May 28, 2025 • 41 mins
Medal of Honor is back with Season Two! Join new host J.R. Martinez, a U.S. Army veteran whose life was profoundly changed by a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2003. J.R., introduced by Malcolm Gladwell, shares his journey of finding purpose through storytelling and previews the compelling stories of heroism in this season. Season Two explores a range of historical conflicts, from the Civil War, where we encounter the first Black sailor to receive the Medal of Honor, to the Boxer Rebellion and the remarkable Marine Daniel Daly, a recipient of two Medals of Honor.
We also want to hear from you! Send us your personal story of courage, or highlight someone else’s bravery. Email us at medalofhonor@pushkin.fm.
You might hear your stories on future episodes of Medal of Honor, or see them on our social channels @pushkinpods.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Two days ago, we celebrated Memorial Day to honor
and remember the US military personnel who died in service
to the country. It's time to reflect on their courage
and sacrifices, which is something we've been doing in this
(00:36):
new season of Medal of Honor. The reason we make
the show of Pushkin is simple, courage is contagious. These
are stories we think everyone benefits from hearing, and we've
got new stories for you coming up in the next
few weeks, from Robert Blake, the first black sailor to
be awarded the Medal, to Daniel Daily, one of only
nineteen people to have received the Medal of Honor twice.
(00:59):
These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by
acts of valor above and beyond the call of duty.
You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and
what their stories tell us about the nature of courage
and sacrifice. But before we get to our new stories,
I wanted to kick off season two by introducing you
to our new host, JR. Martinez Jr. Is a US
(01:24):
Army veteran whose life changed forever when a roadside bomb
exploded under his vehicle in Iraq in two thousand and three,
after over thirty four surgeries for his severe burns, Jr.
Discovered a profound purpose helping others by sharing his own story.
I can't imagine anyone better suited to guide us through
(01:45):
these powerful stories of valor and sacrifice. Hi Jr. Nice
to meet you.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Hello Malcolm, nice to meet you as well.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Welcome. We are so happy to have you taking over
as host of Medal of Honor, and you are such
a step up for me. It's unbelievable you're actually a
veteran as opposed to just someone who was pretending to
know about the army.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Well, thank you, Malcolm. But you know when you mentioned like,
well you're actual veteran versus someone who's pretend, I think
that's the beauty of what you've created and the team
has put together in season one and now leading into
season two. I think if we can have more people
that have never worn the uniform, that have maybe no
real connection to the military to come and learn, and
(02:34):
then hopefully at the accumulation of each episode in the season,
people are feeling that much more connected and attached to
the stories. I think it goes both ways. I think
it's nice to have yes somebody that has served in
the military, and it maybe feels like there's some credibility,
but man, as someone who's served and as someone who's
been around the military for a long time. Season one,
when I listened to it, I learned so much, so
(02:57):
many things that I had no clue about. So I
think we're all in this boat together, quite frankly, just
going on this journey of really discovering what the human
spirit is truly capable of.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
You know. The moment that Season one hit home for
me was I was giving a talk in Orlando and
somebody it was the Q and A, and someone asked
me about Medal of Honor, and I was young, saying,
I wo I wanted to do the show because I
felt there were all these incredible stories that needed to
be told, and that this was something going into twenty
twenty six, which is the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary
(03:33):
of this country's founding. I thought it was really important
to tell stories that united us all. And then one
by one throughout the audience, people started standing up and saying,
I served in you know, Marine Corps for some I
was in the Navy. And I listened to that show
and I felt like I was finally being heard. Yeah,
but what we did, what I was a part of,
(03:55):
was fine. I just it was incredibly moving. It really
made me think that there's something really important and lovely
about Medal of Honor, this storytelling journey that we're on.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
I have always felt this level of uncomfort with imposter syndrome. Right.
I was nineteen when I was injured, and I found
myself sort of thrust into these different circles, and there's
a lot of these conversations that are happening that I
have no idea what people are talking about or truly
understand them. But the more that I've traveled all over
(04:29):
the world and have met such incredible people who have
served in the military or have not, I guess it
made me a little uncomfortable. When people would say, Jr.
Look at what you've done. They would elevate me, and
I just felt uncomfortable with that because I'm like, you
have no idea. There are so many people out there
that are walking amongst you in your community. When I
(04:53):
get introduced, and I always asked for those that have
served in the military or family members to please remain standing,
and I challenge the audience. I say, look around at
the people standing amongst you. Look at them. Do they
look like me? Do they look like what most of
us think of when we think of veterans, my scars
(05:16):
and what my body's been through. And a lot of
my friends who are missing limbs or have traumatic brain injuries,
or just have something physically that you can immediately identify
and say that person's been through something. But I can't
tell you the amount of times, Malcolm, I've stood next
to my friends who have served just as long as me,
that have done a hell of a lot more than
(05:36):
I did, have done multiple tours and people come right
up to me and they say thank you, and they
do it in the most sincere place from their heart,
and I appreciate that. But it's about reframing that. And
I think when you talk about how many people stand
up and say, we feel seen and we feel heart
and I think that's part of what this series has
(05:59):
done and is hopefully going to continue to do, is
allow people to tell these stories that need to be told.
And this is a perfect opportunity where you and the
team have created something that it just allows me to
completely geek out on these badass human beings.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
And they are bad as bad.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
They are bad ass, man. And let me tell you
something like, if we all just cared a little bit more,
if you all just eliminated all the other things and
just operated from this place of just pure humanity, what
are the possibilities man? They're endless.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Yeah, what did your family think about it when you
signing up?
Speaker 2 (06:35):
My mother's from Central America as south of the Otto.
My father's from Mexico. My mother came here as an
undocumented immigrant and met my father here and about a
year and a half later. I was born in Louisiana,
and so I'm a Southern boy, and I grew up
in Louisiana. I lived there for the first nine years,
then moved to Arkansas, and then right before my senior
year of high school, moved to Georgia. And listen, man,
(06:59):
I was a kid that was I was struggling. There
was a lot of things that I was having to navigate.
Nine years old, I'm getting myself up for school by myself,
getting myself to school. My mom worked at graveyard shift,
so it was a lot of responsibility, and my father
wasn't in my life. My mother was involved in some
pretty abusive relationships when I was younger. Demographically, I was
(07:21):
one of the first Hispanic kids in Arkansas, and I
struggled with that, and I would get into trouble a lot,
and academically like I didn't really excel because I would
be suspended from school three five, seven days at a time.
My defense mechanism was always to be like, well, this
is dumb anyways, just be the funny guy. You don't
really quite understand how those things are going to play
(07:42):
into your life until later. And so I moved to
Georgia my senior high school, and things got better because
I felt like the community was different, and I started
thinking about when I'm listening to Molly as a counselor
to talk about the way she leans into her students.
The counselor calls me to his office and he says, hey,
you're a senior. I'm looking at your transcript. You're not
(08:03):
going to graduate on time. You don't have enough credits,
you don't have the grades. What's going on? Vividly remember
that interaction with him, and I was taken back by
that question, because if that's a simple question, but no
one had ever asked me that question. And he says,
do you want to graduate on time. I said I do,
and he says, okay, well, let's put a plan together.
And I started on this journey to graduate from high school.
(08:26):
I had this vision, man, this really naive perspective, that
I was going to go to college and play football
because that's what I see on Sundays on ESPN. I
went to the school and they told me that I
could come to school there, but I would not be
able to play sports at the college level for two
years because of academics. So I was like, I'm not
going to college then if I can't go to play football,
(08:47):
because that's how we are. And as cliche as it
may sound, I mean there's a reason they have them
because to some degree it works. I was home one
day watching TV and a commercial popped up about the
military and it wasn't a brand new concept. Listen to
the town that I graduated from high school. I mean,
(09:08):
at recruiters had a presence at the school, as they
do in most right, but this was probably an area
you're really going to try to get some kids. They
have no alternatives. And then one of my football coaches
sad sir, so I was like, you know what, let
me go down and talk to this recruiter and see
what this is about. But I didn't tell my mother.
So I go down to this recruiter. I go to
all the branches, kind of skipped over the Navy. I
(09:30):
was like, I don't think I see myself being on
the ship. And then I went to the Marine Corps
and they said four years, we watch you. Four years
the minimum. And I was like trying to negotiate with
the recruiter and I was like, what about three? No,
four years?
Speaker 1 (09:43):
I don't think you negotiate with the marine corks.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
And so then I was like, let me go next
door and I went to the arm In the arm
I was like, we'll take it. Whatever you want to
commit to, we'll take it. And he gave me all
this information. He put it in the folder and I
rushed home and I felt elated. I felt like I
had found a solution for my life at this point.
And I remember going into the house and saying to
my mom, I figured it out. I know exactly what
(10:08):
I'm going to do. I'm going to joined the Army.
And my mom said absolutely not. Now, to give people
context why she said no so quickly was in the
early eighties, and I my lord, there was a civil
war that was happening. So my mother understands what war
does to people. My mother has experienced that. When I
(10:28):
was three years old, one of my sisters passed away
from an illness. She was born Wes, so my mother
has lost a child. I graduated high school in two
thousand and two, and we already had troops in Afghanistan.
We as a country were at war already. So my mother,
understanding that, understood that if I joined the military during
this time of war, there's a good chance of her
(10:50):
losing another child, her only son. Listen, as a parent,
you know that fear kicks in and you're like, absolutely not.
And here's one of the most incredible gifts my mother
gave me that I don't think she intended. I think
it was just how she was trying to show up
(11:10):
for me. My mother, in the midst of her listening
to her son talk about joining the military during a
time of war, she pulled up a chair and sat
down right in front of me and said, Okay, tell
me why you believe this is the best thing for you.
At the end of this two hour conversation, my mother said,
(11:31):
if you want to join the military. If you believe
that's what's best for you, I'll support you. And I
just think about the courage. We talked about courage a
lot right with Metal of Honor recipients, and you think
about the courage it takes as a parent who has
already experienced the worst thing that a parent can experience
and yet to put that aside and say I'm there
(11:53):
for you. Yeah, And so off I go. Man. Off,
I go to the Army. I joined in the love
and Bravo. So I'm an Infantryman. I go to Basy
training for penning Georgia. I get a sign to my
unit four months later, which was one hundred and first
out of four Cambal Kentucky, which is just outside of Nashville.
Nineteen years old. You know, young kid in this unit.
(12:13):
I was one of the youngest. There was me and
two other people that were the youngest. I was definitely
treated lest here's this young guy. A lot of these
guys had a lot of training and experience, and nineteen
years old. You put him in a unit during a
time of conflict, and for the most part, he's going
to feel like incredibly naive, like nothing's gonna happen. And
(12:35):
even though I raised my right hand and knew that
war was a possibility, I never thought it would be
my reality. And sure enough, one of my sergeants one
day came and pulled me aside and said that I
needed to be prepared because we would be deploying sometime soon.
And my response to this man, my patuna sergeant who
clearly outranks me by a decade and a half. My
(12:58):
response to this man at the time was, Sergeant, I
just got out of basic. I just got here relaxed.
Imagine telling you're superior, it's just chill, bro, That's essentially
what I did.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Having met you now for half an hour, I can
imagine you saying that.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Thank you, that's a comple of it, and so and so.
Of course, after I was doing to do a push
ups and said I was for telling my superior to
just relax, you know, it really set in that hey,
he was trying to tell me that physically I was fine,
Mentally I was not ready. And sure enough, a few
weeks later I found myself on a plane heading over
(13:34):
to war at the age of nineteen, going to Iraq. Yeah,
it all happened fast. Will were you stationed in Iraq
in Kuwait, like there was these little bases set up
and there were Camp New York and Camp Pennsylvania, and
I think it was Camp something else. And then once
the conflict started, which was in March of two thousand
and three, we crossed over into Iraq. But we were
(13:55):
one of those units, at least my company was. We
were just in this holding pattern. Just a lot of
our gear was not even there because they were on
ships still coming over. And our job early on was
to escort different jobs in the military from point A
to point B. So we were part of these big
convoys of helping people in the medical field or supplies
(14:16):
or you name it, just get from here to there.
And I'm just kind of going through the motions, not
quite sure I understood my purpose, my role, the agenda,
just going through it, to be honest, and until one
of my commanders one day introduced this concept of service.
And after that I started to buy in and look
(14:39):
around and say, I have a role. I might not
be the biggest member of this team and the most experienced,
but I'm part of this team. I started to then plot, man,
I'm not going to do this for three years. That
I originally thought I'm going to do this for twenty years.
I could vividly remember nights where I'm sitting in a
humvee in the middle of the desert and looking up
at this big, beautiful, bright sky and I'm sitting there
(15:02):
just thinking about when I come back to the States,
I'm going to go to Pathrond, I'm going to go
to Ranger. I'm going to like I'm nineteen. And then
of course life decides we're going to kind of take
you on a little bit of a journey here, my friend,
and we're going to change all that. And it did.
It changed a lot.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
When did you have your accident? You were how long
into the army?
Speaker 2 (15:24):
It was seven months? Seven months and seven months. I
want to make sure that they're listening. Is going to have
to hit like the back button fifteen seconds to thirty
seconds to be like, wait, did he say seven months
he was in country? No. I enlisted in September. September
December two thousand and two, was a basic and then
January of three I arrived. March of three, I deployed
(15:47):
April of three. I was injured, so just a few
days shy of me being in country, a full month.
I sustained my injury which I was driving a humby
through the city called Carbala when the front left tire
of the humby that I was driving run over a
roadside bomb and I was chopped inside. And there were
three other guys in a humvy with me, but they
(16:07):
were thrown out of the vehicle and they all walked
away with minor physical injuries. And it's important for me
to emphasize that because although physically they were okay, emotionally
and mentally they were not. I was trapped aside and
this humvee caught on fire, and five minutes trapped aside
of this UMV man fighting for your life, and you
(16:29):
realize everything that you had been exposed to for nineteen
years of your life has prepared you for that very
moment to survive and to fight. And I kept telling
myself while I was in that hum vy, there was
no reason to believe that someone's going to come and
pull you out. Because you talk to any individual military
(16:51):
or not that has had a near death experience will
tell you that whatever timeframe it was that there were
experience in it, it feels like it's amplified by ten. Right,
So even though it was five minutes, it felt like
fifty minutes, right. It just feels like no one's coming
to your aid until they finally two. But throughout that
(17:12):
five minutes, I would almost trick my brain. I would
talk to myself and trick my brain to believing that
someone was coming. They were coming. Eventually two of my
sergeants pulled me out, started the medevac process, and I
ended up in San Antonio, Texas, and I was in
the medical induced coma for three weeks. Oh wow. And
woke up in Texas and the doctor's like, do you
know where you are? I was like, this doesn't look
(17:34):
like the last place I was in. Yeah, he says,
you're in Texas and that's the burn center for the military.
(18:01):
How much of your body was burned about thirty four percent. Yeah,
it's almost if you look at my body or any
burn survivors someone like looking at a map, like, it's
just kind of the path and the structure and the patches.
But the biggest thing at the time that was threatening
whether I was going to survive or not, was not
so much the burns to my body was the inhalation damage.
Was smoke that I inhaled.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Oh yeah, for.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
The five minutes I was trapped inside, I was inhaling
all this smoke from the fire. So they weren't sure
if I was gonna make it. This is two thousand
and three. They were like, we don't know if he's
gonna make it. And they told my mother, if he
makes it, that was a lot of the language that
we're using with her.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Your mother's worth the nightmare, the very thing she feared.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
The very thing she feared. You know what's interesting, Malcolm,
is I lived my life and some people, my wife
would tell you you're probably one of the most fearless
people that I know, and she's used the words at
times maybe reckless. You just think nothing's going to happen.
I was like, oh, that's debatable and subjective about reckless,
you know, but the reason why, to some degree, I'm
(19:04):
operate from this place of like just fearlessness, if you will.
I'm deathly terrified of snakes. I'm scared of snakes. I
don't like snakes. I don't know what it is. Never
had a bad encounter with one, no one close to
me has ever had one. But I just deathly terrified
of snakes, and I remember when I came out of
my medical induce coma and talking to my mother about
(19:28):
a lot of these dreams, and a lot of it
was the drugs as well, right, and a lot of
these dreams that I had, hallucinations, whatever. And I remember
vividly telling her I remember this dream that her and
I were at some party. There were a lot of
people there, and I'm sitting on the couch and all
(19:51):
of a sudden, there's this snake that slithering through the room,
coming right at me. And the snake just lunges and
right at me and goes right into my mouth, and
I fall on the ground and I'm trying to pull
this snake out, and everyone that was in the room
rushes over, and instead of trying to pull the snake out,
(20:14):
they're pushing the snake in. And I'm looking at my mom,
and my mom's standing over these people looking down on me,
and she's just terrified and I'm terrified. And I was like,
that makes absolutely no sense. And then the more I
started talking about my experiences and things, then I started
remembering throughout my entire training. When I found out that
(20:37):
I was going to deploy, the one thing I was
terrified of I wasn't terrified, believe it or not, that
I would I could get shot, that I could get stabbed,
that I could that I would die like that. The
thing that I was terrified the most was a landmine.
I was terrified of those. In our training, you have
(20:59):
to learn how to spot them and then essentially diffuse them.
And what was the thing that got me a landmine?
The thing I feared the most. My mother had this fear.
And what was the thing that happened?
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Snake?
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Right? What I later put together was that snake. What
really was happening was that was when I was being
intubated in country, because I met some people later that
were part of a medical unit that treated me in country,
and they said that I was fighting them off, that
I was telling them I was okay, and clearly my
body's going through shock, and they're said they were trying
(21:33):
to intubate me, and I was fighting them, and so
they had to get a team of people to come
and help intubate me, to hold me down so they
can intubate me. But my body presented that as the
thing that I'm terrified the most, as a snake. And
so when I think about those things, it starts to
make me say, I can't operate from this place of
(21:54):
fear because the thing that I fear the most ends
up catching up to me and getting me at the end.
So I have to find a way to lean into
this somehow. And it's a lesson, a hard lesson I
had to learn and what I had to go through,
But I'm great full that I learned it at the
age of nineteen, twenty years old. It's her in twenty
in the hospital, twenty one in the hospital, twenty two
(22:16):
in the hospital.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
You in the hospital for how long?
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Almost three years?
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Oh my goodness. Yeah, while you were there, you met
a nurse who made quite an impact on you.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Yeah, she is not the same one you talked about
in season one. Her name is Mary Walker. Mary Walker
from season one who wore pants right in, wanted to
wear pants all the time. But her name was Mary Walker,
and she's a nurse. Listen, when you're in a hospital
setting for as long as I was, or even whatever
the amount of time you're in that staff, they're not
(22:46):
your doctors or nurses, your respiratory thera base. They kind
of become your family. Especially the experience that I had. Yeah,
there was such incredible human beings. I think as much
as you could say it takes a special person to
join the military, be a first responder, be a teacher,
I think equally anybody to be in the medical field,
it takes a special individual, especially in the burn ward.
(23:07):
I'm not in the business of compare, but i will
tell you that I've talked to a lot of my
friends who sustained a variety of injuries, and it seems
like burns. Recovering from that probably hands down takes it.
Just the amount of pain and discomfort you're put through.
And we take for granted what the skin does for
us until we don't have it. And so six months
(23:29):
after I was injured, I'm just killing time between appointments,
hanging out at the nurse's desk, and Miss Walker says
to me, JayR, I want you go and visit that
patient who had just arrived and is struggling. And I said,
and say what, And she's just come and talk to him,
and I was like, absolutely not. She said why not?
And I said, I'm twenty years old. What am I
(23:51):
going to say. I'm not a therapist. I'm not like,
I'm not a counselor. What am I going to say?
I have nothing to say to this individual, and she
just kept insisting. And so because we were on that
dynamic of we were more like family, and she was older,
so it was almost like my mom telling me to
go clean your room. And I responded to her as
any child would to a parent for the most part,
(24:12):
where I was like, oh, fine, I'll do it. And
I remember opening the door to this patient's room and
every room in the hospital has these huge windows. It's Texas,
so it's a lot of light, a lot of sunlight,
so let's a lot of natural sunlight come in. But
it was completely pitch black dark in the room in
(24:34):
the middle of the day, and I'm standing in the
doorway and I just feel something in my stomach. Man,
and I just like, oh, I'm so uncomfortable. I don't
want to walk into this room. And everything in me
was telling me to just leave. And I had a
moment where I had to pause and I had to
(24:55):
say to myself, that's a human being, and what messages
that sending to that individual if I just storm out
of here. And so I just had to remind myself
when I was in that position, and all I wanted
was someone to come and visit me. And so I
just approached his bed asked him a couple of questions,
basic stuff, what's your name, where you're from, what you
(25:16):
know you're in, what happened? And then it turned into
a forty five minute conversation to the point when I said, hey, man,
I'm going to come back tomorrow. And I said, hey,
you want me to bring you anything tomorrow? He said, no, man,
all I need is a visit. And I was like, okay.
I started the walk out of the room, but before
I could exit, something caught my attention. He had turned
(25:39):
the light above his bed on, but he was starting
to get out of his bed as well, and he
was opening the curtain to the window. That was one
of the early moments that I started to really pay
attention and what I paid attention to, and on that
particular day was I shed some light. There was something
that I was able to provide that I changed sort
(25:59):
of the path to a degree. And I exited the
room and approached the head doctor of the burn ward
and said, can I visit patients every day? And he said,
and I started visiting patients every single day.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
I love that Jr. We'll continue with Jr's story right
after this quick break.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
When you talk about courage, this is probably of all
the things that I'm most proud of that I've done.
One thing that I was reminded of is I kept
listening to, especially when you talk about like Henry Johnson's
story of Season one from Albany, and you know, he's
paraded in New York City and he's promised all these
incredible things, and he's invited to Saint Louis to speak
(26:49):
in front of five thousand people. And this man did
this incredible heroic thing as a black man, and he
gets on stage and he tells the truth about how
he's treated, about how other black service members are treated.
He talks about the challenges the experience, and people didn't
like that, and it takes courage to do that, but
(27:12):
to know that essentially everybody turned their back on him.
Fast forward about a year after I'm injured. I'm now
involved in a nonprofit and it's a nonprofit to help
service members their families. And one of the biggest gaps
that I kept witnessing was when I would go into
these rooms and talk to these patients, all the care
was taken care of their famili's lodging was taken care of,
(27:36):
their meals were taken care of. But what was not
taken care of if you came from a two income household,
or even if your parents are the ones that are
having to relocate to be by your side, well, guess
what the bills are still accumulating at home. Who's paying
those bills? So I would be in these rooms visiting
these patients and their families were there, and I would
(27:57):
be privy to these conversations of talking about how are
we going to pay this? How are we going to
pay that? And I just thought that was such an injustice,
and I thought that was such a horrible thing that
they have to navigate. They can't even heal because they're
too busy trying to figure out finances. And so in
this nonprofit, I started going on TV and talking about
(28:19):
the nonprofit and what people could do and donate, and
people started donating. The nonprofit would give me a check
of twenty five hundred dollars five thousand dollars, and I
would go into these patients room and I would say,
here's a check to pay for whatever it is, so
you don't have to worry about that at least. And
then all of a sudden, I get a call from
my commander in San Antonio. I'm part of the wounded Brigade, right,
(28:44):
all the wounded troops are part of this battalion. So
I go into his office and it's him and a
couple of sergeant majors and the first sergeant standing there,
and they're like, the general wants to speak to you.
They drive me up to the general's office and they're
marching me in, and the General's like, you can't do that,
(29:08):
and I said, do what you can't as an actor
duty service member. You can't endorse a private organization. And
I was like, oh, I didn't know that. And I
was like, well, sir, what about there's gaps and lack
of better words, he just listen, that's not your problem.
You can't do that. And I said, well, what happens
if I continue to do it? He says, you can
(29:28):
be Article fifteen. You could be kicked out. And I
said to him, I said, if that's the consequence to
do what I feel is right, then kicked me out.
Kick me out, sir. He didn't like that. Of course,
I was injured as a private, and I woke up
as a specialist to corporal like I just instantly got promoted.
(29:51):
But he didn't like that there was this younger ranking
telling a one star general do it, then challenging him.
But I felt it was right, man, And sure enough
I got called into the office again and I pretty
much stood my ground and felt like it was the
right thing. And I said, n let's the military steps
up and is able to meet those families' needs and
(30:13):
that capacity. You know, that's what when I hear at
least season one and you hear about these stories and
read about them, you're like, man, the courage it took
for a lot of these individuals, and just like them.
You know, I've had people come up to me over
the years that said, man, what you did, And I'm like,
I don't feel any I don't feel any different. I
don't feel I should be elevated any more than anybody else.
(30:38):
I'd like to believe that we would all do this right.
I mean, that's my hope.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
At least tell me a little bit about clearly, spend
an enormous amount of time talking to people who have
been through something consequential for lack of a better word,
and that's what this show is about is getting people
to talk about something really, really, really big and important
and hard. How do you get people to talk about
(31:06):
something this hard?
Speaker 2 (31:08):
I think a lot of people just simply need to
feel like you're listening. I always talk about this distinction
between listening and hearing, like I'm actively listening to you, Malcolm,
so I could actually repeat back to you the question
you just asked me, almost verbatim. If I'm hearing, I'm sorry,
what'd you say? Right? He starts to get into that
(31:29):
if I start looking at my watch, if I still
looking at a clock, if I start there's all these
other things, people start to lose this interest. And I
think when you think of Molly's story from season one,
and she talked about listening, she talked about the importance
of being present and listening, but then equally not just
listening in the traditional sense, but for her as a teacher,
(31:52):
Ela teacher, she's like listening to the writings, paying attention
to what kids are putting down on paper, right when
they're allowed that freedom to go and express and write
about whatever what I've discovered. When I find myself in
the presence of an individual who may I feel a
little bit more open to talking. I need to make
(32:14):
sure that I'm equally open to listening. And in order
for me to get to that point in my life,
I had to do a tremendous amount of work on
myself first and foremost, because earlier on, when people would
share things, I would realize some things triggered me. Whether
it was related to the injury, whether it was a
military story or if it was just something they experienced
(32:37):
outside of the military, things would trigger me, and I
had to ensure that if I was going to be
able to show up for people, I needed to do
the work on myself so I could be fully present.
But what did it for me? I could tell you
that the physical recovery obviously was challenging, there's no secret there.
But the emotional and mental recovery that came after I
(32:57):
left the hospital when I was twenty two, twenty three,
twenty four was really challenging. I was not a pleasant
kid to be around for the most part. I was drinking,
I was angry, I was resentful. I would take it
out on people. Little things would trigger me, and my
friend would say, man, you go in and you bite,
and you latch on and you don't let go. And
(33:20):
it's just because I was carrying so much, and not
just from my military experience, but from prior. And this
person that told me that was also a veteran, and
we worked together at this nonprofit. We were around each
other a lot, and one day we were on a
trip with some other veterans at a fundraiser, and after dinner,
(33:42):
we're driving back to the hotel and somebody says something
and I just again, I'm in a bad place, and
I make a snarky remark. And this individual's driving and
he tells me to chill out. Simple, hey, man, chill out.
But I didn't like that, so I snapped back at him,
mouthing and I told him pull the car over. Let's fight,
(34:03):
because that was the only tools I had. And he
pulls over, and I'm getting out of the car and
these other two vets are trying to hold me back
from getting out of the backseat of the car. And
you get some dark humor when you go through something
like this. So one of the guys is a double
amputee and you know, legs below the knee, and he's
holding onto me around my waist and I'm just pulling
(34:24):
the sled with weights, and all of a sudden, here
and his prosthetics pop out, so I'm carrying half of
a body like. He eventually lets go and then he
low crawls back over to his legs pops it back in,
and I'm coming around and trying to fight the driver,
and the driver wants no part of it, so he
tells me to get back in the car. I get
(34:45):
back in the car and I'm just I'm just oh.
And we get back to the hotel man, and we're
all getting out, and the driver, his name is Dan,
puts some window down and he says, yeah, get back
in the car. And I sit in the passenger's seat
and he tells me to cry, and I was like,
what do you mean. He says, man, you need to cry,
(35:06):
and I was like, no, I don't, and he said
it again. Before you know it, I just started crying.
And then all of a sudden, I just started like
sharing a lot of things and the power of that.
Ten minutes ago, I was trying to severely injure this man.
I was just so angry and mad. The irony of
(35:29):
that is I'm five nine, about two hundred pounds. He's
six foot four, two hundred and eighty five pounds. So
luckily he didn't engage, because had he done that, it
would have worked out so well for me. But instead
he chose love. He chose to show up as a
human being. And every time we would end the conversation
prior to this interaction over the phone or in person,
(35:51):
he would always say I love you. He would always
tell me that I thought that was weird, like I
was just like okay, and I would always respond, all right, bro.
Because my dad wasn't in my life. I never had
a male figure in my life, so I wasn't comfortable
with that. I didn't know how to receive that. And
that night, in that in that parking lot of the hotel,
(36:11):
at two three o'clock in the morning, I looked at
him and I said, thank you, I love you, and
to tell you that my life instantly like that, It
just changed my willingness to be vulnerable, but in the
right space with the right person. Not everyone's ready, not
(36:33):
everyone's equipped to be that listener right. But Dan had
done so much work on himself because of the things
he experienced in his life that he was able to
show up for me in that way, in that moment.
Now I've passed that on. I've come in contact with
a few of my friends that I served with in
the military that reached out years later, and we start
(36:54):
talking every single day because they're not in the great place.
And I end the conversation by telling them I love
them and they don't say it back initially, and that's okay.
I'm still going to say it because I do. And
I talked to my friend the other day. We both met.
We joined the military and basic training. Both young eighteen
nineteen year old kids, naive no clue in the world
(37:15):
the journey we were going to go on. Before I
hang up, I said I love you, man, and he says,
I love you too, and we hang up. And to
normalize that, to normalize the ability to talk and to
share without judgment, I think is what we need. We
need more people to feel that it's okay to share
(37:37):
those things, it's okay to talk about those things, that
there's tremendous amount of power and strength that comes from
sharing those things.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
That's beautiful. Yeah, tell me what's coming up that's exciting.
What are you excited about? What should the listeners out
there expect?
Speaker 2 (37:57):
Just a continuation of season one in regards to learning
about some incredible individuals and learning about their very simple
lives prior to the military and the things that they
were exposed to prepared them to be these incredible individuals
that went on to do such incredible things. From learning
(38:18):
about somebody that would go catch chickens in the middle
of the night, who knew that was like actually a job,
and to say that individual was like, I felt prepared
for the military, not because I played sports, but because
I would go catch chickens. Yeah, like your professional chicken chaser.
From that to Alvin Yorke, who did some incredible things
in the military, We're going to talk about an astronaut,
(38:41):
and we're going to pivot a little bit and talk
about something completely different that is not sort of the
traditional I mean, you did that in season one with
Molly right, and then we're bringing that in with a
female astronaut. And I'm just excited as someone who's in
awe of these individuals and what they'd done. And so
I hope that people that had listened to season one
(39:03):
continue to stay and not only that, but bring more
of their friends and family along the journey. I actually
have had from season one and the subjects that you
guys covered. I brought a lot of those stories to
our dinner table, to my wife, to my thirteen year
old daughter. I can tell you that when I'm sitting
there talking about these individuals, my daughter is sitting there,
(39:26):
that's a critical age where they're like, Okay, can I
go do something else? Okay, I don't want to hear that,
And she's engage. And I think these are beautiful stories
that I think the entire family needs to hear. Buddies
sitting around together need to hear more of You created
something great, Malcolm, and I just want to make sure
that I'm doing not only you, but the team and
(39:49):
these stories justice.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
You know, no question about that.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
It's incredible what this show is all about, man, And
I hope that we can all see a little bit
of ourselves and each one of these individuals, because there's
a little bit of us and every single one of them,
or a little bit of them and every single one
of us. We just got to be willing to discover.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
Yeah, thank you, JayR. This has been wonderful.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
This episode of Medal of Honor Stories of Courage was
produced by Jess Shane Our editor is bend A Dafhaffrey.
Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorsky. Our executive
producer is Constanza Gaiardo. Fact checking by Arthur Gombert's original
music by Eric Phillips. We also want to hear from you.
(40:36):
Send us your personal story of courage or highlight someone
else's bravery. Email us at Medal of Honor at Pushkin
dot fm. You might hear your stories on future episodes
of Medal of Honor or see them on our social
channels at Pushkin pods. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus to get
early episodes of Medal of Honor ad free starting May
(40:56):
twenty eighth. Subscribers also get bonus episodes, full audiobooks, and
early ad free listening from your favorite Pushkin hosts and authors.
Find Pushkin Plus on the Medal of Honor show page
on Apple Podcasts, or at Pushkin dot fm slash plus.
Listen to Medal of Honor wherever you get your podcasts
Pushkin. Two days ago, we celebrated Memorial Day to honor
and remember the US military personnel who died in service
to the country. It's time to reflect on their courage
and sacrifices, which is something we've been doing in this
(00:36):
new season of Medal of Honor. The reason we make
the show of Pushkin is simple, courage is contagious. These
are stories we think everyone benefits from hearing, and we've
got new stories for you coming up in the next
few weeks, from Robert Blake, the first black sailor to
be awarded the Medal, to Daniel Daily, one of only
nineteen people to have received the Medal of Honor twice.
(00:59):
These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by
acts of valor above and beyond the call of duty.
You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and
what their stories tell us about the nature of courage
and sacrifice. But before we get to our new stories,
I wanted to kick off season two by introducing you
to our new host, JR. Martinez Jr. Is a US
(01:24):
Army veteran whose life changed forever when a roadside bomb
exploded under his vehicle in Iraq in two thousand and three,
after over thirty four surgeries for his severe burns, Jr.
Discovered a profound purpose helping others by sharing his own story.
I can't imagine anyone better suited to guide us through
(01:45):
these powerful stories of valor and sacrifice. Hi Jr. Nice
to meet you.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Hello Malcolm, nice to meet you as well.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Welcome. We are so happy to have you taking over
as host of Medal of Honor, and you are such
a step up for me. It's unbelievable you're actually a
veteran as opposed to just someone who was pretending to
know about the army.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Well, thank you, Malcolm. But you know when you mentioned like,
well you're actual veteran versus someone who's pretend, I think
that's the beauty of what you've created and the team
has put together in season one and now leading into
season two. I think if we can have more people
that have never worn the uniform, that have maybe no
real connection to the military to come and learn, and
(02:34):
then hopefully at the accumulation of each episode in the season,
people are feeling that much more connected and attached to
the stories. I think it goes both ways. I think
it's nice to have yes somebody that has served in
the military, and it maybe feels like there's some credibility,
but man, as someone who's served and as someone who's
been around the military for a long time. Season one,
when I listened to it, I learned so much, so
(02:57):
many things that I had no clue about. So I
think we're all in this boat together, quite frankly, just
going on this journey of really discovering what the human
spirit is truly capable of.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
You know. The moment that Season one hit home for
me was I was giving a talk in Orlando and
somebody it was the Q and A, and someone asked
me about Medal of Honor, and I was young, saying,
I wo I wanted to do the show because I
felt there were all these incredible stories that needed to
be told, and that this was something going into twenty
twenty six, which is the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary
(03:33):
of this country's founding. I thought it was really important
to tell stories that united us all. And then one
by one throughout the audience, people started standing up and saying,
I served in you know, Marine Corps for some I
was in the Navy. And I listened to that show
and I felt like I was finally being heard. Yeah,
but what we did, what I was a part of,
(03:55):
was fine. I just it was incredibly moving. It really
made me think that there's something really important and lovely
about Medal of Honor, this storytelling journey that we're on.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
I have always felt this level of uncomfort with imposter syndrome. Right.
I was nineteen when I was injured, and I found
myself sort of thrust into these different circles, and there's
a lot of these conversations that are happening that I
have no idea what people are talking about or truly
understand them. But the more that I've traveled all over
(04:29):
the world and have met such incredible people who have
served in the military or have not, I guess it
made me a little uncomfortable. When people would say, Jr.
Look at what you've done. They would elevate me, and
I just felt uncomfortable with that because I'm like, you
have no idea. There are so many people out there
that are walking amongst you in your community. When I
(04:53):
get introduced, and I always asked for those that have
served in the military or family members to please remain standing,
and I challenge the audience. I say, look around at
the people standing amongst you. Look at them. Do they
look like me? Do they look like what most of
us think of when we think of veterans, my scars
(05:16):
and what my body's been through. And a lot of
my friends who are missing limbs or have traumatic brain injuries,
or just have something physically that you can immediately identify
and say that person's been through something. But I can't
tell you the amount of times, Malcolm, I've stood next
to my friends who have served just as long as me,
that have done a hell of a lot more than
(05:36):
I did, have done multiple tours and people come right
up to me and they say thank you, and they
do it in the most sincere place from their heart,
and I appreciate that. But it's about reframing that. And
I think when you talk about how many people stand
up and say, we feel seen and we feel heart
and I think that's part of what this series has
(05:59):
done and is hopefully going to continue to do, is
allow people to tell these stories that need to be told.
And this is a perfect opportunity where you and the
team have created something that it just allows me to
completely geek out on these badass human beings.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
And they are bad as bad.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
They are bad ass, man. And let me tell you
something like, if we all just cared a little bit more,
if you all just eliminated all the other things and
just operated from this place of just pure humanity, what
are the possibilities man? They're endless.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Yeah, what did your family think about it when you
signing up?
Speaker 2 (06:35):
My mother's from Central America as south of the Otto.
My father's from Mexico. My mother came here as an
undocumented immigrant and met my father here and about a
year and a half later. I was born in Louisiana,
and so I'm a Southern boy, and I grew up
in Louisiana. I lived there for the first nine years,
then moved to Arkansas, and then right before my senior
year of high school, moved to Georgia. And listen, man,
(06:59):
I was a kid that was I was struggling. There
was a lot of things that I was having to navigate.
Nine years old, I'm getting myself up for school by myself,
getting myself to school. My mom worked at graveyard shift,
so it was a lot of responsibility, and my father
wasn't in my life. My mother was involved in some
pretty abusive relationships when I was younger. Demographically, I was
(07:21):
one of the first Hispanic kids in Arkansas, and I
struggled with that, and I would get into trouble a lot,
and academically like I didn't really excel because I would
be suspended from school three five, seven days at a time.
My defense mechanism was always to be like, well, this
is dumb anyways, just be the funny guy. You don't
really quite understand how those things are going to play
(07:42):
into your life until later. And so I moved to
Georgia my senior high school, and things got better because
I felt like the community was different, and I started
thinking about when I'm listening to Molly as a counselor
to talk about the way she leans into her students.
The counselor calls me to his office and he says, hey,
you're a senior. I'm looking at your transcript. You're not
(08:03):
going to graduate on time. You don't have enough credits,
you don't have the grades. What's going on? Vividly remember
that interaction with him, and I was taken back by
that question, because if that's a simple question, but no
one had ever asked me that question. And he says,
do you want to graduate on time. I said I do,
and he says, okay, well, let's put a plan together.
And I started on this journey to graduate from high school.
(08:26):
I had this vision, man, this really naive perspective, that
I was going to go to college and play football
because that's what I see on Sundays on ESPN. I
went to the school and they told me that I
could come to school there, but I would not be
able to play sports at the college level for two
years because of academics. So I was like, I'm not
going to college then if I can't go to play football,
(08:47):
because that's how we are. And as cliche as it
may sound, I mean there's a reason they have them
because to some degree it works. I was home one
day watching TV and a commercial popped up about the
military and it wasn't a brand new concept. Listen to
the town that I graduated from high school. I mean,
(09:08):
at recruiters had a presence at the school, as they
do in most right, but this was probably an area
you're really going to try to get some kids. They
have no alternatives. And then one of my football coaches
sad sir, so I was like, you know what, let
me go down and talk to this recruiter and see
what this is about. But I didn't tell my mother.
So I go down to this recruiter. I go to
all the branches, kind of skipped over the Navy. I
(09:30):
was like, I don't think I see myself being on
the ship. And then I went to the Marine Corps
and they said four years, we watch you. Four years
the minimum. And I was like trying to negotiate with
the recruiter and I was like, what about three? No,
four years?
Speaker 1 (09:43):
I don't think you negotiate with the marine corks.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
And so then I was like, let me go next
door and I went to the arm In the arm
I was like, we'll take it. Whatever you want to
commit to, we'll take it. And he gave me all
this information. He put it in the folder and I
rushed home and I felt elated. I felt like I
had found a solution for my life at this point.
And I remember going into the house and saying to
my mom, I figured it out. I know exactly what
(10:08):
I'm going to do. I'm going to joined the Army.
And my mom said absolutely not. Now, to give people
context why she said no so quickly was in the
early eighties, and I my lord, there was a civil
war that was happening. So my mother understands what war
does to people. My mother has experienced that. When I
(10:28):
was three years old, one of my sisters passed away
from an illness. She was born Wes, so my mother
has lost a child. I graduated high school in two
thousand and two, and we already had troops in Afghanistan.
We as a country were at war already. So my mother,
understanding that, understood that if I joined the military during
this time of war, there's a good chance of her
(10:50):
losing another child, her only son. Listen, as a parent,
you know that fear kicks in and you're like, absolutely not.
And here's one of the most incredible gifts my mother
gave me that I don't think she intended. I think
it was just how she was trying to show up
(11:10):
for me. My mother, in the midst of her listening
to her son talk about joining the military during a
time of war, she pulled up a chair and sat
down right in front of me and said, Okay, tell
me why you believe this is the best thing for you.
At the end of this two hour conversation, my mother said,
(11:31):
if you want to join the military. If you believe
that's what's best for you, I'll support you. And I
just think about the courage. We talked about courage a
lot right with Metal of Honor recipients, and you think
about the courage it takes as a parent who has
already experienced the worst thing that a parent can experience
and yet to put that aside and say I'm there
(11:53):
for you. Yeah, And so off I go. Man. Off,
I go to the Army. I joined in the love
and Bravo. So I'm an Infantryman. I go to Basy
training for penning Georgia. I get a sign to my
unit four months later, which was one hundred and first
out of four Cambal Kentucky, which is just outside of Nashville.
Nineteen years old. You know, young kid in this unit.
(12:13):
I was one of the youngest. There was me and
two other people that were the youngest. I was definitely
treated lest here's this young guy. A lot of these
guys had a lot of training and experience, and nineteen
years old. You put him in a unit during a
time of conflict, and for the most part, he's going
to feel like incredibly naive, like nothing's gonna happen. And
(12:35):
even though I raised my right hand and knew that
war was a possibility, I never thought it would be
my reality. And sure enough, one of my sergeants one
day came and pulled me aside and said that I
needed to be prepared because we would be deploying sometime soon.
And my response to this man, my patuna sergeant who
clearly outranks me by a decade and a half. My
(12:58):
response to this man at the time was, Sergeant, I
just got out of basic. I just got here relaxed.
Imagine telling you're superior, it's just chill, bro, That's essentially
what I did.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Having met you now for half an hour, I can
imagine you saying that.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Thank you, that's a comple of it, and so and so.
Of course, after I was doing to do a push
ups and said I was for telling my superior to
just relax, you know, it really set in that hey,
he was trying to tell me that physically I was fine,
Mentally I was not ready. And sure enough, a few
weeks later I found myself on a plane heading over
(13:34):
to war at the age of nineteen, going to Iraq. Yeah,
it all happened fast. Will were you stationed in Iraq
in Kuwait, like there was these little bases set up
and there were Camp New York and Camp Pennsylvania, and
I think it was Camp something else. And then once
the conflict started, which was in March of two thousand
and three, we crossed over into Iraq. But we were
(13:55):
one of those units, at least my company was. We
were just in this holding pattern. Just a lot of
our gear was not even there because they were on
ships still coming over. And our job early on was
to escort different jobs in the military from point A
to point B. So we were part of these big
convoys of helping people in the medical field or supplies
(14:16):
or you name it, just get from here to there.
And I'm just kind of going through the motions, not
quite sure I understood my purpose, my role, the agenda,
just going through it, to be honest, and until one
of my commanders one day introduced this concept of service.
And after that I started to buy in and look
(14:39):
around and say, I have a role. I might not
be the biggest member of this team and the most experienced,
but I'm part of this team. I started to then plot, man,
I'm not going to do this for three years. That
I originally thought I'm going to do this for twenty years.
I could vividly remember nights where I'm sitting in a
humvee in the middle of the desert and looking up
at this big, beautiful, bright sky and I'm sitting there
(15:02):
just thinking about when I come back to the States,
I'm going to go to Pathrond, I'm going to go
to Ranger. I'm going to like I'm nineteen. And then
of course life decides we're going to kind of take
you on a little bit of a journey here, my friend,
and we're going to change all that. And it did.
It changed a lot.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
When did you have your accident? You were how long
into the army?
Speaker 2 (15:24):
It was seven months? Seven months and seven months. I
want to make sure that they're listening. Is going to have
to hit like the back button fifteen seconds to thirty
seconds to be like, wait, did he say seven months
he was in country? No. I enlisted in September. September
December two thousand and two, was a basic and then
January of three I arrived. March of three, I deployed
(15:47):
April of three. I was injured, so just a few
days shy of me being in country, a full month.
I sustained my injury which I was driving a humby
through the city called Carbala when the front left tire
of the humby that I was driving run over a
roadside bomb and I was chopped inside. And there were
three other guys in a humvy with me, but they
(16:07):
were thrown out of the vehicle and they all walked
away with minor physical injuries. And it's important for me
to emphasize that because although physically they were okay, emotionally
and mentally they were not. I was trapped aside and
this humvee caught on fire, and five minutes trapped aside
of this UMV man fighting for your life, and you
(16:29):
realize everything that you had been exposed to for nineteen
years of your life has prepared you for that very
moment to survive and to fight. And I kept telling
myself while I was in that hum vy, there was
no reason to believe that someone's going to come and
pull you out. Because you talk to any individual military
(16:51):
or not that has had a near death experience will
tell you that whatever timeframe it was that there were
experience in it, it feels like it's amplified by ten. Right,
So even though it was five minutes, it felt like
fifty minutes, right. It just feels like no one's coming
to your aid until they finally two. But throughout that
(17:12):
five minutes, I would almost trick my brain. I would
talk to myself and trick my brain to believing that
someone was coming. They were coming. Eventually two of my
sergeants pulled me out, started the medevac process, and I
ended up in San Antonio, Texas, and I was in
the medical induced coma for three weeks. Oh wow. And
woke up in Texas and the doctor's like, do you
know where you are? I was like, this doesn't look
(17:34):
like the last place I was in. Yeah, he says,
you're in Texas and that's the burn center for the military.
(18:01):
How much of your body was burned about thirty four percent. Yeah,
it's almost if you look at my body or any
burn survivors someone like looking at a map, like, it's
just kind of the path and the structure and the patches.
But the biggest thing at the time that was threatening
whether I was going to survive or not, was not
so much the burns to my body was the inhalation damage.
Was smoke that I inhaled.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Oh yeah, for.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
The five minutes I was trapped inside, I was inhaling
all this smoke from the fire. So they weren't sure
if I was gonna make it. This is two thousand
and three. They were like, we don't know if he's
gonna make it. And they told my mother, if he
makes it, that was a lot of the language that
we're using with her.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Your mother's worth the nightmare, the very thing she feared.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
The very thing she feared. You know what's interesting, Malcolm,
is I lived my life and some people, my wife
would tell you you're probably one of the most fearless
people that I know, and she's used the words at
times maybe reckless. You just think nothing's going to happen.
I was like, oh, that's debatable and subjective about reckless,
you know, but the reason why, to some degree, I'm
(19:04):
operate from this place of like just fearlessness, if you will.
I'm deathly terrified of snakes. I'm scared of snakes. I
don't like snakes. I don't know what it is. Never
had a bad encounter with one, no one close to
me has ever had one. But I just deathly terrified
of snakes, and I remember when I came out of
my medical induce coma and talking to my mother about
(19:28):
a lot of these dreams, and a lot of it
was the drugs as well, right, and a lot of
these dreams that I had, hallucinations, whatever. And I remember
vividly telling her I remember this dream that her and
I were at some party. There were a lot of
people there, and I'm sitting on the couch and all
(19:51):
of a sudden, there's this snake that slithering through the room,
coming right at me. And the snake just lunges and
right at me and goes right into my mouth, and
I fall on the ground and I'm trying to pull
this snake out, and everyone that was in the room
rushes over, and instead of trying to pull the snake out,
(20:14):
they're pushing the snake in. And I'm looking at my mom,
and my mom's standing over these people looking down on me,
and she's just terrified and I'm terrified. And I was like,
that makes absolutely no sense. And then the more I
started talking about my experiences and things, then I started
remembering throughout my entire training. When I found out that
(20:37):
I was going to deploy, the one thing I was
terrified of I wasn't terrified, believe it or not, that
I would I could get shot, that I could get stabbed,
that I could that I would die like that. The
thing that I was terrified the most was a landmine.
I was terrified of those. In our training, you have
(20:59):
to learn how to spot them and then essentially diffuse them.
And what was the thing that got me a landmine?
The thing I feared the most. My mother had this fear.
And what was the thing that happened?
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Snake?
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Right? What I later put together was that snake. What
really was happening was that was when I was being
intubated in country, because I met some people later that
were part of a medical unit that treated me in country,
and they said that I was fighting them off, that
I was telling them I was okay, and clearly my
body's going through shock, and they're said they were trying
(21:33):
to intubate me, and I was fighting them, and so
they had to get a team of people to come
and help intubate me, to hold me down so they
can intubate me. But my body presented that as the
thing that I'm terrified the most, as a snake. And
so when I think about those things, it starts to
make me say, I can't operate from this place of
(21:54):
fear because the thing that I fear the most ends
up catching up to me and getting me at the end.
So I have to find a way to lean into
this somehow. And it's a lesson, a hard lesson I
had to learn and what I had to go through,
But I'm great full that I learned it at the
age of nineteen, twenty years old. It's her in twenty
in the hospital, twenty one in the hospital, twenty two
(22:16):
in the hospital.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
You in the hospital for how long?
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Almost three years?
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Oh my goodness. Yeah, while you were there, you met
a nurse who made quite an impact on you.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Yeah, she is not the same one you talked about
in season one. Her name is Mary Walker. Mary Walker
from season one who wore pants right in, wanted to
wear pants all the time. But her name was Mary Walker,
and she's a nurse. Listen, when you're in a hospital
setting for as long as I was, or even whatever
the amount of time you're in that staff, they're not
(22:46):
your doctors or nurses, your respiratory thera base. They kind
of become your family. Especially the experience that I had. Yeah,
there was such incredible human beings. I think as much
as you could say it takes a special person to
join the military, be a first responder, be a teacher,
I think equally anybody to be in the medical field,
it takes a special individual, especially in the burn ward.
(23:07):
I'm not in the business of compare, but i will
tell you that I've talked to a lot of my
friends who sustained a variety of injuries, and it seems
like burns. Recovering from that probably hands down takes it.
Just the amount of pain and discomfort you're put through.
And we take for granted what the skin does for
us until we don't have it. And so six months
(23:29):
after I was injured, I'm just killing time between appointments,
hanging out at the nurse's desk, and Miss Walker says
to me, JayR, I want you go and visit that
patient who had just arrived and is struggling. And I said,
and say what, And she's just come and talk to him,
and I was like, absolutely not. She said why not?
And I said, I'm twenty years old. What am I
(23:51):
going to say. I'm not a therapist. I'm not like,
I'm not a counselor. What am I going to say?
I have nothing to say to this individual, and she
just kept insisting. And so because we were on that
dynamic of we were more like family, and she was older,
so it was almost like my mom telling me to
go clean your room. And I responded to her as
any child would to a parent for the most part,
(24:12):
where I was like, oh, fine, I'll do it. And
I remember opening the door to this patient's room and
every room in the hospital has these huge windows. It's Texas,
so it's a lot of light, a lot of sunlight,
so let's a lot of natural sunlight come in. But
it was completely pitch black dark in the room in
(24:34):
the middle of the day, and I'm standing in the
doorway and I just feel something in my stomach. Man,
and I just like, oh, I'm so uncomfortable. I don't
want to walk into this room. And everything in me
was telling me to just leave. And I had a
moment where I had to pause and I had to
(24:55):
say to myself, that's a human being, and what messages
that sending to that individual if I just storm out
of here. And so I just had to remind myself
when I was in that position, and all I wanted
was someone to come and visit me. And so I
just approached his bed asked him a couple of questions,
basic stuff, what's your name, where you're from, what you
(25:16):
know you're in, what happened? And then it turned into
a forty five minute conversation to the point when I said, hey, man,
I'm going to come back tomorrow. And I said, hey,
you want me to bring you anything tomorrow? He said, no, man,
all I need is a visit. And I was like, okay.
I started the walk out of the room, but before
I could exit, something caught my attention. He had turned
(25:39):
the light above his bed on, but he was starting
to get out of his bed as well, and he
was opening the curtain to the window. That was one
of the early moments that I started to really pay
attention and what I paid attention to, and on that
particular day was I shed some light. There was something
that I was able to provide that I changed sort
(25:59):
of the path to a degree. And I exited the
room and approached the head doctor of the burn ward
and said, can I visit patients every day? And he said,
and I started visiting patients every single day.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
I love that Jr. We'll continue with Jr's story right
after this quick break.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
When you talk about courage, this is probably of all
the things that I'm most proud of that I've done.
One thing that I was reminded of is I kept
listening to, especially when you talk about like Henry Johnson's
story of Season one from Albany, and you know, he's
paraded in New York City and he's promised all these
incredible things, and he's invited to Saint Louis to speak
(26:49):
in front of five thousand people. And this man did
this incredible heroic thing as a black man, and he
gets on stage and he tells the truth about how
he's treated, about how other black service members are treated.
He talks about the challenges the experience, and people didn't
like that, and it takes courage to do that, but
(27:12):
to know that essentially everybody turned their back on him.
Fast forward about a year after I'm injured. I'm now
involved in a nonprofit and it's a nonprofit to help
service members their families. And one of the biggest gaps
that I kept witnessing was when I would go into
these rooms and talk to these patients, all the care
was taken care of their famili's lodging was taken care of,
(27:36):
their meals were taken care of. But what was not
taken care of if you came from a two income household,
or even if your parents are the ones that are
having to relocate to be by your side, well, guess
what the bills are still accumulating at home. Who's paying
those bills? So I would be in these rooms visiting
these patients and their families were there, and I would
(27:57):
be privy to these conversations of talking about how are
we going to pay this? How are we going to
pay that? And I just thought that was such an injustice,
and I thought that was such a horrible thing that
they have to navigate. They can't even heal because they're
too busy trying to figure out finances. And so in
this nonprofit, I started going on TV and talking about
(28:19):
the nonprofit and what people could do and donate, and
people started donating. The nonprofit would give me a check
of twenty five hundred dollars five thousand dollars, and I
would go into these patients room and I would say,
here's a check to pay for whatever it is, so
you don't have to worry about that at least. And
then all of a sudden, I get a call from
my commander in San Antonio. I'm part of the wounded Brigade, right,
(28:44):
all the wounded troops are part of this battalion. So
I go into his office and it's him and a
couple of sergeant majors and the first sergeant standing there,
and they're like, the general wants to speak to you.
They drive me up to the general's office and they're
marching me in, and the General's like, you can't do that,
(29:08):
and I said, do what you can't as an actor
duty service member. You can't endorse a private organization. And
I was like, oh, I didn't know that. And I
was like, well, sir, what about there's gaps and lack
of better words, he just listen, that's not your problem.
You can't do that. And I said, well, what happens
if I continue to do it? He says, you can
(29:28):
be Article fifteen. You could be kicked out. And I
said to him, I said, if that's the consequence to
do what I feel is right, then kicked me out.
Kick me out, sir. He didn't like that. Of course,
I was injured as a private, and I woke up
as a specialist to corporal like I just instantly got promoted.
(29:51):
But he didn't like that there was this younger ranking
telling a one star general do it, then challenging him.
But I felt it was right, man, And sure enough
I got called into the office again and I pretty
much stood my ground and felt like it was the
right thing. And I said, n let's the military steps
up and is able to meet those families' needs and
(30:13):
that capacity. You know, that's what when I hear at
least season one and you hear about these stories and
read about them, you're like, man, the courage it took
for a lot of these individuals, and just like them.
You know, I've had people come up to me over
the years that said, man, what you did, And I'm like,
I don't feel any I don't feel any different. I
don't feel I should be elevated any more than anybody else.
(30:38):
I'd like to believe that we would all do this right.
I mean, that's my hope.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
At least tell me a little bit about clearly, spend
an enormous amount of time talking to people who have
been through something consequential for lack of a better word,
and that's what this show is about is getting people
to talk about something really, really, really big and important
and hard. How do you get people to talk about
(31:06):
something this hard?
Speaker 2 (31:08):
I think a lot of people just simply need to
feel like you're listening. I always talk about this distinction
between listening and hearing, like I'm actively listening to you, Malcolm,
so I could actually repeat back to you the question
you just asked me, almost verbatim. If I'm hearing, I'm sorry,
what'd you say? Right? He starts to get into that
(31:29):
if I start looking at my watch, if I still
looking at a clock, if I start there's all these
other things, people start to lose this interest. And I
think when you think of Molly's story from season one,
and she talked about listening, she talked about the importance
of being present and listening, but then equally not just
listening in the traditional sense, but for her as a teacher,
(31:52):
Ela teacher, she's like listening to the writings, paying attention
to what kids are putting down on paper, right when
they're allowed that freedom to go and express and write
about whatever what I've discovered. When I find myself in
the presence of an individual who may I feel a
little bit more open to talking. I need to make
(32:14):
sure that I'm equally open to listening. And in order
for me to get to that point in my life,
I had to do a tremendous amount of work on
myself first and foremost, because earlier on, when people would
share things, I would realize some things triggered me. Whether
it was related to the injury, whether it was a
military story or if it was just something they experienced
(32:37):
outside of the military, things would trigger me, and I
had to ensure that if I was going to be
able to show up for people, I needed to do
the work on myself so I could be fully present.
But what did it for me? I could tell you
that the physical recovery obviously was challenging, there's no secret there.
But the emotional and mental recovery that came after I
(32:57):
left the hospital when I was twenty two, twenty three,
twenty four was really challenging. I was not a pleasant
kid to be around for the most part. I was drinking,
I was angry, I was resentful. I would take it
out on people. Little things would trigger me, and my
friend would say, man, you go in and you bite,
and you latch on and you don't let go. And
(33:20):
it's just because I was carrying so much, and not
just from my military experience, but from prior. And this
person that told me that was also a veteran, and
we worked together at this nonprofit. We were around each
other a lot, and one day we were on a
trip with some other veterans at a fundraiser, and after dinner,
(33:42):
we're driving back to the hotel and somebody says something
and I just again, I'm in a bad place, and
I make a snarky remark. And this individual's driving and
he tells me to chill out. Simple, hey, man, chill out.
But I didn't like that, so I snapped back at him,
mouthing and I told him pull the car over. Let's fight,
(34:03):
because that was the only tools I had. And he
pulls over, and I'm getting out of the car and
these other two vets are trying to hold me back
from getting out of the backseat of the car. And
you get some dark humor when you go through something
like this. So one of the guys is a double
amputee and you know, legs below the knee, and he's
holding onto me around my waist and I'm just pulling
(34:24):
the sled with weights, and all of a sudden, here
and his prosthetics pop out, so I'm carrying half of
a body like. He eventually lets go and then he
low crawls back over to his legs pops it back in,
and I'm coming around and trying to fight the driver,
and the driver wants no part of it, so he
tells me to get back in the car. I get
(34:45):
back in the car and I'm just I'm just oh.
And we get back to the hotel man, and we're
all getting out, and the driver, his name is Dan,
puts some window down and he says, yeah, get back
in the car. And I sit in the passenger's seat
and he tells me to cry, and I was like,
what do you mean. He says, man, you need to cry,
(35:06):
and I was like, no, I don't, and he said
it again. Before you know it, I just started crying.
And then all of a sudden, I just started like
sharing a lot of things and the power of that.
Ten minutes ago, I was trying to severely injure this man.
I was just so angry and mad. The irony of
(35:29):
that is I'm five nine, about two hundred pounds. He's
six foot four, two hundred and eighty five pounds. So
luckily he didn't engage, because had he done that, it
would have worked out so well for me. But instead
he chose love. He chose to show up as a
human being. And every time we would end the conversation
prior to this interaction over the phone or in person,
(35:51):
he would always say I love you. He would always
tell me that I thought that was weird, like I
was just like okay, and I would always respond, all right, bro.
Because my dad wasn't in my life. I never had
a male figure in my life, so I wasn't comfortable
with that. I didn't know how to receive that. And
that night, in that in that parking lot of the hotel,
(36:11):
at two three o'clock in the morning, I looked at
him and I said, thank you, I love you, and
to tell you that my life instantly like that, It
just changed my willingness to be vulnerable, but in the
right space with the right person. Not everyone's ready, not
(36:33):
everyone's equipped to be that listener right. But Dan had
done so much work on himself because of the things
he experienced in his life that he was able to
show up for me in that way, in that moment.
Now I've passed that on. I've come in contact with
a few of my friends that I served with in
the military that reached out years later, and we start
(36:54):
talking every single day because they're not in the great place.
And I end the conversation by telling them I love
them and they don't say it back initially, and that's okay.
I'm still going to say it because I do. And
I talked to my friend the other day. We both met.
We joined the military and basic training. Both young eighteen
nineteen year old kids, naive no clue in the world
(37:15):
the journey we were going to go on. Before I
hang up, I said I love you, man, and he says,
I love you too, and we hang up. And to
normalize that, to normalize the ability to talk and to
share without judgment, I think is what we need. We
need more people to feel that it's okay to share
(37:37):
those things, it's okay to talk about those things, that
there's tremendous amount of power and strength that comes from
sharing those things.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
That's beautiful. Yeah, tell me what's coming up that's exciting.
What are you excited about? What should the listeners out
there expect?
Speaker 2 (37:57):
Just a continuation of season one in regards to learning
about some incredible individuals and learning about their very simple
lives prior to the military and the things that they
were exposed to prepared them to be these incredible individuals
that went on to do such incredible things. From learning
(38:18):
about somebody that would go catch chickens in the middle
of the night, who knew that was like actually a job,
and to say that individual was like, I felt prepared
for the military, not because I played sports, but because
I would go catch chickens. Yeah, like your professional chicken chaser.
From that to Alvin Yorke, who did some incredible things
in the military, We're going to talk about an astronaut,
(38:41):
and we're going to pivot a little bit and talk
about something completely different that is not sort of the
traditional I mean, you did that in season one with
Molly right, and then we're bringing that in with a
female astronaut. And I'm just excited as someone who's in
awe of these individuals and what they'd done. And so
I hope that people that had listened to season one
(39:03):
continue to stay and not only that, but bring more
of their friends and family along the journey. I actually
have had from season one and the subjects that you
guys covered. I brought a lot of those stories to
our dinner table, to my wife, to my thirteen year
old daughter. I can tell you that when I'm sitting
there talking about these individuals, my daughter is sitting there,
(39:26):
that's a critical age where they're like, Okay, can I
go do something else? Okay, I don't want to hear that,
And she's engage. And I think these are beautiful stories
that I think the entire family needs to hear. Buddies
sitting around together need to hear more of You created
something great, Malcolm, and I just want to make sure
that I'm doing not only you, but the team and
(39:49):
these stories justice.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
You know, no question about that.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
It's incredible what this show is all about, man, And
I hope that we can all see a little bit
of ourselves and each one of these individuals, because there's
a little bit of us and every single one of them,
or a little bit of them and every single one
of us. We just got to be willing to discover.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
Yeah, thank you, JayR. This has been wonderful.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
This episode of Medal of Honor Stories of Courage was
produced by Jess Shane Our editor is bend A Dafhaffrey.
Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorsky. Our executive
producer is Constanza Gaiardo. Fact checking by Arthur Gombert's original
music by Eric Phillips. We also want to hear from you.
(40:36):
Send us your personal story of courage or highlight someone
else's bravery. Email us at Medal of Honor at Pushkin
dot fm. You might hear your stories on future episodes
of Medal of Honor or see them on our social
channels at Pushkin pods. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus to get
early episodes of Medal of Honor ad free starting May
(40:56):
twenty eighth. Subscribers also get bonus episodes, full audiobooks, and
early ad free listening from your favorite Pushkin hosts and authors.
Find Pushkin Plus on the Medal of Honor show page
on Apple Podcasts, or at Pushkin dot fm slash plus.
Listen to Medal of Honor wherever you get your podcasts
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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