July 8, 2024 • 34 mins
Brad Snyder was part of the U.S. Navy’s most elite bomb squad. In his role, he was rewarded for his intense independence. But after a bomb blast left him blind, he had to relearn how to depend on others. He talks with Maya about how embracing vulnerability helped him reach his dreams.
Sign up for Maya's new newsletter here https://bit.ly/41lPqaZ and follow her on instagram @DrMayaShankar.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
I felt like I was invincible. There was nothing I
couldn't conquer. That idea is nurtured when you jump out
of an aircraft or you get all these advanced capabilities.
There's this feeling that I alone can do anything.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Brad Snyder was part of the US Navy's most elite
bomb squad. In his role, Brad was rewarded for his
intense independence, but then a bomb blast left him blind.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
This idea of surrender is just like not in my DNA.
So to kind of wrap my head around giving up
pieces of this fierce dedication to lone wolfness, my previous
life was not easy.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
On today's episode, when change forces us to surrender our independence,
I'm Maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans,
a show about who we are and who he become
in the face of a big change. Brad grew up
(01:33):
near the beach in Saint Petersburg, Florida. He loved bodysurfing
and swimming in the ocean. When he was eleven, he
was the slowest kid on his first competitive swim team,
but he kept at it. He swam in high school
and then became captain of the Naval Academy's swim team.
I started my conversation with Brad by asking why he
(01:54):
decided to join the Navy.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
I don't remember a moment where I didn't think that
that was probably the direction I was going, And the
reason was my earliest memories all revolved around my grandfather,
and most of them were just kind of looking up
to this figure and just knowing to my core that
I wanted to be like him. He was the model
of who I wanted to be when I grew up.
(02:17):
I think the thing that was clear to me was
this notion of respect. Like my grandfather commanded a lot
of respect. My grandfather was a veteran of World War Two,
he had served in the Pacific. That's my lineage, So
I grew up kind of understanding that, you know, my
job was to be a kind of new version of
the Greatest Generation.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
What kind of training did you end up doing in
the Navy?
Speaker 2 (02:39):
When I was at the Naval Academy, they asked me
early on what do you want to do in the Navy,
And my answer to that was, well, I'm really good
in the water. I've been swimming my whole life. What
job in the Navy needs you to be a great swimmer.
And the answer I got back from the powers that
be was Navy seals and EOD officers. EOD is explosive
(03:01):
Ordnance disposal, which is a misleading and nondescriptive acronym for
the bomb squad of the Navy. The job of the
EOD community is to mitigate render safe any explosive hazard
you might imagine from a bomb that was supposed to
go off that didn't go off, or it improvised explosive
device in places like Iraq or Afghanistan. And I just thought, Oh,
this is incredible, Like this is a day in, day out,
(03:24):
day in the life of an EOD technician. Sign me up.
I felt like I was invincible. There was nothing I
couldn't I couldn't conquer, and I can do everything. That
idea is nurtured when you go to jump school and
you learn how to jump out of an aircraft or
you get all these advanced capabilities. There's this feeling that
I alone can do anything.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
I'd love to fast forward Brad to twenty eleven when
you were deployed to Afghanistan and you embedded with a
Navy seal team. Can you tell me more about your
job there.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
We were embedded with a seal team doing assault missions.
It's very stressful and the stakes of your job are
very high. And oh, by the way, at this point,
this was in twenty eleven in Afghanistan, the ied threat
improvised explosive device threat in Afghanistan was very, very high.
(04:18):
And the culture you must imagine in this environment is
very sort of macho. It's very type A, very aggressive.
The tolerance for failure is very low. You know, it
was really scary to go out into these missions and
know that basically anywhere, buried in the earth or on
a rooftop or on a pathway, there might be an
(04:40):
ied lurking beneath the surface that might have the ability
to kill or mame one on my team.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah, do you mind bringing us back to September seventh,
twenty eleven. This was about six months into your deployment.
You were out with your patrol, which was half American
and half Afghan So.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
The way that most missions would work in Afghanistan, we
would walk out in front of the patrol with a
metal detector to make sure that we were taking the
highest level of precaution possible against any potential improvised land mines,
a rock paper scissor with my buddy Adam to see
who would have to lead our patrol from point A
to point B. He lost I one, so I watched
him navigate this really difficult terrain in this valley of Afghanistan,
(05:23):
and then he disappeared behind a wall. And then shortly
thereafter I saw a giant blast plume shoot up into
the air. We saw that one of the Afghans in
our patrol had stepped off of the path that Adam
had cleared, and he had stepped on a forty pound ied.
This is a very big explosion by virtue of comparison,
A hand grenade is about a quarter pound of explosives,
(05:45):
so a forty pound blast, you can imagine, is a
pretty big ied that really badly hurt the fellow who
stepped on it, and really badly hurt the guy standing
behind him. So Adam and I were able to figure out, oh,
we have two casualties. We need to quickly get these
guys out of here, so we need to move really quickly.
I was running back up to the front of the
patrol when I stepped on another ied that was located
(06:05):
about a meter away from the first blast sight. So
I committed the cardinal sin. I made our problem two
times worse by missing an ied. And there was a
brief pause, like a skip in the tape. And then
I'm laying there in the fetal position on the ground.
There's no sound, there's nothing, and I remember I could
(06:27):
just barely see out of my left eye, and I
looked down and I saw my hands, and behind it,
I saw my boots. And what I didn't see was
any blood or any damage or anything apparently wrong. And
that didn't make any sense to me, because I knew
(06:48):
that I had just stepped on this big bomb, But
how can I not be hurt? And the only way
I was able to make sense of that was that
I must be dead. I must be dead, and I'm
now in between. I'm in between life and death, and
I'm waiting here for whatever happens afterward. And I had
(07:14):
this really remarkable opportunity to sort of think everything through
and reflect, to just sit and think about my whole
life up to that point, twenty seven years on this planet.
A lot of good things, a handful of bad things,
some regrets, but some things I'm really proud of. I
(07:38):
was really sad that I wouldn't be able to say
goodbye to my mom and my family, but I thought
that they would be proud of the life that I
had lived, too, And I remember feeling like kind of excited,
like I've read a lot of books and have perused
all the different philosophies and religions and been searching for
truth my whole life about what happens after you die.
(08:00):
And here I am right on the precipice. I'm about
to find out. But then I didn't. I came back,
I came back to the consciousness. I could hear my
buddy Adam calling to me, Brad, Brad, that sound is
what brought me back to reality. And two things hit
me at once. One panic, and so I grabbed at
(08:20):
him and I said, how bad is it? And he said, Brad,
your face is pretty messed up, but the rest of
you looks fine. Do you think you can stand up?
The other reality to hit me really fast, was I
have screwed up. I have essentially failed at my job.
My job was to protect these guys. I'm supposed to
be the one who can find these IEDs. I've got
the metal detector. I'm the one walking out in front
(08:42):
of the patrol and here I missed.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
One m so I know that you were transported back
to Walter Reed, a medical center that takes care of
military service members in Maryland. How did those next few
days and weeks unfold?
Speaker 2 (08:57):
I woke up in Maryland, you know, half a world
away from where I went to sleep in Afghanistan, and
I was on a heavy drip of painkilling medication, sleep medication,
very strong drugs, and it caused me to hallucinate really badly,
and so I was very confused the whole time. About
a week into being at Walter Reed, the surgeons were
in my room describing to me the last surgery that
(09:19):
I was going to have to go through, and they
kept using this phrase, hopefully we'll get some of your
vision back, And I remember being very perplexed by that,
what do you mean get some of my vision back?
And so I think at the end of the presentation,
I asked, essentially that what do you mean get some
of my vision back? And the surgeon said, Lieutenant Snyder,
you have a less than one percent chance of being
able to perceive light and dark with your right eye.
(09:42):
We're going to have to remove your left entirely due
to our risk of infection. And I realized what that
doctor's saying, like, that's very complex talk for your blind
and you will likely be blind for the rest of
your life.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
How did you react to this news spread so we.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
I did try that surgery and the result was not favorable.
I ended up completely blind in both eyes. Do you
start to think about all the things that you'll never
be able to see or do? Or how am I
going to be able to be a bomb tech? Where
the trope is do you cut the red wire or
the green wire? Well, I can't do that job anymore
because I can't tell what the red wire or the
greenwire is.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
I was really struck by the fears you had in
seeing your little sister in particular, and it seems like
you had to reckon with a new type of psychological
challenge in that moment. Can you tell me more about that.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
I remember my mom or somebody telling me my sister
and Lisa's going to be here, and I remember feeling like, no,
don't let her in here. I don't want her to
see me this way. I don't want this image I
think she has of me to be broken. I'm eight
years older than my sister, and so for our entire
life I was her brother, but there was sort of
(10:56):
like a paternal edge to my brother relationship with her.
I was always looking after her or taking care of her.
She's going to come into the hospital room and I'm
not going to be this hero version of myself wearing
the white uniform and the gold buttons and the metals
on my chest. I'm going to be laid up in
a hospital room with stitches all over myself and tubes
(11:17):
coming out, and I can't even get up to go
to the bathroom by myself. How am I going to
live up to this hero notion of myself when she
has to see me like this?
Speaker 1 (11:28):
What was it like when she finally came into your
hospital room.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yeah, she came in and I was expecting for her
to be sad or devastated or upset, and she wasn't.
She was none of those things. She was loving and
she held my hand. She said, it was so great
to see you, and I'm just so glad I have
the opportunity to be here with you, and I'm so
happy you're alive. And the way she embraced me in
(11:52):
that moment was really you know, kind of a paradigm
changing for me, realizing that this brother sister relationship wasn't
exactly what I thought it was. It wasn't that I'm
this hero, role model, kind of perternal figure for her.
How's her brother? And that's like unconditional love. She's going
(12:14):
to love me no matter what. She loves me when
I'm a hero, and she loves me when I can't
get out of bed, and I remember feeling unburdened. I
guess like to feel like she's not going to be
disappointed and I haven't let her down. In fact, I
think we're closer now as a result.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
So, Brad, about three weeks after you first arrived at
Walter Reed, you were then discharged and sent to a
hospital in Florida, which is where you grew up and
it was also where your mom still lived. Can you
tell me a bit more about this transition?
Speaker 2 (12:47):
So, I think at the tactical level, blindness is sort
of about like how do you do these normal things,
like you know, on a day to day basis. I
have to get up, I have to get dressed, I
have to feed myself, I have to brush my teeth,
I have to look presentable and I go out into
the world and I do a variety of things, and
that's very challenging. But all the while there's sort of
a bigger, more internal struggle about well, who am I?
(13:09):
Who am I? What is my identity? And much of
our identity revolves around what value do you bring to society?
And I felt like, up until that point in my life,
my value was this really elite capability as a bomb
disposal technician. There was a lot of prestige associated with
wearing the naval uniform, and I kind of ostensibly a badass, right,
(13:33):
So when I first started to wrap my head around
being hurt, I didn't want blindness to hold me back.
I wanted to burst out of that box as quickly
as possible. I don't want to be in the hospital.
I want to be moving as fast as possible. Where
am I going? I don't know, but I just want
to be moving. And so being discharged from wal to
Reed felt like progress, And in fact, there was a
(13:54):
lot of ups to being in Florida. The upside was
I was near my mom's house. So once I was
sufficiently healed, they started saying, you can go on essentially
like weekend pass, you know, you're an impatient during the week,
but when the weekend rolls around, none of the therapists
are here anyway, so you might as well go home
with your mom. And I thought, that's great, That's exactly
what I want to do. And the first Friday that
(14:15):
I was let out coincided with this recurring event in
downtown Saint Petersburg, where it's essentially a block party in
the kind of active area of the downtown. And somebody
had whispered to so and so to whisper to so
and so that this was going to be my opportunity
to get out of the hospital, and someone had arranged
it that the benefit of all the beers or whatever
sold would be a benefit to us my family in
(14:37):
my rehab. And everyone was there to celebrate me. It
was awesome, but there was It was an interesting sort
of dichotomy to what was going on.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
You know.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
On one hand, everyone was really excited that I was
alive and they were there to celebrate me and be
there for my family, but there was a very palpable
sadness to many of the people who are hugging me,
like I'm so happy you're alive, But boy, oh boy,
what is this blindness thing going to be like and
that I don't know that that was spoken, but it
(15:08):
was definitely felt.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Yeah, I read that there was someone at that event
who ended up changing your life from that point on.
Can you tell me more about this person?
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Yeah, interstage left my swim coach, Fred, who was a
very stoic, sort of gruff guy, had really pushed us
hard when we were young, and so it would have
been weird for him to come over and you know,
be huggy and cryy or whatever. And all he said was,
you know, Brad, it's great to see you. Hey, we
(15:39):
have practice tomorrow. Do you want to come to our practice?
And I felt like it was it was his way
of kind of trying to wrap his heads around the
uncertainty of the future. And his way was, you battle it,
just come come to practice and we're going to start
figuring this out. And I said, Yeah, this is my opportunity.
This is how I'm going to prove to myself, to you,
to my family, to all these people that everything is fine,
(16:01):
everything is the way it was. I just can't see it.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
We'll be back in a moment with a slight change
of plans. The day after the block party, Brad's mom
drove him to swim practice, something she'd done countless times
(16:28):
when he was a kid. His old swim coach, Fred
was waiting for him at the pool.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
He set up a pool noodle on the edge of
every lane so that when I'd get close to the wall,
I'd bump the pool noodle with my head so that
I wouldn't hit the wall. And when I'd bump the
pool noodle, I'd reach out with my arm and the
wall would be right there. And I was like this,
this is perfect. And getting into the pool was the
first time I felt like I could wrap my arms
around normal. This was me. I was free, and I
(16:57):
felt there's a future here and I'm going to find
my way. And I feel like for my mom and
other folks, they could see that what.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
Made you feel free in a way that you hadn't before.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
There's something about swimming. You know, it's a very sensory experience,
and it's a sensory experience that is not necessarily visual.
I mean, in fact, you know, growing up in Florida,
you know, the fashionable goggles at the time were these
little pieces of plastic you jam in your eye sockets
and the sun's always very shiny, and you actually can't
see that well anyway, And when you can see, all
(17:30):
you're staring at is a black line on the bottom
of the pool. Like, the visual component of swimming laps
is not its primary component. It's the feeling of water
going across your body and rotating across and pulling and
feeling powerful as you stroke over stroke over stroke. So
I jumped in and I felt graceful, I felt strong.
(17:51):
I felt like I had before, you know, I'd swam
so many laps in that exact pool. It felt like home.
It felt like me, and it didn't feel like a
constrained or compromised version of me. It felt like the
full expression of me. And to be able to have that,
even just for a moment stroking across that lane, it
(18:12):
gave me the confidence to say, yes, I'm going through
an epic transition, but it's gonna work. It's gonna be fine.
I am still me and I just got to keep
moving down this lane.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Yeah, it's kind of a big leap to go from
that initial swim to competing in the Paralympics. So tell me, Brad,
how did that all come to be?
Speaker 2 (18:34):
So I get a call from Rich Cardillo, a retired
Army colonel who worked at the Association of Blind Athletes,
whose job was to deliver resources to wounded vets suffering
from blindness to get into sports as a function of
the rehab. This idea of rehabbing vets through sports is
not a new one. In fact, just quick aside, the
(18:55):
genesis of the modern Paralympics came from a hospital in
the UK after World War Two, four wounded vets. They
actually created a set of small competitions as a function
of rehab, and the modern Paralympics grew out of that
after math of World War Two. And I remember Rich
called me. I was still in the hospital and he said, hey,
(19:16):
you were a good swimmer in college, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
I swam at the Naval Academy. I was captain of
the swim team. You were captain of the swim team
at the Naval Academy. Yeah, you know, you might be
pretty good at this Blind Paralympics thing. And oh, by
the way, we need to do this basically now, because
the last opportunity to qualify would be at the end
of February. So my Paralympic journey began, you know, before
i'd even really discharge from the hospital, because there was
(19:40):
a sense of urgency that if I wanted to compete
at all, I needed to start it right away.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
What did that training look like for you, Brad, I mean, like,
that's an extremely intense process to throw yourself in so
soon after such a massive physical and psychologically brutal injury.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
So I got really lucky. By twenty eleven, there were
a lot of resources available for wounded vets, specifically as
it pertains to sports, and I really benefited from the
specific efforts of the Commit Foundation that helped me find
my way to Brian Leffler at Loyola University, who had
this rare, nuanced expertise in how to coach a blind
(20:20):
swimming athlete in the Paralympics. He helped me learn a
variety of things, changing some of my stroke from the
way I used to swim to looking for the lane
line on either side with my arm strokes so that
instead of catastrophically crashing in and rumble stripping on my
shoulders and my side, I could delicately find the lane
line and just guide myself in the lane very gracefully
(20:42):
and fast without losing speed. That's in essence, like the
most frustrating thing about blind swimming. Accepting help was something
that was very uncharacteristic of me. I would not in
my previous life have done that. I would have said no, no, no,
I'll figure it out and I'm going to go do X,
Y and Z. I think there was sort of this
urgeoning acknowledgement that I do need help and I need
(21:03):
to be open to new opportunities and the council advice
and guidance of other folks, and I think in so
being open is what really allowed me to find that
new pathway. I think if I had been my previous
self and wasn't open to growth, I don't think I
would have gone anywhere.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
It's so important for us to talk about all those
moments in which you were forced to surrender some of
that autonomy and that independence in order to stay safe
and be healthy and survive. And so do you mind
talking a bit more about what that experience was like
of kind of owning the fact that you are now
on a team of sorts in your life generally and
(21:43):
then also within the pool.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
I think this sort of surrender, which I think is
a great word for it. I wouldn't have jumped to
that word because that's like a kind of trigger word
for a guy like me who's brought up in the
military and we're like, you know, the especially at the
Naval Academy with the don't give up the ship flag
being a big part of our historical legacy. This idea
(22:05):
of surrender is just like not in my DNA. So
to kind of wrap my head around giving up pieces,
surrendering pieces of this, what I would categorize is like
my fierce dedication to lone wolfness in my previous life
was not easy, and I recall a particular moment with
my mom. You know, the most challenging aspect of adapting
(22:29):
to blindness is the ability to get from point A
to point B. And the primary way that a blind
person does that it was with a blind cane. And
the way you use a blind cane as you tap
about two feet in front of you the place that
your foot is about to go. So I tap where
my left foot's going to go. Then I tap where
my right foot's going to go. And the idea is
if I encounter an obstacle or a curb or a
change in terrain, I'm going to hit it with my
(22:51):
cane and I can adjust, but as you might imagine,
like that's terrifying when you first start. And as I'm
navigating this learning how to find my way with the
blind cane, I had the benefit of my family participating
and being there for a lot of that. And at
one point where in the hospital, my mom is following
closely behind and she is at least as scared or
(23:15):
as nervous as I am in navigating this difficulty, standing
behind me, watching me trying to figure out where I'm
going and how to navigate and avoid all these obstacles,
and she just can't help herself from telling me, there's
a chair there, bred lookout, there's a column, You're coming
up on a left hand turn. And I was trying
to be patient with that and saying, you know what.
(23:36):
And she's doing this along with me. She needs to
learn as I do, and so I'm trying to do it.
But as I'm navigating this difficult situation, I'm getting a
little angsty to and at one point I remember growling.
I turned around. I said, Mom, you have to stop that.
You have to stop that, like I have to do this.
You can't follow me around for the rest of my life,
(23:57):
telling me what's in front of me. I have to
do this. This is me that I have to be
able to figure this out. And yeah, we're in this nice,
gentle hospital environment, but I'm not always going to be here.
What if I'm outside, What if I'm at the bus
stop and I'm trying figure out where the bus is.
You can't be there. I've got to figure this out.
And my tone was very like that, like growling at her,
(24:18):
and she was like okay, and she tried to settle
down and just be quiet, and I promptly turned around
and smacked my face into a big column.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
You know.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
The hospital had these big round columns. And I got
a hematoma and it burst open, bleeding on my forehead,
and I crumpled down on the ground and my mom
like comes hugs me and she's crying. She's like, I
can't watch you do that.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
I can't watch you do that.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
It's too hard.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
But also like an amazing told Yose moment for your mom.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
So yeah, it's exactly what the moment was. It was
a very humbling for me. I mean, I don't think
I don't feel unjustified in that feeling, you know, there
is a tension like, yeah, she has to give me
the space, but at the same time that space is
hard for her to give. You know, she let me
go once and I went out to war and I
came back all blown up, like, of course she's going
(25:07):
to be nervous to let me go again, and so
I you know, the lesson learned there, I think for
me was maybe I could do it before, Maybe I
could do the lone wolf military tough guy thing. I
can't anymore. I can't do that now. And for me
to succeed as a blind person, I'm gonna need to
let her in and she needs to be a part
(25:28):
of this journey. Yeah, I'm going to reclaim independence where
I can, but I need her help. I need her
here with me. That opens something up for me. That surrender,
letting her in, accepting the help allowed me to move
through the rest of that journey. You know, as a
blind swimmer, I don't do it by myself. My coach
(25:48):
is on the end and as I approached the wall,
he reaches out with a stick and a tennis ball
and taps me in the back to let me know
that my turn is right there. And at first I
wanted to figure it out by myself, but I can't
be the best blind summer I can be without help
from my coach.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
I'm so curious, Brad. You know, you talked about how
how your blindness essentially forced you to surrender to people
for their physical help and support, and I wonder whether
that had spillovers into your emotional life. So were you
more willing to lean on them for emotional support?
Speaker 3 (26:22):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (26:22):
I think my physical limitation makes me physically reliant and
dependent on other people for a variety of things. But
that opens up a new conduit or a channel for
that emotional support in a way that was probably inhibited
before by my own hubris. There is kind of a
it's like a new muscle, I guess in that sort
(26:44):
of emotional aspect of my life that was probably precipitated
by first the physical reliance on everybody else.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
So, Brad, you ended up making it to the twenty
twelve Paralympic Games, where you'd be representing the United States,
and the date is pretty special.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Yeah, you know, I thought, oh, this will be a
great thing to just go do, but I really wasn't
building up too much in my mind. But as we
got closer and closer to the games, getting ready for
the race on September seventh, twenty twelve, there was kind
of a feeling of this is actually manifesting to be
very extraordinary. I'm having the opportunity to swim in the
(27:23):
Paralympics for Team USA on the exact year anniversary of
the day I lost my vision. But along with that,
while that was kind of exciting, it was also pretty scary. Yeah,
there was a feeling of, well, what if I screw
this up, what if I false start, what if I crash,
what if I start going down? All these millions of
things that could happen. So it started to feel, you know,
(27:46):
the tension of the moment started to escalate, especially as
we got right up to the beginning of the race.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Yeah, so tell me about that race. Tell me about
that moment.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
For me, when the gun goes off, my mind goes away.
There's no ego, you just do. And that's how that
race unfolded. I just did. I just dove off and
just swam. In blind sports, It's very unique because I
touched the wall, but I don't immediately know what happened,
so I had to wait for a while. It was
(28:16):
a little bit of a delay. I have to wait,
and there's the moment. It's exciting that the crowd is
cheering and there's adrenaline it and it feels incredible. But
you don't know, is this moment excitement because of me?
I don't know. Is it because someone else did something
else happened? Did the race actually happen? Is you have
to wait for a while and then finally the referee
blows the whistle and that means the race is over.
(28:38):
And at that point they want to stick it out.
And according to the rules of international competition in the Paralympics,
at that point my coach can legally talk to me.
And at that point he leaned over and he said
two words I'll never forget. He said, you won. I
won a gold medal in the Paralympics on the year
anniversary of the day I lost my vision in Afghanistan.
And now I know in that arena all that like
(28:59):
amazing excitement and energy and glitz and glam, it's because
of me. I won. And I'm up on this. It's cool, it.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Is really cool. I'm so gratified that you had that
kind of moment. It's just it's amazing to even hear about.
Can you take me back to the podium after your
gold metal win? What was going through your mind in
that moment.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
So that energy and that venue and that crowd is
like the coolest thing in the world because they're all
cheering for you. They watched you swim, and they're all
moved by you, and that that energy is really incredible.
And I remember waving and they cheered because I waved
and I got so excited, and then I'd wave again
(29:45):
and they'd cheer.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
It was just the same.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
It's almost indescribable thing. There's no words in my mind
other than just joy, like this is just this is
I'm just tickled, like it's really a golden moment. And
all of a sudden, before you really processed what's going on,
they announce, you know, winning the gold medal for the
United States, Brad Schnyder, and you're just kind of like
pushed up there and just smiling and cheering, and there's
(30:08):
this big, loud music and before you know it, there's
someone telling you to bend over so they can put
the metal around your neck and the bouquet of flowers.
And it's an incredible thing because it's just kind of
like you're at the center of the universe. But what
was equally is incredible is that moment goes away like that,
because all of a sudden, the room gets quiet, and
(30:30):
everyone stands up, and they start playing our anthem, and
they raise our flag higher than all the other flags
in the arena, and all the eyes go from the
podium to the flag.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
It's just this.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Really dramatic transition of focus. And that's exactly what happened
to me. I went from being the center of the
universe to now thinking about all the people who are
a part of my journey, from Adam and Kyle, the
guys on the battlefield who dusted me off and got
me to a helicopter where the pilot put their aircraft
(31:08):
and their flight crew at risk to land in an
ied laden zone, to take me to the hospital where
a surgeon spent twelve hours putting my face back together.
To my mom, who got the call at five point
thirty in the morning saying her son had been blown up.
He has a traumatic brain injury. Potentially we won't be
able to speak to him for a few days. We
needed to get to Maryland as quickly as possible, to
(31:30):
my siblings who wrapped their arms around my mom and
got her through those trying circumstances. To Brian Leffler, who
helped me figure out how to swim straight, to my
friends and colleagues who got to watch that race from
places like a rack in Afghanistan. There was this incredible
feeling of connection to all of these people, and I
recognized that, you know, while I'm the one who gets
(31:52):
to have the medal around my neck, none of it
was possible if it weren't for all of those touches.
So all the uses of the puzzle were so integral
in that success, and feeling that, acknowledging that and being
at the center of that is what truly made the
podium moment special.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this
conversation with Brad, make sure to check out the other
episodes in our Olympic series, including my conversation with swimmer
Missy Franklin, and next week we'll finish the series with
user Mardini. Usura fled civil war in Syria as a teenager,
and after a harrowing journey to safety, competed on the
(32:50):
first Olympic Refugee Team. If you enjoyed this conversation, we
on the Slight Change team would be so grateful if
you could share the episode with someone you know. It
helps us get the word out so we can keep
making more episodes for you. Thanks so much and see
you next week. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written,
(33:19):
and executive produced by me Maya Shunker. The Slight Change
family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate
Parkinson Morgan, our senior producer Trisha Bobida, and our engineer
Eric o'kwang. Luis Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and
Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of
(33:39):
Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so a big
thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special
thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change
of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Shunker. See you
next week.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
The the
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
I felt like I was invincible. There was nothing I
couldn't conquer. That idea is nurtured when you jump out
of an aircraft or you get all these advanced capabilities.
There's this feeling that I alone can do anything.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Brad Snyder was part of the US Navy's most elite
bomb squad. In his role, Brad was rewarded for his
intense independence, but then a bomb blast left him blind.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
This idea of surrender is just like not in my DNA.
So to kind of wrap my head around giving up
pieces of this fierce dedication to lone wolfness, my previous
life was not easy.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
On today's episode, when change forces us to surrender our independence,
I'm Maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans,
a show about who we are and who he become
in the face of a big change. Brad grew up
(01:33):
near the beach in Saint Petersburg, Florida. He loved bodysurfing
and swimming in the ocean. When he was eleven, he
was the slowest kid on his first competitive swim team,
but he kept at it. He swam in high school
and then became captain of the Naval Academy's swim team.
I started my conversation with Brad by asking why he
(01:54):
decided to join the Navy.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
I don't remember a moment where I didn't think that
that was probably the direction I was going, And the
reason was my earliest memories all revolved around my grandfather,
and most of them were just kind of looking up
to this figure and just knowing to my core that
I wanted to be like him. He was the model
of who I wanted to be when I grew up.
(02:17):
I think the thing that was clear to me was
this notion of respect. Like my grandfather commanded a lot
of respect. My grandfather was a veteran of World War Two,
he had served in the Pacific. That's my lineage, So
I grew up kind of understanding that, you know, my
job was to be a kind of new version of
the Greatest Generation.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
What kind of training did you end up doing in
the Navy?
Speaker 2 (02:39):
When I was at the Naval Academy, they asked me
early on what do you want to do in the Navy,
And my answer to that was, well, I'm really good
in the water. I've been swimming my whole life. What
job in the Navy needs you to be a great swimmer.
And the answer I got back from the powers that
be was Navy seals and EOD officers. EOD is explosive
(03:01):
Ordnance disposal, which is a misleading and nondescriptive acronym for
the bomb squad of the Navy. The job of the
EOD community is to mitigate render safe any explosive hazard
you might imagine from a bomb that was supposed to
go off that didn't go off, or it improvised explosive
device in places like Iraq or Afghanistan. And I just thought, Oh,
this is incredible, Like this is a day in, day out,
(03:24):
day in the life of an EOD technician. Sign me up.
I felt like I was invincible. There was nothing I
couldn't I couldn't conquer, and I can do everything. That
idea is nurtured when you go to jump school and
you learn how to jump out of an aircraft or
you get all these advanced capabilities. There's this feeling that
I alone can do anything.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
I'd love to fast forward Brad to twenty eleven when
you were deployed to Afghanistan and you embedded with a
Navy seal team. Can you tell me more about your
job there.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
We were embedded with a seal team doing assault missions.
It's very stressful and the stakes of your job are
very high. And oh, by the way, at this point,
this was in twenty eleven in Afghanistan, the ied threat
improvised explosive device threat in Afghanistan was very, very high.
(04:18):
And the culture you must imagine in this environment is
very sort of macho. It's very type A, very aggressive.
The tolerance for failure is very low. You know, it
was really scary to go out into these missions and
know that basically anywhere, buried in the earth or on
a rooftop or on a pathway, there might be an
(04:40):
ied lurking beneath the surface that might have the ability
to kill or mame one on my team.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah, do you mind bringing us back to September seventh,
twenty eleven. This was about six months into your deployment.
You were out with your patrol, which was half American
and half Afghan So.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
The way that most missions would work in Afghanistan, we
would walk out in front of the patrol with a
metal detector to make sure that we were taking the
highest level of precaution possible against any potential improvised land mines,
a rock paper scissor with my buddy Adam to see
who would have to lead our patrol from point A
to point B. He lost I one, so I watched
him navigate this really difficult terrain in this valley of Afghanistan,
(05:23):
and then he disappeared behind a wall. And then shortly
thereafter I saw a giant blast plume shoot up into
the air. We saw that one of the Afghans in
our patrol had stepped off of the path that Adam
had cleared, and he had stepped on a forty pound ied.
This is a very big explosion by virtue of comparison,
A hand grenade is about a quarter pound of explosives,
(05:45):
so a forty pound blast, you can imagine, is a
pretty big ied that really badly hurt the fellow who
stepped on it, and really badly hurt the guy standing
behind him. So Adam and I were able to figure out, oh,
we have two casualties. We need to quickly get these
guys out of here, so we need to move really quickly.
I was running back up to the front of the
patrol when I stepped on another ied that was located
(06:05):
about a meter away from the first blast sight. So
I committed the cardinal sin. I made our problem two
times worse by missing an ied. And there was a
brief pause, like a skip in the tape. And then
I'm laying there in the fetal position on the ground.
There's no sound, there's nothing, and I remember I could
(06:27):
just barely see out of my left eye, and I
looked down and I saw my hands, and behind it,
I saw my boots. And what I didn't see was
any blood or any damage or anything apparently wrong. And
that didn't make any sense to me, because I knew
(06:48):
that I had just stepped on this big bomb, But
how can I not be hurt? And the only way
I was able to make sense of that was that
I must be dead. I must be dead, and I'm
now in between. I'm in between life and death, and
I'm waiting here for whatever happens afterward. And I had
(07:14):
this really remarkable opportunity to sort of think everything through
and reflect, to just sit and think about my whole
life up to that point, twenty seven years on this planet.
A lot of good things, a handful of bad things,
some regrets, but some things I'm really proud of. I
(07:38):
was really sad that I wouldn't be able to say
goodbye to my mom and my family, but I thought
that they would be proud of the life that I
had lived, too, And I remember feeling like kind of excited,
like I've read a lot of books and have perused
all the different philosophies and religions and been searching for
truth my whole life about what happens after you die.
(08:00):
And here I am right on the precipice. I'm about
to find out. But then I didn't. I came back,
I came back to the consciousness. I could hear my
buddy Adam calling to me, Brad, Brad, that sound is
what brought me back to reality. And two things hit
me at once. One panic, and so I grabbed at
(08:20):
him and I said, how bad is it? And he said, Brad,
your face is pretty messed up, but the rest of
you looks fine. Do you think you can stand up?
The other reality to hit me really fast, was I
have screwed up. I have essentially failed at my job.
My job was to protect these guys. I'm supposed to
be the one who can find these IEDs. I've got
the metal detector. I'm the one walking out in front
(08:42):
of the patrol and here I missed.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
One m so I know that you were transported back
to Walter Reed, a medical center that takes care of
military service members in Maryland. How did those next few
days and weeks unfold?
Speaker 2 (08:57):
I woke up in Maryland, you know, half a world
away from where I went to sleep in Afghanistan, and
I was on a heavy drip of painkilling medication, sleep medication,
very strong drugs, and it caused me to hallucinate really badly,
and so I was very confused the whole time. About
a week into being at Walter Reed, the surgeons were
in my room describing to me the last surgery that
(09:19):
I was going to have to go through, and they
kept using this phrase, hopefully we'll get some of your
vision back, And I remember being very perplexed by that,
what do you mean get some of my vision back?
And so I think at the end of the presentation,
I asked, essentially that what do you mean get some
of my vision back? And the surgeon said, Lieutenant Snyder,
you have a less than one percent chance of being
able to perceive light and dark with your right eye.
(09:42):
We're going to have to remove your left entirely due
to our risk of infection. And I realized what that
doctor's saying, like, that's very complex talk for your blind
and you will likely be blind for the rest of
your life.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
How did you react to this news spread so we.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
I did try that surgery and the result was not favorable.
I ended up completely blind in both eyes. Do you
start to think about all the things that you'll never
be able to see or do? Or how am I
going to be able to be a bomb tech? Where
the trope is do you cut the red wire or
the green wire? Well, I can't do that job anymore
because I can't tell what the red wire or the
greenwire is.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
I was really struck by the fears you had in
seeing your little sister in particular, and it seems like
you had to reckon with a new type of psychological
challenge in that moment. Can you tell me more about that.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
I remember my mom or somebody telling me my sister
and Lisa's going to be here, and I remember feeling like, no,
don't let her in here. I don't want her to
see me this way. I don't want this image I
think she has of me to be broken. I'm eight
years older than my sister, and so for our entire
life I was her brother, but there was sort of
(10:56):
like a paternal edge to my brother relationship with her.
I was always looking after her or taking care of her.
She's going to come into the hospital room and I'm
not going to be this hero version of myself wearing
the white uniform and the gold buttons and the metals
on my chest. I'm going to be laid up in
a hospital room with stitches all over myself and tubes
(11:17):
coming out, and I can't even get up to go
to the bathroom by myself. How am I going to
live up to this hero notion of myself when she
has to see me like this?
Speaker 1 (11:28):
What was it like when she finally came into your
hospital room.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yeah, she came in and I was expecting for her
to be sad or devastated or upset, and she wasn't.
She was none of those things. She was loving and
she held my hand. She said, it was so great
to see you, and I'm just so glad I have
the opportunity to be here with you, and I'm so
happy you're alive. And the way she embraced me in
(11:52):
that moment was really you know, kind of a paradigm
changing for me, realizing that this brother sister relationship wasn't
exactly what I thought it was. It wasn't that I'm
this hero, role model, kind of perternal figure for her.
How's her brother? And that's like unconditional love. She's going
(12:14):
to love me no matter what. She loves me when
I'm a hero, and she loves me when I can't
get out of bed, and I remember feeling unburdened. I
guess like to feel like she's not going to be
disappointed and I haven't let her down. In fact, I
think we're closer now as a result.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
So, Brad, about three weeks after you first arrived at
Walter Reed, you were then discharged and sent to a
hospital in Florida, which is where you grew up and
it was also where your mom still lived. Can you
tell me a bit more about this transition?
Speaker 2 (12:47):
So, I think at the tactical level, blindness is sort
of about like how do you do these normal things,
like you know, on a day to day basis. I
have to get up, I have to get dressed, I
have to feed myself, I have to brush my teeth,
I have to look presentable and I go out into
the world and I do a variety of things, and
that's very challenging. But all the while there's sort of
a bigger, more internal struggle about well, who am I?
(13:09):
Who am I? What is my identity? And much of
our identity revolves around what value do you bring to society?
And I felt like, up until that point in my life,
my value was this really elite capability as a bomb
disposal technician. There was a lot of prestige associated with
wearing the naval uniform, and I kind of ostensibly a badass, right,
(13:33):
So when I first started to wrap my head around
being hurt, I didn't want blindness to hold me back.
I wanted to burst out of that box as quickly
as possible. I don't want to be in the hospital.
I want to be moving as fast as possible. Where
am I going? I don't know, but I just want
to be moving. And so being discharged from wal to
Reed felt like progress, And in fact, there was a
(13:54):
lot of ups to being in Florida. The upside was
I was near my mom's house. So once I was
sufficiently healed, they started saying, you can go on essentially
like weekend pass, you know, you're an impatient during the week,
but when the weekend rolls around, none of the therapists
are here anyway, so you might as well go home
with your mom. And I thought, that's great, That's exactly
what I want to do. And the first Friday that
(14:15):
I was let out coincided with this recurring event in
downtown Saint Petersburg, where it's essentially a block party in
the kind of active area of the downtown. And somebody
had whispered to so and so to whisper to so
and so that this was going to be my opportunity
to get out of the hospital, and someone had arranged
it that the benefit of all the beers or whatever
sold would be a benefit to us my family in
(14:37):
my rehab. And everyone was there to celebrate me. It
was awesome, but there was It was an interesting sort
of dichotomy to what was going on.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
You know.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
On one hand, everyone was really excited that I was
alive and they were there to celebrate me and be
there for my family, but there was a very palpable
sadness to many of the people who are hugging me,
like I'm so happy you're alive, But boy, oh boy,
what is this blindness thing going to be like and
that I don't know that that was spoken, but it
(15:08):
was definitely felt.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Yeah, I read that there was someone at that event
who ended up changing your life from that point on.
Can you tell me more about this person?
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Yeah, interstage left my swim coach, Fred, who was a
very stoic, sort of gruff guy, had really pushed us
hard when we were young, and so it would have
been weird for him to come over and you know,
be huggy and cryy or whatever. And all he said was,
you know, Brad, it's great to see you. Hey, we
(15:39):
have practice tomorrow. Do you want to come to our practice?
And I felt like it was it was his way
of kind of trying to wrap his heads around the
uncertainty of the future. And his way was, you battle it,
just come come to practice and we're going to start
figuring this out. And I said, Yeah, this is my opportunity.
This is how I'm going to prove to myself, to you,
to my family, to all these people that everything is fine,
(16:01):
everything is the way it was. I just can't see it.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
We'll be back in a moment with a slight change
of plans. The day after the block party, Brad's mom
drove him to swim practice, something she'd done countless times
(16:28):
when he was a kid. His old swim coach, Fred
was waiting for him at the pool.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
He set up a pool noodle on the edge of
every lane so that when I'd get close to the wall,
I'd bump the pool noodle with my head so that
I wouldn't hit the wall. And when I'd bump the
pool noodle, I'd reach out with my arm and the
wall would be right there. And I was like this,
this is perfect. And getting into the pool was the
first time I felt like I could wrap my arms
around normal. This was me. I was free, and I
(16:57):
felt there's a future here and I'm going to find
my way. And I feel like for my mom and
other folks, they could see that what.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
Made you feel free in a way that you hadn't before.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
There's something about swimming. You know, it's a very sensory experience,
and it's a sensory experience that is not necessarily visual.
I mean, in fact, you know, growing up in Florida,
you know, the fashionable goggles at the time were these
little pieces of plastic you jam in your eye sockets
and the sun's always very shiny, and you actually can't
see that well anyway, And when you can see, all
(17:30):
you're staring at is a black line on the bottom
of the pool. Like, the visual component of swimming laps
is not its primary component. It's the feeling of water
going across your body and rotating across and pulling and
feeling powerful as you stroke over stroke over stroke. So
I jumped in and I felt graceful, I felt strong.
(17:51):
I felt like I had before, you know, I'd swam
so many laps in that exact pool. It felt like home.
It felt like me, and it didn't feel like a
constrained or compromised version of me. It felt like the
full expression of me. And to be able to have that,
even just for a moment stroking across that lane, it
(18:12):
gave me the confidence to say, yes, I'm going through
an epic transition, but it's gonna work. It's gonna be fine.
I am still me and I just got to keep
moving down this lane.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Yeah, it's kind of a big leap to go from
that initial swim to competing in the Paralympics. So tell me, Brad,
how did that all come to be?
Speaker 2 (18:34):
So I get a call from Rich Cardillo, a retired
Army colonel who worked at the Association of Blind Athletes,
whose job was to deliver resources to wounded vets suffering
from blindness to get into sports as a function of
the rehab. This idea of rehabbing vets through sports is
not a new one. In fact, just quick aside, the
(18:55):
genesis of the modern Paralympics came from a hospital in
the UK after World War Two, four wounded vets. They
actually created a set of small competitions as a function
of rehab, and the modern Paralympics grew out of that
after math of World War Two. And I remember Rich
called me. I was still in the hospital and he said, hey,
(19:16):
you were a good swimmer in college, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
I swam at the Naval Academy. I was captain of
the swim team. You were captain of the swim team
at the Naval Academy. Yeah, you know, you might be
pretty good at this Blind Paralympics thing. And oh, by
the way, we need to do this basically now, because
the last opportunity to qualify would be at the end
of February. So my Paralympic journey began, you know, before
i'd even really discharge from the hospital, because there was
(19:40):
a sense of urgency that if I wanted to compete
at all, I needed to start it right away.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
What did that training look like for you, Brad, I mean, like,
that's an extremely intense process to throw yourself in so
soon after such a massive physical and psychologically brutal injury.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
So I got really lucky. By twenty eleven, there were
a lot of resources available for wounded vets, specifically as
it pertains to sports, and I really benefited from the
specific efforts of the Commit Foundation that helped me find
my way to Brian Leffler at Loyola University, who had
this rare, nuanced expertise in how to coach a blind
(20:20):
swimming athlete in the Paralympics. He helped me learn a
variety of things, changing some of my stroke from the
way I used to swim to looking for the lane
line on either side with my arm strokes so that
instead of catastrophically crashing in and rumble stripping on my
shoulders and my side, I could delicately find the lane
line and just guide myself in the lane very gracefully
(20:42):
and fast without losing speed. That's in essence, like the
most frustrating thing about blind swimming. Accepting help was something
that was very uncharacteristic of me. I would not in
my previous life have done that. I would have said no, no, no,
I'll figure it out and I'm going to go do X,
Y and Z. I think there was sort of this
urgeoning acknowledgement that I do need help and I need
(21:03):
to be open to new opportunities and the council advice
and guidance of other folks, and I think in so
being open is what really allowed me to find that
new pathway. I think if I had been my previous
self and wasn't open to growth, I don't think I
would have gone anywhere.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
It's so important for us to talk about all those
moments in which you were forced to surrender some of
that autonomy and that independence in order to stay safe
and be healthy and survive. And so do you mind
talking a bit more about what that experience was like
of kind of owning the fact that you are now
on a team of sorts in your life generally and
(21:43):
then also within the pool.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
I think this sort of surrender, which I think is
a great word for it. I wouldn't have jumped to
that word because that's like a kind of trigger word
for a guy like me who's brought up in the
military and we're like, you know, the especially at the
Naval Academy with the don't give up the ship flag
being a big part of our historical legacy. This idea
(22:05):
of surrender is just like not in my DNA. So
to kind of wrap my head around giving up pieces,
surrendering pieces of this, what I would categorize is like
my fierce dedication to lone wolfness in my previous life
was not easy, and I recall a particular moment with
my mom. You know, the most challenging aspect of adapting
(22:29):
to blindness is the ability to get from point A
to point B. And the primary way that a blind
person does that it was with a blind cane. And
the way you use a blind cane as you tap
about two feet in front of you the place that
your foot is about to go. So I tap where
my left foot's going to go. Then I tap where
my right foot's going to go. And the idea is
if I encounter an obstacle or a curb or a
change in terrain, I'm going to hit it with my
(22:51):
cane and I can adjust, but as you might imagine,
like that's terrifying when you first start. And as I'm
navigating this learning how to find my way with the
blind cane, I had the benefit of my family participating
and being there for a lot of that. And at
one point where in the hospital, my mom is following
closely behind and she is at least as scared or
(23:15):
as nervous as I am in navigating this difficulty, standing
behind me, watching me trying to figure out where I'm
going and how to navigate and avoid all these obstacles,
and she just can't help herself from telling me, there's
a chair there, bred lookout, there's a column, You're coming
up on a left hand turn. And I was trying
to be patient with that and saying, you know what.
(23:36):
And she's doing this along with me. She needs to
learn as I do, and so I'm trying to do it.
But as I'm navigating this difficult situation, I'm getting a
little angsty to and at one point I remember growling.
I turned around. I said, Mom, you have to stop that.
You have to stop that, like I have to do this.
You can't follow me around for the rest of my life,
(23:57):
telling me what's in front of me. I have to
do this. This is me that I have to be
able to figure this out. And yeah, we're in this nice,
gentle hospital environment, but I'm not always going to be here.
What if I'm outside, What if I'm at the bus
stop and I'm trying figure out where the bus is.
You can't be there. I've got to figure this out.
And my tone was very like that, like growling at her,
(24:18):
and she was like okay, and she tried to settle
down and just be quiet, and I promptly turned around
and smacked my face into a big column.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
You know.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
The hospital had these big round columns. And I got
a hematoma and it burst open, bleeding on my forehead,
and I crumpled down on the ground and my mom
like comes hugs me and she's crying. She's like, I
can't watch you do that.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
I can't watch you do that.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
It's too hard.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
But also like an amazing told Yose moment for your mom.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
So yeah, it's exactly what the moment was. It was
a very humbling for me. I mean, I don't think
I don't feel unjustified in that feeling, you know, there
is a tension like, yeah, she has to give me
the space, but at the same time that space is
hard for her to give. You know, she let me
go once and I went out to war and I
came back all blown up, like, of course she's going
(25:07):
to be nervous to let me go again, and so
I you know, the lesson learned there, I think for
me was maybe I could do it before, Maybe I
could do the lone wolf military tough guy thing. I
can't anymore. I can't do that now. And for me
to succeed as a blind person, I'm gonna need to
let her in and she needs to be a part
(25:28):
of this journey. Yeah, I'm going to reclaim independence where
I can, but I need her help. I need her
here with me. That opens something up for me. That surrender,
letting her in, accepting the help allowed me to move
through the rest of that journey. You know, as a
blind swimmer, I don't do it by myself. My coach
(25:48):
is on the end and as I approached the wall,
he reaches out with a stick and a tennis ball
and taps me in the back to let me know
that my turn is right there. And at first I
wanted to figure it out by myself, but I can't
be the best blind summer I can be without help
from my coach.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
I'm so curious, Brad. You know, you talked about how
how your blindness essentially forced you to surrender to people
for their physical help and support, and I wonder whether
that had spillovers into your emotional life. So were you
more willing to lean on them for emotional support?
Speaker 3 (26:22):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (26:22):
I think my physical limitation makes me physically reliant and
dependent on other people for a variety of things. But
that opens up a new conduit or a channel for
that emotional support in a way that was probably inhibited
before by my own hubris. There is kind of a
it's like a new muscle, I guess in that sort
(26:44):
of emotional aspect of my life that was probably precipitated
by first the physical reliance on everybody else.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
So, Brad, you ended up making it to the twenty
twelve Paralympic Games, where you'd be representing the United States,
and the date is pretty special.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Yeah, you know, I thought, oh, this will be a
great thing to just go do, but I really wasn't
building up too much in my mind. But as we
got closer and closer to the games, getting ready for
the race on September seventh, twenty twelve, there was kind
of a feeling of this is actually manifesting to be
very extraordinary. I'm having the opportunity to swim in the
(27:23):
Paralympics for Team USA on the exact year anniversary of
the day I lost my vision. But along with that,
while that was kind of exciting, it was also pretty scary. Yeah,
there was a feeling of, well, what if I screw
this up, what if I false start, what if I crash,
what if I start going down? All these millions of
things that could happen. So it started to feel, you know,
(27:46):
the tension of the moment started to escalate, especially as
we got right up to the beginning of the race.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Yeah, so tell me about that race. Tell me about
that moment.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
For me, when the gun goes off, my mind goes away.
There's no ego, you just do. And that's how that
race unfolded. I just did. I just dove off and
just swam. In blind sports, It's very unique because I
touched the wall, but I don't immediately know what happened,
so I had to wait for a while. It was
(28:16):
a little bit of a delay. I have to wait,
and there's the moment. It's exciting that the crowd is
cheering and there's adrenaline it and it feels incredible. But
you don't know, is this moment excitement because of me?
I don't know. Is it because someone else did something
else happened? Did the race actually happen? Is you have
to wait for a while and then finally the referee
blows the whistle and that means the race is over.
(28:38):
And at that point they want to stick it out.
And according to the rules of international competition in the Paralympics,
at that point my coach can legally talk to me.
And at that point he leaned over and he said
two words I'll never forget. He said, you won. I
won a gold medal in the Paralympics on the year
anniversary of the day I lost my vision in Afghanistan.
And now I know in that arena all that like
(28:59):
amazing excitement and energy and glitz and glam, it's because
of me. I won. And I'm up on this. It's cool, it.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Is really cool. I'm so gratified that you had that
kind of moment. It's just it's amazing to even hear about.
Can you take me back to the podium after your
gold metal win? What was going through your mind in
that moment.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
So that energy and that venue and that crowd is
like the coolest thing in the world because they're all
cheering for you. They watched you swim, and they're all
moved by you, and that that energy is really incredible.
And I remember waving and they cheered because I waved
and I got so excited, and then I'd wave again
(29:45):
and they'd cheer.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
It was just the same.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
It's almost indescribable thing. There's no words in my mind
other than just joy, like this is just this is
I'm just tickled, like it's really a golden moment. And
all of a sudden, before you really processed what's going on,
they announce, you know, winning the gold medal for the
United States, Brad Schnyder, and you're just kind of like
pushed up there and just smiling and cheering, and there's
(30:08):
this big, loud music and before you know it, there's
someone telling you to bend over so they can put
the metal around your neck and the bouquet of flowers.
And it's an incredible thing because it's just kind of
like you're at the center of the universe. But what
was equally is incredible is that moment goes away like that,
because all of a sudden, the room gets quiet, and
(30:30):
everyone stands up, and they start playing our anthem, and
they raise our flag higher than all the other flags
in the arena, and all the eyes go from the
podium to the flag.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
It's just this.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Really dramatic transition of focus. And that's exactly what happened
to me. I went from being the center of the
universe to now thinking about all the people who are
a part of my journey, from Adam and Kyle, the
guys on the battlefield who dusted me off and got
me to a helicopter where the pilot put their aircraft
(31:08):
and their flight crew at risk to land in an
ied laden zone, to take me to the hospital where
a surgeon spent twelve hours putting my face back together.
To my mom, who got the call at five point
thirty in the morning saying her son had been blown up.
He has a traumatic brain injury. Potentially we won't be
able to speak to him for a few days. We
needed to get to Maryland as quickly as possible, to
(31:30):
my siblings who wrapped their arms around my mom and
got her through those trying circumstances. To Brian Leffler, who
helped me figure out how to swim straight, to my
friends and colleagues who got to watch that race from
places like a rack in Afghanistan. There was this incredible
feeling of connection to all of these people, and I
recognized that, you know, while I'm the one who gets
(31:52):
to have the medal around my neck, none of it
was possible if it weren't for all of those touches.
So all the uses of the puzzle were so integral
in that success, and feeling that, acknowledging that and being
at the center of that is what truly made the
podium moment special.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this
conversation with Brad, make sure to check out the other
episodes in our Olympic series, including my conversation with swimmer
Missy Franklin, and next week we'll finish the series with
user Mardini. Usura fled civil war in Syria as a teenager,
and after a harrowing journey to safety, competed on the
(32:50):
first Olympic Refugee Team. If you enjoyed this conversation, we
on the Slight Change team would be so grateful if
you could share the episode with someone you know. It
helps us get the word out so we can keep
making more episodes for you. Thanks so much and see
you next week. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written,
(33:19):
and executive produced by me Maya Shunker. The Slight Change
family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate
Parkinson Morgan, our senior producer Trisha Bobida, and our engineer
Eric o'kwang. Luis Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and
Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of
(33:39):
Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so a big
thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special
thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change
of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Shunker. See you
next week.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
The the
Popular Podcasts
1. Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
2. Stuff You Missed in History Class
Join Holly and Tracy as they bring you the greatest and strangest Stuff You Missed In History Class in this podcast by iHeartRadio.
3. Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.