John Doolittle’s conversation with Andrew Cormier on “For the Zoomies” Podcast
Episode Description
Host of FTZ Andrew Cormier sits down with USAFA grad Navy SEAL Capt John Doolittle to discuss the power of doing things for others and how to look out for your buddies in difficult times.
The views expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily represent the views of the DoD or its components.
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Transcript
The views expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Defense or its components. This is Perspective number six, a part of the For the Zoomies podcast, and I’m your host, Andrew Cormier. Today’s guest is a 1992 Air Force Academy graduate who ended up cross commissioning into the Navy upon graduation. He worked as a hard hat salvage diver for three years and then completed BUDs as the leader of Class 213. From 1996 to 2017, he was assigned to various SEAL teams and conducted multiple deployments throughout the European, African, Pacific, and Middle Eastern theaters of operation. While getting his master’s degree, he did a solo swim across the English Channel in memory of a fallen teammate and friend to raise money for the Navy SEAL Foundation.
Since retiring from the Navy, he spends his time sharing his perspective to young leaders across America through public speaking, along with working as the Chief Revenue Officer at KAATSU, a fitness and recovery company with the mission of improving the lives of wounded warriors. Ladies and gentlemen, Captain John Doolittle. Thanks, Andrew. Nice lead-in, man. I appreciate all the kind words, and it’s great to see you again.
Thanks for letting me be on your show, man. It’s awesome. I hope the cadets remember you from our M5, our warfighter talk about a month ago, but it’s really good to be able to get more of your message out to a community that kind of needs to hear it. Andrew, it’d been 33 years since I was at three degrees sitting through an M5 in that exact room. I think I might have a little bit of PTSD from that time of my life, but I’m past it.
The post-lunch, you know, warm F1 room that, you know, to get right into the question set here. All right. What brought you to the Academy? You know, give us a little background about what life was like before the Academy and what brought you here? Okay, 1987, there was a movie out. You might have heard of it called Top Gun. And I tell you, it was one of the most incredible recruiting films the Navy ever made. Because everybody in my little spear of influence, they all wanted to go be Fighters in the Navy. And that’s really what kickstarted it for me. I mean, my dad was Air Force. He was a weapons controller during Vietnam, a small island between Vietnam and Okinawa.
It’s interesting. He never really pushed me, per se, to join the Air Force. But when Top Gun came out and a buddy of mine that I swam with, I was a swimmer. And he went to the Air Force Academy. Yeah, I just, I tried to go to the Naval Academy and I got shot down immediately. And Air Force Academy, I barely, barely, oh my gosh, barely had the requirements to get in.
But swim coach was looking for a guy that did my, you know, that was like a breaststroke and butterflyer and that helped get me in. But to answer your question, it probably more than anything was the Navy recruiting film. Well, if it makes you feel any better, I didn’t even get in my first try. So at least you got in your first try, whether it was through swimming or whatever the reason was. Did you go to the prep school?
I didn’t go to the prep school. I went to Marion Military Institute down in Alabama, but COVID kind of shut things down, so it was, you know, they call USAFA a prison while you’re here, but that was quite literally a prison. Yeah, yeah. Prison food and everything. What squadron you in? I’m in 15. Okay. So I started in 8 back then. It was you just did your freshman year in that squad. I started in a equal 8. It just had recently changed its name from Evil 8 to Equal 8. And then I did three years, Mighty Barons in ’26. Okay. Yeah, every once in a while I see an Evil 8 flight suit patch rolling around on someone’s shoulder. I don’t know if they got rolled out with all the 20 tours, but yeah. So was Top Gun the reason why the Navy kind of took you upon commissioning or was there some other reason?
No, it was interesting. My grandfather on my dad’s side, he always was, he was part of the Navy League. He was an electrical engineer during World War II. And I think because he didn’t go into Navy, he always felt because all his buddies, his brothers, and all his buddies went to World War II overseas. And he worked here on the homeland as an electrical engineer in helping out.
And I think he always felt like he had missed something. So as soon as he could, when the war was over, he started getting involved with the Navy League. And I remember being a little kid, and he would take me with him when, you know, he’d go visit during Fleet Week in San Francisco. I grew up in Walnut Creek in Pleasant Hill and Concord in the Northern California Bay Area.
And he and my grandmother lived in Santa Rosa and he’d come pick me up, take me on aircraft carriers and stuff. So I always loved the Navy. Ever since I was a little kid and watching the Blue Angels fly by the Golden Gate Bridge and all that. So I kind of had that in my blood a little bit from him. And then I had the Air Force in my blood from my dad. He was active for a short while during Vietnam.
Then he got out and he realized almost immediately that he missed the camaraderie of being in the Air Force. And then he tried for years as Vietnam, the drawdowns started. He tried for years to get back in and the Air Force kept saying no. But finally they let him back in the reserves and he did a bunch of different things in the reserves. Towards the end of his time, he was running Civil Air Patrol for Northern California, I believe out Travis Air Force Base, mostly. But yeah, I had it. I had it in my family, but nobody ever really pushed me. And then, you know, friends of mine started going into the military, Top Gun came out and bam, I went. Yeah, but so, you know, you wanted to fly.
This is true. You came to the Air Force Academy. What pushed you into the Navy? Oh, you’re gonna go there, aren’t you? Okay, so I was not the best student of the True Blue ’92 Air Force cadets. I struggled a little bit. I was on academic probation. God, I don’t even know if I should put this on your podcast. I can edit it out after if you want me to. Yeah, six times I was on academic probation. I kept getting in trouble. And I just, I struggled there, man. I struggled. And academically, I was just always cutting it really close. Not on purpose. I was really trying hard, but I was struggling with the combination of being an NCAA swimmer. I swam all four years for Casey Converse and, you know, as a varsity swimmer all four years.
And the combination of that, the academics that were harder than anything I’d ever done, and the military performance piece and the requirements associated with that, put all that together. And I was, yeah, I was in the Hurt Locker. I was just struggling there. So did that kind of bring you to you know pilot wasn’t an option for you, and naval aviation could have been? Yeah, I should have finished that story, right? So because I was not at the bottom, I was at the bottom of my class, basically, in ’91. So this was President Bush number 41, President Bush’s administration. So in 1991, the Air Force came out and said, “Okay, USAFA graduates that are not in the top third of their class will not go to UPT. The rest will be banked for a year or go do other things in the Air Force.” And all I heard was being banked for a year. And I was, you know, 19, 20 at the time. And this is actually a pretty good lesson for your listeners. One year sounds like a really long time. It’s not really that long.
So what I ended up doing was putting in my paperwork to cross commission into the Navy to go into the SEAL teams. But the irony of that decision is once I got in the Navy, I got denied going to BUDs at SEAL training. I got denied six times before I finally got in. So I was in the regular Navy as a hard hat diver and ship driver for three years. So, you know, if you look back on it, if I had just taken the one-year banked time, then I could have gone to UPT. But hey, man, everything, I believe everything happens for a reason. And so I ended up leaving the Air Force. I was commissioned. So same day of graduation. Actually, in the morning, we all went and got commissioned before graduation. So I got commissioned as an Ensign.
So technically when I graduated through my hat in the air and all that, I was actually in Ensign wearing an Air Force Academy uniform. You could have left out the whole academic probation thing once you said the top third of the class. He was like, you could have been at the 50% point and be like, yeah, I mean, I did okay. Well, it’s okay though, because I want people to understand that they are there at the zoo, at the academy. Sorry, the zoo. But just because you get in a little bit of trouble, just because you hit some rough spots, just because you’re on academic probation or whatever, it’s not the end of the world, man. It really isn’t. As long as you surround yourself by good people and teammates and wingmen and women, yeah, you can make it through about anything. And that’s actually part of where I’d like to drive kind of the conversation today is.. Yeah, of course.
It really is kind of amazing what you can achieve when your mindset is right and you surround yourself with the right people. Yeah, I guess going kind of off that tangent, I mentioned in the intro that you swam the English Channel. And upon closer reading, you did that for Neil Roberts, is that right? Yep, yep. He was.. yeah, Neil Roberts at the time. When I when I showed up at SEAL Team 2, I had finished SEAL training. I had finished jump school. I thought I was all, you know, big and bad. Didn’t have my Trident yet because back then, before you were awarded the Navy SEAL Trident, you had to be on a probation status for a year or so at the team that you went to. So I walk in, I’m in my service dress blues, I’m all dressed up, got like my three or four ribbons on, I’m feeling important. I walk in and I meet two guys on the quarter deck at Seal Team 2, and one of them was Neil Roberts.
And those guys, quote unquote, took me under their wing immediately. But over time, Neil became one of my mentors at the team, and I became friends with him. And later on, friends with his wife, Patty. And when Neil was killed, he was the first SEAL to die in combat after 9/11. So when Neil died, I actually reached out to one of my mentors that I grew up swimming for, a guy named Mike Troy. Navy SEAL from Vietnam era, did three tours in Vietnam. And after he was done in the Navy, he started coaching swimming, coached a lot of incredible swimmers, but my sister and I swam for him in high school. So behind my dad and my mom and my grandparents and whatnot, he was definitely a mentor for me. And that’s something I always try to emphasize with people. If you don’t have a mentor, a non-family mentor in your life, it’s really important that you get that. Because occasionally in life, you come across that you come to these sort of forks in the road trying to decide what to do.
It’s just really good to have a mentor. So for me, I called Mike after Neil died and I was going to school for the Navy at the Naval Postgraduate School. And I said, “Hey, Mike, I want to do something to memorialize Neil. I’m stuck at school right now. A lot of my teammates are overseas getting after it. Do you have any ideas?” And without skipping a beat, he said, “Yeah, you should swim the English Channel and do it for your buddy.” And I was like, “Mike, I swam like the 100 fly in college, 200 breast.” I’ve never done a marathon swim in my life. He’s like, “Yeah, well, you made it through SEAL training. I’m sure you can do it.” And then he hung up. So I called Patty, Neil’s wife, and I ran that idea by her.
And it was after that call that I was like, oh my god, I’m doing it because she was so just over the moon about the whole idea. So yeah, ended up taking some time off, went over to Dover, England and did that. That was a challenge. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. But, you know, without going into the whole English channel swim story, I will say this about halfway across. So it’s 21 miles as the crow flies. And when you look at your GPS track, you go through two tidal shifts. So the track that we actually covered for my swim was 37.7 miles. Oh my God. About halfway across, the wind started picking up and it was going opposite of the tides and currents.
So instead of swimming in swells, we suddenly, I was swimming in this chop, this three to four foot chop, which was crazy. And I remember, I remember my stroke count was falling, my shoulder was starting to hurt a lot. I was starting to internalize all the pain and discomfort. And I look up because you got a pilot boat. You got a chase boat, pilot boat, whatever you want to call it. And you don’t really navigate across on your own. You just navigate wherever the boat’s going. So you just keep the boat, in my case, off to the right and a little bit upwind. And I look over when everything in my mind and I’m totally self-absorbed in my pain and suffering. And I look over and there’s the support crew. My dad was part of the support crew and they had snuck on a three by five American flag and they’re holding it up in the air just like 20 knots of wind.
And I remember seeing that American flag and it was like all the pain and discomfort just melted away. I thought about Patty. I thought about Neil. I thought about a lot of my friends that I’ve lost at that point and how many more, because that was in 2004 and how many more we were going to lose. And yeah, I like bringing that up because you know sometimes in life you’ll do things that are tough and hard and it’s always nice to do things for a purpose that’s greater or bigger than yourself. In this case, it was for a Gold Star family and other Gold Star that I knew Gold Star families I knew we’d have in the community.
But yeah, great, just a great experience. Incredible. Yeah, one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. Yeah, you mentioned purpose and you know it sounds like that’s what kept you going when you’re in the channel. But I think that’s one thing that people have a hard time grasping onto is seeking out opportunities. Like you called up your coach. Was it Troy, correct? Yeah, Mike Troy, yeah. To put yourself out in that, you know, nobody asked you to do it, nobody told you to do it.
You know, people don’t usually look for adversity. And I mean, I don’t necessarily advise you know going out and looking for adversity because it might be too much to handle or I shouldn’t say looking for adversity because adversity is the only way that you grow, but looking for the correct adversity. And you know, this sounds like a really good example of, you know, that is, you know, swimming the English Channel is no easy feat. That is a really high threshold of adversity. How do you just pick out what you wanna do when you wanna memorialize someone or, you know, have a purpose behind something? Well, for me, it was, I just, I didn’t know. I had no idea.
But I knew I needed something, I needed to pursue something difficult and hard. And I’ve always felt that and had that in my life. And at that point, I just, I relied on Mike for an idea and he gave it to me. But anytime during life, I feel like it’s always good to have short-term goals, long-term goals, things that you’re always chasing. And when you’re at the academy, that’s just part of what’s fed to you there is everything’s goal oriented. You know Like checkpoints, yeah. Yeah, the long-term goal is graduation, the short-term goal is passing the Sammy on Saturday, whatever. But when you leave and you go into the military, I feel like it’s important that you still do that.
And sometimes the military won’t give that to you. Sometimes you gotta do that for yourself. And for a lot of people that have an athletic background, they’ll look for that adversity in physical events, but it doesn’t have to be physical events. It could be anything. It could be psychological stuff. It could be behavioral health stuff. It could be reading. It could be learning. There’s so much you could do, but you should always, in my opinion, have to caveat everything with that. In my opinion, everything in life rolls better when you’re goal-oriented and you’re chasing something. If you’re not chasing something, you become stagnant. And when you become stagnant, everything else seems to slowly fall apart, in my opinion. I believe you also did a frog man swim. Is that right?
Yeah, yeah. Thanks for bringing that up. I live in St. Petersburg, Florida. I’m married, beautiful wife, Katie, three kids. Sean is 20. Ryan’s 18. Sean’s at UCF. Ryan’s at Auburn University and Meg’s 16. And she’s in high school here at St. Pete High. And one of the things we do here in St. Pete Tampa region is we do every January, we have a swim that directly supports the Navy SEAL Foundation. And the Navy SEAL Foundation helps, they do a lot of things for divorce, both active duty and veterans. But one of the things they do that I just, I love, is they really provide a lot of resources for Gold Star families, surviving spouses and surviving kids.
Okay, so jump back to, let’s see, it would have been November, December 2010, I believe. Yeah, it was 2010. Dan Knaussen, SEAL lieutenant. He’s in Afghanistan. They’re inserting on target. Dan’s a second in order of March. The chopper lands and they’re all moving out. And he steps on a pressure plate IED, improvised explosive device. And the IED goes low order, meaning that the entire ring charge did not go, but the charge under Dan immediately under Dan did go. Enough that it blew off both his legs above the knees. And Dan was medevac, of course. And by the time he got to Walter Reed and was receiving his Purple Heart, it had been like six or eight days or something after the incident. And we immediately heard about it. I was stationed at that time. I was doing a staff tour at SOCOM at Special Operations Command Headquarters, which is in Tampa. And we heard about Dan and we heard that the family kind of was in financial need. They need some help. And back then, our foundations, and I say foundations because there’s dozens of them now, but the foundations didn’t have a lot of money.
And so about 25 of us put our heads together, came up with the idea to swim across Tampa Bay, not all the way across Tampa Bay, but from St. Pete to the peninsula where SOCOM is about 5K, so like 3.2 miles or something. And so a bunch of us, we didn’t ask for permission. The Coast Guard didn’t clear us or anything. We just kind of showed up on a January morning really early before the sun came up and we all pushed off and each of us had a kayak. And we agreed before we did that swim that we would try to raise some money for Dan’s family, back to my earlier point. And so we did the swim. It was cold. It was like 37 degrees outside and water temp was mid-50s. And so we finish and we’re at the American Legion on the Tampa side and we’re counting up all the wads of dollar bills and IOUs written on bar napkins and voided checks and all this stuff. And at the end of the party when we added, we were hoping to give the family $3,000 to $5,000. And when we added it all up, it was 30 grand. And that’s when we realized and this was like 14 years ago, 13 years ago.
And that’s when we realized, oh, wow, we’re onto something here. So then long story longer, the swim has evolved every year. And now all the resources from the swim go to the Navy Seal Foundation. And it’s just incredible because that money all goes to help Gold Star families, Gold Star kids. And yeah, I’m on the board. I love it. It’s one of my favorite things that I do. It sounds like everything you do just revolves around giving back to people that need it more than you. Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. I try. You get out of the military. I did 25 years, 25 plus in the Navy. Most of the times in the SEAL teams. And, you know, when you spend, so let’s count the academy, right? It’s 25 plus 40.
So when you spend nearly three decades basically in service to this country in some shape or form, you kind of grow accustomed to a life of service. And what I will tell your listeners, when that’s gone, you miss it immediately. And everybody in my circles that I navigate in, everybody looks for a way to still help out and be relevant in some way, whether it’s paying it forward in some way, being involved with Gold Star families, or just being involved with the ROTC units or what have you. I think it’s important.
I think when you spend a career serving the country and serving others, serving purposes that are bigger than yourself, when you get out of the military, it’s important that you try to maintain that to some degree, if that makes sense. Kind of moving on to a discussion point that you had when you were here during that M5. And I think this is a big part of the majority of your public speaking is to look out for your friends, you know especially the ones that are going through hard times, because you know especially at the academy here, life is not easy. I’ll extend that out into the military and even beyond to the civilian where life gets hard. True.
What would you tell people to encourage them to look out for their friends that might be going through something? There’s so many angles we could go in this. I don’t know if you want to start with your story. I think that would be a good way to lead into it. Yeah. All right, let’s talk about that one. So it’s December 22nd, 2012. I’m stationed over in Germany. We had a unit there. I was the commanding officer. And one of my good friends, Job Price, was also a commanding officer at the time. So I was our unit CO in Germany, and he was a team CO, SEAL Team 4 CO, and he’s down in Afghanistan.
And he had one of his task units up in Germany working for me in dealing with our partners, you know, doing through buying with training, JSET training, and that kind of stuff that you’ll do when you get out of the Air Force Academy someday. And so Job’s guys were doing stuff for me and with me in Europe and in the European theater. And then I had guys down in Afghanistan working for Job. So every week, we would have a face phone or VTC, you know, a video teleconference, just like you and I are doing right now. And anyway, you know that was a typical thing back then. And so anyway, I remember I was taking Sean to a birthday party right outside Bubblegan, Germany. And I remember it was cold, snow underground. You know, it’s December.
Germany’s kind of chilly in December. And I’m walking Sean into a birthday party, my Blackberry starts ringing and I pick it up and it’s a friend of mine from Virginia Beach. So I had an operational commander in Germany, General Mike Repass at SOC Europe, Special Operations Command Europe. He was my operational boss. My administrative boss was back in Virginia Beach. And so one of his guys calls me and I could tell right away in his voice that something really bad just happened. And you know I said this during the M5, you know these calls, these bad news calls, when you go into a life of service in the military, you will definitely get these calls. It comes with the territory.
Being in the military is inherently dangerous for a lot of reasons. It doesn’t matter where you go in the military. So anyway, I pick up the phone. I can tell it was bad news. He goes, “Hey, John, I got bad news.” And I said, “Okay, Jamie, who was it?” And he said, “It was Job.” And I said, “Okay.” I took a deep breath because Job is a good friend of mine and also an Air Force Academy grad. I was in ’92. He was 93. And I took a deep breath. I said, “Oh man, okay. What happened?” And it’s what he said next that took the wind right out of my sails. I was expecting to hear some kind of, I mean, he was a commanding officer in Afghanistan in combat, leading troops in combat, right? So what he said next, just to this day, I just can’t believe it. He said, “Well, John, what you need to know is it appears that Job died by his own hand, a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.” And when he said that, I just felt all the air go out of my sails. And there’s a lot more to the story beyond that.
But in the interest of time, what I will say is my takeaway from that experience and almost all of my teammates take away from that experience was if it can happen to Job, a commanding officer of a SEAL team overseas in combat operations. If it can happen to him, one of the most resilient guys, one of the strongest personalities and leaders in all of the SEAL teams at the time, he was. Everybody loved Job, man. He was on his 14th deployment. If it can happen to Job, it can happen to everybody. My biggest takeaway from that was that everybody’s got a breaking point. I don’t care how much of a studette or a stud that you are or you think you are, everybody’s got a breaking point. And when you’re looking at your wingmen and you think everything’s good with them, it might not always be good. And I look back on what happened with Job. And yes, we would have these weekly calls.
And early on in their deployment, they lost a SEAL on an operation, killed in action. And then later, a few four or five weeks later, they lost two more operators on an operation. So three KIA on that deployment, I think before the midpoint of the deployment, six-month deployment. And I would do these weekly calls with Job and I could see, especially after that second operation where things were really bad, I could see him starting to go south. And I wish I could go back in time and kind of go through those things differently. I can’t tell you to sit here and say it would have made any impact in the decision he ultimately made, you know, a permanent decision, in my opinion, to a temporary problem.
That’s what I feel suicide is, permanent solution to a temporary problem. But I’ve done so much reflecting on that, and so have my friends. We’ve lost a lot of guys and gals to suicide. You know, I had one deployment in Afghanistan where I was gone over 12 months. It’s 13-month deployment, 12/13-month deployment. And everybody came home. We had some injuries, but everybody came home. And within two years, we’d lost three to suicide. So it’s incredibly prevalent out there. And I know I’m going on a monologue right now. I’m sorry. Oh, you’re good, sir. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have some intrusive leadership or just friendship or mentorship. Just reaching out and seeing if your buddies, and even if they’re not your buddies, when you have that kind of that sixth sense that something’s not right, it’s okay to reach out and say, “Hey, man, are you okay?” And if you’re not, are you thinking if you’re hurting yourself?
‘Cause I want to help.” And you know, I never said that to Job. I wish I could go back in time and change it, but I didn’t. I saw him spiraling and I talked to him and he wasn’t sleeping. He stopped working out. He wasn’t eating well. When sleep starts to go, everything starts to go. And the biggest indication, when you’re talking to your friends and teammates about how they’re doing, a great entry point is, hey, how’s your sleep, man? Because usually the first indication, and this includes MTBI, blast injury, even PTSD and stress and burnout. One of the first things people will willingly talk about is sleep. ‘Cause there’s not a stigma associated with sleep. You ask somebody if they got PTSD, there’s a huge stigma, right? People don’t want to talk about their psychological issues or behavioral health.
But when it comes to sleep, especially because we now know sleep is so important for performance, having a performance conversation is valuable. And if somebody, when you’re asking how they’re doing with sleep, if somebody’s struggling with sleep, I guarantee you they’re struggling with other stuff. It’s a good entry point. It’s an easy way to initiate that conversation. And you know I look back at Job after that second engagement, his sleep was completely in the tank and he was taking meds for it and all this stuff. And that should have been a huge warning sign for me and all my buddies that were interacting with them. But we didn’t know what we know now back then. Well, yeah, I really appreciate you sharing this story because I’m sure it wasn’t, you know it’s never easy to bring it up.
But I hope that some people can take something from it and hopefully prevent that from happening, you know that permanent solution happening to a temporary problem. Hopefully your kind of story keeps that from happening. But I guess on the bright side, I remember we were talking, you said that Job would be on the wall of academy grads that are fallen out on the terrazzo. Is that correct? Yeah. And I got to tell you, I’m really happy to hear that that decision’s been made at the Academy and the Association of Graduates and everybody that was involved in this decision, because I firmly believe that what happened with Job and what happens with a lot of guys that the mental health and behavioral health spiral that some guys experience is a direct result of combat operations.
But yes, Job is gonna be on the wall of heroes, yeah. That’s very good news because like you said, you know just because it’s not on the battlefield, it came from something that was on the battlefield and the same honor should be given to those. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. You know, when you’re exposed to combat and before 9/11, we used to have 18 months to rest, refit, kind of heal from physical wounds and behavioral health wounds, if you had them. 18 months was a long time. After 9/11, for a lot of guys, it became this port and starboard type thing where you deploy for six months, be home for six.
And when you were home for six, you really wouldn’t be home because a lot of the training would be done elsewhere. So imagine taking 18 months of workup training, squeezing it into six months. And a lot of that workup training involves cumulative, subconcussive issues, blast exposure, you know breaching training, all this kind of stuff. Excuse me. So after 9/11, guys did not have the ability to kind of fully recover from these, especially these kinetic deployments. And when you don’t get that chance to fully recover, it’s very easy to get stuck in what they call hypervigilance.
So if you’ve heard of your body being in a parasympathetic state, which is how you want to be you know in order to fall into a good deep sleep and get REM and everything. Or you’re in your sympathetic state, which is fight or flight. And if you get stuck in the sympathetic state, your sleep is the first thing to go. Well, what happened was what was happening after three, four rotations, these guys would get stuck in that sympathetic state or hypervigilance and their sleep would be in the tank. And if you’re never getting stage three or stage four sleep, that’s almost a type of physical torture. It is physical torture. That’s what they would do to guys back in Vietnam, get them to break. They’d let them sleep, but they would never let them get into recovery sleep. And that was happening to Job and that is a lot of these guys that are dying by suicide.
A lot of it, in my opinion, can be attributed to that. I guess to round out this episode, because I think you’ve said a lot of things that us in the military community need to hear for a really prevalent issue, what other unique advice would you give to anybody that’s looking to commission? Anybody looking to commission or go to a service academy? Just in general, whether it’s OTS, the Academy, ROTC. That leadership’s not just about you. It’s about those that you surround yourself with. In my experience, the best leaders were those that went out of their way to know all their teammates at the command, especially the enlisted teammates.
Notice I didn’t say officers enlisted, they’re all teammates and you’re all after the same mission. And when you go around your command and you know people’s names, and you know their wives’ names, and you know their kids’ names, and you know what their interests are, it’s amazing. It’s amazing what those people will do for you and for the command. Those officers that show up to a command and say, “Hey, this is how we’re gonna do it.” And the reason we’re gonna do it that way is because I said so, people will do what they are told. You know, they’re in the military, they know how to follow orders and they’ll do it. But that is one type of leadership that does not– I never saw that it succeed in the SEAL teams.
If you treat, you know, remember I worked for General Petraeus once on a deployment, and he used to say this thing. He used to say, “Everybody influences the battlespace, even the strategic corporal.” And I remember thinking, “Strategic corporal, what is that?” And his point was that everybody can have a strategic effect. Even the most junior person on the battlefield, even the most junior person at the command can have a strategic effect. And if you don’t believe me, just think of if they do something wrong and it gets on CNN, right? You got the CNN effect, right? And if it’s bad, that can have strategic consequences. Well, the same is true for good things too. There’s a Medal of Honor recipient, a living recipient.
His name’s Britt Slabinsky, nicknamed Slab. The Roberts Ridge mission as well, correct? Yes, he was. Very good, very good, Andrew. He actually spoke at NCLS this past year. Oh, God, Slab’s amazing. Great, great guy, great leader, an American hero. He has a saying that I love. See if I can get right. You’re never too junior to have the best idea in the room, and you’re never too senior to be wrong. You’re never too junior to have the best idea in the room. That can mean tactically, operationally, or strategically. You’re never too junior to be that guy. And you’re never too senior to be wrong. And that’s great for officers to keep in mind.
You might be absolutely convinced that the way you’re going to do this A, B, or C, this mission, whatever, is the way to go. And you might be wrong. And you need, being a good leader means surrounding yourself with good people. You always hear that, but actually listening to them too. ‘Cause you might be wrong. Well, sir, I have never heard that, but I will try my best to live by it because I agree with it fundamentally. But I really appreciate your time and everything that went into getting this set up and your vulnerability and sharing difficult experiences, I think it all went to a good purpose. So thank you. Hey, Andrew, thank you very much for having me on. And to all your listeners there at the Academy, hang on, before you know it, it’ll be gone.
I graduated 31 years ago, and it seems like it was yesterday, man. Well, thanks for coming on, sir. Thank you.
