Combat Story (Ep 9): Jimmy Settle Air Force PJ | Purple Heart & Air Medal (V) Recipient | Author

i see this guy jump out and i see three muzzle flashes and my mind's like oh we're taking fire and i instinctively reach for my comms to identify the threat the second round went through the belly of the helicopter and through the fiberglass floor and then bounced up and went under my helmet through the scalp not breaking the skull and it just rode my skull all the way around to the side welcome to combat story i'm ryan fugit and i serve war zone tours as an army attack helicopter pilot and cia officer over a 15-year career i'm fascinated by the experiences of the elite in combat on this show i interview some of the best to understand what combat felt like on their front lines this is combat story today we hear the combat story of jimmy settle a retired air force pararescueman or pj credited with saving 38 lives and assisting and saving 28 others in combat in addition to saves in the alaskan wilderness he racked up over 270 cesar hours in afghanistan we earned an air medal with valor for his life-saving heroics and a purple heart after being shot in the head and returned to combat 24 hours later his book never quit chronicles the friendships hardships pranks and events that changed his life on the front lines of the pj world i hope you enjoyed his story as much as i did enjoy [Music] right uh jimmy thank you for for uh sharing your story with us today thanks ryan i really appreciate you making the time to interview me and hear my story perfect so jimmy your your book never quit that i i just finished honestly reads a lot to me like in a positive way almost like forrest gump where things happen to you that should only happen to 10 or 15 other people separately and all happen to you in one lifetime in a short period of time so there's a lot to unpack before we get into that i was hoping just the kickoff question what is the oldest you have ever been because as i look at your life growing up in alaska you go through this massive pj pipeline you're doing pararescue in alaska you're in afghanistan up in the mountains what is the coldest you have ever been training combat whatever cold has been a long intimate partner of mine throughout my life many times um throughout high school i was part of a cross-country ski team uh racing team and to you know zipping around in the woods and spandex not much else and so it was like almost an annual event where i would get frostbite on my pecker and on my hands and my ears and cheeks and so it's like that would be the indicator to me like oh you need to wear that uh underwear with duct tape on the front to kind of block the wind there so that was like my introduction to being cold and i would have some really fierce days he'd come in from the cold and that throbbing because like some of my most painful memories of cold are coming in after races and that that throbbing feeling as the blood's rushing back to those sensitive areas but uh none of that really prepared or compared to uh being dunked in the the cook inlet in february uh in the middle of the night i mean there was a lot of times in the pipeline where we were really really cold cold for like days on end and just like oh it's sapping your body but when i was in the water with roger that was next level cold it was unbelievably cold and like i can compare that to excuse me doing uh winter helicopter work in fairbanks in the in the winter time where it's already like negative 20 degrees and then you're under the rotor disc and you've got all this blasting and it's so cool too because sometimes in the winter time when it's really that cold the helicopters generate an amazing amount of static electricity so you grab that hoist cable and it's zippity zappity zippity zappity it's shocking you could just feel it pulsing through your body uh but no getting dunked in that water for like 45 minutes with a semi leaky dry suit was it took like a week to recover from and and actually to this day my hands don't work right anymore they're as soon as i touch cold they get white and they're creaky and achy so i think my experience in cooking it was absolutely the most coldest i've ever been okay i mean that and on a good day that water in february is like 30 degrees and there's chunks of ice bouncing off of roger and i it was so cold in fact that there was ice forming on the inside and the outside of our dive masks so we really couldn't even see and i didn't think that would be possible it was nuts so i i want to get back to that instance because i feel like that's one of i don't know how many near-death experiences you've had but i feel like that's one of them we got to talk about it later so now let me let's let's take a moment to just describe what a pj is because i had this vision in mind from being in the military and i was in the on the army side of it um to me a pj was this idea of a lone ranger in a flight suit geared up all tactical that very rarely gets called on and has to go in and like recover a pilot deep behind enemy lines that was always kind of like my impression after reading your book and looking at the pipeline you go through it's almost like you're a um a medevac crew on steroids with enormous capability so how would you describe pj to the layman in the military who's never come across them well i think you've got a really good handle on it um uh there's a bunch of different ways you can look at it and which what's kind of neat so yeah pararescue in itself was initially established as a insurance policy for the military to recover their highly trained uh pilots behind enemy lines and recover or destroy sensitive equipment and uh in addition to that because of these skill sets we are also tasked with responding to uh uh tragic oh man my brain just dumped on me uh natural disasters things like humanitarian missions uh and then that evolved into search and rescue and stuff however within the community uh which many folks don't know about is uh pear rescue kind of gets divided into two groups uh there's the rescue side of the house and then there's the special tactics side of the house and i was part of the rescue side the rqs squadron and then the sts squadrons uh they have a slightly different mission set uh the rescue squadron the west rescue side of the house was my it was was my passion that's the way i wanted to go and because i grew up in alaska and in alaska the the the pjs up there do a ton of civilian search and rescue work and uh i guess i'm jumping ahead but you know uh back in the uh 70s my family had a horrific boating accident and it turned out to be air force pjs that came and saved them didn't know this until i was writing the book so that's pretty cool i'm sorry i think i kind of walked away from what the pj is but so pjs uh they're kind of like you you nailed it and that they are the last line of 9-1-1 kind of uh we're the dudes that'll go in when nobody else can or won't go in and uh you're right in terms of like sometimes they're we're just a dude and a piece of glass behind a piece of glass that says break in case of emergency all kitted up you know it's parachutes scuba tanks weapons all that good stuff plus all the tons and tons of rescue and recovery gear like for collapsed spaces and all sorts of neat stuff so anyways the rescue side of the house their mission mainly involves like sitting alert and for launching on rescue missions which could be a pilot going down or hikers getting lost or troops in an ambush the other side of the house the special tactics squadron guys they're the dudes that tag along with like the navy seal teams when they're doing kinetic kinetic strikes and stuff like that and so there's really two roles you can either be attached to like a helicopter platform or a c-130 or c-17 or something like that or you can be attached to a special operations team that's on the ground whether it's uh alphabet soup or whatever uh just like we're door kicking medics but we're not gonna be the first one through the door we shouldn't be you don't want us to be the first one through so in that case the the sts side they are performing like an enhanced medic role on this team exactly like an 18 delta got it all right yeah that translates well to my side of the house for sure yeah and uh and we're that's kind of what the pipeline is uh designed to do is to make us be able to be plug and play within the dod's other special operations communities like if they've got they're spinning up a mission somewhere they can just pull the pj from whatever squadron and stick it in and it should just be minimum you know time to get spun up and on the same page yeah all right got it and just looking at the on the air force's site about like the what it takes to get into into that career how long it takes like and we'll get to the pipeline because i think you can't talk about that discipline without this awesome courses that you get to take that very few people get to do one of and you get to do all of them so we'll get to that you got to tell me about growing up alaska i think talking about that accident you just described is important but what what got you into the air force like what was your family environment like um did you have military background in the family how did you find your way there um i think like if you read the book or just if you hang around me i'm pretty non-traditional non-direct i kind of come at things from funny angles and so uh yeah there was some there is a lot of military history in my family um my father was in the navy he was a cook not that glamorous but people need to eat um my grandfather he his job was pretty cool he did korean vietnam war and he was one of the first uh air force forward air controller types and uh he would spend 30 40 days behind enemy lines just on foot patrols calling in stuff and he had some crazy stories and then what the crazy thing about my grandpa is that his name is jim lovell and the same as the astronaut that did the apollo 13. yeah and when he was deployed downrange he was off the grid and so he was from a small town in oregon and a lot of the folks from oregon thought he was the astronaut instead of a combatant in korean vietnam so when he came back he had to really kind of sort that out did you talk to him about his experiences in combat before you joined the air force or was it after it was after it was after uh he was he's one of those veterans that was really guarded about his stories and uh you know he had some pretty intense experiences and when they came back to the environment was much different you know civilians and stuff weren't quite as welcoming as they are today and so he kind of did like the the ptsd nosedive where he just became a commercial fisherman out of kodiak where he could just be the master of his own destiny away from everybody and eventually came out of that and became a great grandpa but uh yeah he kind of kept it quiet until after i came back from combat and then we he started opening up and we started sharing stories and that was that was real special that was really cool because i could tell it was stuff he hadn't talked about years you could start seeing it come out and it was really nice to be able to bond on that level with him yeah oh that's really that's special right there yeah um so in the book talks about your kind of foray into um cross country and you mentioned it earlier and i feel like it's not even it's not like you just did cross country you kind of excelled at it and it propelled you forward so did that feed into you joining the military at some point this like athletic desire or um push for being better i think my cross-country experience actually fed that monkey real well but it also gave me a lot of tools that enabled me to be successful uh in the pipeline and in as a pj there's you know the structure because i you're right i didn't just run cross-country i lived it you know i it taught me how to be disciplined and be mindful of my body and listening to my body and like sometimes saying no to going out with friends because i've got something that's more important to me and i think those kinds of things are really helpful in the pipeline because we'll get into it later but the pipeline's a really long experience and you can get tired of being locked down all the time and just saying no to fun but you know if you say yes the fun too many times you're going to have some hard times yeah but cross country is also how i learned about that that this ties into the pear rescue in that one of the friends i made in cross country running after high school he became a pj up in alaska and he was the one that kind of more formally introduced me to the career field and what the what it was like on the inside and that guy's name's chris robertson and he's still pj'ing it up up in alaska he's one of the senior leadership on the enlisted side up there and he is a great dude maybe a fun guy for you to talk to if you ever get a chance is is he the one that first talked to you about being a pj i think if i recall in the book you're you're working at a shoe store maybe and somebody comes in and they're like hey have you heard about this 100 yeah i was working at this uh so that was cross-country running led me to this job at a really high-end specialized running store in alaska a place called skinny raven which uh it wasn't like your normal shoe store in that it was designed it was a shop where we would fit people to their specific needs for running and so we uh the pj team would come into our store to get fitted for shoes because the unit would buy them shoes and then one day i recognized the guys like hey i know you he's like jimmy and so he brought in chris brought in his laptop and just showed me like an hour of just slideshow all these cool things these cool jumps these cool dives these cool rescue missions and he he really planted that seed and got me thinking and training about it and i talked to i talked to a few other friends about what pararescue was one guy was a ranger who uh transitioned the lerp or something like that and uh i told him hey man i'm thinking about being a pj he's like dude that's really hard you should probably just do alert for something like that it's like oh i really want to do this other stuff and then uh there was this old man who uh was a a friend of one of my running coaches growing up who was a former seal through the vietnam era and i talked to him a little bit about it he's like oh those pjs are the best i love pjs so like when you you start talking to these other operators and these crusty salty dudes and they're like dude pjs are the bomb like well what is this group of dudes i've never heard about that everybody who does know about them loves them so it really got me motivated and then so and i think i may have jumped forward there because if i recall you went to the naval academy for a period and then yeah and then came back and this i think happened right yep yeah in that yeah so out right out of high school i was a really fast cross-country runner and so i had some colleges offering scholarships uh but the naval academy was really tempting this is kind of funny because uh back when i was a little kid top gun came out and that was one of the the first movies i saw in a movie theater and i got the conversation started at home like what's the navy what do they do my mom was very pro-navy like oh yeah you can do anything you want and so when i was offered an opportunity to go to the naval academy i scooped it up and uh you know circumstances didn't work out uh you know i had some i had a cardiac event that uh really changed the direction i was going and i was it's a multi it's a blessing because excuse me if i had taken a scholarship to say a university and then had this cardiac event which is just kind of laying in weight uh i would have been hosed you know if they probably would have pulled my scholarship and i would have been sent kicking rocks but since i was at the academy they they patched me up you know they did surgery and they made sure i was good and healthy and then i had some long thoughts and i realized that the navy wasn't gonna i wasn't gonna be able to do what i wanted to do in the navy which was either become a pilot or become a seal or any of these kind of cool those sexy jobs you know and i was afraid my heart would limit me and so i just kind of parted ways it was cool because they didn't really have any misgivings they were like yeah go go go have a good life and so then after that i went and got the job i got i went back to work at skinny raven and but the things i picked up in the naval academy stuck to me like how to dress how to say hi like these weird manners you know like fork and knife kind of kind of skills that you don't really pick up in life unless you've got a real disciplined family or something but you know and that stuff it really never went away and so and that i left the naval academy in 97 and then i did the shoe thing for until just a little after 9 11 when 911 kicked off that's when my friend chris started coming around more often and i wanted to be a part of this thing you know there was a high uh high patriotism was really it was a big deal and i wanted to do something and what i found cool about pjs is that yeah your door kickers your special operations dudes but the thing that's driving the mission is rescue you're saving lives that's the goal and i don't know i've always kind of visualized myself as somebody who's friendly and helpful and wanting to help people and i saw this as like the most extreme way i could take this uh that desire and so yeah it's it's not a direct path but it all kind of little pieces is building on themselves and uh yeah and i trained for like a year in secret because uh i wasn't sure if i could be a pj because the the the test to get in was really hard it was harder than there's initial uh exam your physical aptitude stamina test that is a ball buster and at the time it was the hardest workout i'd ever done in my life it was just passing that initial eval and then chris told me yeah dude you got to be ready to do that every day that's what we do i i gotta say like i mean you you almost gloss over you describe this as a cardiac event that you had yeah but i feel like i mean if from looking at the book that is probably your first near-death experience i think like yeah the way you describe it you can feel the pressure on your chest and like how bad that felt and how invasive that was right like that surgery and yeah i mean it it wasn't like you were in and out in a couple days and you're just back to normal i mean it was a significant physical event for you from from reading the book yeah and it was uh physically emotionally and all of that like so for uh the listeners i guess i'll go a little more deeply into it how it happened was uh you know i was like 19 uh maybe 150 pounds but i could run like four and a half minute miles endlessly you know just just go i was just a little all i was lungs and legs you're i mean you're a collegiate athlete yeah like that caliber right so i think that sets the stage for this it's not like you just started working out one day and then this happened because your body wasn't ready for it right yeah and uh and you know also that's when you're that invested into something to be performing at that level it becomes part of your identity you know it's a part of every everything you do is uh you're thinking about how it's going to affect your performance later on whether sleep food drink all that good stuff and uh so i was uh so it started after the well towards the end of the cross-country running season and early into the indoor track season i started having these weird like chest feelings when i would get running and i just felt like i had no gas in the tank like i would try to push the gas pedal and the engine would just flood kind of thing and then it got worse and worse and eventually uh i threw on a um a heart monitor and was doing a workout and i could have sworn the hari this is back when polar heart monitors were like the cat's meow and uh and uh it was reading like this crazy number way over 200 and flashing i was like oh this [ __ ] thing's broken all right whatever i'm going to keep going but told my coach [Laughter] we're just like we should we should get this looked at but you know let's go do this uh meet and i was really excited because i was running uh indoor track meet at harvard which is a really cool indoor track it's wooden it's old and it's in this small building so when you're running it's like boom boom boom boom you can just hear the steps and when the pack's coming through it sounds like a herd of horses it's like a magical place to run and you know as we touched on i was pretty fast fella at this race it was only a mile run uh but it's eight laps on this little tiny track i was getting lapped and that had never happened before and i was pushing the gas harder and harder and it was just struggling couldn't catch my breath in my heart my chest was going crazy i could look down at my shirt and just see my shirt just fluttering like crazy and about that same time i was getting like my legs were going numb my arms were getting heavy there was no breath getting in and then the world is my first time with the world starting to kind of fade into a black tunnel my first time yeah right and uh yeah i collapsed off the side of the track and it turned out to have this uh what what we found out eventually was that my heart had developed a third electrical node so within the anatomy of the heart there's two primary electrical nodes that drive the pumping action of the heart that's why we get that lub dub dub my heart decided it was so cool it wanted a third one of those but like me if you see me i don't dance with rhythm i got no rhythm i started in my heart when i got that third node my heart could not keep a rhythm and so when i push the gas it would just go into this fibrillation event and so uh yeah so they went in through my so cutting forward a little bit you know i'm still this 19 year old college athlete but i've been kind of locked up on the campus not really out seeing girls or anything like that and they fly me to a hospital the national navy medical center there in bethesda where at the time was one of the best hospitals in the world um and they performed a surgery on me and the surgery wasn't they used a laser and they put scar tissue around that third electrical node using this laser but to get there they had to go through my samoa artery which was bizarre and uh yeah like the first attractive girl i've seen in like six months or whatever she's the nurse tech that's gotta shave the hair in my femoral artery and i'm 19. i'm five ways awkward just like i don't know what the hell is going on here and uh but uh yeah there that that whole experience was wacky i mean i have like these so the surgery they went in and they uh they they didn't knock me out they kept me lucid but i was heavily sedated uh and uh so i can hear and feel things and uh to do the laser part they actually had to stop my heart and uh that now i know what a heart attack really feels like because it was the most bizarre thing it felt like an elephant punched me in the chest like it's no joke and then like everything also in my mind i remember just like my hearing was quiet like i didn't hear like my hearing was a little bit better and then i realized oh it's because i'm not hearing that background sound of blood flow and stuff through my hearing oh the heart stop you know and all this i'm in this weird lucid state like but it all goes really well it was a very weird experience and uh you know i'm recovering in the hospital and uh find out later on so at the time i thought things were weird because my mom flew down and my grandma flew down to come hang out with me and i just thought it was weird because they weren't really hanging out with me i found out later on they both had pneumonia and they couldn't be near me so it was just like what the [ __ ] what the hell's going on here it's so uh and then in the hospital i remember when they transferred me from this from the litter to the bed uh one of the bandages came off of my femoral artery and i'm in this doped up state and i just thinking i've never taken hallucinogens at that time and i just remember thinking cool the walls are changing colors they're turning red and there's people just panicking around me no way yeah so what happened is my femoral artery was just spraying blood everywhere oh yeah and like this big huge muscley guy came and pushed my my mom and my grandma's side and just putting direct pressure on me i'm like ow that hurts stop it trying to push his hands off me he's like no bro and at the same time i'm embarrassed because i feel like i peed myself because it's all warm and wet and like i'm embarrassed like you don't want to touch my pee but it's such a crazy experience for a 19 year old right or anybody at that matter dude so so when you i i know you you kind of describe having to to leave the naval academy your mom isn't happy about it and i mean it seem i would imagine being 19 like you're in this great spot you had the scholarship you're at one of the best schools in the country um i imagine you could have stayed there no problem with the scholarship um you decide to walk away against your family's kind of desires reading more in the book doesn't surprise me that you kind of choose your own path but like how how did you think about that at the time because you still could have gone in the navy right and for sure yeah they didn't kick me out yeah i left yeah i want to be clear about that and uh and that was a 19 year old decision you know uh because around this time you know i'm thinking about oh how the the goals i had now have to be changed because also i wasn't running anymore either running at the time i was running two three workouts a day and now i'm down to zero and if you do that to anybody it's gonna make them start going a little crazy and then i'm also this is at the beginning of email in college and so i'm getting emails from my friends like oh dude the party last weekend was awesome i'm having so much fun college is so cool and i'm like this college sucks they won't let us do anything these guys are mean and so i chose i mean i i didn't even really talk to my parents about it until right before you know i had already at this point committed i would talk to the the the commander of my uh what did they call it i want to say squadron because i'm air force now they remapped my brain but yeah the uh the commander who was a uh a major in the marine corps and i talked to him about it and he's like dude you got to stick around and it's like i don't want to and he's like all right i told my parents my mom was pissed and she was like you're not coming home i don't care what you do but you can't come home and i understand it now like yeah you jackass but that was good because it took me on a different path that led me to something else really cool yeah and i got to have my own adventures in a weird different indirect twisted way yeah i mean even you just saying like you know it's hard here people are mean to me and then and then you look at what you ended up going through it had to have been exponentially worse than what you would have gone through at the academy i'm assuming oh the irony of my choices was not lost on me later on awesome all right let's let's jump then you're you're at the shoe store chris comes in he talks to you shows you kind of some of the stuff that they're doing the high speed stuff you decide to get into the pipeline talk to me about the pipeline and just like from what i've written down you have indock combat diver airborne free fall you go to seer like five times pararescue emt you got your apprentice course i'm sure i missed some but this is a long evolution in in the training pipeline just before you can get your beret and even start start working coming from the aviation community i can appreciate the long pipeline like flight school is very long you're constantly evaluated every day every week there's a test everything you do is tracked very closely um you do seer you do the outdoor stuff you do the book stuff and you kind of talk about the mental versus physical like talk to me about the pipeline man what is that like how daunting did it feel how rewarding at the end oh man it was an awesome adventure uh some of the old pjs that uh so i was a guard guy uh i when uh after 9 11 kicked off and i decided i wanted to be a pj i joined the alaska air national guard and so that pipeline track is slightly different than uh the active duty side and with in terms of like who owns you and i that was something i learned about when i was in it it's like they finally active duty then the regular cadre they're in charge of you they're in charge of your uh mapping out your pipeline but if you're in the guard the state owns you and then you kind of like the redheaded stepchild getting picked last for dodgeball kind of thing a lot of times and so but also on the other side of that token the alaska team is a really prestigious team it's very busy they have tons of rescues and it's not it's not for slouchers so there was a tryout for the team before i could even try out for pararescue and i thought that was really cool because uh they're filtering out people who they don't want to invest in but also they're preparing you for some of the things you're going to face in the pipeline because when they kick you out the door to go jump in the pipeline they want to ensure a high possibility of success in this candidate however i'm sure i made them question their choices many times [Laughter] my chiefs at the time a guy named skip pula he told me before i went after i passed the uh the initial uh screening he was like dude you know it's a hard pipeline it's going to be a long pipeline and it's not uncommon for people to fail courses but my policy is you get three strikes and then you're out so you can fail up to three times and then boot uh which really kind of played into the whole thing for me because uh when let me back up a little so after i got selected and i trained with the alaska team for a while and because such so much time had elapsed between my navy time and my joining the air force i had to go through air force basic training at 28 years old which was another like ego check humbling experience and it also was really good at just getting me used to sleep deprivation too i just wasn't there wasn't time in the day to do the workouts i needed to do to keep my edge so while people were sleeping i was doing push-ups and sit-ups and pull-ups and jumping jacks and everything else i could possibly think of in the showers on the floor while people are doing night watch and stuff like that and uh it was kind of fun because there would be tough guys in my my squadron like yeah i wanna i wanna work out with you it only lasts one night you know there was nobody who was a repeat worker out buddy so then that rolled me right into the uh the indock which is the selection course for the pipeline the in-dock is now a little bit different i'm not fully up to speed on how they're running it now they've gone through some changes since i uh went through and i to my understanding in doc now is uh not just pjs i believe they've combined uh combat controllers and maybe some of the other special weapons i'm not sure but i know combat controllers and pjs are back together again and uh but when i went through it was just pjs and it was run by pjs and uh they were some mean sons of [ __ ] and they kicked our asses constantly and uh your interview with uh wes bryant he does a really good job of kind of explaining some of this stuff but uh and but my story is a little different you know um so i'm in the pipeline and they model in doc after buds the navy seal training program it's not exactly the same but the intent is there they're really trying to harden you and take you past your own limitations and your own like make you achieve your own potential which is pretty badass but at the same time it weeds out a ridiculous amount of people like i i'll come back to this but it took me two passes to get through indock i failed the first time at midweek for pull-ups which not a big surprise i wasn't i'm a runner not a rock climber all my weights in my ass and quads there's i got little chicken wings so that was a definite weakness that i had to work on um and uh so most of what goes on in indock is uh the the place where people quit so my my each of my classes started with over a hundred people per class uh by the end of it the graduating class was like eight people some along those lines yeah there was classes where nobody graduated they don't care they're not trying to meet quotas or numbers because there's just enough people who want to try and so they are not afraid to have classes with no grads and it's wild to go look in the in the schoolhouse and that every class has their class picture and there's classes where it's just nobody was like damn so um yeah there's no nice guys no favors my friend roger sparks uh who turned out later on to be uh my senior enlisted when i was deployed he was uh awarded the silver star while in endoc and then they went back to kicking his ass [Laughter] yeah he was i'm sorry i should probably go a little more detail he was awarded a silver star for actions he had done what as a forced recon guy yeah and so this is a marine force recon guy and air force is like still not good enough bro you got to go through indock like everyone else yeah everyone else and there's a lot of cross trainees that's one neat thing about pear rescue is there's a lot of cross trainees from other fields uh there's a there's nate on my team in alaska there was a navy seal there was a bunch of marines a bunch of army guys it isn't just like a bunch of chair force dudes there's just a lot of people who know a good thing when they see it was that strike one for you indock yes and all right yeah and so that was a tough call like that was a weird there's a lot of weird things happened in a short amount of time during that um so at that time uh there was another dude from alaska who got picked and was also an indock with me and he was a crow a combat rescue officer which is the officer version of a pj and uh his name was major adrian and he and i were in class together and but we had also trained in alaska together alaska together for months and months and months we were really good buddies and so at midterms uh partway through uh indock that's when i got set back i failed pull-ups and i was just like okay i'm gonna take a couple days off get my head back in the game shake it off let the legs recover because you know you're just beating your body to death and uh you know you're running you're wrecking all the good stuff anything that makes you sweat they're gonna throw at you and uh but so i'm on this first day of leave and i get a call from my buddy chris and he's like dude jimmy i'm sorry and i see i'm thinking oh he's calling to like help me feel better about getting set back and to try to keep my spirits up and i'm like dude i'm gonna be fine i'm just gonna keep focused and then it took a few minutes for us to realize we're talking about two different things and i'm like chris you seem very very apologetic what's going on dude and he's like i guess you didn't hear about major adrian turned out on my first day of leave the team continued on with their training and they got into the pool and it was a hellacious pool session and major adrian wound up having uh something happen to him and he passed out underwater uh and was never revived it so it gives you an idea how tough this course is so yeah there was a dude that died in the selection program and uh yeah that was pretty tough but at the same time he gave me a little more fuels like okay i'm gonna add this to my pocket i'm gonna do this for major adrian you know because he was just a good dude and uh yeah so then i had a little more hunger and a lot more pull-ups under my belt and got back into the next class afterwards for indock and i had no problems i it was tough it was incredibly challenging to say i had no problems would be downplaying it yeah there's a lot of times where it's like i don't know about this you know there's yeah the pool is the great equalizer and that's where most people tend to quit because you're starting there day one i'm just skinny little runner dude and i'm looking around at these freaking like he-man he-man dolls and gi joe dolls like oh my god there's no way i mean that guy's obviously gonna be a pj not me but no those are the first guys usually quit in the pool because those big muscles get hungry for oxygen and the oxygen isn't isn't available under water yeah that's where we spend a lot of time is underwater and sometimes when you're thinking this like why would they be doing this to us why what's what's the intent of this abuse you know and a large part of it is to get people ready for the combat dive course which is a real ball buster but i also feel like later on down in my career in afghanistan some of those like harassments in the pool where you're completely oxygen deprived and you have to conduct these uh highly detailed tasks where attention to detail is critical in a time-sensitive manner while you're under the stress of oxygen and getting beat up on by instructors it really translated well into combat medicine when uh things were just going sideways and like i'm hurting you know because i uh spoiler alert i you know i caught a cut around to the dome and uh and uh i kept going you know they i sat off the helicopter for 24 hours and then i was right back on the helicopter and yeah with stitches in my head still dried blood on my face still working other people i wanted to go home but at the same time what really drove me more was the mission the people who needed me and my own team and those times in the pool i think really helped kind of condition me for that because it wasn't a new feeling it was something okay just put your head down stay focused on the task in front of you you can deal with that other stuff later and uh was indock harder than the combat dive school because the more i understand about that school i've always heard how difficult it is talking to wes brian about it you know like you can just feel how hard it is reading your book is that harder than indock it's different hard it's a different kind of hard um so i was i didn't go to the army dive course i was part of one of the first classes to go through the air force's combat dive school so the air force uh traditionally had been sending pjs and combat controllers to the army dive course down in uh the keys uh but there just was only so many spots there wasn't quite enough to meet the demands so they stood up their own schoolhouse in panama city florida there's a navy base there where they trained the navy eod divers and stuff and uh so they stood up this class and i think i was part of the second class and the fourth class maybe see another another uh washout opportunity um but that first time through dive school uh there were times where i thought this is way [ __ ] harder than in doc uh there's no i wouldn't say endoc had any mercy but their level of abuse was limited by the things they had at hand when we got to dive school and you're throwing twin 80 dive tanks on your back and weight belts and taking away your shoes and you're walking around on beaches and stuff doing like push-ups and flutter kicks and stuff with tanks on your back in the sand after you just swam three miles you know it was it wasn't very fun but uh the second time around got a little better and i think that may have been because i had a little bit understanding of what i was getting into um but uh yeah so my diet school experience was uh was pretty cool at first i was really enjoying the ability to breathe underwater that was my favorite thing i loved about dive school was like oh air underwater yes after so much time of having air taken away and head shoved underwater it was great to breathe again and it this this course is uh it they call it crawl walk run where they start yet with some basic stuff then they amp it up and then they amp it up but sometimes that curve of amping is like really it's a real steep climb and uh there's an event called one man comp uh where your mask is blacked out and instructors are just really tossing you around and messing with you and there's all these things you've got to try to accomplish specifically you're trying to maintain control of your air supply and then when it gets ripped out of your mouth it will it gets tied into knots behind your back and you're wearing a blacked out mask so you couldn't see anyway so you're you're trying to build a mental image in your mind of what this knot is and got to untie it and get this air supply back there's no cheating you can't breathe off of your your secondary or anything like that and then there's all these these steps you got to go through anyways i did the whole procedure where you got ditch your gear specific way you do some things and then you put your gear back on in exact specific way and then you tread water at the surface and you give this i feel fine dive suit and then they inspect you they're looking for twists on your straps any of that kind of stuff oh before i go any further one thing about the pipeline is almost every day is a go no-go day where you could be sent home if you fail and that's like a stress that lingers over your head uh so i tell my my friends and wife like yeah i did this training program where every day i could get kicked out for three years yeah and so i felt really awesome i was like i nailed this because i had been practic one of the things i learned in running was mental visualization especially before races i would spend the night or even every night before a big race and visualize the race how i was going to feel on specific parts of the race and tactics i would employ and i use that a lot through my pipeline experience you know okay how do i tie a square knot under water without looking at it you know things like that and i had done a lot of that with this ditch and dawn sequence and so i was like i [ __ ] nailed it yes because this after this the course is supposed to get a little easier after you get past this one little one-man comp and uh i'm so stoked and i'm coming swimming to the edge of the pool they gave me the okay you can get out dude and uh so they don't call me dude i and i come to the edge of the pool and as i'm getting out i drop my [ __ ] mask in the water and that's a safety violation and it's like settle out and happen to sit on the edge of the pool going like what did i do wrong why did i do i was just so in the moment of excitement that climbing ladder i dropped my mask and that small little lapse in of inattention ended that ride and uh i had to go back to alaska that's one of the things that separates the guard guys from active duty when you get recycled from a school active duty guys typically get sent back to lackland where the cadre at the schoolhouse enhance your training so that you're more prepared but i went back up to alaska where unchecked full-blown pjs could have their way with me and uh that was uh that was very motivational because i didn't want to get sent back home again yeah and so i spent like three months back up in alaska doing my best to train for dive school and at the same time what was really cool is there's new cones coming through so uh trainees in this area are people in the pipeline right that's the name for the unfortunate few who are in this pipeline that is 100 correct yes so the the life sequence of a pair rescue men is when you have these fantasies in your mind about being a pj and you're training in secret you're considered a toad and then then once you pass that that initial exam and you begin the pipeline you graduate to a cone cones then i still have nightmares about that term because anytime a pj walk around cones drop and there you go you're just doing a set of 50 push-ups plus one for every pj you see standing around and one for teamwork and freedom in america next thing you know you're doing 80 push-ups in a set and if some person quits you got to start all over but uh yeah then you move into cone and then you become once you get your beret then you're a pj and then when you're a pj you're still kind of a new guy they don't trust you with a lot for a while yeah in fact there was a brief while and it was pretty common for new guys to have their berets taken away for a little while to re-earn it yeah that that's an ego check right there uh but you know if you're not fully mission qualified initially you know it might it might make you re-earn it just uh just make sure you're on the level of them right so yeah back to dive school then i went back and uh the second time i passed there wasn't any major hiccups there was a lot of fun weird wacky stories and stuff because you know we're in panama city florida and it happened to be during spring break and uh it was pretty cool you know and uh surreal sometimes too you know you're doing these uh crazy mock-up missions and stuff that are really tough and you come up out of the water and you see spring breakers on the beach having a good old time you're like i'm really questioning my life choices right now oh man so yeah so oh you keep going sorry jimmy oh i was just gonna keep walking down the pipeline but if you want to talk more about this feel free well i want to jump to airborne school um oh yeah so like your your book is riddled with the pranks that you pull and the crazy stuff that you do and you did something at airborne school that i i literally cannot even imagine myself even considering when i was there and i think like anybody who's been to benning has seen the jump towers the 250 foot towers like in the area they're massive you can see them from all over i remember being hoisted up on that thing to be dropped and all the stuff that i've done that is one of the scarier things just like hanging there not knowing when you're going to get dropped and still like having to put your faith in the army that you're not going to die when this thing drops you you know like wind is bad somebody didn't pack your chute right whatever you free climb that thing right so like tell me tell me about this man because i i can't even imagine doing that so tell me like what what was going on what went through your head how many strikes did you have at the time in the pipeline well you know um so like all great ideas this started with alcohol and a friend and uh there's a lot of this is a great idea and none of this should we risk analyze this no and uh see i'm sitting at two strikes one for indock one for dive school and uh go through airborne and uh for anybody who's gone through airborne there it's like i kind of liken it to being a soccer goalie on a really awesome soccer team to where there's long periods of standing around being bored with brief moments of excitement back to standing around being bored and so in those long stretches of boredom you know there's ideas for shenanigans brew and uh my friend john and i it's we just finished it was the last night jump the next morning we're gonna go on the parade field and get our get pinned with our jump wings and uh my buddy john is like dude let's tag this place and what started out as drawing green feet everywhere with the magic marker grew into spray painting green feet with stencils on all these jump towers in weird spots so that when you're walking up those wooden steps and some of those zip line things you'll see like a green foot and a weird spot you're like ah [ __ ] pjs and then sorry the green foot is a is a marker for the pjs right correctly yeah yeah two green feet uh and that came from vietnam uh from the helicopters that were called jolly greens when they land in the grassy fields and then take off it would look like footprints from a giant and so the jolly grains grew into green feet which kind of symbolized the rescue community and pj's really adopted that and it's not uncommon for like uh the rescue pilot or i'm sorry rescue helicopter crews to also get the green feet tattoo after a rescue excuse me like including the flight engineers the gunners and pilots and stuff hearing it yeah um so but that's overall that's kind of like the the pj gang sign green feet and uh so this grew into oh i got a great idea let's take a bed sheet and spray paint a big huge green feed on this thing and about this time it's 11 o'clock at night midnight maybe one in the morning the whole base is dark and asleep and i'm like where can we hang this thing and we both look up at this jump down like oh yeah let's do that so we wound up uh helping each other get up because the bottom part was chain linked off thinking like that would stop people from climbing these towers and it didn't slow us down and yeah we free climbed these metal scaffolded towers uh no ropes kind of slightly buzzed doing it in the middle of the night so wings blowing and you could see cars down below looking at their headlights like we'd freeze whenever a car come by thinking that maybe security got us so we'd freeze and hang tight for a while eventually uh my buddy john climbed all the way out at the end of the drop arm and draped the flag when we like high-fived each other yeah this is awesome and uh climbed back down we did it unscathed no problems whatsoever wake up the next morning and at airborne school wake up times around 4 30 in the morning some ridiculous hour always and so we're up and it's still dark and we're standing on on the wires and as the sun's coming up we we're john and i are giggling to each other because you could see our flag from the jump tower from where we were this white flag with big green feet flowing on it and uh all of a sudden we noticed that all the black cats which are the airborne instructors that wear these black baseball caps and call them black hats they all start like running around talking to each other you can see there's a major hubbub and like officers are coming and going people and then john and i do some quick math like dude i think we're the only [ __ ] pjs here i think we're the only cones there's no way that they're not gonna believe it's us but you know i through our seer training and stuff it was like stay in your circle deny deny deny redirect and uh so we're getting what starts out as like a friendly uh black cat like hey guys do you guys see that thing that looks pretty cool do you guys know who did that oh no that's crazy we would never do anything that fast forward hours later of us being on our faces with cadre yelling at us who [ __ ] did it we're just doing push-ups we're in our blues doing push-ups as everybody else is getting pinned we're still doing push-ups and john and i stayed in our circle i don't know who did it no we no and uh eventually they pull us out of graduation we missed graduation we're sitting in the commandant's office and commandant calls our schoolhouse and talks to the schoolhouse commandant which is like calling dad you don't want that guy you know and he just goes jimmy john tell them what the [ __ ] they need to hear so you can come home and i can deal with you here like oh i don't think i like the way this is going to go so we we kind of fessed up to it and the the airborne commandant was like i'm really impressed with what your guy's physical ability is that that is just amazing but i got a lot of knuckleheads on the space that are going to want to do the same thing so i have to punish you you can't do that and so it was kind of bittersweet but it felt pretty good right yeah and became legendary this big green flag and they had to get a special climbing crew that took hours for them to climb up the tower to remove it john and i had done this in like an hour with no equipment whatsoever it's so high the best part is they just threw the flag in the dumpster and so john and i jumped in and and yeah yep and uh as graduation present for the pipeline for john i think gave it to him and he still got it that's sweet man yeah and uh right like you got your jump wings yes sir yeah i got i was really happy about that that because i was concerned they would fail us oh my god i couldn't believe they didn't fail you after hearing that all right so uh i mean we haven't even touched on much of the pipeline but i also want to make sure we get to some of the the hairier moments of you doing the pair rescue stuff um i wonder could you take me to the first time that you even even maybe it's during your when you're in philly doing that apprentice work like the first time you're actually working on a real patient and you feel like this is for real now like i might still be in training but this is the real thing like what was that first experience like for you going to the first call or could you set the stage for it was it philly was it alaska somewhere else uh so yeah it was philly is where i did my paramedic rotations um and that was like my first time working on uh real patients that weren't classmates or dod personnel and uh i got uh placed with a proctor who was really cool his name was larry and it was down in station 25 and down and deep in philly and also i did rotations in camden which is across the river from philly both places they sent us there because both those places at the time were some of the most violent places in america where we could get experience with trauma medicine you know like bullet shots and stab wounds and drug overdoses things like that and uh you know i did a lot of runs initially that were kind of like vanilla ish maybe i'll get an iv started or throw some o2 and taking mostly taking van vitals and doing handoffs but the first one where it was like oh [ __ ] this is for reals uh it was when uh walked in uh it was a call for an unresponsive person um on like a third floor walk-up and these little tiny narrow stairs these really steep stairs are really i've never been in buildings like this where they're uh three like like a single bedroom stack three high kind of thing and there was this really heavy woman who had fallen off of her bed and onto the floor and was unresponsive and staying onto the floor i mean it was less than a pillow's width between the bed and the floor it was a really tiny space and she was huge and she was slippery and unresponsive and so i'm trying to get her out and i keep slipping and i'm also trying to get vitals and starting to do cpr on around the spot and uh eventually we'd get her down the stairs and that was like dripping with sweat and it's like we gotta move we gotta move we gotta move and uh uh i intubated her in the ambulance and that was like my first real intubation with uh a live patient not like a training dummy or cadaver or anything like that and it was uh it went in so easy i thought it messed it up you know because it's really easy to put the tube instead of in the lungs to accidentally put it in the stomach and so i'm trying to check to make sure my instructor is like no dude you nailed that let's keep going and so yeah that was pretty that was like the first time where i felt like these medical skills are like i could do this and this is valuable and i don't i don't think she ever came back like i think she crossed over but uh it was a good experience for me to use my skills and like dealing in an emergency with a critically ill person and you get this adrenaline going on all this stuff and it's like really important to stay calm and collected and know your algorithms and do your checklists and that's when i really also began to appreciate the way the military has been structuring all their training with these checklists and algorithms because when you're in that heat of the moment it almost becomes automatic and you don't really have to think about oh this then that or and uh excuse me it just flowed really smoothly and then when it was done and we're walking away from the hospital i'm talking my proctor i almost didn't even remember what i did it was so automatic and he was like no you just nailed that iv you nailed the tube and that's like a really good feeling yeah and uh yeah so that was like the first time i worked on somebody and uh in the civilian or who was yeah that i felt that i know i worked on a bunch of others but that one really stands out in my mind because that was also one of the first times where i was still working with a warm but dead body too you know and that's something that kind of comes back in in afghanistan you know where the dudes are are hurting or blowing up or tore up and it's still warm and it's like you know it's there's some mental stuff you kind of have to work through uh because it does make you stop short sometimes like whoa weird but did you come out of that jimmy with like that first that experience like this is pretty cool this is like i'm on the right track like all this stuff that i've gone through is worth it now like this is what i should be doing yes that just further reinforced my choices it was like i can now sort of save people's lives in addition to doing all this other cool stuff like jumping out of airplanes and scuba diving you know and because this was really my goal was learning how to save lives you know and it's something too i still kind of carry on today i'm not i'm no longer active like i don't have active licenses as a paramedic or anything anymore but it's a skill set i share with like my kid i have a son who's in cub scouts or wasn't cub scouts now he's getting me to be a boy scout but uh i tried many times to teach those kids basic first aid and stuff like that because that basic stuff it does most of the work and if you get the the basics down at an early age you never know when that stuff might come in handy later on and so that's one thing that's i'm still passionate about i don't i know i'm jumping ahead i'm no longer active in the like the medicine world or anything like that but i am passionate about sharing that information and experience hoping that other people can have these tools and if they need them they know what to do instead of because i can't imagine a worse feeling if like you see somebody go down and you just don't know what to do yeah you know that would be a terrible feeling well moving from that that so that was kind of civilian world you get your beret you're in alaska as you described the kind of the unit you're in in alaska is is well known for having a lot of rescues just because of the nature of what people do in alaska right like the great outdoors not a lot of connectivity you're kind of on standby going to help people out whether it's skiing or climbing or boating or fishing whatever it is what was the first experience you had in alaska doing a rescue that you or one that really comes back to you before getting to afghanistan yeah so one thing about rescue missions they don't advertise excuse me excuse especially in alaska is uh a lot of rescue missions involve uh window time hours and hours of looking out the window for where these people are because alaska is so big and the train is so diverse that it can be really challenging to locate people and so you could spend up to 12 hours on an airplane looking for somebody and i had a lot of those missions before i got one where my hands were i got my hands on a person and the first one that really stands out was also one of my favorite rescues because this it it was it's just neat in weird ways like unexpected and uh so it was i was night alert and so the pj section up in alaska for civilian rescues runs like a firehouse on 12-hour shifts you have day crews and night crews and that's largely driven by the airframes we're tied to because uh aircrew have rest requirements and you can only be on duty flying for so long before they gotta give you some rest and so they're running two shifts a day and i was uh you know still really new pj and i was on c130 night crew so that means we're going to get the long range missions stuff like that and any kind of potential jump missions which is pretty exciting stuff you feel super badass when you're jumping in to go save somebody oh yeah but this was like a lady who was way like i think it was a four hour flight in the c-130 and way down in the southeastern part of alaskana island and it was a hunting party and uh they had just arrived their plane had landed and they were they had quads or four wheelers and this lady had a uh a chainsaw and she had strapped it to the front of her four-wheeler to take it to their their hunting site and while she was going there she had uh her atv rolled over and since she wasn't wearing a helmet the chainsaw just slayed her scalp right open you could see the bone you could see the white and it was real bloody um and it took us a little while to get to her and we couldn't land and there was nowhere for the c-130 to land and so then the guy i was with his call signs bear he we drop open he's a senior he's a senior guy by years on and he's also loves shenanigans and he also liked to really kind of question my making and so he had the pilot drop open the ramp on the c-130 it's the middle of the night it's winter time the winds you could just see the winds ripping across the wave tops because it was like mountain right to ocean there was no flat spots and he's like jimmy what's your thoughts on jumping in all right well i guess we trained for it let's try it yeah i'll try anything he let me get my shoot on and it's like jimmy we're not gonna jump in this are you kidding me we're going to die and so i jocked back down like oh okay well i trust bear the helicopters finally got to the lady and we found a place where we could land and we linked up with the helicopters and transferred on board the c-130 and uh that's when i got to take over uh care for her and it was really neat she had this really beautiful pink camouflage that's like victoria's secret camouflage outfit and she was in great spirits too i was she's one of the most impressive people i've worked with because she had to be in incredible pain and yet she refused any meds and uh yeah she took it like a champ yeah and she was joking with us the whole time like do you think it's gonna mess up my part you know stuff like that i mean her skin was off of her yeah yeah like we put a wet gauze on her forehead to try to keep that stuff hydrated and you peel it off and like oh [ __ ] there's bone put it back on oh yeah and so i i don't feel very strong compared to her oh man yeah that's brutal yeah that was kind of a fun one though just because it was so light-hearted not light-hearted but it was a good happy ending yeah and so oh yeah go ahead keep going no no you you go ahead i want to talk more about this cook inlet scenario fiasco near-death experience so this is i understand correctly this is prior to afghanistan you're a pj it sounds like it's a night op and you're dropped into this freezing area of alaska right yes so like what what were you doing there and what happened because things didn't seem to go as planned yes so um it's pretty standard in our unit that every other week or more currently you're going to do water work and that is to keep our skills up with working with helicopters climbing in and out of helicopters out of the water as well as parachuting into the water because there's water such a huge part of alaska that uh you have to be extremely proficient or you're going to be in trouble and so we were this is a february before we were walking out the door to afghanistan in october and so every training thing we were doing was tactical we went from our cool bright orange rescue suits to the black tactical suits took off all the active strobes and reflectors and put ir stuff on and uh the helicopter we so what the the mission the training mission was was we're gonna do two helicopters there's two pjs in each helicopter first helicopter goes in the pjs jump out climb the rope ladder in next helicopter does the same thing and it's about 40 to maybe 100 mile i don't know exactly 40 50 60 miles away from anchorage you can't really see it anchorage is the biggest city in alaska and it sits right on the water and it's kind of a beacon when you're flying like oh right there's home um but we're so we're flying away from it and it's dark it's february uh i think the air temps were hovering around negative 20 and um we're all ninjaed out you know and so the first crew first i'm on the second helicopter negative 20. is that what you just said negative 20 all right yeah 20 degrees below zero fahrenheit to be very specific and uh a fog so the first bird did the thing the guys jumped out and it took them a lot longer to get back in the helicopter than we normally do and but we didn't really think about anything like that except roger and i were like all right jimmy we're gonna [ __ ] nail this we're not gonna be as long everything's a competition you know that first team it took them five minutes to get out we're gonna get out less than five and so i i'm stoked you know there's a lot of faith in the equipment at this point especially when you're jumping into icy waters like it's not just negative 20 in the air it's just at freezing level in the ocean and the ocean is coalescing into ice chunks and stuff the tide had started to change on us bringing an ice floe in on top of us and with the tide also became a fog bank but we didn't see the fog bank because it was dark and uh and so raj and i jump in and uh first thing i noticed when i hit the water was how cold it was like all the skin around my dive mask was just like burning cold and even though i had neoprene gloves on my hands instantly became useless they were just big numb clubs and we realized immediately that we were not gonna be able to climb the ladder out so we gave the sign for uh the hoist cable please send down the hoist cable and in all these operations we were climbing harnesses on top of all of our gear just so we can quickly clip onto the hoist cable and get out of there well something weird happened um we had done water work a million times before and never had this issue but this time when the flight engineer was dropping the hoist cable to us yeah i think it's called the above ground effect of the rotor wash just which is like what i'm trying to say is the downwash from the propellers on the helicopter created this horizontal wind that was really powerful on the surface of the water so the hoist cable would get about within a foot of my hand i'd almost be able to reach up to it and then it just goes sideways on me and uh the first time it did it i thought it was funny i was like that raj look look at it go he's like and i started swimming for it and he grabbed he's like jimmy you'll never catch it just stay here let them get it to us because it's their job to get it to us it's like okay and we sit there and the helicopter is over on top of us and if you've ever been underneath a helicopter it's pretty abusive and even on the best of days and in the warmest of water that water turns into like needles smashing your face and what we were doing we were feeling like ice crystals sand blasting our faces and uh my mask was fully encased in ice i couldn't see it i couldn't see the helicopter so i had to keep pulling my mask off to try to find things but the rotor wash was so powerful that it was like hurting my eyes i couldn't see it was just water just squinting through and water flooding through my eyes and eventually roger's like [ __ ] swim for it jimmy you know after 15 minutes of the hoist cable coming down and scooting away from us it stopped getting funny and we were both getting really cold and then all of a sudden uh all the helicopters lights turned on and it was way closer it was sitting right on top of us and it was tail down kind of flying backwards and we were like oh [ __ ] that's not good at all helicopters don't like to do that and uh all these lights lit up and it gained altitude and took off and then it was just quiet just going it was gone there is not a sound now you can just hear the sound of ice bumping into ice in the ocean you know and the wind and then there's oh crap there's fog coming in and so raj turned to mania and i suspected at the time that it was a training question he's like jimmy what do we do now but i also think maybe he was like what the [ __ ] do we do now yeah and i'm like i guess we start swimming he was trying to swim for anchorage and he's like good luck with that and then we look around and it's so crazy we were where we were was like about a mile from a collection of oil refinery offshore oil refinery things and i'm thinking do you think we could make it to one of those it's like i don't know i guess we could try but it was we only maybe tried swimming for five minutes but with all that equipment on and in those dry suits it's really really really hard and around this time i'm getting deeply cold and roger's not talking as much and i turned to him and he's just like i could see it in his face he was he was really really cold and i go raj how you doing he's like jimmy i think i've got a leak in my suit i'm wet inside and i'm cold and i'm like oh no so i hooked uh hooked an arm around his uh his harness to try to keep him close to me thinking well if nothing else it'll be easier to find the two of us together instead of the two of us apart if because it started running down that checklist like oh there's the backup helicopter where to go and we had no columns with us there was uh and that's one of the things that sucks about water work is they haven't really made a great radio for water work i mean they have some waterproof ones but like when you're jumping in and out of stuff things get wacky and kind of jacked up and batteries go south on you and stuff so uh yeah we're floating there for a while and uh nobody's coming to get us and so i uh i had an ir uh chem light it's an infrared chem light tied to like four feet of shoelace type string and it's uh called like a buzz saw for those folks who don't know if in fact that's one piece of equipment i highly encourage everybody to throw in their survival gear if you're going off-road like if you're doing going to the mountains throw a buzz on there because from the air you can see that thing from a long ways away and it doesn't take up any space and it might help you and uh especially at night yeah so we used to use that for mark and ground for getting eyes on the ground target or the uh friendly forces to then figure out where to shoot so i mean it's really helpful yeah and it's such a simple thing it doesn't require any wazoo technology and and uh not many things that can go wrong and so i busted that out just to keep just to have something to do grand total before they finally pulled us out we were in the water for over 45 minutes and yeah and on the best of days the suits we were wearing are 30 minute suits and so yeah when the when the second bird finally did come and get us um they uh they uh they tried to drop the hoist cable to us but both of our hands were just so useless that we couldn't even put a carabiner onto the hook and uh so i think leo one of my buddies he jumped in and hooked us up to the hoist cable and got us out of the water and so like the pjs happened to say pj's kind of thing but uh uh i sat like i bear hug the uh the heating unit r2d2 for the whole flight home i was like i need you yeah and i was i was in so much pain that i had no ear protection in and i didn't even care i didn't even ask for plugs or anything i was just like and those things are really loud and so what had happened was uh from what we were able to debrief was at the helicopter that we were originally with uh the rotor wash uh kicked up some sea spray and the spray came in the helicopter and iced up all their instruments and then the helicopter gained a ton of weight and ice really quickly and that's uh that's not good for those things and uh yeah so they had to bail out to save themselves uh yeah but that was a there was some there were some times there where i was like i wonder if i'm gonna be in the paper tomorrow or something like that you have hypothermia coming out of that oh yeah i'm sure um i don't we know i never got rectally checked like my you know for the lavage but i i highly suspect i had hypothermia because i didn't feel right for a week and uh um i mean like i was saying too i still have lingering effects but we're so hardcore the following week roger's like jimmy we're gonna go complete that training we didn't complete last week we don't want to go pumpkin on training we gotta check that box and so it was like and it's kind of funny because he and i had that same experience in afghanistan where there was this crazy event and we're at a crossroads where i'm gonna hang it up or get back on the horse and i chose to get back on the horse you know and roger's a good uh good uh a good leader for that so let's let's just jump to afghanistan because i i mean you were there for a brief period of time but you know looking up save accredited with saving i think 38 lives 28 assists air medal with valor purple heart so um and you do a great job in this book of setting up your mindset of going into combat like prior to this it was you're watching it at home you hear about it from other people and then it's like real and i i can very clearly associate with that that feeling that you have and i think many people can from from that experience so the the day that you're you're getting your first nine line like what's going through your mind because you've already done rescues in the civilian world you've done them in in real life like literally in alaska how did combat feel any different to you in that time frame and then take us through that first mission because it's incredible dude uh that transition to the combat zone was surreal um flying into afghanistan crammed in uh c-17 with a whole bunch of people and like i don't know what folks know like if if you're a civilian who's never deployed and you're listening to this it's not sexy how they get troops to the theater they cram as many bodies as they can like the seating on the c-17 would not you couldn't do it in the civilian world people would revolt and they're crammed all this and anyways when we're coming into bagram uh the flares on the back of the c-17 went off and that was the first time i've been on an aircraft where the flares had gone off without me knowing where like somebody's testing it or hitting buttons and calling it out and it made me really think oh geez this is for reals like people aren't playing here [Music] and then getting in the squadron uh it was at first it felt like summer camp a little bit you know when it first landed you're on bagram it's this huge huge base there's a bunch of gi joes running around and everything's dusty and dirty it's kind of like the movies but not really um it reminded me a lot of uh the southwestern united states in some ways just the arid high altitude mountains kind of stuff and uh walk around bagram and then like the first thing that struck me was just the weirdness of being deployed so here we are we're downrange we're all tacticaled out but when you're on base you have to wear a reflective belt and so it just felt so weird you know i was like here we are in combat zone here i am look at me so there's silly little things like that and finally get taken to our little our base our little compound within a compound kind of deal and we called it the opium den just because we wanted to have like this mystical surreal feel for for what we're doing because what we're the work we're doing is this kind of weird mystical thing like we come in out of nowhere do these crazy things and disappear like the chancellor cat and uh um so yeah we embraced the alice in wonderland and uh opium den kind of feel and getting to meet all these guys and the first time i got a nine line drop so now if you don't know what a nine line is a nine line is an order that comes over the airwaves and it can say a bunch of different things but it's basically nine items on a list hence this real creative name nine line that uh troops can tell what they need whether it's food or boots or if they need backup or whatever and most the time for us nine lines involve medical care and uh usually when it comes through for us it'll have a number of casualties and then how bad they are and then what we're getting into but those nine lines are often incomplete and when you're flying in they can change you know and i'm sure you've had that experience as a pilot especially in apache pilot man that's what you flew right apaches oh i got some questions for you too after we can get to it all right you got it and jimmy you i know you started in bagram but i i think if i recall correctly you have at this point when this nine lines coming in aren't you in in jbad in that area so yeah yeah i guess i'm sorry yeah let me be a little more clear yeah so we fly into bagram and uh that's like where our main cache of stuff is and uh kind of where we operate most of time but roger who i keep talking about and our officer captain kirby at the time and captain bailey those guys were phenomenal and pushing the leadership to expand our our missions because for a while the air force was just limiting us to only air force rescue assets because they wanted to make sure we were available if an aircraft went down so that meant there was a lot of time we're watching nine lines drop and medevac is going and getting it or dust stops going and getting it and we're just sitting around picking our noses you know and so our leadership pushed and pushed and pushed and eventually we got to be able to do the cesar missions much more freely and we'd take on we were able to divide up mission alerts with those other assets like dustoff could do this time period we'll do this time period because we were we're good to go in bad weather and night time and all that kind of stuff and we're also carrying lessons you guys could go in low illumination where sometimes dust-offs could not and that was a yeah like oftentimes i would see the air force get called in for some type of evac when an army chopper couldn't go in just because they didn't have the optics to do it yeah that's one thing i really liked too because it made us a little bit cooler that's right man it was like a great glass nobody else can do it send these guys in yeah and uh there's a few times oh so getting to what you were alluding to my first real mission mission mission where i was uh so we after our leadership push to get included in some cooler stuff they took a small group of us and forward deployed us to jbad um and uh this other fob called fob joyce it's a forward dropping based joyce which isn't very far from the water and corngal valley area and uh the army had planned this operation called bulldog bite and what their intent was to close down mountain passes for the bad guys through the wintertime because they were fearing troops and supplies over these mountain passes and we wanted to own that and shut them down intel came across as like oh it should be a breeze there's not many bad guys here we're just gonna drop guys here here and here and it'll be done in just a couple days um things went sideways right away as so the first day of the mission uh i don't remember exactly what time it was but it was daylight turning into dusk and uh we're flying in and uh if the nine line came across it's like there's some dude maybe a little shady on the details which is why i wrote the book because my memory is slippery but there was people who were hurt who needed help and so we flew in and this stuff i clearly remember is i remember the the beautiful alpine glow along the the mountain ridges highlighting these stone huts that these guys would build these stone huts way high up these mountains and these terraced gardens and stuff and uh we fly over the the americans who need help we have them pop smoke we identify them and at this time uh helicopters you know for safety's sake we fly low and fast or really really really high uh but since we're trying to rescue dudes we're flying low and fast fast and we ran a race track over the top of them and doing our dog bone turns coming around and i can see them across the valley at the same time i see like we had them pop purple smoke and at the same time i see a dude in all black hop out of one of these stone huts and i'm sitting on the left side of the helicopter doors open knees in the breeze uh you know i got my weapon in my lap and got you know i'm just kind of looking out doing the cool helicopter dude thing you know and uh i see this guy jump out and i see three muzzle flashes and my mind's like oh we're taking fire and i instinctively reach for my comms to identify the threat and before i can do anything i heard the sound of like i this is just the only example i can think of but a sound of like a hefty bag full of really wet diapers hitting a wall at 100 miles an hour just like [ __ ] it it was grossest town and i i and like a whole lifetime of thoughts happened in like a fraction of a second and it's like my medical knowledge kicked in it's like jimmy i think we just got hit in the forehead and like the next thought is oh this is a horrible place to be injured like thinking of all the cognitive failures and things like that my brain is going to be doomed and then as i'm flying through the air like this is like the only time where i really get deeply spiritual and look to the higher power it's like you know if i hey god if i live through this uh i want to be a better dad to my son because that was like the first thing that came into my head how old was he jimmy at the time that's two maybe three no he was two just two a little like two and a quarter and by this point i had already missed a christmas and both birthdays and a lot of important stuff and i was like man if i survived this i don't want to miss anything else you know and uh you had just been shot in the head also like yeah you're kind of describing this but that's what happened right like you took a round in the head yeah yeah so just to help people understand a little better i was uh fully kitted up i had the bump helmet which is a sexy helmet and uh i got my plates on and everything and this dude who hopped out of the huts and fired three rounds at us the first round hit the uh the motor drive on the 50 cal on our helicopter that was on his side and the third round hit our rear rotor drive and the the axle of the rear rotor and then but the second round went through the belly of the helicopter and through the fiberglass floor and then bounced up and went under my helmet through the scalp not breaking the skull so [ __ ] lucky and it just rode my skull all the way around to the side here and up in here and uh people ask well doesn't the helicopter have armor well yeah sometimes but we took that out so that we could take another person or two we we traded our safety for the capability of pulling more people out and uh which is funny because later on people started making pj's chairs that had uh plates in them so you could sit on a plate do they call that the jimmy plate they should call it the jimmy please they said that'd be great we could market that that's right man uh so yeah it so i'm flying through the air i'm tethered to the floor with a cow tail which is a piece of rope carabiner to my harness and i sort of lose consciousness i don't remember what happened or how long i was down uh and i kind of wake up to my my fellow pj because we travel in pairs and i'm hanging out his side of the helicopter and reach over and he's like holy [ __ ] jimmy's hit jimmy's hit and then it's kind of turns into like this funny it's sort of funny now because he did the right things but i was being a combative patient um the hot the hot bullet was still in my head so my head was just screaming and he sees his blood and he's trying to put direct pressure using gauze on this open wound on my head and i keep hitting him off so get off me that hurts because he's pushing down on his bullet fragments and stuff and so we wrestled with each other for a while and uh oh brandon he was he was a hoot um we and he so the helicopter we the thing that really bummed me out is we uh couldn't rescue those guys so we had to turn around and go drop me off because i got busted up long story short is i land at fob joyce and x-ray in my head head is okay it didn't break the skull but they can't do anything else so they're just gonna suture all that crap in place just to close the wound and um crazy thing is for years i was pulling fiberglass threads out of my head and stuff it had pulled so much junk into my head and never thought about things like that with bullet wounds um so they sit stitch me up and i'm just kind of laying there on this bed with this headache and about a half hour hour later our replacement crew is bringing in those guys that we were trying to go pick up and they are torched they're really beat up and there's not many beds in this little ford operating base i think it was like maybe three maybe four and so i jump off my bed which isn't a bed it's a litter on on stilts or saw horses and uh i jump off my bed and i direct the the the med techs to put him on my bed and i just start working on the guy you know while there's still blood and everything on my face and i was like okay this guy's got shrapnel all over his back i started lying on him trying to seal up any bleeders and stuff the doc walks in he's like what the [ __ ] is going on you should be laying down man like no these people need it more than i do and so i get i i kind of fibbed to our flight dock and i tell them oh i'm fine no headaches nothing i'm great put me back on the bird because from the point i had been shot it was just a non-stop rainfall of nine lines dropping in this operation went sideways on the army guys there turned out to be a lot more bad guys in that place and the army guys were just getting chewed up excuse me and this uh this battle elevated to the point where we had to call up other helicopters and additional rescue teams because our helicopters are taking so much battle damage that they were unflyable and uh it was just nuts and so i you know 24 hours later you know i'm kind of lie a little bit to the flight dock but he understood too he's like this is like i told him like dude this is our super bowl this is what pj's training their whole lives for is this event right here this is what we're supposed to do the glass is broken this is an emergency put me in and he's like fine do it and i was like but doc i can't wear a helmet it touches this spot it hurts can't have anything he's like well you've already been shot in the head what could be worse so so i just i i operated in that environment like without a helmet for a while and uh that was nuts uh so like my that first mission back in the uh so this is kind of like with that water work with raj you know getting back on that helicopter to do the water work again that first time out i felt nauseous you know i had second guessing and a lot of us doubt when i was in afghanistan and i got back on this helicopter i had the same kind of feelings but much more acutely i wound up throwing up out the side of the helicopter but i was like you know what there's no turning around bro you this is like one thing with life i found that the pipeline sort of brought out is that uh the only the fastest way through challenges is a direct path you know and trying to avoid the scary thing or go around that challenge it was only going to draw out that pain a lot longer and so uh i was like i'm we're doing this because the only way for me to get through this uncomfortable moment is to have a broken person in front of me to work on and so we're flying in and we're doing two birds and uh normally the way we set our setup up without giving away too much classified information because we're so cool is that we'll have senior dudes who can call like an officer and a senior enlisted guy on one helicopter and then two junior dudes on the second helicopter and typically the two junior dudes will do most of the groundwork while the two senior dudes can have that tactical vision and uh but this nine line that we were flying into uh it just kept getting screwyer and screwier the voices were changing different people were coming on the radio call signs were being wrong and uh so they called grindr which is our fancy way of saying we're going to switch places and they we dropped in the senior guys first and it turned out to be roger and koa and both those dudes are amazing dudes and that's one thing about this career field there's a ton of amazing people and i'm proud to be part of this community because of all these kind of people and uh so they get put on the ground and uh as they're they're not even on the ground yet they're hoisting down and i'm orbiting i'm in a helicopter that's orbiting providing gunship cover and as soon as they stepped off the helicopter all hell broke loose and it was better than any fourth of july works show i've ever seen and i understood like oh this is what fireworks are supposed to be like as you've seen like disco tracer fire and rpgs and it was unbelievable the whole valley at night jimmy yes okay and because you could see the tracer fire and i could see that was one of the craziest things seeing a real rpg fire off and it flew like nothing i've ever like it didn't make sense so i couldn't i was like what that's how those things fly because i've never been on the receiving end you know and then seeing them light up our buddies helicopter and uh trying to return fire with my small m4 feels like a badass gun when you're walking around the streets you feel like a tough [ __ ] but when you're in a helicopter based gun fight it's just a peashooter it's just nothing and so uh doing my best to shoot from the helicopter and we're all opening up and uh you know unfortunately there's just not enough ammo on those things sometimes and we went black on ammo uh but let me back up a little so what at first it was just kind of like a quiet mission insert because when we went into that valley the comms were funky and we did the change but it wasn't like there was they had been there hadn't been any active shooting in a while so we thought we were cool uh and i'm in my helicopter just kind of looking around and then i hear over the comms i can hear roger's voice uh hey uh can you get us on the ground faster we're taking direct fire and like what the [ __ ] really turn around and you just see this madness and roger you should interview roger because his story is he's an amazing storyteller and what happened between him and koa on the ground is surreal like those guys need to be elevated um but from my perspective it was like we're trying to kill all the bad guys that are trying to kill us and we run out of ammo and we're up high in the sky we have no other choices we have to go away and uh one of the mantras through the whole pipeline is you never leave a buddy behind you know and so that was unfortunately that decision wasn't mine that was like the aircraft commander's decision and uh it was the right one because there's nothing we could have done we just would have collected more lead that's all and so uh we had to fly and uh we can hear them talking a little bit and raj is calling in close air support and getting some heavy-duty firepower rain right on top of his head i'm one valley over at a helicopter depot where the flight engineers duct taping holes refilling the helicopter grabbing bullets and hosing blood out of the back of the helicopter we can just hear the boom boom boom boom boom where the boys are and it's just like heartbreaking i want to just run to them you know give me my stuff i'll just start running but that wouldn't have really worked out like i thought it would you know have those thoughts and we get back on the bird and uh we're reloaded in record time we're back over there but the air space is denied for a little while uh because there's just so much going on so we had to loiter and just wait and i can hear all this going on and it's just killing me and uh eventually we get to go back in and uh get boots on the ground and that was just like a whole mickey mouse affair because our adrenaline was spiked we knew there was tons of casualties and so my my partner and i are trying really hard to get ahead of the supply curve oh no we're trying to resupply the ground guys with a speed ball so a speed ball isn't a bunch of cocaine or anything it's a it's a big huge body bag filled with bullets and grenades and food and stuff like that and uh this [ __ ] thing had to weigh 400 pounds and i can't get it off our helicopter we're hovering over the guys that need the bullets and i'm kicking and i'm kicking and i'm kicking we couldn't get it off the bird eventually we get it off the bird but we've drifted so far that it's like unusable for the ground forces they couldn't get to it it's like ah and this whole time is delaying us to get to roger and koa which is what i really want to be doing we get on the ground and it's dark and we get set right into like a bush that's on like a ledge and so we fall off this ledge still attached to the hoist cable the hoist cable is tangled up in this stupid bush the rotor wash and we're kind of half on half off this cliff and we can hear the boys yelling this is like oh my god i'm trying it's so hard and finally we get free you know the helicopters over us we get them to get out here we were even debating having them shear the cable which is a big move if they do that they're no longer a rescue asset that's kind of a bad thing and fortunately we were able to get off before things got bad because we really didn't want them because they're sitting duck everybody knows where that helicopter is and here we are mickey mouse and on the ground trying to get free um and that's one thing about this whole operation is the pilots need the pilots and air crews have brass balls like the helicopter pilots held their hovers as like tracer fire and rpg is hitting their helicopters flying through it it's like holy crap and uh so get up to raj and he just has like carnage stacked all around him dudes missing faces and holes and heads and gurgling sounds and the he just points to him he's like hey unfuck yourself like who you are sergeant and i think he thought uh maybe we were just taking our time to get up the mountain but he didn't understand at the time we were tangled up in the bush he's probably like what are you guys doing this isn't and uh he points me into this dude who's uh blue and uh he's posturing his uh his body's rigid not like uh not rigid from death but rigid from a seizure and so i get on this guy and i establish an airway or i try to establish an airway and i can't it's just not enough time because the helicopter is coming right back on he's the number one patient get out of there load i clipped roger tells me to go with him oh yeah he's like jimmy take this guy and yeah you hear like fire coming in while you're doing this like there's a gunfight going on you got the hundred you i mean you're supporting the 101st and rangers in this op not like just any old mission i mean there's a lot going on while this is happening huh yeah there's some legitimate pipe hitters on the ground and uh yeah they're swapping lead with friends you know and uh or foes and uh so i got this guy on the stokes litter and i can't carry him to the spot so i grabbed one of the guys one of the army guys who just to me at the moment it looked like he was just sitting down catching a rest and i dream like hey [ __ ] i need your help taking your buddy down here and he gets up just out of like okay who y'all and uh he immediately collapses and i look down i see he's like got a huge hole in his leg and he's just not i'm like oh i feel like such an [ __ ] and so work my way down get the guy on the helicopter i go up the helicopter with him i'm working on him and i'm trying to establish i'm getting ready to get a crike i'm gonna cut down this guy's throat and establishing airway and uh i get bumped behind as they bring in another litter and uh so i spin around real quick and they bring in this guy they put him down behind me i do a quick assessment and i lift his shirt up and his intestines spill over the floor of the helicopter and uh his story is that he got hit in the chest plate with an rpg and flung into a tree and he survived and years later i met this guy again he's still alive he has a colostomy bag but he's still a jolly fella and uh it was great because i'm in this helicopter and i'm trying to put his guts back in and he's like no dude work on my buddy i'm like no i will but i this is a mess he's like no he kept slapping my hands no work on him so i spin around and i do my medical work and eventually i get this guy breathing again and uh you know of course this flight's only 15 minutes long but it feels like days and uh i get get the guy breathing again he doesn't doesn't really start talking till we land and that was like one of the best feelings because a lot of these missions we pour our heart into people trying to save them and then we hand them off to a higher level of care and then we don't ever get any feedback you know we don't know how we did or how they did uh this is one of those times i was like holy [ __ ] he [ __ ] lived yes hey man jimmy as i was reading that i would imagine for people like who would listen to this and think i wonder what it's like being a pj in my mind this was like you were doing what pjs were designed to do you know like you went on the ground you're pulling two guys out of a firefight at night on a chopper you have to crike somebody like probably low light environment tactical you describe having like your setup on their chest as you're operating um like you're just all the adrenaline calming down following the checklist like if there's ever a video of what it's like this is probably the closest to it i would imagine and you're injured at the time yourself like 24 hours from a head wound you make it sound really cool man that's what it sounds like man like i would imagine if you're 18 and you're like what's this pj thing like that's what you want to go do right there yeah and you know at the time it was just the right thing to do you know i was it wasn't like i was seeking glory or anything like that i was just this is my purpose in life and kind of like how i talked about it was the super bowl pj super bowl this is and uh yeah and it was awesome man but and that just kind of turns into a blurry week where we're flying in and out of that same area contested every time for a week just pulling dudes out yeah and then and i i know i've taken a lot of your time man but i don't know so you you kind of talk about losing your memory there or some aspects of it from this head wound mm-hmm i've never talked to somebody who's taken a around in the head so just what did that how did you start to notice that because it eventually had you medically retiring out of the service yeah it was real wacky man like it showed up insidiously um because for that week i was conducting purely trauma medicine and trauma medicine isn't rocket science um and they pound it into our heads over and over and over for years you know so that it's you don't even think and i was operating from that operating system and uh not really having to think about anything other than plugging holes and pumping in liquid yeah when that when the operation finally wound down well there was a time where i was returning fire and i forgot how to change my mag out i remember looking at my weapon and just like being confused not not sure what to do and then one of my buddies reaches over and pushes the mag release button just for me like very gently reaches over click yeah thanks dude and then when we go back we rotate after all that operation we rotated back to bagram to kind of like rest and rebuild and recoup and get all of our supplies backed up and really take a serious inventory and debrief and it was during that time that i started noticing like some weird memory stuff but there wasn't anything to put a finger on mostly what was going on was i had a killer migraine headache the whole time after that it was just like the worst hangover times 10 uh and i was just taking handfuls of motrin it was like chronic candy and it's just not touching it and uh then later on fast forward just a little bit more when i returned home the stateside that's when the memory problems really manifested um you know and whether it's from the tbi or the ptsd or both working together um it was there were times where like i didn't recognize the lady i was married to i was forgetting family members names i when i started driving i would forget how i got to where i was going where i was going how do i get back home and this is before our cell phones had gps on them and stuff and uh and i was having really hard times managing life you know because i didn't appreciate how much a cognitive acuity is needed in daily life and uh i got really lucky because i got plugged into the tbi clinic down in madigan which is outside of tacoma washington on the joint base lewis mcchord and they have a great tbi clinic down there and they really took care of me but i never really fully recovered there's long-term nerve damage to the exterior of my skull i still get migraines from trigeminal nerve damage and i'm the only one that can touch my head that's why i'm bald because i can't have anybody else cut my hair gosh and hats are a nightmare i can't wear that kind of stuff for very long so the air force said thanks for your hard work see you later uh they took really good care of me you know it took some time and some coaching but i had a lot of awesome advocates that were in my corner to help make sure i didn't fall through the cracks because it can easily happen you know i think anybody who's transitioned out of the military even under the best of circumstances realizes how hard it is to become a civilian and you know just reading some of the stuff like there's a part in the book where you say for once in my life i knew i was doing what i was meant to do and to then have that kind of like taken away from you and then have to assimilate into civilian life like how did you manage the transition poorly at first you nailed it uh because that that one of the biggest things i still sometimes deal with is the loss of identity because pararescue isn't a job it's a lifestyle and and it's not an easily obtainable one it's you know a very narrow rigid path that walks steeply that you can fall off any time and so you get to work really hard and it uh you know having that taken away was really painful you know especially after such a high climatic combat experience oh let's wrap up combat real quick just because you're right i did not spend much time in theater it feels weird because you know i talked to people who've been in combat zones for years you know cumulatively i got shot two weeks in on my first deployment yeah and i did finish it up but it was only a hundred day deployment and so that's pretty short and so sometimes you know i feel a little inadequate compared to some of those guys who put their time in but at the same time it isn't about quantity it's about quality i guess and i feel like i had a pretty high quality experience uh but yeah coming out of the military and losing that identity but also losing the direct team you know the team that those group of guys uh that were closer than brothers you know and then just being kind of naked alone and afraid out in the wild you know in the civilian world where it's it's maybe you know from the outside the military world looks really scary but i think once you're in it it feels safe and stable because it's predictable and then you get out in the real world and it's it's wild man it's very unpredictable and then on the other hand there's an ego component too where i had just done these epic things and feeling great about myself but i'm here walking amongst civilians who don't care don't want to know and uh it just like what would i do all this for you know what what was the purpose but then you know i've come to accept everything it wasn't easy man i've had to have a lot of people help me through this i didn't do it on my own i'm pretty strong but i'm not that strong yeah and uh so you know and it cost me a marriage and uh there was even a brief while which isn't so glamorous but there was a brief while where i was homeless so being part of the guard things aren't always automatic like they are an active duty side and so when i rotated back it wasn't a seamless transition to medical care and all that stuff so i sort of fell through the cracks because i was down here in washington state my team's in alaska and so it was hard for them to keep visibility on me and uh also with guard the pay system is kind of [ __ ] up sometimes and that you got to submit paperwork for your pay it's not automatic and it's month to month and if the guy who's processing that paperwork's on vacation your pay could be delayed for a month or two and so i found myself in that position where i was like many months without pay nope my left my wife and well she i'm not yeah we can pass over that and uh i was just living in a car in the parking lot on a commissary in a commissary parking lot for like a week and uh and then this uh tacp chief was walking through and uh i was wearing my uniform at the commissary but i looked like a bag of [ __ ] because i've been living in my car and you saw my stuff you know the pj the the triple stack and all that and he's like what the [ __ ] up with you man what's going on and i told him my story and uh he made some calls and got me hooked up with some short-term housing and got me back on my feet it was really cool yeah that guy actually eventually became the top enlisted for the state which is pretty cool a guy named chief tyvan he's a very good dude dude that's brutal so like do you do you talk to your in your mind with your son do you kind of talk to him about these experiences do you in one day envision or hope that he would choose a similar path or maybe take something a little different that's funny we were having this conversation the other day yeah so my book um there's two versions there's the grown-up version and what's the swear words and the dick jokes and then there's uh the scholastic books version which is really cleaned up and it's all pg-13 and so i forced my kid over the summer to read this book he didn't want to read it because he it it's pretty intense and there was a few times where he's like i don't i don't know my dad yeah this is crazy this is not the guy that i know and uh but eventually he started asking really cool questions and stuff and like hey what's it like working out at night when everybody else is sleeping those are the things you do to keep your edge man but at the same time i would be proud of him if he chose the path similar but there's no way i'm going to force him or ask him to do it uh i feel like i did it for him you know being one thing i realized through this whole experience is that sure the war fighter has to carry a heavy heavy heavy load but the family has a heavy heavy load to carry two and like my mom probably aged 10 years from that time span you know it was pretty and like it took me like five six years to kind of become jimmy again yeah and um i've we had a family vacation reunion a couple years ago for the first time since before i deployed and my mom finally opened up and shared some stories about how she was really scared for me you know and it was really yeah it was really hard because uh yeah it's a heavy load for the family to carry and i don't necessarily want to have to carry that selfish reason there yeah like why don't you be a coder or something be an artist one of the other guys i interviewed another apache pilot i flew with jt snow and i hear what you just described i hear all the time that it's harder on the family and so he had done for he was the biggest badass i knew as a pilot four deployments like thousands of combat hours and the hardest thing for him was watching his son go to play afterwards you know like being that person at home don't want to watch the news and you don't know what's going to happen when you wake up so i i hear it all the time um all right i got just two more questions for you one is is there anything that you carried with you into combat that had like sentimental value or superstition keep you safe good luck charm something somebody gave you uh there's a couple things i consistently carry um i took uh the normal like a normal size american flag and i folded it into a square and i tucked it in my uh plate carrier behind my ceramic plate and uh i did i had two one in the front and one in the back and so there was two flags that went on every mission with me that's cool yeah i gave one to my to my parents and i have one here in a shadow box awesome and yeah and then i had um a small collection of pictures of my kid and i kept them in my shoulder pocket with the hopes of if i ever got rolled up and they uh start going through my stuff it may humanize me a little you know looking for that slight advantage um although i got to be totally honest that when uh those nine line drops nothing else in the world entered my mind i wasn't thinking about family or kids or anything like in order to stay alive you have to stay focused on what's right in front of you can't be distracted um and then as far as like luck charms ah nothing really i just just kind of like my attitude i guess yeah yeah you you mentioned earlier the cheshire cat reference like popping out of nowhere and then disappearing again and i was wondering in the book why you chose that that makes sense to me now as well um very cool all right last last thing and i asked this of everyone but especially for you jimmy going back like all the hardship you went through like leaving the naval academy this long year years long pipeline what you had to see and deal with getting shot the ptsd the tbi and then being homeless like i didn't even know about that part the family lost like would you go back and do all this again um if you could go back to that 20 to 27 year old right uh yes i absolutely without hesitation and if anything uh my only regret is that i didn't try to be a pj earlier like i wish i would have maybe started out like five or ten years earlier just to get more experiences because you know my pipeline experience was three years from 2005 to 2008 but my real parade wearing pj time was just two years you know until the end of the combat and so i wish i got to be a pj longer if anything so i have a question for you yeah so right next door to us at bagram was uh where they parked the apaches and the kiowas and all that stuff um and after bulldog bite we started exploring alternative x-fil options because of our birds getting chewed up one of the things we've we teamed up with the apache guys is that they have these little things on the outside of their birds that we could clip into and ride on the outside have you ever done that has anybody ever ridden those because it looks like it would be rowdy so usually like once once a year you would do a training exercise at your airfield where one pilot would clip in and you do a traffic pattern just so that you could feel what it was like being the person on the outside because it's freaky it's not designed to do that but it can be done and it's been done and then in combat people have done that earlier on in iraq they had they ferried troops from like across a river basically letting them hook on pick them up and drop them off just like field expediency there wasn't time to wait for something else i never had to do that in reality i've just done the the training run but for sure uh people have done that just seems like a wild ride yeah man it's not fun being on i mean it's fun but that's not where you might be right hank well thanks so much jimmy for sharing the story uh the book is great never quit and i didn't realize there was a pg version because i definitely did not have the pg version the non-pg one as well uh yeah great talking to you thank you for being so open i appreciate your time ryan and this is a really cool experience i hope you enjoyed this combat story if you want to tell your own story go to combatstory.com if you know someone we should interview send me their info at ryan combat story dot com hearing these stories can be tough or bring back your own memories if you're battling ptsd please call the veteran crisis line at 1-800-273-8255-273-8255 safe

Channel: Combat Story

Views: 32,044

Rating: 4.9278846 out of 5

Keywords: Air Force, veteran, Alaska, Jimmy Settle, PJ, pararescue, special operations, Special Ops, specops, AFSOC, Afghanistan, Purple Heart

Id: Ccq0x_tMJ0k

Length: 125min 12sec (7512 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020