Jocko Podcast - 339: Winning The War After The War: Braxton McCoy Fighting and Defeating Insurgents, Addiction, and Lies

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

After being wounded in The Glass Factory S-Bomber incident, Braxton McCoy Fights his way out of the darkness.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 339 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. I awoke face down in blood-soaked sand. The world spun around me. What little sounds I could make were muffled and indistinct. It was like I had been twirled around on an old tired swing, then flung into a swimming pool. I couldn't gather my wits anymore than I could get my bearings.

The harder I tried to get a handle on the world. around me the more slippery my grip became my eyes strained to adjust to the scene pain sunk its fangs permanently we have just been hit by rockets i assume this must be a coordinated attack my confusion turned to panic oh god oh god please god the sounds that surrounded me became clearer i could decipher some individual words but they seemed only to add uncertainty who is groaning i heard gurgling as someone tried to force air through a blood-filled throat the wounded and dying were bellowing in both English and Arabic screams of death filled the air rage filled our hearts medic medic all the walk bar i prop myself up as much as i could the inch or two that i was able to manage

was not enough to make a significant difference in my field of view i thought i heard the reports of rifles Is that AK fire? I need to start helping my guys, I thought to myself. We're being ambushed. Shock was setting in. I desperately tried to locate my weapon and return fire, but I was totally unable to move. I wanted to figure out why, but I couldn't get my body positioned in a way that would allow me to look toward my legs. I could see both of my arms and my chest.

My arms were definitely broken. Osmosis was spreading blood throughout the sleeves of my uniform, but I could still move them sort of. I propped myself up again onto my side and peered down toward my legs. But when I finally looked downward in the direction that my legs should have been, all I could make out was thick black blood and a pile of muddy entrails. I am cutting too, I said aloud, unsure whether I was talking to the dying men around me or to myself. I ran a bit of organ through the fingertips of my left hand.

I was certain that it once belonged to me. Where did it fit in this mess? I searched the jumbled human remains that rested underneath me and wondered exactly where this little organ went, but I couldn't complete the puzzle. My mind drifted. Distractedly, I wondered what it was going to be like to die. Certainly there would be no way to save a man who had been cut in half. Oh God, oh God, oh God, the screams filled my ears again. I'm hit.

Johnny, medic. Was that me yelling? I wondered. I tried to look for the frantic American voice, but all I could see was dark red sand, limbs which had been flunged from their torsos, bloody men writhing on the ground, begging for death to end their suffering, and hundreds of empty sandals. Lying there, still rubbing that piece of what I believe to be a pancreas between the tips of my fingers, I again contemplated what it was going to be like to die.

Was I going to cross over into some other dimension and meet Jesus like I had been taught my entire life? Or was it all just going to go black, like slipping quietly into a slumber, a sleep that one never comes back from? Please don't let this be my final resting place, I thought. Not this shithole. Not now. And that right there is an excerpt. From a book that is called The Glass Factory, written by Braxton McCoy. And the shithole that he was referring to was a shithole that I'm familiar with,

a place called Ramadi Iraq. And the title of the book, The Glass Factory, is a title that anyone who served in Ramadi instantly knows. and I have talked about the Glass Factory on this podcast a couple times. I've talked about it on the unraveling podcast as well. The Glass Factory was the place of a horrific attack where suicide bombers detonated themselves at a police recruiting event, killing over 50 Iraqi police recruits and also two Americans. the Americans that were killed,

Lieutenant Colonel Michael McLaughlin of Mercer, Pennsylvania, and Sergeant Adam Cannes from Davy, Florida. And there were scores of wounded Iraqis and Americans as well. Many of them severely wounded. One of them was a young soldier, who was also the author of this book, Braxton McCoy.

And it is an honor to have Braxton here with us tonight to talk about his experiences in war and perhaps more important his lessons learned after the war and how he followed the path toward the truth. Braxton, thanks for joining us, man. Thanks for having me, Jock. Great to meet you. And I know you sent us this book a while ago, years ago. And somehow, look, I get sent hundreds of books, actually. And I just slipped past my radar. And it wasn't until I was on Twitter.

And I think someone tagged you and me and said, hey, Jocco was just talking about the glass factory on the podcast. And you came back and said something like, he got it. mostly right couple errors which you know of course I said minor minor errors though yeah minor errors but you know of course I I know I'm not going to know everything I don't ever claim to know everything but as soon as I saw you had a book called the glass factory that you were wounded there you know I said hey man you you know you said hey do you want this a book and I said absolutely and said let's talk about on the podcast so here you are man thanks for coming down yeah thank you It's really kind of crazy to be here.

Karen, you read my book. It's kind of weird. Man, it's a great book. And I should start off by saying this. You never know what you're going to get when you read a book. And I think one thing that you can measure a book by is how vulnerable someone is willing to be in order to convey what happened to them. And this book is raw. And you talk about things in this book

that I know had to be hard as hell to write. And that's one of the things that make it so powerful. And the other thing that makes it so powerful, even though, look, it's a book, definitely, there's a chunk of it that has to do with war. And there's a chunk of it that has to do with the struggles after the war. But the most powerful part of the book is, you figuring out how you needed to live in a proper way.

And it's just an epic book. It's an outstanding book. And so anybody that is listening right now, jump on there. We'll have it on our website and go buy this book immediately. We're going to read some of it today. There's no way I could read the whole book. I know that you're working on an audio book right now. So eventually you'll be able to buy that.

But, you know, actually never mind the audiobook for now. The cover of the book is awesome. And what's the deal with the cover? I read a little bit about the cover of the book, but where did it come from? The guy who designed it was a medic there that was at the glass factory with me. And we, I told him I wanted it to be, look like the windows, you know, the brass over the windows over there and the copper stuff. But I wanted a buffalo on there. So he kind of worked it in.

Yeah, it's a very distinct cover. And plus it's, well, this version is hard cover. So are there still hard covers available? There's like maybe 300. You can get on my website. Those are as good as gone. Those are as good as gone. Anybody that, if you can get one of those 300, get it, order it.

What's your website so people can order? Braxtonaccom. Braxton Macquay.com. So there, we just sold all those 300 books. And then the other ones are available on Amazon. Those are soft cover, I'm assuming. Yeah. And we actually, you know, without getting goofy political right off the bat, we tried, we tried to work on getting another print run and white paper stock is short like everywhere.

So, or at least the publishers we had before. And then we tried to use a different publishing company out of Idaho and they couldn't do it. Check. We might have to talk to other publishing companies that other people know, like mine. Figure out what we can do. All right. So, again, it's a very interesting book. and one of the things that's interesting about the book is it basically starts off with the attack on the glass factory.

And it doesn't, you have flash, some flashbacks throughout the book, pertinent flashbacks, but there's no detail. There's not much detail on how you grew up. And probably that's the next book you should write is just some of the experience that made you who you are. But before you write that book, since you're sitting here, let's talk a little bit of, about how you did grow up and where you came from and how you ended up being who you are. So where'd you grow up? I grew up in, well, I lived before Utah, Salt Lake Valley started to get expanded. There was a place called Rose Canyon Estates up.

There's a bunch of just small ranches and ranchettes up south of Salt Lake. It's now kind of all the same valley. But back then it was like, I don't know, 25 miles of town or so that I'd go to school every morning. And we had just a little horse operation out there. My mother and father are divorced. So my mother married my stepfather when I was four. And so we pretty much been in my life. So what was going on in the horse ranch?

What were you doing? When I was a kid. Yeah. Man, feeding in watering and hitting golf balls and shooting arrows into the haystacks and shooting rabbits and lizards. And man, I'd get home from school and get matured. done and go grab a backpack and throw a water bottle in there and get my baby gun and just head up the mountain because there's nobody behind us. And there's this cricks called Yellow Fork. And you can go

up yellow fork all the way up and just shoot every bird known a man. I must have smoked 500 woodpeckers this time I was 13. And my grandpa had a thing for songbirds. He just loves songbirds. And I kind of get it now as I age. I like having them around my place too. So if I got cops shooting songbirds, I get in big trouble. But woodpeckers all day. All day. Did your stepdad have any military experience? No. No, his father's, he grew up on a ranch in Sipio, Utah, which is where we ended up moving when I was 13. But he, World War II, or right after World War II, I guess, he joined the Navy,

ended up an air traffic controller, eventually ended up air traffic controller out here at Top Gun. And then he got out and came home to the ranch and sold it. He said, I never wanted to do another day of farm work in my life. And moved up to the city. And he was an air traffic controller for Delta Airlines or something. I don't know. I saw like international for years.

And then he ended up moving back after he retired. And what about your mom? What did she do? She was, she worked for Cisco as like a food sales rep for a while. And then she went into real estate. Now she's a real estate broker. And what grandfather, the grandfather that you write about in the book, primarily what was his background?

He was a Marine and then a plumber. He's a plumber my whole life. Just big time outdoors. And he was all, like, everything for him was hunting and fishing. I mean, working just so he could get out and hunt fish with his grandkids mostly. Dude, I got pictures of me. I'm like two years old and his cowboy hat with a damn deer leg in my hand. Like, walking around deer camp.

Like, that was his jam. And that was my mother's dad. And then you said you moved from one ranch to another ranch when you turned 13? Yeah, we moved down. We sold out up there and then moved down to Sipio, Utah. And my stepdad had about 40 head of horses down there and, yeah, roughly 40 head. And then he's an electrical contractor and helped make ends meet. And then the horse market went bust pretty hard back in 2020.

Let's see, what was that? 2002 maybe. I can't remember the first time. Anyway, when they passed the no-kill bill. Oh, yeah. I can remember if it was 2002 or 2004. And anyway, it hit hard. I mean, there was good horses on the market for nothing.

People were just taking their horses out and turn them out in the desert and stuff. Like, go on, live free. I mean, those horses just died because I don't know I know I do. The reason I said, oh, yeah, because I read an article about that not too long ago about how people were just letting their, I guess their domesticated horses go

and they're not ready to survive out there. Well, especially most everybody has gildings. And no wild horse herd. is going to let a gilding in. I mean, the studs just going to kill him. It's not a mayor, and it's a eunuch, and he doesn't need that around. I mean, maybe mayors could make it, but even then it's doubtful their hooves are not, they're just not built for it anymore.

You know, it's really bred out. How does a horse kill another horse? They kick, so a lot of times they'll break their backs, like stud horses. They'll get up on their hind ends like this and flip them, break their necks or backs, and bite and kick. I mean, they can kick. A horse kicks another horse in the head. It'd kill it easy, for sure. I had a horse kill one of my cows last fall. At least that's all we can figure out, too.

Cal was fine next day. There was a horse around there. Now, you were pretty into sports, too, right? When did you start wrestling? What other sports did you play? I didn't start wrestling in cell. I was a freshman in high school. I played baseball growing up. I did some boxing my family's friends with Jim Foamer.

was a family friend, or Gene Former, I'm sorry, I was a family friend growing up. And so I did a little getting punched in the head for a bit. And then I got in, it was a, I think there was like a middle school, that's what it was, it was a middle school PE, you know, where you'd go through like all the different sports, and be like badminton and shit like this. And there was like a wrestling section.

I was like, man, I like this. Well compared to bad bitten. Yeah, that's right. So then my mom signed me up. but the tree house with Yvonne Evenoff for a while. That was in Traper, Utah. I was like maybe an hour drive. And so I was taking his classes for a bit with like Cam Jones and some of these other studs from high school wrestling studs.

And Cam went to rest of college. And then we moved and I went, or no, I wrested that first year at Riverson High School. And then after that I went and moved down to Fillmore. And did you still wrestle when you got to Fillmore? Yeah, SIPO, yeah. What year was this? What year did you graduate from high school? How did you do wrestling?

Did you make the state or anything? Yeah, I won districts my senior year. And then at state, I ended up, man, it sucks so bad. I got super sick. I had to drink. My wrestling coach, I had to talk about this all the time. But I was weighing in with a gallon jug of water trying to get up to weight because I was wrestling at 89. And I just wasn't burning.

I just didn't wait enough. You got to make the 160 weight limit. I wasn't making it. It's state, well, plus two pound allowance, I guess. Anyway, yeah, I struggled that year. That's still pretty impressive that you only started wrestling your freshman year and you made it to state your senior year. Yeah.

It's pretty impressive, man. Man, my junior year, I think I was probably a better wrestler, but I got in trouble. I was kind of a idiot. What did you do to get in trouble? This is where the good story is going to live. I don't know that. So, I got, me and my staff. stepdad got in a fist fight and I got kicked out. He and I had butted heads since I was little,

big time. And I ended up, we gotten a pretty good scrap. And anyway, we couldn't live in the same places anymore. So I went to live with my other grandpa in Salt Lake and I went back to Riverton that year, Riverton High School. And I just was an idiot, you know. I was like, just not going to school. And my dad, my whole life, my biological father was like, and out of jail and stuff, in the end of prison. So what? What was he doing? Man, I don't know.

I get stories. I don't know what's... I know at least one thing was a white-collar thing. I know there were some violent things, but I don't know what, you know, anyway. Like, I don't know. I don't. So he was out for a minute. And so I was like, well, I'll just live with him then.

And that was a bad idea. That lasted for, like, man, he was out for like a month or something. And then being a stepdad's like a tough like a really tough job. Yeah. And he's, man, he's, I don't want to sit and he had some issues of his own. So, man, like whiskey bottles in the damn grain bins and shit. I'm going to be out trying to feed horses. You're like, oh, here's some rich and rare.

Check. When did you, so you were hunting your whole, as growing up your whole life? Oh, yeah. Bow hunting too? I started bow hunting in about 14. Okay. My cousin, Cody Hassan got me into it. he's actually I think last week I think it was he went and tried out for the world team

dang for uh stick boat dang yeah he's pretty solemn at what point did you start thinking about joining the military uh I you know G. I jo and shit as a kid I always thought about it you know but I was you know what I thought for sure I was going to go into the military but then like there was nothing going on you know I'm like I don't understand why anybody would join without a war like what's the hell's the point so that Then I was just, you know, so anyway, it went through a stretch where I thought, I won't do this, and I was an F-off and just riding bulls and just being dumb and partying and every other thing that young Cabot kids do, chasing girls and such. And then 9-11 happened, and I was, this is when I was actually at Riverton High School. So you were, what, a sophomore maybe?

Just starting your sophomore year? No, yeah, sophomore year. No, junior year. Yeah, sophomore year. No, junior year. Oh, yeah, because you said graduated in 2003. I was a junior. year because I was at Riverton because my sophomore year I was at Millard.

Yeah, and we were sluff in school, which, you know, it was like the first period of the day, but we were all over at my cousin's house, and one of the kids that was there was a, I can't remember if he was from Pakistan or whatever, but anyway, a friend of ours was from the Middle East and he was there with us, you know, watching this stuff go down. And I feel like that always kind of helped me, like view things differently because he was still buddy you know but we so we saw the towers come down i was like man i'm gonna go i want to fight over there you know so i finished up school and then our well actually enlisted as a junior i was first recruiter that talked to me i'm just enlisted and i was going as soon as over and you just the first

recruiter you talked to was an army recruiter yeah that was that yeah i didn't know crap man my grandpa didn't really like the marine corps very much and the only thing he says i'll kill you if you join the Marine Corps. He told me that at least a dozen times growing up. And so I thought, well, it's not the Marine Corps. Did your grandfather fight in which war? No, he split Vietnam and Korea. And then his two little brothers went over to Vietnam. And I think he was bitter about that. I mean, I've never, I never asked him why he had the Marine Corps. So I really don't know. I know he had a tattoo of a bulldog over here. And when he was older, he used to say, I used to say, grandpa, or when I was little and he was older, he said, Grandpa, what's that?

You know, he said, it's a picture of your grandma. That's right. So you, did you know what kind of job you were having the Army? Did you even know that the Army had jobs? No. Well, I mean, not really, no. So he shows me this video, okay. This is the recruiter?

Yeah. I almost want to say his name. But he, he's not a bad guy. He just did bad things. So he shows me this video and he's like, check that out. These dudes are like jumping out of planes and shit. I'm like, oh yeah, that looks bad. 100%.

Yeah. He's like, that's what you're going to do? I'm like, hell yeah. And he's like, see that one guy? And it's like the, I'm assuming it's the Echo, the 18 Echo or whatever. And he's like, see that guy with that radio? I was like, yeah. He's like, he gets paid six extra grand to join if he carries that radio.

I mean, that's not exactly how he said it. But he's like, you get a signing bonus and all you got to do is carry this extra 20 pounds of gear or whatever. You know, he's like, you're tough enough to carry 20 extra pounds. I'm like oh hell yeah he'd run that racket before him yeah yeah playing psychological warfare you're tough enough right yeah oh it's just yeah I still frustrates me something I mean I don't hate the guy it worked out but so that so what did you enlist ask did you have an MOS when you enlisted yeah it's a calm job there's a 31 series calm jobs 31 unit they changed it but I think it was a 31 uniform at the time

and it's like just like signal something I honestly goodness did not a single thing I had dudes, I could barely feel a singar when we were over there. Like, I didn't know shit. In fact, one time I was dating a girl, and she was like, what's the smartest thing you ever did when you were over there? And I was like, what are you talking about? She's like, what's the thing took like the most brain power? And I was like, I set up a tax at one time on this island.

And then I was thinking about it. I'm like, oh, shit, I just carried it. I really, you know, you didn't even say it. I didn't even say. But really in my head at first, I thought I did. but then I remembered I give it to Adam and he set it up. And you joined the National Guard, right? Yeah.

Did you know the difference between the National Guard? No, I don't, I swear to you, I think maybe 20% of kids at that time had any idea it was going on. It's like Smalltown Utah has a bunch of those National Guard recruiting stations. They don't know. Uniform says the same thing. You don't know shit. Unless you have like a family member that's in or something. And then that's different.

Which my buddy, who I enlisted with, had a. family member that was in so that would have been did they tell him what was up did he know what was going on here's what i think happened there his his brother-in-law really good dude i think was like let's not get you guys sent over into a meat grinder got it i think that's if i had to guess little did he know yeah right and you know it's funny the guard thing works out better for me because had i been in an active unit with that shit m o s i wouldn't never did anything i'd have been stuck in a freaking com cage the entire time. So it kind of worked out.

Yeah. So did you go to boot camp in between your junior and senior years? No. So you had to fully graduate. Yeah. You fully graduated. Delayed entry or whatever they called it. And so you fully graduated.

At what point did you know that you were going to be activated and sent overseas? I volunteered for it. So I got to, so I went through basic training and then they... What did you think when you got to basic training? I'll tell you. So my recruiter, so I always tell people, I'm like, when you get to boot camp, you're not going to like me anymore. There's going to be two to three weeks where you're like, Jocko, I hate that guy. If I ever see him, I'll take a swing at him.

Because almost no matter who you are, when you get to boot camp, you think, uh-oh, this was a mistake. Yeah, especially them first three weeks. But then toward the end, it starts to be kind of. You're like, this is cool. And so I went to Fort Benning, but Pogue side Fort Benning. And again, you wake up every morning screaming infantry and all this shit. You don't know what the fucking doing. And then so my recruiter had also, he put me through MEPs with the airborne physical and all this stuff.

Told me how to airborne on my contract, all this shit. I get into boot camp and, you know, like two weeks before when you're at Benning, they call up. And they're like, everybody with the airborne on your contract, come to line up. I come line up, you know. I go in there and he's like, what the fuck are you doing? And I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, you ain't a fucking airborne in your contract. Get out of here.

So it wasn't even in your contract. He went as far as it put me through the airborne physical. Yeah. But it wasn't in your contract. Yeah, like why go through the physical? If it's not like, no one else does. So anyway, I felt like I got kind of, but it worked out. You know, I'm not trying to complain, but I do feel like he, I'm a little irritated.

I'm salty. I'm like, like, almost 20 years later about this. But when you're going in, when you're going in, when you're going. going through boot camp in the National Guard to be reservist, you must also, that's like make it a little bit more comfortable because you can find some comfort in the fact that like, God, well, at least I didn't go active duty. Sure. Whereas if you're active duty, you're like, oh, this is the rest of my, this is the next six, four years

of my life is to be in the, surrounded by these crazy people yelling and screaming because you think that's what the military is like when you go to boot camp. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean, I guess, but I just want to go to the war, man. So as soon as I got back to my unit after AIT and all the stuff So you went to boot camp AIT were you kicking ass in AIT since you killed so many freaking woodpeckers growing up? Were you like, did you were you marksman expert and all that stuff? I mean, I shot fine, you know, I don't think I was, but the triggers on those were really hard to get used to the M16 trigger first, but I mean, I shot fine.

What about what about just like being out in the woods and just feeling good about all that? That was great. Did you kind of kick ass in the AIT? Yeah, especially like the FTX stuff. I mean, it was like nothing, man. It's like all these dudes are all worried about like three days in the mud. It's like camping, man. The only time it sucked is when it, at Benning on our final FTX, it rained,

which I think is true for like almost anybody that goes through Benning, but it rained for like the entire time. So all of our hasties were like water up to our chest and stuff like that, you know. In fact, one time during night guard, my buddy, you know, we had your ankles interlocked in the hasties or whatever. Well, he was sleeping and I was up and it was his turn, I turned around, and there was a wolf spire like this big. And I put that sucker on his chest right.

I just tapped him. They woke up. His eyes are like, you know, you can't make noise, you know. So I'm trying to get it off and shit. Anyway, yeah. I was in Fort Lewis, Washington. I was going through SEAL tactical training, which is what you're doing, you're a new guy.

and there's some pretty heinous mosquitoes where we were and I had learned to carry a mosquito I would just carry like a like a one yard square of mosquito netting and that way if we laid up I could just take that thing out and just put it underneath my floppy hat and and tuck it in my collar and I'd be good to go well my my the officer that was in charge of us bought brought like a full on mosquito net like you see I don't or no, like maybe in some British colonists would wear in, like, Africa in like 1875 or something. You know, this big giant screen with the wicker bands around it, pushing it out. And so we're in this layup position.

And this other friend of mine didn't have any net. And a lot of guys actually didn't have any net. And so my buddy was sitting there catching mosquitoes and putting them into this dude while he was sleeping, catching mosquitoes. Some of the mosquitoes were actually trapped inside this guy. You woke up in the morning. I got a kick out of that one. That's brutal. Yeah.

What were you to say, though? So you put the spider on the dude? Oh, yeah, yeah. It was just funny to watch him spazz out when he knew he couldn't make noise, you know? Yeah. This mosquito one was better, though. So you're feeling good at AIT? And the war is in full swing right now, right?

So what year is this? This would be 2003. Or no, what was that? 2004 or 2003. Probably getting it. You said you graduated in 2003? Yeah. And you went right to boot camp?

There was a couple month break because I was doing concrete. So I did concrete. So I must have went to boot camp around October. Something like that. So it's probably 2004. Could have been. Well, that would have been. No, because, well, maybe it was.

I can't remember. I'm sorry. It could have been 2004. I'm just trying to think time frame of what was going on in Iraq at the time. Because we shipped, oh shit, maybe. I'm sorry, I keep doing this. Now I'm thinking we shipped out on January 21st of 2005 for Iraq. So it probably was 2004.

Yeah. Yeah. So you got, when you got done with it, it's like 2004. So the war is going, but it's not gotten crazy. yet in 2004. No. It's still like pretty low level conflict happening in Iraq. Then you got, so you got done with AIT.

Then what happened? Did you go home and you get attached to your unit? But you didn't deploy right away, did you? It wasn't very long. I can't remember how long, but it wasn't very long at all. I went to the first drill thing. And I was like, this is horrific. What, going to drill?

It was just, it was terrible. Because you wanted to be a, well, and it's also just, yeah, and it's just like sitting, doing radio shit

and like in a, like a office and stuff. And like, no, I'm not about it, man. So as soon as there was somebody deploying, they said they had,

so I was in drill. I can't remember which iteration drill was, but I was in drill. And they, they said they had someone downstant, doing SRP to go or it was an SRP. What's an SRP? I'm trying to remember if that's a right.

Well, it's like where you're getting all your checking all your paperwork, vaccination, is getting stood up to go out. I can't remember if that's the right acronym. But anyway, they were downstairs doing that crap. And they said that they had slots. And so I went and talked to my first line leader. And I was like, I want to go, you know, I want to go on this. And he was like, fine, you know.

So he let me go down there. and go. How long did they do extra training? Who did they attach you to to get ready to deploy? Gronsky's 28th ID. They sent us to, so after we, yeah, and so that was actually, yeah, so we went straight from there to, from Utah to Mississippi, just north of Hattiesburg, what hell is at Camp Shelby? And we did a couple of months at Camp Shelby, and then we did a month rotation to NTC, and then we

shipped. And how was that? Did you feel like you were getting pretty well prepared? Yes, well, because by then they put us, they stood up an actual PSD element. And so we had a separate training cycle. We had the same cycle, but separate training pathway. So other than like company live fires and stuff like this, we were all getting spun up by. And most of the OCs were like Rangers because they were the only ones that had really been doing PSD for real. So we had good OCs, I felt like and training was pretty good.

It was better training than I got anywhere else. So you immediately got attached to a group that was going to be doing PSD, which is personnel security detail. That's what they told you your job was going to be. Yeah, they pulled from within the unit and developed a PSD element because they didn't have one. And then you went to, you ended up going to NTC, which is in Fort Irwin, California, which is freaking awesome training. I mean, they have whole cities set up and villages and role players and pyrotechnics. Did they have all that stuff for you guys? Yeah.

Were you feeling pretty good about it? Man, we were living in those circus tents for like 30 days. That part's not fun. Yeah, the training was good, I feel like. Yeah. But the two uniforms for like 30 days in that circus tent was not my favorite. Now, at this time, Ramadi is start, do you know, when do you find out you're going actually to Ramadi? Like, you don't know.

Day before we shipped. Get some. They were just, they just kept telling us, take this training serious, man, because you might have to use it, you know, that kind of stuff. You'd hear like grumbling, Sunni triangle, you'd hear this kind of stuff. Uh-huh. Okay. You were ready rock and roll. Dude, I'd want to get rid.

How old were you at this point? 19. Yeah. Hell yeah. It's young and dumb, man. Yeah. And so then you get done with that. Now it's time to leave.

Do you freaking blow it out before you went overseas? Yeah. Yeah, we went. We spent some time in Louisiana for a minute. check and when you when you're leaving what's your

what your parents saying what's your mom saying what's your grandfather saying are they worried sick yeah my mom for sure was my grandpa just didn't say much honestly he really never did

about any of this but my mom was definitely terrified the whole time for sure she wasn't happy and I just like kind of laughed a little bit. I don't know why. Because I'm thinking you're 19, like, there's nothing else in the world you want to do,

and your mom's just horrified by the whole thing. Sorry, Mom. And honestly, as a father now, I've got three boys now. I have a daughter and three boys, and I think about it all the time. I think it must be much, much, much worse to send a kid off to war than to go to war yourself. Yeah, it would have to be. And I've also always felt that it would be worse. Like, when I was overseas I think it was worse for my wife than it was for me because I know what's going on. If I die, it's kind of like I mean, I don't, you know, I'm not really going to like care too much. I mean, I guess I would be bummed for that split second. But, but, you know, my wife is going to be, you know, stuck with all these kids and everything. So I don't know. I always felt like it was much harder for the people

that are staying home than it is for the people that are going overseas. Yeah. But worse even still for kids, I think. Like the children of parents. Yeah. Yeah, I think my kids were actually too young to even understand. They were between the ages of like, I guess, seven and three. Is that right?

Yeah, seven and three or something like that. So I don't think they really even comprehended. And I don't know You know like one thing with me is I never I never like wore a uniform home In the steel teams you just don't You just you know you got all your shit at work And you just put your uniform on to get there

When you get done you put on shorts and a t-shirt And flip-flops and you go home And your kids just don't even know what's happened They don't understand any of it you know They just think you just go to work sometimes And you travel I don't know I don't think my kids really Connected it too much

that they were, that I don't think they had the mental capacity or understanding to actually worry. I don't think they worried at all. I don't think they worried one second. Not like my, my wife did. You know, especially when she's going to, you know, going to hospital visit guys and stuff like that.

I guess when the kids are a little bit older. Yeah, you're probably right about all that though. Yeah, it's like when I think even now when I go hunting for a week or so, I probably worry more than my kids or miss my kids more than they miss me. Yeah, yeah. I get home. Yeah, I had my buddy Laif

You know, he's got young kids right now and he was talking he's like I don't know how you I don't know how you went on deployment like with you know he feels bad when he goes on a work trip for a week, you know and and I get it you know and maybe it's because you know he's older than I was at the time and and I guess I had that like kind of mindset that was a little bit Maybe not super good So you find out a day before you find out you guys were going on Romadi? It was either like a day or two before it wasn't long. I mean, I don't think it was a week. Did you know anything about Ramadi?

Yeah, I mean, we were watching the news. And yeah, Flusia had happened about eight months or so before, something like that. Maybe a full year. When was Phantom Fury May? Yeah, something like that. So, yeah, about a year. year before Fallujah had happened

so we had you know we had some idea uh-huh and ever all the bad guys pushed into Ramadi at that time yeah at least that's the story

we always heard yeah well I think it was pretty accurate just when you look at the level of violence from Fallujah and then the level of violence in Ramadi at that time

it definitely flared up a lot do you guys just fly over in like a C-17 or something how'd you get over there no we flew over in like Delta or something it was like a

civilian jet. To where to Kuwait? Yeah, we flew into Kuwait. Yeah, we went from Mississippi and then fueled up in Maine and then from Maine to Shannon, Ireland, and then from Shannon Ireland to Kuwait. And then you get to Kuwait. Now they throw you on C-130s to bring you into Raleadi? No, I drove up. You drove up, huh? Yeah, we were, your whole unit? No, they flew them up, but our team was security for the log pack and all that and all that. Got it. So we drove up. So I drove through NavStar. And so now it's 2005. Yeah, now it's 2000.

But what month? I think May. No, June. It was June, I think. June of 2005. You're rolling up. So that's a freaking transit right there. Yeah.

Because speaking to the SUNY triangle, you're going right through that shit. It's a whole S-O-B, yeah. Yeah, the first day was not, I mean, it was interesting, you know, once you cross those gates in there, It's like oil whales on fire and stuff and bullet hole cars here and there scattered, but there's really not like anything going on in the South Iraq. So for the first day, the first nine hours, I can't remember if it was a, so we left Buring is where we rolled out of in Kuwait. And was it Skania?

It might have been the first stop. I think Skania was the first stop. And anyway, so throughout that and like nothing happened. And then, but other than, you know, just kind of taken in the culture. and it is a for real cultural shock. Like southern Iraq, you know, anyone who's spending time in Mexico, you've seen poverty that's different than poverty in America for sure. But the poverty in the South Iraq is a whole new level.

I mean, dudes, like, stealing pieces of tarps from Americans just to, like, patch holes in their tents and stuff. So that was kind of a shock. And then, you know, kids coming up asking for water and food and this kind of shit, you know, that was like new. Or if you get slowed down somewhere, dudes wanting cigarettes tapping on your window, you know. So it was interesting to just sort of, it was kind of a,

and in some ways it was good to get acclimated, but nothing really happened on that first two days. And then on day three, we ended up hitting, well, I mean, it didn't detonate, but ended up discovering an IED, the lead truck did. And this was between Fallujah and Baghdad. And so that was like our first real experience with doing anything for real in country, you know.

How many vehicles, like, just to ask, Like how many vehicles are in this log pack? Is this like a 40 vehicle? It could have been more than that. So it's massive. Yeah, it took like six hours or something. I can't remember three years. It took hours and hours to fuel up, you know, all these.

I can't take a long freaking time. Oh, man. So when did you finally pull into Ramadi? How many days did it take you to get there? Three. Three days you pulled into Camp Ramadi. And they, what's that like? I mean, settling in.

you get moved into a barracks or where'd you where'd you guys stay out no yeah city no they didn't have any of that yet there was a big there was a big mvr building at the front and they just put us up in that you know or they had that boxing ring and that stuff in there they just put us up in that and cots for a week or two i can't remember but it was easier i think it was easier for us in some ways to transit for for the people that were going to go outside the wire I think it was easier for us for the first like mentally for that first week because when we hit that when we hit that uh or didn't you know when I say hit it didn't detonate when we hit that IED it's kind of like you know baths in fire in some ways like you to see all like what this war is really about to be for the next year you know it's like middle of the night they can't the Marines that were helping us they came you know tapped on the door and were like hey we need help You know, and you want to go. I'm like, oh, hell, yeah, I want to go.

So it's like AT4, you know, like, let's go. And so it was me and Johnny and these two Marines went out up this debt cord. So what they'd found, an IED, and, you know, honestly, after I'd been there for a while, looking backwards, it's a very obvious setup, right? There was an IED, and then this dude's prayer rug, and his driver's license was just left there. you know it's like or his ID card not driver's license but um so we were told we don't have time you know eOD can't make it whatever uh just trace that debt cord and if it goes into the house because it was going out into this compound you know like olive orchard type stuff it's like uh

if it goes into the house just fragged the house and come back and i was like oh yeah i was so freaking stoked me so we we hit the edge of this compound you know under no This is you and then two Marines and your buddy Johnny? Yeah, my first line leader at time. Well, I guess he stayed my first line leader. But it was before I got promoted. And it was, you know how they'd have those big, obviously you know, but they'd have those walls, you know, cinder block walls.

Well, this one had a gate that was locked. And then you could see there was a hole in the sides where I will just go through the hole. So we go around. And as we come around that hole, you could hear a generator running. I just assumed that it was in the back or something, but you could hear a generator running, and then this dog starts barking, like this little yappy dog. And we're like in my mind,

the only thing we got going for us right now just four men is that nobody knows we're here, you know, within this compound. I don't exactly want to take plunging fire in this compound and just four dudes very badly. So now I'm like, I can't wait to blow that effing dog up, man. I come on trying to hit that dude with my frag. going on. So I'm thinking that as we're coming around toward the front of the home. And then

once we take the right, you know, so we skirt in the house here and then take a right towards actual front. And you could see the deck cord going into the house. And I was like, oh, yeah, man, this is, it's about to be on. So we go around the deck cord and then there's a like kind of a half ass, like a stoop, not a, not a true porch, but like a stoop. And on that stoop was these sandals all laid out in like succession you can tell us like dad mom you know son older daughter and then baby daughter with like these little two inch pink sandals man that i had a i had a little sister i still do but i was very close to her at the time she was like six or seven at that time and man that hit me like a freight train you know like whoa you know it's not it's you're not just killing bad guys all the time

you know so what ended up happening we can win on we went all the way around it ended pretty good actually we went all the way around and the deck cord came out and went into his orchard in the back so we traveled through it a little bit and then one of the Marines said hey I'm going to pull

a pin flare out or pop a pinflare and Johnny didn't hear him so I'm like over here looking at a small echelon and Marine pops off the pinflare and Johnny just hits the deck in this orchard so I got a good kick out of it but We stopped there for a minute

We just see that the debt corps was going out somewhere And there was two dudes up in another home on a balcony Smoking cigars, you know, with AKs was like Well, anyway, depending on the situation But we went, you know, we didn't nothing happen But to you just walk back to the vehicles It's basically, yeah But the thing is like almost guaranteed

Those dudes were waiting to see what we would do Like almost guaranteed They were the ones to set it up and everything. I mean, what are you doing smoking cigars on your deck at 240? Yeah, you can't. Unfortunately, you can't even answer that question because they would be doing the most wild, crazy, like unknown things that you ever have imagined it a million years.

That's true. You know, like, for instance, 240 in the morning. I mean, I had a guy approach a target one time, and my Terps yelling at him, and the guys, like, got carrying a box with him, and he's walking towards, we're assaulting a target. This was in Baghdad.

We're assaulting a target, and this guy's walking up looking super suspect. And my Terps like, hey, there's 50 cows pointed at him. And like, hey. And so finally, I just like aggressively approach him. And no, we told him put the box down. So he sets the box down at his feet. And I get over. So I go to, like, grab this guy.

And as I'm going to grab him, he, like, pulled something out of his pocket. And I'm so close to him. I had my weapon. I, like, smash. He mashed his hand with my weapon and he dropped this little remote that he was carrying. And yeah, it sounds all cool. Here's the deal, though. This dude was drunk.

You know, once we got to the bottom of it, he was drunk. And in the box was a video machine and he had been over at his buddy's house watching porno and getting drunk with his buddy. You know, I almost smoked him. You know, he might have deserved it. But they do some dumb shit, man. And so you never know. So what you're saying is since you had a little bit of experience driving up there, The guys that arrived via air were sort of had to get used to going out in town.

Yeah, they didn't experience any of the culture, you know, or at least even not necessarily that we experienced, but even get a taste of it. So their first time interacting was maybe not the best day, you know, and we got to have kind of ease into it a little bit. So then what was your day, what was your mission? So your mission as a PSD guy was to protect people, you know, important people, whether that's a battalion commander, a brigade commander, support, I don't know, support EOD clearances. That was basically what you were doing.

Yeah, well, yeah. But then our principals never really left. So we ended up just doing whatever came down. Lots of QRF stuff, lots of EOD support, quite a few, like, log packs. Those are the most miserable missions on the entire. You got to drive all the way around Lake Havanaugh. and absolutely nothing's going to happen except for you're going to get smoked with an IED.

Like they're just, yeah. Those were terrible because they're boring and it's just like a crapshoot. Yeah, boring and waiting to die at the same time. Yeah, it's like the worst. So that's like mostly what we were doing. And then we, you know, a few raids come down here and there and need somebody and we go do that stuff.

What was your op tempo like? It varied a lot. Yeah, it just varied a ton. It depended. Or like we were doing like Prisoner transport, then that would be like a two-day boring-ass thing. Same kind of thing with log packs. But then if we were back home and there was not that going on,

then we might have a little higher up tempo, you know, just whatever's coming in and out. But you were basically working, would you say you're working every day? Yeah, for sure. Definitely working every day. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Rolling outside the gate every day off. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't think we had a day off until they brought in, I don't know if they did this, you guys probably not, but they ended up bringing in shrinks. I can't remember what month it might have been December I can't remember what month it was anyway they ended up bringing in shrinks to like the army was starting to have a problem with

PTSD stuff on at home but they were still kind of PTSD back then I think and so they brought in these shrinks and it was like if you've done this many missions outside of the wire in this amount of time then they were pulling you off the line and putting you like on a guard tower for how long two weeks

and off the line yeah and when they did that with us I was telling my first son, I'm like, This is the stupidest Should I've ever heard in my life. You can't, I mean, yeah, you don't want to come in and just get soft, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, and then also you might start to not want to go back out again because, you know, you get that, you get too much time to think about it. And haunch out. Was there any missions that you did that stood out to you that were particularly, interesting or important missions?

Not really, man. We did, I was a normal dork guy, man. I didn't do a lot of cool stuff. We did a raid with, we just supported First Marine Recom on a raid between Ramadi and the Syrian border. Someone, once we got Predator drones, they discovered this compound out there

that nobody even knew existed. It was like out in sand dunes. I can call it Big Wadi Farm, I think. I hope that's not, I hope that's not like some classified shit or something. I don't know. I don't think big Wadi phone could be that classified. If it is, they need to work on their freaking classification system. Well, I know that's what we called it.

Okay, then you're good. So, yeah, I mean, that was cool. Watching Recon take that down was pretty cool. But, like, we just did normal, like, day to day. Try not to get blown up, you know, try to shoot the people that need to get shot and not the ones that don't. I mean, just really, it was kind of, that's why. When I was writing the book, you know, I had just like a very basic normal guy's soldier's story. So I don't think there was any, for me it didn't seem like there was any sense and going into all these little minor.

You know, this day we got shot out here. Like the first time I took sniper fire was for sure memorable. In fact, I'll tell you that story real quick. We were out on, do you remember Trooper Recone? It was just outside of the Northgate. Before they had fortified that, we just had a. We just had like a big Texas barrier up there. And we were just sitting there waiting.

I can't remember where the heck we were going, but we were staged to go somewhere. Yeah. And anyway, we just take one round first and then another round. But it goes right over my gunner's head, who was sitting in the Humvee on the gun, you know, but he's just daydreaming, you know. And it goes right through, they had a piece of camo netting.

It goes like right through the camo netting. and he hit. He looked like if you ever slaughtered a bull when you shoot him, it's almost like their legs come up and they hit the ground like a cartoon. That's like what he did. We thought he was dead, man. Like it sounded like he just piled up in that Humvee. And so I was like, where's he shooting from?

Where's he shoot from? I was like trying to find where he was coming from, but also not keep my head out for five minutes at a time. So like moving from side to side up and down, just trying to peek. And then finally I said the only thing this could be is this covert like there's nothing else you could possibly be so we radio up and we radio up and we're like hey we're going to go get this you know this this this is or we're going to go check this covert it's the only place we can figure that we get shot at from now it's also possible that he was just

like out in the desert somewhere and I'm shooting further than we thought they were capable of but when you see a handful of Iraqi shooting at you with like AKs with no front sight post you know like you're not thinking they're pulling off the 1100 yards shots Look at that Colvert that's 200 yards away. There he is. So the captain is like, I want to go out with you guys. I'm like, oh my gosh. Okay.

So we wait and we wait. It had to be 15, 20 minutes. Had to be. Waiting for the captain to show up. Had to be. Could have been longer. So by the time he gets there, we're all talking. We're like, there's no way this dude's still there.

There's no freaking way. He's just going to lay there for 20 minutes. Like, they're dumb, but they're not that dumb. So the captain gets there and we roll out and he's like, okay, you know, so we got truck here, truck here on the side of the covert. And I was like, I'll go in. And I pulled a flashbang out and he goes, McCoy, don't you throw that flashbang in there? I'm like, what are you talking about?

And he's like, could be a UX or an IED in there. And I was like, okay. He's like, well, I want you to set this IED off while we're standing on it. And I was like, dude, I'm not going in that without throwing a banger, bro. I think I'd much rather have the flashbang set the ID off than McCoy. Yeah. That's freaking crazy. Mike, it's not happening, man.

And he goes, if you throw that flashbang in there, I'll write you in Article 15. And I said, get your fucking pen out. I swear. I know it sounds pretend. I swear to God. So I throw it in there. And this is how you know it's a true story because I throw that sucker in there. And I jump off.

Johnny comes in. I mean, we're going in. And I panicked my son. I saw my own banger and I thought it was UXO so I was like UXO UXO I'm trying to back out and Johnny's like what I'm like UXO he's like sure's like fucking flashbag What's your unexposed or unexploded ordinance so he flew his flashbag in there it went off But there's still like little chunks of it you know that are sitting there He's not just an idiot backed out to get his freaking article 50s

Yeah Yeah, that's classic he And that captain was a good dude. He just, I don't know what he was thinking on that one. He didn't write me in the heartbeat team. Yeah. I mean, man, it's hard. I'm assuming that he was fresh in country as well.

Oh, yeah. And he was young, man. You have no idea of, like, what's going on when you first get in country. You have just no idea. It's hard. And a young guy, like, was he, 25 or something? 24. I don't know.

How old are they? Roughly when they... Yeah, he's probably something like that. Probably maybe 26, something like that. But, yeah, he's not. It takes four years takes four years to make captain or miko three so he might have been 20. Yeah, so he's like 24, maybe 25. Yeah.

And he doesn't know anything. He doesn't leave the wire. He's, you know, he's running a battery. Like he's, you know. You know, just on what you said earlier about, hey, you were just a regular soldier. All of my guys, we all just, we all looked at you all like, damn. Because you guys were out going out there, like you said, every single day you're going out there to do random searches of culverts where you were just taking fire from it just

like shit like that on the daily basis and you uh we we just held all of you guys in the highest regard for what you guys were doing every single day you know we'd come back and we'd go out and off and come back and we had good chow and a place to chill out a little bit and if a guy was like tired it was like okay you know and you guys are just getting that tasking every single day. There's another thing I've talked about where it's like I don't know which one of these there's there's a different psychological impact a lot of times army guys like we'd be working with army patoons and they're like oh this is what we're getting tasked to do but we're going to go out and patrol this area we're going to go out and clear this this block we're

going to go out they're just getting tasked with what they're going to do they don't have any real say in it and we had a complete we had complete control like oh this is what we want to do then we'll go do it if we didn't want to go do it we wouldn't go do it up Like pretty much we just made up what we wanted to do and there's Pros to that because you know, you can say hey, I don't think this is a good time to do that But also when something happens it's a hundred percent because you said Hey, this is what we're gonna do so there's a different Psychological impact depending on who you are of how it ends up in your brain because

For us anyways on that deployment we did what we wanted to do we picked and chose exactly what we wanted to do We watched Army guys getting tasked, hey, you're going to go out. You know that road you got IED on yesterday? Yeah, you're going down it again today. You know the one you got IED two times before that? Yep, you're going down that one as well. And guys just had to grit their teeth.

And oftentimes just that was the mission. They'd go execute it. We had more flexibility. But then again, like I said, that means when something does go wrong, it's 100% on me as, yep, that's my mission. I'm approving it. Let's go. But yeah, you guys, you know, you talking about you just being a normal, oh, I didn't do it, didn't do much, there's no big deal.

Going out there every single day into that city is a freaking salute to all you guys. How often would you say you were taking contact when you guys would go out? We didn't, a lot of guys got way worse than us. We didn't take it a lot. We really didn't take it a lot because we would also end up on dumbass like log pack shit. You know, like I'm saying. So then we're way out to quorum. But even on stuff like that, it's like IED every single time or every other time or something.

But in town, I mean, I don't know if, I don't know if anybody didn't at least get shot at everything. Like, you couldn't, you sure as hell could not go down Route Michigan and not at least have someone shoot at you. Like, I had some guys over at Eastern Ramadi, and I was briefing the colonel of the siege of Soda. awesome guy. And I was just briefing them on what we were doing, how we were doing it. And I said, you know, sir, my element that's out in eastern Ramadi, they've, they've been, they've been contacted by the enemy, the last 23 operations in a row. And then my intel guy or my talk guys came in like, while I'm saying that and they're like, sir, just to let you know troops in in contact and the guys in the house like, I said, sir, make that 24 times in a row. So yeah,

you were definitely going to, the enemy was there. Yeah, for sure. The enemy was definitely there. Well, it didn't help that everyone was just retaking the same ground every day. Mm-hmm. I mean, and every idiot on the line was saying it, you know, this makes absolutely no sense. What were we doing?

You know, we eventually ended up starting setting up cops and stuff like this, but in the beginning it was just essentially glorified presence patrol after presence patrol. It's just very stupid stuff. But, yeah, I mean, like I say, other guys are doing way more than we were, too. So, like, way more. from a leadership perspective what did you see from the good leaders that you work for what did you notice about them what made you want to follow them for integrity is huge

when somebody it's from a leadership perspective it's into actually maybe integrity is not the right word yeah if when you start seeing your like your brass bullshit in you you know it's I mean, it's really hard to get that trust back. Like, just don't bullshit me. Tell me what it is. I mean, I don't want to name anybody or even tell certain stories, but there was a couple where it was like, man, what are you doing? You know?

And here's just a little warning for leaders. If you think that your frontline troops don't know when you're lying to them, you're so wrong. You tell that frontline troop that, hey, they'll know, this is, no, don't worry, because we're going to do this later or this is what's really happening. everybody can see right through it. So if you're lying to your people, they're going to know.

You're not smarter than them. They know exactly what's happening and you can't bullshit these guys. So don't try and do it. Yeah, like one of them came up with this plan. I don't want to say who, but he called it Operation Decoy. And we had Apache gunships for the day,

you know, but it was like supposed to be two weeks out or something. And the plan was that our team we'll just take our trucks and roll through until like iDs went off you know like hopefully you see them right but we're like listen man you're going in lead vehicle bitch like what is this you know like you're just happy you got some helicopters it's like you just yeah yeah we end up not having to do that one but that was legitimately the plan and yeah my my nCO is like no you can bust me we're not doing this. Check.

With that, that kind of covers some of the stuff leading up to anything else you want to cover leading up to Glass Factory? No, that's fine. All right. Let's get into this book, man. Again, book is called The Glass Factory. You're going to hear me read parts of it.

It has got, it's great, it's great story. You're a great storyteller, but the internal dialogue that's going on in here of what your thoughts are, The progress you're making as a person is, it's just an outstanding book, so get the book. Here we going. The Glass Factory starts like this.

The whole recruitment push had gone smashingly thus far, but we were on our fourth day of this same drive, and we had already hugely surpassed our initial goal of 200 new recruits. The men of Ramadi had lined up in droves for the opportunity to become one of the guys chosen to fly to Jordan for the high-speed training, the U.S. government had funded for them and later returned to their hometown to clean it up. In fact, we had processed hundreds of candidates already. The catch was this was going to be day four of this particular mission, and we had only been promised three peaceful days.

The problem was all the spots that we had for these future Iraqi police had been filled days ago. This was all just for show. No one on our team felt like it was a good idea to put ourselves at risk for almost nothing, but we were soldiers, and that's just part of the job, or so we are told. When we got into our Humvee, I cracked a joke. Well, let's go get blown up, boys. I was just trying to cut the tension, probably mine more than any others, but I'm not sure it had the desired effect. Actually, talking to General Gronsky on here, you know, he talks about the fact that as he looks back,

He's like, I, the four days in a row, didn't need it. Shouldn't have done it. You know, that's his, that's what he feels. That's what he said. And, you know, you're in a, I mean, hindsight is always 20-20. Yeah. Well, I know why he did it, though. We, the thing that was frustrating for us was day two, they had shot us, I mean, they missed wildly, but they had shot at us with rockets.

And then day three, and that's just, I mean, maybe they were just shooting a camper monitor. Like I said, they missed wildly. day three two dudes sat at the bus stop for like four hours and we reported it up like i mean who's first of all what are they waiting for you know um so anyway we reported that up and but the reason you know to defend gronsky here the reason that he went on with it is we had guys process and queer up until like midnight and it was dark and we turned away a couple hundred people got it so he didn't want them to feel like they didn't have the opportunity even though no one was having the opportunity by then but just the show of that

At least that was my take. And then just from a strategic perspective here, the goal was to have the local people from Ramadi join the Ramadi police and then police up their own city. So they could fight against the insurgents there. And as you said, there's hundreds of them that showed up. So that's pretty awesome. That's a pretty great feeling. And all those people are showing up.

You want to help them. And the call was made, try and get these guys in there. You actually, and again, I'm not reading the whole book right now, let people get your audio book, but you had an uneasy feeling about this op. Yeah, I think we all do. Yeah, in fact, you wore like your winter, your shitty winter warfare boots, right?

Those boots sucked. Yeah. Because you knew they were going to get cut off you at some point. I mean, that's what you're thinking anyway, you know. Or at least if you're going to live, you know, I want to keep my good boots. Yeah. I mean, there was just too many things. and then I do I don't know if it's premonition or what but you I just I just felt like I knew just knew

fast forward a little bit we put our team members in their places inside the glass factory's walls and went outside and went out ourselves I was oddly calm as we walked out the gate not that I generally feared of being among Iraqi people it's just in a situation like this where you were surrounded by roughly a thousand men whom you have no ability to directly communicate with things can spiral out of control very quickly the otherwise peaceful crowd could be overtaken by the chaos of the mob in an instant, and that should be frightening to anybody. Up and down the line of Iraqis,

we walked checking the crowd for threats as we went. We stopped frequently to interrogate Iraqis who looked eager, agitated, or uncomfortable. Honestly, most of them looked nervous and unsettled, which was perhaps the most reasonable way to feel in that moment. These guys knew they were in danger just as well as we did. After all, they lived in the city that we fought in. The danger of terrorist attacks had become,

just another part of daily life to the citizen of Western-on-bar province at one point a man approached us uneasily instantly causing my blood pressure to rise he stood close to me as he began to talk too close back up i said he has something to tell you Carlos and Carlos is the nickname that you guys gave to your interpreter Carlos leaned in and told me defensively grenade you found a grenade our interpreter continued the conversation yes the man responded a grenade with a wire Carlos relayed to us in English. You gotta be shitting me, I said. There's a fucking trip wire out here somewhere. Ask him where the hell it is, Carlos? Carlos turned to the man and asked, but we, but they were having a hard time communicating because the guy was so scared. It was like watching a Kindergarner,

tattletail on his classmates on the playground. God damn it, we are out here in a cloud of a thousand unpredictable Iraqis and there's a fucking booby trap somewhere I said aloud, but to no one in particular. So there's a, this is just, and I'm only, again, I'm only, I'm only, reading chunks of this thing. But this is a, this is a rough situation to be in. How many people are you guys got?

Like, we had 12 that day. And then, yeah, we had 12 and then they had, the 1-7-duce had an Abrams on the road. And then the Marines had a little bit of security. I mean, we probably, anyway, our team had 12 people.

How many, what was the total coalition forces? Probably 40, I bet. And there's a thousand. Yeah. Something like that. Something roughly, yeah. I mean, you know that joint recruitment checkpoint up the road by the bridge from the glass factory? I don't know.

It's like it's got to be a third of a mile or so, maybe even a half a mile. Or maybe it's a quarter mile. Anyway, you know. It might have changed too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they could have took it out. That's true. Anyway, they were lined up down near to, like, damn near to their three deep. I got pictures of what I should send you.

There was a lot of people there are. So you're at this point you're trying to locate the IED you're kind of like you're focused on that Of course you can't just totally focus on that you got all these other guys walking around You're asking questions and then Going back to the book I heard a strange sound to my left followed by the report of rifles and burst from the machine guns set atop the Abrams tank that had been positioned to a block a street I dropped to a knee and began to scan for targets Bang bang bang crack crack crack the round sounded off as they hit struck their target men began shouting in two different languages the

confusion of combat sets in rapidly iraqis were running around frantically screaming in high-pitched tones and flailing about in the streets others stood frozen as if in fear and curiosity had stiffened them still scanning for a target that I could possibly identify and engage but coming up with none I was getting worried that I was missing some obvious ambush coming from the buildings to our south then I saw it a semi-truck had crashed through our perimeter a few hundred meters away. Our fellow soldiers and Marines had immediately recognized the threat and eliminated it before it could do any more damage to our position.

That's one hell of a V-bit, I thought to myself. The acute problem had been solved. I hoped, for all I knew, that thing might be filled with explosives. But an even larger threat now loomed, a terrified mob. Civilians were running around horrified, shoving each other, climbing over the Jersey barriers, screaming, lost in the confusion of the moment. It did not take long to decide that we could not allow them to get any more riotous. It was time to start wrangling non-combatants.

Johnny was within an airshot, so I asked him what the new plan of action was. He radioed the talk and briefed them on the current situation. Our commanding officers verified that reinforcement troops were now en route. All we could do in the time being is keep the Iraqis contained until we had enough help to reorganize them. So there's a big vehicle approaches. Machine gun on the tank, the coaxer or something stops that vehicle. Yeah, yeah, a couple. Yeah, we had a machine gunner set up in a position, kind of a blocking position to.

So they were, you know, hitting the engine block and disabled it. And it ended up, turned out, it was just an Iraqi, you know, Iraqi being an Iraqi. And he just drove through our Constantine wire. But you, yeah. Well, you can't. I mean, in a situation like, especially when we've been told all. morning that's a V-bed. Yeah.

And by the way, that means there's Constantine wire. That means there's signs in Arabic that say don't pass here. Deadly force will be used. There's several layers of that stuff, which is why I was saying earlier, like you could never imagine that someone would do that. And oftentimes also they're, well, and in this case, likely true, probably a distraction to get people distracted from what else was happening. So maybe they didn't have time to build a V-bid.

and so they just sent this guy in there to start the distraction, which is what it looks like to me. Going back to the book, we started yelling at the civilians to get back in the line as Carlos translated for us. A few listened, but most pretended not to hear what he

was saying or just plain too afraid to move. We ratcheted up our anger a little and looked them dead in the eye and let them know we were still in command of this circus, but it was of little use. Whether we wanted it to be or not soon became apparent that we were going to have to be more forceful.

Some of the men had to be physically dragged off of the tops of barriers. Some had to be shoved. Others conformed when they saw that we were no longer messing around. Still, others ran away and escaped the scene altogether. Fast forward a little bit. Two of our new Marine friends were there asking whether we wanted them to get their dogs. Roger, please do. These two Marines were canine handlers and by reputation damn good ones.

One of them was Sergeant Kahn. He had already deployed to Iraq before. This round for him had started at a small base out in western Iraq near the Syrian border, but that area lacked the action he longed for, so he had requested transfer to the hottest area of the fight. Ramadi. He was a true badass warfighter, and in my experience, the military has no better tool for safely changing the minds of stubborn Iraqi men than a canine warrior at one end of a leash and a copse. Your Marine at the other. So you got dogs on station now.

At one point, you sort of lighten your load a little bit. What did you go back into the gate to do that? Yeah. Yeah. To the man gate and just started off-look because there was so many grab hands going on. We were so undermanned. And I started worrying about, especially my smoke up here, getting hit with flak. You know, I just didn't want to burn the shit on my face.

So I started offloading the stuff, and then I chose to keep my shotgun, which I still, it's still weird to me that I, but I didn't know, like, my shotgun is what I really needed in the moment for the crowd, but, you know, what if we had to push out? And anyway, I talked about that a little bit in there. I mean, if you had to push out, maybe you'd just go back and get your rifle, you know. Like, but you made yourself a little slicker. This is basically what you did,

so that you could do more crowd control without worrying about one of these guys grabbing something. Um, there's some Iraqi policemen with you. Yeah. Oh yeah. And these guys started getting, they started getting hyper aggressive. That was the best one we had, by the way. The one that, this one that's going off here. Here you, so this guy like basically is pointing his, pointing his AK at everybody.

You know, he's getting ready to freaking, looks like he's getting ready to start shooting people. Well, when I found him, they had him encircled. and he was in the center of circle and they were hollering back and forth. I don't know what they're saying. And then I see him jack around out of that. I was like, oh, shit, man. He's not to light these dudes up.

I mean, I don't know. I don't know if I had hated him for doing it in that moment. I was pretty frustrated at everything. I didn't want him to shoot something. I didn't make a joke. But yeah, he was scared. You know, they don't respect other Iraqis. And there's a really weird customary thing.

I don't know if this was throughout the whole of Iraqis. but for sure in Ramadi where they're really like not afraid of AKs. You pull out a pistol and those mofos get all kinds of like, you know, it's an attitude changer. And I've always heard that maybe it was because of like hit squads and stuff like that. But yeah. So if you just have like an AK pointing out, I'm not like, man, I've been doing that to my brother since we were five, you know, not even, not even worried about it, you know.

So he was like jacking that round in and to be like, no, I'm seriously going to shoot you. So then all of a sudden, hey, I heard yelled at an authoritative and powerful new American voice. We don't fucking act like that around here. That's Saddam's tactics. We don't pull that shit. Lieutenant Colonel Mack had arrived and he was not pleased with the behavior of our Iraqi comrade. Apparently, Colonel Mack had heard that things were getting out of hand and had decided to gather up his personal security detail and come see the mission through. With the help of Mack's team, the dog handlers, we began to.

and the dog handlers, we began to regain control of the crowd. We separated civilians into three lines heading east and west along the large concrete wall that formed the outer border of the glass factory. Fast forward a little bit. The entire morning, my good friend and medic, whom we affectionately called Z, had been hounding me to have him relieved of his post. He was manning our 50 caliber machine gun within the walls of the glass factory, which we had set up to defend us from the crowd and from potential attacks. for me though

the problem at hand was a personal one so he's he's like requesting to get out of there he's been hollering me for an hour by then and your basic thought was don't come out here you just want to put a he's the medic if something happens you don't want him to be involved

in it so you're you basically you're basically like okay just a minute just hold on and you're basically just trying to put it off until the yeah man I told him no for hours and he just wouldn't shut the I'm like, all right, man, just give me a second, give me a second.

Try that tactic. Slow rolled him. Fast forward a little bit. Hey, Corporal McCoy, get over here. Lieutenant Colonel Mack yelled at me. I'll be right back. You know what to do? I told Rick before I jogged over to the colonel.

And again, this seems a little bit like stilted when I read it. Maybe you don't recognize all these characters. That's because I'm not reading the whole book. So buy the book. Hey, McCoy, you got any dip? Yes, sir. Mack was a commanding, but warm. leader. You could not help but feel a little stronger when you talk to him. He was straight to the

point and I would not use the word friendly per se, but he was certainly not the typical overbearing, massively insecure curmudgeon that some officers or even NCOs for that matter can be. He was a warrior, a man you respected and admired. He went on to give me a new set of instructions that I cannot quite recall and then sent me off. Each of us heading back to our positions about 50 meters apart. When I got back to Rick and stood in front of him with my back turned to his direction and picked up instruction right where I had left off. Then Z called me on the radio again to say he was on his way out there because he had found relief. I reached up with my left hand to key the microphone on my left shoulder and bent my neck to respond. Raj, see you out there. Suddenly there

was a loud bark followed by a violent growl coming from somewhere just in front of me. I peered under the brim of my helmet to figure out what was going on, neck still bent to the radio mic. Sergeant Kahn's dog, Bruno, had grabbed an Iraqi man in the midst of the first line by the arm and began to shake him violently. Sergeant Kahn threw himself at the guy. Boom, boom. Deffining blast rumbled out back to back accompanied by two ratcheshing.

rapid white flashes. A burning, stinging sensation shot through my entire body. It was as if I'd been struck by lightning. I felt my muscles and bones contort fiercely, almost like they had flexed in succession so swiftly that their mere compression had been enough to shatter my skeleton. Then followed an unimaginable pain. It felt like every nerve in my body had been set ablaze

at the same instant, then blackness. You have a pretty good memory of that. Yeah. Surprisingly. Up into that moment, I think I have a pretty solid handle. And then afterwards, it's a little looser for a period. Because when Johnny and I talked about it, he had said that he thought he got to me within like a minute or so, which is totally plausible

given the distance. But in my mind, it seemed like it was quite a bit longer than that. So I don't know, after getting your head bell wrong that, you know, it's hard to. But my psychologist told me

that the reason that that's actually not uncommon as far as like leading up into something. It's called a flashbulb memory or something like this. Your brain like imprints, you know, like a one moment. in time.

Yeah. Like, apparently this often happens to people in violent situations. I think it's called a flashbolt

memory. I'm sure I'd have my phone on Google. Yeah. And so, and again, like,

it's only as accurate as I can be. I'm sure there's mistakes. Yeah, yeah. Well, no, I mean, I've got friends that got blown up

and they don't literally don't remember anything. I mean, it's just, they don't remember anything. They don't remember,

you know, they maybe member 15, 20 minutes before it happened and then just blank until they wake up in a hospital somewhere. Interesting.

Yeah, and that's, you know, from that moment, that's where I started the podcast. You know, when you were faced, you wake up, face down in the, in the sand, covered in blood. Going back to the book here, fast forward a little bit. You say when the blast went off, they had thrown dozens of men, including me, some tens of feet. When we had all landed, I met up at the bottom of one of the piles of dead.

and wounded. Johnny pulled the bodies off me as he continued to shout. Corses lifted one by one. I believe there were three bodies on top of me. The weight lessened. I could move a little more freely. Then when one of the corpses was pulled off of me, I saw the mangled parts which had blocked the view to my own hips leave with it. For the first time since the initial blast, my waistline was exposed. I was able to see that my hips and at least the upper portion of both of my legs were still intact. I had not been cut in half after all. Great news in the darkest of moments. But I still could not see below my knees.

Johnny grabbed my body and rolled me over. I realized my legs were still fully attached and fully articulated from feet to hip. The pain was extraordinary, but things were looking up. My friend kept on talking to me as he patched me my now exposed wounds. He assured me that both of my legs were still there and that they were not missing any joints. which I thought I saw with my own eyes, but his reassurance sure didn't hurt anything. He did his best to keep me calm and relaxed.

I did my hardest to tough it out for him. On every mission, I wore no-mex gloves, which I had the fingers cut out of early on deployment. Because my right hand was so mangled, Johnny and Lyle, another soldier who was helping administer first aid, fought it best just to get the bleeding stopped, so they bandaged my hand right over the top of the glove. They had my right hand elevated and bandages up by the time I saw it, but both bandages and the glove quickly ran through with blood.

There was a three inch long gash across the top of my right forearm just above my wrist. It had been opened up so wide that it revealed the bright white bones and my warm and pink muscle fibers, which twitched on either side of the wound as it bled. there were approximately seven holes in that arm and eight more in my left they were all leaking hot thin looking blood traced ghastly lines down each arm from shoulder to hand i had still yet to see what my legs looked like under my uniform but it was obvious that even though all of each leg was still attached the situation was dire every time i shuddered convulsed or worse yet was bumped by someone else i grunted and moaned in agony otherwise i I either gritted my teeth to get a handle on the pain or babbled incoherently. I'm sorry, Johnny. I'm trying not to be a pussy, but this shit really hurts. I know it does, bro. You don't have to apologize.

When Z, our medic finally reached us, he looked over at me and said, Mack, I've got to go help a Marine. He's worse off than you are. I'll be back as soon as I can. His voice was stricken with panic. I heard it, but I felt a deep sense of pride at how well my friend and teammate defeated that trepidation and did his job right. Z stood up and hustled over to Sergeant Kahn's side to begin treatment on him.

Z was worried about my future as any close friend would be, but a basic Army medical procedure had a very strict rule of progression. A medic is to start with the American who is most gravely injured. And you got a one thing that's cool about this book, you got a bunch of footnotes in there where you'd kind of just add some detail. And I don't know how many of them going to read, but this one is pretty cool, pretty interesting anyways. I just want to reiterate this point. It could have been upsetting to watch a close friend walk away while I was clearly on the brink of death, especially since he left to go help a warrior who had almost surely already passed away. But that's not how I felt at all. All I remember feeling was a deep sense of respect and the strength of character that my friend had just displayed. He had been forced into an extremely uncomfortable and complex situation with nearly no time to think it over. And he had demonstrated the courage to put personal loyalties aside and do the right thing.

thing. Just imagine the world we would live in if more people had that kind of fortitude. Yeah. Because Z's like your boy. Yeah. And he has to just be like, hey, I'll be back, man. Yeah. And my buddies that were there trying to pat, I mean, you could sell just from reading that, that are not exactly medics, you know, if you couldn't get hands to quit bleeding,

you know. I mean, they're doing the best. Yeah. They're just like wrapping gauze over open. Like, you know, you got a hole all the way through my hand right here. And then all the way through my knuckle and my thumb. And, you know, I mean, I can't even move my finger. And it's like, like, this is all mangled.

And they're just, like, wrapping gauze around like we're going to work out or something. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, they're trying, but, you know what I'm saying? And then, like, this one up here, you know, that was all opened up. They were just, like, wrapping it, you know. And that was from just a ball bearing and just ripped the, you know what I mean. So they just didn't really know what they were doing. And so it's not like Zane could.

What I'm saying is. It's not like Zane couldn't see that when he first looked. And the one thing I can't remember if I wrote about it, but I will say is the compartment syndrome part, which maybe you might read. But with the way the legs sucked up, probably saved my life, really. Because it's like creating an internal tourniquet on your femurs, you know. So at least my legs were not bleeding as badly as they could have been in that moment. Tell us about that compartment syndrome. So when your femurs break, especially if they break in multiple places, but if any, any time they break, your femur is always at risk of a compound fracture anytime it breaks because your glutes and your quads are just strong.

So my femurs were broke in multiple places. So they just folded like a, you know, almost they just folded up anyway. And they went beside each other like this. And then you're just cutting all kinds of blood vessels in there and potentially arteries and all of that. but so that creates some internal swelling and pressure and then you get like blood that gets locked into, in between two

like it can't go above or below that spot so it's like a blood that's trapped in an area but it was almost acting like a tourniquet. Yeah, you basically you got lucky in the fact that you had compartment syndrome that's swelled around your arteries and shut some of that bleeding down. Yeah.

Because otherwise, yeah. At this point, Z's back working on you. And you say my clothing all removed, I could finally see the multitude of holes in my legs clearly. Z began to patch what he could, but they were even worse condition than my arms were.

Each leg had more than 10 different holes in it, some of which were nearly two inches in diameter. Most were not that big. They were about the size of, they were about the size of a small marble on average, but they had gone straight through both sides of my quadriceps. At this stage, the wounds were not pumping out as much blood as one might have expected. It was more like a steady leak.

He says, I lay there watching them bleed for a while, thinking to myself, holy shit, saving Private Ryan really got it right. These wounds look exactly this they do in the movie. So they are now packing you up, and they're trying to get you onto a damn litter. Eventually, they get you on the litter. They get you on the litter. Now, each time the truck would bounce in and out of potholes, My bones would rattle and rub together.

The pain at this stage was so intense that when combined with my heavy blood loss, it caused me to pass in and out of consciousness. But because of the condition I was in, Z was doing everything in his power to keep me awake. Mac, Mac, don't you go to sleep, he yelled. I moaned a response as best I could and then forced my eyes open. This is fun. When we finally reached the rear entrance of Camp Ramadi, we ran into a whole new set of problems. Our own soldiers, ineptness.

We rolled up only to be immediately stopped by the soldiers who ran, the gate. They would not let us in because we did not have a convoy number. Can't make this shit up. That's 100% true. Yeah, Z was losing it on those boys at that point. Back and forth, our driver argued with the gate guards until eventually Z, standing

in the bed of the truck, lost as cool. We don't have a fucking convoy number. I can't let you in without one. This isn't a fucking convoy, you idiot. We got a wounded American here. Eventually, the soldiers at Ogden Gate let their better sense abilities take over when we allowed to enter our home. And the, the EVAC that we were using by that point,

Medivac, was a five ton, you know, it was like, so that's where you run you in the back of a five ton? Yeah. That's a comfortable. It's like riding on a brick with wheels. Yeah. So they just had like the litter stretch between those two benches. Uh-huh.

Yeah, it was misery. And then some sort of major had this, you know, bright idea he was going to, you know, too many guys were rolling over. I never heard of a single person rolling over. I mean, maybe they did. But anyway, he put speed bumps all the way to dent, you know. So it was like speed bumps all the way to the damn Charlie Med.

Each one of those freaking personally built for Braxon-Coyce. Sometimes I wonder if any of those guys ever read some of these kind of books that come out later on, you know, and just think, man, maybe that was stupid. I remember. Well, when I first got to Baghdad, this is like 2003, and there are all these potholes. on like the road around the base. And like deep pot holes, they're kind of jacked up. And then they filled in all the potholes.

And then they built speed bumps. No way. I was like, bro, you had it. And then you filled it in. And now you're building speed bumps. Come on, man. Going back to the book, I began to pass in and out of consciousness so frequently

that I was having a hard time telling the difference between reality and whatever dream world I was off to in between. Once they carried me to the medical facility, they realized there was another problem and it was already filled with wounded Iraqi men in one side of Charlie Med. We went in one side of Charlie Medd

and right out the other. Down the road a little way is another aid station which belonged to our brigades engineers, so we headed there. Once inside, the first thing they did was only start transfusing blood. In the beginning, they only had lines containing a quarter or so a piece

into each arm, but eventually they had to stick an IV into my jugular and start pumping in fluid that way. Damn. Yeah, they put a pick in. After establishing a steady stream of fresh blood into me, they fixed as many bandages as they could and rushed me out to the PLZ to board a MEDAVAC flight containing several other wounded people bound for Balad.

While en route to Balad, the flight crew decided that because some of us had lost so much blood and emergency landing in Fallujah was necessary to save our lives. Included. I was passing in and out of consciousness again. My grip of reality, if you could call it that anymore, was so slippery that it was like I was that was like trying to squeeze a wet fish. The harder I tried, the worse it became. The darkness that awaited me each time I passed out was becoming more and more welcoming. I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was sleep. To put it into a sentence, I was starting to give up. What will death be like? Everyone always talks about a white light near the the end of a tunnel, but I am not seeing shit. Yeah, man, and it was cold too. It was January. I know, like, it's Romani, but it's still cold.

It's like 65 or something. And when it's been 120 for eight months, 65 feels cold as hell, you know. And then you've run out of blood, so you're just even colder. It was, at that point, I was pretty close to just send hell with it, you know, whatever that means. I don't know if you really have control of that or not, but. I think I do have some level of control of it. I mean, I've heard plenty of stories of people that had that will to survive and are able to stay alive. And you know what I actually think of that the most is hearing stories from guys that were in prison of war camps.

And the difference between someone that lives and someone that dies is like this person was just like, I'm going to make it. And this other person said, I'm not. So I think there's definitely something to that. You get here where guys are Braxton, Braxton, stay with us. I know it hurts. but we've got to stretch your legs out again or you're going to lose them. Okay, I moaned. Then I passed out again, blunt stained tears running down both cheeks.

I'm not sure how long I was out for and I was not fully awake, but the next thing I distinctly remember was the sound of my flesh tearing under a scalpel. Scalpel. The surgeons were slicing the side of each quadricep to relieve my compartment syndrome. Blood and pus practically spewed out of my swollen legs split wide open. I will never forget the way that cutting sounded inside my head. It was reminiscent of a muddy zipper being forced open. Something stick with you forever, hearing your own flesh being cut apart is one of them.

Yeah, that shit sucked, man. And it's knee to hip on both sides, like point of the knee all the way up to the point of my hip. They split, and then they, once they got me in that traction split, then they put in these wound vaks. It's like a big sponge. And then they wrap it. So it's like a big spongy-looking thing, and it's got a vac set up across the back. pulls the shit out of the sponge.

So I think the way it works is the sponge sucks up the moisture, whether it's, you know, the liquid, whichever liquid it is, pus, internal like water from you, I don't know what the hell it is, blood and all that. And then the vacuum sucks it out of the sponge, I think. So they cut you open and then they slip that in to the wound. And it's like, it's like this big, you know, as far as width-wise. and then they put like a plastic thing over it and then just pump that. Yeah, you got some pictures on your website of like your legs splayed open like that.

It does not look, it doesn't even look survivable. I mean, how much they cut you open. It's freaking crazy. It was crazy. Yeah. I mean, it's wild. My IT bands are still, like, you know, your IT bands are like supposed to be one band, right? And I got like two of them or four of them, I guess.

To one each leg Yeah What did they like Did they cut the IT band open or did they Yeah they had to stretch open No they had to cut through it to get to the To be able to get that wound back in there At least that's my understanding of it

You can stick your finger through it Like you can go all the way to the muscle Yeah it was it was nuts man And you were conscious during this Yeah well No way didn't you any morphine or anything By then I was starting now Once they got me stable then they could start

Hit me with stuff But in Vermont they weren't going to give me anything because my blood pressure was super low and I just didn't want to you know zonk me which I think is probably a good idea glad to be here yeah we'll take it whatever call got made apparently was the right one yeah and I you know I think probably what happened is I had been another thing is I'd been I don't know if Groski's talked about this but they had I was one of the last people getting evaq because they just it was just a wrecked And they had a bunch of Iraqis that were already in Charlie Med by the time they got me there and stuff.

So they just screwed up the triage. So I think probably the call was made because it had been quite a while before they got me in there. So they were like, well, if he's making it like why risk it now? He's made it this long without it. And so then they, I'm sure they hit me with it in Fallujah because I don't really remember Fulia to Baghdad. I mean, Balad, hardly at all. And all of this, I'm still pretty hazy, you know. Yeah, you say I was put en route in route to the big Air Force Base Hospital in Balad.

I guess I'm still alive, I thought. The question became a common theme throughout the following hours and days. And like you said, you know, you write about it in the book. You can hear doctors talking, you're, like, partially coherent. You're tired. You're just, like, in and out of sleep. for a while. That's pretty much your memory of Balad is just, you know,

linen out of consciousness, little bits and pieces. You say I woke to loud rumbling of an airplane engine. I was being pushed across an airstrip towards a C-130, Medevac flight headed for launch dual Germany. Fast forward a little bit. I had to read this part because it sounds freaking horrifying. Later I woke up choking in in sheer terror. I felt like I was drowning, but how?

Instinctively, I tried to turn my head to one side to get a breath, but I couldn't because it was so tightly fast into this bed. I wiggled as much as I could, gagging, hacking, trying desperately to dry, are still unsure of what was happening. Left and right, I moved my head, only managing a centimeter or less in either direction. I groaned for help, still too tightly restrained to move. Help, I screamed inside my head. I desperately needed to breathe.

I couldn't hold my breath much longer. Yes, you can. Toughen up. My thoughts ran wild. Help, I gurgled aloud this time. It was completely unintelligible because my mouth and nose were filled with water. Fear turned in anger. Inside my head, I had screamed a series of idle, senseless threats and cuss words.

Suddenly, I felt the strap loosened. My head shifted to one side. As soon as I felt cleared, I coughed and hacked out all the fluids that were lodged in my throat. I was still in a daze, but at least I could breathe. I gasped for air and muttered, thank you to the nurse who had just. just saved my life. Inside my head, I was calling this flight and all the unwounded people on at every combination of curse words I could dream up.

Yeah, I think I probably threw up. You know, while you were, and that just woke you up as you probably drowned in your own vomit. Yeah, like probably, like, I thought about this later on, and that's probably what happened. And, you know, they'd strap your head to that, that litter, you know, so you can't move. and then being on drugs and in the air. And she's, who knows how many, you know, people she's attended to, I mean, because I can't say shit except for the roof of the aircraft, you know.

And you're all drugged up, so you're barely even coherent anyway. And, yeah, that's scary. How old are you, are you 20 yet? Yeah, I turned 20 over there. I turned 21 back home. And you had gotten married when? Was like, did you go home on leave and get married? Yeah, I did.

Yeah. Oh, man. That's always a tough but understandable call that soldiers can make from time to time. Everybody in the whole world tells you not to do it. But you're like, oh, man, I know what I'm doing. I have personally given that advice to many, many young men over the years and have almost never been listened to. So is it you went for, you went home for two weeks of leave? during deployment.

And that's me going to be. Check. World Series and the deer hunt. Check. Later on, a surgeon came and told me that they had planned on trying to put rods in my femurs while I was in surgery there, so now you're in Germany. But the doctors thought it would be best to wait

for the infection to clear up. He explained as he lifted the sheets and showed me my legs for the first time since I left Iraq that they had instead placed external fixators on each one of them. These metal cages were implanted just to get me stable enough to be flown back to Walter Reed Army Medical Center

in Washington, D.C. He told me I was headed there that night. So they put these freaking external fixators on your legs to try and let them heal up more before they would eventually put internal rods inside your legs. They're trying to get the bacteria out.

There was some bacteria that they had discovered that guys were coming home with from the sand in Iraq. Some moge freaking bacteria. Yeah. So when you, Yeah, when you get to Walter Reed, if you have that, they put a blue, like a blue label on your door or whatever. So they can't put a rod in your femurs while you have an infection because it could,

it risks introducing the infection to the inside of your femur. And then you're really in trouble. So they had to get that cleared out and then they could get rods and end up taking like a month or something to get everything. Oh, sorry, really quick. And the way that those things work is it's like the external fixators. Yeah. It's like a big cage like you're saying, almost like a series of halos. But then those halos have a like rods that come out of them.

And those rods have screws like drill bit screws or drill screws, wood screws on the end looking thing, more like a machine heads or screws. And those are screwed into your bone to keep your bones stable. And then they go back out through that halo and they bolt into that halo. So it's like that thing's actually screwed to your bone. Yeah. I had a friend of the family, little girl. She was probably nine years old and she broke her femur.

She had an external fixator on her femur. You don't even think if you don't think that seems like a good idea. Like if you're a, if you didn't know anything about medicine, which I don't, then you told me, hey, what we're doing is we're going to do is we're going to screw rods through the skin into the bone and have a whole contraption on the outside? you'd be like, you're an idiot. Yeah. It doesn't make any sense. It's true, yeah. Like, it's crazy.

It's a crazy idea. You'd think you'd just, it'd be infected. Yeah. Yeah. That's freaking crazy. This is, you go into talking about a little bit like what's going through your head at this point. I'm going to fast forward a little bit. This feeling of helplessness and confusion lasted in varying degrees for days, if not weeks.

During this period, I had surgery nearly every morning to clean and irrigate my wounds and change the bandage that swath my body. From what I understand, the doctors had to put me under for these daily hygiene sessions because the sheer number of open wounds and their depth made scrubbing too intrusive and time-consuming to do while I was awake. I had a dozen or more wound channels, which were through and through. It's a term used to describe a wound that starts on one side of the body and passes through its other side exiting entirely. Usually on a limb, I also, usually on a limb.

I also had dozens more wounds caused by projectiles, which had penetrated my flesh, but it stopped in something more dense, like bone or thick muscle. What do you think? This S-Vest was just, like, filled with ball bearings or something, and that's what you got shredded with? Man, I'm packing, like, eight or ten of them still.

How big are they? Are they all the same size? Yeah. So it's like a uniformed kind of professionally built S-vest. Well, so we found some before where They were just filling up water bottles with wheel bearings And then just taping those that those water bottles to the front of the explosive So I guess like professional

Yeah Trained by the Iranians like I think probably Yeah I got one in my ass that really messes with me when I'm riding horses sometimes Like tried to get them to cut it out but it's like too deep I guess You say this, I spent the next few weeks in the same bed lying around and thinking about what my new life was going to be when, if I got out of the hospital. When I was not caught up daydreaming about what my long-term recovery was going to look like, my mind was on my brother's back in Ramadi. I knew the morale-crushing war that they were living every day, and I had begun to feel an enormous amount of guilt at the thought of them facing those trials without me.

The thought was only made worse when I considered that they were doing it while I lay safely in a bed back in the States. I felt grief as I think anyone would for the memories of lives lost and my role actively or passively in their deaths. I also felt guilty for being one of the people who survived. I could have, should have done more, I often thought. By this point in the story of my mind had cleared through to recall. the scene at the glass factory in detail. I remembered seeing Sergeant Kahn and Bruno confronting the suicide bomber. I remembered Z telling me that he had to go check on the Marine who was injured worse than I was.

I remembered almost everything from that morning, including the courageous action Bruno and Sergeant Kahn had taken, yet somehow ridiculously and unfairly to Sergeant Kahn's heroic memory. I had saddled myself with the guilt of his death. It was not in any way my fault that he was. had chosen to give his life trying to protect the Marines and soldiers around him, but that was, but that is much easier to right now with the rationale of hindsight than it was to convince myself of it in the hospital bed. That's like the, the, the, the, they interview all these

wounded soldiers, you know, and they all say, just want to get back to my unit, just want to get back to my unit, just want to get back to my unit. As you, so as time went on, your memory of what happened, did it become more clear? As far as the suicide bombing, I don't think not really. It's hard to, it's really hard to know because I got into psychology for a minute, and now I know that your brain often like rewrite stories backward or back fills, you know. So I don't know. It's like, it's one of those questions.

It seems really easy to answer. But if you're, you know, if you're being honest with yourself about the way the human brain works, you really, it's really not that easy of a question to answer, you know, because you do backfill. Do you backfill with memories that are subconscious there? Do you backfill with like sort of what you assemble from what you can kind of put together logically as to what happened? Yeah, it could be that and then also talking to your friends and hearing their version of stuff over time. And then maybe your brain just fills in gaps. I got, I don't really know.

No, that's that I actually do. I did a podcast about that. The way you can hear part of a story and part of a story and your mind will fill in the gaps. It will film the gaps with things. They'll kind of just figure it out and take the best guess and then you can very easily believe, oh, this is what happened,

this is what I saw. Yeah. And, you know, I can't say that didn't happen because there's no way for me to know. But I feel like, I don't, I don't know that it really ever changed. I know that, you know, I talked to Johnny. he's before we ever put this out and he's like yeah man that's how I remember you know sans this or that detail the one detail I know that I absolutely did lose was a friend of

mine Casey was out there and I don't even remember him being there we were just driving to Texas to do a long range course the other day well a couple months ago and he was like dude I was there I was there later he's like no man I got to you quick it's like he's like I was to you in like minutes, you know, and I didn't remember any of that. So I know there's got to be problems, you know, with my memory. Oh, yeah. Well, it's also everybody's memory, you know, there's, everybody's memory is different from witnessing the same things. I know of, you know, Laif and I have memories of things that we did where he literally remembers something and I literally remember something else. And we're both there and our viewpoint. And there's no reason,

it's not like, there's no reason we should remember different things, but we're, we just do yeah um people just have a different perspective of what's going on and that locks into their memory yeah and then you can only store so much shit true that freaking hard drive gets filled up yeah yeah so if you do a whole bunch of dumb shit when you're young man you're gonna be you're gonna suck it like this stage of your life you're gonna lose all the good stuff uh fast forward a little bit you got surgeries you got doctors you got psychologists physical therapists, just lots of things going on. And again, I'm fast forwarding through it,

not because it's not a really interesting read. Because there's all kinds of, I was learning all kinds of things. And, you know, the story itself is just, it's an awesome, I hate to say, if you use the word awesome, I don't know what other word to use. It's a very well-told story. So get the book.

I'm going to fast forward a little bit to where you say, these new training aids, so you're doing this physical therapy, these new training aids were useful, and they did help me pass the time. But at this stage in my recovery, the only lofty goal I had left to look forward to is getting the external fixators removed and moving into a wheelchair. Not more than a month before I'd been a young man, a warrior in his prime. Now I lay in bed, doing my level best to avoid sleep, and my grandest physical aspirations were to have the cages removed from my legs and be fitted for, a wheelchair 20 years old yeah and because like my hand was messed up I only had one hand that way in my lift humorous was broken so I had like a plastic they didn't cast it because they wanted to leave me with a limb that was like still functional so I'd like a spiral fracture here and they just

put like a plastic almost like I almost like the stuff motorcross guys where you know it's like didn't really I don't know that really did anything but other than like remind you your shit was broken. I don't know what it was doing. But so the, the, the, what was occupational O.T. Occupational therapy, they, they bring like these tools and you learn how to like pull a sock over this kind of conical shape thing and it's got a couple of strings hooked to it and throw that shit at your foot and so you can pull like your own sock on and get started or yeah, they'd bring like this kind of sort of conical shape deal with buttons on. it and zippers and try to learn how to manipulate stuff with one hand.

And I don't know if they were doing that to prep me because they weren't sure how much my hand would ever work again. I mean, that could honestly be possible. But I don't know if, so I'm saying I don't know if it's routine. I don't know if everybody does this, but they brought me all these aids that I was, you know, trying to learn how to do shit with one hand, which, anyway, so I was like, I was passing my time that and watching like Dukes of Hazard on a DVD thing and Seinfeld and shit.

By the time you were aware of what was going on, were you, was it seemed like pretty solid that you were going to keep both your legs? Oh yeah, it did for sure by that point. Yeah. Yeah. The book here,

fast forward a little bit. I laid in bed for the next few days a little more beaten down than I was before. I raised the sheets now and then with my left arm, my only limb, that sort of functioned and wondered whether this was finally going to be the thing that took my legs for me. I was physically tough and was tolerating pain, but the roller coaster of emotions and the all-round uncertainty surrounding my life was starting to get me down. I was nearing that breaking point again.

I spent most of my time just watching the yellow-green pus ooze out of my thighs. They look like Swiss cheese that had been aged way too long and the smell radiated throughout the room. This was a gnarly infection that you had. Yeah, again, green. That was like my third infection too. And I don't know if you're, like, I'm not trying to throw Walter Reed under the bus, but right around that time was when CNN did that, or maybe it was right after that, when CNN did that, like an expose time deal.

And I remember some perhaps unsanitary stuff, but, you know, Walter Reed was, like, loaded with people at that point. There were a crap load of dudes there, so, like, I don't want to, you know, I'm not trying to throw anybody on the bus, but there was definitely some stuff. that was not being like there's too much infection going around to not be having some procedure something's being screwed up here yeah so um but they reschedule the surgery um they get done they take off the fixators and then they put rods inside your femurs remove the freaking spongy vacuum machine things no let the wounds close

hundreds of stitches you say staples and and you had been in bed at this point that you so long you had a bed source yeah like gnarly bed source yeah they're still scarred god yeah and when they put those rods in they because of the way the brakes were on my right leg i think they called it a retrograde nail but they went they flip your kneecap over and come up through the bottom and then it screws up into your hip but on my left leg They put a rod, excuse me, in my left hip as well. So they put that rod through the hip into the femoral head, and then it has like an islet at the top,

and then they put the other rod through that islet, so it's like tied together. And then that one screws down into the head of your femur on the bottom head. I don't know what the proper, I felt anatomy. But it down here, so they went both directions. So it's kind of like, like my hip sucks and my right knee sucks, like at this point. So they gave you one of each. Yeah.

One they went from the bottom, one they went from the top down. Yeah. Yeah. But they didn't put a rod in my right hip because it wasn't broke as bad. At one point, your uncle, Justin, comes to visit you. And you call him Juddy. That's his nickname. He says to you, one of the days he was there, he discovered some information that had been kept from me.

Hey, bro, I need to tell you something. Okay, I said expecting the word. Colonel Mack died. Nobody wanted to tell you because they were not sure how you were whether you were healthy enough to hear that. How? He was killed by shrapnel from the suicide bomber that hit you. Oh, thanks for telling me. I said slightly in shock. It was particularly devastating news. I already knew that Sergeant Kahn had passed away, but Colonel Max seemed impossible. But he was way too far away to have been struck by any significant amount of shrapnel I thought.

As it happened, he had been quite a ways away, and he had only been hit by a few pieces of shrapnel, but those ball bearings had hit him in the back of the head, killing him virtually instantly. Survival in war is random, I have learned. Yeah. Yeah, that one tripped me out, man. He just seemed like a long ways away, like 70 yards or 50.

I mean, it seemed like a long ways. I don't know how far it actually was, but it seemed far. And, you know, I was a 20-year-old kid. I didn't really have shit to lose, you know, and he had three kids at home. Probably, probably like the age I am now is probably how old he was then, you know. I think back at stuff like that, and I don't know if I'd have had that kind of sand at this age, you know, with all that, to put that much on the line, especially when, you know, you're a light colonel, you're a lieutenant colonel out there with a bunch of E4s, E5s, and the highest ranking that's the E6. I mean, that's quite a gap. Yeah, that was a stunt.

Yeah, no, even when I got there, because I got there, this was in January, I got there in April, and people talked about him, like, totally revered him as a leader and what he was doing and what he was making work, and the effort that he was putting forth, I mean, he just was everybody revered the guy. You say learning of the death of Colonel Mack was another psychological set back in time, rife with them. My bout with survivors' guilt was getting more aggressive by the day.

I was still having serious trouble sleeping and my overall emotional well-being while awake was so fragile that even I was beginning to recognize it. This was roughly the time I began to use physical recovery as a distraction from mental anguish. I have often heard the phrase,

fake it till you make it. I'm not exactly sure where it originated, but I was about to take my term at the strategy and would do so for years to come. Flagrary. Unfortunately unsuccessfully. Yeah, I think that fake it to the make it shit is bullshit. It's complete bullshit, man. You got to fix your foundation.

That's the problem. You can't just fake shit. You got to go all the way to the route and start working there. Yeah. Yeah, I think, you know, when someone's talking about going to do some job somewhere, they think they can fake it to you make. And it's the same thing I said, oh, I wrote about this in leadership strategy and tactics. If you don't know something and you're trying to fake it, everybody can.

can see it like even from a leadership perspective it doesn't work but then when you start trying to put together your your psychological well-being by faking it it's not going to work out good right it's not going to work out good um the physical therapy you got this guy you're working with named solomon um i'm fast forward and now you're you're you're starting to you know you're starting to heal up a little bit. Hey man, when do I get to walk down those bars? My remark was said purely ingest because I'd already been told several times it would be 18 months, if ever, before I was going to be able to walk again.

You're going to use them right now, he said, obviously seeing through my lame bravado. I can't walk, Solomon. I said coldly. Yes, you can. I'm going to help you. I was starting to get irritated at him because I knew I could not walk. I can't even stand for hell's sake. I was frustrated and embarrassed by the whole situation.

I was frustrated because I thought that this guy I liked and admired assumed I was capable of more than I actually was and I was about to let him down. Does he not know how badly injured I am? I wondered. I was embarrassed that I couldn't dress myself. Embarrassed that even if I could have, I could not wear clothes that were not several sizes too big because they had to fit over my casts and braces. I was embarrassed by the fact that I could not do up a button on my own underwear or use the bathroom without help throughout the entire process. I was literally unable to wipe my own ass, as they say. Little more than a month before this moment, I had been a roughly six foot tall, 190-pound warrior

in the prime of his life, proud and full of all the arrogance of youth. But there I was a few months later, sitting before a man who wanted to help me, deeply wanted to help me, but I just physically could not do what he was asking. Then there was the fear. Fear that if, by some miracle of the imagination, I was able to stand up and try to walk,

might fall and if I fell I would surely lose all the independence that I had fought so hard to achieve It felt like an exercise in futility to even speculate about what it would be like to walk again already Then Saul loosened the braces on my chair bent down in front of me and said are you ready I reached out put what I could on my arms on his shoulders and lifted and he lifted me out of the chair My heart raced as I stood up for the first time a feeling of anxiety fear and triumph washed over me though they were hardly supporting any body weight, my leg shivered beneath me. Then we started walking. We only covered a few feet distance, but I could hardly contain my joy as Saul half dragged me over to those parallel bars.

The instant the cold stainless steel touched the fingertips of my left hand and invigorating dose of adrenaline shot through my body. Even though Solomon was bearing most of my weight, I had to overcome an obstacle I had not at all anticipated. I don't know if it was because of my brain injury or just because it had been so long since I had last walk. But I couldn't make my muscles move my legs like they were supposed to. I knew how walking was supposed to be done. You just lift up and step out in front of your lead foot then repeat on the other side I could have drawn you a picture or describe what walking is supposed to look like I knew how to do it, but I didn't know how to make me do it Each confusing attempt at the process sent intense bursts of pain to my brain that I was quite that I was not quite ready for but the torment mixed with the excitement of a Discovery kept releasing more of that ever-intoxicating adrenaline. That's got to be freaking weird when you...

It was weird. Like, your body doesn't know what to do. It was weird. I still don't know how to really describe how that felt. It is weird. And yet you have a guy like Solomon there who I still to this day admire. He was a really freaking neat guy. I'm not sure he's alive, but, you know, out of my life,

because thank God I'm not still there in the hospital. But, yeah, and you got a guy like that with you that you really care for and, yeah, or respect or whatever you want to do as good as you can. And, you know, your body's just like not, not working. It's almost, it's almost like, you know, when you put a limb to sleep sitting on something. But, like, do it bad, not just kind of a little bit of sleep. Like fall down kind of asleep. Yeah. I've done that before.

It's like, oh, I'm going to fall down. Exactly. That's kind of how it was. like I knew it was supposed to work. I just couldn't, or, you know, you could feel, that's the best I can describe it. If it was something like that. And the muscles were not firing properly. And then the, my right quad had a real good hole through it.

And that one, even my physical therapist that I got later on as a civilian, was not quite sure if that femoral, or excuse me, which head is that? Anyway, if the actual head of that part of the quad would ever fire again, because it It was just not, like the muscles were not going around the way they should have. It does kind of now. So there could have been like some muscular damage involved, too. I mean, there was muscular damage involved, but that could have been part of it too. I don't know. Wow.

Freaking crazy. It's hard. And, you know, it's not like you're making progress, but the progress is so slow that you still feel like you don't even know how much you're going to be able to heal. and at one point you're talking to your cousin Juddy again and you say you say Juddy I meant I might never walk again and if I do it will probably be assisted in some way I don't want to push around a walker for the rest of my life I can't hunt elk on a cane I'll never feel that icy mountain water roll past my waiters as I cast flies at fall browns I'll only have memories of sliding into a saddle on a crisp October morning when at dawn you can see your breath and by new and you've sweat through your hat band. I've done my last bow hunt. No more dirt bikes or bull rides. I basically just started up my twilight years in my early 20s.

I'm in a fucking nursing home for soldiers right now, and I may always be. I was being a negative whiny child. There was no doubt about it. But I was trying to explain to him everything that made me, me, was gone. Those were not just activities that I like to do. That was my identity. I hunted, fished, cowboyed, and soldiered. Those were my essence.

If I was too broken to do those things that distinguished me, then I was too broken to live as far as I was concerned. Yeah. Just everything you like to do. Yeah, I think you may never do it again. Yeah, I think a lot of guys go through that. And even I think some, like you look at guys when they're getting ready to retire from MMA. You know, I feel like everything's, I mean,

maybe not in the same circumstances. There are some guys that are in similar circumstances with their brains, but maybe not exactly the same kind of circumstance, but they're going through a similar period. Like everything that they are is, in some sense, being taken away from them because of all the time is undefeated, right? It's a similar, you know, I think it's similar. So I'm definitely not alone in having experienced these sorts of feelings,

but it's a really weird place to find yourself in, for sure. Yeah, and I think the fact that you're 20, at the time you know at least an mima fighter that's retiring or can't fight anymore and he's 37 33 whatever you know that's that's a different deal um this is a real important conversation that you have here fast forward a little bit a member of the surgical team which monitored my progress walked in near the tail end of this conversation he was just there to do routine checkups and to introduce himself he was a young guy who seemed very well put together in high speed. He checked my limbs one by one for circulation and feeling. Juddy put a question to him.

Hey, Doc, Brackson has been told that he may never walk again. He thinks he is never going to be able to stand in a river to fly fish or hunt or hike or ride horses again. Can you talk to him? I concentrated on him, hoping to read his expressions for tells of lies. He proceeded to give me all the reasons why I may be able to do those things again. He covered every angle, including some caveats such as I may have to use a cane to hike or limit the distance that I traveled and only fish shallow holes etc but he was telling the truth then at the end of his answer he said the most important thing I have ever been told either before or since Braxton I think you can walk again but you are going to have to do

it soon you have too much soft tissue damage to risk allowing your muscles to atrophy any further if you don't start now You may never walk again at least without the use of a cane or a walker even in everyday activities It is all up to you It is all up to you I repeated It's all up to me even in a situation like this one my body may have been badly bruised but it's one spirit that determines the outcome of a tragedy Not a doctor's prognosis that was exactly what I needed to hear in that moment I needed decisive language and a kick in the ass Not some sugar-coated version of what may or may not happen.

There was probably not anything that young surgeon said, which I had not been told before. But I'd never heard that truth until right then. The words he said, the order he chose to use, and the conviction with which he said them were as perfect for me as if the universe had handcrafted that message. It's on you. I can see how, you know, when someone says, well, you know, you could, you know, could happen you know you could walk again or yeah you might be able to do this and it's almost like people are inviting you just to leave it up to fate yeah well it's almost like they're they're trying not to tell you that it's not possible you know like almost like how women will sometimes do

with their kids you know like oh yeah yeah you're great you draw great that's beautiful man we might send you to art school you know it's kind of like that kind of uh it feels like that a little bit especially coming from a primary care of surgeon or something yeah yeah you probably can do this because you know that they're pushing it off on to the next guy or pushing down the timeline you know so when you get a guy that's like no man you can do it if you want to do it you can do it you know just figure it out it's really which is the truth i mean it's true of virtually everything in life you know i mean if you're if your spinal cord severed you know you're you're in a different circumstance you know but if it's not you can probably get out of that

Whatever in the circumstance, you know, whatever that health situation is, you can probably change it. So at this point, I'm going to fast forward a little bit. You're still, you're still not, it's not fast forward in that far, but you go to Arlington Cemetery. And you're not really truly walking yet. But you go there and you decide you're going to walk. You say, my legs trembled underneath me. I saw another sign that read simply. silence and respect.

My arm shook as I pressed into my canes to grind myself forward another step. It felt like my bones were going to explode under the force of my body each time I transitioned my weight. We trod on slowly. We made our way by the rows and rows of heroes sacrificed on the altar of freedom at a snail's pace, but with the same determination they had brought into combat. I was either going to walk the entire way or die trying. I don't know how far we walked that morning exactly, but it was at least a mile from the gate to Section 60, and I had trekked every step of it.

My arms ached and shook as my quadriceps just quivered their way through the steps. The rest periods between legs of the journey grew longer as we went along, but I never went back to that wheelchair. When we reached the sign that said Section 60, I did not want to stop anymore. Braxton, you should probably take a break here. Overdo it. No, I'm okay, I responded, the sweat pouring from my face. When we were inside Section 60's boundaries, it must have taken us another hour to reach Sergeant Cairns' graveside. Along with the slow pace we traveled due to my fatigue and the weakening pain threshold, I read nearly every headstone I walked by on the way, each one adding more time

and new significance to the journey, but also giving me a little more fuel to feed the desire the desire to remain erect. Every step made me miserable. Pain radiated from my hips to my knees. The agony had grown so immense that several times I thought that I might throw up because of it, but we never gave up. I trudged every torturous pace of that march out of respect for Sergeant Kahn and the 250,000 fallen warriors he lay with when we finally reached his grave side and read,

Adam Lee Khan Sergeant United States Marine Corps January 25th 1982 January 5th

2006 BSM with the Purple Heart Operation Iraqi I lowered myself to a knee and wept not because of the pain

I was experiencing but because I had the nerve the flat out audacity to complain about it these hundreds of thousands of heroes had given their lives to provide me with a safe place to recover and all I had thought about up to that point was how hard my time had been whatever I'd given in service to my country and my brothers paled in comparison to what they had done who was I to feel so sorry for myself

who was I to complain about my situation I was above ground there was not a soul laid to rest in that holy shrine who would not have gladly taken in my place if they could have it became clear to me in that moment that I really did have nothing to complain about and every time I did complain it should be seen as a slap in the face to far better men than I will ever be when I had finished paying my final respects to Sergeant Kahn and the men immediately surrounding him I stood up on both canes and began my long walk out of the cemetery a brand new sense of urgency to recover a new found pool of motivation to draw from I was going to beat this thing

I was going to fight to take my life back again not just because I wanted to but because I had to because they couldn't that pledge was not an easy not an easy pledge to take not an easy pledge to keep even coming back from that I mean you you you know you're you started swelling up everything started swelling up from doing that long walk. Later on, you say, oddly enough, just sitting there trying to need the pain from my legs did help ease the frustration a bit. I stopped thinking about the things I couldn't do, like open a cab door on my own and

started thinking about what I just accomplished walking some real distances. Distances no doctor who had operated on me had ever imagined possible. How did I do that? I wondered. It took me years to get to the bottom of that question. The truth is that the only reason I had walked. that far in that condition was because I had read a sign that reminded me that Arlington was not about me. I didn't care enough about myself or my future to grind through that kind of torment.

Self-gratification nor self-improvement was enough to motivate me. My own ego was nowhere near big enough to carry me through that. I had done it because I did not want to disrespect Sergeant Can or any of the rest who had given their lives at war. I made that journey because I had a reason bigger than myself. I needed to cling to that maxim. When I read that, and that's one of the points in this book, when I'm talking about these sort of internal thoughts that you've had and things that you figured out along the way,

I was thinking about the fact that oftentimes we don't mind letting ourselves down, but we just wouldn't want to let down our friends, our teammates. I mean, I know for a fact in the military and the SEAL teams, the worst possible thing you want to have happen. Look, if you disappoint yourself, okay, that's bad, that sucks, but you don't want to let down your teammates. And to me, you know, you said it took you years to get to the bottom of that question, and that helped me get to the bottom of that question.

Of how, what is it that these guys will do anything for their friends? they'll do anything for their friends they'll take better care of their friends than they will of themselves which is a crazy thought I mean I know you

you listen to some Jordan Peterson to read some Jordan Peterson and one of the things that he says is it's like treat yourself as if you were someone that you would want to take care of it's a similar thought oh yeah it is and I guess I'm probably where I got it and just had never put the two together actually Yeah, I think it's also true

Like anytime you're doing anything hard Like if you're ready to quit You can find something You know, like find some other reason It'll put Like your ego is just only so big And it's also really easy to be like Man, no one's even going to know I quit right now

Rationalize And no one knows that bulls load down there I'm the only one that knows that bulls in that canyon You know No one's going to know if I don't hike down there You just got to find something to force you, you know. Like for me, it's like I got to go home and tell my buddy that I pulled that bull out of that canyon, you know. It's like I got to talk shit to my buddies too.

You know, like just as much as you love them. It's kind of like that give and take of the relationship, you know, both ends. Yeah, that was a moving section of this book, man. That whole section was rough to read. and those canes are the ones with the four ends on them you know not like a regular cane I ended up getting regular canes later from Walter Reed but those were the different kind

and so it gave me like a little bit more stability I think on a regular cane that it probably fell a few times for sure and you know that road is it's like a good good road and everything so it's like the walking wasn't that bad it's just that's pretty buzzer it up and and yeah and I had never I'd never been to Arlington before I'd never seen it and there really is I don't know if spiritual is the right word or what but it really conveys some sense of reverence especially once you get into the actual grounds you know the the the tourist center is

one thing but the you know once you actually get in there it's a very powerful moving place and And then you start to realize like every one of these stones is an actual person. Not just like a picture you saw in a movie or something. You know, it's like here's his name. And in many cases, here's his wife on the other side. Right. You just see like generations of dudes who have died, you know, and women too now. Yeah, it's really, it's one of those places in the world where, or in this country where you just have to

go experience it. And there's really, I don't think anyone can write powerfully enough to explain what it's really like there. Yeah, and I think, you know, when you know guys, when you know guys that are buried there, and you can kind of relate,

relate that individual, when you look at all those graves, you just, you know that every one of those is, like you said, a person. It's like, that's a, that's a mother, a father, a son, a daughter it's like like someone that was known and and I think it's easy to fall it's easy to just call a soldier a soldier right and now remember that that soldier's a person and I think

when you know when you know some of those people in those graves it's easy to expand and connect that personal side to each and every one of those gravestones knowing the the sacrifice isn't just somebody in a uniform. It's a person. Like I said, it's a brother, a sister, a father, a son, a daughter, a mother, and it's freaking heartbreaking to be in there. Meanwhile, as this is going on,

you still have, you know, you're still working through, like, your physical issues. And it sounds like your hand was just, like, like, I can't, When I look at your hand, now when I was reading this, I didn't think your hand was going to be in the kind of shape. It looks pretty freaking good to go. When I read stuff like this, this is from the book, large chunks of skin were falling away from my hand. They were not thin and dry strips like those shed from snakes, but thick and wet like scales floating away from a rotten fish that's washed up into the shallows.

I couldn't help but feeling like this part of my body belonged to a corpse. the visual is bad in Ramadi but that day it looked as if it were dying this day it looked like the hand was already dead like it was foreshadowing all that was to become of me if I were to succumb to my wounds and though I was still doing much better the fate of my I was still

the fate was still far from out of the question I still had an infection in my body blood clots in my legs an IVC filter that could break apart at any minute and no one is addressing my brain injury yet Even if I did live through the whole ordeal, I would be doing it without most of the function of my right hand. All that I had ever done in my life, which I had found worth doing, whether it be shooting, working, weightlifting, boxing, wrestling, cowboying, bull riding, or even war fighting, had required not just two hands, but too strong and capable hands. This hand, which had once defined me, now looked as if it were gone forever.

I had not given it permission to give up yet Yet there it was And sat crippled atop my wrist a symbol of not just what could become of me But of how little control I had over my fate The futility of resistance can be maddening Yeah and it's that's another thing that's interesting about this book is You can tell a freakie you can tell it's not a Hollywood movie Because in a Hollywood movie it's like there's some point where

everything turns and everything's like good now, you know. They write the book with that perfect story arc and this ain't a perfect story arc. It's like up, down, up, down, up down. Sometimes the down is way lower than the up. And that's one of the things that makes it powerful is this freaking, it's like realistic. And it's also makes it powerful because like every time I read something and I'd be like, oh yeah, there it is. Like I'm like brainwashed by how.

You know I'm reading it like oh yeah he went visit the grave here's the turnaround and then no We're like oh you know this happens and we're gonna hit some more of those But that's life right yeah that's the real thing yeah there's a couple even after the book was over that happened to Yeah, that's that's gonna be in the second book I guess yeah I don't know Dude what about this this one section where this physical therapist is is she comes in to bend your finger this one yeah she's she says hey I'm gonna bend your finger and you say don't it's fused yeah and she says no no it's not we just need you need to just suck it up you which you're trying to get me do this church and steeple thing uh-huh do this

but this finger does this knuckle doesn't move she's like pulling on it so you're telling you're telling her it's a funny part of the book dude how bad did she feel I I think she felt pretty dumb. I was sitting there waiting like... For it to break. Yeah, you know when you got a cyst when you were a kid in your grandpa was to go get the Bible and whack it with a hammer?

You know, I was just waiting for her to come hit it with a book. I was like, whatever. I can't really feel it worth of shit anyway. Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah, because my, right here in my wrist is where that median nerve was transected. So I really couldn't feel this part of my hand,

like hardly at all at that time. So it wasn't like really hurting. I mean, a little kind of sort of, like, the point. The way you describe it, she's like getting tired. She's like getting tired. She's cranking on your freaking knuckle. She was like this big around. Yeah.

And yeah, she was. And kind of attractive too. So I was just like, oh, go for it, man. There it is. Sucker. You read all kind of sympathy when that thing cracked. You end up getting this deal where they're going to send you the community-based health care organization, which is you get to go back home basically to heal up.

Yeah, I think they've since ended the program. But it seemed to you at the time, like freaking awesome. You didn't have to be stuck out there at Walter Reed anymore. You could head home. So I'm sorry to catch you off. The traditional path that Walter Reed is you're inpatient and then you're an outpatient, but you stay on. Walter Reed campus in like you know these barracks and stuff and then you're just doing all of your outpatient work at Walter Reed so guys are there for like two three years sometimes Yeah, they're going through all their outpatient and so the army is like well, let's just send him home do outpatient care at home

Yeah, and that's kind of how the I mean I You were stoked you were stoked to get the hell out of there hell yeah and go back home freaking hate cities man I get me out of this point You got some again there's so many so much stuff that people got to get the book for as you're making progress and as you start driving across the country and as you know you get a new car,

you get in some situations that are all in here that are good reading, man. Not always the most positive thing, but at least it's good reading. Smartest kid. Fast forward a little bit. Now you're driving across country, you're getting home. Even in the dark night,

the green agricultural fields of home seemed to glow as our headlights shown on the little mountains in the valley. It was too late to see my family. They were all in bed long before we arrived for most of our drive. I'd been communicating with my two closest friends, Dan and Josh. They had planned to meet us at the house when we arrived. I hope they were still awake.

I sent them another message. We're just getting into town. The words, welcome home. Corporal McCoy were written in big block letters across a banner that spanned the two-lane road and two-lane road at the northernmost end of town, at the southernmost end of town. Home at last, I belted out through a grin. The steps to my house have been covered with a homemade wheelchair ramp engineered by my stepfather. My wife went to the door, opened it, and carried our bags inside.

Another bit of my pride died as I helplessly watched her do the heavy lifting. I reached across my body and jerked the lever which bound the vehicle's door. My right hand was still too weak to perform the tasks. So, of course, what's the smart move at this juncture? Start drinking with your friends, which is what you do. Yeah, opioids and every other kind of thing in there. Yeah. You start drinking with your friends.

And this is, again, when I talked about, like, one of the things that makes this book so good is just the fact that you're just going to tell the truth of what you did and how you did it. And this is one of those things where I was reading. I was like, okay, check. So you're drinking with your friends. literally the first night you're back and finally someone says you know so what happened how did you get hit and you say in the book i started the story with why the why my team had been at the glass factory in the first place i tried to inform them of the political climate in ambar and how the arguments at home were shaping the battlefield over there i gave them as much backstory as i could hoping to give them enough

to gather a layman's understanding of our experiences then i got to the to january 5th and the buildup to the explosion that crippled me and killed our brothers i had been descriptive of been honest up to that point, but for some reason that I may never fully understand, I started lying. I said that I acted in heroic ways after being wounded by the suicide bomber when I didn't. Maybe it was just the whiskey. Maybe it was insecurity. Maybe it was survivor's guilt screaming my head that I could have, should have done more.

Whatever the motivation was exactly, I will never know. But there I stood in my kitchen, pants down to my ankles, leaning awkwardly on my canes, pointing at the scars, covering my limbs, and lying about battlefield heroics I never exhibited. Yeah, she makes it cringe still. But I is true, so. You want to hear my assessment? Sure.

Of this situation? I think this is what happens to dudes. When you're trying to tell somebody's story, what your goal is, is to make them feel what you felt. And so if I'm looking at you and I'm telling you a story and I want to tell you that like a mortar hit, let's say a mortar hit 50 yards away from me, which mortars have hit 50 yards away from me?

It's scary. And it scares the shit out of you. It goes, ma'am. And it can kill you. Even 50 yards away, it can kill you. But it didn't. So if I'm telling you a story, and especially if you're a story, and especially if you're a civilian I want you to know I want you to feel what I felt that freaking explosion scared

the shit out of me so when I tell you some of the details I think there's a tendency to say this freaking mortar hit five feet from me and I'm just trying to let you feel what I felt in the best way that I can so when I'm thinking you know Even going out, like going outside the gate, going outside the wire, walking out there, trying to capture what it's like, it's hard to convey those. And you want someone to feel it so bad, what you felt. I don't know. I think that drives guys sometimes to say things that maybe aren't 100% on point. They're not 100% true.

The spirit of what they say is true, but the facts aren't, you know. So I think that's some of it. You know, just when you, when you rattle through the, like, you're not really sure why you did it, I think part of it is because you want people to feel at least some of what you felt. And, you know, we're not always the best at conveying the feelings. And especially when people are looking at you and you can see that they're not quite getting it, you know, and you go, you can see the look on some civilians face that's like 50 meters away.

That doesn't sound like a big deal, you know. I'm looking at Echo right now. He's kind of like 50 meters. What are you kidding me? No factor. Across the football field? Yeah, yeah, half the football field. Are you kidding me?

What a joke. So that's one of the things. Look, other other Nickender's, sure. But when I've talked to guys, when I've heard stories from guys where I'm like, when I'm suspect, I usually just take into account, oh, they just want me to feel what they felt. They just want me to feel what they felt. And I think that adds to it a little bit. This is a really interesting perspective.

I've never considered. Yeah. And this is what's weird. And this is what you say. The lies and embellishments I was telling were chipping away at what was left of my pride, even as I spouted them. But really, what did I have left to be proud of?

See, that's the other crazy thing. It's like, you're talking to civilians. Like, you don't need to say, like, you're like, hey, I got blown up, man. Like, that's good enough of the story as you're going to get, you know? I was a shortened, pasty, frail, and morally compromised shell

of whatever kind of man I had been once before. Pride, what pride could be expected of a man who's forced to urinate in a plastic bottle next to his bed because he's too weak to walk to the bathroom at night. So again, in your mind, you think you've got to build up like yourself, but bro, I mean, anybody that's sitting there looking at you like, hey man,

you obviously freaking, you know, got after it. or in front of it or something. Yeah, man, I don't know. You're right. I had really never considered that. You're right. Yeah. Yeah, it's weird when there's civilians involved, too,

because they literally have no idea, you know? Like, it's only in your head, you know? It's only in your head that you think, maybe I need to tell them that I did this they're they're bro you went to Iraq these people were sitting around in freaking Utah whatever drinking beers you know well I've been you gotta remember too I've been in the hospital living in my head 24 hours a day for months at that point

because they can't really talk to anybody even though they're army nurses and stuff they might as well be civilians too they never I mean they just work in a hospital I'm not saying they don't do powerful and great things I just mean so far was like being able to relate or understand they can't you know they can't relate and the when I was in the neural word at Walter Reed the kid got a kid not a kid soldier that was like my same age got put into a room next to me that got shot through the throat in Afghanistan and once he got to where he could talk again at least every once in a while we'd be able to both you know shoot the

shit a little bit but outside of that and he couldn't talk from you know he was struggling I mean he got like a 5-4R, I think it was through his neck. So, yeah, so you also just constantly living in your own head. So maybe when I was home, like that perspective that you shared earlier, I'd never considered. Maybe I was doing exactly that, but to myself, you know. I don't know. So I'm going to fast forward a little bit again.

You go to visit your, you go to your mom's house and your grandma and your granddad. there and you make it in your grandma's there she's like glad you made it home you are you know hey where's grandpa he's over on the couch she pointed I popped down beside my childhood hero and clung as tightly as I could manage his arms felt weaker than they once had but not a thing could diminish his mountainous stature in my eyes we sat there for a while in embrace I almost felt like a kid who had fallen down and scraped his knees I just wanted to hear hear him tell me that it was going to be all right i'm so proud of you he whispered i love you grandpa i'm

sorry tears welled up in my eyes he told me that he was proud of me just like i had hoped you would but it didn't make me feel good i didn't deserve that accolade and i knew it when he said he was proud of me he was talking about who i was as a man not what i had accomplished physically i knew that the very night before i had demonstrated a lowly character why should he be proud of me he wouldn't be if he had known that I was a kind of man who lied to his friends. Oh, you dummy, what the hell are you sorry for? Knock it off before I kick you right in the ass, Grandpa responded. I buried my head into his once broad and muscular shoulder,

trying to hide my shame. I don't know how long I stayed there for, but I would have stayed longer if he'd let me. I spent the better part of a week building that damn wheelchair ramped, and you didn't even use it. My stepdad quipped. I'm never getting back in that goddamn chair again, I bellowed. Braxton, watch your mouth.

Mom yelled. Watched her all socky one. Grandpa joined in. Fast forward. Like many other soldiers at war, my home front had changed considerably during my absence. My great-grandmother, whom I had been very close to, passed away, but she had written a letter while I was in Ramadi saying she expected to go soon. Her death was not so unexpected. My step-grandpa never seemed to age a day in his life before I left for the war, but while I was gone, he developed prostate cancer.

The chemotherapy aged him dramatically and just one. one year, but even this was less jarring than the sight of that wheelchair. Everyone's life has an event horizon. My grandfather's had just come earlier than I anticipated. That was all there was to it. I just wasn't ready for the sight of my hero, the man who raised me when no one else wanted to crawling into a chair. And that's because he's, you know, basically he's now in a wheelchair.

Yeah, and I'd watched him battle his back injury for, since I was like 14 years old. and he just kept working because he had to pay for his family, you know. And so I knew exactly how he ended up in that chair. So it kind of hit even harder, you know. So the whole reason that you came home, the whole reason you were able to come home

was this community-based healthcare organization. It's two and a half hours you had to drive to get there. Kind of checking in here. Corporal McCoy, how the hell are you? A deep, familiar voice boomed out from behind the vehicle. I'm rolling along. Top, how you been? It was First Sergeant K, a senior NTO that I knew well.

In fact, he had been the guy that approved my request to volunteer for deployment to Ramadi. I've been well, cowboy. I wanted to introduce you to your new platoon, Sergeant. Master Sergeant Dillinger. Hello, Sergeant, I said extending my hand. He grabbed my hand and proclaimed young man. I expected me to soldier in a wheelchair. You seen him around anywhere?

Yeah, well, I'm doing my best to stay out of that damn thing, Sergeant. he's a grisly old bastard corporal most of us around here just call him Bulldog First Sergeant Kay chimed in Master Sergeant Dillinger Bulldog was a short stocky combat veteran of the Vietnam War Usually he paced around briskly with a cigarette in his lips Looking for someone's ass to chew

He didn't beat around the bush about anything If he had a thought you were liable to hear it But he cared about the men in his platoon He played no games especially the armies Later on in our relationship When there was a mandatory formation upcoming that he didn't think I needed to drive up for. He simply called me on my phone and asked me where I was and whether I was okay.

Then he told the commander that I was accounted for. Over time, I developed a deep admiration and respect for that man, the kind that no rank or ribbons can earn. He sounds like a character. He was so funny. And just the best guy, he got me my first job after I got out. And he's just a really good guy. I end up dying a couple of years, five years ago.

secures you know just lung cancer he was 70 years until by then yeah he was a hell of a guy and he was he was a kind of leader that expected you to do whatever you were supposed to do but he would really shield

you from nonsense that you didn't need to be involved in you know yeah you say in the book here uh corporal I know you've been through a lot of shit in the last year I'm old enough to know what this shit is like I did my

time in Nam. Our war wasn't squat compared to yours. I interrupted. Shut the fuck up. McCoy, cut me off. I've seen plenty of war. It's all the same shit. Our wars might have been different, but you did your time in the shit. You don't owe me any, you don't owe me or anyone else a fucking caveat. Understood, I nodded. What I'm trying to say is this unit is different. This is a medical holdover company. We're not a line unit, but don't get it wrong. This is still the army. There's still enough bullshit here to pack 10, 5 tons. I will do my best to make sure you only eat the shit you have to, but I swear to God if you fuck with me, I will have your crippled ass on the next fucking flight to D.C., understood.

Roger, Sergeant. I will call your cell phone anytime I feel like it, and if I want to, and if you don't answer, you better be dead, dying, or in the middle of a medical appointment. Understood? Yes, Sergeant, you call me first thing in the morning. I will know everything, I will know about every medical appointment on your schedule, and if you leave your house for any reason, I don't give a shit if it's just to go outside to piss on the tree.

You will ask permission first, copy? Roger, Sergeant. All right, now get that pretty little wife. for yours home and let it relax corporal you're free to go roger sergeant i'd only made a few steps when i heard his voice call out again corporal mccoy yes sergeant welcome home son glad you made it thank you sergeant so there you go man freaking stud stud stud um again you know that sounds all cool i'm all happy i'm reading that part i'm like oh here's the good turning for you uh uh the Then you fast forward a little bit.

I told myself that none of my behavior was an overreaction when taken in context. After all, these little burst of extra pain may have been slight when considered on their own. But when piled on top of the constant and never-ending aches, I endured, they seemed excruciating. I heard every second I was awake and nighttime brought me no reprieve. When I lay in my bed at whatever time seemed appropriate that evening, I didn't sleep. What's more I never expected to sleep? How could I sleep when I hurt so much? What had I become?

I was being weak. I had once thought my mental toughness was as sure as the sun coming up in the morning, but I was broken down again. Before I was wounded, I used to claim that I had never quit in my life and nothing could make me, but I was wrong. I had hit many, many breaking points during recovery. The internal dialogue whirled about my head in an endless cycle. I was being soft and I knew it, but rationalizing the pain was so damn easy to do.

I had made all sorts of excuses over the course of the past few months, and although it should have been the last time, I had made such justifications. It wasn't. So you mentioned in a brief moment a little bit ago, opioids. Scary thing. They've been in the news a bunch. You say on the question of addiction, many of us had little to say to begin with. This is an interesting point.

I didn't choose to be addicted. I didn't even understand the degree to which I was addicted. There was no true first time, so to speak. I never had an opportunity to debate the potential pitfalls of drugs with a sober mind. The fact is, like with so many other soldiers, my addiction was little more than the tragic side effect of healing. I left Walter Reed taking hundreds of milligrams of oxy cotton a day. One civilian doctor told me that I had been prescribed dosages in multiples of what he wrote his terminal cancer patients. I didn't choose that.

Neither did thousands of other men and women who found themselves in similar circumstances. I did, however, make things much worse. And that can't be hung on anyone but me. This caveat to the story is meant to be read as a sort of table setting, not an invasion of personal responsibility. I have learned many lessons through my journey, probably the most important of them being, taking ownership of one's failures is the best way to avoid making the same mistakes in the future. If there's a way to rationally place blame on another or on fate itself, that is all the more reason to look inward for a culprit because that's a way.

That knave is the only one you can reliably alter. A little bit of extreme ownership going on there. Yeah. Yeah, I took that from you. Sorry, man. By all means. By all means. You can't take what's free.

It is true, though. It's one of those deals. I'm sure you've, I know you wrote similar things in your first book. There is a way to view this, sort of situations where you can look at it like well sure maybe I was forced into this and that wasn't my fault but the only way I get out of this is if I just control the parts that I can control and I can't I can't do that without taking ownership of the things that I'm screwing up so you almost have to just say okay we the first

play doesn't matter anymore now it's you know third and ten and I got to figure out how to crunch these yards. That's it. That's it. That's it. And, you know, you say you stole it from me. You actually talk about, you give credit to extreme ownership, the book in this. So I appreciate the shout out.

And I'm glad that it was able to something that you were able to connect to. So that's sort of the opening that you give on this dealing with OxyContin and whatnot. You say the hardest part of managing pain was not dealing with the sharp off and crippling surges, it was the constant aching. In retrospect, I think the most profound effect of the oxy cotton was on my sanity. The continual never-ending dull aches that engulfed my lower extremities, spine, and right hand were psychologically torturous. It wasn't exactly excruciating, but the utter lack of respite was brutal. And that's, you know, you kind of go into that, but I wanted to highlight the fact that you say a couple times,

like it was just absolutely constant, unending pain all the time. You think about that, let's say the Soviets had the ability to inflict this kind of thing, like invisible damage. I mean, it's not invisible, but like let's say they could make invisible damage

and chronic pain. That would have been the preferred torture mechanism, you know, because they could send you back into the real world. And be like, whenever you're ready we can push the button or you know remove the device or whatever and make the pain stop yeah but you got to do what we told you to do yeah but that's how a lot of these guys are living for months and years at a time and i i think we don't really i i don't think we don't go deep deep enough into the psychology of that often enough when we tell our own stories we sort of

kind of gloss over that achy you know dull almost maniacal pain and a lot of he was even just like construction guys are living like this. For sure. You wonder why they're drinking like 30 pack a night or whatever. It's because their backs jacked up or whatever. And like you said, they still got the bills to pay, the family to feed. And speaking of drinking, at this point, you say you're drinking a half a fifth of bourbon a night on top of the painkillers. At one point, one of your friends, I guess, teaches you how to snort oxycodone.

Yeah, some things had changed while I was gone. Yeah, I mean, I'd like seeing this kind of stuff done as a kid. Like you'd see people, you know, you'd a party or something. You'd see people like grow up a dollar bill or something. You're all just drinking. But there's like a whole process to be able to snort oxycon. And that was news to me. So you do it.

This guy kind of shows you what's up, teaches you how to snort oxycott. And once you do it, you feel like you feel like you're going to puke. He tells you go puke. You go puke. And then you say from the book, after I vomited, I felt better than I have ever had in my entire life. Yeah. Yeah. When I was speaking at schools for a while, I used to tell teachers.

And like the worst thing you can tell a kid is that it's not fun because then they know you lied to them. Oh. Like, because it is. It really is like the most invigorated. It's really as bliss. It's honestly, it's difficult to put into words how good it feels. It's like euphoric. But if you lie to people and say drugs are all terrible,

and then their first experience is like, what have you been hiding from me, dude? Like, this is amazing. You know? Then they're more likely to, you know, it's much better to focus on how bad things can get rather than tell them it's not fun. Same thing with, like, drainage.

I mean how many preachers daughters end up doing preachers daughters things The guy I knew my friend of mine told me he he ended up in jail and whatnot but he said the first time he ever did crystal meth It was the only thing he ever wanted to do for the rest of his life I was just like so he just loved it very first time done he was done he was addicted and he ended up you know addicted until he went to jail You say my desire to continue on was eroding. Many factors were contributing to this, like the impossibility of finding refrained from the physical torment, but my inability to come to terms with the fact that my best friends were still in harm's way,

living in the hell that was Ramadi in 2006 without me, and my own poor behavioral choices were the worst of them. Once I had scrawled the timeless military mantra, death before dishonor, death before dishonor on the, walls of my hooch in Iraq now here on the home front where that code should be easiest to live up to I failed and I continued to fail every day over and over the surest form of justification ran through my head what does it matter anyways once I started abusing pain medication my mental health went downhill rapidly but I didn't care I felt nothing even chasing the dragon became a sort of mundane routine

doctor appointed visits doctor appointments visits with specialists in physical therapy sessions were too similar to tell apart the only piece of me that had grown was my opioid addiction and it had metastasized in the morning I'd wake up wheel into the bathroom grind up another oxy cotton in eagerly devour it as if it were the cure to rather than a cause of my self-hatred after my usual half days work at the hospital I stopped by the liquor store and picked up a fifth of bourbon oftentimes feeling safely away from the presence of the local law enforcement I opened a bottle the moment I exited the freeway most days I drove right past my house headed for the nearest solitude I could find I longed for a place where I could be alone just me and my thoughts my thoughts nearly never left Ramadi it was almost as if I still lived there in my mind I'd become bitter and angry I hated everyone and everything around me don't any of these assholes realize we're at war right now good men are dying in an ungrateful countries half a world away what the fuck is everyone smiling about the only people

i still loved were thousands of miles away and i had no way to talk to them i slid my way out of the truck placing most of my weight on the cane in my left hand and the and the rest on my left leg as i had become my new normal pain shopped through my body my hip wobbled it couldn't handle the redistribution of weight i let out a short grown fucking this shit I yelled aloud broadcasting my complaint to God the universe and whatever else may be listening I emerged from my home a short while later with my semi automatic 45 caliber handgun and a fresh bottle of pills in tow I climbed into my truck yanked the lever into reverse and started for my favorite little mountain

valley in those East Hills I pulled my truck back up to the edge of the valley in front of the old cabin hoping that someone might me before my decomposing corpse began to blow. I didn't want my mom to have to deal with that image for the rest of her life. I retrieved my lighter, bill, credit card, CD case, and oxy cotton. I was ready to get on with it. I kept pounding whiskey while I crushed up my narcotics. I was anxious to feel the warm blanket of euphoria.

Their imperceptible chains would bring. Lines spread across the CD case placed in the middle of the, my center console I rolled up an already chalky bill and snorted the first line I feel better already I thought to myself as I chased it down with another swig of the bottle I was holding between my knees my pistol sat on the passenger seat beside me I reached over with my right hand wrapped its two working fingers around the grip and push the frame into my thigh to stabilize it then I racked the slide with my left hand the gun now main ready I said upon my lap muzzle toward the front of the cab never point a weapon at anything you are not willing to destroy

I took up the bottle again and had another slug I retrieved the loosely rolled bill and tightened it back into a cylinder then I placed it at the tip of my other nostril leaned over and softly breathed in the last of my respite calm I stared over the dashboard at the valley that it once held many of my fondest memories The world around me slowly closed in. My eyes darkened. I fumbled for the pistol in my lap. I longed desperately for the bite of its cold barrel on the side of my head and the hot leaden delivery it could bring. Every ounce of my soul begged for its one-way ticket to anywhere but the nihilistic hell I lived in.

My eyes opened sometime later. A near empty bottle of whiskey on the floorboard and the song I just got back from hell. by Gary Allen reverberating throughout the cab. So thankfully, you passed out. Yeah. Yeah, I'd had a, I had this mix that I'd made it. That truck just had a CD player, so I'd had like this mix of songs,

and they were all those kind of songs. And I drove up to this valley that I used to go, you know, you go shoot rabbits or hunt snakes or party with the girls and this kind of stuff. I just wanted to be done with it. I was just frustrated and done. And luckily, as you said, I passed out, man. She could have been really bad.

And luckily, I didn't, you know, like acute liver failure or some shit from opioids and alcohol. And, yeah, like physical therapy every day, I was just set back after set back, And then, you know, my entire recovery was like setback after setback. And everybody was in Ramadi. And I was on, like, all kinds of fucking drugs.

And, you know, psych drugs and opioids and every other, you know. And my body didn't work. And I was just over it, man. I was just completely over it. Didn't that, you know, it wasn't like in the best marriage at the time, which how could you be? You know, when you, like, how could your marriage be good when you're behaving? like this every day right so just like everything it was it like spiraled down the toilet um and that's it's not an uncommon it's really unfortunately not an uncommon occurrence uh this is kind of why

eventually that i wanted to write the book in the first place was i was reading these other books here and there and i just didn't i felt like i didn't see anybody that was going is it was they weren't being like the stories weren't reflecting everything that I was saying in my own life and my friends and you know some guys were doing great and then other guys were really not doing great how is it that no one like saw I mean if you're drinking that much and you're freaky are they not blood testing you to see how much opians or opioids are in your system or shit like that so I was getting blood tested every day for uh I think I can't remember if I was off of blood thinners by then or not.

When I was on blood thinners, I had to get tested every day. But they don't test for anything but like the, I don't know if it's viscosity or what, but however like how thin your blood is. And so then they just adjust your blood thinner medication to that. So no one was like, piss testing me for alcohol or anything. And you're not talking to any freaking therapist or psychologists or chaplains or anything like that. Just they figured, oh, he's fine?

Yeah, I mean, I was probably, I mean, I was definitely trying to blood. everybody all the time but no I wasn't so you know I had to speak to a therapist I can't remember if it was three times a year it was something like that it was some very that might have been a VA thing I can't remember there's anyways there was at some point there was a requirement to speak to a therapist like three times a year and that was what I was really yeah and I don't I wish I knew why it got that bad but it did well you You just kind of breeze through it. And I'm breezing through the book.

I mean, I've skipped through a bunch of stuff where the daily grind of what you're doing, you're missing your friends in Ramadi, you're not healthy the way you want to be. The downward spiral of, oh, I'm addicted to this shit. And the only way to stop feeling shitty about feeling addicted to this shit is to do more of this shit that I'm addicted to. So I think you, you, the way you lay it out is actually. very helpful because people might be able to identify where they are on that downward spiral. Yeah. And for me, what finally got me there, I'm saying I wish I knew what was at the very,

very bottom of it. But the final catalyst was I injured my leg at physical therapy again. And I was just like, fuck, man. You know, I can't like, I'm done like this. I've had enough roller coaster at this point, you know. So I think if you're, if you're one of these people that's going through addiction and you're what they call like functionally addicted, whether it's heroin or, like there's only a handful of drugs

that people can really do it on, alcohol mostly. If you're one of these like functional addicts, you should really know that you might hit that one catalyst that sends you to a whole another level of it. You know what I mean? Because maybe you can ride that for a while, but eventually something goes wrong and you're going to turn to that substance

to help you get over that. and that's going to go you're going to be at a whole new whole new level of addiction because now you just conquered another thing you know with it so and yeah like you know back to your other point thankfully I didn't shoot myself I'm pretty happy about that now you know I've I've said before like when people get in these modes in these situations like there's like a storm cloud around their head that they think is the whole world is a storm cloud and like anyone on the outside can look at it and say bro you're just you're just just a right You come over here. You'll be okay. You'll get out of it. But from the perspective that you're in at that time all you see is just freaking darkness everywhere To the book here the 15 mile drive back home dragged on this is after you got your ship back together My thoughts drifted back to Arlington the last place in time where I felt strong and accomplished I remembered again how it felt to recognize how mine or my complaints truly were in the grand scheme of things My sacrifice were so little when compared to what those heroes had given. I was kicking away the blanket of freedom and security that they provided me.

It is my duty to live for those who can't, I had once said. Who am I to be so selfish? I was going to throw away my gift of life due to a little suffering. Who among them would not gladly trade places with me? I said to myself, hoping that it would sink in again. My commitment to those heroes rekindled. shame the right kind of shame the kind that expedites transformation washed over me not long ago I had stood above their sacred resting places offering whatever small vicarious redemption I could

yet I had failed at that promise I had tried to quit my duty in its infancy never again I renewed my vows to them before God and whatever else was listening I promised never to give into the darkness again now as I write this today I wish so desperately the that I could tell you honestly that I made good on this second oath, but I can't. That was not the last time I failed them. In fact, it was just one stumbling among a multitude. I was starting to feel a little better about myself. I had made a grave mistake, but luckily it hadn't been final.

I've got to get my shit together, I said. So you, like you said, you redo this vow kind of thing. And, you know, and then again, you freaking fool me into thinking like, this is it, this is it. He made it out of the darkness. I'm like, cool, we're good. And you do. You know, you go up, you start squaring some shit away. Fast forward a little bit.

These cold fronts and winter weather kept me shut up inside day and night. In my waking hours, I stared out the window at dark and frigid skies. When I lay down to rest, the freezing world around me was replaced by 130-degree memories and nightmares. I felt as if my life was constantly on the brink of an unforeseeable but impending doom. Depression brought me back to the blanket of the bottle and the brief bliss of medication. My hospital visits were shrunk from five days a week to three, but physical therapy was virtually non-existent. The only thing that got me out of bed each day was my hatred for the sheets.

I did nothing but watch movies, play my guitar, and drink whiskey. Rock bottom is a slower and softer landing than one may think. That's why we keep chisling away at the bedrock. That's some good writing. It's freaking depressing writing, but it's good writing. Another piece of good writing right here. If there's such a thing as the Christian's concept of the devil, opioids and alcohol are some of the best tools he employs to capture weakened men.

The instant euphoria softly whispers its lies to the heart. There are no problems I cannot solve. Addiction snags you at your weakest times like the wolf kills a buffalo. The wolf waits until the bison's gate is crippled or the snow is deep enough to entrap him. Then he pounces. Usually he hamstrings the animal first, then slowly and methodically he gnaws away the flesh until his prey expires. Fast forward a little bit more. When I returned home, it was about noon and I was already an inebriated mess.

I walked through the door, canes and bourbon in tow. the smell of whiskey radiated from my pores. Hey, Braxton, I have something to tell you, my wife said. She must be leaving for good this time, I thought. She's unemotional. This time, it's for real. Am I okay with that? I've wanted her to leave dozens of times, but am I really okay with it?

Yeah, I think I am. How will her family take it? I will remain friends with, will I remain friends with her brothers, her dad? No. Maybe they already know that we fight all the time. They must. thoughts swirled about my head. I think I'm pregnant, she said.

What? I'm pregnant. Aren't you happy about that? She said, smiling. Of course I am. I acted as if I were. I took another shot of bourbon. I wanted to be a father badly.

God only knows why I wasn't fit to be one. Still, I was indeed very happy that I may be fulfilling that wish, but was this really the best time? Was I with the best person for me or the best person? or was I the best person for her? The answer to both of those questions was clearly no. Less than a week before we had been fighting nearly every day. We told each other that we hated one another and we meant it.

Each of us had uttered the word divorce aloud. Now we were going to have a baby. Check. You couldn't have predicted that one when you read it early on though, right? No. No. It's, uh, yeah. It's, yeah, rough, man.

rough. Yeah. You guys were married young and then you go through all this. Like you said, it's hard, what you just said, you know, it's hard to have a good marriage when you're drinking. Yeah. Bourbon and, you know, doing drugs and all that. Yeah.

Yeah, you can't put the blame on her for this. That's the way I look at it anyway. Well, you know, the cliche answer, which is the real one, though, is that I got my daughter out of the deal. And she lives with me and wife's great. I mean, this is now 14 years later. But yeah, it sucked there for a stretch. And it's just really easy to get back down in that hole,

especially when you really still don't, you still feel like you don't have anything to live for. That's why I always say that gratitude, you really got to cultivate gratitude in your daily life. But when I read that part, Well, when I read this part where she's actually born and, you know, she's healthy. And you say it's amazing how much a parent can love a child. I already loved her.

I would have happily died for her. I still would. But in that moment, as I sat there watching them, I realized something was still wrong, not with her or with me. So, like, I'm like, okay, cool, here we go. You know, we're going to kind of make it through this. You talk about PTSD. you bring it, you bring it up earlier than this, but this was the time, this is where you started like kind of conveying your thoughts on it.

You say, I previously mentioned other times when I thought that I may have been afflicted by PTSD. Many times my subconscious registered a symptom of the disease that I'd read about or my therapist had mentioned. Who could miss the unwelcome memories at inopportune times or the never-ending need to suppress unprovoked anger or the nightmares or the illogical moments of panic? I had denied the existence of my illness from. many reasons, but most important was that I just did not want to be associated with many of the

others I had seen at the VA pensions for the disease, or sorry, had received VA pensions for the disease. I knew of a guy who had worked in the laundromat in Iraq. He got a rating of 80% disability for PTSD. For what experience exactly? I wondered. Another guy had heard of had been found 100% disabled from the trauma of answering radio transmissions from soldiers in combat. How could a person be so soft that they were damaged by the sounds of combat? I wondered bitterly. During my transition, there seemed no less noble an act than claiming to suffer from PTSD. It wasn't just seen as an illness that plagued the weak.

It was in many cases an illness claimed by liars. Whether they were weak or not was unimportant. I had made many mistakes and acted cowardly and lied many times in my life, but I had no desire to have those descriptors permanently enshrined in my records. At least that was the way I saw it back then. Interesting thought. I mean, it's a very interesting thought, you know, that you're having because you're a freaking tough cowboy. And these guys that are saying they have PTSD because they worked in the laundromat in Iraq, you're like, no, bullshit.

Yeah, right. Yeah. But I wasn't, a lot of guys thought that at the time. And because it's a lot of truth to it. You know, I mean, dudes really game the shit out of that system, and we all know it. I understand that the VA's in a tough position because, you know, how do you really weed out people that are gaming it? I get it, but from a soldier's perspective, I didn't want to be, still to this day, really don't want to be labeled in that same way. Like, I'm happy to talk about, you know, PTSD and working through stuff and acknowledging that it's definitely had profound impacts on my life,

and I would like to try to help people through whatever suffering they're having, but I don't necessarily want to be associated with it, and that's for that same reason today, you know. I mean, luckily, I don't have to, you don't have to worry, in a lot of ways I don't have to worry about being associated with that crowd, just for obvious reasons. But, yeah, it's, you know, people talk, especially in the veteran community, we want to destigmatize the term PTSD, and I don't know.

I think we need to destigmatize mental health for sure. But PTSD sort of took on a life of its own. And so maybe it's time to just shed that label and go with something new or stigmatize the shit out of it and tell people who really really need help. Don't want to be associated with it. I don't know. I don't know the right answer. I don't know either, man.

As you're working through that shit, you and your wife end up getting divorced. And initially, her and her and your daughter leave for her home, which is like middle of country, 1,300 miles away. Yeah. And then you say if you thought that the heartache of divorce and the departure of my beloved child would have caused me to take a long, hard look at myself, you'd be wrong. Because hedonism and self-indulgence provide immediate gratification.

The rush and excitement and euphoria make it difficult to dig in one's heels and change course. And why would you want to change your lifestyle if you've got no respect for your future? The simple, perhaps sad truth of it is that debauchery can be good, old, plain fun for a while. For about seven years, I lived in hell and sometimes I relished in it. you basically you basically went hard for seven years yeah I mean I'm not so much on drugs

but alcohol and partying and chasing girls one of those times I've said in San Diego actually yeah we went out of friends that were a bachelor group and we were all doing okay making pretty good money and we're just like we're just going to party yeah so we did The evenings like my descent always started out in exuberance and ended shamefully.

I was not myself. I didn't know who I was. All I knew is I didn't like the man I saw in the mirror and given the option I would destroy him. My chief mistake was that I didn't realize there was a cure for my illness. The truth. Had I only been willing to accept that I could have been freed of my hide, as in Jekyll and Hyde much sooner. There were more girls and more parties than I care to remember.

Not that I could remember them all if I wanted to. My first steps onto the slippery slope were enjoyable. It can be great fun to lose control momentarily, but once on that slope, I couldn't keep myself from careening to the bottom. I hardly had control of anything in my life, let alone my alcohol habit. I had ripped the moral substrate out from under my world and descended into nihilism. Nileism is not without benefits, though it simplifies life. There's a problem with nihilism.

It leads to depravity and uncontrolled chaos. If nothing else matters, then that's that. Why care about health for the future? Unbridled pleasure was the closest thing I could find to happiness. I sought only hedonistic satisfaction, which I think is the logical conclusion of nihilistic ideologies. It's important to note that my life wasn't all that bad either. It rarely is. That's what makes it so hard to crawl back up the slope.

I was still making very realistic, very real physical milestones. I'd abandon the cane altogether. I still stretched every day and did light workouts. My physical body was healing. And aside from the infrequent brushes with the law, I was having fun. The most dreadful part was that somewhere buried deep down in my subconscious in the land of all that shadow was the truth. It was all my fault.

War, no war. The problems I faced were my own creation, and I knew that. Yeah. I think sometimes we use these things Some people will use these things as a way to Escape from the shame of knowing that you're not what you could be You know like people talk about potential all the time and no one knows your potential better than you Like you know who you really are way down in there and so you just come up with distractions like useless and senseless

Distractions parties and you know girls and whatever other venture just to avoid becoming what you're you know what you could be and you said you were making money at this time what were you doing i was working in outreach for a not-for-profit company but you were getting paid they were paying me pretty good and and then at some point um you kind of realized you said my life was falling apart my credit score was tanking my job was on the rocks every close relationship but i had once depended on was virtually demolished. I was having too much fun to see it.

You decided you quit your job. Yeah. There was a... And you wrote about that in here. It's an interesting... Basically, there was like an integrity issue with the place you were working for. Yeah.

And you, at one point, you're talking to a Medal of Honor recipient. And you just couldn't... Couldn't lie to him, basically. Well, and this is just such an obvious flat-out... Bullshit lie like straight up and not like one of these white lies or stretches of the It was just a straight up falsehood at the expense of You know other veterans and this you know trying to fundraise essentially you know like the lie was

Attemptive raise more funds and so yeah, I quit and you quit so you quit your job you still have I mean obviously you're getting your disability pay and did you get medically retired so you get you get medical retirement? You don't get both though. Oh you only get one mm-hmm Yeah. But at least that was enough money to survive on. Yeah, especially in Caltown, Utah. Man, my freaking mortgage is like $700. I was doing fine. So you quit that job, and you want to talk about unexpected, didn't see that coming, was... I don't know where this going now.

What, comedian? Yeah. So you started doing stand-up comedy. Yeah. Yeah, well, like, I was going to college, and I was like, I've always wanted to try it. So I started doing it. And you must have done all right. You did it for a while?

I mean, it's still Utah, even in Salt Lake. It's like, so. Yeah, I did for like. A big fish in a small pond and Utah comedy scene. A medium-sized fish and a very small pond. Yeah, I mean, we did okay. And I got to be buddies with a guy that was really good. And so that helped, you know, I mean, I was terrible like everyone is.

But I got, you know, it was fun. I did enjoy it. But, you know, looking back, even the jokes that I would write and stuff were reflective of like a different person than I'd ever been because I was like. And especially like as a young open micer and then he progressed like a middle act and stuff. You're just really reaching for stuff and you're just saying horrific shit sometimes. Just like shock value. Yeah. And I look back at some of that stuff and I'm like completely embarrassed by it.

You think you're going to take a crack at it again, come out of retirement? I live in central Idaho. Just go post up at the bar and Idaho Falls or something. Look, you're making us laugh, man. You got it. You still got it. One of the best things that happened was you actually ended up meeting a girl. And the girl that you meet, she has a son, who was a few years older than your daughter.

but he's like playing baseball and you didn't think that the baseball was really getting him what he needed so you signed him up for wrestling and it turned out that his wrestling coach was your communications professor in college and he knew who you were as a wrestler, is that right? Yeah, well, and then I coached at Miller for a while after that as an assistant coach.

Oh, okay. But he knew you had a wrestling background, so he basically said, hey, if you don't freaking coach wrestling, it's going to hurt your grade. Yeah, he straight up. Straight up. So you start coaching, and as you're coaching him, wrestling season ends, then he's going into baseball,

so you decide you're going to coach baseball too. And then this happens. This is pretty cool. I flipped the pitch, so you're coaching these little kids. I flipped a pitch to the little batter. He hit it softly in the air. I lightly trotted to it and reeled it in. Another pitch.

He hit a hard ground ball, a step to my right. I fielded it with ease. Somewhere in my subconscious, the thought rang. Dang, that felt good. I served him another. This time he hit a hard ground ball about three steps to my left. My glove, hand, side. I sprinted to it and scooped it up with a spinning motion.

A smile as wide as Montana creased my face. Holy crap, you just ran, his mother shouted. I know. I couldn't contain my excitement. I started charging it every ball he hit, even the ones I didn't need to. A rush of love filled me. I'd forgotten how good it felt to be somewhat. capable and likely never would have run toward a ball if I hadn't been tired and losing focus.

The lack of attention allowed my subconscious mind to unshackle the chains. My conscious mind bound my legs with. On the next pitch, he ripped the line drive over my head. I tried to jump for it. Nope, still can't jump. Well, I guess basketball is out of the question. I yelled grinning widely. We called it quits, and I immediately grabbed my phone out of my ball bag.

I sent out several text messages that read, I just ran in all caps. A few war buddies who received it called me later that night, demanding to hear the full story. When I reiterated it to them, he cried. Pretty awesome discovery right there. It really was. Yeah, I wonder how much sooner I would have figured that out if I wasn't screwing everything else up.

You know what I mean? If I'd have just been dedicated to working on my body, I could have probably had five years that I lost. I'm partying. Near the end of his baseball season at about 4 p.m. got a message.

Grandpa was just rushed to the hospital by ambulance, read a text from my mother that would alter my course forever. I called her on the phone to get the details and comfort her. If there was some way that I could, she was clearly anguishing. What can a son say to a mother

who was witnessing her rock wash away? That night sitting on the balcony of my apartment in West Jordan, Utah, staring at my tomato plants, I wondered what I would do in a world without him. I wished to be away from the bright lights and noise of the city sitting by a morning campfire drinking coffee with him again. I knew I had long since begun to rediscover myself, but could I stay properly aimed without him? I had started hunting and fishing again.

I went back to my roots. I read a little young and became convinced of the importance of symbols, not just in a sociocultural sense. but personally, I'd begun to wear my cowboy hat in public instead of only on the weekends when I was away from the prying eyes of onlookers. Still, though this was a positive step backward, I had not truly returned home yet. And I didn't know exactly what that meant. I only knew that the answer lay somewhere in my history, somewhere in my roots. I think it is true that clothing does not make the man,

but a display of what it is inside the heart. A cowboy hat may have been a trivial thing, but before I had descended to the underworld, I had worn it with pride. It was a symbol of honor, hard work, and respect of heritage. It had been so closely attached to that symbol that I'd worn one nearly every second of my life before I strayed. As a boy, it was no strange event for my mom to remove a hat from my head as I slept.

My hat was the first thing my ex-wife brought to me when I was in Walter Reed recovering. I wore it nearly all the time after that. It was not a fashion statement, but a symbol of all my grandpa believed in. I thought a lot about all that my grandfather had taught me as a boy. He thought there were concrete skills and lessons required of a man from the West, and he made damn sure that I learned them. And in your footnotes, you say, by the West, you mean the Rocky Mountain West.

I remembered his knuckles pressing into Mountain Mud to show me how a mature, mule deer bucks weight causes depressions much different than a young buck or doe does he showed me how to read the difference between an elk track that had just slid down a wet muddy hillside and one who is on a dead run he tied his own flies for catching trout out of our mountain creeks rivers and lakes all of which were different flies and weights of flies by his estimation and he made sure i could do that too he taught me how to skin an animal by showing me how he did it but he only let me practice on the lower legs of elk and deer he killed he taught me how to trap and clean fish in game he spent time on more abstract things like what it really means to be a man that's a much harder concept to pin down on

page on one deer hunt when i was about 10 years old he handed me a raw liver from a buck he had just killed he told me that taking a large bite of it was the only real right of passage to manhood when the metallic tasting fleshy substance filled the entirety of my mouth and thick warm blood ran down my cheeks and neck he let out a deep belly laugh i realized the joke was on me he was trying to teach me two lessons there one that no single physical act makes a man and two not everything an authority figure tells you is worth believing sometimes you're just the butt of a joke you say that the positive step backward. Normally we think step backward, we think of a negative

connotation, but for you, like, the cowboy hat was going back to your roots in a positive way. Yeah, not all progress is progress. It's a good note. A couple days later, my girlfriend and I were back in my hometown at the church where his funeral would be held. The hallways were lined with pictures of him and my grandma, the love of his life and his best friend.

He believed that family was the most important thing in life. There were dozens of pictures of him and his brothers, his kids, and his grandchildren to prove it. Table sat on the other side of the doors to the chapel where his service would be held. Each was decorated with his prized belongings, his fly fishing pole, flies that he had tied, and his hunting knife. On one table, atop a rack that held his recurved bow and leather quiver filled with wooden arrows, rested his brown cowboy hat. if it is true that you can tell the character of a man by the company he keeps, then I think it equally true that you can tell the type of man by the possessions his company believes he values.

I stood staring at the hat for a while. I remembered asking him if I could wear it around our deer camp when I was a young boy. He dropped it on my head and smiled. I spent the rest of the afternoon walking around with that hat like it was a crown fit for the king of kings. My great uncle John, grandpa's younger brother, came up to us while I was daydreaming and asked how I was doing. John was a combat controller in Vietnam.

He had seen more than his fair share of fighting. I knew intuitively that the question was meant to get at something deeper than how I felt at present. I answered it honestly. Getting better, I think, I said. How long have you been back now? about seven years or so give it 10 and you will be fine he said

you may be a mess for those 10 years but you'll be okay after that it will always be there it doesn't go away but one day all of a sudden you'll have it under control okay thank you the host called the children and grandchildren up to the casket to pay final respects

reluctantly I walked up and put my arm around my mother She was sobbing uncontrollably. Between gasps for air, she whispered, Aren't you going to say goodbye? No. I'd rather this not be the last image I remember him by. She grabbed my hand and dragged me up to his body. Up until that point, I had hardly shed a tear.

Grandpa taught me that men ought not to cry anyway. I tried to keep my composure. When I saw him lying there, hair combed perfectly, body dressed in his Sunday best, I broke down in a way I never have before or since. The flood of grief and despair twisted my face. I felt like I had been struck by an avalanche of emotion. It seemed as if every little bit of anguish I had collected throughout my lifetime welled up at once. I raised my black cowboy hat up to cover my face and wept. This was a different kind of pain than I had felt before.

The kind that a person only encounters when he knows he had failed another that he loved and revered. For years after returning home from the war, I had lived less than two blocks away from grandpa and grandma, but I seldom visited them. When my mother asked me why I wasn't going to see my grandpa when I more often I always gave the same selfish pathetic excuse It's just too hard for me to see my hero withering away in a bed I don't want to remember him like this I think the full gravity of my selfishness hit me at that moment It should never have been about me What an ignorant wretch I was As for the excuse that I had been using to avoid the situation, that was only half true anyway.

The whole truth was, yes, it was hard to see him like that, but I was running from everything in my life after the war. I was running from my emotions, from my responsibilities as a man, and from my own mind. My mistakes, as happens to all of us when we fail, were too often thrust onto other people I loved most around me. Sure, I was paying for them too, but so were they. And they had done nothing to deserve it. I failed a man that I loved more than life itself. My selfishness had hurt him when he needed me most, and it was too late to make up for it. All I could do is weep.

That's all I did. It does seem like these moments throughout the book that when you're read them you think of this this this is this the one is this the one that's going to kind of get you up on step get you to kind of transition away from this this negative path and it certainly seems like this one had a big impact yeah I definitely wish you could see what we're at now she could have seen you when you walked into my gym today um down here in southern california in san diego sporting a cowboy hat I'm sure he'd be he'd be hell of proud Yeah, and he loved his grandkids, and I wish he could see my kids, you know.

So how good life is now. Obviously, I can't, you know, I can't go back and be there for him when I should have been. One thing that is, another thing that's positive is someone sitting here listening right to this right now, I guarantee at least one person. I don't know how many, but I know at least a minimum of one is going to make that move and go and spend time with people they care about that they should. I hope so. So that lesson that you learned now gets passed on. You, as you go through that, you start to realize that you missed what, like the various things that you missed about being in the military, the various things you missed about being in combat specifically. And you realized you missed even training.

and getting ready and preparing, which are really positive things in life. You say in the book, I miss training. I love the feeling of conquering a particularly difficult day at work, the kind of satisfaction that one only gets when he thinks it improbable to overcome the challenge before he begins. That reminded me, I did run a while back. Maybe I can run a full mile now. I decided to call up my old friend and first line leader Johnny.

I knew he had been running marathons and triathlon since he returned for my Rock surely he would love to be there when I ran my first mile since the suicide bombing crippled me I called him up hey bro I want to run a mile You you so you go out you do it We finished the mile loop in about seven minutes and 30 seconds I was proud of my pace but something else struck me after we finished my ego was the problem I discovered that I was the root of most of my psychological problems years before this and I had taken some measures to get better What I hadn't realized was the role ego was playing in all my suffering.

I started to look back at every ill-advised decision I had ever made, every argument I'd ever been in, and the grudge against the army that I had held, nearly all of them could be traced back to my ego. And you talk about those. I mean, just like an example is, you're pissed at the army didn't keep you in. And yet you say in the book,

you're like, hey, I wasn't capable. I couldn't freaking, you know, like carry a ruck. I couldn't shoot a gun right now. How are they going to keep me in? Yeah. But in your mind, your ego was like, they should have kept me in. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, how stupid can you possibly be?

But, yeah, I don't know what I thought, other than that I was pissing that and burnout. Yeah, I mean, you're right. And it's, and I think it's really easy to, and it is 100% of your ego but it's really easy to start doing that thing where you're like, wow, the army just treats me like a number

and all this stuff. I was like, well, yeah, man, they got like half a million people that they got to, bro. Like, what do you want to write you a letter? Like, what? Yeah. But yeah, really, it is, everything is ego.

Even still the day when I screw something up, which is, you know, a daily occurrence. It's almost every time my own ego, like almost every time. Yesterday I got pissed at something. I don't even remember what it was now. About a half hour later, I was like, that was me.

That was me too. The path is not an easy path. Path is not an easy path. It was my wife's birthday today. Oh. And she's overseas right now. And I like woke up in the morning. So she's in a different time zone, right?

I woke up in the morning and like, I got shit to do, right? You know what I'm saying? I got things called like Work up, work out So I wake up and there's a family group text And it says You know

Happy birthday It's from my daughter that's overseas with my You know happy birthday mom Family group text And I'm like okay cool You know I'm hey cool But I You know I'm not gonna like

I didn't text at that moment in time Right So I wake up Work out You know Do my morning stuff go for a run ice bath right do the whole nine yards and i look at my text and there's a text off the family group text only from my wife it says thanks for the birthday text today

that's not the end of the story so in my mind i was like oh that's interesting i was kind of a little bit surprised and i was all and here's the funny so in my mind i was like i just got the home from a trip or from a work trip i was gone for four days i worked how many hours a day am i working at the muster 16 hours a day at the muster uh just constantly on the go talking to people shaking hands bowl that's delivering up on stage boat to doing all this stuff get home from that i got to finish reading your book braxton then it's father's day what do i do on father's day prep this podcast so that's what i'm doing on father's day and then i wake up up, then I got to, I know I got to record this day.

I had another call, a big call in the morning. And now I'm thinking my wife is like texting me like, oh, you know, she's on vacation. But you know what? I was like, you know what? Just, I'm just going to, you know, I'm just going to text her and say, hey, you know, sorry about that. I was, you know. And then before I could even respond, because I was going to sit on it for a little while, breathe, you know, take a breath.

Then my wife sends me a text on the, not the. family group text, just hers. And it says, that was Rana, my daughter. So my daughter tricked, she tried to trick. I laughed about it. I was like, yeah, I knew. I said allegedly, oh yeah, I knew.

I will say, I was kind of strange that she would have written that. That's why I was kind of surprised. Like was out of character. Yeah, it was out of character. I thought maybe something bad had happened, like some annoying thing, you know, like whatever made Braxton mad,

something like that. Something that made her mad. But luckily I didn't respond. Imagine if I would have responded in anger. Yeah. Don't do that. That's ego. Got to keep that ego in check.

I kept the ego in check is what I'm saying. But it sometimes can be tricky. Good thing you relaxed. Looked around, made a call. Step back. Step back. Put my ego in check. But that's the thing.

What was causing my, like all that little, that little trail of thoughts that I had, I was doing this and I was doing that. I was working so hard. And you're making it. It was just like, ego, ego, ego, ego. So before I even respond, I was just like, okay, you know what? And you know what I thought to myself? And I do this a lot good.

I want my wife to be at a point where if she can be on vacation in a foreign country, by the way, that I'm paying for it. And she could be mad because I didn't send her a birthday tax at 434 in the morning when I woke up. That's a good thing. That's a good. That's what you know things are good for her. So I was kind of a little bit stoked. But you got to watch that ego, man.

You got to watch that thing. It's ready to bite. Uh-huh. This is cool. This is where we start going. Man, you say from that point forward, my life began to morph rapidly. When I was a younger man, I thought courage, strength, and tenacity were traits that made a man worthy of the title. But by exercising each of those traits at different times during and after the war, I realized they were not enough.

They are important, highly important, but they are not sufficient enough to make life worth living. I realized that what Grandpa had been trying to teach me all along was that a good, man and a good life are made of balance, growth, and selflessness. If those three things are a person substrate, everything else will take care of itself. Strength is important, but it must be balanced with caring. Selfishness, as hard as it may be to spot, erodes the purveyor, or sorry, selfishness, as hard as it may be to spot, erodes the purveyor, the victim, and all those caught in between. If a person is focused on growth, no matter of the challenge, he or she will always come out better than they were before the impetus.

A mindset of growth helps us internalize our mistakes and craft better strategies for the next bout of trouble. If we can do it without crushing our spirits under the weight of our own self-judgment, that is. Here's where we get rocking and rolling. I decided to quit smoking cold turkey. It was difficult, but by no means excruciating. I limited my drinking to a couple days a week

and started each day at 5 a.m. This latter bit being the key to squashing low-key alcoholism most abruptly. The change in my habits helped expedite what was already the most rapid physical change in my body had gone through since Walter Reed. Every morning I stretched out, then I ran a mile. Soon that turned into two miles. I was lifting weights in my garage every morning and doing a 30-minute workout at night. I couldn't exercise enough to satisfy my lust for health and vigor. Once my body was strong enough to endure a little hiking, I set out looking for the teacher who had taught me the most valuable lessons in my youth.

The mountain. Each mile up, those blustering ridges cut through my delusions. The mountain is indifferent to our existence. We are nothing but another speck upon its rims, no more or less important than the rock beneath our feet or the deer we chase. Ego is no currency in the wilderness. That's a lesson we can all stand to learn. I rediscovered God or at least or at the very least you could say that I had rediscovered meaning but I think that's a distinction without any real difference in the vastness of the wild

the indifference of the Rockies humbled me humility and truth set me free starting to feel pretty good about this book now you started speaking and you had been speaking Yeah. But, you know, it's weird. You talk about when you're speaking, you kind of felt like a fraud. Like you'd be telling people like, yeah, you can overcome anything. And you'd be like, I'm full of shit. Yeah, 100%.

Those people hopefully claw back their money coming up. Well, that was for that not-for-profit, though. So they weren't like paying me. Got it. Got it. Got it. You do in corporate events. You were talking to, you know, professional athletes.

Then you went to the summit in Vail. There was a bunch of academic people there. One of those people was a monk who taught ethics at MIT. You say this. He taught us the most valuable lesson I had ever learned. Life is suffering. It is only by accepting that fact that we can lessen it. I had been saying something close to that in speeches for years,

but he helped concretize it for me. I was done laying my problems at the feet of others. I got online and searched for any information I could find on brain injuries. I found that I had demonstrable. signs of TBI. I remembered that the VA sent me a letter listing all the most common symptoms of both brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. I wasn't going to read these, but I actually am going to just because it's important for people to know these things. Common symptoms of PTSD. One, re-experience the event over and over again. You can't put it out of your mind no matter how

hard you try. You have repeated nightmares about the event. You have vivid memories almost like it was happening all over again. You have a strong reaction when you have a strong reaction when you have encounter reminders such as a car backfriering. Two, you avoid places or feelings that remind you of the event. You work hard at putting it out of your mind. You feel numb and detached so that you don't have to feel anything. You avoid people or places that remind you of the event. Three, you feel keyed up or on edge at all time.

You may startle easily. You may be irritable or angry at all the time for no apparent reason. You are always looking around, hypervigilant of your surroundings. You may have trouble relaxing or getting sleep. And then this thing that you looked up goes on to talk about TBI. Common signs of brain injury, difficulty organizing daily tasks, blurred vision or eyes tired easily, headaches are ringing in the ears, feeling sad, anxious or listless, feeling irritated or angered, feeling tired all the time, feeling lightheaded or dizzy, trouble

with memory attention or concentration, more sensitive to sounds, lights, or distractions, impaired decision making or problem solving, difficulty inhibiting behavior, impulsive. Slowed thinking, moving, speaking, or reading, easily confused, feeling easily overwhelmed, change in sexual interest or behavior. And then you say this, the last 150 pages of this book and the decade it took to live it, look in retrospect like an aggregate of those symptoms played out in one person's experience. I had long understood that the VA wasn't taking my brain injury very seriously, but after reading that paper, it became immediate that I, it became a, it became

immediately apparent that I had not taken the brain injury I incurred seriously enough. Yeah, and I'm pretty sure that was actually straight from the letter that they had just mailed me. Like that's the chart from or whatever the memo. Isn't it kind of interesting to take all those symptoms and just send it to on a letter to someone that has these symptoms? Like you won't be able to do exactly what it says. It makes no sense whatsoever. Like you wouldn't even be able to read this thing because you'd be irritated. You'd be confused.

You having trouble like organizing shit. They want you to do all this? What's wrong with them? That's freaking ridiculous. You know, this is important section. What was I to do with the fact that my brain, the organ we used to process reality, was permanently damaged? I didn't want to blame my own personal failures and there were many. This is such a key point.

I didn't want to blame my own personal failures and there were many on something that was out of my control. I knew that was too simple an answer. The temptation to use. use this new information as a scapegoat was strong, but deep down in my core, I knew that taking that path would only lead me toward more suffering. I wasn't going to do that again. I decided that the best I could do was accept that I had incurred an injury that had made and would continue to make my life harder than it was before. It was time to move forward with that fact fully internalized. Scapegoating would be another cop-out, more cowardice. I was done with that road.

So you had a realization that, okay, you read through all this stuff, and instead of saying, well, okay, that's why I've been behaving this way. It's like, no. No. No. No scapegoat. Yeah, I mean, you can't. I mean, you can, maybe you can give yourself a little bit of a, like, because I tend to carry a lot of, I tend to place a lot of burden on myself, like for shit I've done in my life. It makes it a little easier to be like, all right, whatever, you know, let some of that stuff in the past.

It makes it easier to let things in the past go, but you can't use it moving forward or you just fuck your life up. You have to just accept that this is a thing. And really, like, even like, let's say the impulsivity stuff or the trouble organizing, well, you get a fine to work around. Yeah. Yeah. And just think if you think to yourself, well, oh, I have PTSD and TBI.

That's why I'm impulsive. Now you're just like, oh, and I'm cleared hot to be. been more impulsive. Exactly. Yeah. We don't stand up again like a month. Yeah, or I have trouble organizing things. That's why I'm late to the, you know, whatever.

That's why I didn't turn in this thing. Like, yeah, you can use that excuse. Or like you said, you can say, oh, I know I have trouble organized. So I got to write stuff down. I got to make a plan. I got to put reminders there or whatever. Yeah. Freaking actually take ownership of it.

A good friend of mine and a green beret we called preacher stopped over around the time I discovered this problem. While we were visiting, I shared with him my new worldview about the importance of humility and acceptance and how I felt the mountain could teach a man both things. Then he tells you this. There is a forbidden mountain hike on the big island of Hawaii that you have got to do.

You have to start your ascent around midnight so you can reach the peak before sunrise. The view is incredible. Echo Charles? I don't know. Which one is you talking about? Not familiar? Not familiar?

It's overlooking Hilo. Is it a name? Does it name? It's Monique. And he was being totally full of shit. It's not, he was just trying to get me to go. It's not a forbidden hike. Oh, he just called it that?

Yeah, he just, he was like, yeah, there's this trail. It's illegal, man. You got to just jump on it. I was like, all right. Tell you something about Moniquea. That's the first time ever saw snow in my life. Monacoa. What's the altitude?

Do you know the altitude? 133. Oh, it's 133. Oh, it's 133. Damn. Yeah, it's hot. And there's like, at the very top, it's hard. You know, there's, there is, there's like nine or ten different peaks, like, small ones, you know, whoops.

Like, so, because it's a volcano, right? So there's, like, lots of little, like, extra. It's hard to tell which is, like, the real peak. I mean, there's an observatory, but then there's all those. I mean, I don't know. I'm looking at you, like, you're like, bro. A little bit. He knows a little bit.

He's from Hawaii. Yeah, well, that's what I'm saying. Still not an expert on my kid. So when you get this goal, you start freaking training because you're going to go climb the forbidden mountain Yeah. On your way there, you get on the dating app and you swipe right. And on a female, a girl named Randy, R&D. That's why you're sitting in the airport at Salt Lake.

And then you land and you land in Kona. You find out that she had matched. Dude, I did this. I'm too old for all that. I mean, I was married and I'm just too old. I miss that whole thing. The whole thing. To think back in the day,

you had to just randomly meet a female out of all the millions of females. And now you can just literally go on and access upon access. Well, and the problem I didn't have. And pretty, kind of a pre-screened access too. Yeah. Like, hey, like, you're writing about, you're looking at her little profile and she's like shooting a bow, right? And like, whatever, she's got a dog, she's shooting her bow. Yeah.

You're like, check. Pre-screened, hey, I want someone that I want a few. female that is brunette knows how to shoot archery like good to go absolutely but I cut you off what you're gonna say no no no I had you know I tried like the bar like if you're in your mid mid mid mid mid late 20s I mean I don't know really where you meet chicks you know it's like the bar or the grocery store and so like I tried the bar thing that should don't work so it's like willing to try just about anything at that point and a lot of people say like go to church and I guess that's probably a good answer but I didn't go to church so but I mean even if you

went to church you could meet how many girls at church nine right yeah you know maybe like 20 20 13 I don't know yeah but you go on the app and it's like you can meet how many a million a million girls right at coach Charles I know you don't know you either but I'm saying because you're the technical expert here you're the tech guy I'll guess one million yes right sure am I wrong I don't know if you're It's got to be a lot, right? A lot of people use the interwebs. It's got to be a lot. You know what?

I actually do know. You know why? Because I got friends that are kind of in the game still. And they'll be like, bro. There's a lot. There's a lot. It's a million. But of those millions, you swipe right on the bow hunter.

Yeah. Or at least the archery. And you land there. You end up sending her like just a text back. then you end up climbing this mountain. I'm going to fast forward past the details of the climb. It's pretty cool to read about the climb and what happened on that.

You have some more, let's say, moments of discovery in that. And I'll say this. You say the forbidden mountain, allegedly forbidden mountain is the gateway to the grandest sunrise on earth. I reflected on my life atop that volcano, all 29 years of it. And I'm going to fast forward now to the kind of the, I guess it's this, a little bit of the summation of what you talk about towards the end of this

and the things that you figured out. And again, I'm hitting the highlights. This is a book, almost 300-page book of lessons. For anyone for any human being filled with lessons for any human being here are some of them I spent almost a decade suffering things in my youth I never could have imagined some caused by life Some were caused by associating with the wrong people other bouts by society But most can be laid directly at my own feet So many more so many of our problems it's a lot more than we think the problems that we're

caused the problems that we initiated yeah look like you said life's gonna bring some at you some some some people are gonna bring them at you sometimes sometimes society's gonna bring these problems to you but way more than we think are because of us back to the book when I was wounded I made a clear choice one of the few choices I ever made that I'm deeply proud of I decided that I would rather put my flesh in harm's way than have a friend of mine put at risk for reasons that I did not think were Worthy when I was lying on the ground bleeding to death I was in a great deal of pain Torment that you cannot imagine if you've not endured it but it wasn't suffering

I was serving my country my family and my brothers I didn't truly suffer until I started lying to myself and to others about my problems with nightmares stress and sleep Those lies built into other lies and those lies built into more until one day I was a suicidal, nihilistic addict. I created my own hell and it nearly destroyed my soul. You continue on a little bit further. You can't hide from a dragon or he will burn down your entire village and all that you love and care about with it. You must face him.

When I ran from the dragons, my life crumbled, the spirit split apart and burned. It was like my soul itself was fractured. Then one day I decided I would face my problems one at a time. I wanted to own them. When I did or at least started to, I improved almost instantaneously. Then more pumped up, more dragons. I think this is why we feel overwhelmed when we try to take on our problems. There are always dozens more than we thought there were.

and it's not until we emerge from our cowardly little hiding places that we can see them all clearly. This overwhelming feeling can crush us if we had not stiffened our spine for combat. That is why I think it's important that we crush our most pressing physical obstacles before we try to take on the mental ones. If we can stop eating terrible diets that we know are killing us, if we can run when others say we can't walk, if we can put down the bottle that is drowning our soul, then we know we can do anything. The lessons we learn on the physical journey will steal our resolve for the longer, much harder, fight for our mental and spiritual health. Sometimes when we first emerge and feel completely overwhelmed, we run back to our hiding places. We see so many little dragons that we are afraid of the aggregate of issues that will demolish us.

Maybe that isn't the worst thing. Sometimes armies must retreat in order to regroup and acquire some help before they fight another day. We can use this philosophy as well, but we can't make it a habit. We must go back into the fray again the moment we are ready and again. Then we become practiced. We have doled our swords on so many small dragons that we understand their weaknesses as well as we do our own. This gives us the ability to take them out more easily, to see them for the minuscule issues that they often are. Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is.

The best antidote for fear is experience. The first step then is to get the physical body in order no matter what that takes, no matter how steep the climb may be. The next is to stand up for truth in your own life all the time. I sworn oath to my brothers in Arlington. I failed to keep it many times and probably will fail again, but I am on the course right now. Those failures will happen less and less often as I gain more and more experience.

You may not have a national shrine to cling as your guiding light, but maybe you're a mother or a father. You have your children in their futures. Certainly my kids are the centerpiece of my life now. What better thing could you do for them than to get yourself together, to lead by example, to face your mistakes, fears, and the chaos of life with a steeled spirit and selfless heart? What better thing could you do? Nothing. teach them to manifest courage, integrity, honor, and selflessness in their own lives by living those virtues so fully that they cannot help but to see them displayed.

Slay your dragons or they will consume you. Slay your dragons or they will consume you. Have you ever read my book, Mikey and the Dragons? No. Oh, God. Okay. I'll be giving it to you shortly. How old is your youngest?

Uh, my youngest is eight months old. Uh, my daughter's 14 years old and my sons are three and four. Okay, cool. So eight months. We got, we got Mikey and the Dragons candidates there. Yeah. Uh, so the book is just outstanding. Um, so, like I said, so many lessons learned in there. You did it. Did you, did you go to college? I went for like a minute. What'd you study? Um, it was all like the, like the stuff that you have to do, the prerec stuff, you know, like your two years. How long did it take you to write this? Like, you, I mean, eight months, a year, something like that. I wrote a lot of that out of a backpack in a leather, I wrote the whole thing in a leather

bound and two leatherbound journals with a fountain pen because I'm a fucking nerd. And then I transferred that onto a computer. leather bound notebook and a fountain pen. You still have that? Oh yeah, I got both of them. That's pretty legit. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool.

I don't have any cool stories like that. Like sitting there with a word processor. I have none of that stuff. You talk about a little in the book, but what made you decide to start writing this? I started writing it at first, almost right after they, retired me but it was just bad and I just like knew I wasn't ready like what I don't know I just

knew I wasn't ready and um and then when I was doing all those corporate gigs uh you know you're always constantly getting prodded to write a book and I was I kind of thought like why for what you like I don't know I just didn't feel like there was a story in there and then a good friend of mine kept pushing on me and I finally thought well maybe I'll give a shot and kind of looked around and the, you know, the other, the other stories that were around just didn't seem to be feeling that. They just didn't seem to be conveying exactly what I was seeing my friends go through, you know, like, or me. I had some friends that were doing really great, and then I had some friends that were going to jail. And some, you know, one committed suicide, you know, and I just felt like no one was telling.

on the full story. And I also didn't want, it felt like the two genres of Iraq Warbook were either like heroism or super whiny crybaby shit. And I'm just, the heroism stuff is great. And I mean, every culture has always done.

That's great. And that should continue. But like the super whiny bitch, there's no reason for that. But I understand the attempt to kind of try to write something. different and I said well I'll just try to tell my story and hopefully we'll fit somewhere not on the whiny bitch scale you know and like fill that other gap and you know I mean I

knew that I couldn't be the only guy that it had I got to think that there's at least 10,000 guys from the GW that have had similar stories you know maybe not exact same wounds but yeah they're they're definitely out there so then so you finished the book this got published in 2017 yeah yeah and so what are you up to now so obviously you married randy how do you say your name was randy randy so you married randy you got kids um and what are you doing i start colts um full-time i'm a colt starter and hold on can really quickly before we're going i just want to point out that i did say in the book that he bullshitted me that it wasn't really forbidden on the hike oh i just want clear that out.

Yeah. Sorry. Anyway, that that was eating at me. No, yeah. No. So, wait, when did he say that? When did he tell you was bullshit? That it wasn't forbidden.

Before you hiked it? Well, he didn't have to tell me once I got to there. Oh, once you got there, there was a big trail sign. So it was before you got there. He said it's not really forbidden. No, no, no. I'm saying I put in the book that he was bullshit in me. Does this make you sense?

What I was saying is I just don't want someone out there listening, thinking that I was calling this a forbidden hike because people would be like, Oh. What does he talking? Apparently the only person that thought was a forbidden hike was me. No, yeah. But I'm a colt starter, so I train horses to start Colts and train some horses. And I've been working on another book for a while.

Nothing to do with me, to do with the roots of, like America. The best way I think I would articulate is when people, when you ask somebody, what it means to be American. They have all of these ideas of where that that sort of ethos came from. And my contention is that it was born on the pioneers

on the American frontier by pioneers from Kentucky all the way to California. I mean, like you can point to, like, let's say like this, if you were to ask an American to describe what it means

to be an American, they're going to talk about shit like fortitude, perseverance, loyalty, dedication, love of family, country, you know, spirit, right? I mean, you can point to like Valley Forge and maybe a couple of battles, but other than that, the eastern seaboard was like pretty much Europe 2.0. You know, I'm saying it's glorious, lots of war glories there, and our forefathers fought hard to steal Europe 2.0 from them. But everything that happened on the frontier was new.

It had never happened in, well, hadn't happened in 10,000 years, anything like that before. And so that's why America felt so different because it had really had a totally different birth than any of these other nations. So I've been working on that for a while. And then, you know, like I say, ride Colts, and then I run this bunkhouse deal where I take guys out once a month to train on different things. And like last weekend, we were doing some advanced home defense. training in Utah with a Green Beret dude working in shoot houses and stuff like that. And we've taken dudes up hunting and we've run. I just facilitate all these courses.

But we've done field med courses and, yeah, we've done long-range precision courses with some guys. And yeah, we just, so anyway, these are basically my main focus and so far as work goes. And then after that, it's just family. How big is your ranch? So as a horse trainer, I can only ride, well, it used to be I could ride about 10 a month, but now I kind of have too many other things. So now I can only ride about six a month.

So I keep about 15 head of horses at my house at any one time. And then once they're ready, I sell them, and then move on. And what's the name of the company that does all, like, the tactical training? Bunkhouse. It's the Bunkhouse LLC, but it's not just tactical stuff. Like I've taught basic horsemanship with them. I did a backcountry navigation course with some people. Talks how to hunt basics course to people like how to hunt the mountains, basic stuff.

So we try to spread out like jack of all trades type skills as much as we can. Kind of become more generalists. Who are your clients? These guys, well, it's all, it's just a membership deal. So it's members and then they just come and we just take them out. And every Wednesday, we have some expert for somewhere come on and we'll just do a quick Zoom call and they'll have an hour like usually me and that guy or girl we'll just have a back and forth and then we'll open it up

and they can ask questions and cover different you know whatever it is. How many people are members of the bunkhouse? We don't have a lot like 350, something like that. So it's easy to get into courses, you know, it's super easy. But yeah, I do that. That's kind of like a side passion project thing. And if people want to do that, where do they go? to sign up for that?

Bunkhouse. Drackson-McCoy.com. Chuck. So you said that's your side project? What's your main project? Writing Colts. That's the deal, huh? Yeah, that's my jam.

I love that shit. I love it. Yeah. I've always loved it. But I think it's really good for me mentally now, too. Because you can't, like, young horses, you got to stay present and focused. You can't be thinking about other shit

or worrying about other shit, you've got to be on that horse, like, with him all the time. So I think it's good for me, too. How long does a transition take before they're ready to go out, before you're ready to give them to somebody else or sell them to somebody else? It depends a lot on the horse. It depends a lot on the horse. So if I'm riding, like, an outside horse would be, like, a client's horse. I'll usually ride them for 60 to 90 days for them and then send them off.

But I only do a little bit of that now because I wrote so many for people. that they would take them and then just not ride them after they left. And the problem is, like, you get a two-year-old that you put 60 days on, and then the owner goes and just parks it in a pasture for like six months and then goes to try to get on it the next spring. It's like the horse doesn't even remember anything, you know. So now I only ride Colts outside horses for one big ranch that's a neighbor of mine. They run a big old spread.

But I'll ride them for them because they'll take them and use them as soon as they get them. But so the average, I would say, it depends on what you're asking that horse to do, but if you're trying to build like a safe trail horse, you could get a lot done, depending on the age of that horse, but you could get a lot done in a summer, as long as the other person won't take him back and use them. Now, if you're sending it off to somebody who's, like, good and knows what they're doing, then usually they'll ask for 60 or 90 days riding on them and then take him. But like my stud horse, I bought him from that rancher.

I was just talking about because I was starting him for them. And I had, well, Dwight Hill, probably the best horse training in the country, came out to help me with him, rope him for me that first day. You wanted to show me some tricks. And so I rode him that day. Dwight roped him for a bit, and then I rode him, and then I took him out and roped him myself the next day, and then I rode him two more times.

And then that fifth time I took him out moving cattle for like 12 miles for that ranch. Dave. Yeah, and he was when he's a two-year-old. So it really depends on the horse what you can get done. Now, he sure as hell wasn't broke by then, but he was easy compared to a lot of other ones. He was getting there. What about your hunting?

I mean, what's September looking like? I'm hammered September. I got a New Mexico buck tag that I'm super excited about. I got a friend of mine gave me, actually he's a mutual friend of Micah and I's, gave me a wine cut bull elk tag. So that's, I'm so good for that. And then obviously I got my elk hunting Idaho, and I got one buddy coming up to hunting Idaho that I promised I'd take for a week.

So I really don't have a day off in September. Is that all bow? Yeah, for me. Yeah. Pretty good awesome. What else, man? Does that get us up to present day? Does there anything else you need to tell us about?

No, I mean, no. So a couple of things did happen that weren't in that book. That IVC filter that it's like up in your vina cave, kind of behind your kidneys essentially. Yeah, just so everyone, I didn't read this part, but they had to put like a filter in your body to prevent clots from getting what to your lungs. Yeah.

And it's some kind of mesh filter that they put in. It just prevents blood clots from going through that screen. It's basically a screen. and they had to put it in. And so you've had that in you for, what, freaking a long time, 15 years. Yeah, well, I had it in for 12. And that I went in, so I was running endurance races for a while,

doing really good. And actually, like, competitive in every race. I should have won the first one. How far? The first one I ran was a duathlon, so it was a two-mile run, or it might have been a, yeah, it was a two-mile run. And then I think a 20-mile bike ride and then a two-mile run.

It's the first one. And then I was training for an ultra when I had this issue with my heart. And I went in and they said I had a heart attack. And I was like, well, that's great. So then I had to quit training because, you know, a heart attack. Well, it ended up that it wasn't a heart attack, which is great. So I go up to the University of Utah. thought, oh, and this, the filter, the way this filter ties in here is the, I could get that out of my hands.

What the fuck? And my doctor's like, it's, there's a potential that your filter is just like releasing protein in your blood, you know, because like, I guess the way, like, it's damaging that blood vessel in there. And it's releasing protein. Because I guess the way that it's like a heart attack is protein in your bloodstream, a certain type of protein in your bloodstream. and that's what they had detected. So he's like, I said, can we get this thing out then? You know, because I'd really like to do this whole alter deal. And he said, no, you're stuck with us.

It's been in there for too long. There's no way it's coming out. So I came home and got, you know, on Google, we start looking and it looked like probably right. Like, you probably couldn't get it out. So then I went. That's what I do. And the doctor tells me something to. I go home and Google it.

Like, what up? This dude don't know what you're talking about. Exactly. I think you got Google, son. WebMD. What? So I went and got on J store and started looking for any article I could find in a turn, or any paper rather, I could find.

And then turned out there's a doctor up, a radiologist, I think he is, I'm pretty sure, up in Penn State that had done, had to, had removed like three or four of them or some shit. At like, I forget, seven or eight years in. And I was over that, but, you know, so the max that I could find that had been, length of time that I could find that had been removed was like seven or eight years. So meanwhile, I'm doing all this heart shit in between trying to figure this out. Well, finally, my wife was like, won't you just call the University of Utah and just ask the radiology department. I was like, those bitches, they don't, it's like I can't find anything from them in the J store.

Like, what do they know? So she calls and she's like, hey, they said that you can come up for a consultation on Wednesday and that they do this all the time. They can get it out. okay so we go up there and meanwhile I'm so waiting on all my heart prognosis stuff right and we go up there and meet with the the radiologist and he's like yeah coming on Friday we'll take it out why is it a radiologist uh because the way the procedure works is they have to keep you awake and they put some shit in your uh in your blood so they can see it yeah so he he's like coming on Friday and

Meanwhile, my primary care position told me he's like, man, you know, if you try to get this removed, your vina cave, it could rupture and, you know, like, there's no way to plug that. And so I'm going to, like, stressed out. Damn, bro, you can't give me, like, a week to think? So it ended up getting pushed off until the next Friday. But I went in and they got that sucker out. It was, like, I guess the way this guy had done it was so that at the top of that deal, there's like a little loop. and I mean that's how it was designed to be able to be removed. So they push this thing onto it and try to squish it together like this

because it looks almost like an umbrella without a skirt on it. So they would push a deal over it that kind of squish the umbrella together. And if that doesn't work, then there's a loop on top of the filter and they would try to hook a thing on it and pull it out with that. But if that thing, the reason that people weren't able to get them out is if that thing straightened out, now you just have like a sharp thing in there and like how to get it out. So what this guy had done,

he must have grew up like Blue Car or something because he was like, I'll just put a damn alligator clamp on there and just shove that bitch down. So that's what he did. He invented like this tool. Anyway, he got that out, which was great. I mean, it's like my arm was stuck like this for a couple days

because they go down your jugular to rip it out. So that was good. I just wanted to like update it. It was good. That thing's out of there and I don't have to worry about dying because my freaking doctor when I went in, he's like, he's like, well, eventually that, you know, that IBC filter would just plug up.

I was like, well, how long? Yeah, what, that doesn't sound cool. Yeah, and he's like, 10, 15 more years probably, maybe 30. I'm like, bro, I'm freaking 31 years old, man. Like, or what was I 20? Yeah, I'm probably 30 at the time. So anyway, they got that out, which was great. And then we pushed on on the heart stuff and turned out,

and then my heart was actually okay they wanted the scans so they didn't echo and then whatever that other one is where they put you through a CT and they look at some shit I forget but anyway

they'd give you like a calcium score on your arteries and all this and I had a calcium score of zero so I told my wife I was like I got damn baby arteries like I want to hear no more shit about all my stakes is that because you had filter in there for so long

or why is that? I don't know I don't really care I just I don't want like I don't want to hear any more shit about bacon and eggs and fatty steaks. Che, I'm sure it's good. Bring up the ribby's son. That's right. So it turns, actually it turned out I just had a scar on my heart from getting hit in the plates with the explosion.

Oh, damn. So my heart's good. What did your plates look like after the, do you know? Yeah, I could show, oh, I got them. Yeah, I show you a picture actually. Were they jacked up? Not really. The, so I, the plates I had had a steel.

backer on them. There's like, I think they were, I can't remember what level they were at the time. My uncle was a, did you have side sappy plates in? No.

Jack. No, I took everything on the front. Yeah, my uncle was like a, I can't remember if he's a major or a light colonel in the Air Force, like a, a wreck investigator or something. And he had just rotated out

and he'd bought these fancy ass plates, so we just mailed them to me. Sweet. So we just mailed them to me. So we worked out. I can't remember if it's five or six in the plate. The craziest part is the... That's game over, man.

100%. Two of them are like right here. Right by the heart. You need to toast. I'm like almost dead before you hit the ground. Yeah. Yeah, and the craziest part about those plates is I didn't realize this until one of my engineer buddies came over the other day.

And he was like checking him out and put him on my counter. And it's like warped, like wobbles. So it's like I... hit hard enough to like tweak it. Who was the range that you got hit from? Probably 15 meters-ish. And luckily, you know, I had my head down like this, I guess like this. So probably my K-pot took a lot of that concussion.

Oh, yeah. Instead of taking it all right here. Oh, man. Does that get us up to present day? Yeah, man. Everything's good now. I got four kids and life is fucking great. freaking outstanding man outstanding uh if people want to find you um you got brach brachston mccoy dot com yeah

that's like a central location for you on instagram you're at braxton mccoy brxton dot mccore oh sorry all right brxton mccoy that's b r x t o n b r a x all right cool uh b r a x freaking people getting super sensitive about this apparently B-R-A-X-T-O-N-Mocoy. And on Twitter, your Braxton underscore McCoy, if people want to follow you or find you. You can find in any of those places. And you're doing, are you still speaking to companies or speaking to people or not really?

Coronavirus kind of killed it from me. Check, check. Echo Charles. Yeah. Got any questions over there? Yeah. Remember we were talking about your IT band? Yeah.

So where are we at with that? I mean, does it get like jammed up? for a while because that's kind of a big deal right yeah i split down the down the middle kind of yeah every morning i i heat up a bath as hot as i can tolerate it every morning yeah and i mean like if i'm at a hunting or training i can't but otherwise every morning hard as i get it and sit in there for 20 minutes and just try to stretch it with my hands and then i get out and stretch as much i can and then i roll it and just hope for the best yeah does it like like after a bout of like physical activity does it like act up like right after or whatever especially

especially yeah my knees get jacked and it starts to dig with my hips too and my low back starts to get weird even just yeah everything gets kind of just out of place and then you said you have ball bearings in you still yeah damn how many uh i think it's around eight or so i don't have to i got there's a picture on my instagram i'll look and see that's crazy and how bigger these they're like size of a P like a little bigger than a P

yeah that's a marble smaller than a marble slightly bigger than a P I just say a P roughly a P they're literally wheel bearings is what they are that's crazy

that's pretty typical with asbest scenarios but they could put like you were like they could put like nails and just random like bolts, nuts, just any metal crap that'll freaking rip you apart. It's crazy, man.

Good to meet you, bro. What have you done with Micah? I've done it. No, I've never met him. We just have a mutual friend. I know a guy that knows him. You guys definitely need a link up. That's what he said.

Yeah, he's freaking awesome. Any closing thoughts, bro? No, just thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Well, I'm sorry it took so long. and thanks for joining us. More important, obviously, man. Thanks for what you did in Ramada, you and the rest of the guys in the 228.

Did an incredible job taking the fight to the enemy and prepared the battlefield for us when we got there and also made incredible sacrifices and we will not forget what you guys did and we'll never forget your sacrifice or the sacrifices of guys likely to. Lieutenant Colonel Michael McLaughlin and Sergeant Adam Cair and so many of the other brave soldiers and Marines who sacrificed their lives for their brothers. And we will live to honor them.

And thank you for helping us find a way to do that. Appreciate it, brother. Thank you, sir. I appreciate you. And with that, Braxton McCoy has left the building. a freaking outstanding guy and get the book. The book is just, it's a great book. Look, we scratch the surface on it.

There's so much stuff. It's, I feel like, I feel like I didn't do a good job. I didn't do the book justice in what I read. I don't know, because there's a lot in there, man. There's a lot in there. And part of it is because you got to kind of tell the story. You know what I mean? Yeah.

You got to, I mean, at least that's what I feel. I feel like you got to kind of know what's going on. And that kind of leads me to read a little bit more of the what's going on stuff as opposed to some of that internal dialogue and some of the discovery and stuff like that. So it's just an awesome book. Order the book. I feel like I enjoyed, related, maybe in a weird way, more than normal with Ellen. Maybe it was because of how he was too.

I think just the whole thing together. I was like, I felt not, I mean, in a way more into it, but more like, you connected. I connected with it a lot, like a lot more than the normal, I guess, given the circumstances, you know? You think maybe it's because he's more your age? But actually he's not more my age. I mean, he's 36. Yeah.

I'm like. 40. 6, 8 years. How old are you? 44. I know I'm very youthful. I know I wasn't thinking youthful immature yes that I was thinking oh there you go the the part like how he he's talking about like the alcoholism and then like his anger at this and anger at that for some reason like the way he

put it was like that's so true like almost like not that I necessarily felt all of that but it was like I felt like I can see how that could be I could totally see how that could be. And this one part that I think he like nailed was when he was like something about the existence of the devil where alcohol and drugs are like his tools. Yeah. It's so true. His strongest tools. Bro, it's so true. I'm almost as I'm almost tempted to say, freak, that is the devil. That's like, you know, the devil's like spirit coming down for sure and like touching people and jamming them up because it's true where and he was saying this. I don't know if he said it on air, but he was saying, I think it was before we were recording when he was like,

hey people in school or people like teachers and stuff in school people when you're young they don't tell you that drugs are like kind of good like they feel good do you say that he did say it on there yeah okay it's like they don't tell you that they lie they lie yeah and then it kind of jams you up yeah but it's true though it's like and obviously different people like different drugs like I you know I don't have that much drug experience but the very limited that I do like no drugs to me felt good at all not even like painkiller I took all that oxy, like, not morphine, but like, you know the ones they give you. For surgery?

Yeah, after surgery. Bike it in, like all these ones. I took, when I got neck surgery, and I was like, I'm not taking anything. I'm so tough. And then I got home and the stuff wore off. And I was like, give me whatever they gave you to my wife. I was like, give it to me now. That's real.

But the weird thing is it didn't feel like, it didn't, I didn't feel any, like, even he described, like, euphoria. I didn't feel any of that. I just felt like, okay, I can go to sleep now. Yeah. You know, because I'm not in agony. Yeah, like kills. So I didn't, I didn't, I don't know. Yeah, I felt a little bit like weird and woozy or whatever, but I didn't like it though.

I didn't really feel that either. But then even like weed and stuff like that, it's like, yeah, I don't like the feeling or whatever except for alcohol. That's the one. That's your, that's your, that's where the devil gets you. Yeah. And that's where I experience the devil scenario. Because it is. It's like, awesome.

especially when you're having fun or you're bonding with someone and you guys are both going down memory lane all hardcore and you just don't want it to end. You're like, oh, this is the best. Like, oh, this alcohol is helping it. It's helping me. You see what I'm saying? Help me feel.

And then like the next day that pray, I remember I was drinking with cake nuts. Right? I'm not going to tell you when. Doesn't matter when. Sounds like it was a very recent scenario. I am working at the mustard. We ended up.

We ended up like. You think you had that. flight on Saturday, huh? Yes, sir. Extending the good time, like, way past, like, the plan. And just, you know, and we're just, they were doing that, going down memory lane, talking talking trash, having a laugh, huge laughs. Huge, oh, man, it was the best, it was the best.

Then the next morning we're, because we're on the same, not on the same flight, but same time, so we're all going to the airport together. And, like, we're sitting there. Like, why do we even do that? Like, how I feel right now, it's, like, not even worth it. Like, even last night was super good fun, but it's not even worth feeling. like this how much percentage of fun could you have had without alcohol the night before I don't know like you let's say you had let's say you had 90% fun yeah without alcohol

the night before how much fun would you've had I don't know hey I don't know I mean because I'm tempted to say well yeah 90 probably 90 or 89 or whatever because I think I can't could have been maybe like 25 I think I can truly have like 90% yeah all the fun I understand with or without yeah I understand but like Not everyone's like that. Straight up. Where just because like, especially cake nuts, he's kind of a reserved like person.

Oh, so you had to break down that. But when we're together, it's cool. But then you could tell because there's other people like Maine Ty was with us at some point. It got that. It was like that. We don't even know where Maine Ty was. We don't know where he showed up when he departed. Sorry to the freaking bus and throw him under the bus.

But nonetheless, he was like, you know, certain things you're like, oh. But the key point is the next day of, wasn't even worth it wasn't worth it and we were literally talking about how it's not worth it so it's like a deal with in the moment it's more than worth it bro you can I'm thinking about the flight it's a complete lie it's a complete lie but you feel it like to your in your bones that it's worth it at the time and the next day you know the reality that's the devil right there that's how sneaky it is it's true and so how he put that I was like bro you're spot on spot on no he definitely you know I even that last on

underground podcast we did where a guy asked you know hey you know how much drinking should I be doing you know I'm right I got the friend group they would they don't really want to drink you know hey what's a good way for me to drink I'm just like I can't even I can't even give as a matter of fact I saw I talked to somebody at the at the muster who was you know who's had issues and he said when he heard that question he was like please chocolate please say say the right thing say the right thing and I was like you know I can't even support he's like yes he goes you can't because it's a freaking lie yeah it is

It's a lie, man. Let's stay clean out there. Stay clean. Another thing he said about the ego, which, like, conceptually was like a lot of times, like you'll say this, but he said this very specific thing where he said, oh, the army should have kept me in, even though he knew he couldn't have got in. But it's weird because, like, you kind of have that feeling. It's almost like, under certain circumstances, obviously, like, you know, it depends

of who you are. But it's like, you know how it's almost like a more advanced version of the simple idea of, like, you know, the classic, like, oh, they didn't invite me to the party, even though I didn't want to go, but like I still should be invited, you know, kind of because it's me. It's like a weird illusion. And if you really, if you really pull the string on that, like you can blame everything. Like, oh, they didn't keep me in the army. That's why I'm drinking right now. Yeah. That's why I'm doing this. That's why I'm doing that. I'm out here. That's why I got, you know, that's why I'm in this relationship with this person. Like, you can, everything is just rooted in. There's one thing

because they wouldn't keep me. That's a trap. And luckily he figured that out, man. Luckily, he figured that out. And it's good that other people hopefully can recognize these things. You know, another big point, physical. Yeah. The physical well-being is paramount.

You got to be, man, you got to get up in the morning. You got to get after it. You got to get up at 4.30? No. You got up at 5, no. But getting up consistently, doing some work. So good for you, man. So good for you.

So a ton of lessons there. So, get on that. Instead of drinking vodka. Yeah, I got a better idea. We'll drink the discipline go. Yeah.

Drink a mok. Yeah, or mok. Yeah, both. Drink a mok, drink some go. Drink some, maybe even want to drink a little bit of that pre-workout discipline go. Sarah goes, my wife says,

she was like, you know what you should do? You should make a video. And this was like such an old concept. I've seen videos like this. It's like this. Bless her. Don't do it like that right now.

She just doesn't watch that. It's a good idea. Go ahead. I like her idea. What was it? She doesn't watch that much TV like I do. Sarah. But Sarah Charles.

I got you, Sarah. She was like, you know, she should do a video like showing like how discipline go. The energy drink is like it's an energy drink, but it doesn't have sugar in it. And then show this other energy drink that you can't show the label, of course. And then just show how much sugar is in it. And then do the equipment. You know how they used to do the scoops of sugar. And be like, this all much sugar you're drinking.

She's like, do a video like that. That would be good. You don't be funny is like we started the video like that, but then we started saying it. Like, oh, and here's a scoop of rat poison. Arsenic. We started pouring like actual. Probably should. Just poison there.

We'll do it. Yeah. Good idea. See? AD, Jocko over here. Yeah. But it all originated with Sarah Charles, creative genius. Creative direct.

And you're over there naysay. Maybe you need some discipline go, homie. If you want to get some discipline go, you want to get some milk. Go to joccocofoil.com. hooked out of go to the vitamin shop go to wah-wa go to hib down in tejas yeah we got it going on so we're spreading check that stuff out also origin usa i origin usa dot com forgot to tell brachston that we got hunt gear coming he will he will get to hunt in some american made gear you know he doesn't want to buy stuff from china or from overseas 100% he there's only one kind of hunting gear he is

wanting and that's American made hunting gear so we'll get you some of that origin USA.com if you want some of that if you need jiu jitsu gear if you need a t-shirt if you need a sweatshirt if you need a pair of boots jeans jeans I got two pair on the way I should I should have talked to Braxton about that as well because you know he wants to wear American made yeah I do fully it's with origin USA.com jocco store.com what we got there some a lot of how should I say yeah the various things but mainly it's apparel peril peril you're gonna represent on this path peril discipline equals freedom yeah good we're restocking some stuff we're going

to hard oh wait so we ran out of stock we were what I'm here from I said you just put yourself on report oh it's a life I live hey look it was better pretty cool to see at the muster of people representing with the Sherlock shirt yeah you can see that those are it seems like they're kind of hitting they're landing they're landing people are kind of stoked people are kind of stoked because that's just that's just like full representation yeah like yeah I'm in the game over here on my side what about you it's it's funny too because people will like come to me and ask me like hey where did that guy get that shirt locker all day all day but yeah that's how like

that's how much they were land by one old shirt from the short locker if desired yeah so basically it goes like this join shirt locker membership subscription 34 a month. Yes, you get a new shirt every month. And if you want. If you want, you have access, exclusive access to like, yeah, all the other stuff. It's like a private store. You can buy anyone, anyone from the past.

That's what's called observing the feedback loop. The feedback loop was some people wanted some of those other shirts that were, and come out. Yeah, so they thought they missed it. So it's like, oh, I missed that one shirt and that's kind of, you know, the one. and then maybe two, three months later, they're like, oh, I miss that one again. You see what I'm saying? So it's like they felt like, apparently, that was almost like a gamble, you know, but it's not a gamble. There's no gamble.

It's a win. It's a win-win. Check that out. Subscribe to the podcast. Subscribe to jaco underground. jaco underground.com. We're answering a bunch of questions. We're talking about topics.

We're getting deep into aspects that we might not hit here, but that are very integral to living and crushing and doing well. So jocco underground.com. It's also where we are because in case we get kicked off of this platform or some other platform, we got our own platform. Jockunderground.com, if you want to join, if you want to help out on that $8.18 a month. And if you can't afford it, we look, it's okay. We want you in the game. Email assistance at jocco underground.com.

Check out the YouTube channel. Check out psychological warfare. Check out flipside canvas with Dakota Meyer making cool stuff to hang on your wall. That's a good idea. Books. You can get a bunch of books. wrote a bunch of them also braxton wrote one it's called the glass factory when i'm saying this right now whenever you're listening this there's only 300 hard covers left that that brachson mccoy dot com

they ain't going to last long no if they are get one that's a first edition that you ain't you know you ain't coming by again if they don't have that cool get it from amazon um you'll get a one that's printed on demand which is still awesome because it's a great book so many lessons learned only cry for the living check out holly mackay's book she's been on here for wrote a fantastic book she risked her freaking life to write so go check that one out and then I written a bunch of books you know what they are kids books I just realized I didn't give Braxton a copy of Mikey the Dragons all to send it to him Braxton hit me up so I've written a bunch of books check them out echelon front leadership consultancy just just finished the muster

as we were just talking about next one is Atlanta hot Lana October 12th through the 14th We're going to sell out. COVID's over now, officially, a fish, officially over. Because people do not care. And we're back to the pre-COVID numbers at Muster. So it's going to sell out. There you go. Battlefield, we're doing EF Battlefield, a little bighorn.

It's almost sold out. I think there's literally two more seats. Probably not by the time you listen to this. But if you want to go to Little Bighorn with us, check that out. All that stuff, Eshalomfront.com. Also, we have the Academy, Extreme Ownership.com. We're teaching this stuff all the time.

Just did a live event today, interacting with everybody that's on there. If you have questions on how to handle a situation, just go on there. And you can ask me, and we can interact. You can give me the details. The deets. You heard this expression?

Yeah, from you. It's lame, isn't it? Not, bro. I like it. Good. Keep it. If you want to help out service members active and retired, their families,

Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee, she has an awesome charity organization. What she does is she helps people, helps veterans that need medical help that the government's not paying for. So if you help her, she will help veterans that need it. America's mighty warriors.org. Also, we talked a couple times about Micah today, his organization, Heroes and Horses.org. It's the first time I've gotten that thing right. So it's dot org.

He's taking vets up into the wilderness for 41 days, 41 days? I think so. 41 days on a horseback. Dude, freaking awesome. And once again, Braxton, what a stud, what a hero. What an awesome guy. You can follow him. He's on the web if you want to talk to him.

Braxton McCoy.com. His Instagram is braxton. dot McCoy. His Twitter is Braxton underscore McCoy. Hit him up. Of course, on the Twitter, on the gram, on the Facebook. Echoes at Quo, Charles. I'm at Joccoquil.

Listen, you go on there, cool. I don't mind you going. I don't mind you checking in. Don't dwell. Don't hang out there. Don't move in there. Don't say, oh, I'm going to look at this other thing and this other thing and this other thing. And just like that little dopamine grabs you by the by the freaking throat and pulls you in there.

Don't do it. Otherwise, like at my house right now, just had a couple people. I had a couple people from the underground. Dopamine, dopamine. So for those of you don't know that don't have the jocco underground.com at my house right now, if you pull out your phone with my family,

people just start going dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine. So. It's real. Yeah, it's real. It's a real thing. It's what we're doing. It's keeping people in check. I'm putting my phone back away because it's annoying.

Right? So don't let that happen. But you can find this there. Watch out for the algorithm. Special thanks to all the military personnel out there, especially our wounded warriors who continue to fight long after the war is over. We salute you and thank you for everything you have done and everything you continue to do for our country and our way of life.

Thank you to the wounded vets. And also to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all the first responders out there, you also sacrifice every day to protect our way of life here at home. And we thank you for that. And to everybody else, remember these lessons learned from Braxton. They're so important. And look, they're so hard earned from Braxton for what he went through to figure these things out and then to pass them on to us.

The lessons do not lie to yourself. that will be the main source of your suffering. We often create the vast majority of our own problems. And listen, I get it. I get that you can't control everything. No one can control everything, but take ownership of what you can control. And it's usually a lot more than you think.

And then sharpen your sword. Sharpen your sword. And by that, I mean your body, your mind, your spirit, and then go out into the world and slay those dragons. And until next time, Zeko and Jocko. Out.