Angry Planet - Tracer Burnout and Growing Up in the U.S. Military

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

The American civilian-military divide is stark. Only about 1 percent of the U.S. population has served in the military. We here at Angry Planet like to do what we can to bridge that divide and have found that the easiest way to do that … is just to talk to veterans and service members.That’s why you should listen to the podcast Tracer Burnout, a show where a pair of Army vets talk to other vets about their service. The guys at the center of it are Dan and Roger, two friends who both grew up as Army brats. On this episode of Angry Planet, Dan and Roger stop by the show to tell us about Tracer Burnout and what it was like to grow up on American military bases.The origins of Tracer BurnoutHow Fury inspired a veteran to start a podcastPsychic soldiers in FuryThe difference between the branchesThe changing relationship between the military and the American civilian populationCalifornians in TexasThe life of a military bratFrontier re-enactorsHardtackThe anti-authoritarian streak in veteransWhat happens when the Army makes you to learn a languageLife as a personal trainer in the ArmySubmarinersWhere the name comes fromListen to the Tracer Burnout podcast herehttps://tracerburnout.com/Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello, and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew Galt. It is too late for Jason Fields to be up right now, so he is not here. But that is all right because I've got two wonderful guests with me.

Dan and Roger, can y'all introduce yourselves? Of course, Dan, you first. Sure. I'm Dan Baker, a combat veteran, retired after 23 years in the Army. And now Roger and I are in the business of podcasting. Oh, man. That's a tough act to follow. I'm Roger, also retired combat veteran. Dan and I are located here at the home of the airborne and special operations in Fayville Fort Bragg area. That's right. I said Fort Bragg. And bearing the lead, Dan and I are lifelong best friends. who last year decided it would be a good idea to start a podcast where we sit down with a third veteran and let them talk about their service in their own words. So that's what brings us here today. We appreciate it.

Yeah, absolutely. What's the name of the podcast? Tracer Burnout. And so what inspired y'all to start the show? Go ahead, Raj. Okay. Perfect. So as I was going through my retirement process, I was on a medical journey, getting some medical stuff done.

I was simultaneously doing a fellowship to a really great organization called the Honor Foundation, which helps guys and guys who are retiring, kind of figure out what their path is going to be on the way out, kind of gives them a little purpose and direction if they don't necessarily know exactly what they want to do. So I was up in Boston, Massachusetts, doing medical stuff. And I'm talking all these really great people on the scholarship. It's virtual, of course, and got some really good ideas put it into my head. And I couldn't really figure out exactly what I wanted to do exactly. I knew I wanted to do something involving veterans or military somehow, but I couldn't really get my arms around this thing.

It was just kind of out of vision to mix metaphors. So I pick up my phone and I'm just sitting around my hotel bed in Massachusetts. I text Dan and say, hey, man, Dan who retired, what, two years ago at the time? Does that sound about right, Dan? Yeah, about 18 months or still, yeah. Okay, yeah, give or take. So I text Dan, who's somewhat recently retired and say, hey, man, do you want to start a nonprofit with me doing veterans or something, something?

And he immediately texts me back. And what do you say, Dan? I said, call me. And I pitched the idea to him of rather than starting a nonprofit because there are I mean, God bless these people. There are so many nonprofits out there that help veterans and their families in some capacity or another. And I said, let's start a podcast where we just talk to people about their service.

Because there's a, you know, there's a lot of stigmas attached to military service and military service members, whether it's through, you know, television or movies or books, you know, The Air Force flies planes and drops bombs, you know. Marines, you know, swim through the water and show up on shore and shoot stuff, you know. But people don't really know about the vast capacity of a solid 95% of the military and what they do on a day-to-day basis. So across the course of several months, we whittled down our scope and decided that we were just going to sit down with other veterans from across all services. and just talk to them about it. Record their stories for posterity.

Let them get some things off their chest that maybe they haven't told their friends, their family, their loved ones because there are certain things that you only talk to other veterans about. Yeah. Another part of this is, Dan laughs whenever I tell this part of the origin story, right?

It's our villain origin story. Many years ago, kind of the seed for the, This is my journey, right? The scene was planted when the stupid Brad Pitt movie called Fury came out. And I saw the preview for it and thought, oh, that's great, a World War II movie. And I did a little digging and realized that the entire movie is utterly fiction, from top to bottom, totally fiction. And I was furious about this, so to speak, because I thought, think of the millions of men and women who went underarms during World War II and went off to

fight this menace, any whom didn't come home, but the ones who did, and they had these, you know, just think of all the untold stories. I mean, that generation almost to a fault

wouldn't tell their stories, by and large. Just think of all those stories that went untold. And so we have to completely make stuff up because Hollywood wants to make, make a war movie with guys with really great haircuts.

I don't know. It just really made me mad, and I kind of tucked that away for a while. And it all kind of came out on one, you know, phone conversation last summer. right then. Yeah.

Well, a series of phone calls. We'll call it that. I really like that movie. As far as, as, I'm a big movie buff. I love movies. And as far as movies go, it's not bad. But as also a big history nerd, like really, you had to just completely make something up

out of holecloth about the only thing that they got right in that movie was Americans were fighting Nazis and we had tanks. They, uh, I think they had the last, they had the last tiger, I think that like is extant and works in that film, actually. Uh, and as a mild defense of this, the original, I've read the original screenplay. Um, they make the Shia LeBuff character, I think. think it's the shy little. It might be Brad Pitt actually, is psychic. And has like, of course. In the original screenplay has like psychic flashes and powers.

They cut that out though. I think to the movies benefit. Is this like the proverbial thing where a screenplay will get written by a really talented writer and they'll put this thing together? Maybe with a team and they'll sit down with a bunch of Hollywood execs and the Hollywood execs will sit them down and say, hey, this is a really great show. you know, screenplay, don't get me wrong. However, you need a talking dog. You're like, what? No, this is actually the guy who made the bad suicide squad movie and the bad Will Smith magic orc movie on Netflix.

I can't remember his name, wrote and directed Fury. And he went in with the screenplay with the psychic Brad Pitt, the psychic tank soldier. And Hollywood was like, hey, we think we've got a harrowing World War II tank movie here. Okay. Maybe let's lose the psychic Brad Pitt. So it's a mirror image of what I was saying. Right. So it's, yeah, it's one of those few times when the executives were like, maybe let's lose some of this.

No talking dogs. No talking dogs. They actually said tone it down. Yeah, they actually said tone it down. That's a rarity for Hollywood. Oh, man, exactly. It's funny you, I think one of the big themes above Angry Planet. off and on throughout the years has been like civilian military divide and the

inability to like breach that divide and for people not to communicate. And I watched it last night as playing a video game with two friends, one of whom is Navy veteran. And we were talking about a red thread I'd seen where a guy was at, he's like 18. He's like, should I join the army or should I join the Marines? Then my Navy friend said, well, the Craig dancer is Air Force. And then there was laughter. And the third friend said, like, I don't get it.

I don't understand what's going on. And then it was like 30 minutes of conversation about the way the rest of the military view, like the way every branch looks at every other branch and like why, like the way they look at the Air Force specifically. Obviously from a very Navy perspective, but just like I find myself in those positions these days where like I'll have smart friends that just have no experience with any of this stuff. Yeah. And like, I'm not a veteran, but somehow I end up in these conversations where I'm explaining, like, the way the Navy looks at the Air Force, you know? Well, it's, we talked to an Air Force veteran a few months back, and he explained it this way, as far as, like, the difference in the services. The Army and the Marines sleep under the stars.

and the Air Force books their hotels by the stars. And that I thought was a pretty succinct way to put it. Yeah, that's perfect. That is about what we told him last night, yes. Yeah, I mean, obviously tongue and cheek, it all just comes down to what exactly you're, why are you joining and what is it that you want to accomplish while you're there? And, I mean, there's going to be some overlap between the services on all those things, of course.

And the entire thrust of our show is that your service matters. So at the end of the day, when you raise your right hand put on that uniform, I mean, you're serving Uncle Sam and your fellow citizens. And so it really doesn't matter which service you went into. Of course, there's inter and intra service rivalries. But it's all good at the end of the day. It's the fact that you put on the uniform to serve so that someone else wouldn't have to. Yeah, peacetime or otherwise. Whether you did three years or 30 years, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter what service you were in. It's the fact that you served and your story deserves to be told in your own words so that somebody doesn't write a crappy Hollywood script with a psychic tank commander. Or a talking dog. Or a talking dog. Has this kind of friction between civilians? and, I mean, friction's not even the word, because I don't feel that there's that much friction, actually. It's like an apathy from the civilian population towards military service.

Is it in a different place now than it was when you all joined? I think before we started recording, Dan, you joined in a previous millennium, right? I believe it was how Roger put it. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's kind of different for Roger and I because we are both the sons of career army officers. So we've been in the military our entire lives up until the point where we retired, obviously. So we've never really known anything else. I can say that when I joined in 98, I joined in a relatively peaceful.

East Time Army. It's the end of history. And then by the time I was making the decision on whether I was going to get out or not, that's when 9-11 happened. And obviously I stayed in and spent years of my life in Afghanistan and retired a few years ago. And there was a difference from when I joined to where I was like, oh, you're in the Army. That's cool. And then after 9-11, it was, oh, you're all heroes.

And then by the time I retired, or years before I retired, it was more, it was back down to, oh, you're in the Army? Oh, that's cool. Yeah, I mean, a cursory study of history will tell you that there's always an interwar period because there's always another war. Yeah. So to say that this is the first time this has happened is not accurate. I mean, obviously with technology and connectivity and all the synergies we have in a modern society, maybe the dynamics a little bit different than it used to be. But I think another thing worth bringing up, though, is, and there's really smart people with PhDs who've written extensively on this.

I'm just kind of shooting from the hip a little bit. But when you think about the all-volunteer force, that, and again, we had a very large all-volunteer. Force through really towards the end of the Cold War, beginning with the first riff in the early 90s after Desert Storm is when we started paring it down for the first time. I think with the creation of the All Volunteer Force, it kind of created almost silos. And I think Dan would agree with me on this. We talked to folks who are intergenerational military families. And so I think it kind of exacerbated that, which is not necessarily a bad thing,

but to your point, Matt, what you're asking about is that civil military divide. I think if we have the same military families that are, it's almost like the family business, right? You know, sons and daughters from the family, that's just what they do. You know, they go off and join the military. Maybe their career, maybe they're not, but it's just kind of a generational thing. What that's created is almost kind of these, you know, my word, silos where you had the same folks or the same families doing this over and over again, and maybe that's exacerbating that divide. That's a good way to put it. So it's like almost like these family dynasties that then can over the generations continue to separate out further and farther away from the rest of the population.

Yeah, I think so. And I mean, this isn't any judgments here. But what that creates is that you have families who live in certain pockets. And again, a lot of, particularly the Army, a lot of the bases are going to be located in the southeastern United States. Why is that? It's because after the Civil War, really the beginning of the 20th century, that's where all the cheap land was because the South was economically not as prosperous as the North. And so the land was cheap. And so you've got millions of square miles, not millions I'm exaggerating, but of square miles of these pine forests, you know, just knock them down and, you know, put bases in them.

So, you know, you think, how does that affect over the period of time? that means you have all these military bases, particularly the Army, because those are going to be the bigger ones as far as numbers-wise population. You're going to have the same demographics serving in and around these areas of southeastern United States over and over again. Some of this applies to the Marine Corps, too. So what we're looking at is a century of demographics. Those families tend to then retire near those installations. oftentimes, like Roger and I, were just a few miles from Fort Bragg, Fort Laudette.

Right. So you get these very large, multi-generational families who not only do they have a history of service in their family, they're then growing up, knowing that the majority of the local economy is based on military service. They constantly see soldiers or service members in uniform, whether they're at school and their friend's dad comes in

or their teacher is a retired, you know, Colonel Air Force pilot, whatever. Their Sunday school teacher, their basketball coach. Their pastor, their coach, their bus driver is a military spouse. It's constantly surrounding. So you get these same family members that are surrounded with it from the time that they're born and they just, it's just natural. I mean, I suppose it's probably the same way with, you know, cattle ranchers or farmers.

Their families do the same thing. You know, they have multiple kids to help out on the farm and everything. The kids grow up. What do they know? They know farming. They know ranching. So what do they do? They go to school for, you know, agriculture or whatever the case is.

All their friends do the same things. How many generations do you all go back? Mine is at least back to the Civil War, possibly further. Yeah, in my case, we have, this is kind of a family. When we did the 23 and me, we were able to figure some stuff out that we thought had been kind of folklore, but was actually true. And I can't say that there's a completely unbroken string of military service, but it isn't true that I have an ancestor who was a, I want to say Hessian,

but anyway, mercenary that was hired by the crown to come over here and deal with the pesky colonials and fought in a battle or two and then said, I got nothing against these colonials in this place is awesome. And he deserted and moved to Kentucky, southern Ohio, Ohio area and put down stakes and the rest of its history. The first time my dad visited me here in Columbia, we were at the state. house grounds walking around, which is one of my, one of the places I like to take people when we visit Columbia for a variety of reasons. He was, he kind of looked at me and he was like, you know that we, we help burn this place down, right? And that's, that is as far as I know, as far as it goes back on my end.

I interrupted the chain. All my cousins joined, but not me. But I've got that in the past, yeah. It's also funny you bring that up too because I'm not as familiar with Columbia I have been there before. I imagine they still have some signs, you know, whether they're the official historical, you know, Department

of the Interior signs or maybe some more unofficial ones. But I know here in Fayetteville, when you walk through downtown Fayville, there's still a giant sign that says, you know, Sherman's March. And I remember, Dan probably remembers this too, you know, when we were school kids back in the 80s growing up here.

Let's just say that there was still as recently as the 1980s, there were still Southerners here in the Fayville area who were pretty butt-hurt about Sherman. Yeah, it's funny because I grew up in Texas. So it has its own. Texas is like its whole, it's a whole own thing. The country of Texas. Exactly.

And that is what you learn about. Yes. And you learn about that in middle school. That's like a huge part of it is learning all of those battles and learning how the country Texas came to be and then joined the U.S. It's interesting to come here and see all this history that's tied up

in the stuff that Texas just ignores because the civil war is like in and losing the civil wars in the bones of the city. And I would say is like almost everything about that like still affects everything here.

Like Columbia specifically and South Carolina specifically because it's You know, it was one of the most powerful and consequential states in the union. And then bottom of the list and has been for a long time since. Yeah, that was another, to your point, that was another thing growing up in North Carolina is, yeah, North Carolina was the backwater in the 19th century. And then South Carolina became the backwater in the 20th century. So, yeah. You guys have all the cool tech jobs and North Carolina's not doing too bad.

You've got Asheville. To be fair, most of those folks aren't from North Carolina. No, they're really not. They continue to move in here for other states because we have better tax laws. And the veteran community is always really big. And especially now that veterans don't pay state income tax on their veterans benefits, that has also boosted the veteran. community moving here and retiring here.

Case important. Yeah, in the Research Triangle with the Raleigh-Durham Chapel Hill, that's a lot of people from out of state. Gotcha. How many Californians you got coming in there? Go ahead, Dan. I know Dan's got something he wants to say. Go ahead, Dan.

I honestly don't know. As long as they're red-blooded America lovers, then everybody's welcome. Yeah. I just remember if they're good at their history. job and they love the country and what it does for them, then we'll take them. But yeah, there's a lot of Silicon Valley that's moved out here, particularly the Durham area. I had a lot of them in Texas where I lived, a lot of Californians. And so my mom's from California.

But it was just funny to watch. So I worked almost the entire time I was in Texas, I was working retail. And I would watch the culture shock happen. I could usually tell, like, who was from California. It's like, you know, people that even though they've, even though they live in California, and there's a lot of farmland there, it's like they'd never been out of whatever city they were from. They'd never seen like cattle and were shocked by cattle next to like a strip bowl, which is like a pretty typical thing there.

Like complain, they're in line about to buy books. They're complaining about their neighbor's goats and, you know, stuff like that. This is just like a normal thing. But we're here to talk about the military. And goats. And goats. Goats factor in pretty heavily to naval traditions. I know, at least.

Learn that from my father. All right, angry planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this. All right, angry planet listeners, welcome back. So one of the things I wanted to talk to you all about is that I think is pretty interesting, is this experience that I didn't have. because my father served and then got out

and we were not like a military family growing up and it's like a completely different experience that I think that it's a pretty small portion of the American population has and I wonder if I could ask you guys a couple questions about what that's like. Of course.

Yeah. So how often did you move when you all were kids? About sometimes it would be as little as nine months or a year and then sometimes

two and a half, three years it depended on the assignment that my dad had. Assignments in the military tend to usually be a few years long, two to three years. If you are in a command position, they can be shorter.

But I mean, Roger can speak more on that. Yeah, I mean, the command could be anywhere between two three years. But that's kind of the further up you go. I mean, the Army is what I can really speak to the most, but I imagine most of the services are pretty similar on this. They're always trying to strike a balance between rotating folks through particular

positions because it's good for their career development to get a job doing this and then this and then this. And so often that will require displacing and going to another installation. So they're trying to balance the career and professional development for the service member while not totally second piece burning them out as far as moving them all the time. That's not always taken into consideration, unfortunately, but it is considered. And then the third thing, oftentimes it comes down to the military. Well, it's needs to the military, but it's also cost.

And it's, if we can find a job for this service member on the same installation that they're already at, we don't have to pay to move them and their family and all of the money. Because the Army runs on green. I know the other services do, too. Runs on green, right? So in a resource-constrained environment, they're going to look for cost-saving ways. So maybe you don't move as much. Maybe a little more creativity in figuring out where to move folks or not.

Yeah. you may just get a new assignment on the same base. Yeah. So you may just be moving across the street as far as you work. You know, I spent a lot of my career here for Bragg. That's not so hard to do because there's so much going on here. If you're at my not Air Force base, there's not a whole lot of game in town there. You're either doing a job and you do there until it's done and then you've got to move on to the next thing.

So, yeah. When you're a kid, though, how does that affect you? like that kind of constant moving. It's like a lot of us like put down roots and established friend groups. Y'all are changing things up every few years. For me it wasn't really an issue. I loved it.

I was, I mean, I was born in formerly West Germany. And then we bounced around all over the place. I always looked at it as, that's great. Where are we going and when are we going? because I wanted to go see places and see new things and do cool stuff,

like climb the pyramids or go to the wailing wall or even be surrounded by snow most of the year in Canada. But my brother and sister absolutely did not feel that way. Yeah. I did know what Dan said. I was the same way. I loved the adventure. I always liked being the new kid because I kind of liked the challenge

of figuring out the dynamic and you know, figuring out what makes people take and do all that, which kind of makes sense when you figure the kind of career

I got into much later into the Army, but my sister, she hated it. Hated it. And did any of the siblings joined military? Yep.

My brother did. After I did. He's my older brother by about a year. And he ended up enlisting after college and becoming a warrant officer.

He's still in now. He's getting ready to retire himself. But my sister did not, no. Yeah. And for me, my sister did not serve, but her husband currently serves. So again, the family business, right? Do you think it made y'all closer to your siblings?

I would say in our case, yes. Because when your support network becomes the people inside of those four walls. I mean, it's a forcing function. Yeah. I would say yes, when I was younger, especially, because the military did not have an education system overseas. So when I was growing up as a kid in the Middle East,

we were homeschooled with a couple of other American family kids. And so we were close because we were the only friends that we had, right? But as we got older and, you know, we started, you know, branching out and everything, not so much because we were, we were old enough that where we were going off and making our own, our own friends at school and stuff like that. So I guess out of necessity as kids, when we were younger, yes, absolutely, we were much closer. But as we got older, it wasn't, it wasn't so forced. Yeah.

What was your favorite place you lived, Dan, when you were a kid? That's tough. I would probably say Egypt, because we did a lot of traveling while we were there. Went to Tunisia, went to Israel and Jordan, and for anybody who hasn't been to Petra and Jerash, which you see in so many movies, like Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade, where they're going to the canyon. Yeah. The penitent men shall pass. Yes, it is nothing like that.

But the scenery, the scenic view and everything, yes. We got to go so many cool places. I mean, I was, I don't know, seven, eight years old, and I was at the Cairo Zoo, and the zookeeper was wrapping cobras around my head and taking pictures so that I could have, like, a picture like you see with the old pharaohs where they have the snake crown or the serpent crown,

going to the temples of Lozzer and everything going down the Nile. Just wild, wild stuff. I would love to go back on a vacation someday. What about you, Roger? Mine's not nearly that interesting. We also lived in West Germany, although I was a little bit too young to remember most of it. We moved to North Carolina after that. But to answer your question, we spent four years, the last four years of my dad's career in Colorado Springs,

This would have been in the early 90s. So really before Colorado, the population boom happened. And so Colorado Springs was a sleepy prairie town out there. And my dad's really into the outdoor stuff. And so he passed that along to me. So we would do the whitewater rafting. We were very involved in the scouts. We would do wilderness camping.

We would go up in the mountains. My dad was, he's a history buff. He was, he's really into historical reenactments. And so the four years, we were in Colorado, we would do rendezvous. So put on you know, buckskins and get the cast iron Dutch oven and the muzzle

loader and grab all that stuff and go join up with a bunch of other Yehoo's up in the mountains who are doing. It's all total, total period pieces, right? So we'd go up in the mountains and do stuff like that. So Colorado was pretty amazing. Yeah. I had no idea there was

like frontier reenactors. Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. This was in the early 90s. assuming that stuff still goes on. Oh, I'm sure it does. With the internet and everyone finding each other, I'm sure there's, there's that same thing.

Did you eat that, what's that like hard tack, that disgusting? I'm just going to, I can't remember the name of it. No, it's called hard tech. I mean, hard tech is, yeah. Yeah, but it's basically just super,

super dried bread that it, that pretty much comes in almost a super thick cracker. kind of form, crackers are softer than hardtack. And you're not supposed to eat hardtack the way it's presented. You're actually supposed to get it wet first.

But we would make, all the food preparation was all done to standard for the period. And so, you know, we would make our own jerky. So we, you know, slice it thin, marinated, and whatever we could get our hands on, smoke it, you know, cut a real thin, put it over a fire, smoke it.

aired out. I mean, we would do all that stuff. Yeah. How long would one of the rendezvous go? I mean, it was usually a weekend kind of thing. You know, weekend Warriors. Nothing more intense than that, yeah. I'm sure they probably did longer ones, but you know, this is my dad taking his grade school age

kid, so, but I was involved in the scouts. Like, we do all. We do non-wild and crazy camping to some more, you know, traditional style stuff as well. So, but yeah, the mountains are amazing. And did you all attend, I know that you'd said, Dan, that you were home schooled in Egypt.

Did you all ever attend normal high school, or was it always kind of like on base in a mix of homeschool? Or like, what was the deal? No. When we were abroad, we were homeschooled. But when we moved back to the States, we went back to a normal school, whether it was a private school at one place or a public school at another place. Yeah. So that's how. Dan and I got to know each other in the late 80s when we were.

kids. That was the first go-around. We lived in the same neighborhood and went to the same, you know, school. He was encroaching on my, the common area in the backyard where, you know, it wasn't technically my property, but I was willing to fight to the death over it. There was a creek that ran through our neighborhood. That creek still exists, by the way. So that's, Dan and I became, you know, instant friends. This was back in the late 80s. We broke away for about four years because our dad's moved. And then we converged back on Fayetteville in the mid-90s and kind of hit it back off. You know, we moved back into the same houses.

Yeah, the same houses that we were in here. Just right down the street. And we've been best friends ever since. And was it ever a question when you all were kids that did you just kind of grow up knowing that you were going to go in? Well, when I was real little, I wanted to be a ninja. And I had this, I had this ninja mask. that my mom got me.

And this is when I'm like, I don't know, six or seven. And I wore it everywhere to the point where I started to stink. And I was like, I can't imagine wearing this all the time. So then I was like, well, I guess I'm going to be like dad then and I'm going to be in the army. Mine is not nearly as humorous as stand. It's kind of funny when I was getting halfway through high school, really junior year rolls around, comes and goes and senior year. And I was a reasonably intelligent guy. I didn't try as hard as I should have.

I think that's most teenage boys. But, I mean, I was reasonably intelligent. You know, I played sports. You know, I kept my nose clean more or less. I was a decent kid. And all my friends who were particularly in my class were all getting, you know, getting really great scores on the SATs and had big plans to go off to these big schools. And, you know, UNC Chapel Hill, full ride this and that.

And they wanted to go do big stuff. And I just remember thinking like, I must be the lamest person on earth because I just, I want to get out there and work. I want to do something. I don't want to go to college. I want to work with my hands and,

you know, be independent and do all the things, but I don't really know what I want to do. And so I don't know if it was a lack of imagination. It just seemed like a natural fit to me. And maybe it was, you know, years of my dad's brainwashing.

I didn't even know. I never really considered anything else. Is that sad? Maybe. I don't know. I don't think it's sad. My dad told me that he didn't think that I was going to make it. He told me that he didn't think I was going to make it through my first tour or for my first enlistment. And he certainly didn't think that I was going to be able to make it a career.

Right. Because I didn't respect authority. And still don't. And I was like, he and I had, I don't know, we were having lunch a couple of weeks ago, or probably a couple months ago. And I was like, we were talking about. this conversation and I was like, well, you were right on one out of three things. It's not bad for baseball. I know.

I feel like that that kind of anti-authoritarian strain runs through most of the veterans, I know. They're always a little salty with someone telling them what to do. It's everything in its proper place, right? I mean, if it's a legitimate authority and where, I mean, you're a volunteer, right? So you get into draftees. That's a totally different story. But we're talking about volunteers. Like, you were here on a contract for grown men and women. So you might not like your first line supervise or you might think the old man, the commander is a turd. But I mean, I guess there's something in a way, it's kind of liberating to know that, hey, you know, I'm here to do a job and I'm here to respect the authority, whether I want to or not. And then every two to three, years you get a new boss in the military too. So that's another good thing. Sometimes you may have to hold your nose for a couple of years, but, you know,

just do it long enough and somebody new will come along. And that's not necessarily a luxury you may have in the private sector, right? I mean, you may have to work for the same awful boss for years, decades. But yeah, I agree with your assessment on being a little salty towards authority. I don't know. I don't know if maybe it's just the older guys, Dan. What do you think? It probably is the crusty old veteran,

the get off my lawn attitude. But I think also a part of it, especially with people who are in the service longer than just, you know, one enlistment or just, you know, however long it takes them to pay off their college loans. Once you start getting to 10, 15, 20 or more years, and then you retire or you get out, it's like you have no idea what I've done

that I didn't have to do. And so for you to feel an air of superiority that now you can tell me what to do is just wrong. So no, I don't respect you and I don't have to listen to you. I think there's probably part of that in there as well. Whether that's a good or bad thing,

we'll leave that to the listener. It's always situational. It's always situational. Roger, I want to circle back to something you said earlier. You'd like to be in the new kid and that you like to figuring people out. And that informed the jobs you ended up doing. What did you mean? So right out of the – so the way Special Operations works in the Army, as a general rule, there are exceptions.

but as a general rule, you assess into them after you've done something else for a few years. The other services are different. If you want to go on a seal contract, you do that right at a basic training. Or Marines, same way. If you want to be a combat controller in the Air Force again, you do that right out of basic. The Army is different. By and large, we do have a few exceptions. And so I was an artilleryman for my first few years, did a hitch in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And I got kind of a feel for civil affairs is what it's called. While I was in Iraq, I was still technically an artilleryman, but I was a young soldier kind of working at the direction of a season civil affairs officer who was responsible for all the civil affairs within our battle space. I was in the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq. And I thought it was really cool because it was kind of hairy and complicated, and there weren't really right or wrong answers to anything. and you're kind of dealing with cultures

and you're trying to figure out, you know, the tribes, what there's a relationship to each other, you know, the commanders trying to accomplish certain things. What are some really, really, really kind of non-standard or unconventional ways we can try to accomplish what the old man wants us to get accomplished without just rolling around in gun trucks, right? And so I kind of got a feel for it.

And so I assessed into the Civil Affairs Regiment, which was pretty new to the active duty side at the time. Historically, it had been predominantly an Army Reserve component, and they had just created the active duty side, which was on the special operation side.

So that was kind of where I got my, you know, thanked my teeth into that and really, really found it interesting. And over the years, we would go off and do other type missions, usually in a very small footprint and really

austere areas. Sometimes, sometimes you're working in an embassy. Sometimes you're working out of a, you know, small firebase out in the middle of nowhere, but you're trying to learn and understand how the people and how the civilians, kind of what makes them tick, because there's a whole other side of the army that is solely focused on, you know, the enemy, what is the enemy doing? The enemy, the enemy, the enemy, and your civil affairs folks are the ones who are taking that into consideration, but they're often going to have a very, very different perspective on the battlefield. because they're going to be looking more at the civilian aspects of the terrain.

They used to call it human terrain. I don't know if they use that in the doctrine anymore, but it's trying to account for relationships. You know, what are the levels of government, you know, local government? Is it tribal? Is it, you know, more of a bureaucracy? What are the relationships between those folks? What's the key infrastructure in this area?

So if we ever need to come back in here, you might want to know what the clearance, you know, height on the bridges are. So kind of getting to understand the economy and the infrastructure and all that stuff. People aren't necessarily doing their homework. So anyway, the Civil Affairs was a good fit for me because it was kind of complicated and weird. And it's just so much of it involves that humans and how they interact with each other and much less dropping bombs. I hope that was a good explanation. That's a great explanation. How many languages do you speak?

So part of fluently to, I'm passable German. That's mostly just square peg round hole of trying to learn that through college. When you assess into a special operations regiment in the Army, everybody gets a language. And whatever language you end up getting, they will send you to school. Unfortunately, on the Army side,

They won't send you to Monterey for a year to learn how to do it like Dan's big brother got to do. No, you do it in a basement in a big building on Ardennes in Fort Bragg. So my language was Tagalog. I got to more or less choose what I wanted. At the time, it was a priority language. And so they said, do you want that? You got it. I chose that one because I wanted to work in and out of Asia.

I wanted to learn an Asian language that didn't require me to learn. characters because they use the Latin alphabet, right? So all those things. And I have an affinity for the Philippines do just because we have a pretty rich history, not all of it good with the Filipinos. I think they're pretty great people. And I wanted to learn that language. So there you go. Did you pick up any of other languages passively? A little bit of French. Spanish, because Tagalog, Filipino, they kind of go back and forth, changing the name Tagalog, Filipino. It's probably about half Spanish. So I wouldn't,

I would be so bold as to say that I'm fluent in Spanish, but it's, it's at least passable because of my, my partial fluency in Tagalog. Dan, what was your career like? Well, I was a combat soldier for

the majority of my career. I was an infantryman, and for the first half of my career, I was, going overseas to fix and eliminate the enemy. And then the middle portion of my career

was me training young soldiers through basic training when I was a drill sergeant to have them do the same thing. And then for the latter stage of my career as an observer controller, I was training the security forces assistance teams to go to Afghanistan and go to Iraq so that then they could work with their counterparts to do the same

thing. So that was my focus, almost for the majority of my career, was in some way, shape, or form trying to locate, fix, and destroy the enemy. Dan doesn't say his last job in the Army was being a personal trainer. It's true. It's true. What is that? mean? Basically, my last few years in the Army, the Army had a developmental program where our brigade had essentially a gym and rehabilitation center. So we had several civilian counterparts that were physical therapists and running coaches and things like that, but they also needed a large body of non-commissioned officers like myself

to work with the soldiers that actually had some sort of, you know, command authority over them rather than just civilians. And so we would take soldiers that could not pass the physical training test, and we would rehabilitate them, whether it was through their own negligence, or maybe they were recovering from an injury or a surgery. Postpartum, things like that. and we would work up personal personalized training programs for those of them that needed it.

You know, be it, you know, if they were recovering from injury, we would work with the physical therapists and come up with a personalized training regimen for them. If they were not good at running, then we would work with the running coach and their first-line supervisor to try and work out a schedule for them to come into the facility or a link-up time. and work with them one-on-one or in small groups. It was very rewarding for me because when I first got there, I was ready to retire. I was recovering from my third back operation, and it was the right job at the right time for me personally, and I enjoyed doing it.

And it was very rewarding for being that late in my career. You get to help other people, right? It is, it is, as a young leader or as a young soldier, you don't really think about, you know, how your physical fitness conditioning program on your very small three, four person team really impacts them. But later on in your career as a senior at CO,

and you're working with somebody who is genuinely trying to get better, to prolong their career, or to recover from their surgery, or to recover from having a baby so that they can, you know, get back in the fight, as it were, that is hugely rewarding

to watch them meet those goals that you have set, you know, a week, three weeks, three months down the line, and to see them be able to check them off as they meet those goals. That is really rewarding. Was there a particular case or person that you worked with that really was like the aha moment for you that like this is why I'm here? I'm sure if I thought long and hard enough about it, yes.

Well, I mean, I guess it wouldn't be me because when I first got to the unit, I was very demoralized. Like I said, my back was in pieces. I was recovering from yet another surgery. I had a lot of things going on in my personal life, and I was not in a great place. And I was like, okay, well, let me try to at least get myself better because I wasn't assigned any responsibilities because I was myself recovering.

And as I slowly started to recover, I mean, I got on a treadmill. and I couldn't even walk a quarter mile without like wanting to just fall over. It was that bad. I could barely. Roger, Roger has seen me at some of my worst moments

with my physical pain that I was in. Oh yeah. And when I finally got to the two and a half mile mark, because if you are on a physical limitation profile, the army allows you to do a two and a half mile walk. And when I actually got to the point, For your test. Right.

Yes, for your test. And when I actually got to the point where I could do that, I was obviously overwhelmingly happy for myself, but I was also really proud of myself that I can now do this for other people. I can make them have this same feeling that I have right now if they're willing to put in the work. And that was amazing to me. And I loved watching that for the last few years of my career, being able to see some really physically and, like, mentally, broken is not the right word, but damaged people and being able to help them achieve those goals to better themselves. Yeah. It's a phenomenal feeling.

It can be very humbling to be, you know, Captain America and getting out there and doing all the things. and then one injury or one surgery or one, whatever, can take you from being the guy that runs triathlons on the weekends to, you know, I can't even bend over to put my socks on now. So, you know, guys like Dan do a really great job of physically getting people back to where they need to, but probably 80% of that is going to be mental, at least at first. Yeah.

Helping people get out of their own way. there are, I had plenty of, I had plenty of soldiers who had just signed themselves off. They, they wrote it off. They are like, okay, I'm going to go take part in this program. I'm going to fail it, and then I'm going to get kicked out, or I'm just going to get out, and that'll be that, and, you know, I'll be damaged for the rest of my life. And I'm just going to go, whatever the case is. Direct my feelings every night for the rest of my life, yeah.

And to be able to sit them down and teach them classes about, health and nutrition, mental resilience, teach them about, you know, muscle conditioning and, you know, how your body actually works and moves. And then being able to have them take that information and do a simple physical training regimen for 30 minutes a day, why does this muscle group hurt? Oh, because I did these exercises and, you know, this was the consequence. and there's tightness here because I didn't, you know, rotate the ball joint here enough, you know, whatever the case is. It's, I don't know how much of that information they retained once they met those goals. But I did have, I did have a lieutenant that I worked with.

I helped her recover from her pregnancy to get back into shape. and she left the post and then about nine months later, a year later, she emailed me and said, I just got pregnant again for my second kid

and I still have all of the notes, all of the slide decks, all of that stuff that you gave me, you know, so long ago that I'm going to have no problem

you know, recovering from this. And that was awesome. But what was even better was about three months after that, she was then enrolled in, I don't remember which base she went to, but she was then enrolled in that installation's pregnancy and postpartum physical training program. And she emailed me back and said, can you please send me everything that you have

because our installation program and their instructors are awful. With all due respect, of course, in. So it was also rewarding that she then thought so much of me and the training that we put her through that she then carried it on to another unit and was then able to pass that information onto more soldiers going through the same thing that she was doing. We have an old saying in the Army

that's plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery. That's good. I like that. Just take it. Just take this PowerPoint slide. It's fine now. How did you hurt your back? Many years of

climbing up and falling down the mountains of Afghanistan, getting slapped around in a turret. And just, I am a taller person. So at the time, the turret went up to my just above my waist.

So when you're going over rough terrain, we'll call it, you're getting thrown around, and what was getting banged around was my lower back. It just wear and tear

and being young and thinking that I was... Superman. Yeah, Superman. It took... It took... Even after my first back surgery, I took four days off and went immediately back to work, going on and continuing on and doing everything that I had just been doing that resulted in a back surgery. For any Army listeners, you may have, Dan did his expert infantry badge, his Ruckmarch. He did it with a broken foot.

Yes. That will resonate with some of your people. I did that too when I was a young soldier. That was pre-9-11, and I didn't learn even after that. How did you all maintain a friendship while you were both in? I like to give Dan a hard time because he would have years at a time where he would submarine and disappear. And then resurface and then disappear and then resurface. Usually from deployments, I'd usually tell myself, like, I haven't heard from Dan in a year or So he's probably downrange.

Yeah. But it became a lot easier, obviously, in the age of... Dan's never really been a social media guy. I barely tolerate it. But, you know, email made it things easy. And then once we had, you know, iPhones, we can message each other pretty much from anywhere. So...

Yeah, cell phones and things like that. And then both of our parents, you know, retired here in town. So there was always the chance of, hey, I'm going to be in town for Thanksgiving for a couple of days. Are you going to be around? Or, hey, I'm going to be here for Christmas. You're going to be around?

Yeah. And then, yes, obviously the technology made things much easier. Tell me about this show a little bit more. Who, who, I don't want you to play favorites. Let me think. It was Dan's idea. No, meaning like, is there, I guess, is there a white whale guest or a white whale type of guest? Is there like a veteran or a type of veteran that you've been trying to get on or that you want to talk to and you want to hear the story of that you haven't been able to get yet?

I mean, right now we're prioritizing the best of our abilities. I mean, it just comes down to an age thing. And, you know, if we can get Korean war. I mean, unfortunately, most of our World War II vets are a little long than the two of this point. Korean War veterans are our priority followed by Vietnam. And then pretty much every. everything after that is cake. So we've got a couple. Actually, we met a, I should say, a Korean War and Vietnam War veteran this weekend. We're going to twist his arm and try to get him, get him. I know where he works. And so I will, I will harass him at least once a month until he clears room and his schedule to sit down and talk to us. I mean, just think about that. This guy's a Korean and veteran Vietnam War and he's still working. Yeah, that was my question actually was like he's still working. Yeah. I mean, it may be a volunteer position. I don't know. I believe it's a volunteer gig, but.

But I mean, to still be going at it, hey, there was a, they were a different breed back then. But as far as like a specific person, not really. And doesn't speak for me. I want to get a submariner on. I want to talk to a submariner on. Well, I was speaking more of a, like, specific individual, not a specific profession. Why do you want to talk to a... We do have a submariner that we are trying to get in studio.

Why the obsession with a submariner? So, like I said, I'm a special operations guy. I've been an airborne guy. I've done jumping out of planes, all the wazoo stuff, war, all the things. There's nothing more terrifying to me than being. in a metal tube at the bottom of the ocean having depth charges dropped on me. Like, you want to talk about having a brass pair? That's what I want to hear about while sitting on a nuclear reactor, no less.

So there is a, the USS Yorktown, the aircraft carrier. A lot of people know that that's a huge exhibit. It's Charleston, right? Also, right there next to it is a submarine. And I went on there. ago. And like I said, I'm a taller guy. I was like, how did these people do this? How? You think that's... They're not six four, Dan. But it is, it is so tight and it is so confined. I don't think a crew of umpalumpus would be comfortable in there. Oh, man. The

umpalumpa audience is going to be offended by that. A couple months ago, I was visiting family in Texas and we were in the middle. Um, the, um, the, um, the, dead middle. And I went to, there's a great Pacific War Museum there. And you think the, you think those, our submarines are tight. You should see the two-man Japanese subs. Oh, yeah. Just nothing. Nowhere to go. Oh, yeah. The, um, one of them was probably smoking. No, thanks. No, thank you. There, there was, uh, years ago, the, um, the World War II, I think it's the Naval War Museum in New Orleans. They have one of the old, like two-person Japanese subs in there.

No. No, thank you. Not for me. If you go to the World War I Museum, which is in Kansas City, I believe, they have some of the original tanks in there. Yeah, also nightmare machines. People see tanks in like movies and stuff like that. They have no idea what the first ideas of tanks were.

Those things were, whether they were large or they were small, they were giant coffins. Death traps. I would say this is one of the things I like about Fury is that it depicts them as a rolling death trap. They made that Sherman look so roomy and so common. comfortable. You still got to get a camera in there. I've been inside a Sherman. It is, there is not that much space in there.

Absolutely not. When, uh, do you think it's easier to, have you all, have you all interviewed Vietnam or Korean war vets at all before yet? Or who's the oldest, the oldest person that you've talked to? Go ahead. Our first two guests were both, uh, Vietnam veterans. and they were both late 70s. Yeah, I'm not sure how old our first guest was,

but our second guest was 79. Both great gentlemen, both had, they were both in-country at different times, but they both had some similar circumstances, talking about survivor guilt and the way that they interacted with civilian population once they returned from Vietnam. Yeah.

Yeah. We have a country learned a lot after Vietnam. Yeah. We have not been able to speak to a Korean War vet yet, which, like Roger said, those guys are getting fewer and fewer far between we would still love to. But it's really just about talking,

veterans talking to veterans. That's it. And it doesn't matter whether you did four years, or if you did a full, you know, a full, you know, 20, 25, 30 year career, you chose to put on the uniform. And so sit down and talk with us, tell some of your stories that we,

will understand because we also serve that maybe you can't tell your mom, your dad, your wife, your husband, you know, your brother or sister, because they just wouldn't get it. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Share those stories and preserve them for the generations to come. And then also get things off your chest, maybe help, maybe help the other listeners. relate or maybe help the civilian population, help bridge that divide, make, you know, give them a

chance to better understand. And what better way to understand than from hearing the veterans themselves. Yeah. Rather than some psychologist who's on the news talking about, this is why somebody's going through, you know, post-traumatic stress. But that psychologist has never served. What's their expertise? And I mean, the focus is, we try to do it through storytelling or through narrative, because there are some pretty good projects that are out there that are trying, taking a much more military history type angle, and I think the three of us are pretty familiar, military history can be pretty dry, but it serves its purpose for what it is.

but what we're trying to do is make this a little more of a human interest so people can hear these stories and like Dan said, you know, relate to them and try to help bridge that divide that we kind of talked about at the very beginning about the civil military divide. So don't, there are, like Rogers said, there are a lot of projects out there who are recording it from a more historical aspect, right? But think about it this way.

The people that we are talking to, they're your neighbors. they are the bus driver for your kids. They are the local assistant football coach. They are, you know, the deacon in your church. They are your local, you know, Lowe's help men. You know, they are the people you run into every day and you would never know that they served unless you actually talk to them.

I kind of, Dan and I joke around about this a little bit growing up in Fayetteville-Four-Bragary here is, You know, the movie Grand Torino, like that, especially back in the 80s and 90s, that was pretty common. You know, there's an old widower that lives at the end of the street who yells at the kids who walked through his grass. You know, did you know that that guy had a, you know, distinguished service cross from Korea? Like, oh, like, oh, the mean old man?

Yeah, has anybody ever actually gone out of the way to talk to him? Well, no, not really. We just say he's mean. Okay. Yeah. You know, kid stuff, right? Yeah. And if there's anybody listening right now that wants to reach out and talk

about their service, maybe you come on the show. How can they get a hold of you? Well, they can go to our website, tracerbrown.com. Then all of the social media and stuff is linked there so they can get a hold of Roger because not me. And then the email is there also. So, I mean, info is tracerburnout.com. Yeah, tracerburnout.com.

And then, of course, it's Tracer Burnout on all the social medias and stuff, you know, YouTube and Rumble and TwitterX and Facebook and... Yeah. Dan, will you explain everybody? Tracer Burnout is a really clever name, but sometimes we have to explain it. Would you please explain? I won't go into the whole story of how we came about Tracer Burnout, but the Tracer Round, is your guiding light round. It's the one that you see in the movies and stuff where you can see a flash of light. And I'm not trying to explain this in a way that's insulting to anybody that already knows, but there are people that don't know.

So your tracer is your guiding light round. And the military or service is that guiding light for a portion of your life, whether it's, you know, three years or 30. The military service, They will tell you what to wear, they will tell you where to go,

and they will tell you what to do. They are your guiding light. But eventually, you're going to get out. That tracer is going to burn out after a certain distance. And you, the rest of your life, that penetrating around,

will continue to go on. So, since our show is primarily service-oriented, although we do talk about stuff, you know, before and after, uh, Tracer Brum. It's the end of your career. You're saying it's a metaphor of sorts.

Yes, of sorts. That's very clever. Dan, Roger, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and talking to me about your service and talking about Tracer Burnout. Absolutely. I appreciate Matt. Thanks so much. I suggest everyone go and subscribe and listen to the show. Thanks again.

Yeah, that would be great. Thanks. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners, as always Angry Planet is me, Matthew Gald, Jason Fields, and Kevin Don, was created by myself and Jason Fields. You know where the, you know where the substack is. Angry PlanetPod.com. Kick us a little cash.

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