Lt. Jason Redman, U.S. Navy SEAL, Ret. (Full Interview)

our guest this week on Veterans Chronicles is Jason Redman he's a u.s. Navy veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq he's a US Navy SEAL his attitude after being severely injured in Iraq became an inspiration for many wounded warriors Jason is also the author of the Trident the forging and reforging of a Navy SEAL leader and Jason thanks so much for being with us Greg honored thank you where were you born and raised sir so I was born in Ohio a little town kind of south east of Columbus shocked in Ohio okay and there's a history of service in your family correct there is absolutely so I grew up always wanting to be in the military just hearing the stories my grandfather had a very distinguished career in World War two he was a b24 pilot flying in the European theater he flew all of his missions even was shot down over Yugoslavia and they crashed landed the plane and thankfully snow it was winter so they crash land in the snow everybody survived and then he led his crew they evaded back to friendly lines to Italy and he got the Distinguished Flying Cross for that bat mission and then he seven air medals over his combat career I've never got to meet him came home and died of a heart attack after the war so but then my dad followed suit he went in the army I was the black sheep and joined the Navy my brother was a marine and my sister was Air Force why the Navy specifically for the SEAL Teams growing up I grew up in the age of GI Joe like many young men and just kind of became very intrigued and by the Special Operations side of the military and initially looked at army long-range recon patrols and Rangers and the Green Berets and my dad had done some work with the seals in Fort Campbell Kentucky and he said hey there's a group of guys out there you know they say their training is the hardest they jump out of planes they blow stuff up they everything's from the water they swim he said you may want to look into that and I did about the age of 15 and I said that's where I'm going what was that training like we the stories all the time but for someone who's actually been through it I have been it's tough you know and it's it's it's neat because I've had the unique perspective of going through not only seal training I went through Ranger School and a lot of people always ask me well what's harder seal training is just it's brutally hard there's no doubt about it it's it's designed to be that way as you get further away from it though you you forget I had the honor of going back about probably five or six years ago now watching a class go through hell we could have brought back a lot of memories but you know I think the biggest thing that puts it in context is is the statistics so my class I started with class 200 and we started with 148 students and I didn't even graduate with my original class I graduated in class 202 but 200 only graduated 19 so that was it's you know loss ratio sticking right around an average attrition rate of 75 percent for seal training there any point where you we're close to yes stepping out yeah when I was going through how weak how weak is one of the hardest blocks of training many say in the US military some say in some of the world's militaries but it's one week straight where you get very limited sleep if you're lucky you may get two or three hours of sleep for that entire week starts on Sunday you go to Friday afternoon early evening and you're constantly wet coated in sand you're constantly moving you're cold and it is just hell and I had been told that if I could make it to sunrise on Wednesday morning it got easier so I wrap my head around that tidbit of information and it was my lifeline that I hung on to so the Sun rose on Wednesday morning and I was like you know I'm telling buddy say it's all downhill from here you know we made it except we had not Thursday night was my hardest night of hell week the temperature in San Diego dropped that night down into the high 40s my boat crew was losing every angle race and when you lose you're punished for it through you know unique you know extra exercises or extra moments freezing in the cold surf and that's exactly what was happening and I kept thinking back you know this is you know this is BS you know I Wednesday morning came and went it's supposed to be easier and it wasn't I did I for a few moments I thought about quitting and but I told myself look you quit you know this goal was done so it kept me in there and I pushed through to the other side and and finished a week what was the feeling when you finished amazing it is amazing it's you're so tired though it is a fatigue the only time I've ever felt a fatigue that heavy and even more so was when I was shot and bleeding out you know you're so tired you're you know you can't even think straight and you're so cold that that's all you could think about so the biggest thing I remember about post hell week was once we finally were secured we had a community shower that was probably about ten feet wide and about fifteen feet long and there was probably I don't know 10 showerheads that lined the walls and I took one of the metal chairs out of my room and put it right in the center of the shower and I turned on all the showerheads on hot and I just sat in the shower and slept in there for at least a couple of hours before I went to bed that's the biggest thing I remember after probably got to warm up a little bit yeah man so weird after all of this where were you assigned pre 9/11 so pre 9/11 I was an East Coast shield my entire career my first SEAL team was SEAL Team four and at that time the the United States was heavily involved in the drug war so we were really working hard to try and stem the flow of drugs coming out of South America so a lot of the things that I did early in my career prior to 9/11 was jungle counter drug-related in Colombia Peru and working with our foreign counterparts special forces and government agencies on things like that did did a stint in training where I was teaching reconnaissance and surveillance communications things like that where I moved into an area where I got recommended for a commission picked up for a commission and headed off to school so after 9/11 how does that change where you're deployed what's changed everything I mean literally 9/11 changed everything I don't know how much I'm sure it impacted the military as a whole on the same level but within the SEAL Teams it was a absolutely dynamic shift in everything it shifted in the way we deployed it shifted in the way we configured the SEAL Teams it shifted in our tactics up until 9/11 the SEAL Teams the last time the SEAL Teams had seen heavy sustained combat was Vietnam so many of the tactics that we were still teaching was from the Vietnam War we were also using a lot of old Soviet doctrine you know that obviously played in but it was 9/11 you know we got into this very ambiguous very heavy urban and close quarters combat mountainous long range desert combat and it made us really take a look at us a lot of things we're doing have changed like I said the deployment cycle changed prior to 9/11 the SEAL Teams were geographically specific areas of the world and after 9/11 the demand was so high on special operations forces that they reconfigured how the SEAL Teams deployed and every single SEAL team became worldwide deployable Afghanistan you were there before you went to Iraq correct and what was I don't know how much you can talk about it but what what type of missions and and type of responsibilities were you taking on there we mean the SEAL team is primary mission is a probably our primary mission is direct action so we are going after individuals so fine fine fix and finish the enemy so whether we capture those individuals or whether we aid them on their way and that's specifically what we were doing in Afghanistan so we were doing what we call capture kill missions so operated different places in Afghanistan and everything from individual target takes net takedowns to sometimes long-range patrols where we were patrolling through valleys and dense areas up in the mountains where we knew there was heavy enemy activity and we were looking for caves we blew up a lot of caves so those were some of the missions that we were doing in Afghanistan how would you describe the Taliban or whatever other groups you were fighting there with a competent where they did provide challenges that you expected or didn't expect yeah they were definitely confident I mean there are people who have been at war for many years I mean they held off the Soviets and you would be ignorant to think that they didn't know what they were doing you had to fight them on their terrain in their backyard on in an area that they knew very well and in an area that they had used very effectively against the Soviet Army so you had to go in that and you had to respect that heavily they were very good at using the terrain and we had to be very aware of that so we recognized we had to maintain a extremely high level of fitness to be able to operate at these high altitudes and to be able to maneuver quickly in this really steep mountainous terrain that was you know that was where they like to fight how did you counter the home-field advantage there well how did you they they know where all the mountain passages go and you don't how do you how do you overcome that extensive Intel collection and extensive understanding of terrain extensive prepping the battlefield if you will all right let's talk about Iraq now when did you go there I showed up in Iraq in the spring of 2007 was which was right at the we were kind of into the height of the Anbar awakening at that point so the Anbar awakening occurred in the fall of 2006 and I showed up in Fallujah so we were operating all throughout Al Anbar Iraq was a really hard war we saw a lot of progress in the beginning of the war which I wasn't there then I was in Afghanistan and then it really stalled and we got deep into this insurgency al Qaeda you had different tribes who were involved in fighting for different areas you had the Sunni Shia mix with McDonald Sadr and Baghdad trying to hang on to their piece of the pie and then al Qaeda which is soon he was hanging on to their piece of the pie more much more so and heavily involved out in Al Anbar so the Iraqi people for years you know having been subjugated and you know held under this tyrannical rule of Hussein did not trust anyone including us and they made it very difficult for us to operate because they would not provide any information and what happened with the Anbar awakening is in 2006 finally the the tribal sheiks came together and said okay al Qaeda and the insurgency is killing far more of our people than you know the Americans in this war is you know they've been here for a while they keep telling us they want to help us they have done some good things so let's help them and that was really the turning point in the war for us in Iraq it really started providing information actionable information that we suddenly really started turned the tide where we were able to with pinpoint accuracy go after mid level and high level leaders and take them out or capture them and so it was really active I mean that deployment that I did in Iraq in 2007 was you know I like to say everything I ever trained to do is seal I mean we were operating almost every night very kinetic operations going in after a very bad people and like I said you know either wrapping them up or aiding them on their way what happened the day you were shot we were taken down the target it was the end of the deployment and we were going into an area Karm Iraq which is northeast of Fallujah and Carmel you know Fallujah was really a battleground holding point for al-qaeda and they had fought for it in 2004 obviously and then again in 2006 and then the 2006 battle really kind of pushed al-qaeda out most of Fallujah and they moved up into karma and the Marines had an outpost in karma and they tried to be as active as they could but it started abdun flow depending on the units that were operating in that area at the time so when we got there we came to find out that not many units had been out in the rural Carmen that there was a we were told there was a lot of activity so the very first deployment that they our troop went into karma wasn't on that mission it was a huge firefight they got into and petty officer Clark Schweddy ler was killed seal we had multiple guys wounded and we knew that you know this was the area we needed to be in so we just started going into Carmen developing more information about karma throughout that deployment so fast forward to the end of the deployment we had been in multiple firefights in karma we had been tracking the number one leader for all of al-qaeda for the Anbar province in this area of karma and we got word that he was going to be in a specific time and location time-sensitive target for us and we launched on that mission mission fully expecting heavy resistance we entered the target and nothing you know his offense happens in combat and with intelligence it can be dated and we went into this building and there was a lot of activity it looked like people had been there recently but nothing was there so we stood down we found a lot of bomb-making equipment we found munitions so we found a lot of activity indicating you know this was definitely part of the insurgency or al-qaeda so we're going to blow that up and we were gonna head out for the night and our snipers saw some individuals flee from a house about 150 yards away and they ran across the road and and went into about five individuals into a thicket you know some thick brush and the ground porous commander came up to me and said hey I want you to take your team let's go up there let's find out who these guys are you know let's question them because it was 3 a.m. in the morning Iraq had a curfew at the time you know most individuals when they heard helicopters explosions anything like that they stayed away from it the only people that came to it where the individual was looking for a fight we saw these individuals for him to hide so we thought ok you know they're trying to hide there may be something to this maneuver of my team around and long story short we walked right into a very well executed al Qaeda ambush what we found out later was the leader had left the building that we initially took down moved to this other house about 150 yards away and the five individuals that came out were the last part of his very well trained security detail in the pre stage an ambush line in that thicket with the idea of thinking that we may drive up to the house to take it down or we would land our helicopters in the field across from this thicket instead we basically walked right into the kill zone where they were which started a very effective ambush hitting my medic hitting me at least eight times that we know of and hitting one of our other guys who managed to run forward and save our medic the only the only point of cover we had was nothing but thousands of yards of empty desert and the only point of cover we had was a large tractor tire like a John Deere tractor tire my team fell back to that I was still out front at that point and I had already been shot multiple times across the body I had taken two rounds in the left arm which at that point I thought my arm had been shot off and I was pinned down by multiple machine guns and I was continuing to try and shoot got up to move and try and get back to the tire when I caught around in the face impacted the right side traveled through my face exited the right side of my nose took out my right cheek bone took off most of my nose paper eyes d-orbital war broke all the bones above the I destroyed the head of my jaw and shattered my jaw down to my chin and and knocked me out so guy saw me fall unconscious thought I was dead continuing to fight request in a fire mission but we were so close to the enemy that had us pinned down that we were well within the danger-close parameters we would have the rounds would have killed us is basically what the aircraft overhead we had an Air Force ac-130 gunship overhead continued to fight I came to at some point and woke up and literally was watching rounds traveled directly over me you know thankfully had enough wherewithal to not sit up and enough wherewithal to realize that I was really there was nothing I could do it until my teammates won the fight so I waited hillo on fire I called out to my team leader and asked him how long till the medevac and he told me you know it's gonna be just a few minutes which was a lie so and I ping him on that but uh but uh they continued to fight they continued to try and pin the enemy down they requested the fire mission again and the gunship said no we can't do it you guys kind of figure out a way to fall back he called back and said there's no way you know there's no place to go it's nothing but open desert you know we have one point of cover and we're making our stand here so continue to fight and finally he called back third time and said hey look we're running out of ammo it'd been in probably about thirty minutes at this point and he said hey running out of ammo you know I got three severely injured one you know potential ki a he said that you know if you don't bring in this fire mission nobody's gonna be left so finally they relented and they agreed he told him exactly how to do it and and it was pretty amazing he called out to me and said incoming and I literally you could hear the rounds go off and and impact the ground in front of us and the explosion blew up over us so multiple 40 millimeter rounds the machine gun that had me pinned down was hit and either that first initial volley or the second one but I'll never forget that the gunfire stopped and the enemy fighter was crying out he was in pain he'd been hit pretty badly and he was he was calling out to Allah and I remember thinking to myself stand by because he's coming and sure enough they brought in the next fire mission and that that eliminated him during that point my team leader ran forward and grabbed me and dragged me back to the tire he got a tourniquet on my arm so he saved my life and a few more fire missions were brought in which finally neutralized the enemy and we finally were able to bring in the medevac estimated 35 40 minutes from the time of initial impact the medevac was on standby which literally you know I have to credit that to saving our lives I read in secretary gates book how much they really push to strategically place our medevac assets and strategic locations on standby based off operations that were going on in the theater during those nighttime to enable the greatest success for us that had been wounded to be to get to the combat support hospital within that golden hour and it absolutely happened for me I mean they they they picked us up and they flew the rotors off that helicopter to get us to Baghdad and I think I got into the o.r probably right and close to that hour mark with nothing left and not that you know medical team saved my life at what point did you understand fully just how serious the injuries were pretty quickly pretty quickly I knew that I couldn't get my tourniquet on I knew I was losing a lot of blood and and I I tell people I knew I was dying I mean you know I had learned enough about medical trauma were trained in battlefield trauma and I knew enough that I was going into shock and I was going to hypovolemic shock from the loss of blood and what was happening is I can feel my body was trying to save itself I was getting cold in my extremities I was losing feeling and the ability move in the extremities because my body was trying to pull stuff into my core to keep me alive and it just got harder and harder to breathe it got harder and harder to think every breath I felt like I was running you know at full sprint and and I just I was like you know you're you're gonna die here I I said a prayer and a thought popped into my head you know and the thought was I had seen a show Baghdad ER and on that show they talked about that if our wounded warriors showed up in the Combat Support Hospital with a pulse the military trauma professionals had a 90% chance of saving them and that became my focus and my goal so I just you know I just focused on stay awake to stay alive stay awake to stay alive and that was just kind of my mantra right up to the point that you know they wheeled me in and the bright lights in the O R came on clinging to that spot it's like getting to Wednesday morning sunrise only this time they were right right yeah thank God thank although there is a funny story that happened in the operating room a little bit of a Wednesday morning moment so I got into the operating room and I was like okay I made it I can let go you know they could if I died right now they'll bust out a crash cart they can bring me back but you know I've got all the people here they've got the tools they've got the talent and I was letting go and drifting off and I felt this tug on my left side and this nurse yells out he still got a bomb on him and when they took all my gear off I used to carry a grenade on my belt so they had removed all my gear but they had missed this grenade and they don't like explosives in the operating room doctors and nurses and all them are not trained to deal with those things so they are trained that if there are explosives they clear the operating room and they have somebody who's trained to get rid of it so yeah Here I am I'm dying and he's got a bomb on him and it looked like it looked like something I've eluded to in scar tune like Road Runner you know nothing but clouds of dust and I'm in there alone and I'm like you've got to be kidding me I'm like I'm dying and that that I think the last thought I remember was oh my god what a bad day obviously the surgery was successful yes I stabilized you got you home and then a time later you became famous for having a sign on your door Walter Reed that said this attention to all who enter here if you are coming into this room with sorrow or to feel sorry for my wounds go elsewhere the wounds I received I got in a job I loved doing it for people I loved supporting the freedom of a country I deeply love I am incredibly tough and will make a full recovery what is full that is the absolute utmost physically my body has the ability to recover then I will push that about 20 percent further through sheer mental tenacity this room you're about to enter is a room of fun optimism and intense rapid regrowth if you are not prepared for that go elsewhere explain what inspired that and and what happened once people saw that yeah so what expired that was I had some individuals that came into the room that were expressing pity over the wounds that I had received and and just going ahead and writing me and other wounded warriors off that you know what a tragedy we send these young men and women off to war and then they come home broke in and they're never going to be able to you know realize their full potential or something along those lines so when they left my wife came back I couldn't talk you know wired shrinks stomach to the works and I can only write on a notebook and I wrote to her I said never again nobody is going to come into my room and feel sorry for me I refuse to feel sorry for myself and and I penned out that sign and there wasn't a whole lot of thought that went into it it was like just a stream of consciousness in a moment and I told her to get the brightest piece of paper she could find and put it on the door and I said nobody's allowed in my room unless until they read this and if they can't handle that then tell them they're not allowed to come in and and a New York firefighter who I later became friends with took a picture of the sign and wrote a blog about it and it went viral it just went everywhere and it just really it took on a life of its own so much so that President Bush invited me to the White House I was my family and I got to meet him in the fall of 2008 but what's really neat about the sign we donated the sign because I didn't feel like it was mine so many people want to make this big deal oh you're the guy that wrote the sign but the sign it is it is I speak so much about this idea of the overcome mindset and the sign is the epitome of that mindset and the overcome mindset is nothing but a choice and it's a choice to either quit or to keep driving forward and in that moment I chose to keep driving forward and there's so many other wounded warriors that have done the same so that's why I felt like it was in mine it was ours and you know we had it framed with the current campaign medals in the Purple Heart and it hangs at the wounded ward but that's a National Medical Center continuing to motivate and inspire other wounded warriors I get I talked to many who tell me that before a surgery they touch it before they go into their surgery as they go by that's awesome 37 surgeries 15 skin grafts among other medical procedures and obviously your attitude wounded wear which is another thing that you found it has helped a lot of different wounded warriors but I know one of the things you're working on now and and deeply concerned with is the ongoing suicide rate among our veterans and so too many don't have either I don't know how you would describe it either this mindset or they just struggle in other ways so what do you want folks to know about what wounded warriors and others are going through so there's there's two things that are gonna help us win this war make no mistake we are losing this war right now there is you know for all the wars we've had it is the war at home that's the most insidious and you know we talked about this statistic anywhere from 20 to 22 veterans a day who are taking their own lives we lost a little over the current numbers are a little over 7,000 individuals from the global war on terror since 9/11 well we are losing that number every single year every hour and 20 minutes we're losing a bedroom there are two things that are gonna help us win this war one is purpose they are struggling to find their purpose in the civilian world all you have to do is watch the news to see how difficult I mean it's difficult for the average person who's lived here their whole life right now to find purpose we're so divided we're so angry everybody just you know we're so split to the extremes and our guys and gals that have been to war come home and they're like you got to be kidding me you know I fought for this to provide the freedom an opportunity and this is what you're doing with it so so many of them are lost to figure out what is their new purpose you go from a military unit that gives you a mission and a very specific purpose and you come home and you're like oh so much these guys reach out to me they say I'm lost I don't know how to live without a war so that is the number one thing we have to do we have to help them find a purpose I mean companies and individuals that you know I wrote a program called the overcome Academy and the first thing they asked me is are you gonna get them a job as if a job is some sort of magic lon that's going to make them feel better you know a job is merely a means to provide us money which obviously the world runs on but if you find the right job it gives you a purpose and what we need to do is teach them how to lead themselves to find that purpose what's going to accomplish that money funding programs that can help them do it it's not it's not a yellow ribbon on the back of your car it's not buying a grunt style a Ranger up t-shirt although I love those companies are phenomenal I have some myself you know and it's not doing the MER flawed and CrossFit all those things are great but if you are not directly contributing in some way to a good organization that is out there that is directly helping them find a purpose then you're not helping second is research we know for a fact there's a lot of studies that are going on right now that that the impact of explosives on the brain are having long-term damaging effects and there's this new study that's going on that there's a very strong correlation between CTE is what a lot of these football players are being diagnosed with concussive traumatic encephalitis I believe and they used to think we were having veterans that were killing themselves who had the exact same signs and symptoms in the brain as CTE but recently in about the last four or five years they've come to learn that veterans brains and the impact is totally different CTE is off a single impact from a concussion whereas I call it blast related CTE it's all the way through the brain so the entire brain is being affected and rewired so we have individuals like my buddy Ron Condry who was a neo 25 year decorated EOD guy Ron had an amazing purpose after he got out he was living his dream beautiful wife doing what he wanted to do he killed himself a month ago how well I think it's because Ron had blast-related CTE so research is the next one we need veterans to donate their brains I'm working with a concussion legacy foundation same group that's doing work with the NFL I donated my brain we don't have enough veteran brains in the brain bank to be able to study to truly understand because right now there are no biomarkers that we can find that that can help us stop these guys in gas that can help us say hey listen yes you have PTSD yes you have a traumatic brain injury but it's to the level that it's literally affecting and hacking the way you think and to the point that you're doing making these erratic decisions like killing yourself so those are the two biggest thing funding a research and that's the way we're gonna win this war and and I you know if you truly say you care about our veterans I need you to get involved Jason powerful statement and I hope a lot of people hear it because what you just explained is absolutely right thank you for your service to our country and thank you so much for being with us here today Greg my man Jason Redman is a u.s. Navy veteran u.s. Navy SEAL of Iraq and Afghanistan I'm Greg corumbá this is Veterans Chronicles

Channel: American Veterans Center

Views: 501,488

Rating: 4.8953066 out of 5

Keywords: AVC, American Veterans Center, lt. jason redman, lieutenant jason redman, us navy seal veteran, jason redman the trident, afghanistan and iraq veteran, bethesda medical center, wounded warriors coming home, navy seals, seal team

Id: zdwizRp3z_w

Length: 33min 20sec (2000 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2019