November 18, 2024 • 60 mins
A masked man known as Delta Forks (found all throughout this LinkTree: (https:// linktr.ee/DeltaForks) talks about losing opportunity and a large swath of his self-esteem while trying to join the US military.
Music by Guilherme Silva (On Fiverr: https://www.fiverr.com/guimoraes)
Official Intro by Suzana J (Her website: https://www.suzanasvoice.com/)
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Fun fact, I don't know how to do math, and I thought that if I did from April to December,
(00:07):
that that's eight months, but if you counted on your fingers like I did seven times to
try to get it right, that's nine months.
So I shorted myself a podcast episode, and I really thank you for that.
You're welcome.
Welcome to It's Your Lost podcast, where raw stories of resilience and healing are told,
(00:29):
while uncovering and destigmatizing the diverse symptoms of loss.
Welcome back to the podcast.
If you missed last month's episode, well, it's your loss.
I'm host Michael LeBlanc, and I have with me here DeltaForks.
That's his name.
Nobody questioned it.
I'm going to call him D. He looks very tactical.
(00:53):
He sounds very tactical.
And my God is his hair amazing.
D, how are you doing today?
I'm doing pretty good.
Thanks for the compliment.
It's longer than I normally have it.
So if I'm brushing it out of the way, I'm not flexing or anything.
It's a good swoop.
It's a good swoop.
I'm just jealous because I'm just rapidly losing the top of my hair, and I thought that
(01:14):
I wouldn't be going bald like my father, but I am.
So I'm taking my loss and turning it into compliments for anybody who I think has got
some good stuff going on.
Also, it's just good to start with a compliment.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm going gray, but you can't really see it.
I'm going gray in weird places.
Like obviously on the bottom of my beard, I'm going gray, but like I'm getting these
(01:35):
weird hairs right here on the ridge of my nose that grow out really quick, very thick.
So like I noticed like I go to scratch and like something's like rubbing against my finger.
So I pluck those.
Those are white as the driven snow.
I, there's no evolutionary advantage to that.
I have no idea why that's happening to me.
(01:55):
I've been, I've been going gray over white hair.
Since I was 13.
Oh, here and there.
But now it's starting to poke up in my beard and everything like that.
Even though it's really short, you can't really see it.
No, no, I can't.
I can't.
It's the mystery under there.
The mystery, the national man of mystery, I guess.
It's just kind of been something I've always known was going to happen.
Yeah.
(02:15):
I don't want to steal too much from other people's podcasts, but there's this one that
I really enjoy.
And in fact, we talked about this a little bit earlier before this episode.
And that's Josh's last meals and one of the things that he asks, and I've been meaning
to kind of just weave it into mine because it kind of just fits so well with it.
How often do you think about death?
(02:36):
Not super often, but not, not often.
I don't know what the normal amount is.
I don't know if there is one.
Maya, I guess I have a weird relationship with my own mortality.
We'll probably get into it later, but the short answer is that I don't really care.
Yeah.
We're going to have to come back to that one.
So first things first, we're going to dive in into things that you've lost and everything.
(02:59):
And I'll go ahead and ask all the pertinent questions.
And we'll talk about that.
This is a podcast about loss after all with the pieces of information that you gave me,
the same place that I have people sign up over there at sittingwithyou.com, forward slash
podcast.
Go over there.
If you want to be a part of my podcast as being a guest on the episode, there was a shorter
way to say that, I'm sure.
Sounded good to me.
(03:20):
Oh, thanks.
I ask people what their favorite game is.
Sometimes that gives me the chance to play like a virtual board game with somebody like
I got to play a battleship on paper back and forth with somebody.
But I don't know how I'd be able to play this with you during the podcast because one, I
don't have a PlayStation and two, I would just be distracted all hell.
(03:42):
No conversation would actually happen.
You enjoy hell divers.
I bought it day one and suffered through the, well, I say suffered, but they suffered from
their own success.
And I've been a pretty big supporter of the developers since it's come out, mostly because
it's such a good, like they're good to their customers.
(04:04):
No, it seems like it.
And I appreciate that when some of the other games I play, they hate me or they just want
your money like most of the others.
I guess probably one of the more interesting things is while they were having several problems,
I got frustrated and started converting all of the stuff into D&D, not D&D itself, but
(04:26):
I think my statement was I'm going to play this game one way or another.
One of the things that I like is when people enjoy an IP, they turn it into their own tabletop
playing game because tabletop role playing has been a huge part of like keeping me sane
as you could find out like in my book.
Here it is right here, a dink D&D in the coffin hold of the USS enterprise.
(04:46):
There's going to be an ad read for that later audience.
So listen for that.
There's some river world, which was turned into a really good tabletop.
And then there's this one system called aberrant, which you basically you just use a percent
dice, you could turn that in pretty much anything.
And that was really cool.
So yeah, I could see where that could definitely be a good passion project turning that into
(05:11):
to a D&D esque type style.
I have a quiz here that popped up at the top of my Google feed.
So it's got to be the best.
And it's called How much do you know about Hell Divers to so queue up the game music.
And we're just going to go ahead and run through this.
We got two and a half minutes to go through these questions.
And hopefully it won't take that long.
(05:32):
All right.
First and foremost, who is the publisher of the Hell Divers series?
We can do multiple.
Okay.
You already know.
All right.
Cool.
We got that.
Let's see.
Oh, according to this, you got that wrong.
It was Sony.
I'm starting to guess the developer was.
Yeah.
Okay.
Good.
I'm starting to guess the validity of this quiz.
(05:53):
Hell Divers series takes heavily heavy inspirations from this one.
I know.
Stars of Troopers.
Absolutely.
So much so that Liberation Day is October 26.
And that's when the book was published.
By the way, did you know that?
I found that out today.
I did that.
Who is the creative director of the game series?
(06:16):
I have multiple choice if you need it.
It should be Pielstad or something like that.
Pielstad.
I have Johan Pielstad.
Correct answer.
Good job.
What kind of game is the first Hell Divers title?
It's Top Down.
Top Down Shooter.
Correct.
You are, you're killing it, my guy.
(06:37):
Except for the first one.
Except for the first one.
Yeah, Hell Divers 2 includes a permanent blank feature.
I'll give you multiple questions here.
We have unlimited ammo, difficulty scale, death.
They spelled difficulty wrong, by the way.
I just want to point that out.
And Friendly Fire.
Well, Friendly Fire is always on here.
(06:57):
So I would go with that.
Yeah.
And they said that they're never going to change it because it's part of the charm of the
game and also to recode that would be a nightmare.
What is the fictional planet in Hell Divers called?
What, Super Earth?
Super Earth.
It's the only one that makes sense because the first one's Tatooine and I went, I know
that's not right.
Yeah.
What game engine does it use?
(07:19):
It's Unreal.
Unreal 4 or 5?
Oh, I don't know.
I would go with 4.
5 is...
4.
We're doing 4.
It was the Autodesk Stingray.
Okay.
Yeah, that seems wrong.
What year did the first Hell Divers game release?
2015, I think.
(07:40):
Correct.
And what kind of game is Hell Divers 2?
It's a third person.
Third person shooter.
We have two seconds left.
Did we answer all of them in time?
We did not.
Unfortunate.
We're not real gamers.
We're not real gamers.
We got a total of 70 points.
How about a nice cup?
This is what you've earned, this statement.
(08:02):
You can go ahead and print this on.
It's yours now.
You can do whatever you want.
How about a nice cup of Liberty?
All right.
Good job.
What's the only certificate that I've ever got that I can't print out?
I'll send you a Google Doc of it.
But no.
So yeah, the game looks amazing.
(08:22):
A lot of people have been enjoying it.
Some people are kind of divided on the whole Liberty aspect of it.
In fact, I saw a Reddit post while I was doing kind of like a dive into figuring out how
I was going to introduce Helldivers into this episode where they're like, can we dial down
the democracy?
I'm like, I don't think you get the point.
I don't think you get the point of why democracy is.
(08:44):
A, democracy is, that sounds treasonous.
It does.
But B, satire is a thing.
It is.
You can tell people who didn't watch or didn't understand Starship Troopers when this game
first came out.
Because people were like, oh God, it's so farcical.
It's so in your face.
(09:06):
And then people who didn't know about Starship Troopers started hearing about Starship Troopers
and they were like, oh my God, they ripped this off on my people.
Satire is a thing.
And it really depends.
They went more with the movie than the book.
Because the, is it Paul Verhoeven?
Was the director of the movie?
(09:28):
This historical experience is, because he's from Denmark, I believe.
And their experience from World War II kind of colored his view of the book.
Yeah, I could see that.
The book was very pro-military.
It was a little on the nose.
It might have been, it could have been satire on its own, right?
(09:49):
But it was very like pro-service, pro civil servant ship.
And the movie was like, oh man, this is fascist.
The game is just like, just, you know, we're going to go free the shit out of some bugs.
Yeah, right.
You're part of it.
You're so much of a part of it that you don't know anything else.
What's really cool is watching people play it and then like the behind the scenes story
(10:14):
that they're telling with like some of the placements of the dead bodies, the propaganda
that's being shown and everything like that.
And you know, there are some people, like the moments where they go, wait a minute,
are we the bad guys?
No, we're not the bad guys.
No, we're not the bad guys.
We can't be the bad guys.
We can't be the bad guys.
We're literally liberating this planet.
(10:36):
You're a defrosted 18, almost 19 year old kid that just got dropped onto a planet and
was eaten by a bug.
Your life existed for five minutes.
It's, if as many veteran friends as I have, I mean, I think the quote is the United States
figured out that worshiping veterans is better than taking care of them.
Yeah.
(10:57):
It's an unfortunate thing.
And I have, you know, not for lack of trying, but I wasn't a veteran or I'm not a veteran,
but I have a lot of friends that are.
Right.
And their experience is very widely, but that's kind of one of the things that they can all
kind of, they haven't put it into words because I think a comedian made that quote.
(11:19):
Yeah.
So I can't claim it.
I could remember who it was, but it's too true.
It's unfortunate.
I've seen, I've seen a couple of different sides when it came to people being taken care
of by the VA or being put on hold forever for a health thing.
(11:40):
And VA is our only health choice.
So they just basically have to suffer until they get to it.
But I think really it's kind of luck of the draw when you walk into that building on what's
going to happen.
I think I myself lost pretty much all of my VA benefits for the way that I got out of the
military.
It's called an other than honorable.
It's paperwork, a paperwork discharge is they just basically strip everything of you and
(12:02):
then like kick you out the door and it's like, all right, go with God.
And I looking back on it, the way that I acted, which was like a really stressed out early
twenties, older teens kid who was married and trying to balance in military.
I, I put too much myself quickly and the military didn't care about that.
(12:25):
They were just like, you're not, you're not performing.
Right.
So I don't blame them.
I did when I first got out.
Sure.
Pretty bitter, pretty sour, but yeah, no anymore.
But let's let's not worry about my loss right now.
Let's worry about yours.
All right, so the first thing I'm going to ask is, I don't know exactly what you remember
(12:49):
when you filled out the form, but I'll go ahead and ask you, D, what have you lost?
So my childhood was not that bad.
I mean, it was kind of average.
I kind of grew up without us, without much of a sense of hope, but that's not what I
lost.
I grew up with very like realistic.
(13:11):
I grew up real poor and I grew up, you know, my parents didn't sugarcoat it.
You know, they, I never went hungry.
They might have gone hungry.
I don't really know if they did.
They never showed it, but my family kind of fell apart when I turned 18.
And after, after that, I kind of, I feel like my purpose was lost because I, not for lack
(13:35):
of trying, I was, I did attempt to join the military.
It's supposed to be a combat medic.
And I, through either a failing in the system or my own failing, I had a back injury that
nobody knew about.
And it turns out when you're supposed to be a combat medic, you're supposed to be able
to fire and carry somebody.
Yeah.
And put their body weight plus 60, 70 pounds of infantry gear.
(13:59):
It turns out I couldn't do that.
And they got real mad at, you know, it's the military, you know, it's some, it's an
uncaring machine.
Sure.
And is a, in an undisclosed time between 2010 and 2015, they were, which is, you know, middle
and middle into GWAT.
(14:20):
So they, they, they were more cared about getting bodies in there.
And I think it was, whether they thought I was just being a quitter or not, it's here
nor there, but I either just wasn't tough enough to deal with the injury or I was just
too hurt, probably both.
But it was just, I think there's no way to prove it, but it's just in like, almost like
(14:45):
a, you know, with something, you know, pulling on your spirit a little bit, like, I think
I was supposed to like take a bullet for somebody or save somebody.
Sure.
Then either that didn't happen.
So like, I wouldn't say that I feel like a sense of a newie afterwards, just kind of
that listlessness.
Yeah.
But it's, I don't know, it's just something that didn't happen that I feel like it was
(15:09):
supposed to happen.
Okay.
And then kind of after that, you know, you, you, you pick up and do what you have to afterwards
and you have to make money.
Yeah.
And then a lot, my family fell apart further after that instead of just being kind of fractured,
it just fell apart totally after that.
And then I was left to take care of a couple of family members, all of my own.
(15:33):
It was a parent and then a grandparent at the same time.
And my siblings were nowhere to be found.
My parents got a divorce shortly after I terminated my enlistment contract in an undisclosed year.
And so that sucked.
And then I got a job that was really good at the beginning.
(15:56):
I struggled to say I shouldn't have taken it because the money was pretty good.
And I learned a lot, but it murdered my social life.
Okay.
None of that's ever really recovered.
So not to be too morbid, but like, I think I'm probably still here just out of spite.
You mean here on planet Earth?
Yeah.
(16:16):
Out of spite?
Okay.
I'm just like, the universe isn't going to get me.
Like they don't, they don't get to determine when I go.
Got you.
There, there's something to be said for having a spirit of, you know, middle finger to the
stairs, like, you know, you can fuck you, you tried, you know, what is it?
Like in the military, there was the acronym leadership.
(16:39):
And it just had, I forget what all of it lasts.
I haven't heard, I haven't heard that in a while.
So much that I forgot that I just remember the small acronyms like FTN, fuck the Navy.
It might have been an army thing, but there's this thing called leaderships.
And it all it is just the acronym, the army values.
Yeah.
And it just adds S on the end and S stands for spite.
(17:03):
And it turns out spite gets a lot of shit done.
spite.
It does.
It does.
It's, it got me started into content creation.
It got me not, you know, taking your sewer slide.
It gets it done.
And I try to, you know, not be like full hate mode with it.
But you know, it's, it's my personal freedom to make that decision.
(17:27):
If you basically attacking the world with spite, hey, look what I can do.
I can do this in spite of everything else.
Is that your main method of coping?
Or do you have something else?
I think you mentioned self-deprecated humor is also in your bag, which there ain't no
humor and like self-deprecating humor, like no other humor I know.
(17:52):
So I kind of defer back to my childhood.
My dad is really funny.
And my mom is really funny and my sister is really funny.
Both of my sisters are really funny.
But I grew up in a family that if you weren't funny or had like a keen wit, you were locked
all over.
So I learned to be my sister humor.
(18:13):
And then, you know, if you've seen any of my stuff online, I'm reasonably tame, but
I'm not like that in real life.
I have a vicious sense of humor.
I have, I have made grown men cry.
I have affected negative mental states on people ongoing.
I have just a constant, what is it, vicious mockery?
Just spilling out of you.
Is that what's happening here?
(18:34):
It's like, I have like the ability, it was instilled in pretty much everybody in my
family that you, if you couldn't fight back verbally, you were just, you're not bullied,
but you're made to feel it.
You were made to feel it.
It's okay to say your family bullies you.
If anything, your family bullies you before a good family, I think gives you a little
(18:58):
bit of bullying before you go out and get bullied by the world because kind of let you
know, it's like, Hey, if you think we're rough, it's just going to get worse out there.
So you need to learn to kind of spar a little bit.
You get toughened up and it builds character.
You know, the things that like parents will say, especially from this geographic region
is a full gambit and then having ADHD kind of gave me anger problems as a kid.
(19:26):
Both of my parents have a temper.
I have a temper.
I tend to, I describe it as a fury of that lightning because it's there and it's gone.
It's mostly why I've avoided physical altercations because I don't, I don't, I don't want to snap
on somebody and end up in jail.
You guys can't see it, but I'm too pretty to be in jail.
Yeah, that's kind of hard to, it's kind of hard to spite your way out of the moment.
(19:47):
Yeah, it's the moment that they put you in there.
Also, I'm not, I'm not trying to spite somebody to hurt somebody.
I'm just, that's not my target.
It's just kind of like, like a lot of my friends, and I guess people in their early 20s and stuff
like that, they usually have a lifeline, like there's somebody to bail them out if something
goes wrong.
I didn't have that.
In fact, I was, I was the lifeline for other people.
(20:10):
And a lot of ways I'm tired of living through, you know, historic events and it never makes
anything easier.
It's always harder.
If anything, I'm glad that I'm kind of lucky, but it's going to run out eventually.
And I'm one, I'm just kind of waiting for that.
So it's just kind of the whole spite thing.
It's probably a oversimplification of it or, and it might be making it too aggressive,
(20:37):
but it's just, life's not going to get me down.
And I've, I've come up through some pretty rough times in my adult life and I'm, I can
give it right back.
It's a good mindset to have.
I do want to say you're kind of bringing up a couple of things that I heard from my therapist
as one is like, you know, parents are also supposed to be at a certain point, you're
(21:01):
safe space.
My mom and dad would sometimes forget that when it comes to like some of the jabs and
whatnot, and she says, maybe that's why, you know, you, you have the kind of relationships
that you are, that you have right now.
And she's yet to go fully deep into why I'm pretty sure that's going to be, you know,
(21:23):
further on down the line.
Can't wait to dig into that.
Loss of something that is not physical is definitely something that is still a loss.
You will wind up going through the five stages on your own terms.
Sometimes it takes a long time.
Sometimes it's quick, depending on how much of a value that had in your life.
(21:43):
And then again, sometimes those, those stages only show up way later.
Like you don't even deal with them at all.
Talking with a friend of mine who just recently lost his mom and his dad actually all within
a couple of months.
He was saying that he hasn't cried and he cried more at his friend's funeral, which
happened a couple of years ago than he has now.
(22:05):
And he started beating himself up mentally over the phone is like, you know, why am I
such a piece of shit?
What's wrong with me?
And I'm like, dude, you grief doesn't happen like that.
It's not, it's not something that is predictable.
It doesn't land the same way every time.
It's not even shaped the same way.
It doesn't feel the same way.
He's like, it will happen.
And if the more that you are open and you get the anxieties, even the anxiety of not
(22:30):
feeling grief, that more that you get that out, the more there will be healing.
You just won't notice it until later.
Right.
That's part of the reason why I do this podcast.
In general, there are a lot of people out there.
I was talking to somebody the other day who just now started processing the stuff that
happened to him when they were 15 years old and they're like in their early 40s, late
(22:51):
30s.
I don't know.
I didn't ask.
It wasn't proper to ask.
You never ask a lady her age.
But it's something I say down here.
Yeah.
But it all comes out in its own time.
Having said the career loss, let's go ahead and just start talking about that first and
we'll work around to other things.
The military is something that it sounded like that you were really excited about the
(23:12):
prospect of getting into.
Am I wrong?
It was something that I don't come from a military family or anything like that, or
even a family that has a whole lot of civil service.
I think my grandfather was a lawyer and my great grandfather was a Supreme Court judge
of the state.
(23:32):
Wow.
So not federal.
Like I'm not from that kind of family.
I mean, still.
Yeah.
I never met him, but I've heard a lot of stories about him.
My family is very good at telling stories, at least my father side of my family.
I'm reasonably close to.
It was something that I was excited about.
(23:54):
It was probably the first time that my family was out and out proud of me for something,
something I did instead of just being a smart kid.
Because I'm really smart and I don't flex those wings that much.
Mostly not in public, mostly because people just don't like it.
So I'll quietly be smart quietly in a corner and be like, that's not how that worked.
(24:19):
If someone's talking about history or physics or something like that, that's not how that
works.
But I won't tell them how that doesn't work.
I just I'm like, I'll just I'll be like, okay, I know how that works because it's a tangent.
But I can do algebra in my head when I was in high school.
Sure.
And I used to get in trouble for it for not putting it all like they would make you write
down your work.
You're speaking my language.
(24:40):
Is this that conversation about somebody had the other day?
Teachers don't like that.
No.
And I would get the answer kind of from here.
Yeah, I learned.
I did what you taught me to do.
Why are you mad at me?
Why are you bullying me?
I'm right.
In the words of Hannibal Bress.
But to go on to the work thing, it was something that my family was proud of me for.
(25:02):
And when it didn't work out, I didn't.
My grandfather flipped my dad kind of flipped for like a weird reason.
My dad flipped because of my grandfather flipping and because my grandfather was like, he's
never going to get a job and like I didn't get dishonorable.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I just cut a contract.
(25:22):
I'm like, I don't know why everyone's flipping out.
I think they did some bragging to their friends.
And then they had to go back and say, oh, hey, that never worked out or just never talk about
it again.
And then they ask about it later.
And then your grandfather's like, it was a bad back.
I don't even know, man.
(25:43):
Well, my grandfather was an Olympic Javon thrower and played football in college.
So like, and then he was a lawyer.
The fathers in your family are getting shit done.
That's what I hear.
It's weird.
Like, and then my dad's a truck driver.
Okay.
There was there was there's a certain there's a certain kind of marathon running spirit
(26:05):
you have to have to be a proper truck driver.
So the biggest lesson that was hammered into me when I was a kid, like every family, like
teaches the sons like a lesson.
This is what makes you a man or however, you know, right or wrong.
But the lesson that I was taught is your work ethic defines your worth, which as an adult,
(26:26):
I'm like, maybe that's not the healthiest thing.
But it's like, it's even though I'm not the healthiest thing, I will sacrifice everything
for work.
It's definitely an economic America type thing.
Like something that was told and that a lot of us now are very getting very disillusioned
with we're like, no, that that sounds horrible.
That makes us just horrible humans.
(26:46):
No wonder everyone's looking at the previous generations and going, man, you guys, your
priorities were forked.
But I had, I mean, I have a very good work ethic.
Most buses that I've ever had love me because I will work myself to death for them.
And that's kind of that's led to some problems, mostly boundaries and stuff like that.
(27:10):
And it's so, I mean, it's just it's the experience of yourself and your 20s.
It's like you work yourself to death to get a little bit and then you establish yourself
and then you realize you still have a whole lot to go off.
Yeah.
And then my current like the military was something I wanted to do to get back to it.
Maybe he's kicking in.
So I'm trying to focus.
It's all good.
(27:31):
You didn't go that far.
It's fine.
I don't know whether they thought I was I was a quitter or I've taught with other veterans
about it.
And I don't think I've ever had like a negative reaction from them.
Mostly it's like, it's like, there's like, hey, those dudes were just assholes.
They failed you.
Sure.
I don't fully agree with that because they made some points that were very harsh that
(27:56):
made too much sense.
And they were probably trying to motivate me and it just didn't hit the way they wanted
it to because it was the one that sticks in my in my head was.
And it's still he was now granted.
This is a six that got shot in the head and half game state.
Wow.
You couldn't tell.
(28:18):
And when he told me what he was, you know, that far from my face screaming at me.
And this is before I was government property, mind you.
And he was, you know, as a medic that couldn't lift somebody or a future medic that couldn't
lift somebody.
And he was like, what, you know, to quote, what the fuck am I supposed to do when I'm
shooting at some dickhead on the mountain?
(28:39):
And I have, I can't come fucking help you carry this guy when he got it.
Someone's going to get killed.
And unfortunately it's not going to be.
So, you know, that that turns some levels.
Oh, shit.
I'm fucked up.
I mean, yeah.
But I write, but still.
(29:01):
That hurts.
I had some things thrown at me while I was in the military, ranging from everything to
how I will never be somebody who gives anything of value in the naval nuclear scene to why is
your wife with you because you are a waste of effort.
(29:26):
And to make me realize that the, a lot of that was coming out of places out of one anger,
unresolved anger that they have in a situation that they're in.
And to the culture that they're raised up in if they're in there long enough, it seeps into
them, it becomes a part of them, which looking back on it, I'm glad that I learned what I
(29:50):
did out of leadership, because I had a couple of good leaders in there that weren't telling
me that, you know, I was a waste of the human genome.
And I took a lot out of that, which I hope, I hope that kind of help that helped you to
like I feel like anybody who gets out of the military at a certain point, especially early,
(30:12):
they get what they can out of it that was positive.
And they go forward with that.
Have a lot of respect for people that do make it.
Yeah, on a physical level just because the first job I wasn't the medic was a
first thing I was supposed to have I was supposed to be military intelligence.
But in the infinite races of the United States government, you can't do that and be colorblind.
(30:35):
I didn't know I was colorblind until I went to meps.
You learned a lot about yourself in meps.
Yeah, military entrance program for those of you don't know.
Yeah, it was.
Yeah, the civilian doctor was like, Hey, dude, you're colorblind.
I'm like, what?
I went to art school and explain some other stuff about art school.
(30:56):
But it was like, no, you're rendering colorblind.
I'm like, what does that mean?
It's what you can't have the OS they sent me here for.
And I'm like, ah, yeah, I was supposed to be a 35 Mike, which in the army is human,
human intelligence, which kind of my interview is called human because that was something
I really wanted to do.
(31:17):
And they're like, no, you can't do that.
Let's let's go pick another one.
I'm like, okay, fine.
There goes a $20,000 signing bonus.
Okay, great.
Fantastic.
Well, you can be an MP or you can be a medic.
And I'm like, ah, and though when you get an LPN license out of basic training, so you
can go do that after the military.
And I'm like, oh, okay.
(31:39):
They were really good about reminding you what you could do afterwards.
Like, you know, trying to trying to lead up, you know, as far as if you do this, it'll
set you up for later.
Yeah.
And that was that was nice.
The only thing you needed at that point was the ability and the physical ability to have
the follow through and be able to see that.
Right.
(32:00):
And I think this like my recruiter, my original recruiter was awesome.
I got handed off to somebody else that they fucking hated me.
They were both infantry.
My original recruiter was it was a paratrooper.
He was pretty chill.
The first words he ever spoke to me was never get married.
Don't ever get married.
(32:21):
He'd had an argument with his wife that morning.
It was just made me laugh.
And the second impression I got him, it was they tried those government cars at the recording
stations like they fucking stole them.
He drove up a state highway, like 80 miles an hour weaving in an amateur.
I don't know.
Cool, man.
(32:42):
This is fantastic.
Like we're going.
I did really well on the as Vab.
I guess you have to be to be a M.I. or a medic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or a Navy nuke.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You had to do well.
You had to do well.
They're happy with my numbers.
I don't know how I don't remember exactly my scores, but I know my GT score and normal score
(33:03):
was over 107.
Yeah.
And my other recruiters, one was he was a staff sergeant.
I won't use his name and he had been shot in the head.
And you couldn't tell and he was getting out of the military.
Military Army recruiters fucking hate their job.
It's a volatile situation.
Most of them, yeah.
(33:25):
The other one fell off of through a building in Afghanistan with a 27 pound machine gun
on his back.
Fucked his back up worse than mine was.
So I got no sympathy for my back from him, which explains something years later now.
And he, his first advice was me, if you ever get picked to be a recruiter, do something
and get in trouble to get demoted.
You don't want this.
(33:47):
Roger.
It was about the only thing I could say to him at that point because you just don't expect
that.
And you know, I was, I was still a civilian at the time, but I was so like wrapped up like,
I'm going to do this.
Like I, I referred to them by rank.
They didn't hate it.
I don't think they loved it.
And then so I went, I did the thing.
You come back from meps and they had at the time, what was called future so soldier is
(34:11):
basically these went back two days a week to PT the shit out of you.
Okay.
Um, mostly probably because they hated you and they hated them.
So that whole unresolved anger.
I got that at the time.
Like I understood that they don't like me because they're having a bad demo.
I get it.
It's not personal, but I'm also going through some stuff.
Uh, it was, ah, it was rough.
I was like, wait a minute and it was just basically like,
(34:34):
it went from bad that I couldn't firemen carry and did like the guy that,
the staff sergeant.
Uh, was like, what's your MOS?
I knew it was coming.
And I said it and he, he stopped in the middle of yelling and at the rest of the
group to me, who was off to the side doing flutter kicks.
And he basically lifted me by my shirt because there was, there was no like,
(34:57):
resisting.
It was just like, Hey, I'm, I'm a back.
Oh, no.
help you with that, Dukehead. When I'm, you know, someone's gonna get killed. After that,
I think they pt'd the shit out of me so hard that I passed out. Because there was in a strip
mall. So it was like, there's that road behind it. I was like, Hey, I'm gonna go throw up and
they're like, cool. Don't get it on yourself. And I'm like, Okay, cool. So I got to throw up and pass
(35:21):
out as everybody else is going home. No one comes looking for me. I walk back into the recruiting
stage. And the one of the other recruiters that I didn't interact with much is like,
what happened to you? And I was like, I passed out sergeant and it's like, Oh, close that door.
Yeah. And then I went home. Then I think a couple weeks later,
(35:44):
when they found out, Oh, hey, you have a back injury. I think I passed out standing up once.
Not for lack of physical exertion. I wasn't always a fat ass. I just got old and fat. And then they
threatened to punch me in the face. And I think at that point, they ran me until I threw up,
hanging out the side of a car once. It was an overall unpleasant experience. Like, I understand
(36:09):
the medic is important. You want him to be able to do his job. Right. So I don't hold what happened to
me, like personally against them. But I also recognize that that's not the way that I was
supposed to do. Like, yeah, my original recruiter, the paratrooper was like, Hey, because I was like,
Hey, I have like a little bit of a back injury. They knew that going in. They signed it off like,
(36:33):
Hey, sure, what back injury? And I was like, Okay, cool. That's how this is. Several things of
medical history just kind of disappeared. Yeah, exactly. Whatever they whatever they can do to
to move you forward. Right. And which at the beginning, I was appreciative of, you know,
Hey, you're helping me, you know, do the thing that I feel called to do. Cool. Oh, wait, not like
(36:57):
that. If I had known that this is what it's going to be, I just would have taken the deep, you know,
the, the, what's it the DQ the disc wall, right, right. And I would have been, you know, better off
at the end. And I just would have gotten the job. Signing the termination for my contract was
probably the worst. I wasn't sure what was going to happen to me. So I brought a witness.
(37:19):
Okay. And then I was grilled by a whole bunch of people from like E five to E seven. And I got a
call from an O three later that day. My God. Yeah, they really did not want me to terminate that
contract. Which I mean, getting the government the recant on anything like that. It's, it's
pretty normal. It went from like, the NCO screaming at me to like, the later on that day, the captain
(37:44):
like, trying to sweet talk me back into it. And I was just like, I know what's going to happen if
I walk back in there and they're going to bug and kill me. Right. Like it's already been clear that
this isn't something that I should do. Like being a medic, like I was a little bit concerned that
I was going to get someone killed. And unfortunately it wasn't going to be me to mirror that guy's
words, which in my age now is unhealthy. Yes. Yes, it is. And it's important. I think it's
(38:13):
important to realize that, but yeah, definitely. I'm pretty self aware psychologically that, you
know, I'm, I don't know that I'm real fucked up, but I'm not normal. And I think I attributed it
mostly to the, to not this, I don't attribute it to this. That was just a period of like three months.
I attributed it to more of just the ADV. Like I cope weird. Like I have like really strong coping
(38:37):
mechanism, but they're weird. Let's, let's pivot slightly because this became an episode about
your military and everything like that. And I'm perfectly fine because it sounds like there was
a lot there to unpack. One, great, because I haven't, I haven't had another episode about this
particular thing from the other side. I've told people about my experiences, especially writing
(38:57):
in the book and everything. So it's really interesting to me to feel a large sense of
mirroring when I'm talking to you about your experiences. Two, it doesn't matter how long
the trauma took place. And it doesn't matter how long ago the trauma took place. It's still trauma.
(39:17):
It's still happened to you. And the fact that you're beginning to kind of see that, you know,
and you also have a kind of peace with that to realize that that was fucked up. And it probably
did do something to you. Don't shy away from that, because I think you can get a lot of good catharsis
by continuing to unpack that, especially either talking with friends or if you happen to have a
(39:38):
therapist, I don't know if you do. Three, the amount of people that I had to talk to and the looks of
let's be honest, disgust, yeah, disgust and disdain. That's perfect. The looks of disgust and disdain
from the people who are in the room talking to you like you have just not only failed them,
(40:01):
but you have failed yourself and you have failed your future that at such a young age, it does remarkable damage to you that I only recently, well, I didn't say recently, like it took me at least 15 years later to when I was talking to somebody in the VA about the possibility of switching my outcome to just a regular discharge, where she was like, they did you wrong.
(40:29):
And hearing somebody in the VA said that like it triggered something in me. I'm in there. I'm in the VA office going, I didn't know anything else. It sucked.
It was bad. Of course, I'm one to cry my emotions out in general. I just do.
Yeah, you're on with it.
Yeah, so I want to know, can we talk more about your coping? Why you think, I mean, your words, you said you cope weird. I would love to hear about more about your coping thing because the beauty of this podcast for me is one person's weird coping ability.
(41:05):
Could when they describe it and give somebody else validation, because they think that they're a fucked up individual for the way that they cope. So tell me about tell me about your go to coping mechanisms. I mean, even if you think that they're just too weird, I want to hear about them.
I will. But first, I will take you back on something. I had that moment of catharsis a couple of years later. Really, it was within two years of it actually happening. I was I worked really close to home. It wasn't a very good job, but it wasn't terrible, but I would walk home.
(41:37):
Because it was close to close to drive.
Sure.
But I would like there was an old man that would also walk and I got to talk to him. He was actually he was a World War two that.
And he served like all all of a war to sure. And then make his living afterwards washing dishes. Very nice man. I hope he's okay. Though this is a number of years. I'm sure he's passed. He was in time.
(42:00):
But he was a first of a number of veterans that gave me my validation.
And he was like, you tried. No one, no one can ask anything else. You try way more than what some people do.
Which is what he said. Yeah, that you tried. You gave an honest effort. It didn't work out and you've moved on to other veterans going, Hey, they did you dirty.
(42:26):
They weren't supposed to do that. They certainly weren't supposed to touch you. Right. Let alone make you know physical threats of violence against you or, you know, talk to you that way. They were supposed like going back to my original sergeant or recruiter.
He was like, Hey, we're going to work with you. We're going to build you up to where you can do this.
He got transferred. Right. He was he was in the hundred and seventy third. He was a cool dude. He wasn't even the highest ranking, but he was like the league guy.
(42:54):
But they put him in charge of another recruiting station and I got handed off to tweet all that tweet of the tweet of them. But a hard ass one and hard ass two.
I like the idea of tweet of the tweet of them. Oh, they they've rocked my shit. But moving on to coping mechanism.
I don't know that it's an act of coping mechanism again to how I would come when I was younger. I cried my emotions out to up until I was probably 13 or 14.
(43:24):
And then I didn't cry again till I was in my mid-twenties.
OK, I mean, those are formative years. You're still learning how to balance your emotions. So that makes sense.
Right. And then I just I think I didn't cry. I remember I was my middle eight twenties when I cried again.
OK.
And it happens every once in a while. I didn't view it as anything particularly cathartic or un-cathartic.
(43:48):
It's fine. It's it's it's an emotional outlet.
But as far as my coping, it's kind of a passive way of going about it is a reminding myself that it can always be worse.
And I I've never dipped into the trauma comparisons where other people do have it worse, which is true.
Other people do have it worse. But there there's the comparison is the thief of joy.
(44:13):
Yeah.
So I will I'm good about that. I will never compare myself to someone else because no one else has done what I've done in the exact order that I've done it.
So really, it's just kind of a detachment from it. It happened. OK, I'm going to be open about it.
And then I'm going to move on. And it's just an acceptance and understanding of what happened, why it happened, what with the ramifications for it going forward.
(44:41):
And then washing my hands of it. It's I don't I don't want to call it an emotional numbness to me. But there's some of the philosophical philosophical and spiritual things that I've subscribed to in my in my adult life.
There's not a whole lot that I care about very strongly.
Yeah, I caution myself early on about that. Don't not using it as a barrier.
(45:07):
I've always maintained and stressed a level of self awareness about myself.
That what's healthy, what's not what's to be careful about what's not to be careful about.
And especially just a detachment is something that can be dangerous. I would like to think that I have maintained a sensible level of it, at least within my own psychological limits.
(45:35):
I'm a very psychologically strong person. I've been told by people that with a psychology background that mirrors that that, hey, you have very strong coping skills.
And it's not because you don't deal with it is because you just process it in a way that might not be typical that at least lets you just kind of be like it happened.
(45:58):
I'm moving on. It's it's behind me now. The past is dead.
Which mirrors one of the first conversation pieces of the conversation that we had earlier when we were talking about, you know, focusing on the present because past is dead and the future hasn't happened yet.
Having said that, the human psyche does one thing really well and that's hold on to things that we don't necessarily realize that we've held on to.
(46:21):
And sometimes that expresses itself in different ways, either an addiction to something that seems relatively benign, a tick, either a physical or a mental one, or bursts of really quick anger, which that was one of the reasons that I went to therapy is because I was experiencing that.
(46:44):
Do you think, looking back on the way that that you are processing the way that you have processed being very sounds like being relatively methodical about it.
Do you think that there's anything that's still kind of like a burr in your psyche that maybe shows up every once in a while that you think maybe could be due to something in your past.
(47:12):
Kind of but almost unrelated. I don't really care. Like there have been a couple situations when the last six months that I was reasonably sure I was about to die.
And I just went, eh, happened to happens.
In which, in what way, if you don't mind me asking.
I was reasonably certain someone kicked open my front door in the middle of the night one time.
(47:36):
Which I woke up rendered it like they shoot me, they shoot me. And another one I thought I had, I had vertigo real bad.
And then I was like, oh, hey, I'm suddenly sweating really badly because of the stress of having vertigo.
Right. Like bad vertigo like I couldn't stand. And then like half of my body went numb. I'm like, oh crap, I might be having a stroke.
(47:59):
And I just kind of laid down on the ground. I went to sleep and I was like, if I wake up, I wake up and then I woke up and I was still half numb and I was like, shit, I lived.
Do things.
One, I'm glad you're alive.
If not solely for the process of making this podcast.
Also getting to know another new face, which has kind of been the joy of this year is actually getting to know new people.
(48:26):
As an adult, you realize you don't get to do that very often unless like as a genuine back and forth instead of just like at Walmart.
The other thing is, is you may already know this from somebody who has lived how they lived and whatnot.
But what a typical male response to have something drastically happen to your body and you're just like, I'm not going to tell anybody if I live, I live.
(48:53):
If not, I'll get it fixed.
There was somebody in the house at the time.
But I was like, then part of me was like, yeah, I should probably have someone call an ambulance, but I need a shower.
No, I'm good.
Oh, the priorities.
I just don't want to be in like, what is it?
(49:14):
My mom hates it when I say it, but it's like, if I die, it solves all my problems.
Makes up, makes problems for you and other people, but my problems are gone.
My mom was very big of the phrase that death is all about the living because once you're dead, you're dead.
Everybody else has to deal with the ramifications.
And, you know, knowing that there is some kind of freedom of that.
(49:36):
I think my grandfather was a really big proponent of that.
That's why he set everything from the moment of his death on on his terms, you know, made sure that everybody pulled him off that the best that they could.
Your story reminds me of the one time that I experienced PM Tylenol because I had a headache.
(49:58):
I needed to take some medicine and it had been a bad headache.
Like one that like so I understand.
Yeah, yeah, it was started here and it just started swallowing my whole head basically.
And so I was taking some I took some some time at all and it was blue.
But I'm like, whatever, pills come in different shapes and colors like I didn't check the box or anything like that.
(50:20):
And then I'm sitting there on the couch everybody.
I'm in a house with four other people and we're all watching TV and then all of a sudden I just get like just cordonly sleepy.
Like the the the quickest I've ever gotten and half of my brain went.
I mean, at the time we were having some hard times too.
So I was like, I wasn't really stressed out about this thought.
(50:44):
I just knew it was coming over me.
I was like, this is the sleep of death.
I'm going to curl up on this couch.
I looked at my wife thought, I love you and went to sleep thinking that that was going to be it.
I raised no alarms.
I woke up later about five or six hours still groggy as hell.
(51:09):
And my wife's like, are you okay?
I'm like, do you really sleep?
And she's like, what kind of pills did you take?
I'm like, I don't know the blue pills that were there.
And she's like, Michael, you idiot, you're on PM medication.
And I told her straight up still in my groggy state is like, oh, I thought I was dying.
And the look on her face, she's like, you thought you were dying and you didn't tell me anything.
(51:32):
So I, I understand the thought process, but I would say now because of where I am, who was in my life, what I'm doing.
I am more susceptible to actually having things that are wrong with me getting taken care of, because I think my quality of life is better now.
(51:55):
And therefore my wants to continue and to keep putting my names on things and to meet new people and to do new things is, is budding.
Which it sounds like to me, that's kind of what's going on with you over this last year, getting into socials and whatnot and willing to put your face even half of it up on the screen for other people to see.
(52:17):
I don't know, D, it sounds like to me, and for somebody who just met you, it sounds like to me that you're going through a period of growth and damn it, I'm glad I'm here for it.
Well, hey, well, it just means that if I die, it's now your problem.
At least a little bit, just a little bit.
Hey, you've got you've got footage of my face. Congratulations.
Yeah, congratulations. You spoke to me like, I mean, I'm certainly not God's, you know, gift on earth.
(52:42):
But I mean, the trauma is mainly funny.
Amen to that.
The story of you telling like your wife that hey, I thought I was dying. Like I told that to a co-worker just, I mean, I'm pretty open about these things.
I probably shouldn't be like most like one of the people that works with like the elderly disabled people at my job.
(53:05):
This was like the look that she gave me was like, what the fuck.
Oh, it's one of those moments like I said earlier.
They were like, oh, honey, what's wrong with you?
Oh, I won't use her name.
I won't use her name, but she's like a really, really nice girl in her like early 20s, early 20s.
Probably mid 20s. I don't know how old she is. I've never asked.
(53:27):
Again, you don't ask that.
You don't ask.
No.
One of the two people that I'm really close to at work or not really close to but close enough, especially I've always maintained like a boundary at work.
This job is going to make me soft because it's an office job and I've never had an office job before this one.
Same here, buddy.
So it's nice to like I've like, I've, you know, it's nice to like sit on my ass and type at work instead of having to like move heavy shit.
(53:53):
There's a simplicity of just knowing that a portion of your day is just emails and that's okay sometimes.
Oh, that's okay.
Now I will tell you this, it's forced me to have to go outside every day and take walks for the vitamin D and the mental health because I know that if I just live behind the desk, I'm going to waste away.
But there's still a gentle simplicity about it.
(54:14):
Anyway, go ahead.
Yeah.
But just the way that this lady looked at me like I like this, like she was having a crisis because she knew I was I have a crisis and it didn't compute that I didn't care.
And I was just like, she's, she's really, really nice.
And I think there was another coworker she's about to have a master's degree in psychology.
(54:41):
And she is like, I can never tell exactly what that person thinks of me because they were the person that you're really self aware, like someone with a master's degree in psychology is like, you're on that like you're out oddly, oddly self aware of yourself.
And I'm just like, I don't know what to think that as a compliment or not.
You just look at her and go, thanks, it's the trauma.
(55:04):
Well, no, she's the one that claimed that you're funny because of the trauma.
Yeah.
And it's just kind of like, okay, I'll take it.
I'm really funny.
Most of the time, though, these people don't get the really mean kind of humor that I've done that is what I'm really funny.
Yeah.
But they get done the lighthearted where I'm just really quick-witted.
I tone it back depending on when I'm around because you can't be like that around everybody.
(55:27):
Yeah.
Especially in a professional setting.
I would like to keep this job.
I don't want to go back to freight or retail.
It doesn't pay the best, but it's not stressful.
And that's kind of what I needed life.
You need that work-life balance, my guy.
I understand that.
They care a lot about, I mean, I work with like 95% women and they're either like a lot younger than me or a lot older than me.
And granted, I'm pretty low on the totem pole there.
(55:51):
I mostly just do data entry, but I'm really good at my job.
There you go.
So nobody wants my job.
So they just generally leave me alone to let me do my job.
One of the very few times that I've had no supervision for the most part,
my boss is like, I don't care if I hear a few after a week or two, but like,
I know the job's going to get done.
So I guess that's kind of what I funneled into because it's important to me to have a good reputation that works.
(56:16):
And that's mostly because I don't want micromanagement.
I hate being micromanaged.
I don't know what that says about me.
Probably nothing because I don't know too many people that like being micromanaged.
No, no, not unless they, they're in for the job simply just to get paid
because at that point they're just like point and click, man.
(56:37):
Just tell me what to do.
And then the other segment of people that really like to be micromanaged,
but we're not going to get into that.
No, that's a different thing.
That's a whole different thing.
That's a whole different thing.
Certainly not me.
I'm not even, I'm not even joking.
That's not me.
I view my like personal free will too much.
That's crazy.
Look, we're going to pause here for a second because I got to read about my book.
(57:00):
Just taking a small break to tell you that this episode of the podcast is brought to you by Dink,
spelled D-I-N-Q-D-N-D in the coffin hold of the USS Enterprise.
It's my first book, a memoir in which I tell you about trying and failing in a Navy school for nuclear operators,
all while juggling marriage and depression.
Where does D&D come in?
It's woven all throughout the book.
(57:22):
Check it out on Amazon as a paperback or on Kindle.
The link's in the description below.
And hopefully that makes you want to buy it.
It's still available on Amazon or Barnes & Noble if you want digital or you can get a paperback.
That's fun too.
Anyway, back to D.
I'm just going to blatantly steal another thing from Josh here.
(57:49):
And of course he asks a different question, but it is still a pretty succinct question.
He likes to ask people at the end of the podcast, are you happy?
Which brings a wide varied, a lot of them just smile and go, yeah, I am.
Because they talk about all the good things in life.
And then sometimes you get, I think I am.
And those are always the interesting answer.
(58:12):
But for you, I just want to ask, do you think you're healing?
To be perfectly honest, there's not much healing to do.
Okay.
And to answer your other question, I'm content.
Okay.
Content.
That's fine.
That kind of goes along with the thing that you're saying that you're more self-aware.
I think that answer fits you perfectly.
We've scratched the surface of what I was going to ask you, but that's because when I started scratching, we realized that there was a bigger hole, I think, to actually get into there.
(58:39):
And I'm so glad that we did.
I would love to have you on again.
You know, five years down the road, I still want to be doing this because this is fun.
It's relatively easy to do.
And I'm meeting so many new people and getting to know people.
So thank you so much.
Where can people find you?
I think both Instagram and TikTok is DeltaForks.
(59:02):
My interview is human with DeltaForks.
And I have DeltaForks on YouTube.
I think it's DeltaForks.
That's the channel name.
So are there any spaces, underscores, and how do you spell human?
Human. H-U-M-I-N-T. Human intelligence is the military term for it.
(59:25):
But most of the stuff goes through DeltaForks on TikTok.
It is much wider.
All one word?
I don't know.
Get your shit together, B.
It's like, I don't...
I'd say a way.
Yeah, it's all one word.
(59:47):
Don't care about anything. Nothing serious.
It's also going to be in the description below as well.
And I am your host, Michael LeBlanc.
And if you happen to miss next year's episode, still, it's your loss.
Thank you so much, D.
We'll talk again.
(01:00:08):
Thanks for having me. It was fun.
MUSIC
Fun fact, I don't know how to do math, and I thought that if I did from April to December,
(00:07):
that that's eight months, but if you counted on your fingers like I did seven times to
try to get it right, that's nine months.
So I shorted myself a podcast episode, and I really thank you for that.
You're welcome.
Welcome to It's Your Lost podcast, where raw stories of resilience and healing are told,
(00:29):
while uncovering and destigmatizing the diverse symptoms of loss.
Welcome back to the podcast.
If you missed last month's episode, well, it's your loss.
I'm host Michael LeBlanc, and I have with me here DeltaForks.
That's his name.
Nobody questioned it.
I'm going to call him D. He looks very tactical.
(00:53):
He sounds very tactical.
And my God is his hair amazing.
D, how are you doing today?
I'm doing pretty good.
Thanks for the compliment.
It's longer than I normally have it.
So if I'm brushing it out of the way, I'm not flexing or anything.
It's a good swoop.
It's a good swoop.
I'm just jealous because I'm just rapidly losing the top of my hair, and I thought that
(01:14):
I wouldn't be going bald like my father, but I am.
So I'm taking my loss and turning it into compliments for anybody who I think has got
some good stuff going on.
Also, it's just good to start with a compliment.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm going gray, but you can't really see it.
I'm going gray in weird places.
Like obviously on the bottom of my beard, I'm going gray, but like I'm getting these
(01:35):
weird hairs right here on the ridge of my nose that grow out really quick, very thick.
So like I noticed like I go to scratch and like something's like rubbing against my finger.
So I pluck those.
Those are white as the driven snow.
I, there's no evolutionary advantage to that.
I have no idea why that's happening to me.
(01:55):
I've been, I've been going gray over white hair.
Since I was 13.
Oh, here and there.
But now it's starting to poke up in my beard and everything like that.
Even though it's really short, you can't really see it.
No, no, I can't.
I can't.
It's the mystery under there.
The mystery, the national man of mystery, I guess.
It's just kind of been something I've always known was going to happen.
Yeah.
(02:15):
I don't want to steal too much from other people's podcasts, but there's this one that
I really enjoy.
And in fact, we talked about this a little bit earlier before this episode.
And that's Josh's last meals and one of the things that he asks, and I've been meaning
to kind of just weave it into mine because it kind of just fits so well with it.
How often do you think about death?
(02:36):
Not super often, but not, not often.
I don't know what the normal amount is.
I don't know if there is one.
Maya, I guess I have a weird relationship with my own mortality.
We'll probably get into it later, but the short answer is that I don't really care.
Yeah.
We're going to have to come back to that one.
So first things first, we're going to dive in into things that you've lost and everything.
(02:59):
And I'll go ahead and ask all the pertinent questions.
And we'll talk about that.
This is a podcast about loss after all with the pieces of information that you gave me,
the same place that I have people sign up over there at sittingwithyou.com, forward slash
podcast.
Go over there.
If you want to be a part of my podcast as being a guest on the episode, there was a shorter
way to say that, I'm sure.
Sounded good to me.
(03:20):
Oh, thanks.
I ask people what their favorite game is.
Sometimes that gives me the chance to play like a virtual board game with somebody like
I got to play a battleship on paper back and forth with somebody.
But I don't know how I'd be able to play this with you during the podcast because one, I
don't have a PlayStation and two, I would just be distracted all hell.
(03:42):
No conversation would actually happen.
You enjoy hell divers.
I bought it day one and suffered through the, well, I say suffered, but they suffered from
their own success.
And I've been a pretty big supporter of the developers since it's come out, mostly because
it's such a good, like they're good to their customers.
(04:04):
No, it seems like it.
And I appreciate that when some of the other games I play, they hate me or they just want
your money like most of the others.
I guess probably one of the more interesting things is while they were having several problems,
I got frustrated and started converting all of the stuff into D&D, not D&D itself, but
(04:26):
I think my statement was I'm going to play this game one way or another.
One of the things that I like is when people enjoy an IP, they turn it into their own tabletop
playing game because tabletop role playing has been a huge part of like keeping me sane
as you could find out like in my book.
Here it is right here, a dink D&D in the coffin hold of the USS enterprise.
(04:46):
There's going to be an ad read for that later audience.
So listen for that.
There's some river world, which was turned into a really good tabletop.
And then there's this one system called aberrant, which you basically you just use a percent
dice, you could turn that in pretty much anything.
And that was really cool.
So yeah, I could see where that could definitely be a good passion project turning that into
(05:11):
to a D&D esque type style.
I have a quiz here that popped up at the top of my Google feed.
So it's got to be the best.
And it's called How much do you know about Hell Divers to so queue up the game music.
And we're just going to go ahead and run through this.
We got two and a half minutes to go through these questions.
And hopefully it won't take that long.
(05:32):
All right.
First and foremost, who is the publisher of the Hell Divers series?
We can do multiple.
Okay.
You already know.
All right.
Cool.
We got that.
Let's see.
Oh, according to this, you got that wrong.
It was Sony.
I'm starting to guess the developer was.
Yeah.
Okay.
Good.
I'm starting to guess the validity of this quiz.
(05:53):
Hell Divers series takes heavily heavy inspirations from this one.
I know.
Stars of Troopers.
Absolutely.
So much so that Liberation Day is October 26.
And that's when the book was published.
By the way, did you know that?
I found that out today.
I did that.
Who is the creative director of the game series?
(06:16):
I have multiple choice if you need it.
It should be Pielstad or something like that.
Pielstad.
I have Johan Pielstad.
Correct answer.
Good job.
What kind of game is the first Hell Divers title?
It's Top Down.
Top Down Shooter.
Correct.
You are, you're killing it, my guy.
(06:37):
Except for the first one.
Except for the first one.
Yeah, Hell Divers 2 includes a permanent blank feature.
I'll give you multiple questions here.
We have unlimited ammo, difficulty scale, death.
They spelled difficulty wrong, by the way.
I just want to point that out.
And Friendly Fire.
Well, Friendly Fire is always on here.
(06:57):
So I would go with that.
Yeah.
And they said that they're never going to change it because it's part of the charm of the
game and also to recode that would be a nightmare.
What is the fictional planet in Hell Divers called?
What, Super Earth?
Super Earth.
It's the only one that makes sense because the first one's Tatooine and I went, I know
that's not right.
Yeah.
What game engine does it use?
(07:19):
It's Unreal.
Unreal 4 or 5?
Oh, I don't know.
I would go with 4.
5 is...
4.
We're doing 4.
It was the Autodesk Stingray.
Okay.
Yeah, that seems wrong.
What year did the first Hell Divers game release?
2015, I think.
(07:40):
Correct.
And what kind of game is Hell Divers 2?
It's a third person.
Third person shooter.
We have two seconds left.
Did we answer all of them in time?
We did not.
Unfortunate.
We're not real gamers.
We're not real gamers.
We got a total of 70 points.
How about a nice cup?
This is what you've earned, this statement.
(08:02):
You can go ahead and print this on.
It's yours now.
You can do whatever you want.
How about a nice cup of Liberty?
All right.
Good job.
What's the only certificate that I've ever got that I can't print out?
I'll send you a Google Doc of it.
But no.
So yeah, the game looks amazing.
(08:22):
A lot of people have been enjoying it.
Some people are kind of divided on the whole Liberty aspect of it.
In fact, I saw a Reddit post while I was doing kind of like a dive into figuring out how
I was going to introduce Helldivers into this episode where they're like, can we dial down
the democracy?
I'm like, I don't think you get the point.
I don't think you get the point of why democracy is.
(08:44):
A, democracy is, that sounds treasonous.
It does.
But B, satire is a thing.
It is.
You can tell people who didn't watch or didn't understand Starship Troopers when this game
first came out.
Because people were like, oh God, it's so farcical.
It's so in your face.
(09:06):
And then people who didn't know about Starship Troopers started hearing about Starship Troopers
and they were like, oh my God, they ripped this off on my people.
Satire is a thing.
And it really depends.
They went more with the movie than the book.
Because the, is it Paul Verhoeven?
Was the director of the movie?
(09:28):
This historical experience is, because he's from Denmark, I believe.
And their experience from World War II kind of colored his view of the book.
Yeah, I could see that.
The book was very pro-military.
It was a little on the nose.
It might have been, it could have been satire on its own, right?
(09:49):
But it was very like pro-service, pro civil servant ship.
And the movie was like, oh man, this is fascist.
The game is just like, just, you know, we're going to go free the shit out of some bugs.
Yeah, right.
You're part of it.
You're so much of a part of it that you don't know anything else.
What's really cool is watching people play it and then like the behind the scenes story
(10:14):
that they're telling with like some of the placements of the dead bodies, the propaganda
that's being shown and everything like that.
And you know, there are some people, like the moments where they go, wait a minute,
are we the bad guys?
No, we're not the bad guys.
No, we're not the bad guys.
We can't be the bad guys.
We can't be the bad guys.
We're literally liberating this planet.
(10:36):
You're a defrosted 18, almost 19 year old kid that just got dropped onto a planet and
was eaten by a bug.
Your life existed for five minutes.
It's, if as many veteran friends as I have, I mean, I think the quote is the United States
figured out that worshiping veterans is better than taking care of them.
Yeah.
(10:57):
It's an unfortunate thing.
And I have, you know, not for lack of trying, but I wasn't a veteran or I'm not a veteran,
but I have a lot of friends that are.
Right.
And their experience is very widely, but that's kind of one of the things that they can all
kind of, they haven't put it into words because I think a comedian made that quote.
(11:19):
Yeah.
So I can't claim it.
I could remember who it was, but it's too true.
It's unfortunate.
I've seen, I've seen a couple of different sides when it came to people being taken care
of by the VA or being put on hold forever for a health thing.
(11:40):
And VA is our only health choice.
So they just basically have to suffer until they get to it.
But I think really it's kind of luck of the draw when you walk into that building on what's
going to happen.
I think I myself lost pretty much all of my VA benefits for the way that I got out of the
military.
It's called an other than honorable.
It's paperwork, a paperwork discharge is they just basically strip everything of you and
(12:02):
then like kick you out the door and it's like, all right, go with God.
And I looking back on it, the way that I acted, which was like a really stressed out early
twenties, older teens kid who was married and trying to balance in military.
I, I put too much myself quickly and the military didn't care about that.
(12:25):
They were just like, you're not, you're not performing.
Right.
So I don't blame them.
I did when I first got out.
Sure.
Pretty bitter, pretty sour, but yeah, no anymore.
But let's let's not worry about my loss right now.
Let's worry about yours.
All right, so the first thing I'm going to ask is, I don't know exactly what you remember
(12:49):
when you filled out the form, but I'll go ahead and ask you, D, what have you lost?
So my childhood was not that bad.
I mean, it was kind of average.
I kind of grew up without us, without much of a sense of hope, but that's not what I
lost.
I grew up with very like realistic.
(13:11):
I grew up real poor and I grew up, you know, my parents didn't sugarcoat it.
You know, they, I never went hungry.
They might have gone hungry.
I don't really know if they did.
They never showed it, but my family kind of fell apart when I turned 18.
And after, after that, I kind of, I feel like my purpose was lost because I, not for lack
(13:35):
of trying, I was, I did attempt to join the military.
It's supposed to be a combat medic.
And I, through either a failing in the system or my own failing, I had a back injury that
nobody knew about.
And it turns out when you're supposed to be a combat medic, you're supposed to be able
to fire and carry somebody.
Yeah.
And put their body weight plus 60, 70 pounds of infantry gear.
(13:59):
It turns out I couldn't do that.
And they got real mad at, you know, it's the military, you know, it's some, it's an
uncaring machine.
Sure.
And is a, in an undisclosed time between 2010 and 2015, they were, which is, you know, middle
and middle into GWAT.
(14:20):
So they, they, they were more cared about getting bodies in there.
And I think it was, whether they thought I was just being a quitter or not, it's here
nor there, but I either just wasn't tough enough to deal with the injury or I was just
too hurt, probably both.
But it was just, I think there's no way to prove it, but it's just in like, almost like
(14:45):
a, you know, with something, you know, pulling on your spirit a little bit, like, I think
I was supposed to like take a bullet for somebody or save somebody.
Sure.
Then either that didn't happen.
So like, I wouldn't say that I feel like a sense of a newie afterwards, just kind of
that listlessness.
Yeah.
But it's, I don't know, it's just something that didn't happen that I feel like it was
(15:09):
supposed to happen.
Okay.
And then kind of after that, you know, you, you, you pick up and do what you have to afterwards
and you have to make money.
Yeah.
And then a lot, my family fell apart further after that instead of just being kind of fractured,
it just fell apart totally after that.
And then I was left to take care of a couple of family members, all of my own.
(15:33):
It was a parent and then a grandparent at the same time.
And my siblings were nowhere to be found.
My parents got a divorce shortly after I terminated my enlistment contract in an undisclosed year.
And so that sucked.
And then I got a job that was really good at the beginning.
(15:56):
I struggled to say I shouldn't have taken it because the money was pretty good.
And I learned a lot, but it murdered my social life.
Okay.
None of that's ever really recovered.
So not to be too morbid, but like, I think I'm probably still here just out of spite.
You mean here on planet Earth?
Yeah.
(16:16):
Out of spite?
Okay.
I'm just like, the universe isn't going to get me.
Like they don't, they don't get to determine when I go.
Got you.
There, there's something to be said for having a spirit of, you know, middle finger to the
stairs, like, you know, you can fuck you, you tried, you know, what is it?
Like in the military, there was the acronym leadership.
(16:39):
And it just had, I forget what all of it lasts.
I haven't heard, I haven't heard that in a while.
So much that I forgot that I just remember the small acronyms like FTN, fuck the Navy.
It might have been an army thing, but there's this thing called leaderships.
And it all it is just the acronym, the army values.
Yeah.
And it just adds S on the end and S stands for spite.
(17:03):
And it turns out spite gets a lot of shit done.
spite.
It does.
It does.
It's, it got me started into content creation.
It got me not, you know, taking your sewer slide.
It gets it done.
And I try to, you know, not be like full hate mode with it.
But you know, it's, it's my personal freedom to make that decision.
(17:27):
If you basically attacking the world with spite, hey, look what I can do.
I can do this in spite of everything else.
Is that your main method of coping?
Or do you have something else?
I think you mentioned self-deprecated humor is also in your bag, which there ain't no
humor and like self-deprecating humor, like no other humor I know.
(17:52):
So I kind of defer back to my childhood.
My dad is really funny.
And my mom is really funny and my sister is really funny.
Both of my sisters are really funny.
But I grew up in a family that if you weren't funny or had like a keen wit, you were locked
all over.
So I learned to be my sister humor.
(18:13):
And then, you know, if you've seen any of my stuff online, I'm reasonably tame, but
I'm not like that in real life.
I have a vicious sense of humor.
I have, I have made grown men cry.
I have affected negative mental states on people ongoing.
I have just a constant, what is it, vicious mockery?
Just spilling out of you.
Is that what's happening here?
(18:34):
It's like, I have like the ability, it was instilled in pretty much everybody in my
family that you, if you couldn't fight back verbally, you were just, you're not bullied,
but you're made to feel it.
You were made to feel it.
It's okay to say your family bullies you.
If anything, your family bullies you before a good family, I think gives you a little
(18:58):
bit of bullying before you go out and get bullied by the world because kind of let you
know, it's like, Hey, if you think we're rough, it's just going to get worse out there.
So you need to learn to kind of spar a little bit.
You get toughened up and it builds character.
You know, the things that like parents will say, especially from this geographic region
is a full gambit and then having ADHD kind of gave me anger problems as a kid.
(19:26):
Both of my parents have a temper.
I have a temper.
I tend to, I describe it as a fury of that lightning because it's there and it's gone.
It's mostly why I've avoided physical altercations because I don't, I don't, I don't want to snap
on somebody and end up in jail.
You guys can't see it, but I'm too pretty to be in jail.
Yeah, that's kind of hard to, it's kind of hard to spite your way out of the moment.
(19:47):
Yeah, it's the moment that they put you in there.
Also, I'm not, I'm not trying to spite somebody to hurt somebody.
I'm just, that's not my target.
It's just kind of like, like a lot of my friends, and I guess people in their early 20s and stuff
like that, they usually have a lifeline, like there's somebody to bail them out if something
goes wrong.
I didn't have that.
In fact, I was, I was the lifeline for other people.
(20:10):
And a lot of ways I'm tired of living through, you know, historic events and it never makes
anything easier.
It's always harder.
If anything, I'm glad that I'm kind of lucky, but it's going to run out eventually.
And I'm one, I'm just kind of waiting for that.
So it's just kind of the whole spite thing.
It's probably a oversimplification of it or, and it might be making it too aggressive,
(20:37):
but it's just, life's not going to get me down.
And I've, I've come up through some pretty rough times in my adult life and I'm, I can
give it right back.
It's a good mindset to have.
I do want to say you're kind of bringing up a couple of things that I heard from my therapist
as one is like, you know, parents are also supposed to be at a certain point, you're
(21:01):
safe space.
My mom and dad would sometimes forget that when it comes to like some of the jabs and
whatnot, and she says, maybe that's why, you know, you, you have the kind of relationships
that you are, that you have right now.
And she's yet to go fully deep into why I'm pretty sure that's going to be, you know,
(21:23):
further on down the line.
Can't wait to dig into that.
Loss of something that is not physical is definitely something that is still a loss.
You will wind up going through the five stages on your own terms.
Sometimes it takes a long time.
Sometimes it's quick, depending on how much of a value that had in your life.
(21:43):
And then again, sometimes those, those stages only show up way later.
Like you don't even deal with them at all.
Talking with a friend of mine who just recently lost his mom and his dad actually all within
a couple of months.
He was saying that he hasn't cried and he cried more at his friend's funeral, which
happened a couple of years ago than he has now.
(22:05):
And he started beating himself up mentally over the phone is like, you know, why am I
such a piece of shit?
What's wrong with me?
And I'm like, dude, you grief doesn't happen like that.
It's not, it's not something that is predictable.
It doesn't land the same way every time.
It's not even shaped the same way.
It doesn't feel the same way.
He's like, it will happen.
And if the more that you are open and you get the anxieties, even the anxiety of not
(22:30):
feeling grief, that more that you get that out, the more there will be healing.
You just won't notice it until later.
Right.
That's part of the reason why I do this podcast.
In general, there are a lot of people out there.
I was talking to somebody the other day who just now started processing the stuff that
happened to him when they were 15 years old and they're like in their early 40s, late
(22:51):
30s.
I don't know.
I didn't ask.
It wasn't proper to ask.
You never ask a lady her age.
But it's something I say down here.
Yeah.
But it all comes out in its own time.
Having said the career loss, let's go ahead and just start talking about that first and
we'll work around to other things.
The military is something that it sounded like that you were really excited about the
(23:12):
prospect of getting into.
Am I wrong?
It was something that I don't come from a military family or anything like that, or
even a family that has a whole lot of civil service.
I think my grandfather was a lawyer and my great grandfather was a Supreme Court judge
of the state.
(23:32):
Wow.
So not federal.
Like I'm not from that kind of family.
I mean, still.
Yeah.
I never met him, but I've heard a lot of stories about him.
My family is very good at telling stories, at least my father side of my family.
I'm reasonably close to.
It was something that I was excited about.
(23:54):
It was probably the first time that my family was out and out proud of me for something,
something I did instead of just being a smart kid.
Because I'm really smart and I don't flex those wings that much.
Mostly not in public, mostly because people just don't like it.
So I'll quietly be smart quietly in a corner and be like, that's not how that worked.
(24:19):
If someone's talking about history or physics or something like that, that's not how that
works.
But I won't tell them how that doesn't work.
I just I'm like, I'll just I'll be like, okay, I know how that works because it's a tangent.
But I can do algebra in my head when I was in high school.
Sure.
And I used to get in trouble for it for not putting it all like they would make you write
down your work.
You're speaking my language.
(24:40):
Is this that conversation about somebody had the other day?
Teachers don't like that.
No.
And I would get the answer kind of from here.
Yeah, I learned.
I did what you taught me to do.
Why are you mad at me?
Why are you bullying me?
I'm right.
In the words of Hannibal Bress.
But to go on to the work thing, it was something that my family was proud of me for.
(25:02):
And when it didn't work out, I didn't.
My grandfather flipped my dad kind of flipped for like a weird reason.
My dad flipped because of my grandfather flipping and because my grandfather was like, he's
never going to get a job and like I didn't get dishonorable.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I just cut a contract.
(25:22):
I'm like, I don't know why everyone's flipping out.
I think they did some bragging to their friends.
And then they had to go back and say, oh, hey, that never worked out or just never talk about
it again.
And then they ask about it later.
And then your grandfather's like, it was a bad back.
I don't even know, man.
(25:43):
Well, my grandfather was an Olympic Javon thrower and played football in college.
So like, and then he was a lawyer.
The fathers in your family are getting shit done.
That's what I hear.
It's weird.
Like, and then my dad's a truck driver.
Okay.
There was there was there's a certain there's a certain kind of marathon running spirit
(26:05):
you have to have to be a proper truck driver.
So the biggest lesson that was hammered into me when I was a kid, like every family, like
teaches the sons like a lesson.
This is what makes you a man or however, you know, right or wrong.
But the lesson that I was taught is your work ethic defines your worth, which as an adult,
(26:26):
I'm like, maybe that's not the healthiest thing.
But it's like, it's even though I'm not the healthiest thing, I will sacrifice everything
for work.
It's definitely an economic America type thing.
Like something that was told and that a lot of us now are very getting very disillusioned
with we're like, no, that that sounds horrible.
That makes us just horrible humans.
(26:46):
No wonder everyone's looking at the previous generations and going, man, you guys, your
priorities were forked.
But I had, I mean, I have a very good work ethic.
Most buses that I've ever had love me because I will work myself to death for them.
And that's kind of that's led to some problems, mostly boundaries and stuff like that.
(27:10):
And it's so, I mean, it's just it's the experience of yourself and your 20s.
It's like you work yourself to death to get a little bit and then you establish yourself
and then you realize you still have a whole lot to go off.
Yeah.
And then my current like the military was something I wanted to do to get back to it.
Maybe he's kicking in.
So I'm trying to focus.
It's all good.
(27:31):
You didn't go that far.
It's fine.
I don't know whether they thought I was I was a quitter or I've taught with other veterans
about it.
And I don't think I've ever had like a negative reaction from them.
Mostly it's like, it's like, there's like, hey, those dudes were just assholes.
They failed you.
Sure.
I don't fully agree with that because they made some points that were very harsh that
(27:56):
made too much sense.
And they were probably trying to motivate me and it just didn't hit the way they wanted
it to because it was the one that sticks in my in my head was.
And it's still he was now granted.
This is a six that got shot in the head and half game state.
Wow.
You couldn't tell.
(28:18):
And when he told me what he was, you know, that far from my face screaming at me.
And this is before I was government property, mind you.
And he was, you know, as a medic that couldn't lift somebody or a future medic that couldn't
lift somebody.
And he was like, what, you know, to quote, what the fuck am I supposed to do when I'm
shooting at some dickhead on the mountain?
(28:39):
And I have, I can't come fucking help you carry this guy when he got it.
Someone's going to get killed.
And unfortunately it's not going to be.
So, you know, that that turns some levels.
Oh, shit.
I'm fucked up.
I mean, yeah.
But I write, but still.
(29:01):
That hurts.
I had some things thrown at me while I was in the military, ranging from everything to
how I will never be somebody who gives anything of value in the naval nuclear scene to why is
your wife with you because you are a waste of effort.
(29:26):
And to make me realize that the, a lot of that was coming out of places out of one anger,
unresolved anger that they have in a situation that they're in.
And to the culture that they're raised up in if they're in there long enough, it seeps into
them, it becomes a part of them, which looking back on it, I'm glad that I learned what I
(29:50):
did out of leadership, because I had a couple of good leaders in there that weren't telling
me that, you know, I was a waste of the human genome.
And I took a lot out of that, which I hope, I hope that kind of help that helped you to
like I feel like anybody who gets out of the military at a certain point, especially early,
(30:12):
they get what they can out of it that was positive.
And they go forward with that.
Have a lot of respect for people that do make it.
Yeah, on a physical level just because the first job I wasn't the medic was a
first thing I was supposed to have I was supposed to be military intelligence.
But in the infinite races of the United States government, you can't do that and be colorblind.
(30:35):
I didn't know I was colorblind until I went to meps.
You learned a lot about yourself in meps.
Yeah, military entrance program for those of you don't know.
Yeah, it was.
Yeah, the civilian doctor was like, Hey, dude, you're colorblind.
I'm like, what?
I went to art school and explain some other stuff about art school.
(30:56):
But it was like, no, you're rendering colorblind.
I'm like, what does that mean?
It's what you can't have the OS they sent me here for.
And I'm like, ah, yeah, I was supposed to be a 35 Mike, which in the army is human,
human intelligence, which kind of my interview is called human because that was something
I really wanted to do.
(31:17):
And they're like, no, you can't do that.
Let's let's go pick another one.
I'm like, okay, fine.
There goes a $20,000 signing bonus.
Okay, great.
Fantastic.
Well, you can be an MP or you can be a medic.
And I'm like, ah, and though when you get an LPN license out of basic training, so you
can go do that after the military.
And I'm like, oh, okay.
(31:39):
They were really good about reminding you what you could do afterwards.
Like, you know, trying to trying to lead up, you know, as far as if you do this, it'll
set you up for later.
Yeah.
And that was that was nice.
The only thing you needed at that point was the ability and the physical ability to have
the follow through and be able to see that.
Right.
(32:00):
And I think this like my recruiter, my original recruiter was awesome.
I got handed off to somebody else that they fucking hated me.
They were both infantry.
My original recruiter was it was a paratrooper.
He was pretty chill.
The first words he ever spoke to me was never get married.
Don't ever get married.
(32:21):
He'd had an argument with his wife that morning.
It was just made me laugh.
And the second impression I got him, it was they tried those government cars at the recording
stations like they fucking stole them.
He drove up a state highway, like 80 miles an hour weaving in an amateur.
I don't know.
Cool, man.
(32:42):
This is fantastic.
Like we're going.
I did really well on the as Vab.
I guess you have to be to be a M.I. or a medic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or a Navy nuke.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You had to do well.
You had to do well.
They're happy with my numbers.
I don't know how I don't remember exactly my scores, but I know my GT score and normal score
(33:03):
was over 107.
Yeah.
And my other recruiters, one was he was a staff sergeant.
I won't use his name and he had been shot in the head.
And you couldn't tell and he was getting out of the military.
Military Army recruiters fucking hate their job.
It's a volatile situation.
Most of them, yeah.
(33:25):
The other one fell off of through a building in Afghanistan with a 27 pound machine gun
on his back.
Fucked his back up worse than mine was.
So I got no sympathy for my back from him, which explains something years later now.
And he, his first advice was me, if you ever get picked to be a recruiter, do something
and get in trouble to get demoted.
You don't want this.
(33:47):
Roger.
It was about the only thing I could say to him at that point because you just don't expect
that.
And you know, I was, I was still a civilian at the time, but I was so like wrapped up like,
I'm going to do this.
Like I, I referred to them by rank.
They didn't hate it.
I don't think they loved it.
And then so I went, I did the thing.
You come back from meps and they had at the time, what was called future so soldier is
(34:11):
basically these went back two days a week to PT the shit out of you.
Okay.
Um, mostly probably because they hated you and they hated them.
So that whole unresolved anger.
I got that at the time.
Like I understood that they don't like me because they're having a bad demo.
I get it.
It's not personal, but I'm also going through some stuff.
Uh, it was, ah, it was rough.
I was like, wait a minute and it was just basically like,
(34:34):
it went from bad that I couldn't firemen carry and did like the guy that,
the staff sergeant.
Uh, was like, what's your MOS?
I knew it was coming.
And I said it and he, he stopped in the middle of yelling and at the rest of the
group to me, who was off to the side doing flutter kicks.
And he basically lifted me by my shirt because there was, there was no like,
(34:57):
resisting.
It was just like, Hey, I'm, I'm a back.
Oh, no.
help you with that, Dukehead. When I'm, you know, someone's gonna get killed. After that,
I think they pt'd the shit out of me so hard that I passed out. Because there was in a strip
mall. So it was like, there's that road behind it. I was like, Hey, I'm gonna go throw up and
they're like, cool. Don't get it on yourself. And I'm like, Okay, cool. So I got to throw up and pass
(35:21):
out as everybody else is going home. No one comes looking for me. I walk back into the recruiting
stage. And the one of the other recruiters that I didn't interact with much is like,
what happened to you? And I was like, I passed out sergeant and it's like, Oh, close that door.
Yeah. And then I went home. Then I think a couple weeks later,
(35:44):
when they found out, Oh, hey, you have a back injury. I think I passed out standing up once.
Not for lack of physical exertion. I wasn't always a fat ass. I just got old and fat. And then they
threatened to punch me in the face. And I think at that point, they ran me until I threw up,
hanging out the side of a car once. It was an overall unpleasant experience. Like, I understand
(36:09):
the medic is important. You want him to be able to do his job. Right. So I don't hold what happened to
me, like personally against them. But I also recognize that that's not the way that I was
supposed to do. Like, yeah, my original recruiter, the paratrooper was like, Hey, because I was like,
Hey, I have like a little bit of a back injury. They knew that going in. They signed it off like,
(36:33):
Hey, sure, what back injury? And I was like, Okay, cool. That's how this is. Several things of
medical history just kind of disappeared. Yeah, exactly. Whatever they whatever they can do to
to move you forward. Right. And which at the beginning, I was appreciative of, you know,
Hey, you're helping me, you know, do the thing that I feel called to do. Cool. Oh, wait, not like
(36:57):
that. If I had known that this is what it's going to be, I just would have taken the deep, you know,
the, the, what's it the DQ the disc wall, right, right. And I would have been, you know, better off
at the end. And I just would have gotten the job. Signing the termination for my contract was
probably the worst. I wasn't sure what was going to happen to me. So I brought a witness.
(37:19):
Okay. And then I was grilled by a whole bunch of people from like E five to E seven. And I got a
call from an O three later that day. My God. Yeah, they really did not want me to terminate that
contract. Which I mean, getting the government the recant on anything like that. It's, it's
pretty normal. It went from like, the NCO screaming at me to like, the later on that day, the captain
(37:44):
like, trying to sweet talk me back into it. And I was just like, I know what's going to happen if
I walk back in there and they're going to bug and kill me. Right. Like it's already been clear that
this isn't something that I should do. Like being a medic, like I was a little bit concerned that
I was going to get someone killed. And unfortunately it wasn't going to be me to mirror that guy's
words, which in my age now is unhealthy. Yes. Yes, it is. And it's important. I think it's
(38:13):
important to realize that, but yeah, definitely. I'm pretty self aware psychologically that, you
know, I'm, I don't know that I'm real fucked up, but I'm not normal. And I think I attributed it
mostly to the, to not this, I don't attribute it to this. That was just a period of like three months.
I attributed it to more of just the ADV. Like I cope weird. Like I have like really strong coping
(38:37):
mechanism, but they're weird. Let's, let's pivot slightly because this became an episode about
your military and everything like that. And I'm perfectly fine because it sounds like there was
a lot there to unpack. One, great, because I haven't, I haven't had another episode about this
particular thing from the other side. I've told people about my experiences, especially writing
(38:57):
in the book and everything. So it's really interesting to me to feel a large sense of
mirroring when I'm talking to you about your experiences. Two, it doesn't matter how long
the trauma took place. And it doesn't matter how long ago the trauma took place. It's still trauma.
(39:17):
It's still happened to you. And the fact that you're beginning to kind of see that, you know,
and you also have a kind of peace with that to realize that that was fucked up. And it probably
did do something to you. Don't shy away from that, because I think you can get a lot of good catharsis
by continuing to unpack that, especially either talking with friends or if you happen to have a
(39:38):
therapist, I don't know if you do. Three, the amount of people that I had to talk to and the looks of
let's be honest, disgust, yeah, disgust and disdain. That's perfect. The looks of disgust and disdain
from the people who are in the room talking to you like you have just not only failed them,
(40:01):
but you have failed yourself and you have failed your future that at such a young age, it does remarkable damage to you that I only recently, well, I didn't say recently, like it took me at least 15 years later to when I was talking to somebody in the VA about the possibility of switching my outcome to just a regular discharge, where she was like, they did you wrong.
(40:29):
And hearing somebody in the VA said that like it triggered something in me. I'm in there. I'm in the VA office going, I didn't know anything else. It sucked.
It was bad. Of course, I'm one to cry my emotions out in general. I just do.
Yeah, you're on with it.
Yeah, so I want to know, can we talk more about your coping? Why you think, I mean, your words, you said you cope weird. I would love to hear about more about your coping thing because the beauty of this podcast for me is one person's weird coping ability.
(41:05):
Could when they describe it and give somebody else validation, because they think that they're a fucked up individual for the way that they cope. So tell me about tell me about your go to coping mechanisms. I mean, even if you think that they're just too weird, I want to hear about them.
I will. But first, I will take you back on something. I had that moment of catharsis a couple of years later. Really, it was within two years of it actually happening. I was I worked really close to home. It wasn't a very good job, but it wasn't terrible, but I would walk home.
(41:37):
Because it was close to close to drive.
Sure.
But I would like there was an old man that would also walk and I got to talk to him. He was actually he was a World War two that.
And he served like all all of a war to sure. And then make his living afterwards washing dishes. Very nice man. I hope he's okay. Though this is a number of years. I'm sure he's passed. He was in time.
(42:00):
But he was a first of a number of veterans that gave me my validation.
And he was like, you tried. No one, no one can ask anything else. You try way more than what some people do.
Which is what he said. Yeah, that you tried. You gave an honest effort. It didn't work out and you've moved on to other veterans going, Hey, they did you dirty.
(42:26):
They weren't supposed to do that. They certainly weren't supposed to touch you. Right. Let alone make you know physical threats of violence against you or, you know, talk to you that way. They were supposed like going back to my original sergeant or recruiter.
He was like, Hey, we're going to work with you. We're going to build you up to where you can do this.
He got transferred. Right. He was he was in the hundred and seventy third. He was a cool dude. He wasn't even the highest ranking, but he was like the league guy.
(42:54):
But they put him in charge of another recruiting station and I got handed off to tweet all that tweet of the tweet of them. But a hard ass one and hard ass two.
I like the idea of tweet of the tweet of them. Oh, they they've rocked my shit. But moving on to coping mechanism.
I don't know that it's an act of coping mechanism again to how I would come when I was younger. I cried my emotions out to up until I was probably 13 or 14.
(43:24):
And then I didn't cry again till I was in my mid-twenties.
OK, I mean, those are formative years. You're still learning how to balance your emotions. So that makes sense.
Right. And then I just I think I didn't cry. I remember I was my middle eight twenties when I cried again.
OK.
And it happens every once in a while. I didn't view it as anything particularly cathartic or un-cathartic.
(43:48):
It's fine. It's it's it's an emotional outlet.
But as far as my coping, it's kind of a passive way of going about it is a reminding myself that it can always be worse.
And I I've never dipped into the trauma comparisons where other people do have it worse, which is true.
Other people do have it worse. But there there's the comparison is the thief of joy.
(44:13):
Yeah.
So I will I'm good about that. I will never compare myself to someone else because no one else has done what I've done in the exact order that I've done it.
So really, it's just kind of a detachment from it. It happened. OK, I'm going to be open about it.
And then I'm going to move on. And it's just an acceptance and understanding of what happened, why it happened, what with the ramifications for it going forward.
(44:41):
And then washing my hands of it. It's I don't I don't want to call it an emotional numbness to me. But there's some of the philosophical philosophical and spiritual things that I've subscribed to in my in my adult life.
There's not a whole lot that I care about very strongly.
Yeah, I caution myself early on about that. Don't not using it as a barrier.
(45:07):
I've always maintained and stressed a level of self awareness about myself.
That what's healthy, what's not what's to be careful about what's not to be careful about.
And especially just a detachment is something that can be dangerous. I would like to think that I have maintained a sensible level of it, at least within my own psychological limits.
(45:35):
I'm a very psychologically strong person. I've been told by people that with a psychology background that mirrors that that, hey, you have very strong coping skills.
And it's not because you don't deal with it is because you just process it in a way that might not be typical that at least lets you just kind of be like it happened.
(45:58):
I'm moving on. It's it's behind me now. The past is dead.
Which mirrors one of the first conversation pieces of the conversation that we had earlier when we were talking about, you know, focusing on the present because past is dead and the future hasn't happened yet.
Having said that, the human psyche does one thing really well and that's hold on to things that we don't necessarily realize that we've held on to.
(46:21):
And sometimes that expresses itself in different ways, either an addiction to something that seems relatively benign, a tick, either a physical or a mental one, or bursts of really quick anger, which that was one of the reasons that I went to therapy is because I was experiencing that.
(46:44):
Do you think, looking back on the way that that you are processing the way that you have processed being very sounds like being relatively methodical about it.
Do you think that there's anything that's still kind of like a burr in your psyche that maybe shows up every once in a while that you think maybe could be due to something in your past.
(47:12):
Kind of but almost unrelated. I don't really care. Like there have been a couple situations when the last six months that I was reasonably sure I was about to die.
And I just went, eh, happened to happens.
In which, in what way, if you don't mind me asking.
I was reasonably certain someone kicked open my front door in the middle of the night one time.
(47:36):
Which I woke up rendered it like they shoot me, they shoot me. And another one I thought I had, I had vertigo real bad.
And then I was like, oh, hey, I'm suddenly sweating really badly because of the stress of having vertigo.
Right. Like bad vertigo like I couldn't stand. And then like half of my body went numb. I'm like, oh crap, I might be having a stroke.
(47:59):
And I just kind of laid down on the ground. I went to sleep and I was like, if I wake up, I wake up and then I woke up and I was still half numb and I was like, shit, I lived.
Do things.
One, I'm glad you're alive.
If not solely for the process of making this podcast.
Also getting to know another new face, which has kind of been the joy of this year is actually getting to know new people.
(48:26):
As an adult, you realize you don't get to do that very often unless like as a genuine back and forth instead of just like at Walmart.
The other thing is, is you may already know this from somebody who has lived how they lived and whatnot.
But what a typical male response to have something drastically happen to your body and you're just like, I'm not going to tell anybody if I live, I live.
(48:53):
If not, I'll get it fixed.
There was somebody in the house at the time.
But I was like, then part of me was like, yeah, I should probably have someone call an ambulance, but I need a shower.
No, I'm good.
Oh, the priorities.
I just don't want to be in like, what is it?
(49:14):
My mom hates it when I say it, but it's like, if I die, it solves all my problems.
Makes up, makes problems for you and other people, but my problems are gone.
My mom was very big of the phrase that death is all about the living because once you're dead, you're dead.
Everybody else has to deal with the ramifications.
And, you know, knowing that there is some kind of freedom of that.
(49:36):
I think my grandfather was a really big proponent of that.
That's why he set everything from the moment of his death on on his terms, you know, made sure that everybody pulled him off that the best that they could.
Your story reminds me of the one time that I experienced PM Tylenol because I had a headache.
(49:58):
I needed to take some medicine and it had been a bad headache.
Like one that like so I understand.
Yeah, yeah, it was started here and it just started swallowing my whole head basically.
And so I was taking some I took some some time at all and it was blue.
But I'm like, whatever, pills come in different shapes and colors like I didn't check the box or anything like that.
(50:20):
And then I'm sitting there on the couch everybody.
I'm in a house with four other people and we're all watching TV and then all of a sudden I just get like just cordonly sleepy.
Like the the the quickest I've ever gotten and half of my brain went.
I mean, at the time we were having some hard times too.
So I was like, I wasn't really stressed out about this thought.
(50:44):
I just knew it was coming over me.
I was like, this is the sleep of death.
I'm going to curl up on this couch.
I looked at my wife thought, I love you and went to sleep thinking that that was going to be it.
I raised no alarms.
I woke up later about five or six hours still groggy as hell.
(51:09):
And my wife's like, are you okay?
I'm like, do you really sleep?
And she's like, what kind of pills did you take?
I'm like, I don't know the blue pills that were there.
And she's like, Michael, you idiot, you're on PM medication.
And I told her straight up still in my groggy state is like, oh, I thought I was dying.
And the look on her face, she's like, you thought you were dying and you didn't tell me anything.
(51:32):
So I, I understand the thought process, but I would say now because of where I am, who was in my life, what I'm doing.
I am more susceptible to actually having things that are wrong with me getting taken care of, because I think my quality of life is better now.
(51:55):
And therefore my wants to continue and to keep putting my names on things and to meet new people and to do new things is, is budding.
Which it sounds like to me, that's kind of what's going on with you over this last year, getting into socials and whatnot and willing to put your face even half of it up on the screen for other people to see.
(52:17):
I don't know, D, it sounds like to me, and for somebody who just met you, it sounds like to me that you're going through a period of growth and damn it, I'm glad I'm here for it.
Well, hey, well, it just means that if I die, it's now your problem.
At least a little bit, just a little bit.
Hey, you've got you've got footage of my face. Congratulations.
Yeah, congratulations. You spoke to me like, I mean, I'm certainly not God's, you know, gift on earth.
(52:42):
But I mean, the trauma is mainly funny.
Amen to that.
The story of you telling like your wife that hey, I thought I was dying. Like I told that to a co-worker just, I mean, I'm pretty open about these things.
I probably shouldn't be like most like one of the people that works with like the elderly disabled people at my job.
(53:05):
This was like the look that she gave me was like, what the fuck.
Oh, it's one of those moments like I said earlier.
They were like, oh, honey, what's wrong with you?
Oh, I won't use her name.
I won't use her name, but she's like a really, really nice girl in her like early 20s, early 20s.
Probably mid 20s. I don't know how old she is. I've never asked.
(53:27):
Again, you don't ask that.
You don't ask.
No.
One of the two people that I'm really close to at work or not really close to but close enough, especially I've always maintained like a boundary at work.
This job is going to make me soft because it's an office job and I've never had an office job before this one.
Same here, buddy.
So it's nice to like I've like, I've, you know, it's nice to like sit on my ass and type at work instead of having to like move heavy shit.
(53:53):
There's a simplicity of just knowing that a portion of your day is just emails and that's okay sometimes.
Oh, that's okay.
Now I will tell you this, it's forced me to have to go outside every day and take walks for the vitamin D and the mental health because I know that if I just live behind the desk, I'm going to waste away.
But there's still a gentle simplicity about it.
(54:14):
Anyway, go ahead.
Yeah.
But just the way that this lady looked at me like I like this, like she was having a crisis because she knew I was I have a crisis and it didn't compute that I didn't care.
And I was just like, she's, she's really, really nice.
And I think there was another coworker she's about to have a master's degree in psychology.
(54:41):
And she is like, I can never tell exactly what that person thinks of me because they were the person that you're really self aware, like someone with a master's degree in psychology is like, you're on that like you're out oddly, oddly self aware of yourself.
And I'm just like, I don't know what to think that as a compliment or not.
You just look at her and go, thanks, it's the trauma.
(55:04):
Well, no, she's the one that claimed that you're funny because of the trauma.
Yeah.
And it's just kind of like, okay, I'll take it.
I'm really funny.
Most of the time, though, these people don't get the really mean kind of humor that I've done that is what I'm really funny.
Yeah.
But they get done the lighthearted where I'm just really quick-witted.
I tone it back depending on when I'm around because you can't be like that around everybody.
(55:27):
Yeah.
Especially in a professional setting.
I would like to keep this job.
I don't want to go back to freight or retail.
It doesn't pay the best, but it's not stressful.
And that's kind of what I needed life.
You need that work-life balance, my guy.
I understand that.
They care a lot about, I mean, I work with like 95% women and they're either like a lot younger than me or a lot older than me.
And granted, I'm pretty low on the totem pole there.
(55:51):
I mostly just do data entry, but I'm really good at my job.
There you go.
So nobody wants my job.
So they just generally leave me alone to let me do my job.
One of the very few times that I've had no supervision for the most part,
my boss is like, I don't care if I hear a few after a week or two, but like,
I know the job's going to get done.
So I guess that's kind of what I funneled into because it's important to me to have a good reputation that works.
(56:16):
And that's mostly because I don't want micromanagement.
I hate being micromanaged.
I don't know what that says about me.
Probably nothing because I don't know too many people that like being micromanaged.
No, no, not unless they, they're in for the job simply just to get paid
because at that point they're just like point and click, man.
(56:37):
Just tell me what to do.
And then the other segment of people that really like to be micromanaged,
but we're not going to get into that.
No, that's a different thing.
That's a whole different thing.
That's a whole different thing.
Certainly not me.
I'm not even, I'm not even joking.
That's not me.
I view my like personal free will too much.
That's crazy.
Look, we're going to pause here for a second because I got to read about my book.
(57:00):
Just taking a small break to tell you that this episode of the podcast is brought to you by Dink,
spelled D-I-N-Q-D-N-D in the coffin hold of the USS Enterprise.
It's my first book, a memoir in which I tell you about trying and failing in a Navy school for nuclear operators,
all while juggling marriage and depression.
Where does D&D come in?
It's woven all throughout the book.
(57:22):
Check it out on Amazon as a paperback or on Kindle.
The link's in the description below.
And hopefully that makes you want to buy it.
It's still available on Amazon or Barnes & Noble if you want digital or you can get a paperback.
That's fun too.
Anyway, back to D.
I'm just going to blatantly steal another thing from Josh here.
(57:49):
And of course he asks a different question, but it is still a pretty succinct question.
He likes to ask people at the end of the podcast, are you happy?
Which brings a wide varied, a lot of them just smile and go, yeah, I am.
Because they talk about all the good things in life.
And then sometimes you get, I think I am.
And those are always the interesting answer.
(58:12):
But for you, I just want to ask, do you think you're healing?
To be perfectly honest, there's not much healing to do.
Okay.
And to answer your other question, I'm content.
Okay.
Content.
That's fine.
That kind of goes along with the thing that you're saying that you're more self-aware.
I think that answer fits you perfectly.
We've scratched the surface of what I was going to ask you, but that's because when I started scratching, we realized that there was a bigger hole, I think, to actually get into there.
(58:39):
And I'm so glad that we did.
I would love to have you on again.
You know, five years down the road, I still want to be doing this because this is fun.
It's relatively easy to do.
And I'm meeting so many new people and getting to know people.
So thank you so much.
Where can people find you?
I think both Instagram and TikTok is DeltaForks.
(59:02):
My interview is human with DeltaForks.
And I have DeltaForks on YouTube.
I think it's DeltaForks.
That's the channel name.
So are there any spaces, underscores, and how do you spell human?
Human. H-U-M-I-N-T. Human intelligence is the military term for it.
(59:25):
But most of the stuff goes through DeltaForks on TikTok.
It is much wider.
All one word?
I don't know.
Get your shit together, B.
It's like, I don't...
I'd say a way.
Yeah, it's all one word.
(59:47):
Don't care about anything. Nothing serious.
It's also going to be in the description below as well.
And I am your host, Michael LeBlanc.
And if you happen to miss next year's episode, still, it's your loss.
Thank you so much, D.
We'll talk again.
(01:00:08):
Thanks for having me. It was fun.
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