Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Facing Fears, Family Feuds, and Navy SEALs Lost at Sea

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

Overcoming Freezing in Crisis: A father recounts the moments when he froze during a life-threatening situation involving his daughter. How can he train to overcome this natural 'freeze' response? How do you train to manage fear and reaction under extreme stress? Family Feuds and Forgiveness: Another listener struggles with the decision to cut off a difficult relationship with his father, torn between resentment and the longing for reconciliation. How do we handle the complexities of familial bonds and the challenges in navigating them? The Mystery of the Missing SEALs: Lastly, a question about a real-life emerging - two SEALs missing off the coast of Somalia. What are the possible scenarios and the realities of high-risk missions, including equipment use and the potential for unexpected events? The Speed of War Comic Series: https://www.thespeedofwar.com/ Check out the newest Cleared Hot Gear here: https://shop.clearedhotpodcast.com/  

Good morning, everybody, and what's up? Hope you had a great week. Three different questions. There's a couple nested inside of those three, but we're going to span the gambit today. We're going to really cover some ground. What else is new? I just, for those of you who don't exist on social media, let me tell you right now, quite jealous of you.

But I was going to say announced. I don't know if that's the right term. I posted on there that I finally did a refresh and have some inventory in the podcast store for T-shirts. This one of this shirt right here, this red, white and blue one, one of the best sellers from last year. That's in there. I just released a new shirt called Be a Rebel. And if you want to check that stuff out, follow the link in my social bio, which, for those of you who I just said aren't on social media, go to shop.

com. And that's it. Pick one up if you want. And if you don't want to, that's cool, too. Let's get into this. Regularly scheduled program. Full out of Friday. And away we go.

close now. Come on winter, baby. Give it to me. I mean it. You're clear it hot. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, here we go. Right into question number one.

The subject line of this email was how not to freeze when it matters. It was intriguing to me, so I clicked on it. And I think it's worth addressing. So let me read this and we'll get into it. I am a 45-year-old father of three and unfortunately found out the hard way that when it comes to fight, flight, or freeze, I'm in the latter category. I have had two experiences that I'm deeply ashamed of, but I don't know how to train this out of me and be of value ad. Many years ago, my four-year-old daughter was riding her bike on a sidewalk when a pickup truck backed out of the driveway without looking and hit her. She was approximately six feet ahead of me, but I was not fast enough to grab her and yelling stop at the driver did nothing.

Thankfully, she was not seriously injured, and she had an instinct to make herself as small as possible, and the truck passed over her and stopped before the rear axle would have hit her. In that moment, I froze solid. I couldn't move or speak, and my body felt as if it were covered in cement. My daughter was crying, people were yelling, passerbyes were calling EMS, and I was a spectator statue. The fact that it was my job to protect her, and I failed miserably, bothers me to this day almost 10 years later. Years after that, I witnessed a terrible car accident, and I was able to call 911 for help. But when giving my statement for what had happened at most 10 minutes prior, I couldn't recall very many details, even the color of the vehicle that ran the red and was at fault was a mystery to me.

In your previous career, how are you trained and prepared to not? not freeze, and what can I do so that this is less likely to happen to me again? Great question. Let's start with this. I'm sorry you experienced those two situations. They suck. One kind of sucked more for the person in the car accident. The other one sucked directly for you.

Broadly, what I would say you are describing is a state of shock. And that's okay. Your body has natural mechanisms. Actually, let me be very clear about this. Everyone's body has these natural mechanisms to include everybody who has ever come from my previous career. The people who are seals now, previously, and in the future, they're not superhuman. I think people would be woefully underwhelmed at the average physique. The intelligence level, I don't think people would be underwhelmed at that, but you would find that there are,

edge cases for kind of dumb-dums and people who probably should be figuring out how to land rockets on Mars and everybody else in between, but it's not a community of people who are MENSA members by any stretch. They're very average. And they come to the SEAL community with the same natural mechanisms of the human body that anybody else does. What I want to address is how you described how you feel about these situations. You feel like you're deeply ashamed. my first recommendation would be if you can change the way that you talk to yourself about this you know the car accident being there as somebody who was calling EMS and then giving a statement later he didn't have a choice in that and that was actually somebody else's emergency i'm glad that you were there to call for EMS but it's a learning experience with your daughter she didn't get hurt you did freeze but again it's a learning experience so I wouldn't be ashamed. You could perhaps feel like you didn't perform to the level that you wanted to.

But if that's the case, my question for you is, why are you writing me this email 10 years later? It sounds like it had a very deep impact on you. And I wish you would have written me this email 10 years ago, even though I wasn't doing the podcast 10 years ago. So I guess that's a moot point. But the point is you've identified that this has been something that has been a weight on your shoulders for a decade and are just now reaching out of it. about it. So maybe spend some time with that and determine why that is that you waited so long. It's a really long time to carry a weight and a burden. And I don't want that for people. So shock. You found yourself in a situation that you didn't feel like you were prepared for,

and you found yourself in a state of shock. And that's okay. To answer your question about how we teach people to work through these situations, it's simpler. than you may think. It is incremental exposure over a long period of time. The training pipeline, even in butts, and again, I'm going to go back to an example that I've used many times. The second phase test that I administered called Pool Comp was a test that occurred underwater with a set of twin 80 cylinders with an old school manifold and regulator system that Jacques Cousteau probably invented and went out of technological currency. in 1842, and it's knots, and it's removing gear and putting gear back on, and it's all in sequence

and an order, and sometimes you're breathing, and sometimes you're holding your breath, and sometimes you can solve the problem, and sometimes you can't. But that test has nothing to do with diving. And we actually warn the students afterwards, like, please don't think that because you pass this test, that you are actually capable to go out into the wild and recreationally dive. You know, you could, and I'm not saying you'd be unsafe, but recognize the test and the accomplishment that you just achieved doesn't have anything to do with diving. It has to do with being able to follow procedure regardless of external stresses that the water or the instructor in the water might be applying to you. Now, you could look at that test and be like, holy shit, that thing is impossible to pass. No wonder a lot of people fail.

But what you're missing is that a week before that test, we break it down into individual chunks. And we don't throw people into that test without a level of training, education, and understanding because they're not prepared for it. So we incrementally apply that stress and pressure, anecdotally, a three to five percent at a time. I've no data to support that whatsoever. But there are so many tests like that in the seal pipeline. and a lot of times there's a culminating event. And let's use these two things that you encountered as a culminating event. Before we put people into a culminating event, we teach them, we educate them, we give them time to practice.

Then they take the test. If they fail the test, they get remedial training and practice, and then they attempt the test again. Now, whether they pass or fail on those second, third, fourth times, and what happens, after that, that's a totally different question. But I hope that you're understanding there's a theme here. And that theme is, if you want to perform well in the moments that matter, you have to put the work in before you arrive at that moment. Now, as a parent, I totally understand what you're saying. You feel responsible for your child, but let's be honest here. Your child's six feet in front of you. Sometimes things in life happen quickly. There probably was no way that you were

going to be able to prevent the car backing it. You're just never going to be able to control the world that is around you. So sometimes really shitty things happen. And I'm really happy to hear that nothing happened to your daughter. You landing in that place of shock is not abnormal. And I don't want anybody to think that freezing is not a possibility for a seal as well. I've seen it. And I would say, if I'm being objectively honest about myself and my own performance, there were times where I performed well below standard for a variety of reasons. fear, uncertainty, the combination of those two things. But I can go back to, and this is just, this is for your first situation, this is a piece of

advice for anybody who finds themselves in a situation where they feel frozen. You don't have to have all the answers, but you need to move. We use this in training specifically, we call it getting off of the X. There is a huge difference in enjoyment between initiating an ambush and being on the receiving end of an ambush. I'll let you figure out which one of those is more fun. When you're on the receiving end of an ambush, the most dangerous thing that you can actually do is nothing. And I literally mean that. It is actually better for you to make the incorrect call and start to move off of the X.

And by the X, I mean, not that we would ever physically paint an X on the ground, but think of the location where the incoming rounds are impacting. The most dangerous concentration of incoming fire. You have to get off the X if you want to survive. I would rather have somebody make a poor decision that they can correct for once they develop movement and momentum than to stand there on the X with the Apple Squirrel Wheel of Death in their eyes. One will get you killed. One may get you killed if you continue to make bad decision after bad decision. But at least you have a fighting chance. And it gives your leadership and everybody else there with you an opportunity to get caught up, build that momentum and move.

then work with that and then hopefully flank the people that are ambushing you. But again, that's a question for another day. If you ever find yourself in a position where you're frozen and you don't know what to do, and it is impossible for me to give variables out there for all of these different situations, what I'll say is recognize that you are on the X and recognize that You don't have to have all of the answers, but you need to move. I know the feeling of being like in concrete. I know the feeling of being a statue. But I also know from personal experience, if you can get that first little piece of momentum,

those things start to shed away. Your feet will come out of those concrete blocks that you feel like are holding them. The fluidity of your body and its movements will come back. And you'll start to get a better assessment of what's going on in the world. around you. Why did you freeze? Because one of the things you care about most in life was threatened in front of you and you have never been in that situation before. I don't necessarily know how to practice that because I would never want people to intentionally put their loved ones in danger so they go, ha, want to check how I would react. Maybe just recognize and understand freezing as possible.

And if it happens, take every bit of effort to try to develop some momentum. Now the second situation is a little bit different. And I say that because this one you can practice. You know, having a medical kit in your vehicle is an amazing thing. But if you arrive at, let's call it a vehicle accident scene and you don't know what to do with that, and let's say you have practiced taking your medical kit out of your vehicle, opening it up, but you've never gone and pushed yourself to a place of maybe putting a tourniquet on, an appendage. You know, every time that you take the tourniquet out, you use both of your hands and you're able to lift the leg and slide it up to the high thigh and get it up next to the hip.

And the first time you ever come to an accident scene, you see somebody who's been ejected from vehicle, and both of their legs, their femurs, high femurs are destroyed, and you actually can't lift their leg anymore. So now you have to disassemble the tourniquet, put it back together after sliding under each one of those legs. Now it's, you know, you're sweating, you're breathing hard. Maybe the light conditions are a little bit different. You're dealing with blood that you've never encountered for the first time. So it's a horrible situation to imagine yourself having to navigate your way through. And if you haven't practiced for those things, a lot of people are going to freeze,

even if they have the right tools. Now, I'm not saying go and seek out a training environment that recreates all those things. If everybody had the time and the money to go do those things, I would say absolutely do that. But you can at least slowly and incrementally expose yourself to situations like this when it comes to actually providing first aid and care for somebody. You can work your way into that situation that I just described. And I know that there are organizations that provide that level of training. You could just go to your, you know, what I would suggest if you don't have that in your local area is I would as an opportunity. to get even more deeply ingrained in my local community, I'd go talk to the first responders.

I'd go talk to the firehouses, the EMTs, I'd get to know those people, ask them where they do their training, ask them if you could observe their training. And you're incrementally exposing yourself to these very severe environments. While you are in these situations, you can also expose yourself to while something like this is going on, you can practice making phone calls to 911. one. And what you're going to find is that over time, your recall, your perception, your ability to communicate, and your ability to operate inside of these environments is going to improve. You will not go from zero to 100 overnight. To become a seal, this can take you about two years once you enter the pipeline. Think of all the different opportunities to introduce stress. Think of beyond that

initial pipeline, the job itself and these 18-month training cycles where you go through everything from diving to demo to small arms to navigation on foot and in vehicles and small unit tactics and urban environments and desert environments and jungle. We can go on and on and on and on. And again, there are evolutions in all of those that are performance related, but we don't put people into those situations without the practice, without the training, without an opportunity to remediate. And I'm not advocating that people treat themselves like a seal pipeline. But if you want to perform well in environments that are stressful, the best advice that I can give you is take control of your situation and slowly and incrementally expose yourself to those things.

It is totally possible to have a medical training situation going on while other people are working on their ability to call 911 and report that medical training situation. situation. You know, you could use even just handheld radios instead of calling 911 to practice not only talking, but listening to people who are asking you important questions. And the more that you do that, the better off that you are going to be. And another piece of advice I'm going to give this person before I move on is this. Please don't let another 10 years go by. If this bothered you and has weighed you down for this amount of time, please do something about that so that your life can be improved and you can put this down a little bit. And another thing I would

say, and then I would add to that is, involve your family and loved ones, bring them along with you, bring your friends, aggregate these experiences. One, it'll bring you closer to your friends by sharing these experiences, and two, it'll increase the capability of the people around you and therefore elevating that capability of the community that you live in. So that's my advice for you. Moving on to relationship advice. Everybody knows this is my strong point and favorite. Neither of those things are actually true, but people ask me these questions. So here we go. My question is this. My dad is an asshole, and I've cut him out of my life. I'm a little jealous of the relationship you have with your dad, and it makes me wonder if I'm being too harsh. Here's the story. In 1986,

I was in a car accident. I was driving, and my stepbrother was killed. In the aftermath of that, my dad said to me, he was willing to run me into a bridge to appease my stepmother. Needless to say, It's been rough at best. Throughout the years, he has offered things to me and then taken them back. He gave me airline tickets to go visit him and took them back and gave them to my other stepbrother. Same with a letter from a car manufacturer that would have allowed me to get a car at manufacturer cost. He gave that to my other stepbrother too. He offered to help, and you put that in quotes, me buy a house, but his idea of help was giving me the down payment and when I sold it,

he was to get back his down payment and any equity the house had accrued my dad even blamed me when my older stepbrother passed away about ten years ago from alcoholism again my fault somehow because of the first stepbrother that had died in the accident where he was driving in november of 2019 when i was on my way home from work i had a dead hog in the middle of the night that was lying in the road it really fucked up my car honda's apparently aren't made to be launched three feet into the air. Hmm, who would have known? My dad had offered to help me again in air quotes, either get my car fixed or get me a new car if mine wasn't fixable. I'm a truck driver for a big home delivery company. Our busy season is November to February. I wasn't able to get my car looked at until the end of January, and my mechanic said

that it wasn't worth fixing, and it was time to get a new car. From November through January, my dad kept repeating. And again, in your air quotes, will help you get it fixed or help you get something else. When I told my dad that my mechanic said to let it go and get something else, my dad told me to find a credit union. That was the beginning of the end and about a month later was the last time I've spoken to them. Most of me is glad that I don't have a relationship with my dad and my stepmother anymore. But sometimes I wonder if I should try again. I'm sorry you're in this situation.

I'm sorry anybody, I'm sorry that anybody is in places like this where the people that you would think because of your genetic tie and family tie should be treating you in the exact opposite of this way. I think anybody who is watching this or listening to this realizes that's not the world that we live in. And if that's not the reality of the world that we live in, why do we put so much emphasis on things? family, and by that I mean the genetic and blood ties. Why do we tolerate so much shitty behavior from the one group of people that should be our biggest advocates? And I don't have an answer for that, but it just sucks. You know, the people that you meet throughout your life, you have a different level of connection and attachment and shared experiences with them. And you don't know them as well as your family. You don't have the time with them. You don't have the time with them. You don't have

the shared experiences. And so maybe it makes a little bit more sense that when it gets off the rails, we can cut them off easier. But damn, it just sucks what we're willing to tolerate from our own families. Sometimes you wonder if you should try again. My question to you would be this. What are you going to change if you do try this again? Because the definition of insanity is attempting the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result. What would you make different about this? Would you shit your dad, sit your dad? Did I say shit your dad? Maybe I did. And maybe that is a controversial approach. Maybe you should shit on your dad. I don't know what that would net you. And I'm not advocating it. But let's think about it collectively.

Are you going to sit your dad down and talk with him about the level of communication that you have had previously and set parameters going forward? Are you going to sit your dad down and maybe get a neutral third party out there and try to unpack his feelings about the death of the younger stepbrother and then the older one, the one in the car accident and the one from alcoholism, and maybe try to get to the root cause of why he thinks it's your fault and deal with that. because if you don't, I don't know how that's going to necessarily change. Are you going to change your expectations of your father and stepmother when they offer you help? The expectation is that the help will actually be delivered or are you going to tolerate them offering and then taking away? If you're not going to do any of those things and you're just going to try to re-engage without any reset of foundation, I think the email that you sent me lays out pretty well what I think is going to do. going to happen. But I think your question is more along the lines of should I? Should I try again?

And I can't give you a concrete answer on that. Maybe, but also maybe not. My own father, which you mentioned here in this email, got to a point with his dad where he realized who the person was and that no matter how many times he attempted to reinvigorate that relationship, the end state was going to be the same. And that decision point is going to be different for everybody, because everybody's situation is different. Father figures are so incredibly important in young men and women's lives. but if you don't have that, I don't think it means you can't find it.

I think it means you're going to have to find it somewhere outside of your family. You're older, obviously. You're talking about driving in 1986, so you were at least 16 years old in 1986. So you're later in life. You might be better served focusing your energy on people who treat you the exact opposite of this. And developing a deep level, a deeper level, of your relationships and bonds with those people? Because at the end of the day, what the fuck does it mean to be family when they treat you like this? And at this point in my life, at the age of 46,

you know, my personal litmus test is not whether or not we share a genetic tie. It is how you treat me. And I haven't had to cut out people in my family. But if I needed to, to I would because I care less about perhaps the last name that we might share and far more about your impact on my life. And I also try to remember that in my behavior towards other people as well. So, I mean, maybe give it another try. But define the end state that you want to achieve from that. Define the things that you can change, which is the only level of control that you're going to have in this situation, and define the things that you're not going to tolerate. And that will at least give you a little bit more of an objective approach as to whether or not

this may be worth your time. What I would hate to see is that you try again, it nets the same result. And then a few years down the road, try again, and it nets the same result. That's not what I would want. Figure out what you need, what can be changed, what you can, what you're hoping for, what you are expecting and treat it a little bit more objectively than emotionally. That would be my advice to you. Hopefully your dad is capable of meeting you halfway. And if he's not, then fuck that guy. And go find a relationship with somebody that is far healthier and that both parties will get more out of.

So hopefully that helps. moving on to the last question for today if I can find it. And this one actually kind of draws us into current events. It is, for any of you who are, I've seen it in the news, there are two seals missing off the coast of Somalia. And it ties into this question. Maybe you can answer this, but I can understand if you can't. It's about the seals missing off the coast of Somalia. Let me start with this. I don't have an inside track to information. I'm not going to talk about specifics. I'm going to talk about this from the broadest of perspective. is because I'm completely detached from the community, and that's exactly how I want it to be. I don't have any intel.

And the question is a little bit more like, how could this have happened? And I can answer that from a broad level. And at the end of the day, I do not think they have, for the knowledge that I have this far, they haven't recovered the bodies, or recovered the sailors themselves.

So I'm not even going to touch on that aspect. We'll talk a little bit about what potentially happened and why. We used to practice underway shipboarding. Honestly, we never did it for real, but we trained for it several times per year. And at one point, I brought in some former SEALs as instructors. I can't remember the company name, but I remember one of the SEALs was named. The only reason I remember him is because he was a funny dude. The SEAL community is full of funny dudes.

But I will tell you this. Our sense of humor is a little bit more gallows humor than most people are prepared for. And that is okay. I fully understand an underway shipboarding is complicated. difficult and dangerous, but I find it hard to believe those two guys could be lost at sea. The story is the first guy fell and the second seal jumped in. That is believable. Don't they have flotation that automatically inflates? I purchased those for the team after our training with the seals. When they have IR strobes and or location beacons just for this very situation,

seems like there is more going on here that they don't want to admit. Maybe there's a firefight that they don't want to acknowledge because it would or should escalate the situation. Am I missing something? I don't think you're missing anything, but I also don't think that there's more going on here. Maybe there is, but I don't think so. What I think happened, and from what I have heard, is one of the people slipped on the ladder. Okay, let's back this up. What are we talking about here?

Large vessel, a small vessel full of seals on the water line. they're going to hook and climb, meaning they're going to put a caving ladder or a type of ladder. They're going to have to hook it on something, usually at the railing level, the top level of the ship. You have to get to a place where you can actually climb the ladder and get over the top. Sometimes that distance can be a lot, and you're going to have a lot that you're going to have to climb.

Small boat comes alongside the bigger boat, hook, climb, people start climbing. From my understanding in this particular situation, the sea state was incredibly rough and the current was moving incredibly fast. What I have been told is that in the climbing, one of the members slipped and fell, lost their grip, whatever it may be. It terminated in this person falling. And from what I have heard is they hit their head on the boat, the smaller boat on the way down and disappeared. The person next to them jumped in as is the SOP or standard operating procedure. And I want you to think about that. just for a second.

The level of buy-in, the level of belief, the level of care and love that you would have to have to see somebody fall on a real-world boarding into an unforgiving environment at night, I'm assuming, knowing that you were not in that situation of the person falling, but jumping in with them. The SEAL community is full of normal people who are tasked with doing abnormal things. And that level of commitment to who you are, what you are doing and what you stand for,

to me, still like raises the hair on my skin. So this SOP, standard operating procedure is that the minimum fighting unit in the minimum fighting unit size in the seal community is not one, it's two. First guy fell, second guy, and I'm not sure it was the second guy. I'm just using that as vernacular jumped in with. Now, there are flotation devices that automate, uh, inflate automatically. There are saltwater activated, but in a really rough sea state where salt water is being flung all over you, they can be problematic because what you definitely want to have happen is an inflation or a life saving device,

inflate when you don't need it to. It can restrict your movement. Hell, it could if you were on the ladder, cause you to fall because of your inability to move and articulate the way that you need to. So there's pros and cons. When I was in, we did not have automatic inflation devices, meaning that if you fell and were wearing a device that you had to inflate but were unconscious due to hitting your head on something, you would not be able to inflate it. And like I said, I'm checked out from the current tactics. Maybe they have these things, but no tool is perfect. for every job. There are situations where you wouldn't want an automatic inflation, and perhaps that was the situation that these people were in. Would they have IR strobes? Yes. When I was in,

I didn't have a IR strobe that was water activated. I'm sure that they have those things, but again, if you're soaked by the time you actually come alongside the vessel, you're going to hook and climb. In the modern era, you should not assume that your adversary doesn't have the ability to see IR light as well. Laser discipline, IR light discipline is incredible. important. I mean, old school Sony handy cams used to have the ability to see IR light. So you don't want something that's going to automatically turn on with saltwater immersion or saltwater interacting with it. But if you're unconscious, that also means that you can't turn it on. Beacons, maybe they did have beacons. Beacons require an ability for a signal to actually transmit. And one medium that really

limits transmissibility is the water. And I don't know where they had these things on their body. It's always best to try to be neutrally buoyant when you're doing anything in a waterborne operation environment. Let's just say that standard is not always held by the individual. It's possible that if the person who hit their head was unconscious, they might have sunk. And even if they did have a beacon and an IR strobe that was activated by saltwater immersion, Nobody's going to see or receive any of those things if they went underwater. Now, what about the other guy? Who knows is the actual answer?

From my understanding, he was seen jumping into the water. We don't know what condition he landed in the water. I have heard that the sea state was at like eight feet plus, so 16 foot swings from peak to valley, which will make a waterborne operation incredibly difficult. I've also heard that the current was absolutely ripping where they were. So not only are you going to have a limited visibility from a vertical perspective, you're drastically, oh, and again, both of the vessels likely moving, who knows at what speed, but likely in the opposite direction of the current. So with every second that passes by, you have a lot of lateral separation. Oh, and guess what?

You still have to complete the hook and climb, and you still have to complete your mission. So all of those things are taken into account. I don't think that there is a lot of. I don't think that there is anything going on. Actually, what were the words that you use? Seems like there's more going on here than they don't want to admit. How about they're still trying to figure out exactly what happened? How about they're focusing on the rescue and recovery efforts for these two individuals? How about, even though it's easy to go down the conspiratorial rabbit hole, sometimes things just don't go as planned. And you can have all these safety mechanisms in place and you encounter situations where those safety mechanisms don't necessarily directly apply. That's what I think

likely happened. It's a dangerous job. And very normal people are asked to do abnormal things in environments that are consistently and constantly looking for ways to injure you or take your life. And sometimes that's what happens. To the person who wrote this in, and for everybody else, my recommendation is this. Give it time. The truth will reveal itself once they have more information. now it seems like they are focused on recovery, and that's exactly what it should be. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean that things are being hidden from you. The person who wrote this email doesn't necessarily come from that world. Actually, they admitted that they don't.

They said that they don't. And that's cool. So allow for some gaps in your understanding. That's okay and should be expected. And that's it. That's all I have for this Friday. See you guys on Monday.