Jocko Podcast - 413: Reach Out. Stay Connected. People Need People. With Frank Larkin

Episode Date: November 22, 2023

The story of Navy SEAL, Ryan Larkin.The physical and mental toll of service lasts long after the uniform is retired. Many of those who are suffering are not seeking help or treatment, or they may not even know how to vocalize what they are feeling. They may pull away from family and friends and isolate themselves, a known precursor to suicidal ideation. They may be suffering from undiagnosed traumatic brain injuries that mimics psychological ailments or PTSD.  Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocco Podcast number 413 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Ryan Larkin deployed on heavy combat tours between 2008 and 2013, where he would blow through thick walls and doors, fire weapons with a powerful blast, and be exposed to improvised bombs. In one video, he is seen as he stands by, his fingers in his ears, as another soldier blasts a rocket launcher,

a few feet away. He would say to me, Mom, it would just clear out my sinuses and you could feel it. It was so unbelievable, Jill Larkin said. The vibrations left microscopic tears in her son's brain so small that MRIs and PET scans couldn't detect the damage while he was living. Survivors of explosive attacks often report headaches, difficulty sleeping, trouble concentrating, irritability and memory problems. A 2017 study of eight deceased military personnel found that blast exposure produces scarring legions in the brain. When Larkin returned home after his third tour, his brain had changed.

He was a different kid, totally, his mother said. Larkin started having trouble sleeping. He complained of headaches and became short. fused he stopped smiling and his relationships started to erode he deployed on his final tour in Afghanistan's Helmand province an area with a high rate of enemy contact when he returned home he was more anxious and confused he was hard to talk to his parents said when he was able to sleep he would have nightmares larkin began teaching other seals explosive breaching techniques in San Diego where he was

exposed to blast waves daily. Eventually, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. The Navy referred to him, referred him to several programs. Some were helpful, others destructive. The common theme was a prescription for medication, his parents said. Boxes of medication would arrive at their house. Every time we turned around, somebody was writing a new prescription for some type of drug. Frank Larkin, Ryan's father said.

Over two years, Ryan Larkin was prescribed over 40 medications, his father reported. The drugs made him feel worse, and he was labeled operationally unfit and mentally unstable. Without a customized care plan, he started losing trust in the institution he loved above all else. He's the only one that said something was wrong with his head, Frank Larkin said. Ryan would say something is wrong with my head. I don't know what it is, but they keep telling me I'm nuts. I'm crazy. He was honorably discharged from the Navy in 2016.

He was referred to a veterans hospital for treatment, which felt like being abandoned. The lack of science explaining traumatic brain injuries led the Larkins to countless doctors and therapists, but they never got a definitive diagnosis. You become very vulnerable with a lack of good science to help support your decisions, Frank Larkin said. He said they almost spent themselves into bankruptcy on different treatments. When you see someone like Ryan circling the drain, you will do anything, he said. And those are some excerpts from an article from the Washington Post to buy Lilly Price from February of 2020. And Frank and Jill, Ryan's mom and dad, did everything that they could. Ryan's dad, Frank, had also been in the SEAL teams in the late 70s and early 80s.

Ryan is what's known as a legacy, a SEAL whose father was also a SEAL. But despite his father's understanding of the Navy and the SEAL teams and of the job, Ryan continued to suffer. and on April 23rd, 2017, he killed himself. He had told his dad months before he killed himself that he wanted his brain to be studied. He knew there was something wrong. And after he died, his brain was studied at Walter Reed National Military Center, where a doctor discovered a severe level of microscopic brain injury uniquely related to blast exposure. But it was too late.

and in an effort to prevent this from happening to more service members in the future, Frank Larkin has made it his mission to get the funding, research, and protocols in place to help our service members before it's too late. And it's an honor to have Frank Larkin with us here tonight to discuss his life, his son's life, and the lessons he learned through service and service. sacrifice for him and his family Frank thanks for coming down and joining us clearly just a horrific scenario and I spent the last few days talking to talking to people that worked with Ryan over the years his master chiefs some of his chiefs and you just get this picture of a kid who is what you want a young frog man to be he was

fired up. He was hard working. He was squared away at everything he did. And what everyone said was he took a turn that was totally out of character of who he, what he was like prior to. And this is a story that I heard as well. I've heard before from other SEALs and SEALs family members who see a different person after a certain period of time in the SEAL teams. And just a tragic scenario. And obviously, no one knows that better than you. And it's an honor to have you on here just to be able to share what you've learned, what you discovered, and what we can do to try and prevent this kind of thing in the future.

Thanks for joining us. Thanks to Jocko and Echo Charles here. I'm glad to be here and, you know, my intent is just to help folks understand so that we know what else has to walk this path of pain. So let's get into your background a little bit. Your, where are you from? How did you grow up? So I'm originally from Philadelphia, so I talk fast and with my hands.

You know, an Irish kid grew up in a Italian neighborhood. You know, just nothing out of the ordinary. just had a good childhood, you know, came from a large family. What would your mom and dad do? My dad was into advertising and marketing, and then my mom was a homemaker for many years, and then went back to school, became a nurse, and eventually a real estate agent, and, you know, became that independent woman that said, you know, I can do this on my own. And so she's, my dad's not, you know, he passed 25 plus years ago, but my mom's still alive and

kind of on her, on her final runway, you know, probably soon to depart. Did you have any veterans in the family growing up? No, I was the first. So I kind of broke the ice. So how did you hear about the Navy? So I was in high school, and I'll be honest with you, Jocko. I mean, I was an average kind of, you know, student. You know, my grades were so-so until my senior year,

and then all of a sudden the light came on, and, you know, I went from, you know, a CD student to straight A's. But honest with you, you know, as a lot of my, you know, fellow students were pointed in going to college, I just felt that I wasn't ready yet. You know, I need to grow up a little bit. Did you play sports or anything? Yeah, so I played soccer. I ran track, some wrestling.

I like to mix it up. I also, you know, was working. I've been working since I was 11 years old. You know, I started delivering papers, you know, on a bicycle. And the next thing you know, I was working at a grocery store, slamming cans into shelves and pushing carts back, you know, into the bin. And from there, you know, I said, you know, once I graduated from high school, that, you know, the other thing is Vietnam was still, you know, churning along.

We were starting to wind down, but, you know, the draft was still active. I had a low draft number. And I said, even though my grades were good, you know, my senior year, they weren't good enough to get into the schools I wanted to get into. So I said, well, let me, you know, kind of take the bull by the horns, which is kind of a metaphor for how I looked at life. It was all about adventure and taking control. I said, well, I'm going to listen in the Navy.

And that's what I did. Did you know what the seals were at the time? No, no. I had actually, I had been in for a period of time. I had a buddy that had just started training. and he told me about it and it caught my attention. This is once you were already in the Navy? Yeah, yeah.

What did you go in the Navy? Did you do? Yeah, so I was a corpsman. Okay. And he was down, gone through training, and I had never heard of it. So, you know, one thing led to another. I put my application in through my command. I was told no.

And then I, you know, went back to my buddy. It said, hey, look, you know, they're denying my, you know, my application, you know, to come down here. And he says, well, let me, let me talk to some folks. Where were you stationed when this was going down? Camp Pendleton. So you were with the Marines? That was with the Marines.

So I'll never forget. And this is what, 1970? 73. Seventy-four. Got it. And then the next thing you know, you know, I've got, you know, called into the CEO's office, and he's pissed. And he's saying, I don't know what you did, but I've got orders for you.

you know, to go to Coronado. I told you I was going to deny any of your requests, but, you know, the next thing you know, he said, departing words were, you fail, you're coming right back to me. That's the deal I cut, and that was my motivator. But, you know, tremendous experience. It was really foundational for me.

You know, it was the first real team dynamic that I had been involved in. some, I just think, you know, I credit it with, you know, the successes that I've been able, you know, fortunate to have in my life. And, and then, you know, to come back and circle back with the teams later in life, not only with my son, you know, as he joined the teams, but, you know, directly supporting the teams, you know, during the global war on terror. And we can get into that. Yeah. So what class were you in? What Bud's class were you in?

84. So what class got, wasn't that around the class that everyone quit or didn't, no one made it? What was that class 80 or something like that? Yeah, there's something, you know, one of the classes, I don't know the specifics of it, but one of them lost a lot of folks. There was a class that they, because when I went through, which was in 1990 or 1991, they would tell us about, I think it was class like 80 or class 82 or something. something like this. It was one of these classes. They called it the class that never was.

And basically they had so many people quit or get dropped that they were down to a handful of guys and they just rolled all of them into the next class. So there's a class that just didn't exist. Yeah, I think weather had a lot to do with it. It was a really harsh, you know, winter period. And, you know, it can get pretty bad, you know, on that coast, coastline. Oh, yeah. You know, especially if, you know. It ain't Baywatch. Oh, no. People think San Diego's Baywatch. Oh. And then they show up here, touch that water, and they go, yo. Well, and I tell you what, and your nuts go right to the back of the throat.

So, you know, at least you know where they are. So when you showed up to butts, were you in good shape? Did you start training for it? Did your buddy that had gone through? Was he telling you, hey, that's what you need to do to be ready? Yeah, there wasn't much, you know, out there about it. So I started running the hills, you know, up in Camp Petalton. And, you know, all times of the day, you know, depending on what my work schedules,

was and then you know when I was wasn't working I was working as a wildland firefighter part-time and that would you know really tighten you up no doubt oh yeah so you know you're up there in some extreme conditions you know you're you're moving into a fire while you know everything that's still alive is moving away from it you know so you know rattlesnakes are crawl in between your legs and rabbits and everything else are going the other direction but I think that that kind of set me up but no matter how good I think you guys you guys you're going to you guys you're going to go down there, the physical condition obviously is important. It's really what's in your head and your heart. Did you have any major challenges? How were you in the water? I was pretty good.

I wasn't the fastest, you know, but I think, you know, the folks that were the fastest and the slowest got most of the attention. Yeah. So if you kind of hung in the middle, you know, you were kind of blending in a little bit more. My best evolution was the O course, you know, because I was, you know, you can tell, you know, obviously nobody can see me here, you know, physically, but, you know, I'm this hulking, you know, five foot eight, you know, 160 pound, you know, giant. But I could throw myself over, you know, the obstacles, you know, pretty easily and, you know, some pretty good upper, you know, body strength, which, you know, now in my late 60s is, you know, not the same place it was, but still, you know.

But it's, you know, I think it's an experience. It's, you know, as you know, and, you know, a lot of the folks that have been through it, it's, it's definitely something that, you know, cars, you know, a pretty deep imprint into, you know, who you are and shapes it who you're going to be. And I think everybody obviously has different experiences, but I will say mine were good. I had, you know, cross paths with some tremendous leaders, you know, back. then whether you liked them or not I worked for Dick Morsenko you know guys like Bob Shamburger you know God rest his soul you know he and I were roommates you know he was one of the first you know what was Marsenko your skipper at team

two yeah oh right yeah and he either liked you or he didn't there was no middle ground so it was a pretty you know solid line that separated those two Yeah, I know, you know, Marcinco is definitely a polarizing figure. One of my platoon commanders who was a prior enlisted guy, who was a prior senior chief, who was a, had been stationed all over the place and just a highly respected guy and definitely the leader that I've always tried to emulate one time we were talking. And this was in the 90s. I mean, so I guess the book Rogue Warrior had come out in 1990 maybe.

So now it's probably 1993, 1993, 1994. And I'm talking to this guy. And he had been, you know, a plank owner with Marsenko, working for Mar Sinko. And I said to him, I said, hey, you know, hey, sir, what, what was, what was Marsenko really like? What's he like? And he just looked at me, he said, best skipper ever. That's what he, that's all he said. And this guy wasn't, you know, this guy was just a straight shooter.

And I've always remembered that. Like all the things you hear about Marsenko. Look, he's definitely a character, definitely brought a lot of attention to himself and the teams. But when a guy like the person that told me this just looked at me and said, Best Skipper Ever, and this guy that told me this is not, he doesn't really fit that mold. You know, like this guy is more of a straight shooter and a little bit more, I would say a little bit more Navy, like Big Navy type, traditional type military guy. Just looked at me, he said, best skipper ever. So I know that the guys that that worked for Marcinko definitely, in many cases, they loved

and admired him. So you get done with buds. Did you get rolled back or anything? No. Just made it through first time every time. Yeah, went to two, did a hop skit. Could you have gotten stationed at UDT back then? Because this is still in UDT?

That's right. How did they pick who was going to SEAL team? You know, I don't know. You know, I think they asked us, West Coast, East Coast. I elected East Coast and, you know, wound up at two. Working for, you know, Rudy Bosch, which was a legend. Bull Knox, another name from the past. You know, these were, and a lot of the guys were just, you know, coming off Vietnam.

I was going to say, yeah, you're getting there in 19, so you get there in 17. 75. It's, you know, the guys are coming in and, you know, you really have some combat experienced, you know, folks, you know, no nonsense. You know, they played hard. They worked hard. But they were also carrying some burdens coming back. You know, some of them got beat up pretty good. Yeah, I was talking to one of my friends that checked into SEAL Team 1 in like 1972. And he said, like, they went out and P-Ted. And he's back there taking a shower. And like you could see, I mean, basically every guy is wounded. Every guy had scars. Every guy had bullet holes in him. He said it was definitely a very interesting time. There was only 150 seals, period.

And so it was a very, very small community. And I remember cutting metal out of guys, you know, for. Oh, that's right, because you were Cormond. Yeah, years later, you know, I was cutting metals, you know, because the body would eventually start to push that out. and but you know getting back to demo dick you know I would characterize the same thing whether you agreed with him or not you know he took care of his people and you know he you know there was no door that he wasn't going to go through he drew you know he moved to contact and drew

fire um he had his way and uh you either got on board or you know you found yourself squashed you know like a bug um but yeah the guys that came out um you know, probably the closest one I was, you know, with Shamberger, you know, and actually, you know, we had taken one of the dogs that had come back from Nam, as, you know, took him home.

You know, by then he was getting old, big old German Shepherd by the name of Rennie. Rennie. Rennie. Yeah. And, you know, Sham, sham was a, you know, kept things close to the vest.

You know, had a great rep in the teams. Of course, you know, he, you know, we lost him, you know, in the Ops down in the Caribbean, where, you know, we lost three others on a drop. But, you know, it was a different time. And then the reason I bring that out is because, you know, as I watched, you know, my son, you know, go into training, you know, get into the teams and so forth, you could definitely see the difference, the contrast. And I'm sure you could see that, you know, with some of the younger guys that, you know, you work with.

Yeah. It's a different time. And, you know, not surprising because nothing ever states the same. Things have been flowed depending on the geopolitical, you know, state within the world and what we're challenged with. But, you know, as we get more and more into, you know, a modern warfare state, there's going to be new challenges that, You know, we need to be able to, you know, operate in, you know, to have that level of maneuverability. So when you showed up in 19, what, so was it, 1975 when you got to Team 2? Yep. When you show up there, you get put into a platoon? Yeah, got put into a platoon.

And, you know, by then, you know, you're, you know, the roaches on the floor treated better, you know. You know, you do all the scut work, and that's okay. you go in there knowing it and just keep your mouth shut and otherwise someone's going to shut it for you and it's not going to be a you know it's not going to be somebody coming up and putting their arm around or anything you're going to get a hard pop in a face or next thing you know you're going to be looking at the floorboards it was a different time yeah but definitely made its impression and so was this team too was they were they still doing the uh european like workup and stuff. Were you training on skis and all that stuff?

Yeah. So, you know, you'd have your deployments to Norway and Canada. You know, you'd have joint exercises with, you know, other coalition nations, which was good because you got to see things. I remember doing a tour and with the Berlin Brigade, you know, which was kind of interesting. The wall was still up, you know, kind of going through Checkpoint Charlie and, you know, doing some pretty interesting things, you know, with the unit that was there. You know, in the midst of Berlin that, you know, still was, you know, very much the impression of World War II was still alive. And now you had this, you know, very stark separation of, you know, looking across the wall and seeing nothing but gray and black. And then you'd look on, you know, the free side and it would be all these neon.

lights and a lot of color and movement and so forth. So I remember those days, but kind of an interesting piece of terrain to operate in and really, you know, kind of, you know, wires up a whole different level of senses to be able to move in an environment like that, just knowing that, you know, my takeaway when I came out of there was, you know, I couldn't put any my finger on, actually, what was the basis for the economy there other than the fact that everybody was following somebody. So, you know, it was a whole kind of societal mix of people just following other people. And, you know, it was a pretty, pretty interesting place. Now, this is post-Vietnam, the Navy, the whole military's downsizing.

I know they took guys after Vietnam. The guys got sent from the seal teams to the fleet. like there's a guy, the dirty dozen from SEAL Team 1, they took guys from the SEAL team that had been in the SEAL team, made it through Buds, and they took those guys and said, yeah, we don't need you in the SEAL teams anymore, and they sent them to the fleet.

The fleet made them do it. What was that downsizing? Like, were you seeing that? You know, it was interesting because, you know, at the time, you know, Big Navy was not exactly treating, you know, naval special warfare very well. And, you know, after the war, there's a lot of questions. And sometimes Naval Special Warfare doesn't treat the Big Navy very well.

Well, yeah, yeah, it's a two-way street. It's a two-way street. And again, you know, I guess we could have a whole show on that. Have you read Ben Milligan's book by Water Beneath the Walls? Yeah, it was just with him not too long ago. I mean, that really is just an incredible book. Yeah. And really lays out so much.

And it shows you that even though it can be a tenuous relationship between the Big Navy and the SEAL teams and Naval Special Warfare, ultimately when that relationship works, it's, it's amazing. And, but, you know, when, when the SEAL teams aren't needed, like as much, it's very easy for them to get sloughed off to the side. And that's what was happening in the 70s. Yeah, you know, when, when they're, when they're kind of, you know, reaching deep, you know, into the couch cushions and all for the coins to be able to build new ships and just even to be able to rehab ships that needed work, you know, or planes, you know, back. it was, you know, a lot of the aviation wings were, you know, almost non-operational because they just couldn't get, you know, keep airplanes flying. And I remember being on the ranges, you know, we would need some vehicles and we couldn't get any vehicles.

So we'd go out and, you know, these old, you know, beat up jeeps and, you know, six-bys and four-bys, you know, we would, you know, haul them off the range and start pulling parts off them and build a whole new vehicle, you know, that, you know, we would use, you know, and it's just the way it is, you know, to throw some new pain on it and, you know, kind of, you know, go to town. But, yeah. Or we'd go out, you know, to camping stores and stuff and, you know, because the stuff that we were getting. And this was really, like a big contrast between what you see now, the kit that, you know, they get some good gear right now. Yeah, it is. But back then, I remember, you know, we would be spray painting red sleeping bags, you know, you know, that, you know, we're, you know, top of the line, you know, you know, pieces of gear that just, you know, weren't our, our color to use operationally. So we had to kind of, you know, do our thing. And so a lot of, a lot of guys would, you know, out of pocket, you know, kind of gear themselves up, you know, for the job. Back then, you know, you had some interesting activity going on.

You started seeing the rise of terrorism. You know, the Red Army faction, the Red Brigade was lifting its head up, you know, in Europe. You had some Cuban infiltration going on down in Central America around the Canal Zone and other places. and Africa was always, you know, a place that, you know, kind of, you know, resided below the surface, but you knew bad things were gone there. He just didn't have the throw weight or the reach in Africa to, you know, to understand exactly what was taking place. So how many deployments did you do at SEAL Team 2? Well, the deployments that I had were kind of, you know, short trips out to do, you know,

training or we would do, you know, maybe a recon op. So it wasn't the deployments in the traditional sense that we saw, you know, like I saw with my son, you know, six or 12 month, you know, pumps. You know, they still had the, the marg going on where, you know, you'd float for a while with a, you know, a marine detachment for six months. That was about it. Never made one of those. I didn't have an interest to really do one of those. So were you guys doing basically like a deploy for purpose. Like if you, if there was a, a J-set or an exercise to be done over Europe,

you'd fly over there, do the exercise and come back home? Exactly it. Oh, wow. Right. And they had, they had a couple, you know, exchange programs going where they would send guys over for a period of time. And then come back and same with, you know,

for instance, the Germans, the Brits would send folks over. Yeah. You had some Koreans, you know, rock Marines, you know, coming over. But it was a different time. You know, the money was really. tight and so you pretty much a lot of you know your your preparation you know for you know doing what you needed to do was was you know done at api hill or or you know which you know

which you know in hindsight i should have bought property there you know vacation property along the rappahannock would have been beneficial but anyway spent a lot of time there and then I don't think you saw the almost the the next evolution you know what I would say positive evolution came after Desert 1 you know where you saw the standup of Special Operations Command joint special operations command and then you know the establishment of our counterterrorism force and then you know all the feeders and support elements. that went into that. And that was, you know, after my time. So you ended up getting out of active duty in what year? Uh, 78 and then stayed active reserve until, um, 81. When you say active reserves, I mean, you were like working every day. Is that what active reserve is? No, you, you come in and, you know, you do your time, uh, like weekends, once a month and then come in and do a deployment or some type of training op during the summer, you know, then that could be, that could be, you know,

a couple weeks all the way to a couple months depending on where, you know, the tasking was. You know, I was a student at the time. I was going to the university up in Philadelphia. And so I would try to, you know, spend as much time, you know, in that, you know, active summer period or as much time as I could in the summer period on active status. Get that money. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was a good money.

And what were you going to school for? Sociology and criminal justice. Were you looking at like, I'm going to be a cop? You know, I was looking to come back in. Oh, really? Yeah. Were you to try and get a commission? Yep.

Yep. There's going to come back in, but got bitten by the law enforcement bug. And, you know, next thing you know, I'm walking a beat in the Philadelphia area. Probably one of the more, you know, formative experiences that I've had in my life, you know, as a middle-class, you know, white-bred dude suddenly dropped into, you know, a neighborhood where I, no doubt, I was the outsider. So what was, would you graduated from college and then you went to what police academy? No, so I was still in college, finishing up my senior year when I took on the job with the police department. So I finished my senior year over the course of two years.

just because I had a Dodge shift work and so forth. How was the police academy? How long was that? That was about six months. Did you learn anything? Was it cool? Was it mostly legal? You know, a lot of legal, you know, how to operate in those environments, you know,

a lot of weapons training, which, you know, I've been through a lot of different weapons training programs depending on what I was involved in. So you have to kind of park all your prior experience and do it their way. Otherwise, again, you draw fire in that, you know, literally. literally. And, you know, don't make friends. So it was a good experience. I mean, you know, you had to know the law. You had to know how to maneuver in that space and so to keep yourself out of trouble. And it was a tough, tough department. Where were you, so you were a beat cop? Yep. And where were, where were you? What town? Yeah, just outside of Philadelphia and a town

urban element called Nars Town, just on the edge of Philadelphia. A real tough. neighborhood or piece of terrain. And it taught me how, you know, walking the beat really taught me, you know, how to kind of integrate into a neighborhood that, you know,

didn't want me. You know, they hadn't had to be a cop in like 20 years working there. And, you know, I got to know the people. And I just started with the basics, you know, of just, you know, just talking to people. I'd see, you know, elderly, you know, women, you know,

dragging, you know, shopping bags home from, you know, the store and, you know, you know, shuttling their way up the sidewalk and I'd come up and I'd come up and I pick up their bags and carry their bags for them. Or you got have a kid that, you know, didn't have a bicycle. I'd go look for a bicycle for them, you know, so that you could, you know, kind of, you know, be with the other kids.

to you start building relationships with the folks in the neighborhood basically. Yeah, yeah. And it wasn't about locking everybody up for every little, you know, freaking crime or, you know, incident. It was about, you know, being accessible. And that's kind of how, you know, what I try to share with, you know, new officers that I talk to, you know, today. They're just coming out of the academy.

And I share a story that, you know, you know, I had three principles that I always stuck to is that one was treat others the way you want to be treated and then you've got to ask that question in reverse how do you think they want to be treated which we don't always ask that question and then the second one was

treat everybody with respect no matter what you know a lot of them don't have control over their environments or you know it's kind of what they were handed And the third was never take somebody's dignity way. That's when you're going to get a fight. And so in doing that, you know, I think I was able to, you know, build relationships in it. And, you know, one night, you know, late afternoon, I came around the corner

and there was a pretty prominent drug leader dealer doing business with his gang and came around at probably the worst time and got caught up right in the middle of the deal and it turned into a street brawl right there and you know from you know doing your street brawl meaning what like all out you grabbed the guy

you tried to arrest him people are running people are swinging at you like what happened? Yeah yeah it's basically it I mean you're into it you know punch it flying you're trying to you know drag on to people. You got to partner with you? No. Just solo operations?

Solo operations just basically got a radio call out that I needed help. Didn't even know if it got out. And you feel people reaching for your gun. And you're trying to protect your weapon. And I just remember that, you know, things started getting dark. You know, how they, you know, everything comes in from the periphery and it gets more an hour or an hour. And, you know, you're just trying to, you know, and probably the last thing I heard were sounds

a sirens, you know, coming. But the next thing I remember is that, you know, these folks from the neighborhood were helping me back up to them on the street. And back up hadn't gotten there yet. And, you know, as I kind of, you know, kind of got my balance again and kind of my wits about me, I saw, you know, three of these, you know, dudes, you know, down, out cold on the street. And the fourth one was slanned up against the wall. And I remember this woman, you know, she,

She had her finger going into his chest, and, you know, that's our cop. You don't mess with them. You know, don't ever, ever, you know, that, don't ever mess with them. Next time it's going to be you down there and you're going to be dead, you know, we're going to take care of you. Don't mess with them. So some of the local neighborhood people came out and saved you? Yeah, yeah, it just came out of the woodwork. You know, they saw what was going on, you know.

I mean, they didn't like this gang being, you know, operating on the street, you know, most of these gangs, terrorize the locals anyway. You know, they bully them. And then, you know, when I got, and you know, there's a different code on the street. You know, it's all about fairness. You know, they have their own fairness code. And then when they saw me, you know, with four on one, that wasn't fair. Plus, you know, I built this relationship over the prior nine months or so.

And, you know, as fast as it happened, it was over. and but it taught me a real powerful lesson, you know, and how relationships mean everything. And, you know, again, you know, treating people, you know, the way they want to be treated with respect and dignity can take you a long way. And that's part of the thing I think I would share about leadership, you know, as a core principle is, you know, it's not to lose your compassion, not to lose your sense of, you know, empathy. Once you do that, you know, if you become a cold bastard, a cold leader,

I think you go to a different place, you know. And that's not saying that you can't be a tough leader. But when you lose your sense of, you know, compassion and empathy, I think that puts you at higher risk for being a bad leader. Oh, yeah. I always tell people like, look, you can't make your decision based on emotions, but you have to put them in the calculus of the decisions that you're making. And that's not just your emotions, but the emotions of the team, too.

Are they frustrated? Are they mad? Are they tired? Like, what are they feeling? And if you start doing things that don't make sense from an emotional standpoint, you're going to end up with problems. And so, look, we don't want to make our decisions based on emotion, but that doesn't mean we're devoid of emotion because otherwise you're going to have

problems. So how long did you end up staying on that like as a beat cop for? For about a year and then I got into the patrol and then from there moved into, uh, jumped to a different part of law enforcement into plain clothes, working some narcotics, uh, investigations for a while and they went into homicide. It was the youngest homicide detective on the department. So and that was experience, you know, doing, you know, death investigations and so forth, which is, you know, something I can elaborate on more as we talk about, you know, veteran suicide, you know, unless we want to talk about it now. Go ahead.

Yeah, you know, so we get these numbers that get put out by the VA or, you know, whoever is projecting, you know, is it a 22 veterans a day that we lose the suicide? Is it 17, whatever? you know, as a student of statistics, I know you can manipulate numbers, but not saying, you know, their calculus is wrong. But as a homicide detective, you know, doing death investigations, I know that, you know, you call your findings based on evidence. So, you know, if you've got evidence that's a homicide, then it's a homicide. If it's a suicide, you know, there may be in a note, there may have been some other, you know, evidence on scene to consider that definitely puts it into the suicide category or an unattended death because, you know, they had been sick or they made it cancer or it was a, you know, got hit by a car. But there's this big gray area that sits in the middle where you don't have enough evidence to call it one way or the other.

but yet it's an unattended death. And so I think that there's an undercounting of what really exists. And then there's this other piece that comes in, and it's part of the reality is that because suicide is such a stigma in our society that I think is starting to soften. But you have somebody that's taken their life, and then you look at the family. And sometimes, you know, the way you classify a situation like that

may not be a suicide in order to protect the family because the family will have nothing if it's declared a suicide. You know, very often they will not get insurance. They will not get other, you know, benefits and then have to live with potentially the stigma of that suicide. So I just throw that out there. You know, it's kind of out of this, you know, sequence of what we're talking about. But my homicide experience definitely, I think, has given me credibility to go back at some of those numbers that are being projected every year by the VA and others that, you know, probably not, you know, an accurate picture of how many we're actually losing.

And because each state reports differently. we don't have a, you know, a national database that actually, you know, records these suicides in a common format. So there's a lot of, a lot of, like I said, gray area for those numbers to be, you know, pulled in different directions. Yeah. When you're in that job of homicide detective, like how many homicides are there, like how many cases are you working at a time? Is it, is it, in the area you were working, was it like one? murder a month? Was it 10? What was it like? It comes ebbs and flows. Holidays are the worst. But basically you're taking caseloads. You might have three or four, you know,

homicides that you may be working at a time depending on on the caseload, availability of, you know, manpower. Some of the cases are pretty clear cut, you know, you know, you know, a dispute that goes bad between two people that know each other versus, you know, probably the most, the hardest, you know, where you have a situation where somebody comes in from outside the area is not known, doesn't really leave a lot of signatures as far as their presence there and winds up, you know, killing somebody and you're trying to figure out, you know, who may be responsible and they've already left the area and, you know, very little traces to, you know, who or what they were.

What is that doing to your, you know, when you're coming home at night and you've just been looking at whatever crime scenes, murder scenes all day. What's that like coming home at night? Well, I can tell you that, you know, you're human too, you know. And so as much as you build up some insulation and you try to inoculate yourself and stay professional, it does, you know, kind of wear on you. And because of my medical background, I would get all the homicides or suspicious death investigations that involve kids and that that was tough to deal with and and it almost caused some

some problems with my marriage because you know you know having contact with these type of scenarios I didn't want to bring any kids into the world whereas my wife you know yeah she she she wanted to have kids and I didn't want to have kids for a period of time so you know at some point I made the decision to move on. And that's when, you know, I applied to the Secret Service and the FBI and subsequently was hired in as a special agent with a secret service. When you're talking about kids getting killed, like who's, what's a scenario where a kid gets murder? Is this child abuse gone to an extreme? Is that like the most common thing?

Yeah, what I see are parents that aren't prepared to be parents. A lot of them have been raised up in households that there was a lot of abuse, so they didn't know any better. So you get your shaken baby syndrome or a kid wouldn't stop crying. And I remember one case, you know, the father had stuffed a stuffed toy down to kid's throat, you know, a toddler's throat. in other cases they would burn the kid to try to get them to stop, you know, screaming or yelling. And in some cases, you know, it was, believe it or not, the parent, you know, felt that the kid was taking all their attention away from the other parent.

And so, you know, in their kind of limited way of processing, you know, a limited competition. I mean, it's pretty, and then you'd have the neglect scenarios where they wouldn't feed the kid or they keep the kid locked up in a room or, you know, so it's tough cases. How do you kind of control yourself? You know, I've always said I'd be the worst cop ever because, like, I run into a situation like that. I feel like it'd be very difficult to, you know, see a parent that clearly had killed their own kid or burned their own kid to death. that's got to be an exercise in restraint unlike any other.

Yeah, I mean, you've got to reach deep. I'll be honest with you. You know, you definitely want to exercise some street justice in those scenarios. And, you know, how could anybody fault you for it? Some cases, you know, the individual that's responsible has got some, you know, serious mental health issues. And like I said, may have some family extension, you know, some experiences on how they were raised. They don't know any different. but yet that's hard to kind of, you know, kind of justify and resolve, you know, when you're in the heat of that investigation and you're seeing the consequence of that abusive behavior. It's tough. It's tough. And, you know, a lot of times you lean on each other to kind of keep yourselves, you know, from falling into that, that, not unlike, you know, in some cases, you know, the battlefield. You know, when you experience a horrible situation where you lose a teammate and, you know,

the immediate reaction is to exercise that immediate justice. And how do you control that? Yeah, no, that's definitely something that the leadership, from a leadership perspective, you got to get, make sure you're keeping control of the guys because if the emotional reaction is allowed, then it's going to be a problem.

And guys are going to get in trouble. That's something that every leader's got to contend with to make sure that they're keeping that in check. how long had you been married for what year did you get married uh 81 and when i was in the police academy okay and so after this horrible job i mean for all practical purposes you you decide to get out of law enforcement and you go into secret service is that when you win the secret service which is still a quasi law enforcement federal law enforcement so i i you know got into the secret service went through their training which was you know a six plus month

months of training. You know, they, to me, I call them the special operations of law enforcement just by the way they, you know, they behave, the way they operate, you know, they're not a nine to five job. You know, most of my career I lived out of, you know, a kit bag, you know, because we were on the move all the time and got to give credit to my wife for raising my two kids, you know. but you know what because I know there's different parts of the Secret Service what what job what job did you have when you went to Secret Service so initially I started up in the Philadelphia field office as a special agent working criminal investigations and they do what

counterfeiting money they do counterfeiting they they do fraud investigations basically they're responsible for you know protecting the integrity of our our monetary system here in the United States, which is both, you know, involves paper money and digital funds, you know, so they get into a lot of fraud investigations and, you know, counterfeiting, you know, was really kind of a street level crime that, you know, we would get, it's almost like dope. You know, you get down on the street levels, dealing with people who are passing, you know, bad money. And, you know, you take into some interesting investigations. credit card fraud. Again, it's another money instrument. They had an intelligence arm, which,

you know, protective intelligence arm, which, you know, would deal with any threats against the president, vice president, or, you know, anybody in a senior leadership position. And then they had other specialty units that, you know, depending on, you know, the assignment would come into play, but protection was really what the agency was known for. You know, protecting the president, protecting the vice president, has a state or anybody else that's designated, you know, by presidential order. You would have to, you know, build that protection element around them. And that was a 24-7 job. So, you know, a lot of holidays away from home, birthdays. So did you work in each one of those different categories at some point? I did. Yeah. So I, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my,

My span of service was from the Reagan administration through Bush 43. Were you on duty when Reagan got shot? I was not. Is that prior to? Actually, that was one of my motivators for applying to the Secret Service. And right after that, it's when I applied and, you know, eventually got processed in. So where are you, so you're a pretty old dude at this point to be starting out of that job. Yeah, yeah.

Because you went in the Navy in 74? Three. So you're like 10 years older than the other people, maybe 12 years older? Yeah. Just the old guy on campus, huh? But, you know, never thought of it, you know, that way. I mean, I'm in my late 60s now, and as I shared with it earlier, I'm a firefighter paramedic with the city of Annapolis.

Wait, how old are you? 68. 68. And you're an active duty full-time? firefighter. Yeah. Paramedic. Doing calls. Yep. Getting after it. Working at 24-hour schedule on, 72-hour schedule off. Work with a bunch of great men and women in Annapolis and they keep me young. You know, it's that tribal connection. What do you talk about tangential? So are you, what kind of workouts are you doing? You know, at this age, a lot of it's aerobic. You know, you're doing some

strength workout basically to keep yourself toned but you know not you know with the heavy weights that I used to do you still do pull-ups and push-ups and dips oh yeah yeah yeah I I can't do as many as I used to but I use a lot of you know weight resistance you know you know training so if you're doing a workout how many pull-ups are you doing in a workout about 10 10 at a time at a time so you'll do like sets of 10? No, I'll do 10 and then, you know, if I feel like I can't get that full 10, then I'll use like a band or whatever. A band to try to continue to work that resistance and that strength. But I had some shoulder surgery, so I had to complete reconstruction my shoulder a couple years ago. So that's taken

a while to come back. So probably use the bands more than I would like to. But you're on the Comeback trail. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There's, failure's not an option. I mean, I learned a long time ago, investment, you know, in your health and your fitness. And I think it's a testimonial where I am today. I'm still doing what I want to do.

I still have a, you know, kind of a, you know, well, it depends on who you ask. I mean, I still think, you know, my heads, you know, back in my 20s and 30s, which can get me into trouble because I still think I could do stuff, whereas my wife will tell you that no, my head's in a lot younger, you know, probably adolescent, period. But, you know, she's, I, when I met, when I came out of the service, I met her, I was working as a paramedic in the Philadelphia area while I was going to school, and she was a brand new emergency room nurse ripe for the picking. And so, you know, one thing led to another. We got married. So she's, you know, of been in the business too, you know. But if you, you know, if you ever come in contact with any

emergency room nurses, you know, they, they suffer no fools. I mean, they see a lot too. And so I've gotten away with very little in my life. She keeps me pretty humble. What about food? What are you eating? You know, I try to stay away from sugar. Coffee, I drink black coffee. I don't, you know, pour any stuff into it. A lot of fruit, fiber, meat. I've been pushing away from meat lately and trying to get, you know, I love fish, you know, any type of fish, you know, chicken. So I tried to, you know, find a balanced, you know, diet, which I feel better.

And I don't eat as much as I used to, you know. You used to get your Philly cheese steaks on. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, but then you. feel like a load afterwards. And so I think the older you get, there are changes in your body in metabolism. So you've got to stay on top of that if you want to feel good.

You run every day? No, no, I don't run every day. I'm really trying to preserve my knees. They took a pretty hard hit up in New York on 9-11. You know, we can get into that. But since that time, my running has really kind of, you know, feathered down to where, you know, I love to run. I love to run outside.

I hate to run on a treadmill, but I'll use an elliptical more. I go get in the pool and swim, which I think is probably the best exercise these days, you know, for me. Besides my Chuck Norris total gym that I have at home. You got the Chuck, Chuck Norris total gym? That's something kind of like a Pilates situation, isn't it? Echo Charles, fitness expert? Yes. Yeah.

It's like you're using pulleys to kind of drag your body weight up and down. You can set at different levels. And I'll tell you what, you know, I'm not plugging, you know, his, his kit, but you get a pretty good workout. How long have you been on the Chuck Norris total body workout program? About three years. We're going to sell some Chuck Norris. Total gym workouts. I mean, Chuck Norris is in good shape.

How old is Chuck Norris? I don't know. I mean, he was in the Air Force in Vietnam, so he's at least seven. Right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. He's still getting after it. Yeah, I think it's about, you know, continue to pay it forward, eating right. You know, sleep is big, you know, sleep, you know, is challenging as you get older because your sleep patterns change, but still sleep is really important. So, you know, I've got a couple wearables that, you know, kind of tell me how I'm sleeping.

Of course, you know, when I'm working a firefighting shift, you know, you know how that goes, you know, two o'clock in the morning. And I mean, the other night I worked 20, actually, you know, when I flew out of here yesterday, I just got an office shift. And, you know, it just seemed that, you know, I swore to my partner that every time my head went in contact with the pillow in the bunk room, we got toned out for a call. And I swore that the dispatch center had some type of sensor in my pillow could see when I had put my head down because they would pop us out again. So, yeah, sometimes you get the bear and the bear gets you. Yeah. But, yeah. So it's.

So what capacity were you in? You just mentioned 9-11. What capacity were you in? Were you with the Secret Service at that time? Yeah. So I had, as you said, started in Philadelphia. And from Philadelphia, I went down and took a job in our training division. After being with the service about three years, I took over their emergency.

their emergency medicine training program. All the agents are trained in emergency medicine at different levels all the way from first responder to EMT to, you know, they have a cadre of paramedics. And then, and part of that is because, you know, we recognized early on that you got to keep your operational force healthy. And if they're gone down because they're sick or they're hurt and working the schedules that we worked, that can happen pretty quickly. And then with all the overseas deployments, you're in places that, you know, you're not in a 911 system. And this is because you're going Advon to go because the president's visiting wherever. And you're going Advon, checking it out, setting everything up.

And then he's there. If you're on that team, you're there while he's there. And then he leaves and then you pack up and go to the next place. Yeah. And it's not always with the president. I mean, it could be the national security advisor that you're traveling with. You know, like right now we have, you know, the activity going on. and the Middle East.

Well, I had done a lot of time, you know, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip back, you know, when they were broker in peace in the mid-90s, you know, with Arafat in the Israelis. And so, you know, interesting working with, you know, the Shimbet and Mossad, you know, in that environment. What would you go into Gaza and do? Well, because we, again, by presidential order, we were direct. to protect the U.S. envoy that was trying to broker the peace agreement back then. So we would, you know, go into Gaza to meet with Arafat at his headquarters. And that was what was your assessment back then?

That was a Wild West show. Yeah, I mean, you, obviously, we'd go in under, you know, the protection of the Israeli defense forces, but, you know, we partnered up with the Shimbet. And we would go in for these meetings. And, you know, while we're having the meetings, you know, so much cranking off an AK-47 in the background. You hear explosions and so forth. I remember one time we were trekking to one of the...

So this is like early 90s? Mid-90s. Mid-90s. Yeah. Okay, so we're talking Bill Clinton... 94-95. Yeah. Tracking.

Yep. So, you know, we get into that. That was an experience. It's another time I'm with a national security advisor, you know, in the middle of Africa and Burundi, Rwanda, Zaire. You know, the Tutsis and the Hutus were slaying each other, you know, by the thousands. I was off the coast of Rwanda at that time in a seal platoon, get on standby. All spun up, ready to go help out. They didn't send us, though.

Yeah, yeah, we rolled in there, a small element of us that had, you know, a tactical background, you know, the guy from, you know, a couple guys that former tier one guys who were agents and then myself. And, of course, I had the tactical medical background too. And then a fourth guy that came out of SF were the protection element for this envoy that was trying to get in between these two warring tribes. lives. And I'll never forget, you know, we get it on the ground in an unmarked plane. We had worked our way in through Europe, down through, you know, top of Africa, and, you know, doing refueling stops, land at this airport, that, you know, there's, you know, smoke coming up and crashed airplanes at the end of runway. And, you know, we jump into some vehicles. And I remember heading to the embassy, you know, and we get there and it was like, you know, we pull up and we get out and we go again

and there's just like this little, you know, like metal, you know, door into a bigger door that slides aside and says, you know, who is it? And here, you know, our embassy staff had been hunkered down behind the walls and hadn't gone outside. And anyway, we wind up going to a field hospital that had the day before had been attacked and people had been pretty, you know, butchered up. You know, it was an environment that, you know, no matter where you went,

every house had a bullet hole, an RPA hit, you know, it's pretty, you know, body strewn all over the place, you know, just, you know, rotting out. Yeah, it's 800,000 Tutsis killed in 100 days. Yeah. It's like one of the most efficient exterminations of human life in history.

It was in total insanity. And I remember we ran into, you know, element of French Foreign Legion. And they said, you know, what are you guys doing here? And we told them, they said, you got to be kidding me. We don't even go out there. You know, so, you know, again, you know, sometimes you find yourself in places that you just say to yourself,

and we had our own E&E plan. And it was going to be a violent, you know, know, push out if we had to. You know, we, the four of us had kind of made a pact that, you know, if things go bad, we're going to take as many of them as we can. But we were going to push out and try to get to the, to the lake and then commandeer a boat and, you know, put some distance between us. But, you know, we had a number of sites that we had gone to that were pretty, you know, to say the least sketchy. But, but again, you know, the job took you to a lot of different places that, you know, you never hear about. You never talk about, you know,

you know as far as you know media coverage are they to looking for a dude like you that's going to do those gigs and meanwhile like mr clean cut dude's going to get the presidential detail running alongside the limo is well i've done that too okay so it doesn't matter do you get those jobs you know it depends on you know who's got the skills and again it was another opportunity to work with a high caliber you know a group of folks that you know just were very professional so you know fortunate to come out of the teams do that. You know, I had my basic street law enforcement experience, which gave me a whole different side of life. But then Secret Service was pretty, like I said, you know, I equate them to the special ops of law enforcement. You know, nobody operates like the Secret Service does.

You know, they, you know, obviously they drew some attention a number of years ago, you know, they're not without, you know, stumbling, but, you know, they don't get a second chance. You know, They've got to do it right the first time all the time, especially when it comes to the protection of the president. So you have this wide range of experiences now. And so what's your duty? What was your duty on September 11th? Where were you? What was going on?

So I was up in the New York field office as a senior supervisor. So that's where you were actually stationed? You had moved to New York? Yeah. Our largest field office, you know, because the U.N.'s up there. A lot of foreign heads of state coming to New York. And now you're married? You've got two kids at this time.

I got two kids. my daughter was I think 15 at the time my son was 13 or 14 where where in New York do you live in New York where do you live no I lived in Jersey just west of the city you know in a town called Chatham and Summit which literally because it was called Summit you know had a little bit of higher elevation and had an unobstructed view of the whole New York City skyline which is important because on that day, I just basically followed my routine. I would get up early in the morning, like, you know, 5 o'clock in the morning. I, you know, had my workout gear, and I, you know, get into the field office.

The whole objective was getting through the tunnel before it got clogged up. So I'd get into the field office, and then I'd go for a run along the Hudson. And I was, you know, a pretty good runner. And that's how I got my day going, come back into the gym, start pumping some of my house. iron, you know, and I remember that day, I was running back, and I remember looking up at the towers, and it was just a beautiful sight. There wasn't a cloud in the sky. The towers were just pristine, you know, just shining, the sun was shining off of them. I'm thinking of myself, wow, you know, we're so lucky that nothing's happened. I mean, it's just, this is one of the days you just live

for. And the reason I said that, because I had been in New York in 93, you know, right after after the first bombing and sold the destruction there and how close, you know, our adversaries came to drop in the building that day, which, you know, it came pretty close. But yet the experience of that particular incident calculated into what happened later that day on 9-11. I got back off my run, I was in the shower,

stepping out, you know, stark naked, And all of a sudden, the lights flickered. And I started razzing the guys, you know, Secret Service agents, you know, they're at the wet sink. They got their hair dryers going, you know, because the hair's got to be in the right place. And I said to them, you know, you're going to let yourself up, you know, with those dryers and, you know, all that water. And the next thing, you know, somebody came over the speakers and said, hey, there's been a massive explosion in Tower One. And then he came back and said, hey, this is not. a drill. And within 30 seconds of that, they said, you know, evacuate the building. This is not a

drill. We've had a meteor explosion in Tower 1. Of course, our office was in Tower 7, which was, besides Tower 1 and Tower 2, which are the two, you know, you know, notable World Trade Center buildings, Tower 7 was a 49-story building right next to Tower 1. And so I remember, you know, You know, everybody's running out, you know, their boxer shorts, whatever, you know, grabbing clothes. I remember going back to my locker and, you know, put my, you know, suit back on, tied my tie, you know, got, you know, and I walked out and walked down to my office and, and, and I was able to look out the window and look up at Tower One and I could see the fire just boiling out of, you know, Tower One. And at that point, the agent in charge came by my office and said he was evacuating everybody to a certain location, you know, down the street. And I said to him, look, because of my, you know, prior law enforcement and EMS experience, I said, look, I'll go down with Ford Police and Fire Command and be your, you know, I'll make contact with them and let you know what's going on. So I grab a bunch of radios and pagers and so forth, and I had an NYPD radio with me.

He went down. First of all the rules in the sense that, you know, I went to the stairwell and it was all jammed up full of people. And I said, there's no freaking way I'm getting down, you know, to the street here. So I went to the elevator and they tell you you never go to the elevator when you have to evacuate a building. But I pushed the button, the door opened up. Nobody was on it. Took it right to the first floor. And next thing I know, I'm out.

And I'm walking out, you know, in front of World Trade 7 towards building. building one and something had had distracted me and I don't know what it was I think it was a sound or something and I had stopped in turn just as just a godly thud hit you know right in front of you know where I was about to walk and here it was somebody that had you know just jumped out of the building from the upper floor definitely would have killed me you know instantly and and that was just kind of like, you know, holy shit, what is happening, you know, and debris is falling on the street and, you know, you look up and, you know, it's just this, this, you know, unconscionable sight of, it's a surreal sight of, you know, people just raining out of the sky, you know, and, you know,

you just say, what's going on? And so I was able to get with police and fire command, you know, people again because they were medically trained or running in trying to help with evacuation and get you know injured people out get into triage areas which you know equipment was just starting to arrive you know we had we had a firehouse that was on the perimeter of the world trade center complex they were probably first on the scene from the fire department police or constantly there and got with police and fire command you know to try to get a sense of what's going on and I can tell you you know we weren't sure that a plane had hit the building you know We're still in the middle of that early chaos, you know, of, hey, what's actually going on here?

You know, and that's when, you know, I heard this, this, just this sound of, you know, projected energy, you know, coming at us. And that's when the second plane, you know, hit Tower 2 from the opposite side. And it was like a shotgun blast, all that debris and everything else. I mean, remember, like, Volkswagen sized pieces of stuff coming at us. And, you know, yelling, hey, run for cover, get cover, get down. And just as this stuff just started raining on the street, you know, later found out that one of the engines had gone right over the top of us and had embedded in the street a couple blocks behind.

But so when that happened, it was a defining moment in that event because we went from having one major catastrophic incident that needed to rally, you know, police and fire command together in order to deal with it now to split operations, which then really caught, you know, set in motion a lot of confusion and really stretched resources. And I remember I had a team of agents with me, and we were moving towards the plaza, which was in between the two buildings, that tried to, again, help evacuate some people and get them out. And that's when somebody started yelling,

right before we got up into the plaza, somebody started yelling, you know, run, run, it's coming down, it's coming down, and had no idea what was going on, but to start hearing this ungodly rumble start. And we could not see the top of the towers from where we are because all the wind was blowing the smoke over the top of us.

So we were, you know, our ability to see the top of the towers is obstructed. And I remember diving under a fire truck. And the next thing you know, it's just this horrific rumble and just, you know, vibration and just this, you know, almost undescribable, you know, feeling. And then everything went black and then you couldn't breathe. And I remember, you know, crawling out. from underneath, you know, this truck and over the top of somebody. And, you know, it just, I had to, you know, throw my face into my armpit to try to breathe

because the air was just so thick with dust. And, you know, you could barely make out anything. Just some small fires that were burning on the street, you know, some headlights that were on. and then eventually started clearing to the point where you could start making our corners of buildings and so forth. And I started yelling for my team and slowly we started to reconstitute each other. And, you know, said, what just happened? You know, obviously some type of collapse had happened. And fires were starting in the street from.

So when the buildings came down, anything that was lighter than air blew out of the buildings. They're paper, papers, cloth, you name it, and settled onto the ground. And then the jet fuel, the burning jet fuel, started igniting that, which then started igniting, you know, gas tanks in the cars that were parked along the streets. And then, you know, so we're, and you're losing all track of time. And you lose communications, you know, all our communications kind of shit the bed, you know. And it got down, you know, to the point of what you could physically. see and reach.

Next thing you know, someone's yelling, you know, you know, Tower One, Tower One, and I started hearing this, like, this sound of this metal failing. And again, the wind was blowing, you know, everything over the top of us. All I could remember seeing was the big spike tower, radio tower, on top of Tower one. and just in a brief break of the clouds and the smoke, I just looked at the, you know, up at this needle, and the next thing you know, I started seeing it leaning. And at that point, you know, everyone started yelling,

run for cover, run for cover, run behind a building. And same thing just happened, you know, that happened before, you know, everything went dark, you know, clouded up with a bunch of dust and smoke. and eventually started seeing things again, pulled the team back together, and, you know, a lot more fire on the street now. It's almost like a wall of fire that surrounded this whole World Trade Center complexes

as, you know, again, more paper and cloth and stuff, you know, came down on the street, more vehicles on fire. And we could see there were some people that were trying to get out from deep, inside the you know the complex and we you know we were in proximity of this old fire engine that was hooked up to a hydrant and I remember you know saying to the guys hey grab some hoses I'm going to see if I can get this thing working you know and with a little bit of knowledge that I had had

from you know being a volunteer firefighter back back in a day I got this you know the pump working and we started knocking down some of the fires so we could create a path for these people to get out. And next thing, you know, we get alerted to a bunch of people that were seriously injured, you know, and one of the other buildings in the World Trade Center and get in there, and there was a fireman and a complex worker that were, you know, badly injured and traumatized.

And some other, you know, folks that were fortunately still walking wounded I remember telling my guys, hey, you know, we got to find, we got to get these guys out of here, got to get them some help. And, you know, they found an ambulance from New York Presbyterian Hospital because, you know, up there, it's not only the fire department, the response to emergency. It's also hospital-based units, and it had all its windows blown out of it, but had the keys in the ignition. I don't know where the medics were, but, you know, we loaded these people and onto the litter and on to the litter and on to the bench seat and piled as many as we could into the ambulance. And this is the first time that I had physically touched somebody that day because I've been trying to stay in a command and control position with my team.

But, you know, two of these folks were really in bad, you know, one wasn't breathing, another one, you know, was in bad shape. And got a NY, I'm sorry, a Port Authority police officer off duty who came in, you know, I guess was leaving his job when all this took place, hopped up in the front seat. I got another agent, too, with me in the back, and then we start heading down to the Battery Park area

south of the Manhattan, where the Port Authority officer said he had heard that they were setting up a triage area. And we're driving down, you know, through the street, and I'll never forget, all this wind and stuff is blown right through the ambulance. I mean, because we had no windows. And we get down to the battery.

And next thing, you know, people come running up to us. And it was just such a contrast from where we had just come from, you know, like 10, 15 blocks up where now we're down into this area that's pristine, it's green, there's color. People are opening up the doors. You know, we're all covered with soot, got blood running down in our faces. we've got these bad casualties in the ambulance. And as soon as the door opened up and they looked in and it, you could see the shock on their face.

Like, holy cow, what's going on up there? And so we wound up passing them off to the folks down, you know, the medical teams down at the battery. And then I tried to get back up to the scene because my folks were still up there and I wanted to take the ambulance back up there and they wouldn't let me. So I freaking down the road comes this NYPD motor officer,

and I get stopped right in front of them, he slams his brakes on. He says, what are you doing? I said, I tell you what you're going to do. It says you're going to get me back up there. I got people up there. And he said, all right, man, hop on. So next thing you know, we're scootering our way up, you know, back into the scene where I reconnected with my guys, you know, lost all track of time,

lost about three hours. was there when our building came down about 5 o'clock that night. But after about 3 o'clock, we weren't finding any more people alive. And about 5 o'clock, our building came down because when Tower 1 came down, it leaned over into Tower 7. and part of Tower 1 carved out the front of Building 7, the fire got in there. And because the city had lost so many firefighters and police officers

and their equipment, there was nobody there to fight it. So eventually that fire chewed away at the base of Tower 1 and the weight of the building just brought it down about 5.30 that night. And I wound up, you know, on the scene for a while. while and then got you know my team and I got back to a place where they were we heard that they were you know rallying up our our field office people got there and they had set up decon and you know by then you know I'm covered you know with all this you know you probably saw the you know the the videos and stuff you know and uh wound up you know the only thing that was you know the clothes they

had were like, you know, XXL, you know, you know. So I put, you know, I looked like Gumby by the time, you know, I was tying knots and the clothes and all. And, uh, I knew I had to get home because, um, I had been reported missing, you know, to my family. And that whole time that this is going on, my kids, of course, you know, everyone immediately gets alerted that something's going on. My wife was a nurse paramedic and she was working a heart attack victim in somebody's living room and turned and saw what was happening on the TV and almost lost it while she's trying to treat this patient. My kids, you know, of course, you know, a lot of the kids that they went to school with were, you know, parents were Wall Streeters and, you know, worked in the World Trade Center and the

word went out and next thing, you know, the kids are running out of school. But my son witnesses this from, you know, the hillside, you know, west of the city. And, you know, I get reported as missing and you know I knew I had to get home and so I walked through the door about midnight that night and and you look on their faces when they looked at me was like you know my eyes were beat red you know I had you know cuts and scratches all over me and you know they just you know we just hugged you know and just kind of and cried and and I would tell you jaco it was the first time that day that I actually realized that both buildings had come totally down because where we were positioned, we just didn't have that situational awareness of what had happened. It wasn't real yet, but I watched

it on TV and that's when I, you know, right after I got home. And that's the first, you know, kind of acknowledgement or realization that, you know, I had been in the middle of that, probably not close enough to, you know, to, you know, lose my life, though I came close about five times that day, definitely. But far enough out that we could still do what we needed to do. And so I wound up being the Ground Zero supervisor for the Secret Service and part of the Joint Task Force that was dealing with the rescue and recovery. And a couple weeks after that day, oh, well, you know, Does that mean you're going into work the next day? You're going right back down there.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I just came home, got about four or five hours sleep. You know, I had gotten a suburban from our Newark field office, which was across the river. I had to get back down there, you know, to kind of, you know, understand what happened, protect our, which our office got destroyed. But we had a lot of equipment and so forth that was subsurface down in the garages and so forth. That was very sensitive material. And then next thing, you know, I was asked to brief the president, you know, that Friday, Bush 43 when he came to ground zero. And that's, you know, it's the famous, you know, picture of him standing on top of the pile with a megaphone.

But I briefed him, you know, what it was like to be on the street that day, you know. And I said to him, it was it's just a matter whether you stepped right or left, you know, often determined. whether you lived or died that day. And so, you know, going back and forth to ground zero over the next couple weeks. And, you know, my wife, you know, hits me up and says, hey, you know, something's wrong with Ryan. And my son, you know, is like I said, about 14.

And he's not talking. He's staying up in his room. You know, he looks depressed. So I went up to see him and said, you know, what's going on? And he says, look, I want you to take me down to ground zero. I need to understand what happened. And again, he had witnessed all this from the hillside, you know, west of the city. So I said, well, I don't think that's a good idea.

And your mom's not going to go for it. And he said, look, Dad, I just need to know what happened. But something, you know, how your gut talks to you sometimes. And you can't really put, you know, a lot of, you know, common sense or logic. But something told me, all right, I needed to do this. So I kind of made a pack with them. Look, I'll take you down there. But if I sense that you're not dealing with this, you know, we're out of there.

No questions to ask. Because by two weeks out, it's a pretty nasty place, you know. And by then they figured out that the air was probably not good to breathe, you know. So now everybody was wearing respirators and helmets and stuff, which is good because I took them down there and I dressed them up all in all that. police jacket and we walked around for about three and a half hours because the debris field was so extensive and that's what people just don't understand is when when that happened and those buildings came down that the breadth of debris and destruction went blocks beyond the World Trade Center and so I you know told them where things were that day and what I was doing and even then it was you know kind

hard for me to kind of, you know, resolve it in my own head because everything looks so different. And it's just a tremendous amount of destruction, you know, a lot of people work in the pile, trying to recover what they could recover, and there wasn't much to recover. It had gone from a rescue into a recovery operation. And anyway, fast forward, you know, I get pulled back to the White House to take over security operations. So on December 7th, December 7th was my last day at ground zero. And I'll never forget they were pulling an eye beam out of the ground. And as they were pulling it out of the ground, they were hosing it down.

And it was steaming. Like, you know, it was, there was still fire, you know, boiling underground. And I'll never forget that. Came back, you know, started back at the White House. And so was this a new assignment at this point? Yeah. Your family are up. Up and all that, you know, they didn't want to go.

You know, job said, you know, you know the deal. You know, pack it up, you know, put it in the truck. And Ryan's, what, a freshman in high school at this point? Yeah, yeah. So he comes back to, you know, we came back to the Annapolis area where we had to live before. We got transferred up to New York. And he finished out high school. he was uh he worked for a neighbor of mine that had a diving salvage company so which i think is

was was pretty important he was you know diving year around you know in the chesapeake bay doing you know scut work you know scraping the bottoms of you know rich people sailboats and you know changing out zinks and finding stuff that was you know but he was doing it year round but he graduated high school and i said was he playing sports in high school was he doing What do you like high school? Yeah, so lacrosse was, you know, it's a big lacrosse. You know, so he's doing some lacrosse. But he liked making money.

So, you know, he was, you know, in the water a lot. And then he worked with my daughter, who was about a year, year and a half older than him. They worked at a restaurant in Annapolis. And so, but I said to him, look, you know, after he graduated, I said, I give you a year to figure this. But, you know, at that point, I'm going to show you the door. And, you know, a little tough love, you know. So he came home about six months, I don't know, about nine months later. So this is after he graduated high school?

After he graduated from high school, we're down in Annapolis area, you know, having transferred. And he's just, once he graduates high school, he's diving, he's making money, working in the restaurant. Yep. And it had been doing that, you know, since we had, you know, moved back, why we still in high school. school, but now this is pretty much all he was doing and souping up his car and doing, you know. So anyway, I, you know, he comes home one day and he says, I just enlisted in the Navy. And I said, you did what? Yeah, and this enlisted in the Navy.

And, oh, by the way, I volunteered for the SEAL program. And just then I look over to my wife and she's reaching into the, into the knife drawer and all I see is this edged weapon coming out and I'm thinking and she's saying to you know this is your fault you know and do you do you talk to you about it all beforehand not really not really um so I said to him look do you know what you're getting yourself into and he says yeah I know what I'm getting myself in the correct statement is you don't know what you're getting yourself into that's where I was going with it I said well I tell you what I'm going to I'm going to have you talk to some folks.

And so I got a hold of, you know, Annapolis is a big town. In naval academies there. You know, a lot of, you know, frogmen, you know, roll through there. And we had some friends that sponsored, you know, guys that went to the teams. You know, it was why they were in the academy and we had sponsored some. So I hooked them up with some of the guys that had just come out of theater. And I said to him, hey, look, unvarnished, tell him what it's like. And don't sugarcoat it.

And so he sat down with him. And, you know, after they were done, I said, okay, what do you think? He says, 100%. 100%. He went from 99.9.9 to 100%. So, yeah, it's a thing. You think you're dissuading someone when you tell them what it's about? And if they already have that mindset, it's just more.

But, you know, I asked him, Jocko. So why? Why are you doing this? and he said because I don't ever want to have happened on 9-11 to ever happen again he says I'm going to be part of the solution and that is a

a response that I've heard from so many of the men and women that you know following 9-11 who stood up on the line raised their hand and said they were going to be part of the solution and and off he went you know, to the Navy, you know, to Buds. How were you feeling when he went to Buds?

Do you feel like he was ready for it? You know, he was running, he was working out. Obviously, you know, he had kind of, you know, sensitized himself, you know, the diving, I think was a real, that's definitely helpful. It was key. But, you know, he got there. And by then I had retired out of the Secret Service, and I had gotten hooked back into Department of Defense

into the joint IED defute organization, called it Jayedo. Yeah, the Jayedo was a huge component of what was going on in the fights overseas. Basically, for people that don't know what that was, it was a place where they were taking all the various IED intelligence and kind of putting it all together and collaborating that intelligence,

putting it into forms where we could use it overseas, take that information and try and keep guys safe. That's what Jayeda was. It was a huge effort, because at that time, I want to say about 75% of the casualties in Iraq. I don't know what the number was in Afghanistan, but in Iraq, 75% of the casualties were from IEDs, roadside bombs primarily.

And so there'd been a huge effort to get something, to do something about that. And that effort resulted in the formation of the Jayado, which was just focused on defeating IEDs overseas. And so what was your job there? So I got, you know, it was almost like a black van pulled up, you know, alongside me one day, and this giant arm reaches out, and it's a retired four-star Romani Miggs, who, you know, was leading the organization at the time.

And the organization had morphed from a task force in the basement of the Pentagon to now an ad hoc organization that the president and SecDef had stood up. because, you know, as you said, you know, the, there was a weapon system that the enemy was using against us. And, you know, this was causing, you know, the majority of our men and women that had, you know, they were coming home, you know, and flag-drake coffins were exposed to the IEDs and coming home with these horrible amputations and just disfiguring wounds. They had to get on top of this. It was paralyzing our maneuver on the battlefield. field. So, you know, I said to Monty Miggs, who passed away a couple years ago, he was a big brain guy, great leader. I said, why me? And he says, I need somebody to help me think about this

in a different way. And he says, you know, you come from an organized crime background, you know, And so, you know, at that point, they were starting to realize that they had up-armored, you know, they had, you know, built robots. They had, you know, worked on all the, you know, the hardware stuff that they could and, you know, had harvested or picked the low-hanging fruit. And they realized that they had to go after the human factor side of this. And so, which meant going after the extremist networks and the bombing networks. So that's when you started seeing a lot of the law enforcement techniques, tactics, and procedures. There are TTPs coming into play, you know, where we started enrolling, you know, military H-Mails and other folks that, you know, were detained with biometrics. You know, we started collecting fingerprints.

We started collecting, you know, their photos and other identifying information. Iraq was a little bit easier because of the oil. for food program database that they had gave us a lot of information about their population. Afghanistan was a totally different story. And so I went into it. I was, you know, on the ground floor building a platform called the counter IED operations and intelligence integration center. We called it the COIC.

And it was a big brain of data that we had put together in a, non-disclosed location out in northern Virginia with a lot of active duty and contractor personnel to staff it. A lot of them came out of special operations, and we started to pull the thread on these networks that were employing IEDs. And we realized that we weren't going to win this at the point of the blast. We needed to get to the left of it. And that's where the organized piece came out of it and the recognition that we had to follow the money. We had to look at their transport networks. We had to look at their supply chain. We had to look at how they were recruiting, you know, what their motivations were in any given part of the battle space. But even more so,

we had to recognize that we had to build a relationship with the units that were forward. Because they were the last tactical mile. They had the best, you know, you know, optic of what was going on or what they were confronting. And so I made the decision that we were going to project people forward. So, you know, 25%, you know, 30% of my workforce went forward to sit in the two and three shops, you know, the intelligence operations shops. And what, you know, my model that, you know, kind of broke the parochial way, the doctrinal way that, you know, military intelligence does stuff was my folks forward were, and I took a page

out of J-Sox playbook for this, you have to send your best people forward, which means it's going to hurt you, and it's going to make things uncomfortable, you know, in the rear, and send them forward and give them the power to make decisions and make things happen. So my philosophy was we worked the problem from the edge back, not from, you know, the rear. The rear forward. You know, where everyone was going home at night, back into a warm, comfortable bed, you know, getting three hot meals and, you know, some playtime. The people who, you know, I sent forward, where are my scouts out,

where my sensors, were my liaisons with the forward commanders. and that's where, you know, we made the money, building those relationships and feeding them information that they combined with what they were seeing in order to develop, you know, situational awareness to outline and map, you know, the bombing networks, which all had their own little style and fingerprint, you know.

And it was successful, very, very successful. And so the reason I, I, I say all that is because it brought me back to the community, which now my son was deployed in these areas. So I had skin in the game. How'd that feel? I mean, at this time, now we're getting it. So first, your son goes to Buds. Was he a decent enough runner? Obviously, he was good in the water? Did he have any issues? Was there any problems? Was there, or did you all right? So, you know, nothing's without some adventure. And the thing is you either make it or you don't, right?

That's right. There's very few people that breathe through seal training. So there's going to be issues, but how do you do? Yeah, he did well. And of course, you hear, you know, the backstory after, unfortunately, after he passes, is when I hear a lot of the backstory on, you know, how you did and how people thought of him. But he went into training. he was the middle of the pack guy

you know like I said he he was pretty situationally aware you know he never wanted to be out front he never wanted to be last he blended into the middle and he was a smart guy

but he went into Hell Week with a stress fracture in his leg they were doing log PT they bobbled the log he went you know out of instinct went to kind of supported came down on his leg. So I remember him calling me right before he started Hell Week.

And he says, my leg is like, you know, and I said, do you, he says, you're going to get it checked out? And he said, fuck no. I said, there's no way I'm going to medical with this. I wasn't surprised, you know. And I said, okay, look, man, just, you know, I sit the best you can, you know, try to give it as much rest. Don't go on and do anything crazy. And so he, he said, he's, you know, he said, he went in Hell Week with this stress fracture on his leg. Well, through the course of Hell Week, he is compensating, shifting his body weight, doing whatever. Anyway, you know, he started taking some heat from his boat crew. You know, hey, man, you're not carrying your weight, and he's not saying anything.

He just tries to adjust and continue. Anyway, they get to Friday, and, you know, they secure Hell Week. then everybody collapses, you know, and they start, you know, picking them, and Mullen secured their hell week, Admiral Mullen. Okay, yeah. And so. The chief of naval operations at the time. Yeah, yeah.

So, anyway, I forget how many he still had, you know, left in his group, but they had lost a lot, too. And so everyone's getting off, picking themselves off the beach, and he's not getting up. so you know they they help him up and they help him back to his room you know he gets cleaned up and he's laying in his rack he's not getting out of his rack everybody's you know going over for his town is this 2005 was he in butts in 2005 uh six 2006 six seven yeah six seven and uh anyway they realized something's not right so they they wind up you know he's got a lot of pain in his back uh they take him over to uh the naval hospital san diego

and they get him into, you know, a CAT scan, PET scan, and his whole back lights up like the aurora of Borealis. He's got stress fractures all the way up his back. So what happened was he's literally, he's broken his back in Hell Week as a result of trying to compensate for the injury he went into Hell Week with, and when his teammates found out, they said, holy shit. He says, here we thought he was, you know, dogging, and not realizing that he was gone through with this type of injury.

They said, holy cow. And he went up before a review board because they were going to toss them because the assessment after his injury was identified was, you know, he's got to go on light duty for three months. And so they had a review board. And I remember, because I got the backstory on this, you know, they were going to suggest that, you know, he leave and because of his injury. And I forget who the commanding officer was of the center at the point came in and said,

so what you're telling me is this kid, you know, goes into Hell Week, you know, with an injury like that, he goes all the way through Hell Week and comes out with, you know, a broken back. and you want to throw them out? Yeah, not happening. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, this kid can need some pain. And so they all kind of looked at each other and said, you know, you're right. So he rolled back a couple glasses and then, you know, eventually, you know, got out, went through SQT, did well,

immediately went to Sockham, special operations. Medic course down in Fort Bragg did well there, came out of that top of his class, and then, you know, they gave him maybe a week to pack his bags, and he was in Iraq. Oh, we went straight to Iraq after that? Yep, yep. And he wasn't there but days before he was in contact. Did he get to assign to a team, and the team was already on deployment? Yeah, yeah, he was team seven.

And then he so he rolls straight to Iraq. Now, you're in full work mode at Jayato at this time. That's correct. So you're tracking what's going on. Oh, yeah. This is going to be like next level stress for you. Yeah, I had to discipline myself not to read their daily reports. You know, though my guys were keeping an eye on it.

I had a special operations, you know, team in my center that supported, you know, both white and blacks off. So, you know, they would, you know, keep an eye on what he was doing. But even more so, I was able to broker on the pre-deployment cycle of the teams to come through the COIC. Okay. So they can understand what we could do for them. And because it's all about relationships. So once you understand, you know,

what's available at your fingertips or simply by, you know, a phone call, then that, you know, potentially can give you a lot more capability that you can lean on. And so they would come through, you know, the platoons would come through, interact with the operators, the analysts. And that's another dynamic that was non-traditional, is that I had all my operators sitting with my intel analysts, sitting with my technologists because we were bending pipe while this was all going on.

And then in the second bench I had my trainers. So as I rotated people forward to be with the units for six months, in some cases a year, and some of these unit commanders didn't want to let my people go because they had become so dependent on that relationship and the information that we were exchanging with them. but when they came back, I immediately put them into the training cell so that they can industrialize the latest, greatest lessons learn that they were bringing back from the forward edge and then rotate them back into the support cell with the operators and the analysts. So that rotation really proved to be, you know, I think, you know, the secret sauce that, you know, enabled our success in our ability to support the units forward.

But yet my son's unit being one of them. So he goes on that first deployment without even doing a workup, rolls right over there probably because he's a medic and he shows up with the team. They're on deployment. So he just rolls over, starts helping out, probably gets thrown into a platoon, starts supporting them. And was he over there for the full deployment? Was it like a six-month deployment for him?

Yeah. Okay. And he gets home, what's your assessment after he gets done with his first deployment? How's he doing? You know, he had broken his cherry, you know, was coming home with a good rep. He was jazzed up. He loved, you know, being in the teams, loved his platoon. They were tight.

He was loyal to a fault to his boys. And so that first pump, you know, into Iraq out in Al-Ambar was, you know, was really formative for him. And he was looking forward to get back, you know, back in the fight. So that's what he does, rolls back into a workup, still at Team 7, goes through a workup. Are you getting feedback from him as he going through a workup and stuff? Yeah, you know, they're doing, you know, pretty much what they do in the workups, you know, heavy training. Actually, I was running his workup, you know. I was the trade at commander at that time, and I was 100% putting him through all of his training.

So whatever he said about it was a reflection of me. Yeah, and the training was pretty rough at the time. Yeah, I mean, but, you know, he was all about training. Yeah. You know, and I think they had a couple J sets mixed in there between his, you know, first, second, third. You know, he went to Honduras one time to work maritime ops and then went into Lebanon, which was a real interesting, you know, kind of hornets nest of activity.

Yeah, for sure. you know, with Hezbollah there. But, you know, he loved the training. He had a high standard. I would say if there was a fault that if, you know, he had a little tolerance for incompetence or, you know, people not doing their job. And that was no reflection on his teammates.

He was like when he had to deal with the rest of the Navy or had to deal with, you know, other components that, you know, would not, you know, live up to his standard. I would say that was part of his personality. But he was loyal to the fault to his teammates. And, you know, his best friend was an officer. And, you know, he had a lot of really good close friends, good, good troopers. And then where was his next deployment to?

Do you go back to Iraq again? Yeah, he went back to support the task force. you know, the Tier 1 Task Force, Army Task Force, up north in an HVI, you know, a hunting mission and really got a different perspective up there. That's where he got his, you know, they actually put him in, you know, this Tier 1 Army unit put him in for his Bronze Star up there because of his, you know, his actions. But it was a different side.

And that's when I started seeing some changes because they got mixed up. stuff into some stuff up there. Some of the torture chambers and so forth that they came upon and some of the other, you know, sites of, you know, I think it goes to some of the moral injury challenges that, you know, our folks wrestle with, you know, coming out of experiences like that. So when you say you notice, so he comes back from that deployment, obviously if you're working with a tier one element, their op tempo is very, very high. and he comes home from that deployment

and this is maybe the first time looking back you start to assess that he was going through something that was a little bit affecting him mentally yeah but not really you know in a sense that anything was sticking out

but I could see you know there was changes he's maturing you know he you know very serious you know we would talk about some things but not everything you know because like I said he was very loyal to his teammates and obviously

so there's some things that he just wasn't going to talk about but you know through that experience he which I would assess was a good experience word came down that they

needed a special operations corpsman in Afghanistan they had I guess somebody got hurt and they needed an experience medic over there so they put out call for you know, anybody interested, and he immediately popped up and says, I'll go. So he finishes his second pump in Iraq and comes home for a couple of weeks, resets his kit, and then heads out the door for

for a ruse gun, where, you know, he's, you know, now an augmentee to another task force, and they're seeing a lot of action. He winds up, you know, operating in a different altitude, high altitude. He winds up getting high altitude sickness on one up. You know, gets banged up a little bit. But, you know, again, you know, likes the experience. You know, he's in with a good team element. And then comes home from that.

So he's almost been deployed a year now. which is kind of a significant, I guess, piece of this. You know, that year-long deployment where you get no reset, I think, is significant, especially, you know, within a special operation's high-op-tempo environment. But, you know, when he came back off of that, that's when I started perceiving some, you know, signs that things are definitely changing. What are some of the signs? He started complaining and he couldn't sleep.

and that when he did get to sleep, he was having some nightmares. About some anxiety, he became short-fused, stopped smiling, you know, because he was kind of a jokester. He was one of these guys who was very quiet, but when he said something, you know, it was funny. You know, people paid attention. And he had this great ability to abstract, you know, think second, third order, you know, steps ahead. You know, so he, you know, kind of made a name for himself and planning operations and so forth.

But after that third deployment, he, like I said, was wrestling with some of these issues. But it was kind of a low kind of like. And you're only seeing him. So you're living in Virginia or whatever. Maryland. And he's stationed out on the West Coast. So you're not, you're talking to him, but you're not seeing him that often. That's right.

Just not possible. That's right. So, you know, he's got a new family now. You know, the family that he grew up with, you know, that's transitioned to his... That's the secondary family. Yeah, his teammates, which he's gotten really close. He's spilled blood with him. So, but he winds up going to sniper school.

You know, comes out the top of his class in sniper school. It was Indiana for that, you know, period of training. And then, you know, again, back into another workup. This time he goes into Helman Province. It goes into a, you know, it's assigned to a wild outpost up above, north of Bastion. And Lashgargah up towards the Kajaki Dam. And it's like a Fort Apache scenario. You know, they're taking, you know, in coming rounds all the time.

and constantly locking up with the enemy. But, you know, he's got now the seal sniper designation. They wind up, I remember him calling me one night. You know, he just had to talk to somebody. They had just come back from an op, and they said he was rattled. And he was rattled because it was a near helicopter, you know, collision. that they, you know, Marine 53s were inserting them and were getting brownouts as they were coming in for approach

and then would pull up. And then, you know, they almost clapped together. And then they would circle around. And it wasn't until like the third attempt on insertion into this hot zone that they finally, you know, just ran off the back ramp. And then he said it was just, you know, really, you know, unnerving. Everybody was shaking, shaken up, and they had to, you know, quickly get their bearings again to get, you know, to lock into the hop, which then turned into a firefight because now, you know, the elements of surprise is gone.

And, and then wound up. So what are you telling your son after he's, you know, you can, you can hear it in his voice. Like, you know the feeling of, like, terrible helicopter scenarios where you're like, there's no way we're going to make it out of this. And then you somehow make it. What are you telling him? Yeah, I mean, it wasn't your time. It wasn't your time. And, you know, you got to try to turn that, you know, around, you know, into a strength.

You know, try to, you know, sit down with your boys and talk about this. And, you know, again, you know, when you go into these jobs, shit happens. You know, to quote that famous philosopher, Forrest Gump. But the only way you can do it with is really kind of letting it out. And, you know, it's not weakness. It's just you've got to process it. Otherwise, it's going to chase you. Well, he wound up having another bad helicopter experience.

Again, same with marine aviation. Not to throw down on marine aviation, but, you know, I think that part of the country had its unique challenges, you know, high dust environment and so forth. forth and old aircraft and folks maybe not as familiar with, you know, operating with special operations and not like, you know, the type of experience that, you know, you get with the 160th, you know, and night stalkers. But anyway, it is what it is. and but talking to them telling them hey look you know I've had my own close experience you know close

in experience with helicopters you know they're mechanical shit breaks you know you put all your trust on your pilots and you know you're there for the ride yeah that uh vulnerability you know whenever I talk to people about you know being a pilot being a tanker being anything I liked more than anything just being on my feet in the ground like to me give me me in my platoon and i feel a thousand times safer than when i'm riding in a humvee riding in a bradley riding in in a aircraft of any kind so yeah when you have to do that over and over again it's one of those things and you don't it's also one of those situations where there's very little you can do to control it and you know even when we have when when it's my humvies and i'm picking the route and i can gather the

Intel and I can use the jammers and I can get all this stuff to kind of mitigate as much as possible You're at least feeling that you've you've you've controlled what you can control man when you get on board Into a Bradley into into into a helicopter There's a lot of you there's a lot of things going on I mean like you said there's mechanical I mean those things just crashed sometimes and that happens so yeah if you start to think about that See my gig was I don't think about that. Like there's some stuff I can't control. I don't focus on it at all. That's right. I'm just, hey, I'm getting this bird. These Marines, these Army, these Air Force pilots,

they're going to do this as good as anybody can do it, and we're going to rock and roll. That's the best I could do. That's what I figured out for me when I'm relying on. I mean, sitting in the back of a Bradley driving down a street that's had nine IEDs in the past 48 hours on it, that's not a good feeling. And if you think about that, it's going to really It's really going to rough you up mentally. For me, it was always like, cool. Yep, these guys know what they're doing. We're going to rock and roll.

And if it's time, it's time. But I'm feeling good tonight. I'm feeling lucky because that's how I always feel. Let's go. When you let that start to creep into your head, it definitely, I don't know. I wouldn't know how to deal with that. Like, if you focus on what can go wrong, because how many parts are there in a helicopter? How many parts are there in a helicopter?

aircraft that you're about to get into and how old is that aircraft and when was the last what was the what was the maintenance dude thinking about when he was doing the maintenance on this piece that everything you start going down that thought process it could get pretty ugly pretty quick so i always just did my best this is what i'm thinking about i'm thinking about what i can control that's what we're doing that's what i'm focused on that's what i tried to get my guys focused on but it's not always easy to do that it's it's actually not very hard to get wrapped in into those negative thoughts. And especially you have a close call,

you realize that we survived this by a millimeter and it's very hard to not focus on that. Yeah, check. I mean, check on all that. I mean, yeah, and that's the same with me. I mean, I only focus on what I think I can influence and control. It's kind of the advice I gave Ryan.

You know, it's your time, it's your time. You know, and you don't get visibility of, you know, that, you know, in a lot of cases. I can remember, you know, you talk about 53s, you know, the jolly green, you know, you get on board and, you know, freaking hydraulic fluids dripping all over the place. And, you know, you pointed out to the crew chief, hey, man, you got, you got, there's a leak here. You got hydraulic fluid. You know, without even, you know, like batting an eye, he says, well, just let me know when it stops dripping.

Because then we got problems. Yeah, that's the way it is. So that was his last deployment. It was. He's in Afghanistan. And, you know, I was talking to my friends, some of my friends and the teams and some of the guys that had worked directly with Ryan. And just, you know, because I didn't remember Ryan from when I put him through training because I put a lot of guys through training. And but I was just talking to, you know, hey, what, what do you remember?

And, you know, the people that worked with him is first two, three platoon. was like freaking stud team guy you want great new guy then a great Juan Cruz one like just was just on the path to kind of be just the awesome team guy what are you seeing so now by the time he comes home from this fourth deployment what what are you noticing what are you seeing that's different so he's become a little bit more vocal and his inability to sleep Which, you know, I mean, we don't get a good night's sleep. You feel like crap the next morning, but he's not getting any sleep.

And then, you know, so he's, you know, I think going to, you know, he's drinking more, you know, trying to get to sleep. He's, you know, wrestling with some pain, whether it's, you know, residual pain from, you know, training or just, you know, getting, you know, rock too much in combat, whatever. So the alcohol is becoming an issue. Do you know that at the time? I sensed it. I sensed it. I mean, he was pretty straightforward. He was saying, you know, hey, I'm drinking more and I don't want to.

But, you know, I got to try to get to sleep. And then he said when I would get to sleep, I'd have these nightmares. And I know that he had one shooting that involved a kid, you know, early teens, you know, I think a 12. I think it was a legitimate shoot. I know it was from what they said, but it bothered them. I think the kid had a weapon. But still, you know, it's part of that moral injury.

And here's the other thing, you know, that I've seen with, you know, that's specific to the medics, is that, you know, one side of your brain is, you know, you're a shooter. and the other side you've got you know you're wired to help people you know and sometimes you know I think that that creates a you know kind of a attention you know an emotional tension yeah the other thing is you don't always have the capability to save people that's right you're exactly right you know like so so when you can't and I definitely saw this with some of my medics it was like some of my Corman was you see that Look, they're working on guys

that can't be saved. They can't be saved. But it doesn't matter that they can't be saved. It doesn't matter that if you put them on the, with those wounds, with the best surgeon in the world that Johns Hopkins that no one can save an individual, but

they still feel like they should have been able to help more. So that's, I think, is part of it too. No, you're exactly right. And I think that they, you carry an increased burden. And it goes back to how do you deal with this stuff? And especially when you lose a teammate,

it's hard to resolve. Is he coming home on leave back to the East Coast? You know, occasionally, but his home is out here. We would come out to visit him. When he would come back, you know, it almost, what I saw is that he felt more comfortable being deployed than he did being back in garrison he liked he liked being deployed he liked operating he didn't like you know what he would i think characterizes the nonsense that you know

occurs a lot yeah when you're when you're home and and then i think also that you know occasionally you would say people just don't understand what we've been through or what we've done so i think that is true in the way our society just doesn't understand our warriors, certainly the ones that have served the last 20 plus years of conflict, which is part of the challenge I think we have and with our warrior and veteran community. But yeah, he started at that point, you know, coming off that last deployment, he was asked to, you know, become the elite petty officer in Salk, Special Operations, Urban Combat Training.

As you know, is really, you know, an important phase of workup before the platoons, you know, lift and shift to combat theater. And I think he was asked to do that because of his experience. And so, and he took that very seriously. I mean, he, you know, was very much into redesigning lesson plan. and wanted to replicate, because he would call home and ask me about different things, replicate the combat environment as closely as possible, and really, you know, create a level of stress and performance expectation that would, you know, serve the units that

were going. And he was pretty, I think, straightforward in his critiques of, you know, how different groups, you know, performed. and but at the same time you know he felt that he had to be there right on top of you know these evolutions so when they would breach a door when they would come in and have a dynamic entry he was right there absorbing all that yeah you know many crashes get thrown like if he's at salk and you're working salk and you're crashing rooms and not just crashes so the flash crash grenades for people that don't know but then we have like fake grenades like blue body

call them blue body but they're they just have a blasting cap in them but you might you might be in a room in you might get you might absorb 15 crashes on one run you know what I mean like there is a lot of and this is after the bridge so the breach goes and then people are crashing rooms that are throwing blue bodies by the way you got a uh a mark 48 machine gun inside of a room that's six by six shooting out of a window and you happen to be in there when this is going on there's a lot of of concussive forces that you're experiencing and so just given some people if that's what he's doing working the the special operations urban combat block of training

That's what it is. It's just explosion after explosion after explosion all the time and when you do that you know when you're going when you're in a platoon You do that block of training but then you go to spec recon what are you doing on spec recon? You're quiet in the woods for two weeks Then you go on combat swimmer. What are you doing combat swimmer? You're under the water for three weeks then you go to Mar-offs. What are you doing? You're in a boat So you're if you're in a workup. You're not getting exposed over and over and over again when you're in training cell and that's what you're teaching you're just cycling platoons through that over and over and over again. So if you're in land warfare, you're you know, you're eating rockets all the time if you're in South you're eating crashes and and explosive breaches and same thing with CQC. You're eating those things. So definitely the exposure that he's getting at this point is very high. Yeah, and when he went to sniper school, you know, they're shooting the 50 cow. And so he would come out with, you know, for instance, shooting a 50 cow where they would just shoot endless rounds and say that, you know, blood was pouring out of his nose. His ears were ringing.

He'd come off the salk, you know, workups and, you know, he'd have to lay, you know, they go out to the island and, you know, have a heavy day of. of weapons and, you know, breaching and dynamic entries, he'd come back to his room. He said he'd have to lay down for like five, six hours on the floor, just, you know, because his head was hurting so much. And then started complaining about some vision problems and hearing, but it'd get to a point where he recognized he needed to go get some help. So, you know, went to medical, and, you know,

they immediately pulled out the prescription pad and wrote them, you know, prescription for sleep medication. And then they wrote him another prescription for, you know, anxiety. And so he started, you know, taking that, but it really wasn't helping. And together with the alcohol, really didn't make a good combination. But he was still doing his job. He was getting out there. He's taking us serious.

And then, you know, he had an incident where he hit his head, you know, alcohol-related incident and came out of that. That, you know, that was, I think, the first, you know, incident or event that we really started to understand that something wasn't right. So he, like, fell down drunk type thing? Yeah, kind of, I don't know where they were. They were in Spain on a, they were going over, I think, to Iraq to change out a team. And he was going on the trip. and actually he was his re-enlistment.

He was going to re-enlist in theater and wound up, you know, this is like within days of them putting them on this medication and he wasn't sleeping. I think the combination of it, he, you know, rolled back and, you know, hit his head and was unconscious. And so, you know, like most of the, you know,

the dudes, you know, they get up, they shake it off. And he hopped back on a plane, goes into Iraq, and things aren't right. The folks that are on the trip with him said he's just not right. And they come back out of Iraq, and they wound up having to go to Launch Stool, you know, because, you know, while he was at attitude, he had some type of crisis. And so they evaluate him, you know, in Germany and realize that, you know, something's happened but they don't know what it is. So the crisis that he added out to,

this is like he passed out, this is like, what was the situation? I guess there was some type of, something that he felt, like an out-of-body experience where he felt like he was dying. So some kind of like maybe panic attack type of thing.

Right, something that wasn't, you know, he wasn't thinking right, he wasn't speaking, right? So whether change in altitude, maybe he had some type of, you know, bleed or insult going on in the head from, you know, obviously having this concussive event, you know, a number of days before, you know, going to altitude was having some type of an effect, but they really couldn't put their finger on it when he got to Germany. So they wound up, you know, getting him on a civilian flight back to the West Coast where, you know, he was a reevaluated again

and nobody could really put their finger on it. There's something, just to give people some perspective here in the teams and I can really only speak to the teams but I also know that the Army and the Marine Corps has an element of this as well but from growing up in the teams there's an element of everything that we're saying right now that I'm sure people are like oh my gosh this is like be red alert you know this is a huge red flag but in the SEAL teams for someone to be drinking for someone to be you know, acting a little bit crazy for some. These are things that, for lack of a better word, in many cases, are normal.

It is normal for a guy or for three guys to show up on a Monday morning. One guy's got a black eye. Another guy, they're still hung over. Maybe they're still a little bit drunk. Hey, guys get your shit together. Like, I'm not saying it's good, but I'm telling you it's the reality. When you, this is, this is, these men are not Boy Scouts. These are guys with a high testosterone level.

These are guys that are taking, have a very risky job. These are guys that seek combat. That's who they are. And so the types of things that we're talking about, these aren't huge, like maybe if you worked at an accounting firm and Fred comes into work on Monday and he's got a black eye and he's really hung over, you might be thinking, oh my gosh. And if he does that next weekend, you're like, oh, we got a problem here.

In the SEAL teams, that's a 23-year-old dude that's been on multiple deployments. And I'm just saying it's not such a red flag for a normal seal. And there's many, many seals that that's what they did. And they did it from age 22 to age 29. And then they all of a sudden they got married and they had a family. They just kind of carried on and everything goes normal, right? Myself included, I was a wild freaking 23-year-old. I was a wild 25-year-old.

It was a wild 21 year old. I was drinking. I was getting in fights. We were all, that's what we were doing. That's what we were doing. And then, you know, get a little bit older. All of a sudden, you're, you know, you get a little bit of responsibility. And then you end up getting married.

Then you have kids and you kind of just grow. And that is a fairly normal progression for a seal, at least back in the day. There's actually less of it now, I believe. But I just want to give that, kind of set that data point for people to think, oh my gosh, You got a guy that says he can't sleep, go talk to a seal platoon. Guys like, oh, yeah, I didn't sleep last night. By the way, I didn't sleep last night because I went out to a party. I met a girl.

I did this. Got lost in an Uber, came home, couldn't find my ID, and I had to jump over the fence. This is a normal story. So I just want to set that so people aren't thinking, oh, these are huge. Like, why didn't everybody focus on this immediately? It's because it's fairly, for lack of a better word, normal. Yeah. Yeah, I would agree.

you know, and again, this goes back to what I said earlier, is that, you know, they come back to a society or to an environment that, you know, they don't understand what these warriors have been through. And so in some cases, they, you know, these warriors, you know, there's this expectation that, you know, they come home that everything's going to be normal. You know, they walk in the house and it's going to be the way

they left it, you know, six months ago or a year again. go and that, you know, they're going to behave, you know, just like everybody else. And that's not the case. I mean, you can't create this level of warrior and put the level and put the expectation on them that this nation does to go do, you know, some of its toughest, you know, tasks. Yeah. And not, you know, it's added consequence. And, you know, to your point, this is.

This is, you know, it may might appear to be abnormal to everybody else, but this is kind of like the normal for this cadre of special operator. Yep. And it's not, it's a normal course that eventually kind of levels out and becomes, again, I was talking to one of my buddies yesterday about Ryan and, you know, we were both older. And so when the war is going on, guess what I was doing when I came home from combat? I had a wife and three kids. and then four kids.

My kids didn't care. You know, they weren't like, hey, wait, you know, what have you been through? No, I had to go home and be a dad, and it kind of forced, it kind of forces you to, like, get, it, it forces you to correct your behavior and get, you know, there's no, yeah, you're, you're now 35 years old. You got three kids at home and a wife.

The kids, they want to go to the, you know, wrestling tournament that you got to go and spend 12 hours there. You can't be freaking drunk, but it's not going to be as, conducive you have a there's a bigger tendency for you to get forced back into sort of a better behavior pattern than when you're single because when you're single and you come home well what are you going to do you can go out with your friends what are your friends going to do you're going to go out drinking what are you going to do you can go out drinking you're going to find some girls are going to get in fights we're going to we're going to do what a 23 24 25 year old does and again it's not a red flag

you got to pay attention to it but I'm just trying to point that out what the same thing you're saying And it's just a little bit, I know it sounds crazy, but it's not totally abnormal. It is a fairly normal behavior. It's not a, it's, it's, what is this, what is a 23 year old seal do when he gets home from a trip on a Friday? Goes out, has some beers with his friends, meet some girls, stays out all night. What does he do the next day? Wakes up early because he still told his friends he'd be there at the gym to work out.

So he only got three hours of sleep, four hours of sleep. By the way, couldn't sleep that great anyway. probably because he drank too much. Like there's all these things that just kind of slowly add up. And if they don't get, they can kind of self-correct, but sometimes they don't. Yep. Exactly right. I mean, so, you know, it's, I think, you know, how do they deal with it?

And what's acceptable and what's not. And I think that part of the challenge here, you know, goes even within our medical community, is they didn't have an understanding of that. Yeah. So, you know, it kind of creates this perfect storm. You know, and I think a point that you made that's important to understand is that there's a different dynamic for those that have families and have other responsibilities than those who are coming out, you know, who are single. Yeah. and there's, you know, the different, you know,

responsibility or accountability. It's nothing like a wife to pull you back, you know, on that center line. Yeah, 90% divorce rate in the SEAL teams, but if you're not getting divorced, guess what you're doing? You're freaking mowing the lawn and you're, you know, taking care of the kids on the weekend that you're home. Yeah. And kids can be, you know, pretty humbling, you know, they can,

they'll call you out in a minute, you know, they'll hold you to task. So we started seeing these changes and went to get helped. But after that concussion incident and that trip in and out of Iraq, then we started looking at NICO, the National Intrepid Center of Excellence at Walter Reed, Bethesda, to get him in to get, because that's when he started talking about.

I think something's wrong with my head. And, you know, especially after, having some of these experiences with severe headaches, nosebleeds, these, you know, changes in his vision, ringing in the ears, all that. So he calls me up and says, hey, look, I'm trying to get to NICO, but they're not letting me go. And I said, what do you mean they're not letting you go? Well, you know, I'm not sure that they believe in what NICO is doing. And I said, is that right? So at that point, you know, I'm the Senate Sergeant in Arms, so, you know, I pick up the phone.

And within a couple hours, he's got a slot at NICO. And the NICO, so just so people understand, so NICO is a program, where is it in Virginia? Or D.C.? No, it's in Maryland. It's at Bethesda, Maryland. It's the old Bethesda Naval Hospital that now is a joint service, you know, National Medical Center. So it takes guys that have been in combat, that have been exposed to combat, and it does, it's like, what is it, about 30 days? It's like a month long and you go there and it's like a real comprehensive assessment, you know, assessment of blood work, scans.

And then they're putting you in art therapy and yoga and good, clean diet. all these things to try and get guys sort of reset and back on a good path. I've heard some guys that went have just loved it, said it was great, helped them so much. Other guys, nope, didn't buy into it type thing. So I think a little bit of it is what your take on it is gonna be. And there's also this, human beings are not all the same at all.

And I usually when I talk about this type of stuff, I talk about Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Muhammad Ali, you know, well, George Foreman, they're both heavyweight fighters. They're both heavyweight champions. They're both had a long career. George Foreman, you see George Foreman today, he's totally normal intact, mentally talks. You know, he's fine. He suffered how many, God knows how many thousands of concussions he took in his career. He's fine.

Muhammad Ali Not fine You know he had something called pugilistic disease Which is something that some Boxers get Freddy Roach same thing Freddy Roach is a fighter How does he end up? He ends up

You know he's got that Pugilistic disease Where you've taken a bunch of concussions But not every boxer gets it Why is that? Well it's because human beings are different And so there's some human beings That might not be impacted by certain protocols and some that might be, both on the healing side and on the negative impact side.

So it's very difficult to form a pattern off of something like blast injuries when there's a whole spectrum of people and how they're going to react to it. People have different reactions to these things and we don't understand those things. So as we're sending guys out, you know, someone might be looking at Ryan thinking, well, he's, quote, only done for deployments. And you think, well, first of all, what do those deployments consist of? Then what was he doing when he was working at trade at? And then what is his biological reactants to this stuff? Because everybody's different.

So these are the kind of things that are coming into play as we start looking at what guys are going through. Yeah, I couldn't say it better. You're exactly right. Everybody's different. They're wired different. you know, genetics comes into play. You know, it's just like, you know, you could put, you know, five folks in a line, you know, and take the same knife and cut them in the same place.

And there are all five of them are going to heal differently. You know, some will get an infection. Some will heal within a couple days. Others will take two weeks to heal. I mean, and that's part of the reality. And this is, you know, part of what we're trying to understand, you know, as we, we deal with some of these challenges, but I couldn't have sent it better. How worried were you when, you know, when he's getting sent to NICO, how worried are you

from what you could tell, from talking to him? How worried were you? Yeah, by then, all my antennas are up, you know, I realize something's wrong. You know, we're seeing changes in him that are not him. And, and coming out of night, go. It was interesting. They, you know, put them through all the heavy imaging studies, you know, PET scan, cat scan, regular x-ray, you know, spectra scans. You know, they looked at him from, you know, tooth to tail, blood work. You know, they could see cognitive changes in him. They were definitely cognitive changes in him. They had memory issues. He had vision changes. He had, you know, ringing in the ears. He had balance issues. They started. They started to

his testosterone was in the tank, which are, you know, the case with a lot of operators. And his cortisol levels, which is your overdrive, was off the charts. And, you know, we see operators get stuck, you know, at both ends of this. And then you look at sleep, which has, you know, you know, the very strong influence in the calculus of all this, you know, the quality of sleep that they get. And you mentioned, you know, eating. How do they eat? You know, because you are what you eat. So if you're putting junk in your body, then your body's going to react to that as opposed to, you know, the right nutrients and so forth.

Exercise is another piece. But then it goes back to your head. You know, you're, you know, that brain housing group is your command and control center for what goes on in your body. And if it's not in a good place, then that makes this all, you know, that more difficult, you know, whether we're talking about mental health, whether we're talking about the biophysiology. of the brain, neurophysiology, all that comes in balance. You know, so if you're seeing hormonal changes, something's not right. If you're seeing other chemical changes in the brain, something's not right. If you're seeing, you know, cognitive dysfunction or irregularities, something's not right.

So there are signals that are being, you know, transmitted, but we weren't picking up on them. Because in some cases, we didn't know what we didn't know. You know, the science had not caught up with this. And part of the problem that I see, as I've assessed this, is that we first introduced high explosives to the battlefield back in World War I. And ever since then, you know, we have been calling, you know, this condition that comes off the battlefield, you know, the soldier's heart, you know. We call it, you know, battlefield psychosis.

You know, we call it, you know, we put all these different names on it. And now we call it post-traumatic stress. And, you know, so we really haven't advanced the ball very much on understanding what, you know, happens on the battlefield and why some people come off the battlefield with certain conditions. but what has happened across the board is that it has largely defaulted all towards a psychiatric diagnosis, you know, mental health, where things are scored against the DSM-5 diagnostic registry. And in some cases, because that's how people get reimbursed. You know, they've got to come up with a diagnosis.

So it's interesting in Ryan's case that they could never put their finger on anything that was happening to them. And, you know, as you said in the introduction, you know, he just became a walking experiment. You know, they were trying this drug, that drug. And in some cases, you know, these drugs, though they have some rescue effect, are not meant to be long-term solutions for what folks are dealing with. But unfortunately, they get lost, you know, in the mix, and they're on these drugs for years at a time. And then when they realize that they shouldn't be on these drugs, it's harder coming off the drugs than it is being on the drugs. And we saw an abrupt change of him coming out of NICO. We was put on a drug called a Fexer, which was a very high-end mood stabilizer.

And overnight, we saw a kid who was trying to fly out of the storm suddenly just heal over and nose dive. And when he came back to the West Coast after finishing NICO, with a pretty significant. can write up, but absent any findings in his brain, as far as, you know, brain damage or anything, they didn't see anything. It comes back to the West Coast and, you know, you know, you kind of alluded to this that, you know, they tried to teach you, you know, first of all, they tried to tell you what is going on to give you a sense of what may be causing some of the changes and some explanation and then they give you some tools on how to deal with it but then you come back into an environment where you know it's not exactly conducive for following through on that stuff because you're

back into a deployment cycle you've got other responsibilities you know you don't always get a solid eight hours sleep and and you know as we're learning now with circadian rhythm you know it you know they say you should go to sleep at the same time every night you should have a routine yeah come on you Now, here I am as a firefighter, you know, tell me how that works, you know. And then you come back to a medical enterprise that's not, doesn't exactly understand what NICO's doing. So, you know, their opinion is, hey, they're off the reservation. They're gone rogue.

And I'm not doing anything that they're recommending. And that's what he came back to. He came back to, you know, a medical enterprise that didn't understand, you know, the challenge. that these warriors have been through or going through didn't understand the the NICO assessments and so basically openly disregarded any recommendations and then on top of that you've got the operational realities of being with the teams so though NICO was a good experience the impact in NICO was minimal and so he comes back and he starts to really

his own self-assessment that he's got to do something about, you know, the alcohol. But he says, look, alcohol is not my problem. He says, I can stop drinking. So he, you know, got himself voluntarily admitted to an outpatient alcohol rehab program up at Point Loma where he attended. But wound up failing in his last week there. He was doing very well, but was still having problems sleeping. And I'll take you back to when they prescribed him sleep aids, Ambien. He took some Ambien and woke up one morning, literally his last week in the treatment program,

and there was a whole six-pack of empty beer cans on his living room table. And he had no recollection of it. And when he went into the center that morning, you know, because they have him blow on the pipe, he popped positive for alcohol in the system. And, you know, they, you know, said you're out, which to me was upside down. That was you're out of the program? Yeah. Yeah. No, no, out of the program.

You know, you failed the, you know, the SART program, the substance abuse rehab program because that was our rule. you can't be drinking. But to me, that was kind of like so counterintuitive because you've got to expect that some folks are going to fall off the wagon and you've got to pull them back in because this addiction is not an easy thing to deal with. Yeah, it seems like you get rolled back,

not dropped from the program. Yeah. So anyway, but then we came to learn that, you know, and you get great clarity after some incidents. But he had taken Ambien before and there had been some events. I remember he was home and he took Ambien one time and he fell

into a wall in the house and then crawled back into bed and the next day I go into his room and there's a freaking big hole in the drywall and he's getting up out of bed and I said what happened? And he says I don't know I didn't do that and so we came to find out that when he was on this Ambien,

which is a side effect, he had amnesia. You know, and it's not an uncommon side effect that you hear from some people, and that's why they're pulling away from using drugs like Ambien. So, you know, this was part of the calculus of, you know, what happened with this alcohol incident. But as we went into the end of 2015, things just, you know, he was, they were trying to med board them out. And unfortunately, you know, at that time, you know, med boards were looked at as not a favorable, you know, exit strategy by the community. There were some personalities in the community that felt that folks that were seeking medical boards were, you know, playing the system. and so his medical providers were

legitimately trying to get him a legitimately trying to get him a medical board and you know here's the thing he didn't want to leave the Navy but he knew you know he was his own decision that he says I'm afraid that I'm going to get somebody hurt because here's a kid who used to be on top

of the mountain and now is you know slid you know sliding down the slope trying to understand what happened what's happening to him and he's not getting any answers. And then he's becoming more and more distrustful of the system because information's coming out about him that, you know, he's saying, well, who's talking about this? Who's releasing my medical information?

Now there's a certain, you know, responsibility that, you know, leadership needs to know somebody's condition and if they're, you know, a potential threat or a safety issue. but, you know, he started, you know, instead of looking at, you know, the system and the medical enterprise as, you know, a pathway to get help, he started sensing that, you know, they were weaponizing his, his, you know, issues against him. and there is definitely, you know, within a command element, a sense that, hey, we don't want to be burdened with these problems. We don't have time for it. So, you know, maybe he needs to leave. And the VA would be a better place for him.

You know, they're better equipped to handle this stuff. And, you know, we went through the, you know, Christmas, New Year's holiday, which was a good, It was a rough period. He came home. And, you know, he's just coming apart. You know, he feels like he's been betrayed by, you know, by the community that he has put everything into. He feels that he's let his boys down because, you know, he can't do his job anymore, which was a big, big, you know, hit to him.

they were hanging a bunch of labels on him that, you know, your alcohol abuser, your prescription drug abuser, oh, by the way, they were the ones right in the prescriptions. But in their effort to help him control his pain, they put him on opioids, which is, as we're finding out now, when you put somebody on opioids, they need more opioids to control their pain. you actually dig a deeper hole by putting them on opioids. Do you know when he started getting put on opioids? Yeah, the fall of 2015. And then together with the alcohol, which he had pulled away from on his own.

But, you know, again, at that time they were also realizing that he shouldn't be on afexor. So the psychiatrist that was treating him wanted to get him off of a fixer and was in the process of writing a medical board for him and they wound up transferring him completely out of the community. So he lost continuity with the people that he had been working with and who he had trusted. And now he was starting from square one again. and in an environment that was not very receptive to, you know, processing these medical boards. And so he started distrusting the system. And it became adversarial. Now, he, you know, he never gotten in trouble as far as, you know, getting locked up outside or, you know, confronting the authorities.

he never hurt anybody, he never did anything that, you know, wound up, you know, calling attention to himself until after he came back from the Christmas New Year's holiday when, you know, while he was home, he was dealing with pain to a level that he couldn't stand. He had run out of his prescription medication and had, you know, turned to some marijuana to try to deal with the pain. And when he came back, you know, to the, you know, to his unit after that holiday, you know, he popped positive for, you know, cannabis in the system and wound up, you know, you know, being brought forward for a NJP, you know, captain's mast, of which, you know,

and again, I think there were some folks who were legitimately trying to get him help, but at that point, he was too far down the road and not trusting the system anymore and had come to a point where he said, look, I got to get out. Which was tearing him apart because he wanted to stay in. He loved what he was doing. And I think out of loyalty to his teammates, he says, I got to go before somebody gets hurt. And I remember that, you know, the day that he had gone,

I was not out here for it. day he had gone through the captain's mast, he had scores of people showing up on his behalf saying, you know, what kind of operator was, you know, that this was not him, that, you know, not sure what was happening. But yet, I think, in my opinion, some of the leadership that was in place at the time really weren't interested in that. They just wanted to get rid of the problem. and he wasn't the only one. I mean, there had been a pattern of behavior. You know, I just, like I said,

I think it was a dynamic of some folks not knowing what they didn't know, trying to do the right thing for the right reason, maybe all the wrong way, and then there was some personalities that definitely factored into the calculus, personalities that definitely had, you know, at a senior command level, the ability to influence, you know, the course of, you know, options that Ryan had. But I think at that point, he had already made the decision I got to get out. And I remember they started processing them out, and you got to go through all your, you know, your final meta.

examinations, you've got to turn your kid in and all that. And he was supposed to show up one morning and he didn't show up. So they wound up sending a couple guys out and they found that he was completely uptunded. He was, you know, he was hallucinating. He was, you know, he, you know, just and I have no knowledge of this. And by then they had already, you know, we, you know, we, We had had some folks that you and I know had gone to his apartment and made sure there's no firearms or anything because the concern was really starting to, you know, escalate that, you know, maybe he would hurt himself, you know. You know, he was he was unraveling, you know, emotionally, you know, becoming paranoid, felt that people were watching him and listening to him. And he was getting into a dark place and becoming isolated. and so they sent them out, they sent these guys out to bring him in

and determined that he needed to go to Bethesda for a safety evaluation. And into the course of doing that, they were basically restricting his movements while he was in the emergency department going through an evaluation. And I would submit to you that if you hold any friggin' frogman or seal down and physically, you know, constrain them, you know, it is not going to be a good outcome. And he made some threats to his leadership,

who he had felt were behind some of that action. And that's all they needed at that point to lock him up in the mental health ward. And once that happens, that's a stain that follows you forever. and he wound up being in there for three, almost four weeks. And I remember, you know, on one occasion talking to his providers, asking that. Was that at Bethesda? That was at Bethesda.

I'm sorry, no, let me correct that. It was not Bethes. It was at San Diego Medical Center. He had gone to Bethesda for the NICO, but he was now back on the West Coast. Are you talking to him? I'm talking to him. And he's even becoming distrustful of me, you know, because, and I've got to be, I've got to be honest with some of the things he's telling me, I just don't, you know, I mean, just, it can't be, because I'm putting my trust in the command and into the medical enterprise out there to do the right thing. Matter of fact, they said to me, hey, pop, you know, your dad, I'm glad you're out here, you know, it's, it's good that, you know, you're showing the interest.

but, you know, he's ours and we'll take care of him. I'll never forget that. And then went to visit him while he was in this lockdown unit, and, you know, you talk about somebody who, I didn't even recognize my son anymore. They had completely stripped him of his dignity. He was, you know, guys from his teams would come to visit him, and he just couldn't even look at them. He just was just, it was horrible what they did to him.

And this place was horrible. And I remember a couple of his clinicians saying to me that he shouldn't be here. And I came to find out that a couple of them stepped up to the command and said, why is he here? He shouldn't be here. And again, by then, I should have picked up on the flags, but I didn't. but all the communications turned to lawyers. And that was a bad sign.

Because to me, what I missed was now this was all about building a case for getting rid of them, not helping them. And one of the clinicians told me that she openly protested something that the medical command wanted her and her team to do. and she said ethically she was not going to do it. I don't know to this day exactly what that was, but it was something that was not going to work in Ryan's favor and certainly was going to work into the favor of the command's effort to get rid of them.

And this is all verifiable. She actually wrote a piece about this that she published. and I'll never forget this. This was February of 2016, and Jocko, he was discharged from the mental health lockdown ward and discharged simultaneously from the Navy and not allowed to come back to the team for closure. And, you know, the staff there,

said it was the first time they had ever seen anything like that happened. And this kid had never been a threat to anybody. As I said, the only thing he did was threaten, you know, some of his leadership who we felt were responsible for, you know, putting him in that circumstance because they were holding him down, you know, on a litter in an emergency department. And I submit to you who wouldn't react that way. But that's what, you know, that was like the icing on the cake.

It gave them, you know, their, it just solidified, you know, their actions and, you know, their justification for getting rid of them. But I'll never forget, you know, the personnel, you know, chief that came in and the MAA, when they discharged them and signed them out, had tears running down there, you know, their faces. I mean, they just, you know, they couldn't say anything, but they said, you know, you could just see the empathy that they had for what they were being asked to do. And my son, it was just, he had no emotion. I remember walking him out, you know, from the hospital, and he was still wearing, you know, like a hospital, grub top and a pair of board shorts and flip-flops.

And my wife and I were looking at him and he didn't even look like our son anymore. And he stops like halfway before we get to the parking lot and he says, he looks to me, he says, dad, you know, why'd they do this to me? All I was trying to do is help. All I was trying to do is help my boys. Why did they do this to me? And surely after that, we moved them up to, um, Palo Alto to the VA hospital there.

They had a polytrauma unit up there that we had gotten them in. And, you know, to put more freaking, you know, kind of to really cap this thing off, he gets a call from one of his buddies a couple days later. It says, hey, man, where are you? We haven't seen you around. But there's posters with your face on it all over the place. you know, be on the lookout that, you know, you're not allowed, you know, in any of our facilities. It was a, it was a Bolo that had been put out by the command saying being on the lookout for this guy.

And that immediately sent a shock through my system of, holy cow, if he is even, you know, seen, you know, anywhere near any of our, our, you know, San Diego Naval facilities, How are some of these freaking security types going to react to him? You know, I mean, this was like, this was so bush lake, so like unprofessionals. I had never seen anything about this poster was just a, and he laughed it off. But I know it was like somebody had just, you know, stabbed him in the back and twisted the knife. And his teammates went around and yanked all those posters down. And I just, you know, I just felt, you know, there's this new term coming out called institutional betrayal.

And, you know, I said, you know, in a public forum that was held, you know, a number of years later where, you know, I had put my trust in the community. I came out of the community. I loved the community. It gave me my foundation. I'm internally grateful for the experience. My son loved the community. I love being a seal.

But they so disappointed us. So disappointed us when we trusted them to do the right thing. And as you've expressed, unless you say anything different to me here, Jocko, I have never heard anybody say anything negative about him. That he was always trying to do the right thing. a good team player, he was loyal. And yeah, they saw changes in him towards the end. But, you know, as we come to learn, there was reason for those changes. But, you know, I felt that, you know, some of those command personalities violated our core ethos. They left one of our own

behind. A friend of mine named Sarah Wilkinson, who's been on the podcast and, know her very well. Yeah. That was really for me a very enlightening conversation I had with her, especially when she started, you know, the thing that always has stuck with me, and I just saw her this past weekend, but the thing that's always stuck with me was how she described very similar to what you're describing. And that is, you know, she was saying that the person, the person at the end, Chad at the end, that killed himself

simply was not the same person that she had married. He had changed in a radical way that was not the same person that she had initially married. Yeah. And unfortunately,

you know, we, have a group of us that have lost loved ones in this community, then we can finish each other sentences. As you're seeing this thing unfold, I mean, you're talking to, you got friends in the teams, and you just weren't getting, or was it the trust that you had in them? Was it, like, how did that, how were those conversations going?

Well, they had a concern for Ryan, but this was, this happened so fast that they need even though he was gone. And, you know, one of the guys says to me, you know, if this, you know, he's the guy we looked up to. This is the guy we wanted to be. If they could do this to him, you know, if this could happen to him, what does this mean for the rest of us? And, you know, Ryan constantly said that, you know, I'm worried about my boys.

They're experiencing these things. And I kept warning him. I said, look, be careful, son. you know, very often the bureaucracies kill the messenger. Just be real careful. I know what I'm doing. I know what I'm doing. And I said, look, you've got to take care of your own issues first

before you worry about everybody else. But he was their doc. You know, when something wasn't right, they were coming to him. And he felt that he had let them down. And that was a big part of the burden that he wrestled with. Plus, the labels that they hung on him, you know, you know, operationally, you know, effect or unsat, whatever, you know, just all the labels that they needed to push him out the door.

And fortunately, we got him out with an honorable discharge with his trident, but he never hurt anyone, if anything, I think is because of his, to a fault, his loyalty to his boys and to the community, you know, wound up setting him up for how things happened. And, you know, this is another interesting point. We're also finding out right now as we do some of these post-mortem or forensics on some of these incidents, the vulnerability that somebody who separates from service, especially from a team dynamic like this, is it's a very critical time your first one, two, three years out. And how you separate is absolutely a factor.

on how things go. So if you elect to leave or retire because it's your time, you're looking at the new horizon, new opportunity, new adventure, that's one thing. You've probably scoped out your LZ, your glide slope to get there. But if you're pushed out, or

you feel that you have to leave because as you know in the team dynamic, you don't ever want to fail your teammates. You don't want to and a lot of times, even though you're close, you know, you know, absolutely close to your brothers, you still don't want them to see that you're hurt. You know, you'll,

you'll put that mask on, you know, and you'll do everything you can to continue to do the job, to be there, you know, to be, to make sure that, you know, they can depend on you. And when you feel like you can't do that, that creates a whole different level of attention. And I've talked to more guys that have said the reason I left is because I felt that, I felt, that I wasn't able to do the job the way it needed to be done, and I didn't want to disappoint my boys. So when you have those kind of negative influences or less than optimum conditions where somebody's separating, it kind of puts them in a whole different place, and I think that makes them more vulnerable for that period when they separate, where they can become isolated and get into some

dark places. And this is where this whole issue of institutional betrayal is starting to gain some momentum. It's, you know, really, you know, how you separate somebody, how you, you know, that glide path of departure is really critical as to how they're going to be able to navigate their way forward from that point on. So it's, it's February 2016. That's when is that when he was discharged? And then he's up in Palo Alto. What's he? Is he like in a inpatient up there in Palo Alto?

Well, initially it was an inpatient, then it became an outpatient, but it didn't work out. And he wound up coming back east, where he then had another, you know, bad episode where he had to be admitted to the VA in Baltimore for a period of time. And by then, you know,

he's just, feeling that, you know, nothing's going to get better. We got them into some programs. We got them into the brain treatment program down in Texas, the cerebrum center down there. And then we got them in for some transcranial magnetic stimulation, you know, on the West Coast in Newport. We had some other options that we had.

gotten them, you know, into. But this was, in many cases, on our own dime. And, and, you know, when he goes to these places, you know, you're paying for a hotel room that's, you know, a couple hundred bucks a night, you know, the food, transportation, all that, you know, very quickly starts to, you know, deplete your resources. And like I said, you know, when you got somebody like Ryan, a loved one who's, you know, in this level of desperation, you'll do anything. You'll do anything to save their life and you become very vulnerable. You know, we didn't have a good level of situational awareness of what, you know, was available. And anyway, you know, about a year out from when he left the Navy and he'd been trying to get answers and go through these programs.

He had, you know, on the positive side, he had started back at the community college. He was taken, you know, he had an, like I said, he was a very intelligent guy. I had a tremendous ability to abstract, but he started taking, he had a real affinity for numbers. So he started taking calculus and algebra, and then very quickly advanced into advanced calculus and advanced algebra. And he was taken, you know, science. courses and, you know, he was looking at, you know, maybe going into PA school, Physicians Assistant School. But it was interesting, you know, he could do these advanced problems and very often would,

when he felt stress, would, you know, go to the basement of our home and his way of dealing with stress was to do math problems. But then he was having trouble navigating himself through the day. He would have, you know, these outbursts of anger. He would, you know, you would look at him. and his face would be completely, you know, devoid of any emotion. He looked right through you. And you would even, like, talk to him, and he wouldn't respond.

He would just be, you know, kind of fixated looking, you know, right through you, right past you. He, you know, he wasn't exercising that much. He was still, you know, drinking, but not, you know, excessively. He started smoking, which he had never done before, which he said helped to calm his nerves down. He was still having problems with sleeping. And fortunately, you know, one of his former girlfriends had come forward to be with him as a caregiver. And she was a very stabilizing influence. But yet to be around somebody like that, it took every bit of her patience and, you know, determination to stay with him to help him.

But in the course of being at the VA, the medicines, the drugs just kept on common. And my estimation at the VA, it was just such a huge gorilla of a bureaucracy. It was even for somebody like me, and I've got multiple, you know, advanced degrees, I was having trouble navigating through the VA, let alone somebody that is, you know, kind of turned inside out. And I remember that I would take them to the waiting room there at the Baltimore, and it would be, you know, packed full of, you know, older veterans all wearing their ball caps, you know, from Korea, from World War II, from, you know, Vietnam, you know, the Gulf War. And I could see the look on his face, you know, as he looked around, and you could just see it. Is this me? Is this going to be me? You know, and it was just, you know, it just was ripping my heart in half. And, you know, it just was ripping my heart in half. You know, like I said, I got a medical background.

My wife's a trauma nurse. I mean, we were completely unprepared for this, you know. And we're sitting around a fire one night, you know, it was March of 2017 out behind our house. And it's just him and I. And, you know, he says to me, you know, dad, something's wrong with my head, but nobody's listening to me. You know, they just keep telling me I'm crazy. And, you know, I said to them, look, you know, we'll get through. this, you know, we got you out, you know, we're going to school. He says, yeah, I know, but

something's wrong with my head, and I just, you know, it's just so hard, it's just so hard, he said. And he said, you know, I'm not going to live to an old age. I just want you to know that. I'm just banged up inside. And to look at him, he looked like a gladiator, you know, other than the fact that, you know, some wear and tear over the past year and so forth, but still you couldn't see he didn't have any disfiguring wounds he had both his arms his legs he says yeah i'm not going to live to him yeah i'm just banged up and uh if anything ever happens to me i want you to donate my brain my body for uh traumatic brain injury research and um breacher syndrome research and i said well you know ryan come on you know you're you're

gonna be fine you know we're we're we're we're we're we're we're gonna get through this you know And at the same time, he had, you know, been processing or worked up for a position at Secret Service at their training academy. You know, they wanted him to help with their emergency medicine training and some of their tactical training. And they were very interested in him. So the things were opening up, you know. And they didn't see any of what he had been through as a disability or, you know, an impediment. but on April 23rd of 2017 we had just come home from an overnight trip

where my wife and I went to a family event and I'll never forget it it was a Sunday morning and his dog a Belgian mountain was like gone ape shit as we came into the house and something said something's not right I mean, something, you could feel the spiky sense in me saying something's not right. And I had found that he had taken his life in the basement of our home.

He didn't use a firearm. You know, he asphyxiated himself. He was wearing a SEAL Team 7 t-shirt. He was wearing red, white, and blue board shorts, and had illuminated a shadow box that I had made for him. that prior Christmas that had all, you know, his medals and insignias and other memorability in there. And then he had burned a hard drive in the fireplace

with all his deployment photos and stuff. And, you know, Jocko, I, it, you know, I've been through a lot of stuff in my life, you know, seeing a lot of, you know, human tragedy. And up to that point, I thought maybe 9-11 was at the top of my list, but I'll tell you, when I found him, my heart just ripped in half. And, and I just, you know, it, you know, I loved him to death.

He was my, he was my swim buddy, you know. And I didn't like what he did. I didn't support what he did, but I've grown to understand why he did it. And it really was for his boys. He was trying to prove, you know, that something was wrong. And, you know, to lend some evidence to that as we got into his computer afterwards, he had been reading countless studies on head trauma and brain injury and, you know, researching the drugs that they had been putting him on and had written, you know, as I went through his papers, had written some personal reflections of how, you know, he was not being treated the right way, how he felt that, you know, he had been trade, you know, by some elements of the command that, you know, that something was wrong with his head. And, you know, he's gone. And so, you know, the burden that I carry, honestly, is, you know,

I've been rescuing other people for like 40 plus years. And in the end, I couldn't rescue my own son. And so, you know, how do you deal with something like that? How do you deal with that? And I so desperately wanted to have one more conversation with him, and that kind of put me in a bad place. Because my, you know, that was not going to be a good route. So, you know, he knew what he was doing. He knew what he wanted me to do.

And he had even offered some reflections to some of his friends that said, hey, if anything ever happens to me, make sure my father takes, you know, takes hold of this and tells the story. And that's what I've been doing. You know, his story has really opened up. And what happened is a couple months after he took his life, we got, we complied with his wish and got his brain donated for a very intense research project. that was looking at, you know, military blast exposure.

And they came back to us and briefed us out like two months later. And I remember walking into the briefing room to this world-renowned neuropathologists who looked at Ryan's brain. And I said, look, man, Doc, don't tell me when I want to hear. Just tell me the truth. Just tell me what you found. And he says, look, it's not the case. He says, your son suffered from a severe level of microscopic brain injury uniquely related to blast exposure.

And, you know, and he showed us, you know, the slides. He showed us, you know, the extent of the injury. And from my wife and I, we just like all of a sudden had this weight lifted off our shoulders. We got an explanation that there was, you know, all along Ryan was right. There was something wrong with his head. But they didn't see it. And we've come to learn because we don't have the technology to see it in a living person. Not too different than from what, you know, like our contact sports players, you know, football players, you know, mixed martial arts, you name it.

With CTE and the evolution of CTE in the brain, we can't see that in a living person yet. And so, you know, it became very clear that day what my mission needed to be. and that's bring attention to this and illuminate this brain health threat that, you know, almost, you know, creates this perfect storm

of what we call invisible wounds. You know, invisible wounds is the signature injury of this 20 plus years of conflict and also can be assigned to previous conflicts, but, you know, we've got somebody that looks normal and we don't see anything, you know, wrong, but inside they're broken up. They're hurt. And, you know, they're dealing with, you know, post-traumatic stress. They're dealing with moral injury. We don't talk about that a lot. You know,

that's, you know, where you, you know, we raise our kids to value human life, respect each other, follow the rule of law, and all of a sudden we're projecting them to places around the world where that's not exactly, you know, how life's lived. And they come home, conflicted back to a society. It's very judgmental, so they don't want to talk about this. You know, it's, so it's, it's, it's choose a way on the inside of them like Pac-Man. And then everybody we know that's been in this business, and even the fire service, they're all in pain, some sort of physical pain, emotional pain, spiritual pain, and so they desperately try to deal with that pain.

So then you get these substance use disorders. Alcohol is a big part of it. And then, of course, the opioid crisis where, you know, our clinicians, our medical providers, were so quick to write that prescription for those pain killers. which have completely addicted our society. An addiction is not a trivial thing. It's a rewiring of the brain. And now that we find out that there's a growing body of evidence

that exposure to blast, blast over pressure, is ripping the circuitry in our brains. And really complicating some of this. And to your point earlier, everybody is different. and everybody reacts differently to injury and they heal at different rates. And we're just trying to understand that the research has not been at the level of urgency with a level of priority that it needs to be, especially after 20 years of dealing with us. And when I was in GIAO, we recognized this back in 2010, 2011.

We started to look at this and Congress told us to back off. It's not our job. And in my opinion, we lost them with 10 years of potential. research opportunity to understand what was going on. But we're starting to get some answers right now, and it's undeniable. It's disruptive. And it's really causing a lot of heartache within the psychiatric mental health community that, you know, on one hand, you've got some clinicians and providers saying, what do you

mean? We've been treating all our people wrong, you know, the past, you know, a number of decades. It's not what we're saying. We just didn't know what we didn't know. But science is always challenging our assumptions. Should always be a driver for us to look at things differently. And that's what's happening right now. And so there's a growing body of evidence that's showing that there's a biological connection

to some of what we're seeing. And it would be irresponsible of me to say that psychiatry and mental health don't play a part in this because it does. it goes hand in glove. It goes hand in glove. Just like some of the medications. I am not an anti-pharmaceutical, you know, person. I realize that drugs have a tremendous ability to save lives.

But in some cases, we just misuse them. And there's a lot of, you know, instances where we have medical providers out there who have no background in this stuff, prescribing medications for stuff that they have that, you know, they're not a psychiatrist. They don't, they're not a neuroscientist. They don't know the full effects of these drugs will have one in a person. But yet, because they have MD behind their name, they can write that drug and prescribe it. And so we're treating symptoms. We're not identifying what the root cause is. And that's really where my focus is with trying to push and advocate for the science.

is we got to get down and understand what's behind all this. And I say this to leadership within the community, within the special operations community, within defense, whatever solution we come up with cannot impact our operational effectiveness or our lethality on the battlefield. We can't be afraid to understand what's going on because that information, that knowledge, will help us navigate through this

in a way that we can buy down this, that buy down on these risks on the front end without impacting, like I said, our performance on the battlefield and the resiliency of our force. And that's what we have to look at, is how do we increase the resiliency of our force? And very often I talk to the veterans and the warriors

who I come in contact that are struggling, and with this knowledge, I tell them, look, you're not crazy. You very well be injured. Injured because you did what this nation asked you to do, to go into harm's way to do the tough jobs that you've done, and you have come home burdened with these injuries. And when you look at it, how could you not come home burdened with some injuries?

You know, when you look at, you know, the operational exposures and so forth, and we're seeing environmental exposures and how they're coming into play. with a discussion about burn pits, let alone blast over pressure and head strikes and so forth. So it really creates this rubric that we just need to understand. And I believe that we will get through this because it's not because we lack the intellectual capability or the capacity. We lack the unity of effort to circle the wagons on this, just like we did with the IED. level playing field, talk a common language,

move in a common direction, guided by the science. We'll figure this out. Are there, where does like the resistance come from? Is it ego? Is it closed minds? Is it, this is the way we've been doing it forever? Is it like, why would someone,

I mean, clearly anyone that's listening to this right now would say, okay, we've discovered that there's probably another call. there's another cause for this type of downward spiral for people, how do we fix it? Is there, it sounds like there's resistance to that. What does that come from? Well, I would say D, all the above. Just a little bit of everything. Yeah, you've got people that, you know, this is not their scope of practice. This is not, you know, where they, this is not, this challenges their comfort square. This, you know, creates attention. you know, in the force, so to speak.

And, but we can't be afraid of this. You know, we've been up against, you know, other disease processes, you know, cancer. You know, we've been up against, you know, HIV-AIDS. We have been up against COVID and other challenges. And at first, the reactions fear, you know, let's ignore us. Let's kind of put our head in the same. and let's make it, you know, wish it that goes away. And then get to this point, a crisis point, where I think we are right now with this head, brain health stuff, is, okay, we have to understand what's going on.

And so am I a little disappointed in Department of Defense and the fact that they have not made this a priority despite spending over $2 billion, you know, with very little to show? $2 billion on what? on brain health initiatives, on mental health, on suicide prevention. But it has all been kind of a boutique, ad hoc efforts. I mean, again, it's not to say that there haven't been some good advances that have happened within defense health, but I'm disappointed in the fact that they have not led the way I feel they could have led on this subject, considering the risk and the threat that this, you know, puts on our force.

And we're starting to see the effects of this where recruitments are down. And also retention is having a problem. And even I think within our community, people are worried about, you know, they love, you know, this community. And you can talk to any special operations or community. conventional unit that, you know, hey, they, this was a important part of their life. But at some point, they also realized that, hey, if I stay too long or if I have too much exposure, what, you know, am I going to wind up like that? And I, because I'm getting these questions from, from Ryan's contemporaries right now. You know, people who are at the time and place in their

career where their level of maturity, you know, their operational maturity or their leadership maturity is right, you know, what we need. But if they're getting out, that's not helping us. So what's being left behind? You know, so, you know, how many people that, you know, early promotion or must promote are leaving that equation and what's being left behind within our development mental, you know, cadre. You know, does that make sense?

I mean, does that make sense to you? I don't know. I mean, from your perspective and who you talk to, are you seeing, you know,

reflections of that type of behavior right now? Yeah, I think that guys are more conscious of their health and wellness than we ever were. You know, everything from nutrition

to working out to everything that goes with that. And that's because the whole world has moved forward. And we've been at the cutting edge. You know, we've been pretty far forward on the cutting edge of how to get in good shape, how to stay in good shape, what nutrition we should be doing. But, and I think guys are now more cognizant of that, but they're also more cognizant of, what is this doing to me?

Where am I going to end up? How is this going to impact me at a later date? and I think there has been some protocols implemented now that they're starting to track this stuff at some level. I don't know. I mean, I'm sure it's not at the level it should be, but I know that they're assessing, you know, like I was talking about earlier,

you know, I used to go out on the range as an RSO with a platoon out there shooting rockets, and you'd go out there and stand there and watch 15, 16 guys shoot rockets and you'd take those blasts you take 16 blasts well now they're limited to three what did that do to my you know my my time frame of guys or Ryan's time frame of guys when he would go out there and you know you're teaching somebody how to throw a crash into a room well you're gonna sit there you're outside the room but still you're gonna do that for a task unit 40 guys you're gonna huck a crash into a room and so so I think it has become I think people are

become aware of it. And I think that they're seeing guys like Chad, guys like Ryan. I mean, the guys that I talked to about Ryan, they reported that, hey, here's a guy that was good to go. I mean, just good to go. And by the time he's at Trade at, guys are having a hard time, like, communicating with him. You know, when you were talking about him having like a blank look on his face, that's

the feedback that I got. He was sort of like blank stare, didn't feel like, you know, guys are talking to him. And I think one of the biggest problems for leadership is at that time, they don't even know what's happening, right? They think, oh, well, what's his problem? Oh, you know, what's his deal? Oh, he's not, you know, I'm a, I'm a freaking commander or I'm a master chief. Why is this guy, you know, and I'm telling him he should, he needs to square his shit away. And he looks at me with a blank stare, he's got a bad attitude because they don't understand.

where how much this stuff has impacted someone. And so I think the recognition of knowing what signs we should be looking for for leaders to say, oh, here's a guy that was totally squared away and now he's acting like a different person. There's something wrong that I need to address from a medical perspective, not from a disciplinary perspective perspective. And that was one of the people I talked to was, made that exact point is that we as a community have a tendency or at least had a tendency of

Someone's not doing what they should be doing It's not a it's not a health problem. It's a disciplinary problem right and that's a huge differentiation You know because part of it's because of what I talked about earlier. Hey, you got a guy you know one of your guys goes out gets drunk Gets in a fight cool you discipline him he's he stops doing it. We got the problem solved well if he's he's he's showing up drunk or not showing up or he's late or he's despondent or he's not responding the way he should be and you say hey man you're freaking late again you slept in you whatever you you're late again discipline I discipline him it doesn't correct him why doesn't it correct him because the problem isn't a discipline

problem the problem is a health problem I believe that shift is starting to take place or has has started to take place I think Ryan's one of the reasons why that I think people recognize right in in in a post-mortem that, oh, we failed as a community to see that what we thought was a discipline problem, wasn't a discipline problem, it's a health problem. And again, we're very used to, you know, a freaking guy gets in trouble. When a seal gets in trouble, they are horrified. They want, for every reason that you just talked about from Ryan's perspective,

it's when we get in trouble, it's like, oh, I can't, I'm not going to be able to deploy with my guys. I'm not going to be able to take care of my guys. I'm going to lose, you know, I might lose my trydette. I might I'm making the community look bad like all those reasons Troublemakers in the seal teams They they square themselves away right they square themselves away because they don't want to get kicked out They don't want to have problems So when we see someone that has continued problems

We should recognize and again, I believe that we're moving in this direction that there's probably not a discipline problem There's probably a problem is there's some there's an underlying health problem That's the issue because look how many guys if I I always joke I only I only wrote up I would say I wrote up I think three or four guys in my whole career Three of them I only wrote them up because I was told to write them up by my boss because something had happened and I was like I got to write you up that's the way it's going and then I take those things in a couple weeks later and put him in the shredder Because 99% of the time when I pulled the guy aside and said hey look dude you just did this if you do that shit again. It's gonna be a problem they'd be like I got it, boss, no problem. I'll fix it.

And it wouldn't be a problem anymore. So when we see someone that now has a disciplinary problem and they make a mistake and they do it again and they do it again and they do it again, the recognition that either this guy has like a serious, could be an alcohol problem, could be a drug problem, or we have this other, this other possibility now, which is TBI, which is post-traumatic stress, those kind of things. And unfortunately, also on top of all this, you got guys that they do something stupid. And what they say is, oh, it's because I got PTSD. Hey, shut up, dude. They're gaming the system. They're gaming the system. And that's a terrible thing to have happen as well.

Because that delays someone from looking at like Orion and going, hey, dude, cut the shit, you know, knock it off. You don't have, hey, I was on a bunch of deployments too. You know, that's another conversation I had in the last few days. We look at guys that had problems. they're on the same deployment as me. Hey, I was on that deployment with you. What are you talking about? Oh, this guy was on that deployment too with you.

I know him. He's fine. What's wrong with you? And sometimes it's like, well, guess what? I've had this conversation. Hey, that guy who's doing knucklehead shit, who's saying he has PTSD, he was doing knucklehead shit when he was 25.

And he's, and he's still doing knucklehead shit when he's 27. And now he's 42, and he's still doing, it has nothing to do with PTSD. It has to do with the freaking dudes It's a little bit of a wild character. So we need to put them in a position where we can take care of them and keep them out of trouble. But those guys that kind of, as you said, game the system really hurt the guys that have legitimate freaking problems. And I think there's a huge spectrum.

I think you can have guys that are out on the same deployment. They go through the same. They can be on the same operations and it can affect them in a radically different way. And that's just a fact of life. And this is not just my opinion You look at guys in World War II You look at guys in Vietnam You look at guys in the Korean War

Go watch Band of Brothers Right Dick Winters talks about that He talks about Hey every guy was here We all did this same thing Some guys needed to go home

We didn't hold anything against him And by the way That's I forget the name of the character In Banded Brothers But he's a real person And Dick Winters talks about it In his book on leadership When that guy broke

And he remember this guy. I can't remember the character's name. I apologize. He's a badass guy that's leading from the front. That's taking all kinds of risks. And he reaches a breaking point. And the whole company looks at him and goes, yep, get him home. They hold nothing against him.

He reaches breaking point. You take another guy like Spears, who was doing all that stuff as well and kept doing it and did even more dangerous stuff, never impacted him a negative way, just kept doing it. And what Hackworth says in about face, everybody's got a, cup and when it's a different size for everybody you put you put combat trauma into that cup some people it's going to overflow some people got a pint some people got a gallon some people got a teaspoon and it's and it's it's almost genetic i mean whether it's just genetic or nature or nurture

but however they grew up here or however they ended up they got a cup and when that thing overflows that that's it that you got to get them out of that combat area and if you're you're You're a good leader, you recognize, hey, they gave everything that they could. And both those guys also talk about the fact that if you can take that person before they break and you go, hey man, you're coming off the front lines for a while. We're going to put you in the rear. We're going to put you in an admin position. We're going to let you do some short duty.

They can recover and they can come back. But once you burn out that engine, it's like the check engine light. I talk about this lot. Check engine light comes on. If you're driving a car down the highway, check engine light comes on. If you're driving a car down the highway, check engine light comes on. What should you do? Pull over, get the engine service.

They'll change the oil, whatever they got to do. That engine's going to be good to go. If you keep driving that thing, what's going to happen? You're going to blow up the engine. You're going to ruin it. And these are, again, so it's not really just my opinion that I've seen this myself, which I have, by the way. I had freaking guys that went through hardcore deployments and came back,

we're ready to go again. And had guys that went through not as, hardcore of a deployment that needed a break and maybe couldn't deploy again. But it's not just me. This is what Dick Winters talk about. This is what Hackworth talks about. This is common for combat that every individual human being has a different level of resilience. And if you break them, it's going to be a problem.

And we need to recognize that. Yeah. So I hope everybody's listening to what you just said because I'm at 100, 200% agreement. the piece of high ground that I'm on is really kind of exposing, you know, what does the brain trauma? How does that factor into this? And right now we don't have the diagnostics. And I feel for, you know, command leadership. And I believe in good order and discipline. People need to be held accountable. It's nothing like a master chief crawling up your ass because, you know, you're not, you're not. you know, doing the right thing. And that needs to happen. And people still need to be held accountable. But I'm convinced we've got some research studies coming out here in the next couple months that are really going to add some fuel to this. It's going to be disruptive to your point. Not everybody's going to like what they're going to hear, but it's going to make us rethink what's going on.

And with that, we strongly believe that within the next three to five years, we're going to have diagnostics to be able to qualify this and a living person, not wait until after they're dead and we're doing a post-mortem examination, which is going to do a couple things. And you alluded to this earlier. We're starting, you know, and a lot of it is because of Ryan's story and because of a Navy SEAL Admiral who, you know, was captured by his story. who grabbed onto this, took it with them to SOCOM, Special Operations Command, and made this a priority to baseline all the operators and to start tracking so that we could start seeing changes early. And I think as the science comes together,

and I look at this like a railroad track that goes off into the distance, you know, one rail is this effort that we're trying to do now is push the science, create the level of urgency, a level of focus. The other rail on this train track is the here and now. We're dealing with people that are challenged right now, you know, active duty warriors, veterans, first responders.

And you've got these cross ties that hold the tracks, you know, stable and in alignment. And that's where that communication, that's where that knowledge development has to happen, you know, and be shared. Because it's not one track or the other. But as you look at that track and it goes into the distance, what's happening, happens, those rails come together. And that's our hope is that we get a lot smarter. Yeah, this is going to be disruptive and this is going to push people out of their comfort squares. And it's going to make, it's going to force us to think about this differently. But if we can give a commander that's dealing with a situation like this that appears to be a behavioral problem that, you know,

as you said in the past is usually remedied by non-judicial punishment or some type of punitive action and we come up and say hey we suspected that because of his operational profiles, deployments, some of the things he's been subjected to, there may be some biological or medical explanation for this and when we have a diagnostic or a number of diagnostics that can qualify that, that's going to put this in a whole different place. That's going to be valuable information for that leadership team as they make decisions. But that's got to go hand and glove with education where we, as we cultivate leaders, we give them this information and leaders at all levels, you know, from the very top to the deck plate that, hey, you know, this is a consequence of

doing this job. And it's not calling out weakness. It's not, you know, focusing on the injury, but we got to treat it like an injury. And how do we treat injuries? We cast them up. We put them in splints. We, you know, we put them through rehab because we want, you know, that arm, that leg to come back into, you know, 100%, you know, operational, you know, capability again. Same thing goes with our brain. You said something that was very important. And which I think is a part of the, you know, the contributing factors is that we had no reset time in the 20 plus years.

that door was constantly spinning. You're deployed. You come home. You go into, you know, most guys are dispersed to other assignments. They go into new training. They start spinning up. And the next thing you know, they're being pumped out the door to another rotation. And without that time to reset and certainly to reset somebody, just like, you know, what we see now with concussion protocols, you know, with the NFL, somebody gets a knock on the head.

They're pulling them offline. and it's because what we've learned is that if you're put back into the game too soon, you're actually increasing your chances for having something worse, because this is, in some cases, a cumulative. And another big handicap that we have, and this is why we need the science again, is we don't know the long-term implications of this. So right now we're just starting to kick the door on a lot of this, and we're still moving through the tall grass without a sense of direction.

but the science is going to guide us forward, which then is going to help us prevent this on the front end. It's going to help us better monitor this so we can identify somebody early in the evolution of injury or disease before it gets to the catastrophic point like it did with Ryan and they take their lives. And there's a strong, very strong connection between brain damage and suicide. Very strong connection.

And then it's going to help us identify. identify, you know, a precision treatment protocol for that individual so that we get away from one size fits all to one size fits one. And we get them down the right rehab path and we get them back into the team. We get them back operational. Let's face it, some folks may not be able to go back and do the job that they did before, but they're still part of the team. And we still value what they've done for this community, this nation. And this is not just about the SEAL community, but you talk to SF, you talk to Rangers, you talk to, you know, the Marine Raiders, they're all challenged with this.

I just had conversations with the UK, you know, SAS and SBS types, and Australian and Denmark and other countries that I come in contact with through, you know, some of my other circulation, they're all struggling with these scenarios. and they're all seeing the effects of modern warfare on their warriors and on their veterans. So I think we're on to something. We just can't be afraid to peel it back. It's going to make us smarter. It's going to make us more resilient as a fighting force.

But yet at the same time, we're going to take care of our people. we're going to, you know, we're going to live up to our promise to take care of them if something happens. Because we can't ever forget that the whole reason that they're here in the first place is because they step forward to do the job. Yeah, when I was reading about, I had a couple articles about Ryan and, you know, the one of them was like getting called unfit for operationally unfit or something like this. and we're going to get him out of the teams. And I remember one of my guys, Ryan Job, he had been shot the face. He'd been rendered blind. And before he decided he was going to get out, he's going to medically retire.

You know, he told me like, oh, I want to stay in. And I want to stay in the teams. And I remember I called the Admiral, who I'd worked directly for. And I was like, hey, sir, Ryan Job wants to stay in the teams. And the Admiral goes, Roger that. We'll find a job for him. I think he'd be an outstanding bud's instructor. I'm like, I think you're right.

Like he was, and that's exactly how it should be. And if you can find a job for a seal, which you obviously can, that's blind, then you can absolutely find a job for a guy that's, hey, guy can't be around any blast exposures. What do we got for him? There's a thousand other jobs for him to do. And that way he gets to stay in the community. gets to proceed with his career, gets to still be around the guys, and continue serving, which is, you know, what they want to do.

Yeah, and I believe that if things had gone down a different path and he had been treated, you know, differently, he'd still be here. I believe that. And I will tell you that when I got that briefing, you know, at Bethesda-Walter Reed, after he had passed and they had looked at his brain, the neuropathologist said to me, if Ryan had this information, do you think it would have made a difference? And I said, absolutely, because it would have qualified that he was right, that something was wrong with his head, that he was not crazy.

And because every one of these folks, these men and women, are struggling with what's happened to them as they slide down this slope, and they're desperately trying to grab onto something, and they're not getting the answers. And, you know, we can't forget what they've done for us, and we can't demonize it. and weaponize it against them because then we're leaving people behind. And again, you know, some very, I think, important points to make that not everybody is righteous

and they will game the system. I mean, that's human nature. And unfortunately, it takes away from those that really do need the level of attention that we're talking about. and I know because I had a leader call me about a year after Ryan passed who was dealing with his own issues and admitted to me the reason he was calling is because he bought into the whole freaking narrative that hey Ryan was gaming the system you know for a medical board and then when he you know came to learn that you know Ryan you know had a severe brain damage and that was something going on he you know was

upset about that and had gotten kind of sucked down a path that, you know, he regretted. And that's why we have to, you know, help at all levels, leadership, you know, arm them with the right information, give them the tools to make the best decisions. I don't think anybody was out to do any harm to him. I don't think. anything, you know, I just think it was this the perfect storm, and we didn't know what we didn't know, didn't know how to deal with it. I do think, you know, for the exception of a few personalities, there were some, you know, individuals who just couldn't be bothered with it, and I will never forget them.

and but it is personality based you know whoever's at that key intersection if they're sensitive to this if they got their eyes open they're looking for it you know they're trying to understand it then they can do a lot of good for folks

that are challenged with with some of these conditions if you get the wrong person in that intersection they can do a lot of damage a lot of damage and that's why we need the science. And, you know, leadership is something that obviously, you know, you talk a lot about, I talk a lot about. We're in a new era of leaders right now. I call it leadership by lawyer,

where, you know, we have leaders who are making decisions without, you know, getting the approval from their lawyer. And it's, in my opinion, it's eroding. our edge. What makes us different from our competitors is that, you know, our forces have always been given the license to innovate, to immediately flex and pivot to conditions. And we push that down to the edge, where people can adjust immediately on the battlefield or in any condition to accomplish their mission. But we're getting to, getting away from that. You know, everything's becoming so politically correct. And I used to remember when I would complain about, you know, risk adverse behavior. Boy, I'll take that back in a minute

because now it's no risk behavior. And it's paralyzing us. And I don't know, I don't know, other than, you know, putting it right out in people's faces, I don't know how we're going to get around this. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. And maybe I'm taking this conversation in a different direction, but so much of this does come back to leadership and being able to accept the responsibility and be accountable for decisions. And again, it's not a perfect world. It's not a fair world. But you know, you've got to have the freaking nuts to make the decision when you need to make it, especially when people's lives are at stake or, you know, greater consequence is at stake. And it's not always going to go right. And some of the best

scenarios that I've been in, which have taken courage on my part and other leaders that I've been with, is then when they let their people go do their job, yeah, they're going to bang into stuff. And it may not always go the right way. But, you know, more times than not, I have been completely overwhelmed with what's come back. Far exceeded my expectations. Far exceeded any level of performance that I had for that particular mission.

or operation. Yeah. The fourth fall of combat leadership that I talk about is decentralized command, which means you're going to let your subordinates leaders lead.

And guess what? When you do that, there's a level of risk. And if you're not willing to take that level of risk, you're going to end up being a micromanager, now you can't maneuver, now people aren't making things happen,

and now you're going to be slow, and now you're going to lose. But it does take a level of trust and a level of you've got to be willing to accept the fact that sometimes you're going to get you're going to get in trouble you're going to get your boss going to look at you and say what the hell's going on you're going to say yep boss it's on me some you know I put the guys out there they did something I didn't expect but that's not on them that's on me I gave them the parameters I told them what to go execute they executed they didn't do it the way I thought they were going to do it I'll I'll make sure it doesn't happen again but that's what went down and if you have people that aren't willing to take that risk there are just micromanagers and now things don't move and and you don't win that's what happens So, yeah, leadership 100%. You've got warrior call.org.

This is sort of, I would call this sort of the physical or organizational representation of what you're trying to do. Talk to me through warrior call.org. What's its mission? What's it doing? So, hey, I'm glad you brought that up. It's really a grassroots deck plate dirt level effort to reach out to those that are isolated. and, you know, what we found is isolation is a key factor that often plays into some of these suicide scenarios that, you know, we come in contact with.

You know, as somebody separates from their tribe, you know, especially if it's not on positive terms. And, you know, and again, you know, if they're burdened by labels, which can be extremely damaging and you know they lose their sense of you know a purpose and they lose their dignity and so forth and with that they start to lose hope and in you know many cases they start distrusting the system they start sliding into dark places and it's like it's like being dropped down into a well the further you go the less bright the light is you know it starts to shrink and and so does so does that hope.

And I think they get to a place where they feel there's no way out. I think that with a lack of qualification that if they are injured or what they're dealing with is as a consequence of their service, if they don't have any level of confirmation that they're hurt or that this, as I said, is a consequence of their service, and they're being told that they're mentally, you know, unstable or they've got some type of other mental health issue, that doesn't put them in a good spot. If they feel, as we've been talking, if they've abandoned their brothers,

their teammates, that doesn't put them in a good spot. If they feel that they're a burden to their loved ones, that really puts them in a good spot. But then I would say the fourth thing is this is institutional betrayal, that if they've given it all to their unit, to the community, to their agency service, and that turns on them, that inflicts a tremendous amount of damage. So, you know, the warrior call effort is really to connect up with those folks, make a call,

whether it's physical phone call, a text message, or do a drive-by, or take a call from them if, you know, for whatever reason it comes out of the blue, that call comes from a veteran or an active duty or a first responder, somebody who served in uniform, and have an honest conversation. You know, just, you know, get past the formalities of,

hey, how you doing? I haven't talked to you in a while, but, you know, kind of have a regular conversation. You know, you don't need to be a psychiatrist or a psychologist or a social worker to have this conversation. It's me calling Jocko saying, hey, Jock, man, we haven't talked in a while. How you been? You know, I just, you know, I was paging through.

through my contacts here. I saw your name. I just thought I'd shoot you a call. And how you been? What are you been up to? And, you know, through that, you know, the conversation's going to build. And more times and not, we've gotten reflections back from the guys and gals that we can't put a finger on why the call came when it did, the time it came, whatever,

but it came at the right time. that somebody connected up and pulled them away from the line. Let them know that they weren't alone, that somebody cared and that there was hope. And so that's what Warrior Call is all about. And yesterday, initiative led by Congressman Derek Van Orden in the House, passed unanimously to codify National Warrior Call Day it had already passed in the Senate,

so it's got to go into conference right now in order for it to become law. But we wanted this day as a stake in the ground to say to our general population, let alone our active duty and those that have served in uniform, that this is how they can help. Because we always get asked, how can I help the veterans?

How can I help contribute? Well, this is one simple way. You pick up this thing, called a phone, and you make a call and see where it goes. And if you sense that somebody's not in a good place, then you align them with some resources. You stay connected to them. It's like our old buddy line system. You know, we hook a buddy line onto somebody. You know right away whether that person's going off in a different direction or lagging behind or pulling you, you know, out of, you know, out of vex.

there. But it's warrior call is just a simple kind of outreach directly related to isolation. And you know something? We get equal reflection from the caller who after they've talked to somebody that they haven't connected with in a while, how much that has, has pumped them up. You know, it was like an injection of like energy to them. So, you know, national warrior call. So, you know, National Warrior call day. I'm hoping that we can, you know, drag this into the end zone. Who knows with Congress, you know, as my days up there as, you know, the Senate Sergeant in Arms, you know, it was a four-year out-of-body experience. I mean, there's a lot of good people up on Capitol Hill trying to do the right thing, but, you know, as we've seen. There's everybody else. Yeah. And as we've seen recently,

there's also a lot of distraction and dysfunction. So I will be, you know, I will not be a happy camper if they don't get this done. And I will, you know, keep poking them, you know, to get it done. But if it doesn't get done, I'm not going to be a happy camper and I'm going to let them know it. So hopefully that answers your question. But they can go to warrior call.org to kind of get more information on this and see how they can help. It's a matter of deputizing everybody that's out there that's listening right now to just simply make a call, take a call, have an honest conversation, and stay connected.

Yeah, no doubt about it. That's awesome. It sounds like we're waiting on some studies to come out in the next several months that we might have more information, more things to talk about, what those things look like. But other than that, does that kind of me, we've been talking for a few hours now. Is it kind of get us up to speed? Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, let's face it, you know, this is a tough subject.

You know, losing a son like Ryan, I realize that, you know, there's different sides of this story. And I tried to keep an open mind to it. But, you know, the bottom line is I have a mission and I'm not going to fail. I mean, Ryan's sitting right here with me right now. And a lot of what I say is actually him talking through me because he may not be here physically, but that energy goes someplace. And as I said, he knew what he was doing that day.

You know, he wanted to prove a point. And his story, I think, is a catalyst for a lot of the changes that you alluded to and certainly has opened up the discussion. I'm hoping that the science is going to put a fine point on this because, you know, you only get good science by doing good science. And so far, you know, we've been handicapped by not having enough good science that has illuminated exactly what's going on here. But I do think that, you know, with our modern warriors, you know, we have to be

prepared to answer these questions for them. We need to give them the confidence that that we're going to take care of them in the event that something happens to them as they go forward and do the jobs that we ask them to do. And it's simple as that. We have that obligation and we cannot leave any more behind. So, Jack O'I just want to thank you and what you're doing and certainly for the opportunity to talk about this. you know, this isn't about me. It's never been about me. I just feel fortunate that I've had the opportunity to, you know, come in contact with a lot of great people. And they don't all have titles before their names or after their names. They're just good people who have not lost sight

of being a good person and what it, you know, what you need to do to be a good person. And I love this nation. I think that we've got to be careful that we, you know, don't take our eye off the ball because the enemy definitely has not taken the eye off the ball. I mean, they're, you know, in some cases with some of the behaviors in our society right now, I think, you know, they're sitting back heating up the popcorn, and they're just waiting for the right time. And if we don't pay attention, we're going to find ourselves in a bad spot. And that's not a political statement. It's just fact. You and I have been, you know, at the front end of this and it's not going to go away. I remember the old saying that they used to, you know, when we were in theater,

it was, you have the watch, we have the time, and they don't forget. And so I'm hoping that, you know, that flag that we fight for, you know, with all all the other stuff that's going on. You know, folks within our society would not be able to step up and, and, you know, blow their horns and wave their flags if it wasn't for that red, white, and blue flag that has created the environment that has allowed them to do that. And in very few places on this earth, does that happen? So I hope that we don't give that up, because once it's gone,

we'll never get it back. Yep. Not on my watch anyways. Not on my watch either. I can't say much after that. Echo Charles, you got any questions? Actually, yeah, so you know when you guys do like breaching and, you know, you talk about the crash grenades and all that?

Do you guys wear like ear protection? Is there any additional equipment that you wear to like protect yourself from that and stuff? So, yeah, you have, we used to wear ear. Pro most of the time. Yeah. Your protection, like the literally like the little things that you roll up and put in your ear. In modern times, we now have headsets that are noise cancelling headsets that also have your radio speaker inside of it.

So that's a huge advancement. I will say, like, back in the day, we would do immediate action drills sometimes with no ear pro as, like, ear pro appreciation. So you'd kind of like, according to the master chiefs from Vietnam, be used to it and be ready for it when it happens. Probably not the smartest thing in the world. I think that's like getting used to getting prepared to get punched in the head. By getting punched in the head, it doesn't really help you. So that's what it is now. I can tell you like in combat.

You've probably heard me tell the story before. Like I watched my breacher, you know, I'm standing up a ladder on a wall looking down into a compound that we're about to enter a building. and Breacher puts the breach on the door, starts to try and back away from the breach. There's nowhere to go. There's some, you know, junk or whatever in the, in the courtyard. So I look at him and I'm watching him. I'm like, oh, he's, what's he going to do?

Oh, he's just going to lay down right there. Sure enough, lays down right there and cracks this breach off. I mean, totally unsafe distance. And, you know, I like get, because I duck behind the wall, right? The breach, he says, turning steel. I get behind the wall, breach goes, jump over. I mean, go past him. He looks like he just, you know, he's walking around like he just got, you know, knocked out.

And that's kind of a, that's what you do, you know. So guys are exposed to a lot of blasts. And, you know, just like it's different for everyone, you know, junior seow. You know, you know, junior seo as I'm sure. I mean, you know, how is that that guy who played football, like a lot of other people played football? But the impact that it had on him was terrible. And we don't know why, but we know that that's what happened. So the ear protection you would think, and I don't know, maybe, like, ear protection is one thing,

but isn't like the vibration in and of itself, like more, you know, that's more of an impact than any ear protection. So what they're finding out is that, you know, with this blast wave propagation over pressure, that actually, you know, there's concern that maybe the helmet is actually holding some of that blast wave in. And then to your point about ear protection, that's another way into the brain. So loud noises and so forth actually create trauma to the brain, as does what we're finding out is a lot of that blast wave is going in through the eye sockets. Now, this is, you know, we'll get some more fidelity on this coming up, but directly affecting the frontal lobe of the brain where our executive functions are. So that makes a lot of sense why we may see changes in behavior. So the neural science translation from the injury sites, which are literally all through the brain, the gray matter, the white matter, the lower brain is showing damage at different degrees depending on the individual and the level of exposure.

but it definitely will explain why somebody's having problems with regulation, why they may not be able to sleep. It's going to give us some hard evidence once we perfect the diagnostics that will allow us to make better decisions. But some of the protection that we've had in the past that we've put a level of reliance on we're finding out is not actually given us as much protection as we think. There's also visual trauma that happens. that we're finding out that somebody sees something, you know, that's horrific, you know,

creates that kind of PTSD, you know, baseline of a catastrophic, you know, exposure. That visualization, even though they don't come in contact with any physical forces, is actually causing changes in the brain. So we're early on into this. We just need to understand it. And like I said, this is not about getting rid of folks. that are hurt. This is about ensuring that we have the most formidable, resilient fighting force in the future and how do we take care of our folks when they get hurt, you know, especially when

they're doing the job we've asked them to do. Sure. Yeah. Anything else, Frank? Any closing thoughts? Now, I just, like I said, you know, your focus on leadership, I know a lot of people are paying attention. That discussion needs to happen. I'd be glad to come back at any time to give you some more thoughts on that. Just based on my experience, I don't know all the answers. I've just, you know, I've drug around this black cloud that, you know, puts me in places where, you know, shit happens. And you tend to learn, you know, from the good things that happen. You probably learn more from the bad things that happen. And some of my best leadership takeaways have been from some, you know,

being in the company of some horrible leaders where I just come back and say, well, there's no freaking way I'm ever going to do that or treat my people like that. But I do think there's still a lot of good leaders out there. I hope if they're listening, you know, I'm not saying that you don't need a lawyer at some point to consult on some things. But as I used to remind my lawyers, You have no decision-making authority. All you do is provide me advice and counsel. It's up to me to choose what I am going to, you know, do. And I own that.

I own it. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us. Thanks for coming out here. I know, like you said, you're a 68-year-old active duty firefighter. So thanks for taking the time to come out here and join us. Thanks for your service, you know, in the Secret Service, in the police. in the fire service, of course, thanks for your service in the teams and your son's service as well.

Our fellow frogman, Ryan, will remember him. We'll do our best to learn from what he went through so that his loss is not in vain, your loss is not in vain. And thank you for carrying on his message speaking for him so that we can help the veterans that are out there today. Thank you. Thank you, Jocko. And with that, Frank Larkin has left the building. Lots to think about lots of things that we can do as people to help other people out. You know, staying on the path, look, I know it's sort of, what's that word? Maybe it's this sort of like trite thing for me to say, oh, you'll be on the path.

You know, maybe I say it too much. Maybe I don't explain it properly. maybe maybe I do it too casually sometimes but the path it causes you problems you know what I mean and you know when you hear about Ryan look all those issues and then like you add into that like drinking just yeah man and you could hear just like all of a sudden he's not drinking not working now and then you couple that with these these brain injuries man it's just a nightmare and definitely a horrible situation can i mean it's unimaginable it's just unimaginable to uh to to to watch that unfold and even to hear you know his dad tell the story um and talk through it is

just it's just a nightmare man um look you got to we're talking about mitigating this You know, in Ryan's case, you're talking about doing your best to mitigate, you know, this, this, these brain injury from all these blasts and stuff and whatever, the moral injury. Like, you're trying to mitigate all this stuff, but that's, like, that's the best you can do, right? What you don't want to do is not try and mitigate it. And this is just so difficult. And I think really from my perspective as I was hearing this and it probably came through in some of my questions, you know, like what were you seeing? Because to me, when I see people that around me and they veer like off the path, that's when I start getting worried about them, right? When all of a sudden they're doing things that we know they're not good for, right?

We know this isn't going to work out. We know this isn't a good move. so that's just another thing going back to this idea of warrior call.org when you've got someone that you know that's at a broad level not doing the things that they should be doing like do your best to reach out connect with them trying to help them try and get them pointed right back in the right direction and having this kind of information is is very helpful and actually after we stopped recording you know frank pointed out to me that you know, because of NSW, because of the SEAL teams,

there has been a focus on moving, on discovering and learning more about this. And, you know, to the point of kind of what I opened up, this whole thing about when they found these traumatic injuries to Ryan's brain, that's too late. It's too late. And because of that and because of Frank's efforts and because of Frank's efforts and because, of the efforts of seals that have that are still active duty that got on board said yeah this was a this was a mistake what do we do to fix it there is progress and they and they went to special operations command and started doing these studies which the results are forthcoming so and you know kind of what I closed out by saying you know let's make sure that that Ryan's loss and

Frank and his family's loss wasn't in vain by trying to spread the word. It's the, I think it's the best thing we can do in this terrible situation. So, terrible story, but we're going to take some lessons from it and try and have an impact out there. So that's what I got. Thanks for listening, everybody. If you are on the path, go get yourself some jaco fuel. Get yourself some good nutrition for your body. get your hydrate, get your greens, get your creatine.

You're on creatine right now? Yes, sir, I am. It's a big deal, isn't it? It is a big deal. Everyday protocol. Do you do one of the scoops? Yeah, so I'd one and a half. One and a half.

How come you up the levels? Well, because I was reading the real, the protocols. Because I'm American and more is better. I was reading the protocols. And remember back in the day when creatine first exploded on the scene, in my periphery, they were like, there's the loading face. You gotta take more and all this stuff so it gets in your stuff

So I was reading about that and they were like you know you know like that's not necessarily true You know but you know all this stuff for whatever so I was like hey if I just take one and a half scoops I think we're good to go let's just round it up yep that's what I did and that's what I do and hey man do you do it? No you just do it normal it's part of your daily it's in your system It's just flown because I hear people talking about like they're doing it almost like before a workout Like it's a pre-work out I don't think it works like that extra heat for the set it doesn't work like that though I don't think Hey, bro. Let's let that placebo,

how about this? Whatever works. Let's let it ride. Yeah, I'm going to let it ride. So we got that. We got mulk. I know you and I just pounded a mulk, so that's good.

Get a little, because we were going catabolic, probably both of us. You did squads today apparently? Yesterday. Yesterday? What did you today? I didn't do nothing today yet.

Okay. I got to get mentally ready for these things. Check. Jocofuel.com. Go get yourself some stuff. You can get in stores too, which, by the way, is like, awesome.

When you go to a store, and you buy some jaco fuel, it's very helpful. It lets people know, lets those stores know that we're down for the cause. So, Wawa, vitamin shop, GNC, military commissaries, Afees, Haniford, dash stores in Maryland, Wakeform, ShopRite, H-E-B down in Teos, yes. They got the end palette, what's it called? End cap. In cap.

You know what that is? In the store. Yeah, in the store. It's like the end of the aisle kind of a scenario. Like a cap on the end of the aisle. We got that going on. Meyer in the Midwest, Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, shields, and then little gyms.

You know, little gyms little CrossFit gyms. If you're doing CrossFit, whatever you're doing. Jiu-Jitsu gym, powerlifting gym, maybe it's just a regular old Globo Gym. If you work at one of those or you own one of those, go to JF Sales at joccofuel.com.

If you want to sell some jacoFuel, get yourself on the path. Keep your system clean. You know, when people tell me, me they're tired or they can't sleep I'm like what are you eating yeah or when they're telling them that I'm energy what are you eating yeah you know what I mean yeah it's such a huge thing it's like you get you take your car yeah and like I know you drive a Cadillac sure did I just breach protocol here no you're fine so you got a Cadillac let's say you put

a Kool-Aid in your cattle-it you know what I mean yeah would we're expecting that thing to run well it'd be messed up no yeah what if we put kerosene in there no no I probably wouldn't even sleep well if you put kerosene with your Cadillac do you have to put the premium in the premium gas in there you don't have to do but you do this is the recommended scenario for sure you put that Jocko feel with it. Hey, that's the deal right? You want to you want to stay clean. That's what you want to do joccofuel.com go get it. Yeah, that's what we're doing you bring a good point. It's a good way to look at it and I'm not saying this just to say this is for real. real good way to look at it, where it's like, you know, we look at ourselves just like, I'm one person, you know, and that's it. But a more, how should I say, helpful way to look at it would be that you are a whole system. You're like in multiple systems working kind of together.

And just like any system, you start jamming out one part of the system, it can jam up the other parts of the system. So like if you can't sleep, there are probably other factors in there that's causing you not to be able to go to sleep because you sleep for a reason. Yeah. And if you have less of a quote unquote reason to sleep, then you're probably not going to sleep like good. And inversely, you stay awake for a reason.

And if you give yourself more of a reason to stay awake, when you don't want to stay awake, you're going to stay awake still. See what I'm saying? Because there's something else in the system. And what you eat, what you put in, it's part of that system. And, you know, I forgot to mention,

a jaco go, discipline go. It's an energy drink, but I'll tell you what, this is not, this is so far as we were talking, I was at a retailer. Sure. You know, so a store talking about bringing in jaco fuel and they're like, well, you know, you have energy drink this and I go, hold on. Yeah, I'm not, look, I didn't get crazy. No, I didn't get crazy. I was like, you sure about that? Hey, hold on a second. I was like, because they have all their, they have like a bunch of different energy drinks, right? And I'm like, well, ours is different. They're like, well, I mean, it's an energy drink, whatever, like, blowing me off. Yeah. Blowing me off. Not really blowing me off. But definitely, I was getting some, what we call vibes. Okay. And I said, hold on. And I like, looked at the can. And the ingredients. And the ingredients. And the ingredients. Are the whole back of the can and it's a bunch of nine syllable chemicals and stuff like that I go let me tell you what we got in here I picked up a can and go and I'm like

Here's the ingredients filtered carbonated water right that's number one natural flavors Citric acid which is what is like in an orange tea because this is a the can that I have was Yeah tea Monk fruit and then fermented cane sugar That's what's in it. That's the end of the eating ingredients list. Okay. Now does it have some new tropics in there?

Yes, it does. You know, so it's got vitamin B12 and vitamin B6 and it's got caffeine. It's got alpha G. So it's got other ingredients in it, but all these things are good for you. That's why we put them in there purposefully. So this is not normal. It's not normal. It's a totally different gig.

It's a totally different gig. And I wish I could think, I wish I was better at, thinking what we should call it. You know what I mean? Because you can't call it an energy drink because it doesn't. It's like, yeah, it's a different thing. It's a stigma, right? This is literally good for you.

So I'm like, I'm asking this retail person. I said, why would anyone drink anything else when they could have this? Which is literally good for you. And she, like, her face was changing. Yeah. I'm like, read the ingredients in that one. And she like, look at it. And she's like, I can't.

I was like, no, you can't. You can't. You don't know what that word is. That's not English language. That's a different form. in language chemical language chemical that's the chemical languages we don't we're not speaking that over here no so this is this is no downside get something that's clean for you and it gives you energy does that make it an energy drink

technically yes it does is it an energy drink like the rest of these disgusting things that are out there being marketed to you it's not the same thing it's not the same thing so there you go get you some of that to joccofuel dot com good idea Speaking of the tea, that was the fur, I know it's going to sound crazy. I never had the new tea since the flavors got revamped. Assessment. Good. Very good.

I don't know if you notice how fast I pounded it. Pounded it. If I'm going to go home and jack some steel? Yeah, most likely, yes. But yeah, good deal on the tea. Tactical tea, by the way. Tactical tea. All right, there we go.

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You're going to go out for a date with your girl. Yes. You're going to wear a pair of jeans. You got to pay boots on for that. You're going to wake up in the morning workout. That's R-TX. When you get done working out, you're going hunting. We got a hunt gear.

Of course, of course. When you get done with that, it's going to be cold. You're going to put a sweatshirt on. We got you covered. And then you're going to go to work t-shirt and jeans. Everything that you need, we got you. All 100% American-made. And I see why, but you did.

There was some detailed stuff in there that you did kind of pass over, which is fine, but I don't pass over these things. I notice these things. Sox. Oh, yeah. I wear origin socks. Belt. Oh, yes.

I wear origin belt. Wallet. Oh, yeah. Wait, say that again? Belt. Sox. Uh-huh. Wallet.

So it's interesting you say wallet and you don't say wallet. Because normally you say weird things like cotton. Because T is the last like letter or whatever, you know? So they say cotton. You say cotton. Mm-hmm. What else I'm going to say cotton? That's what I said.

That's what I say. No more. So if there's letters after the T, you forget about the T. You know who says cotton? My daughter, Hannah. Well, there you go. She was saying that's up to the end of the day. She says, it's made of cotton.

I was like, what? Where are you from? Cotton, mountain, important. And yet. Okay. So in Hawaii, there's, I think it's Japanese, though, but the last name is Soto. Soto. Soto.

Soto. Soto. No, not S-O-D-O. Soto. So it's hard, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of the hard one if you don't say. Anyway, side tracked.

But yes, the origin has plenty of stuff. The cotton that origin uses made in America, by the way. Grown in America. Technically, we're not making cotton made by nature. Okay, cool. OriginUSA.com, go get some. That's true. Also, Jocko Store.

He has a store. It's called Jocko Store. That's where you can do discipline equals freedom, shirts, hats, hoodies. Merch, if you will. It's more than merch, though. It's good. It's like wearable.

of people say their favorite t-shirt comes from jaco store it's the best fitting shirts that we have there also we have the shirt locker which is a subscription scenario you get a new design every month it's a good one this next month so this month i should have saved it for january but i didn't the count is zero next month december the last month of the year was more appropriate for the last month it is a until the end. But it looks good. You should have flipped those two. No,

I should have put the count of zero for January. Yeah, that's what I mean. And December is still until the end. Until the end is a good end of the year thing, right? Yeah, yeah. Now it's correct for December. That's the December.

So when's the January one? The January and when's the count of zero? This month, November. Oh, okay. Bad strategic planning on your part. It is what it is. You know, hey, but we're looking,

we're looking to improve. every single month. So yeah, check that. It's on jaco store. All right. Also, get some steak. Just make yourself feel better with steak. It's medicine.

Medical grade steak. Is that a thing? That doesn't sound. Pharmaceutical grade steak? No, no, that's bad. How about just nature steak? Nature steak for sure. Yeah, that's what we're doing.

Colorado craftbeef.com, primalbeef.com. Two awesome companies making awesome steaks for you to put in your oven, on your grill, or raw if you just want to get some and just eat it right and just get stronger because that's what we're doing these are awesome stakes awesome companies also subscribe to the podcast also jaco underground dot com also youtube subscribe to the youtube check out the jaco podcast YouTube channel plus the origin USA YouTube channel plus the jaco fuel YouTube channel some various channels to get on psychological warfare flipside canvas.com to code

are making cool stuff to hang on your wall, a bunch of books. I've written a bunch of books. Get them. Aschlam Front. We have leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. We also have events. We go to companies and work with companies.

We also have events that you can come to. We solve problems through leadership. That's what we do. Whatever problems you're having, they're leadership problems. And we will help you solve those problems through leadership. Go to Eschelonfront.com for details. We also have an online training academy. It's an extreme ownership.com.

We put courses up there that you can take that you can learn the skill of leadership to use with your family, to use at work, to use with your kids, to use for yourself. Help you become a better leader, and that's what will help you in life. Extreme Ownership.com. Also, if you want to help service members, active and retire, you want to help their families. Gold Star families. Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization, awesome organization. Go to America's Mighty Warriors.org if you want to donate or you want to get involved.

Also check out Heroes and Horses.org, Micah Fink's organization, Jimmy Mays organization, beyond the brotherhood.org. And of course, Frank Larkins, check it out, warrior call.org. And if you want to connect on the interwebs, Frank Larkins organization is at warrior call.org on the interwebs. He's also got a Twitter at Warrior Call Day and Facebook at Warrior Call. Also, Echo and I are both also on the internet.

there as well echo is that echo charles i am at jockle willing just watch out for the algorithm which wants to suck your brain and your time away and never give it back to you thanks once again to frank larkin for coming down thanks for his service in in the navy in the police in the secret service in the fire service and thanks for your son service as well ryan larkin we will not forget Thanks to all our military personnel out there and our veterans and listen if you need help reach out reach out reach out to some of your friends and if you don't need help reach out to your friends you don't know what people are going through stay connected call your friends and the same thing goes to our police law enforcement firefighters paramedics

EMTs dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service all first responders stay connected call each other you keep us safe keep each other safe as well and to everyone else out there you know what you don't have to be a first responder you don't have to be in the military it's the same message stay connected to your friends to your people to your family call text swing by people need people people people don't let time slip by a week a month a year a few years people become isolated they become alone and that's when bad things happen don't let bad things happen connect with your friends we are stronger together and until next time this is Echo and Jocko out