Jocko Podcast - 333: Excuses and Rationalizations are Not Valid... And We Know That. W/ Dan Cnossen

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

0:00:00 - Opening0:04:59 - Dan Cnossen 3:22:00 - How to stay on THE PATH.3:38:23 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 333 with Echo Charles and me Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. The rumors started in the morning. Some guys in Afghanistan got hit. There's some wounded guys. And you don't know who it is at first. You don't know what team, East Coast, West Coast.

You're just wondering. Pretty soon we know it's West Coast guys. And you know the transition is happening. So you got two teams over there at the time, Team one and Team 7. And now you know you got wounded guys and then you're thinking of who do I know? And at this point, I kind of know everybody

because I've been putting all these platoons through training for the last couple years. So I know I'm going to recognize names when they come through and then you're waiting and then we hear it's one guy, it's only one guy and that's good

you know, good, it's only one guy how bad is he? And it doesn't sound good and you're hearing reports as a massive ID how bad real bad how bad is real bad

real bad and then you start to ask that horrible question to yourself, is he going to make it? Then you start getting reports back. They don't know if he's going to make it. And that's not a good sign because team guys are usually positive thinkers who we think we can survive anything. So when you hear a team guy say he doesn't know if someone's going to make it, it doesn't usually bode well. And there's a weird, strange.

silence around. Everyone's kind of waiting to hear and quite frankly everyone's waiting to hear a name and waiting to hear the outcome and wondering if we're going to lose a brother. Finally I get an actual call.

An actual call the distant voice from one of my buddies over in Afghanistan and I get the firsthand report of what's going on. And yeah, Confirmed massive IED I get the name Dan Knawson. He's one of the platoon commanders that

I just put through workup great guy humble tough Locked on and I asked that question. You know is he gonna make it? Bons is You know something along the lines of he lost both legs and he's got massive trauma to his lower abdomen Looks like they have him stable The guys did a great job and this is like a stall tactic not answering my question is he gonna make it and the answer comes again I don't know and you sit with that for a while Because there's only one thing that's gonna give you the answer and that's time only time will tell and in this particular case We were blessed because Dan Knausen did make it

He survived a massive IED that would have killed probably anyone but somehow he was able to survive and we can talk about that because we're lucky enough tonight to have the honor of having Dan with us here to share some of his experiences and his lessons learned from his life and from his time in the SEAL teams. Man, thanks for coming by, man. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, Chaco.

Thanks for having me here. That was, you know, one of those weird days at the teams where I remember this when you got blown up and that, you know, this would happen. You know, guys would get wounded and you'd hear those rumors when you got to work. Someone saw message traffic or someone talked to one of their friends and it would just get, you would have so little information. and then as the time, as the day goes on, you sort of, the picture becomes more and more clear. And I really remember that well, you know, just because I was in trade debt,

I'd already lost guys and was not looking forward to going to a funeral. So I'm freaking glad you're here, man. I'm glad you didn't have to go to that funeral. Let's start at the beginning, man. Let's start at where you came from and how you grew up and all that. Let's get to it. Sure. I'm born and raised in Kansas, fifth generation family farm from 1874.

I grew up roaming around outside. I had a BB gun. I got in a little bit of trouble with the BB gun shooting some targets I shouldn't have been aiming at. But really, I think grown up on a farm in Kansas, I developed a deep-seated love of just being outside. I think this comes into play later in my story. Was your family a farming family? Is that what you did? They did for a living?

Yes. It's on my maternal side of the family. My mom's father, so my grandfather, his grandfather, his grandfather came out. This is Homestead Act, 1870s. If you farm the land, you get to keep it after a certain amount of time. And they built a limestone home, a limestone barn. Still stands today. That's where I was born and raised.

I was a kid. I didn't think anything of it, just where I grew up. But now I realized how special that was. 240 acres. And my grandfather had three daughters, one of whom was my mother. And so the farming didn't get passed down. And I did not grow up as a farmer, but I certainly took advantage of the tractor rides. And then what was your grandparents in the military at all?

My dad's father was U.S. Army World War II. and I don't know he is no longer alive. I don't know the extent of action that he saw, but he was in the European theater in the later part of the war. And what about your dad? My father served in the Marine Corps. He in 1965 enlisted. He didn't get drafted.

He chose to enlist, and then he chose to enlist in the Marine Corps. And he did three tours. And the third, and my father is no longer alive as well. well to talk about some of the specifics. And as a kid when I grew up, he didn't talk about the specifics. But generally speaking, he gave me a glimpse of life into the Marine Corps, into the military. And actually, I wanted to be a Marine in high school. My dad, at the end of his third tour, did one of these small teams where you're working with locals, kind of going village to village, four-man teams. That's the last thing he did. And he exited the Marine Corps in 1968 and it was

was done. And he didn't he didn't share much with you about that when he not about combat. When I was a kid I remember in our family room we had some old storage items and I was combing through this this is while he was still alive and I saw citations Navy commendation metal bronze not I'm sorry a Purple Heart and he he was under mortar fire at one point and rendered life-saving aid to a teammate to another Marine and so he's commended for that. But yeah, I don't have specifics. I also found some old letters that he had written home that were pretty interesting just to, you know, it's a glimpse into my father when he was 23, 24 years old, writing home from Vietnam. What was he saying in the letters? You should have brought him, though we could have read him. I think there was a mention of R&R and I probably

don't need to go to the specifics. I guess it depends who he was writing home to. Yeah. Yeah. What did he do when he got out of the Marine Corps in 1968? So he ended up going to business school in Cornell. He did have a degree from Iowa State. He's from Iowa. And so he had a college degree enlisted in the Marine Corps. 1968 gets out. He would have been 25 at that point.

Went to Cornell. And my mother. So he enlisted in the Marine Corps even though he had a college degree. Yeah. Are you tracking any like decision-making process on that? Was he just fired up for the Marine Corps? I think it was a little bit of rebellion against his father. And his father had said, if you're going to go in the military, do not go in the Marine Corps.

Any service, not that one. Well, yeah, if his dad served in World War II, he might have had that impression that, hey, you don't want to be the Marines. You're going to be in the, you know, storming beaches over in the Pacific. You want to have a more plush job, like storming the beaches in the European theater? I don't know. Interesting. So you think he rebe, a little bit of a rebellion? Rebellion, I think.

And I think he probably wanted to be part of something special. And I think that is something I've seen. Growing up on a farm in Kansas, I think you have work ethic, but you also want to be part of something special. You like to be part of a team. And it's a continuation of that, going in the military. So he gets done with business school. And then how do you meet your mom and end up in out there in Kansas

on the 240 acres of beauty. Yeah, my mother ended up in New York City. She was a secretary and in the office, there was a woman who introduced somehow. And I need to talk to my mother about the specifics of how they got introduced. But on the first date, she didn't like my father as well as would indicate, given the fact that later they got married, but went out on another date, I guess.

And they eventually moved to New Orleans. They went into the Peace Corps. We're in Brazil for two years in the 1970s. And then they came back. settled on the farm. At this point, my grandfather was retiring. So hold on. We got to slow your roll a little bit. You can't just roll out Marine Corps, NOM, three tours, Peace Corps. That's kind of, that's a freaking dynamic you don't normally see. Yeah, yeah, I think in addition to growing up with stories of the Marine Corps, I grew up with

stories of life in Brazil. And this is in the 1970s in the Amazon region. So it's very remote, primitive living. My mother was teaching Brazilian kids with special needs, teaching them Portuguese. And my dad was somewhere in the realm of teaching business and skills to local community people. And how long were they down there for? Two years, two year tour. And that's in the 70s? Late 70s, yeah.

Did your dad, like, start going a little bit hippie? Is that the scenario? Perhaps. But when I was, my only living memory of him was not as a hippie. But I think there may have been a stage there in 1970s, post-Vietnam. It can happen. Uh-huh. Interesting.

He's going to be pissed if he just heard me say that. He's like, I want a freaking hippie. I was helping out the locals. All right. So then they get married. And at what point do they move back to Kansas? Around the time the Peace Corps tour ended. And I think my grandfather was retiring, moving to the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri.

This beautiful property, the home was there. I think my parents wanted to start a family. What better a place? The land was being farmed by an associate of my father's, a grandfather's. And so they settled, and I think shortly thereafter had me in 1980. You were born in 1980? 1980. Check.

And then what's growing up like? You're out there on the farm. You're getting in trouble for shooting shit with your BB gun and stuff. Yeah, we had a section of woods. We called the Northeast Corner with a creek running through it. And I would go and just play there, try to get lost. What'd you have for brothers and sisters? I have a younger sister.

She's seven years my younger. Seven years you're younger. She is a nurse. And when we get later into my story, I mean, she quit her job to move down to D.C. to take care of me. Dang. Oh, her a lot. Yeah. So she's seven years your junior, though.

So you were kind of like an only child for a while. For a little while. I learned how to play by myself. I didn't have close neighbor. I mean, we have neighbors, but not necessarily with kids of my age. I learned how to entertain myself. And a lot of this was being outside. I did like to read as a kid, but in the daytime, I'm outside playing.

We had some dogs, some cats, some pigeons that were in the barn that I was aiming at. You know, going on tractor rides, learning how to drive tractors, playing sports. That was my childhood. What sports were you playing? I started baseball, soccer, gravitated towards soccer. It turns out I'm not that great. at team ball sports. However, the lessons that you can learn from team ball sports really come into play later. And so I'm very thankful that even though my calling as an athlete was not as a team

ball sport player, nor was it in combatives. I tried wrestling in middle school. It was just awful. And then I had this idea of doing boxing. So it was my sophomore year in high school. I went to the local Topeka Golden Gloves gym and said, you know, I want to take some lessons. And so I remember my dad would drive me there and back. And eventually I started just driving myself. And I would go and train in the local boxing gym that resulted at one point in going to a competition in Kansas City. And Kansas City is a big deal when you're from a farm in Kansas. I went to this tournament in Kansas City. And I remember there were hundreds of people in the audience. It's kind of in a more underdeveloped area of Kansas City, if you will.

And I remember my opponent's older brother was just laying waist to someone on a previous round. And so I think I was just so nervous. I get in the ring, and it was three rounds, very amateur. In the first round, he just laid into me. And I had the standing gate count against me. The second round was fairly even. in the third round I actually gave him the standing eight count, but it wasn't enough because I just got whooped that first round.

So I lost the fight. So I lost the fight. My dad was there watching, and afterwards we went and had some, had a meal, had dinner, and I just remember him kind of, it's okay. He did a good job. And that was my one and only competitive boxing match. The thing you've got to remember, Dan, is like, wrestling. Like, if you go, quote, try wrestling,

you're going to get your ass kicked. Like there's, it's not, people think wrestling and boxing, they think it's like a primal thing that you're just going to be able to do. But man, there's all kinds of skills involved in that stuff. I started to think that if all you know is winning, that's just not realistic.

I've spent a lot more time in the not winning realm than the winning realm. And I can tell you that when you're not winning, it forces you to adapt, it forces you to look at what you're doing. How can you be doing things better? It forces you to grow, challenges you. And I think if sport is just about character development,

which I really think that's what it ultimately is about, then there's a lot to be learned from not winning. And you need to seek out people who can beat you in order to get better. Yeah. Yeah. So what, did you play sports all through high school? I did soccer. What did you end up excelling at, any of them?

I was a varsity soccer player, defender, because I didn't have good ball skills. Even as a freshman, I didn't always start. I was more of a bench rider, but I did earn a varsity letter as a freshman. It started starting as a sophomore and then was a varsity player all four years. My last semester as a senior spring, I knew I was going to the Naval Academy, and we can get into the reasons of why I wanted to go there. But I knew I was going, and so I decided to join the track team, distance running. I thought, I got to show up to the academy ready to go, ready to bust out a 1.5 mile run. Track had a 2-mile event, a 1-mile event.

So I signed up, and it turns out in soccer, I was really good at running, but not so much kicking the ball or passing it. It's a defender. I just try to kick the ball to one of my teammates who could actually do something with it. But in track, I was pretty good for one-season track athlete. I ended up running a sub-five-minute mile. It had a, I don't know, a 10-30-2-mile. And so I thought, endurance sports. could have been my thing.

I just wasn't exposed to it earlier. I certainly wasn't exposed to cross-country skiing as a kid from a farm in Kansas. So you end up going to the Naval Academy? How did you get interested in going to the Naval Academy? I don't want to say that my father pushed me in that direction in no way whatsoever. He wrote me a letter when I did get into the Naval Academy

and he said that his childhood dream was to go to the Naval Academy, but he didn't have the grades and didn't even apply. But I didn't choose to go to the military. in the sense of it feeling like a decision. It just felt like this is what I'm supposed to do. It really did. I wanted to be a Marine. Did you apply to West Point, too?

I did. West Point was my backup plan. Oh. And I got into the best one, the Naval Academy. So I just wanted to combine military service with continuing my education. And I felt like as an officer, I would have leadership responsibilities. And this would be, I had read books. You know, Vietnam still fascinates me.

And probably a large part of this is due to my father having been in the Vietnam War, but I would read anything I could get my hands on about special operations in Vietnam, infantry platoons, Marine Corps. It was very, very much keen on infantry, small unit tactics. I ended up signing up for the local U.S. naval sea cadets program. There was a naval reserve unit in Topeka, Kansas. We'd drive there, and it was kind of modeled out. after reserves, one weekend a month,

you show up and you drill. The summers between your academic years of high school, you get Navy training. It starts with boot camp in Great Lakes. So I went to Great Lakes, the summer before my junior year of high school for two weeks. How old were you?

15, 15, 16, yeah, two weeks. Not an actual boot camp, but it's very much, you're in Great Lakes, you're wearing dungarees, you're marching around, you're getting yelled at. I'm just in high school. I don't remember ever signing a waiver. But they had this training called seal training. I had to do one other training before that.

So after that summer of going to Great Lakes for boot camp, I went to amphibious school in Virginia. And again, I'm 15 or 16 because I had to knock out one of these before I could be eligible for seal training. Now, in order to go to this seal camp, which is going to be the following year that I would be eligible, the summer before my senior year, I have to take the Bud's physical fitness test,

500 yard side stroke and pushups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and 1.5-mile run. So I started training for it. And I was just horrible, horrible at swimming, just horrible. But I somehow got under the 12-minute time or whatever, the cutoff, barely. And so they put me out to Virginia Beach, Little Creek, for this two-week camp. And it starts with a... What year is this? This would have been 97.

Ninety-seven. So this is actually run by active-duty team guys putting these high school kids through this washed down version of hell week. We had a hell night. It started off. And I remember that was a continuous. It was a 24-hour thing. Started sometime in the day and sometime the next day.

Go through the night running with boats on your head. And I remember at one point running with a boat on my head. I was on the left side of the boat. And an active duty Navy seal is just yelling at me because I was. Do you remember who it was, buddy? I don't. I don't. I don't.

I remember there was a. Chief Blackburn. And he, and this, the particular individual in this story is not Chief Blackburn. I was slacking off. And he just laid into me about how I wasn't being a good teammate. And I'll never forget that. It just cut right into me. And I came back.

After that, we got to shoot MP5s. We got to do the water obstacle course in Virginia Beach. And just as a high school kid, I mean, this is amazing. But truth be told, I didn't have perfect eyesight. And I just was. horrible in the water. So when I did get into the Naval Academy, my preference was for the Marine Corps. So all that whoia seal stuff didn't get you like totally brainwashed? I was brainwashed just sitting over here listening to you tell that. If I would have been 15, it would have been a done

deal. It was, but I just didn't think. How bad was your eyesight? I had a chance. It was, it needed to be it wasn't within 2040. It wasn't certainly wasn't 2020. At this point, I didn't know about corrective surgery. I didn't need that wasn't even a thing. I, at the Naval Academy, I thought I can go in the Marine Corps infantry, be a platoon leader or company commander. And so that's what I was leaning towards. I mean, absolutely, though, when I went to the Naval Academy,

the SEAL program was extremely intriguing to me. I just didn't think I would be eligible. Why would you set yourself up just to be disappointed? Chuck. So anything else from high school before you roll out? How hard was it to get like all the congressional recommendation and all that stuff? You know, I don't think it's that hard when you're applying to the Naval Academy from Kansas. Now, it may be different now, but if I was applying in Virginia or California or Texas,

Maryland, Virginia, the geographically proximate states, they're very competitive. But I had good grades. You know, one thing I should say is by the time I was a freshman in high school, I was fortunate enough to have this goal of the Naval Academy inside me. I don't know how it got there, but it was there. And so it then becomes a matter of, well, what do I need to do to get into this place? It's going to be really hard. Okay, you got to have good grades.

Check. I'll study and get good grades. You got to demonstrate some athletic talent? Okay, well, I'm already doing that. That was easy for me. Leadership, okay, well, I'll try to be a sports team captain. I'll try to run for student government. I'll do the sea cadets.

and that's kind of how I structured it. And so I think as my story unfolds, you'll see I tend to be a fairly goal-oriented person, but this is something I think is very important, but not to force the goals. But when I have these goals naturally, I feel like I can just be ignited because this is driving me forward. And that's what was happening as early as my freshman year. And that's why I think I'm very fortunate because if you make this decision, you want to go to a service academy in your senior year of high school. It's too late. You got to start the process in your junior year. You do have to get a nomination from either senator in your state or from your congressional representative.

And they're in communication with the academies. And I think the academies kind of lean them towards the candidates that they are already identifying. And you have no, where did you hear about the Naval Academy for the first time? You don't remember? Had to have been in a book. I mean, I would just. I remember watching movies like Predator and just how come Echo didn't end up at the Naval Academy. He was watching Predator a lot more than you were. Oh, yeah, probably was reading some books on a platoon leader in the Marine Corps in Vietnam or something, Naval Academy. I think how it actually happened was at one point I wanted to be a pilot, but then, you know, the eyesight thing. It's just, it's not happening.

But to be a pilot, I mean, you start getting aware of the Service Academy because to be a pilot, you have to go to a commissioning source. So when you show up at the Naval Academy for like PLEB summer, you must be pretty used to this kind of crap. Because you've already been to boot camp. You've had a bunch of team guys in Virginia Beach were freaking crushing you. It really was not that big of a deal.

And Pleebs Summer is this six-week indoctrination. It is not boot camp, but it is a service academy equivalent of boot camp, your class is about 1,200 incoming freshman report in the middle of summer, July for about a six-week indoctrination into the military that occurs and ends before the academic year. And on the note of the sea cadets, I will say that at the end of my plebe year, freshman year at the Naval Academy, I was invited back to be the class leader. And I did do that. And that was just an awesome leadership.

opportunity. I could be the class leader. Class leader of what? Of the incoming C cadet class of high school students. So as a now done with my plebe year at the Naval Academy, I'm the class OIC of this group of high school kids coming from all over the place running through the same thing I had been through two years before at this point because the other summer was plebe summer. And how did you like the Naval Academy? Well, it was, it's like a love-hate relationship, right?

Yeah, you know, there's this saying, I-H-T-F-P, I hate this place. But, you know, in high school, I had friends, but I didn't have what I would call deep connections with the people that I was going to high school with. And I definitely had friends, but when I was in the Naval Academy for the first time, I'm finding people that I really see eye to eye with. I mean, really quite bonded in this way of looking at the world the same way. Like, just common interest, common personality, this kind of thing. But to a person, and we found each other, weren't in the same companies.

They all wanted to be selected for seal training, all of them. Was that telling me? A couple of these individuals were recruited swimmers, all American high school swimmers, Now they're varsity swimmers as freshman at the Naval Academy. One, actually two were really good boxers, and I found that out the hard way, trying to spar with them a little bit in the ring. And then, you know, there was me, a farm kit from Kansas,

and, you know, I just was not comfortable in the water. The truth of it is, in Pleep Summer, I excelled physically in anything that was on land, but any time we had to do something in the water, and this is maybe two times a week. You have to demonstrate to the Navy that you can float, that you can take off your camis, camouflage uniform when you're floating,

and tie them and inflate them to help you float. You have to demonstrate that in the event that you fall off a ship, that you're not a total liability, that you can swim from one side of the pool to the other. This is what you're doing in PLEAP Summer. And on those particular days, we're marching, it's hot out.

I would have knots of anxiety. anxiety in my stomach, palpable. Were you scared of failing or were you scared of drowning? I was scared of the water. I just didn't have a lot of exposure. Now, granted, I'd gone to this sea cadet seal thing, but there wasn't, there was a little bit in the water and that stuff petrified me. So I mean, you know, and given what I ended up doing, one could call in to question my

career decision-making skills, given that this reality when I went to the Naval Academy, I was just very, very scared of the water. But by the end of this first year, I had met my circle of friends. They all wanted to pretty much to a person, wanted to be selected for seal training. And so are these guys all in your same class? Same class. So we're plebes freshmen. And they're just down for the seals.

Yeah. And how long did it take for you to start thinking in that direction as well? I would say by the end of my first year there, I no longer wanted to be a Marine. And I wanted to be selected for a seal program. but I knew that I needed to get in the water and start training, get better. What about your eyesight? Had you now learned that you could get a corrective surgery? That year's class, 1999, was able to get PRK.

So that was a game changer for me. And then it's like, okay, well. So you weren't the class of 1999. No, I was class of 2002. So that in the... So you watched the guys that were going to graduate in 1999, or that had graduated in 1999. Yes, and who were going to buds. And for those listening, there are at the time 16 billets from the Naval Academy graduating

class to go to BUDs, seal training. And those class, those billets are split over multiple classes, but 16 graduate and get to go to BUDs. And that service selection happens around January of your senior year. So as a freshman in January, seeing who gets picked. And I had just heard that some of these individuals had PRK to create. their vision so that they may have had that done a year before or something. But that this is, this is a game changer for me. I just need to get better in the water because I was awful. In addition

to being scared of the water, borderline scared, just could not swim. So do you start spending extra time in the pool? Does someone grab you and coach you and mentor you? Like how do you start getting through this? Well, I had a good buddy who became a team guy and we just started training together. and yeah, I would figure it out myself. We work on jobproofing. We'd work on swimming underwater, 25 meters, something like that. Working on the stroke, working. I also had this goal of trying to make the triathlon team

because that year, the senior class, out of those 16 billets going to buds, I want to say five came from the triathlon team. So, well, that's a team that could be good to make. It's not a varsity sport, so therefore, you know, you don't have to be recruited. It's a club sport. Let's get in the water and start training. And I was a very good runner and good at cycling,

so I thought I'll train for triathlon. And along with my friend, we started training. We would just go on these adventures running or cycling with our fins strapped to a backpack out to Bay Ridge or into the Chesapeake and just then go fin swim and cold water, come back, get on the bike or run back to the academy. Just doing fun adventures like that. And it just started pushing my limits. What were you majoring? What did you major in? I chose to major in English.

The service academies are geared towards science and engineering. And they said plebe year chemistry is a good identifier of whether you will do well in engineering and science if you want to major. And they call it group one. And then group three is more of the humanities. First semester chemistry, no problem. It was a repeat in my high school. But second semester chemistry was new stuff.

It just was over my. head and so I thought I had a very influential English teacher in high school, Mr. Schultz and in addition to my parents really exposing me to reading and just I love, I still love to read. I read a lot. This teacher really inspired me to want to be an English major. If you, if this is what you like to do, do it. And there's benefit from this. I thought, you're going to, you learn about people, you learn about situations, you develop an ability to empathize or hopefully with other people and communication skills as well this is all very important in the military so you decide that you're going to study english while you're at the naval

academy correct and are they look what part of english are you studying like i mean that just seems kind of strange it's english lit it just was called english there but it really is it's not i mean i think they had some writing classes or creative writing this kind of thing but really it's the study of literature and my favorite class was a class on Hemingway. And as a kid, I had read Hemingway, and I read A Farewell to Arms, for whom the belt tolls. And these are books very much about war in the wartime experience.

So as you're going through, at what point are you starting to compete and you're starting to look at, hey, how am I actually going to get selected? Because, you know, you say there's 16 billets, and that is, it's as competitive as it gets to get one of those 16 billets, what do you think you did that was able to make you stand out and actually get selected? I remember PLEB year, we were in an auditorium. I think this is during PLEB summer

when the whole class 1,200 people is assembled and they're saying, who wants to be an aviator, 600 hands go up. Who wants to be on a ship? 600 out of roughly 1,200. I'm estimating who wants to be on a ship and a few hundred, who wants to be a Navy seal and like 200, 150 hands go up, easy.

But by the time it comes around, to the junior year, we really got to start making things happen. I feel like there were maybe 60 or 70 in my class that were kind of very much gutting for this. You have to do a screener weekend in order to get ready for mini buds. MiniBuds is a three-week program prior to your senior academic year. So you'd go there to Coronado. Did you go to Minnie Buds? I did. I had to do the screener weekend in the fall in my junior year. And in that, you're ranked based on a PFT, physical fitness test, you go through about two days of just hazing, essentially from the seniors, the upper class who have gone to mini buds if that really qualifies them to do that.

And then from that, if you survive. The most badass. Most badass is struck. They've been to mini buds. When at the time, you know, you're revering. They've been to mini buds and some of them are going to go to buds. And if you get through all this, then you can go to mini buds and then ostensibly you're ranked out of that.

And then it goes into your senior year. You do another fitness test that gets ranked. You do a peer evaluation. Who do you want to go to buds with? Who do you not want to go to buds with? So you got selected to go to mini buds? I did. Yep.

And how was mini buds? Yeah. I thought it I did well. It's three weeks long. Yeah. This is my first time going to Coronado, California. And I fell in love with the place being from Kansas. This is awesome.

We had the weekends off. I think we did a hell night. similar to the C cadet thing I did, except now it's in Coronado as opposed to Little Creek, Virginia. And then it was just exposure. You know, in high school I'd been shooting MP, they let us shoot MP5s.

And I don't think we even got to do anything that cool in minibuds. I think some of it was just going out to La Posta and doing some land navigation in the heat. But it was just a really good time with my buddies from the Naval Academy. And then after that I got to go to Navy dive school because I had done a screener for that,

and that's in Panama City, Florida. And I think that really was, helpful for me given my my insecurities in the water to go to dive school five weeks in Panama City Florida learning how to dive twin 80s how long was it five weeks it's five weeks so that summer before my senior year was just for me it was just the best summer mini buds for three weeks dive school for five weeks come back senior year with a dive bubble not that's I mean just in the school like that's kind of a big deal to have a dive bubble Oh, you were kind of a badass day.

And you get done with all that. And now this is like September 2001, right? This is like September 11th, 2001. It's going to go down right before or as you start your senior year. Yeah, I remember September, I'll never forget that day. I had a late morning class. And I went out for a run that morning and outside of the campus, outside of the yard. And as a senior year,

allowed to do that. I came back to the gate and they wouldn't let me in. I didn't have my ID. You don't need to run with an ID. Why are they asking for my ID? And then I came to find out what it happened. I went back to the dorm where we all live. I changed into my uniform, went to class and you're seeing the replays. I didn't see it live, but things totally, totally changed. I mean, that day, the academy was on lockdown. We didn't. know what was happening. We'd heard the Pentagon had been attacked. Of course, the towers in New York. And for me, this really drove home this reality. If I get selected for seal training, and I'm not going to know until January, I'm going to be directly involved in the nation's response to this.

This is for real. It's now we're at war. And there's a decision that anybody wanted to to go to Buds has to make its decision of what are you going to put as your second choice. And the theory amongst the majority of my friends, in fact, I think all of them was, well, if you want to demonstrate that you want to be a seal, you need to put ships as number two because that's the best way to laterally transfer. You're going to have to go to Newport, Rhode Island for surface warfare officer school. You'll do a tour in the fleet, and then you can put in your package and you can come to Bud's two years later.

for me I was thinking about this long and hard because you're trying to game you want to get one of those billets but you don't know if you will it's very competitive at this point there's probably 45 guys that are up for this

and these guys are like varsity wrestlers varsity swimmers water polo badasses they're destroying the PST they got a 4.0 GPA it's like just studs yeah so for me I thought about this

and I put the Marine Corps is number two. You have to go into an interview board. And this happens in the fall. And this board was happening after 9-11. And it's comprised of senior seal officers, mid-mid, middle-range seal officers, a couple lieutenants at the academy at the time, and then some senior enlisted seals. So this is intimidating. It's a panel of maybe eight to ten team guy officers and enlisted that, you know, You just you don't see a lot of tridents at the academy. So when you do, it's just intimidating. Dude, when I went to boot camp, there was one seal there.

And like, I saw him years later, like probably two or three years later. He had gotten out and was coming back in. And so he was at boot camp, like going through some basic, like, wickets to get reinstated in the Navy. And he had to try to, and, you know, I was like, oh, my God, it's a freaking real. seal and when I met him years later totally good dude but if you would ask me what was the height and approximate weight of this guy that you saw that was a seal in boot camp I would have said oh he's probably let's call it probably six five two 60 because that's what he in my mind that's what he was and I met him in real life and he was like like 511 you know

190 you know and that that's legit like I legitimately thought that he was like that badass. And I was young, I mean, but still that, uh, when you're, when you're young, you see that, that freaking chicken for the first time. You're like, oh, damn, so you're going to this board with eight of these dudes. Yeah. One of, in the highest ranking officer is in 06, a seal captain. And I don't know anything about the ins and outs of the SEAL teams, but this is intimidating. And everything, everything seems to, you know, depend upon my performance right here, right now in front of these people. And so I just remember standing outside the room,

the guy in front of me is in there. You know, he comes out. And I'm like, how was it? You know, he's like, like, shaking his head. Like, it's tough. So I go in there and, you know, they asked me, I think they were leading me down. So why are you an English major?

Do you write, do you like poetry? Do you write poems? And I'm trying to say, well, sir, this is about, it's about learning. of other people and understanding situations and developing communication skills. And I think that'll serve me really well in the community if I'm, if I have the honor of being selected. Then they said,

your second choice, you're not putting down surface warfare. What's going on with that? And I said, well, we're at war. I'd rather be in the Marine Corps if I can't go to Buds. I'd rather lead a infantry platoon. At the time I didn't know,

I think looking back, that's probably the right answer. And I really did, I don't know if the Marines would have taken me. The rumor also was you put them as second. They're not going to take you. I've heard that that's like a real catch-22 for guys at the academy because they want to go in the SEAL teams, but there's so few billets. But if you put Marine Corps as number two, the Marines are like, are you kidding me?

Marine Corps should be number one later. So that's a bummer. But that, I've heard that as well. Yeah. And truth be told, I think I'm not going to game this. I'm just going to rank my choices. And honestly, there's a lot of things I'd rather do than be on a ship. And so I'm either going to make it or not into buds.

And maybe the Marines will take me, maybe they won't. But I remember exiting the interview thinking, I have no idea how that went. It felt like it was forever, but it was probably half an hour. And did you know nothing? I'm just sitting here laughing. Did you know nothing about anything? I know they were. In retrospect, they probably knew the people they wanted.

And maybe a couple were on the fence. I don't know where I stacked in there, but they probably were just screwing with it. They probably laughed after you leave their public. Did you meet any of these guys later in the teams? Absolutely, yeah. Did they debrief you at all? Did they even remember you?

The company officer at the academy was there, and he's still in, and I have not asked him specifically about that. But I was ranked fine. I found out afterwards. So you were ranked fine. You find out in January. That's when you find out what, where you're going.

Yes, there's a day called service selection day. You're going to go into your company officer's room. Every company, there are 30 companies at the academy. Every company is comprised of all four years. And that company has a company officer from either the active duty Navy or Marine Corps and then a company senior enlisted from the Navy or Marine Corps. So you go into the company officer's office. And he's or she is going to tell you what you've,

been assigned and this is your fate you don't get to this is what you're doing that's not a debate no you don't get to say well this or that and if you're assigned to a ship later that night you get to choose and it's somewhat of a lottery system I think it actually depends on class rank you can choose what ship you want to go on but you don't get to contest the fact that you were assigned surface warfare so I go in there and he's printing off a certificate that's going to tell me my fate and his back is to me I just remember it's just my heart is pounding what did you think your chances were at the time I thought about 50 50 50 50 check so I go in there and the first thing he said it was don't worry you're fine what does that mean you got what you wanted

so I remember just feeling absolute relief and then about maybe five minutes later it was like I'm going to buds. Whoa. And now I'm already starting to feel this apprehension because hell weak. Second phase. You know, with water. I got to get ready.

How many of your buddies didn't get picked up? Like, of your good buddies? One of my... How was that whole freaking relationship thing? Because you know there's like two guys that were like faster than you and there was another guy that was smarter than you. and another guy that was like a better wrestler,

and you're just going, yeah, by and large, most of my best friends got a billet, but one of my best friends did not, and one of my other buddies who did, the guy that was going on the adventures with, we came up to his room later that day, and he started crying in front of us.

I won't forget that either. We all wanted this so bad, but I think it was more than necessarily the job. It was, this is what your buddies are, do you want to be with your teammates it's so yeah it's a challenge and you're intrigued by that but it's about teamwork and he was crying and man I felt bad for him and you know going on to buds wanting to stay in touch with him not knowing how to navigate how much do I tell about what I'm

doing or do I try to protect his feelings and not really you know it's it's you know this or that or whatever. But I am proud to say that later on when I went to a team, another friend of mine, we spoke to the commanding officer and who apparently had good rapport with the detailer. And we said there's this guy, the individual who did not get the billet that year. And he was able to lateral transfer. And he is the commanding officer of a team. A team right now. That's freaking, which is awesome. Yeah, I mean, for me, when I was in, when I was asking a bruiser, stoner and Laif, both those guys didn't get picked up out of the academy.

And they both had to go to the fleet and do the whole lat transfer thing. And, you know, it's all just, man, like you said, it's your fate is in the hands of all these different things. And you can push it. And that's a great story. You know, it's a great story when guys actually stick with it and go to the fleet and do that lateral transfer thing. That's a game.

I'm glad I didn't have to play. Yeah, in many ways you were smart. But I will say, I remember in the plebe year, the individual who did not get the bill, who is now doing quite well in the teams, who you know. He, in freshman year, we were talking about, what are you going to decide for your major?

You don't have to declare until the springtime. I was like, I'm going to do English. And he goes, I think I'm thinking computer science. And so he chose, computer science and his grades were not the best. And so it's for me, this was English was such a good choice. Clutch. The clutch choice. I could, I happen to be someone who likes to read and I can maybe not always read all of the book, but still write a decent paper, focus on my math and science and engineering classes to try to get at least a B in those classes to try to have good grades because they are

evaluating everything and part of that is your grades. So September 11th goes down. You get picked. picked up, you're in your final prep. You must have been feeling decent about the water now that you pass Navy dive school. Yes, I'm much more confident in the water. I felt like I had improved a lot, and I knew that anything on land, I'm going to be just given the perspective of being borderline afraid of the water, that I could use this to my advantage. I've overcome a fear. I'm used to to being afraid of the water. There's actually a strength in that, learning how to overcome something.

What I did was I walked up to the water's edge just about every day there at the academy for four years and literally immersed myself in this environment that I am uncomfortable in. And come to find later, I had a distinct apprehension of jumping out of airplanes as well. And so seal stands for sea air and land.

Sea and air were not my thing. But the processes of overcoming this fear of the water serve, I think have served me quite well. And so there's this, I think, inner strength that can come from approaching situations that make you uncomfortable. You get through this. You take it one small step at a time.

Work on something. There's always something you can work on. Do one thing today. Do another thing tomorrow. over time, this will accumulate and grow. Yeah, I've thought about that too. Like you're jumping out of airplanes. You're fast roping.

You're rappelling. You're diving. You're diving at night. All these things that are a little bit sketchy if you're not comfortable with them. And look, the first time you jump out of an airplane, even if like for me, I thought it was going to be fun, but it's still a little bit sketchy. First time I fastrope like, hey, this seems like it's going to be fun, but it's still a little bit sketchy.

First time you repel off the tower, seems like it's going to be fun, but it's still a little bit sketchy well you're building up sort of the mental protocol to be in a fearful situation and just like proceed anyways which I think is really good for the first time you're going into combat like oh okay yeah I know those little butterflies no factor I'm going to push through them that's probably a probably a pretty good reason just to do those things in the first place of course you sounds like you did it more than I did yeah I think the first step here is acknowledging what's going on you know Okay, this is the situation. I'm uncomfortable in the water.

Okay. Yeah. Check. Let's come up with a plan of action now. But yeah, going into Buds, I remember graduated May 24, 2002 from the Naval Academy. And my report date at Naval Special Warfare Training Command, Buds is late June, 2002. So I had about a month off. We got to choose of the 16 of us who were going to go to Buds with and in what order.

And it was split over three classes. And I was in the group that was going to go first. And so we weren't going to have the stories from, and I thought this is actually probably good. I was happy with the first off the deck because we're not going to see Naval Academy classmates who are further along, who maybe can give some wisdom,

but they're also through various stages. And I'd rather just be the first one to go. And so that worked out well. There's a definite, like the Naval Academy guys usually do well at Buds. And if they quit, they're just like hated by everyone because they took a billet. They took one of those 16 billets and everyone just can't believe that you got this opportunity and freaking blew it. Like, I mean, the enlisted guys, like, I didn't care. I mean, when I was an enlisted guy going through, I didn't care if somebody would quit for whatever reason.

I was like, whatever. But Naval Academy guys, they take that shit real personal. There's some pressure. But I also think that can be an advantage. I went out to Coronado. So there's actually going to be six, five, and five in those three groups. So I'm going to be going with six, five other classmates from the Naval Academy. We were packed into an apartment in Imperial Beach, three bedrooms, two to a room, like $200 per person a month, for rent.

And there was no way I could come back to that apartment, having quit. No way. How could I do that? So you're putting yourself in a situation. Did any of your 16 quit? One. Damn. Not in my group.

Yeah. But you're putting yourself in a situation where external factors, you know, peer relationships, this kind of thing can actually, although it could be conceived or construed as adding pressure, I think it actually made me, you know, at these kind of you're at your breaking point moments. this was maybe just a subliminal nudge in the direction of do not do not succumb do not quit push through let's go I was like so detached from people quitting I didn't even understand what was happening like people just quitting I was like I was saying this the other day like they didn't seem like human to me like they didn't seem like a human like oh this guy I didn't I didn't picture a person with like hopes and dreams and I can't believe they just did that and they they joined the Navy and now they're quitting like that.

like oh gosh what I was just like oh that this person just a non-human thing that just like is moving on and they're not part of what we're doing and so I wasn't even I can't even name I can only name one guy that quit and he was my boat crew leader and he was my boat crew leader in Hellweek but that's the only everyone else was just like gone I just never even thought about him never even and I never had thoughts like oh I you know this guy's my friend so I never thought like that I was like oh we're just going I'm just doing this oh what are you wants to climb those rocks you want us to jumping in the water or whatever like I was like you said oh maybe you mentioned real quick I said well you know I didn't have to go through all that stuff the naval academy like yeah maybe you're smarter

and I was like no in my mind I was like no I was dumb I was just like oh I'm going in the Navy I want to be a seal they tell me to do something I'm going to do it like that was my attitude so so and it might have been beneficial it seems like it was beneficial but it also disconnected me from even really any recognition of how hard seal training is because to me I was like there was just two groups of people me and my buddies and everyone else and we didn't know them and they just went away and then we were all going to the teams it was like oh who yeah we're going to the teams so it was almost like this weird like now when I hear some of the statistics and you know more about it and and and you know that guys that are went to the naval academy and guys that were you know a freaking

Division one swimmers and Division one wrestlers and Division one football players, and they all quit. And, like, I just didn't even, I just thought there were a bunch of guys that just didn't want to be here. And I do. So that was that. Kind of crazy. Yeah, I remember someone giving me advice or I collected it along the way, three pieces of advice. Number one, in hell week, eat like it's your job. Don't ever let eat, no matter how tired you are, eat, eat, eat.

second was give 70% effort 100% of the time try not to have to ever give 100% but a good 70% effort 100% of the time sustainable and then third was don't get close to anybody because you don't know if they're going to quit I'm wondering if when your boat crew leader quit if that affected you I hear when an office it sounds like it didn't but you hear stories about when an officer or quits, three or four people go with that person. Yeah, I forget my buddy Giff, who I went through Hellweek, he was on here the other day and we were talking about it. He just said, like, he was laughing.

He's like, you just looked at him like, all right, whatever. And we just like carried on. I was like, yeah, no factor. I was too like, I was too crazy, I guess. I was too just weird, I guess or crazy or something. Did you have any challenges during butts? Like when you got to pool comp, how was that? Did you have any challenges with the, with the five and a half?

nautical mile swim or anything like that. You know, I think what I saw in Buds with my class was no matter how gifted a person was, there was probably going to be something at some point that was going to challenge them. And one of my classmates, this individual from the Naval Academy who I had known for four years at this point was just a stud in Buds. And there was one day at the very end, for whatever reason, the obstacle course rope with the low wall, the one you have to, the high wall, you ascend the rope and then. and kind of roll over.

The rope was wet and he just had a really hard time. I hope I'm not, if he's listening, I hope he's, I'm not bringing up some bad memories. Give it PTSD. For me, you know, I actually did quite well in pool week. I had, I had to have helped me. Yeah, dive school had to have helped me. And I remember in dive school,

the first, just feeling really uncomfortable, breathing underwater, just was weird, you know. But by the time second phase, dive phase of buds comes around, that was normal. The double hose regulator was new because we were using a single hose in dive school. Oh, dude. Yeah, you know. Aqualong Aquamaster.

Yeah. There was one evolution, though, and it's life-saving. I forget if that was pre- or post-Hel week. I want to say it was pre-Hel week. I think it's pre. We had some large instructors who had weight belts on. Oh, yeah, they bring it. They bring it in.

I failed the first time. Did your world come crashing down? Yeah. It was just, he was just taking me under. And the second time I failed. And it was like the third time, I'm thinking,

you know, I'm sitting on like that wall, that line of shame, yeah, where you failed and now you have to, this is your chance. You know, I'm thinking like,

is this it? So I, I just really tried to focus on the procedure and trying to do it. And number one, like what I was failing was the fact that this instructor was underwater. So like number one thing is keep this person's head above the water. I don't care if I'm drinking water. If I'm underwater the whole time, his head needs to be above the water the entire time.

And I get to the wall and it was a pass. It was just like, we'll take it. Yeah. And I hope I didn't come across like Buds was easy for me. Because I mean, I failed to run. I failed to swim. I failed pool comp and actually here's the funny thing for life saving I got so ready for life saving I was going I was like hostile I was like oh I'm gonna I'm gonna fight some dudes and it was like that

back then I don't feel like that when you went through it sounds like it was it was a fight like you're gonna fight this person and so I was super amped up for that I went out got first in line and in pool comp I failed pool comp on Friday and and over the weekend me and my buddy who's now an active duty master chief. He failed too. And we spent, I don't know how we did this. I don't know how this was legal.

I don't know if it was legal. We spent the weekend in the dip tank with charged twin nitties. I don't know how we got them. And we just freaking pool comped each other in four feet of water. Like we're standing outside the dip tank. I'm in the dip tank. He's standing there just rip in my face. And we did that for the whole weekend.

The whole weekend we did that. I got on, on Monday morning, I went in there. the instructor came down and this instructor ended up being an admiral but he came down and as soon as I saw him coming down I ripped off my own face mask and spit out my mouthpiece like can bring it dude

and sure enough he was like dude this guy is obviously very confident and he messed me up but then he was just like you know passed so I kind of would go a little bit extra on some of these things but I don't want to make it sound like it was easy for me because like I said

In fact, I failed to run. I failed to swim. Not only that, I can promise you, I never want to run. I never want to swim. I never won an O course. I was like in the middle of everything. And that was about all I had too. Like when I failed to run, it was because I didn't.

I tried to pace myself a little bit and failed. So my only way to pass a run was to run as hard as I possibly could the entire time. 100%. Yeah. Not 70% 100%. No, it was 100%. That's how I had to do it to pass a run. to pass a swim to pass everything.

So your only big challenge, though, was life-saving? Life-saving, but there was a moment in the beginning stages of Hell Week where, and I can tell the story, I was at a decision point, at my, I would say my breaking point. And a lot of this was because of frustration. Oh, dude, they're going to get you somehow. Frustration with physical pain can be a really potent combination. And Hell Week, you know, starts on a Sunday. You know it's going to end Friday.

You're going to not sleep once until sometime on Wednesday. All these thoughts are kind of going through my head. 70% of my class, 80% are going to quit. I'm not going to make it. Am I going to be one of the ones who gets through all these looking around? You're in an isolation room waiting for this thing to start. Just all these thoughts going through your head. You know what I was thinking at that time?

Just like, oh. Wait, wait, when's this going to start? I want pizza. So you're having all these advanced thoughts, dude. I'm having like just nothing. I'm like a freaking idiot. You know, I'm thinking all this stuff. And, you know, who knows who's going to quit?

Don't get close to anybody. And we break out and it's just chaos and form up the longest mile. You go all the way down with the boats on your head to that bottom end of the silver strand racing. You're tired. It's not, it's not comfortable by any means. but, you know, at this point, it's like, we're in, I'm in this. I mean, you're in it, you're in it.

And so all that anxiety and build up and apprehension has kind of dissipated because I'm just in this now. But we're forming up for the second race, this part of the longest mile with the logs. Logs are, you know, the sectioned telephone poles. And my team steps up to a government pickup trucks, receiving our log. And this thing was just insanely heavy. I don't know what was going on with it It wasn't old misery

I don't know what was going on It felt like it was waterlogged Yeah, it probably could have been waterlogged And maybe the instructors knew Maybe they didn't I don't know They knew And immediately I just remember

We had one of the guys in the boat And I guarantee you every single person Under that log It remembers this log It was just so heavy I mean And you know what a log is supposed to weigh you've done this stuff before and immediately groaned.

And there was a guy on the boat team. He had been through, I think, three days of hell week before and two years before, gone to the fleet, come back and immediately was saying, this log is a career ender. This is not good. So we received the brief, you know, log carry north, bust them, go. It races on. And just all the teams in the class were just out of sight.

You couldn't hear or see the second. to last place team even. This is bad. Wait, so you guys are so far behind the second to last place team. You can't even see the second to last place team. I mean, like the whole class is just God. And we are all by ourselves at the last place. So of course, the instructors descended upon us like a pack of wolves, you know,

with their megaphones and hurry up, step it out, move it out, let's go. And then there was this instructor in my face. And this person had a unique. to really get under my nerves. And he's telling me he's going to kick me out of the program. We need to step it out. I'm at the far left end of the log. Are you the boat crew leader?

Yes. Far left end of the log where the weight tends to collect. And the person to my right, it just 10, 15, 20 minutes into this rate. I have no conception of time. But we're into this race now. We're in last place. And it seemed like his arms, there just wasn't much. So you can feel the increase of the weight.

and I'm at the far left end of the log, so it felt like I was carrying two people's worth of weight on the far left end, this log that was so heavy. I mean, it literally felt like my arms were going to just rip my, rip out of the shoulder sockets. My biceps were totally on fire. I mean, every step was just horrendous. And I started just succumbing to self-doubt, frustration,

thinking long-term thought, like, how am I going to this is I'm just a few hours into hell week how am I going to make it like to Friday? Friday seems impossibly far away and you know this log is destroying my body this is not good it's not good I've worked years to get to this point and you know things are just unraveling fast this is not a good start to hell week we're only a few hours in middle of the night and there was this moment where I remember looking up into the skies were struggling to advance this log forward through the soft sand in last place and just thinking, I can't do this.

This is just too much. And I was frustrated because these instructors and they don't, you know, I just wanted to scream. This isn't fair. This is not, this log is not the right kind of weight. It's not a fair race. But I couldn't say that. And they didn't know or led onto their knowledge that this log was too heavy. So at this critical point where I, just out of frustration, I was just,

about to walk away. I remember I just had this idea of like playing this game and it's all in my mind but I could quit but first, you know, take a few more steps. I take those steps but then okay, can just keep playing this game, okay? Take a few more steps. Okay, I've done that. Let's just keep playing this game. And so I just got in that rhythm and then I started, you know, yelling some encouragement to the team and let's go, let's go, let's go. And, They probably wanted me to shut up. But this game, I learned a lesson. Like, okay, you got to, when you have these situations to push you to your limit,

you may have long-term goals. You know, I wanted to be a Navy SEAL and all that. But it seemed like really far away. And as I, you know, think about this and unpack this experience, what I have learned is that a way to get your mind away from these long-term thoughts that can only be discouraging is to just focus on mechanics and procedure and proper. support the log with my arms advance it with my team one step at a time that's all I need to be thinking about right you know and just you learn that I learned that in that night Right then and there in that rate and yeah of course we finished last place and we got hammered

But because you know it pays to be a winner and they want to drive home this lesson that Losing in combat has severe consequences you need to find ways to win there was no way in hell we were gonna win under this log But that punishment occurred the log was away. We were just I don't know, doing air squats or bare crotch, whatever it was, it was better than being under that log. And I knew that, I just got through that. There was nothing, nothing this week that can be that bad. And nothing was that bad.

And I remember laying in the surf zone, surf torture sessions, all I would need to do was just think, man, this is rest. At least I'm not under that log. My whole perspective, it changed. I got through it, I learned that lesson, you know, just focus on one step at a time, advancing it in one, one. But this, I think every person who gets through Hell Week at some form,

whether they process this consciously or not, but you have to break down long-term massive challenges into increments, things that you can do right now that add up over time to get through a very difficult situation. That lesson was very valuable for me. No, that's a good one. And like I said, from my perspective, It was just like, I never even was thinking that far in advance.

I was like, what, carry this log? Cool, got it. You know, it was too much about knuckle-dragger to process these kind of big picture strategic thoughts about my life. Yeah, you know, maybe I'm prone to overthinking. And so there is something to be said for just doing it and not think, you know, just do what you got to do. You know, I remember thinking when I was in Hell Week, I was like, oh, it's going to feel so good to go to sleep.

Like, it was almost like my anticipation. I was like, oh, it's going to feel so cool to stay awake for so long because imagine how good it's going to feel to fall asleep. In a week, that's going to be so cool. It's going to feel so good to just like lay down. And I was kind of excited about the prospect of having stayed awake for so long, but then I got to go to sleep. The only way you can get to get that much pleasure in sleeping is to stay awake for that long. Otherwise, it's just kind of a pain to go to sleep. It's like a waste of time.

It feels like it's like bad. So thankfully, you made it through. How many people started in your Bud's class? Do you remember? We had, when we classed up, I believe it was 196. That number sticks in my mind. It seems like a pretty precise number. Class 242.

So June of 2002, we classed up. Hell Week was late August, 2002, summer Hell Week. So the surf torture sessions weren't that bad They just leave you in longer But again, it's just rest They adjust, yeah And I believe we graduated 26 original But we had rollbacks along the way

Yeah You get done So those were your major challenges A little bit of lifesaving Two big challenges, yeah You get done And you get assigned to a team What team you end up going to?

West Coast team one So you end up going to team one Did you want to go to the West Coast? Yeah, I chose that. I had... You had that Coronado on your mind. Yeah, you know, being from Kansas, I've been East Coast at the Naval Academy,

and, you know, I... The thing is, when you get to a team, nobody cares that you went through Hell Week. Yep. Nobody cares. Nobody cares that you have a Trident. These things I've been working for, for years, they no longer matter.

Did you get your Trident after SQT? Yes. So... So September 2003, I reported the... that West Coast team in October 2003 as a new guy. So you show up and do you get put right into a platoon? No. The policy at that team at that time was,

and they were, the detailing was a little off in the sense that they were just a few months away and ended up doing a surge deployment. So the team had to do a surge deployment to Iraq. I think, I kind of forget that. particulars, but maybe more platoons were needed. Is this an 04? Yes. And you were at team one?

Yes. And you went on deployment? Yes. In less than four months after arriving. You went on deployment in the, what time of year? January, 2004, I believe there was some kind of a surge happening within the community. And so I got to that team. They were already well through their workup.

And so the policy, there were several of us junior officers who were just kind of floating around and the policy was not to put the third officer in a platoon at that team at that time so did you go on deployment yeah I did I deployed the Pacific okay and got I was at team seven and team one relieved us that's why yeah so I if you would have gone to Iraq you would have high-fied with me in Iraq because I was getting ready to head home I was not in that group I was I was bummed you know when you think at the naval academy that you've now been selected to go to buds 9-11 just happened this is for real. We're going to war. You go through buds, hell weak, etc. Land warfare, everything, SQT, you get to a team. You're deploying a war. I did not realize that some platoons

deploy to non-combat environments even when there is combat going on. And that was a surprise to me. Not exactly what I expected, but I'm a new guy. And so you just, you go. where you're told. And a lot of people may not realize this, but platoons don't often get to control where they deploy, or even the commanding officer of the team doesn't get to control that. There's a, there's a strong element of chance in all this stuff. And you have, that's why the best thing you can do is get to a team, do a good job, do the best you can, keep going on deployment. And hopefully get in the right place at the right time.

The better you do, the better reputation you have, the better chance you will have. but it's still only a chance. So did you do a full six months in the Pacific? It was nine months. Oh, dang. Nine months in the Pacific staged at Guam, doing a lot of exercises with various countries. I mean, you got to, we got to do some cool training,

which for me was actually new training, especially in terms of urban combat and movement through houses and among structures. So that was something I hadn't been exposed to because I hadn't done the workup. So getting to do that with a platoon with sim munition and this kind of thing was really good training, I thought.

So you get done with that deployment, now you get put as an assistant platoon commander? Yes. And you're still at team one? Yeah, so this is now 2004 going to be deploying 2005. Assistant platoon commander, same team. And how's this?

Yep. assistant platoon commander I'm still a new guy you know you're in this position as a junior officer in my situation not being prior enlisted like you were that you're in terms of not only age but experience

in the teams you're just outranked even though maybe technically on the uniform there's a rank so it's a difficult position to navigate sometimes I think you want to go into this

with some humility, with asking questions. I found that junior officers in the team sometimes, and I think I can put myself in this category, try to cover up some of their insecurities, not knowing things, not having the experience, by acting as if they do know. Yeah, which is a big mistake. Yeah, in retrospect, you can see,

you know that people can see through this, but at the time you don't necessarily realize that. And so, maybe you're reluctant to ask advice or ask someone's opinion, but I actually learned that this is a wonderful opportunity to show someone that you value their opinion. You ask, hey, in the locker room where the cages are, how you setting up your kit, just pick their brain.

And I mean, I think this is a good thing for anybody in any organization when you're new, is ask the people who know what's going on, what do you recommend? And this creates a sense of, buy-in, I think the fact that you value their opinion, that's useful. So I tried, I tried to approach it from a position of humility, but as an assistant platoon commander, your primary responsibilities are learn tactics, learn small unit

leadership and then do administrative functions for the platoon and support the platoon commander. Yeah. I mean, even though I was a prior enlisted guy, I mean, I still would ask the team, like the, the guys, hey, how do you think we should do this? What do you think we should do? Where should we insert? What do you think about this platform over here?

I would always do that, even when I was the more experience and sometimes even the most experience. And I learned that from one of my platoon commanders, who was a prior enlisted guy who had more experience than any of us, who asked us, hey, what do you think? How do you think we should do this? And that's, you know, I got to just steal his leadership techniques for when I was put in charge. But I always give that advice, you know, if you, there's no sense in acting like you know, you're doing because everybody not only do they see through it but they don't expect you to know everything they're like hey you've been here for three months bro we don't expect you to know how to run this drill or how to plan for this mission it's okay we do and we can all work together to figure

this out any standout memories from that workup getting ready to deploy you know my memories are of the people and in particular two who are no longer here and that's just something that I'll always take away from that platoon. One, one was killed in the extortion helicopter crash and another on an operation a few years ago. So that's, that's tough. I, you know, I really just, I think about those guys a lot. I would say one of my leadership failures in this phase was along the lines of being in that position of you're younger, you don't have as much experience, you're falling into wanting to be one of the guys, one of the buddies. And I would say, you know, this is probably something that everybody deals with in the junior officer ranks of the teams. You, you

want to be liked, you want to be buddies, you know, going out and this kind of thing with the guys. And I, you know, I did that. And I don't have any regrets. But I think for me, one of the hardest, I think, hardest positions I could have put myself was to be able to make a decision that's, that may be right, but not popular. Now, I wasn't the platoon commander. But as an AOIC, it's pretty easy to get into that situation of like, okay, you're supposed to support the platoon commander, but yet you are buddies with the guys. It can be sort of like in between a rock and a hard place kind of a situation. I think that was a leadership takeaway that I had from that platoon.

And we ended up deploying to the Pacific again. This was more directly located in one specific AO. And it was doing foreign internal defense with host nation forces. And we were dispersed kind of in a satellite model. And it was a long deployment. there's definitely some leadership challenges. Guys in the platoon, they want to go to Iraq, they want to go to Afghanistan at this point,

but we're on this deployment to the Pacific theater. And so, yeah, there's some leadership challenges for sure in that environment. Yeah, and for a while, the SEAL teams was rotating. So you do half your deployment in the Pacific and then go into Iraq or Afghanistan for another three months. But eventually people said that's not a good move either. And it really isn't. I mean, it really just doesn't make, it's like the fair fairy comes up with those kind of ideas

because it's more fair to get, and, you know, you feel, you feel it. You know, you're like, well, this guy, these guys want to go get in the fight. So that seems like the fair thing to do. But unfortunately, it's the fair fairy doesn't always have the best ideas. Even though it seems fair, it's not smart. Yeah. And the argument is, well, okay, six months is too long to be in combat. so we can relief in place and the people who really want to go to, you know,

but then you're bringing in people that don't have AO expertise. It's just, yeah, I agree. So at this point now, I've done two deployments as a junior officer. I have not been to Iraq or Afghanistan. And people who had gone through buds with at this point have started deploying to Iraq or OEF in Afghanistan. and they're going on combat operations. You know, the stuff that we trained to do, we trained to do all of it,

but what really pushes your training and the ultimate test of your training applied overseas is what you could be doing in Iraq, given the state of things at that time, was what you could be doing in Iraq or Afghanistan. And so, yeah, I was feeling, to be honest, a bit frustrated because as a junior officer, you're going to get your AOC deployment, your OIC deployment in platoons.

And if you're either in a platoon or you're not. And when I first showed up at the team and I'm not in a platoon, that sucks. It sucks. You're in a platoon or you're not. And you're going to get two platoons and then maybe a task unit commander to her, but okay, certainly not as quite as operational. so yeah I got one more to go and yeah I was I was a little bit frustrated to be honest

and then now I and I don't want to come across as bitter I'm just trying to be honest about how I felt at the time well what kind of human beings try and go through all this shit to go to the SEAL teams guys that want to go to war so when you do it a nine month deployment with no war and then you now you're going a six month deployment no war and you know you've got limited opportunities in the rest of your career it's going to be I mean I wouldn't I wouldn't want the type of person

that's like I was happy I wasn't going to war like that's not the kind of guy you would want the seal teams I talked to firefighters and I talk to them and see not that you're necessarily necessarily wanting there to be fire people's lives to be at risk but given that there is one you want to be the one who responds and if you're not around people that feel that way that's a problem. And I was proud to be around a group of people that by and large want to go respond to that fire,

so to speak, in the teams. Yeah, and I think they eventually got to a point where, like, hey, if a guy had just gone to Iraq or Afghanistan and maybe he'd gone twice in a row and now they put him in a platoon where he's not going to go. And it was a little, it did get more fair as time went on, but this was only what? This was 2005.

So it was like, you know, it's a tough one. Yeah, I come back from that deployment in 2006. And then I did a little bit of an overseas augmentation in Afghanistan. And I did get to go there, got to see some of the country, some of the area of operations. I came back from that. And then I did what's called a disassociated tour. So you're not in a platoon. And again, in my estimation, you're either in a platoon or you're not.

And if you're one of the people who's not, it's a distinctive. feeling. There's nothing like being in a platoon. It's one of the best. I mean, I would do that job for 20 years if I could. But so I'm a disassociated tour, but supporting platoons at the team on a deployment that. So you did another deployment? Another deployment. We, but at least you, so you've been to Afghanistan. And now you come back, you're doing a disassociated tour of some job where you're supporting the teams. Where you're doing some kind of like recon element type thing. Generally speaking, yeah, intelligence collection and this kind of thing. So it was definitely a leadership.

You know, I'm a officer in charge. Right. And you're in charge of operational stuff that's going to help. Yeah, absolutely. Where did you deploy to? To Iraq. Okay. Yeah.

So that's also nice. Yeah. And I got to see the area. I did get to go out on some operations, but again, I'm not in the platoon. So it was, it was. It's just, you can chalk it up to experience, but again, I just can't help but think, okay, I don't have combat experience. And you know this.

Combat experience is the mark of respect in the teams. Now, that deployment goes to 2008. I've been in five years with a Trident, six years into my career, and I don't have combat experience, and it's not my fault, but this is something I felt like I had been training for and I just felt insecure about it. Where were you when you in Iraq, where'd you go? We were in the western provinces there. Yeah.

So near where you were in Ramadi and we had various, I think it was more like an outstation model at this point. Did you at least go like on some ops? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but no shots fired. I mean, I don't consider that combat. Not that, not that, I mean, some good operation, there may no, there may not be shots fired. It's just I didn't have, and I wasn't in a leadership position tactically.

Okay, so you come back from that deployment. Yes. So now you're one, two, three, three deployments deep. Yep. And an augmentation. Oh, how long was that augment to Afghanistan? Two months. Okay.

And I got to do, I got to go to an outstation there. And that was great. But I'm now past my service requirement. I could get out. You know, after graduating from the Naval Academy, you do five years, you can punch. I'm like, that would just seem like so weak to me. Yeah, I honestly, I didn't even think about that, to be honest. But as I look back, I'm like, wow, yeah, I could have, after that deployment, I could have just gotten out.

And then, you know, things would have been different. Well, it's really hard, like you, like we're talking about, it's really hard to look at your career and be like, okay, I'm just going to get out now. When you know you got friends that are fighting, you know that you have more to offer. So you're not getting out. No, and the one job that I have to do is platoon commander. In my opinion, if you don't do that, that's for me where I was in my mind. I don't do that job. I'm failing myself and everything that I've been through.

That's the one critical tour that I'm going to do. Right. And so you go back to team one to do that? Yeah. So you get back to team one. Now you're a platoon commander. Correct. and this is now,

you know, I had been an officer in charge of the previous element, but for me, this was a very special assignment. And I really was excited just to be a platoon leader in a seal platoon. Just felt like seven, eight, nine years of effort. It's like coming down to this two-year assignment. And you actually have some decent experience for being a platoon commander. I mean, you've done multiple deployments overseas, you're doing all right.

This isn't like a guy that, like sometimes you get a lateral transfer that has like what they did. Sometimes they do no deployments. Sometimes the lateral transfer is really senior and they just get put into an OIC position. They have no experience. So you've been in the teams the whole time

and you know you've done multiple deployments. So you're feeling, you must have been feeling pretty good about being a platoon commander. Oh, absolutely. And I volunteered. I'm the person who's going to volunteer. I volunteered to go do the augmentation.

I didn't need to do that. And that was after a deployment. You know, I pretty quickly after, I wanted to go out. I wanted to get the experience. But you go through an 18-month platoon workup cycle, and your deployment is where your deployment is. And so six years may seem like a long time, but it's actually not a lot of different assignments.

It's only three assignments, really, within that time. And what's going on with your family this whole time? Like, you've been gone. What's happening with the family? So at this point, it's just my mom and sister. My sister now is, she's in college in Kansas. My mother remarried after my father died in 1999. I was at the Naval Academy.

How do we, we skipped over that. What happened to your dad when you were at the Naval Academy? Well, he was out on a bike ride one day and was hit by a car. And this just happened out of the blue. I had been training for the triathlon team, and I think he had kind of taken up cycling. But it was one of these mornings at the Naval Academy. I was just getting ready to go to class,

and I remember one of the upperclassmen came by, and I'm a sophomore at this point, and it's pretty, I had just been home in Kansas because over the summer, and he said, the company officer wants to see you. What did I do? You know, there's probably, I'm sure there was something I had done in the recent memory that would leave me to believe like, oh, man, I got caught.

So I go in there, and he told me the news, and it just was like the floor dropped out from under me. We had a, the company senior enlisted was a Marine Corps gunnery sergeant, and he was, he knew he had met my father. Because at the end of PLEep Summer, the parents get to come and see how things were, you know, you've graduated PLEP summer. And so they talked about the Marine Corps. And this gunny was awesome. And he was very supportive. I got, this happened on a Thursday. And the Naval Academy and all of its generosity told me,

you can go home on emergency leave, but you need to be back Thursday the following week. One week. That still pisses me off. But I went home. The funeral and then came back and was in class a week later and Yeah, that's so my mom ended up remarrying I ended up being overseas when that happened my sister Is in nursing school in at Kansas and I'm single ready to deploy and

Ready to be a platoon commander in 2008 so you're you're in a platoon and going through workup This is probably when I met you for the first time when you're yes You were training detachment OIC. Yeah, we have good times. Yeah, and I first of all, want to thank you for the training, specifically land warfare. You know, I didn't get to stay on that deployment very long, but I'm of the firm opinion that training should be very difficult, and I think you really stepped it up. And so that probably saved lives.

Jason Gardner, who was the, I guess he was, He was this senior enlisted guy when you guys were out there when you got hit. But he talks, he's talked to me about it and like how everything went down. And definitely, you know, his whole deployment, he has multiple stories where, you know, there was maneuver elements that they were able to act on and able to stop and blue on blues that could have easily happened that they didn't happen because they'd been through training. That was really hard. So, yeah, it was definitely, uh, my goal.

goal was to make the training hard so that guys were ready for combat. And, you know, it was awesome to see. It was awesome for me to be able to watch guys develop and get really good and understand what their job was. It was a really steep learning curve, but it was also like a learning curve that was steep, but also had like really nice steps on it where you, you know, this training operation, you'd learn this thing. And then they'd figure this other thing out. And then they'd do this other thing. We'd put them in a different scenario and then you've got them in Mount and they're learning, you know, other steps. So by the time guys were getting done, they were really, really competent leaders. And it was awesome to see. I remember you, you broke things down in a way that

made sense in its simplicity. I remember one time you were, I think, I don't know if we were one-on-one, but it was a very close conversation. And you were just saying, listen, either you're online or you're in an L. I just, I think it was one-on-one. And it just, the way you said, it just really hit home. You know, yeah, okay. And then I fouled it away. And that was a very valuable lesson for me. And it's a simple.

It's pretty simple. But sometimes, you know, in the chaos, you just get overwhelmed. And then just to prioritize and execute, that's a really important rule that, you know, there could be, I can see situations in training environments or in combat where, you're getting overwhelmed by either too much going on or you're actually overwhelmed because there's there's actually no seemingly viable course of action. I think those are two different situations, but in the other, the one where there's just so much going on, okay, prioritize and execute and pick the most important thing or either delegate it or act upon it

yourself. With the other situation, yeah, there's, it just doesn't seem like there's any viable course of action. What can we even do to make this situation better? Just realize there's always something you can do. You're never out of the fight. Even if you're going to continue doing what you're currently doing, that's an active choice, not a passive choice. And there's a difference there. Oh yeah, there's a big difference. As you're going through that workup, how was like the relationships with your, with your platoon chief, with your LPO? Did you guys have a good solid, you know, platoon from your perspective? Yeah, we did.

And I think that's why our platoon task unit was selected to go to Afghanistan because I think we did well. And when I say that platoons and taskingists don't only get to choose where they deploy, but there is a little bit of a selection process going on within the team. And so I think I took it as a compliment that we're going to go on this deployment to Afghanistan. And the West Coast teams had not been deploying to that AO for a while. So it was going to be new.

and we weren't going to be going to Iraq this time. And so we knew that the team, the platoons that we would be replacing were getting into it. My platoon chief was experienced. We had a prior enlisted assistant officer in charge. It was really, really great. And, you know, one of the things I wanted to approach this position with in my mind was this leadership position was, if through the workup, I can ask the opinion of the enlisted members of the platoon. and really show that I value their advice,

that that is going to create a sense of empowerment and buy-in, but also that their value is, their opinion is valued in that can create an atmosphere of innovation because you don't want to train fire team leaders to just be responsive to doing what they're told. You want them to have initiative. And so in order to do that, you know, this is a hey what do you think about this what do you think about this just in the day to day

and I hope that that you know the ultimate barometer here is is the opinion of the people in the platoon but yeah and the other the other thing is when you're going through a platoon workup you're you're trying to train yourself and you're trying to train everybody in their various job but you also have to be training people to be able to step up and that is one of the things going through a training evolution you have training detachment instructors evaluating you on your own leadership and tactical decisions, but you need to be able to step aside and say, okay, hey, you got this one. Let's go.

And it's, it's tough because you're, oh, are people to think I'm just ducking it out? Because I don't want to make a bad call. But you do need to have the ability to do one job above you. And I think those two things were what I worked on. And I think, especially the second one, you know, giving assistant platoon commander the opportunity to take my position that that in hindsight was the right call for sure yeah and we would we would do that too you know if we had a a platoon commander or a platoon chief that was really running everything they'd be the first person we put down in a training scenario just to let's see what's

going to happen now now that we pull this guy out um so you get done with this workup and and now it's time to go on deployment and like you said you had been selected to go to Afghanistan. And you end up going on the PDSS, right? The pre-deployment site survey. Yes. You know, we didn't go months in advance. So there was, as I recall, there was going out a few months early,

and then there was going out three weeks or so before your platoon. For whatever reason, we didn't go a few months or I don't know why. But the plan was, for some, of the key leaders in the task unit to go early, three weeks or so early. That's standard procedure. I remember thinking, you know, this is, this is just what you do. This is a very important deployment for me given, and I remember thinking, you know, if I was only going to get one, if you can only have one really good deployment, well, this is the one I would choose. So it just kind of felt like things are lining up. Yeah, and going into that deployment, like I said, it was

Jason Gardner and his task unit Task Unit Trident and they had You know Jason describes that as the most kinetic of his deployments and he'd done a lot of deployments And so those guys were And you know I was tracking those guys I remember I said I would sign my emails back and forth when they would tell me what they were doing I would sign my emails to them You know jaco spiritual advisor to task unit Try did they got a kick out of that him and the task unit and stuff

But you know we were tracking they were doing a lot lot of really kinetic operations. And yeah, definitely for the guys on the West Coast getting ready to go there at that time, that's a good place to be going because, you know, Iraq had settled down a lot at this point, you know, kind of after the, the debt defender group going into Sauter City, you know, Iraq had definitely settled down. So you guys were going to the, you know, the best show in town. Yeah, and I felt we were ready. Land warfare in the desert of California is pretty similar to the terrain and the geography of

Southern Afghanistan. And we had a hard land warfare training block. We dialed in our training specifically over the, you know, post-workup phase where you can kind of, you know we're going to deploy and we're doing a lot of operations in training that We're going to mimic, we're mimicking what we felt. We're reading in the after action reports. We knew these guys were getting into it, but we knew specifically how they were going on that person,

so we could tailor the training for that. And we had done all that. So we were, we were ready, we were ready to go. So you show up on the ground, how long are you on the ground for before? And when you hit the ground, do they like, hey, we got one in the hopper right now. We're going to rock and roll? Yeah.

So some operations are time sensitive. This is one that was not. It was shelved. And I think they wanted to, you know, and rightly so, they wanted to expose us to not only the execution of the operation, but the planning process, the relevant players, sit in on the briefing, and all of this is very valuable, who were going to talk to the air crew and all of that. So, yeah, they had one ready for us for the leadership element that had gone early. And keeping in mind most of the platoon and tasking is still back in San Diego at this point. so as soon as you show up on the ground are they like all right here's here's what we got in the books we're gonna how how how long was it before you from the time you got on the ground do they hand

you like hey come let's give you a brief a general brief of what's happening let us give you a concept of operations of what we're about to go do yeah i think this is where my memory gets a little fuzzy i think just given what ended up happening i i feel like i was on the ground well certainly no more than 48 hours yeah yeah so you show you show you up, you're getting a brief, how many guys from your task unit are there? It's like three or four? I'd say six to eight. Six to eight.

Yeah. And you guys all have, you get assigned probably jobs with, you know, the different sections or the different squads. Yeah. So I was assigned to the platoon leader from one of the two platoons in country, who you know from your task unit. Yeah. Yep.

Yep. And so we just go through. I remember. they were planning but in the final stages. And then I remember sitting on the brief. I remember going to the plywood huts, kidding up. I remember going to the flight line,

taking the trucks to the flight line. And are you thinking this time, hey, you have a good understanding of the operation, you know what we're going to do, you're going to get a good feel for it. Yeah, absolutely. And don't let my absence of memory right now

and the details of where it happened affect the impression that I just, given what happened and I don't remember where this happened. I don't remember the I remember the generalities of the operation of course but I the details escape me. What do you remember? I remember being in Canada. I remember going for a run. I remember going for a lift. I remember eating. I remember sitting in the briefing. I remember going to the plywood hut. I remember sleeping one night. I remember going to the fire pits before we launched for a chaplain-led ceremony, a ritual. You know, this is, I think, evident of combat.

It's like you have bits and pieces of memory, facts, and they can get assembled in different ways. And certainly when I talk about the operation and what happened, in order to get the complete picture, you'd have to talk to other people. My impression is my own impression, and I fully acknowledge that my memory may be distorted, but there are absolutely parts of this that I completely remember. And what is interesting to me, though, is that some of this pre-operational occurrences that I just don't really remember a lot of it. I don't know. I don't know why.

Do you remember being on the helo's going in? Yes. I remember sitting on the helo. You know, it's loud and you're on night vision goggles. No one's really talking. You could hear the pilot chatter if you want to be on that frequency. And it's probably about a 45-minute flight. I mean, the general operation was to conduct a target assault, a compound, a drug, a bizarre.

I think at this time we were getting into the counter-narcotics. You know, this is a funding source for Taliban. And this is in heavily controlled Taliban territory. There's bad dudes in this place. This is Taliban controlled village and there's going to be an assault. I'm not in the assault force element, but I'm going to be in the blocking force. And so I'd be shadowing the element that was a pre-assault detached from the main assault force. We would, you know, after disembarking the helicopters, we'd foot patrol under cover of quiet and darkness, middle of the night.

Do you remember that? Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. And just going over the plan, you know, it was just to secure the top of a hill in the element that I was in. Right. Right. So you're going to provide kind of like an Overwatch support element for as an assault is going down. Yeah.

And all this is going to happen. The assault was going to happen either right before or right at first light to have a little bit more visual clarity. I think that that's really what they wanted to do. So you remember the helo's coming in? Yeah. I remember going to the flight line. I remember sitting on the helicopter. I remember that getting off the helicopter, you know, they're departing. You wait for, you know, it's quiet again. You start foot patrolling. It's kind of, you know, offset. So going through, I remember walking, everyone's, you know, night vision goggles. So it's, I'm sure the technology has improved a lot, but back then it's green and black. And I remember, you know, the villages there look like they're from medieval times just with the mud brick. Seeing that, it's very quiet. it, we're just moving. And then, you know, the element that I was a part of detached from the main assault

force to proceed to that hill that overlooked the target compound, we were going to, we needed to clear and hold that hilltop. And there was, from satellite imagery, we knew there was an old fort up there from back when the Russians were in Afghanistan. So we needed to clear and hold that structure, but it was very crumbled at this point and own the high ground. And once we had done that, we could see. set up a commanding overwatch position with heavy weapons and this kind of thing.

So foot patrolling, we had detached from the main assault force element, foot patrolling to that hill. It's going to be about a 15, 20 minute hike to get to the top of the hills. It was not a mountain, but it was a large hill going single file, working their way up. And being led, we had a Navy explosive ordinance disposal technician up there, and he was sweeping the ground like you know as standard but it was recognized that there's a strong possibility of improvised explosive devices we'll have EOD up front and have everybody else covering behind and as we're working our way up I remember I was shadowing with the platoon commander

and then we kind of had got our way up to the top and I just started moving forward. And I've thought about this a lot. I certainly, you know, and I'll talk about it later, but you can armchair, quarterback, everything. And I'm just detaching from who I was shadowing because it didn't seem, at this point, I'm not being value added by just standing there.

And so I was going to take part. And moving forward, I was going step by step, all of a sudden, the next thing I know I'm on the ground. I want to say there was a flash of light. I didn't hear anything. I was on the ground. I didn't know what had happened. Now, this is where the experiences of combat can be different from one person to another.

And to get a complete picture, you'd have to talk to everybody that was up there. All I remember is waking up. Coming to. I don't know how long I was out. I've talked to people on that operation who are down below. They said a massive mushroom cloud went off. And that for a long time, nobody was responding on the radio. And that they thought perhaps everybody up there was dead.

All I remember is coming to. I was disoriented. It occurred to me, I must have stepped on a pressure plate. I remember that. And pressure plate below the ground, the bomb goes off. I didn't know what the bomb was, but it turns out, I'm told, 205 millimeter artillery shells wired together. The second one didn't go off.

The first one went off low order. I mean, this can destroy everybody up there, armored vehicle. But the second one didn't explode and, yeah, low order. But I'm laying there. And I just remember thinking I need my teammates. It didn't occur to me that they were dead, but I didn't know if they were alive.

I just knew I needed them. and I remember reaching up for my push to talk. I remember I got to get a man down out over the radio. And I reached up for where it should be, but it's not there. I was thinking, this is not good. And nothing's where it's supposed to be. Only my arms seemed to work. I can't see anything.

I think my helmet had been blasted off, Night Vision gone with it. I can't move. Only my arms are working. and I'm laying there for a second I just felt utterly helpless because I couldn't do anything

you want to be doing something I tried to find my push to talk it's not there in my memory the next thing that happened though my teammates are on me none of them had been injured bells rung yes but nobody

incapacitated we could not afford to have one other person incapacitated up there remote position elevated I mean just not a good situation to even have one person down, but two, really not, I mean, just if not impossible to deal with. We had a medic up there, of course. Navy explosive ordinance disposal is trying to just protect

us at this point, sweeping and digging for other, finding additional IDs, I'm told, up there. There were several. In fact, we had been walking on them. None had gone off until I found one. But the medic, fortunately, you know, responded. It wasn't injured, responded. he was trained to do. Everybody responded as they were trained to do selflessly, quickly to try to save my life. And I remember him putting on a tourniquet. You know, we practice putting these on and training, but you don't ever really crank it down like you do when you need to actually save someone's life and to actually cut off blood flow, a staunch blood flow. It's painful. Just franking that thing down. I wasn't in pain from the blast. I was in shock, but I do remember

the tourniquet getting cranked down, but that wasn't enough. So we applied another one, and then another one, and another one, and another one. I'm told it was six total, just cranking each one of them down to try to stop the blood flow to my lower body. and then I'm told that there was just this scramble going on, unbeknownst to me, this is happening all external to my own inner world right now. But to get the helicopters, it initially dropped us off, which according to the plan, we're going to go back to Kanda Har airfield of 45-minute flight away, touchdown refuel, unload an Army Special Forces team and some Afghan command.

Mando troops bringing these soldiers back to be a blocking force for when that target assault would commence. So the plan was already to bring the helicopters back, but this is now a major contingency that has to be responded to, and time and fuel and everything is going to be of the essence. Now, I'm only hearing this after the fact again, but it's going to be a race against the clock to try to get me out of there because time is of the essence. And so the guys up above, You know, they hadn't cleared the hilltop, so there's no way you can land or hover a helicopter up there. I mean, it's just too dangerous, so they got to get me down off this hill that we had taken, you know, it's 20 minutes plus to climb when we were good, not to mention now dragging someone. I seem to remember them carrying me and tripping and falling, and I'm falling from a few feet in the air.

And it just, in addition to being disdamaging to my body, it just was slow. They needed to go to the downman drag, shoulder straps of my kit dragging me. And so this is where their grit comes into play and their fitness and their desire to save my life and why I'm eternally grateful to my teammates because they were having to drag me down a steep, dark, rocky hilltop switching off dragging. And it's fatiguing to do that. Maybe one or two are going at a time and they're rotating out. the medic was attending to me.

And I remember that just, I was probably in and out of consciousness, but I don't recall that. I just recall this just happening in real time and with no interruptions. This, and people have asked, did you think you're going to die or anything? No, I didn't. I just didn't. There was no space in my mind, no capacity to think those thoughts because I was consumed, inundated by the pain.

getting dragged over. It was sharp, raggy rocks. This, I talk about the pain of six tourniquets getting applied or any physical pain like doing a marathon

or running a hell week race with a log or something. It's just, it doesn't compare to that. This was excruciating. And it was all I could do just to try to stay awake and stay awake and stay awake

and stay awake. And I think that was, my desire to live that if I could stay awake that that is my struggle to live and to not succumb. And so that was what I was focused on. And whether my brain was saying that or not, that's what was happening. I wasn't thinking thoughts of you need to stay awake in order to live. It just was stay awake. And I think at this point, it's getting very close to.

the helicopters and their fuel, time fuel calculation, bingo fuel, all of this. You know, if they hit bingo fuel, they're gone with or without me. And I'm told that I got loaded onto the helicopter really, really close to the bingo fuel mark. So, I mean, there was a lot that had to line up for that to happen. And for me to get on that helicopter, I shook Nick's hand. I remember that. I absolutely remember that. He got off the back.

They were going to continue with the operation. The tail ramp goes up and then I remember there was a light in my face and then it was out. I don't remember anything after that. Yeah, you know, working with Jason now, he's talked me through this scenario a bunch of times. That being said, I don't want to try and, you know, give his whole side of the story. But, I mean, just a couple key points. if you think a femoral bleed can kill you in a minute and a half, two minutes, and you had two of them wide open. And the guys were able to get in there and put enough turn tickets on to stop that and keep you alive.

Like that right there, how quickly they must have been done that is just a testament to the training and their determination to keep you alive. I know that there was, Jason talks about one of the seals that got on his hands and knees with the, EOD guy with their bayonets to start probing for IEDs because they realized that the IEDs that were up there weren't magnetic. So the sweeper wasn't finding them. So these two guys are on their hands and knees probing for a path to get you guys out of there. And then, you know, the OIC is getting all this stuff coordinated.

And yet, Jason usually when he talks about this, he'll mention the fact that, and actually Laif and I wrote about this same OIC when he was Laif's AOIC. like calls me calls me on the radio in a situation he's like hey this is what we've got right now we got down guys we've got a iraqi killed like he's talking in a calm cool collected voice and that's exactly what jason said this massive explosion happened and jason gives him a second and then finally he wants to know what's going on he says hey what was that and that oh i see calm colon collected said uh we've got a that was a big that was an iED we've got a badly wounded guy we're working through it at this time and then like jason just

let him work. But, um, yeah, the, all the things that fell into place, um, from your own mentality to like stay awake to the medics and other guys getting turnicets on to guys on their hands and knees with literally with their bayonets to, to try and find a way out of there. And then the guy's buddy carrying you and dragging you down. I mean, it's, uh, it's, it's a miracle that you're sitting here. Um, and the wounds were, um, horrific. You know, it wasn't, it didn't stop at your legs, right? This blast, like, tore into your guts and everything else and just absolutely horrendous.

And that's why, you know, some of the initial reports that we got back on the strand was, you know, is he going to make it? I don't know. And like I said in the beginning, when you hear a team guy say, I don't know, that's a bad sign. So, yeah, the platoons in the task unit, they really did what they were supposed to do. They did what they were trained to do. They did what they planned to do, you know. And it's a testament to our training and the determination of our guys and how much they care about each other and what they'll do to try and, you know, save their friends. Yeah.

For any of them listening, I really just appreciate it. It's all I don't even know what to say. But, you know, when you think, when I hear this, anytime I hear an external account, such as what you're talking about, Jason saying, happened, it's just, it's just a reminder to me how lucky I mean to be alive. And I'll take life like this, missing two legs any day over dying up on that hill any day. So the pilots as well.

Thank you. Doctors, medical professionals. I mean, every step along the way, people responded professionally, bravely. I remember before deployment, we're reading the after-action reports in the task unit in country at the time, which we were going to be replacing. We're doing the turnover up with. They had in a situation where an Afghan soldier stepped on an IED as well, two legs gone. And as bad as it may sound to say, that that was practice and practice in real life saving in the field. And I'm told that person later died of infection.

They were able to keep him alive in the field, later died of infection in an Afghan hospital. Because infection is a serious risk. And that is another thing that I'm very thankful for, getting dragged down that hill to not, I mean, through. ages and ages worth of goat shit and dust to not have massive infections is a miracle. And yeah, for many, many reasons, I'm very, very grateful for the fact that I'm here and that I have what I have. When did you wake up? I woke up about 10 days later, give or take a day. and I'm in what appears to be a hospital room with my mother's face about two feet away.

And I can tell you when you go to bed at night and you wake up in the morning, you have a general sense of the progression of time relative to, say, taking a nap this afternoon when you wake up. when you are in a medically induced coma for about 10 days, you wake up and you don't have any sense of time progressing. My last memories were being dragged into a helicopter at night, being on foot patrol, being at the top of this mountain. Now I wake up and I'm just all of a sudden in a hospital

with my mom's face right there. I had no, how the hell did I get here? What the hell happened is what I'm thinking? What the hell happened? And so could you talk about? immediately? Did you look at your mom? What was that? What was that awakening like? Really one of the first things I said to her, she had been summoned from the basement of the

hospital, Bethesda Naval Hospital. My mother and sister had been told what had happened. And in those 10 days had come to D.C. So they were there. My sister was up above near the ICU. She calls down to our mom drinking coffee. So she comes up and kits up in the gown. I just remember seeing her right there. And pretty quickly, I commented on the coffee breath that was hitting me. Because I'm not a coffee drinker. And she was so close to me, the coffee breath was just blasting me. I'm not a fan of coffee breath either.

But I remember no one was saying anything specific. And my mind was off. I was on some heavy painkillers, and my lower body was covered in blankets. I just, I wasn't looking down that way. Maybe I knew, but no one had said anything. And I didn't know for a fact. And I do remember asking a medical professional to the right of my bed, whether my, are my legs gone?

And that person replying, just, yeah. And that's, that's tough to hear. It's tough to hear out of the blue. It's really tough to process and to think about. You do have no idea at that point? Or did you, you said you had to let that suspicion? I feel like I feel like when I was in the medically induced coma that maybe people's conversations around me were sinking in, but I didn't know for a fact and to be then told

in a state, you know, I'm not completely lucid at this point, but like I can comprehend what that means and what that means for the future and that that is not the entire of what's going on. Your legs are amputated above the knees. Your pelvis is shattered. You have an external fixator, contraption sticking out of you. Don't know how long that's going to be in.

You have a couple bags attached to you, one of which is a colostomy bag. And I didn't know what that was, but once someone explained it to me, I'm thinking, okay, that's something people don't want to have normally. A bladder, too, coming out of my bladder. My fingers are in, casts and I had a burning fever and this I had a NG tube up my nose down my throat into my

stomach I was going through surgery Monday Wednesday Friday there was one week I remember Monday Wednesday Thursday Friday surgery and these are surgeries that are at a minimum seven hours sometimes 10 12 there's 14 hours surgeries I mean I was clocking 20 30 something hours a week of surgery time easy week after week after week after week. And so my intestines weren't working. And actually with all that I had going on, this NG tube up my nose down my throat to try to decompress my stomach because the intestines weren't working was the bane of my existence because I wasn't allowed to eat or drink anything because my stomach wasn't functioning. So I was fed and hydrated by IV. So you can imagine how dry your throat

gets. You cannot drink a single sip of water. I was allowed to take some ice chips, but In order to talk to anybody, I had to chew gum to generate the saliva to do so. And I had a lot of people coming in the room wanting to talk. I mean, on the day that I woke up, I'm told there were over 70 people in the visiting room, creating a stressful environment for my mother. I wanted to rip that energy tube out, but I knew they'd put the thing back in, and I'd be awake when they put it in. And I was awake at one point when they did put it in, not because I ripped it out,

but it is not fun to have that thing inserted. And then, yeah, this fever, this inexplicable. fever. We thought it was infection, but it was an infection, but I just had this burning fever. But the worst part about that was that this fever combined with a bad mental reaction that I was having to the painkiller. I wasn't on the right kind of painkiller that worked with my mind. And so you can imagine a bad fever, a bad reaction to the painkillers, nightmares. delirium all centered around Afghanistan, my last memories. I remember one, and these are, these are as real as I'm talking to you right now, these nightmares, delirium. I mean, just

it was, I'm in this just like we're talking right now. There's no ability to look from an outside perspective and say, okay, this isn't real, you're going to get through this, you're going to wake up. You're in it. My platoon calling me a coward for being, not on the deployment with them. And this kind of thing, being on a foot patrol, getting dismembered by some kind of rack machine, I mean, just awful stuff. And so this is really the ground zero low point for me,

waking up in an ICU room, finding out this is going on, and then just struggling. How long is this sort of bottom time last for? I was in the ICU for three weeks, right off the bat. I ended up going back there again, but three weeks, not eating, not drinking, NG tube, and week after week of surgery. So it was a good 20 plus days of just really just hell. I mean, there was a service member in the ICU room next to me. He was a helicopter.

Probably had been shot through the head. I'd heard about him, managed to land the helicopter. And at one point, he died while I was in the ICU. Only two visitors could come at a time. You're hooked up to every contraption on earth. Monitoring your body, your body signals. They can't ever make the room dark. You're close to the nurse's station. You can't sleep.

Every hour they're checking you. So I wasn't sleeping. I remember if you took away surgery time, that it was an astonishingly long time that I had last slept. And then what I could fall asleep, it would just be the it would be delirium nightmares at one point my sister tells me that at about five or six in the morning a ICU nurse who sees a lot I mean this is a combat ICU room in a hospital calls are crying saying that you're you need to get in here and talk try to help your brother he's

just breaking down I don't I don't know which one of those nightmares that I've described this was but there was just like a total bottom point. I was on Dilaudid, which is a very powerful opiate. They did shift me over to morphine, and that was much better for not just pain management, but also for my psyche and everything. Then do you start like making a turning point and they wrap up some of the surgeries

and is it like a slow crawl out of the pit? It is. In addition to dealing with, some of the factors of disconnection from the platoon, and that was also going through my mind, there was progress and then there'd be setbacks. They'd say, it's, okay, it's three steps forward, two steps back. You're just going to have to get used to this.

Well, if there's three steps forward, they're probably like 33 steps back in the beginning, because it seemed like that there would be setbacks. I alluded to the fact that I couldn't eat or drink for a few weeks. At one point, I'm going to do the swallow test. This is a big step here. If I can eat some chocolate pudding and swallow it okay, I've passed, and then I can maybe actually take some food and not have to be fed by IV. So I took the chocolate pudding, and I mean, it tasted really good.

I hadn't had any food in weeks. And I remember just a couple minutes later, it all just comes back out and fails back on the NG tube, you know, IV. I had a routine surgery on my hand. My right hand was damaged, and there needed to be a plate put in. I had a tendon that was damaged. And so a very routine surgery. And I was actually out of the ICU at this point. I wake up from the surgery and I'm back in the ICU.

What happened? Why am I here again? And I got the admiral of the hospital on down coming through apologizing. Something bad happened in this surgery. what was it? Well, I apparently had an normal amount of potassium in my system in the resident anesthesiologists.

These are training hospitals, so they're always training new military doctors. The resident anesthesiologist either messed up or just didn't take note of the amount of potassium in my system and gave, administered a anesthetic that releases potassium. So my system in the middle of this very routine surgery

flooded with potassium and my heart stopped. I'm told by the surgeon who responded brilliantly that she had to put the chest paddles on me and shock my heart back into function. And so I wake up from, I basically died and had to be resuscitated in a routine surgery after going through all of this weeks later. It's, I mean, to me that's unacceptable, but this, you know, you may think you're over the hill, but you're not.

anytime you go into surgery it's a it's a risk like it seems hard to and like a lot of things had to fall the line to get you to survive coming off the battlefield but it's like just the beginning just the beginning I mean you know I'm in addition to realizing all the medical complications that I have

you're thinking what is my life going to look like how am I going to do basic things am I going to be in a wheelchair am I even going to get out of this hospital am I going to get through surgery? Will I get to walk again? How am I going to shower? Can I drive a car?

Dating girls? What's that going to be like? This was my first combat deployment. This was the first operation within the deployment. My platoon wasn't even on the ground yet. And so it just felt like, you know, why me? I would tell myself, well, okay, let's just say, if someone had to, up on that hill had to stop, like, you should want it to be you.

You should say, I'm the one who can handle this. I survived. I can make a good life. Do I really feel that? I'm not just saying that. I want to believe that it should have been me if it had to happen to someone. Do I really believe that? You know, this job felt like my calling is every, the only thing I ever wanted to do, really, in my career.

And it just seemed like it was gone. My identity was very much wrapped up in being a team guy. Yeah, okay, you can still stay in the teams, but guess what? I had a senior ranking officer come at one point in visit, and I was trying to do physical therapy and really was focused on my physical therapy, not talking to this individual so much, certainly not talking about career plans, and it was kind of saying, well, you know, you can stay in the teams, we can send you to acquisition school. And I'm just, like, this, that's just not, you know.

So, okay, you're not going to do this job the way in which you'd been doing it, even if you can stay in the community. But as I said, you're either in a platoon or you're out of a platoon. And I'm going to be out of a platoon. People say, yeah, but, you know, as an officer, you progress through it. You're going to be, even if this didn't happen, you'd be, you know, you'd be administrated. You'd be doing some staff tours. And yeah, okay, this happened on the first operation within the deployment.

You don't get it. It's just, it's not the same. And, but most importantly, it was just, I'm not going to. to be on this deployment with my teammates. If this had to have happened to me, let it happen at the very end of the deployment. It was what I was thinking. But to be disconnected like that is tough. And so in addition to a physical component, I think there was absolutely a mental challenge that I was also dealing with. What was the first, like, what was the first positive step or the positive light that you saw? I remember one day, and that,

this is very basic, but they were saying, okay, we're going to work on getting you up out of Betty. I had this shattered pelvis. It was surgically fixed with two screws. I had this external fixator that is a contraption. The stayed in place for about 100 days. They took it out surgically at one point, but that meant that I could not. You had an external fixator on your pelvis for over 100 days. Yeah, drilled into the, it's two crossbars extending out. You can't, I happen to be a stomach and side sleeper and you know in addition to everything else going a part of the reason with the sleep maybe it's just that I couldn't turn so I'm stuck on my back and you when this thing gets taken out surgically they're okay you're ready to get we need to get you out of your back

off of the bed because you're developing bed sores and this kind of thing but it's not going to be easy to balance like sitting up it's not a big deal I set up they like two one person on either side of me, sit me up out of the hospital bed, and they let go, and it was just like fall back. Is this because your abs were, or you just didn't know how to do it yet? I think my, the system of balance in the flu, I don't know if we have fluids that kind of dictate our balance. That just was gone after being bedridden for a hundred days. I mean, definitely I had atrophied in strength, but I think just the whole system of

balance was out of whack. So this is still not like, I'm asking for. That was like, but, but, but. After a few efforts, I was able to hold it. And it was like doing like a plank or something. You know, where you're just, you're shaking and you're holding and you're concentrating. But I was able to hold it for a little bit of time. And I felt, okay, I'm out of bed.

Okay, that's awesome. At some point, this means I'm going to be able to transfer into a wheelchair now. And then when I get in this wheelchair, I'm going to be doing laps around this hospital. I'm going to do as much as many. So you were fired up immediately. To get out to get to get outside. I mean, that was actually one of the other challenges. When I became an inpatient, it just didn't make sense to me.

Why can't I just get into a courtyard just to get outside? If it's a sunny day, like, that would be awesome. I love being outside. I'm outdoors. Was there a reason for it? Is it infections? What is it? Well, I, the cynical interpretation is that when you're in an ICU forget about it,

but when you're in the inpatient status, there's a nurse who's balancing now four patients total. I see you. It's one-on-one. You have undevoted attention from your nurse, but now you're getting juggled with a few other patients. And so I had a lot of, I still had some apparatus attached to the bed, and all of that would take a team of people, not to mention the on-duty nurse who then might not be able to attend to the other patients. So there was a logistic aspect to this that I think was challenging. At the end of the day, you know, I felt this means so much to me, Can't you just do that? I just want to get outside. And there was one, they're going to make it happen finally. And this was after a while, I think, longer than it should have been. But, you know,

I don't want to be too reprimanding of them. They got out into the courtyard. It was a sunny day. It was kind of like the sun had come through. And it just was a very powerful moment for me. Just to be outside. My mom and sister were with me. And, okay, I got outside. That's a step. eventually get into the wheelchair and eventually I was able to start doing laps around the hospital pushing myself. I don't want people to push me, but to be able to just cover ground on my own is I think a basic human need that needs to be fulfilled. And when you're getting pushed in a wheelchair or on a bed by someone else, it's not the same thing. So it's about me getting a little bit. wheelchair and be able to move. So then when when did you start making what was the next big step that

you took? Like you're you're now in a wheelchair, you're able to get yourself around. Yeah, I think the next step was there's going to be a day pass coming up. Okay, a day pass means not the whole day, but a couple hours I'm going to get to go out of this hospital with my mother and sister out to dinner. I'll be in a wheelchair and it'll be about two hours and you come back. So I'm in anticipation of this laying there in bed and thinking, wow, I'm going to leave this hospital. What's that going to be like, that's awesome. Oh wait. People are going to look at me. I don't look right. I don't look normal. I look different. I'm used to being anonymous. nothing you know don't stand out really it's an average guy now I look different radically

different what are people going to stare at me what's what's going to be like and I was just thinking you know I'm going to have to get used to this is my future reality whether I'm in a wheelchair whether I'm on prosthetic legs you look different and if you do not get used to this somehow and eventually you're going to be bitter for the rest of your life So I started thinking along these lines of body image and stuff, whenever I get these prosthetics and I don't have them yet, whenever that is, I don't know when it's going to be. I'm going to boost them up a little bit. So I'm a little taller. I was 5'9 and I was thinking 6'foot would be pretty good.

If people are going to look at me, I might as well be taller. But I remember getting on that day pass, you know, I'm sure. How long had it been from like from you showed up there until now? you're getting your first day pass? I would say two solid months. Two months, which at the time, you know, at the time, it seemed like a long time in the grand scheme of things. Things were moving fairly rapidly.

I had the bag still. I'm about to be discharged from Bethesda, about to be an outpatient. First, I got to go to Walter Reed. That's where I'm going to do the physical therapy. I've got to be an inpatient there for a few days just to get in their system. Did the day pass. my mother and sister were being taken care of by special operations command. They had a program to provide housing, apartment out in town for the family of service members

and also for the service members. For me, whenever I am allowed to be out of this hospital, this is a privilege and really a luxury that Army and Marine Corps soldiers non-socom didn't have. At the time, I didn't know any of this, but yeah, this is. This was very fortunate that my mother and sister had an apartment out on town, that apartment that I would be able to go to. So the next thing in this is just to get that discharge to become an outpatient. And then after that, it's you're starting physical therapy.

You're going to learn how to walk again. Okay. Roger that. So now you start learning to walk. Yeah. And this was. And you're an outpatient. So now you're living out in town?

Living with my sister. Our mother had gone back to Kansas to resume work. And, you know, she felt like things were in a good place. but she had been allowed to go to the East Coast covered long as you need, but, you know, I'm living with my sister. My sister was a nurse in New York City, quit her job to come down and take care of me. And when I was an inpatient, other people were taking care of me, but there absolutely was a phase where I was ready to be out of the hospital, but I was no means ready to take care of

myself and live out in town. No way. And I'm a single guy. And so the fact that my sister did that is just so. so awesome and she would drive me to the hospital every day for my physical therapy and it's now it's okay you're going to get fitted for prosthetics you're going to do physical therapy every day okay that's working out i'm going to be working out every day and this is a new sport it's kind of how i thought about it you're going to learn how to walk on these prosthetics first you're going to have

short ones they don't bend then you're going to have bending ones because i don't have knees so the prosthetics are going to be my knee joint and it's going to be tough but it's you got as much time as you need and every Monday through Friday every day you get two hours of physical therapy and then I have a lot of other appointments with the various departments that I fell under plastic surgery orthopedic surgery etc so that that was just hospital days end up being in the hospital four to six hours just about every day as an outpatient coming in driving there with my sister coming back at the end of the day And then how long was it before you were up on your kind of like normal full size prosthetics? Yeah, I'd say that was, so my goal was, okay, my platoon is coming back in March.

If I could be on the knee prosthetics, the ones that bend, even if I have crutches or canes, that's okay, but just to be there on the flight, like not in a wheelchair. If I can get up on the prosthetics. So first you have to go through the short legs. that was late January, I want to say. All of February I started eventually learning how to walk on the knees because they bend under you, it's really difficult.

And keeping in mind that I'd atrophied a lot, you need a lot of hip strength and core strength. Even now, this walking a long distance, because they're heavy, it's fatiguing. So you can imagine when you're really, really at this low point is very difficult. I would just be so tired at the end of the day. I remember thinking at the time,

you've got two hours of physical therapy. what's automatically provided. The physical therapists are working with other service members, and they don't have time to be with you for four hours or five hours, but I was thinking, okay, if I do twice the amount of physical therapy per day, I'll get out of here and half the time. The math doesn't work like that. But when I got to say when I got to Walter Reed, physical therapy,

I was surrounded by dozens of injured service members. And some of these people were missing three limbs, four limbs, four limbs, three limbs. I remember one day looking at the therapy mat next to me, it's pretty easy to look around and you can see a quadruple amputee, or in this case, a triple amputee, I don't know what was going on in his head, but he was working hard right then and there

to make his life better. And so once I got in that environment, it becomes competitive and it also provides a sense of perspective. I'm not saying that perspective just let me, okay, I feel better about myself because others have it worse, but it did allow me to really highlight the unique circumstances, the conditions that I should be thankful for. Just realize, okay, I've got arms that work. I've got a brain that works. I can see, I can hear, I can talk. I'm not badly burnt. I'm not blinded. I'm alive and we know people who are not here that I mean their families would get anything for them

to be in this situation just be missing two legs but to be alive I know that and so I'm going to be thankful for what I have not focused on what I'm missing that that that is really what that environment taught me at what point did you start saying to yourself you're going to start doing you know like wild shit again well you know I I I really like, I was really like hiking and running, trail running, just get out in the woods. I actually did a couple extreme hike, actually in hindsight, stupid hiking excursions, like either before or after deployment, because that's when you get the most amount of time, these like pre- or post-deployment leave excursions.

But my point was, I just like being outside, and I like being active. And so I was definitely thinking, I want to run. And that's a good goal to have, because in order to run, you need to be able to be to walk so that kept me motivated and and I started I got a hand cycle and I'm in D.C. It's not a not a great one but I at least was able to start getting outside and just do it by myself on a bike show near the apartment where my sister and I were living and were you were you able to meet the platoon when they came home yeah yeah so what was that like so the generosity of someone affiliated with the Hotel Del Coronado

put a room up for my sister and I to go out to San Diego Coronado. Stay at the Hotel Del ocean front. Well, I got the ocean front room. She had the other one that didn't face the ocean. But, and then the platoon redeployment bird kept getting delayed. So like this, he was supposed to be like a couple days.

It ended up being like a two weeks stay at the Hotel Dell waiting. And I was at North Island on the flight line when they, got off. I think I may have had one cane, but that was, that was for me, at least a very proud moment to just be, at least be standing. And I don't know if any of them knew when they got off the bird that I was going to be there. I don't know what they were told, but, you know, I shook everybody's hand and then, and then the festivities commenced. So back to the hand cycle, you're starting to think about being able to do that. You're starting to push yourself. What was it?

Didn't you end up doing the New York City Marathon at some point? Oh, I did. I did. This was on a hand cycle. And part of it was like hand cycle and then run the last stretch. I think I hand cycled 16 miles, ran 10. And just getting out there like that and getting a sense of my athleticism, regaining a sense of my physicality was huge to realize that I can still be an athlete.

There's this whole world of adaptive sports, just about. anything that you want to do or had done you can do maybe in a different maybe it's going to take your upper body to do it or maybe you're going to be doing in prosthetics but that you can be an athlete and then I had heard about this thing called the Paralympics and then that was very very intriguing to me as well what did you heard about it well I heard it's basically the Olympics for people with physical disabilities and it's not the special Olympics it's different it's under the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic committee it is it's competitive, it's difficult.

You'll get world-class coaching. You can represent the country overseas. It is a direct representation of the United States overseas. And you can be part of a team. There's all these different sports out there. There's summer, there's winter. It's just like the Olympics. Did you have any inkling of what you would be trying to do in there?

I was thinking something along the lines of running or cycling. I actually, there was a recruiter or liaison at Walter Reed, the clear place to find athletes for the parallel of the program was Walter Reed. You got a young, motivated soldiers, Marines, troops that are looking to get, you know, looking to get after it. Yeah, yeah. And so they had Rob Jones in there, right? Yeah, yeah.

I was injured before Rob and Rob is. Maybe a year before or something like that. Something like that. Yeah. So this is just, you know, this environment fed off each other. You know, Rob was just so fired up to get back after it. And there's some people not maybe, maybe being an athlete wasn't their thing. Some people want to get into a career.

Some people were struggling. Some like Rob were just just doing all sorts of impressive stuff. And I think you hear about someone before you, oh, that person was a double amputee above the knee. They did this and that. And, oh, wow, this is possible. And then it creates, there's a competitive environment. Rob, he's just a little bit after, saw me running.

And then he's like, you know, I'm going to run, but I'm going to run faster than Dan, you know, this kind of thing. And so it was, it just was a good environment. It makes me think, if I had gone through this in a vacuum and a bubble, would the outcome have been the same? perhaps. I think it helped, though, to have that sense of perspective

and to see what other people are dealing with and in some cases really struggling with. Military medicine can keep people alive these days in ways just not possible. And so you're seeing, I mean, it was not uncommon to see triple amputees, quadruple amputees, and I think there was a bond in that environment

that transcended your service, your rank, what you did in your service that is different than the bond I had in the teams, but it was very special. So the recruiters come from the Paralympics and they come scoping out at Walter Reed looking for some motivated troops who want to get so. And one of these guys introduced himself to you or something?

one of the yeah one of the recruiters she asked do i want to go to san diego for sports camp yeah that sounds awesome trip to san diego and i go out there not really expecting anything but really it's a trip to san diego i'll get to do some adaptive sports sounds good and the coaches two coaches from the paralympic nautic ski team that's cross-country skiing and biathlon approached me and hey you ever thought about doing biathlon i thought that was running and swimming it's cross-country skiing with get shooting. That sounds pretty cool. Well, hey, you know, they had like an indoor ski org there and like a little laser shooting station. Okay, this isn't on snow, but do you want to come to snow a few months? It's August right now, November, late November, West Yellowstone, Montana,

camp. Okay, I'm there. Now I still had a colostomy bag. I wasn't done with surgery. The one major surgery I still had remaining was to take away the colostomy bag. And this sounds awesome. Awesome. I go out to West Yellowstone. I don't know how to dress as an amputee with my stumps. I don't know how to, I don't know the clothing. I don't have all that. I mean, this thing called a sit ski, which now, I mean, now at a higher level, it's all carbon fiber. It's custom fit to me. It's lightweight, strong. But back then it was like a lawn chair on two skis. And it was not an athletic device. But, and then, okay, cross-country skiing, all you got is two poles. You got to use your upper body, your arms, your, your, core, your back, and you don't get to use your lower body, you're strapped into this thing. How are you going to stop? How are you going to turn?

Okay, we're figuring this out. My future teammates are just racing by me. It's like, wow, they're fast. I don't know if I could ever get to that level, but at a minimum, just being outside. West Yellowstone, Montana is one of my favorite places of cross-country ski. It's near big sky. It's just pine trees. You feel like you're in the woods.

Yeah, the trails are machine grew. But once you're out, it's quiet. There was days, we were just getting, it was a good snow. This is late November. It's not always consistent, but that year, fortunate for me, because if it would have been a dry year and canceled, who knows? But it was dumping snow, which isn't always good for cross-country skiing when you're trying to power through with your poles.

But more than anything, I just had this connection with nature. That was so important. I had been running on the prosthetics. I wasn't trail running. I wasn't running, you know, out. in the woods. I was hand cycling a little bit in DC. The cars honk at you. It's not a feeling of nature. So this was this was just different and I really just wanted to keep doing it. And so then what happens? What's the course? Because is that that ends up being what your first

competitive sport is. Is that right? It's all I've done in the Paralympics and I, for me, it started because I just wanted to be in the woods. And then it was like, okay, you could actually start doing this full full time training and get better and just see where you can go. Maybe you'll make a Paralympic team get to go to the Paralympic Winter Games. I'm still on active duty. I'm still in the hospital.

I saw this surgery. I got through the surgery. Big recovery. They cut open my core again to take, to reconnect my intestinal system. I still have orders at Walter Reed. I got to get out of the Navy. I had a conversation with the head seal admiral.

He was like, well, we'll support you if you want to do this. three years of training, trained for the Sochi Paralympics, assign you to Fort Carson, Colorado, 10 Special Forces Group. I'll be training up in Winter Park. I had met a coach up there in Winter Park, and they got snow. They got a training area. So I took orders.

I mean, again, I'm very grateful to the NSW community for doing that. For me, I just, I could have gotten out, but there was something special about still being in and still training for this sport to go represent the country. And so the way I saw it, I have orders to move out to Colorado and to train. And I'm going to train and train and train. I probably trained a little bit too much

and maybe overtrained in that desire to kind of work through my injury and to show that I've overcome it. And so that was for the sochi. So how did that end up going? Yeah, I showed up there. A newer athlete. I've been doing the sport for three years.

living and training in Colorado. And now that I look back on that time, I'm just wondering why did someone who lost their legs and within two years move out to Colorado didn't know anybody? I knew that local coach, just go train and a sport that like 98% of my training was by myself, hours. In the off-season cross-country skiers, roller ski,

I had this mountain board apparatus, so I'm on the dirt roads out there and just training and training and training. Probably working through some things, but it just felt good to be an athlete. I could train for this sport, be part of a team, follow a training plan, see progress, set long-term goals, work towards those long-term goals, put the skills in the training of the test overseas, represent the United States if I can make a Paralympic team. This seemed like a logical thing to do for me coming out of my time in the teams and in the service.

So but I'm still in the service and I'm representing you know the Navy and all of that I put a little bit of pressure on myself I showed up at the I did make the team for Sochi and we know now in retrospect that Russians were doing performance enhancing drugs that's not necessarily verifiable but I think plenty of people have come out and said that that was happening and maybe don't have the sample but there was there was a very tough competition cross-country skiing is a tough sport The distances range from 15, 18 kilometer races down to sprints. What one did you do? I did six races at the Sochi Games. And that's pretty standard.

So the longest, so it would have been six races in cross country three, 15 kilometer, 10 kilometer, and then 800 meters sprint. And then in biathlon, 15 kilometer, 12.5 kilometer, 7.5 kilometer. These six races happen in like eight days. It's intense. You don't get a lot of recovery. And I was kind of in the 10th, 12th place area, 14th. The fields aren't as deep as in the Olympics, but they're still very competitive.

And I made the sprint final that one and got six out of six on the sprint final, but made it to the final. I exited Sochi, to be honest, a little bit disappointed because I think I had put too much pressure on myself. And you think you over-trained, too? I think so. I was living at very high altitude in Winter Park, Colorado, Frazier, Colorado, living at 8,700 feet. It's altitude has pros and cons. A lot of people think it's a, it's just a win-win. You're up at high altitude training for an endurance sport, but you do develop the red blood cells that improved efficiency in your transportation system internally, but you cannot train to the extent that you can at sea level. And so your neuromuscular system, is not performing at the. So what's it best to do, both? Yeah. Like high altitude and.

Yeah, the model is live high, train, low. If you have unlimited funds, you would be at sea level, or in this case, where there's snow, but lower altitude and you would let, you would pressurize your house to be at like 10,000 feet. Assuming, assuming you can recover, you step out the door. Yeah. Yeah. And then when you, you know, you spend a lot of time of your house and you go out and then

now you're at, you're at sea level. So you have the red blood cells from the altitude inside, and then now you're training fast and hard at a higher tempo, a higher intensity than you can at altitude. So you make it to the Olympics. You come in sixth, 12th, 10th, whatever, and you're all kind of pissed at yourself because you didn't do something. Well, I think, you know, as I look back,

I mean, what was I expecting? I was nude. I mean, do you want to just be given this? Yeah, and like, it's like there's not as much reward if it was easy. but the other thing is I think I put too much focus on the end result that there's actually a different focus. The focus should just be on the process, training, execution of the training plan, modifying as necessary, making adjustments at the end of every season based on what went well and what could have gone better, and that if I can make some changes to equipment,

make some changes where I'm living, I moved to New England. And so I'd be at a lower altitude and that if I can execute the process of training and preparation that, and then, of course, on race day, go as dig deep and go as hard as I can in a smart way, that at that point, you got to be happy with what happens at that point. So I ended up training for the next cycle, and these are four-year cycles. And you moved to New England, go to school, right? Yeah, to use my GI Bill. And I just, I had some friends from the teams who had gone to the Kennedy School of government and wanted to go there.

It was a one-year program. I was very much still training. A little skeptical of whether I could get in the training hours that I needed. I didn't know how demanding the academic program was going to be, but I found that with discipline and time management, go to bed early, wake up my training zone, 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. go to class at 10, the rest of the day, and then recover. And I often in Colorado, prior to in the train up for the 2014 games, through boredom and through just a desire to be training and thinking, you know, this is like a buds mentality. More is better.

Yeah, more is better. If you train twice as hard, you're going to get twice as fast. It doesn't really work that way. And you don't, yeah. If you, there's days, you training has to be hard. Yeah. But then you have to give, you obviously know. Well, I'm actually obviously may not know this.

I'm like the worst. Yeah. Echo is in full support of like heavy rest. Make sure you're recovered. Yeah. So you're training. So when you're going to school, you're training basically two hours a day. Yeah.

And whereas in Colorado, I've been training like three to four at high altitude, not giving myself the recovery. And then you start getting dialed in. You got a good coach out there that's helping you get dialed in on all this? Well, a physiologist and it was a remote coach. coaching, but yeah, I mean, looking, like, uploading workouts, getting feedback. And, and then in the winter, I was exploring the, okay, because it was 20, the first year I skied, I did not ski with the team. The next year, I needed to ski with the team internationally to be able to qualify for the

games in 2018. And I was working out, okay, like, I can train up in Vermont. There's a really good center at Craftsbury, Vermont for Nordic skiing. And there's a coach who will help me with biathlon. I can drive there. If I take, you know, compress classes to be like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I can drive up there Thursday afternoon, train Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. And then there's a ski track in Boston. I can't do biathlon there, but it's a what? A ski track. Sorry, ski track. Oh, okay. Yeah. The, uh, they make snow from the Charles River. And it's about a time, like 15 minute drive so I can do a work out there. And I'm like, I think is possible. So I think I can be a student and train. And how hard was school was was

they pushing you hard? It was difficult if you did all the work and if you did all the reading and I mean I don't know many people that can actually do all the reading. I was also training as a full-time athlete. Yeah. You got it done is what I'm yeah I got it done and I got good grades. I think I think they're not in the business of trying to separate people at you know you're there. Didn't you go to then you go to then you go to divinia School as well? So what was that all about? I had gone to the Kennedy School and I really liked being in class, in learning from people, and seeing new ideas. You don't have to agree with them, but it's, I'd gone to a military school for college. I just thought this is, this is a good opportunity.

And I met some students from the Divinity School and they said it's not, it's not what it sounds like. You can go to the ministry if you're inclined, but there's this other program. It's just an academic study of religion or questions that religion is trying to answer. And so I thought, well, I'll apply. And I was accepted. I studied ethics there. And I got to take some classes through electives. This is a wonderful program in the sense that it was broad,

and I can kind of just take whatever interested me. I took some classes on Buddhism, and I'm not a Buddhist, but there was something in my exposure to that way of thinking that really resonated in the athlete in me. this idea that, you know, life is suffering and I can identify with that. Even when you are happy, you're suffering because you know that that happiness is not permanent and that there's a way to, that this suffering comes ultimately from our desire and craving for happiness, that there's a way to end this suffering.

and that is through a process, but the process can involve mindfulness and meditation. And so I was exposed to that. And I think when I was in the teams, I would have scoffed at this, but I was thinking, now I'm of the point where I am trying to get every 10th of a percent of performance that I can.

And if this was the difference between getting fourth place and getting third and I didn't do it, well, I just at least wanted to know. I tried everything. that could help me be a better human, a better athlete. And in biathlon, the reality is you're skiing hard. And you have to come into the range and you have to place five shots precisely with other athletes next to you shooting, an announcer saying something,

a crowd, your heart beating, maybe numb fingers from the cold, pressure, knowing you need to hit the shots, that if you can cultivate an ability to be aware of, your mind and be aware more quickly when your mind has drifted away from the task right in front of you, that that could be a competitive advantage, not to mention cultivating this ability to just focus and to focus on your breath or to have the ability to, through breathing, re-center yourself. I think that this is actually something that I could have benefited from highly when I was in the teams. The ability to be aware.

of where your mind is. It's almost like you're developing an outside view of your mind and you can see when it's gone away. And so I started developing this kind of practice just through some classes I took. And that kind of exposure was exactly why I did the Divinity School program. Yeah, I've been running into a lot of that stuff.

You know, I, in the book, Leadership Strategy and Tactics, I talk about how my very first platoon, we were doing gas oil platforms and I basically, we were online, no one's making a call, and I kind of stepped back and looked around and made a call and got praised for it. You know, I was kind of expecting as a new guy to get told shut up,

but it was like the initial idea in my head of taking a step back and detaching and being in a position mentally where you're looking around and you're not in the problem, but you're outside the problem. And that was really beneficial to me. And then, you know, I've come to find out, like, for instance, when you take a step back and you, well, when your, when your field of vision opens up more broadly, it relaxes you. That's why when you go to the ocean and you look at the sunset, you feel relaxed.

That's why when you stand on a mountaintop and you look out over, you know, vast span of land, you feel more relaxed. Those things, those are physiological things that happen because as a, as a animal, if there's a movement in the jungle, like a tiger, you need to focus on that and it amps up your heart rate and it gets you ready to, fight puts adrenaline your system yet the opposite of that is when you when you open up your field of vision it becomes it relaxes you so kind of unintentionally for me as a young seal I figured out of hey if I take a step back and look around I'm more relaxed it was more of a byproduct it wasn't I was doing it too relaxed and then the other thing that I figured out was like anytime you'd hear someone panicking on the radio screaming you're like hey what I don't I need people over here and whatever and so you'd make fun of that guy we'd make fun of those people

And so I would always, when I was going to key up my radio, I'd take a breath. And it turns out that when you take a breath, that also calms you down. So I kind of stumbled into these things and other things throughout my career that now when I either learn about the physiological, the physiological things that happen in our body that also people use things like meditation to drive these same physiological things. I kind of like got lucky and stumbled upon them. And just, you know, now I'm sort of starting to put two and two together now as I get older and learn more about the world. You know, these physiological things that I sort of stumbled upon, people go out and seek and figure out. And, you know, same thing with like jiu jihitsu.

If you lose your temper during jihitsu, you're going to lose. Like if you start getting mad, you're going to lose. So I realized, oh, how do I keep that in check? Oh, you know, same thing. Take a breath. Don't let, don't get caught up in the moment. And I got very, very lucky to kind of stumble on these things in my career so that by the time I was, you know, I was in a platoon commander and a task unit commander. I was like, oh, yeah, take a step back, look around, make sure you don't get caught up in the problem.

Interesting stuff. Yeah, I think this is an opportunity. For me, it would be 10, 12 minutes a day. And I just get in a quiet space, close my eyes and try to follow my breath. And I can use this in an opportunity to visualize a race, how I want the race to go, but also some things that might go wrong during the race and how I want to react, miss a shot. Sometimes the next shot is in anger.

You get another shot? You take five shots on five targets. And you only get five shots. Five shots. If you miss, it's a penalty lap or a one minute penalty, depending on the length of the race. Got it. And you do either two or four stages. So that's either a 10 shot total race.

or a 20 shot total race. And I've noticed in the past that if I have a miss, the next shot is almost like an anger shot or a frustration shot instead of, so as an example, this could be an opportunity to visualize missing a shot. That doesn't mean it's going to predispose me to miss that shot. It just means I can work on having the response to a miss

in the event that that happens. And the kind of response I want to have, which is it's just the next shot. It's one shot at a time. Just take the next shot. But it's also a chance to track my breathing, which is very critical in shooting, the timing of your breath with the trigger squeeze and side alignment.

So what you notice is that your brain just goes all over the place when you're trying to focus in a calm room. You are only doing that. You don't need to eat right now. You don't need to drink. You don't need to sleep. You don't need to talk to anybody. You're socialized.

you're just tracking your breath and I can't even do it my mind's going all over the place but guess what happens during a race my mind's going all over the place so the quicker that I can notice when my mind has wandered and bring it back to the breath

this is just a simple exercise to just notice when your mind has wandered and bring it back to the task at hand this for a tactical leader or anyone in tactical environment or an athletic environment I think this is this is golden stuff and it just

takes a little bit of discipline, doing it every day, and just working on this ability to notice your mind, just notice where it's going. It's not a problem that it's drifted. It's going to drift. It's just working on noticing that it's drifted a little bit quicker and then bring it back. So you work the breath, you work the skills, you're at the right altitude, you're training, you're going to school, you rolled into the 2018 Paralympic Games. And you're ready to rock and roll. I think so. In retrospect, I was very much ready to rock and roll.

Where were those games? They were in Pyongchang, South Korea. And I would be going as a full-time graduate student. But what that meant was that just lucky for me, it lined up with spring break. And I was going to skip a week of class. So I'd be gone for two weeks total, but only missed one week of class. My spring break was competing in Korea. I didn't have any sense of pressure or expectation.

My competitors aren't in graduate school. I don't, you know, no one expects me to do anything. I'm not one of the people that the media pre-picks to do well. I didn't have good results. I qualified, whatever. But I've been training going up to Vermont. I was ready to go. Showed up.

The plan was to do six races in that about eight-day span, three biathlon, three cross-country. The first race was the morning after the opening ceremony. Didn't go to the opening ceremony. I wanted to be rested. The first race is a sprint biathlon. which is a tough race because you don't have time to take that couple of breath extra to hit the, you know, you got to, because it's such a short ski race. It's a 7.5 kilometer ski race.

You got to go hard and you got to shoot fast and get your shots. It was a windy day. And not to mention of all the races to put first, I think that's like the hardest one because you're amped up. And in biathlon, I have a different optimal mental state than I do in cross country and cross-country. I want to be just ready to go. It's like psycho, right? Yeah, like I am going to.

There's no holding back. Barry myself on this race. And then biathlon, if you have that attitude. In Sochi, the first race off the bat was the sprint biathlon. And like, I came in way too hot and missed three shots. I'm like way too hot. But that was a learning point. And in Sochi, I also learned, do not look at the big screen that has the real time race results.

I'd ski by and look at it and see where I want. Don't do that. Don't listen to the announcer. it comes in one ear out the other like I had learned a lot of lessons that I was going to rigidly try to apply and just take one race at the time don't think about the next race if a race goes bad or if even five minutes ago something bad happened in this race it's gone the only thing you can do is affect right now I can't affect five minutes ago if I do things properly now the future will be the way I want it to be but I can't be it does no good to think

about the future. All I can do is act right here and right now. What's right in front of me. If it's a hill, I'm going to attack the hill. I'm not going to be thinking about what's going to happen in three minutes when I hit the shooting range. So that was kind of my mindset. This was informed by some of the classes I had taken and just I was going to apply this and just see how it goes. You know, the first race, skied the first lap. We had good skis. It was a hilly course. This is a good advantage for me. Windy day. Went through. First shot hit. Second hit. third shot hit, fourth shot hit, fifth shot hit, get out, go, bypass the penalty loop, all right, good start.

Ski the second lap. It's about seven minutes per lap coming to the range. All right, I'm a shooter now, let's go. Glasses up, get to the mat, lay down, take the rifle, check out the wind. It was windy, kind of gusting and swirling, and first shot hit, second shot hit, third shot hit, four shot hit. And then I started like, oh my God, I got to hit the shot. And my rhythm was off.

And I'm like, go, okay, take a couple bra. Okay. And then I lined up the sights and squeezed off the round and I jerked the trigger and it was a miss. I got up just Matt like, ah. So I skied into the penalty loop, skied it. And then I exited the penalty loop and pretty quickly there was a coach there yelling like, hey, everybody, everybody's missed. Like all the key players have missed.

It's, okay, clean slate. Let's go. Either way, you go either way. But it's nice to know. Nice to know. Everybody's like the top guys. So I went as hard as I could on that last lap. And I remember coming into the finish line.

You don't, because it's individual starts. It's not head to head. It's like a time trial. You don't know. You have a general idea. I knew that probably, okay, I'm in contention. Right. But you don't know to the second where you are.

It's, you just have to find ways to push yourself, knowing that every second counts in that last stretch going as hard as I could. I cross the line. and I had told myself, I'm not looking up at that screen to see the race results. I'm not doing it. Not doing it during the race

and I'm not doing it after. And so I cross the line. I didn't know how I finish and I just go out and I'm like eating a recovery bar and someone was taken a few minutes later taking off the timing chip and they said, I don't know. An American one.

Who was it? I don't know. It's got a kind of a weird last name. And my two other teammates in the race had pretty easy to pronounce name. So I was thinking of it. Maybe that was me. It was seven seconds separation between first and second.

Belarusian athlete got second place. And that was unexpected. Gold medal. Gold medal. Out of the gate. Out of the gate. Good way to start the games. And then you kept rocking through the games.

Yeah, it was tough races. The next day's rate, I was going one race at a time. And the next race was a very difficult, the 15-kilometer cross-country race. actually on the first lap had a great first lap and was right where you would want to be. On the second lap, I didn't take into account it was warm. The sun was kind of degrading the tracks. I had done the first lap on this critical fast, sweeping downhill left turn in the track, which kind of guide you around.

You can be in the track or out of the track, but I had been in the track in a tuck. Low aerodynamic. The second lap, low aerodynamic. Same thing. I didn't take into account the tracks had degraded. Other skiers had gone through. They had created some exit channel, so I was in that tuck and just all splayed out, totally wiped out.

And I got up and I had blood on my arm. I was racing in a T-shirt. It was so warm. This is the winter games. But none of my equipment was broken. I started skiing and really was just thinking, it's not about quitting or any of that. I've proven I can do things. It's about being a smart athlete.

I got four races to go. This one is two last. It's a five-lap race, 15 kilometers, 35 or so more minutes. Does it really make sense to go hard and get like eighth place, ninth place? I can try to work my way back into this, but, you know, this race is going to make me tired. I got four more to go. Maybe it's actually better to sit it out or to, you know, exit the course and just be done. It's a do not finish, did not finish course.

But I was kind of skiing at like three quarters effort. I had lost all this momentum that would have carried me up and over the next hill. I'm like, you know, digging that, digging myself out of that hole, I just don't know if it makes sense. A coach was yelling, you're still in it. Go, go, go, go. So I just kind of responded to the coach like an athlete and started going. And I'm like, well, let's just see what, you know, it's the games. I've trained years for that.

Let's just go. Let's see what happens. I got 35 minutes to work my way back into it. I got time. It's looking at it a different way instead of like, does it make sense? to go hard for 35 minutes, it's, well, I got 35 minutes, let's go. So I kind of, I was, I was seeing my progress improve. You'd get lap splits, but again, you're just pushing yourself.

My lap splits after every lap were getting a little bit better. And then on the last lap, it was kind of like five of us are kind of in it. They don't exactly know where, you got to go. And so I just, I went really hard and I crossed the line. And I ended up getting second. But for me, I'm actually more proud of this race than the gold medal race, because I think that in sports, it's all about character to development. The sport in the race itself, in the metal, none of that really matters.

What matters is the person that it's making you. And you actually learn more from setbacks and, okay, I got second place. Whatever place I got that day, it was about taking a fall despite all my training in the lead up. Sometimes you make mistakes or sometimes just things happen, right? it's about getting up and and I had doubt doubt kind of was working its way into my mind that's probably natural but working through that doubt by doing what I trained to do which is to push hard and go hard to the finish line and so for me this race is more meaningful in an internal way

of course the previous day's race I got to see the flag go up that was very special too but the cross-country race the next day was more meaningful in that sense. And you end up with one gold, four silvers, and one bronze. Yes. I just was in that really sweet spot of physical peak, mental peak, all lining up in a four-year cycle, really like a seven-year cycle because I've been doing this, trying to train since 2011, 2012, moving out to Colorado. So timing that, and I was 37 years old, I felt like it's the blend of time in the sport,

seven plus years, plus not being over 40 like I am now, which helps with recovery and everything, that it was just everything was lining up. And the course, no doubt, played into my strengths with hill climbing. And you end up getting the best male athlete of the games. Is that right? That's right. I think... That's kind of like stud scenario, right?

Well, you know, I think you're supposed to say this. Well, it's not about medals or awards. Of course, I'm proud of it. And that I performed like that, that I think it was a fair and clean field. And that I got to represent the United States overseas. And for me, this was... just a time that I could think, you know, all of this work, most of it was unseen. Yeah, you get on a

podium ceremony or get voted the best male athlete, but nobody saw the hard work I was doing in Colorado back in the day on those dirt roads and I'm by myself in the summer. And that's actually what I'm most proud of. And what is most meaningful for me was, was that. It wasn't the end result of winning or getting second or whatever the race result was it was putting in the work and pushing myself and growing and reconnecting with nature and all of it but really it was about the work in the training so where are we at now so that was that was 2018 yeah 2018 unexpectedly i i did unexpectedly well and then that opened up some opportunities that I didn't see coming or expect. But, you know, I had, after my injury, I stayed, I didn't talk about, I didn't talk about it.

I have read about General Ulysses S. Grant serving in the Civil War and refusing to cash in on his service not to write a memoir. At the, in the very end of his life he did because his wife was dying and he was broke. broke. He had been swindled and so he decided to write a memoir. I just, I didn't feel comfortable talking about my injury. I didn't even have anybody asking me to talk about my injury. So it was pretty easy not to have to talk about it. So when I was out there just training, I was just doing the work, doing the work, doing the work. And now all of a sudden it's like, oh, I have these opportunities to like monetize or whatever, you know, just I can actually create opportunities to give talks and

this kind of thing. And that came my way. And I had to do some soul searching. Is this, is this right for me, for me in where I'm at, in what I want to do? And I thought, if I try it, it's a challenge because there's a couple things going on. If I'm going to be honest with myself, one, I'm not comfortable publicly speaking. Let's just be honest about it. I'm not comfortable. about it. I'm not comfortable. It's like getting in the water or trying to jump out of an airplane. It's in that realm. And then the other thing is I just don't know. I mean, in the teams, we're getting told, you know, be a quiet professional, just put in the hard work. Don't seek glory, this kind of thing. So that was all going on. But okay, I'll try. I'll just at least

try to develop a narrative and see how it goes. And I worked on that a lot. And then I started giving some talks and that came about because I got some medals and did had those results those opportunities didn't exist even though I'm the same person with essentially the same background in 2014 yeah check that's just how things work in this world yeah and I mean from my perspective obviously uh I look at it as not so much you taking the opportunity to monetize what you've been through but to me it's more important to go out there and share what you've been through because it can legitimately help out a lot of people. And, you know, I had one of our admirals one time tell me, you know, we were having to talk. I had a book coming out and, you know, he said something along the lines of, you know, I was

like, well, you know, this is, this is not really the quiet professional for me to be doing this. And he said something along the lines of, hey, we need to be quiet professionals, but that doesn't mean silent professionals and their stories that should be told. And as far as I, my opinion is you have a story that should absolutely be told. And I mean, when you're talking and we probably could do a nine hour podcast if we went back and got like medical records, when you're talking about all the things that you were going through from the time you woke up in the hospital, like I'm a baby. Like I, I'm hearing the things that you're.

I'm like mad if, you know, oh, uh, you know, like the floor's cold when I get up. to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I'm like, oh, this is where, you know what I mean? Like, or like I'll get like a sprained ankle and I'll have to wear an ankle brace and I'll be like I'm so mad about it, you know? I'm sitting here just thinking, man, the perspective that you have and then you took it even one step further. Like you're sitting there with a guy that's a triple amputee and he's over there getting

after it trying to make his life better. So, man, I think to the contrary of what you're. kind of saying about like, oh, trying to monetize this and the silent professional, it's like, hey, man, this is things that are going to help people, a lot of people that are in a tough spot and also, you know, team guys that are going to go through tough situations and, and just other veterans, it's just human beings, man, life is hard. And for someone like you that's been through the hardest of situation and still be able to get up and every day keep getting after it, man, that's like,

that's you I would actually tell you if you're not sharing this story I think that's actually kind of wrong bro to be honest with you yeah and that is the side of the fence I'm on right now is that it actually could be selfish of me to not tell my story to just for some valorized concept of you know whatever not not cashing in or but really this it the opportunity presented itself because of some success that I didn't have four years prior. But now there's some opportunities to talk. My friend from the teams started this company, O2X, that is doing awesome work. And there, I don't have any holdups of going and giving classes to firefighters and other public service professionals

as part of the O2X team, teaching principles of resilience or mental toughness, grit, whatever you want to call it, but also working on goal setting because in my own life, setting goals as an athlete, setting goals after my injury, setting goals at the Naval Academy, that all really helped me. And it doesn't mean you have to have goals, but if you have a powerful long-term goal, that can be a very potent force to help you get through difficult situations. But sometimes those long-term goals can be discouraging in the moment of intensity.

And so you're teaching, you know, setting middle term as an athlete year to year, I set performance. goals based on various different categories of performance that do not entirely include physical training. It's a lot of nutrition, sleep, mental skills, and this kind of thing, tactical, technical. And so also teaching them that in the moment of a tactical situation when chaos is just everywhere, that you can set micro goals, just to be aware of that, that this idea of you're never out of the fight. There's always something you can do. One more step forward, something that can contribute positively, that this is very powerful. And also what you taught me, I teach them as well, prioritize and execute. What's the most important thing that you need to be focusing on right now? Either

act on it yourself or delegate it. And then what's the next most important thing? With improvement in experience and training, you can more quickly identify what is the most important thing to work on. But just passing on those lessons learn to tactical athletes as part of O2X. That's just a no-brainer. I love being part of the team to do that. Yeah, that's awesome. So are you training for 2022 now?

Well, I competed recently in the 2022 Beijing Winter Games, and I came back with one gold medal as part of a team relay. And it, again, was a six-race individual format with the very last day being a team event. and the first race off the bat was that same biathlon. And so now I'm going in with, okay, I've had four years since 2018. I knew that going in, there would be a little bit more attention directed to whatever extent that would be. It would be more than before 2018, which was nothing. So there's going to be maybe some more people wanting to do an interview or some media outlets

or some maybe sponsorship opportunities, this kind of thing. And with that, I started to feel, okay, somebody sponsors you, they want you to get a medal. They want you to perform. This is a different situation. So going into 2014, brand new, didn't know anything. Going into 2018, more experienced, but with no expectations, either externally or internally. Now, external expectations probably, even though no one's going to say that, but really some internal expectations because I'm perceiving those external expectations. expectations.

That was a different, different, just every, each one of the games I've been to is different in that sense. But of course, training, just focus on what you can do, execute the training plan,

working through, getting, you know, positive communication with the coaches, adjusting the training plan. COVID happened. That didn't interrupt my personal training so much, but it interrupted the competitive scene somewhat.

And then this season, just doing a lot of altitude exposure, training actually in Bozeman, Montana with the team, focusing on biathlon support at the range we have there and showed up that first biathlon was, again, as usual, I'm just really amped up on that one because it's the first race and just you've been training and the course in China was not as advantageous for my strengths as an athlete as it was in 2018, but it was going to be grind, really slow snow, totally dehydrated snow. It was weird to watch.

Weird snow. Like there was a dirt. on the sides and stuff. Really windy place. Just like blowing, so they groom the course overnight or whenever they did it. And then you show up in the morning,

but the wind was picking up outlying snow and blowing it under the train. And that was just the slowest stuff ever. So this is going to be some challenges. It's going to be grind. In that first race, we were competing against Chinese athletes. I hadn't seen them.

The competitive circuit. And keeping in mind, I'm a sit skier. There is, I would say, a lot less technique. in cross-country sit skiing than there is in cross-country standing skiing because we're only maneuvering our poles so there is I think an ability to rapidly develop athletes in my sport sitting as compared to in the standing discipline but that first race I'm very proud of it

I came in hit five shots came in again for the second and final shooting stage hit five shots it was windy skied hard absolutely went as hard as I could on the last lap because I was just off of third place the last split I got was on the last lap just having hit all 10 shots your five seconds off third place that is that is a motive like motivating I okay I just was about and we're at altitude so I crossed the line and I don't done a lot of racing at 5500 feet like we were trained at it but at a games race at that altitude when you're going absolutely as hard as you can it's painful And I finished that race in fourth place, but I can tell you that that was perhaps in my own estimation the best race I've ever had.

It doesn't matter what place it was. Of course, getting on the podium is nice, but it's about the execution of your own race. You do not control who else is out there. The second race the next day was 18 kilometers. Again, one of the better races I felt like I've ever executed in terms of pacing, sixth place. And then races number three and four didn't go. so well. I sat one out, was named to the relay team. Our relay team consisted of four legs. I was the third leg. And at this point, my mentality is just take what I was given and try to gain a

couple seconds or something, pass it off to the anchor leg. And we unexpectedly got first place. We beat some more favored teams. And so I ended up getting to come home with the gold medal. I can tell you that that was a more special experience than an individual medal. Part of a team. To be part of a team. And I think I felt it. No, I know I felt it during the race, the difference of an individual race versus a race where someone passed it off to you and you're going to pass it off to someone else and you

don't want to let them down. They're counting on you. And they're counting on you. And that's a different. And so for an individual sport to have that team element is just awesome. Man, right on. I guess that brings us up to kind of where we're at today. Is there anything else?

Echo, you got any questions? Probably a good place to wrap it up. I mean, Echo, you got any questions? Yeah, we were talking before we started recording about Jiu-Jitsu, and you were asking pretty kind of hardcore about the tournament scenario, how it's laid out, is that to indicate that you are considering doing Jiu-Jitsu? Well, I was asking Jocco, is this possible? You know, is there adaptive

adaptive martial arts? Yeah. Well, actually, let me rephrase that. There is no, like you would compete with other dudes and there is no, I've never seen, I've never seen like, oh, you know, here's a bunch of guys without legs that are going to do jihitsu. It's no, you'll compete against other dudes because jihitsu itself is adaptive. And so you would figure out moves that work for you that, you'd figure out how to do it.

And there's like there's competitive wrestlers. There's wrestlers that have fought in the NCAAs that have one leg, no leg, no legs. And they just adapt their body to figure out how to win. And so yeah, there's the sport itself is adaptive. But there would be no like other special rules. I mean, you go to jujitsu competition. There be people that are blind. They do have one rule like in wrestling.

If it's a blind wrestler, they have to, you have to maintain contact with them. But that's the only rule. That's wrestling, too. Yeah, I don't even know if that's jiu-jitsu or not. Yeah. But we have friends that, I mean, I have a friend that's paralyzed, you know, pretty much chest down. He does jiu-jitsu.

That's awesome. And there's definitely, like I said, there's people with one legs. I mean, one of the greatest jiu-jitsu players of all time, Jean-Jacques Machado. He only has a few fingers on one of his hands. And in jiu-jitsu grips are really important. We got another friend named Jeffrey Rial. Jeff Rial has one hand and he competes all the time and he just competes. There's no special category other than get some.

Yeah, I'm here for a few days so maybe I could come and take a class. One of the things I learned and I guess the ultimate thing I've learned as an athlete in Paralympic sport for 10 years and the thing I was telling myself most recently in Beijing was it's not about results. It's not about how you feel today. It doesn't, no one cares where you came from. No one cares how old you are. No one cares what you look like.

No one cares how much money you got, how many degrees you have. None of that matters. The only thing that matters is what you can do right here and right now. That's all that matters. And ultimately your opponent is yourself. The voice inside you that's saying,

I don't know if I can do this, the voice inside you that's saying, don't go that hard. it's painful. That voice, that's actually what you're competing against. And I think in martial arts, it's probably perhaps even more true than in cross-country skiing. Yeah, when he had Rob Jones out, we did some mat work with him. See if you give him that little jiu-sitsu bug.

Remember Kyle Maynard? You knew that? Yeah. No arms, no legs. Wow. Yep. And he would train. And he, I've trained with him before.

That was a long time. He might even be a black belt by now. Dang. school. Yep. No arms. So yeah, man. Jitsu is for everybody.

For everybody. Hey, you know, we're going, we're over three hours right now. Anything else that we didn't cover? Anything else you want to hit on? Any final closing thoughts? Covered my life thoroughly. Unpacked my life and brought up a lot of memory. So I appreciate you providing this platform and for asking me to be part of your podcast.

It's an honor. Yeah. I don't know why it's taken so long. Hey, if people want to find you, it's Dan Kanasin. dot com, right? Yes, I do have a website. That's where people can find you if they want to, you can go speak.

You can go and help them out. They can find you on there. Yeah. You don't have any social media, do you? No, I got on LinkedIn. That's not social media homes. I'm not a social media. That's one line that I'm not ready to cross right now.

Yeah, yeah. Well, right on. You got the website, though, and if people want to contact you, they can find you through there, which is awesome. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Cool, man.

Thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing your lesson learned for sure. And, you know, more important, thanks for what you did for the country. Thanks for what you did for the teams. Thanks for what you've done since representing America. That's awesome. And really, it's just, it's always an incredible example for me, just knowing that you're out there. And no matter what's happening, no matter what you've done, no matter what you've been through,

I know for a fact, you're still getting. getting up and you're getting after it. And I appreciate being able to follow that example, man. Thank you. Thanks, Chaco. And with that, Dan Knaussen has left the building. Echo Charles. Yes, sir.

What was your assessment? Okay. So the first thing, what I didn't even realize until a few minutes in is when Jason Gardner makes his speech, one of his many, about training works. And he tells the story. He was talking about this guy, right? Yeah, 100%. That was him.

That's crazy. Because to me, that's one of the better speeches, especially from Jason Gardner. Like that, that's a, that's what I look forward to, you know, because the way he says it and like the lesson. You're talking about at the muster. At the muster, yeah. Jason talks about the effectiveness of training and sure enough. And I didn't want to go through all the details and miss speak anything, but some of those details that I did cover for sure. But I'll tell you what, man.

And I kind of talked about it. But like the amount like waking up after being in a coma for 10 days. And then having just the insane medical issues, just insane medical issues. No legs, freaking abdomen blown apart, colostomy bag, the thing going down your throat, not even allowed to drink one sip of water. You know, like, I get complained I have a sore,

like here's my complaint. Like, you know you're doing jujitsu and you cut your mouth. Sure. Like you cut you bite your tongue, you get ripped. You can't catch the teeth and then you can't like eat an acidic food for like a week. It's true. Like and I'm complaining about this, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And Dan's over there for for a hundred days or whatever with a freaking tube down his throat. And he's not allowed to have one sip of water. So this is another one of those situations where you just think, man, you have so nothing to complain about. There's so nothing to complain about. And Dan just has a freaking awesome attitude. When he said that about when he woke up and did, you know, like no passage of time like that situation. So I got a concussion, like a bad one, the kind where you have amnesia for a long time.

So basically it's like a super, super duper, duper, duper mild version of that experience. So you've basically been through the same thing. It was a secondary lane. So it was in a football game, I hit this guy and then got knocked out. but the knockout like where my body was limp only lasted for like it was like a flash knockout so they helped me up and I was all like weary but everyone on the on my team saw me and knew I was like out yeah out of it so they pushed they put me to the sideline apparently I don't remember any of this part so but when I came to I was just standing there in the sideline and it was weird because just like how he said is but I had amnesia too though that's that was a weird thing I didn't remember and I don't even know where I was like the kind where I'm just, oh, standing here, you know? But it's so, like, especially as a little teenager, right, it's high school time. It's so scary because you don't, it's like you don't know what's going on at all.

And nothing is like making sense or whatever. So, man, I just kind of broke down and started crying. And my brother's like, and my brother's on the same team, obviously. He's like kind of worried and stuff. He's calling the trainer or whatever, the doctor. And they're asking me all these questions. And I'm like, I don't know anything. And it's weird.

And it's really freaky. Now that you're in the hospital Man But man I was feeling him I was like That is crazy man That's a crazy experience The level of discomfort Is like unimaginable

Right again You know for me I get a cut in my mouth And I'm like I can't eat ketchup for a week Or whatever you know It's going to sting right And he's just You know lost his legs Got the freaking tube down

us, the nose, having heinous, real nightmares that he thinks are real. Yeah. Like, this is crazy. So, and then for him, I mean, can you, is there a nicer guy out there? You know, just as nice as they, totally nice guy. Humble, like, just freaking incredible. So he did say something. And he only said it real quick to and just continued to move on.

but it was a, it told a lot of the story on his, on his mindset when he said, oh, when he started, I think, when he started sitting up, right? Yeah. And when he was considering, you know, before he went into rehab, he said, okay, this is like my new sport, right? I was like, ooh, I see what you did there. And that's huge. That's a huge deal where you don't look at it as like, oh, my gosh, I'm starting from like, I was at 10 and now I have to go all the way back to one. It's like, no, it's not that. It's like a new sport.

It's like a new challenge that you can start from your, almost like in a way, your original starting spot because you're new to this sport. It's a new sport. New thing. Yeah. And then boom, you kind of gamify it in that way where it's like, oh, shoot, now I can sit up. Okay, now I can take some stuff. Okay, I can use this.

And it's like this sport. Yeah. And it makes sense too because look at him. Paralympics, no big deal. Yeah. Winning. That being said, you can gamify that stuff. but at the end of the day,

you can't get out of the game. And that's why you have to have that, that, like, just incredible mindset to look at it. And, you know, when we had Jim Srollsley on, and, you know, he had lost both legs and one arm in Vietnam. And that talk that he had with us after the podcast

when he was talking about Lewis Pillar Jr., and he said that Lewis Pillar Jr. you never accepted 100% what had happened to him. And he's like, and I did. And you could hear Dan talking about that today. You know, he said there was times. He's talking past tense. Like there was times where he would be like,

oh, why did this happen to me? Oh, do I really think it was the, you know, he said, this happened to me because I could take it. And then he said, I questioned myself, did I really, do I really think that? And he was doing it in the past. So he got to a point. He was like, okay, this is me.

This is my life. And what am I going to do? I'm going to go freaking kick ass. I'm going to become an awesome athlete. I'm going to win a bunch of freaking Olympic medals. I mean, it's just awesome, awesome example as a human. So anyways, honor to have him on here. Dan, thanks for coming on, brother.

And, yeah, if you want to help out, if you want to support, if you want to support yourself, you can do it. It's true. By getting good fuel in your system. Yep. Improving your situation, whatever that may be. Yeah. Physical is a big one and mental. By the way, so we have what?

Discipline go, energy drink. I've been utilizing these all week. Oh, yeah? And it's only the second day. Highly productive week so far. Yeah, so far. We got a big one. You know, I don't say, I don't run around saying I'm so busy all the time.

I don't say I'm not busy. But I will say this week I'm a little bit busy. A little bit busy. Good. Good. So yeah. I mean just got a lot of stuff done. Yep.

Joccofuel.com get get some milk that's a big one yeah it's such a good little it's almost like a trick it is like a trick that you can have something that tastes delicious and it's good for you you know it's providing you the protein that you need to get stronger you know the expression uh if something seems too good to be true it probably is yeah this one is that it's that it's not it's not too good to be true it's good and true yeah and i said it before i'll say it again that man it's not Especially if you're on the path, you're lifting. Lifting is a big one. But if you're really working out and you're trying to get that additional protein,

it's hard to get the required, recommended amount of protein. It's harder than you think. So add to that one. Easy now. Not if you got that trick. Easy now. Jocofuel.com. You can also get the drinks at Wawa.

You can check out the vitamin shop. They've got everything in there too. So appreciate that. Go get it. Also, as far as supporting yourself, this podcast, and America, if you're going to get some jeans, if you haven't already. Go to origin USA.com. This is where you can get your American-made jeans.

Yeah. Yeah. It's real simple, you know. Oh, like, oh, it's cool. It's an American-made. And then you, oh, yeah. And actually, you're helping defeat communism and tyrannical leaders in the world. So you want a new pair of jeans.

Great. Get them from Orange, USA.com. That's a positive move. if you want to help stomp out tyrannical leadership in the world that's enslaving a bunch of people you can also go to horgeuisa.com

you can get jujitsu stuff sounded like Dan was juditsu curious he was too jiu jih Turing he was really at the beach real I was out yeah okay yeah yeah right as I was coming in he made it a point

and he was he was really interested to know how do the tournaments how the tournament set up like do you have this you have that and you're right right we didn't you came in and we had to kind of record but I didn't realize that yeah they don't have they don't have like an adaptive division yeah jiu jitzu is adaptive you just go you adapt yeah yeah figure it out and by the way like what's your weight class because Dan probably if he had

legs would probably be 170 yeah so he's going to be in some with some 1208 pounds I have no what his actual weight is but he's definitely going to be for his size and strength upper body is going to be a force to be reckoned with. Yeah. And but there, and there are, do I want to say a lot? Or there's not a lot, but it's not a rarity to be like to, to see a guy with one leg, no legs, competing in jujitsu and winning. So there are like very definitive, adaptive techniques that go in and are very effective

in there. So, yeah. To train that jih Tjitsu. Train that jih Tijuana. The jiu jih Tzu's for everybody. That's the bottom line. The jiu jih Tisu's for everybody. Where is it?

you get there from I just said it today nobody said it right there with a little bit of an accent no you know why because everybody you could separate it into two words and you have a little pun right everybody yeah and everybody back in the day okay remember Stuart Cooper yeah Cooper films yeah so he did a video with Hobson Mora and that's what it was called jujitsu jiu jiu jesus for everybody and that's how you sounded kind of like I thought it was from that video that was my favorite steward cooper video Brazilian Portuguese accent comes out you know from my youth. It's true.

Also, Jocko store, you want to represent why you're on the path. Discipline equals freedom shirts and hats and hoodies, some good stuff to say good

and also some creative designs. If you want a new one every month as a subscription, what was the last shirt locker shirt that came out? The last one. Do you even know? Everybody must, no,

no, there's one called. Everybody must get stoned. Yeah, but that's not the most recent one. Yeah. What's the most recent one? Again,

good high level problems. Oh, dang, check that out. It's good road in like, what do you call, like a script, like a real elegant script. Yeah, yeah, with the logos. You got to check it out. Why is it saying high level problems? Because, like, you know, you know, you know, what do you call the aristocrats, right?

That's how it looks. I don't know. I'm just saying, now here, you want to know the layers? Okay. So I always say we always kind of talk about. about how like people now, or it's been said that people now, they're complaining about like dumb stuff, right? Everyone's offended or all this.

First world problems. First world problems. Yeah, I did. That's like, the thing is, sure, it can be viewed as bad, especially when you compare it to real problems, quote unquote, real problems, but it's only natural to have these problems. And if they're problems, they still need to be solved. Most of them can be solved with attitude, of course,

rather than, you know, killing a bunch of enemies. World Problem, good. It's essentially, no, no, no. It means first world problems need to be solved just like any other problem. No matter how easy or hard, but they still exist. But you still have to have the same attitude. You got to have that good attitude. The same good attitude.

It's just a higher level good. Quote unquote, higher level, yes. All right. So there you go, Sherlock, get some of that. Subscribe to the podcast. Jocko Underground.com. We've been rolling out some Jocco Underground. Pretty interesting topics coming out there,

talking about various things on earth and answering a lot of questions. Jocco underground.com if you want to help us with our own little platform that we've got going, just in case we get banned, just in case we get censored. Yeah.

What else? Banned, censored. Yeah. Banned and censored. Canceled. Cance. Whatever. You know, I mean, I don't think, well,

then again, I don't know nowadays. Because remember, YouTube. you could say pretty much whatever as far as like actual words like you know how they're swearing on YouTube right that was never a thing and then there's certain like words that they like make it a point

to like bleep out so their channel doesn't get canceled like there's people I listen to it and they like cut out the words I've heard that but the words that you're talking about are words like COVID have you ever heard a podcast like that where they're saying

the word COVID and they edit it out yeah yeah or half the word it's weird. So that just makes me kind of weird. It doesn't make me nervous, but it makes me think. Wait a second. Why are they doing that?

Because they might have got canceled or demonetized or what? That's why we have jocco underground.com. Because we can't control these other platforms. But we, we, meaning all of us, we all control doconderground.com.

So if you want to support that, check out. Check out YouTube, by the way. Hopefully you can watch this episode, even though I just said COVID with no frame of reference whatsoever. I just said,

The word. Twice now. Three times, I think. So hopefully you can see us on there. Subscribe to it. Check out the Origin USA. Channel as well. If you want to know what's happening there,

psychological warfare. Don't forget about Dakota Meyer making cool stuff to hang on your wall. It's flipside canvas.com. I've written a bunch of books. Check them out. We got Eshlam Front, leadership consulting. Inside of Eshlam Front, we have the Extreme Ownership Academy. And this is guidance on life.

guidance on life, how to interact with other human beings, which is what you're doing. That's what we all do. We have to do it, whether it's just the person that you live with, mom, dad, brother, sister, husband, wife. Whether it's your landlady across the hallway, you've got to build a relationship with her so you don't get evicted. So if you want to help learn to build relationships, help have a better life, go to Extreme Ownership. com for the academy. If you want to help service members active and retired, their families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee.

She's got a charity organization. It's America's mighty warriors.org if you want to donate or you want to get involved and don't forget about heroes and horses.com. Micah Fink getting people out into the wilderness for sure. Echo and I, we're both on Twitter. We're on the gram. We're on the Facebook. But listen, fair warning

Better watch out for that algorithm Because it's looking to grab you right by the throat Pull you back in actually doesn't grab you by the throat It grabs you by like a gentle kind of like handhold And it kind of lowers you in there It's not aggressive by the uh what's the amygdala Yeah It grabs you by the gray matter by the gray matter

It just eases you into the algorithm next thing you know you look up And you just wasted 17 minutes of your life looking at a bunch of stupid things. So watch out for that. Thanks once again to Dan Karnasen for coming on. And thanks, Dan, for everything you've done, everything you've done for America, for the teams, and the way you represent America in the Olympics.

Awesome. And like I said, it's awesome for me to think that no matter what, no matter what's going on in your world, you're out there getting after it. That is an example for all. of us to follow and thanks to all the service men and women who have paid the price of freedom in blood we are only here because of your sacrifice and we thank you for it and thanks to all the work done by our police and law enforcement firefighters paramedics EMTs dispatchers correctional officers

border patrol secret service and all first responders out there you also sacrifice so that we can be and we are grateful for what you do and to everyone else out there whatever whatever excuse you have whatever justification you make up in your head whatever rationalization you allow to go on in your mind to stop it to stop it the excuses and the justifications and the rationalizations are not valid and we know that we know that because of guys like Dan Kanasin who face incredible challenges, but he doesn't make excuses. He takes action.

He overcomes. He drives on. So let's all of us be more like Dan and go out there every day and get after it. And until next time, Zekko and Jocko out.