Veterans Archives: Preserving the Stories of our Nations Heroes
In a world where storytelling has been our link to the past since the days of cave drawings, there exists a timeless tradition. It's the art of passing down knowledge, and for Military Veterans, it's a crucial piece of their legacy. Join us on the Veterans Archives Podcast, where we dive deep into the heartwarming and awe-inspiring stories of those who served, no matter when or where.
Here, Veterans get the chance to be the authors of their own narratives. Through guided interviews in a relaxed and safe environment, they paint their experiences with their own words and unique voices. The result? A memory card in a presentation box, a precious gift they can share however they please.
But that's not all. These stories find a secure home in our archive, a treasure chest of experiences for future generations to explore. The best part? It's all a gift to the Veteran – our way of saying thank you for their service.
Tune in to the Veterans Archives Podcast, where history, heroism, and heartwarming tales come to life.
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Veterans Archives: Preserving the Stories of our Nations Heroes
A Soldier’s Road: From Istanbul To Afghanistan (Louis Goldstein)
A quarter-mile high school hallway, a foreign exchange year in Istanbul during 9/11, and a “beer man’s kid” from Minnesota don’t usually add up to route clearance in Helmand—yet that’s exactly where Lewis Goldstein’s path led. We sit down with Lewis to unpack a career built on unlikely turns: split-option enlistment, a boot-camp proposal beside a POW museum, missing multiple deployments by timing alone, and then landing in Afghanistan for a year of convoys, MRAPs, and 300-plus IED encounters that rewired how he thinks about leadership, innovation, and luck.
Lewis explains why reserve units can adapt faster than people expect, how civilian skills translate into battlefield ingenuity, and what it took for his company to escort convoys across the desert with no organic losses. He contrasts that high-trust tempo with a later Kuwait deployment marked by toxic leadership and idle time, showing how trust is the true force multiplier. We go deep on doctrine—how it’s a shared language, not a cage—cover his transition to officer via direct commission, and the surprising satisfaction of teaching ROTC while building a wargaming program that turned cadets into designers. Along the way, you’ll hear about a sat-phone call colliding with a medevac notification breakdown, and two Purple Hearts awarded on the most symbolic dates possible, reshaping how he views success, failure, and survival.
At the heart of this conversation is a simple charge: every “number” in war is a person. Volunteers come with different motives—tradition, opportunity, a Tuesday morning in 2001—but each brings a story that matters. If you’re curious about Army Reserve life, route clearance, Helmand Province, ROTC, or the real mechanics of adaptive leadership under pressure, this one delivers both grit and grace. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves military history and leadership stories, and leave a review with the moment that stuck with you most.
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Today is Monday, October 20th, 2025. We're talking with Lewis Goldstein, who serves the United States Army. Currently serving. Correct. All right. Well, thanks for meeting me here this afternoon. Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure. All right, we'll dive right in with the toughest question first. When and where were you born?
SPEAKER_01:So I was born in St. Louis Park, June 28th. My parents got to pick the date because I'm born at midnight. So half of me is June 28th, the other half of me is June 29th. My dad got to VS the question which day, and so they chose the 28th simply because that was the day my mom was in labor. The joke always has been it's shorted her a day in the hospital because they considered that a full day of labor. It's always been instead of getting her a full three days, she got a my dad shorted her a day out of accident. Uh-huh. Now, did you grow up in the same town? No, so at the time my family lived in New Brighton, which is a suburb of Minneapolis. Um so we lived in New Brighton. Uh, we were there until I was in kindergarten. And then uh by that time, we my parents had had my brother. Um, so we moved out to Hutchinson, Minnesota, because my dad and his dad, my grandpa, had owned a beer distributing business. So he my dad got an opportunity to work with his dad uh in a town called Glencoe. And then so we lived in Hutchinson, he worked in Glencoe, but my dad was always the beer guy, so that's why we moved out to Hutchinson. Really, did that make you popular later in life? It it was kind of a curse. It was a I don't want to say a curse. It was a blessing and a curse. I got really cool summer experiences because in the summer when I wasn't doing sports, my summer jobs were helping my dad deliver kegs and beers to the local bar, and I got to meet all the people, and I got to meet everybody, I got to meet the old vets, and I got to talk to the old, you know, townies and stuff like that. Um much later in life, I realized like, oh, that was the day drinkers. I grew up with a wide variety, but I loved the job and it was a lot of fun. Um, it was kind of a catch-22 in the sense of like my dad was always very worried about like, you know, he didn't want to have his kids be the drinkers or be providing like he was worried about his job and some of the perceptions of that. Right. So it was kind of one of those things where it didn't, it was great to be the beer man's kid because everybody knew my dad, knew my grandpa, we all knew everybody, but it was also kind of stunky because I always had to make sure that it wasn't me providing anything on the grounds of I didn't want to get my dad in trouble or get the business in trouble and stuff like that. And I wanted to play sports, and and that time it was you got caught with alcohol, it was an immediate two-week suspension. I was like, I don't want to miss sports, so I I didn't do it. Yeah, yeah. So you just had one brother then? So I had a brother and a sister. So my brother is born, we're almost Irish twins. He's born in September of 86, I'm born in June of 85, so we're pretty close. Yeah. Uh we grew up essentially almost twins for a long time, except for then at one point he sprouted past me. He's like 6'2, and we couldn't be more opposite career path than life type of a thing. Uh-huh. But we're really good friends. And then my sister, who's six years younger than me, was born once we moved out to Hutchinson. Okay. So you're the I'm the oldest. Oldest of three.
SPEAKER_02:Gotcha. So you you're a take charge kind of guy anyway. Yeah, it was kind of how it fell apart for me. Yeah, yeah, I got you. It's funny, my my young my younger brother uh was so different from my sister and I. We always claimed that he was like the mailman's kid.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, we we joke all the time with my sister that, you know, she was something different from us. Um, we always used to tell her that, like, you know, well, my mom and dad had another kid, but that one died. So this was you. We would do stuff like that. We were ruthless. Well, yeah, you have to be. It was two brothers. I mean, we had a we didn't and we were so close, like we were basically each other's best friend for a long time. Uh-huh. And what so what was it like growing up like that then? It was cool. Um, I mean, his stuff was green, my stuff was blue. That was kind of how we kept ourselves apart for a long time. Um, but we played sports together for a long time. Uh, there was about a point kind of like towards middle school where we kind of drifted off into different things that we interest. Um, my parents were always cool with like, you know, supporting us in the things that we wanted to do. Like, what is it you want to do type stuff. Um and then we went and would go do those things. So like I did a lot of sports. My brother did a lot of, he did sports, but then he kind of drifted off into some other stuff. Um, he did a lot of like robotics, non-robotics, that's uh my son. Uh he did he did like a bunch of like different like project stuff, project-based things, and got into some different world. Uh he did a lot of academic stuff. So like he went to college early and stuff like this, and I barely passed high school. So we went down different paths.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, I can I I can see. So um you talk a little bit about sports. So uh what what were what were the sports that you played in school?
SPEAKER_01:Uh so I always did sports as long as I can remember. Um, from you know, pictures of T-ball as soon as you could walk. Uh we're from Minnesota, so as soon as you can walk, you can skate. So I've always done hockey, I've always done football, I've always done baseball. So those are my three main sports. But I dabbled in everything. I mean, I remember being in wrestling, tried wrestling for a while, I've done all the park and rec tennis courses. You know, you name the sport, if it was offered, we went and did it kind of a thing. Yeah. Um as it as I got older, I I really ended up focusing in on um football. My town was kind of that's what we were known for, was our football team, and then hockey and then baseball. So it went from football in the fall, hockey in the winter, baseball in the spring and the summer, and then rinse and repeat and keep going. So there was no time to not be able to do that. No, there was no break. You were always doing one of the three, or something in between. So um, but that was the big ones. And then in high school, I I lettered in all three of them. Okay. So that was kind of fun.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So you barely but you barely made it through high school, but you made it through high school.
SPEAKER_01:Made it through. So the joke, so my wife actually and I are married from high school, so we're high school sweetheart. So she's No way. Oh, yeah. That's awesome. So that's another story. But they um, so my thing was in high school, so I kind of had a weird high school experience in the sense of I went to high school my freshman year. My sophomore year, I took a study abroad program, and I went and lived in Istanbul, Turkey for an entire school year, and that was September of 20 of 2001. So my 9-11 was spent in Istanbul, Turkey, learning that experience from that perspective. So I missed my entire sophomore year with all my friends, and I'd been in K through 12 with everybody, and then came up, came back, did my junior senior year at high school. And when I say I graduate, when I barely quote barely survived, is there was 232 or so in my class, and I'm very much tenth from the bottom in terms of GPA overall. And my report cut it either you're an A because I liked you as an instructor, or I liked your class, or it's a D or straight F. Um, the joke, my wife always talks about it, and I joke because my friends know what is. I have the distinction of failing fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade art and never taking another art class again. And I've never passed an art class in ever.
SPEAKER_02:So suffice to say, you're not gonna take art classes when you do it.
SPEAKER_01:Art and me did not get along at all.
SPEAKER_02:I gotta say this the first, I've never heard of anyone failing art class.
SPEAKER_01:You fail art by simply not doing it. That was I was just a stubborn SOP, is what I was.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I got you. I got you. So I want to back up a little bit though. So uh Istanbul, Turkey. Yes. Uh on 911. Yes. And I and I have to think there were probably some people there that were kind of celebrating that.
SPEAKER_01:Not so much where I was at. So I was in the metropolitan that is Istanbul. So Istanbul is right on the Bosphorus. I was on the European side, um, and I had a lot of friends on the Asian side as the year progressed. But when I had just gotten there, I had just met my family. I didn't know Turkish. Um, the whole reason I ended up in Turkey was because my grades weren't good enough to go to Germany. So they said you could go to these programs, and my options were Russia, Turkey, uh, Thailand, or anywhere in South America, and I chose Turkey because I was interested in the Ottoman Empire at that point in time. So I was very interested in that history. That's how I ended up in Turkey because that's what I chose. But what I experienced was at that time, um, this was before Erdogan, Erdogan hadn't won his first election yet. But the uh the people that I met were very like this is not represent the Muslim religion, this is not us, this is these are radicals that we even we detest and denounce, we want nothing to do with these people. We love America. Uh make sure Mr. Bush doesn't nuke us with something that people would tell me all the time. Um they wanted it known to me once I disvolged that I was American that they didn't stand for that, that they didn't agree with it, that that was a perversion of their religion in a sense. So I never, in the year I was there, I never really experienced any disdain towards me as an American or disdain at that time. But what was interesting at that time was from September to about November, a little bit into December, it was still front page news in Turkey. By about that after Thanksgiving for my calendar, which they don't have Thanksgiving, it's just my calendar internally, was that 9-11 was just a thing that had happened. Like it was it was back page news, it wasn't front page anymore, it it wasn't the topic of conversation. So actually, when I came back later that year in twenty two in June, I got hit with it like it is was still had happened yesterday, because that's how our country was dealing with it. So I had a weird, you know, cultural experience coming back to the United States and being like, oh, 9-11 actually is still a thing. Like it was a obviously I got used to it, but it was a very weird connection type of a thing because I didn't really talk about it much when I lived in Turkey because it wasn't the topic we talked about.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But it was cool, it was a great year. I had a lot of fun that year. Learned a lot of things. It's really interesting, especially Turkey. You don't hear a lot of people talk about Turkey. And that was one of the reasons I was uh at that time I had an interest in learning Turkish for the sense of I thought I was gonna pursue the learning that as a language. I was fluent, I've lost it now, I haven't spoken it in years.
SPEAKER_03:Right.
SPEAKER_01:But I also knew it was an you know it's a country that neighbors Iraq, and I knew that Iraq was gonna be a country that we had an interest in. We said watched the first Desert Storm and Shield the first time, and we knew that we still had a political interest there, so learning Turkish was something I thought I could bring to the army, but I ultimately didn't do that. Right. Um, but it was a thought process at the time.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So I I wanted to ask you, you mentioned like just briefly that you had like an interest in the Ottoman Empire. Uh like have you had an interest like in military history since a young age or Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:No, it's kind of been uh I had a lot of friends in high school, you know, in my town where I grew up. We talked military stuff, like military history was kind of like something we talked about randomly all the time. Um, I've always been fascinated by the history of different empires and how history is just history in general has always been an interest to me. Um if I think back to that particular time, I was I'd been going from the Romans to the Byzantines to you know the the Ottomans and then the Ottoman crash after the first world war and some of that history stuff was of interest to me.
SPEAKER_03:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Um city of Istanbul, Constantinople, and I got to see a lot of stuff. Like I went to Tokappa Palace, I went to see Hagia Sophia and got to see it. Uh went to the Grand Bazaar, I'd donned the Galatessarai Tower, I'd seen the Bosphorus Strait, I've seen the Galatesserai trait, I've seen, you know, got to walk the same place that the Crusaders walked. I mean, I got to see all that history, so that was really cool. Yeah. And I got to see that when I was 16 and got to live there for a year. So that was interesting.
SPEAKER_02:Now, is it true that was a the that was a larger empire than the Roman Empire at one time?
SPEAKER_01:So by the time the the Byzantines were at their height, they were, if not as large, because they claimed the western half for a while. Yeah. Um, but they were in their own sense. And then the Ottomans, when they became the Ottomans, they were actually a bigger empire in the sense of the Roman Empire. So they were larger in terms of sheer ground that they covered or claimed to cover.
SPEAKER_02:Well, it's interesting you bring up Constantinople too, because my wife is Greek. Okay.
SPEAKER_01:And uh you want to start a conversation in Turkey, just bring up now. It's weird though, because they'll talk it, they get passionate about it, but when you talk to the people, I never got the sense of like they they cared. Like they cared, but they they didn't like they were like, whatever, they're Greek, who cares? But the governments, man, you talk to the governments, and there's a history that cannot be disentwined because that history is yesterday's history, even if it's two, three hundred years ago. That is yesterday's history for those two. Yes, and for the Greek people as well. Oh, but understandably when you look at some of the stuff that's going on, but even for the Turkish people, when you look at, you know, their war of independence with Auditurk and stuff like that, and how the Greeks occupied, and then even the the peace treaty after the you know, all the islands that are right there in the gene. Like the but you've got history that goes back in that area how many different empires, how many different governments or societies have quote claimed it or left their mark in some way, shape, or form. So it's a very interesting historical place.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Fascinating. Oh, yeah. Actually, when you look at the how how far back the history goes. Yeah. When you start going, you can't throw a stone and not hit something where somebody, you know, 2,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago could have walked on, or you know, if you go out on the glipley or you go to buy Troy was. I mean, I got to go down to Izmir and see some of that stuff, and that was you know, and then you go to the Black Sea, and then you want to talk about the Rush, the Crimean War and the Russians and all that stuff. You can you can go down that rabbit hole for for days with them.
SPEAKER_02:Oh yeah, it's all right there.
SPEAKER_01:And it's all living history to them. Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_02:So it it's kind of crazy. So in high school, then, were you the potential kid? Like, you know, I say that in the nicest way possible. Like your guidance counselor would be like, oh, Lewis has great potential.
SPEAKER_01:He could do whatever he wants, he just doesn't do what he doesn't doesn't do what he's supposed to. Yeah, no, that was that was a common theme. Yeah. Um, I was like I had said, you know, now I would look back and be like, oh, that's probably ADHD, probably some of that. Because I I really just looked at it as like, if I liked your topic, I was in. So that would be like wood shop class, you know, any of the gym classes. You know, different teachers would incite me about different ways that they taught or how I connected with their teaching method. So it could be English one semester, but then the next semester I hated the English teacher, so I didn't care about English. But the semester before, I cared. Like it was kind of a weird dynamic, so my grades were kind of all over the place. But yeah, guidance counselor would always that would be a common theme.
SPEAKER_00:They'd be like, Yeah, he could do it if he just applied himself.
SPEAKER_01:If he would just do it. But I especially confused my guidance counselors because you know, I did the foreign exchange student thing, I did that as a sophomore, like I'd done all these weird things, you know, and the small town that I lived in, I mean Hutchinson, Minnesota at the time was just barely over 10,000. Now it's like 15,000.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But you didn't do that a lot, you didn't do a lot of that stuff. And then I was the one who did, and then I was still there for two years, but I came back in June of 02 and I joined the army in November of 02. So I was only home for a couple of months before I joined the Army. Yeah, so let's talk about that.
SPEAKER_02:So you uh did you join like on a split option?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so I was a little split option. So my whole thing was I'd always known I was gonna join the army. Like that was kind of something I kind of had decided. I just didn't know when. Yeah, I just didn't know when or how, but I had always kind of I can't recall a specific time or age when I like definitively decided like I'm joining the army, other than when I came back. So I've well, I should when rephrase that. 9-11 solidified that I was gonna join the army in some way, shape, or form. Like that was done. Like I knew that was gonna happen. I just had to get back and figure out how to do it, and I didn't know what to do. But you didn't come from a military family. So my the first, I was the first in a generation. My grandma was a whack, my grandpa had been in the World War II generation, my dad's dad had done the National Guard thing, um, hadn't deployed, but had been in the National Guard. He was all he didn't really talk a lot about his military service, but his was more like Nebraska National Guard in the 60s, 70s, where it was more like the Good Old Boys Club thing. Like, yeah, he did it. No one's gonna take away that service, but it was more of like, I'm in the National Guard because I I'm in the National Guard and I don't have to do the other side of the army type of a thing. So that was more of how I that's always been explained to me. And he never really before he passed, my grandpa never really spoke to me. Even after I joined, he was alive for a few more years after that, but he never really spoke to me about his service. But I just it was always just you know 50s, 60s, 70s National Guard life, which was different than the guard now. And then my grandma was a whack, my grandpa who passed away when my mom was 11, I never met. Um, he'd been in the specific theater, PSC, you know, conscript, in and out type of a thing. So there was, besides me, there was no one else in my family who had a military connection of any kind. The closest my dad came, he had a conversation with the Marine Recruiter in the early 80s. When the Marine, he tells the story is the Marine Recruiter asked it, What do you want for the Marines? He goes, an education. And the guy said he closed up his book, paid for his lunch, and just walked out the door. I was like, all right. So that's why so when I joined, it was one of those things. I knew I was gonna do it, just didn't know when. Um, and because I didn't really have a track on what I went, like college wasn't what I was thinking about. I wasn't gonna do any of that. I was like, I'm just gonna do the army. Army's easy. I can do this, I can do that. So when I came back, I showed up to school one day. In the very first like two weeks, there used to be the old block TVs that would be up in the hallway. And our school had this, we were distinct because we had this quarter mile-long hallway, which was just ridiculous. So I was walking down to one of my classes, looked up the monitor, and said, uh Army testing ASVAV today, this time, if you do, you will miss. We were on a block system, so there were four blocks. So I got to miss three of my four blocks of instruction. Really broke your heart, huh? And I was just like, wait, so what do I gotta do? Oh, you gotta take this test, you have to take this test to get in the army. And I get to miss three classes today. Yes. Sweet. Where do I go? What room is it in? I walked in, had no clue, then didn't even know what the ASVAV was. Walked in, had a little sheet that said, Are you interested in the military? I was a recruiter's dream. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. To everything that they would want to know. Took the test, winged it, no clue what was on that test, just absolutely just like, sure, B, C, I don't know, whatever the answer might be, could have cared less, scored well enough, and then basically they came over to me and I chuckle now because my date of enlistment or my date of joining is November 4th, and the only reason I'm in November 4th is because I was his quota for the month. I could have easily joined in October, but he held me over to MEPS until I was the first day available in November because that was the easiest. If you have ever been a recruit, he played that game. Oh, he played that game splendidly. Yes. Like looking back, I'm like, well played. Well played, my son. Well played. But yeah, so that's my so that I was that was that quick. I was like, nope, yep, good. I was 17. I had no background, I had nothing in a background for the guy to like, I had no criminal record. So I was he always joked with me, he goes, You're my you're the easiest thing I'll ever fucking recruit. Right. Went to my parents said, sign this. My dad's like, sure. I mean, they'd already just sent me away to Turkey for a year. It wasn't gonna be a hard sell to sell at 60. That's hey, at 70, can I join the RV? It wasn't really a hard sell. Yeah. They signed the paperwork and then I did split up. So I started off drilling that January and did the drills and then went to basic, came back for senior year, and went to AIT, and then I was in. So where'd you go to basic? Uh Fort Levinwood, uh, Fort Leonard Wood because I was a combined engineer I joined as a common engineer. Yep. And I was a knucklehead. I turned down what I've calculated to be somewhere in the range of like$80,000 to like$60,000 to$80,000. I was offered a$20,000 signing bonus and like a thousand dollar kicker to my GI Bill to be a cook. Um I was offered a similar thing to be a truck driver, and then I was offered some variations of that. So if you had up everything I was offered, I turned all of that down and said, I don't want any of those jobs. I don't want to be a cook, I don't want to be a truck driver, I don't want any of this. I said, What else do you got? And I'll never forget it. The guy at MEPS, annoyed at me because I wasn't giving him what he wanted, picks up an old school three-ring binder, one of those, like it is the thick, heavy, like big ones. And he literally goes, Boom, throws it down in front of me and says, and he points, he goes, he flips it open, he goes, You tell me, and I don't, it was just a list of different jobs. And he had flipped it open to combat engineer, and I read the combat engineer, demolitions and explosive experts, clearing of breaching of obstacles, working in minefields and the demolition of mines. I want that job. And he looked at me and goes, There's no bonus, there's no kicker, and I go, that job. And he goes, There's no bonus, there's no kicker. And I go, that job. And he's like, You're an idiot. Sign here. Right. Straight up with the conversation of how I became a combat engineer.
SPEAKER_02:But Fort Leonardwood, I I spent about five months there. Uh decent, but uh but very difficult to be there.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. I don't I've grown, Fort Leonardwood has grown on me because it's the home of the engineer. So I've I've been there in my military career now. I have spent in probably in totality three years of my life there. Yeah. In one way, shape, or form, between classes or something. Um it's grown on me. It is the home of the engineer, it's got history for us. Um, but it wasn't bad. I knew.
SPEAKER_02:They still have that little uh German restaurant outside. Yes, they do.
SPEAKER_01:Oh my god. I still go there whenever I learn. So good. It's like a rite of passage. You have to go there. Like it's something you have to do.
SPEAKER_02:There's that place, and then there's the place on the highway in the mountains. It's a barbecue place. Yes. Oh, I can't remember the name of it. You know what I'm talking about, though.
SPEAKER_01:This is just it's it looks like you wouldn't want to eat there. Yeah, but it's the best barbecue you're ever gonna get. Oh, yeah. Yep. And we're not really talking about I can like picture it, but I can't remember the name of it. Yeah, loved it down there. Just same with the German place. I can picture exactly how to get there, but I can't remember the name of it right now.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, my son actually came down to visit me when I was there, and we went to the German place.
SPEAKER_01:It's good.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, you can put on some pounds.
SPEAKER_01:You can easily do it there. That's what's so cool about Leonardwood, is because Leonardwood's got the home of the MPs, the engineers, the chem, and then transportation is also there. And you get all these people who come back and they bring all these places they've seen in the military and you bring it back. And then you get their families that they, you know, you marry a Korean woman or something like that, or other places you've been, and they bring all that culture back to Leonardwood. It's kind of weird because it's in the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere Missouri, in the middle of the Ozark Mountains, and in a place where like it's the quid essential, like this is some really crappy terrain. Army base. It's the quid essential Ozark Mountain. Nothing should be here, no reason for anyone to be here. And the army picked it there, and yet it's this weird melting pot of all these cultures from all these places that the army's experiences spider off into. It's kind of weird place.
SPEAKER_02:It's yeah, but it's a because it is it is it's a small southern town, is what it is.
SPEAKER_01:It really is, but it doesn't feel that way. It is not a southern town. Once you get in, it has this there's portions of it that are old school southern, but so many people live off that base. Like that, you know, St. James, St. Roberts, they don't exist without Fort Leonard Wood. They just don't. They in Waynesville, they don't, those three towns, they do not exist without Leonard Wood being there.
SPEAKER_02:So you uh you go to basic and Leonard Wood. Uh talk me talk me through like your what was your first impression when you got there? Now I know that a lot of guys go through like uh reception for a few days, which is nothing like boot camp. No. Yeah, so talk talk to me about that.
SPEAKER_01:So going to basic so obviously having played three sports, I felt like I was physically fit to so once I got there, basically I mean, I found it kind of feels dumb to say. I always call basic a million dollar experience I would never pay a nickel to do again. Yeah. But it was it was great. I didn't really mind basic. Like I know I don't have like a horror story. I've got fun stories from basic. I mean, but even in the moment, like I never really found basic to be like over the top. It was everything I expected it to be. People yelling at you for what they were doing, follow basic instructions, heavy encouragement to do everything you're already doing fast, faster. And you know, as long as you listened to what was being told to you to do, it became pretty baseline. And then when you got you messed up or stepped out of line, you were corrected and brought back into line. And when you were in line, you were rewarded for being in line. It was like basic training to me at the time was pretty a straightforward thing. Um was a weird time to be at Basic as you in the history of you know, I didn't know it then, but looking back now, I mean, this is early 2000s. So I was in what was called Hotel Company, which doesn't exist anymore at Basic. And it was a we were the one of the last, we were the last company of hotel to go through because we were the end of the 9-11 surge. So everybody after 9-11 had joined. We were the last of that. So they had you now when you go to Basic Atlanta, what it's like it's alpha through Echo, is all they have. We had all the way to Hotel, and there had been in um uh India before us, and they had already disbanded India, but we were the last of the hotel, so they've contracted all the way back up to just Echo now. Yeah. Um But at the time, like this is 2000 and summer of 2003, is when I went to basic. So this is we're talking, you know, this is the end of the era where they could, the drill starts just got done where they couldn't put hands on you. So that is a couple years in now. Uh-huh. They are just transitioning into the they can't they can swear at you, but they can't like swear swear at you. Like they can't degrade you anymore. They can't call your mom names. Right. They can't do that, but they can still kind of swear at you. But this is the still in the era of the the true smoke session. Like the true on. I remember going to basic and having what we call, you know, make it rain. Like they would close up our bay windows and then they would smoke us until like it condensation from the ceiling came back down. I had a drill start and his favorite thing when he was on CQ. Again, things I learned later and could put the piece together. He would put CQ, he'd play F CQ, he'd pull up a chair, and he would put Metallica on. It was the only music we'd heard in forever. We didn't care, it was music. Right, right. And he would just smoke us to you know the Metallica Black CD, and we would just for the duration of that CD, we'd just do whatever workout he wanted us to do while he listened to music and we had to do whatever he was telling us to do until it was muscle failure. And I was like, all right, Roger. So does Metallica still make you sweat? Oh, I mean I still enjoy it, it's still a lot of fun, especially my deployment. We play Metallica all the time. Yeah. So it wasn't that bad. Again, I think I was fine because I was in shape from sports, so some I wasn't one of the like I wasn't the smoke sessions, weren't they were rough. Like, don't get me wrong. Like I got my ass handed to me plenty of smoke sessions. I got my ass handed to me, and I would walk away from like, okay, that sucked. But I wasn't in a position where I was also learning how to be physical. So it wasn't anything I wasn't unaccustomed to from being in sports where, you know, between football running gassers and hockey running skating gassers and then baseball running the bases. I mean, it wasn't anything I hadn't you didn't have that obstacle over. I didn't, yeah, it wasn't anything I hadn't done through my coaches I had in different sports and you know, different ways of doing things. So it wasn't anything overly new. What was new was learning how to shoot the way the army wants you, um, you know, learning to work as a team in a different type of way than what a sports team does and stuff like that. Um military movements and understanding, you know, how to space yourself out and how to be responsible for others versus like, yeah, they kind of teach out in sports, but not the same way the army does. So that was kind of a lot of where that came from.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:I think that was the biggest thing. Then leaving and then coming back the next summer was probably the hardest thing because I I had to leave a group we'd started with and then come back in and then join a group that had already been together for their nine weeks of basic training, and now we were coming in as the the new guys and had to like mess with them to do AIT. And AIT for combat engineers at the time was uh five weeks, four weeks of training, one week of uh graduation. Uh-huh. And that was we were still learning at that point in time like how to defuse mines and how to find mines and go through minefields. That was a lot of what we were learning at the time.
SPEAKER_02:So talk to me a little bit about what it's like to take the split option because you basically you come back and you're in high school. Yeah, it was weird.
SPEAKER_01:That was weird. So it was interesting in the sense that I'd already been gone. Because when I'd left, so in my town, I'd gone through K through 12 was the same grade. Like when I graduated high school, I probably knew at least one detail about every person in our school simply because we'd been together that long.
SPEAKER_03:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Um but when I had left, it was weird. So when I left to go to Turkey and I missed a sophomore year, I missed a lot of things. Like I missed a lot of like, you know, the the stories that they told about it their summers and their school year. Like I didn't have that connection to them, so I was kind of out. Um but I was also we a weird one, as much as I was a quote, a jock, I could also I had friends in the band, I had friends in choir. Like I could kind of go around and I never really belonged to any one group kind of thing.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Um but being back was interesting because yeah, I was you know, I folded my socks weird, and my friends made weird because I was just ingrained in me in that point in time. Like I um like one of the I can remember going to like the national anthem at the football games and I would stand at attention now. And my friends were like, What are you doing? I'm like, uh it's I'm supposed to. This is what you do. No, yeah, granted, if I go back in hindsight, maybe I wouldn't have, but I still would have because at that point in time I didn't know no better. Right. Um, so it was a little different. Um I don't know if I I noticed a distinct difference. Yeah, I had friends who asked me questions and were curious, but not to a great extent. Like they had known I'd done it, but they didn't really know what it meant, yeah, type of a thing. So I would tell them what it was, I'd tell them what happened, I'd tell them how it had gone, and that would be kind of the end of it. And I don't really remember any major differences, mostly because, from my perspective, ever how you having already been gone for my sophomore year, joining the The army, being gone my junior to senior year summer wasn't any different than I'd already done, as far as my friends knew, kind of a thing. Yeah. So I still have to do all the sports, so it didn't really make that big of a difference.
SPEAKER_02:And you just so basic training was how many weeks then for you?
SPEAKER_01:So that was nine weeks. So I was there for a total of ten. Reception, nine weeks, and then a couple extra days to like get out of there. Um, but I was there for about a total of ten weeks. So you pretty much missed that summer, though. Yeah, so we school ended in like early June. I left end middle of June. Like I left like two weeks later, like I got a two-week summer.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And then I left. I came back in August, and I was basically home one week before school started. And then I went right into school. Okay. So that was my summer. Yeah. Woohoo. And then I when I left, when I graduated, I didn't go back until August to keep in time with when I would have been graduating otherwise. Okay. So I had a little, I had a couple months' break there. Yeah. So you got kind of a senior summer though. Yeah, I got a kind of a senior summer because I didn't apply for jobs, I didn't apply for college, because I knew I was gonna go back to AIT, so I wasn't in the mood to try. So I never applied to a college out of high school, or I never applied to a I mean I had jobs, so I just kept doing what I was doing. Between what I was doing at that time, I was working for Target. Um I kept that job, and I was doing odds and end jobs for my my dad in the beer business. So between those two things, and then I coached the hockey team for a year with my dad, I had things keep me busy.
SPEAKER_02:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:So then you uh hop on a plane, you fly back down to Missouri? Fly back down to Missouri, complete AAT, four weeks of training, five. I was there for six weeks, one week of reception, four weeks of training, one week of graduation, and that was the end of that.
SPEAKER_02:Well, you seem like the kind of guy that would do this, but I have to ask, like you got there, and it's got to be tough, right? Because you like you were saying, these these uh people had already bonded through their experience in basic training, but at some point, did you go like accepted into the group?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, I think we did. There was a there was a period because I what it happened for us is when we got there, the company that we joined had waited for two weeks for us. So their entire basic had been extended for two weeks while they waited for all of us from that were the split-ops guys. Oh, that makes you a lot of oh man. We were already we were already popular because they had just completed basic, but then for two weeks, they just sat around and marked time. Oh, and whatever the drill sergeants could get them to do to stay busy. I can't imagine how many stupid details they did or whatnot. Paint and rock. Just waiting for us to get there because they couldn't move on with their training until we were in. Right. So there was a period when we got to the first basic training where there was some initial grumbles of whatever, but it honestly disappeared pretty quickly because once we all got going, it meshed pretty quickly. Um, I would say even though it was four weeks within a week, we were pretty much we were fine. Yeah. I think after that we kind of figured it out, like we made it work. Uh especially because I was a 12 Bravo, so like uh basic training at the time was 12 Bravo broke off this way and the 12 Charlies broke off that way. So there was only, you know, there was a half of us went this way and half of us went that way. So we only really saw half of the company the whole time we were there. So the Bravos messed with the Bravos and the Charlies messed with the Charlies and we did our things and we came back in the evening and then we would sleep and then we'd go off and do it again. Gotcha.
SPEAKER_02:So at the end of that, then did you come home again or did you just go to your first duty station?
SPEAKER_01:No, so I would I joined the reserves. Okay. So I so to do split ops, I had to join the reserve of the guard. So I joined the reserve. And the reason my reasoning at the time is comical now, but it made sense to me then. Was I was gonna do the reserves, get quote, two years of high speed training. Uh-huh. Boy, did I not understand that process at the time. And then I would go active duty. That was gonna be my plan. Right, I was gonna come in, get AI, I was gonna be in the army for two years, I'd come out of AIT, I'd go straight to active duty, um, and that was gonna be my life. That was gonna be what I was gonna go and do. Um, that is not what happened, however. So during, I did the complete boot thing, and when so I got back, I started dating my now wife when I was a junior, she was a sophomore. So at the end of AIT, when I'd already graduated high school and she was still in her senior year, I did the whole propose to her after AIT, oh textbook. Textbook. Textbook boot. Oh, it's even worse than that. If I Yeah, look, let's get the whole story on this. Let's just go down the whole thing. But let's caveat it with you don't regret it. No, I don't regret it. We're still together, we got three kids, we're doing everything together. She's survived, two deployments. I picked the winner, like I did all the right things in picking who I picked, but um, she stood by me during my lows and my highs. She's been there for me, but um could not have done it any more boot. And I have paid that price. It is constantly brought up. Like I've had to I've had to redo it, I've had to my my kids make fun of me for it. Oh, it's a constant running joke. So basically, from the perspective of the boot, I did it the per like it might be the quintessential boot story, to be perfectly honest.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So did the whole, I wrote a letter to a parent, said, Hey, I'm gonna marry your daughter, blah, blah, blah. Wrote a letter to my parents, says, I don't give a fuck what you think I'm doing, this is what I'm doing. So it was that was that divide. So you're making friends. I made friends right off the bat. Mom and dad, suck it up. This is what I'm doing. Hey, future in-laws, I love your daughter. Can I marry her? Get their permission, we're good, cool. I was 18. So 18, no, what money do I have? So it's the Walmart ring. My mom gets off the old internet print off, sent me that in the mail, picked this one. I circled the one I want. She so she bought it from the Walmart for me. Uh she comes, so what the family calls, my my girlfriend now wife comes down with my family. So it's my mom, my dad, my grandma, my brother, and my sister, and our foreign exchange student from Thailand who's been in my house for like all of five days. They drive down in an old school minivan from Minnesota down to Leonardwood. We get there. So I'm in uniform, all these other things, right? At the end of the ceremony, blah, blah, blah. We break off. And you know Leonardwood. Yeah. We start walking around. Where do we go? The German POW Museum. Because that's I don't know. More romantic. More romantic spot. So we start walking ahead of the group, and we get to a point, and I had had to this day, the way I'll tell the story and the way I always tell it is I had a speech. I had a whole, you know, something speech. I had something. I don't remember what that is because of what happened. So I get to the point now. My wife, she is the even though I'm in the army, we you know, we don't like to break the rules, she's more of a rule follower than I, ever will be and ever has been. So I was in uniform, old greens, and I was stepping off just off the sidewalk on the grass, and I was about to go to kneel. As I'm going to kneel and I'm hitting my putting my hand in my pocket to pull out the ring, I realized I forgot to test one thing. I can't kneel in this uniform. I literally feel like this going to rip. And so I've now I've got the oh crap, I'm gonna rip my pants. And I've got the oh shit, I have the ring in my hand moment. And I've got her slapping me because I'm now standing in the grass, and she's all worried that I'm gonna get in trouble because I'm in the grass because they've been given the welcome speech from all the freaking Sergeant Major saying, Stay off my damn grass. Right. So all of this can buy. So, what is my confident just finished up AIT? I can fucking find I. You know, mines, diffuse minds. I learned how to use a minesweeper, I can do all these things. All that confidence goes poof. So, what do I muster up? I take the ring, I look at her in the face, and I go, Do you want it? It's all I can muster. That was it, that was all I can muster with a do you want it? Her face goes to, and we had talked about it, the idea of it, so it wasn't like a huge surprise, but she's in like a hoodie and like all this, like something else, and she does the whole like gets this panty face, turns and starts walking away from me. So I grab her by her her, I call it a hoodie, she calls it something else, and I grab her and I turn her around and I go, now this is where it goes full boot. And I have now I have that moment to like collect myself, figure it out, like gain some composure, do something. Nah, nah. Well, do you? It's all I got out. She said, Yes. My grandma thought I found it on the ground and thought it was a cool rig. I had to explain to her what it was. Oh no. And that was how I got engaged.
SPEAKER_02:Wow.
SPEAKER_01:Perfect boot story. I think perfect boot story. I think you deserve to be picked on mercilessly for the rest of your life over that one. 100%. She did get my dad back, which was kind of funny. My dad's deathly furrated heights. On the drive home, we stopped at the arch in St. Louis, and it was one of those like semi-windy days. If you've ever been up in the arch where you can feel just breeze. But if you've been up there, they've got windows that are about like maybe this big, this long, and like a ledge. So my dad was leaning over looking out the window, and my now fiance pushes my like gives up a little shelf. He was here and he was gone. And it was like a cartoon, like where you see the like little dust outline of where he had been. He'd moved that fast. Like he was there and he was gone. And everybody was like, Did he just die of a heart attack? Like, what just that was all the same, that was all the same day. That was the whole thing.
SPEAKER_02:What an amazing day.
SPEAKER_01:That was a weird day. And of course, Pear, who is this foreign chain student who's been with my family for all of five days coming from Thailand, has this is her experience of like, welcome to America.
SPEAKER_02:Right, right. Now she's gonna go home and that's gonna be her.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that was her first impression of everything. It's like, oh boy. So but no, yeah. So that's where I changed though, because after I got engaged, my wife gave me the well, my wife gave me the whole, like, she wanted to go to college. Like her thing was she was going to college. Like I had never thought of college. College wasn't even on the fuck the radar, I wasn't gonna do it. And she basically said, I'm I'll marry you, but you have to go to college. Or like, okay, fine. What's four years? I'll do four years and then I'll go active duty.
SPEAKER_03:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Um, so we ended up going to St. Close State. So we went to St. Close State. So you went to high school together and then you went to college together.
SPEAKER_02:Yes. And you're still together. Yes. That just that blows my mind.
SPEAKER_01:So we went to college together. So we went to St. Close State together.
SPEAKER_02:Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_01:Um, that's where we had our first daughter, and then and we both did the fraternity and the sorority thing. So we did those things, and then we did all sorts of fun stuff there. Um, I ended up like figuring out that I actually liked school at that point. Like once I could start picking my courses, I really started figuring out that I actually liked education, which is weird. Um, but I figured that out. Um during this whole time, like when I after I got back, I had missed my unit's first deployment by f uh three months. So I gra I graduated AIT in September, and they had went to MoB in they went to Moeb in like July. But because of when I came off of the out of school, they wouldn't catch me up to the MOB. Yeah. So I missed the first deployment. So I was like, all right, fine. So I missed that. And then of course, this is still, you know, Afghanistan, Iraq are hot and heavy. This is still pretty high up. This is everyone's leaving out the door, like you're you're going from an era where, oh, you have a deployment patch to where's your deployment patch? Like we're going, we're making that transition. Yeah. So now it's about getting that deployment because you got to get that experience. So I'm in college, I survived college, never had to deploy, which what was a frustrating mess at the time, but also annoying because I wasn't getting the experience that my exactly. Um I actually ended up missing three deployments. Uh, one I missed because it just got off-ramped. Um, another deployment, uh I was a specialist and they were looking for a specialist, and it just turned out that they took the guy that they knew versus me, the the nobody, which, salty as I was, made sense, whatever. And then another one, I got on, I was a specialist, I got promoted to sergeant, and they said, nope, we don't need a sergeant, we need a specialist. So I got so I missed three of so I've missed four deployments, so I made it to E6 before to staff sergeant before I ever got deployed the first time in 2010, and it just so aligned that I graduated college, got my bachelor's degree, and then I got my first deployment, but I was already a staff sergeant and I'd been in for eight years by the time I got my first deployment. Wow. Just because of how it all my particular course worked out.
SPEAKER_02:And at this time, too, I I I can't make too fine a point on this. At this time, if you don't have a combat. You're a nobody. Well, not only that, but people think that you've been avoiding.
SPEAKER_01:You're shucking something, and I missed three. Yeah. Four if you count the one that I when my unit was already gone and they wouldn't let me catch up. Two, simply because one, they picked somebody that they knew versus me, fine. Promoted, got the sergeant, didn't need a sergeant, wanted an E4, missed that. And then one just simply I volunteered for it and it just never materialized. Right. So I missed four total deployments before I got my first actual deployment. Yeah. But that was one of those eras where, like, yeah, you had to start. If you were going up the ranks, like, and I made staff sergeant, and I didn't have a deployment patch. Like, there were questions to be that I had a logical story. I didn't I could like, hey guys, I've been here. Right. This is what I've been doing. But the more you explain it, the worse it looks. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. It was it was an oddball thing. And, you know, I'd already had guys that were, you know, they were in college, but they'd already deployed once. And then, you know, so there was things like that that were happening. Um, but I was just doing the reserve thing. So I would, you know, I'd jump on whatever school they'd send me to. I would do things, I would volunteer when it came up, but my unit just never got called. And they'd have been called up in 04 to 5, so their rotation didn't come up for a while.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And then that was just kind of how it fell out for me at the beginning, right off the bat.
SPEAKER_02:So 2010. So you've you graduated, what'd you get your degree in?
SPEAKER_01:So I graduated in December of 09. Okay. And then I at that point we knew we were deploying. So I just stayed, I went on like basically ADOS orders with my unit. Right. And then we deployed in um August of 10, is when we when we hit we when we deployed, did a month of ramp up, and then we hit ground in October. Actually, what's the day? The day is the 20th. As of yesterday, my daughter, who is now turned 15, was born 48 hours after I got the country in Afghanistan, said hello to my wife while she's in the room, to our second daughter, and then went out and was gone for 72 hours on my very first mission right off the bat. That was that was the start of my deployment. Wow, that's just that's craziness. So that was how we started it, and then it was a year of route clearance. Doing that that deployment was a year of route clearance. Now, where were you at in Afghanistan? Hellman Province, Afghanistan. Uh so if uh Hellman Province at the time was the quote king of opio um opium. Yeah. Um so we were Camp Leatherneck, uh, which was kind of a marine base. We our army battalion and headquarters were stationed in Kandahar, and we were the company that was kicked out to Camp Leatherneck to be the support for route clearance out there. So we did what was called at the time log pack route clearance. So we didn't run a route A to B, B to C, and just keep rotating through. We ran an A point-to-point, making sure that there are these convoys for different log packs or different supply drops to Naz, St. Um Nazaj, Shagazi, Um Shikvani, Payne, these different places in Hellman Province. We would run up and back. We basically run a convoy up there, they'd unload, and then we'd run them back through the Hellman Desert, is what we were doing. So you were busy. Yes. Uh it was we were on a pretty consistent run of we'd be gone for at least a week, be back for 72-ish hours, and then rinse and repeat. Some missions would be like, oh, it's going to be, quote, three days, and then we'd be gone for seven. Then it would be, oh, three days, and then we'd be gone for two. So sometimes it wasn't, it wasn't always consistent, but we was normally by the time you got back, you had about 72 hours of refit and you'd go right back out.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So it was a pretty consistent rinse and repeat that we would do it. The longest we were ever outside the wire for one mission, I think we hit 17-ish days. I think we hit.
SPEAKER_02:But I but again, I at least for me, like that makes the deployment quick.
SPEAKER_01:It went real quick. Um it was a it was a very busy deployment. Um, ups and downs as every deployment has. You have your everything or flow. Um but ultimately it was a pretty quick deployment in the in the grand scheme of things. Like it it feels long in the moment, but once you look back, you're like, whoa, that went fast.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So is there anything about that deployment that sticks out in your mind when you think about that deployment? This is something that you would talk about.
SPEAKER_01:Uh the fact that at the time we thought we were just doing our job. And at the time I really just figured it was what we were doing, but we got by the time we left to describe what we did or what we accomplished and why it was so weird, was by the time we left, we had three different two or higher stars come down and tell my specific company thank you for what you did and leaving. At the time, I was like, okay, that's just cool, we're leaving country. Then I realized, like, no, stars don't come and say goodbye to every unit that's leaving country. That's not a normal thing. And when I went back and got to like kind of sit with it a little bit, it's because ultimately what our the company achieved and what our unit achieved between our three different platoons and the different leaders that we had, at the time we were told was something that hadn't been achieved before. We had over 300 IAD fines or detonations, but that's and we called getting hit a find. So but we encountered over 300 plus IADs in a year between three companies, and we didn't lose anybody. And we only, out of everyone we escorted, we only ever lost three people in the entirety of what we were doing. So getting between our hit and fine ratio to only lose, and we lost one I one EOD tech, and we lost two soldiers from a uh CSB company we were escorting. That was it. But for our record for what we did, our fines and everything we did, and we walked away with pretty much everybody walked away with almost a I don't want to say everybody, we had over 50% of the company had a purple heart, if not multiple purple hearts by the time it was all said and done. So it was once I had time to step back and realize what we accomplished, it was a pretty cool accomplishment considering what we did and the conditions we did it. And we were a reserve unit. Yeah. And we had to fight the whole, you're a reserve unit, you don't know what you're doing. I'm like, yeah, but we can do it. So we fought that too, and we we went got past that to the point where we were getting asked by name to be the unit that would go on that mission with them by the time we left.
SPEAKER_02:So because you were trusted, and so it was a it was a cool thing.
SPEAKER_01:So I mean I think the coolest part about that deployment was we we brought everybody back. Everybody that was organic to my company came back. Yeah. That was a pretty cool accomplishment for everything that we were doing.
SPEAKER_02:No small feat at all.
SPEAKER_01:At all. No, it's not. And all of the odds were against us. Right. To it's sure, great. We have awesome technology. I mean, technology was amazing. You have the the insertion of the mine rap of the MRAPs, the mine resistant ambit protected vehicle, class of family of vehicles was a huge improvement to our route clearance abilities. We had some really creative uh soldiers who found some really creative ways to make the technology to even enhance the technology we were already using. Um, Husky, um, one of our Husky drivers, they created a rake and they improved upon a rake design that the uh the army had furnished us with, and they improved on it. We we created TTPs that we were able to share across the country at the time that allowed for people to um make things happen. So it was a pretty cool experience at the end of the day.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Well, and I think you find that in uh reserve and national guard units, I believe, more than active duty, is that you have these people who do things other than the army, right? Yes. So they have these other ideas that they bring.
SPEAKER_01:And this is what I will I will always kind of say it this way. I've been in the reserve my entire career. I've either been a TPU soldier, which is the one week in the month, two weeks the year soldier, or I've been the AGR soldier, which is I'm the active duty reservist who ensures that the reserves can come in on the weekend and be trained. Right. Or that their training is ready to go. That's essentially the two different worlds I've lived in. But I've always been in the reserves. And what I will always say about reserve soldiers is they have a harder job than any active duty soldier because as an active duty soldier, I respect and love what they do. But they do that one thing and they do that one thing well. Are they the best combat engineers? Probably. Because they can combat engineer like nobody else. Can they infantry like nobody else? Yes, they can infantry like nobody else. Can they truck drive like nobody else? Absolutely, they can truck drive like, and they know how to do it in an army fashion. But my reserve guy, my reserve unit, we can combat engineer. We might not it's gonna take us a minute to catch up, but we can do it. It's gonna, we're not gonna come out of the gate. Right. We're we're we're gonna be minor league, probably down at like single-A ball to start. We gotta we gotta build us up for a little bit. But we learn real fast. And that's partly because, yeah, this staff sergeant who is a combat engineer, squad leader, on the civilian side, he's running an entire network of trains at you know, northern railroad, something or other, yeah, maintenance requirements. So when he comes in, he brings a whole different perspective. And then this platoon leader is a combat engineer, but on the other side of the life, he's a branch manager for some large Fortune 500 company who has to make sure all this other stuff functions in the logistics. So they're bringing these different perspectives from their not only their personal and their professional lives, but they're then they're combining that with their military experience. And yeah, we might not start off looking great, but I've always every reserve unit I've ever been with, and uh when we go to training rotations at an NTC or JRTC, at least in my personal experience, yeah, not gonna freaking sugarcoat it. We come off and we look like a bag of ass. Right. That first that we gotta knock the rust off, we look like a we look dumb, we we don't have the quote military bearing the same way because that staff sergeant and that platoon leader might be buddies on the outside and they might talk in a different way and it might not look quote military, right? But they have that relationship and they can freaking get shit done because they can talk to each other in a way that I don't see active duty doing. And on top of that, they're so much quicker to adapt to stupid. Because once not that active duty isn't adaptable, but I've just in my personal experience, I see reserve units adapt faster. Right. Because we're just used to it. Oh, you have to. Because we come in for a drill weekend and we have 48 hours, and when you break down those 48 hours, it really comes out to that in a total of 48 hours, I might ultimately have 16 hours worth of actual legitimate training time to accomplish a month's worth of what an active duty unit has. So that's 16 hours to accomplish a month's worth of training and stay the same level of proficiency. We become pretty adaptive pretty quick. Guard reserve units have a really unique thing that we can come into the fight, especially when you our experiences through um Iraq, Afghanistan, we just have things to bring to the fight that an active duty unit doesn't bring to the fight.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Or it's different. I wouldn't say they don't bring. We just bring a different flavor.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. I don't, and I don't I I would even argue not one is not better over the other. They're just different. They're just different. And now you have it's a force multiplier, right?
SPEAKER_01:But the combination together of their professional proficiency at their specific task and our professional adaptability, and you combine the two of them together, no one is better than the other. Reserves aren't better than active, and activism isn't better than reserves because we have a different skill set. But when you combine our skill sets and you put us in units together, we force multiply the whole thing. Yeah. And it is a then you combine the whole American military model compared to some of our foreign countries and some of even some of our adversaries. It's it's an even quadruple because of how we empower our soldiers to do down to the lowest level, whereas some countries, you take out that officer, they're dead in the water because they don't know what the hell to do. Whereas you can take everyone out in the chain of command except for that last private, and that last private will still have a monochrome of an idea of what it is they're supposed to do and why it is they're doing it, and how to possibly get it done, even if they're the last guy standing.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Not many militaries can do that because of the way we try to create a team.
SPEAKER_02:Well, and I think the Russians even said years ago that one of the reasons they never attacked America is because we don't follow our own doctrine. Our own doctrine, right? I mean, we have doctrine, and everyone would tell you you have to have a plan, but none of that, again, none of that survives the first shot fired. But at least we have a plan. And the problem is they would follow our doctrine and we wouldn't even follow it. And they would be like, well, they should be doing this, but they're doing that.
SPEAKER_01:And it's a great way to operate, actually. Doctrine is a guideline.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I think that that was something that was kind of funny. I got when I went to my CCC when I became a captain, and I had to go to you know, company commanders course for engineers, that was right during the pandemic, is when I was at graduating, and I got put in doctrine, and we were writing a brand new engineer platoon manual, and I got to write, I didn't get to write the whole thing, but I got to be the final person that kind of made some last edits, gave some last input from a common engineer side for the survivability, the contability, uh, chapters within that platoon book. And I got to, and I looked at that doctrine, I was writing it, and then I came back out to a unit and started training. I'm like, F that doctrine, we're gonna do this. I mean, I've been the only guy that had a hand in writing that doctrine. Yeah. And that doesn't even follow that doctrine because it didn't make sense for the situation we were in. The situation dictates the action. Yes. Doctrine is a guideline. Yeah. And I think that that is something that is so unique about our militaries. Like we have, we spend incalculable hours writing doctrine. I'm here at ROTC as an instructor. I'm teaching doctrine. Right. But even I teach the cat. Like, I'm teaching you what doctrine is because it's a baseline for you to which to build ideas from. It's how we communicate across the army, is that we have a baseline of understanding what our doctrine is. But then from that baseline, you can get creative. You at least have a starting point from which to branch off, create ideas and stuff like that. And take that doctrine and apply it to the situation you're in and be that way. And that's what makes our the army unique and well, the military in general unique that way.
SPEAKER_02:It allows you to take action in the absence of orders, which you have to do. Yes. Like you can't be waiting for someone to tell you what to do when you're in the middle of something. Correct. So you uh I want to back up a little bit. So you you said something that kind of struck me. You said that uh, you know, you didn't think about the success until you got back and had time for that to soak in. So you had a very active deployment, your first deployment um to Afghanistan. Um did you find that when you got back, like you had time to think about the totality of it and and and how dangerous it really was.
SPEAKER_01:And how did that impact you? Not in the moment. I think when I first got back, I was still obviously when I first got back, first two years I was just kind of like I was still going in the army, I still knew I was gonna do it. Yeah. So I didn't really set in. I think I've only come to that realization recently, as I've had more time to kind of come out of high tempo and get into this environment I'm in now. Right. Um and kind of give me an opportunity to think on it. But I also I guess I kind of knew what it was at the time. I just didn't realize how big of a deal it was, if that makes sense. Yeah, it does. Um but no, I think it's like if gotten space and time from that deployment in 10 to 11, um, it's become more crystallized, like how incredible it was to be a part of that type of a thing. Because my second deployment, I would love to have a do-over because I don't want to remember anything from my second deployment. That can be a throwaway.
SPEAKER_02:Well, let's let's dig into that for just a moment then. So you you got back in 11. So if you if you were boots on ground uh October, so you got back like October, November?
SPEAKER_01:I got back in August of 11. Oh, so you didn't do that. So they counted the they counted our train up month and a half as part of our deployment. So I was on boots on ground for 11 months, is what I was. Yeah. We didn't get that. Yeah, so that was they changed that up. So then I did, so from 11 uh to my next deployment in 16, I was in the middle of a couple of things. So I ended up taking, I didn't, I graduated, I had graduated, I didn't pick up a job, I had just stayed, was gonna deploy, so I went to deploy. So my return from my grad my deployment was my essentially my college graduation. Right. So I found a job, I got lucky, and I got to work for Wounded Warrior Project, being the alumni manager in Minnesota, covering one, two, three, seven states, being the point of contact for anyone that wanted to come to Wounded Warrior Project as the first point of contact for all anyone in seven states. Um, and that was really cool, and I got to do some amazing things in that job. But I was in a race between finding a job like Wounded Warrior Project or trying to go active duty. Wounded Warrior Project won, gave me a job, so I didn't go to active duty because I didn't pull the trigger fast enough and I didn't get the paperwork through, so I stayed reserved because I was still trying to get to active duty. And ended up doing Wounded Warrior Project, and while I was at Wounded Warrior Project, um, and actually right after I got back from deployment, I promoted this sergeant first class. So I was still doing the reserve thing, still doing that, doing Wounded Warrior Project, running that, and it was just I was went right back into the high tempo stuff.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, my wife will tell you that I ran too fast because. I was all over the place, always gone, constantly doing stuff. I went from deployment right into Windows Warrior Project. And I love what I did at Wounded Warrior Project because it was the best job I'll ever have, no matter what I do in the rest of my life, because I had a simple mandate. Find them, help them. That was it. It was the totality of my job. And whatever I thought was necessary, I had card blanche, blank check. And when I say that, there's a time I worked for Wounded Warrior Project, that was what it was. They gave me a$10,000 discretionary decision-making power that if spending$5,000 on a decision was going to get you a water heater because that's what you need, I can do that. That was my job. I get to give away a wedding once. That was and I got to call it work. I got to be help people have the happiest day of life, and I got to be there on their worst day of life, and I got to do everything in between and do whatever I could to figure it out how to help them. Couldn't have asked for a better job. But I was still trying to go active duty and I was still trying to, and I got a mentor who pushed me to go to the officer's side and get my lobotomy and switch off to the dark side. So I did that. But the disconnect is complete. Yes, I completely disconnected. But I was also at that transition where I made seven. I knew I was up for eight. I didn't want to leave the line. I was having too much fun with the line. I didn't want to leave. That's where I wanted to be. If I went up to first sergeant or master sergeant, I I'm in the I'm never going back. Right. You're not a green tabber. I'm not a green tabber anymore. I'm not going to lead soldiers. I'll lead soldiers, but not in the same way that I wanted to. Right. So I made the decision to switch over to the officer's side and I applied for the final what was called the direct commission program. So what I did was basically took a promotion packet, modified it, sent it off, got picked up for a callback to an interview board. It was a lieutenant colonel, four majors, and they asked me the silliest questions I've ever been asked. They asked me, you walk around the corner and you see two soldiers fighting. What do you do? I'm like, you have a soldier who approaches you and wants to buy a car. How do you describe credit to them? I was like, Wow. So it was what those questions were, and they're actually board questions that I went back, I knew were coming because I'd gone to the board for this, is they always wanted to see your decision-making process and your critical thinking. I gave them answers. I guess I did well enough. They took my packet, took all of it together, and well, the way the board worked at the time was it was called the fire and forget board. So basically, I had a position on hold where a company had agreed to take me as a competent engineer officer if I passed this board, however long it took. They would hold it up for two years. So the process was packet, wait, board, wait. And then I waited for another nine months where they would do this packet because basically what it did was like every quarter they did a regional board. If your packet passed the regional board, at the last quarter of the fiscal year, they put all those that passed those regional boards into a pile. They then had a board, reviewed all of them, ranked, racked and stacked them all, and then Congress said you can commission X number of direct commissions. And if your number was above the cutoff line, congratulations, you made it you got direct commissioned. And I was lucky enough that I was high enough on that OML and I got selected. Um, so I went, joined a unit, uh, left the unit I'd been with my entire military career for 13 years at that point in time, had been in the same unit for 13 years, left that unit, joined another unit, went to Bullock, graduated Bullock, deployed two weeks later. Holy cow. Because I had a buddy of mine, so Bullock for engineers is six months by the time it's all said and done. And so I was gone for six months at Fort Leonardwood. I had a buddy while I was there that I ran into who had been when I was when he was a team leader, I was his Joe. When he was a squad leader, I was his team leader. When he was a platoon sergeant, I was his team leader. When I made a platoon sergeant, he was my platoon sergeant in first platoon, and I was a platoon sergeant for second platoon. So we were next. So we ran into him. He was now the first sergeant for this company. And he asked me if I wanted to be one of his PLs, and I went off and became one of his PLs. Oh, that's awesome. So that was how I got to that one. And ultimately he ended up not being the first sergeant, he ended up being my platoon sergeant. So no, I was the PL and he was my platoon sergeant, or my platoon sergeant, so that was kind of fun. Yeah. Um, but that deployment So where did you deploy to? So that one was to Kuwait. So that one was so I became an engineer officer and I went and joined a construction company. Yeah. Different mission, different world, different time. Afghanistan's not what Afghanistan was in 10-11. It's not this fast-paced thing. It slowed down. We're pretty much just in Bagram in the BGDA, the Bagram Air Group Defense, something or other. I can't remember what the acronym states are. Just not as sexy as that. It's not it wasn't as sexy as mission. And we were basically, it was just one of those missions where you were stuck on Kuwait. And they were great people in that unit, but that deployment just wore everyone down. Yeah. But it was an example of I had a leader who I just to this day I jokingly tell people, I mean, we could both reach our 90s, and if he finally dies of natural causes, you might want to still investigate me for murder because I might have finally found a way to rid him of the earth. Um, because every breath of oxygen he takes is a waste of oxygen for the rest of the productive population. If I can say that. So you didn't like him? No, no. His leadership style is just rough. I just um we kind of conjoled around the fact that we didn't like him. That was kind of the biggest thing. Like to give you an idea of how like an example of how leadership can change things. I told you my first deployment. That that Captain Peterson from my first deployment, that that man was the leader I expoused to be someday. I hoped to be. This this gentleman who I deployed the second time with as a company commander, he was everything I hoped to never be. And to sh to kind of give an example of how he was thought of was he he one day brought back um a chocolate milk from the DVAC. No big deal, whatever. We all did it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Um, but he forgot it in his satchel that he had, and it firm it got so hot because it's Kuwait, the you know how this is. Yeah, I know what's gonna happen here, and it ferments and explodes. Right. But it exploded and it smells like absolute dog shit. Oh yeah. But it looks like shit. And he was so, and because he didn't he had forgotten he had done it, and we were just in commonwealth hooches, like my hooch with the other lieutenants was just on the other side of his door, his hooch.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So we smelled it and saw it, and we're like, it looked and smelled like shit. It was legitimately thought for four for 24 hours. We investigated could somebody have gotten into our building, taken shit, and flung like it. That was the level of hatred or disdain that there was for this particular gentleman that that was a viable thought process. Right. Like that was so out of left field and so not normal, but because of who he was as a leader, it was feasible, if that gives you an idea of how was he your captain Sobel, kind of? Kind of, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Almost although Sobel took care of people. He was just a terrible leader.
SPEAKER_01:He wasn't that. His biggest thing was, and why Hep made that deployment was it just there was just a there was no trust. Yeah. There was no trust, and that bickled down to all of us. So we as lieutenants started to stop trusting each other because it was it created this toxic environment was everyone was out for each other. Yeah. Or everyone was out for themselves. Yeah. And the only way you could survive was by getting off base. So there just wasn't a lot of base opportunities to get off base for expended periods of time. So you were kind of trapped and bouncing back. So bored, not a fun mission. Time in idle hands, and it was almost worse because my first deployment, you couldn't talk to anybody. Like you barely talked to anybody.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Um, and my first deployment, it was weird because I ended up getting the stat phone once, and I got to talk to my wife on mission, and it actually was kind of funny because uh she'd actually gotten a phone call that mission that I had been uh sent to Walter Reed, and that wasn't. Oh, that was kind of weird. That's a whole different thing we can get to in a second. But my first my second deployment, I had a cell phone 24-7. Yeah. My wife could call me on WhatsApp or whatnot, and I could hear about the day's problem, but I could do nothing to solve anything. I could do nothing to fix anything, but I could just hear about all the problems. So that's not helpful. It wasn't helpful for anybody. No, that was at all. So between all of that, it was just a kind of a crummy deployment, to say the least. Um and I left that deployment and I came home. I was home for 20, no, 21 days, and I took an AGR slot in San Diego, California. So for what turned out to be like almost two two years, I wasn't I was home, but for all of like a month. Oh, jeez.
SPEAKER_02:So you didn't move your family to San Diego.
SPEAKER_01:No, they all moved with me. Oh, okay. So they moved with me because I became AGR. Yeah. So I moved on to San Diego, so that, and that's when I started my AGR career. Nice.
SPEAKER_02:But what'd you do in San Diego?
SPEAKER_01:So I was an operations officer for a route clearance company, uh-huh, is what my official title was. Um, did that for about three years. Um, so my entire career has been, you know, squat, you know, started off as enlisted and did the 12 Bravo thing in the headquarters company. Then I moved to a uh a route, the actual engineer platoon up in Brainerd, Minnesota, from St. Cloud, Minnesota. Did that all the way up from specialist to sergeant to staff sergeant to sergeant first class, all in that unit. And that was a Mac unit, which was a mobile augmentation company of engineers. So we were in charge of uh mobility, culminability, and survivability. Did all those missions. Then I did uh became an engineer officer, went to construction, and then I went back to the route clearance world. And then I was there for three years as a lieutenant. Then I went to triple C, got my school there, and then I was in Dubuque, Iowa for two, three and a half, three years. Then there I was the plans officer, HC company commander, firefighter company commander, fell in to cover down on three other companies while they were without um their company commanders. So out of the eight companies, I commanded four of them in some way, shape, or form. And then I was also the operations officer because the operations officer we had was there but wasn't there. Right. Someone had to do it. Someone had to do it. He was there, good guy, like the guy. Um, it just was one of those jobs where I was kind of doing it. Yeah. So just didn't know what he didn't know. Right. So um, but it was cool. Um, and then I came here, and now I've been here for the last two and a half years, and I got one more year, I got this semester and next semester, and then I'm off to the next thing. So you did you come here as a captain then, or you were captain here? I I came captain here. So I came here as a captain. Okay. And this was supposed to be my take-a-knee uh situation. Right. Um, I ended up through a variety of random experiences, ended up being the professor of military science at the University of Michigan for 18 months with myself and a started first class as the only two green suitors and three civilians.
SPEAKER_02:And uh that's no small feat or task here at the University of Middle. This this school is no joke.
SPEAKER_01:No, this was uh it was cool. It was a really cool opportunity. Yeah. Got to learn a ton of cool things. Um, I don't know the video can't show you, but on the boards, we've got the like a war game we started while I was here, so that's been kind of cool. I actually got to take uh a cadet to the war college to get them certified in war game design from the college. That's pretty incredible. From the stuff we've got to got to do while I was the professor of military science. Now I've I've fallen back into my assigned role, which is to be the XO for the ROTC program because we've got a new uh professor of military science here, and then I'll rotate out and leave at the end of the next semester. What a great experience, though. So yeah, absolutely cool. Can't complain. I mean, I've gotten to do some really weird things in my military career. Um I can't complain about any of the things I've gotten to do. It's been really fun stuff.
SPEAKER_02:Do you find though, like if you if you're the kind of person that seeks those things out, you'll find them. Like I because there's so much opportunity in the military that people don't take advantage of.
SPEAKER_01:There's what I have seen, and now in a couple of days will be a 23-year military career. Yeah. Is I specifically I always tell even the cadets, I kind of tell them this, is like I love the engineer branch because I've never there's so much I don't know, and I've been in this branch for 23 years. Okay. 23 years I've been doing something engineer, and everywhere I turn, there's always something new I could do. I didn't know it existed. I could do that, I could do this, I could do that. Um, but I think the military's got that everywhere. It's yeah, I try to I get people who ask me why should I join? I go, the military will spit you out, chew you up and spit you out if you let it. Because if you come into it with, I don't know what it will do, I don't want what it wants, sure, it'll just take it'll take advantage of you. You know, it'll take advantage of you in every way, shape, or form. And it does my career, I'm sure it's done your career. But at the same point in time, what it does is if you don't let it take advantage of you, you can also find ways to take advantage of it. I've gotten certified in suicide intervention and prevention, and I can now teach suicide intervention. I've gotten to do that. I've got to teach here, I got my instructor certification, I've gotten to go to different places, I've gotten to see Germany, I've gotten to see different countries, I've gotten to um, you know, live in unique places that see this country in a way that I would have never seen it if I had never joined the army in terms of like joining AGR and doing stuff like that. I've gotten to so many weird things that I've gotten to go and do simply because I joined the army in some way, shape, or form. I mean, would be that between civilian experiences, my job at Wounded Warrior Project, I would have never had that job if I hadn't been in the army in some way, shape, or form. Right. And I got to do crazy stuff with that. I the military has so much to offer because no one's experience is ever going to be the same, period. Yeah. I could serve with the same people for 23 years straight, and we will both walk away with completely different experiences on how we took advantage of it or didn't take advantage of it. And that's what's so cool about the military is it's it has a if you don't, once you you can't even, there's no, even when you're in it, you don't even know what it all has to offer. Right. Because if you're interested about it, if you're curious about it, if you have an idea, I promise you, if you look hard enough, talk to the right people, there's either a pathway because somebody's already done it, somebody thinks it's a good idea and they'll support you, or there's a program dedicated to just that anyway, and all you gotta do is is advocate for yourself.
SPEAKER_02:Right, right. Because you know, the all those different paths you talk about, um, sometimes you just gotta be a pit bull. Yeah. But if you're a pit bull, you'll get it done.
SPEAKER_01:Do whatever you want. Right. You I've there are people who I've seen who've wrote out six-year careers and done one contract and love what they've done. I've seen people who've took did nothing and did a six-year contract and walk away with salty, and I can understand to some piece, but at the same time, they're gonna go, you didn't do anything to help yourself either.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And then there's those that join in and they find something and it turns into a civilian thing they want to go do.
SPEAKER_02:Or we're well, I think to some to a certain extent, we're all responsible for our careers when it comes to the military. You will run into people who will submarine you. I mean, you can't I I serve 21 years, you're 23 years, you're gonna run into that person.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_02:But then you're either gonna let it wreck you or you're gonna roll on and go on to the next thing.
SPEAKER_01:Yep, exactly. There's the one weird thing about our job and one of the military is we're always on the move.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Because it's you're normally somewhere now three. If you're if you're a reservist or a national guard, yeah, you might stay in the unit for a long time. I stayed in one unit for damn near 13 years. I knew all those people. Like when I made Sergeant First Class, they were still people who I knew were me as we were specialists together, and now I sergeant first class. So that's not uncommon in the guard and reserve. You go to active duty, though, you're always moving every three years. So you don't like somebody, cool, in three years you're gone. Or in two years. And it might be that it falls when you only suffer that person for a year. Yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER_02:Unless you want to be, you're not gonna be stuck in work. Right.
SPEAKER_01:You don't have to stay anywhere. You always have a pathway to go to the next thing if you so choose.
SPEAKER_02:Right. So I don't want to forget this. Uh you brought it up. And so now we need to talk about it. So you're you talked, so you're we're gonna go back to your first deployment. Yeah, oh that's it. You talk to your wife on the SAT phone, and all of a sudden you're at Walter Reed. Tell me about that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that was a kind of a it was one of our weird things that happened in our deployment, and one of the other times we got to see a general come down and talk to our company is so at the time in Afghanistan, if your vehicle got hit and you were uh a mace test, which was the I can't forget, I forget what mace stood for, but it was like the mental agility cognitive assessment or something like that. Yeah. And basically it was a vocal test where a medic would read off like five words, repeat these five words, and then you do these other like, here's nine numbers, repeat these numbers backwards to me, something like that. Like it was a version of this test. And after every explosion, if you didn't pass the mace test, if you weren't physically injured, broken bones, something like that, if you had a concussion, you got medevaced. So we were getting hit constantly, but we weren't getting injured, but we were getting concussed. So yeah. So we were we were failing the mace test. So what had happened is we would go, we would send them if you got Medevac, even in country, they still called your family back stateside to tell them that you've been Medevact. Why they were doing this, I didn't understand at the time. I still don't really understand why they're doing it. But basically, even if it was a in-country Medevac, just from mission to back to base to just because you failed the base test, you were considered a Medevac. Cool. I got I went on leave, told my wife how this worked. Like, hey, if you get this phone call, it's nothing, don't worry about it. It's just how they do it. Nothing's happened, they're just moving us back to base. Like and that was the truth, because that's what we'd experienced. Um, so in this particular mission, my vehicle got hit. And my vehicle, there were four of us in the vehicle, and I was an asshole because I was a squad leader, and I was also, I never wanted to not be on mission because there was no way my soldiers were gonna go on mission and I was gonna not be there with them, right? Regardless of the cost to myself, however that went. We'd also made a rule in our unit that uh all the squad leaders, so the E6s and above, we had the mace tests. So if the medic couldn't get to us fast enough, we could administer the mace test as a to give a preliminary report back. Yeah. I just memorized the mace test. My medic was a friend of mine. So whenever they would come to my truck, I'd just be like, what version? They tell me the version, so no matter how concussed I was, I could know what I was doing. Your memory's good. So I was fine. Yeah. So I could stay at mission. This particular mission, we got hit, no big deal. We go through the process, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Ultimately, I'm the only one in my truck that stays. Everyone else in my truck got metavacted. Partly, one was because we just didn't have room for anybody else to cross seat anybody, so we just took everybody and I stayed. Yeah. Anyway, we go through mission, mission continues on. Nothing, we're on mission for another, I think we were on the mission for like another two days. Like, to me, life had continued. No fucking problem.
SPEAKER_03:Right.
SPEAKER_01:We get to where we were going, and this is the one time we had been given a sat phone, and we were given the opportunity, it got passed around, and you said, like, hey, you can call home if you want, because we have this sat phone. And this is that first deployment where we didn't, the only time you talked was when you were back on base. So to be able to say hi and talk on a sat phone, which nerd me was like, Cool, I have a sat phone. This is cool. I've never been able to call home. I'm gonna be neat. Yeah. So, hey, it'd be neat to say hello from a satellite phone. Yeah. Because that was relatively new technology, or at least it was the first time a lot of us had seen it. Called my wife, said, Hey, I'm home, hey, it's me. She goes, I'm like, Well, what happened? What I hadn't known, and what our whole company was unaware of, was that after my vehicle gotten hit, that call had gone out. What happened was that unfortunately they had two mix-up happen. So another platoon in a different part of the country had the same thing happen to one of their family members, but their family was actually called and told that their family member had their service member had been killed on a phone call, which breaks every never every policy in the book on how I was supposed to be handled token. So in my case, what happened was uh my driver, who was a gentleman by the name of Cahill, his wife had gotten a phone call that he was in Walter Reed, and they were actually getting ready to send him out there. Well, they had missed up his initials. He was Dan G. Cahill, and it was Dan, I can't remember his actual, but it was Dan G. was the one that was actually in Walter Reed, but they called the wrong Dan Cahill's family. So the wrong family got notified that some of that happened. For me, what happened was that my wife got called and said I had been Medevact, and that they'll hear more. Okay, which is what I warned her was going to happen. Right. Which would be I will call us, they'll call you that I'm Medevac, I will call you in a little bit because I'm just at the local Camp Leatherneck hospital. Obviously, I didn't call. She waited a day, she called back. Uh, they said, well, if he hasn't called, he's probably gone the long show because it's more serious than that. And that's what they told her. Oh my goodness. So now they've told her that I've been Medevac. Then they've told her that if I haven't heard, if she hasn't heard, then it's probably more serious and she's probably been sent to somewhere else. And I don't know any of this is happening. Nobody in the unit knows that any of this is happening. So then when I finally and then she finally calls later and they say, Oh, we have no record of him anywhere. We don't know where he is, so we don't know what to tell you. So now it's gone from he's medevact, he's serious, to we don't know where he is. So while in all of that, 48 hours, I'm just continuing mission like nothing happened. So when I called, I was inadvertently in inserting myself in the middle of something I didn't know what was happening. Uh-huh. What we found out afterwards is that somewhere, somehow, protocol had broken down not just once, but three different times for three different families. Well, six families ultimately, by the time it was all said and done. Yeah. And we had a we had a two-star come down and apologize to our entire unit. All I had to say was, all he said was, do not worry. Those responsible have been held held accountable. And we're like, Roger?
SPEAKER_02:You don't want to know.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, but so from my wife's perspective, I was missing and presumed something for a while because they had no clue where I was. So for like 48 hours, I was completely out of the loop. But that was one of our things in our deployment that's kind of weird. So it was a couple of us that got hit up in that one. But yeah, but that was a weird thing for us to that's crazy. It's another one of those random stories like how?
SPEAKER_02:So we've we've covered a lot, like all the way up through where you're at today, and it sounds like you still have plans to do some more things before you uh before you hit that retirement button and and uh and go on to the civilian world. Is there anything that we haven't covered that you wanted to talk about?
SPEAKER_01:Uh I think I think we've hit a lot of it. I think that one thing that's kind of unique, I think that's giving me perspective as I've gotten older, weirdly. I mean, uh so I don't there's a lot of like, I know, as you know too, there's wean we don't like talking about like our service histories and like our awards and stuff like that. But I think there's one that I think is kind of like a a randomly stupid story that I think is funny. So I have two purple hearts from my time in Afghanistan. I split a vehicle in half, walked away from that, and then on my last mission, on the rip mission, I was the gunner and been the first time being gunner and got hit again. Yeah uh and got hit twice in 45 minutes and then hit in the truck, knocked out, got in the medevac vehicle, got hit in that vehicle. Oh my god. That was how that last two went. It was kind of a fun one. But what I think is uniquely weird, and I've learned to kind of think it's a comical thing to say, is there's two things that are unique about the purple heart is the day it's designed, it was awarded and designed, or as an official award, which is February 22nd, 1932, and then there's National Purple Heart Day, which is August 7th. My first one is February 22nd, my second one is August 7th. So my two Purple Hearts are on the exact days that are relevant to the Purple Heart. Wow. Which is just out of all of the ironies of my military career, I for a long time I never spoke that I had Purple Hearts. Like I hated them. I hated them, I hated them. I used to call we used to jokingly call them enemy marksmanship awards. I was just gonna say that. That's what they were. It was a it was a significant, it was a signal that you had failed to do your job. Right. Because in my world, if we didn't find, if we failure to find the ID meant that somebody got hurt.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I I had two of them. I had failed twice. Like, and I ended up getting blown up 13 times, but the only two of them counted as purple hearts. But those are two distinct marks that I actually wear. Like the army, like the enemy got me twice. Like I failed twice. For the longest time, I looked at them as that. As I've grown and got perspective and can make light of them and kind of look at it, it's it's kind of funny to say that that's a mark that I have in the military is that A, I got this random thing that not everybody gets. B, to then get them, how I got them, weird, and then to have them fall on those specific days is like I don't know. I I've grown to kind of think it's kind of a comical story to tell in the sense of like how did that happen? Of all the strange things that's all the coincidences of all of the things that can happen in a military career, that's ridiculous odds. Oh, it is.
SPEAKER_02:You should buy a lot of days on both of those days.
SPEAKER_00:Both of those days, it's like keep going for it.
SPEAKER_02:Because A, you survived the whole thing, and B, it was on those two days. That's that's kind of fun.
SPEAKER_01:But no, I I I from other than that small funny antidote that I think is just kind of funny to tell, is I've loved every I've been in this, I've had ups, I've had downs, I've had incredible highs, I've had incredible lows, but I wouldn't change my military experience for one second. I've I wouldn't be where I'm at because of it, because of the military. I, you know, went to college. I now have a master's degree. I'm about to get a second master's degree. I'm, you know, go I've gotten these crazy opportunities. I mean, for the kid that barely passed high school to say that he's got to be the professor of military science at the University of Michigan. Yeah. No one had that on their bingo card. No. I can promise you that was nowhere on the bingo card in any capacity whatsoever to say that that the kid that graduated high school and joined the army at 17 and want only wanted to be a combat engineer, make it the first sergeant, do 20 years active duty, that kid would look at this, you know, me sitting here today and go, you're not even the same person. Like they wouldn't, they wouldn't know how to reconcile where we ended up for what we thought we were joining. Yeah. And I think that's the coolest thing I've gotten to say about my whole entire military story is that I just followed it where it made sense, and I've loved every second of it. I've even even the low parts, I won't, yeah, I can't say I love those low parts. But in the grand scheme of things, I've had a pretty freaking good career and I've had it pretty nice at the end of the day. Those hard times shaped who you are, right? Right. In some way, shape, or form, I am who I am because of these experiences. Yeah. And I don't know if I would have been the same person if I didn't have the military. I mean, I'm that can be King's J, and that's kind of a cop-out answer in a lot of ways, because well, if I hadn't done it, I'd just be somebody else. I got that. Right. Track and all. But it's more of the I don't think I would be doing or have as much access to pursue things I'm passionate about, be given opportunities if I didn't have the experience I've had, and the people who I've gotten to serve alongside with, both those that I've worked with, those I've worked for, and those that I've had the innumerable honor to have in some way, shape, or form been in charge of, who've entrusted me in some way, shape, or form to do the right thing. Without them and all their combinations, I wouldn't have had the opportunities I've had. Period. End of story.
SPEAKER_02:Well, and so that's a nice segue, with all of that said, to kind of put a uh a finer point on it. You know, as people are listening to your story, um, not people 10 minutes from now, but people 100 years from now, because that's the idea, right? Right. Um, what message would you leave them with?
SPEAKER_01:So I tried to think about this for a while. I didn't I couldn't think of anything specific other than what I would hope somebody watching this, so to whomever is watching this now, is if you're listening to the story and you've listened to this insane ramble down these different pathways, is that you can walk away with that the end of the day, soldiers are still human beings. Is at the end of the day, when you're reading a history book and you read like X number of soldiers did this, or X number of people were thrown into this battle, and X number of people were, you know, casualties of something like this, or X number of something that relates to the fact that there was a soldier and a is every one of those numbers is a human being with a story as unique and as different as my own story. And that as much as we can look at history and you've got quotes like Stalin, you know, five people is a problem, you know, a million people, and one person is a tragedy, and a million people is a statistic, you got quotes like that all out there. Is there's a monoclonal of truth to those because we it's easy to forget that behind every one of those numbers, every time we say we're sending you know a hundred thousand people to go do X, that's a hundred thousand individual human beings who have come together to make a team fill their capacity, working at their individual task inside of a larger task, instead of another task, instead of another task, all working to accomplish one mission, which from our constitution is to defend this United States and to defend our form of government and defend our way of life. Every one of those individuals for the last 50 years has volunteered for that in one way, shape, or form. We don't have a draft since 1973. We haven't had a draft, we haven't had conscripts. So every single person that you read in that history book from there forward until if you're listening to this 100 years from now, 20 years from now, and things haven't changed, then that means in all of that time, every single one of them has volunteered to do this. Willingly, knowingly said that they would do this for whatever their motivation was. And that motivation can be as different from mine as a 17-year-old kid who just wanted to join the army because that's what you did after 9-11, to the person who joins it because it's I've met people from everything where this is the family tradition. You know, I did this because it was this or jail, or I did this because I didn't know what to do with my life, to I did this because I just needed to get college and I'm getting, I'm in here for the money and I'm gone. Whatever the reason was, every single one of those individuals that you hear in a story, every single one of those numbers you hear, if you ever read military history, if you're reading military history now, that's an individual human being. I think that's the biggest thing I'd want you to take away is that our stories are as unique as the you and me sitting here. We have shared understanding because we've been in the, you know, you and I, we've shared a uniform, we've worn the uniform. There's a monocome we understand. Your unit your individual experience is gonna be a million times different than my own. It's a million times different than the person who's listening to this right now. Is we we might share similar backgrounds, but uh there's still an individual behind that story. I think that's the biggest thing that kind of want to make sure people walk away with or that the person listening to this is walking away from, is that it's an individual collective that makes this work for us. Yeah. And I think that that is unique among the militaries in the world. It's like we all have that, there's a bond, we talk about that, and I know militaries have it their own way, but I really think we have a unique structure here that makes it work just that much better. I would agree.
SPEAKER_02:Well, thank you for sharing that with me. Thanks for spending the afternoon with me. I really appreciate it. That's been great. Appreciate the time.
SPEAKER_01:All right.
