hey everybody i'm in downtown franklin getting ready to head into the office to wrap up dj shipley's episode for the sean ryan show with that being said it's becoming increasingly more challenging to reach our audience so if you don't mind helping us out please hit that like button leave a comment hit the bell and turn notifications to all that's not just this channel that's everybody's channel that you like all right love you guys hope you enjoy the show and thank you and uh one more thing happy thanksgiving war's not fair i think that was a lesson learned out of that doesn't matter how good you are if you don't get the chance to fight the chance to show how good you are doesn't matter hey guys let me tell you about this subscription service that i've been working real hard on called Vigilance Elite patreon basically on patreon we have it broken up into three different tiers we've got tier one tier two and tier three let's dive in our tier one patrons get all the behind the scenes footage of the sean ryan show that could include behind the scenes photos that could be side conversations that we have in between breaks that could be specific questions that our patrons give us for the guests on the sean ryan show and a ton of bonus content that doesn't really fit into any specific category for our tier 2 patrons they get access to our tactical training library which consists of well over 100 videos we've broken those videos up into separate categories and those categories are rifle fundamentals pistol fundamentals drills tactics driving gear and weapon setups and everybody's favorite mindset also on tier 2 you will get a live update from me on the 1st and the 15th of every month where we talk about the upcoming guests on the sean ryan show plus all the benefits of tier one our top tier which is tier three gets full access to all the other tiers plus they get full access to me where we do video teleconferencing vtc once a month we discuss anything from tactics to current events to who's coming on the show i take suggestions and it's very interactive no matter what tier you choose the support is greatly appreciated and it is the only thing that makes this show drive on so thank you for all the support see you on patreon first deployment in the seal teams you get in biggest loss and seal team history happens then you get through green team and right after you graduate what maybe six less than a year afterwards yeah i mean august of uh august of 11. extortion 17 happens which again is the biggest loss in seal team history i remember looking over and seeing um jay and i remember him sitting upright and i watched him get shot one more time um right in the face and it looked like that was it he hit the ground so hard you knew he was dead so the way it was it's the front door and is a long ass hallway going down and there's a dude who's in a sandbag position with a belt head at the end of the hallway and it's just chewing down the hallway boom spins him around and dumps him he gets back up grabs him and gets shot again so hold on did you eliminate the threat yep he's dead did he he didn't hit you he did he did hit you he hit me in the in the chest plate i unloaded on him got off three rounds in a boat log i think he took a double stack to the elbow so it blew out his entire arm and he took him to the face that basically removed his jaw removed his nose um and you could look inside him you could hear that dude the impacts you'd hear him smack you could hear him screaming and it was very satisfying and as we go to divide this dude opens up on the front door and lets it go and just you just see splinters of wood and just [ __ ] traces us it's not reality until it's reality that's not gonna happen yes it is whether you want to or not it's happening right now hey everybody welcome back to the show i want to start by giving everybody a couple of updates on what we have going on here at vigilance elite and i want to start off by saying thank you to everybody that left us in itunes review guys the sean ryan show now has 10 000 itunes reviews in only 14 episodes that is unheard of so if you haven't left us a review yet please head over to itunes there's a link down in the description just leave us one word if you're short on time and help us get to 20 000 reviews i would really appreciate it moving on to our patrons our subscription network where we put behind the scenes content guys it is patrons like you that make all of these one-of-a-kind stories from these gentlemen that are on this show possible these stories most of these stories have never been told before and it really is your support that allows all of these productions to happen so thank you very much moving on we're now getting into the youtube short game so we have all these different artifacts a lot of them are from guests on the show maybe you've seen some of them in the background of the show and we are now doing a studio tour of each and every piece on youtube shorts you can click the link right there and they'll show you the youtube short the first one so we'll be doing that all right let's get on with it ladies and gentlemen and now what you've all been waiting for my next guest is a former navy seal and a former development group also known as seal team 6 operator he's got the better part of 17 years of operational experience he's also the founder of tribe skates which is a skateboard company that employs only gold star family members if you don't know what a gold star family member is it's basically a family member who has lost an immediate family member in war that's who he employs which is very solid work he's also the founder of gbrs group which is the premier training group in the united states and most up-to-date at this time ladies and gentlemen please welcome my next guest mr dj shipley dj shipley welcome to the show man appreciate you having me yeah it's an honor it's good to be here yeah it's good to have you we've been wanting to get one of you guys over here for a while and uh and you know finally it happened so but just a quick snapshot of your career before we get started 17 years in the military most of pretty much all of which is in naval special warfare went through bud straight into the seal teams and then over to deaf group so medically retired now you are the owner of two successful companies one being tribe skates where you employ all everyone employed there is a gold star family member correct correct and you guys make skateboards apparel uh you gave me one of those boards it looks really awesome uh it's gonna look great here in the studio and then the other company uh you co-own with your best friend and former teammate cole fackler uh gbrs group which uh in my opinion is probably the most relevant premier exclusive training group in the country right now i mean you guys are definitely the most relevant and uh up to speed fresh out and from tier one unit so that means a lot thanks yeah so uh if you haven't checked out gbrs group check them out um so who do you when you guys are hiring are you only hiring seals you're only hiring tier one or tier one get a couple air force guys we've worked with a couple guys from the army side call in and bring some favors and some some niche stuff we got a couple long range guys and we pull in we need to and now we have a full-time recce guy for chris so you know cqb's bread and butter but i'm not afraid to branch out but yeah it's got to be the tier one resume cool what are you guys teaching are you teaching well last night at dinner we were kind of talking about it it was private lessons it sounds like groups all the way up to swat yeah i mean we do everything military local law enforcement got a couple government contracts stuff like that and then the civilian market the open enrollment stuff scared us it did after the chris kyle thing especially yeah um a lot of people on the yard line a lot of people brand new to guns a lot of people that really want to shoot somebody really want to become famous and there was no real good way to vet them unless you do private so we do phone calls talk to them for an hour and then we google search the [ __ ] out of them you gotta do a little bit of vetting yeah and set up a call with those guys and if they have five or six friends of all equal skill set or the same in state then we'll set up a separate training event we'll drive down there we'll fly in bring them up to us and kind of do everything cool and you guys are based out of virginia beach and we've got a gym there got kitchen showers kill house got everything what no [ __ ] damn how long you been doing that almost two years now two years yep maybe started at 19. damn well it looks like it's uh online looking in you know from the outside looks like it's exploding so that's awesome congratulations i appreciate it but uh well before we get started i always give everybody a gift there you go jesus there we go merry christmas somebody must have told you dude i mean you talked about did you say how much i ate this [ __ ] what's that should tell you how much candy i eat dude i do man i have a sweet tooth bro thank you really yeah yeah we talked about the gummy bear stuff last night i love it um yeah so before we get started uh i have a subscription account and uh as much as i'd love to tell everybody that gummy bears finances everything that's going on here uh really it's my patrons on patreon uh that support the show that's how you're able to sit here how i'm here how all this was built and uh so one of the things i do for them uh is i tell them who's coming on before they get here and uh i let them you know comment and a bunch of questions and then i pick one uh to ask so this is from will on patreon uh to you he says i know his company does a lot for gold star families and i'm sure he's experienced his fair share of losing friends either through physical or mental combat would he be willing to give any advice on how he deals with these feelings that's the first one that's that's that's the only one i'm going to give you it's no softballs okay how i deal with it personally yeah we get a lot of questions on how to deal with loss and uh i've done some videos on it and and it's just everybody's always curious you know how guys like me or you and and our colleagues deal with that get through it you know each one's different um for me for the longest time i just ignored override i just compartmentalized everything didn't happen to me it's not me i don't have to worry about it yeah it's easier just to uh not accept it to be reality when you do a dangerous job long enough it'll eventually get you yeah unless you're fortunate enough to retire um you can't let it can't let that be your defining moment almost like you're waiting for it to happen the gold star thing happens you do a dangerous job firemen police military doesn't matter we all have our gold star community people that die in the line of service and for me it's uh it's a show of their loyalty like i want to see how far they'll go they just showed you they just went the whole way like what an honor to be part of that organization where people will give up their lives for people they've never even met like that's how i process now when i see it i see the families it hurts it sucks yeah there's so many dudes i mess you know you're at harry seed are buying groceries and i look over and there's a whole family damn yeah the two platoons with her husband what do you say go and give him a hug and pretend like it's okay it's not okay but they did exactly what they wanted to do yeah at that moment like he was right where he wanted to be surrounded with the best people on earth duty loved um dudes he would gladly die for and they got the opportunity to show how committed they were to cause so i honor their sacrifice now it took me a long time to get there but that's what i do now i just honor them good for you man that's a great answer um you know i think uh a lot of people experience loss and one thing i always tell them is you know you have to you know it's good to mourn but um you got to think of how that person would want you to live you know and i don't think that anybody that i know and i'm sure anybody that you know wants you moping around for the rest of your life uh because they died doing what they want to do and uh so it's always good to keep that in mind but well great answer so let's get on with it um so we're gonna just start with childhood and go down a timeline of kind of uh your all the way up until now but you've been surrounded and by the seal teams your entire life you're born into it your dad was a seal several family members of yours are seals and then you wound up joining at a very young age but let's just start right at the very beginning with some of the childhood stuff what was it like you know growing up with your dad being an operational seal going on deployments all the time and uh and that's a that's a very high standard to live up to as a kid so let's start that so yeah um when my dad graduated buds i was my mom was six months pregnant so he checked in team one she gave birth to me and i essentially grew up in a platoon hut he was the only guy who had a kid at the time so basically got raised by wolves which was cool um we transitioned we moved over the east coast um like 89 like i was young for i don't remember anything started up school typical stuff but he was gone the entire time um from the time he went to the east coast i forget what the rotations were back then i mean they were six eight month deployments and he did eight of them back to back so i mean he was gone yeah gone 200 300 days out of the year i mean you remember the work up schedule you've gone a lot grew up on a small farm five acres but god man we had everything chickens ducks geese guinea hens pheasants quail raised chesapeake bay retrievers cows horses everything um and i'd take care of it all slopping hogs at five a.m um hot water heater blows out pipes freeze like the whole thing it's like i remember doing that my entire life just dealing with the farm life and then he'd come back home we'd go hunting and he was like now looking back on it's kind of surreal um it was awesome it was great like you're dead superman yeah how [ __ ] cool is that but back in the 90s like you remember nobody knew what a navy seal was no one so like my dad was in the navy your dad's in the army it doesn't really matter nobody gets it as we started coming up you know charlie sheen and that whole thing like people started no but nobody really knew there wasn't a war going on it was um it was 80s and 90s small little skirmishes but um losing people in combat wasn't a thing we never had to live through it it didn't happen it'd be a training accident every now and then and that was it so yeah i kind of went through that whole thing found my outlets um because i spent a lot of time alone you know me and my mom had my sister growing up and your sister older or younger younger five years um so yeah it was kind of just three of us living on that farm making things happen he'd come back home and gear up for another deployment we kind of just picked up where we left off you know but it was weird like people who uh who aren't in the special operations community or don't know anybody like that they think when your dad's uh in the military it's i don't like gunny highway like flat top haircuts and yes sir no sir my dad treated me like i was a new guy really yeah like we were we were best friends we were like that's who i wanted to be well when did you at what point did you know you wanted to become a team guy um it was always just assumed and it was always said like we were always doing something like when i'd have friends come over and stay the night we wouldn't do typical things we would do uh we'd do a physical challenge so we would run out we'd pick up ten logs we'd throw it over here we'd run back ten push-ups do five pull-ups run over here we'd do like an oat course like a circuit and if i didn't win better win it was one of those things so he's always kind of assumed and then when i hit skateboarding that's all i wanted to do i was addicted man i bought in hook line and sinker i lived in the middle of nowhere in chesapeake virginia and we had a little cul-de-sac next door some older kids skating i kind of got in that and when he would leave on deployment i'd have six months of no interruptions i'd knock out chores and straight over there that's all i did all day i obsessed damn started competing and that's what i wanted to do you started competing yeah well like the half pipe and now i did street um he built me a big vert ramp in the backyard so we did the whole thing um wrote it all but i really like street park um and that was kind of the punishment i'd get hurt you broke your arm they're not gonna let you a navy you can't be a seal if you get a plate and screws they're not going to take you you're going to ruin your entire life overriding the skateboard no [ __ ] so it really was just assumed you're oh you're a [ __ ] team guy oh absolutely you know i didn't know any better i didn't care yeah i mean i remember um i think like middle school i remember talking to my mom one day and i was like would dad be upset if i became a veterinarian because i love animals i do i really like dogs like a kind of a weird obsession but a healthy one i like dogs more than people and i wanted to be a vet and um it was kind of just pushed off like why would you want to be a vet and you can be a navy seal true everyone so quickly dismissed you can't be a professional skateboarder you can't be a veterinarian you could be a navy seal um some things kind of fell into place that uh forced it hand a little sooner than probably it should have yeah you talk about uh being addicted to the pressure to perform uh during your childhood and then and then you kind of talk about it again uh later on and i think when you got to dev group but what what were you addicted to performing to when you were a kid what pressure was it to your dad yeah um and there's all kinds of pressure but for me i wanted praise and this long analogy i get into where i equate everybody to a certain type of dog that dog's up bringing um and i'm a labrador i am i just want a people please just bounce that tennis ball on the ground let me go chase it i'll do whatever you want to just pet me on the head at the end of the day and that's all i wanted i just wanted him to acknowledge me that's all i wanted it's like i'm not good in school like we go and we hunt and i shoot everything like i get a good boy doing that but i didn't enjoy it i didn't i did it because it was a thing to do with him i don't care what we did if that dude would have been a fly fisherman i'd be fly fishing like i didn't care i just wanted to be next to him but i didn't enjoy hunting i didn't send him a deer stand i didn't get it yeah i mean i shot him went duck hunting snow goose on him and i had a blast but if you ask me what i want to do at 4 30 in the morning it wasn't go shoot snoogies not back then i wish he just would have wanted to do anything so yeah but the yeah the pressure to perform everything became a competition and then i just started competing at everything not good things yeah you know doing young childhood stuff yeah so you join you join at 17 years old yeah i got into a little bit of trouble when i was 16 and um long story short had to go to court and uh the old man threw me at the mercy of the court and said um your honor he he can't be charged with this you know we have to get this off his record because he's going to go to the navy and he's going to be a navy seal what was it um it was a an assault charge with a robbery with a robbery me and uh meet a bunch of my buddies got into a fight and in the course of the fight reached into um somebody's jacket and grabbed her phone and spiked it on the ground and because the dollar amount associated because it was physical altercation it became robbery and his parents wanted to press charges make it a big deal um at the end of the day we bought him a cell phone and he got expunged off my record um i mean it came up years later but yeah i mean so i had to get a waiver for that i had to get an age waiver underage possession tobacco so i had a bunch of waivers going in um which wasn't good um didn't really help my case and the judge looked at me and deal community service and let me leave and uh i didn't realize at the time but he had already gone to school and talked my guidance counselors on my principles and had signed me up for summer school so that was my uh my sophomore year going into my junior year and it already signed me up so the end of my junior year i graduate or we finish that year in june and i basically do summer school until august and then i'm gone already had me signed up for delayed entry program everything like i was going to the navy damn like there wasn't any doubt about it yeah no seal contract no a school nothing undesignated send it so how the hell did you get the bud zone if there was no contract i passed a screen test to boot camp that's it i didn't realize how um i didn't realize how dangerous a maneuver that was like my entire career for the people who don't know if you don't have a seal contract i tell people do not go to maps do not sign that contract because now they own you yeah and they do if i would have gotten sick if um if the whole class would have gotten the flu and they just don't give you the screen test i'm going to the fleet for four years like that's a long way to get back from yeah um no a school so if i didn't make it through buds i was going to be a deck seam and be a bosun's mate i didn't get in i already had a trident i didn't have a rating damn yeah so uh just for the audience that they don't know what the hell in a school is in a school basically um i kind of describe it as it's almost a marketing play of the teams like they need seals but so many people quit that what they do is they find all the jobs in the navy that have a shortage most of them are the ones you have to be either really intelligent to get into or the complete [ __ ] jobs and uh it's kind of a mixed bag of nuts there you pick one you go through this the training you go to buds uh whatever 80 85 people quit and then they fill those job descriptions so so you didn't have any a school you went right into you went right from boot camp to bud so were you 17 when you got to buds no [ __ ] yeah he um he was getting retired so the way we did it is he retired i think on the same day that i became active we did a one-for-one swap we have the exact same name he's a junior i'm the third and we just swapped him so he pulled strings um i graduated boot camp i came back to little creek i was a white shirt a little scruff roll back waiting for my bud's class yeah did that for three months and flew out to california with a sea bag and sent it i didn't have a car i didn't have a driver's license the entire time i was back i didn't have anything like i didn't i didn't know anything like my senior year i was in buds i knew nothing i didn't know anything i didn't have a cell phone had nothing i just sent it so you grew up in the teams yeah oh you take me on training trips it was a blast i got the ap hill for the demo courses and a bunch of the guys i worked with later in the teams i remember them when they were new guys and they remember me damn that's crazy being out there taking a skateboard out of ap hill and doing kick flips over cases of beer for the guys and yeah oh dude like we did the whole thing i'm like my childhood was [ __ ] awesome and it was like growing up in the teams it was cool but my entire time because i never saw the reality of war um i thought buds was i thought that's what we were doing for for a career because you get a team too back in the day the rudy bosch airs and they do log bt buddy carry ruck runs and all kinds of weird [ __ ] like it was miserable like the pt two miley ocean swims every week like it looked like it just continued so when we went to buds i was um i was not i was too young to be in good shape i was in good enough shape and i was just too dumb to quit i didn't know any better like when people would quit on the the very first day i couldn't get it through my mind like this isn't going to stop anytime soon boys and it would it confirmed my biases when i'd look down the beach and see seal team one doing log pt i'm like yeah dude they're paying us to work out this is the best thing that's ever happened to me like i didn't care i was super human like the whole chafing thing i didn't get it didn't bother you no nothing when i graduated hell week my dad was uh he was contracting then my mom flew out to pick me up and uh she was having me take pictures um it's a famous photo they've got that uh they've got that um that blood's class book they did the only easy days yesterday that's on my bud's class you can see a bunch of pictures of me in there and my mom came to pick me up we had to spend 24 hours in the barracks and then you could go out in town and do whatever um my mom would take a bunch of photos do all this and i missed the bus back to the barracks like that that 500 yards and i sprinted the whole way back there barefoot went back to my room and checked in and um dude it was probably 8 a.m the next morning mom took out a bunch of boys out for murray calendars breakfast did the whole thing uh the whole den mother and then made me go run the o course so she could take pictures of my dad oh [ __ ] yeah man when i ran a full low course when you got the buds i mean probably everybody over there knew your dad right a bunch of the cadre did my um i guess kind of my quasi godfather was the exo at group one time so he picked me up and actually walked me through the quarter deck and it started a bunch of the uh bunch of guys were old team two dudes so they already know full benefit oh yeah yeah full bending how about everybody around you were they getting full benefit because you do yeah um yeah they did but a lot of it was just isolation which is fine how many times how many guys did you start with do you remember i'll mess a number up um i mean i thought it was in the 200s yeah it was it was a ton um i started with 246 and i got rolled graduated with 247 and i think 20 originals something like that wouldn't many yeah if you had to pick one portion of buds uh who was your hardest claw was it second phase pool comp qualcomm i got ruled for that um just bad advice yeah bad advice i am i mean when you do it you have to do a bunch of sequences um you know they hit you with the whammy knot they do the whole thing um it's a whole series of procedures you have to exactly correct and the advice that i was given was they just want to see you not panic they want to see you calm cool and collected don't get wrapped over the procedures just show them they are not going to rattle you done and i went down they smashed me and i didn't do basically any of those procedures they completely flustered me i did it everything i could do and then i came up fail there's one same thing happened again it was a the final check was a j-val flick that was the final thing and i kept messing it i was just overcome by events um i let them ride on my cage and they did yeah got rolled back the next year or the next class a couple weeks but it was what i needed i needed it so you graduate and you head over to team 10. yeah we um finished that buds we all went out to kodiak alaska for winter warfare training and at the very end of that they asked for 10 volunteers to deploy early with team 10. it was a weird cycle everybody was getting kind of messed up and they needed people to go right now i think you were giving guys a month off in between getting your trident and checking the team so guys wanted to go home they wanted to see wives and see moms and all that stuff and nope every dude in that class under 19 years old's hand rocketed in the air as fast as they could no [ __ ] so they had to everybody they had to make a decision mm-hmm everybody we had a so cole um he had orders of team one we already knew we were going he had orders to team one he traded in the middle of our class to go to team 10. he was from virginia beach and he was big in the surfing and he wanted to stay out there and um i guess he'd want to break up the bromance so yeah he swamped right there oh [ __ ] yeah we drove straight across um how did they pick the 10 guys volunteer so there was only 10 volunteers they needed 10 people and yeah volunteered did you know you were going to war oh yeah for sure they told you yeah i mean there was no uh at team 10 they weren't doing um a uconn rotation anymore yeah there was a it was men manning i think we only had two groups we had one going to afghanistan and one going to iraq that's what you know yeah so yeah well before we get into that deployment let's take a quick break when we come back we'll pick up there cool what's going on patreon join me on vigilance elite patreon for our live video teleconference all right so we're back you just graduated skt you volunteered to go to war show up to team 10 and you're 19 years old on your first deployment to iraq how was that um humbling yeah was there any before we get into that was there did you mesh with did you have any time with your platoon before you went out the door or did you just show up and it's like hey guess what i graduated early and uh i'll be uh heading out the door with you tomorrow we showed up in um don't quote me exactly i think we showed up in august and we deployed in march so a little bit a couple months um we got to the major blocks we got cqb land warfare um missed all the pro dev so didn't wasn't one of the guys went to sniper school or any of his new guys so no new guy schools at all they gave us um hazmat demo driver which i couldn't do because i didn't have a driver's license um you had to be 25 so i couldn't do that i couldn't get a rental car um yeah it was basically just the that was like the lowest life form on earth but we had uh we had nine new guys and nine old guys so it was good man the mesh was good the learning curve was high um the standard in that platoon was extremely high but it should have been i'm glad it was now i didn't understand the time i thought they were being dicks just be dicks yeah um but if i could done it all over again i wish i would paid attention more a lot of that um a lot of that resistance came um from feeling like i was already part of it because i'd been born into it um so it was hard for me to let go of you know a little bit of arrogance i'm sure um the fact that i knew everybody like i already knew them like the cmc was my dad's best friend i've known him my entire life damn so it's it's weird to see him in the hallway like hey master chief didn't see him on the weekend like hey matthew you know what i mean what was your dad thinking did what was his reaction that you recall right after that 19. i mean he was happy for me was he yeah he's pretty stoked about it interesting yeah i mean um you could tell he was nervous until my mom was really nervous um i mean iraq in 2004 or five being shot never entered my mind like navy seals hadn't been shot that's not a thing like we're good it happened sporadically nobody's died yet not in iraq it was the ideas we were worried about it was like they were hitting them all day every day so when we got there i mean that was pretty surreal like flying in you know take off 19 years old and you know you're on a c-17 getting ready to land and people start you know two hours out they're breaking the no vans body armor helmet nods loading guns i've never deployed apparently this is completely normal like we landed like we were going to be under fire the entire time like you had no idea and when i mean now that you've deployed you open it up and there's a guy with a flatbed pulling off isu 90s like i thought we would be shot down like the way they were flying in it was crazy um everybody's getting sick just um it was early in the war it was a different environment no one had any um any real combat experience yeah even the older guys in the platoon had been to afghanistan but it was more of um the presence patrols it wasn't sustained combat they hadn't had it before so we were all kind of new guys together where were you guys uh baghdad baghdad yeah so we uh we split we did psd for a little bit and then um we do two weeks of that to doing the um all the dignitaries in iraq real quick psd's personal security detail so a lot of teams were doing that for the iraqi government officials yeah it was a way to way to stay busy way to be employed like hey if we if they have to put us here for this maybe they'll let us do da's too so we had a strike force set up and because i was so young i mean a lot of the new guys got pushed over to the strike force if they didn't want a 19 year old kid standing in front of cnn you know driving around the president of iraq or whatever else we were doing um so i was lucky in that sense i got to go over with we did a weird conglomerate with team 10 and team four from the east coast we all deployed together in the same compound and i think we had five and seven the same thing so we were just overflowed with people so we got to work with everybody it was pretty cool so what were you guys doing then if you weren't on the psd team doing raids raids yeah i'm just streaming what are you doing um a couple of weeks a couple of weeks yeah um you know four or five like staying busy they um but they were all mobility packages we'd pull out of that base and there was no armor um there was no uh no armor and turret gunner so i'd rocked a 50 up front um and it was bad man like we uh you just see the rubble on the side of the road expecting to hit one you just wouldn't and we make it through and you come back you're like okay gotta get some pancakes here we go we gotta make it back we drive back and nothing would happen like every day was a breath hold just wait and get hit you'd hear that sig axe would get reported all the significant activity all the ids that were hit the day before it's the same route in and out you have to drive there to start everything it's like you know marine convoy here army convoy there 10 people killed here god like when is this going to happen and because a curfew was so strict that time you never saw anybody we didn't do anything during the day so at night i mean i didn't see in iraqi and actual local for months no [ __ ] no not until we started doing da's we just didn't it'd be a couple dry holes here like are there people in this country like where are they the curfew was so stringent right then you didn't see them and then all of a sudden you got on a good target set now there's a bunch of people out you know you're like okay this is it it's weird man like iraq was a weird animal especially then being so young just not really knowing um like the training i felt uh the training was good but the mindset wasn't like i had no idea mentally how to prepare for that i just didn't it's like we're doing land warfare in you know arkansas i don't know what that has to do with driving around iraq right now like yeah i'm really good at running a saw in a 60 like but we're gonna get blown up right now yeah i mean uh target discrimination you'd see people on a rooftop ski mask carrying discus or you know pks whatever are they good are they bad are we gonna shoot these people like don't fire until you're fired upon and they wouldn't shoot at you are they good he's like ah sometimes neighborhood watch that's a lot of pressure on a 19 year old kid to not shoot a dude with a pk like you want me to wait until he shoots me that's kind of a weird thing to say but damn no well then how far so so we're your first deployment and the biggest loss since still team history happens yeah man so we're in the compound um everybody was there um four ten five seven we're all in there we've got a centralized jock and you guys never came to the jock we just didn't you stayed out of it we stayed in our own little bat cave doing new guy stuff but i remember i was walking back from the gym one night and the double doors open and it was a huge um tv screens you know typical jock cinematic screens all over the place and uh this frantic oh stuck his head out and grabbed me he goes you would seal team 10. and i said yeah and he goes go get you oh i see right now and i looked over his shoulder and i saw what looked to be the side of a mountain and a big smoldering thing sitting on it and i ran back out there and i grabbed him as fast as i could and told everybody all the new guys stayed put and all the old guys ran into the jock and it only took a couple minutes and you could hear it um you could hear grown men wailing and they knew like i got goosebumps thinking about it [ __ ] man you didn't know so i was supposed to be an echo with him i was and my lpo of golf platoon pulled me out because he knew my dad so i was supposed to be in afghanistan and now i'm in iraq but all of our best friends that volunteered all went to echo platoon and echo platoon is on deployment in afghanistan so i think all of our best friends are dead we think everybody's on the same bird and they're all dead right now and we hear nothing for like two weeks you didn't hear anything for two [ __ ] weeks nothing everything converged in afghanistan and they put us on river city and we heard nothing i saw pictures of dead guys in the gym when it came out in navy times yeah we didn't know anything we didn't have email accounts back then like we weren't it wasn't like you were on some secure access like you didn't you didn't get anything they shut down the phones and um when the cmc finally came in he briefed on the entire thing and they broad brush the actual ground element i didn't find out about marcus latrell and all of those people for months later i never heard the story um he was so overtaken by the helo going down that marcus who like i had no idea never even heard that story um he came in and i remember asking him um everybody walked away and i grabbed him it's like your new guy's dead he said nope and it was a sigh of relief selfishly because the new guys are who i knew and then i thought oh [ __ ] all of that experience is gone right now he didn't have a total he just said no new guys but you knew it was an entire bird full like you knew that it's like now the name started to come out and i remember they uh they set us all down we were sitting down uh outside of a bunch of trailers big gravel big uh fire pit and we put up the proxima like typical team guys [ __ ] and they're playing the memorial service they shot at little creek they're playing it for everybody and uh you know you see uh see seth lucas coming to frame they pin his old man's award on him and i'm [ __ ] bawling my eyes out and it keeps going through and through and it gets to a point um patsy gets up and speaks on danny's behalf and i remember i said it what the [ __ ] is an sdv2 guy doing there and then fcv1 i'm like what the [ __ ] is that but no one knew no one said anything um at least not at that time it didn't make any sense to us so they just augments or they just yeah they're just assisting echo we had no idea it was a qrf at least i didn't for a long time um and then it started to come out about the lone survivor and everything else and we started to piece the story back together but until i was in back at stateside mid-second deployment or mid-second workup 2006 i finally heard the story from someone who was there i had no idea they um yeah that helo was the only thing that mattered like that was that was our entire world did that um because we were right around the same age that time when i was into and uh did that did that hit you like did the magnitude of what happened actually hit you being that young and you didn't know anybody you know you didn't know those guys i didn't know them either no it didn't hit me no the old guys i didn't know um i mean you knew some of them um got really tight with their wives afterwards all the kids obviously um but no like they were uh you were playing chief equipped and i don't know you yeah but i'm not in ecclestone um known for reputation stuff like that but at that time there's no way you could understand the magnitude of what that did with community yeah talk about a dose of reality that's reality like that's what you're doing yeah like these people are actively trying to kill you it's like like to me it wasn't it wasn't real yet it was like a cowardice thing like oh yeah they playing ieds like this and that but team guys weren't getting shot like they weren't dying they had a couple random ones but not like that not like that yeah it's like seals don't die like that like you can't just take out that many it's not a thing so yeah heavy dose reality on the way back but yeah the magnitude wasn't probably until extortion actually no that long yeah it didn't hit me until i got we relieved those guys over there and uh it didn't it didn't really sink in until we started seeing some of the intel reports and they were i remember uh i was with a good friend of mine sitting next to him and they it was shown they were showing deets on there and he just started [ __ ] crying and he uh they were stripping his clothes off and he was like i remember when he got that [ __ ] tattoo on his rib cage and i was like oh this is [ __ ] the real deal but um yeah yeah man it's real deal like there's some evil people on this earth really committed to the cause yeah i mean yeah it's really hard to train for that scenario though it's like how good everybody was on that hilo like they were all bad [ __ ] dude they were awesome and it didn't matter it's like god if you just wouldn't let him sit on the ground and then ambushed him like some cowards that [ __ ] yeah like yeah like war's not fair i think that was the lesson learned out of that doesn't matter how good you are if you don't get the the chance to fight the chance to show how good you are doesn't matter yeah yeah let's take another quick break we'll come back we'll uh get into your second deployment all right dj so we're back from your first deployment and it's 2007 i think you're 22 years old now and you're getting ready to go back to iraq again for a second time and uh you found yourself in somewhat of a historic firefight uh that's been talked about a lot so um i'd love to get your take on what happened and and how that deployment went um yeah kind of leading up to that um and we'll kind of segue back to it we um on our turnover up when we first flew in there the so we had our our platoon our sister platoon and we had a we were leaving seal team four so that was my day's platoon so our turnover out with our sister platoon is when mike dave's incident happened he got shot 27 times [ __ ] that's how we kicked off the deployment that's how it started mm-hmm [ __ ] hey man so we had one of the guys in the systemation got shot got medically retired took a a crazy round through the arm and it um had a bunch of nerve damage and balled his hand up he's out and he was one of our corpsmen too he's an awesome dude so we automatically lost him and we basically just combined forces were you on that operation i wasn't that was our sisterable tune and it was one of the handover offs um so it was team four heavy and then a little bit of team 10 um you know the hq element a couple of senior guys just to see how they did business these what the routes are like just what the target sets like and it just so happened they were going after um an aq cell that had just shot down a marine helo so they had all their guns had their body armor had helmets had night vision had the whole thing [ __ ] so we kind of rode that wave pretty much the whole deployment it was super busy a different area working for uh working for the west coast um teams so it was great we were busy like super busy and it it felt like how i thought it would feel really yeah like this is what you envision when you're you know like even um even some of the animosity stuff like um we'd go to the chow hall and they'd [ __ ] about it because we'd come in wearing tank tops and now you gotta wear like even the stuff we would complain about it made you feel like i feel like a navy seal now yeah like i feel like i'm in a strike force like this is how it's supposed to feel like we're gelling we're going out every night like this is this is what it is but the reality hasn't set in yet on what we're actually doing because it hasn't happened to you yet so it's not it's not a real thing yeah um a couple months in that deployment we're we're steady um engaging with the enemy it's fine um and one night we go out and we're in a really bad um in a really bad section where were you guys at um just outside of fallujah but we were operating this little town called karma okay and it was good but um a lot of palm groves a lot of a lot of nasty [ __ ] out there we just we were not trained to do so kind of coming to play later about our inexperience um but one night we we do an offset in phil we're patrolling a target and we get about 200 meters out and you could see the entire posture shift of everybody in that assault force everybody switched you could smell it like this is a [ __ ] ambush like it just is walking down the road the houses we were walking past like you just you were waiting it was a breath hold the entire way um and i say that because people started doing things they've never done before the pace they were moving we've never moved to that pace before um when we would um when we would do patrolling and training like there's a lack of daisical patrol and there's a patrol to contact like we're gonna get hit right now everybody was in patrol to contact mode like it's happening right now you're waiting for trader to throw rd sims and kick the whole thing off like it was it's right there and i remember the last 50 feet sprinting to the building they had a big overhang and we've been getting isr updates there's multiple guys on the roof okay so as we patrol up there's a bunch of guys in the courtyard of this and it's a it's an iranian influence so that we're kind of going after now and they fight completely different we locked down some guys on these um on these sleepers on our courtyard and we we maneuver up um made silent entry we go in we're doing our whole clearance and i bolt straight for the stairs um it's a huge open room um i don't know how to describe it um just a huge open room with little offshoot bedrooms made no sense to be a house it was like a structure um and they had a a two-tier landing that came up and banked and then it basically just opened into the roof just a an opening in the middle of the roof and you walked up and you're surrounded 360 720 by the roof stacked up the train got right there right at the last little breach of it so about this high underneath it and uh i stood up and threw on my laser and there was a dude sprinting at me at full blast with a pistol in his hand and unloaded six shots at me no [ __ ] yeah so he unloaded um i unloaded on him got off three rounds in a boat lock so dropped to my knees and we called xville ran around the back everybody got their guns up and running and grenades started coming off the roof so in rally what happened is so hold on did you eliminate the threat yep he's dead mm-hmm did he he didn't hit you he did he did hit you he hit me in the in the chest plate in uh one of the magazines so pistol caliber like a 45 dead center i mean dead center um so snack me there which i don't know how we did it with a downward angle because that was presented so blind luck snapping the plates were good i don't know where the other five went i don't know how they didn't hit anybody else um but i mean he was probably within six feet and he was there what you didn't realize um and the isr update we did not get is he was standing at the base of stairs waiting they never told us that he's standing there waiting for us to come up and there is a another shooter in a sandbag position with a belt fed a pk aimed at top of the stairs and he's pulled off a suicide vest and laid it at the base of the stairs and pulled back a command wire and you can see him he's holding it he's waiting to clack it off and we never know so if i would have made entry if i shot that dude and would have continued to go that guy would cut me in half so just blind luck that i got bolt lock and i'm forced to retreat so we start trading grenades on the roof back and forth a bunch of different maneuver elements are happening we've got three or four guys that are fragged from the grenades our chief included you corman our terp our jtac to a bunch of guys not bad but bad enough i mean your first time being wounded like um takes you by surprise like your wounded eagle it's like oh no like how bad you actually think the worst um but we had to win the fight so we're trading grenades on the roof we're doing that whole thing and um one of the guys wanted to send a one of the names from the courtyard he grabs him perfect english um he's like i know who that is oh yeah he's like it's my cousin tells him again like send that dude up there and tell him to tell his cousin to come down here like we don't know who's up there the slant was really weird that night with how many women and kids were supposed to be there was bad intel he was kind of just hodge-podge and we sent that dude back up there and he's calling out to his cousin you know whatever he's saying whatever he's saying he got halfway up the stairs and poked his head up and that dude let it go killed his own cousin and here we go more grenades are coming off the roof um so the whole force now we're basically locked down inside of this building and grenades are coming off we don't know how many dudes are on the roof and now there's multiple maneuver elements of bad guys in and around the city we have to fall back now um we have super badass new guy posted up with a saw basically everybody wants that opportunity rocked the front of this building so we can all run underneath it that dude stepped out and just sent it we all ran back and um we got our first fire mission in like a first like no ship fire mission yeah so um that was cool i didn't know um i've been hit yet you didn't know you've been hit yet i had no idea we uh i kept having a bolt lock so i'd fire three rounds bolt lock i dumped out a mag grabbed a new one and when i did it cut my fingers so where the round hit it it had blown out the back of it a big spider web so when i grabbed it it filled my hands open so i dropped the mag and grabbed a new one got the gun back up and running and for whatever reason i grabbed it off the ground and put it in my back pocket i don't know why i didn't i just i did it um so we got back on the helo we're flying out after that whole thing um we got all the medevac guys out they were fine minimal injuries nothing crazy um we're flying back on the hilo and i'm sitting next to uh the jay redman and i held up the mag and i'm looking i'm trying to focus it with my nods back and forth and i don't know what it is like it never it never entered my conscious thought that i took around there yeah i didn't know what it was put it back in my pocket and we get back to the ready room and we're going in for the debrief and i dropped my gear and i looked at it and it still in disbelief what the [ __ ] is that and i hand it to one of the other guys and he's like that's a [ __ ] bullet dude oh sh that is a bullet that is a bullet dead center um but it's weird when you look at the bullet and the angle it came into um we did a lot of breaching back then we land a lot i used to run around with the charges captain and i had them all capped in and i had my primary charges and a pouch right there and it nicked the edge of the pouch where the caps were exposed to so obviously if it would have hit that blasting cap that would have been a whole damn that'd been a bad day so for the audience just real quick i'm just going to interrupt uh when he's talking about the caps being exposed basically a breaching charge is a bomb you know that they use to blow a door blow a hole in the wall blow whatever up and uh the blasting caps are extremely sensitive so if that would have hit one of those uh it would have been the end of the road for you mm-hmm yeah we were running on big charges we blew everything um we blew everything that was the sop back then if you could uh you could blow it you blew it so you didn't even [ __ ] feel you didn't feel the fact that you got [ __ ] pegged by a 45 in the chestplate so thinking back on it um the guys behind me said they saw me like take a reflex i didn't feel the next morning um when i stood up and i arched back it felt like i did too many sit-ups like sore and sternum um kind of hard to take a full breath but nothing like would you imagine like i imagine i would have known instantly like oh my god i didn't the adrenaline was so high that that's kind of what we use for like a training analogy now like when that adrenaline dumps you won't know yeah you won't know like in approximately a gunfight that is that close when you see muscle flash and you feel it it's very different it's not being shot after 300 meters it's not uh it's not hitting the wall inside of six feet it's a very different experience yeah no i've never been shot i don't know you know what that feels like but i always imagined it would uh knock you on your [ __ ] ass damn luckily it didn't yeah no [ __ ] so yeah we got through that one that was like reality is set in though and it's like okay all the stuff in training now now everything is slowed down the cqb is super crisp now it's all real world we're very current and it's good like business is great we're going out every night every other night we've got assets it's like it's awesome as good as it ever could have been and we go back this is um to the firefight you were referencing was uh the one with jay redmond and those guys um that was september 10th um so almost on the anniversary and uh everything that could have gone wrong went wrong but in a positive way um zero lume there wasn't an ounce of moonlight out nothing and for the guys that don't run around with night vision um those things aren't perfect they're not man you don't have any ambient light out there like they don't work very well they just don't so we were going back to the exact same spot two houses down from where that thing happened so we called it the karma house the bad karma here we go and we're going to land on the axe we're going to blow the front door and take this thing down hard that's what we did back then um so flying helos right to the front door and this is what we're doing and we knew from past experiences exactly what kind of resistance we were going to meet and we planned for the worst like i went in on that thing completely knowing in that first room i was going to get shot damn like they had belt feds they had suicide vests like these guys are committed for sure if we go in right now that first room is going to be sketchy and we landed on the axe and we ran through that thing like we've done a million other times and there was no one there dry hole and we get an update that all those guys had left and it ran out the back and now they are an adjacent essentially a corn field but if you imagine um imagine an endless field of nothing just a plowed feel and then right in the middle of it is about 500 yards of six foot tall i don't know what you call it it's like straw but it's not i mean you can't see anything um and they're trying to walk us down on top of this guy so we all switch over it's um like six or seven of us and we all get online and we're all starting to walk down um we've all switched over to fires and we're listening and two of the new guys and one of the eod guys had not switched over to fires they were we literally interlocked arms that's how bad it was you couldn't see [ __ ] we couldn't lose anybody inside there um we'd never walked the palm groves before we didn't have a dog we didn't have the experience and looking back on is one of the most dangerous things i've ever done because you knew the guy in there had a gun like for sure you knew that uh they run around with s vest and you know they're committed so now we are walking on there so if you imagine just a a big open field with a big sparkle in the center of it and we're gonna walk towards it and we're gonna walk until we find this guy okay so we do completely committed interlocked arms and we are walking forward and we're getting the updates 15 feet ten feet you're standing on him and you see everybody looking down like he's not here third person from the right you are standing on him and we all look over to the right nothing like what the [ __ ] so we're all on a line standing right there and jay calls an audible he's like whole maneuver element take a right-hand turn because we know there's an open field we just have to cross and now it's completely open now we can re-gather our [ __ ] and we can assault from this side if it's walking through all this all this crazy brush we can approach it from the open side and just walk in the brush a little bit maybe call him out do something else and when we turn right this element stayed they didn't get the word so now we have a bad guy our element and then another element now we're in a polish ambush we turn we walk out and we enter this beautiful manicured open field there's not an ounce of cover anywhere in it there's not a rut there's nothing there's not a rock there's a single tire and it's about 20 feet yeah 30 feet from the edge of the uh from the edge of the brush line it's just out there and we're standing there in a team guy gaggle standing around like wondering what the [ __ ] is this guy really there is it a dog is it some animal like these guys are clearly lost and we don't realize that that bad guy is in there probably six feet inside and he's looking at us and we're from the middle of the wall and we're close we're having a full-on conversation and um at one point we're trying to relay to the other guys because now we know we've lost three now they're lost in brush country and we have to reconsolidate them so we can deal with this guy because now we know the reality we've turned the entire profile blue forces bad guy blue forces we've got all the rest of the guys over here on on the west side and now we're trying to do a link up like we have to get them around to reconsolidate with us um the blue force pitcher and knowing where everybody is um it's challenging at times but you really have to know then we basically walked right up to the edge it's um yeah jay's there our corpsman our terp the jtag and a guy we'll just call matty is standing there with me and we're all in kind of a team guy gaggle and jay hears something in the bushes and i think he believed at the time it was the guys and he screamed out hey and when he did that dude let off the biggest hollywood belt fed burst i've ever heard everybody dropped it was like um we do the new guys scenarios you know you're doing land warfare the first contact and all the headshed dies just and that you've got to drag around like you know playing war games that's what it was like everybody hit the deck and there was a tree probably 30 feet that way and i remember i turned i heard it watched him drop and i was sprinting so fast to that thing i remember the dust kicking up in front of me when he was tracking me um i dove behind the tree and he pounded on that tree for what seemed like an eternity um i was on my back looking up i mean you can imagine helmets cockeyed there's no ambient light i can't see [ __ ] through my nods um and there's just dirt blowing all over me i mean i am consumed by this i don't even know where he's at now i don't know if he's on his feet chasing me down like i'm just overcome with withering [ __ ] fire um and then it stops and he pans back over and he starts to engage the dudes um this thing goes on for um for a little bit we're trying to reconsolidate um the jtac has went out and he's trying to grab people now he's behind a tire i remember looking over and seeing um jay and i remember him sitting upright and i watched him get shot one more time um right in the face and it looked like that was it he hit the ground so hard you knew he was dead um so this inaudible has to be made we have the jtac and behind this tractor tire that i mean it's a it's a tractor tire it's not big it's about that half the ground serves no purpose and he's behind it and i'm directly adjacent from him looking at him like i have an out out this way we can't because we have all these dudes that are shot up and i remember it was like the scene from black hawk down come to me [ __ ] you come to me ready yup and i got up and i ran as fast as i could and i dove like a baseball slider and behind that thing in it it was such a sigh of relief to feel another human next to me um i was so thankful that he was there and now we have to figure out how to get out there and bring those people back here and this whole thing's happening very very fast so jay's been shot multiple times he's uh he's discombobulated he's talking and this guy's still trying to shoot him but he can't see [ __ ] because it's black so if you're quiet he can't hear you the bravest thing i have ever seen in 17 years happened on that night um i watched maddie get up and run forward after he'd already been shot and grabbed our corpsman is dragging him backwards just like on the movies corman pulls out his pistol and he's shooting into this bushline um and maddie gets shot again spins him around and dumps him he gets back up grabs him and gets shot again dumps him he gets back up and continued to drag him back until we got them all back to the tractor tire you know we're all pulling them in there we basically just dog piled on them just plates on plates um just trying to build up a human wall to not let these people be shot again um and he's still shooting us the entire time he hasn't let up he just doesn't know where we're at now so if we can keep everybody quiet we've got hands over miles like people are screaming we had uh the corman got shot through tib fib shattered his leg matty got shot through the brachial artery hit his humerus and shattered that and it flipped over the back of his neck and i remember because we talked about it later and it made sense he looked very confused at one point um in between dragging the corman back and he said he was looking for his arm when it broke it snapped and went over his neck and he looked down and just saw this um couldn't see it um i mean there's no moonlight you can't see anything you can't see under nods right there it's just gone you look down and there's a stump there so he doesn't know he's been shot in the leg um jason shot a leg in the um in the side plates i think he took a double stack to the elbow so it blew out his entire arm and he took one through the face that basically removed his jaw removed his nose and you could look inside him it was as bad as it could have been um so we get them back and we go into t triple c mode tourniquet's on there we're packing wounds we're doing that and thank god for that course um i don't know where we'd be without that the live tissue training and all that that was uh i was so prepared for that um we were in and out of that blowout kit so fast to uh and i i joke with matty about it he was um i put the tourniquet on he was begging for me to stop i was like two more two more turns finally got the blood to stop and i had my fingers inside his arm feeling out that thing the medics working on jay and um the corpsman putting on tourniquets pressure dressings all that and i remember having a distinct conversation with maddie he's begging me for quick lot he's like quick club over and over and over i remember from talking to uh the surgeons during the training he's like if you dump quick lot in there the only way to remove it is to cut it out and it's inside of his bicep and i mean to me i have the bleeding stopped i have it under control and i'm not pointing quick lot in you because they're gonna have to cut it out of you like i'm saving you you're not dying here like you don't need that quick lot um we had a bunch of hemostatic dressings like i'm packing this thing it's fine and uh he wouldn't shut the [ __ ] up about it so i told him yeah and i grabbed a i think a quick lot and i mean this is underneath a tractor tire where rounds are coming over it's like i've got it and i pretended like i did it and i went like that and uh he said thank you so much so yeah you never got quick lot um so the next thing we uh we have tourniquets on them we are talking about what we're going to do now and he is still engaging and the jtac j um starts prepping a fire mission and it's close um it's the closest uh at that point is the closest uh fire mission the coalition forces the entire war no [ __ ] yeah that's the name um 10 meters 15 minutes 10 [ __ ] meters i mean close enough where you could take a grenade and throw it holy [ __ ] i mean like it was they started walking them in by this time the other element we had had maneuvered away um nobody was firing because we didn't have um we didn't have a pitcher we didn't know where this dude was coming from we didn't know where our forces were and we thought we thought that if we were to engage this guy we would have hit our own blue forces so there's a big flow in the fire and we were basically just being withered that we were we were just getting chewed up um i mean strobes getting shot off helmets like it's like it's in there and they're everywhere but hitting human beings so we've essentially taken the tractor and we've stacked up plates in between them on our sides and now we're just working on people we're laying on top of people doing whatever we can in jace prepping for a fire mission and he's asking for 25 mike mike and 40 mike mike and basically to start walking it in and i remember a distinct conversation they said no they said it's too close and he said we're gonna [ __ ] die anyway juliet alpha send it gave his initials they started dropping it and you could feel it you could you could feel the vibration start to get closer and closer and start to bounce you off the ground a little bit and kept coming kept coming kept coming and then they started going tally on target and uh i mean you could hear that dude the impacts you'd hear them smack um you could hear him screaming and it was very satisfying i just let him go like let him go like we're not walking back up that tree line again let that dude die we called in um we called in for a medevac they landed right on the axe um right there where we were we loaded them on there and i jumped in um the corpsman already been shot so we had him maddie and jay redman um and we talked about the typical team guy [ __ ] sometimes about if this happens just put me out of my misery you know what i mean like if i get hit by an ied and it blows my dick off just finish me like people say that [ __ ] yeah that would have been one of the times um if my face looks like this put me down and he was the most coherent the most calm dude i have ever seen sitting upright leaning forward letting [ __ ] pour out of his face so he could breathe um and he didn't say much man i don't know if the shock hit him i don't think he knew how bad it really was um so i'm working on maddie and hilo we're kind of doing the whole comb thing running down his fingers we're finding bullet holes we're trying to patch all this stuff up and we get him back um those hilo pilots flew that bird so fast um i thought they were going to suck us out of the bird but we had to shut the doors i've never been in 60 that flew that fast ever i mean to this day that thing that thing was in a full attack mode the entire way back it was the fastest [ __ ] i've ever been in and thank god for it um some of the stuff you don't think about like um the tourniquets slipping like now the compartment syndrome sets in all the blood's getting pushed out now it gets loose now we start blowing blood all out of it like it's in my mouth it's all over me like i'm covered in it head to toe like it's i mean it looks like a scene out of blackhawk download by back of that hilo like there's just med kits everywhere and just people lay down it's like another dose of reality you know team guys do get shot and if you're if you're not trained to handle that situation you won't you won't you won't rise to that like if i wouldn't have been through t triple c if all those dudes would have played out that exact scenario hundreds of times in training i don't know what would have happened like it's a testament to how good those dudes prepared that jtag the balls he had yeah to drop that the confidence he had in that ac 130 crew like if you missed that thing like your first round for windage it was so close he could have killed us it's like that's the confidence um it was humbling man to get back from that thing i remember we um we dropped those guys off i wasn't there for the rest of the target what happened after that um i was probably gone for an extra two hours and i came back from the debrief and i walked in and you know i'm an emotional [ __ ] wreck um i would have sworn that matt was gonna die for sure like jerry looked like he was dead um i never thought he'd make it i mean just the way his face looked like he looks so bad but outside of his arm no real life-threatening injuries um outside of a [ __ ] kind of cosmetic stuff i mean he it's a really lucky way to get shot matty was uh he was a different animal he got a bad infection external fixators you know it's all over the place in the hospital um a very surreal moment um especially for that deployment just that's how we're gonna end this whole thing just it's a somber way to go home on that deployment and i never really got to process it i didn't have time um just the whole reality of what had happened kind of what we've been through damn together as a group um being in firefights is one thing like being in that is completely different like just helpless you couldn't shoot back i couldn't do anything i could just lay there and put my plates in front of that guy and hope he shoots me and not you and give you a tourniquet outside of that man outside of moral support like we're all just in this together and i would about anything there's no way we would walk away from that there's no i thought we were dead after the initial contact it was so close it was so violent um and i think it was kind of that um not laxative attitude because we were definitely wired tight for that but it's not reality until it's reality like that's not gonna happen yes it is whether you want it to or not it's happening right now so um yeah a lot of good lessons learned from that a lot of stuff that carried with me my entire life even in training usually a lot of guys will put on this hollywood show during training they'll um they'll run out there and they'll like try to save the princess or some kind of crazy [ __ ] no sometimes you have to sometimes you have to get up and you have to say cover me and you have to go out and do that and sometimes you have to call in danger close fire missions sometimes you have to run out there being shot already and drag back a dude to save his life like there's no argument with that that's the most heroic [ __ ] i've ever seen ever um i mean to this day like if i had one defining moment where i stood back and i was just star struck that's it like if i had to if i had to capture a you know a 30 second clip of do you want to be a navy seal why do you want to be one because people will do this for me that'd be it maybe jay calling the fire mission matty run out there grab him back to corman dragging him back it's a badass move that is some heavy [ __ ] [ __ ] man damn so yeah i um i'd almost been killed six seven times on a deployment it was it was getting rough and that was kind of the last straw we were about to do turnover they medivacked all those guys home and then they sent me back on the first bird and when i landed i went and saw one saw matty in the hospital his mom was in there and um it was cool man like then the connection to reality because we hadn't had that before i've never had a guy in a platoon be shot and it gave me a really good insight on what happens when you actually get shot like it's not the movies it's not a graze it's like oh yeah he took and he continued to fight for six hours and he doesn't miss a rotation that bullet hits your bone you're out of this program maybe forever you're definitely out of it for nine months multiple surgeries now infections and rehab and physical therapy you get it cleared by the doctors and everything else everything that goes in behind the backside to get you back up and running it wasn't a reality we never had to deal with it like i definitely take that forward now to training like we do simulation [ __ ] i use that as a prime example if you haven't seen what happens when a bullet hits human bone on the blue side or on the bad side the bullet doesn't care it's doing the exact same amount of damage like you're out of the game for six months man yeah so but yeah that was uh that was how we wrapped up 2007. that's pretty [ __ ] rough you keep in touch with all those guys still or yeah i was just texting with uh with the jtac actually dave before yesterday really trying to get him to come in and do the skateboard thing um yeah get smart therapy on get the boys back together i think everybody um well those guys will met or not i don't give a [ __ ] like that really [ __ ] us up um yeah it's rough man yeah got to sit there and just wait to die damn yeah it was um yeah it's a real experience just the proximity of it um that's something that can't be um it can't be overlooked like it's different being pinned down from a couple hundred meters away like you can get up and maneuver not this one like if that dude would have stood up and just walked us down it had been over so it's like all the lessons learned on laser placement how to focus your nods ambient conditions everything else it's like i know now it's like one more pearl and lock that one away i won't ever forget that again damn so it's like everything you know i think we kind of take that forward in the training now it's like all these lessons have been learned not because you know we're superhuman but because we're honest and we [ __ ] things up and everything you're doing right now i've [ __ ] up before there's no reason for you to make the same mistake yeah so yeah i mean huh it's a big thing just not being um not being mentally prepared for that situation you thought you were but i hadn't hadn't looked at it in a in a realistic lens yet it was still video game mode still training mode it was that's not going to happen to me even though we were walking down interlocked arms waiting to get shot wasn't reality yet you scared shitless i knew it was coming any moment but in until it goes loud it's not real [ __ ] man how was it being home after that terrible i was [ __ ] up man i had uh i was dating a chick at the time um she uh [ __ ] just went solid dude i was just i was in a bad spot um everything sent me over the edge just so hyper vigilant um i just couldn't shake it and uh i think i really started to obsess over everything then like the details and training training methodology and just like i really became a student of the craft then like then i got it all the [ __ ] all these old dudes have been talking this is why this is what they were trying to prepare me for but they didn't have a formula to give it to me they didn't have a they didn't have a movie they didn't have uh they didn't have their own c story to tell me this they just knew from training over and over and over this is what it has to be and they were right like if you make training so realistic you don't know the difference because of your mindset it's very hard to trip people up if i paint it real in my mind during training my body won't know the difference let's take a break that was heavy oh [ __ ] man all right man so we're back that was a pretty [ __ ] devastating deployment but uh you came back and a little bit of good happened you met your wife so how did that happen so after 2005 um you had the red wings thing go down and most of the wives stayed local um so we all stayed there now a bunch of them lived offshore drive so that became just our our running crew um we go there new family dinners laura mcgreevy's house all the time and um just became a big melting pot of gold star families um internet patsy threw them so um yeah i've never met her before didn't know danny didn't know any of that i'd seen her for you know a five minute segment before and um yeah gold star community kind of brought us together which was pretty taboo let me backtrack just real quick because the audiences know this so you eventually wound up marrying patsy who previously was married to danny dietz who died in operation red wings she's a gold star yeah so yeah which at the time was um it was taboo like nobody did that they um this is gonna sound bad but i'll say it um we kind of wrote them off like they're untouchable once your husband dies like you can't date again um and i know team guys did it i did it too you judge them like how long are they supposed to wait do they wait 10 years like you can't judge people for that you have no idea what they're going through and kind of the school thought where i came up in the teams um i fell in love with her right off the bat and i didn't give a [ __ ] if she was a gold star or not um and i caught hate for it i did had answers and tough questions um i didn't care what was it about her he liked so much um her understanding she got it she knew exactly what it was reality had smacked her um her stepdad was cecile so she'd been in the navy she knew the commitment um and she served herself like she knew exactly what it was she knew what her deployment was and she knew the reality of it i didn't have to explain it to her i feel like that's a big thing in the teams is people marry their high school sweetheart after you've been gone for four years and you come back and she has no idea that you're gonna be gone 250 plus days out of every year like she has no idea you're gonna come home with you know three weeks of nasty ass laundry drop it off and leave for a two week training trip i didn't have to explain after she already knew and she was bought in so it made a it made that transition so easy because she was dedicated as i was so she uh she really let me she let me obsess like she knew where i had to go to get to the level i wanted to get and she encouraged it so yeah i mean she saved me for sure how long were you guys dating before you got engaged um about a year and a half so a year and a half yeah did you see you met her pretty much right when you got home yeah and then by the end of the next workout you better do the next workout um i think around it was thanksgiving that year or something like that um proposed to her in front of her old family my old family and the community kind of erupted in a positive way it was awesome that's cool yeah dude it was as it was supposed to be yeah so on on this trip home it sounds like it was pretty eventful you you met your wife you got engaged you screened for green team yep um started my third workup we um i was in a very uh i was writing an emotional roller coaster daily i just was um i was drinking back then a lot um just trying to numb my senses i didn't care what it was luckily i never did anything really stupid um definitely had my moments that was the only thing i knew i didn't know what else to do people that i could talk to wouldn't talk other people that have been exposed to similar things they uh they put up this facade like um [ __ ] wrong with you so i just i did the exact same thing i walled it up like nope i won't even address that i won't address any of these feelings i have i want to address the anxiety my performance anxiety going into that 2008 2009 year was through the roof like having panic attacks and i didn't know what they were i thought i was having little mini strokes if you haven't had one they're it's alarming like just sitting down in a cold sweat yeah i have no idea what's coming over me right now but i know it's not good and i know i can't say anything to anybody because they'll pull me out of this job and that's not happening so we have to do what we do suffer in silence just be quiet and continue doing your job and that's what you have to do um fortunately for me right around that time we started a new workup and i got a i got a new platoon chief who uh used to be over to command his name's barrett and um he was everything i needed like i mean you couldn't have you could have molded a better dude at that moment in time for me he um he talked to talk he walked the walk and he performed and he was he was nasty he was he was um because usually you know guys kind of they have a shelf life and they don't you know your platoon chief or your uh your troop chief isn't making the entries every time he doesn't need to be the best shot anymore because he's commanding controlling everything it wasn't like that with that dude he outperformed everybody and he basically set the bar at what development group is supposed to be and like that's what it became like i can't outshoot him i can't out pt him i don't know more about cqb than him i don't have a combat experience he does um and it humbled you which is exactly what i needed exactly what everybody needed we needed we needed to see the in-state i needed to see what you could accomplish if you um if you went all the way and that's what that dude did he showed us like if you want to be a professional if you want to be the guy you have to go all the way well that was good advice or bad advice i took it literally and um i started to set up little walls um little break off points and relationships and friendships and everything else if you impede anything on this progression i'm done not one [ __ ] second will i give to you because you're not worth the end state you're not you're not worth me sacrificing my dreams and my hopes and all my wants and wishes i want to be the best navy seal i can possibly be and if you slow me down one second i'll never talk to you again like i don't have time for it like this community that organization this job deserves the very best of me emotionally spiritually physically everything tactically and you have to completely in my opinion to reach uh the highest level you possibly can you have to cut out all the other [ __ ] and i thought that job deserved it i did i grew up in my entire life and you've never met a dude who loved being maybe still more than me i just did every day i woke up even through the where everybody's complaining in the platoon space on this and that i loved it i'd come home and i just i just smile man just thankful to be there thankful that i'm doing exactly what i uh what i was put on this earth to do i loved it did you cut any did you cut any important relationships or was it just a coincidence and a little [ __ ] no i cut off i cut all kinds of [ __ ] out um we had a in a platoon life um people that spread a lot of hate a lot of discontent a lot of [ __ ] talking um a lot of guys that call them nine to fivers the last one in here you show up five minutes before our first muster near the first dude bouncing out of here at 4 pm like what are you doing yeah birds of feather i'm going to shun myself and i'm going to isolate myself with only people that are better than me and that are going to help me achieve the level i want to achieve the people that want to stay late and train the guys who want to show up early and work out the guys that are doing courses on saturday and sunday like the guys who are going to fully commit that's who i'm going to surround myself with it's the best thing i ever did um it gave me the focus i could just strip out everything and i could just tunnel vision every day had a purpose like today i'm doing fitness i'm not checking my phone i don't have social media wasn't a thing you didn't have to deal with any any kind of [ __ ] like that um but you could just scrub away bad relationship toxicity out of your life so um we do that deployment um it was a long stand down it was really eaten away at uh at the boys overall collective um long story short we uh we deployed in a big joint fashion and the rangers uh had an issue back to iraq he deployed back to iraq back to baghdad um had all the assets third time um full rotation and uh it was awesome like the target set we inherited was amazing like we were going to be getting it and i think we were there for 10 or 15 days and we were just feeling ourselves out the asset schedule and everything else like all the things that actually make the machine run we were slowly figuring out i was a team leader at the time so i'm in all the briefings and all the meetings and the rangers go out and they get into a firefight and they kill a guy and it happens to be one of the shakes son-in-laws and they threw some political [ __ ] storm into the air and they sit us down for 90 consecutive days so we have all the task force people there we have everything kilos everything and every day they'd come in roll 24 roll 24 should be on friday it's a long weekend it's a four day weekend on tuesday we'll get an update friday we'll get an update and they kept doing that the entire time so i mean you can imagine yeah get a bunch of guys overseas that just want to fight just want to get out of the door and you're not letting them and you're not telling them why we didn't do anything i didn't choose that dude i wasn't on that target none of our people were why are you punishing us then you got to feel being a political pawn then you realized that it was nothing to do with us just some guy flexing it's not going to let you do your job but it eroded the cohesion of that entire organization like we were at each other's throats man it was bad um just the living conditions like you could you wouldn't see people for days there was no reason to have a meeting it's like we weren't training we were just rusting um and luckily barrett kind of pulled us out of that and he'd have um basically pulled all the guys together we do cqb we go to flat range we started training that group within the group that spread the collective and we kind of just you know it took a little bit but we all got back on step and on around the 90th day he came in and he said [ __ ] it we're moving and we lifted that entire package and we drove it down the road a couple hours um to fob war horse and we set up there and it was busy like it was uh it was everything we wanted to do um we inherited a bunch of target sets from uh from the army side which is really good got to interface with those guys a lot got to learn about palm groves and a bunch of new ttps that we hadn't even thought about um things that would have really helped us in 2007 we're now learning now like yep i've been there i know exactly what he's talking about so we got to learn a [ __ ] ton we got to put it to put it to good use it was good who are you working with from the army um so we had a ranger element with us we had the tier 1 personality there 2-2 ses was in the same compound um so he was a it was so funny man the uh the ses i [ __ ] love those dudes they they'd roll through the chow hall and they've all got american flag patches on i'm like it's over the patch he said gotta blame it on somebody like okay cool those guys were great man just um i remember seeing them you see all the unit guys you see the sas guys i mean i'm a kid and they look like they're seven foot tall like they look like marcus cabone like they look enormous they've all got huge beards and long hair and like holy [ __ ] that's what the pros look like like now you get to see it up close just before i mean it's just it's just us you get to see the other organization you're like you get to hear what they're doing going out at night and you don't get to so you get to hear about this huge firefight they got into and you can you got to sit there with the rangers and twiddle your thumbs and play reindeer games until we got the lift and shift and it's like okay let's all be big boys again and um it was fine it was it was a decent deployment nothing uh nothing to really write home about um but it showed me how uh shouldn't the seesaw method if the op tempo goes up or island wherefro can go down like you don't need to have xbox and flat screen tvs and all this crazy [ __ ] if you're working every night you sleep on cots in a tent with no ac eating mres the happiest dude you'll ever see nobody gives a [ __ ] when that doesn't happen morale has to go up somehow and there was nothing to give you you can't booze you can't leave the country there's nothing to do you're just stuck there and you just have to watch other people go out and work just to watch how um how that eroded the unit cohesion it did um it took a while to get it back i mean you had to really really bring the voice in like movie time just you know not not mandatory fun but you had to do things to bring everybody back in to re-explain the why i think part of the training part of the mindset conversations the mission planning conversations would they'd take such a philosophical role then because of him that um everybody would buy in it was like nothing you've ever heard before his thought process on mission planning that's completely different school i thought like that is a okay that's it's a new concept to us just um the whole thing just everything the target approach the the methodology between everything everything was to the why so he was teaching all you guys that that's a [ __ ] oh dude he's a leader he is man he's amazing um he got to stay and do a troop chief right after that which i mean anybody who's worked with him i mean he's a demi god in my eyes like i [ __ ] love that dude if i had to pick one dude right now that i'd put on my dream team like that'd be one of my first bugs he was a great and i needed him so bad at that moment um and we came back from that deployment and uh i was kind of on a negative crash i was trying to stay positive because i had green team to look forward to and um know i got married did all that we flew over spain had the honeymoon came back got into a blowout with uh with my old man like um not a big blowout just an argument and it escalated into uh not speaking um basically starting green team into blind so in january of 2010 had an argument and it escalated from there and it got worse and worse and worse and i couldn't do it i couldn't i couldn't have any distractions the platoon chief told me exactly what green team is going to be like i've seen my buddies go through it i've heard the horror stories i know how much pressure is on it and um that's what he kept saying he's like you have to have a perfect day every day no distractions no booze no chick drama break of your girlfriend do whatever don't buy a puppy right now like it's the only thing that matters lock it in right now and give it your total commitment and you'll be successful and that's what i had to do so yeah um a couple months turned into a really long time yeah how many guys started the green team um called somewhere between um 80 and 90. how many came out um 20 20 22. not many low 20s yeah you want to go into any of that yeah we can let's do it um what do you want to talk about let's talk about the first day of green team what happens um we show up you do a screen test you hope you do a physical test it's the only known in the entire selection process you know exactly what it is it's written on a piece of paper everybody knows what it is and it doesn't matter that is the most stressful thing you'll ever do it just does um it's by design you know it was it's like a dream come true just to be there um until we started the screen test and you get a bunch of dudes uh a bunch of the guys that have already made it come out and they watch you they hold for you for sit-ups they count your push-ups they count your setups they tell you if your pull-ups are right and that is a very intimidating thing like you're you're a college football player and you're coming out for your pro debut and tom brady's throwing footballs to you oh [ __ ] yeah no pressure and back in the day um they look like vikings i mean super long hair big long beards and they look [ __ ] mean they did and it was intimidating and i loved it i did man i i got off that bus dude i used to take benadryl before green team i get so excited i get so i get so amped up i take benadryl to try to calm myself down um it's like a cheap man's beta blocker but um i loved every minute of it it was um two different schools of thought you could try to survive it you could try to polish all the way through and come out at the end and be more capable my advice that uh i was giving me was take every day like it's your last day and try to absorb as much knowledge out of that [ __ ] place as possible and that's what i did every day um there's a lot of pressure to perform we talked about that addiction um every day you want to perform and the fear of because now i had that falling out with uh with my parents the thought of not making it now really set home the thought that i would have to come home and look at patsy after all the [ __ ] she's been through and tell her i didn't make it i couldn't fathom it it'd haunt me at night um wasn't sleeping um yeah the pressure consumed me i try to use it uh to my advantage but it's hard man it's hard when every day it's like you see the best dude i've ever worked with just got dropped like why the [ __ ] am i still here i don't really care so one more day do they tell you why you get dropped yeah they do no yeah they tell you i mean yeah i mean it's team got a team guy they tell you exactly why and looking back on it now um that's exactly how it has to be because you know what the end state is like i mean it's hard for people to hear like your ego gets put in check but you're not good enough to be here whether that be a person that personality thing or performance saying it doesn't really matter like you can try to come back or you can't does everybody have the option to come back or you have to be invited back anybody back do you go through the screening again or um they give you a class up um i'm sure it's different every time a lot of guys have to rescreen some guys will stay there and they'll roll back they get hurt or uh they mess something up it's kind of like how we can since if you get past a certain block sometimes you don't have to redo that block unless you really mess it up you gotta redo the whole thing which i mean that's what um that's what most people don't realize is how hard that place is physically like the screen tester double what it is to get into buds that's the bare minimum like if you're not if you're not cranking 120 push-ups 140 sit-ups 30 pull-ups like you're you're last like if you do the minimums you're not going you have to be a freak which was good we were afforded a lot of time to train and get ready for it a lot of time in the shoot house a lot of time shooting mentally preparing for it and that was right um that was right at the height of like the human performance aspect so we had a badass strength conditioning coach at group two um that really helped us out he went over to the eagles and runs their their stuff um i mean so we were ready like the crew we had assembled i mean that was that was as prepared as you could have been oh [ __ ] so we showed up the first day i've never been so nervous my [ __ ] life dude i could barely breathe um and i was a freak i mean i'm i say that cocky because i was like i was in shape when i showed up that was the one thing i had going for me is i could pass that screen test and i'll tell you what the pressure of that day i barely got through that [ __ ] thing it's just cranking out 140 push-ups and a single set like no issue now i've got that dude who i want to be like is counting for me and i'm at 70 and i'm blowing snot out of my face like oh my god like i'm just going to try to do these perfect and hopefully he doesn't say anything to me and let's just hope for the best like that's what it was i mean it's [ __ ] stressful and then every day it just continues i mean it's all cqb based and you know everything else you got to do over there but um the pressure to perform you can't have a bad day yeah and it becomes addicting like what would you say god most guys cqb cqb and that's all yeah yeah let me get a couple guys for some other stuff some jumping some personality stuff the officers have a hard time at the end because now it's all the pressure's on them but no man it's a it's a humbling experience what's the pipeline look like what are the different blocks of journey um let me know how much i can really get into but i mean it's basically um if you were to assault a target it's basically what it is a bunch of cqb a bunch of shooting a bunch of jumping um you do all the land warfare type stuff and then it's all the other external stuff you have to do did they tie it all together at the end yeah like a big oh yeah you know a couple of exercises oh yeah not bad i mean it's it's as real as it could be i think it feels real so what's it like when you uh when you graduate when you're in um anti-climactic really no tradition is there any traditions you can talk about when you make it in or um yeah when you get in there but uh we graduated green team they came in they read a bunch of names off and then they said what squadron they were going to read off a bunch of names he's like all right get in the trucks that's it yeah we got the trucks we went out and we did an fmp that night big full mission profile like we knew we were going it was like i i didn't have a cell phone i couldn't couldn't tell my wife and just like because where i wanted to go was exactly where i went um and i wasn't shy about asking where i wanted to go so i mean um it was like all my dreams had come true just finished up green team um well actually let's go back in green team um we'd do a big jump block i'd already had uh 150 200 skydives before i had my own parachute because i knew what i had to to be able to do so i started training on my own and um it's in august we had to do mandatory downwind landings um it's where they want you to run with the wind so you got a lot of speed coming in it's to teach you that the parachute doesn't know the difference if you're going into the wind or downwind if you do the flare the same you can manage it um and i hit a divot going hard um i panicked a disco and cobra struck this thing and i smashed in and i thought i broke my back i heard a [ __ ] loud pop and my whole right leg went numb and i freaked out and i jumped up real quick and i dusted myself off and i okay we're good and i went back in there and i walked over to the corpsman and i told him i was like i don't know what the [ __ ] i just did but it's something bad he's like you want to do a dexterity no no i finished jumping for the rest of the day and i think that was on a friday um and i grabbed and i was like i gotta get exercise right now like we got to keep this hush-hush we drove over to the er um we shot x-rays came back benign they thought i tore my hip flexor so i just kept training on it um kept jumping probably did another 50 60 jumps on it and we're doing all the normal stuff you know 10 mile rugs conditioning runs buddy carries we're doing the whole thing um and now it's developed to i can't lift my leg up like i'm dragging this thing now if i wanted to drive a car i'd lift it off the gas and put on the brake like it's it's done and i don't know what it is but i know i'm not saying anything because i don't want to get rolled so we finish up jumping and we're about to do um we're about to get to the very end we already know we're going to go we've got some little [ __ ] admin block thing we have to do and my leg's still messed up and i call back into rehab we start going through the whole thing and he's like let's go in let's get some ct scans let's get an mri and let's see if maybe you broke your back like maybe that's what it is and uh they came back to get me i never forget we were doing the nfl combine um and i was on i think i was on crutches at the time we uh we did the broad jump the vertical max bench press squat deadlift we did a bunch of [ __ ] like that a bunch of cone drills and we just got done and uh they walked in and he's like um cmc need to see you in rehab it's like oh [ __ ] i walked over there and he's he's sitting down he's got a big smile on his face and puts his hand on my knee he's like it's gonna be okay and my heart [ __ ] dropped like you could have just shot my [ __ ] puppy like my whole life is over and um i looked at rehab guys who were super [ __ ] awesome and i was like what's going on i was like back broken he went nope your hips broken your femoral neck snapped off because i don't know how the [ __ ] you're walking and i looked at him and i was like i think it's my back and he goes well this x-ray right here this mri and they pull it up and you see it like thermal neck to bottom socket snapped all the way off so that impact had broke it and somehow it had re-locked in position and it just hadn't sheared if it had shifted one inch left or right all the blood supply goes to the hip it dies total hip reconstruction you're out of the military damn so it's like that and i looked at him i've never had surgery um i mean i've been hurt a lot growing up as a kid i've broken everything but i've never had surgery and he's like we're gonna have to emergency surgery and i looked right at him right in front of that cmc and i said during a [ __ ] way no and he looked at me and he goes that's the only option he's like you're not deploying how fast can we do it he goes we can get it done tomorrow at 7 am let's go i walked in they pumped in um three titanium uh five inch lag bolts through my hip and i showed the rehab the next day and we started physical therapy we had to finish see your school i got a gnarly infection out there you know they put you in the box they play the whole game it's really well ran um it was actually one of my favorite blogs really it was really well done um it's a different series school than one we did um it was really well ran i learned a lot about school but i got a nasty infection so i had this wound on the side of my hip i could press on my thigh and blow pus out of it i mean it was bad like they were doing pick lines in my arms it was it was bad and um my body started rejecting the screws i didn't know how bad it was going to be but i knew that i had to deploy soon so we're coming up on the new year and we're supposed to deploy um the realist have christmas there and then we're going to deploy in january so made it through green team got a broken hip i think we had surgery in end of november and i'm going to deploy in january and they're saying it's uh a four to six month recovery time um i i feel superhuman i was even faster back then um and those guys they're not dumb in we uh we do vitamin d3 we do calcium all the supplements to try to get that bone to grow as fast i quit dipping i started right back up after i healed but yeah quit anything to try to get myself in the best position to deploy and i still was and i still wasn't cleared so the rehab guy so badass he deployed with me i met over there and he stayed for like two or three weeks and we did physical therapy there and i tested out in afghanistan they've they flew a [ __ ] rehab specialist physical therapist with you on deployment under we had one of those huge box jumps like one of the ones like waist high and the final test was i had to put on all my gear and i had to do a depth jump off of that and land on one leg and i'd never forget i looked at him um i looked him right into [ __ ] eyes and i was like mike i don't know about this um brother and he went if you're not sure don't do it and i stepped off and it [ __ ] hurt it hurt bad and he went how are you feeling 100 okay he signed me off and we started going um damn it [ __ ] i cleared it out and had a good deployment um it was a half one it's probably two or three months long um because i caught you know behalf of with all the guys who graduated green team with and then came back and kind of geared up for the next one just the constant rotation so you you've been through three iraq deployments before you did your first deployment with dev group yeah and they were all pretty eventful deployments how did that first deployment compare to your other three um especially your second that one was okay um because we were new guys and it wasn't my element i was attached to it um the team that i was supposed to go to was doing some other [ __ ] that wasn't really conducive for new guys to be there um it was more like an older senior position um we were kind of doing the outstation thing so they didn't want us to get bogged down with that so we got to stay with the strikeforce um and it was cool we got to do a bunch of stuff we were we were battling um kind of a weather cycle just the way it did so not as super busy as it was but we turned right back around the next year and that was um 11 into 12 and then it was good it was good it was uh it was humbling just to see that i hate to say how nonchalant but just nothing raised them like they'd go out and whatever would happen and it would be like holy [ __ ] it wouldn't even get debriefed like it was so um it was so effortless to watch the move it was i mean it's like watching gretzky take the [ __ ] ice like oh my god like that's what that's norm so you know what do you mean by that do you mean there's no build up no i mean it's just it's that even keel all the way through pre-op on the up post-op it's just easy yeah like it doesn't matter what happened it professional like that's the way it's supposed to be done and then you saw it and then it all started to click that's why that's why that's why it's to achieve that to where i mean one of the guys um i mean i one of the guys who's out there did some pretty amazing [ __ ] on it on one of these [ __ ] things and uh i made a comment during the deep reflect are we not gonna address that and uh i'll never forget dude he looked right at me almost with uh a little bit of snap and he's like and you get in the end zone act like you've been there before and walked away and that was the that was the tone like don't pound your chest it doesn't matter you got to prove it again in five hours like okay yeah it's like the the level of proficiency was so [ __ ] high that it was like you were just you're just in a constant run to maintain it's it's humbling man like to watch it at finest it was uh it was everything i ever wanted to see yeah i mean it's like grown up playing baseball your entire life and you finally get to go watch the yankees play like you're in the dugout with them you get to see them you get to touch them i mean to me it's like my entire life was nothing but seal team that was it yeah that's all i ever known now i get to see it at the highest level it's i mean it gives me goosebumps man i like to see it that good and you're like holy [ __ ] i had no idea because you get stuck in a get stuck not in a falsehood but um the standard becomes the standard until someone exceeds it and when the collective exceeds it became a dynasty like i can't believe how good it was looking back on it now like that's as close to perfection as i've ever seen it and it was the norm like no chest pounding just go like humbling yeah that's interesting especially i mean they really set the tone it sounds like when you when you get through green team and they're just yep shipley here so and so here yeah getting a [ __ ] truck you know so makes uh makes a lot of sense but all right let's take uh let's say a quick break and then when we get back we'll get into uh when you're a specific deployment you're on all right so we're back you're we're getting into some deployments but i wanted to bring something up reading through your timeline you know first deployment in the seal teams you get in biggest loss and seal team history happens then you get through green team and right after you graduate what maybe six less than a year afterwards yeah i mean august of uh august of 11. extortion 17 happens which again is the biggest loss in seal team history so let's start there um kind of the way we talk about it is where were you where were you when 9 11 happened yeah where were you when june 28th happened and where were you when august 6th happened i know exactly where i was i was sitting in a movie theater with my wife sitting next to me my shooting buddy's wife and then my shooting buddy we're all entering a movie and we're probably 45 minutes into it and phone goes off and you're glued to these things um can't miss a text message like i mean the addiction the the addiction to your phone becomes a real thing like you can't miss a text message you can't miss a phone call ever um and his phone goes off and mind us too when we both crack them and we both looked at each other at the same time and he had got a text from somebody in the white house um a staffer used to be a team guy and he said call me right now and i had the exact same thing the exact same time that said call me right now from a different guy okay and he texts back what's up and uh he said afghanistan hilo and get the word i like to write in my old ladies get up walked her out of that movie they split and drove each other home and i jumped in a car with him we drove straight to work and everybody was in there like it was spreading fast um nobody had any real details i mean we did but um it went into um it turned into a [ __ ] circus it was like i was reliving a movie that i'd already seen that i didn't want to know the ending of um i've been here before i already knew what this is all the notifications basically everybody's throwing on dress blues they're driving out um me and my wife are grabbing groceries and gallons of starbucks and dropping off at gold star houses um just really trying to take care of our own that's one good thing about the gold star community is they know exactly what they need so basically notification team would go out and then we would roll in behind and drop off gifts um you know groceries we'd pick up kids from from school we'd do whatever we could um and that's the collective that's everybody but it's just what you did trying to make sense of what it actually happened um there's just no good way to there's just no good way to go about that i mean that loss is felt this [ __ ] moment like that didn't happen that how did this happen again um and you couldn't explain why i mean things happen in war things that you wish didn't happen you wish it wasn't a reality it's absolutely reality it's another reality check it doesn't matter how good those dudes were you couldn't have picked a better there wasn't a more capable fighting force on the [ __ ] earth than the dudes were on that helicopter and it didn't matter it did not matter gone in an instant it's like like how are you going to come back from that and then selfishly how are we going to take care of all these families like what do we do now it's like every foundation just dumped in trying to support trying to do whatever they could to i mean inside of that we're trying to rebuild like we still have we're still fighting the g-1 like we can't let this be our defining moment we just can't we've been through this thing before um unfortunately the the ceo at the time had been through had been to this exact same thing he was a group two commodore when red wings happened he had been through this whole [ __ ] thing so put a plan in action we had to rebuild the force had to take care of all the families um take care all the kids me and patsy started making memorial t-shirts within 12 hours just trying to raise money just trying to do anything that's what a lot of people don't realize is a there's a there's a gap like if you're pronounced dead your paycheck stops there's a long gap before any kind of life insurance comes in or any kind of support so the only thing that puts food on the table the only thing that puts gas in the car is their foundations like people that are raising money um and we don't how long that gap's going to be like now we've got big name foundations that really lend a helping hand but it doesn't matter to them to that singular family the whole world just came crashing down it's over like it'll never [ __ ] be okay now it's like anything you can do to try to lighten that burden you try to that's making a memorial t-shirt if that's you know picking up the kids and having to make skateboards whatever it might be you have to do something um but i'll tell you what that was um that was a super dose of reality because doing a lot of [ __ ] in helos and it's like that's the reality that is exactly what is going to happen like there's nothing you can do for them it doesn't matter like you can't plan for that you just can't i mean you can you can try to do things but a hilo gets shot down with all those people on board there's no good scenario out of that and it crippled us we had to rebuild the force and every team had to give up bodies um and that was the whole point of contention like people wanting to rebuild people not wanting to rebuild i don't want to go i want to go just it was a it was a circus here for a couple weeks it was do you want to describe a little bit more in detail how many lost what happened well without getting many specifics uh the weather was not in favor um it was a high alumni um and a force went out and got contacted and needed to launch a qrf and they launched in that troop to be a qrf and on final they got shot down um everybody's in there like you've got an amazing force you've got the world's best sitting in the back of this flying school bus it lands down they shoot it on the sky it's um you just can't plan for it you just can't it's 31 people gone including some afghan partner forces but an entire troop of people yeah it's just gone and i mean things that people don't think about things that i know that haunt other individuals is um think about the guy who missed that deployment had a shoulder surgery and wasn't there think about the guy had to go home for a birth of his kid you should have been there like that's going to weigh on that dude forever and it is um i don't know i just remember walking into the building it being so [ __ ] somber just um you didn't know where the smile like you wanted to have fun at work but you couldn't like how dare you smile right now it was one of those things like um it wasn't a forced um it wasn't a force thing it's just it's what it was i mean we were in the trenches for a long [ __ ] time man we just were and uh it felt like it was so hard to get back out of it we try to rebuild and we've got the force and they're back and they're i mean they dump every dude they pull guys from all the other teams and try to rebuild that one troop and they grab some [ __ ] all-stars man they did like they spared no expense they grabbed some serious [ __ ] talent and they rebuilt um and they built a dynasty like they built some [ __ ] bad ass dudes um it was like one thing after another so we get them all back up and that's 2011. um so i had nick check in my team we were in the same five-man team and he got pulled out to go over there to backfill when all the guys got killed in extortion and it didn't feel right didn't seem right um him and my wife really tight um we did our first uh platoons together and when he went over um i rolled into his team as a new guy and i [ __ ] loved him man god he was awesome he just was he was uh he was everything he wanted a teammate he came over and retiled my entire kitchen him and my wife when i was on deployment before his first deployment with command up until the last hour he drove to the command covered in tile stood and put on fresh clothes and got my plane damn mike [ __ ] great dude and uh you know we just came back from uh we just came back from afghanistan deployment in between extortion um so we backfilled them had to sleep in their beds had to do that whole thing that's a very somber and sombering thing to have to do um i mean it's the reality like this is what it is sleep in a dead guy's bed so um just another reality check trying to get in there and hit a really good target set and everything's great and we're we're going to work it's all steady in the back of your mind it's like any moment here any moment this thing's going to get us and it almost did a couple times the exact same thing i mean we took rpgs off the refueler um getting shot on infield lexville i mean just close ones yeah um testament to the pilots capabilities just how good they were um but right after that um that was a really good diploma that was probably my favorite deployment um because the people we were with like that team god man i um i did not deserve to be in that team um i [ __ ] loved that if you could have uh if you could lock me in a time capsule i'd still be in there i would have never came home i loved it so much i had separated myself from everything outside of that um it was the only thing that made me feel normal was being there i i loved it i loved the banter i loved the [ __ ] talking i love the pranks um i love the professionalism i love the absolute obsession to the detail i loved it and to watch those guys work with the team that took the loss nope or was this okay this is after all right we just rolled base in the same kind of like you guys on june 28th all right you guys rolled in same thing okay at the same base you relieve yeah all right um it was uh it was weird man just the whole thing was dicey we came back kind of like my mentor at that point like my my true north was my team leader then he um his wife is best friends with patsy my best friend to him his groom's in my wedding i know before i screamed at all that i [ __ ] loved him um and he got hurt got medically retired after that deployment um our number two did three or four other guys got [ __ ] up pretty bad um and it just i hate to say i had all my eggs in one basket but i i love being in that team so much the energy the collective um i was not i was not ready to lose that i wasn't and when he was gonna medically retire he'd [ __ ] crush me is this okay nevermind keep going so it crushed me it was like that's who i want to be this is a whole team like if we can just freeze this [ __ ] like everybody will re-enlist we'll just stay here it's amazing we came back from that deployment we're kind of rebuilding he's moving out we've got new guys coming in everything's good um and nick checked the police he deploys out um i'll never forget man i'm sitting with my wife at yard house i've got both my uncles um i come from a long military background on my dad's side i've got him my grandfather was a fighter pilot usair um u.s airways pilot after that my other uncle was 75th ranger regiment jumped into panama and did 25 years in the secret service counter sniper team my other one was the marine um was marine infantry guy so i'm sitting across my two uncles we're having an honest conversation and my phone goes off it's one of the guys from the team like we're not doing anything but just we're in virginia beach hanging out and i grab it um he's okay what's up he's like walk outside real quick and bebop outside and his car is driving by i'm like plugging one here i'm like hey what's up is that you sitting down no should i be and there's a long pause um [ __ ] man uh this is a long pause and he said nick got shot and i waited i said okay where is he when we need to go pick him up he's even longer pause and i can feel it i can feel it building up inside me it feels like it's resting on my [ __ ] sternum it's about to come out of my [ __ ] mouth and i don't know what it is but it's something and uh in the shakiest [ __ ] voice he could muster he said he's gone and i uh i let out a whimper i let out something i started [ __ ] balling i've been to work in 15 minutes i hung up the phone i dried my eyes real quick i'm like i'm gonna walk in there i'm gonna sit down this [ __ ] booth i'm gonna eat my kung pao chicken i'm gonna drink this moscow mule i'm gonna get through dinner and then i'm gonna drive to work and i'll i'll tell patsy tomorrow like i mean she loved nick she [ __ ] loved him um and i sat down and i stared right in between my uncles i picked a spot on the wall and i stared there and they're all looking at me i can feel it and she put her hand on my shoulder and i looked over at the corner of my eye and she said tell me and i [ __ ] i [ __ ] lost it oh you know [ __ ] man do you want to talk about what he was doing he was doing a hostage rescue for a doctor named joseph in afghanistan um bad scenario obviously ed byers got the medal of honor um a bunch of navy crosses that came out of that op um the long story short they uh they patrolled up nick's walking point and one of the sentries came out and they had a brief engagement um and he ran up to make a dynamic entry super fast like the gig's up we have to go so we closed the distance and um they had a bunch of blankets in the doorway he's clearing the blankets trying to get inside and as he makes entry he takes a round kind of over the rest is history guys came in killed all the bad guys saved all the good guys um you know i talked to the guys that that worked on him you know the only positive um out of the whole [ __ ] thing is they got the hostage that's why you sign that's why you go there is to do that mission only um and to know that you gave your last breath trying to save another human you know that's exactly who he is um so it's an honor to know him um but [ __ ] man i did not want him to go was that your hardest loss probably i am i didn't even process it i didn't i um i still involved that [ __ ] i [ __ ] threw up a wall so [ __ ] thick i did and about five days later i ran all the uh all the schwag so all the all the t-shirts and the hats i made the shadow boxes i did the going away [ __ ] and i had to go make his shadow box and uh i had all his awards had all this [ __ ] all the patches and all the stuff we were going to put inside of uh inside his shadow box and i walked into john will studio some guy that made all your deployment plaques and i walked in i got a really good relationship with him and all the ladies working there and i walked in um and his number two lifted her head up from the office walked out and saw me and i was totally normal just like this and she when i am so sorry and she said it i haven't cried like that probably ever that was probably it um i dropped my [ __ ] knees man i was dry even he was such a good [ __ ] dude he was so talented and he trained all the [ __ ] time and he was you couldn't you couldn't have done better and the reality he was gone i wasn't ready for it i tried to wall it up try to pretend like it didn't happen and then i try to make excuses like why did that happen to him and then i had to justify it to patsy why that's not going to happen to me it's like i better cut out more negative [ __ ] i better cut out everything i've got to completely obsessed now like this is what i have to do now and it just justified it like we're playing for [ __ ] keeps man like became another thing that i'd slide in there like you know you want me to spend more time at home you want me to do this i have to obsess this is [ __ ] for real if i have a bad day at the office that's what happens being the patsy who is a gold star wife and her previous husband you know died uh killed in combat did were able to lean on her a little bit more would she uh like could you relate to her a lot more than most guys could relate with their wives and i mean yeah and especially because you know because i grew up in the teams i grew up in it i felt like i felt like i was much part of that community as anything else um and yeah we leaned heavy on each other and a lot of it was she convinced me it was okay she's like dj that dude loved everything he [ __ ] did he loved it there's no there's nothing else that you would have done if you would have given him an option of dying at 80 in a [ __ ] bed alone or dying on that he would have picked that it's just dude he was like he doesn't want you to be here depressed mourning him all day he wants you to go [ __ ] get it on that's what he wants he wants you to go back to [ __ ] work and be as good as you can fair enough and the obsession continued it's like i wasn't touching myself i didn't know anything about grieve i just i walled it up i did we stopped talking about it we made uh we made shrines for him we made memorial patches um we did everything um but i had to go do the notification and knock at his door for his fiance at the time dude i don't know how people do that but uh i can remember every detail of it it was [ __ ] terrible we all met at my house um 7 00 am had me um will chesney um and one of the guys um who was on nick's new team who's an op chief we all met at my house patsy was there she kind of gave us a brief on kind of what to expect because we've done notifications before for august 6 but you never know so you know we kind of pow-wowed it like hey who who's ringing the doorbell who's saying this we're all in dress blues and it started pissing down rain um it's like torrential downpour in our shoes you know we wear the black horror frame dress shoes it was so hot in virginia beach when extortion happened from sitting on the tarmac it had melted all our shoes it melted the heels off so when we got out of the car and we took a step all the heels blew off our core frames and nick jack is a neat freak he's ocd he's got white [ __ ] carpet so i get out i've got patsy in the car behind us she's got uh groceries she's got starbucks she's got a bunch of [ __ ] just uh like you're not leaving a house for 48 hours here like this will this will tide you over until we can figure out what we're gonna do um because you're not a wife it's kind of a weird you know predicament you're in um so it's really like we had to take care of her notification teams went out to the families and all that but i remember ringing that doorbell and hearing her upstairs directly above the front door i remember hearing her walk down the stairs turning the corner and as i got closer and closer the footsteps got louder and louder um and i was on a [ __ ] breath old man i did not want that door to open i was hoping she wouldn't answer it i was suddenly get turned around and somebody else would have to do that and uh throw bull flips doorknob opens slowly starts to crack and as soon as she [ __ ] saw she knew she didn't cry she's looked at me kind of cocked her head and like she knew me tell me and i [ __ ] came and i gave her a big hug and [ __ ] balling um and i told her we had a very um very um no [ __ ] conversation about what's gonna happen over the next 72 hours um kind of everything we need to to get done um then we kind of just went from there like you got to go buy a [ __ ] dress you got to go buy this you got to get this right now like these are all the things that has to happen um and you've got about 12 hours because this thing's going to go and you're not going to have time so whatever you need let's get on it right now remember her making a comment on the black uh shoe marks we track black [ __ ] all throughout his house and she's like god you're lucky he's dead or he'd [ __ ] kill you i'll start laughing like no doubt stanley steamer they were vacuuming the carpets and shed um we all drove dc together we uh that was the coolest thing um drove there and picked him up um same thing we did for the guys at extortion we all drove darren unison met all the planes and did all that and she drove up there with us it was uh oh [ __ ] man just it's like one of those things you just wanted to be over and you didn't because now you have to do the memorial now you have to get up and speak now you have to go through all your photo albums and pick all the photos you like they have to put into a montage you have to watch it over and over and over now the family starts to fly and you got to meet all of them like it just it never ends it felt like that that process was five years long like i was [ __ ] crippled at the end of that one um i just was i was in a [ __ ] bad spot um some key people in the organization were shifting out they were retiring they were getting medically retired and i felt the void i did with him being gone it um it really felt a void that takes us to 2013. so i think that transition from um from nick dine until basically the rest of the career i um confirmation bias everything i had ever said everything i had ever told patsy was coming true everything um i used to tell her things um because i'd obsess um i bet you in my entire time in the teams i bet you i went into that building every day i've been in virginia beach minus 25. every saturday and sunday i'd go through there just to show face to make sure my cage was still there like i had to touch the magic every [ __ ] day to make sure it was real damn i had to i was [ __ ] obsessed but it was good because everybody else with me was just obsessed but i justified to her i'd start to separate myself from her separate myself from different friends outside of the organization just it was a linear focus this is it this is the only thing that [ __ ] matters there's no distractions and it reminded me of my childhood um the only thing that matters is the team like dad's got to go unemployment you can't do this because of that like you can't do this because it'll affect deployment i can't get shoulder surgery because i need to go undeployment i can't do this because of that we can't take a vacation because of this and i self-justified it um i was like no one's going to die if i'm a 65 husband no one like i'll be a husband when i retire would you change anything looking back now doing that yes and no um what would you change i would have retired sooner they try to retire me in 2014. um i wish i would have let him i was in such a [ __ ] bad spot man i just um i let it take me don't let it take me um i don't regret it some days i do but um i thought it needed it i thought um i thought it was a worthy cause man everything we did all the training the late nights the early mornings um it gave you a it gave you a purpose it did it gave you the why and it became very easy to just judge people like you don't work out you don't shoot you don't care you're not a professional you don't do this like get the [ __ ] away from me i'm gonna surround myself with these dudes because they only give a [ __ ] this is the only thing that matters and it became addictive it did because you got to see the performance you got the feeling like i mean it's a measurable thing like i started here and i ended here and i only did that because i didn't let anything else distract me there's no skateboarding just no snowboard trips for me i couldn't justify it i couldn't justify breaking my wrist and missing deployment i couldn't justify wakeboarding and blowing out an acl i couldn't justify it i could justify the skydiving thanks it's part of work it couldn't justify anything else i couldn't justify drinking like any [ __ ] drink two drinks in a single city like i haven't been drunk since 2010. wow i don't do it can i safely operate a vehicle can i speak to the police can i discharge a firearm can i provide life save medical aid if the answer is yes i'm good to go if i'm shit-faced i can't do any of those that's a metric if i can't articulate my speech and police officer to get you out of a [ __ ] jam i've gone too far i pull up on a car wreck on the side of the road i gotta save him like in my [ __ ] face and that's why i blow past him because i'm afraid i'll get a dui that's not an answer that's not a professional answer the answer is i don't have to worry about that because i'm professional i'm not drunk i'm professional i don't need to put booze in my system i don't need to be shitfaced at 2 30 in the morning that doesn't make the group better yeah the group before the individual became the standard and [ __ ] man it made it made life so much easier just what you're doing now make the group better no and why are you doing it true negative people in your life static whatever does that mean what were you doing to cope then because a lot of people you know they cope with booze they cope with drugs they cope you know all kinds of ways to cope you had to be coping somehow so after i broke that hip um i've got some painkillers um so long story short i'd i blew out that hip um i rushed rehab i did and the way they put those screws in um they lifted my t-band on the side of your leg and pumped in the screws laid the it band back and we did that 20 uh a 2012 deployment i had a i had a pretty bad fall down the side of a mountain and uh those screws came out and they blew through my t-van um had to do another surgery like it was bad um and the rehab came after that it's on painkillers and i needed to be on them um i had a bunch of surgeries that i needed to get and i was just i was held together with you know rigor statement chewing gum i was banged up man and um started eating tramadol and everything else and it just it became a norm like i wasn't high i just i didn't want to feel the way i felt like i'd wake up in the morning it's like i feel like this at 32 holy [ __ ] you're just numb to it yeah you just how much terminal were you taking you know [ __ ] then i mean i even 300 milligrams of pop like that oh i had your [ __ ] done several a day oh yeah but it's like i didn't realize what it was doing because it wasn't uh it wasn't a narcotic you couldn't be addicted to it [ __ ] yeah you get addicted to not feeling pain that's what you get addicted to um and i didn't realize it but that continued from essentially 10 until when i retired like 18. um yeah i rode that train for a while tram it all and uh i'm just curious how did you know how did you know it was an issue what what happened with me personally i know was an issue when i ran out and i felt what what that felt like without having any and uh that [ __ ] hurts i that yeah um so i just came back from a deployment um into a nasty firefight a bad one a lot of really close proximity [ __ ] ate a bunch of grenades um the long and short of it was um because of the proximity to it we had to use some breaching charges and some ordnance essentially on top of yourself to get out of this certain situation and it [ __ ] us up man like no i pro no ear pro i mean grenade's landing between me and you boom just a cumulative effect these little concussions that blew out both ears um oh man i mean just um by the by the end of it um i've blown out both ears i've torn both labrums and both shoulders both hip labrums gone um crunch a bunch of [ __ ] in my lower back and my neck so i needed to have surgery on both shoulders and both hips and my back by the time the whole thing was done and i didn't realize how bad it was [ __ ] i don't know do we get into it do we talk about them no let's get into it okay [ __ ] it we uh so the backside of this is we had a dude um that did the the canyon mall attack remember that so it's that dude um so it's around the horn africa and we are going to go get this dude it's a president-directed mission so it's a big one um the biggest one that i've ever done for sure um intel's painting uh painted pictures it's maybe not accurate beachside bungalow like he goes here to watch tv hang out be super benign in and out cool not the [ __ ] case we get there we've planned we've rehearsed and we've done all our [ __ ] i um i'm running the primary breech on the first floor i go up and over the gate i should probably start off with uh we swam in so that's a whole different set of problems um we swam in a uh a slaughterhouse offshoot um so you can imagine all the great white sharks it's a real [ __ ] thing um that's the fastest i ever swam in my life so we swam in we do our whole thing i go up and over um and i mess around with the locking mechanism on the gate to try to get it open and there's a string going from the gate it looks like it's going inside um and now i think that was a an early warning device i think it was hooked to a battle it was hooked to something we get the gate open we bring everybody in and as we are rolling up to the front door they start getting contacted on the roof guy comes out shoots skips off one of the guy's helmet now the firefighting suits and it's three stories and it's getting [ __ ] chaotic dude like they have been prepping for this for a long [ __ ] time and this is not a beat side bungalow there's uh there's no doors they're all walled up from the inside just nothing to attack you can't see anything it's like i'm trying to get the door open but you don't know where the hinges are you don't know what it is it's just huge um super thick door [ __ ] man it probably must have been six inches thick this is a [ __ ] fortress it's a [ __ ] fortress it's a [ __ ] it's a literal fortress um they start getting contact on the roof and we sprint up the front door and as we go to divide this dude opens up on the front door and lets it go and just you just see splinters of wood and just [ __ ] traces us and doesn't hit anybody we roll to either side and now we're trying to deal with this problem um the hate coming out of that front door was nothing like i've ever seen it just continuous ascended in and the way it ended up being was a long wall the door in the center i'm on one side and i've got my shooting buddy on the other side i've got my team leader behind me and we're trying to figure this out like we have to get inside but we're not supposed to kill this dude that was the whole thing is for whatever reason the powers to be really wanted us dude alive and the last thing they told us before we went i i would rather you shoot him a hundred times and he lives then shoot him one time and he dies bring him back alive well i'm [ __ ] committed we all are we're gonna bring that dude back alive we came up with every plan we could have um and at the end of the day if you don't be captured you're not capturing dude you're just not um especially in that part of the world with just how violent they are i mean you've seen blackhawk down that's the most realistic war movie i've ever [ __ ] watched that's exactly how it is they are [ __ ] and they come on quick so we're in this we're in this [ __ ] storm in the middle of the door and i'm trying to decide how i'm going to blow this thing i've got my charge in my hand it's already capped in um i've got my hydrogel peeled i'm ready to stick this thing and i'm timing between his burst coming through the door so you see it all chew up like three two one goes live again [ __ ] man you're just timing it he finally goes and i slap this thing and there's nowhere to roll there's just nothing to do um you gotta eat it it's like luckily for me the guy behind me is super experienced we all are very experienced preachers and we knew we could take it we've been there before just unfortunate turn your head and exhale and send it and uh that concussion blew out everybody's ears we were all done um and when it blew i could see the locking mechanism behind it was it looked like a [ __ ] railroad tie was stuck down so big new york lock and we weren't getting through it but it blew out a slat about waist high down about this wide and grenades started coming out of it accurate so the way it was it's the front door and is a long ass hallway going down and there's a dude who's in a sandbag position with a belt fed at the end of the hallway and it's just chewing down the hallway there's a dude in the first room off to the right who's shooting at us through the window so i've got my shooting buddy pinned he's taking fire over this shoulder he's taking fire down the hallway and he can't move you can't do anything it's like a big railing we've got all the rest of the guys on so we're the only three that are stuck on there we're trying to get this door open um let me back up when i place the charge i roll back and i look at him and i was like turning steel and i turned my head and i blew it and when i looked back up he was gone and i looked down and i saw the hole and i thought he went and i to my knees and i start going for the door and my team leaders pulling me back i guess he had jumped over the wall um i thought he went and i was not gonna let that [ __ ] dude go alone so i'm on my hands and knees trying to crawl through this [ __ ] hole and uh he's pulling me back like we're good we're good well now we can't get out um this thing's been going on for a couple minutes the guys on the second deck are in the same [ __ ] storm the guys on the roof are in the exact same thing now there's people that are surrounding us we're taking fire from the whole thing's getting dicey um and we've got to [ __ ] leave like we can't sit here and do this for no 10 more minutes like you're not going to let us kill this guy we can we've got to get out unfortunately for us the only egress route was directly behind us which is directly in line with that dude's pk so the only way out is to run straight through his alley can't go up and over the walls there's not enough time we don't have enough ladders and quite a few guys inside the courtyard um we're trading grenades back and forth to this dude and it finally comes time the enemy qrf is upon us and they're in technicals heading our way and we gotta [ __ ] go so look at the tl what do you want man he's like get ready for an rpg like [ __ ] i mean like bells already rang like we've got [ __ ] coming out of our nose like we're we're super concussed um and we ate uh for the guys that know i mean we had a 1200 grain ect from arm's length away jesus no we were pro and we just sent it i mean i know what that charge is going to do the over pressure is going to [ __ ] me up but it's not going to blow me up i know what that charge is doing what it won't and i was confident in it um and we had to send it there was no other way i wasn't going to turn around and leave without giving it every every bit effort i could and i looked back at him and i don't know how the [ __ ] we're gonna get out of here it's like get a t-bone so my buddy was uh down in the courtyard he had a t-bomb because we had to swim in a bunch of this [ __ ] so we had spread loaded a bunch of stuff um so i'd already launched one in and i looked at him and we did a we did a real world flea flicker which is one of the coolest things i've ever seen like [ __ ] threw it across the doorway caught it untape it and launched it um but it was funny it was so funny to see uh the tl he's like pushing on the walls he's like doing the doing the the math in his head like this many queer square feet the concussion this over pressure what's it gonna do to us and um we launched it we sent a bunch of rounds down there and basically called for xfil like hey i'm gonna i'm gonna let this thing loose this over pressure charge and then when it goes boom we're all gonna take off and run and that's what we did and i'm doing the peekaboo thing he's shooting i'm trying to see where he is and i finally see it and i've got that t-bond lucky running pulled a pen and i launched the most beautiful toss i've ever had and uh when i turned the over pressure was so bad it blew me off the porch and we took off at a dead run as fast we could go had a big uh a big guy there blow through the gate we didn't even open the gate everybody came up and over that's how it was taking too long we didn't have time to [ __ ] with it so he shouldered the gate and blew through it that's how we got out and that dude never skipped a beat firing at pk never wow like i'm i threw a t-bomb essentially what i thought in that dude's lap nothing continued i don't know how he didn't shoot us i don't know how he didn't shot one of the recky guys off the ladder um like chewing up the wall that he was on i mean [ __ ] crazy just the continuous hate that was coming out of the thing um when we made it back down we got a quick head count we had everybody there the the enemies massing um and we've got to get the [ __ ] out um and the surf was shitty so the extract platform long story short gets rolled over and surfs them so now this whole thing um it happens in on xvil um just in the in the confusion and everything else just trying to get boats in alignment and i mean we had dudes get not left out at sea but basically like this is such a [ __ ] show right now and it is so [ __ ] dangerous we're just going to swim as far as we can we turn on an iris strobe we just swam got picked up by a bunch of x-fil platforms and everything else but in the course of that um essentially the only way to get out is i grabbed a hold of the bow line and i wrapped it around my my wrist and i had them tow me out on the zodiac and when they picked up enough speed the weight it spun me and it popped my shoulder so now my arm is essentially paralyzed like it's not working it's like holy [ __ ] i do the exact same thing and i wrap it up with this one the same thing like oh my god now i'm treading water like i've got use of my arms but it feels like it feels like it dislocated like it feels strange um an exorbitant amount of pain we get on a jet ski round two and that thing flips and because we're straddling it the weight flipped with such force it blew out this um blew out the uh the leg of my right hip and my left hip so now i'm essentially bobbing like a bag of [ __ ] jesus christ so me and my swim buddy we make it out we get on there we we do our debrief they strip us down naked um with all those frags that we ate everything none of the frags stuck in us i mean we were super concussed we were [ __ ] up but you could brush it and it was like uh like metal shavings everywhere it was like it was like god came down and just said not today i mean it was every inside your ears inside your eyelids [ __ ] everywhere i mean it was the strangest thing um we got back on we started doing like the tbi reporting um you know what's your name and i was feeling [ __ ] weird the three guys were on that porch were feeling very weird um and you couldn't explain it um because i mean i've been knocked out a bunch with fight club and skateboarding like i am no stranger concussion this is very different um i went into a med check and they shined the eyes uh the white light in my eyes and i threw up and then i started getting scared i still can't hear [ __ ] both my ears are perfect um i've got a bunch of other wounds pre-existing that are nasty i've got a nasty stomach infection like an open wound that i had we had a surgically super glue before we did it so i had all kinds of [ __ ] i was battling anyway and it kept getting worse we finally got back to base five days later and i remember laying in my bed with my sunglasses on wanting to die um i didn't know what the [ __ ] was going on with me i couldn't make rhyme or reason i um i couldn't get my thoughts together i couldn't get anything i couldn't be there for the debrief i was just i was [ __ ] out of it and i didn't know what was going on and they drove me to a french hospital out in town and they ran a ct scan in the back of my skull right back here was jet black in my brain and uh the uh the doctor came back and she's like what what is that i was like i don't know you tell me and she's like i don't know how you're standing right now she's like that's a major that's a major blow to the back of your head nothing hit me in the back of the head she's like well something didn't i don't remember any of that um i remember seeing the mri and i remember just telling like that's just over pressure man like that's just over pressure and um they said whatever they did um they got documented you know we finished all that and we fly home um i'm on the next flight home taking his deployment that's the last thing to happen we fly home and i land and i have a six-month-old waiting for me i land i drive straight home and there is a newborn laying in that crib be dad and dude the next 48 hours of my [ __ ] life um i didn't know what to say i just i couldn't everything started to go to [ __ ] i couldn't remember that i couldn't remember my wife's name i couldn't remember my daughter's name um i got lost driving a [ __ ] work you've been a virginia beach i called my wife one time in the [ __ ] norfolk scope parking lot crying my eyes out i don't know where the [ __ ] i'm at amnesia set in um i'd wake up in places um i'd go to drive to work on a sunday and i'd end up at uh like the farmer's market i call pat's like i don't know where the [ __ ] i'm at i couldn't remember anything um and i had no rhyme or reason i couldn't say it to anybody but everybody else was having the exact same [ __ ] thing going on um and it was only getting worse every day it would get worse and with the headaches were so bad the photophobia was so bad i wore sunglasses for years i did until we got it under control um i remember i remember coming to one day i was in the gym um out in town wife doing crossfit or some [ __ ] and i woke up i'm flat on my back and i'm looking up at her and she's kneeling over me and she is bawling her eyes out like tears are falling on my face and i look at her i was like what what's going on she's like where the [ __ ] have you been she's like you've been laying it for 15 minutes i don't remember going to the gym i don't remember doing anything i don't remember anything about that morning i remember that night i remember [ __ ] um like my long-term memory people places things like it's it escapes me it does and it was getting real bad and we had a we had a heavy breaching trip coming up and um my boss at the time knew i was in a [ __ ] jam like he knew i was um he didn't know how bad but he's like i don't think you should go on this breach and trip man he's like you you're good you're current there's no reason to ring your bell anymore than you need to just take some time off okay and i didn't want to and i end up going down to medical to uh fill out some kind of paperwork or something i'm having a conversation with one of the docs there and um i don't know how i said it i don't know what i said but it was something to the effect of i don't know if i'm gonna kill myself or kill my wife but there's something going on with me you have to [ __ ] stop me and the next thing i remember is the command doc the command psych who's a [ __ ] angel my boss are sitting in a chair with their hands on my shoulder giving me value telling me it'll be okay and then i go to niko so my trip to nike was not um not something i wanted um i was in a bad jam and when i when i showed up there i didn't know i didn't know what was going on with me i had no idea well before we get into niko i talked to your uh wife for maybe 45 minutes the other day and uh she had some kind of intuition uh while while that op was going on that you were in trouble she said she just felt something and uh sure should she was right so you got home she said uh one of the first things she noticed was your dinner was right in front of and you didn't even realize it and you're asking when when the [ __ ] are we gonna have dinner she's like dinner's right in front of you she uh she took one i'd pull up uh i pulled videos on her phone because i know she was sending to people um i mean it was a video specifically i was cutting steak and it was like six minutes just over and over the same piece just cutting it i'd join these trances um and i remember it now like going into a trance and telling myself to come out of it and i couldn't it just i'd forget to come out of it i would i just i'd lose track of time um i just i didn't know i thought it was going [ __ ] crazy and then it was the whole cte thing was coming on board and it's like yep this is exactly what this [ __ ] is like everything got super dark um oh [ __ ] man i'd set my uh i just wanted to die i did i've i wanted to [ __ ] die and i didn't know why um i had to pitch a perfect life had a badass wife gorgeous kid dream job my life was heaven and all i wanted to do was die yeah i didn't know why i'd sit in my guest room with that [ __ ] dog of mine and uh i talked to him i would like that that dog saved me more times than any [ __ ] thing else dude i'd sit there and um the obsession over the details are probably what saved me the most because i think about putting patsy through that i think about the reality of shooting myself in the scene it would make in this house the mess it would make that she's going to have to clean that up what am i what's my kid going to find out what are they going to say when they find out and i didn't just not doing it but i wanted to and then i started to turn into other things like i got to get my rocks off somehow like what's my outlet going to be like threading the needle like that was the only thing that made me feel alive is the sketchier [ __ ] would go the more i liked it man it just that tv actually gets away from you fast it um and nobody talks about it yeah sit in those [ __ ] rooms and i know those dudes feel the exact same way i do and they're not saying anything um and they never did i think that started to drive a wedge because i needed it so bad i needed someone to confirm that i wasn't going [ __ ] crazy and because the because of the teams you know not want to show weakness no one did and i thought i was alone other people you know they check in they do this they do that but it didn't matter like i'm not i'm not telling anybody i'm [ __ ] up i'm just wondering why no one else has anything wrong with them yeah like none of this [ __ ] ever affects you nothing you're not human no you never get headaches nope you ever feel weird after a full day breaching nope you ever piss blood nope hmm you forget where the [ __ ] you're at nope maybe i am crazy maybe i am the only [ __ ] one that drove me way down the [ __ ] rabbit hole because now i've spent my entire life to hit a [ __ ] pinnacle and i can't remember anything it's all escaping me um yeah i mean patsy uh she called command she called my boss and she's like you have no idea what the [ __ ] is going on with him she's like he's gonna kill himself she's like he needs you guys right [ __ ] now we have to figure this out and nike was very new um on the scene right then so that was uh 2014. went inpatient niko for 30 days and they did a whole work up on me and put me on all kinds of fancy uh prescriptions and uh they helped they did um i thought i was having seizures i didn't know what a panic attack was um i didn't know what uh real anxiety was i remember sitting in the chow hall and um i remember sweating into uh into my food and people looking at me like sweating through my beard um because of so much sensory overload in that [ __ ] cafeteria chomping chewing hitting the fork banging the dude in the back washing pots and pans it all just consumed me and i just sat there and i just started [ __ ] sweating like [ __ ] man i get the [ __ ] outta the [ __ ] out of here and i'd have to leave and i tried to make not a big deal but it was a big deal because i was so low actually i wasn't so low just no one [ __ ] tell me yeah um so yeah they uh we went up to nika we did the full workup got put on um a bunch of different meds probably 15 15 prescriptions um got put on a stimulant so adderall to kind of keep me focused which helped cymbalta um we did zoloft we did everything practicing at night to stop the dreams we did beta blockers we did everything and basically ran that concoction along with tramadol and everything else basically the duration and it wasn't until the very end when i got hurt one more time when i realized what that [ __ ] actually was let's take a break there so all right so we're back from niko today you got the prescriptions did they give you any insight as to what was going on with you medically yeah they um they went through you know full body head to toe every mri contrast i mean everything you could do to the human body they ran test for um had a couple spots on a brain but nothing crazy but they also back it up with we've had people come in here in wheelchairs pushing themselves around on straws with no spots in our brain so they couldn't really make rhyme or reason just concussion operator syndrome a bunch of that kind of stuff the tbi um ocular stuff so i um the over pressure messed up my right eye so i can't really focus it so they called it tbi related ocular dysfunction so i've got to wear glasses like if i really try to dial in a shot it all goes to a haze i can't do a super finite focus so it makes shooting kind of weird my depth perception is kind of off but i'm used to it now and then i had five surgeries had to get you want to do both shoulders both hips and my lower back um the neck was a they wanted to do a um [ __ ] i can't remember um some kind of surgery on my neck um and i did not want to do it all the docs were like hey if you can get by then push it off like i didn't want to get surgery i don't want to miss a deployment we were gearing back up i mean i was in that thing for 30 days like i was going [ __ ] crazy all this [ __ ] is happening to you and you're worried about missing a [ __ ] diploma that's the only [ __ ] thing i care that's why i was so pissed i was like why can't i just go to portsmouth right up the road and come to work every day and i didn't realize what niko was it's to get away from the phone decompress completely and it was [ __ ] rough man that um i was not i was not good with that [ __ ] to be able to pull the phone away because you're glued to it um you're waiting for that thing to ring the city come to work all [ __ ] day and it becomes um on my nightly routine dude i'd uh i'd check that phone team guys exaggerate this is no exaggeration i bet you i checked that phone 50 times a day damn to make sure my battery was charged was my was the charging cable plugged in right like all that different [ __ ] like i have a i have a serious phobia with being late like an unhealthy one and the thought of missing a movement was not a [ __ ] option um i wouldn't go on family vacations that involve flying or long-distance travel if we had a trip coming up like no i can't miss work i can't do it so we get there and um we're in niko and we're doing the whole thing and that facility was amazing um from the acupuncture to i mean everything they did there was amazing um and they [ __ ] saved me i was in a bad spot and they see all kinds of people that staff really been over backward to me and i think it's because they um they saw where i worked they saw how young i was and they saw how devastated i was that um i was potentially done and they came in at the end of 30 days they diagnosed me with all kinds of crazy [ __ ] um i mean everything and they recommend that i get medically retired he's like hey it's not going to get better dude he's like you need major surgery all over and they almost got me they uh they almost got me they pulled a guilt trip and they were like do you think you can perform your best i like this and i knew the answer was no um but my ego caught me and i went [ __ ] outperform you give me these meds let me go see and dude i i ran hard i ran full tilt for the next four years from 14 to 18 as hard as i could go never missed a day at work um the best time of my life what did your wife think she wants you to retire yeah because what nobody else saw is what i was like at home um i was [ __ ] vile man i spit venom out of my mouth all day long i was just [ __ ] hateful i hated everything anything that wasn't to do with work i didn't want anything to do with it um you know my daughter was a burden being married was a burden having a dog was a burden you know having to do taxes was a [ __ ] burden like why can't you just let me be like one of the 300 [ __ ] spartans and let me just do this this is my profession can everybody just cater to me and walk around and [ __ ] fan me that's what i wanted i did like my ego consumed me and anything that potentially could derail me or um slow me down in any way was not an option it just wasn't i couldn't let it happen um and the only way to obsess over work and i felt and do it at the full commitment that i needed to was to have no attachments so i emotionally started to separate from my wife my kids um you know i tried to play the game when i came home but it wasn't i was thinking about work the entire time i didn't want to change diapers um it was just it was i wanted a kid so [ __ ] bad with her and in 2013 i got one and i was [ __ ] i was through the [ __ ] roof man i've never been so happy my whole life and i went overseas she was you know two months old and i got hurt and when i came back i just it ate me alive and when i went to nike it got even worse now i'm i'm separated now they're telling me there's something wrong with me and it's not going to get better now i look at my family and i start to resent him like you [ __ ] did this to me if i wasn't thinking about being a [ __ ] father i wasn't thinking about being a husband that probably wouldn't [ __ ] happen to me i started a blame shift on everybody that's what i did um i threw my walls back up like yep we're gonna lean forward in this i'm gonna give this thing everything i can and i'm gonna ride this [ __ ] all the way through i never in a million years thought i'd get medically retired never i'd never [ __ ] let him no there's no [ __ ] way i'm too hurt but i'm medicated i'm fine like i'm good um i was shooting immature x probably five six times a week auto injectors for migraines um i was taking essentially a lethal dose of maxill for migraines supposed to take three a week i'd take three a day um i was in a [ __ ] jam man when the sun would come up and crest my world ended when that sunlight hit my eyes it was over were you deploying with all this yep i wore sunglasses all the time medicated um it got real bad one night um it was probably 10 o'clock at night um i walked into the uh walked into the kitchen and i don't know why i don't know what the [ __ ] i was doing but i hit the uh i hit the microwave and the light came on and hit my eyes just right and i [ __ ] collapsed i pissed myself started dry heaving i'm in the fetal position just shaking um i was shaking so hard and i didn't know why i couldn't control it it felt like i was gonna break my own hands it was all i could do it was like i was trying to pop my own head off by squeezing everything as tight as i could um and i hadn't had a migraine like that in a while um because i stayed doped up all the time i was constantly taking maxall and amitrix and everything else and i thought i had him at bay and this [ __ ] thing hit me dude and it uh she was trying to call 9-1-1 i'm screaming at her i'm calling her every name in the book um don't you [ __ ] dare she's that was her big threat she's like i'm gonna call you troop chief don't you [ __ ] dare don't you [ __ ] dare um and she should have i wasn't [ __ ] i was in a bad spot man um and everything on me hurt it's like you said if i um if i'd miss a dose of tramanol i felt everything i had i'd go to the gym in the morning and i'd fake it and i was [ __ ] miserable like i had never felt that much pain i got diagnosed with a fibromyalgia when i was uh when i was up there and for the ones that don't know it's uh it's basically a made-up term it's when you have agonizing pain and they can't tell you why they label it fibromyalgia but for me um it felt like i had shin splints on every ounce of my body um like when you shook my hand it felt like you were breaking my hands my feet when i would walk i could feel it it felt like my feet were splintering um it was terrible every step i took i was just an agonizing [ __ ] pain so i just ate painkillers all day and i masked it and i trained and i deployed and i didn't every trip i could anything to get me away from virginia beach to just escape reality and it didn't pay off um i was i was hurt a lot worse than i really thought i was um i mean i felt bad i didn't realize um it was only a matter of time before i all came apart i'd go through these long bouts of depression weeks on in um i wouldn't want to speak i'd sit there i wouldn't want to eat i'd lose motivation i wouldn't want to go work out and then i'd start to make excuses you know when you lose focus on the why you know you don't have the target set you want you don't have funding you don't have the leadership you want you don't have this you don't have that and you lose focus on why you're actually there because none of that [ __ ] [ __ ] matters the enemy hopes you're not training he hopes you don't have funding he hopes you haven't seen the inside of the gym in two [ __ ] weeks he hopes you don't know where your guns are right now that's what he's hoping and i let it consume me and i just started to hate everything and then i found skydiving um did you start doing that recreational yeah um i really started to obsess over it like that was that was kind of my thing when i was uh at the command anyway um i wanted to be a breacher that's all i wanted to be [ __ ] love breaching and the team i rolled into had a bunch of badass breaches already they don't need another one they need a guy to run all the air stuff so i went way down the jump rabbit hole and um the only bad thing about that is it's so far removed um from what the teams are because it's such a civilian dominated sport that i started to hang out with everybody who wasn't king guy i'd go on these long trips to arizona to support courses and you know i'd four or five hundred jumps a year and um wanted to start competing and and that was so unlike me to do anything outside of work the fact that i would go recreation skydive like that's that's what my wife said she said what the [ __ ] are you doing i was like i'm doing it for work i'm doing it because they asked me i don't need you to be a breacher i need you to be an air subject matter expert i need you to be the best jumper in the room done if you had asked me to be a [ __ ] dental tech i'd be a tier one [ __ ] dental tech it didn't matter that's what you wanted me to do and that's what i'm gonna do and i obsessed over it i spent a lot of personal money and a [ __ ] ton of time out there jumping and wind tunnel and got all my instructor certifications and you know throwing out tandems and everything else and but it started to remove me from the group i started running a bunch of solo projects or me or one or two guys and we'd go out there and we'd just jump we'd go do a hundred jumps in a week and we jumped um and it really started to take a toll on the family life like i was gone a lot i can remember um her sick as a [ __ ] dog like puking over the toilet and begging me not to go on this trip and i looked at her no sympathy gotta go i didn't have to go that was a made-up trip that was a fun trip for me and we'd have a work trip to start on monday i'd fly out the friday before and i'd get a whole week and we'll jump in with all my friends and the work trip would start and then i'd stay late so i turned a two-week trip into three-week trip so was it the fun you were after or was it just getting the [ __ ] out of uh he was getting the [ __ ] out of virginia beach it was something completely different that i didn't have to answer to anybody for it was my own um completed separate group of friends who didn't know me didn't didn't give a [ __ ] about my background maybe they knew they didn't ask they didn't care about the politics they didn't care about what happened overseas they just they liked me for me and they like skydiving and i use that as an outlet but i really used to just separate myself from my family and um just i threw up another wall like i had my virginia beach life and i had my jump life and i'm just running straight this way and um she hated i mean she begged me she bagged me stopped going stopped jumping stop doing this stop doing that and i wouldn't i couldn't i was so addicted to it and it wasn't even jumping itself it was just escaping reality when i'm flying around when i'm jumping these super small parachutes and doing whatever i'm escaping reality my reality is i am [ __ ] miserable and i am waiting to die and i'm just unhappy i don't have any justification for it i can't make rhyme or reason but if i say anything they're definitely going to kick me out of here so i'm going to suffer in silence and i'm going to run this [ __ ] thing until the wheels fall off that's what i did i ran it all away what was the wake-up call was it the accident i um i went down to florida me and my shooting buddy a couple of the guys we were doing a civilian skydive trip it's like a big camp um it's a certain type of free flying we were doing and um it was amazing great time but i was so broken from everything else um things you just don't realize um so we're on a we're on the first day of the jump trip and we're flying in a uh a formation it's called upright basically you're standing and you're flying across the sky on two feet and flying that way and you have to lean back with your arm as far as you can you have to press down into the relative wind to get the throw to launch you forward so it's understanding all the details and everything else you know it's trick flying but it's fun you build a lot of speed and i was so broken up top um i left the video too i leaned back as far as i could and we're hauling ass and all of a sudden i flip over and i feel a weird pop and my chin locks to my shoulder i'm in free fall and i can't move my arm it's pinned behind my back i'm like what the [ __ ] i roll over and i start to track away to try to get away from the group we're probably at 7 000 feet and we're taking it low and we exit at 14 000 feet so we're you know a little over halfway through the skydive but that's the dangerous part is when we have to break away so we don't open on top of each other and i turn i track away and i go to pull and i can't pull my hands at a knot it's locked up i can't deploy i jump a small parachute anyway and i'm not a packet of peanuts um so i had to open up my reserve and i open that thing up and it's super small and that's something you don't think about having to land a small parachute with one hand so i lift my arm up and i unstow the toggles and i i loop it in here and i'm flying super um super casual pattern on the way in i come in with one hand i land i get up and i've got a jump suit on and my arm is paralyzed like it's it's hanging down on my hip i don't know what the [ __ ] is going on but the only thing that kept coming up in my mind is they were concerned on uh taking cymbalta taking the tram at all in three or four of the medications that i've been taking forever and they're like you have to stop taking that or you're gonna stroke out man like you'll have a [ __ ] stroke i thought that's what it was i thought i had a stroke mid-free fall i mean like when i came down i was pinned like this i couldn't do [ __ ] i couldn't lift my arm i couldn't do anything they couldn't get my jumpsuit off when they did my humeral head was down to here so what happened is i reached my arms back to fly and my arm dislocated through my armpit so humor head attached and it came through my armpit that's a very bad dislocation it's very hard to reset especially when um a little bigger than it's probably like you know bigger and uh i landed on the ground and i remember standing on my hand trying to lift up to try to pop it it still hadn't hit my mind that my shoulders have sucked i've never had one dislocate like that i've had them in and out but not like that um my teammates here he's like dude what the [ __ ] i don't know what to do we've got an er a mile and a half down the road i was like i'm going i jump in a rental car and i drive myself right to the er i'm still in my jumpsuit um they go up on the next lift they continue jumping i check myself in the er i tell them what happened and they spend two hours trying to get this thing back in socket let me preface this i pride myself on my pain tolerance it's world class i can take an extraordinary amount of pain i can that [ __ ] oh my god that dude cranked on my shoulder i was sweating i was dry even um i wanted to [ __ ] die he was bad and uh finally they gave me um propofol whatever it is knocked me out reset it and they put me in a sling he's like hey gotta go back i'm freaking out because i don't want to tell work what has happened so now my little hamster wheels going around like i don't have to tell anybody about this like we're good i drive back out to the drop zone i see all the instructors all all the guys like what happened [ __ ] arm came out like jesus and all the guys like hey man we'll refund you for your for the camp because you can't jump the [ __ ] are you talking about i'm jumping he's like you can't jump your shoulder just came out stockings like i'm jumping i'll take the rest of the day off i'll be back tomorrow we went out to uh when that's like a food line or whatever and bought a bunch of kt tape and youtubed it and kt taped my shoulder in place um put on a quasi brace that we bought from you know whatever pin my shoulder and just taped it so all i could do was deploy and i could reach up um and i could grab my toggles and i could steer it which made landing very uh very challenging because i jump a high performance parachute so i really have to be able to control this thing and i just let my go get a hold of me and i didn't give a [ __ ] they uh i showed the next morning they did not want me to jump we had a conversation and uh we settled on a wager if you can do 10 pull-ups right now i'll let you jump and i jumped on that bar and did tim pull up so [ __ ] fast and he went go ahead i put my suit back on i went up and did a jump very gingerly um not getting real dynamic did a second one did a third one did a fourth one and on the fourth one i got a little cocky and i leaned into it a little bit too much on final bringing in the parachute and it popped out of socket again the exact same thing through the armpit the exact same [ __ ] way and the instructor looked at me because it's not common to fall on landing um not at that level and they looked at me and gave me a weird look and i was like i was like getting more [ __ ] banana peels out here trying to you know brush it off and then i looked at him i was like hey man like i kind of tweaked my neck on that opening i'm just gonna sit out the rest of the day and i walked around that dz for an hour faking it because i was so [ __ ] embarrassed and i was like yeah you know guys let me go back to the hotel i'll be back in an hour to pick you guys up and i drove straight over the er now in civilian clothes had changed and i walked in the exact same doctor is working the exact same desk and looks at me he went looking to do you for i was like i was putting on this t-shirt my my shoulder came out we got to put it back in and he looked at me and smiled and he reached out and grabbed a blade of grass out of my ear and went getting dressed out in the field are we come on went back knocked me out popped it back in place um and i didn't jump the rest of that trip i couldn't it was so bad um and i knew how bad it was like the amount of pain it was going through my body was uncommon and it couldn't be good we get back to the command i walk into rehab and i tell them i was like hey man i got some serious [ __ ] going on he's like oh we'll go in there we've got you know great shoulder surgeons um super experienced and we went in there and looked at that thing and he went dude this is gonna be the one like this is it like whatever we'll do a quick one it wasn't a quick one we um we went and did that shoulder surgery we uh we did the mumford we cut out a section by collarbone we did the bicep tendonisis so relocating my bicep tendon we put in two anchors in the front five in the back i got a nasty infection we found out that i'm allergic to the waterproof bandages they put on me so i got a folliculitis almost like cellulitis just gnarly infections all over me dude like bad and the rehab process after shoulder surgery is not fun it's long you can't rush it takes six months and by the time i got done with that um the medical paperwork had already been pushed he's like you got to do the exact same thing to the left and we've still got to do both your hips like we got to fuse your neck we got to fuse your lower back like that's it man and i was in so much pain at that point when we got done with that shoulder surgery um not throw anybody into the bus but i i will they forgot to do my nerve block when i got that shoulder surgery so i went in we do the whole thing and i wake up in a recovery room and this that operation's supposed to be two hours and i was in there almost six long [ __ ] surgery a bunch of stuff in here a bunch of bone fragments are floating around um your shoulder dislocates and slams back in it chips away the corners i've got a couple four millimeter pieces of bone floating around in there they can't get to um four millimeters uh-huh yeah so my humor had just broke off big chunks of it now it's just free floating in there just grinding everything out so i wake up in this shoulder surgery you get your arm pinned you're in the sling and i wake up and i'm overcome by it like if you would have had a pistol sitting on the thing i would have shot myself it it's indescribable how bad that pain was it was it was everything it was reality and that doctor walked over and he's like how you feeling i've never felt this much pain in my entire life he's like nerve block not help did you do one his eyes get real big and he looks at me he's like i'll be right back he leaves comes back three minutes later with two other doctors and uh he's like hey so we decided not to give you the nerve block now we're gonna give it to you post surgery so it'll be more effective for you okay and they free they freehand the same use you do it under um um under like an x-ray or whatever you know what i mean yeah um and they don't they just drop this thing in they hit me this is fine right what's that it's from the spine right they did it through my neck through your neck yeah so you hit some nerve bundle just above your collarbone it basically just paralyzes everything from here to here okay so he misses it and a couple minutes later i remember sitting there and doing touch and goes and you're all [ __ ] up from the anesthesia and i remember leaning my head back and my tongue was paralyzed and it rolled in the back of my throat and i i essentially started to swallow my own tongue and i remember throwing my head over the side and scooping my tongue out and i couldn't breathe i was gasping it was nothing trying to scream i can't get anything out there's no nerves there it's after hours i had a later surgery um this is probably eight o'clock at night it's everybody's gone at this point man manny at the hospital and i remember i grabbed the uh the little monitor the ekg thing and i knocked it on the ground remember this lady came running out of the back and i'm holding my throat like this and her eyes got his biggest silver dollars and i remember them shoving an o2 mask on me and then i remember waking up later so what had happened was they hit the wrong nerve bundle and it paralyzed my throat my voice box my tongue and my right lung um man i was just drifting off the holy [ __ ] i just would have passed out would have been over um so the whole rehab process comes after that um but after that because the pain was so bad we go to pain management and now i get on more meds and now i'm on all kinds of weird [ __ ] now it's like they're just stacking it on top of me over and over and over and it's not getting better it's only getting worse to the point where i don't know what i'm going to do anymore but i'm having some very hard conversations with patsy and everybody else like if this is what i have to live with daily oh no like i don't know what the [ __ ] i'm gonna do like i can't lift my arm like just the whole rehab process was so [ __ ] bad and luckily you know we start the medical retirement thing but it takes so long to actually get there what kind of conversations are you having are you talking suicidal yeah yeah um you're having conversations about suicide with your wife how many times did that happen more than you can count yeah and it was one of those things like i told her i was like i don't i don't know what the [ __ ] is going on with me like i sit here and i just i don't want to do this anymore i'm tired um kind of just everything from my childhood and everything to the teams and just everything just felt like he was hanging around my [ __ ] neck man i couldn't do it anymore i was just i was [ __ ] tired i feel like that's the common theme with dudes when they hit that spot is that's what they say i'm just so [ __ ] tired i just don't want to do it anymore just like reality set in like that was it i'm not coming back from that one um and we got through rehab the med board had already started um we had hip surgery scheduled we had my left shoulder um scheduled and it was going to be three years of uh surgery windows i'm like i can't [ __ ] do this man that rehab was so bad it took everything out of me it was [ __ ] miserable the navy seal foundation stepped in and they had a rehab program ran by an x-team guy actually from the command virginia high performance um they chop you with a world strat world-class strength conditioning coach they cater your meals you two workouts a day do the float tank massage hyperbaric you do everything and it's basically a four week block you can extend and do eight weeks so i did eight weeks with those guys and i came out of that no [ __ ] in the best shape of my entire life really i felt like i don't need to be retired like i'm good i was high as a kite i was on every med i was already on um but i looked apart i looked [ __ ] great um and i still wanted to die inside but i still my ego you wouldn't let it go like i could still do this i can still do this um and then i couldn't i just couldn't do anymore i ended up going to um a neurobehavioral ward at um at bethesda so right across the street from naiko it's called seven east and it is for a it's essentially a detox clinic so in between all of that i go back in to refill my prescriptions in our physician's assistant he was brand new and he inputted all my stuff in and hit enter and an error code popped up and he went i can't give you that he's like you can't take that and this it's like no well that's a problem because i've been taking that for a long time and i [ __ ] need it and he had a very candid conversation with me and he's like no what do we do now whole team came together and they're like we've got a med washout we want to do you know you're starting the med board right now let's get you off all these meds and we'll figure out what your baseline really is and we'll go from there okay and somehow they suckered me into it um and i was not expecting that i expected to go back to nico and it was not niko we walked in they took shoe strings dental floss tooth they went through everything you couldn't have anything and uh there were a couple sf guys in here a couple rangers bunch of guys like some some pretty bad tbi [ __ ] um one of the guys uh he was a fighter pilot had a had an ejection ride and it gave him parkinson's so to be able to watch people how bad it can get it really made me feel uh feel like a giant [ __ ] like you see how bad some of these dudes are and i got there um and i never forget man she walked in and uh this sweet little black lady she looked me and she goes are you ready you know what yeah oh child okay she reached in and grabbed all my meds and she's like not anymore and she locked me in that room i bet you i was in there seven days i didn't really leave that room for seven days i laid in a fetal position and i detoxed off everything i had been on and it was the worst thing that's ever [ __ ] happened to me um i heard piss in the bed throwing up i mean you everything about the spirit world man like being alone in isolation no cell phone no nothing it uh it consumed me i didn't have skydiving i didn't have the team i didn't have my wife i didn't have anything i was just i was eight up dude i was eight the [ __ ] up it uh it was bad and around the seven ten day mark i kind of came out of the haze and i walked out for one of the first times and sat down with a group and had breakfast and i was sober for the first time and i was an agonizing pain like oh my god this is this is normal this is reality right here this is where i'm at and we slowly started to input a couple meds um they left me on a couple things just no no painkillers i couldn't do it anymore from the nsaid use over the years i've got like stomach ulcers so if i take an 800 milligram motion i piss blood like weird stuff so i had to come off all the insides the only thing they left me with was cymbalta and adderall which hindsight being 20 20 i probably should have came off those but at the time i couldn't i couldn't even fathom it my anxiety was so bad my depression was so bad and those pills were the only thing that kept me sane and i say sane relatively i was in a bad spot the patsy came up to see me in the hospital drove up there and um you think it would have gotten better and it didn't um so now we've got two kids got a brand new born uh i'm just in a bag of [ __ ] so i come back from that and essentially got miele my youngest who's now my therapy baby just laying the lane in the bed just feeling sorry for myself i don't really know where i'm going from here but i know my career is over i know i'm miserable i know i really want to take a bunch of pills to stop feeling like this but i can and i don't know what i'm going to do they introduce art therapy it's kind of where the whole tribe skate thing started to go it was a spillover from niko i started art therapy at nico and then um the whole staff knew me and they all remembered me so when they heard i was next door they opened up the facility and i could go over there as much as i wanted to they let me uh do the dog program so i get to hang out with puppies all day therapy dogs and do all that um the red cross walked in one day she's like what can i bring you how about a blank skateboard deck and some paintbrushes do you want i'll make that happen and she wasn't supposed to you're not supposed to leave that place and she snuck me out she walked me downstairs and put me in her car and drove me out downtown bethesda to a skateboard shop and bought me a blank skateboard it was her own [ __ ] money snuck me out totally she got in trouble and brought me back and she's like if anybody asks it just showed up here yes ma'am and i made my first board big paper mache thing a bunch of [ __ ] hands coming out of it um yeah just you know the whole mass concept you do yeah neither it was essentially that but i did it on a skateboard and i just dumped everything i had in me on that board and i felt better i had an sf guys going through a dark spot a real bad spot same thing his career he was not ready to go had him do the same thing like just try it just paint this whole thing white make the whole [ __ ] thing black now do this now do that started to help conversation started to go and get the relive experiences and you know had art therapy [ __ ] it helped we were in that thing for 31 consecutive days inpatient um detoxing off meds having to talk to all kinds of therapists about your feelings and pain management specialist and the big thing i got out of it i was able to override pain so well um that i couldn't tell if i was hurt or if i was injured i couldn't tell the difference anymore everything felt the same um if i stub my big toe or if you break my leg it all felt the same i didn't care i mean we'd go in there for some of these things and i'd have these long conversations with the doc and they'd ask and they wanted to know tips and tricks on how i get over this and i talk about things i do mentally to try to flush out some of the pain i was feeling you know i was doing breathing drills way before it was a cool thing to do and um i'd imagine like i'd i'd go deep thought concentration i would i'd paint away pain i just spread loaded throughout my entire body so it wasn't isolated in one spot and i became successful at it but it doesn't last forever yeah um it was so bad when i came out of that [ __ ] place so that's how tribe skates was born art therapy yeah man like i came out of there and you know you're getting ready to retire the reality of the thing's gonna happen and you don't know what you're gonna do might get a contract what is it did you know you were retiring at this point i knew yeah the med board has already started um we're into we've crested into 2019 now um i'm still jumping a little bit from what i can um i'm contracting working some courses in my off time just maintaining currency all that and then that's when we get to um to tribe skates and like i actually made it a thing we brought in coal we had a shop and it was my uh my little therapeutic outlet didn't make any money but it kept me sane was cold still on at this point yeah he was still in okay yeah he transitioned over he was doing um like a training position um but his med board was about to start he was banged up he said multiple surgeries he's chewed up um and that's when i got into fracture burning it's like i had to replace something some sort of danger element with something else so the skydiving i couldn't do right now i'm going to the med board if i got hurt again they are definitely going to fry me um i just have to sit back here and i just have to when you go through that they take all your specialty pays away um so you used to make an x amount chop that in half and that's they maintain you at and that process can last as long as they needed to and i had a lot of injuries my medical record's two volumes um they take your [ __ ] pays away the day the day you start it every specially pay goes away um sometimes you know i've heard rumors guys having to pay back re-enlistment bonuses um all kinds of [ __ ] man like it's bad but they hold you to that so now the lifestyle you've been accustomed to living you can't afford to live that anymore so now what do you do just get depressed you can't get a job it won't let you have outside employment so what do you do just miserable just waiting to finally retire if they were given the option just to leave i just would have left i was so over by then um i was [ __ ] hateful dude i didn't want to accept that was actually happening to me and then you know i had to kind of close out that chapter and accept it like this is what is happening and i finally got my retirement date the med board is over it's probably uh may or june um there's an invite for the world record for a skydiving thing um and i went out there and i did my training gems and i got picked up and i got a slot invitee for the for the world record it's gonna be held in chicago that year and it was like that was the [ __ ] best thing to ever happen to me so excited came back home and you know got zapped with the voltage kind of reset everything so at that point when that had happened i had been through niko done four more deployments been through seven east came off all the meds except cymbalta and adderall now i've got the um the world record thing coming up super excited basically leaning in heavy on tribe skates just doing that all day long just trying to keep myself sane i'm in the best shape of my life with uh with vhp and training every day and i feel like a million bucks like i'm finally starting to come out of it at least on the surface things were still rocky with the family i was still um any moment i could to separate myself i did i mean i do it now um just out of habit but i'd be up at 5am every morning there's no reason i don't answer anybody and i'd go saying skateboards out in a [ __ ] empty parking lot at 5am just to be by myself i didn't want anybody there with me i just i didn't know what i was going to do man but i knew it wasn't anything positive yeah yeah all right let's move into let's move into father's day 2019 yep so i started to try up skates started doing fracture burning we were laying graphics doing normal stuff and fracture burns kind of introduced me so you take a microwave transformer you pull it out and you hook it up to jumper cables and run a lead out to 110. there's no real safety measure there wasn't on that machine so i ran an extension cord out of my house to an octopus outlet take said machine plug into said octopus outlet and then hit the button hit the button unplug it now there's no power going to it the unit's good i've been doing it for months burned hundreds of boards at this point um i've got my got my chi down i've got my got my whole system down and it's therapeutic it's [ __ ] dangerous like you got to be you got to be locked on so i'm in super good shape it's father's day i am burning paddles for um an eod unit it's about to retire so they're giveaway paddles i fracture burn them now and they do a bunch of cool stuff with them um and a buddy calls me he's like hey i've got a couple more can i drop them off and i've been out there since 6 a.m like send it fast forward i burned uh probably 10 boards that morning and um he shows up and they're not sanded they've got lacquer all over them i've still got a bunch more boards i got to do and you have to sand off every ounce of that lacquer or it won't conduct just won't do it you got to spray electrolyte solution on it hit it with the voltage so he is um i'm fractured burning boards i stop i take a break he's plugged into the octopus outlet with the sander sanding them down in the confusion um the sander gets unplugged my machine gets plugged and the switch gets turned on so i've got um saw horses set up i'm sanding down boards um with a bristle brush knocking all the knocking all the ash off i'm spraying them down with a hose so the whole backyard is covered in water i'm in a i'm in a tank top and board shorts no shoes on um doing my thing remember like it was yesterday we're in front of my bay window and it's probably from here to there and it's close we're standing essentially on the back porch both my kids are there they're watching the ipad or watching cartoons eating breakfast it's probably 8am and uh the old lady knocks on the window she gives me one of these like it's a [ __ ] father's day let's go trying to go have a family breakfast and do the whole thing last burn last burn i was like all right man let's knock out this last one and i grabbed those leads and i readjusted my hands and if you're true north that's where he was i was about in this fashion and when i grabbed those leads it snapped me and spun me towards him and every muscle my body contracted and i can remember my head fighting the urge he wanted to slam back and touch my own spine and i remember fighting it as hard as i could i could remember my teeth heating up and it felt like there was a copper spool like a taste copper in the roof of my mouth [ __ ] spinning um we made eye contact i remember him screaming [ __ ] [ __ ] oh no no no [ __ ] and the contraction got so [ __ ] hard i ended up taking a step back at some point and i landed in a puddle of water but when i did that i heard a loud pop it was my collarbone shattering and if you listen to patsy i leveled out in the air and i shot across the yard still holding on to these things holy [ __ ] i remember hitting the ground and skipping and having this thing um it felt like my entire body was um being burned alive it um it was intense and it was static but it was static you could you could feel um like the static on a tv like everything went to that and it was um the static sound was inside of your [ __ ] brain and he unplugged me and everything went black and i don't know how long i was out for i don't remember but i remember opening my eyes and he was in my face and i remember exhaling and smoke coming out i remember looking down on my hands and i had a burn through my palm had one coming out of my finger a shot came out of my head some arc spots out of my thigh had one come out next to my ass um and i remember laying there and he looked at me and he goes you know where you are on the ground and he said are you okay i said no i'm not okay i was like my collarbone's broken and my left shoulder is out of socket for sure and uh he kind of rocked me up forward and i had a big mouth of copenhagen in and i bit through my tongue so you can imagine what that feels like just kind of open my mouth and just let this [ __ ] pour out of me it was just a steady pull of blood um i didn't know how bad it was but i knew it was bad my wife's freaking the [ __ ] out the kids are freaking the [ __ ] out he's freaking the [ __ ] out rightfully so um i told them i uh i do pretty good to keep my composure situations like that and i was like we're good i looked at patsy and i was like i'm driving myself to the hospital i'll go get checked out go eat breakfast i'm not ruining father's day and that was the stupidest thing that's ever left my mouth you're gonna drive yourself to the hospital now after this and i remember i stood up they were trying to find me shoes um trying to find a hat and trying to find my wallet i live maybe two miles from uh like a level three trauma center and he's gonna drive me there my wife is gonna call her mother to come over and watch my kids and they're gonna meet me there they've already called cole they've called everybody in the shop um tell everybody know what's happened i stood up and i said all right i'm walking to the truck and i turned and i got to the gate and it's probably maybe 40 feet to my truck and i took a step and everything went took another step and it reminded me in the moment i thought about it you remember kill bill um you remember the five finger death punch yeah take five steps on the fifth one you die exactly like that i got the four and i was [ __ ] right here i was a [ __ ] cyclops i couldn't see [ __ ] and i was scared to [ __ ] death i could feel my heart rate slowing down like i could feel it i mean you think it'd be blowing through my chest it wasn't i could feel it and i didn't feel right i felt very strange and i took one more step and everything went jet black it's [ __ ] totally blind and i'm just on the side of my house i can't feel anything i can't put my arms out because everything is broken so i'm just i'm i'm hoping that someone's going to come save me and i can't see a [ __ ] thing nothing and i start to breathe i start to hyperventilate try to flood myself with oxygen and i forced it i opened my eyes as wide as i could and i started to deep breathe until light started to come back in and i felt a hand on my shoulder it was him and he guided me to the truck and by the time i got there my vision had came back but it wasn't normal vision it was like superhuman vision it was the brightest colors i've ever seen in my whole life um it was like i could see like superman i saw everything i felt everything um i've never been so in tune with my body ever i could feel i could feel everything we got in the truck and we drove to the hospital and we hit every pothole on the way so my collar bones in like 30 pieces it's just kind of gravel just moving around my scapula is blown out and um every bump we hit it felt like a shard was going to go into my lung i didn't know how bad it was at the time but i had a pretty good [ __ ] idea and we walked back there walked in told him exactly what had happened we don't know the voltage i don't know the ampage i don't know anything except that everything i've ever read is no one survives this [ __ ] um so i should have been dead they brought me back on the table they stripped me down they're going through everything um they shoot the x-rays they see the collar bones shattered they see the scapula they see everything else and this doctor comes back and he tells me he's like hey man what do you do i told him he's like here's the issue is with electrocution injuries your body starts to produce some kind of enzyme like i'll [ __ ] up the name so i'm not gonna try but he goes if that number hits we'll call it 10. if it hits 10 your whole body is going to turn into essentially like rhabdo muscles are going to liquify and i have to start chopping [ __ ] out of you i'm a lot bigger than i was now that i am now and he goes i got to start cutting out big things dude he's like peck's gotta go lats gotta go glutes thighs hamstrings we gotta cut it out of you because if not it turns to mush it turns septic and you'll [ __ ] die he's like so when this thing goes we gotta go so i'm imagining now i'm laying in a hospital bed and this dude's gonna walk around the corner with a [ __ ] piece of paper and start cutting pieces off of me so it's just your tissue it's dead tissue that's rotting yeah essentially like tops there's so much trauma all the way through your body produces natural enzyme that basically turns [ __ ] septic and he's like that's what happens with rhabdo like muscles liquefy or whatever um and he was concerned about it and um they did an ambulance ride all the way up to the burn unit put me in there ran every test they could all the x-rays you know stayed there for a couple days and that dude came back in and he goes i don't know what the [ __ ] is going on with you he's like everybody on earth produces this enzyme everybody you know with it 10 we've got to start cutting [ __ ] out everybody sets it a 5. he goes not only you not at a 5. he goes i can't find a trace of it in your whole [ __ ] body he goes it's a medical [ __ ] mystery why you're alive i don't know um there were a bunch of theories about because i was holding on to both leads um kind of connected to circuit my muscles just contracted until i blew [ __ ] out and if he wouldn't have unplugged me i just would have stayed like that and cooked you know another second longer they were talking about uh it's kind of like doing a um a defib on somebody he's like we don't know what your heart was doing if you would have unplugged it you know 0.25 seconds pre or post maybe you were flatlined and died we don't know he's like because no one survives it so we can't forget test data for it so i remember laying in the hospital this is right after it happened and i was supposed to work a jump course the following day this happened on a sunday i'm supposed to work on monday and i remember calling the uh the people i was working for um skydive suffolk and uh i was crying i was like i am so sorry like i can't believe i did this to you it's like i'm i'm going to be there i'll be there tomorrow at 0-7 i was like i just don't think i'll be able to jump and that [ __ ] doctor looked over me and he's like you ain't going any [ __ ] way just like that patsy jumped my ass and i was like that's like i'm just gonna go down there i'm in slings i'm not doing any [ __ ] he's like you could [ __ ] die just like that hand the phone over patsy talk to her and basically he he's not gonna make this trip um and i didn't want to hear that and then i instantly asked him like well i've got the world record coming up in four weeks and he looked at me and he's like your days are done dude you're not [ __ ] jumping he's like you're gonna need major hatred reconstructive surgery and i just went through it like i had just gotten done yeah like i just went through a year-long rehab process like again what the [ __ ] man like you talking about driving dude in a hole like not again man not a [ __ ] can um and the things you don't think about like putting on socks i couldn't put on [ __ ] socks i couldn't wipe my own ass i couldn't bathe myself i couldn't do [ __ ] i could do nothing i was worthless for months i mean i've got two plates and 27 screws from here to here like it's over my my collarbone doesn't hinge on my sternum right like this scapula thing when that thing blew out that was an injury that i never respected before you hear about people breaking shoulder blades and scapulas like yeah that's a terrible injury it's terrible when it blew out of my hand it kind of fused my hand so when people would shake it it blew a hole through and hit the nerve and hit the nerve bundle and hit the tendon so anytime you would move my thumb it felt like you were ripping my thumb off you screwed i couldn't i couldn't draw a pistol holding a carbine was miserable um and i had to basically just deal with that and you were going to contract as well when you're retired correct yeah i'm supposed to go in september december so that was out the window now there's no way yeah with the rehab it took there's no way just had to keep pushing that date back further and further try to lean in heavy on tribe skates but now i'm hurt now what do i do like now what i do went back out at 6 00 a.m five days later and i finished for actually burning all this [ __ ] skateboards what i did yeah my wife woke up and you have never seen a look like that dude she stood on that she stood on that back porch and looked at me and if looks could kill i'd be [ __ ] dead call me everything she could selfish [ __ ] and she was right um but i told her i was like it's it's like skydiving you have a cutaway you have to get back on the next load go back up you're going to build it up too much in your head now it's like it's a freak accident i'm lucky enough to be alive and if i don't do it right now it's like this thing will define me right now i was like this isn't who i am i can't let this [ __ ] thing beat me i have to do it again and i think she understood and we obviously have a different system now and it's very controlled now i don't let anybody do it around me we uh we cut that out of it but that rehab coming back um the very next day we started i called vernon griffith my trainer and we started the very next day with a two pound dumbo doing the whole thing over again and it was it was miserable damn and you started uh gvrs group so we had yeah we had tribe skates and then um yeah in 2019 right after that we started uh gbrs so that happened and i retired in august um that happened and when's father's day july june and july 19th yep yep um yeah we started out in september gbrs it's like full steam ahead we gotta go it's focused on rehab every day i heard a full-time trainer and just focused on rehab trying to get back that's not really what happened i uh i separated myself from everything i um i used to skateboard [ __ ] as a as a coping mechanism it's really just an excuse i um i had to i had to replace my love for the teams my love for jumping and my love for being away from my family i had to give myself something else and um is the worst thing i ever [ __ ] did man i um i let my yo get the best of me and started cheating on the old lady and just pushed them away i just did i am i ran multiple affairs for the better part of two years um all the way through and i pushed out my [ __ ] whole family man i um you were able to keep that [ __ ] together for two years you ran two businesses you're retiring you have a family with two kids and you're doing multiple affairs and the thing that disgusts me the most about it is because i love the team so much i put patsy on a [ __ ] pedestal because of who she was what she'd already been through and you know we pride ourselves on loyalty and that's the biggest loyalty breach on [ __ ] earth i had no justification for it she's badass dude like i don't deserve her i mean she's hot as [ __ ] too you know what i mean like i had no excuse she's perfect i just didn't want it i wanted to consume myself with toxic people and that's exactly what i did i hit it for a while and then i couldn't hide it anymore i just i couldn't it i was gonna [ __ ] kill myself um was back on pain pills i just i couldn't do it anymore i had all my stuff from um from before i was back on tram and all back on percocet from the electrocution and i went back on status quo i was like i don't do anything half-assed i'm going to do it i'm going the whole way and i basically everything i did before i just kept doing again i just subbed out the teams for businesses and affairs and i went well then you kind of came into contact well i mean i know you guys knew each other before but patsy made a call to amber capone would what so we heard about it we heard what marx and amber were doing and um what was the final straw i mean it sounded like it was like the last call of desperation there so marx and amber did um i guess you'd call it a commercial it was kind of like their story and we knew their story like we know them the entire time so we knew everything they had been through i mean broad brush we know and uh they made this they made this trailer i guess and uh i was gone on a trip and she sent it to me and uh i was laying in bed at a [ __ ] marriott and i watched that thing and i bawled my eyes out uncontrollably because i knew how bad i had taken i knew how far i had went and i didn't know how to fix it i didn't think it was able to be fixed i didn't and she sent it to me and she went if you love me you'll go it's kind of a weird thing for a wife to ask your husband to go to mexico and do drugs try to fix yourself and what i'll go i'll go um it didn't matter though i i wasn't hopeful um once she said she wanted me to go it was like a beacon of light it let in some hope she does give a [ __ ] she does want me better like she wants me back she's willing to work this out she's willing to accept me um she didn't know everything that was going on she didn't um she might have had an assumption but she didn't know she definitely know the severity of the affairs she didn't so by the time we get there now we're in business with uh three other team guys and now we're all gonna go we're all gonna go together we're all going to heal together we've all been through some serious [ __ ] and we're going to go process this entire thing together in one field swoop what i didn't do um what i didn't do was be honest to the people around me on what i was going through i didn't tell them everything i had going on the [ __ ] overseas the disappointments on retirement the transition life the affairs um you know drama with my drama with my family just everything i didn't let them know how bad it was um and i had a [ __ ] serious secret i had one that i couldn't come back from there's no way it's uh it's my defining moment and that'll be the last thing that anyone ever hears about me is how bad i [ __ ] this up and there's no way to fix it so it's every day we got closer and closer to mexico i fell more and more in love with my wife and kids every [ __ ] day i still wasn't homesick i still wanted to be gone but i would see it and it made me regret everything i had done for the last two years i just every time i saw him it was just the guilt it um it hung around me it hung around my [ __ ] neck man and uh you wanna go through the whole story you take it all the way yeah so we uh we link up with marks and amber and uh we fly out there and uh we put in some serious [ __ ] work men that uh that medicine that entire experience is nothing on this universe it can't be quantified you you can't do an experience and pass it off and tell somebody your story and it sounds too bizarre it just does divine intervention and everything else you believe in aliens after that [ __ ] like it it doesn't make sense um the word cosmic comes up a lot when people do it like you feel like you're one with the universe it's weird um you become interconnected to everything and you understand everything you've ever done and it is at the forefront of your mind when you wake up the next day so how does it happen then i mean is it immediate or you feel it the next day or no i mean you process that thing for weeks um it's in your system for a long time at least it felt like but you know you go down and you do a ceremony you give out your intentions and i haven't told anybody my intentions i haven't told anybody what i'm trying to deal with none of them um they have no idea they assume that we're um dealing with some ptsd [ __ ] and some some stress some operator syndrome maybe some other stuff and uh we did i have a game had a very profound experience and i woke up the next morning for the first time in a decade i would have cut off a [ __ ] arm to teleport home i've never wanted to be home that bad in my entire life um and i knew it was all for nothing i knew it didn't matter there's no going home for me um just the thoughts that go through your mind when you know you're [ __ ] up so bad you can't come back from it what do you say like how do you enjoy that experience how do you process the information knowing you'll never get to share it with another human being because again this road i got to [ __ ] kill myself and that's what it was um that's a hard thing to wrap your head around like i'm so selfish i'm uh i'm such a [ __ ] coward that instead of face of music this is what's gonna happen we process the entire day we wake up the next morning we do a ceremony we um we all come together and we're working through trauma together it's a bunch of team guys in the same room a bunch of them we know coupling we don't know and the common theme um because i'll just say it now after ibogaine i'll just say it i looked at all of them um and they were pouring out some some serious [ __ ] some serious childhood traumas and dumping them on the table for everyone to see and i called them all out [ __ ] you guys i've been sitting here for 16 [ __ ] years alone thinking i'm the only [ __ ] dude you've been my best friend my entire time you've never told me that why'd you let me do this alone why like how many [ __ ] times i almost blew my head off in a [ __ ] guest room why why don't you [ __ ] tell me man it's [ __ ] rough dude it uh and you see the collective everyone everyone in the [ __ ] room the exact same way dudes have been 25 years had a [ __ ] 30-year master chief in there same [ __ ] thing like why why the [ __ ] didn't you say it i want a [ __ ] answer tell me i didn't have one like i wasn't ready you better [ __ ] get ready like if any of you dudes go back home and you don't jump on the first building and scream from the [ __ ] rooftops this [ __ ] will save you and [ __ ] you don't be a senior man but secret not with this [ __ ] i would have been so much better off if people would have just said it like this happened and this is how i'm feeling it's okay to not be okay this [ __ ] is [ __ ] this is life man like as bad as we want to feel like we're universal soldiers and [ __ ] dolph lunger and jean-claude we're not like we're grown ass men that have kids they call us papa you gotta stay up late and do homework we gotta drop kids off on school buses and you got to get on a [ __ ] airplane and fly away and never see them again you got to be okay with that um and it's a hard thing to do especially when you do it solo when you never say it not that it's not there it's there it's on the forefront of everybody's mind and you're just not saying it so we had a beautiful um beautiful couple hours processed a lot of [ __ ] had a nice family dinner and we're just constantly just on topic talking about just everything [ __ ] man i felt so relieved to be able to just say it but i hadn't said it yet yeah i hadn't said a [ __ ] thing yet we wake up the next morning and we're gonna do five meow um dmt we sent up a couple guys and they were saving me last um i i think maybe they thought i was gonna have a conniption um everybody knew i was really working through some [ __ ] and they just didn't know how bad it was um and i laid back um you know we smoked a five laid back and i've never cried like that in my whole [ __ ] life every ounce of pain i have caused my wife i've caused my kids and anyone else i felt right then and i did it over and over i was chasing the release all this negative [ __ ] had filled up and it was coming out of my mouth and i couldn't stop it i just i needed to purge all of this hate that i had inside me and it was really just hatred for myself it um they told you you'll know when you're done you'll wake up and it could be on the the first dose you'll be on the fifth dose it doesn't matter you'll know when you're done and i rolled over and i was done like i was at complete peace with everything like i've never felt so alive i've never felt so connected to this earth i've never wanted to go strap on body armor and deploy more in my entire [ __ ] life i felt like i had a superpower we all did and we all talked about it i feel like i know something no one else on this earth knows it's like you do it's like you have a secret no one else knows like this medicine will save everybody [ __ ] i wish i could just give to everybody right now and fix everybody that's not how it works um and we're still processing all this information so we've done that we do our final ceremony and we're flying home the next day they've uh we've been in river city there's no phones there's no email there's no nothing we had to write a letter home um and they basically gave us a blanket statement they were like hey send this text out to your significant other everybody's married so send it out to your wife it says hey i'd love to um i'm through with the ceremony i can't wait to see you and i can't wait to tell you about everything that i've experienced blanket statement and i knew patsy was itching um to hear from me and we haven't heard from days and your river city on friday and now it's on monday at like noon so we're in san diego we're at an airbnb waiting for our flights and um like okay because you know we're all business partners all the wives are interconnected so you can't text your wife before i text mine yeah right it's like all right ready three two we all send it all their phones go off not mine she's probably at the gym i hit her hit her location she's at the house okay send another text hey are you available for a call i call the house they don't answer click back on location she's not sharing her location with me anymore what's strange call her cell phone straight to voicemail the [ __ ] like maybe the kids are on the phone maybe they're just swiping up they're watching youtube whatever so i let it go um three or four hours go by nothing and i know the other wives have talked to them they're not saying anything to me they haven't heard anything and they're tight like all the they're we're tied we get a drive to the airport we get to the airport and i'm on uh i'm on pins and needles man i can't even [ __ ] breathe because i have the secret and i don't know how it's gonna get out and now i'm a certain question like does she know she find out about the affairs what the [ __ ] is going on we get into the airport um we stop in a layover in atlanta and i power on my phone and there's a notification that pops up that says um password's been changed to my email that's weird and then i go to log on to i had a ghost uh instagram account um that i've run all these affairs on and she had hacked into that she changed the password and opened it up and she opened up on friday when we went river city and she had all day friday all day saturday all day sunday and all day monday to read through everything i had said and done the last two years everything and you're a team guy so you know exactly what those were and she read it all and at the very end of it um she found out that one of the one people i was having a favor was pregnant oh [ __ ] so i don't know any of this i just know that now she's in there and now i'm panicking disco and now i'm telling them oh my god like she's hacked into my instagram account like she knows like we don't know we don't know we don't know we landed virginia beach we drive back to the shop all the wives are there except mine take a big breath and i walk upstairs in my office and every [ __ ] thing i own is some cardboard boxes sitting in my office everything and there was just printouts of all these text messages that i'd been sending out screenshots of pictures and all kinds of there's a there's everything in there and i knew that's it you know coming back from that one there's no coming back it's heavy man um and i uh i saw the other wives give everybody a hug and i um i looked up a coal kissed him on cheek told him i loved him and um he said i'd call him in a little bit and i had no intention of calling him in a little bit i jumped in my truck and i drove straight out to uh to sandbridge right out by the ocean and i backed my truck up right next to uh right next to the command gate and i sit there in my truck and i contemplated everything i had done my entire [ __ ] life from the fall out with my parents to the you know having kids and the affairs and everything in between actions overseas everything i had ever done it was so crystal clear it was like i had superhuman memory for the first time i remembered everything but it wasn't anything positive it was just all the terrible [ __ ] i had done it was in the forefront of my mind and i didn't have the courage to call patsy i didn't um thinking about um thinking about making that phone call and her not answering but her just dismissing me i couldn't do it um all i wanted to do was see my kids that was it just let me see my two girls just let me give you one [ __ ] glimpse of them and i'll be out of your hair just let me say goodbye to them and i'm uh i'm parked over there and she called me out of the [ __ ] blue just called me and she was tracking me um colette actually followed me so he knew where i was going she tracked my location knew exactly what i was gonna do and she called me and she's like hey um i need to see you let me see you [ __ ] face to face right now is that okay had you made your mind up how you're gonna do it yep i shoot myself right in front see that truck made a video for the kids whole thing selfie video that's a [ __ ] man so she found you she [ __ ] drove up parked right next to me um she got out of that car like she had a thousand times and i was sitting on tailgate and uh she walked over to me i'm sitting on the tailgate and she walked right in between my legs and pulled my glasses off my [ __ ] face and she cried um i've never seen a woman cry like that bought her [ __ ] eyes outside or died i mean um one of those uncontrollable ones with [ __ ] just coming out of your face and um i was trying to tell her how sorry i was how much i regretted everything and um she looked at me right in the [ __ ] eyes and she knew that i was back it's the weirdest thing you can't explain it um but she looked at me and my eyes were clear for the first time i was off all pain meds when i woke up from ibogaine never had another painkiller no cymbalta no adderall no copenhagen no nothing no affairs nothing since then but she saw it she saw that i was completely sober for the first time ever and she looked me right in [ __ ] eyes and she said are you willing to try to work this out i said absolutely and she was like i don't know if that means we're married but she's like i can't have you kill yourself she's like these [ __ ] kids need you too much the shop needs you don't do this these families like you and me can you and me can figure out a common ground and that's all i wanted i knew we'd never stay married i don't [ __ ] deserve her i just didn't want to lose at all i didn't want her to i didn't want to end it like that and we went back we had a super hard conversation um and she asked me she's like i want to know everything right now and i [ __ ] told her everything i fell on my sword and for the first time in my life i didn't i didn't filter a [ __ ] thing i sent it the whole way i told her every ounce of it every detail how long had been going on why had been going on and what i'm gonna do now um and i told her i was like i don't want i don't want you to stay with me i don't want you to stay married to me i just want i want the opportunity to make it up to you just give me one [ __ ] chance to prove to you every day that i'm [ __ ] sorry like i don't need to be forgiven just give me the opportunity to make it okay and every day i wake up with that in the forefront of my mind like i'm going to show you today how committed i am i'll show you how far i'm willing to go for the family and that's the that's the goal every day and ever since that [ __ ] day since i've landed in virginia beach we have never been better it's um [ __ ] it's hard to say man but we have never been better my kids have never my kids have never loved me more it's weird my oldest called me dj until i retired all of them yeah and now it's like that's my why now it is like i'm the luckiest [ __ ] dude i know i am and i don't deserve to be i don't deserve i don't deserve to have her i don't deserve to have those kids but i'll [ __ ] take it um she stuck with it through all that [ __ ] she [ __ ] did man she stuck through with all of that everything she's [ __ ] been through all that [ __ ] i put her through not the affairs like that life and teams of me was [ __ ] rough man um i mean she used to look forward to me being gone all i cared about with that [ __ ] place i did i just i cared about the teams i just i wanted to do that i didn't want any distractions and then i let it consume me and then i needed to find i needed to find something else skydiving i couldn't do that anymore now what now we're doing this it's the worst thing that's ever happened to me it's the worst thing i've ever done and it's the only thing in my life that i wish i could take back the rest of that [ __ ] i'll take the scars i'll take the bad memories i'll take the look on her face that's what keeps me up at night just the breach of loyalty she trusted me everybody did they trusted me to to do her right and i [ __ ] didn't i let my ego take control it [ __ ] sucks some [ __ ] heavy [ __ ] man yeah that is some uh real heavy [ __ ] that's an amazing woman no [ __ ] if we think back to not going to mexico just imagine if that happens on a tuesday she finds out there's no mexico yeah i'm the same way that i was before i wouldn't be here i was too [ __ ] suicidal yeah like i mean i was hinging on it like i was man i was just i was itching for a reason and that was my reason without her man i wouldn't be here yeah i was actually gonna have her call in but uh things didn't go as planned but we're wrapping this up but i got to tell you man you've got to be one of the most resilient people i've ever [ __ ] met that is uh been through a lot of [ __ ] it's a daily stroke it is mine like that [ __ ] road ain't easy and i'll tell you what after i um after the whole thing kind of came out you know it spread through the community like [ __ ] wildfire i was surprised how many other people it happened to a [ __ ] ton of people a bunch of people that i knew i had no [ __ ] idea like i mean cheating to it's a common theme in the military i mean it just is gone the road a lot it's a common thing i feel like she should got an exemption it's like i owed that to her you've been through enough you didn't deserve some [ __ ] typical team guy piece of [ __ ] cheating on you didn't she's [ __ ] perfect and i took her for granted it's [ __ ] terrible every day i wake up i'm going to prove to you one more time that's a struggle she said that when uh when i talk to her that every day that's the first thing you say when you guys wake up yep it's the truth i mean she keeps me accountable and that's what i needed i needed someone to hold me accountable it's like since that's happened i mean we turned over um the gold star thing started right after that and it's like every day i'm dealing with that and i'm also dealing with everything else that goes along with it so i mean me and her we're thick as thieves now i mean we have to be like put our backs against the wall just you and me at the end of the day it's just this the rest of it's just noise it doesn't matter it's good for you like the big thing about mexico it doesn't matter the only thing that matters just family things i control things i can reach out and grab and pull in everything else it's fake social media it's not real people pretend like they're happy and they're [ __ ] not and i see it now i know exactly who that guy is i know exactly the pain he's in under the pain that she's in doesn't have to be that way if we just open up and we just say it can save people like i'm sick of people killing themselves over what feels like a a mountain of time it's not it doesn't have to be yeah no i think we were just more open about it just say it be a lot better off if you have one piece of advice for guys coming out now because we're hitting 20 years you know what would it be you guys transitioning yep it's gonna be a lot harder than you think it is i see a lot of guys who do a failed transition now because they try to do it alone you didn't do anything in the military alone nothing you didn't you didn't write your own eval you didn't do anything you didn't do your own med checkups you didn't you had a team supporting you the entire way through guys try to get out and they try to reinvent themselves into something brand new with no experience and they try to do as a singleton and when it doesn't fail so damn good they hit rock bottom like why like i get it you want to go to goldman sachs that's awesome you're the only navy seal in that [ __ ] place are you gonna talk to are you gonna have a conversation with when you're having a bad day a [ __ ] bad day what are you gonna do you're gonna call everybody else is busy like you have to have people to check in with i think that's the other thing that saved us after mexico we just say it like there was open dialogue in that place now all the gold star kids are in there we just say it like we're not we're not having this [ __ ] anymore we have open forum conversations like you got some in your mind say it say it right [ __ ] now don't hold it don't let it faster it won't get better with time you won't just get over it in five years you won't it'll compound it'll snowball and it'll consume you um well i'm glad you're spearheading that yeah i appreciate it i got one last question you have kids after all you've been through all those deployments all those injuries mental physical would you want your kid doing that yes and no if they were gonna do it with true believers with the right crowd that dedicated to the mission um and really obsessed with it absolutely if it turns into uh some water down thing in 15 or 20 years where it becomes like a part-time thing no in my opinion that career field um special operations in general it cannot be a part-time approach you can't mass-produce that you need people that'll obsess over every detail the nation deserves it i have a kid who's lucky enough to be a part of that absolutely but i don't want some watered down i don't want that it's too dangerous to have that it's like the only way to do just do it right do it the best your ability um i know i do it all over again i do every ounce of it except for the last two years as far as military every bit that i hated every time i was [ __ ] somebody it's all part of the story i was exactly where i needed to be doing exactly what i needed to do and i'd do it all again well man i just want to say it was a real honor interviewing and uh seriously truly it was an honor i appreciate it so anybody looking to find you the links are below and man i just wish you the best of success and most happiness i appreciate it thanks for having me on cheers you