Jocko Podcast 241: There Will Be Pain. Life is Rough. Lessons From Being Shot 27 Times, w/ Mike Day

this is jocko podcast number 241 with echo charles and me jocko willink good evening echo good evening i was the number one man on the door in my train which meant i would be the first man into the room missions often included debates as to who would get to go first all these guys were fearless and like to train hop to the front of the stack the most dangerous place to be first into a room seals love to fight we all want to be the first into the fight and every seal is willing to accept the greater risk especially for his buddy's sake i had no apprehension about the possibility of my own death my concern was for my platoon mates while i can't speak for everyone their actions this night proved they all felt the same way clarky and i looked at each other he smiled back at me we had practiced this maneuver a thousand times and had successfully done it on hundreds of missions just like this one there was no rush of adrenaline or anxiety we were composed relaxed and professional we would simultaneously breach our respective doors and go to work clearing the rooms of enemy fighters and other potential threats we launched on the signal a mutual wave of our rifle barrels i breached the door to my room it swung open to the right i followed the door in as it opened looked down the right wall and saw it was clear as i pivoted off my right foot to move down the left wall i had the sensation that my body was being slammed with a dozen sledgehammers my entire body was now in the room and the men behind me in my room clearing train were attempting to follow me in the room was small 12 feet by 12 feet my night vision goggles illuminated the darkness and i saw in clear view four of our targets aiming at me all of them armed with automatic weapons and all of them firing at me that right there is an excerpt from a book called perfectly wounded by a retired seal named mike day and i knew mike when he was a young seal he was maybe 10 classes ahead of me going through basic seal training he started his career at seal team three i started my seal career next door i don't know 50 meters away 100 meters away over at seal team one we crossed paths on what was my first deployment we'd see each other around from time to time he was always very cool to me from what from what i could tell always cool to everyone nice guy no ego no attitude and on the day that mike writes about in that book those insurgents that were shooting at him they hit their mark and not just once not just twice not just three or four or five or ten times but 27 times 27 times mike was shot 11 times in his body armor and 16 times in his body and you have to keep in mind and this is a strange thing but one single round or one single tiny piece of fragmentation can kill you so to receive that many shots and survive is well it's some kind of miracle and then to go beyond that because the story doesn't end there but to receive that many shots and actually fight back is beyond a miracle and that's exactly what mike did he fought back and he won and it is an honor to have mike here today to tell us about his experiences his life and his lessons learned he's got a bunch of them so mike thanks for coming on man i appreciate you guys having me uh yeah get getting you out here i know we're in the middle of middle of covid right now uh you've been driving across country i know you just got done with the total archery challenge up in up in utah i i wish i could have grabbed you there so you'd have to come all the way down here but now you're telling me you're going to try and look to surf a little bit which is awesome well i'm trying to that looks like the surf's going to be picking up in virginia since i'm not there we got a hurricane coming up that's the way it works isn't it you should have been there well hey man um i want to jump into this your book is first of all it's it's just i mean everyone obviously i'm not going to read the whole book i'm going to read some of it just go and go and get the book right now the the detail that mike goes into this is a historical document about being in the seal teams about being in combat and and then what's in addition to that the life stories that you bring to the table are important for people to understand understand what how people grow up in different situations what it does to them and how to get through those hard situations because you definitely went through some hard situations so i'm gonna jump into it man jump into this book and kind of talk about your past and how you grew up and it starts off like this he looked huge like a damn monster she was screaming and fighting back which only made it worse i was frozen in terror he bent her arm over his knee and like a twig cracked it i watched him break her arm he yelled at me go get me a glass of water i ran to the kitchen filled the glass and ran back to hand it to him he drank it then smashed the glass on a nearby table and held the broken shard like a knife he went after her again with this newly created blade i jumped on his back to stop him i think that's what finally snapped him out of his uncontrolled rage i flew off him as he swung his arm and i landed on the ground on my back he spun around to attack his unknown aggressor and realized it was me i clearly remember seeing his expression dissolve from rage into one of guilt and shame this is my earliest memory and my first encounter with a terrorist it was 1976 in new jersey and the terrorist was my father his victim was my mother i was five years old that's your earliest memory seal teams were easy he made it easy yeah this is i believe pretty privilege in our society now a lot of us have just terrible parents and one of the one of the best books i've ever read is the body keeps a score and he says in that book the largest medical issue the largest medical problem we have in this country is childhood trauma because it you learn what you are in the first seven years you know for me luckily it wasn't to the point where i became more of a victim and and worried about what things were going to happen my response was just a fight so when i get scared or angry now i fight when i get scared a lot of people when they get scared the fight or flight is is to cower you can see in a lot of a lot of gunfights with people that aren't trained one of the most prominent places to get shot somebody that doesn't know what they're doing is in their in their forearms and their hands it's because they're cowering and our when we get triggered like people know that you don't jump around a corner to scare me because i'm going to smack you upside the head that's my response i don't flinch my response is to go forward and you know my father ingrained that in me then i got in the seal teams and that was ingrained in me and that night in that gunfight it was there was no thoughts that was all reaction that was all muscle memory uh i was terrified i went through a terrified a little bit of terror terrification that's a new word and uh once i got past that i was just angry and then everything was automatic you go on um you go on here in the book my parents divorced not long after my father broke my mother's arm my mother would soon start dating and eventually marry tom a black man a rare union in the 1970s my father held racist beliefs in my mother's marriage to a black man inflamed my father's racist sentiment the divorce included a custody hearing i was young but i can distinctly recall someone in court a lawyer possibly the judge asking me strange questions about tom like have you ever seen tom naked have you ever seen tom and your mother sleeping together the focus of the custody battle which should have been my father and his treatment of us was instead trained on me an innocent bystander interracial relationships were not the social norm in the 1970s i'm sure the court knew my father beat my mother and us kids but they still awarded him full custody regardless my hunch is that the course were so biased at the time that they decided my younger brother and i would be better off with a wife beater and abusive father than be raised by an interracial couple all speculation but i mean the 70s were kind of like that yeah where was this uh this was uh new jersey still in new jersey and they're still married and i got two brothers one one's in the coast guard from that marriage and uh he's a rescue swimmer well not a rescuer he's a crew chief on the birds that go out that carry the rescue swimmers so how old are you at this point you must been six years old or something like that uh yeah right about then about six i'm thinking um you know when i when i picture you i don't picture the the old bastard that i see in front of me right now i picture this young kid with blonde hair and you know blue eyes there's a picture of me in there yeah yeah no that's that's when i opened i was like oh yeah i know this guy um not this one yeah so i'm sure you're looking at me thinking the same thing you know my dad was driving around as well we haven't changed that much really if i shave this yeah yeah no you did you you don't look that much different except for you you used to have the freaking uh the blonde locks bright blonde blocks i do miss them no but i'm thinking you know you're there you are in court this little aryan kid and the judges are looking at you know the the interracial couple and like you said the i mean you said it's a what'd you say it's an assumption but to think of any other reason why they would decide to send you with a known child abuser is it's hard to come up with a different reason well that's another reason why this book's really good i don't think anybody be able to pick that up nobody gets this life without trauma and uh it's a lot more prevalent than i think we understand child abuse and you look at the child trafficking going on right now uh i mean they're just some really bad parents really bad people out there and people are going to suffer trauma you got to build the resiliency it's training they helped us build the resiliency we required to do what we did in the seal teams and it's just training if you sit on the couch and eat twinkies all day and watch and watch tv anytime something other than that comes up that causes stress you're just not gonna be able to handle it you gotta train to be able to handle stress yeah and then i mean the you know that sounds awesome that sounds awesome but the reality is i mean you're probably this small percentage of people that can get out of a situation like this and move in in a positive direction i don't know what the percentage is but obviously there's some percentage of people that go through these traumatic experiences as kids and they end up you know they end up in jail on drugs and whatever else and um yeah i mean there's there's something along the way that made you there's not a whole lot of difference between me and 80 of prisoners here in california i just had the proper opportunity at the right time mm-hmm because if i didn't join the navy yeah i might be i i i'd be wrong with ms-13 yeah i'm gonna come after the amount of seals and this sounds freaking horrible to say look there's some guys that are saints in the seal teams for sure but the amount of guys in the seal teams just if you just took a broad cut of the seal mentality there is an element of the criminal mentality in there like oh the if you if you want to join the navy we we know where this is going to end up for sure well we have to deal with criminals yeah yes i mean a lot of people think that when we go to war i'd venture to say that 75 percent of the people that we're dealing with are are not isis or al qaeda they're just the criminal element that are profit profiteers off of off of the current i mean look what we got going on whatever mayhem is going on yeah they theologically they don't they don't care they're just like hey i can make some money off of that yeah looking at the religion in this country you know we've got how many christians and then what level are they practicing you know it's the same thing with muslims yeah they're muslim but are they really practicing are they really going to follow what they think is right or are they going to take the path of least resistance which is what humans will do you you continue on here fast forward a little bit my father was a sailor when the navy issued him new orders we moved to pennsylvania from new jersey after the divorce my father remarried our new stepmother soon became pregnant giving birth to my first half sister two years later she gave birth to my half brother trauma attracts trauma it has its own distinct language and behaviors we would be raised by two people who'd been severely traumatized as children my new stepmother was a natural fit for our family she too had a history of childhood abuse both physical and mental i don't know much about her the early years of her life other than her parents would lock her in a closet for long periods of time she was put up for adoption and taken in by a loving couple my stepmother would grow up to be both victim and perpetrator she would alternate between coercing my father to beat us and slapping us around herself she and my father would get into their own fights too she would fight back even though she had no way of winning he was six foot two and weighed 240 pounds one of the worst beatings i ever endured was when i was eight my brother and i had gone out on a winter day and pelted a car with snowballs the driver was pissed is it but if he'd known the price we were about to pay for our transgressions he may have given us a pass we ran to our house with the driver of the car chasing us he knocked on our front door and told my parents what we had done my father and stepmother had a friend over at the time they were all drinking my parents were outraged our father sent us to the basement an ad hoc torture chamber of sorts where he made us strip naked before tying our hands to a pole so we were facing each other he whipped us with his belt so hard after another 15 minutes we'd worked up he'd worked up a sweat all the while my stepmother and her friend sat on the basement steps sipping their booze urging him to beat us harder and longer when he was done my brother and i were both badly bloodied and bruised my father's violence escalated as we grew he would smear toothpaste on the nylon belt when he whipped us so it would sting as it cut and bruised us i'm not sure where he picked up this technique but it worked his routine was to bring me into the basement and make me drop my pants so that my bare ass was available he would wind up and rip into my bare backside with that belt holding onto my arm as i twisted in a circle trying to escape i recall a week that was prefaced with him telling us i know that you will be bad kids this week he beat us bloody and then he went back to work this was some crazy stuff he was so nuts he set his alarm for 4 am to wake us up and beat us for no reason whatsoever before he went to work we got beat and we went back to bed hardly a typical morning routine for a first grader my childhood was a real life horror movie i couldn't escape was terrible about that a lot of people have worse i got out of it a lot of people don't yeah um where this ends up you say finally at the age of 12 after years of enduring its drunken rages and endless beatings i decided to fight back one night i found him passed out drunk on the couch i knew that he was passed out because the crotch of his blue jeans was darkened from having wet himself i grabbed a baseball bat and walked back and forth for about five minutes debating my intentions until finally i mustered up my courage and with an overhead axe swing i drilled him hard on the chest with the baseball bat it felt great a totally empowering rush i didn't kill him but i sure surprised him because he immediately woke up from his booze-induced blackout with a look of total confusion that quickly turned evil he looked at the bat in my hands and realized that i was would that that was what just bounced out off his chest i knew by the look in his eyes he was going to kill me he chased me upstairs to my room where i jumped out of my second story window into a thorny rose bush i looked up to see my enraged father stick his head out only to pull it back in i could hear his pounding footsteps from outside as he ran downstairs he was determined to hunt me down chasing me through the woods around our house in the dark he couldn't get through the thick underbrush but i was too terrified to slow down he never caught me i spent the night at a neighbor's house and the next day when i returned home he had forgotten all about it in 1983 my father was transferred to miramar near san diego california that's where he totally lost it he was drinking causing problems at work had been arrested several times for defeat defecating in the aisles of stores some mental health professionals describe this peculiar public display as elimination disorder it's a behavior that's been identified in several serial killers and manifest out of extreme anger at someone or something i was 12 years old when my stepmother received word that my father would be medically discharged from the navy and institutionalized with schizophrenia and a host of other psychiatric conditions he would spend the rest of his life in an inpatient facility or an assisted living environment my father has since died he was very sick and really broken he did a terrible job as a parent however i know now that he did his best that he did the best he could i don't hold any harsh feelings toward him he really sucked as a father dang so i mean it's just it's beyond he had like legitimate serious mental issues well his father was worse than him uh he just wasn't the one that was able to break the cycle i think he tried to it just ate him up i mean his father used to chase hit him his his brother and his sister around with butcher knives and threatened to kill him he never actually threatened to kill us i mean with that that thought's always there his father used to actually make that threat i never i never met my grandfather and what was your grandfather already dead or was quite honestly i don't know if they just kept us from him or or if he was or if he had passed i met his mother you know looking back on that as a kid it was strange she was she was broke just a broken uh broken woman just strange you know just not normal i mean go over thanksgiving dinner and everybody's eating kentucky fried chicken which i don't complain about it i mean you got you got food but uh not gonna complain with having food but it was just it was not a normal atmosphere you could just feel that it was weird i mean his sister grew up in a psychiatric ward she went in when she was really early really young so i don't know what kind of what was done to her so i mean some serious darkness there i mean we got that going on now in the world it's pretty prevalent you know just shitty parents that abuse their kids don't know how to be parents because they were abused uh it's really not an excuse i mean my kids tell me well i've got old kids i've got a 20 year old and 29 year old and they've always told me we wish he would spank us rather than yell at us i was like it's because you've never been smacked you might change your mind if you've got got an asshole you go on here i was about 12 or 13 years old when my stepmother became our legal guardian and seized her new found freedom by dating a guy in a local in a local rock and roll band named beachy and hosting parties at our house our home quickly turned into a constant party with its own in-house band and all the characters that came with it people strangers would sit around my house all day getting drunk and stoned on one particular occasion my stepmother was partying with beechy and his band of losers when she tried to smack me i caught her arms spun it behind her back then swept the legs out from under dumping her on her ass that episode got me and my brother sent to maine to live with our maternal grandparents who we hadn't seen in years for that summer my half siblings were still young at the time i still remember looking over my shoulder and seeing my half brother lying in his crib and my half sister lying in her bed as i made my way out of the house that is the funny thing about trauma because that's the only thing i remember those two i mean i talked to him now but it's as if they weren't even in the same house with us i don't remember them were they getting any different treatment uh i don't remember them that's wild and so and you were like i don't know you were what team were you at two i was a team two was it team one team two team my brother did like eight years at team two from when to win uh god sometime after two thousand ten what does that mean what you're doing i was going i got out in 2010. yeah i retired in 2010. um yeah the usc was in teams for like 10 years that's awesome but just no memory of them of them none at all that's so wow the only thing i can remember is looking over my shoulder when i was walking out of the house now i can tell this is what i think about memories uh like i don't go back to the town where i grew up very often and so i don't because i don't like fi when i say very often i mean for 10 years at a time right and i don't see all those people that i kind of grew up with so i don't fire those right i don't fire those memories very often so they just like fade and i'll go back there and see someone like oh yeah i remember when you did this all i remember remember that girl remember this and this thing over here and i'm always like i i feel bad because they're telling me vivid stories about my own childhood and i just don't remember and i think it's because i just don't didn't fire those you can read studies on people's memories especially in stressful situations and like like i said my citation is not accurate they gave me credit for saving six women and children that were supposedly in the same room that was in a gun fight with four dudes with automatic weapons they'd all be dead the guy that saw that looked past one of our guys that had been shot and killed to see the six women and children in a totally different room didn't even see the guy laying in the doorway he just saw the six women and children and superimposed them in the room that i was in they'd all be dead hundreds and hundreds of rounds were fired in that room in a matter of minutes so now you're heading up to maine that fall my brother and i moved to maine from virginia beach to live with our mother and her second husband tom it was only after we arrived that i learned about how my stepmother and father deliberately and systematically tried to alienate me and my brother from our mother she showed us a box filled with years worth of christmas and birthday cards had been returned without the check she'd written for us my father and stepmother cast them all and kept the money for themselves despite this i feel the same about my stepmother as i do about my father she survived my father's violence and did the best she could i don't hold any harsh feelings towards her either tom and my mother never hit us they were patient did their best to parent some severely abused young minds if the courts hadn't been so biased we could have skipped the seven years of abuse and lived in virginia beach all along but as i would learn everything happens for a reason never made it through buds i made it through eighth grade and entered green run high school where i lasted until my junior year when my wrestling coach caught me smoking pop in the school bathroom this caused my exposure was that a public school green run yeah it's hard to get kicked out of that one it's actually it was actually called gang run it's hard to get kicked out of that one shortly after being expelled i had to run in with the police cop busting me with a bag of weed at the time any amount over an ounce was a felony the cop grabbed the bag and said is this an ounce i said yes he opened the bag grabbed a pinch and chucked it onto the street then said is this announced now no i replied that cop saved me from a felony charge and may have even saved my life i'd like to find that guy one day and thank him there's a good cop trying to take care of this freaking knucklehead kid i was like 14 or 15 years god so from so you came down i spent almost 30 days in jail now that's where i learned how to play uh what was it pinocchio learned how to play a bunch of card games oh man so then you end up spades i learned how to play spades that comes in that comes in handy on the on the ships once you're in the navy um you ended up in the job corps which is like you know you're doing vocational training uh that doesn't seem to work out too great 1990 or 1988 you got a neighbor retired navy dire diver who tells you you're gonna end up dead or in jail if you keep this up you should join the seal teams instead they'll pay you to do all the things you're doing to get in trouble right now he was he was giving good advice maybe he totally saw it he totally saw his kids were crazier than me yeah man you know there's that attraction of violence man and just mayhem when you're a kid well it wasn't violence it was just you know tying ropes in one tree and blowing another one and sliding down on handlebars and just jumping over ridiculous jumps on our bikes you know smashing frames on our bikes and just stuff i won't admit to and so uh you you you head down and you're gonna join the marines i did i tried to and then you got rejected by the marine corps for having a ged and i actually met a guy that was a recruiter back then that was in 88 or 89 and they had a restriction you had to have a high school diploma the ged wouldn't get you in which i'm my guardian angels knew i'd have done four years in the marine corps i already got out yeah i couldn't have done that there's no way i could have done that yeah i mean i like working with them but pre-9 11 marine corps was a lot different yeah yeah we didn't get along too well pretty 911. yeah that's um the marine corps is a completely different environment yeah and and i mean they do what they do it's actually more it's more dangerous than what we do yeah and their day-to-day life freaking uh uh more spartan life you know especially if you're an infantryman like that's patrol to contact yeah go get some wait till someone shoots you it's gonna go get them it sucks i like to wait till they're asleep that's the goal um you wrap up here saying my childhood was not exactly idyllic but it's what happened to me and i'm very grateful for all of it the wounds of my childhood trauma served as the foundation of some truly excellent resiliency training that's a very positive way of looking at this mic resiliency is a conditioned response to physical and emotional trauma and stress it's a never ending process of understanding endurance evaluation acceptance and application that continues to help me get through some very difficult situations childhood trauma especially the kind perpetrated by parents can be some of the most damaging because it can cause children to feel unlovable some children who feel unlovable can become unlovable adults and some of those become unlovable parents thus repeating the cycle the unlovable live lonely tragic lives if my hurts mistakes butt whippings and insights can help you overcome yours then this book has value for both of us hey i'm not the only one with mommy and daddy issues jack uh yeah i got some i got some codependency shit going on you know i tell people uh i mean we all got insecurities you know i caught navy seals got insecurities it's one of the most insecure people i know are navy seals they're like trying so damn hard yeah yeah yeah i always can't let anybody know i'm weak here i always laugh in the teams if someone says hey you know mike mike day's really good at uh parachuting someone will chime in the back yeah but he's a slow runner you know yeah but exactly but somebody's gonna let you know yeah but running breeds cowardice so always a bunch of cowards uh and so now you go to boot camp to buds after signing on the dotted line i spent the next six months working out doing my best not to get in trouble until i finally boarded the bus for maps and facility in southern virginia masses the way station for all new military recruits there i found myself part of an interesting blend of americana one that included all shape sizes colors and temperatures of young men and women who are leaving for the civil leaving the civilian world getting the first taste of the us military you know what that's inaccuracy because i went to great lakes yeah well there are women i did have a writer with me i missed that one that was all dudes up there all the women were going to orlando what about maps yeah maps was even even even at maps uh at maps yeah they were sending all the women at the time to orlando everybody goes to great lakes now that place sucks what is meps i heard that before military military entry processing station so you you actually enlist and you wait a period of time before you go because they just snatch you so you don't go out like do something else they don't actually have you know what kind of situation well you're not under any kind of restriction or any kind of order or under the the ucmj yet you've signed a contract and they give you a date that you're going to leave so i was only on in maps for like six months i've talked to kids that been you know 18 months they hit some kid in high school you know waiting for him to graduate get him young i was 17 years old when i joined i didn't get anywhere else to go uh this one i found this funny and this is also probably why you say that the marine corps wouldn't have worked out great for you over a long period of time it's you say i never in my life wanted to quit anything more than i did navy boot camp miserable yeah bro yeah uh i mean there's golden underwear oh and great lakes too january oh january 4th uh five feet of snow 30 below man i hate the cold weather yeah i'd rather sweat um you end up you said i think the company commander saw some potential me and knew that i was bored because i kept volunteering to wake up at 4am to do what most people dreaded they decided to give me some extra responsibility made me divisions recruit the divisions recruit mastered arms i was like you're for when i was going through boot camp i got made like a squad leader or something i got fired from that one oh bomber okay well i talked about that in the book the guy wiped the booger on my pillow and right as the company commander was walking in the door i punched him yeah and so that so you got rolled back from graduation week of boot camp and then i get well i got rolled out of in buds out of 166 in the 168 and i got rolled graduation week of 168. just the irony of that then you they both made me cry before you before you went to so you got rolled back in in um in boot camp which i didn't even know there was such a thing as getting rolled back it was only one week though which was cool oh that's right because because you go to great lakes or i went to orlando but you still have to do that stupid passing review all that margin yeah garbage yeah well nobody was coming to visit me for graduation i got into that fight because you put a booger on my pillow i did knock him out i knocked that kid out well he was not a kid i was a kid he was a lot older than me and uh so i didn't have to do the passing review they just made me like a parking lot attendant i didn't want to do it anyway yeah all that practice yeah and we were in a nazi company too they all the flags remember those stupid flags for i don't even remember what they were for bro i actually best marchers best you fold your underwear the best yeah this is not like i have very limited memories of boot camp i hated it yeah i know that i hated it but i don't remember a lot about i remember like the highlights of it probably the biggest i remember just you don't remember shoveling snow no i definitely don't remember orlando i remember sweating i remember like sweating big giant pools of sweat i don't know how to go in there i remember the space shuttle took off while we were standing out there like there was a space shuttle launch and that's totally cool i was like oh that's cool but don't remember much from boot camp uh so you go from there to see school and then you get orders get orders to go to the uss carl vinson yeah which is my first set of orders were to the carl vinson via nuke c school c new machinist mate c school so basically for everyone that doesn't know that means hello regular navy no no no buds no seal teams and i got to watch those guys go through school there that was at the same place i was going through a school they were a bunch of zombies like 12 hours of class oh it's free i had a night class and they had a morning class i don't want a nuke yeah that's that's a freaking hard job man it's a freaking hard job i got kicked out of high school they wanted me to be a nuke yeah whoever was running your career consulting was not doing a great job dude they should have bee lined you straight to the freaking buds uh but then you did you this is kind of crazy though you like requested captain's mass no i just went to his office so you didn't even so that's even better you didn't even request captain as you said i'm going to go talk to the old man yeah kind of like you know group two you know what was her name that was up there for like longer than anybody was in the seal teams the secretary yeah yeah so i talked to the secretary and i was like i got a problem with my orders i had my orders and uh i don't know how i got in there but she let me get in there and i think the guy was just amazed at some e2 was coming to his office some boot i'm like real boot that's insane dude and i told him hey look i passed the test for the screening test for buds there was 50 of us only like 10 of us passed i was told i was going to get this on my on my contract and this is what i got he was like do you understand that you're not supposed to be doing it this way that's kind of how the conference i was like i kind of played in between i knew it was wrong but i didn't care because there was no way i was going to nuke c school so whatever i had to do i was going to i was going to do it and then the dude was cool and just said all right and he took care of it i got beat a little bit but i'm beat not like buds i mean do you ever try to count how many push-ups you did in one day in buds no no you get up to a thousand did you ever i tried really you don't need to lose count yeah i never even thought about the twin 82's hitting or 72's hit in the back of the head forget what number you're on i drove the chow once and this guy didn't make it through he was such a big teddy bear crews just couldn't run and we were late for chow and i had a volkswagen beetle i was like oh we'll go get ciao so last was already gone so so so now we're fast forwarding the buds we're jumping in the buzzer this is this first phase no it's cool man so this is first phase this was i can't even remember so the brakes went out on the thing and you know across the cross intersection at 75 yeah so i crash into that thing because my brakes go out i only hit it at like 25 30 miles an hour both of us hit the windshield started the windshield windshield's out in the middle of 75 as the buds class and the instructors drive by us and like oh god fifteen hundred eight count bodybuilders that weekend that weekend both of us we cheated yeah you pay for it and yeah sometimes you can't buy threes sometimes you can't buy fives you can't do fifteen hundred dollars did you just stand out on the first phase outside the first phase office or something and just sit there and do the bill yeah it was first safe yeah it was right by the bell how do you remember was it like did you do like 750 a day or something like that uh no we just when nobody was looking we just counted sometimes they sat in front of us we count by once as soon as they left we're like 505. did you have any idea what you were getting into when you went to buds uh like what comprehension level did you had i basically yeah i i heard it was gonna be hard um and that's kind of a mindset i've always i've always gotten out and it works i don't know if it worked for other people but i always think it's gonna be worse than it really is so a lot of times it's just hard to get started like how good of a we i know you only were in high school for a couple years but but how good of a how great well did you i know you wrestled i played football i wrestled when i grew up i played all sports soccer i boxed a little bit uh hence the knockouts yeah i remember almost knocking myself out playing football i was always vicious just getting after it i played basketball never really scored a point my coach would just say go foul that guy that was me so so but you had so you had you had some good athletic background yeah i liked playing sports yeah so you would but you had no knowledge of buds like hey none at all did you do did you did you think about like i was i always talk about you know when i was quote getting ready for buds no idea what to expect i just knew that you ran a lot and you swam a lot so i ran a lot i swam a lot but i would do you know four sets of pull-ups and be like all right you know that was a good workout and just had no idea that you were gonna get the buds and you were gonna do hundreds of pull-ups in an hour like more than you could count well they do don't expect you to be able to turn a 14-mile run when you show up yeah it is progressive yeah i think they're even getting smarter about it now they're definitely getting smarter about it but um and guys are the guys are getting smarter about it i guess that's my point people abuse it too what do you mean you can only keep me in the water for 10 minutes because 58 degrees they know that when do you think that chart became a thing uh after us are you being serious like do you think it is after us because i it is after us yeah i mean they were just it was no freaking rules like they probably looked at the student body as a curve and if somebody wanted hypothermia okay it might need to take them out now i remember that part i remember them walking down the line and being like you could hear them like hey brother because the smarties they shut the flashlight this guy's getting high pain and but if no if you didn't hear that then it's like back in the water and they would just keep you doing that until someone started getting hypothermia maybe two people started getting hypothermia and then they'd be like on to the next evolution there wasn't no graph that they were following no i think they they do now i mean i think it's good there's good and bad to it uh i wish the students didn't know it that's part of the game not knowing so and you also met your wife while you were in fourth phase so the old fourth phase was you were there basically standing by to class up i don't know i don't know what they call it now fourth phase i think it's still called fourth phase so you were you were there which is weird yeah okay and that's when you you you met your future wife um and then rolling into first phase drown proofing um you call rescue swimmer life saving yeah so i did work with the writers so some of the stuff is has changed a little bit uh the whole process of going with this what is that award program uh that you got to use when you're editing sometimes some things just get by like man i can't figure this program yeah it's uh it plus when you look at something over and over again you're just gonna miss stuff it happens well and when you work with a civilian stuff that they think is interesting is i'm like why do you want to talk about this jack so it was there was something that the guy i worked with uh felt was interesting and didn't get the proper terminology because to me drown proofing was we didn't lose many people to that yeah drown proofing john proofing was pretty easy you know we lost a few guys yeah he was a few guys in not tying lose a few guys in order swim the underwater swim we did lose a few guys in life saving because life saving was interesting because it was a subjective thing where they could look at a guy and be like hey this guy we don't like they're just trying to drown you yeah and then they're gonna drown you and you they don't like you because they have that power um to do the whole waste push and go down there and tug on their shit and make them comply it's a scrap for sure it is i mean that's what they say you don't let them grab on to you you got to get them away from you and sometimes you got to hurt them but man good punch to the gut you know they'll calm them down they definitely they're going to live there were some guys that they just weren't going to make it you know like a guy that they didn't like or whatever had a bad attitude or they thought it was a punk he wasn't going to get out of the water well those people have a history too it's not just one evolution it's a yeah the repetitive poor performance yeah i think that it seems like there's you think they're stricter about that now where there's less subjectivity or do you think it's the same well i would just have to say that i know there's some things that have changed and a lot of guys will be like oh i think buds is easier but the attrition rate's the same yeah so they're not making any more seals no i mean even with a class that's twice the size i mean we would start with like 125 guys to get 20. now they're starting with what 200 something yeah one i think they start with 165 and they still get whatever whatever they're still only 10 of that is yeah they're still only getting that it's still 75 80 percent of attrition so it's still i don't think it's any easier than it used to be no i i down there i talked to friends that are down there they're like no it's not not easier the other thing that's like one of the evolution might be different that's like for instance when when i went through we had twin 72s they're not as buoyant as the twin 80s so it was a little bit harder to tread water yeah with those damn tanks because they're steel and they weren't as buoyant you know what else they wear um like lightweight boots now not jungle boots not old-school jungle boats that was a difference to that when i was going through is everything was in boots yep they were getting ready to transition to the shoes so the times were different and almost didn't translate you know going from boots and then lowering the times because you're in sneakers it was almost hard yeah i just know we wore boots and then when i eventually picked up what they started wearing i was like oh that's way nicer yeah they were issuing this those garbage new balance which gave me shin splints oh just the running shoes yeah like when you they didn't my legs were better off in boots than running in sneakers the sneakers hurt me more so that's what a 710 pace that's not bad and boots yeah but the thing that's the other thing that's uh what is it deceiving the thing that's deceiving about buds is they go hey it's only a a 32 minute four mile time run that's an eight minute mile when you first get there you go oh that's what i can do no problem yeah but you just did a two-mile swim this morning you just did a two-mile swim and then you did it and then it's five miles just five miles to go to ciao three times a day yeah you run five miles every day just to eat yeah and not to mention that four mile timed run ain't four miles i don't know what they do now but i know that there was times where i'd run as hard as i could and i wouldn't be able to i'd be like barely passing well they do that to every class they have that one run that's long so everybody fails it's a mind game psychological we were doing the five mile time run and that extra mile was so much harder exponentially just to put out for that much longer just one mile yeah and they actually had to get rid of that because it was injuring people and a lot of people were failing it crazy that's what they were pinging me on trying to get me kicked out but i brought a watch i was passing it yeah so so how did that happen you so so you brought a watch because that's another thing that's hard is you don't know we're not allowed to have a watch and we were running the edts so you're what phase is this do you remember this is third phase uh which was dive phase back then um and so you failed one run uh he was failing me on all of them and everybody behind me okay so you had a beef with an instructor with uh and we're not gonna mention names but he was the phase officer he was okay live phase officer and uh oh you know you know the game that used to be played during room inspections i mean you're gonna fail you're gonna get wet and sandy and he he was in front of me and he was like why do you have all this stolen equipment in your locker and oh my god i don't know what you're talking about so he's talking about like extra knives uts and co2s garbage right and i was like i don't have any of that stuff in my locker i was just up there and the conversation just got to the point where he was like well one of two things has happened you're lying or i'm lying i was like well it's not me so it must be you but it wasn't like a disrespectful thing i was answering a damn question i was just answering his question he said one of one of two things is happening what is it i was like well it's not me it must be you damn e2 to a narcissistic lieutenant yeah at the time that's freaking crazy you had like you had more balls than me going through buds i wasn't balls i was just answering a question i don't know man i don't know if i would have said it hate me i guess it depends on how you said it too it was not coming from a place of disrespect it was i was just totally answering the damn question you're just like i'm not lying i'm not lying it's you you asked i'm answering your questions so he didn't like that and so now he kind of had it out for you and then he sicked that guy we were talking about earlier on me so he started just harassing me you know third phase was a lot of classroom you know dive physics and all that garbage but every break i was getting wet and sandy doing pull-ups doing push-ups he was just beating me up and then he started failing me on the runs and i talked about in the book i think i actually named him the guy named doc flynn oh yeah i went and told him i was like hey look i brought a watch they're failing me i mean i'm passing these things by like two minutes and they're failing me and everybody behind me that's kind of a weird move because you were breaking the rules well i had to yeah i know but that's a weird move man that's a weird move to because i've always done it though yeah i went and talked to the commanding officer yeah dude like i said you got more balls than i had i just didn't know any different yeah i wasn't doing it because i thought it was having balls it was just i don't know how else to get out of this fix this so you're not allowed to bring a watch and you brought a watch you timed yourself yeah i timed it i tied it to the uh you remember that the buckles on the edt's yeah i tied it to a piece of like 550 cord and hung it down there cool and so you pan how did you how did you single out doc flynn as the guy that you would trust uh he was just one of the guys in the phase that really never beat us up for no reason he seemed like a fair dude yeah i mean there was two kinds of instructors there there was guys hiding out that never really did anything and then there was guys that back in those days too there wasn't a whole lot going on but guys that were operational that just needed a break so you know some of them just beat us up just because they thought they were the gatekeepers you know kind of like going to some of these army schools i'm the gatekeeper we have to have an attrition rate and i'm going to make sure you go through something as hard as i used to or i did because their fish story is buds was a lot harder when i went through and this guy this guy was a skinny little punk but he later got administratively separated uh for something else he'd done so karma's a bitch yeah so then but doc flynn was like all right cool and then he ran the next run and he said i'm gonna run i'll run the pace and if you finish in front of me you pass doc flynn legit so he ran it and this was a five mile time run which they got rid of uh they came across the finish line and you know what happens when you're the cutoff guy how many times can you be the cutoff guy every damn time yeah no that's uh one of my lpos who you know um people you know when i used my first lpo and i was like coming out of buds i'm asking him bud's questions like did you ever were you ever in the goon squad and he goes i was the cut off for the good squad he said every single run he was unlike the moon that was the only time i got into the goon squad two the whole time through buds was on those times runs and uh what i was good at was winning that first race so you could get secured from the goons coin yeah so then so then what happened uh well he came across the finish line and when you're cut off for the goon squad you get sent to the water that's where you wind up when you fail that run he comes across you know a couple minutes after we finished and we're getting hammered and he was like what's going on with those guys and he was like well they all failed and flynn was like i just did it i just passed it they're like two minutes in front of me but it it got hidden because i went to a uh a review board and still got rolled back dang i got rolled back uh that was graduation week and i got rolled back to drag her face at least i didn't have to do the open circuit garbage again yeah and this was when this was when die phase was third phase when i went through a year or two later dive phase was second phase because they still get rid of a lot of guys during dive phase yes to me i thought it was the hardest phase dive phase yeah yeah i think i think that's why they moved it to that well we lost more people there you don't lose people online warfare yeah yeah you got to be pretty stupid dude i think we lost two guys yeah one of the guys was a good dude i think he did something that they didn't like and they got rid of them he was an officer too personality yeah that'll happen crazy that's a pretty critical community that self-regulates though it works indeed uh and then where are you at sqt did you go through you went through stt right well it was it was kind of a weird one it wasn't uh sqt like it is now it was kind of thrown together at the team because you went to team three yeah but they they cooperated with the other teams so i went through whatever they call i think it was called stt at the time and uh it was just because we had training sales at each of the teams and they would run it yeah so we were meshed together with team one three five and it was kind of ad hoc and then they jammed us into platoons and the platoons pretty much took care of us we didn't have our tridents back then either guys show up at the teams now with the tridents and um we actually had a different nec when we what was it 53 2020 yeah and then it was up to your platoon to decide when you got it they started giving the guys tridents in sqt so they'd show up to the team guys were taking the new guys that showed up with their tridents and making them painting them blue but they still kind of kept it the tradition uh like you can go back into platoon huts now now the platoons with the new guys like you don't get your trident even though it's been put in your admin record we're not going to give it to you until we say it's and then they'll have like the fish tank or you've seen one of those pac-man frogs i've seen a pac-man frog with all the tridents in it and they got to keep the frog alive oh that's legit it's a it's a fun community yeah and there's you know you talk about some of the fun in the community best college i ever went to yeah um some of the fun of the community which is called hazing zero tolerance it never happens yeah uh yeah um i see that's a good good thing about hazing uh especially well probably now also i know there's a zero tolerance and it doesn't happen but if you don't get hazed they don't like you they don't trust you yeah so if you get haste you're like okay this guy's all right so it's like a privilege thank you sir can i have another there ain't enough of you to hurt me uh not enough of you one of the things you said here is you're getting your bird and um this all sounded good i just this brought back memories uh the the commanding officer was the last guy to pound in my trident he had a big grin on his face as he approached he pulled the trident out of my body because this is after you when you get you're trying to you know well we still have quarters too yeah headquarters you get your trident and then the the first you know i don't know who pain that's awesome i think it was my platoon commander but though anyways the whole team freaking lines up and pounds that thing into your chest you know the that doesn't hurt yeah i mean well okay maybe it didn't hurt you air me i mean i mean the punch but you don't actually feel the prongs after yes you don't feel the prongs after the first eight you know you're bleeding but then but then guys start pulling it out and like oh it's a little crooked jocko and they get you again that hurts worse but what i like yeah it's got like those little nubs on the end of it oh the little widgets attached to yeah when you pull it out you could feel it pulling your yep you feel your chest coming out uh but you say your commanding officer he pulled the trident out of my body straightened it like he was fixing a bent nail then he placed it on my chest and slowly pushed it back in that hurts worse i was gonna say that's freaking good times from the old man right there that's back in the days where the back 40 was uh where attitude adjustments were made yeah uh now you're going on peacetime deployment you say this my peacetime deployments took me around the globe asia middle east egypt kuwait japan korea guam points beyond in between conducting joint country to country training on my deployment to bahrain we patrolled the persian gulf and forcing oil embargoes we would board oil tankers that were in violation of various infractions most of the time the infraction was that they didn't identify themselves because the radio didn't work we would catch churches we would catch tankers bearing the iranian flag filled with embargoed iraqi oil all sorts of shenanigans going on um so would you do four deployments eight what'd you do in that first run at team three four four and the first one was southeast asia that was like right after the gulf war uh would you go to the pi i went to the pi yeah so then i think your war happened so fast we couldn't get there then you end up your it looked like you were going to go to buds and be an instructor yeah but you actually had orders you had orders to buds and then what what how did you how did you hear about the leap frog tryout i was just by chance uh and i only had like 30 35 jumps that's insane i had no idea what i was doing that's insane i mean those guys at that time had thousands of jumps well there was there were some guys on on that team that had uh what was that program we used to have our own well we still do the the original free fall program that we had just the military free-fall that was out like three something 3m 3t i can't remember what it was but it was our own program out there at uh yeah you know so a lot of those instructors were on the team with me dwight settle andy krauthammel uh-huh you know glade jackson they all had a couple thousand players yeah those are the guys i'm talking about like they were freaking i had 30. so you decided hey what the hell i'll go get a bunch of jumps in i had no idea right yeah i was i think i got like 45 jumps tryouts with the cool parachute and then you ended up making it yeah that was freaking crazy clay told me he could teach a monkey to fall out of an airplane if he had enough bananas that was his because i didn't think i was going to make it i thought i was going to buzz and i really didn't want to the jump team was was some of the most fun i had probably one of the most dangerous jobs i had until combat yeah the jump team at that time man they were pushing the envelope hardcore yeah we had some injuries uh we had we had a death when i was on the on the jump team uh i remember i was doing like my whatever my jumps to get my gold wings when i first got the team like i didn't i tried it but they sent me down to the freaking brown field to go get some jumps and the jump team was jumping and they did like a down i'd never seen a free fall person in my life never seen a free fall jump and i i landed and got my shoot all packed up or whatever and then income the leap frogs and they did a down plane they were going a thousand miles an hour as far as i could tell and they were so close to the ground and i i i could hear them say break yeah and i was like holy shit this is insane we had a guy shoot himself he broke too low and went into this stadium which at the time was uh jack murphy that was a long time ago uh and he uh hit like four seats and rip them out of the ground those things are bolted into the ground into concrete and he walked away from it yeah i was tommy marquis yeah you know tommy yeah yeah you can hit that dude upside the head with a bat what a beast man he's gone now i know he was a good dude um couldn't hurt him yeah i know that's what i mean he was just a monster uh and nice nice teddy bear too yeah uh you got this little section here while we were falling towards earth so you guys are doing all kinds of crazy jumping while we're falling towards the earth another guy and i had to crawl out from underneath canopies to clear airspace so you guys were doing crew relative work you're all freaking wrapped up um i can't say exactly how fast we were falling as we were as there were fully and partially inflated parachutes but even slowly falling out of the sky can be deadly i was still recovering from the tear of my first cutaway when my second happened a few days later me and another guy got tangled up and caught in a helicopter spin the deployment bag retraction system on the tops of our parachutes had somehow gotten tangled together we were we were twirling around opposite each other falling he was looking directly at me and eye at him and we yelled back and forth at each other cut away no you cut away like the world's most high stake game of rock paper scissors he won and i cut away he's a good long time friend of mine he's a big pussy he should have cut away he was scared i don't even know how that happened well how you guys got all wrapped up well i mean i know how the rap happened but the where our parachutes got connected to each other was ridiculous so that those are canopy relative work parachutes so that usually when you open a parachute there's a trailing pilot shoot well on those because you're doing crew you don't want that stuff trailing it has a retraction system on a three ring retraction system it pulls it up to the top skin of the of the parachute and that's what got connected on both of ours it was a wrap we were doing like eight-man stack rotations guy peels off the top and flies all the way to the bottom that's how it started and you get into a rapid like five six dudes some get shot out god uh and some get wrapped up and we everybody broke out of that and we were just stuck and did it it wasn't on film no because we you know what back then there was no such thing as a little gopro gopro i mean guys were still taking i think i remember going from paul robinson was one of our camera guys and he had this ginormous freaking when he opened his pair she hold his head his pull his head down because he had all this weight up there he'd break his neck they used to jump it wasn't film so i think we had a high eight which is a pretty large camera it's not go any clown can jump a gopro so uh they had blow tubes on the camera you had to take a picture oh that was like a reticle that's how you uh fire the oh no kidding you'd have to start the camera before you went out with the still camera because they would have a video and a and a still and they had a blow tube you'd have to blow into the tube to take a picture and then you had a reticule here i remember seeing guys jump those little reticles so they knew where to aim yeah crazy yeah you guys were pushing the envelope back then with the with the jump team um you did three years there and then you go uh back to the teams and where'd you go did you go to you went to the east coast i went to team eight what year was that uh 99 jack and you and that was kosovo yeah i was gonna say you rolled on there um nato was allied with the ethnic albanian forces and we were tasked with working with nato to assist them in apprehending suspected war criminals and keeping an eye out on the movements of various warring frack boring factions kosovo was a real world test we would do 72-hour special reconnaissance missions in rugged terrain full of natural man-made threats we did 25 sr missions in six months averaging about one a week with one day of prep three days on and a debrief on the other end it was a kick in the butt deployment and conventional forces don't react to anything inside of 72 hours yeah i'll tell you that it's better than sitting around so you'd get yeah that's that's still i mean at that time doing real missions was awesome well we thought that was the game for sure for sure you you can't bond steal freaking the restrictions that they had on the guys out there it was ridiculous i mean they they had to put riggers tape over their magazine well they had to put rigorous tape over their magazine everybody that was out there was supposed to do that we didn't do it i mean it's not unusual to have when they had to do they had an a.d at the front gate with a 50 cal but that's their clearing process at the end they pull the trigger yeah yeah why don't you kind of pull the trigger and clear and save a weapon well at least you got it i hope you had a point in a safe direction he did okay we'll you ever seen a 50 cal shoot 10 feet in front of you pretty impressive so that's 99 come back from that point again i'm skipping a bunch of stuff here really cool information about what those deployments were like that's why people got to buy the book to get some of those details jumping ahead a little bit uh reported to naval special warfare group 2 training detachment on september 8th 2001. new instructor role be there for two years that was the week 9 11 yeah i was going to say september 11th so you just check into trade nobody wanted to go there of course not when did you model now when did you uh what were you teaching i kind of bounced around i got over there did all the air stuff uh at first then i did land warfare cqc i just kind of bounced around all over the place yeah i mean trade has become such a great place to develop seals i mean it really has and back in the day like when when you and i first got the team i know no one wanted to be in training cell and and i did the old guys did the old warrants yeah they they did the old master chiefs that's when masters you couldn't figure out what a master team did in the seal teams yeah i'll tell you i got some good advice from some of those old master chiefs and warrant officers that would say like hey if you want to learn this stuff you got to go teach it yeah and i was lucky enough to go into training sell at seal team one spent a couple years there and it was i did i learned i was trying to figure out the other day i made some estimate like 50 percent of what i learned in the in the entire teams was was working for whatever it was three years or two two and a half years and training sell at seal team one and watching ten groups do the same thing ten groups what best teaching teaching the junior officers that are going through sdt how to do an iad like how what to react in these different situations then watching them and seeing the mistakes they make that was 40 of what i learned another big chunk of what i learned was when i was a trade at later on uh you know same thing you're teaching guys you're watching them do it you're seeing the mistakes they make you're putting them through drills you're seeing the same platoons go through the same training evolutions what the leaders do what mistakes they make so yeah going into training cell and training detachment is a great step and it's a great system now because guys go they you know they get they're an e5 and then they go there they make e6 and then when they're a platoon lpl they just got done teaching the stuff man they're ready most of the time well yeah they're getting there a little bit faster than we used to also yeah yeah yeah it's a little it's way more formalized the way it all works now which is freaking good for them well i just left trade it i was a contractor there well when i left the care coalition after seven years i went to teach in military free fall had an injury and then went to cqc salk yeah and it was interesting seeing guys that when i was the platoon chief are now like leaders they're sure man guys at e6 is when i was a platoon chief are now master chiefs and some of the new guys are doing their platoon chiefs lot it was fun to watch watch them go through and it's i was terrified too when i was doing my platoon chief slot you know like i said we have air insecurities i didn't want anybody to get hurt i want to make sure i i provided everything that the guys needed uh they used to tell me when i started the micromanage hey chief get out of my back pocket because you can't manage all that crap quite honestly the there were guys that were more experienced that were junior to me when i was in charge and you just got to know when you know what you know and what you don't and let the people that are more experienced you know take those reins yeah and you got to be uh you got to have the confidence in your leadership that you can go oh you're hey you've done this sort of thing before you run it nope no factor no problem good to go micromanaging hurts oh yeah it's freaking it's a disaster a lot of hours uh so um so then you get done with trade you go to team four you're you're you go you go on deployment where'd you go baghdad uh yeah you go you go into baghdad i know you got into some team four at the time was actually they had nine details which was huge there was nobody nobody in the seal teams wanted to do the psd yep so yeah for people that don't know one of the major taskings that the seal teams got in 2004 i think it started in 2004 was to protect the senior leadership of the new iraqi government everyone well well not everyone but a whole bunch of people wanted to kill those guys and uh the people that got the job to protect them was the seal teams so that's what you know you did and then of course there's a whole lot out of doing that well there's a whole lot of things that that are that are wrapped up in doing that because if you're proactive about it that means we're going to try and capture bad guys or kill bad guys that might be trying to target our people we're also doing intelligence gathering we're going out and figuring out who's trying to kill these people um that's a great setup that's what i did yeah i didn't do the actual inner ring of protection i was far out of ring looking for threats that were going after targets within those psds yeah yeah and we had nine and they all what every every one of those politicians i want my navy seals you don't want to work with you people yeah that was a harsh harsh one harsh pill to swallow for a lot of guys i got lucky i i was it started right after i left and it ended before i came back well i think it all got turned over there there's actually military units that that's what they do yeah and they got turned over to them yeah um you did have some good times on that one here we go we were speeding down the road and slid to a left turn as soon as we made the corner i nearly smashed into a makeshift road block we must have been moving too fast as we caught the roadblock construction crew off guard we still had their who still had their ak strapped to their backs their friends had all taken up positions on the right side of the road and had their weapons trained on us ready to shoot as we sprinted around the corner in a split second the construction crew found themselves in a very awkward position pinned between us their friends and their friends who wanted to shoot us in the confusion we managed to get the jump on them the lead humvee was equipped with a mini gun those things are awesome i know i have to use a certain level of reverence when i say that because it is so awesome to have a mini gun on a homer um and the gunner had the reflexes of a mongoose 40 feet away the targets and their rifle wielding friends i had a front row seat to the action when the gunner opened up on all of them i had not seen a mini gun in live combat before so i was a little surprised by what happened next by the way there's nothing mini about a minigun it's a pedestal mounted six barrel rotary machine gun that shoots as many as 6 000 rounds of 762 by 51 every minute and the bullet is about the size of a triple a battery but let's spit so fast fast out of the gatling style rotating barrels that it looked like a red laser beam and sounded like the mating call of some bizarre prehistoric bird the first volley bullets hit one guy in the chest as he practically vaporized in a burst of red mist as this was going on about 50 yards up the road and another enemy fighter popped up and fired an rpg directly at the lead humvee the one that was firing the minigun i couldn't see the rpg but i saw the humvee 10 feet in front of me lift up drop back down with a crash and catch on fire the gunner didn't even flinch he just kept on shooting in 30 seconds the 25 or so ambushers including the rpg trigger men had all been killed and were all red piles of flesh spread over the street when it was over we secured the area salvaged what we could from the still burning humvee and then destroyed it with a thermite grenade the minigun turned 25 human beings into shredded flesh in less than a minute that was quick i thought and then i felt weird because the next thought i had was that was awesome awesome because we did not get killed then because the power of the minigun this was the first time i'd seen people in the process of dying but it was not the first time seeing dead people my life and training had prepared me for these situations my constant inoculation of violence and stress made what would have been grotesque and unbearable to many an acceptable situation to me my trauma had conditioned me to accept the unacceptable that's what war does it changes the way you view the world i found no pleasure whatsoever in killing the enemy however this was an outcome of war everyone at some point was someone's child but that thought is lost in war the most profane aspects of war is that it deletes the humanity from humans you pretty much forget about everything you believe you know you're not thinking about that when when you're in a gunfight you know theology religion political whatever politics dude's trying to kill me uh i'm gonna go work on him you get home from that deployment and then then you did that when you get rolled into doing a platoon chief uh yeah do your workup um how was the workup uh well the workup prior was pretty interesting uh because i interfaced with all the guys that were gonna be in the platoon as a platoon chief and i remember breaking uh one of the guy's nods on right before an op he didn't know i was gonna be a splatoon chief he kind of chewed me out i was like dude don't put your stuff on the ground i won't step on it um i did feel stupid about that though but the workup is you know pretty pretty standard we were on an 18-month cycle i think on that one i think it was 18 month cycle so it's a year-long work up you know broken up into the three into three parts you know pro dab everybody going to schools and ult just doing all the standard ckc salk air did you guys know that you were going to iraq when you formed up we were kind of the bastard children too everybody was looking for the shiny object and at the time that was some task force and uh we got what was uh thought to be the least of the shiny best deployments which was fallujah and they the guys that were there weren't doing anything but we we worked different we worked intel different than they did and we were really busy i did 140 da's on that deployment which is i talked to guys in the sealed teams to do 100 da's on the deployments unheard of and then on top of that teaching medical classes to to the military units that they're you know second and fourth iraqi army brigade and teaching tactics and how to patrol and trying to work with the met teams it's you know when you run a target for your regular job it's kind of hard to come and be a mit team and in fallujah proper you know and run a military unit especially when they don't speak english their standard of work is not what no it is not and that was one of the hardest things for us to get to was we when we first got there we we had these expectations that they were gonna get to the level that we were at least close and uh that's just not gonna happen you gotta see okay this right here this is what we want them to be at but right here's gotta be acceptable and this is kind of the way it was over there yeah you gotta definitely adjust your standards in a real big way yeah but it's kind of cool because i'm thinking about you know your last uh your previous deployment where you were kind of gathering a lot of intel and stuff like that and then you roll out because as you know we drive our own operations and if you can make you can find intel and you can put it together you can put up a target package let's go hit it you know that's you know to get that to get a bunch of da's done like that it's it's not the sexy thing to do the hard part is getting the target packages put together the fun parts going out and hitting them yeah most team guys just show me what door i don't even care they show me what door it's a lot harder to get the information so you're on this deployment you're doing all these da's and now we're going to get into april 2007 northeast of fallujah when the shooting stopped i was still on the floor lying on my left side so this is picking up where we started the this whole this whole podcast out when the shooting stopped i was still on the floor lying on my left side i pushed myself up to my knees i don't remember hearing any of the gunfire but now the sounds began to register in my ears the two men who had stacked up directly behind me in my room clearing train were our iraqi scouts the second man in our train took a round to his chest plate and knocked him clear out of the foyer ironically that round may have saved his life he'd originally been within an arm's length behind me as we'd entered the room the third man in my stack had been shot as he entered the room an ak-47 round smashed through his bulletproof chest plate he'd fallen dead in the doorway the chance factor was insane once fired a bullet can be unpredictable the internal milling of a gun's barrel causes bullets to spin in flight some bullets will begin to tumble through the air at low speeds while others are designed to tumble and cartwheel after hitting a target which can cause some brutal damage it's likely that we were all hit by the same type of bullets at nearly the same time shot from the same gun but the damage to each of us was significantly different the balance of my room clearing train five or six other guys hadn't been able to get in the room because of all the volume of fire i moved from my knees and stood to my feet felt like there were 200 pounds on my back i took off my helmet and used the white light on my damaged pistol to survey the room one of our other iraqi scouts entered the room he had been behind clarky and followed him into his room the bullet that hit clark bypassed all three of the iraqi scouts stacked up behind him these three made it into clarky's room and had gotten trapped in the back of the house when the shooting started the scout had been part of the original group of 10 recruits who had been with us since the first day he spoke decent english and gave me a report one seal killed in action one iraqi scout killed in action two detainees and six women and children at this point i actually didn't even realize that they had left it it didn't register yet yeah this is um you know when we started getting reports about what had happened during this you know and and i just remember thinking this is just hey this is just pure insanity you know and um a lot of guys felt guilty for leaving me in there but i can i mean i had to talk to a lot of guys like hey we didn't do anything wrong that night nobody saw me go in there you guys followed protocol that we would always follow uh you didn't blow up the house because you didn't have a full head count you did that right you know so everybody did everything right and i don't know nsw sometimes with the knee-jerk reactions that we would have to uh try to make everything as safe as possible which we're good at but even if you do something everything's right bad things can happen you just can't you know can't minimize all the threats to the point where there's no more threat you just can't do it and you can also do really dumb things and make big mistakes and everything turns out perfect you know and you can do everything things can go wrong perfect plan goes to shit in the first 30 seconds right um rewind it a little bit this is what you said it was surreal like something out of a movie time slowed down almost to a stop and everything happened in super slow motion almost as if i were watching a scene unfold frame by frame second scene like minutes a slow-motion torn of bullets flew at me i could clearly see all the bullets coming at me i had total auditory exclusion there were no sounds i'd never been shot before so i had no idea how it felt in this strange slow-motion scene i had a mental conversation with myself hey am i actually getting shot right now it occurred to me that those sledgehammers smashing all over my body were bullets hitting me one after another it was in this moment that i said my first real prayer god please get me home to my girls my wife and two young daughters were halfway around the world in that instant i felt them and they felt me i felt like a bullet dodging character in the movie the matrix only i wasn't dodging any of the bullets they were hitting me my rifle was shot out of my hands bullets whizzing past my head hammered into the men entering the room behind me even as i continued to penetrate down the left wall nobody else in my train would be able to make entry as all four of the enemy continued to fire directly into what is known as the fatal funnel the dimly lit doorway in which i was standing the enemy bullets triggered my rage and drove me to act it was then that my body became became my mind and took over i suppose that's what habit is when somebody when the body overrides the mind and acts without specific instructions from the brain my right hand instinctively reached down for my secondary weapon a pistol my hand was on autopilot as it unhooked the rubber strap i'd fashion to keep my pistol secure and with a fluid push fluid forward push and pull the very same motion i'd done a hundred thousand times in training my weapon released from my holster i aimed my pistol engaged the enemy fighter directly opposite me down the left wall he was glaring at me with his weapon throwing rounds directly at me i returned fire four or five rounds for my weapon and caught him in the face and chest as he stared at me his head jilted back i saw the life leave his eyes like a light going off i knew he was dead as he melted into a pile in front of me i landed next to the dead man on my left years of training and muscle memory without any direct orders from my brain lifted my arm arched it and aimed my pistol at a young male figure maybe in his early twenties as he stood up and moved toward the doorway i was still on the floor when i watched him pull a hand grenade from the front of his vest and pull the pin my right hand pointed at him my index finger squeezed the trigger i saw the bullets exit my pistol and spin clockwise as they flew toward him leaving a green vapor trail in their wake i watched my bullets punch into one side of his head an exhaust of blood and brain matter instantly exiting out the other side i shot him dead as he attempted a suicide mission to run out in the foyer with a live grenade where my fellow seals and iraqi scouts had stacked up attempting to enter the room my rounds dropped him in his tracks as he fell forward i saw the grenade release from his hand and rolled toward me then it detonated this is crazy one of our newly arrived seals from team 10. so these are the guys that just showed up this is probably this kid's first op yeah but he was he was the platoon chiefs oh okay so he was good to go uh one of the newly arrived first night though it's still always their first night one of the newly arrived seals from team 10 was outside under the carport looking into the room's only window when he saw my bullets enter the enemy's head he watched as the enemy fell the ensuing grenade blast shattered the window spraying shards of glass into my teammate's face this was his first mission in iraq new way to greatness a way to start a new job grenade blast knocked me unconscious when i awoke a few minutes later i was fully lucid and lying on my left side looking across the room at two men both were firing their weapons over my head out the window directly above me the grenade blasted twisted my helmet rendering my night vision goggles unusable the light from their muzzle flashes and the dim glow of the gas lamp in the foyer were enough to clearly illuminate the men standing no more than 10 feet away from me i heard no sounds it was totally silent i was in a very bad place in the middle of a gunfight if the enemy caught a glimpse of me glaring up at them all it would take for them to finish me off with both of them to point down pull their triggers and unload high velocity bullets into me if i could clearly see them then they could see me too for an instant i thought about playing dead but in that same millisecond before the thought could be fully evaluated my anger rejected it outright i had never been so angry a feeling of determined ruthless rage it seemed to be stored up somewhere deep inside me and something just snapped in that moment my rage consumed me my world closed in and nothing else mattered to me but destroying the two men standing still in front of me i would fight back and kill them before they killed me another crazy thing about this is that there were some holes in me that don't line up like i get two holes in my back uh you think they shot you when you're unconscious that's the only thing i can come up with uh i had two rounds in my back that shattered my right scapula and there's no holes in the body armor so i think i they took the pistol and shoved it in there and then they shot me twice in the butt the only way i could get shot in the butt is that someone stood over top of me i don't know why they didn't put one in my head she looked at the helmet more and maybe they tried to shoot me in the head and the helmet just got in the way but this this round right here uh four months after the incident this is around you're not wearing around your head it's a nine mil round that i got shot in a butt with and i didn't know about it that it was still in me until i went to a procedure to get a stint pulled out of my bladder four four and a half months later and they took an x-ray of it and came back in x-ray tech was like hey you know there's a bullet in your head that's how i found this bullet but the way the hip is you know that that arch right there so it was right there and it from 2007 to like two years ago was in a chiropractor and he took some x-rays and it had moved then he took a side profile and it was literally at the surface of my stomach and then we had i had some medics cut it out we thought it was gonna take like five minutes i'll show you the pictures got a video of them cutting it out in the back of the suburban oh there you go proper dinner break proper surgery oh going back to this i didn't know it at the time but i was lying unconscious on the floor while i was lying unconscious on the floor my seal teammates were outside the door of the room trying to get a shot at the enemy two of our iraqi counterparts were the only eyes that saw me enter the room in the chaos that ensued they were unable to communicate my location to anyone the volume of fire coming from the room through the door and out of the window was so excessive that there was no way anyone else was getting into the room the team decided to pull everyone back and call an airstrike to neutralize the target and me with it as the team pulled back from the house connor my other seal teammate was shot and wounded by one of the two remaining enemy fighters firing over my head and out the window while i lay on the floor my teammates worked their radios calling for the status of each other and what was going on in the house i heard nothing as the remaining elements of my assault team departed the house and moved to a safe dropping distance from the target i was lying on my left side with my pistol still in my right hand just like before my arm reached up and aimed at one of the men standing in front of me and my finger pulled the trigger i couldn't hear the gunfire but i felt my hand jump rounds exited my weapon and i watched the projectiles fly in slow motion as they punched into his body small holes burst open in the fabric of his shirt where my bullets entered his face contorted into a bizarre combination of surprise and pain more surprise than pain in less than five seconds i ran a magazine dry completed a magazine change before the two enemy fighters figured out i was still alive and i was shooting back at them my bullets drew their gunfire away from my departing teammates their full attention and bullets were then directed back at me the enemy fighters were now both so close to me i remember the stunned look on their faces as they pointed their weapons back at me and fired a round from one of their ak-47 struck the bottom of my pistol and dislodged my guns magazine my pistol jammed and i felt the gun's grip crumble in my hand another enemy bullet sailed clear through the foot of my magazine i opened my hand slightly to release the shards of broken plastic that were once my pistol grips the grip seemed to absorb the shock shattering like an armor plate i was fortunate to have this type of weapon any other model would have been smashed to bits or been shot out of my hands my palm was now pressed against the gun's internal springs the bullets that struck my pistol caused my weapon to malfunction i squeezed the trigger but nothing happened i quickly cleared the malfunction with the tap of a on the bottom of the magazine to firmly reinsert into the pistol a rack of the slide then squeeze the trigger i had done this tap rack bain malfunction drill so many times that it happened automatically all the while i was still being shot at from no more than 10 feet away an instant later well before the human brain could process what and how it had happened my hand aimed the pistol at the other man standing across from me my fingers squeezed the trigger i saw the rounds twisting as they exited my pistol flying toward him and entering his body then around tunneled into his face i emptied the magazine to both men as they crumbled on the floor in front of me i loaded my last magazine into my damaged pistol i was lying on my left side leaning against the man who i had first shot when i entered the room i pushed myself up with one hand and reached behind with the other placing my pistol against my dead enemy's motionless body and fired several more rounds seconds later all four enemy fighters were silent their dead bodies lay in pools of their own blood and piles of spent bullet casings a metallic odor flooded the room blood and urine leaked from their bodies onto the floor i knew i had been shot i felt heavy like there was a few hundred pounds sitting on my back it was difficult to breathe the fight was not over and the worst battles were yet to come crazy gunfight my left thumb was almost shot off too i got i had around go through this this joint right here when i i didn't figure it out until later after i got up and walked around tried to take my gloves off uh but i put that pistol in this left hand and reached over and shot somebody like this my thumb was like almost hanging off the only thing was holding on was my glove i mean look how lucky i am though yeah still got it just won't bend crazy yeah the the the weapon functioning i mean you still have the magazine i did go back after about five months and i was like hey i want that pistol you know we already cleaned it up and put it back in circulation so somebody else was using it and i was like i want that pistol did you ever get it no damn no yeah the um i was thinking about this you know we started off when i started off i was talking about how you know you can get shot one person gets shot one person can catch a little tiny piece of frag like the size of a freaking the size of a pebble yeah and kill them yeah you pop the femoral artery or you pop an artery up here that's what happened to clark we he had one around basically just go right through his neck right here it was just hit that artery it was quick i mean when i found him he stopped a smile on his face sitting upright position and he was 27 years old at the time got a shirt on that was his second deployment yeah i needed to secure the building myself so i moved to the foyer with its glowing lamp and then to the room directly beside where my gunfight had happened there were six women and children all sitting in the far corner screaming and crying i pointed my white light at them and yelled shut up none of them spoke english but they all became silent that's also the room where i found clarky he was just inside the doorway sitting down with both legs spread out in front of him resting upright and leaning back slightly on his rucksack karki's trademark smirk was frozen on his face with his lips curled in a smile he looked so peaceful he had been killed instantly by a round that had come out of my room i tried to move him from the view of the front door but he was too heavy clark schwedler was 27 years old it would take over a decade for the magnitude of clark's death to penetrate me my tears now are often spontaneous triggered by a fleeting memory a mixture of accumulated losses or just a random thought at that moment though i couldn't stop and grieve over clarky i needed to secure the building and protect my teammates in another room in the back of the compound i found two enemy detainees our iraqi scouts had made entry into this room discovered the men and cuffed them i checked their flex cuffs and put one of our iraqi scouts in place to guard them i positioned our other iraqi scout at the front entry with specific orders to shoot anyone who tried to come into the house i knew that i was shot up i walked around and cleared the house with my damaged pistol each time i turned my head i could feel my radio earpiece snag on my body armor i plugged my earbud in and keyed the radio to ask for a status in the house but no but my radio had been shot it still had a tone but no signal my radio was smashed i needed to contact the team i tried to swap out my radio with clarky's but my gloves were slippery from all the blood i just started to pull off my left hand glove when i saw that my thumb was barely attached to my hand it flopped into my palm there was a bullet hole through the glove i must have been shot in the thumb when the enemy shot at my pistol destroy destroying my gun's grips i decided to leave my gloves on eventually i managed to switch out my radio for clarkie's i moved back into the room where my gunfight had happened i felt safer there as i knew everyone in it was dead it was there that i made radio contact with the rest of the team hey this is mike i'm still in the house it's secure we've got four enemy killed in action one iraqi scout killed in action one seal killed in action two detainees six women and children oh man they called the qrf that night took them hour and 15 minutes to go like five miles five miles when did they activate the qrf when they probably when they started backing out of the house uh as soon as we always initiated the qrf as soon as a gunfight started as soon as there was a tick we would initiate qrf so they would get ready and then we could launch them but back then i mean that that area was so we went after this target one other time we got id'd on the way in yeah and those are some of the cool details that you put in the book which like i said that's why people have to buy the book if they want to want to get the rest of it because the background behind it you know you explain the efforts that you guys had made to hit this target and it was a terrible area pretty much one way in one way out unless you wanted to do like an extra 75 kilometers to get and that if you didn't get lost back there because i mean the maps were inaccurate and i mean your greatest threat over there wasn't getting into a gunfight it was going to and from that was your biggest threat we got ied i think sure six times on that deployment and you know when that when it happens over and over again they start looking who's here every time and i was one of the guys okay mike's possible one of the two possible id magnets because every time we get id'd one of you two is there or both of you are there actually we're both there for all of them so how big how many seals did you have with you how many seals were on the top uh our normal force we could take a little bit more if we had birds but uh a normal force and a half of it had to be iraqis right and we don't give them mods and radios so you have to make corrections for that like we have to drive the vehicles so it would be like 22 guys but that would include a terp you know a half iraqi force occasionally brought this marine i had a dog that never found anything but a pistol holster he did say that dog might have got baked in the car i mean it gets warm out there they're like 22 but we go out with six humvees yeah there's only four seats and well five yeah you got the gunner but the way we work six people in a vehicle you're only getting uh four people that are actually going to work maybe three inside yeah so i've worked with other units where they leave everybody gets out of the vehicle and only the gunner stays i don't like that that's the rules say who does that but we don't like that plan the um man for you to like just go back into full-on team guy mode of okay here's what's going on i'm shot up i gotta finish clearing this house by myself get the house cleared do an assessment set security and then contact the team and say hey it's mike target's secure damn i was there i don't believe it freaking legit man i was definitely in shock i did miss a room i missed the stairs upstairs to the prayer room upstairs so they had to clear that i missed it but i deconflicted the front door they came in they re re-cleared the house because i had to pull the guy off the front door that i told shoot anybody that came through because they were taking fire from the outside you know when when the neighbors know that you're there some people like to shoot out the window at you which was a lesson that we learned early on because who doesn't like to blow up a door but sometimes you don't have to blow it up sometimes you just turn the doorknob sometimes that doorknob works and uh when you blow up the door the whole neighborhood knows you're there people take pop shots out of you yeah freaking awesome man awesome work um i also got an ak round that's where i got the idea for this necklace uh the guys found when they took my body armor an ak round fell out of it and it's slightly flat on one side and it's got rifling on it so that's how you know that it actually came through a rifle barrel but that one hit me inside of 10 feet and it's completely intact i mean it's like barely flat on one side i can't explain that one either but i did get shot in the right places like i know guys that got shot in the femur you hit you hit bone it changes everything i only had two bones hit my left thumb and my right scapula uh i did have a round go up with the in inside of my right thigh which is probably the one the doctors are the most amazed about because if you know about the kinetic energy it's not the energy that's being pushed in front of the bullets what's being pulled and all the cavitation and how it ruptures organs and ruptured blood vessels and arteries that should have popped my femoral artery because that ran from my knee right above my knee all the way up to my inner thigh and that was definitely an ak round because the hole in my leg it looked like someone took a cookie cutter of an ak round and cut it out and the gunshot wounds healed weird they started off small and then they got bigger as they healed and then they shrunk i didn't have any bad exit wounds everything went through me i got a bad accident out of my right armpit that blew out but it's kind of actually hard you know i'm claiming 27 and it's the best of my knowledge uh but you know the one that went through my left thigh might have been the same one that went through my scrotum i don't know but i'm not going to ruin a good story hey bro when i say we round up quite honestly those ones that hit the body armor i was more aware of the ones hit the body armor i had no idea where else i'd been shot until i pulled my glove off i knew i'd been shot in the chest and back i could feel it i mean i had i had a bunch of broken ribs um and i had a confusion on my right lung so when i when i called those guys i was like you guys got to hurry up i can't breathe i think i got a sucking chest wound you know they pulled my body armor off and there's two holes in my back and uh they tried to get a reclusive dressing on it an old one that we used to use and they couldn't get it to stick so luckily it wasn't a sucking chest one yeah and you got shot with green tip too right yeah they took my body armor after that whatever company does the investigation and they took it apart layer by layer so the other layer body armor spalling it's that black stuff it kind of looks i don't even know how to just it's the stuff that holds everything together so it's a ceramic plate there's multiple layers uh plus i had the carrier on and at the time we were doing the soft armor heart armor the four alpha with the soft i i can't imagine getting shot in the chest with standalone four alpha armor piercing protection without that soft armor it's gonna break every one of your damn ribs every damn one i only had i think four broken ribs i mean you did just so you pop a rib out every once in a while that sucks it's freaking horrible man you get that top of your breath and you can't uh someone's stabbing me no you don't want anyone to make you laugh or cough or anything like that but yeah the weird thing about green tip is that if you don't know anything about it's actually penetrated more through the body armor than the ak did oh yeah i totally believe that so green tip is american and and five five six five five six what it's kind of the standard round for america we got a bunch of other ones i know but green tip is kind of the standard round for let's say an army infantry unit and so you might wonder how does mike end up with green tip in his body or in his body armor and the answer is they recovered the weapon and yeah there was a this all this guy's equipment to include his name his lbe his load-bearing equipment with his magazines in it still had his name on it they had his night vision goggles they had his pistol uh they had a bunch of this guy's stuff and it was from what we figured out an ambush out in ramadi uh army unit ramadi so an army unit ramadi got ambushed they captured this guy's equipment and then they put it to use and they put it to use on you man and the green tip was the only one that penetrated through the plate and made entry into the soft armor it got about halfway through all the plies on the soft armor you mentioned the green tip like um that it's standard but what's special about green tip as opposed to it's five five six uh it's the standard ammunition that we use it's uh we had a lot of problems with it in different different places like somalia um what a terrible place do they origin women and children is shields but the the green tip was such a hot round meaning hot it's it moves so fast that sometimes it just goes right through people and it doesn't doesn't get the a lot of the damage from the bullet happens after it passes through and it's the cavitation and the cavity it creates behind it it's really not what it does in front of it um but the green tip so fast it doesn't create that cavitation it just cuts through stuff but it's also it's armor-piercing right yeah it's it's fast and it's small so if it's made it is yeah it punches through armor a lot as you know this it's not it's not supposed to punch through 4a yeah well who knows when i got hit with the green tip because i had three rounds in the chest and if you look at the body armor it's already it degrades with each one they they they're only going to say yeah this will save you from one round yeah that's what they'll tell you after that we don't know what the hell it's going to do because if it i mean if you get if you take one in the 10 ring yeah and that damages everything else maybe that does more damage equally all the way around but i i got hit like here here and here uh and maybe the green tip wasn't the first one or maybe it was the first one before the ak hit it before it was so degraded that it was useless i'd hold one of those plates in front of my face and let you shoot nine mil into it all day it doesn't make it net it doesn't even make a dent you can barely find the dent from a nine mil yeah and that stuff yeah i mean pistols are just a lot weaker than rifles are and then you have that argument too what round or shot placement on shot placement you're all shout placement huh yeah and if you're not good at shot placement then just put a lot there you know can't tie knots tie a lot when in doubt overload uh going back the book 15 minute minutes after i'd called the team to let them know i'd been shot the medevac landed i had to say that because that's freaking awesome jack asked if i need any help as we walked together to the bird about 150 yards and all i felt heavy and slow as we walked together over the freshly plowed field i put my left arm over his shoulder to steady myself as i moved jack instinctively reached up and grabbed my hand which almost ripped off my dangling thumb jack let go of my thumb connor my seal teammate who was wounded in the arm exiting the house jumped on the bird for the short flight to the hospital in baghdad he was another one of our team's medics and i thought he that's why he was with me i didn't know that he had been shot until we were in the hospital together in bethesda maryland that was a new guy on his first deployment uh the flight medic was very efficient crawling all over me to cut off my clothes and gear to get to my wounds inserting his knee into every bullet hole in the process and his defense there wasn't much he could touch that didn't have a bullet hole punched out of it my seal teammate chris till had been assigned as my casualty assistance officer and would accompany me all the way back home chris was standing next to me with a satellite phone you have to call your wife he said i refused it first but then i remembered that my next of kin must be notified within 24 hours of an incident brandon was back in virginia beach shopping with the girls when she answered hey i said i don't have a lot of time i'm coming home early i got shot but i'm fine i've got all my limbs my face is fine and the doctor said i'm going to make 100 recovery i'll see you soon i handed the phone back to chris and the medical team stacked me on the plane i must have passed out because my next memory is waking up in the united states at naval medical center bethesda maryland i've talked to a good 50 people that talked to me and long stole don't remember i don't remember them yeah i mean one of those people is uh was was admiral mcraven yes so that's cool and um and you guys knew each other you guys knew each other from team three yeah i was my first three commanding officers were mcty mcnally and mcraven free three mix uh yeah you do you do that and and you you talk about that visit from from the admiral again well that was uh from i think i did some plagiarism plagiarizing from his book yeah you pulled so he's got a book out called sea stories and it's one of the stories in his book is you know visiting a guy that just been shot 27 times so yeah but yeah you put it in this book as well he's a good dude i mean yeah some people might think he's got some sway political views right now but uh you know i watched him take care of people and that's kind of how i judge people yeah it's like if you care about people and you take care of them yeah and you're not doing shit to feed your own ego or your own agenda i mean you got to have your own agenda i got mine now i mean it's part of the reason why i sold the book i want to go surfing all the time that's all i want to do yeah it's a pretty interesting story i guess from your perspective blessed to have this story and be able to talk about it you know yeah it's uh very few people be able to pick this up and not find something in it that they're going to be able to relate to in their own life bro you got shot 27 times you know and you did your job i mean it's freaking that's the least interesting thing yeah i think um but but just yeah you put the whole story together and um yeah man it's powerful and and like you said there's all kinds of stuff for everybody and and you know i'll get into some of it but a lot of it is is you trying to explain how you got through this stuff and you know how you got through your childhood trauma and what that trauma turns into and i mean we'll get into some of it but that's just a whole nother reasonable even if you even if you're a hippie that doesn't want to read a single thing about war okay skip those parts because you're still going to get something out of the rest of it well my publisher when we were working through this were like mike does this say a navy seal book or a self-help book i was like leave it ambiguous i don't care what you call it i don't care what you call it you know i'm doing pretty good in the uh the the ptsd section uh uh turn on after i'm trailing after you printing bumping at your door i have a ptsd there's a ptsd no you're actually yours is your books are uh number one in uh uh war biographies and oh okay your books do awesome i don't i in the ptsd section no not ptsd and the ptsd section vander kulk uh body keeps the score which is one okay that's the book that you talk about yeah that's one of the everybody should read that book a couple things in there if you understand your trauma your childhood trauma then your behaviors are predictable you know so if you understand that you become the person that you're taught to be invert inside of the first seven years and you know what your reaction is going to be to it then it's predictable and then you can work on it like my trigger is i don't like anybody poke me in the chest and when i get scared i don't cower sometimes i might over push back i don't like to be called names and i mean i got cursed out by a little 22 year old kid in starbucks a couple weeks ago and i had to ask him i was like boy how old are you he's like i'm 22 and this kid's flipping me off because i wouldn't put on a mask and i was like you wouldn't be talking to me like this if we were outside but you know i think that's a problem with a lot of people in this world right now you know the keyboard that the keyboard bullies and they get behind the wheels of their car and they act like a bunch of assholes i you know a lot of people just don't know that if if you could get punched in the face for being as rude as you are you wouldn't do it yeah we got a society it's just so rude now i mean every time you get in your car it's a damn nascar race people cutting you off and i mean i've kind of slowed down i was that type a driver in a rush to get everywhere even though i didn't have a schedule uh you well sir you talk about like i said you talk about some of this trauma and whatnot um and here's like here's a here's a little sample of sort of how you start looking at this stuff i would spend the next 18 months training guys shuffling papers and administrative duty at my new command so this is this is now your i think you're back at tray dead again right yeah i went back to work inside of five months about four and a half five months and i was in that course that we talked about earlier that communications course yeah uh my physical good way to call my physical therapy team became an important part of my recovery in life my team was made up of doctors nurses physical therapist chiropractors and clinicians who specialized in all type of care most importantly this group understood seal culture seals tend toward the extreme we think if one repetition is good then 500 must be great i was blinded by my own bias and it wasn't the first time or the last one day long into my recovery i confided to my nurse that i may have been experiencing symptoms related to ptsd post-traumatic stress disorder i had been sitting in my truck listening to a radio talk show when the when the expert being interviewed began describing the common symptoms of ptsd the voice spoken a calm matter of fact tone talking about the autumn autonomic nervous system and how sleeplessness constant irrational fears and hyper vigilance are often normal and predictable responses to trauma i listened to a stranger's voice describe me to me and i was both relieved and confused when i told the nurse who was a friend and someone i trusted she smiled and chuckled good to hear mike we all thought you actually enjoyed what happened to you in that room she seemed to understand that being profoundly affected by my experience of war was normal and not being altered was abnormal this was the first time that i considered the concept of emotional invisible wounds and that i had them i have come to understand that if the experience of war does not profoundly alter you in some way then you may actually have a problem when the doctor said that i had been perfectly wounded it seemed like a metaphor for my life i had been beat up just enough not to kill me and through the process i earned the perfect scars of wisdom to survive my next thrashing i still had no idea how the events of my childhood influenced my thoughts and behavior i'd become very good at compartmentalization my self-awareness grew as i uncovered layers of trauma i later found that my childhood wounds had prepared me for a career in the seal teams but they also became my most haunting ones ironically it took being shot 27 times to uncover my original wounds the ones that i never considered or knew i had yeah so you know you start looking at what's going on and this is this is cool it's got to read this bro um because it's a one one page chapter called the enemy within i fully accepted all the hazards of my chosen occupation being wounded was no big deal to me at no time during or after i was shot did i ever think i was going to die i was provided the best medical care available and was sure that my physical wounds would eventually heal the real battle began when i returned home the war in iraq was straightforward i was expertly trained and had the unconditional support of a community of like-minded highly motivated professionals professionals as a seal i'd been institutionalized in a sense i knew the culture the people the rules and the objective after leaving the military and returning home my life became a confusing frustrating and stressful mess i was a prisoner who had been released from the institution into a strange new world there was a destructive a distrustful cynic slowly working his way inside me his voice sounded like my own and each day he became more convincing i was surrounded isolated and desperate this enemy knew all my weaknesses he was relentless and he eventually overpowered me this enemy was me so a couple things i want to say on on the btsd at that point it really wasn't ptsd at least clinical because i haven't had any dreams about it i don't mind talking about it uh it doesn't bother me uh it bothered more the people around me more than it bothered me it was more of a hindrance you know that i had to live in a recliner for three months it bothered my kids because they'd never seen me get hurt or sick it pretty much was my first injury ever other than broken fingers and toes i did pinch a femoral nerve that put me down for about two three months at one point doing a pt thing but that was really my only my first injury because the fingers and toes don't count i i don't count but what had happened to me at this point well i want to talk about what i call false anxiety first just bad health eating terrible dehydration drinking too much your physiology when you're in that kind and that state of health feels like anxiety the increased heart rate uh the sweaty palms the whole physiology that goes along with anxiety because of bad health it's your physiology reacting to what people are dumping in their bodies my particular issue and what i think healthcare should be is individual evaluation of each person to adjust their medical care for for that because i watch for years people take medication for for a migraine and then the migraine doesn't go away but they get another symptom so here's another medication for the symptom eight medications later uh the guy's telling me i still got a migraine i can't remember what i did 15 minutes ago i'm taking eight meds for it um i had uh in your stomach you have flora bacteria that breaks up the food so your intestines can take the vitamins and nutrients in and i had no good flora in my stomach so my body physiologically couldn't even break down the food so when i got tested my my urine my stool my blood and they also used epigenetics which says your epigenetics your genetics say that your body will consume and you utilize certain types of food because of your genetics from where you're from we see a lot of guys in the seal teams everybody's on keto why do you know keto is good for you you might be hurting yourself or hey the greeks live for a long time i'll just eat a greek diet might not be the one for you because your genetics don't i mean it might work but it might not be the optimum so i went on to fix mine all i had to do was take antibiotics for a week and then i rebuilt it with diet you know just probiotics and this is to repair your gut floor after you did this test they study everything that's coming out of you they go oh yeah this is what you need so my body couldn't even give me those nutrients because it wasn't physiologically working and i was completely beat efficient d deficient uh had all kinds of spikes and uh heavy metals was this why you were still in or is this after you retired and you started working for the care coalition it was when i was working for the care coalition so i've been there for probably six a little over six years so you you retired in 2010 yeah and where did you spend your last so this incident happened in two thousand would you spend your last three years at uh that little creek and you were so i taught that course got it and then i was the operations officer which was the worst job i ever had and then but so then you retire out of there and you get this job at the care coalition which is working special operations care coalition yeah where where where are you located when you're doing that job well i'm still living in virginia beach but almost the job changed uh when i was initially hired for that job i had all the nsw marsack guys and that is wherever they were so marsack is on both coasts so i'd go to lejeune once once a month i'd fly out to san diego once a month and meet the guys out there nsw and marsack and we were putting guys in if we could find a quality of care that was sufficient we would put them somewhere you know where they were from so they can hang out with their family and so you're you're when you're in that job you're an advocate for all these wounded guys correct non-medical case manager non-medical case manager going okay and this guy's this kid will tell you hey you know i'm having problems with my ex-girlfriend and i need help with that or i mean just i i need i want to get back home to my family or whatever issues that they're facing is that is that right was i ran guys through their uh they were going through a medical retirement board i was the advocate for that and i that was the interface between them and and the pueblos the physical evaluation board liaison officers which weren't really good at what they did so i did va disability i did wellness trips there was a lot of care that you know you know paraplegic doesn't care that it's a test a test medication or a test treatment they just want to walk again and you know sometimes our medical system is not going to facilitate that so others will so we would facilitate treatments outside of network so it was my job as i described it was to improve somebody's situation and i did everything from babysit for people to uh you know medical retirement boards i mean i was a better social worker than i was a seal you you talk about some of the cases you talk about you saw you know you go through this um you talk about some of the people that you helped out holly was one of my first clients when i met her she was only able to lie in bed and scream at the top of her lungs it was scary holly was raised in port angeles washington enlisted in the navy after high school she joined the military to create a future for herself and her family when i met her she was still the bread winner for most of her family she had become an independent duty corpsman which is the highest enlisted medical care provider in the navy she graduated the program and become an arabic linguist hospital corpsman chief petty officer holly crabtree was assigned to work with the seal team as they conducted various operations in iraq it was april 15 2010 i just joined the care coalition and holly was nearing the end of her deployment she was out doing a medical civilian affairs operation when she was shot the bullet pierced her helmet fractured her skull and settled behind her eye she was not expected to live her crew realized that she was expectant and coded holly's condition as hope trauma she proved everybody wrong hollywood not give up or stop working she would have to re-learn how to talk walk even swallow i watched her do it all it was both sad and humbling but most of all it made me very proud to know her holly has since made an impressive recovery and is medically retired after 13 years of service i had another guy he's in there sam same thing shot in the same place both both um did he have to relearn everything as well yeah and they both stroked paralyzed him on the right side of their body he's uh he's working in a program right now where he goes after uh child pornographers and traffickers which is a huge problem in the country right now like what 500 000 children go missing every year in this country that's insane i mean i'll show you real slavery that's happening right now as you're doing this stuff with other people this is when you're starting to realize that you know you should get checked out yourself am i getting that right like in the timeline like this is when you start going hey man i should get these tests well the only reason i did these tests was because i was having issues and uh people around me were like you gotta go go get help go talk to somebody and i i refuse to and the reason why i went with this doctor was because it was the least invasive and all i had to do was talk to him on skype he wasn't even in the same state and quite honestly i kind of half-assed it and it worked uh i've seen all other people go through this to include people in my own family and uh everybody's issues could be different mine was bad gut floor i've seen people that have had h plyory which is a parasite which is pretty prominent which would the symptoms really look like you're having issues with a thyroid so your initial reaction would be well you're having these issues i'm going to take you to endocrinologist and then we're going to make you take these medications so that that we fry your thyroid when the whole time it was just a parasite that you could just stop eating sugar and kill it and fix it that's what healthcare should be uh healthcare right now is completely reactive they don't treat the source of the illness or disease they just treat the symptoms uh was like 250 000 people die every year because of medical mistake we were listening to these people they almost killed me too with uh potassium almost had a heart attack because i had an overdose of potassium when another seal who'd been shot in the eye right next door to me was almost overdosed uh ryan jobe was overdosed when he went in to get surgery just plastic surgery and then and then they tried to lie about it um yeah and those were that was civilian hospital it was that wasn't that wasn't the military that was a civilian hospital i think medicine's not an exact science everybody's body's different and that's why it should be evaluated individually because i'm pretty narcotic resistant i wake up in the middle of surgeries you got to give me more narcotics to knock me out if you want to do a surgery i mean i'm going to wake up and fight good luck getting somebody to do surgery after after you make these statements i'm not gonna get hurt anymore i don't think so uh so you're learning a lot about that you're also doing all like you said you're doing awesome stuff with uh with some of the people setting them up you know you're doing haunting trips um you end up climbing mount mount rainier yeah ryan joe climbed that blind yeah the year before i did yeah yeah you say this about that you say our climb had been in honor of ryan jobe another navy seal have been wounded in iraq by a sniper and injury that had left him totally blind i had met ryan once at mike monsoor's medal of honor ceremony at the white house which i think we were saying today that was the last time i saw the last time we saw each other before right now it's a good party yeah it was um good times um in 2008 ryan jobe climbed to the summit of mount rainier blind a year later in 2009 he died as a result of hospital error most people know ryan from the books american sniper and a warrior's faith he was the character biggles in the film american sniper on my way down i closed my eyes once and gained a new profound respect for ryan jobe i couldn't take 10 steps without opening my eyes there's some bad parts of that mountain you're tied to a damn rope too i hated that when we did that in the seal teams cold weather training yeah i i actually never did cold weather training i hate it i hate it yeah i mean i was in some cold spots but i never you know i got snowed on plenty i froze plenty of times out in the sleet and snow but i never i never did the cold weather uh the actual cold weather training the team two guys the old t2 guys used to love that stuff oh yeah for sure when i got there when i got to team two you know i was hoping that i would get to be able to do that but it was already um that program was it was no longer like seal team 2 was that it's all different yeah you end up going to you end up checking out some kind of i guess what is it called alternative medicine treatment alternative options oh yeah i went full hippie and i went to a place that was i mean i like those things i i like the mindfulness practices uh i should get back to meditating regularly it does help uh but i was introduced at this place to you know shooting with the recurve uh you know walking those paths you know that made with rocks that the indians used to do uh so they teach a bunch of mindfulness practices and they were teaching transcendental meditation and i think that's the part you're getting to where i yeah it sounds like it was like i mean the first thing that happens you're doing this acid trip or something but yeah no drugs involved yeah you're looking at a chair and all of a sudden the chair turns into human bones and then you guys are going down to do some some some uh therapy with horses and then i'm gonna go to the book here while the other participants went to the pen with the instructor i stood outside the corral when i turned and looked at an instructor's face it was like some type of hollywood special effects scene i was staring at him with his damn face when his damn face morphed into an evil demon i froze terrified and trembling it felt like every cell in my body was vibrating violently i just stood there closed my eyes and prayed god please help me i was sure these people were going to hurt me when i opened my eyes everyone was gone i needed to get out of there i saw the group standing in front of the corral and i said as calmly as i could hey guys thanks for everything this has been really good but i need to leave right now the instructors tried to talk me out of leaving saying that it wasn't safe for me to go and i stood there thinking well it's definitely not safe for me to stay here with the demon dude i tried to hide it but i think one of the instructors may have known that i was freaked out one of the female instructors gave me a ride back to my cabin i made her use her gps so i knew she was take where she was taking me when i arrived back the cabin i grabbed my bag chucked into my truck and immediately started driving back to virginia beach that was as that was like fully real in your head and i did a bunch of research after that happened to me that's when i started i had trouble sleeping after that and started doing research and it's a an event quite a few people have you well you look i thought it was interesting you immediately went and got a drug test a full drug test because you thought maybe you had been drugged i thought i was drugged i actually had to stop at a car accident on the way that's right yeah you stop in a car accident and so you kind of knew that you could you weren't on drugs because you were doing normal things uh well i i get into no no no no wait you see you said you you knew you weren't insane yeah because that's why you thought it was drugs that's what it was because i was able to still be objective that's when you know you're crazy when you can't be objective you're like am i crazy if you're if you're just completely denying the fact that you might be crazy then you know maybe you are you have to actually investigate it that's a scary test dude um i don't know if i passed that all the time but i mean this if you all the research i did on it it happens to a lot of people prominent people educated people uh and i say in the book you know i either saw it happen because i have some people that were like hey you just have the ability to see evil it was a temporary psychotic break which hasn't happened since which i've tried to like man i don't make that happen again with meditation because i think it was the meditation that did it i popped open different parts of my brain that i never used um but i cover my ass in there yeah so people don't think hey oh my god the other thing is the kundalini awakening yeah i had to go check that out i watched some youtubes i watched some youtube videos to figure out what a kundalini awakening look like and it's like a yoga like you just we it's just a weird like spiritual trip i guess oh yeah and i would say i'm might confuse people i wear i wear this ring but i would say i'm a recovering christian don't like religion i'm a spiritual person i know there's a guy i just he hasn't she hasn't whatever it is hasn't talked to me yet so i don't know i don't know who's right was there like 10 religions on this rock i do more than that uh i guess because that bad trip you um decided you were gonna still keep getting after it there was a elliot miller another awesome seal um he'd been through some some tbi like treatments uh he was he was wheelchair-bound for a long time he was really overweight so he went to that pro program at carrick yeah i did a fundraiser for yeah yeah so you so you do this you end up doing this um you end up trying to figure out how you can raise money and and the way you figure out you can raise money is uh is by doing a triathlon i did a half ironman half ironman so i tried to do a full that's that's when i was training for that that's when everything came down yeah so so you end up doing the the the short one i'll call it short i mean it's freaking long i guess 13 miles in one it is short it's short for a triathlete doing two in a row was exponentially so much harder that i induced diabetes because i didn't know enough about nutrition did you induce diabetes before the first one or while you were training for the second one for the full ironman so you do the you do the first one and everyone's all happy you raise 135 000 uh folks at iron man contact you and say hey you're great you got us a bunch of publicity and it's awesome chris pratt did it with me too chris pratt did it with you i'm sure they wanted to get some of that i didn't know who he was like guardians of the galaxy oh that one stupid movie with a rack talking racquet they're good movies now i like them i'm a i'm a fan of chris though yeah no he seems like a great guy i've met him um but then this happened so so they tell you hey you can do another you know we'll sponsor you or whatever you can do it and so you start now training for this and here you go i was totally exhausted and burned out before the half ironman now i was training for double the distance after the race the first race the word spread about what i was doing and new donors came to my crowd rise page to support me doing the full ironman but i was at a point where i just could not do my job anymore i was totally burned out and the ironman fundraising and training did nothing but add to my stress everything started to escalate my mind i could feel something was on the verge of breaking the stress of work training and financial obligations were all becoming too much i couldn't sleep becoming edgy and difficult to get along with on the best of days 45 days before the kona race i emailed the iron man folks to thank them for the opportunity and backed out of the race i contacted every donor and offered them to return all their money i was a mess at work i couldn't i would get urgent calls from shrinks who would say stuff like come get your guy some of my clients would scare the medical cl staff and the doctors knew if they called the police all hell would break loose so they called me instead i would have to go defuse the situation these evolutions were exhausting and looking back they were all well beyond my area of expertise i would do the minimum reporting at work then try to sleep or play video games and attempt to distract myself from the constant fear of something bad happening i was trapped without an escape route stress accumulates and it was all piling up inside of me i had no financial help and i'm not one to ask for any i was sure that i was going to get fired from my job this was only the second real job i'd ever had in my life other than being in the navy i felt embarrassed and ashamed and emasculated i would not leave my home for days on end i avoided talking to people even turned off my phone brenda was troubled she knows me so well she was gentle at first asking me if i wanted to talk to someone as i became more isolated and combative she reached out to my friends and co-workers they joined with her and together they all hounded me to get help in a year i'd gone from training to do an ironman triathlon to not being able to get off my couch i was in a dark dangerous place my life had become unbearable there was guilt but i think the real culprit was shame guilt and shame are very different and controlled my thoughts and behaviors in distinct ways guilt was about what i had done or in my case what i hadn't done shame was about who i was or at least who at least who i thought i was i felt like a a prisoner being brainwashed every day my mind seemed to be stuck on a one-track narrative that became darker with each episode every minute of every day there was this weird repeating internal mylog monologue that opened with guilt which created a feeling of shame i would fixate on things that supported this monologue like bailing out of the iron man which i was which i was sure disappointed the donors the treatment facility my clients and my family my anemic efforts at work reinforced my shame that's when all the what-ifs began chiming in what if i get fired from my job will we lose the new house and all my money what if the people who donated to my fundraiser think i'm a fraud because i didn't do the full ironman these thoughts would lead to embarrassment which deep into my feelings of shame i was trapped in this desperate repeating irrational monologue that sounded all rational to me i personally knew people like dan mark holly and tyler who had far worse injuries than me and far more stressful lives and who were all managing themselves well but for some reason i just couldn't put things in perspective i was locked in in an irrational disproportionate escalating mental prison i sat in my truck i had researched how to do it exactly where to place the barrel and how to angle the gun i had practiced it with a cleared weapon and pulled the trigger i didn't want to leave a mess for someone else to clean up i would not do it in my truck so someone else could use it the bullet would go through my heart there would be an instant of pain and then i would be gone i would do to myself with one bullet what four enemy fighters failed to accomplish with 27. i stared at the black gun in my hand i'd used one like this to kill before i was numb and sad confused and tired i had cried alone so many times my downward spiral had come to its final resting place at the bottom was hopelessness the built built-up stress the lingering effects of trauma my psychological deficits all colluded to create a condition of hopelessness my mind worked trying to come up with an explanation to justify my final act to my two beautiful daughters years ago in that room at that compound the thought of not being able to see their faces again terrified me images flashed in my mind holding my daughter's little hand and her own as we sat together the way the girls would wrap their arms around my neck and hug me their soft little voices called out oh dad their smiling faces repeatedly flashed in my mind there was the disproportionate feeling of guilt and shame that relentlessly stalked me i felt trapped in a life layered with overwhelming stress endless responsibilities meaningless tasks and toxic people of whom i felt i was the most toxic it was all my fault i felt i was my own worst enemy this time there was a bullet in the chamber i was beyond contemplation my mind was made up i mentally paced back and forth working up the courage the same way i had when i hit my father with the bat i was getting out of my truck when my phone rang i looked down at the number it was scott heintz my boss i picked up the phone in one hand and held a gun in the other i let it ring not wanting to answer i couldn't do it with scott calling so i put down the gun i answered hey scott what's up and scott says mike i want you to take the next three months to chill out i'm gonna pay you relax take your time and find a new job i'll help you out however i can you're beyond burned out you did amazing work but there's a time limit for how long you can do this job and you maxed it out my boss and good friend had just given me the hope i needed to climb out of the very deep hole i'd found myself in in that instant i could not have answered my phone for anyone other than scott scott had seen it all before he knew that i was surrounded by wounded sick and injured people all day scott also knew that many of the people who i had been meeting with every day for years including patients their family members veterans service members and hospital staff were struggling with depression it's like an alcoholic tending a bar you can only hold out for so long if you're around depressed people all the time you become depressed too i suspect that some of you reading this may now think that i'm crazy and write me off thank you comp for coming this far with me for the rest of you who have ever been depressed or suicidal i can tell you that while i fully believed at the time that i was thinking rashly i know now that i was not my irrational thoughts had started repeating themselves the world will be better off without me i don't care anymore i just want out of here i'm a horrible person my future will just be filled with more of the same stress these thoughts seem totally rational and true in my compromised state but i had no idea that my thinking was compromised what scared me the most about these thoughts and the entire experience is what happened to me just a few months later brenda in her desperation to help convinced me to visit a physician who had a protocol to treat depression and other conditions i resisted at first of course but finally agreed to work with a guy if only to get brenda and everyone else off my back that's why i did it man you uh get tr it's it's interesting you know you talk about the um like now you can look back and see that you weren't rational oh yeah but at the time there's just you know it's a chemical imbalance i mean it it's be more people are coming aware of it now that the gut brain access uh i mean the gut is probably a smarter brain than the one in our skull it can't operate properly unless unless you put proper nutrients and vitamins and this doctor is also really big into the emf electromagnetic fields you know you know how we're affected i mean we had radio antennas over in iraq and afghanistan you could put popcorn kernels in it would pop popcorn what do you think that does to you what do you think that does to your skull and your organs and your cells we already used resonance as a weapon you can use microwaves to make people sick uh well yeah i was a radio man unfortunately i loved the job but i mean sat all those antennas man i was constantly here as a young guy getting we took the what was that thing called the batwing yeah the vehicle antenna for the satellite and we figured well our one of our new guys put it on on the radio with a switch so this oh i see he's running around he looked like inspector gadget you know with a helicopter he had that batwing hanging out over top of his head i don't i don't think sat transmissions are very healthy but frequencies you know resonance i mean we could use it as a weapon it could be used for to heal microwaves they've been used a lot to make people sick so so you go through all that you kind of get um this doctor dr beck sort of puts you on a path like a new mission of you're gonna clean up your diet you're gonna stay away from these um situations the bluetooth limit your limit your exposure to wi-fi and all this stuff which is hard oh yeah for sure bmf is hard so i pretty much blew that off so what did you mostly would you mostly fix your diet mostly it was diet uh i got my gut back right so that it because the way that works your gut prepares the food for the intestines for the intestines to do what they do and if the stomach doesn't work then it just it's going to pass through and the intestines are not going to be able to pull the nutrients and vitamins and i mean i don't take any medication now i uh i am taking mitch's smashing greens i started off with uh this doctor put me on stuff called green juice from organifi uh so it's it's got all the you can have in one shake all the nutrients you know with one scoop of protein and one scoop of greens that's all you need uh pretty i mean we could live on algae and you look at all these school lunches that these kids were getting not now because of covid but i mean they were feeding them crap they're actually making them sick they're not helping them yeah i mean i mean like doritos with like crappy hamburger meat on it yeah if it's even hamburger meat yeah if it's hamburger meat it's not high grade i can tell you that so so you get done you go on this protocol and you say this it took about two months and even then i um i would shop for all the foods meticulously prepare the meat measure all the meals keep the detailed food log i'm sure the process was gradual but one day i woke up and felt like the black cloud that i had been hovering that had been hovering over me with for years was gone i was able to function to move and think think clearly the fog had lifted and the constant negative internal monologue inside my head stopped i felt strong clear and confident enough to get up and start moving forward grabbed my phone opened up my contact list and started sending text text messages and making calls i needed a new job and that's when you ended up going to trade uh back to traded as a contractor i went back to teaching military free fall or prior injury i had three events where i couldn't open my main parachute because my right scapula would seize up my whole back and my hand wouldn't work so i had three high high speed malfunctions went to reserve and the last one ripped my pec off my connects between your arm did you get surgery yeah they reconnected it but it was a slap tear the whole pack came out right here dang so then i went to cqc in salk yeah which is which was awesome because the ttps changed because of me yeah that's that's a perfect place for you to go and teach i mean what better person to be teaching about how to handle close quarters combat that someone don't do what i did i mean we still teach that uh but there's there's better ways to do things and uh different tactics you can use in different situations you can't just do the same thing every time but and then how long did you stay there for uh because you're you're you're retired now from that job as well right yeah so what is it 2020 quit 2018 i was i was probably at trade up between those two jobs for about three years okay yeah awesome yeah this one just left that like last october i think it's it's a cool thing that the teams do bringing older guys back that have experience that some of the younger guys might not have especially someone with experience like you and bring them in there to teach and pass on those words man that's freaking awesome that that we do that in the teams well i learned a lot there being an instructor like you were talking about earlier you know watching 20 different groups come through people do different things different ways and like man that was really stupid or man i wish i would have thought of that uh you ended up getting some tattoos and uh this was cool you know mike martin um who's a master chief team guy that was in vietnam who had gotten out of the got now gotten out for like a long time well he was a training cell at team three when i got there yeah he had gotten out for a long time then he'd gone joined rejoined the navy and went back through but i don't think they made him do like real buds yeah he's like one of a few people that went through like a gentleman's course of buds you know well we had to retread in my class that didn't make it was he a reach at vietnam vet uh i believe so really he was terrible dang that's kind of like martin's uh well he passed away last year on that motorcycle ride and i'll tell you what he was only 62. bro we were i was going he was gonna come on the podcast and and like i was lining it up with you know one of our mutual friends and and we're just you know just trying to find the date and boom yeah i was freaking so bummed out that was the first navy seal book i haven't read many but navy seals don't read navy seal books even though there's so many of them so many jokes i was just hanging out with black rifle and i was like hey you guys want to sell books in here you know all the military books i was like yeah it's a good idea but we'll have to reinforce the shelf for all the navy seal books like you're an asshole dude well i was sitting down with uh the black rifle guys up in montana and um it was me and dudley the archery guy and and then uh and then jack carr was what's his name the other owner small or uh it was evan it was evan that was who was there it was just so often what's up because the other guy got hurt i thought he got hurt matt got hurt yeah so he couldn't come but anyways we sit down and and um you know evan makes a joke about seals writing books and he did it to me too and then of course i looked at him and i was like because i mean it's a funny joke yes but then when you're actually sitting with two seals that have written books i was like oh this is really embarrassing i go real funny evan they're a great group of guys they're definitely doing their job paying it forward for sure man for sure i mean i i was really bummed out when i saw well first of all when i found out that you went to the total archery challenge there and i just did i don't know why i didn't put two and two together well i didn't find out until after you left montana yeah so i was like but then the other thing i didn't know is i i knew i knew that they were doing something with uh with the wounded warriors but i didn't know what they were doing i didn't really grasp it again i just didn't pay enough attention but i could i should have gone down there for that it looked freaking awesome that rolled into a huge archery event afterwards so we there was 25 of us i was one of two guys that wasn't an amputee there was a dude there that didn't have a right arm yeah i saw videos of him you fight that thing yeah yeah that's all that too freaking awesome too yeah dude and she had like 108 yards yeah there's something real cool about archery that uh that it has a lot of similarities you know to the old job you know i like shooting the bow better yeah i do too i i like sharing new bow better the main reason is cause it's quiet it's like there's no like little shock it's just nice and quiet you can do it in your yard and it's harder actually yeah it is harder well it's definitely harder at range i mean and then you can pick up a recurve i haven't done the recurve thing yet that's cool is that what you're like primarily shooting as a recurve these were compounds but i've got a couple recurves and it's all instinctive yeah yeah you just aim and well you can't aim there's no sights there's no rephrase that you kentucky windage and go it is totally kentucky with it oh yeah there's a couple guys that were trying to do some long shots up in montana with the recurves man yeah it looks fun looks fun i don't know if i gotta i got a lot of work to do on the compound before i decide i'm gonna make it even harder you just turn up the juice on that thing man uh yeah one arm guy's hitting stuff at 108 yards how hard can it be that's freaking off he's only got one arm freaking awesome man just freaking out lopez um getting close here but you know you say this it may seem strange but being shot 27 times then having a hand grenade flow up next to me was one of the best things that ever happened to me it was the start of a personal revolution that continues today and hopefully will go on until i take my last breath i say revolution rather than evolution as a result of my experience i have tossed out and or abandoned every bias relationship belief and dogma that has blocked my self-awareness and joy you said again i'm reading this stuff because i know that there's people i mean people talk to me all the time about what they're going through and you know what you say here i think is really important i burned through a number of therapists some were good most didn't have what i needed to help me understand how the traumas of my childhood shaped me as a person and how those same traumas make some of my behaviors predictable at times i had to be pushed into seeing therapists and doctors by people who loved and cared about me i don't know if i can ever thank these people enough for not giving up on me when i was so rude and resistant toward them i say all of this so you know that at least for me there has been no magic pill quick fix or one size fits all solution to finding peace and joy in my life these things have come to me slowly over the past decade as i grew in self-awareness and courage i suspect your personal peace if that's what you're searching for may be gained much the same way yeah you know i think um that that uh just letting people know like somebody thinks oh i'm gonna go see a therapist and it doesn't work out because that therapist doesn't have what that per particular person needs and then they go see i can't be helped instead of saying oh you know what i gotta try some different people both societal too um people think that they you know it could take you years to get into a terrible mindset based training telling yourself doing all the things that make you believe the things that that you're telling yourself and then uh you hit rock bottom or what you think's rock bottom and you're like i gotta go get this fixed i'm gonna go to this one week program you know it took me two years to turn into this disaster area and i'm gonna i think i'm gonna go to a one week program that's gonna fix it and a lot of these programs that i watched when i was at the care coalition it does help but there's no follow-up so there's an improvement while they're there because everybody's you know feeding them good food teaching them the things that that they can use to you know relieve stress uh and they do that while they're there and then they go home and then just fall back into the same routine training themselves to get further into that hole i mean that's what medicine is right now you know people get sick they think that they can take a a medication that's going to make make the sickness go away you know you're not even addressing why you're sick you're just hiding the symptoms they hide in the symptoms um i mean like earlier i said i actually induced diabetes and it was because i didn't know enough about nutrition and the only thing i knew about nutrition is if i was hungry or not and my favorite restaurants were the ones that gave me the most food i didn't care what it was um i mean eat an extra large pizza of myself gallon ice cream and 12 pack of beer you know that's that's the winning path maybe not definitely not it's funny too because we all know uh even since we were little kids you are what you eat but we know it but we don't practice it and then you got the fda with that stupid food pyramid you know you've got people now oh my stuff's fda approved i'm like so what corrupt organization go eat five loaves of bread like they told you to no wonder everybody's fat yeah can you say pre-diabetic oh and then they take medication i mean type 2 diabetes all you got to do is change your diet it goes away i did it i induced it with clif bars gatorade i wasn't eating twinkies yeah yeah yeah i was just you're thinking what seemed like it's cool yeah when i was also being trained by an ultra thonner uh and they're dumber than we are who goes and runs yeah she kicked my ass man and i just didn't know enough about nutrition and i was just dumping carbs and sugars into me and every time i stood up i was almost passing out that's diabetes crazy as soon as i fixed it it went away here's another little section that i think people should hear i have a way i have way more stress and uncertainty in my in my life today than i ever did in the seal teams or when i was suicidal the difference is that i now have a new resiliency portfolio of people tools and skills that allows me to effectively manage stress almost effortlessly while i do have bad days and very bad days they don't control me or impact my outlook on life i'm also keenly aware that most of my troubles are self-inflicted if you are honest with yourself you may find the same is true in your own life adversity is either a privilege or a tragedy depending on how you respond to it choosing to be a victim of the events and circumstances in my life would have been the real tragedy what if we all viewed view diverse adversity as an opportunity for personal growth to define our life's purpose and to help others the reality is that we can but we can't do any of these things as victims if i am to evolve which is my life's mission i can't be a victim even if my problems are the result of someone else's actions i found it easier to find myself than to rely on the perpetrator to repair the damage well that's what a lot of victims do you're a victim because you're blaming somebody else and you're expecting them to fix it and they're just nobody's coming you know they're not gonna fix it yeah so you might as well just take the blame take take take the ownership and solve the problem after everything that i've come through i'm grateful i think that the gratitude and service are i think that gratitude and service are unseparable the more i serve the more grateful i feel that i can still serve and care for my family my warrior brothers and sisters and continue to be of service to all of you these days i spend my free time hunting for a perfect surf and spending time with great friends i set up a non-profit to help shorten the distance to recovery from trauma and depression we join with people who truly want to help themselves we offer these adventurous souls a community of the right relationships and a portfolio of resiliency skills and tools and what's the name of that it's a little bit of forward thinking i'm just on the earl right now so i'm putting in the paperwork uh it's called warrior tribe and uh the focus is gonna be a little trauma metal on this and i want to get into uh at-risk youth yeah you know freaking awesome man the kids that were like me that are one decision away from winding up in the in the federal prison system or yeah or winding up on a great career in the military or some other path you know it only takes one decision i got lucky you know you know what i just want to close it out with what you closed this book out with joseph clark schwedler it comes in waves now and again there's an overwhelming feeling of disbelief that gives way to frustration then my eyes usually well up it's been going on for years now i've lost so many people it takes a toll clark was the kind of man you want your son to grow up to be he was smart driven had a great sense of humor was tough but thoughtful and responsible he was a born leader and he made us all better people after missions we'd be tired but clarky would be working out so we'd work out too he was like a swiss army knife he was our navigator our intel our intel collections guy a team leader sensitive site exploitation officer and one of our iraqi army combat advisors he picked up everything fast and became great at whatever he did clark's dream was to be a navy seal he was a midwestern kid from crystal falls a northern michigan town of 1469 people he was a senior class president played high school football and basketball and ran track he did two years at michigan state and joined the rowing team knowing clarky he did it because the workouts were grueling and he wanted to stay in shape he followed his heart abandoned college and enlisted in the navy to fulfill his dream of becoming a seal clarky got to live his dream and did what he loved to do every time i saw him he had a smile on his face what gives me peace is knowing that if i died doing my job as a seal i would have no regrets and i know clarky felt the same way for those of us who have lost friends and family members in this war the losses connect us while we may be strangers we know each other well there is a surprising comfort in being together in this painful club we don't have words to describe the depth of our grief but we don't need them because we can feel each other's sorrow there's a saying time heals all wounds it doesn't it only makes them slightly less painful i may again meet up with clarky on the other side of this life and i'm looking forward to it i know a lot don't we a lot they just put some new stars and paws on the naked warrior in virginia beach i didn't even know about the dogs that passed i think one of them was a suicide died by suicide a terrible place to be but since i've been there i know i can't get there again that was one phone call from one person that stopped me so i almost didn't answer that phone yeah and i think obviously the lesson there is uh what messes a lot of people up the secondary tertiary effects i told our nutritionist about it who helped me out with the guys that i was assigned to told her what i had almost done and she was like do you know how many people that would have hurt i never considered that i thought i was doing people a favor that's how rational i was but i've been around families where there's been a death by suicide and it it's terrible what it does to the people that are left behind it's a they don't recover from it well you know i you know this this kind of tribute that you wrote there in the end to clarke is awesome but you know from my perspective there's there's no more powerful tribute than you can make than than doing what you're doing right now you know trying to help other people out trying to live a good life take care of family and and really sharing all the things that you've been through and how you made it through them with other people and and i think there's nothing uh better that you could do to truly honor clark's his sacrifice and i do want to make it clear too that i am still seeking a continuum of care i'm recently looking at a program called uh save a warrior which a handful of guys have gone to the last three years of my life probably be a lot better book this is the stuff that i've been dealing with this last three years and the fact that i'm able to manage it is uh is pretty incredible to me uh but i don't know i think some people think oh i've had my ass handed me up into this point nothing else is going to happen i mean shit's still going to happen and i've just been able to get to the point where no matter how bad i got my ass handed to me i somehow fixed it or somebody helped me fixed it and i just had that mindset now i don't care if the rest of you turn into zombies i'll figure it out when when it happens but your point your point in saying that you're still you still are on the path of you still know you need help now i think everybody does there was a point in my life where i would have said nah i'm fine but there's always room for improvement that's an easy way for for someone to say you don't have to say you need help hey there's room for improvement yeah that's that's a that's a better team guy way of saying it because a team guy never wants to say i need some help but if you say to a team guy don't you want to get don't don't you want to improve 99 of team guys say hell yeah i want to improve and another thing with that too it takes you a while to get to a bad state you know that one week program is not going to do it a continuum of care and that's working out good diet you know taking care of the things that that lower the stress hormones it's it's not just one thing it's it's a lifestyle change you can't expect to be well if you're taking down a fifth every day and i'm not gonna be a hypocrite i probably drink too much beer but but i also take in all the nutrients and vitamins that i need to before i drink too much beer uh well hey man look we've been going at it over three hours right now um where where can people people can find you instagram uh yeah my instagram handle is mikeday5326 my social media is a train wreck until i hire somebody i don't know what i'm doing and my website i have a website my daughter who used my gi bill to get a graphic design degree uh did my website uh it's perfectly wounded.com okay so that's where people can find you um any other any other closing thoughts uh no i just there is no easy button nobody's coming uh nobody's gonna take care of you better than you can take care of yourself uh it's they're i can't say enough there's not an easy button you trained yourself to get yourself to a certain point that's your mindset that's training and if you just look at it like that if you can train into a bad mindset you can train out and if you are hanging out with a bunch of depressed people or people that are like-minded that that are negative you're gonna catch it i mean we used to kill that stuff in the seal teams there's always one that one guy that bitched and complained about everything and if you didn't stop it then his buddy started bitching and complaining and then it was like a damn disease the negative thoughts and negative actions are not going to fix and a fit that jack daniels every day doesn't fix it you can eventually have to still deal with it all right all man those are those are freaking good good guidance right there and uh man thanks for sitting down here thanks for talking with us thanks for coming all the way out here um thanks thanks for everything you did for the teams and for the navy and for america and man the example you set for you know for people not not just for what you did in the teams but like the example you're setting right now being putting yourself out there explaining how to overcome things it's freaking awesome man i appreciate it i don't like giving advice i'll try to live by example you know we just came back from black rifle those people you know amputees still going through surgeries and their lives are so much harder just to get up out of bed you know a paraplegic what a pain in the butt that is but they they still fight through it and they're living by example and when i was at the care coalition it did kind of help me for a long time how can i complain when you know dan connauson's above double above the knee amputee yeah taylor morse is a quad amp and i've never seen the guy be upset so it is it is inspiring to see people that we assume have a worse deal which is a hard thing for people to get across to like i don't have the right to feel this way because that guy's worse or that girl's worse which is not true you know everybody's issues or their issues and they have to be addressed even though you don't have the worst deal you know be happy you don't have the worst deal now you don't have to fix that one yeah you might not have the worst deal but it's your deal and you got to deal with it awesome man appreciate it brother thanks guys and with that mike day has left the building awesome to see him and uh that ends up being yet another excuse removal podcast what does that mean meaning it's kind of hard to make excuses when you get done talking about mike day who's been through a lot and he's not making excuses so well echo charles yeah yeah that's uh it's almost like you can kind of just refer to that every single time you know something's going wrong for you and probably others too you'd be like well at least i didn't get shot 27 times you know it's a true statement my thumb almost ripped off yeah it's weird you can keep or that he can keep his head straight when he looks down and be like oh yeah my thumb's almost off as well you know yeah i i said this i said team guy mode yeah and i don't use that term lightly but just from reading it and talking to him about it using full team guy mode which is when you're just like all right i'm going to make things happen right now just yeah so yeah 20 did well speaking of excuse removal what do you think we can do to help ourselves and each other remove some excuses and stay on the path stay capable i think stay capable of course you're not gonna well we all have our challenges right like how you guys were saying uh like people's challenges are more or less or whatever but they're ours we have our that's what you're saying right yeah yeah yeah yeah but they're my challenges or our challenges anyway so we're all gonna have our challenges but we want to stay capable yeah i think so for sure with capability comes exercise i think well you heard you heard mike mention about a thousand times working out right staying in shape eating good food eating good food supplementation supplementation is a thing very helpful thing anyway so yeah supplementation jocko has fuel by way of supplementation jackal fuel so what kind of supplementation for your joints is a big one keep your joints in the game my kids saw a guy do a backflip it was a big muscle guy and he was doing a bunch of other stuff and there was a kid involved in the video and um he was doing so and my daughter you know she's curious she's seven so everything that i did she was like hey dad can you do that and the answer was yes every single time and she would be like hey prove it so i'd have to like prove it you know and there was like a rope in it too so i didn't have to prove that part of it and he she was like he was doing like a bunch of stuff and i was like it was the list was going on and on and i was like i was doing good at first but after a while i started to get nervous like bro this guy's pretty started getting outside of your realm of capability it looked like he was about to you know because he just kept doing stuff and i looked at him i was like he was in good shape one of those athletic shapes too muscle guy i'm like okay all right all right and then finally the last thing he did was this back flip sort of the finale of the video like saying thanks for watching and he does a backflip and i remember back in the day i could do a backflip straight up what do you call it a tuck i think it's called you know the kind of backside yeah so but i'm like oh man if i were to bust out a backflip right now because of course she wants to see her right now i'd probably hurt myself but if i warmed up a little bit i think i could do it right now i'm surprised you didn't go for it at the pool's edge and say hey listen p i can do it but i'm gonna do it over here by the pool just because i'm cold right now see this guy warms up a lot yeah that's all right that's actually what i said i was like yeah he's warming of course you know she's like okay so now every once in a while she'll be like hey just warm up do it before your workout and i'm like i gotta bust out the excuse it's been about 10 years since i did it and you can get hurt if you don't do it correctly so the last thing i need is for me to double down and get injured in front of my daughter you know kind of blow her whole image of me but she knows i can do it in the pool she already knows that cause like i don't think i could get away from the pool thing nonetheless if i practice when she's not looking like in the pool or whatever i'll pull it off but here's the thing i'm a little bit older now so my joints could take a beating if i wasn't on the supplementation that's one of the things i was thinking about as i'm explaining it to her like i could pull it off just need to up your joint warfare just i might have to you know just to first say you know for a safety sake as it were nonetheless yeah so take the joint warfare just in case somebody asks you to do a backflip for sure tuck whatever not inside the pool or other things let's let's face it you try to climb a rope or something like this you shall just get all hurt but if your joints are good you're good also krill oil super krill oil and also that vitamin d yeah get on that vitamin d mix a little vitamin d with your cold water yeah immunity system strong yeah boost the immune system also mulk yeah i was gonna say don't forget about uh discipline discipline go discipline powder we got all kind of discipline yeah a little bit of that when you need that little accelerant yeah to to kind of ignite things try it out you might like it yeah and the and the the jackal palmer both uh powder and the cans i think it's sort of the leading uh flavor it was the tropic one but i think yeah i think i think that kind of it's set in stone i think in my sour apple apple sniper i'm out right now by the way jp nels custom signature jp dunnell signature line well it doesn't good deal david it's good too i've tried you know i tried obviously i tried the uh the sour apple sniper and it's really good yeah it's gonna it's really good it's really good yeah and and yes dave burke good deal yes he also has a flavor coming a signature flavor yeah yeah yeah those are interesting too because you get like it's really orange yeah afterburner orange yeah you um these energy drinks the rtd cans you kind of and i kind of forget this from time to time too i'm like okay i need an energy drink but it's not just the energy drink you get the discipline and you don't get like for real chemicals yeah yeah you don't that's that's so yeah there's no sugar in it it's sweetened with monk fruit still tastes good and but what's even next level is that it's pasteurized so there's no chemicals that keep things stable which we had to go through a long period of of testing and to find the place and to make this drink the way it is so yeah check that out yeah it's like a um it'd be a disservice to call it a health drink even though it essentially is a health drink you know what i'm starting to feel over here is that when we do a podcast like this where you don't say much during the podcast portion maybe that sort of builds some pent-up conversation in your head where where where you want to converse with me about stuff that yeah and because it seemed like you had plotted out a whole kind of topic here that we were going to go into yeah or that you are going to go around you know i feel it too but and that you know now that you mentioned that you're right you're actually yeah in real life you're right and here's what's crazy that's a long podcast that's three hours right so i'm thinking okay cool we just did a three hour podcast and i'm like echo you know we'll we'll just kind of burn through people kind of know what's up they want to support the podcast they're going to get in the game they know to go to origenmain.com we can just kind of let them know but then we're talking about backflips that's what we're talking about really you know how like um what i do is i screw up because then i bring it up i should just keep my mouth shut be like yup backflips cool yep rtd yep good warrior kid molk get it yup monk yep but i don't look i i i take the bait i take the bait it's kind of bait because it's 100 bait well okay so we're all at home you know a lot of us i mean you know some some of us are going out a little bit more than others but like i'm one of the people who i'm at home a lot so i take i talk to the same four people in my family varying levels of age okay you know in maturity levels so after a while it gets repetitive so when i see you you know once a week i'm like hey man let's let's talk let's face it and that's not that's a common thing like because sometimes we can go straight up two hours before we even press record because we're you know whatever whatever and when you think about it i'm just realizing this just now like we kind of rolled in we're like kind of all business yeah so you're correct you don't like that you've got a whole sort of like excess of conversations floating around in your head that just need to come out i don't all in the time over here i'd be just as soon like read off the stuff you tell them where to go and we leave i'd be down with that i understand okay all right well hey let's speed it up but hey let's do you know bear with me if you will so yes discipline can powder all that good for your brain good for your body keep it keep keep yourself on the path and capable by the way monk extra protein in the form of a dessert eating dessert like what ice cream or uh snickers bars for dessert i guess that's not really a dessert that's more of a candy bar but like a cake a bundt cake but don't do that because that'll take you off the path yeah jocko white tea don't forget about that organic and you can get all this stuff at origenmaine.com or you can go to the vitamin shop right around the corner if you got one around the corner from you you can go check it out there and then we also at origin main.com we make all kinds of stuff for you to wear on your body things that you can wear when you are doing jiu jitsu like jiu jitsu like rash guards t-shirts if you're not doing jiu-jitsu you you still need to wear something on your body wear a t-shirt you probably need something on your legs sometimes wear some origin jeans wear some air origin boots if you need something on your foot they got your whole body covered up you got your whole body covered beanies do and and here's the thing this is you kind of throw it in there in the end like it's no big deal everything that i just said is 100 made in america without compromise you're supporting america you're supporting local people that are making things happen our people bringing back this industry being bringing back manufacturing to america so go to origin origenmaine.com get yourself some of that stuff if you need to cover up your foot sure or other places also speaking of clothing let's just say clothes apparel if you were actually apparel seems more like a like a like a it's a bit more spectacular yeah we'll just say close how this okay speaking of which jocko has a store called jocko store some new things on there but this is the place where you can get discipline equals freedom good uh get after you know representing while on the path with closing from jocko's store so go to jocklestork.com just blink with them shirts hats jackets you know a lot of times i say like oh this is ours sure but let me ask you a question is my new t-shirt up yet yes all right good yeah your t-shirt is up yes some people have noticed it too oh something and they knows then they text me you know jack daniel hill yeah so he texted me he was like hey hope you're doing good that new shirt is awesome and it's not like he texts me every day too so it was like a thing so after many years of planning because i've been wanting to do this for you how many years have we been planning that t-shirt three three years i've been planning this t-shirt so it's a t-shirt on the front of the t-shirt it says two words hardcore recondos you all know where that comes from if you don't don't worry about it you'll figure it out at some point and on the back it's got the it's got phonetic letters the phonetic letters it has on the back are november foxtrot sierra and if you don't know what those mean don't worry about it don't worry if you do know what those things mean then you'll probably be when you see me you'll be seeing me wearing that t-shirt get some hardcore condos well yep that one is there joccostore.com if you see anything else on there hey man get it good way to represent while on the path while supporting also if you want to get the book perfectly wounded by mike day we got it on the website chocopodcast.com in the sections where the books are you see it books from the episode we got you there i'll just click through there it'll take you to amazon you can buy it boom straight from amazon also subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already on your itunes or stitcher google play you know wherever you listen to to podcast you know subscribe man easy one click boom easy money and there's not just this podcast we also have the unraveling podcast which gonna have its own uh what's it called its own feed at some point right now we're kind of dual broadcasting get people in the game a little bit make sure that that you know it's out there but eventually we'll break that off so look for the jocko unraveling podcast we got the grounded podcast we got the warrior kid podcast we got warrior kids soap from irishoaksranch.com you can get soap so that you and everyone you know can stay clean we got a youtube channel this is where echo puts tons of special effects into two-minute videos and then puts no special effects in a three-hour video a lot of people a lot of people don't agree with that but that's what echo's doing and according to him that's the way it should be so whatever i also have an album called psychological warfare where i will tell you some little things to do to get through moments of weakness which we've all got little moments of weakness attack them that's what i'm saying if you need some support attacking you support by fire position press play listen to some psychological warfare if you need a visual signal for overcoming a moment of weakness go to flipsidecanvas.com dakota meyer he's making all kinds of cool stuff also made in america to hang on your wall and remind you that you need to stay on the path got a bunch of books obviously mike day's book perfectly wounded we got the code we got leadership strategy and tactics field manual we got way the warrior kid one two and three we got way though we got mikey and dragons we got discipline equals freedom field manual we got the the dichotomy of leadership and then the og book extreme ownership written by me and my brother leif babin we also have a leadership consultancy called echelon front where we solve problems through leadership go to ashlandfront.com for details and also we have an online training program and i'll tell you what i'm going to do i'm going to do some some jocko live events on ef online jocko live event so if you missed the world tour that i did have you missed the world tour that i did uh where i went around america talking to everyone meeting everyone i'm gonna do some of those on the internet so you'll be able to tune in live ask questions i'm gonna do those through ef online no dates scheduled yet but it's coming and and by the way you don't have to wait because if you want to talk to me go to efonline.com and i'm there answering questions the whole team's there you can interact with me right there so check that out also if you want to see us in person go to you can go to extremeownership.com and come to our muster which is a leadership conference next one is phoenix arizona september 16th and 17th december third and fourth is going to be in dallas texas they've all sold out these are going to sell out too if you want to come get there early and of course we also have ef overwatch if you need leadership inside your organization we have connections from the military that understand the principles we talk about go to efoverwatch.com if you want to support if you want to support service members around the world go to america's mightywarriors.org it is mark lee's mom mama lee and she is doing her best to provide for people in the military their families gold star families all over the world you can go there and either donate or you can get involved and if you're a glutton for punishment and you want to hear more of my cretinous contentions or per chance for some strange reason you'd like to hear more of echo's risible reflections then you can find us on the interwebs on twitter on instagram and on facebook echo is that ecwid charles and i am at jocko willing and of course mike day is at mike day 53 26 and speaking of mike thanks once again to mike for setting such an awesome example not only for his deeds on the battlefield but for the example he sets in life putting the word out there explaining what he's been through and how he has gotten through it and to all of our other military members of the past present and future thanks to all of you as well for also setting an example of service and sacrifice and for allowing us to live in freedom and to police and law enforcement and to firefighters and paramedics and emts and the dispatchers and the correctional officers and the border patrol bortak secret service and all the other first responders thanks to each of you for your service as well and thanks for keeping us safe in our times of need and to everyone else out there we know life is rough and we know there will be pain and whether that pain is at the hands of an abuser at the hands of an enemy or at the hands of nature or time or disease there will be pain but with a man like mike day as an example you can overcome you can get through it you can drive on and you do that by getting up every day and getting after it and until next time this is echo and jocko out

Channel: Jocko Podcast

Views: 416,936

Keywords: jocko willink, podcast, discipline, defcor, fredom, leadership, extreme ownership, author, navy seal, usa, military, echelon front, dichotomy of leadership, jiu jitsu, bjj, mma, jocko, victory, echo charles, flixpoint, marines, marine corps, ptsd

Id: lD6J-hzAw0E

Length: 197min 56sec (11876 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

This one is really good. Not convinced about the EMF stuff but not dismissing it out of hand either.

Hopefully it encourages guys who are having problems to seek help, and to not stop if the first attempt at seeking help doesn't work out.

If a guy who got shot 27 times then got up to finish clearing the building can admit he can't do it all on his own, then the rest of us who aren't that badass can as well.

[u/Catswagger11]

My enemy was me.

Was? Sounds like it still is if he’s too arrogant/selfish to put a damn piece of cloth over his face holes.

[u/Ghost_of_Sniff]

In this episode Mike Day said that during the firefight his pistol was shot in the grip, damaged but he was able to clear it and continue to fire it. Later he said it was repaired and reissued to someone else, did he ever say or does anyone know what type brand or model it was?