that I was having a hard time telling the difference between reality and whatever dream world I was off to in between.
[01:33:32] Once they carried me to the medical facility, they realized there was another problem. It was already filled with wounded Iraqi men and one side of Charlie Med.
[01:33:41] We went in one side of Charlie Med and right out the other down the road a little way is another aid station, which belonged to our brigades engineers.
[01:33:49] So we headed there once inside the first thing they did was it was only start transfusing blood in the beginning.
[01:33:56] They only had lines containing a court or so a piece into each arm, but eventually had to stick an IV into my jugular and start pumping in fluid that way.
[01:34:05] Damn.
[01:34:09] After establishing a steady stream of flesh fresh blood into me, they fixed as many bandages as they could and rushed me out to the PLZ to board a meta-vac flight containing several other wounded people bound for balod.
[01:34:22] While in route to balod the flight crew decided that because some of us lost so much blood and emergency landing in Felusia was necessary to save our lives, might included.
[01:34:32] I was passing it around a consciousness again my grip of reality if you could call it that anymore with so slippery that it was like I was trying to squeeze a wet fish.
[01:34:41] The hard drive tried the worst became the darkness that awaited me each time I passed out was becoming more and more welcoming.
[01:34:48] I was exhausted all I wanted to do was sleep to put it into a sentence I was starting to give up.
[01:34:56] What will death be like?
[01:34:59] Everyone always talks about a white light near the end of a tunnel, but I am not seeing shit.
[01:35:06] Yeah, and then he was cold too. It was January, I know it's from on it but it still cold. It's like 65 or something and when it's been 120 for 85 feels cold as hell.
[01:35:21] And then you run out of blood so you just even colder.
[01:35:25] It was at that point I was pretty close to just something health that whatever that means.
[01:35:31] I don't know if you really have control that or not.
[01:35:34] I think we do it some level control of it. I mean I've heard plenty of stories of people that had that will to survive and are able to stay alive.
[01:35:44] You know what I actually think of that the most is here in stories from guys that were in prison of war camps and the difference between someone that lives and someone that dies.
[01:35:54] This person which is like I'm going to make it and this other person said, my mom.
[01:35:58] So I think there's definitely something to that.
[01:36:03] Um.
[01:36:07] You get here where guys are braxed and braxed and stay with us. I know it hurts but we've got a stretcher legs out again or you're going to lose them.
[01:36:15] Okay, I'm on and I passed out again. Bloodstained tears running down both cheeks. I'm not sure how long I was out for and I was not fully awake but the next thing I distinctly remember was the sound of my flesh tearing under a scaple.
[01:36:27] The surgeons were slicing the side of each quadricep to relieve my compartment syndrome blood and possibly spewed out of my swollen legs split wide open.
[01:36:37] I will never forget the way that cutting sounded inside my head. It was reminiscent of a muddy zipper being forced open.
[01:36:45] Something stick with you forever hearing your own flesh being cut apart is one of them.
[01:36:51] Yeah, that's shit suck, man. It's it's need to hip on both sides like point of the knee all the way up to the point of my hip and they split and then they once they got me in that traction split and then they put in these wound vacts. It's like a big sponge.
[01:37:11] And then they wrap it. So it's like a big sponge you look in thing and it's got a vacts set up across the back like poles the shit out of the sponge.
[01:37:21] So I think the way it works is the sponge sucks up the moisture, whether it's either the liquid whichever liquid it is, plus the internal like water from your animal with the lid is blood and all that.
[01:37:33] And then the vacuum sucks out of the sponge, I think. So they cut you open and then they slip that into the wound and it's like it's like this big you know as far as with wise.
[01:37:44] And then they just put it like a plastic thing over it and just pump that.
[01:37:49] Yeah, you got some pictures on your website of like your legs split open like that. It does not look.
[01:37:55] It doesn't even look survivable. I mean how much they cut you open. It's freaking crazy.
[01:38:00] Yeah, I mean, while my IT bands are still like, you know, your IT bands are like, suppose we won't band right and I got like two of them or four of my guests.
[01:38:13] Because they can say yeah.
[01:38:16] What did they like did they cut though IT band open or did they get to have just stretch open?
[01:38:20] No, they had to cut through it to get to the to be able to get that wound back and there at least that's my understanding of it.
[01:38:26] But you can stick your finger through it. Like you can muggle it in muscle. Yeah, it was not to me. And you were conscious during this.
[01:38:35] Yeah, well, whatever you want to name me more free.
[01:38:37] And anything by then I was starting now once they got me stable, then they could start hitting me with stuff.
[01:38:42] But in Ramadi, they weren't going to give me anything because my blood pressure was super low and then it's didn't want to, you know, zoom me.
[01:38:48] Which I think is probably good idea.
[01:38:50] God be here.
[01:38:52] Yeah, we'll take it whatever call got made apparently was the right one.
[01:38:57] Yeah, and I, you know, I think probably what happened is I had been another thing is I've been, I don't know if Chronicles talks about this but they had, I was one of the less people getting evac because they just, it was just a wreck.
[01:39:13] And they had a bunch of Iraqis that were already in Charlie Madbath time they got me there and stuff so they just screwed up the tree-odged.
[01:39:22] So I think probably the call was made because I had been quite a while before they got me in there. So they're like, well, he's, you know, making it like one of them just like why risk it now. He's made it this long without it, you know.
[01:39:35] And so then they, I'm sure they hit me with that in Flusha because I don't really remember Flusha the Baghdad or I mean, blood, hardly at all.
[01:39:43] And all of this I'm still pretty hazy, you know.
[01:39:48] Yeah, you say I was put and wrote in route to the big Air Force Base in hospital in Belad, I guess I'm still alive. I thought the question became a common three throughout the following hours and days.
[01:40:01] And then like you said, you know, you're right about in the book, you can hear doctors talking, you're like partially coherent, you're tired, you're just like in and out of sleep.
[01:40:12] For a while, that's pretty much your memory of Belad is just, you know, laying it out of consciousness, little bits and pieces.
[01:40:21] You say I woke to loud rumbling of an airplane engine, I was being pushed across an air strip towards a C130 met a back flight headed for launch to Germany.
[01:40:34] Fast forward a little bit, I had to read this part because it sounds freaking horrifying.
[01:40:38] Later I woke up choking in a sheer terror, I felt like I was drowning, but how instinctively I tried to turn my head to one side to get a breath, but I couldn't because it was so tightly fast into this bed.
[01:40:48] The wiggle as much as I could, gagging, hacking, trying desperately to dry, or still unsure of what was happening.
[01:40:53] Left and right, I moved my head only managing a centimeter or less in either direction. I grown for help, still too tightly restrained to move, help I screamed inside my head.
[01:41:04] I desperately needed to breathe. I couldn't hold my breath much longer. Yes, you can toughen up my thoughts ran wild.
[01:41:11] Help, I gurgled aloud this time. It was completely unintelligible because my mouth and nose were filled with water.
[01:41:17] Fear turned in anger. Inside my head I had screamed a series of idle senseless threats and cusswords.
[01:41:25] Suddenly I felt a strap loosened. My head shifted to one side. As soon as I felt cleared, I coughed and hacked out all the fluids that were lodged in my throat.
[01:41:37] I was still in a days, but at least I could breathe. I gasped for air and muddered. Thank you to the nurse who had just saved my life. Inside my head I was calling this flight and all the unwounded people on it.
[01:41:48] Every combination of curse words I could dream up.
[01:41:52] Yeah, I think I probably threw up while you were.
[01:41:57] And that just woke you up as you drowned in your own vomit.
[01:42:01] Yeah, probably. I thought about this later on and that's probably what happened.
[01:42:07] And they strap your head to that litter. You can't move and then be on drugs and then the air.
[01:42:14] And who knows how many people she's attending to?
[01:42:17] I can't say she's except for the roof of the aircraft.
[01:42:21] And you're all drugged up so you're barely even coherent anyway.
[01:42:25] Yeah, I was scared.
[01:42:27] How old are you 20 yet?
[01:42:28] Yeah, 20. Yeah, 20 over there.
[01:42:33] Yeah, 20. I turned 21 in back home.
[01:42:35] And you had gotten married when was like, would you go home on leave? I get married?
[01:42:40] Yeah, I did.
[01:42:41] Yeah, I did.
[01:42:43] Oh, man.
[01:42:45] That's always a tough, but understandable call that soldiers can make from time to time.
[01:42:54] Everybody in the whole world tells you not to do it.
[01:42:58] But I don't know what I'm doing.
[01:43:00] Yeah, of course.
[01:43:03] I have personally given that advice to many, many young men over the years and have almost never been listened to.
[01:43:14] So is it you went for, are you going home for two weeks of leave during deployment?
[01:43:19] Yeah, that's me going right.
[01:43:20] Yeah, check.
[01:43:25] Well, it's here.
[01:43:28] Later on, a surgeon came and told me that they had planned on trying to put rods in my femurs while I was in surgery there.
[01:43:34] But the doctor thought it would be best to wait for the infection to clear up.
[01:43:38] He explained as I lifted as he lifted the sheets and showed me my legs for the first time since I left.
[01:43:42] I racked that they had instead placed external fixators on each one of them.
[01:43:46] These metal cages were implanted just to get me stable enough to be flown back to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
[01:43:52] He told me I was headed there that night.
[01:43:55] So they put these freaking external fixators on your legs to try and let them heal up more before they would eventually put internal rods inside your legs.
[01:44:06] They're trying to get the bacteria out.
[01:44:09] There was some bacteria that they had discovered that guys were coming home with from the sand in Iraq.
[01:44:16] Some moose freaking bacteria.
[01:44:19] So when you get, yeah, when you get to Walter Reed, if you have that, they put a blue, like a blue label on your door or whatever.
[01:44:26] So they can't put a rod in your femurs while you have an infection because it could, that you risk introducing the infection to the inside of your femur.
[01:44:35] And then you're really in trouble. So they had to get that clear down and then they could get rods in and up taking like a month or something to get everything.
[01:44:46] Oh, sorry, really?
[01:44:48] The way that those things work is, it's like the external fixators.
[01:44:52] Yeah, it's like a big cage like you're saying almost like a series of halos.
[01:44:56] But then those halos have a, like rods that come out of them.
[01:45:02] And those rods have screws, like drill bit screws or drill screws that wood screws on the end, looking thing more like machine heads screws.
[01:45:09] And those are screwed into your bone and to keep your bones stable.
[01:45:13] And then they go back out through that halo and they bolt into that halo.
[01:45:18] So it's like that thing's actually screwed to your bone.
[01:45:21] Yeah.
[01:45:23] I had a friend of the family, little girl, she was probably nine years old and she broke a femur.
[01:45:28] She had external fixator on her femur. You don't think, you don't think that seems like a good idea.
[01:45:35] Like, if you're a, if you didn't know anything about medicine, which I don't,
[01:45:39] that you told me, hey, what we're going to do is we're going to screw rods through the skin into the bone and have a whole contraption on the outside.
[01:45:47] You'd be like, you're an idiot.
[01:45:49] Yeah.
[01:45:50] Just make any sense.
[01:45:51] That's true.
[01:45:52] It's crazy. It's a crazy idea.
[01:45:54] This is, it'd be infected. Yeah.
[01:46:00] That's freaking crazy.
[01:46:02] This is, you go into talking about little bit like, what's going through your head at this point.
[01:46:06] I'm going to fast forward a little bit.
[01:46:07] This feeling of helplessness and confusion lasted in varying degrees for days, if not weeks.
[01:46:12] During this period, I had surgery nearly every morning to clean and irrigate my wounds and change the bandage that swath my body.
[01:46:20] What I, from what I understand, the doctors had to put me under for these daily hygiene sessions, because this year, number of open wounds and their depth made scrubbing too intrusive and time consuming to do all I was awake.
[01:46:33] I had a dozen or more wound channels, which were through and through,
[01:46:37] as it turned used to describe a wound that starts on one side of the body and passes through its other side, exiting entirely.
[01:46:44] Usually on a limb, I also, usually on a limb. I also had dozens more wounds, conspired projectiles, which had penetrated my flesh, but it stopped in something more dense, like bone or thick muscle.
[01:47:02] We think this, this, this, as vast was just like filled with ball bearings or something, and that's where you got shredded with man on pack and like eight or ten of them still.
[01:47:14] How bigger they are? Are they all the same size?
[01:47:17] Yeah. So it's like a uniformed kind of professionally built as vast.
[01:47:21] Well, so we found some before where they were just filling up water bottles with wheel bearings, and then just taping those, that those water balls to the front of the explosive.
[01:47:35] So I guess it's like professional train by the Iranians, I think probably.
[01:47:40] Yeah, I got one in my ass that really messes with me when I'm riding horses.
[01:47:45] Like try to get them to cut it out, but it's like too deep, I guess.
[01:47:55] You say this, I spent the next few weeks in the same bed lying around and thinking about what my new life was going to be when, if I got out of the hospital.
[01:48:04] When I was not caught up daydreaming about what my long-term recovery was going to look like, my mind was on my brother's back in Ramadi.
[01:48:11] I knew the morale crushing war that they were living every day, and I had begun to feel an enormous amount of guilt at the thought of them facing those trials without me.
[01:48:21] The thought was only made worse when I considered that they were doing it while I lay safely in a bed back in the States.
[01:48:29] I felt grief as I think anyone would for the memories of lives lost and my role actively are passively in their deaths.
[01:48:37] I also felt guilty for being the one being one of the people who survived.
[01:48:41] I could have, should have, done more, I often fought.
[01:48:46] By this point, the story of my mind had cleared through to recall the scene that got glass factory in detail.
[01:48:53] I remembered seeing Sergeant Can and Bruno confronting the suicide bomber.
[01:48:58] I remembered Z telling me that he had to go check on the Marine who is injured worse than I was.
[01:49:03] I remembered almost everything from that morning, including the courageous action Bruno and Sergeant Can and Taken, yet somehow ridiculously and unfairly disargent cans heroic memory.
[01:49:14] I had saddled myself with the guilt of his death.
[01:49:18] It was not in any way my fault that he had chosen to give his life trying to protect the Marines and soldiers around him, but that was,
[01:49:25] but that is much easier to write now with the rationale of hindsight than it was to convince myself of it in the hospital bed.
[01:49:32] That's like the, the, the, the, the interview all these wounded soldiers, you know, and they all said,
[01:49:48] I just want to get back to my unit, just want to get back to my unit, just want to get back to my unit.
[01:49:57] Did, as you, so as time went on your memory of what happened to become more clear?
[01:50:04] As far as the suicide bombing, I don't think, not really, it's hard, it's really hard to know because I, I got into psychology for a minute,
[01:50:17] and now I know that your, your brain often like rewrite stories back or backfills, you know?
[01:50:24] So I, I don't know. It's like, it's one of those questions, it seems really easy to answer, but if you're, you know, if you're being honest with yourself,
[01:50:33] by the way, the human brain works, you really, it's really not the easy of a question to answer, you know, because you do backfill.
[01:50:39] Do you backfill with memories that are subconscious there? You backfill with like sort of what you assemble from what you can kind of put together logically as to what happened.
[01:50:49] Yeah, it could be that, and then also talking to your friends and hearing their version of stuff over time.
[01:50:56] And then maybe your brain just fills in gaps, and I got to, I don't really know.
[01:51:01] No, that's, that I actually do, I did a podcast about that, the way you're, the way you can hear part of a story and part of a story and your mind will fill in the gaps.
[01:51:10] It will fill in the gaps with things, the, it's kind of just figure it out, then take the best guess, and then you'll kind of, you can very easily believe,
[01:51:17] oh, this is what happened, this is what I saw.
[01:51:19] Yeah, and you know, I can't say that, and I think it was, there's no way from it, no.
[01:51:24] But I feel like, I don't, I don't know, that it really ever changed.
[01:51:28] I know that, you know, I talked to Johnny before we ever put this out and he's like, yeah, man, I see, I remember, you know,
[01:51:37] you know, sans this or that detail. The one detail I know that I absolutely did, Lewis, was a friend of mine Casey was out there, and I don't even remember him being there.
[01:51:47] We were just driving to Texas to do a long range course the other day. Well, a couple months ago, and he was like, do I was there?
[01:51:53] He was like, well, I knew he was there later. He was like, no, man, I got to you quick.
[01:51:57] He's like, he's like, I was to you in like minutes, you know, I'm not even remember any of that.
[01:52:02] So I know there's gotta be problems with my memory. Oh, yeah. Well, it's also everybody's memory, you know, there's everybody's memories different from witnessing the same things.
[01:52:14] I know of, you know, life and I have memories of things that we did where he literally remember something, and I literally remember something else.
[01:52:21] And we're both there and our viewpoint, and there's no reason, it's not like there's no reason we should remember different things, but we just do.
[01:52:29] Yeah. People just have different perspective of what's going on, and then locks into their memory.
[01:52:34] Yeah. And then you can only store so much shit and true.
[01:52:39] Yeah, freaking hard drive gets filled up.
[01:52:42] Yeah. So if you do a whole bunch of dump shit when you're young, man, we're going to be, you're going to suck it like this stage of your life.
[01:52:48] You're going to lose all the good stuff.
[01:52:50] Fast forward a little bit. You got surgeries, you got doctors, you got psychologists, physical therapists, just lots of things going on.
[01:53:03] And again, I'm fast forward and through it, not because it's not a really interesting read.
[01:53:09] Because there's all kinds of, I was learning all kinds of things, and, and, you know, the story itself is just, it's an awesome, I hate to see if you could hear the word awesome.
[01:53:19] It, I don't know, one of the words to use. It's a very well told story.
[01:53:24] So get the book. I'm going to fast forward a little bit to where you say these new training aids, you're doing this physical therapy.
[01:53:31] These new training aids were useful, and they did help me pass the time, but at this stage of my recovery, the only lofty goal I had left look for to is getting,
[01:53:39] getting the external fixators removed and moving into a wheelchair.
[01:53:43] Not more than a month before I had been a young man, a warrior in his prime.
[01:53:48] Now I lay in bed, doing my level best to avoid sleep, and my grandest physical aspirations were to have the cages,
[01:53:56] remove from my legs, and be fitted for a wheelchair.
[01:54:01] 20 years old.
[01:54:06] Yeah, and because my hand was messed up, I only had one hand that went in my left.
[01:54:13] Humors was broken, so I had plastic. They didn't cast it because they wanted to leave me with a limb that was still functional.
[01:54:20] So I had a spiral fracture here, and they just put a plastic, almost like, I almost like the stuff motocross guys where, you know,
[01:54:29] I was like, I didn't really, I don't know that really didn't anything, but other than like remind you your shit was broken.
[01:54:34] I got like, I don't know what it was doing.
[01:54:36] But so the, what was occupational OT, occupational therapy, they bring like these tools,
[01:54:44] and you learn how to like pull a sock over this kind of conical shaped thing,
[01:54:50] and it's got a couple of strings hooked to it, and throw that shit at your foot,
[01:54:54] and so you can pull like your own sock on and get started, or yeah, they'd bring like this,
[01:55:00] kind of a certain conical shape deal with buttons on it, and zippers, and try to learn how to manipulate stuff with one hand.
[01:55:07] And I don't know if they were doing that to prep me, because they weren't sure how much my hand would ever work again,
[01:55:13] and that, I mean, that could honestly be possible, but I don't know if, so I'm saying, I don't know if it's routine,
[01:55:18] I don't know if everybody does this, but they brought me all these aids that I was, you know, trying to learn how to do shit with one hand, which,
[01:55:25] anyway, that was like I was passing my time, that in watching like dukes of hazard, on dovety,
[01:55:31] thing, and sign filled and shit. By the time you were aware of what was going on,
[01:55:36] were you, was it seem like pretty solid that you were going to keep both your legs?
[01:55:40] Oh yeah, it did, for sure, by that point, yeah.
[01:55:44] Going back to the book here, fast forward a little bit, I laid in bed for the next few days,
[01:55:53] a little more beaten down than I was before. I raised the sheets now and then with my left arm, my only limb, that sort of function,
[01:56:00] and wondered whether this was finally going to be the thing that took my legs for me.
[01:56:05] I was physically tough and was tolerating pain, but the roller coaster of emotions, and the all-around uncertainties surrounding my life
[01:56:12] was starting to get me down. I was nearing that breaking point again. I spent most of my time just watching the yellow,
[01:56:18] green, plus ooze out of my thighs. They look like Swiss cheese that had been aged way too long,
[01:56:24] and the smell radiated throughout the room. This was a gnarly infection that you had.
[01:56:29] Yeah, again, green. That was like my third infection too.
[01:56:35] And I don't know if you, I'm not trying to throw Walter read under the bus, but right around that time was one scene,
[01:56:41] and then that, or maybe it was right after that, when CNN did that, I can expose that time, do.
[01:56:50] And I remember some perhaps unsanitary stuff, but Walter was like loaded with people with that point.
[01:56:57] They were a crap old dude there, so I don't want to, you know, I'm not trying to throw anybody under the bus.
[01:57:03] There was definitely some stuff that was not being, like there's too much infection going around to not be having some procedure.
[01:57:10] Something's being screwed up here. Yeah.
[01:57:13] So, but they reschedule the surgery. They get done. They take off the fixators, and then they put rods inside your femurs,
[01:57:25] remove the freaking spongy vacuum machine things.
[01:57:31] Yeah. Let the wounds close. Hundreds of stitches, you say, staples. And you had been in bed at this point that you so long were you had a bed source, like gnarly bed source.
[01:57:44] Yeah, there's still scarred.
[01:57:47] Yeah.
[01:57:48] And when they put those rods in, they, because of the way the brakes were on my right leg, I think they called it a retrograde nail,
[01:57:57] but they went, they flipped your kneecap over and come up through the bottom, and then it screws up into your hip.
[01:58:03] But on my left leg, they put a rod, excuse me, and my left hip as well.
[01:58:08] So they put that rod through the hip into the femoral head, and then it has like an eyelet at the top,
[01:58:14] and then they put the other rod through that eyelet, so it's tied together.
[01:58:18] And then that one screws down into your, the head of your femur on the bottom head.
[01:58:22] I don't know what the proper, I felt an enemy.
[01:58:24] But it down here, so they went both directions, so it was kind of like, like up my hips, and my right knee sucks.
[01:58:33] I get this point, you know, so they gave you one of each.
[01:58:36] Yeah, one they went from the bottom, one they went from the top down.
[01:58:39] Yeah.
[01:58:40] Yeah.
[01:58:40] But they didn't put a rod in my right hip, because it wasn't broke as bad.
[01:58:48] At one point, your uncle, Justin, comes to visit you.
[01:58:53] And you call him Juddy.
[01:58:56] That's his nickname.
[01:58:58] He says to you, one of the days he was there, he discovered some information that had been kept from me.
[01:59:03] Hey, bro, I need to tell you something.
[01:59:05] Okay, I said, expecting the worst.
[01:59:07] Colonel Mac died.
[01:59:09] No, we wanted to tell you because they were not sure how you were, whether you were healthy enough to hear that.
[01:59:15] How?
[01:59:16] He was killed by Shrapnel from the suicide bomber that hit you.
[01:59:21] Oh, thanks for telling me.
[01:59:23] I said, slightly in shock.
[01:59:25] It was particularly devastating news.
[01:59:27] I already knew that Sergeant Canada passed away, but Colonel Mac seemed impossible.
[01:59:32] But he was way too far away to have been struck by any significant amount of Shrapnel I thought.
[01:59:37] As it happened, he had been quite a ways away, and he had only been hit by a few pieces of Shrapnel.
[01:59:42] But those ball bearings had hit him in the back of the head, killing him virtually instantly.
[01:59:48] Survival in wars around to my have learned.
[01:59:50] Yeah.
[01:59:52] Yeah, that was what I was like.
[01:59:54] He was seen like long, always away.
[01:59:56] Like 70 yards or 50.
[01:59:58] I mean, it seemed like a long, long way, it's long, long, long, long.
[02:00:04] Actually, well, it's a scene far.
[02:00:08] And you know, I was a 20 year old kid, 20 year old kid.
[02:00:10] 20 year old kid really had to lose, you know, he had three kids at home.
[02:00:14] Probably like the age I am now, it's probably how old he was then.
[02:00:18] I think back at stuff like that, and I don't know if I'd have that kind of sand at this age.
[02:00:23] You know, with all that to put that much on the line, especially when, you know, you're a light Colonel.
[02:00:28] You're a lieutenant Colonel out there, with a bunch of E-4s, E-5s, and the highest ring of the year as E-6.
[02:00:34] I mean, that's quite a gap.
[02:00:36] Yeah.
[02:00:37] That was just a...
[02:00:39] Yeah, no, even when I got there, because I got there, this was in January.
[02:00:43] I got there in April, and people talked about him, like totally revered him as a leader,
[02:00:50] and what he was doing, and what he was making work, and effort that he was putting forth.
[02:00:55] I mean, just was everybody revered the guy.
[02:01:01] You say, learning of the death of Colonel Mack was another psychological set back in time,
[02:01:07] right with them.
[02:01:09] My belt with survivors' guilt was getting more aggressive by the day.
[02:01:13] I was still having serious trouble sleeping, and my overall emotional well being wall awake was so fragile
[02:01:18] that even I was beginning to recognize it.
[02:01:22] This was roughly the time I began to use physical recovery as a distraction for mental anguish.
[02:01:27] I have often heard the phrase, fake it till you make it.
[02:01:30] I'm not exactly sure where it originated, but I was about to take my turn at the strategy,
[02:01:34] and would do so for years to come, flagantly unsuccessfully.
[02:01:39] Yeah, I think that fake it to the make it's bullshit.
[02:01:51] It's completely bullshit, man.
[02:01:53] You've got to fix your foundation.
[02:01:56] That's the problem. You can't just fix it.
[02:01:59] You've got to go all the way to the root and start working there.
[02:02:02] Yeah, I think when someone's talking about going to do some jobs and where they think they can fake it to you making.
[02:02:09] It's the same thing.
[02:02:10] I said, I wrote about this in the leaders from the strategy tactics.
[02:02:12] If you don't know something and you're trying to fake it, everybody can see it.
[02:02:17] Like even from a leadership perspective, it doesn't work.
[02:02:20] But then when you start trying to put together your psychological well-being by faking it,
[02:02:26] it's not going to work out good.
[02:02:28] The physical therapy, you got this guy you're working with named Solomon.
[02:02:36] I'm fast forward.
[02:02:38] Now you're starting to heal up a little bit.
[02:02:42] Hey, man, when do I get to walk down those bars?
[02:02:45] My remark was said purely ingest because I'd already been told several times it would be 18 months.
[02:02:49] If ever before I was going to be able to walk again,
[02:02:52] you're going to use him right now.
[02:02:54] He said, obviously seeing through my lame bravado.
[02:02:56] I can't walk, Solomon.
[02:02:58] I said, coldly.
[02:03:00] Yes, you can.
[02:03:01] I'm going to help you.
[02:03:02] I was starting to get irritated at him because I knew I could not walk.
[02:03:06] I can't even stand for hell's sake.
[02:03:08] I was frustrated and embarrassed by the whole situation.
[02:03:10] I was frustrated because I thought that this guy,
[02:03:12] I liked it admired as soon as I was capable of more than I actually was.
[02:03:16] And I was about to let him down.
[02:03:18] Does he not know how badly injured I am?
[02:03:20] I wondered.
[02:03:21] I was embarrassed that I couldn't dress myself.
[02:03:24] And embarrassed that even if I could have, I could not wear clothes that were not several sizes too big,
[02:03:29] because they had to fit over my cast, some braces.
[02:03:32] I was embarrassed by the fact that I could not do up a button on my own underwear,
[02:03:36] or use the bathroom without help throughout the entire process.
[02:03:39] I was literally unable to wipe my own ass as they say.
[02:03:43] Little more than a month before this moment,
[02:03:46] I had been a roughly six foot tall, 190-pound warrior in the prime of his life,
[02:03:51] proud and full of all the arrogance of youth.
[02:03:54] But there I was a few months later, sitting before a man who wanted to help me,
[02:03:58] deeply wanted to help me, but I just physically could not do what he was asking.
[02:04:03] Then there was the fear, fear that if by some miracle of the imagination,
[02:04:08] I was able to stand up and try to walk, I might fall.
[02:04:11] And if I fell, I would surely lose all the independence that I had fought so hard to achieve.
[02:04:15] They felt like an exercising futility to even speculate about what it would be like to walk again already.
[02:04:21] Then saw loosened the braces on my chair, bent down in front of me and said,
[02:04:26] are you ready?
[02:04:30] I reached out to what I could of my arms on his shoulders,
[02:04:34] and lifted, and he lifted me out of the chair.
[02:04:36] My heart races as I stood up for the first time, a feeling of anxiety, fear, and triumph washed over me,
[02:04:40] though they were hardly supporting any bodyweight.
[02:04:43] I could let legs shivered beneath me, then we started walking.
[02:04:46] We only covered a few feet distance, but I could hardly contain my joy as saw half drag me over to those parallel bars.
[02:04:52] The instant the cold stainless steel touched the fingertips of my left hand,
[02:04:56] and invigorating dose of adrenaline shot through my body.
[02:04:59] Even though Solomon was bearing most of my weight, I had to overcome an obstacle
[02:05:03] at not at all anticipated.
[02:05:05] I don't know if it was because of my brain injury, or just because it had been so long since I had last walk,
[02:05:10] but I couldn't make my muscles move my legs like they were supposed to.
[02:05:14] I knew how walking was supposed to be done.
[02:05:16] You just lift up and step out in front of your lead foot, then repeat the on the other side.
[02:05:21] I could have drawn your picture or described what walking was supposed to look like.
[02:05:25] I knew how to do it, but I didn't know how to make me do it.
[02:05:29] Each confusing attempt at the process and intense burst of pain to my brain,
[02:05:34] that I was quite ready for, but the torment mixed with the excitement of a
[02:05:39] discovery, kept releasing more of that ever intoxicating adrenaline.
[02:05:44] That's got to be freaking weird when you...
[02:05:48] You're body doesn't know what to do.
[02:05:51] It was weird.
[02:05:53] I still don't know how to describe how that felt.
[02:05:57] You have a guy like Solomon there who I still do this day,
[02:06:04] he was a really freaking neat guy, and I'm sure he's still alive,
[02:06:09] but out of my life, because I think I'm not still alive in that hospital.
[02:06:14] You got a guy like that with you that you really care for or
[02:06:18] respect or whatever you want to do as you can,
[02:06:22] and your body's just like not working.
[02:06:25] It's almost like when you put a limb to sleep sitting on something,
[02:06:31] you do it bad, not just kind of a little bit of sleep,
[02:06:35] but fall down, kind of asleep.
[02:06:39] Yeah, I've done that before, it's like I'm going to fall down.
[02:06:41] Exactly, that's kind of how it was.
[02:06:43] I knew it was supposed to work, I just could feel...
[02:06:46] That's the best I can describe, it was something like that.
[02:06:49] The muscles are not firing properly,
[02:06:52] and then my right quad at a real good hole through it,
[02:06:58] and that one, even my physical therapist that I got later on
[02:07:03] is a civilian was not quite sure if that femoral or Xemia,
[02:07:07] which had as that, anyway, if the actual head of that part of the quad
[02:07:11] would ever fire again, because it was just not,
[02:07:13] like the muscles were not going around the way they should have,
[02:07:16] that it does kind of now, but so there could have been like
[02:07:19] some muscular damage involved, I mean there was muscular damage involved,
[02:07:22] but that could have been part of it too.
[02:07:24] Wow, freaking crazy.
[02:07:28] It's hard, and it's not like you're making progress,
[02:07:35] but the progress is so slow that you still feel like you don't even know
[02:07:40] how much you're going to be able to heal.
[02:07:43] At one point, you're talking to your cousin,
[02:07:46] Juddie again, and you say,
[02:07:49] you say, Juddie, I might never walk again,
[02:07:51] and if I do, I'll probably be assisted in some way.
[02:07:53] I don't want to push around a walker for the rest of my life.
[02:07:56] I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't.
[02:07:59] I'll never feel that icy mountain water roll past my waiters,
[02:08:02] as I cast flies at fall browns.
[02:08:05] I'll only have memories of sliding into a saddle
[02:08:08] on a crisp October morning.
[02:08:10] When at dawn, you can see your breath and by noon,
[02:08:12] you're, you've swept through your hat band.
[02:08:15] I've done my last bow hunt, no more dirt bikes or bull rides.
[02:08:19] I basically just started up my twilight years
[02:08:22] and my early 20s.
[02:08:24] I'm in a fucking nursing home for soldiers right now,
[02:08:28] and I may always be.
[02:08:31] I was being a negative, whiny child.
[02:08:33] There was no doubt about it.
[02:08:35] But I was trying to explain to him everything that made me,
[02:08:38] me, was gone.
[02:08:40] Those were not just activities that I like to do.
[02:08:42] That was my identity.
[02:08:43] I hunted, fished, cowboyed, and soldiered.
[02:08:47] Those were my essence.
[02:08:49] If I was too broken to do those things that distinguished me,
[02:08:52] then I was too broken to live as far as I was concerned.
[02:09:01] Yeah.
[02:09:02] That's everything you like to do.
[02:09:04] Yeah, I think they do.
[02:09:06] Never do it again.
[02:09:07] Yeah, I think a lot of guys go through that.
[02:09:10] And even I think some, you like you look at guys
[02:09:14] when they're getting ready retire from them,
[02:09:16] you know, I feel like everything's gone.
[02:09:19] I mean, maybe not in the same circumstances.
[02:09:21] There are some guys who are in similar circumstances with their brains.
[02:09:24] But, you know, maybe not exactly the same kind of circumstance,
[02:09:27] but they're going through a similar like period.
[02:09:30] Yeah.
[02:09:31] Like everything that they are in some sense being taken away from them
[02:09:34] because father times on the feet, right?
[02:09:36] And that's a similar, you know, I think it's similar.
[02:09:39] So I'm definitely not alone in having experienced these sorts of feelings.
[02:09:43] It's really weird to place the find yourself in for sure.
[02:09:46] Yeah, and I think the fact that you're 20 at the time,
[02:09:49] you know, at least an MMA fighter that's retired or can't fight anymore.
[02:09:54] And he's 37, 33, whatever.
[02:09:58] You know, that's a different deal.
[02:10:02] This is a real important conversation that you have here.
[02:10:07] Fast forward a little bit.
[02:10:08] A member of the surgical team, which monitor my progress
[02:10:11] walked in near the tail end of this conversation.
[02:10:14] He was just there to do routine checkups and to introduce himself.
[02:10:17] He was a young guy who seemed very well put together in high speed.
[02:10:20] I check my limbs one by one for circulation and feeling.
[02:10:24] Judd put a question to him.
[02:10:26] Hey Doc, Braxton has been told that he may never walk again.
[02:10:30] He thinks he is never going to be able to stand in a river to fly fish or hunt or hike
[02:10:34] or ride horses again.
[02:10:35] Can you talk to him?
[02:10:37] I concentrated on him hoping to read his expressions for tells of lies.
[02:10:42] He proceeded to give me all the reasons why I may be able to do those things again.
[02:10:46] He covered every angle including some caveats, such as I may have to use a cane to hike
[02:10:51] or limit the distance that I traveled and only fish shallow holes, etc.
[02:10:56] But he was telling the truth.
[02:10:59] Then at the end of his answer, he said the most important thing I have ever been told
[02:11:03] either before or since.
[02:11:07] Braxton, I think you can walk again but you are going to have to do it soon.
[02:11:12] You have too much soft tissue damage to risk allowing your muscles to atrophy any further.
[02:11:17] If you don't start now, you may never walk again at least without the use of a cane or a walker.
[02:11:23] Even in everyday activities, it is all up to you.
[02:11:29] It is all up to you, I repeated.
[02:11:32] It is all up to me, even in a situation like this one.
[02:11:35] My body may have been badly bruised but it is one spirit that determines the outcome of a tragedy
[02:11:41] not a doctor's prognosis.
[02:11:43] That was exactly what I needed to hear in that moment.
[02:11:46] I needed decisive language and a kick in the ass.
[02:11:49] Not some sugarcoded version of what may or may not happen.
[02:11:53] There was probably not anything that young surgeon said which I had not been told before.
[02:11:59] But I had never heard that truth until right then.
[02:12:01] The word he said, the order he chose to use and the conviction with which he said them were as perfect for me as if the universe had handcrafted that message.
[02:12:14] It is on you.
[02:12:19] I can see how when someone says, well, you know it could happen.
[02:12:25] You could walk again or yeah you might be able to do this.
[02:12:29] It is almost like people are inviting you just to leave it up to fate.
[02:12:33] It is almost like they are trying not to tell you that it is not possible.
[02:12:37] Almost like how women will sometimes do with their kids.
[02:12:41] You draw great.
[02:12:43] That is beautiful.
[02:12:45] It is kind of like that.
[02:12:49] It feels like that a little bit, especially coming from a primary care of a surgeon or something.
[02:12:54] You can do this because you know that they are pushing it off onto the next guy and pushing down the timeline.
[02:13:00] So when you get a guy that is like, no man, you can do it.
[02:13:03] If you want to do it, you can do it.
[02:13:05] You can figure it out.
[02:13:07] It is really, which is the truth.
[02:13:09] It is true.
[02:13:10] It is true.
[02:13:11] Virtually everything.
[02:13:12] You know what I mean?
[02:13:13] If your spinal cord is severed, you are in a different circumstance.
[02:13:19] But if it is not, you can probably get out of that, or have a certain sense, whatever that helped situation in, you can probably change it.
[02:13:29] So at this point, I am going to fast forward a little bit.
[02:13:34] You are still not, it is not fast forward in that far.
[02:13:37] But you go to Arlington Cemetery.
[02:13:42] And you are not really truly walking yet.
[02:13:46] But you go there and you decide you are going to walk.
[02:13:52] You say, my legs trembled underneath me.
[02:13:54] I saw another sign that read simply silence and respect.
[02:13:58] My arms shook as I pressed into my canes to grind myself forward another step.
[02:14:03] It felt like my bones were going to explode under the force of my body each time I transitioned my weight.
[02:14:08] We trot on slowly.
[02:14:10] We made our way by the rows and rows of heroes sacrificed on the altar of freedom at a snail's pace.
[02:14:17] But with the same determination, they had brought into combat.
[02:14:21] I was either going to walk the entire way or die trying.
[02:14:25] I don't know how far we walked that morning exactly.
[02:14:28] But it was at least a mile from the gate to section 60.
[02:14:32] And I had tracked every step of it.
[02:14:34] My arms ached and shook as my quadriceps just quivered their way through the steps.
[02:14:39] The rest periods between legs of the journey grew longer as we went along.
[02:14:43] But I never went back to that wheelchair.
[02:14:47] When we reached the sign that said section 60, I did not want to stop anymore.
[02:14:52] Braxton, you should probably take a break here.
[02:14:55] Don't overdo it.
[02:14:56] No, I'm okay.
[02:14:57] I responded the sweat pouring from my face.
[02:15:00] When we were inside section 60's brown boundaries,
[02:15:04] they must have taken us another hour to reach Sergeant Kansas graveside.
[02:15:11] Along with the slow pace we traveled due to my fatigue, the week and the weekening pain threshold.
[02:15:16] I read nearly every headstone I walked by on the way, each one adding more time and new significance to the journey.
[02:15:23] But also giving me a little more fuel to feed the desire to remain erect.
[02:15:31] Every step made me miserable.
[02:15:34] Pain radiated from my hips to my knees.
[02:15:37] The agony had grown so immense that several times I thought that I might throw up because of it.
[02:15:41] But we never gave up.
[02:15:44] I trudged every torturous pace of that march out of respect for Sergeant Can and the 250,000 fallen warriors he lay with.
[02:15:55] When we finally reached his grave side and read Adam Lee Can, Sergeant United States Marine Corps, January 25, 1982, January 5, 2006.
[02:16:11] BSM with the Purple Heart Operation I Racky Freedom.
[02:16:20] I lowered myself to a knee and wept.
[02:16:24] Not because of the pain I was experiencing.
[02:16:26] But because I had the nerve, the flat out audacity to complain about it.
[02:16:32] These hundreds of thousands of heroes had given their lives to provide me with a safe place to recover.
[02:16:38] And all I had thought about up to that point was how hard my time had been.
[02:16:45] Whatever I had given in service to my country and my brothers, paled in comparison to what they had done.
[02:16:51] Who was I to feel so sorry for myself? Who was I to complain about my situation?
[02:16:56] I was above ground.
[02:16:59] There was not a sole laid to rest in that holy shrine who would not have gladly taken my place if they could have.
[02:17:10] It became clear to me in that moment that I really did have nothing to complain about.
[02:17:16] And every time I did complain, it should be seen as a slap in the face to far better men than I will ever be.
[02:17:27] When I had finished paying my final respects to Sergeant Can and the men immediately surrounding him, I stood up on both canes and began my long walk out of the cemetery.
[02:17:40] A brand new sense of urgency to recover.
[02:17:42] A newfound pool of motivation to draw from. I was going to beat this thing.
[02:17:47] I was going to fight to take my life back again, not just because I wanted to, but because I had to because they couldn't.
[02:17:57] Now that pledge was not an easy pledge to take, not an easy pledge to keep.
[02:18:21] Even coming back from that, I mean you, you know, you're, you started swell enough, everything started swell enough from doing that long walk.
[02:18:36] Later on, you say, I'll be enough just sitting there trying to need the pain from my legs did help ease the frustration a bit.
[02:18:43] I stopped thinking about the things I couldn't do, like open a cab door on my own, and started thinking about what I just accomplished, walking some real distances.
[02:18:52] Distances no doctor who had operated on me had ever imagined possible. How did I do that? I wondered.
[02:18:57] It took me years to get to the bottom of that question.
[02:19:00] The truth is that the only reason I'd walked that far in that condition was because I had reticine that reminded me that Arlington was not about me.
[02:19:10] I didn't care enough about myself or my future to grind through that kind of torment.
[02:19:16] Self gratification, nor self improvement was enough to motivate me. My own ego is nowhere near big enough to carry me through that.
[02:19:25] I had done it because I did not want to disrespect Sergeant Can or any of the rest who had given their lives at war.
[02:19:34] I made that journey because I had a reason bigger than myself.
[02:19:39] I needed to cling to that maximum.
[02:19:46] When I read that and that's one of the points in this book when I'm talking about these internal thoughts that you've had and things that you figured out along the way,
[02:19:57] I was thinking about the fact that oftentimes we don't mind letting ourselves down,
[02:20:04] but we just wouldn't want to let down our friends, our teammates. I mean, I know for a fact in the military and the seal teams,
[02:20:12] the worst possible thing you want to have happen. You look, if you disappoint yourself,
[02:20:17] okay, that's bad, that sucks, but you don't want to let down your teammates.
[02:20:21] To me, that you said it took you years to get to the bottom of that question and that helped me get to the bottom of that question.
[02:20:29] Of how, what is it that these guys will do anything for their friends? They'll do anything for their friends. They'll take better care of their friends than they will of themselves,
[02:20:42] which is a crazy thought. I mean, I know you listen to some Jordan Peterson and read some Jordan Peterson and one of the things that he says is,
[02:20:51] it's like treat yourself as if you were someone that you would want to take care of. To similar thoughts.
[02:20:59] I guess I probably were, I got it and just said, and I've never put the two together actually.
[02:21:05] Yeah, I think it's also true, like any time you're doing anything hard, like if you're ready to quit,
[02:21:12] you can find something, you know, like find some other reason, it'll put, like your ego is just only so big.
[02:21:20] And it's also really easy to be like, man, no one's even going to know I quit, rationalize.
[02:21:26] Yeah, and no one knows that bulls up down there. I'm the only one that knows that bulls in that canyon, you know, no one's going to know if I don't knock down there.
[02:21:33] You just gotta find something to force you, you know, like for me, it's like I'm going to go home and tell my buddy that I pulled that bull out of that canyon.
[02:21:43] It's like a toxic shit to my buddy's to, you know, like just as much as you love.
[02:21:48] It's kind of like that given take of the relationship, you know, both ends.
[02:21:52] Yeah, that was a moving section of this book, man.
[02:21:57] That whole section was rough to read.
[02:22:04] And those canes are the ones with the four ends on them, you know, not like a regular cane.
[02:22:12] I ended up getting regular canes later from all to read, but those were the different kind.
[02:22:17] And so it gave me like a little bit more stability. I think I don't regular canes on a profile, few times, for sure.
[02:22:23] And you know that road is, it's like a good road and everything.
[02:22:28] So it's like the walkin wasn't that bad.
[02:22:31] It's just pretty busted up.
[02:22:33] And yeah, and I had never, I'd never been to Arlington before. I'd never seen it.
[02:22:39] And there really is, I don't know, spirituals right word or what, but it really conveys some sense of reverence, especially once you get into the actual grounds.
[02:22:51] The tour center is one thing, but you know, once you actually get in there, it's a very powerful moving place.
[02:22:59] And then you start to realize like, every one of these stones is an actual person, not just like a picture you saw on a movie or something.
[02:23:07] You know, it's like, here's his name.
[02:23:10] And then many cases here is why I found the other side.
[02:23:13] And you just see like generations of dudes who have died, you know, and women too now.
[02:23:20] Yeah, it's, it's really, it's one of those places in the world where earth and this country where you just have to go experience it.
[02:23:29] And there's really, I don't think anyone can write powerfully enough to explain what it's really like there.
[02:23:37] Yeah, I think, you know, when you know guys, when you know guys that are buried there and you can kind of relate, relate that individual and you look at all those graves.
[02:23:49] You just, you know that every one of those is like you said a person.
[02:23:54] It's like that's a, that's a mother, a father, a son, a daughter.
[02:23:59] It's like, like, someone that was known and I think it's easy to fall.
[02:24:06] It's easy to just call a soldier a soldier, right?
[02:24:09] And now remember that that soldier's a person.
[02:24:11] And I think when you know, when you know some of those people in those graves,
[02:24:17] it's easy to expand and connect that personal side to each and every one of those graves don'ts.
[02:24:25] Knowing the sacrifice isn't just somebody in a uniform.
[02:24:30] It's a person like I said, it's a brother, a sister, a father, a son, a daughter, a mother and it's freaking heartbreaking to be in there.
[02:24:43] Um, meanwhile, um, as this is going on, you still have, um, you know, you're still working through like your physical issues.
[02:24:59] And it sounds like your hand was just like, it's like, I can't, well, I look at your hand.
[02:25:07] When I was reading this, I, I, I, I didn't think your hand was going to be in the kind of shape.
[02:25:12] I was pretty, pretty freaking good to go.
[02:25:14] When, when I read stuff like this, large, this is from the book, large chunks of skin.
[02:25:19] We're falling away from my hand.
[02:25:21] They were not thin and dry strips like those shed from snakes, but thick and wet like scales floating away from a rotten fish that's washed up into the shallows.
[02:25:31] I couldn't help but feeling like this part of my body belonged to a corpse.
[02:25:35] The visuals, bad and romadi, but that day it looked as if it were dying.
[02:25:39] This day it looked like the hand was already dead.
[02:25:45] Like it was foreshadowing all that was to become a me if I were to succumb to my wounds.
[02:25:50] And though I was still doing much better, the fate of my, the, I was still, the fate was still far from out of the question.
[02:25:57] I still had an infection in my body, blood clots in my legs, and IVC filter that could break apart it any minute,
[02:26:04] and no one's addressing my brain injury yet. Even if I did live through the whole ordeal, I would be doing it with most of the function, without most of the function of my right hand.
[02:26:15] All that I had ever done in my life, which I had found worth doing, whether it be shooting, working, weightlifting, boxing, wrestling, cowboying, bull riding, or even war fighting, had required not just two hands, but two strong and capable hands.
[02:26:29] This hand, which had once defined me, now looked as if it were gone forever.
[02:26:35] I had not given it permission to give up yet, yet there it was, and sat crippled atop my wrist, a symbol of not just what could it become of me,
[02:26:46] but of how little controller I had over my fate. The futility of resistance can be maddening.
[02:26:54] That's another thing that's interesting about this book is you can tell a freak it, you can tell it's not a Hollywood movie,
[02:27:02] because in a Hollywood movie it's like there's some point where everything turns, and everything's like good now, you know,
[02:27:08] they write the book with that perfect story arc, and disay in a perfect story arc.
[02:27:12] It's like up, down, up, down, up, down. Sometimes the down is way lower than the up, and that's one of the things that makes it powerful is it's freaking,
[02:27:22] and it's like realistic, and it also makes it powerful because like every time I read something,
[02:27:30] and I'd be like, oh yeah, there it is. Like I'm like a brainwashed by Hollywood, you know,
[02:27:36] on reading it like, oh yeah, you went and visited the grave, here's the turnaround, and then no.
[02:27:42] You know, like, oh, you know, this happens and we're going to hit some more of those, but that's life, right?
[02:27:48] Yeah, that's the real thing. Yeah, there's a couple of even after the book was over that happened to you.
[02:27:54] That's going to be in the second book, I guess. Yeah, I don't know.
[02:28:02] What about this? This one section where this physical therapist is, is she comes into bend your finger?
[02:28:08] No, no, no. Yeah, she says, hey, I'm going to bend your finger, and you say, don't, it's fused.
[02:28:14] She says, no, no, it's not. We just need, you need to just suck it up.
[02:28:18] We're trying to get me to do this church and steeple thing.
[02:28:22] Do this, but this finger, this, not what doesn't move.
[02:28:26] She's like pulling on it.
[02:28:28] So you're telling, you're telling her it's fused. It's a funny part of the book.
[02:28:32] Dude, how bad did she feel?
[02:28:34] I think she felt pretty dumb.
[02:28:36] I was sitting there waiting like, free to break.
[02:28:38] Yeah, you know when you got assist when you were a kid in your grandpa,
[02:28:42] you were the Bible and whack it with an hammer.
[02:28:44] You know, I was just waiting for her to come hit it with a book.
[02:28:46] So I was like, well, that wreck can't really feel it worth it.
[02:28:50] Yeah, because my, right here in my wrist is where that median nerve was transsected.
[02:28:58] So I really couldn't feel this part of my hand.
[02:29:02] I carted it all at that time. So it wasn't like really hurting.
[02:29:06] I mean, a little kind of sort of, like, the point.
[02:29:10] The way you describe it, she's like getting tired.
[02:29:12] She's like, she's tired.
[02:29:14] You're freaking out.
[02:29:16] She was like, this big of a round.
[02:29:18] Yeah.
[02:29:19] And yeah, she was kind of attractive too.
[02:29:22] So I was just like, oh, there it is.
[02:29:26] Soccer.
[02:29:28] You're eating all kind of sympathy when that thing.
[02:29:34] You end up getting this deal where they're going to send you the community-based health care organization,
[02:29:38] which is, which is, you get to go back home basically to heal up.
[02:29:42] Yeah, I think they've since ended the program, but, but it seemed to you at the time.
[02:29:48] Very good.
[02:29:49] Like freaking awesome.
[02:29:50] You didn't have to be stuck out there while to read anymore.
[02:29:52] You could, you could head home.
[02:29:54] Yeah.
[02:29:55] Yeah.
[02:29:55] Because it, so I'm starting to catch you off.
[02:29:57] The traditional path that Walter read is your inpatient,
[02:30:00] and then you're in outpatient, but you stay on Wall to Read campus and like,
[02:30:04] you know, these barracks and stuff.
[02:30:06] And then you're just doing all of your outpatient work.
[02:30:09] It Walter read.
[02:30:10] So guys are there for like two, three years sometimes.
[02:30:12] Just going through all of their outpatient.
[02:30:14] And so the army is like, well, it's just sent them home, do outpatient care at home.
[02:30:17] Yeah.
[02:30:18] And that's kind of how the, I mean, I, you are stoked.
[02:30:21] You're stoked to get out of there.
[02:30:23] Yeah, yeah, I can go back home freaking hates it.
[02:30:25] I was going to give me out of this book.
[02:30:28] You got some, again, there's so many, so much stuff.
[02:30:33] Well, that people got to get the book for as you're, as you're making progress.
[02:30:37] And as you start driving across the country and as, you know, you get a new car.
[02:30:40] You get in some situations that are all in here that are,
[02:30:43] good, good reading, man.
[02:30:46] Not always the, not always the most positive thing, but it's at least it's good reading.
[02:30:50] It's, it's smart, it's good.
[02:30:51] Fast forward a little bit.
[02:30:55] Now you're driving across country, you're getting home.
[02:30:57] Even in the dark night, the green agricultural fields of home seem to glow
[02:31:00] as our headlights showing on the little mountains in the valley.
[02:31:03] It was too late to see my family.
[02:31:04] They were all in bed long before you arrived.
[02:31:06] For most of our drive, I've been communicating with my two closest friends,
[02:31:09] Dan and Josh.
[02:31:10] They had planned a meet-up set the house when we arrived.
[02:31:13] I hope they were still awake.
[02:31:14] I sent them another message.
[02:31:15] We're just getting into town.
[02:31:18] The words, welcome home, corporma coy.
[02:31:20] We're written in big block letters across a banner that's spanned.
[02:31:23] The two rain load and the, or two, two lane road at the northern,
[02:31:27] most end of town.
[02:31:29] At the southernmost end of town, home at last, I belted out through a grin.
[02:31:33] The steps in my house have been covered with a homemade wheelchair ramp
[02:31:37] engineered by my stepfather.
[02:31:38] My wife went to the door, opened it, and carried our bags inside.
[02:31:42] Another bit of my pride died is I helplessly watched her do the heavy lifting.
[02:31:47] I reached across my body and jerk the lever, which bound the vehicles door.
[02:31:52] My right hand was still too weak to the perform the tasks.
[02:31:56] So, of course, what's the smart move of this juncture?
[02:32:00] Start drinking with your friends.
[02:32:02] Which is why you too.
[02:32:04] I did.
[02:32:06] Yeah, opioids and every other kind of thing in there.
[02:32:10] You start drinking with your friends.
[02:32:14] This is again, when I talked about one of the things that makes this book so good
[02:32:20] is just the fact that you're just going to tell the truth of what you did and how you did it.
[02:32:25] And this is one of those things that I was reading.
[02:32:27] I was like, okay, check.
[02:32:29] So you're drinking with your friends.
[02:32:31] Literally the first night you're back and finally someone says,
[02:32:33] you know, so what happened?
[02:32:35] How did you get hit?
[02:32:36] And you say in the book, I started the story with why my team had been at the glass factory
[02:32:41] in the first place.
[02:32:42] I tried to inform them of the political climate in Almbar and how the arguments at home
[02:32:46] were shaping the battlefield over there.
[02:32:48] I gave them as much backstory as I could, hoping to give them enough
[02:32:51] to gather a layman's understanding of our experiences.
[02:32:54] Then I got to the January 5th and the build up to the explosion that crippled me and killed our brothers.
[02:33:00] I had been descriptive and honest up to that point,
[02:33:03] but for some reason that I may never fully understand, I started lying.
[02:33:07] I said that I acted in heroic ways after being wounded by the suicide bomber when I didn't.
[02:33:12] Maybe it was just the whiskey.
[02:33:14] Maybe it was insecurity.
[02:33:15] Maybe it was survivors guilt screaming in my head that I could have should have done more.
[02:33:20] Whatever the motivation was exactly, I will never know.
[02:33:23] But there I stood in my kitchen, pants down to my ankles,
[02:33:27] leaning awkwardly on my cane, pointing at the scars, covering my limbs,
[02:33:31] and lying about battlefield heroics I never exhibited.
[02:33:41] Yeah, I shouldn't actually cringe still.
[02:33:44] But I am as true.
[02:33:48] You want to hear my assessment?
[02:33:50] Sure.
[02:33:51] Of this situation?
[02:33:53] I think this is what happens to dudes.
[02:33:56] When you're trying to tell somebody a story,
[02:34:00] what your goal is is to make them feel what you felt.
[02:34:04] And so, if I'm looking at you and I'm telling you a story,
[02:34:10] and I want to tell you that like, a mortar hit,
[02:34:16] let's say a mortar hit, 50 yards away from me.
[02:34:20] It's scary.
[02:34:21] And it scares the shit out of you.
[02:34:24] It goes off and you're like, whoa.
[02:34:26] And like, it can kill you, even 50 yards away.
[02:34:29] It can kill you.
[02:34:30] But it did.
[02:34:31] So if I'm telling you a story, and especially if you're a civilian,
[02:34:35] I want you to know, I want you to feel what I felt.
[02:34:39] That freaking explosion scared the shit out of me.
[02:34:43] So when I tell you some of the details,
[02:34:46] I think there's a tendency to say this freaking mortar hit,
[02:34:51] five feet from me.
[02:34:53] And I'm just trying to let you feel what I felt
[02:34:59] in the best way that I can.
[02:35:01] So when I'm thinking, you know, even going out,
[02:35:06] like going outside the gate, going outside the wire,
[02:35:09] walking out there, trying to capture what it's like.
[02:35:12] It's hard to convey those.
[02:35:15] And you want someone to feel it so bad, what you felt.
[02:35:19] I don't know.
[02:35:20] I think that drives guys sometimes to say things that maybe
[02:35:23] on 100% on point, not 100% true.
[02:35:27] The spirit of what they say is true, but the facts aren't.
[02:35:32] You know?
[02:35:33] So I think that's some of it.
[02:35:36] You know, just when you, when you rattled through the, like,
[02:35:38] you're not really sure why you did it.
[02:35:39] I think part of it is because you want people to feel
[02:35:42] at least some of what you felt.
[02:35:45] And we know we're not always the best at convey in the feelings.
[02:35:49] And especially when people are looking at you,
[02:35:51] and you can see that they're not quite getting it.
[02:35:54] You know?
[02:35:55] And you can see the look on some civilians face that's like
[02:35:58] 50 meters away.
[02:35:59] That doesn't sound like a big deal.
[02:36:01] You know?
[02:36:02] I'm looking at echo right now.
[02:36:03] He's kind of like 50 meters.
[02:36:04] 40 meters.
[02:36:05] No cross.
[02:36:06] Yeah, half the football field.
[02:36:08] You know, you kidding me?
[02:36:09] What a joke.
[02:36:10] Um, so that's what I had to want to do the things.
[02:36:13] Look, the other other Nickender's, the sure,
[02:36:15] but when I've talked to guys,
[02:36:17] um, when I've heard stories from guys from like,
[02:36:20] hmm,
[02:36:21] I'm suspect.
[02:36:23] I usually just take into account,
[02:36:25] oh, they just want me to feel what they felt.
[02:36:26] They just want me to feel what they felt.
[02:36:28] And I think that adds to it a little bit.
[02:36:30] This is a really interesting perspective.
[02:36:32] I've never considered.
[02:36:33] Yeah.
[02:36:34] Um,
[02:36:36] and this is what's weird.
[02:36:38] And you, this is what you say. The lies and embellishments.
[02:36:40] I was telling, we're chipping away at what was left
[02:36:42] to my pride even as I spouted them.
[02:36:44] But really, what did I have left to be proud of?
[02:36:46] That's the other crazy things.
[02:36:48] Like you're talking to civilians.
[02:36:50] Like they, you don't, you don't need to say.
[02:36:52] Like you're like, hey, I got blown up, man.
[02:36:55] Like that's good enough of the story as you're going to get.
[02:36:58] You know?
[02:36:59] Uh,
[02:37:01] I was a shortened, pasty frail and morally compromised shell
[02:37:05] of whatever kind of man I had been once before.
[02:37:09] Pride, what pride could be expected of a man who's forced to urinate
[02:37:12] in a plastic bottle next to his bed
[02:37:14] because he's too weak to walk to the bathroom at night.
[02:37:17] So again, in your mind,
[02:37:19] you think you got to build up like yourself,
[02:37:22] but bro, I mean, anybody that's there looking at you like,
[02:37:26] hey, man, you obviously,
[02:37:28] freaking, you know, got after it.
[02:37:31] You want to, or I'm front of it or something.
[02:37:35] Yeah, man, I don't know.
[02:37:38] You're right. I had to really never consider that.
[02:37:41] You're right.
[02:37:43] Yeah, it's weird when there's civilians involved too,
[02:37:46] because they literally have no idea.
[02:37:48] You know, like,
[02:37:50] it's only in your head, you know?
[02:37:53] It's only in your head that you think,
[02:37:55] maybe I, you know, I need to tell them that I did this.
[02:38:00] There, there, bro, you went to Iraq.
[02:38:02] These people were sitting around and freaking you,
[02:38:04] tall, whatever, drinking beers, you know?
[02:38:07] Well, I've been, you got to remember two.
[02:38:09] I've been in the hospital living in my head
[02:38:11] 24 hours a day for months at that point,
[02:38:14] because they can't really talk to anybody.
[02:38:16] Even though they're army nurses and stuff,
[02:38:18] they might as well be civilians too.
[02:38:20] They, you know,
[02:38:22] I'm just, they just work in hospital.
[02:38:23] I'm not saying they don't do powerful and great things.
[02:38:26] So far as like being able to relate or understand
[02:38:29] they can't, you know, they can't relate.
[02:38:32] And the, when I was in the neuroward at Walter Reed,
[02:38:36] the kid got, kid not a kid.
[02:38:38] Soldier, it was like my same age, got put into a room.
[02:38:42] Next to me, they got shot through the throat
[02:38:44] and Afghanistan.
[02:38:46] And once he got to where he could talk again,
[02:38:48] at least everyone's the one,
[02:38:49] we'd be able to both, you know, shoot a little bit.
[02:38:51] But outside of that, and he couldn't talk for,
[02:38:54] you know, he was struggling.
[02:38:55] I mean, he got, like a 5-4-R,
[02:38:57] I think it was through his neck.
[02:39:00] But so yeah, so you also just constantly living
[02:39:03] in your own head.
[02:39:04] So maybe when I was home,
[02:39:06] like that perspective that you shared earlier,
[02:39:08] I had never considered,
[02:39:09] maybe I was doing exactly that,
[02:39:11] but to myself, you know,
[02:39:13] I don't know.
[02:39:21] So I'm going to fast forward a little bit again.
[02:39:24] You go to visit your mom's house
[02:39:29] and your grandma and your granddad,
[02:39:31] or there.
[02:39:32] And, you know, you make it in.
[02:39:37] Your grandma's there.
[02:39:38] She's like glad you made it home.
[02:39:41] You are, you know, hey, where's grandpa?
[02:39:45] He's over in the couch, she pointed.
[02:39:48] I popped down beside my childhood hero,
[02:39:50] and clung his tightly as I could manage.
[02:39:52] His arms felt weaker than they once had,
[02:39:54] but not a thing could diminish his mountainous
[02:39:56] stature in my eyes.
[02:39:57] We sat there for a while in embrace.
[02:39:59] I almost felt like a kid who had fallen down
[02:40:01] and scraped his knees.
[02:40:02] I just wanted to hear him tell me
[02:40:03] it was going to be alright.
[02:40:05] I'm so proud of you, he whispered.
[02:40:07] I love you, grandpa.
[02:40:08] I'm sorry.
[02:40:09] Tears welled up in my eyes.
[02:40:11] He told me that he was proud of me,
[02:40:13] just like I had hoped he would,
[02:40:14] but it didn't make me feel good.
[02:40:16] I didn't deserve that accolade,
[02:40:17] and I knew it.
[02:40:19] When he said he was proud of me,
[02:40:21] he was talking about who I was as a man,
[02:40:23] not when I had accomplished physically.
[02:40:25] I knew that.
[02:40:27] The very night before I had demonstrated a lowly character.
[02:40:30] Why should he be proud of me?
[02:40:32] He wouldn't be if he had known that I was a kind of man
[02:40:34] who lied to his friends.
[02:40:36] Oh, you dummy, what the hell are you sorry for?
[02:40:39] Knock it off before I kick you right in the ass
[02:40:41] grandpa responded.
[02:40:42] I buried my head into his once broad
[02:40:45] and muscular shoulder trying to hide my shame.
[02:40:48] I don't know how long I stayed there for,
[02:40:50] but what did I say longer if you let me?
[02:40:52] I spent the better part of a week
[02:40:54] building that damn wheelchair ramp
[02:40:56] and you didn't even use it.
[02:40:57] My stepdad quipped.
[02:40:59] I'm never getting back in that goddamn chair again.
[02:41:01] I billowed.
[02:41:02] Bracks and watch your mouth, mom yelled.
[02:41:04] Watch it or I'll sock you on.
[02:41:06] Grandpa joined in.
[02:41:14] Fast forward.
[02:41:15] Like many other soldiers at war,
[02:41:17] my home front had changed considerably
[02:41:19] during my absence.
[02:41:20] My great grandmother who might have been
[02:41:22] very close to past away,
[02:41:23] but she had written a letter while I was in
[02:41:25] the rymoddy saying she expected to go soon.
[02:41:27] Her death was not so unexpected.
[02:41:29] My stepdad ramp,
[02:41:30] I've never seen a day to day in his life
[02:41:32] before I left for the war,
[02:41:33] but while I was going, he developed prostate cancer.
[02:41:36] The chemotherapy age
[02:41:37] and dramatically in just one year,
[02:41:39] but even this was less jarring
[02:41:41] than the sight of that wheelchair.
[02:41:43] Everyone's life has an event horizon.
[02:41:46] My grandfather's had just come earlier
[02:41:48] than I anticipated.
[02:41:49] That was all there was to it.
[02:41:52] I just wasn't ready for the sight of my hero,
[02:41:54] the man who raised me,
[02:41:55] when no one else wanted to
[02:41:57] crawling into a chair.
[02:42:06] When that's because he's,
[02:42:08] you know, basically he's now in a wheelchair.
[02:42:10] Yeah, and I had watched him battle
[02:42:12] as a back injury for
[02:42:14] since I was like 14 years old.
[02:42:17] He just kept working.
[02:42:19] He was a very famous family.
[02:42:21] And so I knew exactly how he ended up in that chair.
[02:42:24] So it kind of hit even harder.
[02:42:33] So the whole reason that you came up,
[02:42:35] the whole reason you were able to come home
[02:42:37] was this community-based health care organization.
[02:42:40] It's two and a half hours
[02:42:42] you had to drive to get there.
[02:42:44] Kind of checking in here.
[02:42:46] Corporal McCoy, how the hell are you?
[02:42:48] A deep familiar voice boomed out
[02:42:50] from behind the vehicle.
[02:42:51] I'm rolling along top.
[02:42:53] How you been?
[02:42:54] It was Sergeant K, a senior entiel
[02:42:56] that a new well in fact he had been the guy
[02:42:58] that approved my request of volunteer
[02:42:59] for the Plymouth to Ramadi.
[02:43:00] I've been well, cowboy.
[02:43:02] I wanted to introduce you to your new
[02:43:04] Paltoon Sergeant Master Sergeant Dillonger.
[02:43:06] Hello Sergeant.
[02:43:07] I said, extending my hand.
[02:43:08] He grabbed my hand and proclaimed young man.
[02:43:10] I expected me to soldier in a wheelchair.
[02:43:12] You seen him around anywhere?
[02:43:14] Yeah, well, I'm doing my best to stay out
[02:43:17] of that damn thing, Sergeant.
[02:43:19] He's a grizzly old bastard, Corporal.
[02:43:22] Most of us around here just call him Bulldog.
[02:43:24] First Sergeant K, chimed in.
[02:43:26] Master Sergeant Dillonger Bulldog
[02:43:28] was a short stocky combat veteran of the Vietnam War.
[02:43:31] Usually he paced around Brit,
[02:43:32] briskly with a cigarette and his lips
[02:43:34] looking for someone to ask to chew.
[02:43:36] He didn't beat around the bush about anything.
[02:43:38] If you had a thought, you were liable to hear it.
[02:43:40] But he cared about the men in his platoon.
[02:43:42] He played no games, especially the armies.
[02:43:45] Later on in our relationship,
[02:43:47] when there was a mandatory formation
[02:43:49] upcoming that he didn't think I needed to drive up for.
[02:43:52] He simply called me on my phone and asked me where I was and whether I was okay.
[02:43:56] Then he told the commander that I was accounted for over time.
[02:43:59] I developed a deep admiration and respect for that man,
[02:44:02] the kind that no rank or ribbons can earn.
[02:44:04] He sounds like a character.
[02:44:06] He was so funny.
[02:44:08] And just the best guy.
[02:44:10] He got me my first job after I got out.
[02:44:14] He was just a really good guy.
[02:44:15] I ended up dying a couple of years ago.
[02:44:18] He was a long cancer.
[02:44:20] He was 70 years tall by then.
[02:44:23] He was a little over guy.
[02:44:25] He was a kind of leader that expected you to do whatever you were supposed to do.
[02:44:32] But he would really shield you from nonsense
[02:44:36] that you didn't need to be involved in.
[02:44:40] Yeah.
[02:44:41] You say in the book, your corporate,
[02:44:44] I know you've been through a lot of shit in the last year.
[02:44:46] I'm old enough to know what this shit is like.
[02:44:48] I did my time in NAMM.
[02:44:49] Our war wasn't squawk compared to yours.
[02:44:51] I interrupted shut the fuck up McCoy cut me off.
[02:44:54] I've seen plenty of war.
[02:44:55] It's all the same shit.
[02:44:56] Our war's might have been different,
[02:44:57] but you did your time in the shit.
[02:44:59] You don't owe me any, you don't owe me or anyone else a fucking caveat.
[02:45:03] Understood?
[02:45:04] I nodded.
[02:45:05] What I'm trying to say is this unit is different.
[02:45:07] This is a medical holdover company.
[02:45:09] We're not a line unit.
[02:45:10] But don't get it wrong.
[02:45:11] This is still the army.
[02:45:12] There's still enough bullshit here to pack.
[02:45:14] 10, 5 tons.
[02:45:16] I will do my best to make sure you only eat the shit you have to.
[02:45:19] But I swear to God, if you fuck with me,
[02:45:21] I will have your cripple bass on the next fucking flight to DC.
[02:45:24] Understood?
[02:45:25] Roger Sergeant.
[02:45:26] I will call yourself on any time.
[02:45:28] I feel like it.
[02:45:29] If I want to, if you don't answer,
[02:45:30] you better be dead dying or in the middle of a medical appointment.
[02:45:33] Understood?
[02:45:34] Yes, Sergeant.
[02:45:35] You call me first thing in the morning.
[02:45:36] I will know everything.
[02:45:37] I will know about every medical appointment on your schedule.
[02:45:40] And if you leave your house for any reason,
[02:45:41] I don't give a shit if it's just a go outside to piss on the tree.
[02:45:43] You will ask permission first.
[02:45:45] Copy.
[02:45:46] Roger Sergeant.
[02:45:47] All right.
[02:45:48] Now get that pretty little wife for your home and let her relax.
[02:45:50] Corp.
[02:45:50] You're free to go.
[02:45:51] Roger Sergeant.
[02:45:52] I'd only made a few steps when I heard his voice call out again.
[02:45:55] Corp.
[02:45:55] McCoy.
[02:45:56] Yes, Sergeant.
[02:45:57] Welcome home, son.
[02:45:58] Glad you made it.
[02:45:59] Thank you, Sergeant.
[02:46:01] So there you go, man.
[02:46:02] Freak in.
[02:46:04] Just on.
[02:46:05] Stud.
[02:46:06] Stud.
[02:46:07] Stud.
[02:46:08] Um.
[02:46:09] Again, you know, that sounds all cool.
[02:46:15] I'm all happy.
[02:46:16] I'm reading that part of my call.
[02:46:17] Here's a good turning point.
[02:46:19] Uh, then you fast forward a little bit.
[02:46:22] I told myself that my, none of my behavior was an overreaction when taking in context.
[02:46:25] After all, these little bursts of extra pain may have been slight when considered on their own.
[02:46:29] But when piled on top of the constant and never ending aches, I endured.
[02:46:33] They seemed excruciating.
[02:46:35] I heard every second I was awake and nighttime brought me no reprieve.
[02:46:39] When I lay in my bed at whatever time seemed appropriate that evening, I didn't sleep.
[02:46:44] What's more, I never expected to sleep.
[02:46:46] How could I sleep when I heard so much?
[02:46:49] What had, what had I become?
[02:46:51] I was being weak.
[02:46:53] I had once thought my mental toughness was as sure as the sun coming up in the morning.
[02:46:57] But I was broken down again.
[02:46:59] Before I was wounded, I used to claim that I had never quit in my life and nothing could make me.
[02:47:04] But I was wrong.
[02:47:05] I had hit many, many breaking points during recovery.
[02:47:09] The internal dialogue world about my head and endless cycle.
[02:47:13] I was being soft and I knew it, but rationalizing the pain was so damn easy to do.
[02:47:18] I had made it all sorts of excuses over the course of the past few months.
[02:47:23] And although it should have been the last time I had made such justifications, it wasn't.
[02:47:35] So you mentioned in a brief moment a little bit ago, opioids.
[02:47:45] Scary thing. They've been in the news a bunch.
[02:47:48] You say on the question of addiction, many of us had little to say to begin with.
[02:47:54] This is an interesting point.
[02:47:56] I didn't choose to be addicted.
[02:47:58] I didn't even understand the degree to which I was addicted.
[02:48:02] There was no true first time so to speak.
[02:48:05] I never had the an opportunity to debate the potential pitfalls of drugs with a sober mind.
[02:48:11] The fact is, like with so many other soldiers, my addiction was little more than the tragic
[02:48:18] side effect of healing.
[02:48:20] I left Walter Reed taking hundreds of milligrams of oxycontin a day.
[02:48:27] Once a million doctors told me that I had been prescribed dosages in multiples of what he wrote his terminal cancer patients.
[02:48:36] I didn't choose that.
[02:48:38] Neither did thousands of others, thousands of other men and women who found themselves in similar circumstances.
[02:48:45] I did however make things much worse.
[02:48:49] And that can't be hung on anyone.
[02:48:51] But me.
[02:48:53] This caveat to the story is meant to be read as a sort of table setting,
[02:48:57] not an invasion of personal responsibility.
[02:49:01] I've learned many lessons through my journey.
[02:49:03] Probably the most important of them being taking ownership of one's failures is the best way to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
[02:49:12] If there's a way to rationally place blame on another, or on fate itself, that is all the more reason to look inward for a culprit,
[02:49:21] because that nave is the only one you can reliably alter.
[02:49:28] A little bit of extreme ownership going on there.
[02:49:32] Yeah.
[02:49:33] Yeah, I took that for me.
[02:49:36] Sorry man.
[02:49:37] I probably thought.
[02:49:38] Oh, by all means.
[02:49:39] You can't take what's free.
[02:49:41] It is true though.
[02:49:43] It's one of those deals.
[02:49:45] I'm sure you've.
[02:49:46] I know I know you wrote similar things in your first book.
[02:49:50] There is a way to view this these sort of situations where you can look at it like, well.
[02:49:59] Sure, maybe I was forced into this and that wasn't my fault.
[02:50:03] But the only way I get out of this is if I just.
[02:50:08] Control the parts that I can control and I can't I can't do that without taking ownership of the things that I'm screwing up.
[02:50:14] So you you almost have to just say okay we the first play doesn't matter anymore.
[02:50:19] Now it's you know third and ten and I got to figure out how to crunch these yards.
[02:50:24] That's it.
[02:50:25] That's it.
[02:50:26] That's it.
[02:50:27] And I you know you say you stole from you actually talk about you give credit to.
[02:50:32] Uh, extreme ownership the book and in in this so I appreciate the shout out and I'm glad that it was able to something that you able to connect to.
[02:50:44] So that's sort of the the opening that you give on this dealing with oxy cotton and whatnot.
[02:50:50] You say the hardest part of managing pain was not dealing with the sharp off and crippling surges it was the constant aching in retrospect.
[02:50:56] I think the most profound effect of the oxy cotton was on my sanity.
[02:51:01] And you will never ending dull aches that engulfed my lower extremities spine and right hand were psychologically tortures.
[02:51:10] It wasn't exactly excruciating but the utter lack of respect was brutal.
[02:51:19] And that's you know you you you kind of go into that but I wanted to highlight the fact that you say a couple times like it was just absolutely constant unending pain all the time.
[02:51:30] You think about what what what this if it's let's say the Soviets have the ability to inflict this kind of thing like invisible damage.
[02:51:43] I mean it's not invisible but like let's say they could make invisible damage and chronic pain.
[02:51:48] That's that that would have been the preferred torture mechanism.
[02:51:52] You know because they can send you back into the real world and like whenever you're ready we can push the button or you know remove the
[02:51:59] device or whatever and make the pain stop.
[02:52:02] Yeah but you gotta do what we tell you do do do.
[02:52:04] Yeah.
[02:52:05] But that's how a lot of these guys are living for months and years at a time and I think we don't really.
[02:52:11] I don't think we don't go deep deep enough into this psychology that often.
[02:52:16] When we tell our own stories we sort of kind of gloss over that achy you know dull almost maniacal pain.
[02:52:25] And a lot of dudes even just like construction guys are living like this for sure.
[02:52:29] You want to buy their drink in like 30 pack and I or whatever because they're backs jacked up or whatever.
[02:52:35] Yeah.
[02:52:36] And like you said they still got to build the pay the family to feed and speaking of drinking at this point you say you're drinking half a fifth of bourbon a night on top of the pain killers.
[02:52:52] At one point one of your friends I guess teaches you how to snort oxygotten.
[02:53:00] Yes and things change while I was gone and yeah I mean I'd like seen this kind of stuff done as a kid like you'd see people you know you'd a party.
[02:53:11] So let me see people like roll up a dollar bill or something you're not just drinking but there's like a whole process to be able to snort oxygotten and that was nice to me.
[02:53:24] When you so you do it this guy kind of shows you what's up teaches you how to snort oxygotten.
[02:53:31] Once you do it you feel like you're gonna puke he tells you go puke you go puke and then you say from the book after I've vomited I felt better than I have ever.
[02:53:40] I've never had in my entire life.
[02:53:43] Yeah when I was speaking at schools for a while you still tell teachers and like the worst thing you can tell kid is that it's not fun because then they know you lied to them.
[02:53:59] Because it is it really is like the most invigorating it's really as boys it's honestly difficult to put in the words how good it feels it's like you for it.
[02:54:12] But if you if you a lot of people say drugs are all terrible and you know and then their first experiences like what have you been hiding from me dude this is amazing.
[02:54:21] You know then they're more likely to you know to it's much better to focus on how bad things can get rather than telling it's not fun.
[02:54:31] Same thing if like drinking I mean how many preachers daughters and dope to preachers daughters thanks.
[02:54:41] What the guy knew of front of mind told he ended up in jail and whatnot but he said the first time he ever did crystal meth it was the only thing he ever wanted to do for the rest of his life.
[02:54:51] Like it was just like so he just loved it very first time done he was done he was addicted and he ended up you know addicted to tell you what the jail.
[02:55:05] You say my desire to continue on was eroding many factors were contributing to this like the impossibility of finding refrain from the physical torment but my inability to come to terms with the fact that my best friends were still in harm's way living in the hell that was Ramadi in 2006 without me and my own be poor behavioral choices were the worst of them.
[02:55:27] Once I had scrolled the timeless military mantra death before dishonor did death before dishonor on the walls of my hooch and I rack now here on the home front where that code should be easiest to live up to.
[02:55:40] I failed and I continued to fail every day over and over the surest form of justification ran through my head what does it matter anyways.
[02:55:59] Once I started abusing pain medication my mental health went downhill rapidly but I didn't care I felt nothing.
[02:56:06] Even chasing the dragon became a sort of mundane routine doctor appointed visits doctor appointments visits with specialists in physical therapy sessions were too similar to telepart the only piece of me that a grown was my opioid addiction.
[02:56:20] And it had metastasized.
[02:56:23] In the morning I'd wake up wheel into the bathroom grind up another oxy cotton in eagerly devour it as if it were the cure to rather than a cause of myself hatred.
[02:56:35] After my usual half days work at the hospital I stopped by the liquor store and picked up a fifth of bourbon often times feeling safely away from the presence of the local law enforcement I opened the bottle of moment I exited the freeway.
[02:56:47] Most days I drove right past my house headed for the nearest solitude I could find I long for a place where I could be alone just me and my thoughts.
[02:56:57] My thoughts nearly never left for my body it was almost as if I still lived there in my mind I'd become bitter and angry I hated everyone and everything around me.
[02:57:06] Don't any of these assholes realize where a war right now good matter dying in an ungrateful countries half a world away what the fuck is everyone smiling about.
[02:57:15] The only people I still loved were thousands of miles away and I had no way to talk to them.
[02:57:22] I slid my way out of the truck placing most of my weight on the cane in my left hand and the rest on my left leg as I had become my new normal pain shop through my body my hip wobbled.
[02:57:37] It couldn't handle the redistribution of weight I let out a short grown fuck this shit.
[02:57:45] I held a loud broadcasting my complaint to God the universe and whatever else may be listening.
[02:57:53] I emerged from my home a short while later with my semi automatic 45 caliber handgun and a fresh bottle of pills in tow.
[02:58:01] I climbed into my truck yank the lever into reverse and started from my favorite little mountain valley in those east hills.
[02:58:10] I stepped up to the edge of the valley in front of the old cabin hoping that someone might find me before my decomposing corpse began to blow.
[02:58:18] I didn't want my mom to have to deal with that image for the rest of her life.
[02:58:22] I retrieved my lighter bill credit card CD case and oxy cotton.
[02:58:28] I was ready to get on with it.
[02:58:31] I kept pounding whiskey while I crushed up my narcotics.
[02:58:35] I feel the warm blanket of euphoria. Their in-perceptible chains would bring.
[02:58:42] Line spread across the CD case placed in the middle of my center console.
[02:58:46] I rolled up and already chalky bill and snorted the first line.
[02:58:50] I feel better already. I fought to myself as I chased it down with another swig of the bottle I was holding between my knees.
[02:58:58] My pistol sat on the passenger seat beside me.
[02:59:02] I reached over with my right hand, wrapped its two working fingers around the grip and pushed the frame into my thigh to stabilize it.
[02:59:11] Then I racked the slide with my left hand.
[02:59:14] The gun now main ready.
[02:59:17] I set up on my lap, muzzle toward the front of the cab.
[02:59:23] Never point a weapon at anything you are not willing to destroy.
[02:59:26] I took up the bottle again and had another slug.
[02:59:29] I retrieved the loosely rolled bill and tightened it back into a cylinder.
[02:59:33] Then I placed it at the tip of my other nostril, leaned over and softly breathed in the last of my respite.
[02:59:40] Calm.
[02:59:43] I stared over the dashboard at the valley that it once held many of my fondest memories.
[02:59:49] The world around me slowly closed in. My eyes darkened.
[02:59:53] I fumbled for the pistol in my lap.
[02:59:55] I longed desperately for the bite of its cold barrel on the side of my head and the hot lead in delivery it could bring.
[03:00:03] Every ounce of my soul begged for its one weight ticket to anywhere, but the nihilistic hell I lived in.
[03:00:14] My eyes opened some time later.
[03:00:17] A near empty bottle of whiskey on the floorboard and the song I just got back from hell by Gary Allen,
[03:00:23] reverberating throughout the cab.
[03:00:37] So thankfully, you passed out.
[03:00:41] Yeah, I had this mix that I made.
[03:00:48] That truck just had a CD boy or saw dad like this. Mix of songs and that they were all those kind of songs.
[03:00:56] And I drove up to this valley that I used to go, you know, you go shoot rabbits or hunk snakes or party with the girls and this kind of stuff.
[03:01:06] I just wanted to be done with the frustrated and.
[03:01:13] Yeah, done. And luckily, like I just said, I passed out, man.
[03:01:21] She could have been really bad. And luckily I didn't, you know, like a cute liver failure or some shit from opioids and alcohol.
[03:01:33] And yeah, like physical therapy every day, I just set back after set back and then, you know, my whole entire recovery was like set back after set back.
[03:01:42] And everybody was saying, I'm like, oh, all kinds of fucking drugs and you know, psych drugs and opioids and every other, you know, and my body didn't work and I was just, I was just over it.
[03:02:00] I was just completely over it.
[03:02:03] Didn't that, you know, wasn't like in the best marriage at the time, which how could you be, you know, and you like how could you marriage be good when you're behaving like this every day, right?
[03:02:09] And so just like everything is, it like spiraled down the toilet.
[03:02:16] And that's, it's not an uncommon, it's really, unfortunately, not an uncommon occurrence.
[03:02:23] It's just kind of why eventually that I wanted to write the book in the first place was I was reading these other books here and there.
[03:02:32] And I just didn't, I didn't feel like I didn't see anybody who was going.
[03:02:36] It was, they weren't being like the, the stories weren't reflecting everything that I was saying, you know, in my own life, in my friends and you know, some guys were doing great and the other guys were really not doing great.
[03:02:51] How is it that no one like saw?
[03:02:55] I mean, if you're drinking that much and you're free, are they not blood testing you to see how much obedience or opioids or in your system or shit like that?
[03:03:03] So I was getting blood tested every day for, I think I came across off of blood thinners by then or not.
[03:03:09] When I was on blood thinners, I had to get tested every day, but they don't test for anything, but like the, I don't know if it's viscosity or what, but how, how thin your blood is.
[03:03:19] And so then they just adjust your blood, their medication to that.
[03:03:23] So no one was like, pissed us off from how come, and you're not talking to any freaking therapist or psychologists or chaplains or anything like that.
[03:03:32] So I just just figured out he's fine.
[03:03:34] Yeah, I mean, I, I was probably, I mean, I was definitely trying to blow off everybody all the time, but no, I wasn't, you know, I had to speak to a therapist.
[03:03:42] I can't remember if it was three times a year, it was something like that.
[03:03:47] It was somewhere, or that might have been a VA thing.
[03:03:49] I can't remember.
[03:03:50] Anyway, at some point there was a requirement to speak to a therapist like three times a year.
[03:03:55] Um, go.
[03:03:57] And that was what I was really, yeah.
[03:04:01] And I don't, I wish, I really wish I knew why it got that bad, but it didn't.
[03:04:07] Well, you just kind of breeze through it, and I'm, I'm freezing through the book.
[03:04:11] I mean, I've skipped through a bunch of stuff where the daily grind of what you're doing, you're missing your friends and your body.
[03:04:19] You're, you're not healthy the way you want to be.
[03:04:22] The, the downward spiral of, oh, I'm addicted to this shit.
[03:04:27] The only way to stop feeling shitty about feeling addicted to this shit is to do more of this shit that I'm addicted to.
[03:04:32] Yeah.
[03:04:33] Uh, so I think you, you, the way you lay it out is actually very helpful because people might be able to identify where they are on that downward spiral.
[03:04:45] Yeah. And what, for me, what finally got me there, I'm saying I wish I knew it was at the very, very bottom of it, but, but, but the final catalyst was I injured my leg at physical therapy.
[03:04:54] And I was just like, fuck man, you know, I can't, I can, I'm, I'm done, like this, I've had enough rollercoaster in this point.
[03:05:02] You know, so I think if you're, if you're one of these people that's going through addiction and you're,
[03:05:08] uh, what they call like functionally addicted, whether it's heroin or, like there's only handful of drugs that people can really do it on alcohol mostly.
[03:05:16] If you're one of these like functional addicts, you should really know that it, you might hit that one catalyst that sends you to a whole, another level of it, you know what I mean?
[03:05:28] Because maybe you can ride that for a while, but eventually something goes wrong and you're going to turn to that substance to help you get over that.
[03:05:37] And that's going to go, you're going to be at a whole new, holy level addiction because now you just conquered another thing, you know, with that.
[03:05:44] So, and yeah, like, you know, back to your other point, I think we would introduce myself.
[03:05:50] I'm pretty happy about that now.
[03:05:53] You know, I've said before like, when people get in these modes and these situations, like, they're like a storm cloud around their head that they think is the whole world.
[03:06:04] Is this storm cloud?
[03:06:05] And like anyone on the outside can look at it and say, bro, you're just, it's just around you, like you come over here, you'll be okay, you'll get out of it.
[03:06:12] But from the perspective that you are in at that time, all you see is just freaking darkness everywhere.
[03:06:18] Yeah.
[03:06:20] Um.
[03:06:24] Going back to the book here, the 15 mile drive back home dragged on.
[03:06:28] This is after you got your ship back together.
[03:06:31] Um.
[03:06:32] My thoughts drifted back to Arlington, the last place in time where I felt strong and accomplished.
[03:06:37] I remembered again how it felt to recognize how minor my complaints truly were in the grand scheme of things.
[03:06:43] My sacrifice was so little and compared to those to what those heroes had given.
[03:06:49] I was kicking away the blanket of freedom and secured that they provided me.
[03:06:54] It is my duty to live for those who can't.
[03:06:57] I had once said, who am I to be so selfish?
[03:07:00] I was going to throw away my gift of life due to a little suffering.
[03:07:03] Who among them would not gladly trade places with me.
[03:07:06] I said to myself, hoping that it would sink in again.
[03:07:09] My commitment to those heroes rekindled shame, the right kind of shame, the kind that expedites transformation washed over me.
[03:07:17] Not long ago, I had stood above their sacred resting places offering whatever small, vicarious redemption I could.
[03:07:24] Yet, I had failed at that promise.
[03:07:26] I had tried to quit my duty in its infancy.
[03:07:29] Never again.
[03:07:31] I renewed my vows to them before God and whatever else was listening.
[03:07:35] I promised never to give into the darkness again.
[03:07:38] Now as I write this today, I wish so desperately that I could tell you honestly that I made good on this second oath, but I can't.
[03:07:46] That was not the last time I failed them.
[03:07:49] In fact, it was just one stumbling among a multitude.
[03:07:53] I was starting to feel a little better about myself.
[03:07:55] I had made a grave mistake, but luckily it hadn't been final.
[03:08:00] I've got to get my shit together, I said.
[03:08:08] So, you, like you said, you redo this vow kind of thing.
[03:08:18] And then again, you freaking fool me into thinking like this is it.
[03:08:25] This is it.
[03:08:26] I made out of the darkness of like cool, we're good.
[03:08:31] And you do, you know you go up, you start squirming some shit away.
[03:08:35] Fast forward a little bit, these cold fronts and winter weather kept me shut up inside day and night.
[03:08:40] Am I waking hours?
[03:08:41] I stared out the window at dark and frigid skies when I laid down to rest the freezing world around me.
[03:08:45] It was replaced by 130 degree memories and nightmares.
[03:08:48] I felt as if my life was constantly on the brink of an unforeseeable, but impending doom.
[03:08:53] Depression brought me back to the blanket of the bottle and the brief bliss of medication.
[03:08:58] My hospital visits were shrunk from five days a week to three.
[03:09:02] But physical therapy was a virtually non-existent.
[03:09:05] The only thing that got me out of bed each day was my hatred for the sheets.
[03:09:08] I did nothing but watch movies play my guitar and drink whiskey.
[03:09:12] Rock bottom is a slower and softer landing than one may think.
[03:09:17] That's why we keep chisling away at the bedrock.
[03:09:21] That's some good writing.
[03:09:25] It's freaking depressing writing, but it's good writing.
[03:09:31] Another good piece of good writing right here.
[03:09:35] If there's such a thing as the Christian's concept of the devil, opioids and alcohol are some of the best tools he employees to capture week and demand.
[03:09:43] The instant euphoria softly whispers, it's lies to the heart.
[03:09:47] There are no problems I cannot solve.
[03:09:50] Addiction snags you at your weakest times like the wolf kills a buffalo.
[03:09:54] The wolf waits until the bison's gate is crippled or the snow is deep enough to entrap him, then he pounces.
[03:10:01] Usually he hamstrings the animal first, then slowly and methodically he nalls away the flesh until his prey expires.
[03:10:12] Fast forward a little bit more.
[03:10:14] When I returned home, it was about noon and I was already an inebriated mess.
[03:10:18] I walked through the door, canes, and bourbon into.
[03:10:21] The smell of whiskey radiated from my pores.
[03:10:24] Hey, Braxton, I have something to tell you my wife said.
[03:10:27] She must be leaving for good this time, I thought.
[03:10:30] She's on emotional this time, it's for real.
[03:10:33] Am I okay with that?
[03:10:34] I've wanted her to leave dozens of times, but am I really okay with it?
[03:10:38] Yeah, I think I am.
[03:10:39] How will her family take it?
[03:10:41] I will remain friends with will I remain friends with her brothers?
[03:10:44] Her dad?
[03:10:45] No.
[03:10:46] Maybe they already know that we fight all the time.
[03:10:49] They must.
[03:10:50] Thoughts swirled about my head.
[03:10:53] I think I'm pregnant, she said.
[03:10:55] What?
[03:10:56] I'm pregnant.
[03:10:57] Aren't you happy about that?
[03:10:59] She said smiling.
[03:11:00] Of course I am.
[03:11:01] I acted as if I were.
[03:11:03] I took another shot of bourbon.
[03:11:05] I wanted to be a father badly god only knows why I wasn't fit to be one.
[03:11:10] Still I was indeed very happy that I may be fulfilling that wish.
[03:11:14] But was this really the best time?
[03:11:16] Was I with the best person for me or the best person for her?
[03:11:21] The answer to both of those questions was clearly no.
[03:11:23] Less than a week before we had been fighting nearly every day.
[03:11:26] We told each other that we hated one another and we meant it.
[03:11:30] Each of us had uttered the word divorce aloud.
[03:11:34] Now we are going to have a baby.
[03:11:46] Check.
[03:11:49] You couldn't predict that when you read it over the envelope, right?
[03:11:52] No.
[03:11:53] No.
[03:11:54] It's uh...
[03:11:55] Yeah.
[03:11:56] It's...
[03:11:59] Yeah.
[03:12:00] Rough man.
[03:12:01] Rough.
[03:12:02] Yeah.
[03:12:03] You guys were married young and then you go through all this.
[03:12:07] Like you said, it's hard...
[03:12:09] What you just said, you know, it's hard to have a good marriage when you're drinking bourbon and you know,
[03:12:14] doing drugs and all that.
[03:12:17] Yeah.
[03:12:20] Yeah, you can't put the blame on her for this.
[03:12:23] That's the way I look at it anyway.
[03:12:26] Well, you know, the cliche answer which is the real one though is that I have my got my daughter out of the deal.
[03:12:32] And she lives with me and wife's great.
[03:12:35] You know, I mean this is now 14 years later.
[03:12:39] Yeah.
[03:12:40] But yeah, it sucked their first stretch.
[03:12:44] And it is...
[03:12:47] It's just really easy to get back down on that whole, especially when you really still don't...
[03:12:53] You still feel like you know how anything to live for.
[03:12:55] You know, it's always say that like gratitude, you really got to cultivate gratitude in your daily life.
[03:13:01] But when I read that part...
[03:13:05] Well, when I read this part where she's actually born and you know, she's healthy.
[03:13:10] And you say it's amazing how much a parent can love a child.
[03:13:14] I already loved her.
[03:13:16] I would have to...
[03:13:17] I would have happily died for her.
[03:13:19] I still would have been that moment as I sat there watching them.
[03:13:22] I realized something was still wrong, not with her with me.
[03:13:25] So like I'm like, okay, cool, here we go.
[03:13:27] We're gonna kind of make it through this.
[03:13:34] You talk about PTSD.
[03:13:36] You bring it up earlier than this.
[03:13:39] But this was the time...
[03:13:40] This is where you started kind of conveying your faults on it.
[03:13:44] You say, I previously mentioned other times when I thought that I may have been afflicted by PTSD.
[03:13:48] Many times my subconscious register to symptom of the disease that I'd read about.
[03:13:52] Or my therapist had mentioned.
[03:13:54] Who could miss the unwelcome memories that in an opportune times?
[03:13:58] Or the neverending need to suppress unprovoked anger or the nightmares or the illogical moments of panic?
[03:14:03] I denied the existence of my illness for many reasons.
[03:14:06] But most important was that I just did not want to be associated with many of the others.
[03:14:10] I had seen it the VA pensions for the disease.
[03:14:13] Or sorry, had received VA pensions for the disease.
[03:14:16] I knew of a guy who had worked in the laundry mat in Iraq.
[03:14:20] He got a rating of 80% disability for PTSD.
[03:14:24] For what experience exactly?
[03:14:26] I wondered.
[03:14:27] Another guy had heard of had been found 100% disabled from the trauma of answering radio transmissions from soldiers in combat.
[03:14:35] How could a person be so soft that they were damaged by the sounds of combat I wondered bitterly?
[03:14:41] During my transition there seemed no less noble and act than claiming to suffer from PTSD.
[03:14:47] It wasn't just that it wasn't just seen as an illness that plagued the week.
[03:14:51] It wasn't many cases an illness claimed by liars, whether they were weak or not was unimportant.
[03:14:57] I had made many mistakes and acted cowardly and lied many times in my life.
[03:15:01] But I had no desire to have those descriptors permanently enshrined in my records.
[03:15:06] At least that was the way I saw it back then.
[03:15:18] Interesting thought.
[03:15:19] It's a very interesting thought that you're having because you're a freaking tough cowboy.
[03:15:26] These guys that are saying they have PTSD because they worked in the laundry mat in Iraq.
[03:15:32] Yeah, right.
[03:15:36] But I wasn't a lot of guys thought that at the time.
[03:15:39] And because it's a lot true to it.
[03:15:42] I mean, dude's really a game that should have that system.
[03:15:45] We all know it.
[03:15:47] I understand that the VA's in a tough position because you know how do you really weed out people out of a game?
[03:15:53] I get it.
[03:15:54] But from the soldiers perspective, I didn't want to be still to this day.
[03:15:58] I want to be labeled in that same way. I come happy to talk about, you know, PTSD and working through stuff and acknowledging that it's definitely had profound impacts on my life.
[03:16:08] And I would like to try to help people through whatever suffering they're having.
[03:16:12] But I don't necessarily want to be associated with it.
[03:16:15] And that's for that same reason today.
[03:16:19] I mean, luckily, you don't have to worry.
[03:16:24] You know, a lot of ways that I don't have to worry about being associated with that crown, this is for obvious reasons.
[03:16:29] But yeah, it's, you know, people talk, especially in the veteran community, we want to destigmatize the term PTSD.
[03:16:37] I don't know.
[03:16:40] I think we need to destigmatize mental health for sure.
[03:16:44] But PTSD sort of took on a life of its own.
[03:16:48] And so like maybe it's time to just shed that label and go with something new or stigmatize it, should I?
[03:16:55] I don't know the right answer.
[03:17:00] I don't know if it ran up.
[03:17:06] As you're working through that shit, you and your wife end up getting divorced.
[03:17:13] And initially you, her and her and your daughter leave for her home, which is like middle of the country, 1300 miles away.
[03:17:28] And then you say, if you thought that the heartache of divorce and the departure of my beloved child would have caused me to take a long hard look at myself, you'd be wrong.
[03:17:39] Because hedonism and self indulgence provide immediate gratification, the Russian excitement and euphoria make it difficult to dig in one's heels and change course.
[03:17:48] And why would you want to change your lifestyle if you've got no respect for your future?
[03:17:51] The simple, perhaps sad truth is of it, is that debotry can be good old plain fun for a while.
[03:17:59] For about seven years, I lived in hell and sometimes I relished in it.
[03:18:05] You basically, you basically went hard for seven years.
[03:18:13] Yeah, I mean, I'd not so much on drugs, but alcohol and party and chasing drills.
[03:18:19] One of those times I've been sending you, actually.
[03:18:23] Yeah, we went out of friends that were a bachelor group and we were all doing okay, making pretty good money and irislike.
[03:18:31] Yeah, the evening's like my descent always started out in an exuberance and ended shamefully.
[03:18:39] I was not myself. I didn't know who I was.
[03:18:41] All I knew is I didn't like the man I saw in the mirror and given the option, I would destroy him.
[03:18:45] My chief mistake was that I didn't realize there was a cure for my illness.
[03:18:49] The truth had I only been willing to accept that I could have been freed of my hide as in jekyll and hide much sooner.
[03:18:58] There were more girls and more parties and I cared to remember.
[03:19:02] Not that I could remember them all if I wanted to.
[03:19:04] My first steps onto the slippery slope were enjoyable.
[03:19:06] It can be great fun to lose control momentarily, but once that on that slope, I couldn't keep myself from creating to the bottom.
[03:19:13] I hardly had control of anything in my life.
[03:19:16] Let alone my alcohol habit.
[03:19:18] I had ripped the moral substrate out from my under my world and descended into nihilism.
[03:19:24] nihilism is not without benefits though it simplifies life.
[03:19:28] There's a problem with nihilism.
[03:19:30] It leads to depravity and uncontrolled chaos.
[03:19:34] If nothing else matters, then that's that.
[03:19:38] Why care about health for the future.
[03:19:40] Unbridled pleasure was the closest thing I could find to happiness.
[03:19:44] I saw only hedonistic satisfaction, which I think is the logical conclusion of nihilistic ideologies.
[03:19:52] It's important to note that my life wasn't all that bad either.
[03:20:00] It rarely is.
[03:20:01] That's what makes it so hard to crawl back up the slope.
[03:20:04] I was still making very realistic, very real physical milestones.
[03:20:07] I had abandoned the cane altogether.
[03:20:09] I still stretched every day and did like workouts.
[03:20:12] My physical body was healing and aside from the infrequent brushes with the law.
[03:20:16] I was having fun.
[03:20:18] The most dreadful part was that somewhere very deep down in my subconscious and the land of all that shadow was the truth.
[03:20:26] It was all my fault.
[03:20:28] War, no war.
[03:20:29] The problems I faced were my own creation and I knew that.
[03:20:39] Yeah.
[03:20:40] I think sometimes we use these things.
[03:20:43] Some people will use these things the way to escape from the shame of knowing that you're not what you could be.
[03:20:53] People talk about potential all the time and no one knows you're potential better than you.
[03:20:59] You know who you really are, way down in there.
[03:21:02] You just come up with distractions.
[03:21:04] You useless and senseless distractions, parties and girls and whatever other venture just to avoid.
[03:21:12] Become what you could be.
[03:21:15] And you said you were making money at this time.
[03:21:18] What were you doing?
[03:21:19] I was working an outreach for a not-for-profit company.
[03:21:23] But you were getting paid.
[03:21:24] They were paying me for you.
[03:21:26] And then at some point you kind of realized.
[03:21:31] My life was falling apart.
[03:21:33] My credit score was taking my job was on the rocks.
[03:21:36] Every close relationship I had once depended on was virtually demolished.
[03:21:41] I was having too much fun to see it.
[03:21:43] You decided you quit your job.
[03:21:45] Yeah.
[03:21:47] There was an end.
[03:21:48] And you wrote about that in here.
[03:21:50] It's an interesting, basically.
[03:21:53] There was like an integrity issue with the place you were working for.
[03:21:58] And you, at one point, you're talking to a metal of honor recipient.
[03:22:03] And you just couldn't lie to him basically.
[03:22:06] Like, all of those are just such an obvious flat out bullshit lie.
[03:22:11] Like straight up.
[03:22:12] And not like one of these white lies or stretches.
[03:22:15] It was just a straight up fall suit at the expense of other veterans.
[03:22:21] And this, you know, trying to fundraise essentially.
[03:22:24] You know, like the lie was attempt to raise more funds.
[03:22:27] And so yeah, I quit it.
[03:22:29] And you quit.
[03:22:30] So you quit your job.
[03:22:31] You still have, I mean, obviously you're getting your disability pay.
[03:22:34] And did you get medically retired?
[03:22:35] You don't get both of them.
[03:22:37] Oh, you only get one.
[03:22:39] Mm-hmm.
[03:22:40] Yeah.
[03:22:41] But at least that was enough money to survive on.
[03:22:43] Yeah, especially in Caltown, Utah.
[03:22:45] Man, my freaking mortgage is like seven hundred bucks.
[03:22:49] I was doing five.
[03:22:51] So you quit that job.
[03:22:53] And you want to talk about unexpected.
[03:22:55] Didn't see that common was, uh,
[03:22:57] I don't know.
[03:23:00] What?
[03:23:01] What?
[03:23:05] Comedian.
[03:23:06] Yeah.
[03:23:07] Yeah.
[03:23:08] Like I was going to college and I was like, I'm always won't try that.
[03:23:11] So I started doing it.
[03:23:13] And you must have done all right.
[03:23:15] You did it for a while.
[03:23:16] I mean, it's still Utah.
[03:23:17] Even Salt Lake.
[03:23:18] It's like,
[03:23:19] It's so.
[03:23:20] Yeah, I did it for a big fish in the small pond and you talk comedy scene.
[03:23:24] I'm medium-sized fish and a very small pond.
[03:23:28] Um,
[03:23:29] Yeah, I mean, we did okay.
[03:23:31] And I got to be buddies with a guy that was really good.
[03:23:33] And so that helped, you know, I mean, I was terrible.
[03:23:35] I get everyone who's, but I got to, you know,
[03:23:38] I get it.
[03:23:39] It was fun.
[03:23:40] I did enjoy it.
[03:23:41] Um, but it, you know, looking back,
[03:23:43] even, even the jokes I would write and stuff were reflective of why I could different person that I'd ever been.
[03:23:50] Because I was like,
[03:23:51] and especially like as a young open micer and then you progress like a middle act and stuff here,
[03:23:57] you're just really reaching for stuff.
[03:23:59] And so you're just saying horrific shit sometimes.
[03:24:02] Just like shock value.
[03:24:03] Yeah.
[03:24:04] And I look back at some of that stuff and I can poorly embarrass by it.
[03:24:07] You think you're going to take a crack at it again.
[03:24:09] Come out of it tirelessly.
[03:24:11] I live in Central Idaho.
[03:24:13] Just go post up at the bar and I know falls or something.
[03:24:17] I guess.
[03:24:20] Look, you're making us laugh, man.
[03:24:22] You know, you got it.
[03:24:23] You still got it.
[03:24:24] One of the best things that happened was you actually ended up meeting a girl.
[03:24:34] And the girl that you meet, uh, she has a son.
[03:24:38] Who was a few years older than your daughter,
[03:24:40] but you, but he's like playing baseball.
[03:24:44] And you didn't think that the baseball was really getting him what he needed.
[03:24:48] So you signed him up for wrestling.
[03:24:50] And it turned out that his wrestling coach was your communications professor in college.
[03:24:57] You know, and he knew who you were as a wrestler.
[03:25:00] Is that right?
[03:25:01] Yeah.
[03:25:01] Well, and then I coached a miller for a while after the I was in this in college.
[03:25:04] Oh, okay.
[03:25:05] So he knew you had a wrestling background.
[03:25:07] So he basically said, hey, if you don't freaking coach wrestling,
[03:25:09] it's going to hurt your head.
[03:25:10] Yeah, he straight up.
[03:25:11] He straight up.
[03:25:12] He straight up.
[03:25:13] Yeah.
[03:25:14] So you, you start coaching and as your coaching him,
[03:25:19] wrestling, he's his end, he's his end.
[03:25:21] He's his end.
[03:25:22] He's going into baseball.
[03:25:23] So you decide you're going to coach baseball too.
[03:25:27] Um, and then this happens.
[03:25:29] This is pretty cool.
[03:25:30] I flipped the pitch.
[03:25:31] So you're coaching these little kids.
[03:25:32] I flipped a pitch to the little batter.
[03:25:34] He softly hit, uh, it softly in the air.
[03:25:36] I lightly trotted to it and reel it in.
[03:25:38] Another pitch.
[03:25:39] He hit a hard ground ball, a step to my right.
[03:25:42] I field it with ease.
[03:25:43] Somewhere in my subconscious,
[03:25:45] the thought rang, dang, that felt good.
[03:25:47] I served him another this time.
[03:25:49] He hit a hard ground ball about three steps to my left.
[03:25:52] My glove hand side.
[03:25:53] I sprinted to it and scooped it up with a spinning motion.
[03:25:57] A smile is wide and as Montana creased my face,
[03:26:00] holy crap.
[03:26:01] You just ran his mother shouted, I know.
[03:26:03] I couldn't contain my excitement.
[03:26:05] I started charging it every ball he hit,
[03:26:07] even the ones I didn't need to.
[03:26:08] A rush of love filled me.
[03:26:10] I'd forgotten how good it felt to be somewhat capable.
[03:26:13] And likely never would have run toward a ball
[03:26:15] if I hadn't been tired and losing focus.
[03:26:17] The lack of attention allowed my subconscious mind
[03:26:20] to unshackle the chains.
[03:26:21] My conscious mind bound my legs with.
[03:26:25] On the next pitch, he ripped the line drive over my head.
[03:26:28] I tried to jump for it.
[03:26:29] Nope. Still can't jump.
[03:26:30] Well, I guess basketball's out of the question.
[03:26:33] I yelled grinning widely.
[03:26:35] We called it quits and I immediately grabbed my phone
[03:26:39] out of my ball bag.
[03:26:41] I sent out several text messages that read,
[03:26:43] read, read, I just ran in all caps.
[03:26:46] A few war buddies who received it called me
[03:26:48] later that night demanding to hear the full story.
[03:26:50] When I reiterated it to them, he cried.
[03:26:53] Pretty awesome discovery right there.
[03:26:58] It really was.
[03:27:01] Yeah, I wonder how much sooner I would have figured that out.
[03:27:04] I felt I wasn't screaming everything else up.
[03:27:07] You know, if I had just been dedicated to working on my body,
[03:27:11] I could probably have had five years that I lost.
[03:27:14] You know, partying.
[03:27:22] Near the end of his baseball season in about 4 p.m.
[03:27:26] Got a message.
[03:27:29] Grandpa was just rushed to the hospital by ambulance
[03:27:31] read a text from my mother that would alter the my course forever.
[03:27:35] I called her on the phone to get the details and comfort her.
[03:27:38] If there was some way that I could, she was clearly anguishing.
[03:27:41] What can a son say to a mother who's witnessing her rock wash away?
[03:27:48] That night sitting on the balcony of my apartment in West Jordan,
[03:27:51] Utah, staring at my tomato plants, I wondered what I would do
[03:27:54] in a world without him.
[03:27:55] I wish to be away from the bright lights and noise of the city
[03:27:58] sitting by a morning camp fire drinking coffee with him again.
[03:28:02] I knew I'd long since begun to rediscover myself,
[03:28:05] but could I stay properly aimed without him.
[03:28:08] I had started hunting and fishing again.
[03:28:10] I went back to my roots.
[03:28:12] I read a little young, became,
[03:28:16] and became convinced of the importance of symbols,
[03:28:20] not just in a sociocultural sense, but personally,
[03:28:24] I'd begun to wear my cowboy hat and public instead of only on the weekends
[03:28:29] when I was away from the prime eyes of all muckers.
[03:28:32] Still, though this was a positive step backward,
[03:28:35] I had not truly returned home yet.
[03:28:39] And I didn't know exactly what that meant.
[03:28:42] I only knew that they answered,
[03:28:44] lay somewhere in my history, somewhere in my roots.
[03:28:47] I think of it as true that clothing does not make the man,
[03:28:51] but it is a display of what it is inside the heart.
[03:28:54] A cowboy hat may have been a trivial thing,
[03:28:57] but before I had descended to the underworld,
[03:28:59] I had worn it with pride.
[03:29:01] I had never seen a symbol of honor, hard work,
[03:29:03] and respect of heritage.
[03:29:05] It had been so closely attached to that symbol
[03:29:07] that I'd worn one nearly every second of my life before I strayed.
[03:29:11] As a boy, it was no strange event for my mom to remove a hat
[03:29:14] from my head as I slept.
[03:29:16] My hat was the first thing my ex-wife brought to me
[03:29:19] when I was in a Walter Reed recovering.
[03:29:21] I wore it nearly all the time after that.
[03:29:23] It was not a fast and statement,
[03:29:25] but a symbol of all my grandpa believed in.
[03:29:28] I thought about all that my grandfather taught me as a boy.
[03:29:32] He thought there were concrete skills and lessons required of a man
[03:29:36] from the west,
[03:29:38] and he made damn sure that I learned them.
[03:29:41] And in your footnotes, you say, by the west, you mean the Rocky Mountain west.
[03:29:46] I remembered his knuckles pressing into mountain mud
[03:29:50] to show me how a mature, mule deer bucks weight
[03:29:53] causes depressions much different than a young buck or do does.
[03:29:56] He showed me how to read the difference between an elk track that had just
[03:29:59] slid down a wet muddy hillside and one who was on a dead run.
[03:30:03] He tied his own flies for catching trout out of our mountain creeks, rivers and lakes,
[03:30:07] all of which were different flies and weights of flies by his estimation.
[03:30:11] And he made sure I could do that too.
[03:30:13] He taught me how to skin an animal by showing me how he did it.
[03:30:18] But he only let me practice on the lower legs of elk and deer he killed.
[03:30:23] He taught me how to trap and clean fish and game.
[03:30:26] He spent time on more abstract things like what it really means to be a man.
[03:30:30] That's a much harder concept to pin down on page.
[03:30:34] On one deer hunt, when I was about 10 years old, he handed me a raw liver from a buck he had just killed.
[03:30:40] He told me that taking a large bite of it was the only real right of passage to manhood.
[03:30:46] When the metallic tasting fleshy substance filled the entirety of my mouth
[03:30:51] and thick warm blood, round down my cheeks and neck, he let out a deep belly laugh.
[03:30:57] I realized the joke was on me. He was trying to teach me two lessons there.
[03:31:02] One that no single physical act makes a man and two, not everything in a authority figure tells you his worth believing.
[03:31:09] Sometimes you're just the butt of a joke.
[03:31:13] You say that the positive step backward,
[03:31:17] normally we think step backward, we think of a negative connotation.
[03:31:21] But for you, the cowboy hat was going back to your roots in a positive way.
[03:31:27] And not all progress is progress.
[03:31:32] It's a good note.
[03:31:36] A couple days later, my girlfriend and I were back in my hometown at the church where his funeral would be held.
[03:31:42] The hallways were lined with pictures of him and my grandma and love of his life and his best friend.
[03:31:47] He believed that family was the most important thing in life.
[03:31:50] There were dozens of pictures of him and his brothers, his kids and his grandchildren approve it.
[03:31:55] Table sat on the other side of the doors to the chapel where his service would be held.
[03:32:00] Each was decorated with his prized belongings, his flyfishing pole, flies that he had tied and his hunting knife.
[03:32:08] On one table, a top Iraq that held his re-curve bow and leather quiver filled with wooden arrows,
[03:32:15] rested his brown cowboy hat.
[03:32:19] If it is true that you can tell the character of a man by the company he keeps,
[03:32:24] then I think it equally true that you can tell the type of man by the possessions his company believes he values.
[03:32:32] I stood staring at the hat for a while.
[03:32:36] I remembered asking him if I could wear it around our deer camp when I was a young boy.
[03:32:40] He dropped it on my head and smiled.
[03:32:43] I spent the rest of the afternoon walking around with that hat like I was like it was a crown fit for the king of kings.
[03:32:51] My great uncle John, grandpa's younger brother, came up to us while I was daydreaming and asked how I was doing.
[03:32:59] John was a combat controller and Vietnam. He had seen more than his share of fighting.
[03:33:06] I knew intuitively that the question was meant to get it something deeper than how I felt that present.
[03:33:12] I answered it honestly, getting better, I think, I said, how long have you been back now?
[03:33:19] About seven years or so, give it ten and you will be fine, he said.
[03:33:24] You may be a mess for those ten years but you'll be okay after that. It will always be there.
[03:33:30] It doesn't go away but one day, all of a sudden you'll have it under control.
[03:33:37] Okay, thank you.
[03:33:42] The host called the children and grandchildren up to the casket to pay final respects.
[03:33:48] But luckily, I walked up and put my arm around my mother. She was sobbing uncontrollably.
[03:33:54] Between gas for air, she whispered, aren't you going to say goodbye?
[03:34:00] No, I'd rather this not be the last image I remember him by.
[03:34:06] She grabbed my hand and dragged me up to his body.
[03:34:10] Up until that point, I had hardly shed a tear. Grandpa taught me that men ought not to cry anyway.
[03:34:20] I tried to keep my composure.
[03:34:23] When I saw him lying there, hair combed perfectly, body dressed in his Sunday best.
[03:34:30] I broke down in a way I never have before or since.
[03:34:36] The flood of grief and despair twisted my face. I felt like I had been struck by an avalanche of emotion.
[03:34:43] It seemed as if every little bit of anguish I had collected throughout my lifetime, welled up at once.
[03:34:50] I raised my black cowboy hat up to cover my face and wept.
[03:34:55] This was a different kind of pain than I had felt before.
[03:34:59] The kind that a person only encounters when he knows he had failed another that he loved and revered.
[03:35:08] For years after returning home from the war, I had lived less than two blocks away from Grandpa and Grandma, but I seldom visited them.
[03:35:17] When my mother asked me why I wasn't going to see my grandpa when I more often, I always gave the same selfish pathetic excuse.
[03:35:28] It's just too hard for me to see my hero withering away in a bed.
[03:35:32] I don't want to remember him like this.
[03:35:36] I think the full gravity of my selfishness hit me at that moment.
[03:35:41] It should never have been about me.
[03:35:45] What an ignorant wretch I was.
[03:35:48] As for the excuse that I had been using to avoid the situation, that was only half true anyway.
[03:35:54] The whole truth was, yes, it was hard to seem like that, but I was running from everything in my life after the war.
[03:36:00] I was running from my emotions, from my responsibilities as a man, and from my own mind.
[03:36:07] My mistakes as happens to all of us when we fail were too often thrust onto other people I loved most around me.
[03:36:14] Sure, I was paying for them too, but so were they.
[03:36:19] And they had done nothing to deserve it.
[03:36:23] I failed a man that I loved more than life itself.
[03:36:27] My selfishness had hurt him when he needed me most, and it was too late to make up for it.
[03:36:36] All I could do is weep, and that's all I did.
[03:37:05] Well, it does seem like these moments throughout the book that when you read them, you think,
[03:37:18] this is the one that's going to get you up on step, and get you transition away from this negative path.
[03:37:29] And it certainly seems like this one had a big impact.
[03:37:38] Yeah, definitely wish you could see him over at now.
[03:37:49] Well, I wish you could have seen you when you walked into my gym today.
[03:37:54] Down here in Southern California in San Diego, Sport and a cowboy.
[03:37:58] I'm sure he'd be hell of proud.
[03:38:01] Yeah, and he loved his grandkids, and I wish he could see my kids, you know.
[03:38:08] So good life is now.
[03:38:12] I was so I can't, you know, I can't go back and be there for him when I should have been.
[03:38:20] Well, one thing that is another thing that's positive is someone sitting here listening right to this right now.
[03:38:27] I guarantee, at least one person.
[03:38:30] I don't know how many, but I know at least a minimum of one is going to make that move and go and spend time with people they care about that they should.
[03:38:39] Oh, so.
[03:38:43] That lesson that you learned now gets passed on.
[03:38:51] As you, as you go through that, you start to realize that you missed what the various things that you missed about being in the military, the various things you missed about being in combat specifically.
[03:39:07] And you realized you missed even training and getting ready and preparing, which are really positive things in life.
[03:39:18] Um, you say, you say in the book, I miss training.
[03:39:24] I love the feeling of conquering a particularly difficult day at work.
[03:39:28] The kind of satisfaction that one only gets when he thinks it improbable to overcome the challenge before he begins.
[03:39:34] That reminded me, I did run a while back.
[03:39:36] Maybe I can run a full mile now.
[03:39:38] I decided to call up my old friend in first line leader Johnny.
[03:39:41] I knew he had been running marifons and triathlon since he returned from Iraq.
[03:39:45] Surely he would love to be there when I ran my first mile since the suicide bombing crippled me.
[03:39:50] I called him up.
[03:39:51] Hey, bro, I want to run a mile.
[03:39:53] You, you, you, say you go out.
[03:40:00] You do it.
[03:40:04] We finish the mile loop in about seven minutes and thirty seconds.
[03:40:07] I was proud of my pace, but something else struck me after we finished my ego was the problem.
[03:40:11] I discovered that I was the root of most of my psychological problems years before this.
[03:40:16] And I had taken some measures to get better.
[03:40:18] What I hadn't realized was the role ego was playing in all my suffering.
[03:40:22] I started to look back at every illidvised decision I had ever made.
[03:40:26] Every argument I'd ever been in and the grudge against the army that I had held.
[03:40:30] Nearly all of them could be traced back to my ego.
[03:40:36] And you, you, you, you talk about those.
[03:40:39] I mean, just like the, the, an example is your piss at the army didn't keep you in.
[03:40:46] And yet you say in the book, you're like, hey, I wasn't capable.
[03:40:50] I couldn't freaking, you know, like, carry a rock.
[03:40:53] I couldn't shoot a gun right now.
[03:40:55] How are they going to keep me in?
[03:40:57] But in your mind, your ego was like, they should've kept me in.
[03:41:01] Yeah, yeah, I mean, how stupid can you possibly be?
[03:41:04] But I, you know, I don't know what I thought.
[03:41:08] I was pissing around.
[03:41:11] Yeah, I mean, you're right.
[03:41:14] And it, it's, and I think it's really easy to, and it is a hundred percent of your ego.
[03:41:22] But it's really easy to start doing that thing where you're like, well, do you know how I'm just treats me like a number?
[03:41:27] And all the stuff.
[03:41:28] And I was like, well, yeah, man, they got like a half a million people who they got to grow.
[03:41:32] I could go, what do you want to write you a letter?
[03:41:34] Like, like, what, yeah.
[03:41:38] But yeah, I really, it, it is everything is ego.
[03:41:41] Even still the day when I screw something up, which is, you know, a daily occurrence.
[03:41:44] It's almost every time I only go, like, almost every time.
[03:41:47] Yesterday, I got pissed at something.
[03:41:49] I don't even remember what it was now.
[03:41:51] I remember about a half hour later.
[03:41:53] I was like, yeah, that was me.
[03:41:54] That was me too, but I'm fine.
[03:41:55] I'm fine.
[03:41:56] I'm fine.
[03:41:57] The path is not easy.
[03:41:58] The path is not easy path.
[03:42:02] I'm losing my wife's birthday today.
[03:42:06] Oh.
[03:42:07] And she's overseas right now.
[03:42:09] And I like woke up in the morning, so she's in a different time zone, right?
[03:42:13] I woke up in the morning and like, I got shit to do, right?
[03:42:17] You know what I'm saying?
[03:42:18] I got a bigger call, I got work up, work out.
[03:42:21] So I wake up and there's a family group text.
[03:42:25] And it says, you know, happy birthday.
[03:42:29] It's from my daughter that's overseas with my, with my, with my, you know, happy birthday mom.
[03:42:34] Group family group text.
[03:42:35] And I'm like, okay, cool, you know, I'm cool, but I, you know, I'm not going to like,
[03:42:40] I didn't text at that moment in time, right?
[03:42:43] So I wake up, work out, you know, do my morning stuff, go for a run.
[03:42:50] I spath, right?
[03:42:51] Do it the whole nine yards.
[03:42:53] And I look at my text and there's a text off the family group text.
[03:42:58] Only from my wife.
[03:43:01] Oh boy.
[03:43:02] It says, thanks for the birthday text today.
[03:43:04] Yeah, he deserve to be really good.
[03:43:07] That's not the end of the story, but.
[03:43:10] So in my mind, I was like, oh, that's interesting.
[03:43:13] I was kind of sort of a little bit surprised and I was like, and here's the funny thing.
[03:43:16] So in my mind, I was like, I just got home from a trip from a work trip.
[03:43:21] I was gone for four days.
[03:43:23] I worked, how many hours a day do my work at the master?
[03:43:27] 16 hours a day at the master.
[03:43:30] Just constantly on the go talking to people shaking hands,
[03:43:33] but that's delivering up on the stage,
[03:43:35] doing all this stuff, get home from that.
[03:43:38] I got to finish reading your book,
[03:43:40] Braxton, then it's Father's Day.
[03:43:42] What do I do on Father's Day?
[03:43:43] Prep this podcast.
[03:43:45] So that's what I'm doing on Father's Day.
[03:43:47] And then I wake up, I got, I know I got a record this day.
[03:43:50] I had another call, a big call in the morning.
[03:43:53] And now I'm thinking my wife is like, text me like, oh, you know,
[03:43:56] she's on vacation.
[03:43:58] But you know what?
[03:44:01] I was like, you know what?
[03:44:03] Just I'm just going to, you know,
[03:44:06] what's his texture and say, hey, you know, sorry about that.
[03:44:08] I was, you know, and then before I could even respond,
[03:44:11] because I was going to sit on it for a little while,
[03:44:13] breathe, you know, take a breath.
[03:44:15] Then my wife sends me a text on the,
[03:44:18] not the family group text, just hers.
[03:44:21] And it says, that was ran, my daughter.
[03:44:24] So my daughter tricked you, tried to trick me.
[03:44:26] I laughed about like, I was like, yeah, I knew.
[03:44:29] I said allegedly, oh yeah, I knew.
[03:44:32] I will say I was kind of, I was kind of strange that she would have written that.
[03:44:35] That's why I was kind of surprised.
[03:44:37] Like, was not a character.
[03:44:38] Yeah, I was out of character.
[03:44:39] I thought maybe something bad had happened, like,
[03:44:41] some annoying thing, you know, like whatever made Braxton mad.
[03:44:44] Something like that.
[03:44:45] Something made her mad.
[03:44:47] But luckily I didn't respond.
[03:44:50] Imagine if I would have responded in anger.
[03:44:52] Yeah, don't do that.
[03:44:54] That's ego.
[03:44:55] I got to keep that ego in check.
[03:44:56] I kept the ego in check, is what I'm saying.
[03:44:57] But it sometimes can be tricky.
[03:44:59] Good thing you relaxed.
[03:45:01] Looked around, made her call.
[03:45:03] Step back.
[03:45:04] Put my ego in check.
[03:45:06] But that's the thing.
[03:45:07] What was causing my, like, all that little,
[03:45:09] that little trail of thoughts that I had, I was doing this.
[03:45:11] I was doing that.
[03:45:12] How if we're here?
[03:45:13] You're making, this is ego, ego, ego, ego.
[03:45:15] So I'd be fine even respond.
[03:45:17] I was just like, okay, you know what?
[03:45:18] And you know what?
[03:45:19] I thought to myself, and I do this a lot.
[03:45:21] I want my wife to be at a point where,
[03:45:24] if she can be on vacation.
[03:45:27] Yeah.
[03:45:28] In a foreign country.
[03:45:30] By the way, then I'm paying for it.
[03:45:32] And she can be mad, because I didn't
[03:45:33] said her a birthday tax at 434 in the morning when I woke up.
[03:45:37] That's like, that's a good, that's the new way
[03:45:39] that's where you know things are good for her.
[03:45:41] So I was kind of a little bit stoked.
[03:45:43] But you got to watch that ego, man.
[03:45:45] Got to watch that thing.
[03:45:46] It's ready to bite.
[03:45:48] You can go and get on it.
[03:45:52] This is cool.
[03:45:53] This is where we start going.
[03:45:55] Man, you say, from that point forward,
[03:45:57] my life began to more for rapidly.
[03:45:59] When I was a younger man, I had thought courage strength
[03:46:01] and tenacity were traits that made a man worthy of the title.
[03:46:04] But by exercising each of those traits at different times during and after
[03:46:09] the way I realized they were not enough.
[03:46:10] They're important.
[03:46:11] Highly important, but they are not sufficient.
[03:46:13] Enough to make life worth living.
[03:46:15] that what Grandpa had been trying to teach me all along was that a good man and a good
[03:46:19] life are made of balance, growth, and selflessness.
[03:46:23] If those three things are a person substrate, everything else will take care of itself.
[03:46:27] Strength is important, but it must be balanced with caring.
[03:46:31] Selflessness, as hard as it may be to spot, erodes the perveyor, or sorry, selfishness,
[03:46:38] as hard as it may be to spot, erodes the perveyor, the victim, and all those caught
[03:46:42] in between. If a person is focused on growth, no matter the challenge, here she will always
[03:46:46] come out better than they were before the impetus. A mindset of growth helps us internalize
[03:46:52] our mistakes and craft better strategies for the next bout of trouble. If we can do it without
[03:46:58] crushing our spirits under the weight of our own self judgment, that is.
[03:47:06] Here's where we get rock and enrol when I decided to quit smoking cold turkey was difficult,
[03:47:09] but no bub by no means excruciating. I limited my drinking to a couple days a week and
[03:47:15] started each day at 5 a.m. This latter bit being the key to squashing Loki, Alka, his
[03:47:22] alcoholism most abruptly. The change in my habits helped expedite what was already the most
[03:47:30] rapid physical change in my body had gone through since Walter Reed. Every morning I
[03:47:33] stretched out then a random mile. Soon that turned it into two miles. I was lifting
[03:47:37] weights in my garage every morning and doing a 30 minute workout at night. I couldn't
[03:47:42] exercise enough to satisfy my lust for health and vigor. Once my body was strong enough
[03:47:46] to endure a little hiking, I set out looking for the teacher who had taught me the most
[03:47:51] valuable lessons in my youth, the mountain. Each mile up those blustering ridges cut through
[03:47:56] my delusions. The mountain is in different to our existence. We are nothing but another
[03:48:01] speck upon its rims no more or less important than the rock beneath our feet or the
[03:48:06] deer we chase. Ego is no currency in the wilderness. That's a lesson we can all stand
[03:48:12] to learn. I read a scuvered God or at least or at the very least you could say that I
[03:48:18] had read discovered meaning. But I think that's a distinction without any real
[03:48:22] difference in the vastness of the wild. The indifference of the Rockies humbled me
[03:48:27] humility and truth set me free. I started feeling pretty good about this book now. You
[03:48:39] started speaking and you had been speaking. But you know it's weird. You talk about
[03:48:44] when you're speaking you kind of felt like a fraud. Like you be telling people like
[03:48:47] yeah you can overcome anything. You'd be like I'm full of shit. Yeah. Those people
[03:48:52] who have a club back the money coming back. Well that was for that not for
[03:48:57] profit though. So they were like paying me. God. The God. You do a corporate
[03:49:04] adventure talking of you know professional athletes. Then you went to the summit in
[03:49:07] veil. There was a bunch of academic people there. One of those people was a
[03:49:13] monk who taught ethics at MIT. You say that he taught us the most valuable
[03:49:18] lesson I'd ever learned. Life is suffering. It is only by accepting that fact
[03:49:22] that we can lessen it. I'd been saying something closer than speeches for years
[03:49:26] but he helped concretize it for me. I was done laying my problems at the feet
[03:49:33] of others. I got online and searched for any information I could find on
[03:49:37] brain injuries. I found that I had demonstrable signs of TBI. I remembered that
[03:49:42] the VA sent me a letter listing all the most common symptoms of both brain
[03:49:47] injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. I wasn't going to read these but I
[03:49:51] actually am going to just because it's important for people to know these
[03:49:55] things. Common symptoms of PTSD. One, we experience the event over and over again.
[03:50:00] You can't put it out of your mind no matter how hard you try. You have
[03:50:03] repeated nightmares about the event. You have vivid memories almost like
[03:50:07] it was happening all over again. You have a strong reaction when you encounter
[03:50:10] reminders such as a car backfiring. Two, you avoid places or feelings that
[03:50:16] remind you of the event. You work hard at putting it out of your mind. You feel
[03:50:19] numb and detached so that you don't have to feel anything. You avoid people or
[03:50:23] places that remind you of the event. Three, you feel keyed up or on-edge at all
[03:50:29] time. You may startle easily. You may be irritable or angry at all. All the time
[03:50:33] for no apparent reason. You are always looking around hypervisulant of your
[03:50:37] surroundings. You may have trouble relaxing or getting sleep. And then this
[03:50:42] thing that you looked up goes on to talk about TBI. Common signs of brain injury,
[03:50:46] difficulty organizing daily tasks, blurred vision or eyes tire easily, headaches
[03:50:51] are ringing in the ears, feeling sad, anxious or listless, feeling irritated or
[03:50:56] angered, feeling tired all the time, feeling light, headed or dizzy, trouble with
[03:51:00] memory attention or concentration. More sensitive to sounds, lights or
[03:51:03] distractions, impaired decision making or problem solving, difficulty inhibiting
[03:51:08] behavior, impulsive, slow thinking, moving, speaking, or reading, easily confused,
[03:51:14] feeling easily overwhelmed, change in sexual interest or behavior. Then you say this.
[03:51:22] The last 150 pages of this book and the decade it took to live it, looking
[03:51:26] retrospect like an aggregate of those symptoms played out in one person's
[03:51:30] experience. I'd long understood that the VA wasn't taking my brain injury
[03:51:35] very seriously, but after reading that paper it became immediate that I, it became
[03:51:40] immediately apparent that I had not taken the brain injury I incurred seriously
[03:51:44] enough. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was actually straight from the letter that
[03:51:51] they had just nailed me. Like that's the chart for whatever the memo. Isn't it
[03:51:57] kind of interesting to take all those symptoms and just send it to on the letter
[03:52:02] to someone that has these symptoms like you won't be able to do exactly what it says.
[03:52:07] It makes no sense whatsoever. Like you would be able to read this because you'd be
[03:52:12] irritated, you'd be confused, you haven't trouble like you organized and shit.
[03:52:15] They're watching to do all this. What's wrong with them? That's ridiculous.
[03:52:22] You know, this is important section. What was I to do with the fact that my brain,
[03:52:32] the organ we used to process reality was permanently damaged. I didn't want to blame my
[03:52:36] own personal failures and there were many. This is such a key point. I didn't want to
[03:52:40] blame my own personal failures and there were many on something that was out of my
[03:52:43] control. I knew that was too simple and answer. The temptation to use this new
[03:52:49] information as a scapegoat was strong, but deep down in my core, I knew that taking
[03:52:54] that path would only lead me toward more suffering. I wasn't going to do that again. I
[03:52:59] decided that the best I could do was accept that I had incurred an injury that had made
[03:53:04] and would continue to make my life harder than it was before. It was time to move forward
[03:53:09] with that fact fully internalized. scapegoating would be another cop out more cowardice.
[03:53:15] I was done with that road. So you had a realization that, okay, you read through all this
[03:53:21] stuff and I said to say, well, okay, that's why I've been behaving this way. It's like, no, no, no,
[03:53:26] scapegoat. Yeah, I mean, you can't. Maybe you can give yourself a little bit of, like,
[03:53:34] as I tend to carry a lot of, I tend to place a lot of burden on myself. For shit I've done
[03:53:40] in my life and make it a little easier to be like, all right, whatever, you know, let
[03:53:45] some of that stuff in the past. It makes it easier to let things in the past go. But you can't
[03:53:50] use it moving forward or you're just fucking a lot of thought. You have to just accept that
[03:53:56] this is a thing. And really like, even like, let's say the impulse,
[03:53:59] civility stuff or the trouble organizing will you get a fine to work around. Yeah, that's
[03:54:04] it. And just think if you think yourself, well, oh, I have PTSD and TBI, that's why I'm
[03:54:11] impulsive. Now you're just like, oh, and I'm cleared hot. Yeah, to be more impulsive. Yeah,
[03:54:17] we're gonna stand up again. Like, I'm like, yeah, or, or I, I have trouble organizing things.
[03:54:23] That's why I'm late to the, you know, whatever. That's why I didn't turn in this thing. Like,
[03:54:27] yeah, you can use that excuse or like you said, you can say, oh, I know I have trouble organizing.
[03:54:31] I just want to write stuff down. I got to make a plan. I got to put reminders there. Whatever.
[03:54:35] Freaking actually take ownership of it. A good friend of mine and a green bra we call
[03:54:43] preacher stopped over around the time I discovered this problem. While we were visiting, I shared
[03:54:48] within my new world view about the importance of humility and acceptance and how I felt the
[03:54:52] mountain could teach a man, both things. Then he tells you this, there is a forbidden mountain
[03:54:59] hike on the big island of Hawaii that you have got to do. You have to start your scent around
[03:55:05] midnight so you can reach the peak before sunrise. The view is incredible. Echo Charles?
[03:55:11] Not from the cinema. Not from earlier? Not from earlier? Not out of nowhere. It's overlooking
[03:55:16] helo. Is it a name? Is it a name? It's Monica and he was being totally full of shit. It's not.
[03:55:22] He was just trying to get me to go. It's not a forbidden hike. Oh, he just called it that? Yeah,
[03:55:27] he just, he was like, yeah, there's this trail. It's a legal man. You got to just jump on it.
[03:55:31] I was like, all right. Tell you something about Monica. That's the first time I ever saw snow in my life.
[03:55:37] Monica? What's the altitude do you know the altitude? 133. Oh, it's 133.
[03:55:42] Three damn. Yeah, it's hot. And there's like at the very top, it's hard. There's like nine or
[03:55:51] 10 different peaks, like small ones, you know, whoops. So because it's a volcano, right? So there's
[03:55:56] like lots of little, like extra. It's hard to tell which is like the real peak. I mean,
[03:56:02] there's even a survey story. But then there's all those, I'm looking at you like you look at
[03:56:07] it. I'll put you like well, a little bit. He knows a little bit. He's from Hawaii. Yeah, a lot of times I'm saying.
[03:56:11] That's why I'm still not an expert on my neck. So you know, so you get this goal. You start
[03:56:19] freaking training because you're going to go climb the forbid mountain. Yeah. On your way there,
[03:56:27] you get on the dating app and you swipe right. And on a female, a girl named Randy, R&D.
[03:56:45] That's why you're sitting in the airport at Salt Lake. And then you land and you find you land in
[03:56:51] Kona. You find out that you had cheered matched. Dude, I did this, I'm too old for all that. Like,
[03:57:00] I mean, I was married and I'm just too old and miss that whole. That whole thing, the whole thing.
[03:57:09] To think back in the day, you had to just randomly meet a female out of all the millions of females.
[03:57:16] And now you can just literally go on and access. Yeah. Access upon access. Well, in the
[03:57:25] promo, I did that. And pre-screened access, too. Like, hey, like, it's you're writing about
[03:57:31] you're looking at her little profile. She's like shooting a bow, right? And like, whatever,
[03:57:37] she's got a dog. She's shooting her bow. Yeah, you're like, check.
[03:57:42] Yeah, I'm like, pre-screened. Hey, I want some of that. I want to female. It's Brunette.
[03:57:47] It knows how to shoot an art. She's not. She's like, good to go. Absolutely. But I cut you off.
[03:57:53] We're going to say, no, no, no, no. I, you know, I tried like the bar. Like, if you're in your
[03:57:59] mid mid mid late 20s, I mean, I don't know really where you meet chicks. You know, it's like,
[03:58:06] the bar or the grocery store. And so like I tried the bar thing. That should don't work.
[03:58:10] So I was like, we'll on a try just about anything at that point. And a lot of people say,
[03:58:16] like, go to church. And I guess that's probably a good answer. But I, I didn't go to church. So
[03:58:20] but I mean, even if you went to church, you could meet how many girls at church? Nine. Right.
[03:58:24] Yeah. You know, maybe like 20, 20, 20, 13? I don't know. Yeah. But you go on the app.
[03:58:30] And it's like you can meet how many, but million. You know, you girls. Right, that
[03:58:34] coach, I was. I know. You don't know either. But I'm saying because you're the technical expert
[03:58:38] and you're the tech guy. I'll, I would guess one million. Yes. Right. Sure.
[03:58:43] Am I wrong? I don't look for your. It's got to be a lot. Right. A lot of people.
[03:58:46] You got to be a lot of people. It's got to be a lot of people. It's got to be a lot of people. We know what.
[03:58:50] I actually do know. You know why? Because I got friends that are kind of in the getting still.
[03:58:54] Yeah. And they'll be like, bro. There's a lot. There's a lot. It's a million.
[03:59:00] But all those millions, you swipe right on the bow hunter. Yeah. And or at least the archery.
[03:59:06] And you land there. You end up sending her like a just a text back and then you end up climbing this mountain.
[03:59:20] I'm going to fast forward past the details of the climb. It's pretty cool to read about the climb.
[03:59:24] And what what happened on that? You have another like you have some more. Let's say moments of
[03:59:32] discovery in that and and I'll say this. You say the forbidden mountain. Allegedly for
[03:59:40] bed mountain is the gateway to the grandest sunrise on earth. I reflected on my life.
[03:59:46] A top that volcano all 29 years of it. And I'm going to I'm going to fast forward now
[03:59:56] to the to the kind of the I guess it's this a little bit of the summation of what you talk about
[04:00:05] towards the end of this and the things that you figured out. And again, I'm hitting the highlights.
[04:00:12] This is a book almost 300 page book of lessons for for anyone for any human being
[04:00:20] filled with lessons for any human being. Here are some of them. I spent almost a decade suffering
[04:00:24] things in my youth. I never could have imagined some caused by life. Some were caused by associating
[04:00:31] with the wrong people. Other abouts by society. But most can be laid directly at my own feet.
[04:00:43] So many more so many of our problems. It's a lot more than we think. The problems that we
[04:00:49] caused. The problems that we initiated. Yeah, look like you said life's going to bring some at you.
[04:00:56] Some some some people are going to bring them at you sometimes. Sometimes society's going to bring
[04:01:00] these problems to you. But way more than we think are because of us. Back to the book when I was
[04:01:10] wounded. I made a clear choice. One of the few choices I ever made that I'm deeply proud of.
[04:01:15] I decided that I would rather put my flesh in harm's way than have a friend of mine put at risk
[04:01:20] for reasons that I did not think were worthy. When I was lying on the ground bleeding to death,
[04:01:27] I was in a great deal of pain torment that you cannot imagine if you've not endured it. But it
[04:01:33] wasn't suffering. I was serving my country, my family, and my brothers. I didn't truly suffer
[04:01:43] until I started lying to myself and to others about my problems with nightmares, stress, and sleep.
[04:01:53] Those lies built into other lies and those lies built into more until one day I was a suicidal
[04:02:01] nihilistic addict. I created my own hell and it nearly destroyed my soul. You continue on a little
[04:02:14] bit further. You can't hide from a dragon or he will burn down your entire village and all that
[04:02:20] you love and care about with it. You must face him. When I ran from the dragons my life crumbled
[04:02:27] the spirit split apart and burned. It was like my soul itself was fractured.
[04:02:35] Then one day I decided I would face my problems one at a time. I wanted to own them.
[04:02:40] When I did or at least started to, I improved almost instantaneously,
[04:02:45] then more pumped up. More dragons. I think this is why we feel overwhelmed when we try to take on
[04:02:51] our problems. There are always dozens more than we thought there were and it's not until we emerge
[04:02:56] from our cowardly little hiding places that we can see them all clearly. This overwhelming feeling
[04:03:02] can crush us if we were not stiffened our spine for combat. That is why I think it's important
[04:03:07] that we crush our most pressing physical obstacles before we try to take on the mental ones.
[04:03:13] If we can stop eating terrible diets that we know are killing us, if we can run when others say
[04:03:18] we can't walk, if we can put down the bottle that is drowning our soul, then we know we can do anything.
[04:03:23] The lessons we learn on the physical journey will steal our resolve for the longer, much
[04:03:29] harder fight for our mental and spiritual health. Sometimes when we first emerge and feel completely
[04:03:36] overwhelmed we run back to our hiding places. We see so many little dragons that we are afraid of the
[04:03:43] aggregate of issues that will demolish us. Maybe that isn't the worst thing. Sometimes armies must
[04:03:49] retreat in order to regroup and acquire some help before they fight another day. We can use this
[04:03:56] philosophy as well but we can't make it a habit. We must go back into the fray again the moment we
[04:04:01] are ready and again then we become practiced. We have doled our swords on so many small dragons
[04:04:09] that we understand their weaknesses as well as we do our own. This gives us the ability to take
[04:04:14] them out more easily to see them for the minuscule issues that they often are. Fear makes the wolf
[04:04:21] bigger than he is. The best antidote for fear is experience. The first step then is to get the
[04:04:29] physical body in order no matter what that takes, no matter how steep the climb may be. The next
[04:04:34] is to stand up for truth in your own life all the time. I swore an oath to my brothers in Arlington.
[04:04:41] I fail to keep it many times and probably will fail again but I am on the course right now.
[04:04:46] Those failures will happen less and less often as I gain more and more experience. You may not have
[04:04:52] a national shrine to cling as your guiding light but maybe your mother or father. You have your
[04:04:57] children and their futures. Certainly my kids are the centerpiece of my life now. What better
[04:05:03] thing could you do for them than to get yourself together? To lead by example, to face your mistakes,
[04:05:09] fears and the chaos of life with a steel spirit and selfless heart? What better thing could you do?
[04:05:17] Nothing. Teach them to manifest courage, integrity, honor and selflessness in their own lives
[04:05:25] by living those virtues so fully that they cannot help but to see them displayed.
[04:05:32] Slee your dragons or they will consume you.
[04:05:47] Slee your dragons or they will consume you. Have you ever read my book like you in the dragons?
[04:05:51] No. God. Okay. Probably giving it to your shortening. How old are your youngest?
[04:05:57] My youngest is eight months old. My daughter's 14 years old and my sons are three and four.
[04:06:07] Okay. Cool. So eight months. We got Mikey in the Dragons candidates there. Yeah.
[04:06:15] So the book is just outstanding. Like I said, so many lessons learned in there. You did a
[04:06:22] good college. I went for what did you study? It was all the stuff you have to do to pre-rext
[04:06:35] them. How long did you take you to write this? Eight months, a year or something. I wrote a lot
[04:06:44] of that out of a backpack and the whole thing in a leather bound into leather bound journals with
[04:06:51] a fountain pen because I'm a fucking nerd. No. Transfer that onto the computer.
[04:06:59] leather bound notebook and a fountain pen. You still have that? Oh yeah, I got both of them. That's
[04:07:04] pretty legit. That's pretty cool. I don't have any cool stories like that. I'll sit there with a
[04:07:11] word processor. I have no, none of that stuff. You talk about a little in the book. What made you
[04:07:19] decide to start writing this? I started writing it at first. It almost right after they retired me,
[04:07:28] but it was just bad. You just like knew I wasn't ready. I just knew I wasn't ready. And then
[04:07:37] when I was doing all those corporate gigs, you know, you're always constantly getting prodded to
[04:07:43] write a book and I was kind of thought like why? I don't know. I just didn't find there was a story
[04:07:51] in there and then a good friend of mine kept pushing on me and I find that well. Maybe I'll give
[04:07:56] a shot and kind of looked around and the other stories that were around just didn't seem to be
[04:08:05] feeling that it just seemed to be conveying exactly what I was saying my friends go through. You know,
[04:08:13] like, or me had some friends that were doing really great and then I had some friends that were
[04:08:19] going to jail and some, you know, one community suicide, you know, and I just felt like no one was
[04:08:27] telling the full story and I also didn't want. It felt like the two genres of Iraq Warbook were
[04:08:34] either like heroism or super whiny, crybaby shit and then just the heroism stuff is great and
[04:08:47] I mean, every culture has always done that's great and I should continue but like the super whiny
[04:08:51] bitch that we just, there's no reason for that. But I understand the attempt to kind of try to write
[04:08:57] something different. I said, well, I'll just try to tell my story and hopefully we'll fit somewhere
[04:09:00] not on the one-y bitch skill, you know, and like fill that other gap. You know, I mean,
[04:09:09] I knew that I couldn't be the only guy that had had. I got to think that there's at least
[04:09:15] 10,000 guys from the Jewaw that it had similar stories. I mean, not exactly same wounds but
[04:09:21] they're definitely out there. So then, so you finished the book? This got published in 2017?
[04:09:27] Yeah. Yeah. And so what do you up to now? So obviously you married Randy. How do you say
[04:09:33] name was Randy? So you married Randy? You got kids. And what are you doing? I start cults.
[04:09:42] Full time, I'm a cult starter and a whole lot of people can really cook before we go on. I just
[04:09:46] want to point out that I did say in the book that he bullshit to me that it wasn't really for bidden
[04:09:51] on the high. I just want to clear that up. Sorry, anyway, that was a eating out
[04:09:57] me. No, yeah. No. So, wait, when did he say that? When did he tell you his bullshit?
[04:10:02] That it wasn't for bidden before you hyped it? Well, he didn't have to tell me. And once I got
[04:10:05] you got there, there's a big trail behind you. Yeah. So it was before you got there. He said it's
[04:10:10] not really for bidden. No, no, no, no, no. I'm saying I put in the book that he was bullshit.
[04:10:14] And then, just make a sense. What I was saying is I just don't want someone out there listening
[04:10:20] thinking that I was calling this a forbidden hike because people would be like, oh,
[04:10:24] how's he talking about it? Because for fairly the only person that thought was a forbidden hike with me.
[04:10:28] I was like, no, yeah. So, but I'm a cold star. So, I was trained,
[04:10:35] trained horses, start colds and trained morsels and I've been working on another book for a while,
[04:10:41] nothing to do with me to do with the roots of like America. The best way I think I would articulate
[04:10:51] is when people, when you ask somebody, what it means to be American, they have all of these ideas
[04:10:59] of where that, and that sort of ethos came from. And my contention is that it was born on the pioneers,
[04:11:06] and that actually mean on the American frontier by pioneers from, you know, Kentucky all the way to
[04:11:12] California. I mean, you're like, you can point to like, let's say like this, if you were to ask an
[04:11:18] American to describe what it means to be American, they're going to talk about shit like four to
[04:11:23] two perseverance, loyalty, dedication, love of family, country, you know, spirit, right?
[04:11:33] I mean, you can point to like, buy forge and maybe a couple of battles, but other than that,
[04:11:39] the eastern sea board was like pretty much your 2.0. You know, I'm saying it's
[04:11:45] glorious, lots of warglories there, and we fought our four fathers fought hard to
[04:11:51] steal Europe 2.0 from them. But everything that happened on the frontier was new,
[04:11:57] had never happened and well hadn't happened in 10,000 years, anything like that before. And so that's
[04:12:02] why America felt so different because it had really had a totally different birth than any of these
[04:12:08] other nations. So I've been working on that for a while, and then, you know, like I say,
[04:12:13] right coats, and then I run this bunkhouse deal where I take guys out once a month,
[04:12:18] train on different things, and like last weekend we were doing some advanced home defense training
[04:12:25] in Utah with a green parade dude working on in suit houses and stuff like that. We've taken
[04:12:32] dudes up, hunting, and we've run, I just facilitate all these wars, but we've done field med courses, and
[04:12:44] yeah, we've done long range for choosing courses with some guys, and yeah, we just, so anyway,
[04:12:49] these are basically my main focus and so far as work goes, and then after that it's just family.
[04:12:54] How big is your ranch? So as a horse trainer, I can only ride,
[04:12:59] well, used to be, I could ride about 10 a month, but now I have kind of too many other things.
[04:13:04] So now I can only ride about six a month, so I keep about 15 head of horses in my house at
[04:13:08] any one time, and then once I've ready myself, and then move on. And what's the name of the company
[04:13:15] that does all like the tactical training? bunkhouse, it's the bunkhouse LLC, but it's not just tactical
[04:13:22] stuff like I've taught basic horsemanship with them, I did a backhunt for navigation course with
[04:13:29] some people, taught how to hunt basics course, the people I kind of hunt the mountains, basics,
[04:13:36] so we try to spread out, like jack of all trades type skills as much as we can,
[04:13:41] kind become more generous. Who are your clients? These guys, well, it's all it's
[04:13:46] of the membership deal, so it's all an anchor. And then they just come and we're taking them out.
[04:13:52] And every Wednesday, we have some expert for somewhere to come on, and we'll just do a
[04:13:56] quick zoom call, and they'll have an hour, like usually me and that guy are a girl,
[04:14:02] we'll just have a back and forth, and then we'll open it up, and then you can ask questions and
[04:14:07] cover different, you know, whatever. How many people are members of the bunkhouse? We don't have a lot,
[04:14:11] like 350, something like that. So it's easy to get into courses, super easy, but yeah,
[04:14:18] I do that, it's kind of like a side-passion project thing. And if people want to do that, where do they
[04:14:22] go to sign up for that? bunkhouse, stop, racks and a chord on a calm. Sure, it's super, yeah.
[04:14:28] So you said that's your side project, what's your main project, Ryan Coles? That's the deal, huh?
[04:14:34] Yeah, that's my jam. I love that shit. I love it, yeah, I've always loved it, but
[04:14:41] now, I think it's really good for me mentally now too, because you can't like young horses,
[04:14:46] you gotta say present and focus, you can't. You can't be thinking about others shit or worrying
[04:14:53] about others shit. You gotta be on the horse, you know, like with him all the time. So I think it's good for me too.
[04:14:59] How long does the transition take before they're ready to go out? To before you're ready to
[04:15:05] give them to somebody else or someone else? It depends a lot on the horse, it depends a lot on the
[04:15:10] horse. So if I'm riding like an outside horse, it'd be like a client's horse. I'll use you
[04:15:14] to ride them for 60 to 90 days for them and then send them off. But I only do a little bit of that now,
[04:15:19] because I wrote so many for people that they would take them and then just not ride them after they left.
[04:15:26] And the problem is like you get a two-year-old that you put 60 days on and then the owner
[04:15:31] goes and just parks it in a pasture for like six months and then goes to try to get on the next
[04:15:36] spring. So like the horse doesn't even remember anything, you know. So now I only ride
[04:15:41] colds outside horses for one big ranch. It's a neighbor mind. They run a big old spread.
[04:15:47] But I'll ride them for them because they'll take them and use them as soon as they get back.
[04:15:52] But so the average I would say it depends on what you're asking that horse to do. But if you're
[04:15:56] trying to build like a safe trail horse, you could get a lot done depending on the age of that
[04:16:01] horse, but you could get a lot done in a summer as long as the other person won't take them back
[04:16:06] and use them. Now if you're sending it off to somebody who's like good and knows what they're doing
[04:16:10] then usually the last for 60 or 90 days, ride on them and then take them. But like my stud horse,
[04:16:18] I bought him from that ranch. I was just talking about because I was starting him for them.
[04:16:22] And I'd, well the white hill, probably the best horse training in the country,
[04:16:26] came out to help me with them, rope him, formed me that first day. You wanted to show me some tricks.
[04:16:34] And so I rode in that day, put that first, do I rope to him for a bit and then I rode him
[04:16:39] and then I took him out, rope to myself the next day and then I rode him two more times and then
[04:16:44] that fifth time I took him out moving cattle for like 12 miles for that ranch. Yeah and he
[04:16:50] was when he's a two year old. So it really depends on horse what you can get done. Now he wasn't
[04:16:54] he sure is how I wasn't broke by then, but he was he was easy compared to a lot of other ones.
[04:17:00] He was getting there. What about your hunting? I mean what's September looking like?
[04:17:06] I'm hammered, September. I got a new MISCO buck tag that I'm super excited about. I got a friend of
[04:17:13] mine gave me actually his mutual friend of Micah and I gave me a wine cut bull elk tag.
[04:17:22] So that's I'm so for that and then obviously I got my elk hunt and I got one buddy coming up to
[04:17:27] hunt and I got that promise I'd take for a week. So I really don't have a day off in September.
[04:17:31] Is that is that all bull? Yeah for me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where are you going to awesome?
[04:17:40] What else, man? What is that get us up to present day? Is there anything else you need to tell us about?
[04:17:46] No, I mean no, so a couple of things did happen that weren't in that book at the IBC filter
[04:17:53] that it's like up in your being a cave, a kind of behind your kidneys, essentially.
[04:17:59] Yeah, just so everyone, I didn't read this book but that that had to put like a filter in your body
[04:18:05] to prevent clots from getting what's your lungs. Yeah. And it's a some kind of mesh filter that they put in.
[04:18:12] It just prevents blood clots from going through that screen. It's basically a screen and they
[04:18:18] had to put it in. And so you've had that in you for what for a long time 15 years. Yeah.
[04:18:24] Yeah, well I had it in for 12. And that I went in so I was running in during races for a while
[04:18:33] to really good and actually like competitive in every race. I should have won the first one.
[04:18:39] But how far the first one I ran was a due affluent. So it was a two mile run or
[04:18:45] it might have been a yeah it was a two mile run and then I think a 20 mile bike right and then a
[04:18:50] two mile run the first one. And then I was training for an ultra when I had this issue with my heart.
[04:18:58] And I went in and they said I had a heart attack. That was like, well that's great.
[04:19:05] So then I could have to quit training because you know heart attack. Well, it ended up
[04:19:11] that it wasn't a heart attack which great. So I go up to the university you taught. Oh and this
[04:19:17] the filter the way this filter ties in here is the I could get that on my hands with the
[04:19:22] fuck. Um, and my doctors like it's there's a potential that your filter is just like
[04:19:29] releasing protein in your blood, you know. And because like, I guess the way like it's damaging
[04:19:35] that blood vessel in there and it's releasing protein because I guess the way that it's like a heart
[04:19:40] attack is protein in your bloodstream or certain type of protein in your bloodstream. And that's
[04:19:45] what they had detected. So he's like, I said, can we get this thing out then, you know,
[04:19:52] because I'd really like to do this whole ultra deal. And he said, no, you're stuck with us.
[04:19:56] Been in there for two long. There's no way it's coming out. So I came home and got, you know,
[04:20:01] long Google start looking and look like probably right like you probably couldn't get it out.
[04:20:05] So then I want to do an at doctor tells me something to go home and Google it.
[04:20:09] Yeah. Well, this dude doesn't know what you thought about. I think he got Google son.
[04:20:13] Web M.D. What? So I went and got on J. Store and so I was looking for any article. I could
[04:20:21] find in the turn or any paper rather. I could find. And then turned out there's a doctor up a
[04:20:27] radiologist, I think he is, I think, pretty sure, up in Penn State that had done, had to
[04:20:32] remove like three or four of them or some shit. At like, I forget seven or eight years in and I was
[04:20:39] over that, but you know, so the max that I could find that had been length of time that I could find
[04:20:45] that had been removed was like seven or eight years. So meanwhile, I'm doing all this
[04:20:51] hardship in between trying to figure this out. Well, finally my wife was like, won't you just call
[04:20:56] University U-Ton to ask the radiology department? I was like, those pictures, they don't,
[04:21:01] it's like, I can't find anything from them in the J Store. Like, what do they know?
[04:21:05] You know? So she calls and she's like, hey, they said that you can come up for a consultation on
[04:21:10] Wednesday and that they do this all the time. They can get it out. I'm sorry. Okay. So we go up there.
[04:21:17] I mean, well, I'm so waiting on all my heart prognosis stuff, right? And we go up there and meet with
[04:21:23] the radiologist and he's like, yeah, coming on Friday, we'll take it out. I was like, why is it a
[04:21:29] radiologist? Because the way the procedure works is they have to keep you awake and they put some
[04:21:36] shit in your blood so they can see it. Yeah. So he's like coming on Friday and meanwhile, my
[04:21:45] primary care physician told me he's like, man, you know, if you try to get this removed,
[04:21:48] you're being a cable, you could rupture, you know, like there's no way to plug that. And
[04:21:53] somehow, like, stress down. Okay, damn bro, you can give me like a weak to think of anything.
[04:21:58] So it ended up getting pushed off until the next Friday. But I went in and they got that sucker out. It was
[04:22:06] like, I guess the way the way this guy had done it was so that the top of that deal, there's like a
[04:22:11] little loop. And that I mean, that's how it was designed to be able to be removed if so they push
[04:22:17] this thing onto it and try to squish it together like this because it looks almost like a umbrella
[04:22:22] without a skirt on it. And so they would push it deal over it. They'd kind of squish the umbrella
[04:22:26] together. And if that doesn't work, then there's a loop on top of the filter. And they would try to
[04:22:31] hook a thing on it and pull it out with that. But if that thing, the reason that people weren't
[04:22:37] able to get them out is if that thing straightened out, no, you just have like a sharp thing in
[04:22:41] there and like how to get out. So with this guy done, he must have grew up like blue car or something
[04:22:46] because he was like, I'll just put a damn alligator clamp on there and just shove that bitch.
[04:22:50] So that's what he did. He invented like this tool. Anyway, he got that out which was great. I mean,
[04:22:58] it was like my arm was stuck like this for a couple of days because they go down your jugular to
[04:23:02] rip it out. So that was good. I just wanted to like update it was good. That things out of there
[04:23:09] are not not to worry about dying because they my freaking doctor when I went in he's like,
[04:23:14] he's like, well, eventually that you know, that IBC filter would just plug up. I was like, well,
[04:23:19] how long? Yeah, well, that does the sound cool. Yeah, and he's like, I'm like, 10, 15 more years
[04:23:25] probably maybe 30. I'm like, well, I'm freaking 31 years old. I'm like, I was like 20. Yeah, I'm probably 30 at
[04:23:33] the time. So anyway, they got that out which was great and then we pushed on on the heart stuff
[04:23:39] and turned out that my heart was actually okay. They, at one of the scans, so they didn't echo
[04:23:45] and then whatever that other one is where they put you through CT and they look at some shit.
[04:23:51] I forget but anyway, they'd give you like a calcium score on your arteries and all of this and
[04:23:56] I had a calcium score of zero. So I'll tell my wife, I was like, I got that baby on her.
[04:24:02] Like, I want to hear no more shit about all my stakes. Is that because you have filter in there
[04:24:05] for so long or why is that? I don't know. I don't really care. I just, I don't want to like,
[04:24:10] I don't want to hear any more shit about bacon and eggs and fatty stakes. Yeah.
[04:24:15] I should get the bring up the rib eyes. Yes, right. So it turns, it actually turned out I just had a
[04:24:21] scar on my heart from getting hit in the plates with an exposure or dam. So, so my heart's
[04:24:28] easier to plate the glyc after the, do you know? Yeah, I could, oh, I got them. Yeah, I should
[04:24:33] be a picture actually. I jacked up. Not really. So my, the plates I had had to
[04:24:39] steal back or on them. There's like, I think they were, I can't remember what level they were at the time.
[04:24:46] Mike, my uncle was, did you have side-sappy plates in? No, I took everything on the front.
[04:24:55] My uncle was like a, I can't remember if he's a major or a light kernel in the air force,
[04:24:59] like a, uh, a wreck investigator or something. And he had just rotated out and he had bought these fancy
[04:25:06] ass plates so he just mailed them to any sort of those. And so we're, because I took, I can't
[04:25:11] have his five or six in the plate. The craziest part is game over man. Oh, you've got a hundred
[04:25:17] percent. Two of them are like right here. I mean, right by the heart, maybe toast. I'm not,
[04:25:23] almost dead before he had the ground. Yeah. Yeah, and the craziest part about those plates is I didn't
[04:25:30] realize this until one of my engineer buddies came over the other day and he was like trucking them
[04:25:34] out and put them on my counter and it's like warped like wobbles. So it's like I get hard enough to
[04:25:40] like tweak it. Yeah. What was the range that you got hit from? Probably 15 meters, this.
[04:25:47] And luckily, you know, I have my head down like this. I guess like this. So probably my
[04:25:54] K-pop took a lot of that concussion. Oh, yeah. Instead of taking it all right here. Man. Is that
[04:26:07] get us up to present then? Yeah, man, everything's good now. I got four kids and life is looking great.
[04:26:14] Bring it out standing man. Outstanding. If people want to find you, you got Braxton McCoy dot
[04:26:21] com. Yeah. That's like a central location for you on Instagram, your app, Braxton McCoy,
[04:26:26] Braxton dot McCoy. Oh, sorry. All right. Braxton McCoy. That's BRX T-O-N. BRX. All right. Cool.
[04:26:36] BR-AX. Freaking people getting super sensitive about this.
[04:26:42] BR-AX T-O-N dot McCoy. And on Twitter, your Braxton underscore McCoy. If you want to
[04:26:51] follow you or find you, you can find any of those places. And you're still speaking to companies or
[04:26:57] ski people or not really. Coronavirus kind of killed it from a check. Check. Echo Charles. Yeah.
[04:27:04] Got any questions over there? Yeah. Remember we were talking about your IT band? Yeah. So where we
[04:27:08] had with that? I mean, doesn't get like jammed up or what? Because that's kind of a big deal. Right?
[04:27:14] I split down this down the middle. Yeah. Every morning, I heat up a bath as hot as I can tolerate it.
[04:27:23] Everyone. Yeah. And I mean, like if I'm at a honing or training again, but otherwise every morning,
[04:27:30] hard as I get it instead in there for 20 minutes and just try to stretch it with my hands and then
[04:27:35] I get out and stretch as much I can and then I roll it and just hope for the best. Yeah. Does it like,
[04:27:40] like after about of like physical activity does it like act up like right after whatever? Especially
[04:27:46] honing, especially yeah. My knees get jacked and it starts to dig with my hips too and my
[04:27:52] low back starts to get weird even. Just yeah, everything gets kind of just out of place.
[04:27:57] And then you said you have ball bearings in you still. Yeah. Damn. How many?
[04:28:04] I think it's around eight or so. I have to, I got the nurse patient on the Instagram. I'm all looking
[04:28:10] to see. That's crazy. And how bigger these? They're like, uh, size of a P. Like a little bigger than a P. Yeah.
[04:28:19] That's marble smaller than a marble slightly bigger than a P. That's a say P.
[04:28:26] Right. They're literally, they're literally wheel bearings. So they are. That's crazy.
[04:28:33] That's pretty typical with S best. Yeah. But they could put like you we say and I really like they could
[04:28:37] put like nails and just random like bolts nuts just any metal crap that'll freaking rip you apart.
[04:28:47] What if you done with Micah? I just I don't know. I have never met him. We just have a mutual friend.
[04:28:54] All right. No, I know. God. Then those him. You guys definitely need to link up. That's what you said.
[04:28:58] Yeah. That's really gonna awesome. Any, any closing thoughts, bro? No, just thank you for having
[04:29:05] me. I appreciate it. Well, I'm sorry. It took us a long and thanks for joining us.
[04:29:11] More important. Obviously, man. Thanks for what you did in Ramada. You, you and the rest of the
[04:29:16] guys in the 2 to 8 didn't incredible job taking the fight to the enemy and prepared the battle
[04:29:23] field for us and we got there. And also made incredible sacrifices. And we will not forget what
[04:29:31] you guys did and we'll never forget your sacrifice or the sacrifices of guys like Lieutenant Colonel
[04:29:39] Micah McCawflin and Sergeant Adam Can and so many of the other brave soldiers and Marines
[04:29:48] who sacrifice their lives for their brothers. And we will live to honor them. And thank you for
[04:29:56] helping us find a way to do that. Appreciate it, brother. Thank you, sir. I'm appreciate you.
[04:30:04] And with that, Braxton McCawley has left the building for an outstanding guy and
[04:30:16] get the book. The book is is just, it's a great book. I will look. We scratch the surface on it.
[04:30:23] There's so much stuff. I feel like I didn't do a good job. I didn't do the book justice.
[04:30:30] And what I read. I don't know because there's a lot in there, man. There's a lot in there.
[04:30:35] And part of it is because you got to kind of tell the story. You know what I mean?
[04:30:40] You got to, I mean, at least that's what I feel. I feel like you got to kind of know what's going on.
[04:30:44] And that kind of leads me to read a little bit more of the what's going on stuff
[04:30:49] as opposed to some of that internal dialogue and some of the discovering stuff like that. So
[04:30:54] it's just an awesome book. Order the book. I feel like I enjoyed related maybe in a weird way
[04:31:04] more than normal with Ellen. Maybe it was because of how he was too. I think just the whole thing
[04:31:10] together. I was like, I felt not, I mean, in a way more into it, but more like
[04:31:17] you can connect, like I connected with it a lot, like a lot more than the normal I guess given the
[04:31:25] circumstances, you know. You think maybe it's because he's more your age. But actually he's not
[04:31:31] more my house. I mean he's 36. Yeah, I'm like 40. Six eight eight. How old are you? 44.
[04:31:39] But I'm very youthful. I wasn't thinking youthful.
[04:31:43] immature. Yes. Okay. I was thinking. Oh, right. There you go. But what the the part like how he
[04:31:52] he's talking about like the alcoholism and then like his anger at this anger that for some reason,
[04:31:58] like the way he put it was like that's so true. Like almost like not that I necessarily felt
[04:32:05] all of that, but it was like I felt like I can see how that could be. I could totally see how that could
[04:32:09] be. And this one part that I think he like nailed was when he was like something about the existence
[04:32:15] of the devil where alcohol and drugs are like his tools. Yeah. So true. All right, I'm almost
[04:32:22] as I'm almost tempted to say, Frick, that is the devil. That's like you know, the devil's like
[04:32:27] spirit coming down and like touching people in the jam in a mop because it's true. Where and he was
[04:32:32] saying that I don't know if he said it on air, but he was saying I think it was before we were
[04:32:37] recording and he was like, hey, people in school or people like teachers and stuff in school,
[04:32:43] people when you're young, they don't tell you that drugs are like kind of good. Like they feel good.
[04:32:49] Do you say that when he did it on air, yeah. Okay. He's like, they don't tell you that.
[04:32:53] They lie. Yeah. And then it kind of jumps you up. But it's true though. It's like, and obviously
[04:32:59] different people like different drugs. Like I don't have that much drug experience, but the very
[04:33:04] limited that I do like no drugs to me felt good at all. Like even like painkiller, I took the
[04:33:09] all that oxy, like, not more, but like you know the ones that give you food surgery. Yeah after surgery,
[04:33:16] bite it in like all these ones. I took when I got neck surgery, you know, I was like,
[04:33:21] I'm not taking anything. I'm so tough. And then I got home and then stuff war off and I was like,
[04:33:25] give me whatever they gave you to my wife as I gave it to me now. That's true. But the weird thing
[04:33:31] is it didn't feel like it didn't feel any like we even he described like euphoria. I didn't feel
[04:33:39] any of that. I just felt like okay I can go to sleep now, you know, because I'm not in agony. Yeah,
[04:33:43] like kills. So I didn't, I didn't, I don't know. I feel a little bit like weird and woo, woo,
[04:33:48] you're wondering if you feel that. I didn't like it though. I didn't really feel that either.
[04:33:52] But then even like weed and stuff like that. It's like, yeah, I don't like the feeling or whatever
[04:33:57] except for how go. That's the one. That's you. That's your, that's where the devil gets you.
[04:34:03] Yeah. And that's where I experienced the devil scenario. Because it is. It's like,
[04:34:08] all especially when you're having fun or you're bonding with someone and you guys are
[04:34:11] both going down memory lane on hardcore and you just don't want it to end. You're like, oh,
[04:34:15] you're the best. There is alcohol helping it. It's helping me. It seems like I'm helping
[04:34:20] me and then like the next day that pray. I remember I was drinking with K. That's
[04:34:24] the right. I'm not going to tell you what doesn't matter when something is very recent scenario.
[04:34:32] I'm working at the master. We didn't have to.
[04:34:36] To know like, they think you had that later flight on Saturday. I mean, you're
[04:34:40] certain extending the good time like way past like the plant and just, you know,
[04:34:47] and we're just, they were doing that quite don't memory lane talking trash. I mean,
[04:34:51] laugh huge laughs. Huge on all the best. It was the best. Then the next morning we're
[04:34:56] because we're on the same, not on the same flight, but same time. So we're all going to
[04:34:59] their part together. And like we're sitting. But why do we even do that? Like, how I feel
[04:35:05] right now? It's like not even worth it. Like even last time was super good fun, but it's
[04:35:08] not even worth feeling like this. How much percentage of fun could you have had without
[04:35:11] alcohol the night before? I don't know. Like, let's say you had, let's say you had 90%
[04:35:17] fun without alcohol the night before how much fun would you have? I don't know. I mean,
[04:35:24] because I'm tempted to say, well, you're at 90. Probably 90 or 89 or whatever, because I think I can.
[04:35:29] But it could have been maybe like 25. I think I can truly have like 90%.
[04:35:34] Yeah, all the fun. I understand. We're there without. Yeah, I understand, but like, not everyone's
[04:35:39] like that straight up, where just because like, especially cake, now, she's kind of a reserved,
[04:35:43] like, person. Oh, you know, to break down that. But when we're together, it's cool, but then you
[04:35:48] could tell because there's other people like, main tie was with us at some point. Oh,
[04:35:52] dude. It got that. There's like that, huh? We don't even know where main tie was. We don't know
[04:35:58] where he showed up, where he departed. Sorry to freaking bust through my mind of the bust. But
[04:36:03] nonetheless, it was like, you know, certain things you're like, oh, um, but the key point is the
[04:36:08] next day. It wasn't even worth it. It wasn't worth it. And we were literally talking about
[04:36:12] how it's not worth it. So it's like a deal with in the moment. It's worth it. Bro, you can, I'm
[04:36:17] thinking about the play. It's a complete lie. It's a complete lie, but you feel it like to
[04:36:22] your in your bones that it's worth it at the time. And the next day, you know, the reality. That's
[04:36:27] the devil right there. That's the sneaky. It is true. And it's how he put that. How's like,
[04:36:32] bro, you're spot on? Yeah. No, he definitely, you know, I even that last underground podcast we
[04:36:40] did were a guy asked, you know, I hate you know how much drink he should I be doing. You know,
[04:36:45] I got the friend group. They would they don't really want to drink. You know, how you want
[04:36:49] to get away from me to drink? I'm just like, I can't even, I can't even give. As a matter of fact,
[04:36:53] I saw I talked to somebody at the, at the, at the master who was, you know, who's had issues.
[04:36:59] And he said when he heard that question, he was like, please talk, I'll please say, say the
[04:37:02] right thing. Say the right thing. And I was like, you know, I can't even say what he's like, yes,
[04:37:06] he goes, he can't because it's a freaking lie. Yeah. It is. It's a lie, man. Let's stay clean out there.
[04:37:12] Stay clean. Stay clean. I think he said about the ego, which like, conceptually, it was like a
[04:37:17] lot of times, like you'll say this, what he said, this very specific thing where he said,
[04:37:20] although army should have kept me in, even though he knew he couldn't admit it. But it's weird
[04:37:24] because like you kind of have that feeling. It's almost like, I underserved circumstances. Obviously,
[04:37:29] like, you know, it depends on who you are. But it's like, you know how,
[04:37:32] it's almost like a more advanced version of the simple idea of like, you know, the classic, like,
[04:37:39] oh, they didn't invite me to the party, even though I didn't want to go. But like, I still should be invited,
[04:37:45] you know, kind of, because it's me, it's like a weird illusion. And if you really, if you really
[04:37:49] pull the string on that, like, you can blame everything. Like, oh, they didn't keep me in the army.
[04:37:53] That's why I'm drinking right now. Yeah. That's why I'm doing this. That's why I'm doing that. I'm out here.
[04:37:59] That's why I got, you know, that's why I'm in this relationship with this person. Like, you can
[04:38:02] but everything is just rooted in this one thing because they wouldn't keep me. That's a trap. And luckily,
[04:38:08] you figured that out, man. Yeah. Luckily, figured that out. And it's good that other people,
[04:38:13] hopefully can recognize these things. You know, another big point, physical, the physical well-being
[04:38:21] is paramount. Yeah. You got to be, you got to, many, got to get, kind of get up in the morning.
[04:38:26] You got to get after it. If you got to get up at 430, no, you got to have a bit of 5, no, but getting
[04:38:30] up consistently, doing some work. So good for you, man. So good for you. So tunnel lessons there.
[04:38:38] So good for you. Instead of drinking vodka. Yeah. I got a better idea.
[04:38:43] We'll drink the discipline. Yeah. Yeah. I'll drink a mulk. Yeah. I'll mulk. Yeah. Boat. Drink a mulk.
[04:38:48] Drink some go. Drink some maybe even want to drink a little bit of that pre-workout discipline. Go.
[04:38:54] So Sarah goes, uh, my wife says, uh, she's like, you know what you should do? You should make a video.
[04:39:00] And it was, this is like such an old concept. I've seen videos like this.
[04:39:04] The glass or something. Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't. Don't be like that right now. Such a,
[04:39:08] she just doesn't want that idea. She doesn't want that idea. I like her idea. What was it?
[04:39:12] She was almost TV like I did. I got you, sir. She was like, you know, she should do a video,
[04:39:18] like showing like how discipline go. The energy drink is like it's energy drink, but it doesn't have sugar in it.
[04:39:25] And then show this other energy drink that you can't show the label. Of course. And then just show
[04:39:29] how much sugar is in it. And then do the quick. You know how they use the scoop of sugar. Yeah.
[04:39:33] And be like, this is how much sugar you're drinking. She's like, do a video like that. That would be good.
[04:39:38] You don't be funny. It's a good start of the video like that. But then we started saying it like,
[04:39:41] oh, and here's a scoop of rap. Boys are sitting at our snake. We started pouring like actual
[04:39:46] hell. Yeah. Boys go down. We'll do it. Yeah. Good idea. See AD, Jocco over here. Yeah. But it all originated with
[04:39:52] Sarah Charles creative genius. And you're over there. Naysay. Maybe you need some discipline. Go
[04:39:58] home. If you want to get some discipline, go, you want to get some more. Go to Jocco Fule.com,
[04:40:03] hook that up. Go to the vitamin shop. Go to wall wall. Go to H.E.B. Down in Tayhouse. Yeah. We got to go
[04:40:11] on on. So we're spreading check that stuff out. Also, origin USA, origin USA.com. Got to tell
[04:40:17] Braxton that we got hunt gear coming. He will get to hunt in some American made gear. You know
[04:40:23] he doesn't want to buy stuff from China or from overseas. 100%. He there's only one kind of hunting gear
[04:40:31] he is wanting. And that's American made hunting gear. So we'll get you some of that origin USA.com.
[04:40:37] If you want some of that, if you need Jiu Jitsu gear, if you need a T-shirt, if you need a sweatshirt,
[04:40:42] if you need a pair of boots jeans, I got two pair on the way. I should talk to Braxton about that
[04:40:48] as well. Because you know, he wants to wear American made everything. Yeah. I think,
[04:40:53] fully. OriginUSA.com. Joccostore.com. We'll get there. Got some.
[04:40:59] A lot of how should I say. Yeah. They're various things. But mainly it's a peril.
[04:41:04] Well, barrel. You want to represent on this path.
[04:41:08] Oh, barrel. Dislanguos freedom. Yeah. Good. We're restalking some stuff. We're going hard.
[04:41:13] Oh, so we ran out of stock. We run out of stock. We run out of here. I'm here for von Meiss,
[04:41:17] so you just put yourself on reward. Oh, it's a lifeline. Hey, look. It was better.
[04:41:21] Pretty cool to see at the master of people representing with the Sherlock Ashirts. Yeah. You
[04:41:25] can see that those are. Seems like the kind of hit it. String, and she's just a landing.
[04:41:30] They're landing. People are kind of stoked. People are kind of stoked.
[04:41:33] because that's just like full representation.
[04:41:38] Yeah, like, yeah, I'm in the game over here.
[04:41:40] I'll decide what about you.
[04:41:42] It's funny too, because people will come to me and ask me,
[04:41:46] like, hey, where did that guy get that shirt?
[04:41:50] I'm sure not girl, they're all day.
[04:41:52] But yeah, that's how like,
[04:41:53] that's how much you can buy when old shirt
[04:41:55] from the shirt locker if desired.
[04:41:57] Yeah, so basically it goes like this.
[04:41:59] Join shirt locker.
[04:42:00] Membership subscription 34 a month.
[04:42:05] Yes, you get a new shirt every month and if you want,
[04:42:09] if you want, you have excess exclusive access to,
[04:42:14] like, yeah, all those stuff.
[04:42:15] You know, all private stories.
[04:42:16] You can buy anyone, anyone from the,
[04:42:18] that's what's called observing the feedback loop.
[04:42:22] The feedback loop with some people wanted some of those other shirts
[04:42:25] that were, and come out.
[04:42:27] Yeah, so they thought they missed it.
[04:42:29] So it's like, oh, I missed that one shirt
[04:42:31] and that's kinda, you know, the one and then maybe two,
[04:42:33] three months later, they're like, oh, I missed that one again.
[04:42:35] You're seeing saying, so it's like, they felt like,
[04:42:37] apparently that was almost like a gamble, you know?
[04:42:41] But it's not a gamble.
[04:42:43] That's no gamble.
[04:42:44] It's a win.
[04:42:45] To win, to win.
[04:42:46] Check that out, subscribe to the podcast,
[04:42:47] subscribe to Jocca Underground.
[04:42:49] Jocca Underground.com, this is where we're,
[04:42:51] answer a bunch of questions.
[04:42:52] We're talking about topics, we're getting deep into aspects
[04:42:56] that we might not hate here, but that are very integral
[04:42:59] to living and crushing and doing well.
[04:43:02] So Jocca Underground.com, it's also where we are
[04:43:03] because in case we get kicked off of this platform
[04:43:06] or some other platform, we got our own platform.
[04:43:09] Jocca Underground.com, if you wanna join the film
[04:43:11] and help out on that $8.18 a month.
[04:43:14] And if you can't afford it, we look, okay,
[04:43:17] we want you in the game.
[04:43:19] Email assistance at Jocca Underground.com.
[04:43:21] Check out the YouTube channel, check out psychological warfare,
[04:43:24] check out flip side canvas with Dakota Meyer,
[04:43:26] making cool stuff to hang on your wall.
[04:43:29] That's a good idea.
[04:43:30] Books, you can get a bunch of books, I wrote a bunch of them.
[04:43:33] But also, Braxon wrote one.
[04:43:36] It's called the Glass Factory.
[04:43:39] When I'm saying this right now, whenever you're listening this,
[04:43:41] there's only 300 hard covers left that Braxon McCoy.com
[04:43:45] and they get a last long.
[04:43:47] If they are, get one, that's a first-of-dish
[04:43:49] that you ain't, you ain't come and buy again.
[04:43:52] If they don't have that cool, get it from Amazon.
[04:43:55] You'll get a one that's printed on demand,
[04:43:57] which is still awesome because it's a great book, so many lessons.
[04:43:59] And only cry for the living, check out Holley McCoy's book.
[04:44:01] She's been on here before, wrote a fantastic book.
[04:44:04] She risked her freaking life to write, so go check that one out.
[04:44:08] And then I read a bunch of books, you know what they are.
[04:44:11] Get the kids books.
[04:44:14] I just realized I didn't give Braxon a copy of Mike
[04:44:17] in the Dragons, all of the sudden, to him, Braxon hit me up.
[04:44:21] So I've read a book, a bunch of books, check them out.
[04:44:24] Actually, I'm front leadership consultancy.
[04:44:26] Just finish the monster as we were just talking about.
[04:44:28] Next one is Atlanta, Hot Lanna.
[04:44:31] I'll go with 12 through the 14th.
[04:44:33] We're gonna sell out COVID's over now, officially,
[04:44:36] a fish, officially over, because people do not care.
[04:44:41] And,
[04:44:44] we're back to the pre COVID numbers at monster.
[04:44:48] So it's gonna sell out, there you go.
[04:44:51] Battle field, we're doing a EF battle field,
[04:44:53] a little big horn.
[04:44:54] It's almost sold out.
[04:44:56] I think there's literally two more seats.
[04:44:58] Probably not by the time you listen to this.
[04:45:00] But if you wanna go to a little big horn
[04:45:01] with us, check that out, all that stuff,
[04:45:03] FeshLonefront.com.
[04:45:04] Also, we have the Academy, Extremeownership.com.
[04:45:07] We're teaching this stuff all the time.
[04:45:09] Just did a live event today, interacting with everybody
[04:45:11] that's on there.
[04:45:13] If you have questions on how to handle a situation,
[04:45:15] just go on there.
[04:45:16] And you can ask me, and we can interact.
[04:45:19] You can give me the details, the deats.
[04:45:21] And you heard this expression?
[04:45:23] Yeah, for me.
[04:45:23] It's lame, isn't it?
[04:45:25] Not bad.
[04:45:25] I like it.
[04:45:26] Keep it.
[04:45:28] If you wanna help out service members,
[04:45:29] active and retired, their families,
[04:45:30] Mark Lee's mom, mom Lee.
[04:45:32] She has an awesome charity organization.
[04:45:34] What she does is she helps people,
[04:45:36] helps veterans that need medical help,
[04:45:39] that the government's not paying for.
[04:45:42] So if you help her, she will help veterans,
[04:45:47] that need it.
[04:45:48] America's mighty warriors.org.
[04:45:50] Also, we talked a couple times about Mike
[04:45:52] today, his organization.
[04:45:54] Heroesandhorses.org.
[04:45:57] It's the first time I've gotten that thing, right?
[04:46:00] So.org, he's taking vets up into the wilderness
[04:46:04] for 41 days, 41 days.
[04:46:06] Thanks for 41 days on the horseback.
[04:46:08] Dude, freaking awesome.
[04:46:10] And once again, Braxton,
[04:46:14] what a, what a, what a stud, what a hero,
[04:46:16] what an awesome guy, you can follow him.
[04:46:18] He's on the web if you wanna talk to him.
[04:46:20] Braxton McCoy.com.
[04:46:23] His Instagram is Braxton. McCoy.
[04:46:26] His Twitter is Braxton underscore McCoy.
[04:46:31] Hit him up.
[04:46:33] Of course, on the Twitter, on the gram,
[04:46:35] on the Facebook, Echo's Echo Charles,
[04:46:37] on that chocolate one link.
[04:46:38] Listen, you go on there, cool.
[04:46:40] I don't mind you going.
[04:46:41] I don't mind you checking in.
[04:46:43] Don't, don't dwell.
[04:46:44] Don't hang out there.
[04:46:46] Don't move in there.
[04:46:48] Don't say, oh, I'm gonna look at this other thing.
[04:46:50] And this other thing.
[04:46:51] And just like that little dopamine grabs you
[04:46:54] by the freaking throat and pulls you in there.
[04:46:56] Don't do it.
[04:46:58] Otherwise, I get my house right now.
[04:46:59] Just kind of a couple people.
[04:47:01] I had a couple of people from the underground.
[04:47:04] Dopamine, dopamine.
[04:47:05] So for those of you who don't know
[04:47:07] that don't have the joc on the ground.com
[04:47:09] at my house right now, if you pull out your phone
[04:47:13] with my family, people just are going dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine.
[04:47:18] So.
[04:47:19] Yeah, it's real.
[04:47:20] It's a real thing.
[04:47:21] It's what we're doing.
[04:47:23] Keeping people in check, I'm putting my phone back away
[04:47:25] because they're annoying.
[04:47:26] Right?
[04:47:27] So don't let that happen.
[04:47:29] But you can find us there.
[04:47:30] Just watch out for the algorithm.
[04:47:31] Special thanks to all the military personal personnel out there,
[04:47:34] especially our wounded warriors who continue to fight long after the war
[04:47:40] is over.
[04:47:41] We salute you and thank you for everything.
[04:47:43] You have done and everything you continue to do for our country
[04:47:48] in our way of life.
[04:47:49] Thank you to the wounded vets.
[04:47:51] And also to our police and law enforcement firefighters,
[04:47:55] paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers,
[04:47:57] board patrol secret service.
[04:47:59] All the first responders out there,
[04:48:01] you also sacrifice every day to protect our way of life
[04:48:04] here at home.
[04:48:06] And we thank you for that.
[04:48:07] And to everybody else,
[04:48:11] remember these lessons learned from Braxton.
[04:48:15] They're so important.
[04:48:17] And look, they're so hard earned from Braxton
[04:48:21] for what he went through to figure these things out
[04:48:23] and then to pass them on to us.
[04:48:26] The lessons do not lie to yourself.
[04:48:30] That will be the main source of your suffering.
[04:48:34] We often create the vast majority of our own problems.
[04:48:39] And listen, I get it.
[04:48:41] I get that you can't control everything.
[04:48:44] No one can control everything.
[04:48:45] But take ownership of what you can control.
[04:48:49] And it's usually a lot more than you think
[04:48:51] and then sharpen your sword.
[04:48:56] Sharpen your sword.
[04:48:58] And by that, I mean, your body, your mind, your spirit,
[04:49:02] and then go out there into the world
[04:49:06] and slay those dragons.
[04:49:09] And until next time,
[04:49:11] Zekko and Joko, out.