David Rutherford Show: A Green Beret's Darkest Night in Baghdad — and What Saved Him | Tyr Symank - The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
When did you start to truly seek that thing?

Speaker 2 (00:05):
I had to break.

Speaker 3 (00:05):
I had to break to seek it. Because I didn't
know I was missing it. I knew something was wrong.
One rocket had hit one of our T-walls. It was
a mortar. It hit a T-wall pretty close to where
I laid my head down. And we had credible intel
that we were going to hit it at a specific

(00:26):
time that night. I sat in my room And I
just cried, and I waited for that rocket to hit me.
I hoped it would hit me, David. Wow. When it didn't,
I sat there even more ashamed because I know I
didn't do my job. I waited in the kitchen for
our PA to get back from training some Iraqis. And

(00:49):
he came in and said, hey, what's going on? I said,
I need to talk to somebody. And I just broke
down right then and there.

Speaker 4 (00:56):
Welcome back to the show, everybody.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
As all of you have heard me been stating lately,
I have this just unattainable scratch in my brain of
really trying to understand how we as human beings and
within the human condition try and figure out how to
either identify, touch, make, concoct, conjure, whatever adjective you want

(01:21):
to describe it, how we can materialize a sense of
peace while we're consumed with the perpetual nature of pain
and suffering that's indicative of any life worth living. And
you also have heard me talk about this incredible experience
I had back in the spring Black Rifle Coffee event

(01:44):
out in Las Vegas. And there were two people that
impacted me so profoundly that I'm still reeling from the
engagement of that time. It's what triggered this quest to
try and understand this phenomenon that is possible within all
of us. One of those people was Earl Plumlee, and

(02:07):
the other is a gentleman I'm bringing on today. He's
a 30-year Green Beret. He's a combat medic, a Blackwater guy.
And probably one of the most insightful human beings I've
ever met in my life. Literally in our first conversation,
the first night I showed up, we're in some casino bar.
I see this beautiful dog walk up. Frito, I look down,

(02:31):
it's my buddy, Tyr. My new buddy, Tyr. And he
immediately just smiles at me. And there was a warmth
and a wisdom behind his eyes. that I hadn't felt
from somebody. I think that's what I try and do
when I meet new people. And then I got into
this insane conversation about life and his life and perspective.

(02:54):
And it was transformational. And so I thought in my
quest to really kind of explore this, there's nobody.

Speaker 4 (03:02):
Better out there to.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
Have tear on to explain this all to you as
he sees it through his eyes. So welcome to the show,
my man.

Speaker 3 (03:12):
Hey, thanks, Dave.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Yeah, Fredo has a lot of warmth and wisdom behind
his eyes.

Speaker 3 (03:16):
You're right on that.

Speaker 4 (03:18):
Yeah, I wasn't talking about you at all, dude.

Speaker 1 (03:21):
It was your dog, and I'm hoping you can, like,
translate for your dog in this interview right here.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
He's a great dog, man.

Speaker 3 (03:32):
I have to give a quick shout-out to Second Chance
Canine and the Ward Burton Wildlife Foundation because without them,
I wouldn't have him today. He's, I like to joke
that he's trained better than I am. I would get
stressed out. I've had him for about two years now.

(03:53):
He just turned three last week and I've had him
for about two years and I would get stressed out
and he would come up and he would just be
wagging his tail and put his head in my lap
and just kind of look up at me and be like,
what do you want, man? And it was, Rebecca had
to point out to me like, isn't that what he's
trained to do?

Speaker 4 (04:10):
I'm like, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:11):
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4 (04:13):
That's right. Okay.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
Good dog.

Speaker 4 (04:15):
Good job.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
It's, you know, all my friends that have dogs and
have had dogs for a long time, I.

Speaker 4 (04:24):
See it.

Speaker 1 (04:25):
Like, I just see the relationship, the connectivity, the joy, and,
you know, there's, there's something that takes place within that
unconditional love. Right. And, and what, how would you describe
that sensation? Like, how do you, how do you know

(04:47):
it's real? How do you, how, like now, are you
at a point where you're having a rough day or
a tough time or a moment? Like you go seek
it out or you snap, or is he always there?
Like you said, How would you describe it, the relationship?

Speaker 2 (05:01):
It's a couple different things.

Speaker 3 (05:02):
So, one, obviously, he's trained to pick up on these
emotions and these cues, and he's there for it.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
The other thing is, you know, he's not judgmental.

Speaker 3 (05:18):
He's not a rescue, so it's not like, he's like, oh,
who saved who? Shout out to people rescuing dogs. I'm
not poo-pooing on that, but I needed rescuing. I didn't
need you know, some dog that I needed to stop
from peeing on the floor while I'm being aggravated.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
So it was a clean slate there.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
He's accepting no matter what I'm doing, unless I'm shooting guns.
He does not like guns. He's kind of liberal in
that respect. I'm not sure what's going on there.

Speaker 4 (05:48):
He'll turn them.

Speaker 3 (05:50):
Yeah. The other aspect of that is it gives, you know,
I'm an empty nester.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
All my kids are adults. I started having kids when
I was a kid.

Speaker 3 (05:59):
Um, and I've got a, I've got a hole in,
in my heart where, uh, my kids were my purpose
and they still are, but I don't see them every
day and I don't hear from them every day. And
having him, uh, it doesn't replace a kid, but it
gives me something to do. That's not me.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
You know, I've, I've, I've got to, I've got to
take care of this, this.

Speaker 3 (06:24):
This other living being and, you know, take him outside
and go for a walk and And that's just as
good for me as it is for him, especially being
fully remote and being secluded out here on this acreage.

Speaker 1 (06:40):
It's interesting you just said, and that comment was powerful,
about it's him, it's not me, right? And I think,
you know, to pivot back to the main question I
wanted to present to you is, like, how do you
find peace in the pain?

Speaker 4 (06:57):
It would seem as.

Speaker 1 (07:00):
you know, as when we were talking, man, you would
always bring something up of serving someone else.

Speaker 3 (07:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:07):
Like, and, and, and I think for, I know in
particular for me, that's why I wanted to be a
medic because I knew I would always be able to
have maintained some, some avenue of empathy by being a medic.
Even though if you ask any of my students, they'll
tell you I was the worst fucking medic on the planet.
the worst bedside manner ever in human existence. But there

(07:31):
was still something, like, to serve someone in that need
or to have the confidence, like, oh, Rutt can plug
my holes or whatever it might be. There's something about
that service that allows a space for peace to kind
of maybe, like, sift in. Is that maybe one of

(07:52):
the reasons you chose to be a medic or.

Speaker 4 (07:56):
Or you stayed in so long?

Speaker 3 (07:59):
So, yeah, definitely two different answers there. I became a
medic because it was the hardest one.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
I was riding.

Speaker 3 (08:08):
I had a super runner's high after they called my
number and said I was selected for Special Forces. And
I didn't know a lot about Special Forces before I
went to selection because there wasn't– I was– I rode
horses for the army at Fort Hood, Texas.

Speaker 4 (08:26):
Dude, that's my favorite part of the story there is.

Speaker 1 (08:29):
And also interesting, it's more animal love too, which is,
and not for all you twisted motherfuckers out there, stop.
I'm talking about the connection with a being that can
feel something through you that humans can't feel, right?

Speaker 2 (08:47):
Yeah, if you see buckets behind horses, something's going on.

Speaker 3 (08:55):
Yeah, so the horse attachment, the first cab horse attachment,
it was a platoon-sized element. It had no tactical mission
as much as I wanted. I daydreamed about that. Being
able to deploy horses, that had been awesome. But we
performed in rodeos and parades regularly. all over Texas in

(09:19):
a roast parade, presidential inaugurations, all that. But it was
all volunteer, and it was hard work. And if you
didn't want to be there, if you got bucked off
and didn't get back on, you could go back, what
we call downrange, you could go back to a conventional
unit again. And so that volunteer aspect was very much
like being a paratrooper. And the hard work and the

(09:42):
camaraderie and the morale was very much like a soft unit.
I didn't know that at the time, but I knew
what it I went from E1 to E5 out there,
and when I went back to an armor battalion, because
I was a, on paper, I was a tanker, I
realized the whole army wasn't like that. You know, that
people were showing up and doing the bare minimum and

(10:03):
you know one and done enlistments and uh it just
drove me crazy um but one of my teammates i
played rugby for the post rugby team also and one
of my teammates was going to selection i was like
what's that so he took me to the sf recruiter's
office i watched a video it was like okay what
are your The reason I went to selection, and I've
said this on numerous podcasts, but the reason I went

(10:23):
to selection was not so much because I really wanted
to be a Green Beret.

Speaker 2 (10:27):
I knew everything about Green Berets.

Speaker 3 (10:28):
The reason I went to selection is because I was
afraid that 10 years down the road, I'd be at
coffee break.

Speaker 2 (10:35):
I'm the first guy in my family that's not a
general contractor.

Speaker 3 (10:37):
I'd be on coffee break with the guys framing up
a house somewhere in Oregon, talking about how that one
time I thought about being a Green Beret.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
So I just gave it a shot. What kept me
from quitting.

Speaker 3 (10:49):
was that I was a father and I just pictured
my kids in the side of the road. And that, that,
you know, anytime things got tough, I just imagined them
on the side of the road and I couldn't quit
in front of them. Wow.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
That's what kept me going.

Speaker 4 (11:03):
So how old were your kids? Just real quick. How
old were your kids at when you were going through?

Speaker 3 (11:08):
Uh, three and four.

Speaker 4 (11:15):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (11:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (11:17):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (11:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:18):
They were young.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
Um, yeah.

Speaker 3 (11:22):
So, you know, they call us from the classroom. You
get to list out your, your choice of MOSs, um, by,
by priority. My GT score was high enough that I
was probably going to get it anyway, but I picked
medic because I'd heard all the scuttlebutt going through that
that was the hardest one. And I figured, well, if
I'm doing this hard thing, might as well just keep

(11:42):
doing hard things. I did have an aptitude for it.
I was, I was a, before I was promoted to
middle management, I was a pretty, pretty, Did we cuss
in this podcast?

Speaker 4 (11:52):
Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (11:53):
I was a pretty shit-hot medic when I first came
out of the course. I definitely had an ego as well,
and that probably helped me be a shit-hot medic because
I was not hesitant to do things like cut off
a dude's leg in Afghanistan. Whoa.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
Oh, you don't know about that. No.

Speaker 1 (12:16):
Remember, you've got 50 million stories.

Speaker 4 (12:20):
I do, yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
And I do have a tendency to pick the ones
that are, like, a little bit more esoteric or metaphysical, right?

Speaker 3 (12:29):
Right.

Speaker 1 (12:30):
We didn't even, like, hit the wavetops of your actual, like,
war stories at all.

Speaker 2 (12:36):
Yeah, that'll take a whole episode, right?

Speaker 3 (12:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (12:39):
Let's do that one next time, then.

Speaker 2 (12:41):
Yeah, we'll come back to that one next time.

Speaker 6 (12:43):
All right.

Speaker 3 (12:44):
Yeah. So, yeah, so I become a medic. 9-11 happens
while I'm in the Q course. And that kind of
changed everything because I went to selection in 99.

Speaker 2 (12:57):
I started the Q in 2000.

Speaker 3 (12:58):
And just returned from doing a paramedic internship with FDNY
in very early September of 2001.

Speaker 4 (13:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
And they took us out to the field from MilMed.

Speaker 3 (13:14):
Uh, and you know, that, that kind of suck fest
three day field problem to remind.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
You that you're, you're not street medics.

Speaker 4 (13:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
And, uh, we came out, we did PT and came
to the classroom. That first tower was on fire. They
had it on the big screen up front, um, saw
the second tower get hit. And I just remember turning
to the guy next to me and saying, we're going
to war, man. And that changed everything. Cause after that,
prior to that, I wasn't quite sure what I was
doing after the queue. Yeah. You know, I was actually

(13:45):
looking forward to doing like, uh, remains recovery with, uh,
with the JPRA out of Hawaii, because they always had
an 18 Delta that went with them on these, uh,
these archeological digs.

Speaker 2 (13:58):
I'm like, yeah, that's cool. That's the only way I'm
getting to Vietnam.

Speaker 3 (14:01):
That'd be cool.

Speaker 4 (14:02):
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 (14:03):
Yeah. Yeah. That changed everything, man. And, uh, I didn't,
whether it was private side or green suit, I didn't
stop deploying until 2023.

Speaker 4 (14:14):
That's crazy, man.

Speaker 3 (14:16):
I had a little bit of break in there, you know,
working a black rifle.

Speaker 2 (14:19):
Um, and I thought it was done at that point,
but I got asked to go again.

Speaker 3 (14:24):
So I did.

Speaker 4 (14:26):
And that's, that's the interesting thing.

Speaker 1 (14:27):
It's like you, you initiated like probably in the greatest
transition and I'm, I'm sure because you're an insightful guy
that you had asked, you had seen other guys trying
to make the transition and struggling. trying asking questions i
know certainly uh you know evan was exploring the kind

(14:49):
of undergirdings of all of this and what they were
doing uh you know um i think as a holistic
approach to who they were working with and hiring and
what they wanted to explore for sure i know evan
and i you know talked about that extensively when when
we first met back in the day and and You

(15:10):
got close, but then there was something like, uh-uh, no, no,
I'm going back in. What was that thing that drew
you back in to interrupt the pursuit of whatever this
space might be where you can just... walk out onto
your back porch and you're naked with your beanie watch

(15:32):
cap and your Crocs and your cup of coffee, right?

Speaker 4 (15:35):
That peacefulness of the morning.

Speaker 3 (15:36):
But you really pictured that because it's exactly it right there.

Speaker 4 (15:41):
Dude, I'm going to picture it every night for the
next month. You know that.

Speaker 3 (15:48):
This answer is probably going to surprise you. It was
addiction disguised as selfless service.

Speaker 4 (15:55):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (15:56):
Yeah. I, um, I, I, I don't want to say
it was pure addiction, but because, you know, I, I
stayed in the military for a long time, uh, 31 years,
total 19.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
Years, one month and four days that is active.

Speaker 3 (16:16):
So, uh, and the, the rest of that, that remaining what, 12,
12 years out of that. You can take five of
that or four and a half of that off a
black rifle and the rest of that time is deployed
with either.

Speaker 2 (16:34):
Other people or DSS. So it's a.

Speaker 3 (16:40):
Lot of time. It's a lot of time in the box.
And I got comfortable with that living in the yellow.
And I was uncomfortable at home. for a long time. The,
the only break I had really, uh, the first break

(17:01):
I had was, uh, I taught ROTC at university of
Washington for a couple of years.

Speaker 2 (17:06):
Um, and that, that was active duty. And that was
my first.

Speaker 3 (17:10):
So I graduated the Q course in April of 03,
September of 2010 is when, uh, I started teaching and
it was 24 hours after I got home from doing, uh,
a J set training.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
With the, uh, with the Indian SAS.

Speaker 3 (17:27):
So I was accustomed to that coming and going, but
there was not much that could have prepared me for
taking that amount of time off, being on a very
liberal campus, being called the enemy. I'm having to wear
my uniform. I'm not blending in. I'm used to blending in,
and here I can't. And I was really angry for

(17:50):
that first year. I was angry at everybody around me.
I was angry that they didn't know how good they
had it and they didn't earn what they had and
they were taking it for granted. And I'm going off
a little on a tangent here, but it was kind
of my first epiphany. About a year into that, I

(18:11):
realized that nobody was going to change for me if
I was going to assimilate at all into this life
that I had to change.

Speaker 2 (18:22):
For the people around me and be more accepting.

Speaker 4 (18:25):
And that's, that's the key, right?

Speaker 1 (18:27):
I mean, cause you, you can't maintain an operational mindset
and ever and ever, I don't believe functionally fit into
society because nothing, almost, almost nothing with the occasional rare
singular act of a that's, that's, you know, bookend in a,

(18:49):
in a structured amount of time. You know, nobody is
going to live up to the expectation of performance of
anybody even remotely close to what you're doing in special operations. Right.

Speaker 3 (19:01):
And honestly, I still don't. And I can say in
hindsight that it was a bandaid. I mean, I thought
I was like, oh, it's so wise, you know, but
I was still addicted to the dopamine and I definitely
wasn't done. You know, sequestration happened, so my orders got

(19:22):
cut short, and that's when I went to selection for
that other program.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
And I did that for a couple years.

Speaker 3 (19:30):
But I always.

Speaker 6 (19:31):
Where other guys with.

Speaker 2 (19:37):
Similar resumes.

Speaker 3 (19:39):
Would be all in on whatever it is they were doing,
I was always treating wherever it was i was at
as a launch pad for the next.

Speaker 1 (19:51):
The next deployment yeah or the next the next thing
you could go touch right like the next group or
the next unit or the next whatever like oh, my
buddy's over there and he's saying that place is phenomenal. Oh,
you could go over here and you can kill it,
make more money over here.

Speaker 4 (20:12):
Or you know what?

Speaker 1 (20:13):
This group is doing this work in this place. And
you're like, oh, that sounds cool.

Speaker 3 (20:17):
I was very mission driven, very mission motivated. There were
times like I quit Blackwater to be an analyst. I
quit Blackwater to be a collector because.

Speaker 4 (20:31):
Honestly, I was.

Speaker 3 (20:31):
Frustrated with getting shot at and running away, which was
the mission, right?

Speaker 2 (20:36):
We're not there to.

Speaker 3 (20:37):
Get protracted firefights, despite what books and movies say and
everything else.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
It was avoid contact at all costs and get the
principal back safely.

Speaker 3 (20:50):
The NSF guy, we knew we were taking rockets after
prayer in the main camp.

Speaker 2 (20:57):
It was predictable.

Speaker 3 (20:58):
You knew if you heard the call to prayer that
you should probably get undercover then because they're going to
launch right after they get up off their knees, you know?

Speaker 2 (21:08):
But nobody was doing anything about it. And we had,
you know, a poo point of origin, right? Slipping back
to the tactical stuff.

Speaker 4 (21:18):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:20):
We knew exactly where it was. And there was a
10th group safe house, like, within rifle distance of that thing.
And it was like, Why does it still exist?

Speaker 3 (21:27):
Like, why doesn't state just talk to soft and get
to say, I was just frustrated.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
I was frustrated at the lack of the lack of integration,
lack of productivity.

Speaker 3 (21:36):
So I left when I, when I told my Blackwater team,
I was doing a low viz ops for, for BW. Yeah. And, uh,
I told my team that I was leaving. They just
looked at me like I was crazy. Like, what are
you going to do? I said, I'm going to work
at Starbucks and take break dancing lessons. And they laughed
and I was like, no, that's what I'm doing. Cause

(21:57):
Starbucks at the time had benefits, you know, I was
in Seattle. So, and they had the tuition assistance and then.

Speaker 4 (22:05):
And you loved to break dance.

Speaker 3 (22:07):
Well, you know, I could fake the pop and lock,
but since I was eight, I grew up super poor. Oh,
piss off.

Speaker 2 (22:16):
Since I was eight, I wanted to take breakdancing lessons.
I grew up super poor. And, you know, now I
wasn't poor anymore. I was a thousandaire.

Speaker 3 (22:25):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (22:26):
So I was like, I'm going to take breakdancing lessons.

Speaker 1 (22:28):
You had like more than $ 20, 000 in your bank account.

Speaker 3 (22:32):
Yeah. Well, that didn't work out because, one, I got
a slot for an Intel school. Then I got a
slot for a sniper school. And the only place I
could find breakdancing lessons were in a sketchy barn in
Snohomish County.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
And I was like, I'm going to get strung up.

Speaker 3 (22:46):
In this barn. This is weird. So I just went
to a bunch of Green Beret schools instead and ended
up back in country as a collector. The title was
Military Analyst, but it was a collection.

Speaker 4 (23:01):
All right. So it's funny, you know, that draw, that hidden.

Speaker 1 (23:09):
that hidden gravity right back to the intensity.

Speaker 4 (23:13):
You call it the dopamine hit, right?

Speaker 1 (23:15):
That addiction, like that gravity of, of feeling a deeper
sense of importance, a deeper sense of being needed on
the team. Like a lot of that for me was
a part of that. Always going back to be like, Oh,
I'm here. I'm relevant out there. I'm irrelevant.

Speaker 3 (23:34):
Right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:35):
The dime a dozen for, know whatever it is i
was doing in between all those you know and i
think that's why when i made the shift to try
and work with kids for in between bw and and
the agency it was like oh this will give me
a deeper purpose and sense of relevance but man that
just shattered me even deeper because kids are like i

(23:57):
don't give a damn like i don't even know what
you're talking about and you're making me do pushups for
like 30 minutes straight and you're an asshole.

Speaker 4 (24:05):
And I was just like, this isn't working.

Speaker 2 (24:07):
Right.

Speaker 1 (24:08):
Um, but it's, it's the gravity pulls you back. Cause
like now, okay, I'm relevant. This makes sense. There's a
framework of it. Um, but, but the sense of peace
was affiliated with, uh, you know, coming back from whatever
the op was.

Speaker 4 (24:27):
Like, that was it.

Speaker 1 (24:28):
That was in that moment, you get back in safe,
you put your shit away, you go, you grab a
beer with a buddy, and it's like, ah, okay, we're,
I'm safe. Like, this is peaceful now. We're successful. But then,
you know, next day, next thing, spun back up, more intensity,
and you're on the loop. And so, like, I got so, like,

(24:49):
I just never even knew where to look. Like, I
never even knew that it was a thing I needed
to be looking for. I never knew it was something
that was attainable by just altering my perspective. I thought, like, oh,
that's going to happen when I'm living in a house
and I've got my kids and I'm holding a steady

(25:13):
nine-to-five job and I've got insurance. I was like, oh,
that's going to be my piece.

Speaker 4 (25:18):
Like, and then... you know, it's just, that's the illusion
of it.

Speaker 1 (25:23):
So, you know, as you keep like getting pulled back,
the gravity of that service and the addiction pulls you in,
were you, when did you start even thinking, oh, this
is something I need to be thinking about. This is
something that is a place that I should probably be
realizing that that's, I need to figure that out.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
2007.

Speaker 4 (25:46):
Wow, that early.

Speaker 3 (25:48):
Yeah, 2007. And I knew the exact moment. There was a,
where I lived in Shoreline, just over the city limit
of Seattle. You know, I was within small arms range
of I-5. And I heard a very loud backfire. Standing
in my living room, I heard a very loud backfire.

(26:09):
I knew it was a vehicle. I knew it was
on I-5. But I dropped flat. Cause I was on,
I was on 90, 30 nineties with BW at the time.

Speaker 2 (26:18):
And, you know, that was a summer of love in Baghdad, right?

Speaker 3 (26:21):
The surge.

Speaker 4 (26:22):
You guys were getting after it.

Speaker 3 (26:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:25):
So I got flat and I high crawled to.

Speaker 3 (26:29):
The front door and, you know, reached up, peaked out
looking for contact that I knew the logic in my
brain knew it wasn't there, but my central nervous system
was so wired tight. That it would not allow me
to not kick into that survival instinct. And I looked
around the living room and my wife and my son

(26:52):
and my daughter were looking at me like I was
a fucking nut job.

Speaker 1 (26:56):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
Rightly so. And I'm looking at them like, why are
you not flat on the ground?

Speaker 3 (27:03):
And I knew then that, you know, PTSD is a
real thing and I have it.

Speaker 2 (27:08):
And someday I'm going to need to get help for this.

Speaker 3 (27:12):
But. I did not want to get help for it
then because I was afraid that if I started resolving issues,
I would not have that hair trigger to keep myself
alive downrange.

Speaker 2 (27:29):
And that's a fallacy.

Speaker 3 (27:31):
It seemed like it made sense at the time, but
I know now that that's a fallacy.

Speaker 2 (27:35):
If you don't hone.

Speaker 3 (27:36):
Your blade, you're just going to keep chipping at it.
It's going to keep chipping at until it's no longer
that you're, you don't have any razor edge anymore. And
that's exactly what happened to me later, later down the road,
more than a decade later.

Speaker 4 (27:51):
A decade later. So, yeah.

Speaker 3 (27:53):
Cause like over a decade later.

Speaker 1 (27:58):
When did, when did, like, even though now you're much
more mature, you've been through a lot of life on
and off, um, you know, multiple divorces. Now, when was
the moment that, like, all right, I'm back in SF,
this is my home, this is a good place for me, um, um,

(28:20):
you've gained a bunch of rank, like, and now I
would imagine a lot of guys that I talk to that,
you know, end up going back or whatever, it's, there's this,
especially when they start teaching and they start, or getting
guys under their command and they start leading guys.

Speaker 4 (28:38):
Like, it almost backfills....

Speaker 1 (28:42):
It's like, it helps the compartmentalization of your own dysfunction,
because now it's like, oh, I'm dysfunctional, but I'm going
to bury it, but I'm going to teach other younger guys,
and they won't become dysfunctional, and then I'll absolve my
own dysfunctional by knowing I taught them how to not
be dysfunctional, something like that.

Speaker 3 (29:03):
I don't know that I had a conscious thought like that.
I was blessed to be a team sergeant of the
best ODA in the SF regiment for five years.

Speaker 2 (29:12):
Um, because it was hand.

Speaker 3 (29:16):
The team room keys were literally handed to me by, uh, uh,
my mentor, Sergeant Major Chris Nolmes, who, uh, was unfortunately
killed in a training accident, uh, a few years ago
in the unit. But when he made it through OTC,
he-he handed me the room keys as a... as an E7.
And I had to sink or swim. It was a

(29:38):
very unique time because this was the 19th group. And
so when I wasn't training as a Green Beret or
with my team, I was doing special operations work as
a civilian down range.

Speaker 1 (29:52):
Right.

Speaker 3 (29:53):
So they definitely fed each other. They were very sympathetic people. um,
careers and half my team was, was on contract. The
other half was cops and firefighters. So everybody brought a
lot to the, to the team, uh, from, from outside. Um,

(30:16):
but I was very much about having us. The reason
we were such a good team one is because I
surround myself with guys that were better than I was.
That made it very easy. The other reason is because
we felt like we had a mission. It wasn't a
weekend jumping barbecue club. Things had real consequences the Monday

(30:42):
after we left training. So we were always training for
a real mission. I didn't really feel that I was
mentoring anybody or passing on any lessons learned until I'd been.

Speaker 2 (30:57):
A Sergeant major for a few years.

Speaker 3 (31:00):
Oh, wow. Um, so I, I probably made rank too
quick to be honest, but you know, when there's not
other people it's, and you're, you've, I.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
Look good on paper.

Speaker 3 (31:15):
Um, but being an E9 really opened my eyes in
a lot of ways to, to things that I was
ignorant of before. Um, When I was selected to be
a company sergeant major of that same unit that I
grew up in, that's when I really started feeling kind

(31:37):
of the maturity and the mentorship of looking at guys
and seeing some of the mistakes they were either making
or they were headed towards and genuinely had the empirical
knowledge to try to steer them in the right path.
And just like me, they only listened to about 10%

(31:57):
of what I'm saying, but I, I did my piece
and some of those guys still, still call me about things.

Speaker 2 (32:05):
So I take that as a, as a win that
I was doing something right.

Speaker 1 (32:10):
I just wanna really, uh, talk about my incredible partnership
with one of my best friends, uh, and that's, uh,
Evan Hafer and the boys over at black rifle coffee. Uh,
I'm so honored, uh, to be a part of their organization.
And just really can't thank them enough for allowing me

(32:30):
to participate. What I want you to do is go
to BlackRifleCoffee.com, and I want to check.

Speaker 4 (32:38):
Out their new energy drinks.

Speaker 1 (32:40):
They have these incredible energy drinks that you can buy
at all different kinds of stores, Wal-Mart. Bass Sports and others,
or you can go online and order. And if you
want to put in your little promo code, FrogLogic20, there
you get a little discount on stuff there.

Speaker 4 (32:57):
I highly recommend that. For me, it's my morning coffee.

Speaker 1 (33:01):
I am addicted to Black Rifle Coffee's Just Black. I
think the Tiger Stripe Camo definitely reels me in. The
other one I love is the AK Espresso. This one
right here is phenomenal.

Speaker 4 (33:15):
Love these.

Speaker 1 (33:16):
But they have so many different things that you could
get at Black Rifle Coffee.

Speaker 4 (33:20):
You will love it.

Speaker 1 (33:22):
Again, when you go over BlackRifleCoffee.com and you're checking out,
type in FrogLogic20.

Speaker 4 (33:29):
Get your little discount code. and tell them, oh, ruddy rut, rut,
send you.

Speaker 1 (33:33):
So to all those folks out there who love coffee
like I do, please do yourself a favor and go
over and check out my brothers at BRCC. It's funny
that I did my piece, you know, and then followed
up with, I still get calls. So like whatever was

(33:53):
said in those small slivers of time it penetrated, it
created something, it created some of that gravitational pull, right,
emotionally between two human beings that have a higher mission. And,
you know, I often wonder, I always imagined, well, that's

(34:16):
the stuff, that's where I get the peace. Like when
I have, that's where the peace exists. It's not this
grand sensation sitting at the top of a 14,000 foot
peak or You know, or dropping in on, you know,
a beautiful wave and getting a three minute long ride or,
you know, or skiing or whatever. That's not it. It's, it's,

(34:39):
it's more, it's more condensed really. Um, and it's in
those meaningful exchanges with other human beings that you feel like,
that you feel like, oh, I can offer something that's,
that's more valuable than money.

Speaker 4 (34:56):
Right.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
I can offer in some context, something that's more valuable than,
you know, you're only as fast as your slowest teammate wisdom.

Speaker 3 (35:04):
Right.

Speaker 1 (35:05):
You know, it's, it's something like, Hey, I'm going to,
I'm look you in your eyes and I'm going to
talk to you as if I, you, so you feel
the depth at which I care about you.

Speaker 4 (35:19):
And, and I, I'm not desperate. I I'm genuinely desperate.

Speaker 1 (35:24):
Hoping you're going to experience that thing that I'm feeling.
And that's the moment, like, that's the moment I feel
the best in my existence in the middle of that place.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
I'm going to take.

Speaker 3 (35:37):
Some wind out of your sails here, but what you're
talking about there, that is a piece of peace.

Speaker 4 (35:43):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (35:43):
But without the other pieces, it's a band-aid.

Speaker 3 (35:45):
Explain.

Speaker 2 (35:46):
Because what we're really talking about there is purpose.

Speaker 4 (35:50):
Interesting.

Speaker 3 (35:50):
You're gaining purpose by providing that mentorship, by providing those
lessons learned, by service to others.

Speaker 2 (35:59):
But like I said, you know, my service to.

Speaker 3 (36:01):
Others was, that was a mask on a dopamine addiction
for me. So if you don't have the foundation behind that,
all you can do is keep trying to fill that
purpose bucket by serving others. And you never really truly

(36:24):
find peace, that everlasting peace. And once you do find
that everlasting peace, it's not there for good.

Speaker 2 (36:32):
You have to keep at it. And you want me
to go into how I figured that out? It wasn't easy.

Speaker 4 (36:41):
That was my next question.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
I was, I was debating like, all right, as the
next question, what is the foundation of peace that you
build your peace off of? But for me, the obvious
one is, is when did you start to truly seek
that thing?

Speaker 2 (36:57):
I had to break.

Speaker 3 (36:58):
Okay. I had to break to seek it. And, uh,
cause I didn't, I didn't know I was missing it.
I knew something was wrong. Um, 21, 22, actually 20.

Speaker 2 (37:13):
Those three years are kind of a blur for me.

Speaker 3 (37:15):
No deployments per se, but I was still company sergeant
major of a Guard SF unit. And we were activated
for the Seattle riots. Wow.

Speaker 2 (37:30):
I always had a.

Speaker 3 (37:33):
Hard wall, just a thick, impenetrable wall between my downrange
life and my home life. And never the two should meet,
you know, but there's a lot of guys that their
families are really tight with their, their, their teammates, families,
mine weren't except for with, except for one guy who
lived with me for a little bit. That, that was

(37:54):
the exception. I kept downrange life completely separate from, from
home life. And I did that as a protection measure
against my family. I saw the ugliness here. I didn't
want it touching here. that had the opposite effect that
I wanted and actually ended up walling me off from

(38:16):
my family when I was trying to protect them from
all this ugliness because I was part of the ugliness. Right.

Speaker 6 (38:22):
Right.

Speaker 3 (38:24):
So when the riots happened in Seattle, all of a
sudden war is at home and I don't have that
wall anymore. It was broken down against my will. And that's,
I think that's actually when I realized how much separation
of church and state I was actually doing.

Speaker 2 (38:45):
So that happened. And then my.

Speaker 3 (38:49):
Mom passed away from cancer. And, you know, I'm trying
to help my stepdad manage that and be strong.

Speaker 2 (39:02):
My uncle passes away, probably of COVID complications, not really sure.
but he didn't leave a will.

Speaker 3 (39:07):
I'm still appropriate for his estate because his wife had
passed away seven years earlier. My grandparents asked me to
move them back from Texas, and they're not in the
best health, and I'm trying to take care of them.

Speaker 2 (39:22):
I find myself being.

Speaker 3 (39:23):
This patriarch and protector for my entire family. Meanwhile, all
this stuff is going on. And I had the DBA
going on for PTSD. So I had to get quartered
psych evals, both by opposing counsel and our counsel. And

(39:44):
so essentially what happened is I had this field that
I had, just put like a sheet of glass over
to keep all the bad shit from coming up.

Speaker 2 (39:56):
And I ran over it with a monster truck.

Speaker 3 (39:58):
With a rototiller. And so it dug up all this
stuff and I had nothing to do with it. And
I remember turning to my partner at the time and saying,
I'm exhausted. I'm tired. And I just want to go
off to the woods and never come back. And that
was a huge cry for help. And what I meant

(40:20):
by that was not go get lost in the woods
and be a hermit. I meant I needed, I wanted
to go off and die.

Speaker 2 (40:24):
I was, I was done. I was, I was, it was,
I was struggling every day.

Speaker 1 (40:32):
Did it, did it, did the cycle of those, the ideation,
was it, did it start slow and go, or was
it just like, wham?

Speaker 2 (40:40):
No, it started slow. It started slow.

Speaker 3 (40:43):
Like there were things like, uh, after the riots, um,
I wanted to sleep on the couch.

Speaker 2 (40:49):
And I didn't realize until that moment.

Speaker 3 (40:52):
So back in 07, 08, 06, all the previous years
when I was in and out of shitty countries all
the time, I found myself sleeping on the couch a lot.
And it's not because I was in trouble or fighting
with anybody. I just felt comfortable there. And it used
to piss my ex-wife off. She thought, you're gone all

(41:15):
this time. You don't even want to come to bed.
That's when I realized that was me, that was my
overstimulated nervous system. That was like the PTSD kicking in.
Just PTSD. It was just a stress reaction. And I
didn't know that until the Seattle riots. And I was like,
I'm going to sleep on the couch. I lost the

(41:38):
train of thought there.

Speaker 1 (41:39):
So the question is, you're in this process. The riots
brought combat to home. You, the ideation spiked. And cause
I think a lot of people that I, that feel
comfortable ever talk to me about it or whatever. They're like, like,
did this just hit you out of the blue one day?

(42:00):
You're just like, you know, or, or is it a
gradual thing that builds and builds? And are you aware
of the build?

Speaker 3 (42:08):
I don't think I was aware of the build.

Speaker 2 (42:10):
Um, it just, I was just exhausted one day.

Speaker 3 (42:13):
And even when those words came out of my mouth,
I wasn't, it's, It wasn't a conversation I was planning
on having. You know, we were just standing in the kitchen.
I was probably walking in from doing something in the backyard.
And I just said it. What band-aided things for me
then was my battalion commander called and asked me to

(42:36):
go to Baghdad with USASOC to be a detachment sergeant
major for USASOC.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
And I was like, yes.

Speaker 5 (42:44):
I'm in.

Speaker 2 (42:44):
100% in.

Speaker 4 (42:45):
Thank God. Thank God. You just saved me.

Speaker 1 (42:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:51):
I ran to that deployment.

Speaker 3 (42:53):
Yeah. I'm not sure if I've told my kids about
that or not yet because they were not happy that
I was deploying. They were just getting used to me
being around after me being gone most of their formative years,
especially in August.

Speaker 1 (43:14):
And that's a really difficult thing for children to get
to know their father, right? Who they're told this one
thing about them. Like, and it's almost like it's the
unwritten word is you always got to have a little
bit of gap in the intimacy of your relationship because

(43:36):
he's a warrior and he's going to go and he's
fighting for the country. And like it, it, it, it,
it creates this unspoken distance.

Speaker 4 (43:45):
For a child. Cause all the child is like, you're
just my dad.

Speaker 1 (43:49):
I just want to, I want closer proximity. I want
to feel your attention on me. I want that, that,
that love, but like kids, the kids that are in
the perpetual deployment cycles, man, how do you, how do
you even understand that there's this higher sovereignty of service
That is the thing that is preventing your proximity to

(44:12):
that intimacy with your father.

Speaker 3 (44:15):
I think, yeah. I think they're just catching on to
that now as young adults.

Speaker 2 (44:21):
They didn't have the benefit of living around other military.

Speaker 3 (44:24):
Families or being on base or anything like that. We're
in Seattle.

Speaker 2 (44:29):
The military is not....

Speaker 3 (44:37):
To give you an idea, just a snapshot of what
this looks like, my youngest reached out to me to
speak at their Veterans Day ceremony, their assembly.

Speaker 2 (44:48):
I said, sure.

Speaker 3 (44:51):
Sophia, my youngest, she got one. She was a junior
in high school when this happened. She got one of
that and pleaded with me, pleaded with me not to speak.
I was like, why?

Speaker 2 (45:01):
You don't have that many veterans around here.

Speaker 3 (45:03):
She's like, I know, but, you know, there's already a
rumor that I'm racist and then you're going to come
and speak as a military guy. And like, well, that's
exactly why I need to speak because people don't understand
what being a veteran is or that we're not all
in like.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
This one political category. Like that's right.

Speaker 3 (45:24):
That's, that's, that's ignorance. So that's, that's the kind of
environment that, you know, they, they were growing up in.
They didn't, There weren't flags out front. There weren't yellow
ribbons everywhere. It was a completely different environment than, say, like,
growing up in Fayetteville or, you know, Clarksville or San Diego.

(45:46):
You didn't see it. It's almost like I felt like
I was living undercover at home.

Speaker 6 (45:51):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (45:52):
Wow. Yeah. And honestly, that's part of why Frito is
named Frito, because the foundation that gave him to me,
the Warbird and Wildlife Foundation, named him Freedom.

Speaker 1 (46:03):
But.

Speaker 3 (46:04):
According to my kids, I'm intimidating to people. So, I
was like, I didn't want to be at the dog
park going, freedom! So, I just shortened it to freedom
to make it a little more fun.

Speaker 4 (46:19):
Oh, God. That's the genius of you right there.

Speaker 1 (46:25):
All right, so you're in this space that the opportunity,
you're trying to figure out All of it, like, I
love the description of you put a glass cover over everything.

Speaker 4 (46:39):
I love that.

Speaker 1 (46:40):
That's like, and you're looking through, you see it all,
you see it boiling underneath you. But as long as you, like,
skate fast and skate light, like, it's not, you're not
gonna go through it, right? But at some point, like
you said, is the monster truck with the, you know,
with the excavator in the back is so phenomenal. if

(47:02):
you break through, then this deployment comes and now your
excuse to escape is there.

Speaker 4 (47:12):
It's there.

Speaker 1 (47:12):
Did everybody around you know what it was other than you?

Speaker 6 (47:18):
No.

Speaker 3 (47:19):
No, I remember Evan, you know, Black Rifle was going
through a bunch of layoffs and he called me and
he was like, who do you want to cut on
your team? And I was like, and I had a
really small team, I was like, I'm going to save
you some work. You don't have to cut anybody.

Speaker 2 (47:33):
I'm deploying. That stopped all the... He's like, what?

Speaker 3 (47:38):
Why? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:39):
Because they asked me to.

Speaker 3 (47:40):
It's my job.

Speaker 2 (47:42):
He's like, haven't you done enough? I'm like, well, not
if they've asked me. So that was probably the limit of,
you know, the outside influence. Everybody else is just kind
of like.

Speaker 3 (47:56):
I thought you were done.

Speaker 2 (47:57):
Yeah, I'm not.

Speaker 3 (47:58):
Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (47:59):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (48:00):
So.

Speaker 2 (48:01):
I did PMT.

Speaker 3 (48:02):
I went over.

Speaker 2 (48:02):
It was kind of a lackluster mission. It was a
staff mission.

Speaker 3 (48:08):
And it felt very much like just kind of a
placeholder mission. Because it was more on the operational strategic
side than the tactical. And it felt very much like
we were there waiting for foreign policy.

Speaker 2 (48:31):
To figure out what it's doing so we could execute it.

Speaker 4 (48:35):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (48:38):
So I wasn't, like, super hard in the paint. I
wasn't pressing the gas real hard while I was there.
And fortunately, I've got enough time on my belt that
I didn't feel like I needed to. You know, there
was no FOMO. There was no, you know, like some
team leaders and whatnot, they will go out and look
for contacts so they can check that block. I did

(48:59):
not have that.

Speaker 2 (49:01):
Uh, but, uh, that fall.

Speaker 1 (49:08):
Um, can I ask a quick question about, about what, uh,
as you're over there and obviously at your experience level,
you figure all that out within the first year.

Speaker 4 (49:20):
Week or so, right? Like what, what were you.

Speaker 1 (49:23):
Doing during the day when you were not on call
to try and justifies the wrong word? I, I'm, you
know what I'm trying, I'm trying to like, what did
you do when you weren't in the office or lifting?
Whereas like, oh this is how i'm gonna push time

(49:44):
forward and faster.

Speaker 5 (49:45):
I tried to knock out a little college um okay
with with varying levels of success yeah uh you know
i i.

Speaker 3 (49:56):
Write so i wrote a little bit.

Speaker 4 (49:57):
Yeah you're a great writer by the way.

Speaker 2 (50:00):
Thank you i appreciate that i need to do it more.

Speaker 4 (50:02):
Uh You should.

Speaker 1 (50:04):
Like, I'm begging, I've been begging Logan to just get, like,
you got, there's so many beautiful writers. I don't know
why there's not a BRCC magazine like there used to be. Like,
it's the greatest travesty there is because there's so many
beautiful writers over there.

Speaker 2 (50:23):
Crazy.

Speaker 3 (50:24):
It's funny you say that because Marty Scoveland is actually
my boss at Xterra. Dude, Marty is a.

Speaker 4 (50:32):
I could read his shit all day long, man. He's
so good. So, uh, sorry for the, no, no, no.

Speaker 2 (50:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (50:39):
I mean, I was the, I was the Sergeant major
of camp Fernandez, which a lot of kinetic stuff was.

Speaker 2 (50:46):
Launched out of back in the day.

Speaker 3 (50:47):
Uh, not so much while I was there, but there
was still elements there. So there's a lot of, there
was a lot of, uh, uh, of repairing or, uh,
making or sustaining relationships.

Speaker 2 (51:02):
I was doing a lot of that.

Speaker 3 (51:03):
A lot of interagency, rapport building, because it seemed to
me that the biggest obstacles we had over there were Americans.
Whether they were wearing green suits or suits in general,
that was the biggest problem we had.

Speaker 2 (51:23):
From the beginning... Uh, my, my background with DSS helped
a lot.

Speaker 3 (51:33):
My, my old boss, when I was teaching DSS agents
at the, the BSR, uh, track, he was out there.

Speaker 2 (51:40):
So that helped quite a bit. Oh, cool.

Speaker 3 (51:42):
And, uh, you know, uh, knowing that being my old neighborhood, literally, uh,
helped a little bit and, you know, just having a
long time in general.

Speaker 1 (51:51):
It's kind of why you go over there. It's not kinetic. It's,
it's more like senior level stuff. but you actually task
yourself to repair the relationships. It's like, oh no, I'm
gonna lean in and I'm gonna fix these relationships for
the next guy coming, or if something does shift, it's like,

(52:13):
I'm not just gonna totally sit back and just do
what I'm gonna focus on the dysfunctional, the problematic, historical,
bureaucratic dysfunction of interoperability, right?

Speaker 3 (52:28):
It's wild that anything gets done past the company level anywhere.

Speaker 2 (52:33):
Just, it's crazy.

Speaker 3 (52:36):
Um, so yeah, I was, I was plenty busy. Uh,
and you know, there's a lot of people, you know,
more junior officers and, and, uh, enlisted on that trip
that this was their first combat deployment. So there was
a lot of mentoring going on there as well.

Speaker 2 (52:55):
Good.

Speaker 3 (52:56):
Um, I went home on mid-tour leave in October, and
while I was there, I went to my friend Josh
Rosen's funeral. Josh was a legend. He started off in
first group, then went to fifth group, was on the
same team as Joe Kent. They were best friends.

Speaker 1 (53:16):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (53:19):
Combat divers.

Speaker 3 (53:22):
Went back to first group, went to 19th, was ground
branch for a little bit, went back to 19th, and
then retired as a CW3 out of first group.

Speaker 4 (53:35):
Absolute legend.

Speaker 3 (53:36):
Yeah. Just, I mean, he's done a lot of stuff,
and I was very glad to have him as a
mentor on a couple of my trips. And having his
respect meant a lot to me. That was an azimuth
check for me. Does Josh think I'm doing the right thing? Yeah, okay,
I'm probably doing the right thing.

Speaker 4 (53:54):
That's cool. Cool description.

Speaker 3 (53:56):
So he....

Speaker 2 (53:58):
He passed away from cancer in October.

Speaker 3 (54:04):
Of 23, and I was able to be there for
the service.

Speaker 2 (54:12):
And that stirred some stuff up, you know.

Speaker 3 (54:16):
Wasn't too bad, I didn't think, but I got recalled
from leave because Hamas attacked Israel, and we had.

Speaker 2 (54:27):
local.

Speaker 3 (54:29):
Qatab Hezbollah, local chapter of Hezbollah there in Baghdad, who
was a recognized Iraqi government, recognized militia that had it
in for us. There was a very tenuous piece there
where they weren't supposed to rocket us because it would
make things bad for the Iraqi government.

Speaker 2 (54:48):
But they did.

Speaker 3 (54:49):
And so That was really the first time I felt
in danger on that deployment. And I was no longer
at Fernandez. I was over at Area 4. And one
rocket had hit one of our T-walls.

Speaker 2 (55:08):
It was a mortar.

Speaker 3 (55:09):
It hit a T-wall pretty close to where I laid
my head down. And we had credible intel that we
were going to hit it at a specific time that night.
And instead of walking around the camp and being a
sergeant major, and making sure guys were good and you know,
all the contingency plans that go into place for, for

(55:31):
an attack. I sat in my room and I just
cried and I waited for that rocket to hit me.
I hoped it would hit me, David.

Speaker 1 (55:40):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (55:41):
When it didn't, uh, I sat there even more ashamed
because I know it wasn't, I didn't, I didn't do
my job. And, um, That's when I made a plan.
I was gonna go out to the far end of
the range on the Iraqi side, and I was gonna
take myself out with my Glock.

Speaker 2 (56:02):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (56:03):
What stopped me was that service to others, knowing the
effect that would have on other people.

Speaker 2 (56:10):
First off, guys are gonna have to go out and
find me.

Speaker 3 (56:13):
And when they do find me, that's an image that's
gonna be burned into their brains for the.

Speaker 2 (56:17):
Rest of their lives. Somebody's gonna have to bag me up.

Speaker 3 (56:21):
And.

Speaker 2 (56:22):
I know what it's like to bag people up.

Speaker 3 (56:24):
I've scooped people's, I've scooped human brains with MRE cardboard
into a body bag. I don't want other people to
have to do that.

Speaker 2 (56:33):
The next piece of that was, it's dark humor, but our.

Speaker 3 (56:40):
S1, I saw her break down after processing fake casualties
when we were doing a computer simulation in pre-mission training. Yeah.
I don't know if that's what she was breaking down over,
but in my mind, I was like, she's gonna fuck
up this paperwork.

Speaker 2 (56:59):
And my family's not gonna get paid for like a year.
So I was like, I can't do that.

Speaker 4 (57:04):
Dude.

Speaker 1 (57:06):
Such a fucking team guy reaction. It is the total
team guy reaction.

Speaker 2 (57:12):
Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 (57:13):
This person's gonna vomit, they're gonna be all fucking out
of it, and then my paperwork's gonna be screwed.

Speaker 3 (57:19):
The third thing, and this is what really put the
kibosh in the plan, is I felt like I was
a better life insurance paycheck than a father or a
husband or a partner or a leader or a human being.
And I knew my SGI was in order, but I

(57:40):
had this thought of, yeah, they're going to have six
figures among them. But how much of that are you
going to spend on therapy for the rest of their lives?
And all this time you spent downrange away from them,
from growing up, everything else. What's your legacy to them?
This is going to be your legacy. And that's what
stopped me. And I waited in the kitchen for our

(58:03):
PA to get back from training some Iraqis. And I
waited for him that night. It was around midnight. And
he came and he said, hey, what's going on? I said,
I need to talk to somebody. And I just broke
down right then and there. And I stayed in country
for a couple more weeks. And then some fifth group
dudes had a bad roll over in Syria. So I

(58:25):
met a fact on a fixed wing with them to
the Fort Sam. And I spent the next four months
in full-time therapy. I did a five-week inpatient dual track
for PTSD and addiction, which is a funny story about that.
And then I did another six weeks in a traumatic

(58:47):
inpatient traumatic intensive outpatient group where i was uh yeah
it was group therapy plus two one-on-one sessions every week
um it was intense is probably too light of a
word yeah for what i was doing when you do

(59:10):
therapy like that, you get out of it what you
put into it.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
But I attacked it like.

Speaker 3 (59:14):
It was my mission.

Speaker 4 (59:17):
Were you.

Speaker 1 (59:17):
Was there anything holding you back at that point? Or
did you succumb to the hard reality of just.
You know, uh, the, the, the buildup of that pain,
like you're like, all right, if I don't go all

(59:40):
in with what this opportunity is, because a lot of
times like guys will get opportunities, we'll hit them.

Speaker 3 (59:47):
Right.

Speaker 1 (59:48):
And then you'll give it a little bit, but then
somehow somewhere you're.

Speaker 4 (59:52):
Like, okay, that's enough. I'm good. I can, I can
take it from here.

Speaker 1 (59:56):
And then there's the other aspect, like, oh, shit, if
I go too far, I'm never gonna be able to
come back.

Speaker 4 (01:00:02):
Like, it's this, there's a mission waiting for me somewhere.

Speaker 1 (01:00:06):
Was there any of that that was, like, trying to
force you out of the all-in in those weeks?

Speaker 6 (01:00:15):
So, my therapist there told me that guys at my
stage of career, you know, senior dudes with a couple
decades in, when.

Speaker 3 (01:00:32):
They find themselves in a program like I was in,
and it's voluntary, like I could have left at any time,
it's either to save their career because they got a
Dewey or something like that, or they're absolutely broken and
they don't have anything left. And I was at the

(01:00:52):
absolute broken stage. And the benefit of being absolute, I
don't recommend getting to that point before you get help.
It's the harder way to do it. The benefit of
that is I had no shame. I had no shame left. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:01:05):
I had, you know, I was, it was a, it
was a bear circle.

Speaker 3 (01:01:11):
There was a lot of rubble to get through. Um,
and some of the stuff that came up that I
thought was Mox Nix, you know, is little shit turned
out to be really big things that, wow.

Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
Shape you as a as an adult.

Speaker 1 (01:01:26):
It's interesting that the shape right that that's that's the
whole construct of our evolution as in in our our
psychology or our soul however you want to look like
we're constantly adding pieces to this shape it's like we're
we're doing the reverse thing of of you know uh

(01:01:47):
uh uh an artist who's you know chipping away stone
on the great, beautiful piece, like, we're adding clay to it, right?

Speaker 4 (01:01:56):
We're adding more and more.

Speaker 1 (01:01:59):
Oh, here's this big war experience, boom, here. Oh, here's
this divorce here, boom. And it's funny, like.
We, like you described it, it's the rock, right? Just
keep putting more in the rock. And it's, and it's...
it's funny because the physicality of pain I think when

(01:02:22):
you go through the indoctrination programs, once you realize, oh, I.

Speaker 4 (01:02:27):
Can take a lot of pain, right? And then I
can just go.

Speaker 1 (01:02:32):
But then you're like, oh, this other emotional pain, this psychological, man, I.

Speaker 4 (01:02:38):
Can do this.

Speaker 3 (01:02:38):
Moral injury.

Speaker 4 (01:02:40):
Moral injuries, that's right. I can do this.

Speaker 1 (01:02:43):
I can take as much as any human being ever
because I'm this or I've done it so long and
I got it. and more and more more more right
um you're almost fanatical about the heaviness of the rock
like that becomes the pride even though the reality of
the weight of the pain you know is destroying the

(01:03:07):
aspect of the thing that's allowed you to keep up
like and it's just when does the breaking point happen
um Were you relieved.

Speaker 4 (01:03:16):
In that time, or was it chaotic or.

Speaker 1 (01:03:20):
Because obviously you've got your family on the outskirts, all
your friends, and I know this is super heavy, so please,
you know, parse.

Speaker 4 (01:03:27):
Out how you want to address it or don't, but.

Speaker 2 (01:03:30):
So, uh.

Speaker 3 (01:03:33):
I had been married for.
Less than a year at that point. Wow. Um, I
was already engaged, but I decided that it was a
bad idea to go to combat zone with a fiancé.

Speaker 2 (01:03:48):
That's like asking to get shot, right?

Speaker 1 (01:03:52):
It's written into the law, I think. I think it's
like in your fucking deployment orders, right?

Speaker 3 (01:04:01):
I'm just like, you know, I knew... I mean, I've
been a sergeant major for a while. Taking care of
families is part of the job as well as taking
care of the troops. So I knew that if we
weren't married, she would have... She'd be completely out of
the loop. She'd have zero rights, even though she'd been
my partner for a number of years. She left in December,

(01:04:26):
and not without good reason. I don't falter with that.
But there were things going on behind the scenes that
every time I would have a major breakthrough in therapy,
I would see something in my bank account or an
email or a text from somebody And it would just
completely devastate me. It would take, it's like, I don't

(01:04:47):
know what it would be like. I was like riding high, boom,
riding high, boom. And that, that made a whole nother
extra set of challenges. You know, there was a lot
of stuff in my life that I, I had no
knowledge of, no way to get knowledge of and zero
control of. Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:05:04):
And you know, an SF guy likes to be in
control of everything.

Speaker 1 (01:05:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:05:10):
Uh, And I'm in a program that, you know, I'm
wearing grippy socks, but I can take those off and
put my boots on and go out those doors anytime
I want and figure out what's going on. And that was,
I think, part of the selection event of all this
was sticking with the program, even though my personal life
and my career were actively.

Speaker 2 (01:05:32):
Being eroded behind the scenes.

Speaker 3 (01:05:36):
But I knew that I needed to get through or
I was going to be back or not at all.

Speaker 4 (01:05:44):
You just called it selection.

Speaker 1 (01:05:47):
I mean, that, that in and of itself, and this, this,
this is the thing, like, this is, this is the thing, right?
That the selection event to find your piece is the
pain of exposing all, all of the other result of
the first major selection, right? Or you can go back

(01:06:07):
to bootcamp and, even into your childhood that we go
through these little selections, but really the real selection of SF.

Speaker 4 (01:06:14):
And then each continual selection.

Speaker 1 (01:06:17):
Of deployment and deployment or contracting trip or gunfire, like
every one of those is a mini selection of some kind.
And then it just like, then all of a sudden
you're just in a perpetual selection, right? And you lose sight. Oh,
there's a whole different, there's a whole different, type of
selection to find an ease of the soul. And then

(01:06:42):
now they collide and you're in this intense, intense psychological selection.
And where you're having to anchor every die on, you know.
Like you said before, I didn't want to be the
guy in ten years sitting around drinking a beer after

(01:07:02):
framing a house. I, I, you know, I could have
been a green beret.

Speaker 4 (01:07:06):
So I went through section.

Speaker 1 (01:07:08):
Was there something similar to that? A mantra like that
while you're in this intense program?

Speaker 3 (01:07:14):
I don't mean to be a cliche about this, but
it really was one day at a time. Awesome. I,
I was, I was so rock bottom when I got there, uh,
that I was just one foot in front of the other. Uh,
I mean, I wasn't, I had no doubt that the
next day would come. I just had no idea what
it was going to bring.

Speaker 4 (01:07:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:07:35):
But I wasn't going to quit on it. And I
wasn't going to quit on it because those kids were
on the side of the road and I couldn't quit
in front of them. It was the same thing that
kept me from quitting in selection. And I honestly don't
know that I'm a strong enough man to have made
those choices without them in my mind. whether it was

(01:08:02):
staying alive or not quitting, it became a call. I
attacked that therapy very, very aggressively. There are people that
go there with high walls and a lot of resistance.
I really wanted to get better. I remember one-on-one, doing

(01:08:24):
a one-on-one session with my therapist, which was essentially giving
me a progress report, like, all right, you've done this, this,
and this. You're making some progress. And I just said, great.

Speaker 2 (01:08:36):
What's next? She goes, you're not ready for what's next.

Speaker 1 (01:08:40):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:08:41):
I don't know if she did that because she's used
to working with sock guys and she knows that that's a.

Speaker 4 (01:08:47):
A hundred percent. A hundred percent.

Speaker 2 (01:08:51):
Let's do it. And I said, wow, what's next?

Speaker 4 (01:08:56):
Of course you know of course i'm ready yeah she
said yeah she.

Speaker 3 (01:08:59):
Put her notebook down and she looked at me dead
my eyes and she said you have to forgive yourself.

Speaker 2 (01:09:07):
Oh yeah man she was right i.

Speaker 3 (01:09:11):
Wasn't ready she said you have to forgive yourself you
can't move forward any farther than where you're at right
now unless you forgive yourself.

Speaker 2 (01:09:19):
And so when I say that.

Speaker 3 (01:09:22):
Having that purpose, filling your bucket with purpose is just
a piece of finding that peace.

Speaker 2 (01:09:27):
That's what I mean.

Speaker 3 (01:09:28):
Because if you haven't forgiven yourself, you're never going to
find that peace.

Speaker 4 (01:09:33):
Amen to that.

Speaker 1 (01:09:34):
Why is forgiveness such a critical aspect of experiencing peace?

Speaker 3 (01:09:41):
If you can't like you, how is anybody else going
to like you?

Speaker 4 (01:09:45):
You know?

Speaker 3 (01:09:47):
We do a lot of stuff to please other people.
That's all temporary. And it's things we can't control. If
somebody's an asshole, they're an asshole.

Speaker 2 (01:09:57):
We don't need to change ourselves to placate them.

Speaker 3 (01:10:01):
Yeah. You know, sometimes there's some of that in the
professional environment, but not at the personal level. No. If
you've got toxic people, you can cut them out.

Speaker 2 (01:10:09):
You can take control. But if you're the toxic person.

Speaker 3 (01:10:11):
How are you going to cut that out? You can
recognize the issues you have going on. You can seek self-improvement.
But if you can't forgive yourself for that person you
were and accept that, you will never, ever have peace.

Speaker 1 (01:10:37):
I think one of the things that, and I, I've,
I've spent a lot of years on, on trying to
figure out forgiveness. Like that, that for me was one
of the most difficult realities of, of, of my existence, right?

Speaker 4 (01:10:51):
Forgiving yourself on, on every level in my life, right?

Speaker 1 (01:10:55):
Forget not forgiving my, not being able to forgive myself
for not being able to help my brother, not forgiving
myself for what I fucked up in college, not forgiving myself.
So how, I fucked up in the teams, not forgiving
myself for how I fucked up in my last marriage,
not forgiving myself how I most especially for fucked up
and how what my kids have had to go through.

Speaker 3 (01:11:15):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:11:16):
That that perpetual thing.

Speaker 1 (01:11:18):
And and, you know, even trying to, you know, find,
you know, I'd have friends do just look in the Bible,
look at what Christ says about forgiveness.

Speaker 4 (01:11:28):
That's your that's your God. OK, it didn't work. Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:11:31):
Now I go over to therapist. What does forgiveness mean?
How do I achieve it? And, and the thing that I, like,
I think I, I tried to feel is like, I, I.

Speaker 4 (01:11:44):
Can only forgive if.

Speaker 1 (01:11:45):
I know what the next version of myself is going
to look like. And that's not the way it works. Right.

Speaker 3 (01:11:52):
Right. I, um, I didn't know what was next for me.
You know, I didn't know what forgiveness looked like. I
had no clue.

Speaker 2 (01:12:02):
I just knew that I had a very.

Speaker 3 (01:12:05):
Hard time knowing that I wronged people and saying that
it's not.

Speaker 2 (01:12:15):
Okay, but you don't have to be that person.

Speaker 3 (01:12:18):
And I forgive you. I had a hard time doing
that to myself because I didn't feel like I had
wronged myself. I'd wronged other people. You know, it was
my family. It was my wife, you know, teammates. guys
that guys that were killed in action that I couldn't
have saved no matter what, you know, with a, with

(01:12:38):
a miracle, but still had survivor guilt over, you know,
all of that. And, um, my oldest daughter, Laurel called
me that night. You know, we can only have phones
certain times of the day. And, uh, she called me
that night and, uh, I was pretty open about everything
I was going through. You know, I was a, I
was open book and, uh, She said, Dad, you know

(01:13:08):
you're my hero, right?

Speaker 6 (01:13:10):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:13:12):
And my voice started cracking. I just said, no, I didn't.

Speaker 2 (01:13:18):
And what I really meant to say was, how could
I be your hero?

Speaker 3 (01:13:22):
I said, no. And she said, I look up to
you so much and everything you've done and everything you're
doing right now, and I'm so proud of you. And
I started crying and we got off the phone a
couple minutes later and I just collapsed on the concrete floor,

(01:13:42):
thin carpet, and I just balled up. And that's what
I needed because my kids kept me alive. My kids
got me through selection. My kids kept me alive when
I was thinking about ending it all. And it was
my kids that I needed their permission to forgive myself.
And that made all the difference. Everything that I tried

(01:14:05):
to protect them from.

Speaker 2 (01:14:10):
Was all for naught.

Speaker 3 (01:14:16):
What I really needed to do was bring them in
and show them who I was or who I could be.
That was the key for me.

Speaker 4 (01:14:33):
That's beautiful, brother. That's absolutely beautiful.

Speaker 1 (01:14:43):
No matter how many certifications you get, no matter how
many trips down range you take, no matter how much
weight is in your ruck, none of that fulfills in
the same capacity as your child validating the simplicity of

(01:15:09):
your existence with them that allows all that to just
go off, to not be relevant or important anymore. And
the fact that she had the wherewithal to, like, give
you that release to... She was the key that unlocked the...

(01:15:32):
She was the key that.
Allowed the glass bottom to go away and whatever that
foundation of peace for you to start beat. She was
the cornerstone, right?

Speaker 3 (01:15:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:15:45):
She was the cornerstone. So how did you start to read? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:15:49):
And I believe that night, you know, that's why, you know,
they call Christ, Christ love the cornerstone of the church
in your heart. Right. Because it's that unconditional love. Like,
it's Frito's love. That's the cornerstone.

Speaker 2 (01:16:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:16:02):
Right?

Speaker 4 (01:16:03):
Like, that's the piece. And that's the piece in the
midst of the pain.

Speaker 1 (01:16:07):
If you can, like, if you can, like, like, you're
in flail or you're falling or you're whatever, and in
your mind you go, okay, here's the piece. Here's the cornerstone. Okay,
now it's like, and you rebuild the foundation real quick.

Speaker 4 (01:16:23):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:16:24):
And then you're ready for, to get your Sisyphus moment
back on, put the shit back on your shoulders, and
start walking up the hill again, right?

Speaker 4 (01:16:33):
And that's what I think it is.

Speaker 1 (01:16:35):
What were the other pieces of the foundation that you
assembled to then go on to... to get you to
the point of the guy I walk into last spring,
and I'm, like, mesmerized by your level of.

Speaker 4 (01:16:53):
Genuineness, you're like, dude, and.

Speaker 1 (01:16:56):
you know, you and I have been to a million
of these things and we know how a lot of
guys like to act or whatever. And man, like I
was like floored by you in such a profound way
that that set the tone. Cause I was nervous about
coming in all this, but I was like, Oh my God,
this guy just like the way you describe it is,

(01:17:17):
was just, it was mad. It was the, it was
the invitation I needed to integrate in whatever that was
going to be that weekend. It was like, you were my,
cornerstone piece of the weekend, if that makes sense. So,
after you leave, uh, um, how do you build the
foundation now?

Speaker 2 (01:17:36):
So, um, I finished.

Speaker 3 (01:17:38):
That inpatient program and then I went to six weeks
of tie-up. I'd heard a lot of horror stories about
soft guys in group programs, like, oh, it's a bunch
of pogues that, you know, heard a gunshot once and
Now they're shaky and need to talk about it. And

(01:17:58):
I unfortunately went into that program with kind of that mindset.
Like I am.

Speaker 2 (01:18:05):
The elite in here.

Speaker 3 (01:18:07):
I don't know what you guys have done, but I
am the elite. And I came out of there humbled. Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:18:15):
One thing I learned is everybody's trauma affects others differently.

Speaker 3 (01:18:18):
Another thing I learned is.

Speaker 2 (01:18:21):
Don't judge a book by its cover. You know, I had.

Speaker 3 (01:18:26):
An officer in that program.

Speaker 2 (01:18:27):
We didn't wear rank roles from below civilian clothes.

Speaker 3 (01:18:30):
There was officers in there that I didn't realize were
officers until it was all said and done. But I
had a member of a female engagement team in there
who I thought was there because she was afraid of dogs.
She was afraid of dogs, but it had to do
with being attached to a seventh group team in Hindu Kush.

Speaker 2 (01:18:53):
She saw some shit.

Speaker 3 (01:18:54):
Probably a lot more kinetic stuff than I have, honestly,
because I was more on the intel side. I had
a ER nurse, 05, who had very similar PTSD to me.
She hadn't been shot at or blown up, but she
saw She saw kids die on a regular basis. And
that was the foundation of my PTSD. It was losing

(01:19:16):
kids that I couldn't save. Because they were the same
age as my kids. And I wasn't able to shave that.
So I came out of there with a, I want
to say renewed. I want to say a new humility.
That my problems aren't special just because I'm special forces.

Speaker 2 (01:19:38):
You know, this is... This is pretty rampant across the,
across the force. Uh, and that allowed me.

Speaker 3 (01:19:46):
To be a better listener and have more empathy, but
not so much empathy that I forget to put my
mask on. You know, I'm, I'm not being empathetic, so
I don't have to work on myself. I'm being empathetic
because I've worked on myself and that is a big difference. Massive. Yeah.

(01:20:06):
Big difference. Um, and the other half is actually under
the spectrum. You know, I don't know a soft guy
out there that doesn't have imposter syndrome. Um, and I
definitely saw it out of staccato, you know, but I
didn't see it in me. I would get mad when
I'd miss a target or one of those red dots
I knew was off, you know, and, you know, compete

(01:20:28):
with tier one dudes and, you know, my peers, guys
have done what I've done. And, you know, I'd have
a smoke and run and then I'd pick up a
nuts pistol and I'd, Everything would be over the top
right of the plate. I'm like, bro. And, you know,
whoever's running the– whoever the RSO is would come up like, paint, paint.

Speaker 2 (01:20:45):
I'm like, looks good to me. I'm like, I think
your eyebrows.

Speaker 4 (01:20:47):
Are off, brother.

Speaker 2 (01:20:49):
You know? There was still that. There was still frustration.

Speaker 3 (01:20:53):
With not being at the top of my game and
realizing that I need to shoot more while I'm working
on my soul. But the imposter syndrome of, no, I
don't want to go because I'm not at the same
level as everybody else. That wasn't there. You know, if
you can take away, in both cases, what you're looking
at there that's holding you back is ego.

Speaker 2 (01:21:12):
If you can wipe that.

Speaker 3 (01:21:14):
Off just enough, we need a little bit of ego.
But if you can push that back a little bit
so that you can really go out there and meet people,
listen to them, have actual empathy, you can go out there,
compete with other people, and know that you're having a
good time. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:21:29):
You know, I think that's what really made the difference there.

Speaker 4 (01:21:33):
Me too.

Speaker 5 (01:21:33):
I agree.

Speaker 1 (01:21:33):
I agree. Um, so as I, I go through this,
this question, so there's the, the, the, the necessity of, uh,
a purpose, right? There's, there's the necessity of a selection itself.
There's the necessity of a humility. There's the necessity of

(01:21:58):
a breaking point, right? It seems like that's a, a, a,
That's something I have one more, like, a question about
with you. And then, obviously, you know, doing it for
somebody who believes in you and having, you know, the
intimacy of those great relationships. But, you know, is a

(01:22:19):
breaking point necessary to be able to realize what.

Speaker 4 (01:22:24):
True peace is? You only know what peace is if
you've broken before.

Speaker 3 (01:22:29):
I don't... I don't know that I would frame it
that way. And here's a simile or metaphor I'll throw
at that. If you're driving your truck down the road
and you're on a quarter tank, you probably should get gas.

Speaker 2 (01:22:49):
If you run it dry, you have to get gas, right?

Speaker 3 (01:22:54):
That's the difference between the breaking point and I think...
I think a better word for the necessity of it
is probably surrender.

Speaker 4 (01:23:06):
Oh, there you go.

Speaker 3 (01:23:08):
You can surrender to yourself. You don't have to surrender.

Speaker 2 (01:23:15):
Being a tactical guy, that has a pejorative context.

Speaker 1 (01:23:19):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:23:20):
But it is necessary. We have to surrender that ego
and recognize that we cannot.

Speaker 3 (01:23:29):
Be.

Speaker 2 (01:23:30):
everything to everybody and.

Speaker 3 (01:23:33):
To us. We will get to that breaking point. We
will put that tank on fumes. There's got to be
maintenance along the way.

Speaker 4 (01:23:42):
Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 2 (01:23:44):
What I really wish, David.

Speaker 3 (01:23:46):
Is that officers and senior NCOs, you know, officers go
off to.

Speaker 2 (01:23:54):
Command and Staff College. They do War College.

Speaker 3 (01:23:58):
Senior NCOs go to whatever level, you know, there's the JSAL,
everything else. There's that time away from command, time away
from the team room, time away from the operational and
tactical responsibilities and duties. In that time, I really wish
that these people who have already been earmarked for senior positions,

(01:24:22):
I wish they had to do mandatory therapy.

Speaker 1 (01:24:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:24:26):
Because everybody's got something There is nobody that will not
benefit from therapy. And even if they don't benefit from
it personally, at least then, when they have somebody come

(01:24:47):
to them and say, I'm struggling, they don't put them
on the bench like a broken toy.

Speaker 2 (01:24:54):
And make the situation worse. They support them and get
them into therapy.

Speaker 3 (01:25:01):
And even if they've got to take them off a
team for a minute, they have some empathy there and say, hey,
this is what you need right now. It's not, okay, well,
I had you on this mission, and now you're fucking
the whole mission up. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:25:16):
You're screwing everybody around you over.

Speaker 3 (01:25:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:25:19):
Great.

Speaker 2 (01:25:19):
Now I've got a broken toy I've got to deal with.

Speaker 1 (01:25:21):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:25:22):
And that's what it feels like.

Speaker 3 (01:25:24):
You know? Yeah. SOCOM loves to say humans are more
important than hardware, but I don't see it.

Speaker 2 (01:25:30):
I don't see it.

Speaker 3 (01:25:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:25:33):
I think it's just built into the nature of the business, right?
There's a business side of this, that you gotta, you it's,
it's like you said, it's are my numbers is my readiness.

Speaker 2 (01:25:46):
Good.

Speaker 4 (01:25:46):
I just got this new, you.

Speaker 1 (01:25:49):
Know, $ 500 billion to build out our new drone protocols
and all this.

Speaker 4 (01:25:54):
Well, guess what?

Speaker 1 (01:25:55):
Now we're going to all your regular. pre deployment stuff.
And now we're going to pack in another hundred hours
of all this type of, Oh, and by the way,
we got a squeeze trench warfare in there now too.

Speaker 4 (01:26:10):
And, Oh, but you know, and.

Speaker 2 (01:26:11):
So, yeah, dude.

Speaker 1 (01:26:15):
And so I, I think, I just don't believe it's, it's,
it's a part.

Speaker 4 (01:26:21):
Of it and they want to make it part. It should.
From the get-go, it should just be built in. You just.

Speaker 1 (01:26:28):
And it doesn't detract from the ferocity of dudes, because
how many dudes do you know that were just, like,
elite guys, and then they'd go home on breaks, and
they'd go get therapy... or they do their little side
Zoom in their different email address, their wife's email, you know,
and so they're doing Zoom sessions with a therapist to

(01:26:50):
manage all the other shit, and they're still killing their job,
you know what I mean?

Speaker 3 (01:26:54):
It's... That's a good question, because people kept it very,
very quiet. You know, through most of the GWAT, we
were worried that therapy would.

Speaker 2 (01:27:02):
Hurt a security clearance.

Speaker 3 (01:27:04):
Always. And they finally made it on the SF-86, excluding
marriage therapy.

Speaker 1 (01:27:09):
So.

Speaker 3 (01:27:10):
The big pull there was you'd go to marital counseling
and it would be for you.

Speaker 4 (01:27:15):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (01:27:15):
That's a good segue into, I want to give a
shout out to all secure foundation and the special forces
trust because both of them have, uh, coaching sessions from
licensed therapists and it is anonymous and doesn't go in
image Genesis.

Speaker 2 (01:27:34):
It doesn't go in your medical record.

Speaker 3 (01:27:35):
Um, SF Trust, the Special Forces Trust, their program is
called Beyond the Battlefield. That's for Green Berets and their families.
All Secure Foundation is for all of SOF. I don't
know what's out there for conventional side. But you do
not have to be active duty to use these. You
can be retired.

Speaker 2 (01:27:54):
So after retirement is where a lot of things pop up.

Speaker 1 (01:27:58):
Those organizations are hands down doing it the way it
should have been done for.

Speaker 4 (01:28:02):
A long time. I mean, I remember.

Speaker 1 (01:28:05):
I started to see the effects, probably 08, 09 is
where guys started shooting themselves that were like, oh, dude,
that dude's a pipe hitter.

Speaker 4 (01:28:15):
Oh, that guy, that guy would never do, you know?

Speaker 1 (01:28:18):
And then I'm like, oh, and meanwhile, I've been, I've
been trying to process all my stuff independently because there
was nothing back in those days. I'm reading old Vietnam
post PTSD books and trying to figure out what this
guy do and what this do.

Speaker 4 (01:28:32):
And, and, um, anyways, um, All right.

Speaker 1 (01:28:36):
Now where you're at, cause I know we got to
wrap it up here soon. And by the way, I
can't thank you enough. That was one of the best
descriptions I've ever heard of what this foundation is, the
process of figuring out the, the restructuring of your perception
of the, the, what the weight in the rock. And then,

(01:28:56):
you know, the one that just, is, is it's going
to really stick with me for a long time as the, I,
the sense, the idea of forgiveness, like that, that, that is,
that's the essence of the whole thing, right?

Speaker 4 (01:29:08):
It is, it really is.

Speaker 3 (01:29:10):
Um, all right.

Speaker 1 (01:29:11):
So now you've been through a lot of that.

Speaker 4 (01:29:14):
That was two years ago, three, almost coming up on three.

Speaker 1 (01:29:18):
Um, what are you doing now and what are you
focused on and how are, how are you able to, um, take,
like I said, I, you know, dude, I, it was for,
I mean, I don't know if I'm more, just more
aware or more astute or more available, but you know, it,
it was so, it was so piercing the way with

(01:29:43):
which you spoke that I was like, God, I hope
this dude is doing this all the fucking time. I hope,
I hope like this is what he is a part
of his life. So, Walk us through some of now what,
what your mission is now.

Speaker 3 (01:29:59):
I'll be honest, man. Right now, my mission is me. Uh,
and I, I'm being selfish for a reason. You know, I'm,
I officially retired from SF a couple months ago, finished
my VA claim. I bought a house in Texas.

Speaker 2 (01:30:17):
I'm still not fully moved. I started a new job.

Speaker 3 (01:30:19):
Um, My youngest is going to, she leaves next week
for Spain to go to college in Madrid.

Speaker 2 (01:30:27):
There's a lot going on right now. And if I
tried to stack on a couple more things.

Speaker 3 (01:30:32):
Like, hey, let me help you out. You know, there's
a reason on a plane they say, hey, put your
own mask on first.

Speaker 4 (01:30:37):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:30:39):
And stack on top of that, you know, part of
what freed me up to do all this transition is
I was my grandfather's caretaker from August until when he
passed away in February.

Speaker 2 (01:30:48):
And we haven't even had his funeral yet.

Speaker 3 (01:30:51):
So a lot of what I'm doing right now is
focusing on me and making sure my life is in
order because it is in a huge transition spot right now.

Speaker 2 (01:31:02):
And I think the biggest thing I've done is recognizing that, you.

Speaker 3 (01:31:07):
Know, I tried to maintain therapy with the VA while
I was back up in Seattle, and it was very
difficult for multiple reasons. But the worst reason that was
out of my control was that I kept getting a
new provider. You know, the therapist I'd have would be
with a certain company and they'd lose their contract and I'd.

Speaker 2 (01:31:29):
Have to start with somebody new.

Speaker 3 (01:31:31):
Or, you know, I'm traveling and Washington State has rules
that if you're doing telehealth, your provider can't see you
if you are physically outside of the state of Washington,
even though it's telehealth. So I had to pull off
to the side of a road outside Vegas and to
talk to the therapist and lie to her and tell
her that I was in Seattle. And I think she

(01:31:52):
knew I was lying, but she ended up firing me
because I was outside of breaking the rules, you know?
No fault on her because she's got a license to maintain.
But getting here and recognizing I've got all this stress
and I'm trying to manage it myself, I saw some

(01:32:14):
of the warning signs that I had before And I
don't know that I would have seen those as anything
other than challenges to overcome if I hadn't done all
of that previous work. It's still frustrating because nothing moves
as fast as I want it to. But it is moving. And,

(01:32:35):
you know, I've got the support of Rebecca and my
friends and being able to come on a show like
yours and, you know, tell guys the bridge is out
ahead while I'm, you know, actively finding another way around it.

Speaker 2 (01:32:50):
That all helps. Um, yeah, but that's, that's actively what
I'm working on.

Speaker 3 (01:32:55):
Um, I still serve others, you know, um, I wasn't
planning on working after retirement, uh, Xterra health, uh, I
believe in their mission. It's a soft owned company. Um,
and you know, helping, helping guys with, we've got a,
a network of healthcare providers. So we do Nexus layers
and DBQs for, uh, for vets and it's not all soft.

(01:33:18):
You know, a lot of these guys are Vietnam vets
that never filed a claim ever. Um, and having been
fresh through that process and seeing how convoluted it is, uh,
you know, I feel some mission there. Once I get settled,
you know, this wall is finished. There's actually cool stuff
on the wall. Uh, there's no painter's tape on the floor.
All my stuff's here. My kids settled in Spain. Once

(01:33:42):
that's finished, I don't know. I think I'd like to, uh,
get a peer coaching certification. I don't want to be
a therapist. I can't take that on.

Speaker 2 (01:33:52):
It's a hard time unloading it.

Speaker 3 (01:33:53):
But I think I'm the right person to recognize that
somebody's needing more than what they're getting and be a
bridge between the suffering, whether it's self-imposed or not, the
suffering they've got and the health.

Speaker 2 (01:34:15):
Beautiful. That's where I'd like to be.

Speaker 4 (01:34:17):
I love it. Last question. How do you find peace
in your average day right now?

Speaker 3 (01:34:23):
Oh, man. It's a challenge right now because everything hurts physically. And,
you know, when we were in our prime or even
on the backside of prime, we could go crush some.

Speaker 2 (01:34:38):
Weight or run five miles and that would.

Speaker 3 (01:34:42):
Shed all that off. Between it being 140 degrees outside,
because I decided to move to Texas right when the
devil was coming out of Satan's asshole. Between that and,
you know, having a bunch of musculoskeletal issues that I
need to get fixed, or at least palatable, durable, sustainable.

Speaker 2 (01:35:03):
I'm making up words now.

Speaker 3 (01:35:06):
I don't have that physical exertion available to me. So...
just going outside literally touching grass at night I'll go
out and I'll stare up at the stars because there's
a reason I moved out in the country because Seattle
stressed me out pet my dog take the dog for

(01:35:28):
a walk spending time with people that love me back
you know hanging out with Rebecca and taking time to
get out.

Speaker 2 (01:35:36):
And go see my friends in the area.

Speaker 3 (01:35:40):
You know I hung out with Logan and Matt, uh,
two days ago, Logan's son had a birthday party. Awesome. Um,
yesterday my friends, Dan and Joey came over and helped
me hang up a 75 inch TV and, uh, helped
me a little bit with this, but I realized that

(01:36:02):
pretty quickly that I was the one that, uh, was,
was not quite a general contractor.

Speaker 2 (01:36:08):
It was his kind of doing construction by committee for
a minute. I'll take care of the rest of this.
You guys are good. So, you know, you got the.

Speaker 4 (01:36:19):
Camaraderie.

Speaker 3 (01:36:20):
You need to find that camaraderie outside. You know, when
you don't have it in the team anymore, you need
to find it somewhere else. And if you're looking to
only be with dudes that have tridents or do that
green berets, you're going to have a hard time finding
that camaraderie. You got to kill the eagle a little bit. Um,
But yeah, you do have to find something that not

(01:36:40):
everything can be.

Speaker 2 (01:36:42):
Not everything can be a crucial to fill your heart.

Speaker 4 (01:36:47):
Amen to that.

Speaker 1 (01:36:52):
Brother, that was one of the greatest conversations I've had
in a long time. And I can't thank you enough
for offering your wisdom and sharing what you went through.
I know there's going to be somebody that listens, just
whoever that person is or persons, if we're blessed. And
you're going to make an impact on their lives.

Speaker 4 (01:37:14):
And I can't thank you enough for that.

Speaker 3 (01:37:16):
I hope so, man.

Speaker 2 (01:37:17):
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 3 (01:37:18):
Absolutely.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}David Rutherford Show: A Green Beret's Darkest Night in Baghdad — and What Saved Him | Tyr Symank