241: There Will Be Pain. Life is Rough. Lessons From Being Shot 27 Times. "Perfectly Wounded" with Mike Day

This is Jocko, podcast number 241 with Echo, Charles, and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

Good evening.

I was the number one man on the door in my train, which meant I would be the first man into the room.

Missions often included debates as to who would get to go first. All these guys were fearless and liked to train. Hop to the front of the stack, the most dangerous place to be first into a room.

Seals love to fight. We all want to be the first into the fight. And every SEAL is willing to accept the greater risk, especially for his buddy's sake. I had no apprehension about the possibility of my own death.

My concern was for my platoon mates. While I can't speak for everyone, their actions this night proved they all felt the same way.

Clarky and I looked at each other. He smiled back at me. We had practiced this maneuver a thousand times and had successfully done it on hundreds of missions just like this one.

There was no rush of adrenaline or anxiety.

We were composed, relaxed, and professional. We would simultaneously breach our respective doors and go to work clearing the rooms of enemy fighters and other potential threats.

We launched on the signal, a mutual wave of our rifle barrels. I breached the door to my room. It swung open to the right. I followed the door in as it opened, looked down the right wall, and saw it was clear.

As I pivoted off my right foot to move down the left wall, I had the sensation that my body was being slammed with a dozen sledgehammers. My entire body was now in the room, and the men behind me in my room clearing train were attempting to follow me in. The room was small, 12ft by 12ft. My night vision goggles illuminated the darkness, and I saw in clear view four of our targets aiming at me, all of them armed with automatic weapons and all of them firing at me.

That right there is an excerpt from a book called Perfectly Wounded by a retired SEAL named Mike Day. And I knew Mike when he was a young SEAL. He was maybe 10 classes ahead of me, going through basic SEAL training. He started his career at Seal Team 3. I started my SEAL career next door. I don't know, 50 meters away, 100 meters away. Over at Seal Team 1, we crossed paths on what was my first deployment. We'd see each other around from time to time.

He was always very cool to me, from what I could tell. Always cool to everyone. Nice guy.

No ego, no attitude.

And on the day that Mike writes about in that book.

Those insurgents that were shooting at him.

They hit their mark.

And not just once, not just twice. Not just 3 or 4 or 5 or 10 times, but.

27 times.

27 times. Mike was shot 11 times in his body armor and 16 times in his body.

And you have to keep in mind.

And this is a strange thing, but one single round.

Or one single tiny piece of fragmentation can kill you.

So to receive.

That many shots.

And survive is.

Well, it's some kind of miracle.

And then to go beyond that, because the story doesn't end there, but to receive that many shots and actually fight back is beyond a miracle.

And that's exactly what Mike did.

He fought back and he won.

And it is an honor to have Mike here today to tell us about his experiences, his life, and his lessons learned. He's got a bunch of them. So, Mike, thanks for coming on, man.

I appreciate you guys having me.

Yeah, get getting you out here. I know we're in the middle of. Middle of COVID right now. You've been driving across country. I know you just got done with Total Archery Challenge up in. Up in Utah. I wish I could have grabbed you there. So you'd have to come all the way down here. But now you're telling me you're going to try and look to surf a little bit, which is awesome.

Well, I'm trying to. That looks like the surf's going to be picking up in Virginia since I'm not there. We got a hurricane coming up.

That's the way it works, isn't it? You should have been yesterday.

Well, hey, man, I want to jump into this. Your book is. First of all, it's. It's just. I mean, everyone, obviously. I'm not going to read the whole book. I'm going to read some of it. Just go and go and get the book right now. The. The detail that Mike goes into this is a historical document about being in the SEAL teams, about being in combat and. And then what's. In addition to that, the life stories that you bring to the table are important for people to understand. Understand what? How people grow up in different situations, what it does to them, and how to get through those hard situations, because you definitely went through some hard situations. So I'm going to jump into it, man.

Jump into this book and kind of talk about your past and how you grew up. And it starts off like this. He looked huge, like a damn monster. She was screaming and fighting back, which only made it worse. I was frozen in terror. He bent her arm over his knee and like a twig cracked it.

I watched him break her arm. He yelled at me, go get me A glass of water. I ran to the kitchen, filled a glass, and ran back to hand it to him. He drank it, then smashed the glass on a nearby table and held the broken shard like a knife. He went after her again with this newly created blade. I jumped on his back to stop him. I think that's what finally snapped him out of his uncontrolled rage. I flew off him as he swung his arm, and I landed on the ground on my back. He spun around to attack his unknown aggressor and realized it was me.

I clearly remember seeing his expression dissolve from rage into one of guilt and shame.

This is my earliest memory and my first encounter with a terrorist. It was 1976 in New Jersey, and the terrorist was my father.

His victim was my mother.

I was five years old.

That's your earliest memory?

SEAL teams were easy. He made it easy.

Yeah.

This is, I believe, pretty prevalent in our society now. A lot of us have just terrible parents. And one of the best books I've ever read is the Body Keeps a Score. And he says in that book, the largest medical issue, the largest medical problem we have in this country is childhood trauma, because you learn what you are in the first seven years.

For me, luckily, it wasn't to the point where I became.

More of a victim.

And worried about what things were going to happen. My response was just to fight. So when I get scared or angry now, I fight when I get scared. A lot of people, when they get scared, the fight or flight is to cower. You can see in a lot of. A lot of gunfights with people that aren't trained. One of the most prominent places to get shot, somebody that doesn't know what they're doing is in their forearms and their hands is because they're cowering. And.

When we get triggered, people know that you don't jump around a corner to scare me because I'm going to smack you upside the head. That's my response. I don't flinch. My response is to go forward. And, you know, my father ingrained that in me. Then I got in the SEAL teams, and that was ingrained in me. And that night in that gunfight, it was. There was no thoughts. That was all reaction. That was all muscle memory. I was terrified. I went through a terrified. A little bit of terrification. That's a new word. And once I got past that, I was just angry, and then everything was automatic.

You go on.

You go on here in the book. My parents divorced not long after my father broke my mother's arm. My mother would soon start dating and eventually marry Tom, a black man. A rare Union in the 1970s. My father held racist beliefs, and my mother's marriage to a black man inflamed my father's racist sentiment. The divorce included a custody hearing. I was young, but I can distinctly recall someone in court, a lawyer, possibly the judge, asking me strange questions about Tom, like, have you ever seen Tom naked? Have you ever seen Tom and your mother sleeping together? The focus of the custody battle, which should have been my father and his treatment of us, was instead trained on me, an innocent bystander. Interracial relationships were not the social norm in the 1970s. I'm sure the court knew my father beat my mother and us kids, but they still awarded him full custody regardless. My hunch is that the courts were so biased at the time that they decided my younger brother and I would be better off with a wife beater and abusive father than be raised by an interracial couple.

All speculation, but, I mean, the 70s were kind of like that.

Yeah. Where was this?

This was New Jersey.

Still New Jersey.

And they still married. And I got two brothers. One's in the Coast Guard from that marriage. And he's a rescue swimmer. Oh, not a rescuer. He's a crew chief on the birds that go out that carry the rescue swimmers.

So how old are you at this point? You must have been six years old or something like that.

Yeah, right about then. About six.

I'm thinking, you know, when. When I picture you, I don't picture the. The old bastard that I see in front of me right now. I picture this young kid.

With blond hair and, you know, blue eyes.

There's a picture of me in there.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's. That's when I opened. I was like, oh, yeah, I know this guy.

Not this one.

Yeah. So I'm sure you're looking at me thinking the same thing. You know, my dad was driving around his.

We haven't changed that much. Really? If I shave this.

Yeah, yeah, no, you do. You don't look that much different, except for you used to have the freaking. The blonde locks. Bright blonde locks.

I do miss them.

No, but I'm thinking, you know, there you are in court, this little Aryan kid, and the judges are looking at, you know, the. The interracial couple. And like you said, the. I mean, you said it's a. What'd you say? It's an assumption. But to think of any other reason why they would decide to send you with a known child abuser is. It's hard to come up with a different reason.

Well, that's another reason why this book's really good. I don't think anybody be able to pick that up. Nobody gets through this life without trauma. And it's a lot more prevalent than I think we understand child abuse. And you look at the child trafficking going on right now, I mean, there are just some really bad parents, really bad people out there, and people are going to suffer trauma.

You got to build the resiliency. It's training. They helped us build the resiliency we required to do what we did in the SEAL teams. And it's just training. If you sit on the couch and eat Twinkies all day.

And watch tv, anytime something other than that comes up that causes stress, you're just not going to be able to handle it. You got to train to be able to handle stress.

Yeah. And then, I mean.

That sounds awesome. That sounds awesome. But the reality is, I mean, you're probably this small percentage of people that can get out of a situation like this and move in a positive direction. I don't know what the percentage is, but obviously there's some percentage of people that go through these traumatic experiences as kids and they end up, you know, they end up in jail on drugs and whatever else. And.

Yeah, I mean, there's something along the way that made you.

There's not a whole lot of difference between me and 80% of the prisoners here in California. I just.

Had the proper opportunity at the right time. Because if I didn't join the Navy, yeah, I might be. I'd be running an MS.13.

I gotta come after you now.

They're gonna come after.

The amount of seals and this sounds freaking horrible to say, look, there are some guys that are saints in the SEAL teams for sure, but the amount of guys in the SEAL teams just. If you just took a broad cut of the SEAL mentality, there is an element, the criminal mentality in there, like, oh, if you want to join the Navy, we know where this is going to end up for sure.

Well, we have to deal with criminals.

Yes.

I mean, a lot of people think that when we go to war.

I'd venture to say that 75% of the people that we're dealing with are not ISIS or Al Qaeda. They're just the criminal element that are profiteers off of the current. I mean, look what we got going on.

Whatever mayhem's going on.

Yeah.

Theologically, they don't care. There is like, hey, I can make some money off of that.

Look at the religion in this country, you know, we've got how many Christians, and then what level are they practicing? You know, it's the same thing with Muslims. Yeah, they're Muslim, but are they really practicing? Are they really going to follow what they think is right? Or are they going to take the path of least resistance, which is what humans will do?

You, you continue on here. Fast forward a little bit. My father was a sailor. When the Navy issued him new orders, we moved to Pennsylvania from New Jersey. After the divorce, my father remarried. Our new stepmother soon became pregnant, giving birth birth to my first half sister. Two years later, she gave birth to my half brother. Trauma attracts trauma. It has its own distinct language and behaviors. We would be raised by two people who'd been severely traumatized as children. My new stepmother was a natural fit, for she too had a history of childhood abuse, both physical and mental. I don't know much about her the early years of her life other than her parents would lock her in a closet for long periods of time. She was put up for adoption and taken in by a loving couple. My stepmother would grow up to be both victim and perpetrator. She would alternate between coercing my father to beat us and slapping us around herself.

She and my father would get into their own fights, too. She would fight back, even though she had no way of winning. He was 6 foot 2 and weighed 240 pounds.

One of the worst beatings I ever endured was when I was 8. My brother and I had gone out on a winter day and pelted a car with snowballs. The driver was pissed, but if he'd known the price we were about to pay for our transgressions, he may have given us a pass. We ran to our house with the driver of the car chasing us. He knocked on our front door and told my parents what we had done. My father and stepmother had a friend over at the time. They were all drinking. My parents were outraged. Our father sent us to the basement, an ad hoc torture chamber of sorts, where he made us strip naked before tying our hands to a pole so we were facing each other. He whipped us with his belt so hard. After another 15 minutes we'd worked up, he'd worked up a sweat. All the while, my stepmother and her friend sat on the basement steps sipping their booze, urging him to beat us harder and longer. When he was done, my brother and I were both badly bloodied and bruised.

My father's violence escalated as we grew. He would smear toothpaste on the nylon belt when he whipped us so it would sting as it cut and bruised us. I'm not sure where he picked up this technique, but it worked. His routine was to bring me into the basement and make me drop my pants so that my bare ass was available. He would wind up and rip into my bare backside with that belt holding onto my arm as I twisted in a circle trying to escape.

I recall a week that was prefaced with him telling us, I know that you will be bad kids this week.

He beat us bloody and then he went back to work. This was some crazy stuff. He was so nuts. He set his alarm for 4am to wake us up and beat us for no reason whatsoever before he went to work. We got beat and we went back to bed. Hardly a typical morning routine for a first grader. My childhood was a real life horror movie. I couldn't escape.

It was terrible about that. A lot of people have it worse.

I got out of it. A lot of people don't.

Yeah.

Where this ends up, you say? Finally, at the age of 12, after years of enduring his drunken rages and endless beatings, I decided to fight back. One night I found him passed out drunk on the couch. I knew that he was passed out because the crotch of his blue jeans was darkened from having wet himself. I grabbed a baseball bat and walked back and forth for about five minutes debating my intentions until finally I mustered up my courage and with an overhead axe swing, I drilled him hard on the chest with the baseball bat. It felt great. A totally empowering rush. I didn't kill him, but I sure surprised him because he immediately woke up from his booze induced blackout with a look of total confusion that quickly turned evil. He looked at the bat in my hands and realized that I was what? That that was what just bounced out off his chest. I knew by the look in his eyes he was going to kill me. He chased me upstairs to my room where I jumped out of my second story window into a thorny rose bush. I looked up to see my enraged father stick his head out, only to pull it back in. I could hear his pounding footsteps from outside as he ran downstairs. He was determined to hunt me down, chasing me through the woods around our house in the dark. He couldn't get through the thick underbrush, but I was too terrified to slow down. He never caught me. I spent the night at a neighbor's house and the next day when I returned home, he had forgotten all about it.

In 1983, my father was transferred to Miramar, near San Diego, California. That's where he totally lost it he was drinking, causing problems at work, had been arrested several times for defeat defecating in the aisles of stores.

Some mental health professionals describe this peculiar public display as elimination disorder. It's a behavior that's been identified in several serial killers and manifests out of extreme anger at someone or something.

I was 12 years old when my stepmother received word that my father would be medically discharged from the Navy and institutionalized with schizophrenia and a host of other psychiatric conditions. He would spend the rest of his life in an inpatient facility or an assisted living environment.

My father has since died. He was very sick and really broken. He did a terrible job as a parent. However, I know now that he did his best, that he did the best he could. I don't hold any harsh feelings toward him.

He really sucked as a father.

Dang. So, I mean, it's just, it's beyond. He had like, legitimate serious mental issues.

Well, his father was worse than him. He just wasn't the one that was able to break the cycle. I think he tried to. It just ate him up. I mean, his father used to chase him, his brother and his sister around with butcher knives and threatened to kill him. He never actually threatened to kill us. I mean, but that thought's always there. His father used to actually make that threat. I never met my grandfather.

And was your grandfather already dead or was.

Quite honestly, I don't know if they just kept us from him or.

If he had passed. I met his mother.

Looking back on that as a kid, it was strange. She was broke.

Just a broken, broken woman.

Just strange.

Just not normal. I mean, go over for Thanksgiving dinner and everybody's eating Kentucky Fried Chicken, which I don't want to complain about it. I mean, you got, you got food, but not gonna complain with having food. But it was just.

It was not a normal atmosphere. You could just feel that it was weird.

I mean, and his sister grew up in a psychiatric ward. She went in when she was really early, really young. So I don't know what kind of what was done to her.

I mean, some serious darkness there.

I mean, we got that going on now in the world. It's pretty prevalent, you know, just shitty parents that abused their kids don't know how to be parents because they were abused. It's really not an excuse. I mean, my kids tell me, well, I've got old kids. I got a 20 year old and a 29 year old. And they've always told me, we wish you would spank us rather than yell at us. And I was like, it's because you've never been spanked. You might change your mind if you got got an ass whooping.

You.

Go on here. I was about 12 or 13 years old when my stepmother became our legal guardian and seized her newfound freedom by dating a guy in a roko in a local rock and roll band named Beachy and hosting parties at our house. Our home quickly turned into a constant party with its own in house band and all the characters that came with it. People, strangers, would sit around my house all day getting drunk and stoned. On one particular occasion, my stepmother was partying with Beachy and his band of losers when she tried to smack me. I caught her arm, spun it behind her back, then swept the legs out from under, dumping her on her ass. That episode got me and my brother sent to Maine to live with our maternal grandparents, who we hadn't seen in years for that summer. My half siblings were still young at the time. I still remember looking over my shoulder and seeing my half brother lying in his crib and my half sister lying. Lying in her bed as I made my way out of the house.

That is a funny thing about trauma, because that's the only thing I remember. Those two. I mean, I talk to them now, but it's as if they weren't even in the same house with us. I don't remember them.

Were they getting any different treatment?

I don't remember them.

That's wild. And so. And you were like 12 or 13.

You might. I don't know. You were. What team were you at? Two.

I was at team two. Was it team one? Team two? Team.

My brother did, like, eight years at.

Team two from when to win.

God, sometime after 2010. What year? I was gone. I got out in 2010.

Yeah. I retired in 2010.

He was in the teams for like, 10 years.

That's awesome. But just no memory of them? Of them?

None at all.

That's so wild.

The only thing I can remember is looking over my shoulder when I was walking out of the house.

Now, I can tell you this is what I think about memories.

Like, I don't go back to the town where I grew up very often. And so I don't. Because I don't, like, fight when I say very often. I mean, for 10 years at a time. Right. And I don't see all those people that I kind of grew up with. So I don't fire those memories.

It comes.

Right. I don't fire those memories very often. So they just, like, fade. And I'll go back there and see Someone, they're like, oh, yeah, I remember when you did this. Oh, I remember. Remember that girl? Remember this? And this thing over here? And I'm always like, I. I feel bad because they're telling me vivid stories about my own childhood, and I just don't remember. And I think it's because I just don't. Didn't fire those.

You can read studies on people's memories, especially in stressful situations. And like I said, my citation's not accurate. They gave me credit for saving six women and children that were supposedly in the same room. I was in a gunfight with four dudes with automatic weapons. They'd all be dead. The guy that saw that looked past one of our guys that had been shot and killed to see the six women and children in a totally different room didn't even see the guy laying in the doorway. He just saw the six women and children and superimposed them in the room that I was in. They'd all be dead. Hundreds and hundreds of rounds were fired in that room in a matter of minutes.

So now you're heading up to Maine. That fall, my brother and I moved to Maine from Virginia beach to live with our mother and her second husband, Tom. It was only after we arrived that I learned about how my stepmother and father deliberately and systematically tried to alienate me and my brother from our mother. She showed us a box filled with years worth of Christmas and birthday cards had been returned without the check she'd written for us. My father and stepmother had cashed them all and kept the money for themselves. Despite this, I feel the same about my stepmother as I do about my father. She survived my father's violence and did the best she could. I don't hold any harsh feelings towards her either. Tom and my mother never hit us. They were patient, did their best to parent some severely abused young minds. If the courts hadn't been so biased, we could have skipped the seven years of abuse and lived in Virginia beach all along. But as I would learn, everything happens for a reason.

Never would have made it through buds.

I made it through eighth grade and entered Green Run High School, where I lasted until my junior year when my wrestling coach caught me smoking pot in the school bathroom. This caused my expulsion. Was that a public school? Green Run.

Yeah. It's hard to get kicked out of that one.

It's actually called Gang Run. It's hard to get kicked out of that one.

Shortly after being expelled, I had to run in with the police. Cop busted me with a bag of weed. At the time Any amount over an ounce was a felony. The cop grabbed the bag and said, is this an ounce? I said, yes. He opened the bag, grabbed a pinch, and chucked it onto the street, then said, is this announced now? No, I replied, that cop saved me from a felony charge and may have even saved my life. I'd like to find that guy one day and thank him. There's a good cop trying to take care of this freaking knucklehead kid.

I was like, 14 or 15 years old.

So from. So you get kicked out.

I spent almost 30 days in jail. Now, that's where I learned how to play. What was it? Pinochle?

Learned how to play a bunch of card games.

Oh, man. So then you end up spades.

I learned how to play spades.

Spades, that comes in. That comes in handy on the. On the ships. Once you're in the Navy, you ended up in the job Corps, which is like, you know, you're doing vocational training.

That doesn't seem to work out too great. 1990 or 1988, you got a neighbor, retired Navy dire diver, who tells you you're going to end up dead or in jail if you keep this up. You should join the SEAL teams and say, instead, they'll pay you to do all the things you're doing to get in trouble right now.

He was giving good advice. He totally saw it. He totally saw his kids were crazier than me.

Yeah, man. You know, there's that attraction of violence, man, and just mayhem when you're a kid.

Well, it wasn't violence. It was just, you know, tying ropes in one tree and lowing another one and sliding down it on handlebars and just jumping over ridiculous jumps on our bikes, you know, smashing frames on our bikes and just stuff I want to admit to. And.

So you. You. You head down and you're going to join the Marines.

I did. I tried to.

And then you got rejected by the.

Marine Corps for having a ged. And I actually met a guy that was a recruiter back then that was 88 or 89, and they had a restriction. You had to have a high school diploma.

A GED wouldn't get you in, which I'm.

My guardian angels knew I'd have done four years in the Marine Corps.

I would have got out.

Yeah, I couldn't have done that. There's no way I could have done that. Yeah, I mean, I like working with them, but pre 9 11, Marine Corps was a lot different.

Yeah. Yeah.

We didn't get along too well pre 9 11.

Yeah. That's. The Marine Corps is a completely different environment. And, and I mean they do what they do.

It's actually more, it's more dangerous than what we do.

Yeah. And their day to day life, freaking.

More spartan life, you know, especially if you're an infantryman.

Like that's patrol to contact.

Yeah. Go get some.

Wait till someone shoots you. It's sucks. I like to wait till they're asleep.

That's the goal.

You wrap up here saying my childhood was not exactly idyllic, but it's what happened to me and I'm very grateful for all of it. The wounds of my childhood trauma served as the foundation of some truly excellent resiliency training. That's a very positive way of looking at this, Mike. Resiliency is conditioned response to physical and emotional trauma and stress. It's, it's a never ending process of understanding, endurance, evaluation, acceptance and application that continues, continues to help me get through some very difficult situations. Childhood trauma, especially the kind perpetrated by parents, can be some of the most damaging because it can cause children to feel unlovable. Some children who feel unlovable can become unlovable adults and some of those become unlovable parents, thus repeating the cycle. The unlovable live lonely, tragic lives. If my hurts, mistakes, butt whippings and insights can help you overcome yours, then this book has value for both of us.

And I'm not the only one with mommy and daddy issues.

Jack.

Yeah, I got my, I got some codependency shit going on. You know, I tell people, I mean, we all got insecurities and how Navy SEALs got insecurities. Some of the most insecure people I know are Navy SEALs. They're like trying so damn hard.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Can't let anybody know I'm weak here.

I always laugh in the teams. If someone says, hey, you know, Mike Day's really good at parachuting, someone will chime in the back. Yeah, but he's a slow runner, you know, like I am. Yeah, but. Exactly. But somebody's gonna let you know.

Yeah, but running breeds cowardice, so screw. It's a bunch of cowards.

And so now you go to a boot camp to buds. After signing on the dotted line, I spent the next six months working out, doing my best not to get in trouble until I finally boarded the bus. For MEPs and facility in southern Virginia, MAPS is the way station for all new military recruits. There I found myself part of an interesting blend of Americana. One that included all shapes, sizes, colors and temperatures of young men. Women who Were leaving for the civil. Leaving the civilian world. Getting the first taste of the US Military.

You know what? That's an accuracy because I went to Great Lakes.

Well, there you go.

Women. I did have a writer with me. I missed that one. That was all dudes up there. All the women were going to Orlando.

What about MEPs?

Yeah, MEPs was even.

Even. Even at MEPs.

At MEPs? Yeah, they were sending all the women at the time to Orlando. Everybody goes to Great Lakes now. That place sucks.

What is MEPs? I heard that before.

Military.

Military Entry Processing Station.

So you actually enlist and you wait a period of time before you go. They just snatch you so you don't go out, like do something else.

Like a half. They don't actually have you though kind of situation.

Well, you're not under any kind of restriction or any kind of order under the UCMJ yet. You sign a contract and they give you a date that you're going to leave. So I was only on MEPs for like six months. I've talked to kids that been, you know, 18 months. They hit some kid in high school, you know, waiting for them to graduate, get them young. I was 17 years old when I joined. Anywhere else to go.

This. I found this funny. And this is also probably why you say that the Marine Corps wouldn't have worked out great for you over a long period of time. You say? I never in my life wanted to quit anything more than I did Navy boot camp. Miserable, bro. Yeah, I mean, there's golden underwear.

Oh, and Great Lakes too. January. Oh, January 4th. Five feet of snow, 30 below.

Man, I hate the cold weather. I'd rather sweat.

You end up, you said. I think the company commander saw some potential in me and knew that I was bored because I kept volunteering to wake up at 4am to do what most people dreaded. They decided to give me some extra responsibility. Made me the divisions recruit. The divisions recruit. Master at arms. I was like your. When I was going through boot camp, I got made like a squad leader or something.

I got fired from that one.

Oh, bummer.

I talk about that in the book. The guy wiped a booger on my pillow and right as the company commander was walking in the door, I punched him.

Yeah. So that. So you got.

I got rolled back from graduation week of boot camp. And then I get. Well, I got rolled out of. In buds. Out of 166 and a 168 and I got rolled graduation week of 168. Just the irony of that. Then they both Made me cry before you.

Before you went to. But so you get rolled back in. In. In boot camp, which I didn't even know there was such a thing as getting rolled back.

It was only one week, though, which was cool.

Oh, that's right, because we go Great Lakes or I went to Orlando, but.

You still have to do that stupid passing review. All that marching garbage. Well, nobody was coming to visit me for graduation. I got into that fight because you put a booger on my pillow.

I did knock him out. I knocked that kid out. Well, he was not a kid. I was a kid. He was a lot older than me. And so I didn't have to do the passing review. They just made me like a parking lot attendant. I didn't want to do it anyway. All that practice.

Yeah.

And we were in a Nazi company, too. They. All the flags. Remember those stupid flags for. I don't even remember what they were for, bro. I actually. Best marchers.

Best.

You fold your underwear. The best.

Yeah. This is, like. I have very limited memories of boot camp. I hated it. Yeah, I know that I hated it, but I don't remember a lot about. I remember, like, the highlights of it, probably the biggest. I remember just.

You don't remember shoveling snow?

No, I definitely don't remember. Not in Orlando. I remember sweating. I remember, like, sweating. Big, giant pools of sweat.

I don't know how to go in there.

I remember the space shuttle took off while we were standing out there. Like, there was a space shuttle launch and we were there. Yeah. I was like, oh, that's cool. But don't remember much from boot camp. So you go from there to C school, and then you get orders. Get orders to go to the USS Carl Vinson. Yeah. Which is.

My first set of orders were to the Carl Vincent via nuke. C school. Nuke Machinist mate. C school.

So, basically, for everyone that doesn't know, that means hello, regular Navy. No, no. No buds, no SEAL teams.

And I got to watch those guys go through school there. That was at the same place I was going through a school. They were a bunch of zombies. Like, 12 hours of class.

Oh, it's freaking.

They had a night class, and they had a morning class. I don't want a nuke.

Yeah, that's. That's a freaking hard job, man. It's a freaking hard job.

I got kicked out of high school. They wanted me to be a nuke.

Yeah. Whoever was running your career, core consulting was not doing a great job. Dude. They should have beelined you straight to the Freaking Buds. But then you did you. This is kind of crazy, though. You, like, requested Captain's Mass.

No, I just went to his office.

So you didn't even. So that's even better. You didn't even request Captain Mass. You just said, I'm going to go talk to the old man.

Yeah, kind of like, you know, group two, you know, what was her name that was up there for, like, longer than anybody was in the SEAL teams? The secretary.

Yeah.

So I talked to the secretary, and I was like, I got a problem with my orders. I had my orders, and I don't know how I got in there, but she let me get in there. And I think the guy was just amazed at some E2 who's coming to his office. Some boot. I'm like, real boot?

That's insane, dude.

And I told him, hey, look, I passed the test for the screening test for buds. There was 50 of us. Only, like, 10 of us passed. I was told I was gonna get this on my. On my contract, and this is what I got. He was like, do you understand that you're not supposed to be doing it this way? That's kind of how the conversation I was like. I kind of played in between. I knew it was wrong, but I didn't care.

Because there was no way I was going to nuke C school. So whatever I had to do, I was gonna. Was going to do it.

And then the dude was cool and just said, all right. And he took care of you?

I got beat a little bit, but beat, not like buds. I mean, did you ever try to count how many push ups you did in one day in Buds?

No.

And you get up to a thousand.

Did you ever?

I tried.

Really?

You want me to lose count?

Yeah. I never even thought about the 20.82s.

Hitting or 72s hitting the back of the head. Forget what number you're on.

I drove the Chow once, and this guy didn't make it through. He was such a big teddy bear. Cruise just couldn't run. And we were late for chow. And I had a Volkswagen Beetle. I was like, oh, we'll go get chow. The class was already gone.

So now we're fast forwarding to buds. We're jumping to buds. Is this first phase, I'm assuming? No, it's cool, man. So this is first phase.

This was.

I can't even remember.

But the brakes.

Went out on the thing. And, you know the cross intersection at 75.

Yeah.

So I crash into that thing because my brakes go out. I only hit it at, like, 25, 30 miles an hour. Both of us hit the windshield. Started the windshield. Windshield's out in the middle of 75 as the Buds class and the instructors drive by us and like, oh, God, 1500 eight count bodybuilders that weekend. That weekend, both of us, we cheated.

Yeah.

Sometimes you can't buy threes, sometimes you can't buy five. You can't do 1500.

Did you just stand out of the first phase outside the first phase office or something and just sit there?

Yeah, it was first safe then. Yeah, it was right by the bell.

How do you remember? Was it like, did you do like 750 a day or something like that?

No, we just, when nobody was looking, we just accounted.

Sometimes they sat in front of us. We'd count by one. As soon as they left, we're like 505.

Did you have any idea what you were getting into when you went to buds? Like, what comprehension level did you had?

I basically, yeah, I heard it was going to be hard.

And that's kind of a mindset I've always gotten out and it works. I don't know if it worked for other people, but I always think it's gonna be worse than it really is. So a lot of times it's just hard to get started.

Like, how good of a. I know you only were in high school for a couple years, but how good of a. How good did you. I know you wrestled.

I played football. I wrestled. When I grew up, I played all sports. Soccer, I boxed a little bit.

Hence the knockouts.

I remember almost knocking myself out playing football. Football, I was, I was vicious. Just getting after it, played basketball, never really scored a point. My coach would just say, go foul that guy. That was me.

So. So. But you had, so you had, you had some good athletic background.

Yeah, I like playing sports.

Yeah, so you would. But you had no knowledge of buds.

Like, hey, none at all.

Did you do, did you, did you think about, like, I was. I always talk about, you know, when I was, quote, getting ready for buds, no idea what to expect. I just knew that you ran a lot and you swam a lot, so. I ran a lot, I swam a lot. But I would do, you know, four sets of pull ups and be like, all right, you know, that was a good workout. And just had no idea that you were gonna get to buds and you were gonna do hundreds of pull ups in an hour, like more than you could count.

Well, they do. Don't expect you to be able to turn a 14 mile run when you show up. Yeah, it Is progressive.

Yeah.

I think they're even getting smarter about it now.

They're definitely getting smarter about it, but.

And guys are. The guys are getting smarter about it. I guess that's my point.

People abuse it, too.

What do you mean you can only.

Keep me in the water for 10 minutes? Because the water. 58 degrees. They know that.

When do you think that chart became a thing?

After us.

Are you being serious? Like, do you think it is after us? Because I.

It is after us.

Yeah. I mean, they would just. It was no freaking rules.

It seemed like they probably looked at the student body as a curve. And if somebody went in the hypothermia. Okay. Might need to take them out now.

I remember that part. I remember them walking down the line and being like. You could hear them like, hey, brother, Smitty's getting off.

They shine the flashlight.

Yeah. Like, hey, this guy's getting high pain. And if. But if. No, if you didn't hear that, then it's like back in the water. And they would just keep you doing that until someone started getting hypothermia. Maybe two people started getting hypothermia, and then they'd be like, on to the next evolution. There wasn't no graph that they were following.

No. They do now. I think it's good. There's good and bad to it. I wish the students didn't know it.

That's part of the game, not knowing.

And you also met your wife while you were in fourth phase. So the old fourth phase was you were there basically standing by to class up. I don't know. I don't know what they call it now.

Fourth phase.

I think it's still called fourth phase. So you were. You were there, which is weird.

And that's when you. You. You met your future wife.

And then rolling into first phase.

Drown proofing.

You call rescue swimmer life saving.

Yeah. So I did work with a writer. So some of the stuff is. Is changed a little bit. The whole process of going with this. What is that word program.

That you got to use when you're editing? Sometimes some things just get by. Like, man, I can't figure this program.

Yeah, it's. It. Plus, when you look at something over and again, you're just gonna miss stuff. It happens.

Well, and when you work with a civilian, stuff that they think is interesting is. I'm like, why do you want to talk about this, Jack? So there was something that the guy I worked with felt was interesting and he get the proper terminology, because to me, drown proofing was we didn't lose many people to that.

Yeah. Drown proofing was pretty easy, guys. Yeah, it was a few guys in knot tying. Lose a few guys in the underwater swim. The underwater swim. We did lose a few guys in life saving because life saving was.

That is interesting because it was a.

Subjective thing where they could look at a guy and be like, hey, this guy we don't like.

They're just trying to drown you.

Yeah. And then they're gonna drown you when you. They don't like you because they have.

That power until you do the whole waist push and go down there and tug on their shit and make them comply.

It's a scrap for sure.

It is. I mean, that's what they teach you. Don't let them grab onto you. You got to get them away from you. And sometimes you got to hurt them. But man, a good punch to the gut, you know, that'll calm them down.

They definitely.

They're gonna live.

There were some guys that they just weren't gonna make it. You know, like a guy that they didn't like or whatever, had a bad attitude or they thought it was a punk, he wasn't gonna get out of the water.

Those people have a history too. It's not just one evolution. It's a repetitive poor performance. Yeah.

I think that it seems like there's. You think they're stricter about that now, where there's less subjectivity or you think it's the same?

Well, I would just have to say that I know there's some things that have changed and a lot of guys will be like, oh, I think buds is easier, but the attrition rate's the same.

Yeah.

So they're not making any more seals.

No.

I mean, even with a class that's twice the size, I mean, we would start with like 125 guys to get 20 mm. Now they're starting with what, 200 something.

Yeah, one. I think they start with 165 and they still get whatever. Whatever.

They're still.

Only 1% of that is.

Yeah, they're still only getting that. It's still 75, 80% retrition. So it's still. I don't think it's any easier than it used to be.

No. I talked to friends that are down there. They're like, no, it's not easier. The other thing.

That's one evolution might be different. That's like, for instance, when I went through, we had twin 72s. They're not as buoyant as the twin 80s. So it was a little bit harder to tread water with those damn tanks because they're steel and they weren't as buoyant.

You know what else? They wear them like lightweight boots now. Not jungle boots. Not old school jungle boots.

That was a difference too. That when I was going through is everything was in boots.

Yep.

They were getting ready to transition to the shoes. So the times were different and almost didn't translate. You know, going from boots and then lowering the times because you're in sneakers. It was almost harder.

I just know we wore boots. And then when I eventually picked up what they started wearing, I was like, oh, that's way nicer.

Yeah. They were issuing us those garbage. New balance. Which gave me shin splints.

Oh, just the running shoes.

Yeah. Like when you. They didn't.

My legs were better off in boots than running in sneakers. The sneakers hurt me more.

That was what, a 710 pace? It's not bad. And boots.

Yeah. But the thing that's. The other thing that's. What is it deceiving? The thing that's deceiving about buds is they go, hey, it's only a. A 32 minute four mile time run. That's an eight minute mile. When you first get there, you go, oh, that's. I can do that. No problem.

But you just did a two mile swim this morning.

You just did a two mile swim and then you did it.

And then it's five miles. Just five miles to go to chow three times a day.

Yeah.

You run five miles every day just to eat.

Yeah. And not to mention that four mile timed run ain't four miles. I don't know what they do now, but I know that there was times where I run as hard as I could and I wouldn't be able to. I would be like barely passing.

Well, they do that to every class. They have that one run that's long. So everybody fails. It's a mind game psychological. We were doing the five mile time run and that extra mile was so much harder exponentially just to put out for that much longer. Just one mile. And they actually had to get rid of that because it was injuring people and a lot of people were failing it.

Crazy.

That's what they were pinging me on, trying to get me kicked out. But I brought a watch. I was passing.

Yeah. So. So how did that happen? You. So, so you brought a watch. Because that's another thing that's hard is you don't allowed to have a watch.

And we were running and you. You to tease.

So you're what phase is this? Do you remember?

This is third phase, which was die phase back then.

And so you failed one run?

No, he was failing me on all of them and everybody behind me.

Okay, so you had a beef with an instructor.

With. And we're not going to mention names, but he was the phase officer.

He was.

Okay, phase officer. And.

You know, you know the game that used to be played during room inspections? I mean, you're going to fail, you're going to get wet and sandy. And he was in front of me and he was like, why do you have all this stolen equipment in your locker? I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. So he's talking about like extra knives, utts and CO2 is garbage, right? And I was like, I don't have any of that stuff in my locker. I was just up there and the conversation just got to the point where he was like, well, one of two things is happening. You're lying or I'm lying. I was like, well, it's not me, so it must be you. But it wasn't like a disrespectful thing. I was answering a damn question. I was just answering his question. He said, one of us, one of two things is happening. What is it? I was like, well, it's not me. It must be you.

Damn.

E2 to a narcissistic lieutenant.

Yeah.

At the time.

That's freaking crazy. You had like, you had more balls than me going through buds.

That wasn't balls. I was just answering a question.

I don't know, man. I don't know if I would have said it ain't me. I guess it depends on how you said it too.

It was not coming from a place of disrespect. I was just totally answering the damn question.

You were just like, I am not lying.

I'm not lying. It's you. You asked. I'm answering your question.

So he didn't like that, and so now he kind of had it out for you.

And then he sicked that guy we were talking about earlier on me. So he started just harassing me. You know, third phase was a lot of classroom, you know, dive physics and all that garbage. But every break, I was getting wet and Sandy doing pull ups, doing push ups. He was just beating me up. And then he started failing me on the runs. And I talk about it in the book. I think I actually name him a guy named Doc Flynn.

Oh, yeah.

I went and told him. I was like, hey, look, I brought a watch. They're failing me. I mean, I'm passing these things by, like, two minutes, and they're failing me and everybody behind me.

That's kind of a weird move because you were breaking the rules.

Well, I had to.

Yeah, I know, but that's a weird move, man. That's a weird move to be like.

I've always done it, though. I went and talked to the commanding officer.

Yeah, dude, like I said, you got more balls than I had.

I just didn't know any different. Yeah, I wasn't doing it because I thought it was having balls. It was just. I don't know how else to get out of this or fix this.

So you're not allowed to bring a watch and. You brought a watch. You timed yourself?

Yeah, I timed. I tied it to the. You remember the. The buckles on the EDTs? Yeah, I tied it to a piece of like 550 cord, hung it down there.

Cool. And so you Pat. And how did you. How did you single out Doc Flynn as the guy that you would trust?

He was just one of the guys in the phase that really never beat us up for no reason.

He seemed like a fair dude. Yeah.

I mean, there was two kinds of instructors there. There was guys hiding out that never really did anything. And then there was guys that, back in those days, too. There wasn't a whole lot going on, but guys that were operational, that just needed a break. So, you know, some of them just beat us up just because they thought they were the gatekeepers, you know, kind of like going to some of these army schools. I'm the gatekeeper. We have to have an attrition rate, and I'm going to make sure you go through something as hard as I used to, or I did, because their fish story is buds was a lot harder when I went through. And this. This guy was a skinny little punk, but he later got administratively separated for something else he'd done. So karma's a. Yeah. So then.

But Doc Flynn was like, all right, cool.

And then he ran the next run, and he said, I'm gonna run. I'll run the pace, and if you finish in front of me, you pass Doc Flynn legit. So he ran it, and this was a five mile time run, which they got rid of.

He came across the finish line, and you know what happens when you're the cutoff guy. How many times can you be the cutoff guy? Every damn time.

Yeah. No, that's one of my LPOs who. You know.

You know, when I. He was my first lpo and I Was like coming out of buds. I'm asking him Buds questions like, did you ever. Were you ever in the goon squad? And he goes, I was the cut off for the goon squad. He said every single run he was, they don't like him squad.

You know what? That was the only time I got into the goon squad too. The whole time through BUDS was on those timed runs. And what I was good at was winning that first race so you could.

Get secured from the goon squad. Yeah. So then, so then what happened?

Well, he came across the finish line and when you're the cut off for the goon squad, you get sent to the water. That's where you wind up when you fail that run. He comes across, you know, a couple minutes after we finished and we're getting hammered. And he was like, what's going on with those guys? And he was like, well, they all failed. And Flynn was like, I just did it. I just passed it. They're like two minutes in front of me.

But it got hidden because I went to a review board and still got rolled back. Dang. I got rolled back. That was graduation week.

And I got rolled back to Draggerface. At least I didn't have to do the open circuit garbage again.

Yeah. This was when dive phase was third phase. When I went through a year or two later, dive phase was second phase. Because they would still get rid of a lot of guys during dive phase.

Yeah. To me, I thought it was the hardest phase.

Dive face. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think that's why they moved it to that.

Well, we lost more people there. You don't lose people in land warfare.

Yeah. Yeah.

You got to be pretty stupid.

I think we lost two guys.

Yeah. Be pretty stupid. Yeah.

One of the guys was a good dude. I think he did something that they didn't like and they got rid of him. He was an officer too.

Personality. Yeah, that'll happen.

Crazy.

It's a pretty critical community.

It self regulates, though.

It works.

Indeed.

And then where are you at sqt did you go through. You went through stt, right? At a team.

Well, it was, it was kind of a weird one. It wasn't.

SQT like it is now. It was kind of thrown together at the team.

Because you went to team three.

Yeah. But they, they cooperated with the other teams. So I went through whatever they call. I think it was called STT at the time. And it was just because we had training sales at each of the teams and they would run it. Yeah. So we were meshed together. With team one, three five. And it was kind of ad hoc. And then they jam this into platoons and the platoons pretty much took care of us. We didn't have our tridents back then either. Guys show up at the teams now with the tridents and we actually had a different nec when we. What was it?

53, 2020. Yeah.

And then it was up to your platoon to decide when you got it.

When they started giving the guys tridents and sqt. So they'd show up to the team.

Guys were taking the new guys that showed up with their tridents and making them, painting them blue for a nerd.

But then they still kind of kept up the tradition. Like, you can go back into platoon huts now and they'll. The platoons with the new guys. Like, you don't get your trident even though it's been put in your admin record. We're not going to give it to you until we say it's. And then they'll have like the fish tank or. You've seen one of those Pac man frogs. I've seen a Pac man frog with all the tridents in it. And they got to keep the frog alive.

Oh, that's legit.

It's a. It's a fun community.

Yeah. And there's, you know, you talk about some of the fun in the community.

Best college I ever went to.

Yeah. Some of the fun of the community, which is called hazing.

Zero tolerance.

It never happens. Yeah. Yeah.

See, that's a good, good thing about hazing, especially probably now also, I know there's a zero tolerance and it doesn't happen, but if you don't get hazed, they don't like you. They don't trust you.

Yeah.

So if you get hazed, they're like, okay, this guy's all right. So it's like a privilege.

Thank you, sir. Can I have another?

There ain't enough of you to hurt me. Not enough of you.

One of the things you said here is, you're getting your bird. And this all sounded good. This brought back memories.

The.

The commanding officer was the last guy to pound in my trident. He had a big grin on his face as he approached. He pulled the trident out of my body. Because this is after you when you get your trident, you know.

Well, we. Quarters too.

Yeah. Headquarters. You get your trident and then the. The first. You know.

I don't know who paint. That's actually, I think it was my platoon commander. But the whole. Anyways, the whole team freaking lines up and pounds that thing into your Chest, you know, the.

And that doesn't hurt.

Yeah, I mean, well, okay, maybe it didn't hurt you. It hurt me.

Well, I mean. I mean, the punch, but you don't actually feel the prongs after the first.

You don't feel the prongs after the first eight. Yes, you're bleeding, but then. But then guys start pulling it out and like, oh, it's a little crooked, jocko. And they get you again.

That hurts worse.

But what I like.

Yeah, it's got like those little nubs on the end of them for the little widgets attached to.

Yeah.

When you pull it out, you could feel it pulling your.

Yeah, you feel your chest coming out. But you say your commanding officer, he pulled the trident out of my body, straightened it like he was fixing a bent nail. Then he placed it on my chest and slowly pushed it back in.

That hurts worse.

I was going to say that's freaking good times from the old man right there.

That's back in the days where the back 40 was where attitude adjustments were made.

Yeah.

Now you're going on peacetime deployments. You say this. My peacetime deployments took me around the globe. Asia, Middle East, Egypt, Kuwait, Japan, Korea, Guam points beyond. And in between conducting joint country to country training, on my deployment to Bahrain, we patrolled the Persian Gulf enforcing oil embargoes. We would board oil tankers that were in violation of various infractions. Most of the time the infraction was that they didn't identify themselves because the radio didn't work. We would catch tankers. We would catch tankers bearing the Iranian flag filled with embargoed Iraqi oil. All sorts of shenanigans going on.

So What'd you do? Four deployments?

Eight.

What'd you do in that first run at Team 3?

Four.

Four.

And the first one was Southeast Asia. That was like, right after the Gulf War.

Did you go to the PI?

I went to the PI, yeah.

So then I think you're not.

That war happened so fast, we couldn't get there.

Then you end up here. It looked like you were gonna go to BUDS and be an instructor. Yeah, but you actually had orders. You had orders to buds and then what? What. How did you. How did you hear about the leapfrog tryout?

I was just by chance, and I only had like 30, 35 jumps.

That's insane.

I had no idea what I was doing.

That's insane. I mean, those guys at that time had thousands of jumps.

Well, there was. There were some guys on. On that team that had what was that program? We used to have our own. Well, we still do. The original free ball program that we.

Had, just the military free fall that.

Was out like 3 something, 3M, 3T. I can't remember what it was, but it was our own program out there at El Centro.

El Centro, Yeah.

You know, so a lot of those instructors were on the team with me. Dwight Settle, Andy Crown, Hamill, Clay Jackson. They all had a couple thousand, plus Jones.

Yeah, those are the guys I'm talking about. Like, they were freaking out. 30.

So you decided, hey, what the hell, I'll go get a bunch of jumps in.

I had no idea.

At a minimum, right?

Yeah, I was, I think I got like 45 jumps tryouts with the cool parachute.

And then you ended up making it.

Yeah.

That's freaking crazy.

Clay told me he could teach a monkey to fall out of an airplane if he had enough bananas. That was his. Because I didn't think I was gonna make it. I thought I was going to buds and I really didn't want to. The jump team was.

Some of the most fun I had. Probably one of the most dangerous jobs I had until combat.

Yeah, the jump team at that time, man, they were pushing the envelope hardcore.

Yeah, we had some injuries. We had a death. When I was on the jump team.

I remember I was doing whatever my jumps to get my gold wings. When I first got the team, I didn't like Trident, but they sent me down to the freaking Brownfield, go get some jumps. And the jump team was jumping and they did like a down. I'd never seen a freefall person in my life never seen a free fall jump. And I, I landed and got my shoot all packed up or whatever. And then income, the leapfrogs, and they did a down plane. They were going a thousand miles an hour, as far as I could tell. And they were so close to the ground, and I, I, I could hear them say, break. Yeah. And I was like, holy, Holy shit. This is insane.

We had a guy shoot himself. He broke too low and went into this stadium, which at the time was.

Jack Murphy. That was a long time ago.

Yeah, it was.

And he hit like four seats and ripped them out of the ground. Those things are bolted into the ground, into concrete. And he walked away from it.

Yeah.

Tommy Markey.

Yeah.

No, Tommy.

Yeah. Yeah.

You can hit that dude upside the head with a bat.

What a beast, man.

He's gone now.

He's a good dude.

Couldn't hurt him.

Yeah, I know. That's what I mean. He was just a Monster and nice teddy bear too. Yeah.

You got this little section here. While we were falling towards the earth. So you guys are doing all kinds of crazy jumping while we're falling toward the earth. Another guy and I had to crawl out from underneath canopies to clear airspace. So you guys were doing crew relative work. You're all freaking wrapped up. I can't say exactly how fast we were falling, as we were as there were fully and partially inflated parachutes. But even slowly falling out of the sky can be deadly. I was still recovering from the tear of my first cutaway when my second happened A few days later. Me and another guy got tangled up and caught in a helicopter spin. The deployment deployment bag retraction system on the tops of our parachutes had somehow gotten tangled together. We will. We were twirling around opposite each other, falling. He was looking directly at me and I at him and we yelled back and forth at each other. Cut away. No, you cut away. Like the world's most high stake game of rock paper scissors. He won and I cut away.

He's a good longtime friend of mine. He's a big pussy. He should have cut away. He was scared. I don't even know how that happened.

Well, how you guys got all wrapped up.

Oh, I mean, I know how the wrap happened. But where our parachutes got connected to each other was ridiculous. So that those are canopy relative work parachutes. So usually when you open a parachute, there's a trailing pilot chute on those. Because you're doing crew, you don't want that stuff trailing. It has a retraction system on a three ring retraction system. It pulls it up to the top skin of the. Of the parachute. And that's what got connected on both of ours. It was a rap. We were doing like 8 man stack rotations. Guy peels off the top and flies all the way to the bottom. That's how it started. And you get into a rap like five, six dudes. Some get shot out and some get wrapped up. And we, everybody broke out of that and we were just stuck.

And did it have that on film?

No, because you know what? Back then.

There was no such thing as a GoPro. GoPro. I mean guys were still taking. I think I remember going from Paul Robinson was one of our camera guys and he had this ginormous freaking. When he opened his parachute, hold his head his. Hold his head down because he had all this weight up there. He'd break his neck. They used to jump. It wasn't filmed. So I think we had a Hi8, which is a pretty large camera. It's not GoPro. Any clown could jump a GoPro.

So they had blow tubes on the camera. You had to take a picture.

Oh, that was like had a reticle.

That's how you fired. Oh, no kidding.

You'd have to start the camera before you went out. But the still camera, because they would have a video and. And a still and they had a blow tube. You have to blow into the tube to take a picture. And then you had a reticule here.

Yeah, I remember seeing guys jump those little reticles. So they knew where to aim. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. You guys were pushing the envelope back then with the, with the jump team. You did three years there and then you go back to the teams and where'd you go? Did you go to. You went to East Coast?

I went to team eight.

What year was that?

99.

Check. And you.

And I was. Kosovo.

Yeah, I was gonna say you rolled on there. NATO was allied with the ethnic Albanian forces, and we were tasked with working with NATO to assist them in apprehending suspected war criminals and keeping an eye out on the movements of various warring frack boring factions. Kosovo was a real world test. We would do 72 hours special reconnaissance missions in rugged terrain full of natural man made threats. We did 25 SR missions in six months, averaging about one a week, with one day of prep, three days on, and a debrief on the other end. It was a kick in the butt deployment.

And conventional forces don't react to anything inside of 72 hours. Yeah, it was better than sitting around.

So you get. Yeah, that's. That's still. I mean, at that time, doing real missions was awesome.

Well, we thought that was the game for sure.

For sure.

You Camp Bon Steel. The restrictions that they had on the guys out there, it was ridiculous. I mean, they had to put riggers tape over their magazine. Well, they had to put riggers tape over their magazine.

Who?

Everybody that was out there was supposed to do that. We didn't do it.

I mean, it's not unusual to have. I mean, they had a dude that had an ad at the front gate with a 50 cal, but that's their clearing process at the end. They pull the trigger.

Yeah, yeah.

Why do you gotta pull the trigger? To clear and save a weapon.

Well, at least you got it. I hope he had a point in a safe direction. He did.

Okay, we'll take it. You ever seen a.50 cal shoot 10ft in front of you?

Pretty impressive.

So that's 99, come back from that point again. I'm skipping a bunch of stuff here. Really cool information about what those deployments were like. That's why people got to buy the book to get some of those details. Jumping ahead a little bit. Reported to Naval Special Warfare Group 2 training detachment on September 8, 2001. New instructor role. Be there for two years.

That was the week 911.

Yeah, I was going to say September 11. So you just check into trade at.

Nobody wanted to go there.

Of course not.

When did you model? Now?

When did you. What were you teaching?

I kind of bounced around. I got over there, did all the air stuff at first, then I did land warfare, cqc. I just kind of bounced around all over the place.

Yeah, I mean, trade has become such a great place to develop seals. I mean, it really has. And back in the day, like when. When you and I first got the team, I know no one wanted to be in training cell. And.

And I did the old guys did the old warrants.

Yeah.

They did the old master chiefs. That's when master. You couldn't figure out what a master chief did in the SEAL teams.

Yeah. I'll tell you, I got some good advice from some of those old master chiefs and warrant officers that would say, like, hey, if you want to learn this stuff, you got to go teach it.

Yeah.

And I was lucky enough to go into training cell at Seal Team 1. Spent a couple years there, and it was. I did. I learned. I was trying to figure out the other day, I made some estimate, like 50% of what I learned in the. In the entire teams was. Was working for whatever it was, three years or two, two and a half years in training cell at Seal Team.

1 and watching 10 groups do the same thing.

Watching 10 groups, who does what best teaching, teaching the junior officers that are going through STT how to do an iad, like how. What to react in these different situations. Then watching them and seeing the mistakes they make. That was 40% of what I learned. Another big chunk of what I learned was when I was a trade at later on, you know, same thing you're teaching guys, you're watching them do it. You're seeing the mistakes they make. You're putting them through drills. You're seeing the same platoons go through the same training evolutions, what the leaders do, what mistakes they make. So, yeah, going into training cell and training detachment is a great step and it's a great system now because guys go, they, you know, they get there in E5, and then they go there they make E6. And then when they're platoon LPO, they just got done teaching this stuff, man. They're ready. They're most of the time.

Well, yeah, they're getting there a little bit faster than we used to also.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a little more. It's way more formalized the way it all works now, which is freaking good for them.

Well, I just left trade. I was a contractor there. Well, when I left the CARE coalition after seven years, I went to teaching military free fall, had an injury, and then went to cqc. Salk.

Yeah.

And it was interesting seeing guys that, when I was the platoon chief are now like, leaders. They're guys at re6 is when I was a platoon chief are now master chiefs. And some of the new guys are doing their platoon chief slot. And it was fun to watch them go through. And I was terrified, too, when I was doing my platoon chief slot. You know, like I said, we have our insecurities. I didn't want anybody to get hurt. I wanted to make sure I provided everything that the guys needed.

They used to tell me when I started to micromanage, hey, Chief, get out of my back pocket, because you can't manage all that crap. Quite honestly. There were guys that were more experienced, that were junior to me when I was in charge, and you just got to know when you know what you know and what you don't and let the people that are more experienced, you know, take those reins.

Yeah. And you got to be. You got to have the confidence in your leadership that you can go, oh, you. You're. Hey, you've done this sort of thing before. You run it. Nope. No factor. No problem. Good to go.

Micromanaging hurts.

Oh, yeah, it's a disaster.

A lot of hours.

So. So then you get done with trade at. You go to Team four. You're. You're. You go. You go on deployment. Where'd you go? Baghdad. Yeah, you go. You go into Baghdad. I know you got into some.

Team four at the time was actually. They had nine details, which was huge. There was nobody. Nobody in the SEAL teams wanted to do the psd.

Yep. So, yeah, for people that don't know, one of the major taskings that the SEAL teams got in 2005, I think it started, 2004 and 5 was to protect the senior leadership of the new Iraqi government. Everyone. Well, not everyone, but a whole bunch of people wanted to kill those guys. And the people that got the job to protect them was the SEAL teams. So that's what, you know you did. And then of course there's a whole.

Out of doing that.

Well, there's a whole lot of things that, that are, that are wrapped up in doing that. Because if you're proactive about it, that means we're going to go try and capture bad guys or kill bad guys that might be trying to target our people. We're also doing intelligence gathering. We're going out and figuring out who's trying to kill these people.

That's a great setup. That's what I did.

Yeah.

I didn't do the actual inner ring of protection. I was far outer ring looking for threats that were going after targets within those PSDs.

Yeah, yeah.

And we had nine. And they all, every, every one of those politicians. I want my Navy SEALs.

We don't want to work with you people.

Yeah. That was a harsh, harsh one, harsh pill to swallow for a lot of guys. I got lucky. I was. It started right after I left and it ended before I came back.

Well, I think it all got turned over there. There's actually military units that, that's what they do.

Yeah.

And they got turned over to them.

Yeah.

You did have some good times on that one. Here we go. We were speeding down the road and slid to a left turn as soon as we made the corner and nearly smashed into a makeshift roadblock. We must have been moving too fast as we caught the roadblock construction crew off guard. We still had their who still had their AK strapped to their backs. The friends had all taken up positions on the right side of the road and had their weapons trained on us, ready to shoot as we sprinted around the corner. In a split second, the construction crew found themselves in a very awkward position. Pinned between us, their friends and their friends who wanted to shoot us. In the confusion, we managed to get the jump on them. The lead Humvee was equipped with a minigun.

Those things are awesome. We never got them.

I know I have to use a certain level of reverence when I say that because it is so awesome to have a mini gun on a Hummer. And the gunner had the reflexes of a mongoose 40ft away. The targets and their rifle wielding friends. I had a front row seat to the action when the gunner opened up on all of them. I had not seen a minigun in live combat before, so I was a little surprised by what happened next. By the way, there's nothing mini about a minigun. It's a pedestal mounted, six barrel rotary machine gun that shoots as many as 6,000 rounds of 762 by 51 every minute. And the bullet is about the size of a AAA battery. Bullet spit so fast, fast out of the Gatling style rotating barrels that it looked like a red laser beam and sounded like the mating call of some bizarre prehistoric bird. The first volley of bullets hit one guy in the chest as he practically vaporized in a burst of red mist. As this was going on, about 50 yards up the road, another enemy fighter popped up and fired an arson RPG directly at the lead Humvee, the one that was firing the minigun. I couldn't see the RPG, but I saw the Humvee 10ft in front of me, lift up, drop back down with a crash and catch on fire. The gunner didn't even flinch. He just kept on shooting. In 30 seconds, the 25 or so ambushers, including the RPG triggermen, had all been killed and were all red piles of flesh spread over the street. When it was over, we secured the area, salvaged what we could from the still burning Humvee and the distance, destroyed it with a thermite grenade. The minigun turned 25 human beings into shredded flesh in less than a minute. That was quick, I thought. And then I felt weird because the next thought I had was that was awesome. Awesome because we did not get killed and because the power of the minigun. This was the first time I had seen people in the process of dying, but it was not the first time seeing dead people. My life and training had prepared me for these situations. My constant inoculation, population of violence and stress made what would have been grotesque and unbearable to many an acceptable situation to me. My trauma had conditioned me to accept the unacceptable. That's what war does. It changes the way you view the world. I found no pleasure whatsoever in killing the enemy. However, this was an outcome of war. Everyone at some point was someone's child. But that thought is lost in war. The most profane aspects of war is that it depletes the humanity from humans.

You pretty much forget about everything you believe.

You're not thinking about that when, when you're in a gunfight. You know, theology, religion, political, whatever, politics. Dude's trying to kill me.

I'm gonna go work on him.

You get home from that dependent deployment and then.

Is that when you get rolled into doing a platoon chief?

Yeah.

Do your workup.

How was the workup?

Well.

The workup prior was pretty interesting because I interfaced with all the guys that were going to be in the platoon when I was a platoon chief. And I remember breaking one of the guys nods on Right before an op, he didn't know I was going to be his platoon chief. He kind of chewed me up like, dude, don't put your stuff on the ground. I won't step on it.

I did feel stupid about that though. But the workup is, you know, pretty, pretty standard. We were on an 18 month cycle, I think on that one, I think it was 18 month cycle. So it's a year long workup, you know, broken up into three, into three parts, you know, pro dev, everybody going to schools.

And ult just doing all the standard cqc Salk air.

Did you guys know that you were going to Iraq when you formed up?

We were kind of the bastard children too. Everybody was looking for the shiny object. And at the time that was some task force. And we got what was.

Thought to be the least of the shiny best deployments, which was Fallujah. And they, the guys that were there weren't doing anything. But we, we worked different, we worked intel different than they did and we were really busy. I did 140 days on that deployment, which is.

Talk to guys in the SEAL teams to do 100 DAs on the deployments. Unheard of. And then on top of that, teaching medical classes to the military units that they're, you know, second and fourth, fourth Iraqi Army Brigade and teaching tactics and how to patrol and trying to work with the MIT teams. It's, you know, when you run a target for your regular job, it's kind of hard to come and be a mitt team in Fallujah proper and run a military unit. Especially when they don't speak English. Yeah, their standard of work is not what.

No, it is not.

And that was one of the hardest things for us to, to get to was we, when we first got there, we, we had these expectations that they were going to get to the level that we were at least close. And that's just not going to happen. You got to see, okay, this right here, this is what we want them to be at. But right here's got to be acceptable.

It's just kind of the way it was over there.

Yeah, you got to definitely adjust your standards in a real big way. Yeah. But it's kind of cool because I'm thinking about, you know, your last, your previous deployment where you were kind of gathering a lot of intel and stuff like that and then you roll out. Because as you know, we drive our own operations and if you can make, if you can find intel and you can put it together, you can put up a target package. Let's Go hit it. You know, that's, you know, to get that, to get a bunch of DAs done like that, it's, it's not the.

Sexy thing to do.

The hard part is getting the target packages put together. The fun parts, going out and hitting them.

Yeah, most team guys just show me what door. I don't even care. Show me what door. It's a lot harder to get. Get the information.

So you're on this deployment, you're doing all these DAs, and now we're going to get into.

April 2007, northeast of Fallujah. When the shooting stopped, I was still on the floor lying on my left side. So this is picking up where we started the, this whole, this whole podcast out. When the shooting stopped, I was still on the floor lying on my left side. I pushed myself up to my knees. I don't remember hearing any of the gunfire, but now the sounds began to register in my ears. The two men who had stacked up directly behind me in my room clearing train were our Iraqi scouts. The second man in our train took around to his chest plate and it knocked him clear out into the foyer. Ironically, that round may have saved his life. He'd originally been within an arm's length behind me as we'd entered the room. The third man in my stack had been shot as he entered the room. An AK47 round smashed through his bulletproof chest plate. He'd fallen dead in the doorway. The chance factor was insane. Once fired, a bullet can be unpredictable. The internal milling of a gun's barrel causes bullets to spin in flight. Some bullets will begin to tumble through the air at low speeds, while others are designed to take tumble and cartwheel after hitting a target, which can cause some brutal damage. It's likely that we were all hit by the same type of bullets at nearly the same time, shot from the same gun. But the damage to each of us was significantly different. The balance of my room clearing train, five or six other guys hadn't been able to get in the room because of all the volume of fire.

I moved from my knees and stood to my feet.

Felt like there were £200 on my back. I took off my helmet and used the white light on my damaged pistol to survey the room. One of our other Iraqi scouts entered the room. He had been behind Clarky and followed him into his room. The bullet that hit Clark bypassed all three of the Iraqi scouts stacked up behind him. These three made it into Clarky's room and had gotten trapped in the back of the house when the shooting started. The scout had been part of the original group of 10 recruits who had been with us since the first day. He spoke decent English and gave me a report.

One SEAL killed in action. One Iraqi scout killed in action. Two detainees and six women and children.

At this point, I actually didn't even realize that they had left.

It didn't register yet.

Yeah, this is, you know, when we started getting reports about what had happened during this, you know, and, and I just remember thinking, this is just, hey, this is just pure insanity, you know, and a lot of guys felt guilty.

For leaving me in there, but I can, I mean, I had to talk to a lot of guys like, hey, we didn't do anything wrong that night. Nobody saw me go in there. You guys followed protocol that we would always follow. You didn't blow up the house because you didn't have a full headcount. You did that right? You know, so everybody did everything right. And I don't know, NSW sometimes with the knee jerk reactions that we would have to.

Try to make everything as safe as possible, which we're good at. But even if you do something.

Everything'S right, bad things can happen. You just can't, you know, can't minimize all the threats to the point where there's no more threat. You just can't do it.

And you can also do really dumb things and make big mistakes and everything turns out perfect, you know, and you can do everything perfect and things can go wrong.

Perfect plan goes to shit in the first 30 seconds, right?

Rewinding a little bit. This is what you said. It was surreal, like something out of a movie. Time slowed down almost to a stop. And everything happened in super slow motion. Almost as if I were watching a scene unfold frame by frame. Seconds seemed like minutes. A slow motion torn of bullets flew at me. I could clearly see all the bullets coming at me. I had total auditory exclusion. There were no sounds. I'd never been shot before, so I had no idea how it felt. In this strange slow motion scene, I had a mental conversation with myself. Hey, am I actually getting shot right now? It occurred to me that those sledgehammers smashing all over my body were bullets hitting me one after another. It was in this moment that I said my first real prayer. God, please get me home to my girls. My wife and two young daughters were halfway around the world in that instant. I felt them and they felt me.

Me.

I felt like the bullet dodging character in the movie the Matrix. Only I wasn't dodging any of the bullets. They were hitting me. My rifle was shot out of my hands. Bullets whizzing past my head hammered into the men entering the room behind me. Even as I continued to penetrate down the left wall. Nobody else in my train would be able to make entry as all four of the enemy continued to fire directly into what is known as the fatal funnel.

The dimly lit doorway in which I was standing.

The enemy bullets triggered my rage and drove me to act. It was then that my body became. Became my mind and took over. I suppose that's what habit is, when somebody. When the body overrides the mind and acts without specific instructions from the brain. My right hand instinctively reached down for my secondary weapon. A pistol. My hand was on autopilot as it unhooked the rubber strap I'd fashioned to keep my pistol secure and with a fluid push, fluid forward push and pull. The very same motion I'd done a hundred thousand times in training. My weapon released from my holster, I aim my pistol, engaged the enemy fighter directly opposite me down the left wall. He was glaring at me with his weapon, throwing rounds directly at me. I returned fire, four or five rounds from my weapon and caught him in the face and chest. As he stared at me, his head jilted back, I saw the life leave his eyes. Like a light going off. I knew he was dead as he melted into a pile in front of me. I landed next to the dead man on my left. Years of training and muscle memory without any direct orders from my brain, lifted my arm, arched it and aimed my pistol at a young male figure, maybe in his early 20s. As he stood up and moved toward the doorway. I was still on the floor when I watched him pull a hand grenade from the front of his vest and pull the pin. My right hand pointed at him. My index finger squeezed the trigger. I saw the bullets execute my pistol and spin clockwise as they flew toward him, leaving a green vapor trail in their wake. I watched my bullets punch into one side of his head and exhaust a blood and brain matter instantly exiting out the other side. I shot him dead as he attempted a suicide mission to run out in the foyer with a live grenade where my fellow SEALS and Iraqi scouts had stacked up, attempting to enter the room. My rounds dropped them in his tracks. As he fell forward, I saw the grenade release from his hand and rolled toward me. Then it detonated.

This is crazy. One of our newly arrived seals from Team 10. So these are the guys that just showed up? This probably this kid's first op?

Yeah, but he was. He was the platoon chief.

Okay, so he was Good to go. One of the newly arrived first night.

Though still first night.

One of the newly arrived seals from Team 10 was outside under the carport looking into the room's only window when he saw my bullets enter the enemy's head. He watched as the enemy fell. The ensuing grenade blast shattered the window, spraying shards of glass into my teammate's face. This was his first mission in Iraq. New way to great way to start a new job.

Grenade blast knocked me unconscious. When I awoke a few minutes later, I was fully lucid and lying on my left side, looking across across the room at two men. Both were firing their weapons over my head out the window directly above me. The grenade blast had twisted my helmet, rendering my night vision goggles unusable. The light from their muzzle flashes and the dim glow of the gas lamp in the foyer were enough to clearly illuminate the men standing no more than 10ft away from me. I heard no sounds. It was totally silent. I was in a very bad place. In the middle of a gunfight, if the enemy caught a glimpse of me glaring up at the them, all it would take for them to finish me off with both of them to point down, pull their triggers and unload high velocity bullets into me. If I could clearly see them, then they could see me too. For an instant, I thought about playing dead. But in that same millisecond, before the thought could be fully evaluated, my anger rejected it outright. I had never been so angry. A feeling of determined, ruthless rage. It seemed to be stored up somewhere down deep inside me. And something just snapped. In that moment, my rage consumed me. My world closed in and nothing else mattered to me but destroying the two men standing still in front of me. I would fight back and kill them before they killed me.

Another crazy thing about this is there were some holes in me that don't line up like I get two holes in my back.

You think they shot you when you were unconscious?

That's the only thing I can come up with. I had two rounds in my back that shattered my right scapula. And there's no holes in the body armor, so I think they took the pistol and shoved it in there. And then they shot me twice in the butt. The only way I could have got shot in the butt is if someone stood over top of me. I don't know why they didn't put one in my head. Should have looked at the helmet more. Maybe they tried to shoot me in the head and the helmet just got in the way. But.

This. This round right here.

Four months after the incident.

This is around. You're wearing around your hatch.

It's a nine mil round that I got shot in the butt with. And I didn't know about it, that it was still in me until I went to a procedure to get a stent pulled out of my bladder like four, four and a half months later. And they took an X ray of it and came back in. X ray tech was like, hey, you know there's a bullet in your hip. That's how I found this bullet. But the way the hip is, you know that arch right there. So it was right there and it.

From 2007 to like two years ago, I was at a chiropractor and he took some X rays and it had moved and he took a side profile and it was literally at the surface of my stomach. And then we had. I had some medics cut it out. We thought it was going to take like five minutes. I'll show you the pictures. Got a video of them cutting it out in the back of a Suburban.

Oh, there you go.

Proper dinner break.

Proper surgery.

Going back to this, I didn't know it at the time, but I was lying unconscious on the floor. While I was lying unconscious on the floor, my SEAL teammates were outside the door of the room trying to get a shot at the enemy. Two of our Iraqi counterparts were the only eyes that saw me enter the room. In the chaos that ensued, they were unable to communicate my location to anyone. The volume of fire coming from the room through the door and out of the window was so excessive that there was no way anyone else was getting into the room. The team decided to pull everyone back and call an airstrike to neutralize the target.

And me with it.

As the team pulled back from the house, Connor, my other SEAL teammate, was shot and wounded by one of the two remaining enemy fighters firing over my head and out the window. Window. While I lay on the floor, my teammates worked their radios, calling for the status of each other and what was going on in the house. I heard nothing.

As the remaining elements of my assault team departed the house and moved to a safe dropping distance from the target. I was lying on my left side with my pistol still in my right hand. Just like before. My arm reached up and aimed at one of the men standing in front of me and my finger pulled the trigger. I couldn't hear the gunfire, but I felt. Felt my hand jump rounds exit my weapon and I watched the projectiles fly in slow motion. As they punched into his body. Small holes burst open in the fabric of his shirt where my bullets entered. His face contorted into a bizarre combination of surprise and pain. More surprised than pain. In less than five seconds, I ran a magazine dry, completed a magazine change before the two enemy fighters figured out I was still alive and I was shooting back at them. My bullets drew their gunfire away from my departing teammates. Their full attention and bullets were then directed back at me.

The enemy fighters were now both so close to me. I remember the stunned look on their faces as they pointed their weapons back at me and fired. A round from one of their AK47 struck the bottom of my pistol and dislodged my guns magazine. My pistol jammed and I felt the gun's grip crumble in my hand. Another enemy bullet sailed clear through the foot of my magazine. I opened my hand slightly to release the shards of broken plastic that were once my pistol grips. The grip seemed to absorb the shock, shattering like an armor plate. I was fortunate to have this type of weapon. Any other model would have been smashed to bits or been shot out of my hands.

My palm was now pressed against the gun's internal springs.

The bullets that struck my pistol caused my weapon to malfunction. I squeezed the trigger, but nothing happened. I quickly cleared the malfunction with a tap of a on the bottom of the magazine to firmly reinsert into the pistol a rack of the slide, then squeeze the trigger. I'd done this tap, rack, bang malfunction drill so many times that it happened automatically. All the while I was still being shot at from no more than 10ft away. An instant later, well before the human brain could process what and how it had happened, my hand aimed the pistol at the other man standing across from me. My finger squeezed the trigger. I saw the rounds twisting as they exited, my pistol flying toward him and entering his body. Then a round tunneled into his face.

I emptied the magazine to both men as they crumbled on the floor in front of me. I loaded my last magazine into my damaged. I was lying on my left side, leaning against the man who I had first shot. When I entered the room, I pushed myself up with one hand and reached behind with the other, placing my pistol against my dead enemy's motionless body and fired several more rounds.

Seconds later, all four enemy fighters were silent, their dead bodies laying pools of their own blood and piles of spent bullet casings. A metallic odor filled flooded the room. Blood and urine leaked from their bodies onto the floor.

I knew I had been shot. I felt heavy, like there was a few hundred pounds sitting on my back. It was Difficult to breathe. The fight was not over, and the worst battles were yet to come.

Crazy gunfight.

My left thumb was almost shot off, too. I had around go through this joint right here.

I didn't figure it out until later. After I got up and walked around, tried to take my gloves off, but I put that pistol in this left hand and reached over and shot somebody like this. My thumb was almost hanging off. The only thing that was holding on was my glove.

I mean, look how lucky I am, though. I still got it. Just won't bend.

Crazy. Yeah, the. The. The weapon functioning.

I mean, you still have the magazine. I did go back after about five months, and I was like, hey, I want that pistol. And they're like, no, we already cleaned it up and put it back in circulation. So somebody else was using it. And I was like, I want that pistol.

Did you ever get it?

No. Dang.

Yeah. The. I was thinking about this. You know, we started off. When I started off, I was talking about how, you know, you can get shot. One person gets shot. One person can catch a little tiny piece of frag like the size of a freaking. The size of a pebble. Yeah. And kill him.

You pop the femoral artery or you pop an artery up here. I mean, that's what happened to Clark. He had one around.

Basically just go right through his neck right here. It was. Just hit that artery. It was quick. I mean, when I found him, you still had a smile on his face, sitting in an upright position. He was 27 years old at the time. Got a shirt on.

That was his second deployment.

Yeah.

I need to secure the building myself, so I moved to the foyer with its glowing lamp and then to the room directly beside where my gunfight had happened. There were six women and children all sitting in the far corner, screaming and crying. I pointed my white light at them and yelled, shut up. None of them spoke English, but they all became silent.

That's also the room where I found Clarky.

He was just inside the doorway, sitting down with both legs spread out in front of him, resting upright and leaning back slightly on his rucksack.

Clarky's trademark smirk was frozen on his face with his lips curled in a smile. He looked so peaceful. He'd been killed instantly by a round that had come out of my room.

I tried to move him from the view of the front door, but he was too heavy.

Clark Schwedler was 27 years old. It would take over a decade for the magnitude of Clark's death to penetrate me. My tears now are often Spontaneous, triggered by a fleeting memory, a mixture of accumulated losses or just a random thought.

At that moment, though, I couldn't stop and grieve over Clarky. I needed to secure the building and protect my My teammates.

In another room in the back of the compound, I found two enemy detainees. Our Iraqi scouts had made entry into this room, discovered the men, and cuffed them. I checked their flex cuffs and put one of our Iraqi scouts in place to guard them. I positioned our other Iraqi scout at the front entry with specific orders to shoot anyone who tried to come into the house. I knew that I was shot up. I walked around and cleared the house with my damaged pistol. Each time I turned my head, I could feel my radio ear earpiece snag on my body armor. I plugged my earbud in and keyed the radio to ask for a status in the house. But no but my radio had been shot. It still had a tone, but no signal. My radio was smashed. I needed to contact the team. I tried to swap out my radio with Clarky's, but my gloves were slippery from all the blood. I just started to pull off my left hand glove when I saw that my thumb was barely attached to my hand. It flopped into my palm. There was a bullet hole through the glove. I must have been shot in the thumb when the enemy shot at my pistol, destroying my gun's grips. I decided to leave my gloves on. Eventually, I managed to switch out my radio for Clarky's. I moved back into the room where my gunfight had happened. I felt safer there, as I knew everyone and it was dead.

It was there that I made radio contact with the rest of the team. Hey, this is Mike. I'm still in the house. It's secure. We've got four enemy killed in action, one Iraqi scout killed in action, one SEAL killed in action.

Two detainees.

Six women and children.

Man, they called the QRF that night. Took them hour and 15 minutes to go like five miles.

Five miles.

When did they activate the QRF? When they. Probably when they started backing out of the house.

We always initiated the QRF as soon as a gunfight started. As soon as there was a tick, we would initiate qrf. So they would get ready and then we could launch them. But back then, I mean, that. That area was. So we went after this target one other time. We got ID'd on the way in.

Yeah, and those are some of the cool details that you put in the book, which, like I said, that's why people have to buy the book if they want to Want to get the rest of it? Because the background behind it, you know, you explain the efforts that you guys had made to hit this target.

And it was a terrible area. Pretty much one way in, one way out, unless you wanted to do like an extra 75km to get. And that if you didn't get lost back there, because, I mean, the maps were inaccurate. And.

I mean, your greatest threat over there wasn't getting into a gunfight. It was going to and from. That was your biggest threat. We got ied, I think.

Six times on that deployment. And you know, when that. When it happens over and over again, they start looking who's here every time. And I was one of the guys. Okay, Mike's possible one of the two possible ID magnets. Because every time we get id, one of you two is there or both of you are there. Actually, we're both there for all of them.

So how big, how many seals did you have with you? How many seals were on this op?

Our normal force, we could take a little bit more if we had birds, but our normal force and half of it had to be Iraqis. And we don't give them nods and radios. So you have to make corrections for that. Like we have to drive the vehicles.

So it would be like 22 guys, but that would include a Terp, you know, half Iraqi force. Occasionally we brought this Marine that had a dog that never found anything but a pistol holster.

He did say that dog might have got baked in a car. I mean, it gets warm out there, like 22. But we go out with six Humvees. There's only four seats. Well, five, you got the gunner. But the way we work.

Six people in a vehicle, you're only getting four people that are actually going to work, maybe three inside. Yeah, so I have worked with other units where they leave, everybody gets out of the vehicle and only the gunner stays. I didn't like that. No, that's the woods. Say who does that?

But we don't like that plan the man for you to, like, just go back into full on team guy mode of. Okay, here's what's going on. I'm shot up. I got to finish clearing this house by myself. Get the house cleared, do an assessment, set security, and then contact the team and say, hey, it's Mike. Target secure.

Damn.

I was there. I don't believe it.

Freaking legit, man.

I was definitely in shock. I did miss a room. I missed the stairs upstairs to the prayer room upstairs. So they had to clear that. I missed it.

But I deconflicted the front door. They came in, they re cleared the house because I had to pull the guy off the front door that I told shoot anybody that came through because they were taking fire from the outside. You know, when. When the neighbors know that you're there, some people like to shoot out the window at you, which was a lesson that we learned early on. Because who doesn't like to blow up a door? But sometimes you don't have to blow it up. Sometimes you just turn the doorknob.

Sometimes that doorknob works.

And when you blow up a door, the whole neighborhood knows you're there. People take pop shots out of you.

Yeah.

Freaking awesome, man. Awesome work.

I also got an AK round. That's where I got the idea for this necklace the guys found when they took my body armor. An AK round fell out of it, and it's slightly flat on one side, and it's got rifling on it. So that's how you know that it actually came through a rifle barrel.

But that one hit me inside of 10ft, and it's completely intact. I mean, it's like, barely flat on one side. I can't explain that one either. But I did get shot in the right places. Like, I know guys that got shot in a femur. You hit bone, that changes everything. And I only had two bones hit, my left thumb and my right scapula.

I did have a round go up inside of my right thigh, which is probably the one the doctors are the most amazed about. Because if you know about the kinetic energy, it's not energy that's being pushed in front of a bullet. It's what's being pulled and all the cavitation and how it ruptures organs and ruptures blood vessels and arteries. That should have popped my femoral artery, because that ran from my knee right above my knee all the way up to my inner thigh. And that was definitely an AK round, because the hole in my leg, it looked like someone took a cookie cutter of an AK round and cut it out. And the gunshot wounds healed weird. They started off small, and then they got bigger as they healed, and then they shrunk. I didn't have any bad exit wounds. Everything went through me. I got a bad exit wound out of my right armpit that blew out.

But it's kind of actually hard. You know, I'm claiming 27, and it's the best of my knowledge. But, you know, the one that went through my left thigh might have been the same one that went through my scrotum. I don't know, but I'm not gonna ruin a good story.

Hey, bro, I say we round up.

And quite honestly, those ones that hit the body armor.

I was more aware of the ones hit the body armor. I had no idea where else I'd been shot until I pulled my glove off. I knew I'd been shot in the chest and back. I could feel it. I mean, I had a bunch of broken ribs.

And I had a contusion on my right lung. So when I called those guys, I was like, you guys got to hurry up. I can't breathe. I think I got a sucking chest wound. You know, they pulled my body armor off, and there's two holes in my back, and they tried to get a reclusive dressing on it, an old one that we used to use, and they couldn't get it to stick. So luckily, it wasn't a sucking chest wound.

Yeah. And you got shot with green tip, too, right?

Yeah, they took my body armor after that, whatever company does the investigation, and they took it apart layer by layer. So the other layer, body armor spalling. It's that black stuff. It kind of looks. I don't even know how to. It's the stuff that holds everything together. So it's a ceramic plate. There's multiple layers.

Plus, I had to carry her on. And at that time, we were doing the soft armor, hard armor, the four Alpha with the soft.

I can't imagine getting shot in the chest with standalone 4 Alpha armor piercing protection. Without that soft armor, it's gonna break every one of your damn ribs. Every damn one. I only had, I think, four broken ribs. I mean, you just. You pop a rib out every once in a while. It sucks.

It's freaking horrible, man. You get that.

That top of your breath, and you can't. Someone's stabbing me.

No, you don't want anyone to make you laugh or cough or anything like that. But, yeah, the weird thing about Green Tip is that if you don't know anything about it, I think penetrated more.

Through the body armor than the AK Did.

Oh, yeah, I totally believe that. So green tip is American. And. And 5, 5, 6. Yeah. 5, 5, 6. What? It's kind of the standard round for America. We got a bunch of other ones. I know, but green tip is kind of the standard round for, let's say, an army infantry unit. And so you might wonder, how does Mike end up with green tip in his body or in his body armor? And the answer is, they recovered the weapon. And, yeah, there was this.

All this guy's equipment to include his name, his lbe, his load bearing equipment with his magazines in it still had his name on it. They had his night vision goggles, they had his pistol. They had a bunch of this guy's stuff. And it was, from what we figured out, an ambush out in Ramadi. Army unit in Ramadi.

So an army unit in Ramadi got ambushed. They captured this guy's equipment and then they put it to use. And they put it to use on you, man.

And the green tip was the only one that penetrated through the plate and made entry into the soft armor. It got about halfway through all the plies on the soft armor.

You mentioned the green tip like that. It's standard. But what's special about green tip as opposed to.

It's 5.56. It's the standard ammunition that we use. We had a lot of problems with it. And different, different places like Somalia.

What a terrible place. They were using women and children as shields. But the green tip was such a hot round. Meaning hot. It moves so fast that sometimes it just goes right through people. And it doesn't. Doesn't get the. A lot of the damage from a bullet happens after it passes through. And that's the cavitation and the cavity it creates behind it. It's really not what it does in front of it.

But the green tip's so fast. It doesn't create that cavitation. It just cuts through stuff. But it's also armor piercing, right?

Yeah, it's fast and it's small. So if it's. And it's made. It is, yeah. It punches through armor a lot. As you know, this. It's not, it's not supposed to punch through 4A.

Yeah, well, who knows when I got hit with the green tip because I had three rounds in the chest. And if you look at the body armor, it's already. It degrades with each one. They think they're only going to say, yeah, this will save you from one round. Yeah, that's what they'll tell you. After that, we don't know what the hell it's gonna do because of it. I mean if you get. If you take one in the ten ring.

Yeah.

And that damages everything else. Maybe that does more damage equally all the way around. But I got hit like here, here and here.

And maybe the green tip wasn't the first one or maybe it was the first one before the AK hit it. Before it was so degraded that it was useless. I'd hold one of those plates in front of my face. And let you shoot nine mil into it all day. It doesn't make a dent. It doesn't even make a dent. You can barely find the dent from a 9 mil and that stuff.

Yeah, I mean, pistols are just a lot weaker than rifles are. And then have that argument too.

What? Round or shot placement? Shot placement.

You're all shot placement, huh?

Yeah. And if you're not good at shot placement, then just put a lot there, you know? Can't tie knots. Tie a lot.

When in doubt, overload.

Going back to the book. 15 minute minutes after I'd called the team to let them know I'd been shot, the medevac landed. I had to say that because that's freaking awesome. Jack asked if I need any help as we walk together to the bird. About 150 yards and all. I felt heavy and slow as we walked together over the freshly plowed field. I put my left arm over his shoulder to steady myself as I moved. Jack instinctively reached up and grabbed my hand, which almost ripped off my dangling thumb. Jack let go of my thumb. Connor, my SEAL teammate who was wounded in the arm exiting the house, jumped on the bird for the short flight to the hospital in Baghdad. He was another one of our team's medics, and I thought that's why he was with me. I didn't know that he had been shot until we were in the hospital together in Bethesda, Maryland.

That was a new guy on his first deployment.

The flight medic was very efficient, crawling all over me to cut off my clothes and gear to get to my wounds, inserting his knee into every bullet hole in the process. In his defense, there wasn't much he could touch that didn't have a bullet hole punched out of it.

My SEAL teammate, Chris Till, had been assigned as my casualty assistance officer and would accompany me all the way back home. Chris was standing next to me with a satellite phone. You have to call your wife, he said. I refused at first, but then I remembered that my next of kin must be notified within 24 hours of an incident. Brenda was back in Virginia beach shopping with the girls when she answered. Hey, I said, I don't have a lot of time. I'm coming home early. I got shot, but I'm fine. I've got all my limbs, my face is fine. And the doctor said, I'm going to make 100% recovery. I'll see you soon. Soon. I handed the phone back to Chris and the medical team stacked me on the plane. I must have passed out because my next memory is waking up in the United States at Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland.

I talked to a good 50 people that talked to me in Launch. Still.

Don'T remember.

Don't remember them.

Yeah, I mean, one of those people is. Was. Was Admiral McRaven. Yes. So that's cool. And. And you guys knew each other. You guys knew each other from team three.

Yeah, I was. My first three commanding officers were.

McTigh, McNally and McRaven.

Free three mix.

Yeah, you do. You do that. And. And you. You talk about that visit from. From the Admiral again.

Well, that was from. I think I did some plagiarism. Plagiarizing from his book.

Yeah, you pulled. So he's got a book out called Sea Stories and it's one of the stories in his book is, you know, visiting a guy that just been shot 27 times. So. Yeah, but. Yeah, you put it in this book as well.

He's a good dude. I mean. Yeah, some people might think he's got some sway political views right now, but, you know, I watched him take care of people and that's kind of how I judge people.

Yeah.

It's like if you care about people and you take care of them.

Yeah.

And you're not doing shit to feed your own ego or your own agenda. I mean, you got to have your own agenda. I got mine now. I mean, it's part of the reason why I sold the book. I want to go surfing all the time.

Just. That's all I want to do.

Yeah.

It's a pretty interesting story, I guess, from your perspective. Blessed to have this story and be able to talk about it, you know.

Yeah, it's.

Very few people be able to pick this up and not find something in it that they're gonna be able to relate to in their own life. Bro.

You got shot 27 times, you know, and you did your job. I mean, it's freaking.

That's the least interesting thing in that.

Yeah, I think. But. But just. Yeah, you put the whole story together and yeah, man, it's powerful and like you said, there's all kinds of stuff for everybody and you know, I'll get into some of it, but a lot of it is, is you trying to explain how you got through this stuff and, you know, how you got through your childhood trauma and what that trauma turns into. And I mean, we'll get into some of it, but that's just a whole nother reasonable. Even if you. Even if you're a hippie that doesn't want to read a single thing about War. Okay, skip those parts because you're still going to get something out of the rest of it.

Well, my publisher, when we were working through this, we're like, mike, does this say a Navy SEAL book or a self help book? And I was like, leave it ambiguous. I don't care what you call it. I don't care what you call it. You know, and I'm doing pretty good in the.

PTSD section.

Trailing after. I'm trailing after you. Bumping at your door.

I have a ptsd. There's a ptsd?

No, your books are number one in war biographies. And okay, your books do awesome.

I don't. In the PTSD section.

No, not ptsd. And the PTSD section. Vander Kolk Body keeps the score, which is one.

Okay. That's the book that you talk about.

Yeah, that's one of the. Everybody should read that book.

A couple things in there. If you understand your trauma, your childhood trauma, then your behaviors are predictable.

So if you understand that you become the person that you're taught to be inside of the first seven years and you know what your reaction is going to be to it, then it's predictable and then you can work on it. My trigger is, I don't like anybody poked me in the chest. And when I get scared, I don't cower. Sometimes I might over push back.

I don't like to be called names. I got cursed out by a little 22 year old kid in Starbucks a couple weeks ago and I had to ask him, I was like, boy, how old are you? He's like, I'm 22. And this kid's flipping me off because I wouldn't put on a mask. And I was like, you wouldn't be talking to me like this if we were outside.

But, you know, I think that's a problem with a lot of people in this world right now. You know, the keyboard. The keyboard bullies, and they get behind the wheels of their car and they act like a bunch of assholes. You know, a lot of people just don't know that if you could get punched in the face for being as rude as you are, you wouldn't do it.

Yeah, we got a society. It's just so rude now. I mean, every time you get in your car, it's a damn NASCAR race, people cutting you off. And.

I mean, I've kind of slowed down. I was that type A driver in a rush to get everywhere, even though I didn't have a schedule.

Well, so you talk about, like I said, you talk about some of this trauma and whatnot.

And here's like, here's a. Here's a little sample of sort of how you start looking at this stuff. I would spend the next 18 months training guys, shuffling papers and administrative duty at my new command. So this is. This is now your. I think you're back at trade debt again, right?

Yeah. I went back to work inside of five months. About four and a half, five months. And I was in that course that we talked about earlier, that communications course.

My physical.

Good way to call.

My physical therapy team became an important part of my recovery in life. My team was made up of doctors, nurses, physical therapists, chiropractors and clinicians who specialized in all type of care. Most importantly, this group understood seal culture. Seals tend toward the extreme. We think if one repetition is good, then 500 must be great. I was blinded by my own bias. And it wasn't the first time or the last. One day long into my recovery, I confided to my nurse that I may have been experiencing symptoms related to ptsd. Post traumatic stress disorder. I had been sitting in my truck listening to a radio talk show when the. When the expert being interviewed began describing the common symptoms of ptsd, the voice spoke in a calm, matter of fact tone, talking about the autumn autonomic nervous system and how sleeplessness, constant irrational fears and hypervigilance are often normal and predictable responses to trauma. I listened to a stranger's voice describe me to me and I was both relieved and confused. When I told the nurse, who is a friend and someone I trusted, she smiled and chuckled. Good to hear, Mike. We all thought you actually enjoyed what happened to you in that room. She seemed to understand that being profoundly affected by my experience of war was normal and not being altered was abnormal. This was the first time that I considered the concept of emotional invisible wounds and that I had them. I have come to understand that if the experience of war does not profoundly alter you in some way, then you may actually have a problem. When the doctor said that I had been perfectly wounded, it seemed like a metaphor for my life. I had been beat up just enough not to kill me. And through the process, I earned the perfect scars of wisdom to survive my next thrashing. I still had no idea how the events of my childhood influenced my thoughts and behavior. I'd become very good at compartmentalization. My self awareness grew as I uncovered layers of trauma. I later found that my childhood wounds had prepared me me for a career in the SEAL teams. But they also became my most haunting ones. Ironically, it took being shot 27 times to uncover my original wounds, the ones that I never considered or knew I had.

Yeah, so you know, you start looking at what's going on and this is, this is cool. I just got to read this bro, because it's a one one page chapter called the Enemy Within. I fully accepted all the hazards of my chosen occupation. Being wounded was no big deal to me. At no time during or after I was shot did I ever think I was going to die. I was provided the best medical care available and was sure that my physical wounds would eventually heal. The real battle began when I returned home. The war in Iraq was straightforward. I was expertly trained and had the unconditional support of a community of like minded, highly motivated professionals. Professionals. As a seal, I'd been institutionalized. In a sense, I knew the culture, the people, the rules and the objective. After leaving the military and returning home, my life became a confusing, frustrating and stressful mess. I was a prisoner who'd been released from the institution into a strange new world. There was a destructful, a distrustful cynic slowly working his way inside me. His voice sounded like my own. And each day he became, became more convincing. I was surrounded, isolated and desperate. This enemy knew all my weaknesses. He was relentless and he eventually overpowered me. This enemy was me.

So a couple things I want to say on the PTSD.

At that point. It really wasn't ptsd, at least clinical because I haven't had any dreams about it. I don't mind talking about.

Doesn't bother me. It bothered the people around me more than it bothered me. It was more of a hindrance that I had to live in a recliner for three months. It bothered my kids because they'd never seen me get hurt or sick. It pretty much was my first injury ever, other than broken fingers and toes. I did pinch a femoral nerve. That put me down for about two, three months at one point doing a PT thing.

But that was really my only my first injury because the fingers and toes don't count, I don't count.

But what had happened to me at this point? Well, I want to talk about what I call false anxiety first. Just bad health. Eating terrible, dehydration, drinking too much.

Your physiology, when you're in that state of health, feels like anxiety. The increased heart rate.

The sweaty palms, the whole physiology that goes along with anxiety because of bad health. It's your physiology reacting to what people are dumping in their bodies. My particular issue and what I think healthcare should be is individual evaluation of each person to adjust their medical care for that, because I watched for years, people take medication for a migraine, and then the migraine doesn't go away, but they get another symptom. So here's another medication for the symptom. Eight medications later, the guy's telling me, I still got a migraine, and I can't remember what I did 15 minutes ago. I'm taking eight meds for it.

I had. In your stomach, you have flora bacteria that breaks up the food, so your intestines can take the vitamins and nutrients in. And I had no good flora in my stomach, so my body physiologically couldn't even break down the food. So when I got tested, my urine, my stool, my blood. And they also used epigenetics, which says your epigenetics, your genetics say that your body will consume and you utilize certain types of food because of your genetics. And where you're from, we see a lot of guys in the SEAL teams. Everybody's on keto. Well, how do you know keto is good for you? You might be hurting yourself or, hey, the Greeks live for a long time. I'll just eat a Greek diet. It might not be the one for you, because your genetics don't. I mean, it might work, but it might not be the optimum.

So I went on to fix mine. All I had to do was take antibiotics for a week, and then I rebuilt it with.

Diet, you know, just probiotics.

And this is to repair your gut floor. After you did these tests, they study everything that's coming out of you. They go, oh, yeah, this is what you need.

So my body couldn't even give me those nutrients because it wasn't physiologically working, and I was completely B deficient, D deficient, had all kinds of spikes and heavy metals.

Was this while you were still in, or is this after you retired and you started working for the CARE Coalition?

It was when I was working for the CARE Coalition. I've been there for probably six. A little over six years.

So you. You retired in 2010?

Yeah.

And where did you spend your last. So this incident happened in 2000. Where'd you spend your last three years at.

@ Little.

Creek. And you.

Were. So I taught that.

Course. Got.

It. And then I was the operations officer, which was the worst job I.

Ever had in the Navy. And then you. But so then you retire out of there and you get this job at the CARE Coalition, which is working special operations. CARE Coalition?

Yeah.

Where. Where. Where are you located when you're doing that.

Job? Well, I'm still living in Virginia Beach. But I'm a. The job changed when I was initially hired for that job. I had all the NSW MARSOC guys and that is wherever they were. So MARSOC is on both coast. So I'd go to Lejeune once a month. I'd fly out to San Diego once a month and meet the guys out there, NSW and marsoc. And we were putting guys in. If we could find a quality of care that was sufficient, we would put them somewhere where they were from so they could hang out with their.

Family. So when you're in that job, you're an advocate for all these wounded.

Guys? Correct. Non medical case.

Manager. Non medical case manager going, okay. And this guy's. This kid will tell you, hey, you know, I'm having problems with my ex girlfriend and I need help with that. Or I mean, just, I, I need, I want to get back home to my family or whatever issues that they're facing. Is that, is that.

Right? Was. I ran guys through their. If they were going through a medical retirement board, I was the advocate for that and I was the interface between them and, and the Peplos.

Physical Evaluation Board liaison officers, which weren't really good at what they did. So I did VA disability, I did wellness trips.

There was a lot of care that a paraplegic doesn't care that it's a test, a test medication or a test treatment. They just want to walk again. And you know, sometimes our medical system is not going to facilitate that, so others will. So we would facilitate treatments outside of network. So it was my job, as I described it, was to improve somebody's situation. And I did everything from babysit for people to, you know, medical retirement boards. I mean, I was a better social worker than I was.

Seal.

You, you talk about some of the cases you talk about. You saw, you, you know, you go through this, you talk about some of the people that you helped out. Holly was one of my first clients. When I met her, she was only able to lie in bed and scream at the top of her lungs. It was scary. Holly was raised in Port Angeles, Washington. Enlisted in the Navy after high school, she joined the military to create a future for herself and her family. When I met her, she was still the breadwinner for most of her family. She had become an independent duty corpsman, which is the highest enlisted medical care provider in the Navy. She had graduated the program and become an Arabic linguist. Hospital corpsman. Chief Petty Officer Holly Crabtree was assigned to work with a SEAL team as they conducted various operations in Iraq. It was April 15, 2010. I just joined the Care Coalition in. Holly was nearing the end the of her deployment. She was out doing a medical civilian affairs operation when she was shot. The bullet pierced her helmet, fractured her skull, and settled behind her eye. She was not expected to live. Her crew realized that she was expectant and coded Holly's condition as hope trauma. She proved everybody wrong. Holly would not give up or stop working. She would have to relearn how to talk, walk, even swallow. I watched her do it all. It was both sad and humbling. But most of all, it made me very proud to know her. Holly since made an impressive recovery and is medically retired after 13 years of.

Service.

I had another guy. He's in there. Sam. Same thing. Shot in the same.

Place.

Both. Both. Did he have to relearn everything as.

Well? Yeah, and they both stroked.

Paralyzed him on the right side of their body.

He's. He's working in a program right now where he goes after child pornographers and traffickers, which is a huge problem in the country right now.

What, 500,000 children go missing every year in this.

Country?

That's.

Insane. I mean, I'll show you real slavery that's happening right.

Now.

As you're doing this stuff with other people. This is when you're starting to realize that, you know, you should get checked out yourself. Am I getting that right? Like in the timeline, like this is when you start going, hey, man, I should get these.

Tests. Well, the only reason I did these tests was because I was having issues and people around me were like, you gotta go get help, go talk to somebody. And I refused to. And the reason why I went with this doctor was because it was the least invasive and all I had to do was talk to him on Skype.

He wasn't even in the same state. And quite honestly, I kind of half assed it and it worked.

I've seen other people go through this to include people in my own family, and.

Everybody'S issue is going to be different. Mine was bad gut flora. I've seen people that have had H. Pyori, which is a parasite, which is pretty prominent, which would the symptoms really look like. You're having issues with thyroid.

So your initial reaction would be, well, you're having these issues. I'm going to take you to an endocrinologist and then we're going to make you take these medications so that we fry your thyroid, when the whole time it was just a parasite, that you could just stop eating sugar and kill it and fix it. That's what healthcare should be. Healthcare right now is completely reactive. They don't treat the source of the illness or disease. They just treat the symptoms.

Like 250,000 people die every year because of medical mistake. We were listening to these people. They almost killed me, too, with potassium. Almost had a heart attack because I had an overdose of potassium when another SEAL who'd been shot in the eye right next door to me was almost overdosed. Ryan Jobe was overdosed when he went in to get surgery. Just plastic surgery. And then they tried to lie about.

It.

Yeah, and those were. That was civilian hospital. It wasn't. That wasn't the military. That was the civilian.

Hospital. Medicine's not an exact science. Everybody's body's different, and that's why it should be evaluated individually. Because.

I'm pretty narcotic resistant. I wake up in the middle of surgeries. You got to give me more narcotics to knock me out if you want to do a surgery on me, or I'm going to wake up and.

Fight.

Good luck getting somebody to surgery after. After you make these.

Statements. I'm not gonna get hurt anymore, I don't think.

Oh.

So you're learning a lot about that. You're also doing all. Like you said, you're doing awesome stuff with. With some of the people setting them up. You know, you're doing hunting trips. You end up climbing Mount. Mount.

Rainier. Ryan. Joe climbed that.

Blind. Yeah, the year before I did. Yeah. Yeah. You say this about that. You say our climate been not in Ryan Job. Another Navy SEAL had been wounded in Iraq by a sniper, an injury that had left him totally blind. I had met Ryan once at Mike Monsour's Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House, which I think we were saying today. That was the last time I saw. The last time we saw each other before right.

Now. It's a good.

Party. Yeah, it was.

Good times.

In 2008, Ryan Jobe climbed to the summit of Mount Rainier Blind. A year later, in 2009, he died as a result of hospital error. Most people know Ryan from the books. American Sniper and a Warrior's Faith. He was the character Biggles in the film American Sniper. On my way down, I closed my eyes once and gained a new, profound respect for Ryan Jobe. I couldn't take 10 steps without opening my.

Eyes.

There's some bad parts of that mountain. You're tied to a damn rope, too. I hated that when we did that in the SEAL teams cold weather.

Training. Yeah, I. I actually never did cold weather.

Training. Hate.

It. Yeah. I mean, I was in some cold spots, but I never, you know, I got snowed on plenty. I froze plenty of times out in the sleet and snow, but I never. I never did the cold weather. The actual cold.

Weather. Training.

Team 2 guys, the old team 2 guys, used to love that.

Stuff. Oh, yeah, for sure. When I got there, when I got to Team two, you know, I was hoping that I would get to be able to do that, but it was already. That program was. It was no longer like Seal Team 2 with.

That. It's all.

Different. Yeah.

You end up going to. You end up checking out some kind of, I guess, what is it called? Alternative medicine treatment. Alternative.

Options. Oh, yeah.

I went full hippie and I went to a place that was. I mean, I like those things. I like the mindfulness practices. I should get back to meditating regularly. It does help, but I was introduced at this place to shooting with a recurve, walking those paths made with rocks that Indians used to do. So they teach a bunch of mindfulness practices, and they were teaching transcendental meditation. And I think that's the part you're getting to where I. Yeah, it sounds.

Like. I mean, the first thing that happens, you're doing.

This. Some acid trip or something, but there's no drugs.

Involved. Yeah. You're looking at a chair, and all of a sudden the chair turns into human bones. And then you guys are going down to do some. Some. Some therapy with horses. And then I'm gonna go to the book here. While the other participants went to the pen with the instructions, I stood outside the corral. When I turned and looked at an instructor's face, it was like some type of Hollywood special effects scene. I was staring at him with his damn face. When his damn face morphed into an evil demon, I froze, terrified and trembling. It felt like every cell in my body was vibrating violently. I just stood there, closed my eyes, and prayed. God, please help me. I was sure these people were going to hurt me. When I opened my eyes, everyone was gone. I needed to get out of there. I saw the group standing in front of the corral, and I said as calmly as I could, hey, guys, thanks for everything. This has been really good, but I need to leave right now. The instructors tried to talk me out of leaving, saying that it wasn't safe for me to go. And I stood there thinking, well, it's definitely not safe for me to stay here with the demon dude. I tried to hide it, but I think one of the instructors may have known that I was freaked out. One of the female instructors gave me a ride back to my cabin. I made her use her GPS so I knew she was taking where she was taking me. When I arrived back at the cabin, I grabbed my bag, chucked it in my truck, and immediately started driving back to Virginia Beach.

That was as. That was like fully real in your.

Head.

And I did a bunch of research after that happened to me. That's when I started. I had trouble sleeping after that and started doing research. And it's an event quite a few people.

Have. Well, you. Look, I thought it was interesting you immediately went and got a drug test, a full drug test. Cuz you thought maybe you had been.

Drugged. I thought I was drugged.

I actually had to stop at a car accident on the way.

Out. That's right. Yeah. You stop at a car accident and so you kind of knew that you could. You weren't on drugs because you were doing normal.

Things.

Well, I get into. Well, no, no.

No.

Wait. Let.

Me. You. You said you. You knew you weren't insane. Insane. Yeah, because that's why you thought it was drugs. That's what it.

Was. Because I was able to still be objective.

That's when you know you're crazy. When you can't be objective. Like, am I crazy? Like, if you're. If you're just completely denying the fact that you might be crazy, then, you know, maybe you are. You have to actually investigate.

It. That's a scary test, dude. I don't know if I passed.

That all the time, but I mean, this. All the research I did on it, it happens to a lot of people. Prominent people, educated people. And I say in the book, you know, I either saw it happen because I have some people that were like, hey, you just have the ability to see evil. It was a temporary psychotic break, which hasn't happened since, which I've tried to like. Man, I don't make that happen again with meditation. Because I think it was the meditation that did it. I popped open different parts of my brain that I never used.

But I cover my ass in.

There.

Yeah. So people don't think, hey, oh my.

God. The other thing is the Kundalini.

Awakening.

Yeah. Which I had to go check that out. I watched some YouTube. I watched some YouTube videos to figure out what a Kundalini awakening looked like. And it's like a yoga. Like you just. We. It's just a weird, like, spiritual trip, I.

Guess. Yeah. And I would say I might confuse people. I wear. I wear this ring. But I would say I'm a recovering Christian, don't like religion. I'm a spiritual person. I know there's a.

God. I.

Just. He hasn't. She hasn't, whatever it is, hasn't talked to me yet. So I don't know. I don't know who's right. Was there like 10 religions on this.

Rock? There's more than that.

I guess, because that bad trip, you decided you were going to still keep getting after it. There was Elliot Miller, another awesome seal.

He'd been through some. Some TBI like.

Treatments. He was. He was wheelchair bound for a long time, really overweight.

So he went to that pro program at Carrick. Yeah, I did the fundraiser.

For. Yeah, yeah. So you did this. You end up doing this. You end up trying to figure out how you can raise money. And. And the way you figure out you can raise money is.

Is by doing a.

Triathlon. I did a Half Iron.

Man. Half Iron.

Man. So tried to do a full. That's. That's when I was training for that. That's when everything came.

Down. Yeah. So you. So you end up doing the. The short one. I'll call it short. I mean, it's freaking.

Long. I.

Guess. 13 miles. And it is short. It's short for truck.

Triathlete. Doing two in a row is exponentially so much harder that I induced diabetes because I didn't know enough about.

Nutrition. Did you induce diabetes before the first one or while you were training for the second.

One? For the full.

Ironman? So you do the first one and everyone's all happy. You raise $135,000. Folks at Ironman contact you and say, hey, you're great. You got us a bunch of publicity, and it's.

Awesome. Chris Pratt did it with me.

Too. Chris Pratt did it with you. I'm sure they wanted to get some of.

That. I didn't even know who he was.

It was like Guardians of the Galaxy. Oh, that one stupid movie with a wreck. Talking raccoon. They're good movies now. I like them. I'm a fan of Chris.

Now. Yeah, no, he seems like a great guy. I haven't met him.

But then this happens. So they tell you, hey, you can do another. We'll sponsor you or whatever. You can do it. And so you start now training for this. And here you go. I was totally exhausted and burned out before the half Ironman. Now I was training for double the distance. After the race, the first race, the word spread about what I was doing and new donors came to my crowd Rise page to support me doing the Full Ironman. But I was at a point where I just could not do my job anymore. I was totally burned out. And the Iron man fundraising and training did nothing but add to my stress. Everything started to escalate in my mind. I could feel something was on the verge of breaking. The stress of work, training and financial obligations were all becoming too much. I couldn't sleep, becoming edgy and difficult to get along with on the best of days. 45 days before the Kona race, I emailed the Ironman folks to thank them for the opportunity and backed out of the race. I contacted every donor and offered them to return all their money. I was a mess at work. I couldn't. I would get urgent calls from shrinks who would say stuff like, come get your guy. Some of my clients would scare the medical staff and the doctors knew if they called the police, all hell would break loose. So they called me instead. I would have to go defuse the situation. These evolutions were exhausting and looking back, they were all well beyond my area of expertise. I would do the minimum reporting at work, then try to sleep or play video games and attempt to distract myself from the constant fear of something bad happening. I was trapped. Without an escape route, stress accumulates and it was all piling up inside of me. I had no financial help and I'm not one to ask for any. I was sure that I was going to get fired from my job. This was only the second real job I'd ever had in my life, other than being in the Navy. I felt embarrassed and ashamed and emasculated. I would not leave my home for days on end. I avoided talking to people, even turned off my phone. Brenda was troubled. She knows me so well. She was gentle at first, asking me if I wanted to talk to someone. As I became more isolated and combative, she reached out to my friends and co workers. They joined with her and together they all hounded me to get help. In a year, I'd gone from training to do an Ironman triathlon to not being able to get off my couch. I was in a dark, dangerous place. My life had become unbearable. There was guilt, but I think the real culprit was shame. Guilt and shame are very different and controlled my thoughts and behaviors in distinct ways. Guilt was about what I had done, or in my case, what I hadn't done. Shame was about who I was, or at least who. At least who I thought I was. I felt like a prisoner being brainwashed every day. My mind seemed to be stuck on a one track narrative. That became darker with each episode. Every minute of every day, there was this weird repeating internal myologue monologue that opened with guilt, which created a feeling of shame. I would fixate on things that supported this monologue, like bailing out of the Iron man, which I was, which I was sure disappointed the donors, the treatment facility, my clients and my family. My anemic efforts at work reinforced my shame. That's when all the what ifs began chiming in. What if I get fired from my job? Will we lose the new house and all my money? What if the people, people who donated to my fundraiser think I'm a fraud because I didn't do the full Ironman? These thoughts would lead to embarrassment, which deepened my feelings of shame. I was trapped in this desperate, repeating, irrational monologue that sounded all rational to me.

I personally knew people like Dan, Mark, Holly, and Tyler, who had far worse injuries than me and far more stressful lives and who were all managing themselves. But for some reason, I just couldn't put things in perspective. I was locked in an irrational, disproportionate, escalating mental prison. I sat in my truck.

I had researched how to do it. Exactly where to place the barrel and how to angle the gun. I had practiced it with a cleared weapon and pulled the trigger. I didn't want to leave a mess for someone else to clean up.

I would not do it in my truck so someone else could use it. The bullet would go through my heart. There would be an instant of pain, and then I would be gone.

I would do to myself with One bullet what four enemy fighters failed to accomplish with 27.

I stared at the black gun in my hand. I had used one like this to kill before. I was numb and sad, confused and tired. I had cried alone so many times. My downward spiral had come to its final resting place. At the bottom was hopelessness.

The built up stress, the lingering effects of trauma, my psychological deficits all colluded to create a condition of hopelessness. My mind worked, trying to come up with an explanation to justify my final act to my two beautiful daughters. Years ago in that room at that compound, the thought of not being able to see their faces again terrified me.

Images flashed in my mind. Holding my daughter's little hand in her own as we sat together. The way the girls would wrap their arms around my neck and hug me, Their soft little voices called out, oh, dad.

Their smiling faces repeatedly flashed in my mind.

There was the disproportionate feeling of guilt and shame that relentlessly stalked me. I felt Trapped in a life layered with over overwhelming stress, endless responsibilities, meaningless tasks and toxic people of whom I felt I was the most toxic.

It was all my fault. I felt I was my own worst enemy. This time there was a bullet in the chamber. I was beyond contemplation. My mind was made up. I mentally paced back and forth, working up the courage, the same way I had when I hit my father with the bat.

I was getting out of my truck when my phone rang. I looked down at the number.

It was Scott Heinz, my boss. I picked up the phone in one hand and held the gun in the other. I let it ring, not wanting to answer. I couldn't do it with Scott calling, so I put down the gun. I answered. Hey, Scott, what's up?

And Scott says, mike, I want you to take the next three months to chill out. I'm gonna pay you. Relax, take your time and find a new job. I'll help you out however I can. You're beyond burned out. You did amazing work. But there's a time limit for how long you can do this job. And you maxed it out.

My boss and good friend had just given me the hope I needed to climb out of the very deep hole I'd found myself in. In that instant, I could not have answered my phone for anyone other than Scott. Scott had seen it all before. He knew that I was surrounded by wounded, sick and injured people all day. Scott also knew that many of the people who I'd been meeting with every day for years, including patients, their family members, veterans, service members and hospital staff, were struggling with depression. It's like an alcoholic tending a bar. You can only hold out for so long. If you're around depressed people all the time, you become depressed, too.

I suspect that some of you reading this may now think that I'm crazy and write me off. Thank you for coming this far with me. For the rest of you who have ever been depressed or suicidal, I can tell you that while I fully believed at the time that I was thinking rationally, I know now that I was not.

My irrational thoughts had started repeating themselves. The world will be better off without me. I don't care anymore. I just want out of here. I'm a horrible person. My future will just be filled with more of the same stress. These thoughts seem totally rational and true in my compromised state. But I had no idea that my thinking was compromised. What scared me the most about these thoughts and the entire experience is what happened to me just a few months later. Brenda, in her desperation to help, convinced me to visit a physician who had a protocol to treat depression and other conditions.

I resisted at first, of course, but finally agreed to work with a guy, if only to get Brenda and everyone else off my.

Back.

That's why I did.

It.

Man.

You get. It's. It's interesting. You know, you talk about the like now you can look back and see that you weren't rational. Oh yeah, but at the time.

There'S just, you know, it's a chemical imbalance. I mean it.

It'S be. More people are coming aware of it now. The, the. The gut brain axis.

I mean.

The gut is probably a smarter brain than the one in our skull.

It can't operate properly unless you put proper nutrients and.

Vitamins. And this doctor is also really big into the EMF electromagnetic fields.

How we're affected. I mean, we had radio antennas over in Iraq and Afghanistan. You could put popcorn kernels in it and pop popcorn. What do you think that does to your. What do you think that does to your skull and your organs and your cells? We already use resonance as a weapon. You can use microwaves to make people.

Sick? Well, yeah, I was a radioman, unfortunately. Loved the job. But I mean sat all those antennas, man. I was constantly as a young guy.

Getting. We took the. What was that thing called? The batwing. Yeah, the vehicle antenna for the satellite. And we figured out, well, our. One of our new guys put it on. On the radio with a switch. So this YC is running around. He looked like Inspector Gadget, you know, with a helicopter. He had that bat wing hanging out over top of his.

Head. I.

Don'T. I don't think sat transmissions are very healthy.

But frequencies, you know, resonance, we can use it as a weapon. It could be used for the heal.

Microwaves. They've been used a lot to make people.

Sick. So. So you go through all that, you kind of get this doctor, Dr. Beck sort of put you on a path like a new mission of you're going to clean up your diet, you're going to stay away from these situations. The Bluetooth limit your. Limit your exposure to WI fi and all this.

Stuff. Which is.

Hard. Oh yeah, for.

Sure. EMF is hard. So.

I pretty much blew that.

Off.

So what did you mostly. Would you mostly fix your.

Diet? Mostly it was diet got my gut back. Right. So that it. Because the way that works, your gut prepares the food for the intestines. For the intestines to do what they do. And if the stomach doesn't work, then it just is going to pass through and the Intestines are not going to be able to pull the nutrients and vitamins and I mean, I don't take any medication. Now I am taking Mitch's smashing greens. I started off with this doctor put me on stuff called green juice from Organifi. So it's got all the. You can have in one shake all the nutrients, you know, with one scoop of protein and one scoop of grains. That's all you need. Pretty. I mean, we could live on algae. And you look at all these school lunches that these kids were getting. Not now because of COVID but I mean, they were feeding them crap. They're actually making them sick. They're not helping them. Yeah, I mean like Doritos with like crappy hamburger meat on.

It. Yeah, if it's even hamburger.

Meat. Yeah, if it's hamburger meat. It's not high grade, I can tell you.

That. So you get done. So you go on this protocol and you say this. It took about two months. And even then.

I would shop for all the foods, meticulously prepare the meat, measure all the meals, keep the detailed food log. I'm sure the process was gradual, but one day I woke up and felt like the black cloud that I had been hovering, that had been hovering over me for years was gone. I was able to function, to move and think clearly. The fog had lifted and the constant negative internal monologue inside my head stopped. I felt strong, clear, and confident enough to get up and start moving forward.

Grabbed my phone, opened up my contact list and started sending text, text messages and making calls. I needed a new job.

And that's when you ended up going to trade it back to trade it as a.

Contractor. I went back to teaching military free fall where prior injury. I had three events where I couldn't open my main parachute because my right scapula would seize up my whole back and my hand wouldn't work. So I had three high speed malfunctions, went to reserve, and the last one ripped my pec off my connects between your.

Arm. Did you get.

Surgery? Yeah, they reconnected it, but it was a slap tear. The whole pack came out right.

Here.

Dang. So then I went to CQC in.

Salk.

Yeah. Which is awesome because the TTPS changed because of.

Me. Yeah, that's. That's perfect place for you to go and teach. I mean, what better person to be teaching about how to handle close quarters combat? That's someone.

Yeah. Don't do what I did.

I mean, we still teach that, but there's. There's better ways to do things and different tactics you can use in different situations. You can't just do the same thing every time.

But. And then how long did you stay there for?

Because.

You'Re.

You're. You're retired now from that job as well.

Right? Yeah. So what is it, 20.

20?

Quit? 18. I was. I was probably at trade up between those two jobs for about three.

Years. Okay, awesome.

Yeah. And I just left that, like, last.

October. I think it's a cool thing that the teams do, bringing older guys back that have experience that some of the younger guys might not have, especially someone with experience like you, and bring them in there to teach and pass on those words. Man, that's freaking awesome that we do that in the.

Teams. Well, I learned a lot there. Being an instructor like you were talking about earlier, you know, watching 20 different groups come through, people do different things different ways, and, like, man, that was really stupid. Or, man, I wish I would have thought of.

That.

You ended up getting some tattoos, and this was cool. You know, Mike Martin, who's a master chief team guy that was in Vietnam, who had gotten out of.

The. Gotten.

Out. Gotten out for, like, a long.

Time. Well, he was at training cell at Team three when I got.

There. Yeah, he'd gotten out for a long time. Then he'd gone, joined, rejoined the.

Navy, went back to buds. I don't think they made him do real.

Buds. Yeah, he's like, one of a few people that went through, like, a gentleman's course of buds, you.

Know? Well, we had a retread in my class. It didn't make.

It. Was he a retread Vietnam.

Vet? I believe.

So.

Really? He was.

Terrible. Dang. That's kind of.

Crazy. Mike Martin's. Well, he passed away last year.

On that motorcycle ride, and I'll tell.

You what, he was only 62.

Bro. We were. I was. He was. He was gonna come on the podcast and. And, like, I was lining up with, you know, one of our mutual friends, and. And we're just, you know, just trying to find the date, and boom. Yeah, I was freaking so bummed.

Out. That was the first Navy SEAL book. I haven't read many, but Navy SEALs don't read Navy SEAL books.

Even though there's so many of them, so many jokes. I was just hanging out with Black Rifle, and I was like, hey, you guys want to sell books in here? You know, all the military books? I was like, yeah, it's a good idea, but we'll have to reinforce the shelf for all the Navy SEAL books. Like, you're an asshole.

Dude. Well, I was sitting down with the Black Rifle guys up in Montana, and it was me and Dudley, the archery guy. And. And then. And then Jack Carr.

Was. What's his name? The other owner? Small.

Or. It was Evan. It was Evan that was. Who was there.

Just. So Evan was. Because the other guy got hurt. I thought he got.

Hurt. Matt got hurt, so he couldn't come. But anyways, we sit down and. And, you know, Evan makes a joke about seals writing books, and he.

Did it to me.

Too. And then, of course, I looked at him and I was like, because. Because. I mean, it's a funny joke. Yes. But then when you're actually sitting with two seals that have written books, I was like, oh, this is really embarrassing. I go, real funny.

Evan.

They're a great group of guys. They're definitely doing their job. Paying it.

Forward. For sure, man. For sure. I mean, I was really bummed out when I saw. Well, first of all, when I found out that you went to the Total Archery Challenge there, and I just did. I don't know why I didn't put two and two.

Together. Well, I didn't find out until after you left.

Montana. Yeah. So I was like. But then the other thing I didn't know is I knew that they were doing something with the wounded warriors, but I didn't know what they were doing. I didn't really grasp it. Again, I just didn't pay enough.

Attention.

But. But I should have gone down there for that. Looked freaking.

Awesome. Well, that rolled into a huge archery event afterwards, so there was 25 of us. I was one of two guys that wasn't an amputee. There was a dude there that didn't have a right.

Arm. Yeah, I saw videos of.

Him. He would fight that.

Thing. Yep, I saw that, too. Freaking awesome, too.

Yeah. Dude didn't shit at, like, 108.

Yards. Yeah. There's something real cool about archery that.

Has a lot of similarities, you know, to the old.

Job. You know, I like shooting a bow.

Better. Yeah, I do, too. I like shooting a bow better. The main reason is because it's quiet. It's like. There's no, like, little shock. It's just nice and quiet. You can do it in your.

Yard and it's harder.

Actually. Yeah, it is harder. Well, it's definitely harder at.

Range. And then you can pick up a.

Recurve. I haven't done the recurve thing.

Yet. That's.

Cool. Or is that what you're like, primarily shooting is a.

Recurve? These Were compounds. But I've got a couple of recurves and it's all instinctive. Yeah.

Yeah. You just aim.

And. Well, you can aim. There's no.

Sights. Well, let me rephrase that. You Kentucky windage. And.

Go. It is totally Kentucky.

Windage. There's a couple guys that were trying to do some long shots up in Montana with the recurs, man. Yeah, it looks fun. Looks fun. I don't know if I got a. I got a lot of work to do on the compound before I decide I'm going to make it even.

Harder. You just turn up the juice on that thing.

Man.

Yeah. So one arm guys hitting stuff at 108 yards. How hard can it.

Be? That's freaking.

Awesome. He's only got one.

Arm. Freaking awesome, man. Just freaking Lopez.

Getting close here. But you know, you say this, it may seem strange, but being shot 27 times, then having a hand grenade blow up next to me was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It was the start of a personal revolution that continues today and hopefully will go on until I take my last breath. I say revolution rather than evolution. As a result of my experience, I have tossed out and or abandoned every bias, relationship, belief and dogma that has blocked my self awareness and joy.

You said again, I'm reading this stuff because I know that there's people. I mean, people talk to me all the time about what they're going through. And you know, what you say here I think is really important. I burned through a number of therapists. Some were good. Most didn't have what I needed to help me understand how the traumas of my childhood shaped me as a person and how those same traumas make some of my behaviors predictable. At times. I had to be pushed into seeing therapists and doctors by people who loved and cared about me. I don't know if I can ever thank these people enough for not giving up on me when I was so rude and resistant toward them. I say all of this so you know that at least for me, there has been no magic pill, quick fix, or one size fits all solution to finding peace and joy in my life. These things have come to me slowly over the past decade as I grew in self awareness and courage. I suspect your personal peace, if that's what you're searching for, may be gained by much the same way.

Yeah, you know, I. I think that, that just letting people know, like somebody thinks, oh, I'm going to go see a therapist and it doesn't work out because that therapist doesn't have what that per particular person needs. And then they go, oh, see, I can't be helped. Instead of saying, oh, you know what, I got to try some different.

People. Well, it's societal too.

People think that they, you know, it could take you years to get into a terrible mindset based training, telling yourself, doing all the things that make you believe the things that you're telling yourself, and then you hit rock bottom or what you think is rock bottom. And you're like, I gotta go get this fixed. I'm gonna go to this one week program. You know, it took me two years to turn into this disaster area. And I think I'm gonna go to a one week program that's gonna fix it. And a lot of these programs that I watched when I was at the CARE Coalition, it does help, but there's no follow up. So there's an improvement while they're there because everybody's, you know, feeding them good food, teaching them the things that they can use to, you know, relieve stress, and they do that while they're there and then they go home and then just fall back into the same routine, training themselves to get further into that hole. I mean, that's what medicine is right now. People get sick, they think that they can take a medication that's going to make the sickness go away. You're not even addressing why you're sick. You're just.

Hiding the.

Symptoms. I was going to say hiding the.

Symptoms.

I mean, earlier I said I actually induced diabetes and it was because I didn't know enough about nutrition. And the only thing I knew about nutrition is if I was hungry or, or not. And my favorite restaurants were the ones that gave me the most food. I didn't care what it was.

I mean, eat an extra large pizza myself, gallon of ice cream and 12 pack of.

Beer. You know, it's, that's the winning path. Maybe.

Not. Definitely not.

It's funny too, because we all know.

Even since we were little kids, you are what you eat. But we know it, but we don't practice it. I mean, then you got the FDA with that stupid food pyramid. You got people now. Oh, my stuff's FDA approved. I'm like, so what corrupt organization. Go eat five loaves of bread like they told you to. No wonder everybody's.

Fat. Yeah. Can you say pre.

Diabetic? Well, and then they take medication. I mean, type 2 diabetes. All you got to do is change your diet. It goes away. I did it. I induced it with Clif Bars, Gatorade. I wasn't eating.

Twinkies? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. I was.

Just. You're thinking what? Seemed like it's.

Cool. Yeah. And I was also being trained by an ultra thonner and they're dumber than we are. Who goes and runs 100 miles?

She kicked my ass, man. And I just didn't know enough about nutrition and I was just dumping carbs and sugars into me and every time I stood up I was almost passing out. That's.

Diabetes. Freaking.

Crazy. As soon as I fixed it, it went.

Away.

Here's another little section that I think people should hear. I have a way. I have way more stress and uncertainty in my life today than I ever did in the SEAL teams or when I was suicidal. The difference is that I now have a new rule resiliency portfolio of people, tools and skills that allows me to effectively manage stress almost effortlessly. While I do have bad days and very bad days, they don't control me or impact my outlook on life. I'm also keenly aware that most of my troubles are self inflicted. If you are honest with yourself, you may find the same is true in your own life. Adversity. Adversity is either a privilege or a tragedy, depending on how you respond to it. Choosing to be a victim of the events and circumstances in my life would have been the real tragedy. What if we all viewed adversity as an opportunity for personal growth to define our life's purpose and to help others? The reality is that we can, but we can't do any of these things as victims. If I am to evolve, which is my life's mission, I can't be a victim. Even if my problems are the result of someone else's actions. I found it easier to find myself than to rely on the perpetrator to repair the.

Damage. Well, that's what a lot of victims do. You're a victim because you're blaming somebody else and you're expecting them to fix it and there's just nobody's coming, you know they're not going to fix.

It.

Yeah. So you might as well just take the.

Blame. Take, take, take the ownership and solve the problem.

After everything that I've come through, I'm grateful. I think that the gratitude and service are. I think that gratitude and service are inseparable. The more I serve, the more grateful I feel that I can still serve and care for my family, my warrior brothers and sisters and continue to be of service to all of you. These days I spend my free time time hunting for perfect surf and spending time with great friends. I set up a non profit to help shorten the distance to recovery from trauma and depression. We join with people who truly want to help themselves. We offer these adventurous souls a community of the right relationships and a portfolio of resiliency skills and tools.

And what's the name of.

That? It's a little bit of forward thinking. I'm just on the earl right now, putting in the paperwork. It's called Warrior Tribe and the focus is gonna be full trauma, mental illness. And I want to get into.

At risk.

Youth. Yeah. Freaking.

Awesome. The kids that were like me, that are one decision away from winding up in the. In the federal prison.

System. Yeah. Or winding up on a great career in the military or some other.

Path, you know, it takes one decision.

I got lucky, you.

Know?

You know what?

I just want to close it out with what you close this book out with.

Joseph Clark Schwedler. It comes in waves. Now and again. There's an overwhelming feeling of disbelief that gives way to frustration. Then my eyes usually well up.

It's been going on for years now. I've lost so many people. It takes a toll.

Clark was the kind of man you want your son to grow up to be.

He was smart, driven, had a great sense of humor, was tough, but thoughtful and responsible.

He was a born leader and he made us all better people. After missions, we'd be tired, but Clarky would be working out, so we'd work out too. He was like a Swiss army knife. He was our navigator, our intel, our intel collections guy, a team leader, sensitive site exploitation officer, and one of our Iraqi army combat advisors. He picked up everything fast and became great at whatever he did.

Clark's dream was to be a Navy seal. He was a Midwestern kid from Crystal Falls on Northern Michigan. Town, 1469 people.

He was a senior class president, played high school football and basketball and ran track.

He did two years at Michigan State and joined the rowing team. Knowing Clarkey, he did it because the workouts were grueling and he wanted to stay in shape.

He followed his heart, abandoned.

College.

And enlisted in the Navy to fulfill his dream of becoming a seal.

Clarky got to live his dream and did what he loved to do.

Every time I saw him, he had a smile on his face.

What gives me peace is knowing that if I died doing my job as a seal, I would have no regrets. And I know Clarkie felt the same way.

For those of us who have lost friends and family members in this war, the losses connect us.

While we may be strangers, we know each other well.

There is a surprising comfort in being together in this painful club. We don't have words to describe the depth of. Of our grief, but we don't need them.

Because we can feel each other's sorrow.

There's a saying, time heals all wounds.

It doesn't.

It only makes them slightly less painful.

I may again meet up with Clarky on the other side of this life.

And I'm looking forward to.

It.

We know a lot, don't we? A lot.

They just put some new stars and paws on the.

Naked warrior in Virginia Beach. I didn't even know about the dogs that passed.

I think one of them was a suicide. Died by suicide.

Terrible place to be. But since I've been there, I know I can't get there again.

That was one phone call from one person that stopped me, so I almost didn't answer that.

Phone.

Yeah. And I think, obviously the lesson there.

Is. Well, it messes a lot of people up. The secondary tertiary effects.

I told our nutritionist about it who helped me out with the guys that I was assigned to.

Told her what I had almost done, and she was like, do you know how many people that would have hurt? I never considered that. I thought I was doing people a favor. That's how irrational I was.

But I've been around families where there's been a death by suicide, and it. It's terrible what it does to the people that are left behind.

It's.

They don't recover from.

It.

Well, you know, I. You know, this. This kind of tribute that you wrote there in the end to Clark is awesome. But, you know, from my perspective, there's. There's no more powerful tribute than you can make than doing what you're doing right now. You know, trying to help other people out.

Trying to live a good life, take care of family, and really.

Sharing all the things that you've been through and how you made it through them with other people. And I think there's nothing better that you could do to truly honor Clark's.

His.

Sacrifice. And I do want to make it clear, too, that I am still seeking a continuum of care.

I'm recently looking at a program called Save a Warrior, which a handful of guys have gone to.

The last three years of my life probably be a lot better book. The stuff that I've been dealing with these last three years and the fact that I'm able to manage it is pretty incredible to me. But.

I don't know. I think some people think, oh, I've had my ass handed to me up until this point, nothing else is gonna happen. I mean, shit's still gonna happen.

And I've just been able to get to the point where no matter how bad I got my ass handed to me, I somehow fixed it or somebody helped me fix it and, and I just had that mindset. Now I don't care if the rest of you turn into zombies. I'll figure it out when it.

Happens. But your point in saying that you still are on the path of you still know you need help now, I think everybody.

Does.

There was a point in my life where I would have said, nah, I'm fine. But there's always room for improvement.

That's an easy way for someone to say, you don't have to say you need help. Hey, there's room for.

Improvement.

That's a better team guy way of saying it. Because a team guy never wants to say, I need some help. But if you say to a team guy, don't you want to get. Don't. Don't you want to improve? 99% of team guys say, hell.

Yeah, I want to improve. And another thing with that too, it takes you a while to get to a bad state. You know that one week program is not going to do it. A continuum of care and that's working out. Good diet, taking care of the things that lower the stress hormones.

It's not just one thing. It's a lifestyle change. You can't expect to be well if you're taking down a fifth every day. And I'm not going to be a hypocrite. I probably drink too much beer.

But I also take in all the nutrients and vitamins that I need to before I drink too much.

Beer.

Well, hey, man, look, we've been going at it over three hours right now.

Where can people can find you?

Instagram. Yeah, my Instagram handle is mikeday5326. My social media is a train wreck. Until I hire somebody, I don't know what I'm doing. And my website, I have a website. My daughter who used my GI bill to get a graphic design degree did. My website is perfectly winded dot.

Com. Okay? So that's where people can find you.

Any other closing.

Thoughts?

No, I just. There is no easy button. Nobody's coming. Nobody's going to take care of you better than you can take care of yourself.

I can't say enough. There's not an easy button. You trained yourself to get yourself to a certain point. That's your mindset, that's training. And if you just look at it like that if you can train into a bad mindset, you can train out. And if you are hanging out with a bunch of depressed people or people that are like minded, that are negative, you're gonna catch it. I mean, we used to kill that stuff in the SEAL teams. There's always that one guy that bitched and complained about everything, and if he didn't stop it, then his buddy started bitching and complaining and then it was like a damn disease.

The negative thoughts and negative actions are not going to fix. And a fifth of Jack Daniels every day doesn't fix it. You're eventually going to have to still deal with.

It.

Right on, man. Those are, those are freaking good, Good guidance right there. And man, thanks for sitting down here. Thanks for talking with us. Thanks for coming all the way out here. Thanks. Thanks for everything you did for the teams and for the Navy and for America. And man, the example you set for, you know, for people, not, not just for what you did in the teams, but like the example you're setting right now being putting yourself out there explaining how to overcome things, it's freaking awesome, man. I appreciate.

It. I don't like giving advice. I'll try to live by example. You know, we just came back from Black Rifle. Those people.

Amputees still going through surgeries and their lives are so much harder just to get up out of bed, you know, a paraplegic, what a pain in the butt that is. But they still fight through it and they were living by example. And when I was at the CARE Coalition, it did kind of help me for a long time. How can I complain when Dan Konossen's double above the knee amputee, Taylor Morse is a quad amp? And I've never seen the guy be upset.

So it is, it is inspiring to see people that we assume have a worse deal, which is a hard thing for people to get across too. Like, I don't have the right to feel this way because that guy's worse or that girl's worse, which is not true. You know, everybody's issues are their issues and they have to be addressed. Even though you don't have the worst deal, you know, be happy you don't have the worst deal. You don't have to fix that.

One. Yeah, you might not have the worst deal, but it's your deal and you got to deal with it.

Awesome, man. Appreciate it.

Brother. Thanks.

Guys.

And with that, Mike Day has left the building.

Awesome to see him. And that ends up being yet another excuse removal.

Podcast. What does that.

Mean? Meaning it's kind of hard to make excuses when you get done talking with Mike Day, who's been through a lot, and he's not making excuses, so. Well, Echo Charles.

Yeah. Yeah, that's. It's almost like you can kind of just refer to that every single time, you know, if something's going wrong for you and probably others, too. Be like, well, at least I didn't get shot 20 times, you know, True statement. My thumb almost ripped off. Yeah, it's.

Weird. You can.

Keep. Or that he can keep his head straight when he looks down and be like, oh, yeah, my thumbs almost off as well, you.

Know? Yeah, I. I said this. I said team guy.

Mode.

Yeah. And I don't use that term lightly, but just from reading it and talking to him about it, he was in full team guy mode, which is when you're just like, all right, I'm gonna make things happen right.

Now.

Just. Yeah. So, yeah, 20 did well.

Speaking of excuse removal, what do you think we can do to help ourselves and each other? Remove some excuses and stay on the.

Path. Stay capable, I think. Stay capable. Of course. You're not gonna. Well, we all have our challenges, right? Like how you guys were.

Saying.

Like, people's challenges are more or less or whatever. But they're ours. We have our. That's what you're saying.

Right? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. But they're my challenges or our challenges anyway. So we are gonna have our challenges, but we want to stay capable. Yeah, I think.

So. For.

Sure. With capability comes exercise, I.

Think. Well, you heard. You heard Mike mention about a thousand times, working out. Right. Staying in shape, eating good.

Food. Eating good.

Food.

Supplementation. Supplementation is a thing. Very helpful thing. Anyway, so. Yeah, supplementation. Jocko has fuel by way of supplementation. Jocko Fuel. So what kind of supplementation for your joints is a big one. Keep your joints in the game. My kids saw a guy do a backflip. It was a big muscle guy, and he was doing a bunch of other stuff. And there was a kid involved in the video, and.

He was doing so. And my daughter, you know, she's curious. She's seven. So everything that I did, she was like, hey, dad, can you do that? And the answer was yes, every single time. And she'd be like, hey, prove it. So I'd have to, like, prove it, you know? And there was, like, a rope in it, too, so we. I didn't have to prove that part of it. And he. She was like. He was doing, like, a bunch of stuff, and I was like, it was the list was going on and on, and I was like. I was doing good at.

First.

First. But after a while, I started to get nervous. Like, bro, this guy is.

Pretty. Started getting outside of your realm of.

Capability. It looked like he was about to, you know, because he just kept doing stuff. And I looked at him, I was like, he was in good shape. One of those athletic shapes, too. Muscle guy. I'm like, okay, all right, all right. And then finally, the last thing he did was this backflip. Sort of the finale of the video, like, saying, thanks for watching. And he does a backflip.

And I remember back in the day, I could do a backflip straight up. What do you call it? A tuck, I think it's called, you know, the kind of backflip.

Yeah.

So. But I'm like, oh, man, if I were to bust out a backflip right now, because of course she wants to see it right now, I'd probably hurt myself.

But if I warmed up a little bit, I think I could do.

It. Right on. I'm surprised you didn't go for it at the pool's edge and say, hey, listen, P. I can do it, but I'm gonna do it over here by the pool just because I'm cold right now. See, this guy warms up a.

Lot. Yeah, that's all right. That's actually what I said. I was like, yeah, he's warming, of course. You know, she's like, okay. So now every once in a while, she'll be like, hey, just warm up. Do it before your workout. And I'm like, I gotta bust out the excuse. It's been about 10 years since I did it, and you can get hurt if you don't do it correctly. So the last thing I need is for me to double down and get injured in front of my daughter. You know, kind of blow her whole image of me. But she knows I can do it in the pool. She already knows that. So, like, I don't think I could get away from the pool thing. Nonetheless, if I practice when she's not looking, like, in the pool or whatever, I'll pull it off. But here's the thing. I'm a little bit older now, so my joints.

Could take a beating if I wasn't on the supplementation. That's one of the things I was thinking about as I'm explaining it to her. Like, I could pull it.

Off. Just need to up your joint.

Warfare. Just. I might have to, you know, just to first, you know, for safety's sake, as it Were nonetheless. Yeah. So take the joint warfare just in case somebody asks you to do a.

Backflip. For.

Sure. Tuck. Whatever. Not inside the pool or other things. Let's. Let's face it. You try to climb a rope or something like this should just get hurt. But if your joints are good, you're good. Also krill oil. Super krill oil. And also that vitamin D.

Yeah. Get on that vitamin D. Mix a little vitamin D with your Cold.

War.

Yeah. Immunity system.

Strong. Yeah. Boost the immune.

System. Also moke. Yeah. I was gonna say don't forget about discipline. Discipline. Go. Discipline powder. We've got all kind of.

Discipline.

Yeah. A little bit of that when you need that little.

Accelerant.

Yeah. To kind of ignite things. Try it out. You might like.

It. Yeah. And the. And the. The Jocko Palmer, both powder and the cans, I think is sort of the leading flavor. It was the tropic one, but I think. Yeah, I think. I think that kind of. It's set in.

Stone. I think in my Sour Apple Apple.

Sniper.

Yeah. Out right now. By the way, J.P. nell's.

Custom. I didn't.

Know. Signature. J.P. danelle signature.

Line.

Well, it doesn't. Good.

Deal. Dates good, too. I've tried. You know, I try. Obviously. I tried the. The Sour Apple Sniper, and it's really good. Yeah, it's gonna. It's really good. It's really good. And yes. Dave.

Burke. Good.

Deal. Yes. He also has a flavor coming. A signature.

Flavor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those are interesting, too, because you get.

Like. This is gonna be.

Orange.

Yeah. After burner.

Orange. Yeah.

You. These energy drinks, the RTD cans, you kind of. And I kind of forget this from time to time, too. I'm like, okay, I need an energy drink. But it's not just the energy drink. You get the discipline and you don't get, like, for real.

Chemicals.

Yeah.

Yeah. You don't. That's that. So. Yeah. There's no sugar in it. It's sweetened with monk fruit. Still tastes good. And. But what's even next level is that it's pasteurized so there's no chemicals that keep things stable, which we had to go through a long, long period of. Of.

Testing and to find the place and to make the drink the way it is. So. Yeah. Check that.

Out. Yeah. It's like a.

It'd be a disservice to call it a health drink, even though it essentially is a health.

Drink. You know what I'm starting to feel over here is that when we do a podcast like this where you don't say much to during that podcast portion. Maybe that sort of builds some pent up conversation in your head where you want to converse with me about stuff. Yeah, because it seemed like you had plotted out a whole kind of topic here that we were going to go into or that you were going to go.

Into. You know, I feel it too. But. And you know, now that you mentioned that, you're right. You're actually in real life. You're.

Right. And here's what's crazy. That's a long podcast. That's three hours. Right. So I'm thinking, okay, cool. We just did three hour podcast and I'm like, echo, you know, we'll, we'll just kind of burn through. People kind of know what's up. They want to support the podcast, they're going to get the game. They know to go to originmain.com we can just kind of let them know. But then we're talking about backflips. That's what we're talking.

About. You know how.

Like. And see, then what I do is I screw up because then I bring it up. I should just keep my mouth shut, be like, yep.

Backflips.

Cool. Yep. Rtd. Yep. Good warrior kid Molk. Get it? Yep. Yeah, but I don't, I, I take the bait. I take the bait. It's kind of bait because 100%.

Bait. Well, okay, so we're all at home, you know, a lot of us, I mean, you know, some, some of us are going out a little bit more than others. But like, I'm one of the people who, I'm at home a lot. So I take, I talk to the same four people in my family, varying levels of age, you know, and maturity levels. So after a while it gets repetitive. So when I see you, you know, once a week, I'm like, hey man, let's, let's talk. Let's face it. And that's not, that's a common thing, like, because sometimes we can go straight up two hours before we even press record because we're, you know, whatever, whatever. And when you think about it, I'm just realizing this just now, like, we kind of rolled in. We're kind of all.

Business.

Yeah. So you're.

Correct. You don't like that. You got a whole sort of like excess of conversations floating around your head that just need to come out. I don't all in the time over here with just zero. I'd be just assuming, like read off the stuff, you tell them where to go and we leave. I'd Be down with.

That. I understand. Okay. All right, well, hey, let's speed it up. But hey, let's, you know, bear with me if you will. So, yes, discipline can powder all that. Good for your brain, good for your body. Keep.

It.

Keep. Keep yourself on the path and capable. By the way, milk, extra protein in the form of a dessert. Eating dessert. Like what? Ice cream or Snickers bars for dessert. I guess that's not really a.

Dessert.

That's. That's more of a candy bar, but like a cake. A bunt cake. But don't do that. That'll take you off the.

Path. Yeah. Jaco white tea. Don't forget about that. Organic. And you can get all this stuff@originmain.com or you can go to the vitamin shop right around the corner. If you got one around the corner from you, you can go check it out there. And then we also@originmain.com we make all kinds of stuff for you to wear on your.

Body. Yeah.

Sure. Things that you can wear when you are doing jiu jitsu. Like Jiu Jitsu GI's, like rash guards.

T shirts. If you're not doing jiu jitsu, you. You still need to wear something on your body. Wear a T shirt. You probably need something on your legs sometimes. Wear some origin jeans. Wear some origin boots. If you need something on your.

Foot.

They got your whole body.

Covered. You got your whole body covered. Beanies do. And here's the thing. This is. You kind of throw it in there in the end like it's no big deal. Everything that I just said is 100% made in America without compromise. You're supporting America. You're supporting local people that are making things happen. Our people bringing back this industry.

Being bringing back manufacturing to America. So go to originmain.com get yourself some of that stuff if you need.

To cover up your foot or other places. Also speaking of clothing, let's just say clothes. Apparel, if you were actually apparel, seems more like a. Like a, Like.

A. It's a bit.

Spectacular. We'll just say close. How this. Okay. Speaking of which, Jocko has a store called Jocko Store. Some new things on there. But this is the place where you can get. Discipline equals.

Freedom.

Good. Get after, you know, representing while on the path with closing from Jocko store. So go to Jocastore.com displeasure shirts, hats.

Jackets. You know how a lot of times I say like, oh, this is.

Ours.

True. But let me ask you a question. Is my new T shirt up.

Yet?

Yes. All right, good. New T shirt is.

Up. Yes. Some people have noticed it too. Oh, and they knows and they text me, you know, Jack Daniel.

Hill.

Yeah. So he texted me. He was like, hey, hope you're doing good. That new shirt is awesome. And it's not like he texts me every day too. So it was like a.

Thing. So.

After many years of planning, because I've been wanting to do this for you. How many years have we been planning that T.

Shirt?

3. Three years I've been planning this T shirt. So it's a T shirt. On the front of the T shirt it says two words, hardcore recondos. You all know where that comes from. If you don't, don't worry about it. You'll figure it out at some point. And on the back it's got the, it's got phonetic letters.

The phonetic letters it has on the back are November, Foxtrot, Sierra.

And if you don't know what those mean, don't worry about it. Don't worry. If you do know what those things mean, then you'll probably be. When you see me, you'll be seeing me wearing that T shirt. Get some hardcore.

Condos. Well, yep, that one is there. Jockostore.com if you see anything else on there. Hey man, get it. Good way to represent while on the path, while supporting. Also.

If you want to get the book Perfectly Wounded by Mike Day, we got it on the website jocko podcast.com in the sections where the books are. You see it books from the episode we got you there, Just click through there. It'll take you to Amazon. You can buy it. Boom. Straight from Amazon. Also subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already on your itunes or stitcher, Google Play, you know, wherever you listen to podcasts, you know, subscribe, man. Easy one click. Boom. Easy.

Money. And there's not just this podcast, we also have the Unraveling podcast which gonna have its own. What's it called, its own feed at some point. Right now we're kind of dual broadcasting. Get people in the game a little bit, make sure that, that you know it's out there. But eventually we'll break that off. So look for the Jocko Unraveling podcast. We got the Grounded podcast. We got the Warrior Kid podcast. We got Warrior Kid Soap from Irishoaks Ranch.com you can get soap so that you and everyone you know can.

Stay clean. We got a YouTube channel. This is where Echo puts tons of special effects into two minute videos and then puts no special effects in a three hour video. A lot of people, a lot of people don't agree with that, but that's what Echo's doing. And according to him, that's the way it should should be. So whatever. Also have an album called Psychological Warfare, where I will tell you some little things to do to get through moments of weakness, which we've all got. Little moments of weakness. Attack them. That's what I'm saying. If you need some support attacking you support by fire, position, press play. Listen to some Psychological warfare. If you need a visual signal 4.

Overcoming a moment of weakness, go to flipsidecanvas.com Dakota Meyer. He's making all kinds of cool stuff, also made in America, to hang on your wall and remind you that you need to stay on the path. Got a bunch of books, obviously, Mike Day's book, Perfectly Wounded. We got the code, we got Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. We got Way of The Warrior Kid 1, 2, and 3. We got way of the. We got Mikey and Dragons, we got Discipline Equipment Equals Freedom Field Manual. We got the the Dichotomy of Leadership. And then the OG book, Extreme Ownership, written by me and my brother, Leif Babin. We also have a leadership consultancy called Echelon Front, where we solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for details. And also we have an online training program. And I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm gonna do some. Some Jocko Live events on EF Online. Jocko Live events. So if you missed the world tour that I did. If you missed the world tour that I did, where I went around America talking to everyone, meeting everyone, I'm gonna do some of those on the Internet so you'll be able to tune in live, ask questions. I'm gonna do those through EF Online. No dates scheduled yet, but it's coming. And by the way, you don't have to wait because if you want to talk to me, go to efonline.com and I'm there answering questions. The whole team's there. You can interact with me right there. So check that out. Also, if you want to see us in person, go to. You can go to extremeownership.com and come to our muster, which is a leadership conference. Next One is Phoenix, Arizona. September 16th and 17th, December 3rd and 4th is going to be in Dallas, Texas. They've all sold out. These are going to sell out, too, if you want to come, get there early.

And of course, we also have EF Overwatch. If you need leadership inside your organization, we have connections from the military that understand the principles we talk about. Go to EF Overwatch if you want to support.

If you want to support service members around the world, go to America's mighty warriors.org it is Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee, and she is doing her best to provide for people in the military, their families, Gold Star families all over the world. You can go there and either donate or you can get involved. And if you're a glutton for punishment.

And you want to hear more of my.

Cretinous contentions or per chance, for some strange reason you'd like to hear more of Echoes Risible Reflections, then you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on Instagram and on Facebook. Echoes at Echo Charles and I am at Jocko Willink. And of course, Mark Mike Day is at Mike Day 5326. And speaking of Mike, thanks once again to Mike for setting such an awesome example, not only for his deeds on the battlefield, but for the example he sets in life.

Putting the word out there explaining what he's been through and how he has gotten through it. And to all of our other military members of the past, present and future, thanks to all of you as well, for all sorts of also setting an example of service and sacrifice and for allowing us to live in freedom. And to police and law enforcement and the firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and the dispatchers and the correctional officers and the Border Patrol.

BORTAC.

Secret Service and all the other first responders, thanks to each of you for your service as well. And thanks for keeping us safe in our times of need. And to everyone else out there, we know life is rough and we know there will be pain. And whether that pain is at the hands of an abuser, at the hands of an enemy, or at the hands of nature or time or disease, there will be, will be pain.

But with a man like Mike Day as an example, you can overcome, you can get through it, you can drive on. And you do that by getting up every day and getting after it.

And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko out.