John’s conversation with Mark Zinno on Hazard Ground Podcast

Episode Description

After an inter-service transfer and cross-commissioning from the U.S. Air Force to the U.S. Navy in 1992, John Doolittle transferred into the Navy. From 1996 to 2017, John was assigned to various SEAL Teams and conducted multiple deployments throughout the European, African, Pacific, and Middle East theaters of operations. Most of his Navy career was focused on our military’s reaction to 9/11; a busy time for John and his family. John’s last duty station in the Navy was at U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), where he led the Preservation of the Force and Family (POTFF) program supporting the 73,000 personnel making up the USSOCOM enterprise. After 25 years in the Navy, he retired from the SEAL Teams, and started speaking to organizations and teams about the importance of resilience, leadership, and trust.

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Transcript

You’re listening to the Hazard Ground Podcast with service members from across the military sharing their stories of combat and survival. And now, here’s your host, Mark Zeno. Welcome in to the Hazard Ground Podcast. As always, we appreciate you joining us each and every week before we get to this week’s episode featuring a former Navy SEAL who made an amazing swim across the English Channel in honor of a fallen teammate. We’ll get to that story and a whole lot more coming up in just a moment. Our normal announcements as always. And I keep repeating them because you guys are not following. You’re not following us on all the social media sites, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Hazard Ground and Hazard Ground Podcast. Tell a friend. Tell them to do the same. Certainly appreciate it. Please continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel as well. Give a thumbs up and a like to the content there. Don’t forget about our promotion with Amazon. You go to our website, hazardground.com and go to the bottom of the homepage. Click on that Amazon button right there. It’ll redirect you to Amazon. You can do all of your normal Amazon shopping, whatever you want to buy. We’ll get a percentage of what you guys spend, then we’ll donate a percentage of that back to some of the charities and organizations you’ve heard featured on the Hazard Ground podcast. Also works from your smartphone, very simple and convenient. So if you’ve saved all your credit card information, I’ll redirect it to the Amazon app. Very, very user-friendly. As well, please continue to leave us Apple reviews. Go to Apple or wherever you get your podcast. Leave us that five-star rating. Tell everybody why you love this show. We certainly appreciate it. Getting a lot of great feedback from you guys and love sharing it with social media. Love sharing your feedback on social media as well. So we certainly appreciate it. And again, continued support of the show. Thank you guys so much for being part of this Hazard Ground community.

All right. This week’s guest is actually somebody that I have had a chance to interview before for a different company. But his story is absolutely worth telling again. Spent 25 years in the Navy, retired as a captain. 22 of those years were spent inside the Navy SEALs and Special Operations. His final assignment was in SOCOM, which is the Special Operations Command as part of the Preservation of the Force and Family Unit, which takes care of all the people within the SOCOM family and making sure that they are okay. And it leads to what he is going to do currently in his post-military career. He completed a swim across the English Channel in honor of a fallen buddy.

That buddy is a notable individual who you may know Neil Roberts, Roberts Ridge, and the story of Tacker Gar. So he completed that swim in honor of him. And now he’s this chief financial officer of KAATSU, which is a company that specializes in rehabilitation, but specifically for veterans, neuropathic pain and dealing with amputees. Here’s John Doolittle joining us here on the Hazard Ground podcast. John, welcome and thank you so much for being here. Hey, Mark. It’s awesome to be with you again, man. Thanks for having me on the show.

It is great to be with you. And I told you this right before we started recording that the inspiration for the hazard ground is the battle of Tacker Gar. And for those who don’t know, Tacker Gar essentially became a battle because of what happened to Neil Roberts. Neil Roberts was the first Navy SEAL killed in the war on terror. The short version is he fell out of the back of a helicopter on the top of that mountain in Afghanistan and a team of Rangers was sent up there to go find him to go get him because he was all alone.

Those Rangers were then entrapped in a battle for about 20 hours on that mountain, outnumbered, outmanned. Not only did Neil Roberts get killed in action, but Jason Chapman also, who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, Medal of Honor, the Air Force Combat Controller, who there are videos out there on the internet. Just put it to that way. You could see what Jason Chapman was able to do all by himself on that mountaintop as well. So some pretty heroic actions.

And you know the story goes here, John, that I remember you know in my armory, in my National Guard armory, you know this is later on in my career, they had all these paintings, all these paintings up on the wall of you know engagements that National Guard members were involved in over the course of the years. And I kept reading about this medic from the Kentucky National Guard who was on top of that mountain, who was running IV bags back and forth, trying to keep people alive, you know in the battle Tacker Gar.

And I’m sitting there going, “That’s pretty amazing.” And so then I was obviously not doing the job that I was supposed to do. I drill one weekend and I started Googling Tacker Gar, you know ’cause us officers were always so engaged. And I started Googling it and I read this whole thing about what went on and I go, damn, why is this not a movie? Why does nobody know about this story? Well, lo and behold, I mean, it was a book. Nate’s Self, who was a former guest on the Hazard Ground, shared his story of what went on on the top of that mountain. But that’s kind of the genesis of this whole show is trying to tell those stories that never weren’t made into movies and yours is certainly part of that.

Well, until today, I mean, I’ve been listening to your stuff for a while. And until today, I had no idea, man. That’s pretty cool. Yeah, Fifi was a special guy. When I showed up at team 2 as a new guy, there were two guys on the quarter deck, and Neil was one of them. So he was my you know kind of a special mentor. I’m putting that in quotes for those who can’t see me early on. So you can imagine new guy, officer in his blues, checking in, SEAL team 2, quarter deck. And there’s Neil Roberts and a couple other guys. And yeah, I got some special treatment. But over time, I became kind of good friends with them and got to know Patty, his wife, and Nathan, his son. And yeah, that was a really meaningful experience for me doing that in memory of him. That’s what you get for being the FNG, right? Yeah, exactly, man.

Special welcome to say the least. All right. Start back at the beginning. How and why you wanted to be a Navy SEAL. Well, you didn’t initially, right? You signed up for the Navy and then found out about the SEALs? Yeah. I actually tried to go to the Naval Academy, and they said no. And I was a swimmer. And you know this is back in I’m dating myself here, but this is in like ’87 Top Gun era. And you know me and all my buddies, we wanna go fly jets.

Be might be like Goose and Maverick and all that stuff. So I applied to the Naval Academy, got shot down. And the coach at the Air Force Academy needed a guy that did fly and breast, and I was a swimmer, and one thing led to another. And I ended up going to the Air Force Academy. But when we were juniors at the academy, President Bush 41, that administration, they came out and they said, “Only the top third of the graduating class from 1992, I was a ’92 guy. Only the top third are going to go to UPT, undergraduate pilot training. And Mark, I was definitely not in the top third. And I would argue I was not even in the top 98%. I was skating somewhere at the very bottom of my class. So I reached out to our mentor. In your last podcast, the guy with the you guys talked about mentorship in the last one.

That’s huge. We can go down that road if you want. But a mentor for me was a guy named Mike Troy and former gold medalist, 1960 Olympics, Butterfly World Record Holder. And then after the Olympics in Rome, he joined the Navy. And UDT Seal or he was UDT initially. Went to Vietnam, did three tours in Vietnam. After NOM came back and became a swim coach. Long story longer, I ended up swimming for Mike. So when I realized I wasn’t going to be able to fly, I called Mike. And Mike, without skipping a beat, he’s like, “Oh, you got to go be a team guy. Get out of the Air Force. Go join the Navy.” And you know the rest is history. Yeah. Did you know anything about the SEALs, though? Yeah.

I didn’t know anything operationally about the SEALs because Mike before workouts, especially those Saturday morning workouts, those ones would be three or four hours long. And they were just brutal, man. But before those workouts, he would tell stories. And they were almost always stories about the teams. And the team stories that he would tell wouldn’t be about Vietnam ever. He’d never talk about that, but he would talk about training, and he would talk about BUDS, and he’d talk about Hell Week. And he talked about all the shit he did in the training to become a team guy. And they were great. They were so motivational, and it would just get us through tough, tough you know physical times. And that was the beginning of my, I don’t know, my understanding that no matter how hard something seems, you can always do a little more than you think you can, how powerful the mind is.

I got all that from Mike Troy, or I got a lot of that from him. Well, I mean, it’s kind of the old or not old, but the ideology that you know things don’t get easier. You just deal with hard shit better, right? Navy SEAL mantra, the only easy day was yesterday, right? So you’re used to dealing with hard stuff, and that’s kind of the whole idea. But I’m curious, because you know shared experience is one thing, but you know verbally him telling you, “Oh, this is what we did. This is what we did.” And then you get to BUDS, where you’re like, “Oh, he’s full of shit.” like Oh, my god. He was so misleading in what he told me, or was he like dead on accurate? Was it everything he said it was going to be? No, it was actually it was impressive how accurate it all was. All the stories he told. I was like, “Oh, my God. This is just like I remember it with what Mike was talking about.” And as a result, BUDS was a you made fun of me for saying this last time, but I stand by it.

The best time I had in the Navy was at BUDS with all my teammates. I mean, those guys became some of those guys are my best friends on the planet. And you know they do anything for me. I’d do anything for them. And while it was hard physically, when you’re with a bunch of guys going through something tough together, there is some magic in that. And you know I was in the fleet for a little while. I was a salvage diver. I was on junk boat. And so I knew that part of the Navy. And I knew that I did not want to go back to that part. Maybe. Yeah. BUDS was the best part of my life is akin to that colonoscopy I was awake for was my favorite time ever. So we’ll leave that alone. That said, you know I always ask this question of SEALs about BUDS because I’m just genuinely curious.

And I think the experience for everybody is different. I’ve gotten a variety of different answers. What was harder about BUDS for you, the mental or the physical? Because I’ve found in talking to a lot of guys that, you know some guys were just built to handle the physical, right? Their bodies were built to handle it all and they had to struggle with the mental and some guys are the exact opposite. Mentally, they could handle everything, but it was the swims, it was getting sandy, it was the you know physical stuff that wore them down so much that they were struggling mentally. Which one was it for you?

Oh, I mean, the mental part is by far the hardest at BUDS, by far. And when you talk to people that say the opposite, I would say you know they just weren’t physically ready for that kind of beating on their body. And I’m sure there are some people that feel that way. But for me, oh, man, it was the mental challenge. But you know what you learn there is your mind is so incredibly powerful.

Your mind’s more powerful than your body, for sure, in my opinion. But yeah, you know everybody gets through that part of their career differently. For me, it was just putting in my mind that I was not going to quit. I might get medically dropped. I might get kicked out, but I was not going to ring the bell. No. Absolutely. And then one more on BUDS because you brought it up.
That’s the other one. You know Ringing that bell, what did it do for you? Because I know that there were some guys you never thought would ring the bell that did. And then there were other guys you looked around and be like, “How did that guy get this far?” He should have rung the bell a long time ago. Yeah. Actually, it’s kind of cool. I did get to ring the bell when we graduated. Oh, yeah. I was the class officer, so I got to go up on the stage, say a few words, and then ring the class out. That was kind of cool.

But I mean, we had some college stud athletes in our class. We had some wrestlers. We had arena football. We had a pro hockey player. We had all kinds of stud physical specimens in our class. It’s the same in every class. You have all shapes and sizes. And yeah, you know you’d look at one guy that was just physically incredible, and yet second day of hell week, he’s ringing the bell and he’s gone.

So yeah, you know no real rhyme or reason to it. You really do get all shapes and sizes making it through. But I think the reason for that is because it is such more mental thing than a physical thing. All right. So you finished BUDs. You get to the team. What year, month are we talking when you first arrive at the teams? Because this is all pre-9/11, obviously, still. Yeah. So it’s ’96 when I got to team two. Go ahead. I’m sorry. No, no. Go ahead. I was going to say like there’s nothing going on in the world. Like Obviously, in the special operations world, there’s always something going on, right? You know And you have this indoctrination, as you talked about a little bit, you know of being the FNG and you know going through some of the things and learning the team life and all that. But what’s the operational tempo like when you get there and what are you expecting it to be like?

The op tempo was basically 18 months of workup training. And that included your leave, your professional development, your unilateral training, your team training, whatever interaction training you were going to do with the fleet or the Marines or whoever you were going to be with. That piece was 18 months, and then the deployment was six months. So when I came into the teams, it was this kind of magic 24-month cycle. And then once you were done with that 24 months, rinse and repeat. That was kind of the and it was a little bit different at some of the teams. Of course, the National Mission Force was very different, but it was kind of a three-in-one before 9/11. And after 9/11, as you can imagine, oof, everything changed.

I mean Let me ask you, was there anything I don’t want to gloss over that part of your career like it did matter because I think everything is formative to a certain extent. Was there anything prior to 9/11 that was significant to you? Was there a seminal moment or anything prior to 9/11, whether it was in training or an exercise, whatever it may be, that stayed? I mean, the first real operational stuff I did was in Kosovo. I really wasn’t part of Bosnia. I did go in and out of Bosnia later on, but I was thinking about Kosovo. Yeah, Bosnia was going on. And then Kosovo was kind of that call it combat reconnaissance. You know Put combat in quotes because it was all reconnaissance. It was just confirm or deny things that were going on across the border with Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, and all that.

And that was kind of the wake-up call for me to the value of BUDs because you’d go on these missions, and they’d be 48, 72, sometimes 96 hours. And you definitely wouldn’t sleep on those things. If you did, they were just tiny, tiny catnaps and you know relied on that whole Hell Week perspective of being able to operate on very little sleep. Was there a seminal moment, like you said, not necessarily, but that idea that all those missions we did in Kosovo, that was kind of a wake-up call for me like, “Oh, shit, this stuff’s kind of hard.” At least I thought it was hard then. And then you know as you can imagine, after 9/11, everything got exponentially more difficult. All right. Where are you at 9/11?

I was actually at Camp Bond Steel in the southern portion of Kosovo. Okay. What are you guys thinking? I mean, who are the guys who are excited? And who are the guys like, “Oh, God. I mean, this is you know..” because I know there was a crew of guys like, “Hey, we’re going like tomorrow. We’re leaving.” So I mean, I say that jokingly. I would never make a joke about 9/11. But you know the reaction from you and your teammates is what? Oh, I mean, I hate to say we were excited to use that word. Everybody was in shock, of course. But that deep-seated realization that all of our lives just changed, there was a crazy energy that came with that. And it affected everybody in different ways. I mean, right out of the gate, we thought, “Oh, my God. C5 is going to land up at Pristina. We’re getting on it, and we are going to the show.” That’s where everybody’s mind was. Of course, it didn’t work out that way, not right away. But yeah, it was a high-energy time. I don’t want to say an exciting time because there was a lot of uncertainty. But it was definitely high energy, high adventure.

So how long did it take for the adventure to actually begin? I mean, how long do you stay in Kosovo? When do you get back to you know home base? And what’s next? Well, at the time, I’m a lieutenant at Team 2. I’m the OIC of a platoon. And you like to think you know what’s going on operationally and strategically. And I look back on it, and I really had no freaking clue, man.
I thought we would be going to Afghanistan in months, weeks, days. And the reality was we finished our entire deployment at Kosovo. And then we went to Egypt for a pre-planned exercise. And I look back on it now, and it’s like, “Oh, okay. These exercises take hundreds of millions of dollars to pull together with NATO partners, non-NATO partners, consolidating on the I mean, to stop something like that, I understand now that you know that’s a big deal.” But back then, it was very frustrating. It was like, “God, man, we are deployed. Let’s go.” And it didn’t work out like that. I did not step foot in Afghanistan until 2010. And I didn’t do my first deployment in Iraq till 2006. So you know it’s funny how it all plays out. I was definitely not one of the earlier guys in the conflict, even though I was deployed when it happened.

I’ve talked about this a lot, but you know and I see it now too. Like you know as in ’06, you start to see the tactical, operational, strategic levels and what goes into each one and why things are the way they are. You know And to a certain extent, I think we do a bad job at explaining to tactical guys, company commanders down at the lowest level, what to do and why to do it and what it feeds into and how it all is part of a bigger plan and a bigger picture. One, because most of them I don’t think they care. I think they care more about the result. Like It was just about you getting in the shit. It was get boots on ground and let’s go, which is a tactical mindset, which I understand. But you know I think that there’s a way to sit those people down in a room before they go into an engagement to understand you know how everything feeds into one another. Because I think it changes some of your decision-making along the line. Not everything is in the tunnel vision vacuum of win the fight in front of me, which is always important. I would never diminish that concept, right, of being tactically sound on the ground, winning the battle in front of you, you know keeping all your folks alive and you know having a decisive advantage militarily, which is you know important for us. But again, I say all that long-winded BS just to you know echo the point that I think you understand now that you didn’t. So you’re bouncing around from Egypt to all these other places.

I mean, is there a part of you that’s like thinking, one, the war is going to pass me by, which was now laughable in retrospect. And then two, you know why are we not getting in the fight sooner? What’s going on? What are the steps leading you up to ’06 in Iraq? Yeah, I mean, it was kind of kind of frustrating. You know I got back from that deployment. Then I went to Germany. I was the ops officer at our unit in Stuttgart, Germany. And still, at that point, had not been in combat. And I’m watching a lot of my friends going. So it was a little bit of a struggle for me personally. I went from unit two out to NPS, Naval Postgraduate School. And that was killing me. I still had not been downrange. I used to talk to a lot of my buddies about this. That is really what drove me to call Mike Troy in frustration out of when I was out at NPS because Fifi had been killed at that point. And I asked Mike, I’m like, “God, man, I’m going insane. I got my nose in the freaking books, and a lot of my teammates are downrange, getting after it, doing what SEALs are supposed to do.” And that’s what drove me to do the channel swim in memory of Neil, to pay it back in a different way to help raise money, resources, awareness.

At that time, we had only lost a few people, but we all knew what was coming. And the UDT Seal Association and the Navy SEAL Foundation had very little funds at the time. So that’s why I did the swim to help do that, raise awareness and all that. And then after that, that’s when my operational stuff really, really started. So ironically, not until after I’d gone to school for a year and a half, after doing an ops tour in Germany, and after a deployment where I didn’t go into the Middle East. But it’s funny, man. Everything happens for a reason. And I’m actually grateful for the time we had that led up to my operational time. So it all worked out in the end. I don’t want to gloss over, Neil, and where you were when you found out and what had happened. I mean, you know this is March of 2003 that Tacker Gar goes on. But you know can you sort of give me the background of what you knew? I mean, you guys were on the same team together.

You mentioned it before, so you knew him well. Yeah. Yeah. You know did you even know he was downrange? How do you learn about how the events unfolded? What do you know? Yeah. So I was the ops officer in Germany. So we fell under SOCER. That’s Special Operations Command Europe. And we were very closely tracking what the guys were doing in Afghanistan and exactly where everyone was and all that. So I mean, we definitely knew what was going on. We were providing personnel and equipment to different locations, most of it going into Kandahar. So I was in Germany when I found out about Neil and about Roberts Ridge and about the whole aftermath of what happened at Tarker Gar. But yeah. It’s tough.

I mean, you know again, when you look back on it and you understand how the events unfolded, is there anything that you reflect on and look at either as a bad decision from leadership or a bad military decision or something that might have been able to have been done differently to maybe produce a different outcome? Or do you kind of look at it as, “Look, this is just what it is, and it’s the way it happens, and it’s combat, and we accept that as the list of possible outcomes.” Initially, I looked at it the second way you said, “Hey, it’s combat. A lot of bad shit’s going to happen.” But as we started seeing all the after action reports and the hot washes and all the information flow that was happening inside NSW and across special operations.

Across the greater military, actually, there were so many lessons that came out of that operation that honestly changed a lot of how we trained, changed how we communicated, changed how we planned. A lot of good outcomes came out of a very, very bad situation. And you know I think one of the things that and it’s not just an NSW thing, but it’s so SOCOM wide. We learn much better how to integrate with the conventional force and how important deconfliction is with all of the planning. Because we couldn’t have National Mission Force doing something where the conventional military and the rest of SOCOM and partner forces not at least being aware of who’s doing what in the battle space. That was a big lesson learned out of that. Yeah. I mean, listen, you know joint operations has been around since the ’70s, right? I mean, it’s not early ’70s.

You know And you learned your lesson from Eagle Claw, for those who don’t know, that was the attempt to save the hostage crisis in Iran, the attempt to go get the hostages and what a mess that was. And I say all this to say, you know having spent time in the Special Operations Community with the Green Berets and understanding that, you know I have a small window into that whole thing about you know not only from a point I mean, I can remember sitting in meetings with SEALs and Green Berets and everything else, and you’re sitting there and you’re starting to see this conglomeration of all these massive forces and getting them to speak the same language sometimes was just difficult.

And then even at that point, you know I’m a low-level guy on the ground, but I’m out there running my own missions in other guys’ battle spaces. And I can remember you know running up on other American forces, them trying to stop my convoy. And I’m sitting here like, “you know This is all bad. You can’t be here.” I’m like, “Okay, I don’t really believe that that’s how this works. I wear this uniform you do. I’m not here to hurt you. Let me go.” And again, you know that’s minor compared to what you’re talking about, but it’s just sort of the evolution of joint operations I don’t think will ever stop.

Depending on the conflict we’re in and where we are and who we’re up against and what the enemy brings to the table, I think are all going to play a continual factor in how we conduct joint operations. But yeah, lessons learned, I guess, right? Yeah. Lots of lessons learned, man. Holy cow. It’s funny you bring up Tehran in the revolution and the hostage crisis. We were living over there, man. I was a kid. I was nine years old in ’78 when all that started. We were living in Tehran.

My dad was on an AT&T contract to completely revamp the communications network in the capital of Iran back when the Shah was there. I always like to talk about this stuff because I think a lot of people nowadays, they think of Iran as bad, bad, bad. There are some incredible people there, man. And we had a great relationship with Iran before the Ayatollah got rid of the Shaw and made him leave. But yeah, a little plug from my dad’s book, Cooda Fez, Goodbye Iran.

He wrote a book during COVID. Just great, great, great story about our family. Look what’s going on there now. I mean, you know they’re on the brink of another revolution for a different reason, so. Yep. Yep. Inshallah, as they say. Inshallah. Inshallah. Okay. I want to spend one more moment here with Neil you know just because I want you to talk about how it affected you.
You know One, obviously, you lost a good friend, and that’s got to be gut-wrenching. I assume it did not quell your appetite to get into the fight at all by any stretch of the imagination. But you know does it change anything about your mindset because of what happened to Neil? Yeah.

I think everybody goes through these different phases of grief, right? And anger is definitely one of them in retribution. I think that was felt across the force, not just for Neil, but all the incredible Americans that were lost in those few days. Yeah, it just makes you hungry, man. It makes you want to train harder. It makes you and your team want to become better and more effective. And everybody becomes more focused. And that’s what we were feeling in Germany at the time, was, “Holy shit, this just got real.” And everybody was just fired up and fired up. So when you are in Germany, obviously, this is ’03.

Just chronologically, I mean, you didn’t go to graduate school before Iraq, right? Was that after? Yeah. I was in Monterey before I ever stepped foot in Iraq. Monterey, California? Yeah. For grad school? Yeah. For fricking grad school. Yeah. Then take me through because this is the same time while we’re sitting here talking about, Neil, this is the same time you decide to swim the freaking English Channel.

Yeah. I mean, how do you arrive at this genius idea? Hey, I blame Mike Troy for this. So I was a middle distance sprinter growing up, and that’s what I did at the Air Force Academy. And you know I was a swimmer. It’s kind of kind of what I knew. And Mike was the one that said, “Hey, swim across the freaking English channel.” I’m like, “Mike, I don’t know the first thing about marathon swimming.” And he said something that always stuck with me. He said, “You know, no matter how hard it is, if you’re doing it for a purpose bigger than yourself, you will absolutely make it across.” And then he said, “If you have any question of whether this is the right thing to do, call his wife.” And that’s what I did. I called Patty. I was like, “Hey, I just got this crazy idea from my old swim coach, former team guy,” and all that. And Patty, it was an emotional conversation, but at the end of the day, she was like, “Yeah, please do it. Please do it. He would love it.” I mean, look, if you’re not comfortable sharing some of the details of it, I certainly understand. What made the conversation so emotional? That was my first time speaking with a Gold Star family member. Yeah. And now, you know jump forward almost 20 years.

You know I’ve had a lot of those conversations. A lot of us had. But at that point, that was my first time. And I was in Germany, so I was not at the memorial ceremony for Neil. And that was my first time talking to Patty since it all happened. And her emotion you know just struck a chord with me. And I was like, “Oh, fuck yeah, we’re going. We’re going to do this. I’m going to figure it out.” I went back the next day.

I went to NPS, the post-grad school, and I said, “Hey, guys, I’m going to go do this thing over in Dover. I need you to all work with it.” I didn’t ask. I told them. And God bless them, man. They made it work. They worked my schedule and whatever, and I was able to go over there and do it. Yeah. Did you tell any of your other team guys you were doing it? What’s that? Did you tell any other team guys that you were doing it? Yeah. The team guys at Monterey knew I was doing it. The SF guys knew I was doing it and a lot of support. I was going to say anybody object? Anybody think it’s stupid? Anybody thought it was like you know? Yeah. Probably my parents, my wife, my sister, all the family members that knew you know my background in that sport and how tough it was going to be. But yeah, it was a pretty crazy experience.

But I got to tell you, man, because I had not been in combat, I just had this nervous energy in my life at that point. I had to freaking do something, man. I had to do something. I couldn’t get out of the orders that I was at. You know how the Navy works in the military? You know They’re not invitations. They’re orders. They tell you to go do something. You’re going to go do it. You’re there for a year and a half. You just got to make the best of it. But I needed the nervous energy I had in my life at that point was crazy. Crazy. So I started training for it. And when I start training for it, that’s when I realized how tough it was going to be. That was interesting. So just so everybody understands, you know again, and I know this because I’ve had this conversation with you.

You didn’t just walk off the shore on the English Channel and said, “I’ll see you guys in France.” That’s not how it right. You went from England to France, right? Is that how you did it on that side? Yeah, from Dover to Calais. I saw this. There was a boat like you know traveling alongside you the whole way. You weren’t left to your own devices to become shark bait along the way. And there were breaks in between, right? Like You stopped and got on the boat, or tell me the whole deal again. Okay. The whole deal. I’ll summarize it as quickly as I can. So you can’t wear wetsuits, so there’s no rubber for it to count as an official channel crossing. You can have on a Speedo and a latex or rubber cap and earplugs. That’s it. You can throw on some Vaseline under your armpits and stuff if you want to do that. But for it to count, no rubber, no neoprene.

So Monterey is a good place to train for that because the water temp is between 58 and 60 degrees. Cold, dude. Yeah. So you know it’s good training temperature, though. And before you can do oh, trust me, dude. I had no idea what I had gotten into because in order to even get one of the pilot boat slots, you have to have shown documentation that you’ve done a 10-hour immersion swim in water under 60 degrees. And I was like, “Okay. Well, I guess that’s going to have to be doable. I’ll work my way up to it,” thinking that I would be able to do that in a few months. So my first swim in Monterey, without rubber, I lasted how long do you think I lasted, man? An hour. Five minutes. Oh, Jesus. Five minutes. And I started jackhammering in the water.

I got in the truck, had the heater on full blast for an hour, just sitting there. It was miserable. And the next time I made it like seven minutes, and next time, like 10. And it took me about six months to work up to what they called the immersion swim, which is the 10-hour immersion swim. And I did that up in San Francisco. But it gets back to that conversation we were having earlier about BUDs, man. First of all, it’s amazing how much your body can acclimate to something that’s very uncomfortable. Cold water is just one example. I mean, I had been exposed to cold water at BUDs, of course, but. Not for 10 hours straight. No, God, no. No, no. And it’s very controlled, at BUDs. You know You’ve got medics and doctors and stuff walking, especially during Hell Week. You know They’re walking.

They’re checking out your pupils, your speech patterns. They’re asking your questions. So everybody’s got a very tight hold on you. It was a little different when you know I bring myself personally to that point of just on the verge of hyping out and then get out. And then the next day tried to go a little further, a little further, a little further. And it became like a mental game, so to speak. And it’s amazing how powerful your mind is because by the time you work your way up to that 10-hour immersion swim, you have yourself completely convinced. I’m good to go. I’ll make it. But yeah, it’s crazy. The mind is so powerful, man. Yeah. So when you start the swim itself, you know I don’t know. I mean, what are you thinking? How do you start?

You’ve done all the training, so I don’t think you thought you were going to fail, but you know is there any point during the swim where you’re going, “I might have bitten off more than I can chew?” No. No. Not at all. Because it’s the same thing with BUDs. Hell Week’s a great example now. When you start Hell Week, you have to and again, everybody does it a little bit different, but I would say 90% of the people because we would all talk about it ahead of time. No matter what, I’m not going to ring the bell. Now, the reality is a lot of people end up ringing the bell, but that is the mindset you got to have. So for the channel swim, once I had done that immersion swim, I was like, “All right. I’m not going to quit. I’m not going to stop.” Now, they might pull me, and if you truly hype out, they will pull you. But a very similar mindset to you know getting through something like Hell Week.

How long does it take you to get across? Yeah, it took me 12 and a half, a little under 12 and a half hours, 12 hours, 24 minutes, I think it was. I mean So 21 miles is Crowflies. You go through two title shifts, so it looks like a big S on the chart. So straight line 21, I think our GPS was 37.3, 37. Something miles. And so why can’t you do it straight just because the tide will shift you away or? Yeah, you might be swimming one knot this direction and the current might be moving five knots the other direction. It’s one of those things where it’s nearly impossible to get across that channel without a pilot boat. And the pilot boats are all fishermen that are extremely familiar with those tides and currents. So you’re not even aware of the current when you’re swimming.

What you are aware of is what the winds are doing with the currents. Because about halfway across, we had the wind go in one direction against the current. So no longer were we in swells, but became this kind of chop. And yeah, that’s when it got really interesting. I mean, can you see anything underwater while you’re doing this?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I would just say sorry to catch up. Yeah I’ve run a marathon, right? You find yourself just gazing around to kill time, right? Just because it’s better than recognizing my knees are killing me, my back hurts, I’m dehydrated. You know, like you just start looking around at whatever else is around you. What are you looking at in the water? Well, for the first three hours, I wasn’t looking at anything. It was pitch black because we started like 3:34 in the morning, just with the way the tides and currents were working that day. And then as the sun starts coming up, I’d say the visibility was about 10 feet. And as you go over these big, giant jellyfish, you just hope that you’re not going to run into one of them. But it’s weird, man. They float down below the water. So I never hit a single jellyfish. But some of those things got the size of like coffee tables.

It’s pretty crazy. Wow That’s the only thing I saw. I saw a ton of jellyfish, and then you can hear they have these high-speed ferries that go across back and forth from Calais, France, to Dover. And these high-speed ferries, they’re so damn loud. So when they’re like two, three miles away, they sound like they’re almost on top of you. So you hear a lot of that coming and going. And yeah. Did you see the boat that was tailing you the whole way? Yeah, you put it off to the side, whichever side you’re breathing. If the wind’s blowing, it’s a diesel boat, so you don’t want to be too close to it. But you want to be downwind of it but not downwind behind where you’re getting the fumes. But you try to use the boat to break down some of the chop. And so when you breathe, you can see the boat. And if the boat starts getting too far away, you know you need to turn that direction.

If the boat starts getting too close, you know you need to go the other direction. So yeah, the pilot boat, it’s not really a chase boat, but it’s guiding you the entire way. Do you get a sense of how close you are to shore? Is there a way you can see, can tell that you’re actually going to do this? The one thing they tell you well, they tell you a bunch of shit. But one of the things they tell you is whatever you do, don’t look forward. Just swim. Just watch the pilot boat. That’s all you need to look at. Don’t look behind you. Don’t look ahead of you. And then, you know of course, as you start getting as we start getting close, the whole idea is to I know we’re deep diving on this, but it’s kind of funny, man, this part. When the ideal swim starts at Dover and ends at this point that sticks out about three-quarters of a mile called Cape Grenade, that’s where you want to hit.

But it’s very, very difficult to hit that exact point. But if you hit that point, that’s the shortest point across the channel. But they tell you, whatever you do, don’t look forward at those cliffs at Cape Grenade because it can be an illusion. And that’s exactly what happened to me. I look up and I see the cliffs of Cape Grenade. I was like, “Yes, we’re getting close, man.” And you know I keep swimming for another five minutes. I look up again, and there’s the cliffs again, but they seem a little bit smaller. And I keep swimming. I look up, and now they’re definitely small. So you have this sensation when you miss it, like I did, that you’re swimming backwards. And it’s a total mind screw with you, man. I mean, just one more question on this whole thing. Well, two more, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is there a point where you stopped actually you know doing your regular freestyle swim stroke and just pick your head up and look around and then keep going again? Or are you just nonstop machine energizer bunny, just bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, the whole way?

You got to be Energizer Bunny because as soon as you stop, you start getting cold. So the water temp was 58 degrees. It was like I think it was 57 in Dover and 59 when I finished. It kind of slowly warmed up going across. But as soon as you stop, everything starts getting cold. So you have these feeding periods. And the way we did it is they would throw this polypro line out in front of me every 20 minutes. I’d swim over it, turn over on my back, and start kicking like a banshee while I was downing like a water bottle full of whatever. So that way, you never stop moving. Once you stop moving, you’re done. You get it to the other side and you put your feet on the ground for the first time where you can walk. Crawl. Well, that too. When you can barely pull yourself onto shore. I mean, it’s got to be the most amazing feeling in the world. Yeah. It was really cool. But this was right after Lance Armstrong had won God, I don’t know which tour it was he won, how many you know but I had this big American flag on the side of my cap, and I climb up on the beach, and I’m ready for all these guys to you know gather around me. Congratulations in French, you know just big hugs and stuff.

Mark, nothing, nota, zip. There’s like people on the beach and they’re just scowling at me. And up on the cliffs, my wife, my mom, and two sons at the time, Ryan was a baby. God bless Katie. I don’t know how she did this, but she went with me on this whole adventure and took our two boys who at the time were infant and two or three. And they’re up on the cliffs, and they’re trying to navigate to where I’m going to finish. And I didn’t even know they were there. I get on the beach. No reception. I’m looking around for Katie. I don’t see her anywhere. You know Unbeknownst to me, her and my mom and the two kids are you know clamoring down some trail about 100 yards away. I look around. There’s nothing. Now I’m shivering. Now I’m cold.

So I just squat on the beach, took a nice long leak that I’ve been holding for a long time, climbed back in the water, swim back out to the boat, turn around, make our way back to Dover. Pretty anticlimactic, I guess, huh? Yeah. Until you get back to Dover and you go to the White Horse Pub, and if you complete a channel swim, they give you a free pint of Guinness. That’s it. That’s what you get. For the whole experience to get a pint of Guinness. There you go. Yeah. You get to write your name on the wall and whatever. But there was a payphone right outside the White Horse Pub. And I had Patty’s number with me. And I called her. And I mean, it was a miserable experience until that point.

And when I called Patty, man, you know tears were flowing, man. It was just it was really, really special thing. It was cool. I can imagine. Yeah. There’s purpose, right? That describes the whole thing. Yeah, I’m so overwhelmed by the whole entire thing. It just seems like insanity to a normal human like myself. Well, I’m not normal. But you get my point to a mere mortal being as me. Now that you’re done playing Frankie de Fish and you got to go back to finish up grad school, what’s different about your mindset after the swim than before? You know One of the things I got exposed to for the lead up to that swim was I really wanted to raise money, resources, awareness for what guys were going through. Not just the personnel, the war fighter themselves, but what the families were going through. And I can’t tell you how many handwritten letters I mean, this is in 2004. You know Yeah, there’s email, but I got so many handwritten letters, and I still have a lot of them just thanking me for what I was doing.

And you know Monterey south of San Francisco, and the San Francisco Chronicle did a little piece like, “Hey, here’s some guy. He’s going to go swim in the English Challenge. He’s going to try to raise some money and awareness for this cause.” And I remember seeing that article. First of all, I was uncomfortable being put in the article as, “Okay, SEAL John Doolittle.” But I got over that pretty quick when I started getting these responses. First of all, the donations that started rolling in. This is from the liberal mecca of Western United States, San Francisco, California. I mean, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. Oh God, hundreds of people were writing emails and sending checks and writing me personal notes of encouragement. And I guess to get to your point, the awareness of how much of America, even in San Francisco, how much of America supported what our military was doing in the undertaking as a result of 9/11. It was overwhelming to me, and it shifted a lot of things for me upstairs with how I approached life going forward.

Were you still so you know chomping at the bit to get into combat after the swim? Did it quell any of that? No, not really. Because you know you spend all this time and effort training for something. And you know it sounds kind of warmongerish or whatever. But I mean, come on, man. You spend your whole professional life, young, adult life to go and do something. You just want to go and do it. You just want to be tested. I mean, you know again, I don’t know. It seems like warmongering to certain people. I don’t think it is. Yeah. And knowing what I know now and knowing what we all know now, I mean, now I would look back on my younger self and I’d say, “Okay. Be careful what you ask for, man, because you’ll get it, and you’ll have some things to carry around with you for the rest of your life.” But looking back on it all, man, I wouldn’t change anything, man.

Well, let’s get to Iraq. You’re finally there. You’ve been called up to the big leagues. Where are you? What’s your mission? What are you guys charged with? I mean, I kind of know, but for the sake of the audience. Well, at the time, Fallujah was run by the Marines. So I was in a liaison position there with the Marine Corps. I was working with SOTF West, Special Operations Task Force West, and we were working out of Fallujah. I was not assigned to the team. I overlapped two NSW deployments. I wasn’t assigned to either of those teams. But due to the liaison job I was doing with the task force side and the rest of SOTF and with the Marines, kind of that whole battlefield deconflicting.

That’s what my focus was on that first deployment. And you know team guys, being team guys, you know they bring me on missions and stuff. So it was cool. But I wasn’t actually part of either of those squadrons that were there. I was in a liaison position, but fascinating job. The battlefield deconflicting that was going on was incredible. I had no idea. You know Before that deployment, I wasn’t a huge fan of the Marines for various reasons. It’s kind of how you’re bred into NSW. After that deployment, holy crap. I have the most incredible respect for that organization. Very professional, very good at what they do. And they actually changed a lot of how we approached mission planning.

Before 9/11, our mission planning cycle was like 72 and 96 hours. After working with the Marines, they had this thing called the R2P2, Rapid Response Planning Process. I might have that acronym wrong, but rapid response. And it was like something that happened. And within six hours, we would launch. And it was a game-changing approach. And a lot changed for me how I approached planning and all that kind of stuff after that deployment. Okay. But it goes back to the simple question. If you’re in a liaison role, my guess is, again, you’re not with any of the team guys. You’re sitting in a talk and in an operations center and in a lot of meetings and part and parceling things out, you’re not actually in combat yet. Well, it’s interesting. Let’s see. General Gaskin was the operations guy.

And then he shared that role with General Allen, John Allen, who later became CENTCOM Commander. And General Allen had this thing in Fallujah. He would headquartered it out of Fallujah. It was called his Helo Diplomacy Tour. So every three days, he would load up a chopper, a couple of choppers. He’d go to Ramadi. He’d load up the government of Iraq, Governor Mamun at the time in Ramadi. And he’d load up Governor Mamun’s whole entourage onto a couple of birds. And then he would fly, let’s just say, to Al Qaim, out at the Syrian border, fly all of the so the Western Euphrates Valley, the capital out there was Ramadi. Governor Mamun was in Ramadi. And he’d take all that governance out to, in this case, let’s say, alkyne. And he’d land on the ground, and he’d take me with him. So every time he did this, I got to go with him. And watching the local tribal elders have these conversations with Governor Mamun and the local governance. And I mean, it would be yelling and screaming.

But at the end of the day, and I attribute a lot of this to General Allen, his whole point was without the support of the tribal elders, what the governance in Ramadi’s trying to do is never going to happen. Never. So it was crazy successful, man. He would get those governance guys to sit in the room with the elders. And at the end of the day, the concurrence, 9 times out of 10, would be like, “Look, we just got to get rid of al Qaeda, man. We’re going to continue losing all our young men and our children to suicide bombing and whatever else al Qaeda’s got them doing. We got to get rid of al Qaeda. And you know initially, the tribal elders thought that they could take care of it themselves with the local population. But once things started really going crazy in that part of Iraq, they realized they need some help from the local governance and the coalition forces. So you remember the awakening and all that at that time? I attribute a lot of that success to what Allen was to what General Allen was doing at the time.

So while I was not on that deployment involved in direct combat, it was very valuable to see how operationally relevant, I guess, we could be as a coalition to help change the momentum of what was going on. All right. That deployment ends. You get back. Now we’re in 2007 timeframe, right? Late 2006, early 2007, somewhere in that window? Mm-hmm. What’s next? Yep. My next deployment was out of SOCOM. So I was working at SOCOM, and you know I didn’t have a whole lot of operational combat experience. And so the community said, “Hey, John, we need you to go overseas again. Go be the deputy commander for CJSOTF AP out of Bilat, Iraq.” That’s a combined joint special operations. Arabian Peninsula. Yeah. That was my command, baby. That’s where I fell under. Hey, man. Good old APO AE, the Army Post Office. Yeah. Yeah. That’s what the AE stands for. But anyway, yeah, that’s CJC. That was being run at the time by Fifth Group. And so I worked under Fifth Group for that deployment. And you know again Who was there?

Who was in Bilat at that time? Who was running CJ SOTF ? It was in ’06, right? Or was it a one star? Yeah. Yep. ’06. I don’t know if I should throw his name out there. Don’t worry about it. We’ll talk. It was all the fifth group, guys. They were the bulk of my deployment. Oh, dude. Those guys are great, man. They were getting after it. Getting after it, man. Really impressed with those guys. So Balad, you know again, LSA Anaconda for those regular Army military folks who were there. Are you guys doing kinetic action at this point in time? Yeah. I mean A lot of it, right? I was in the deputy commander position, but every night, there was something going on every night. And that area, you guys also you know went outside of a lot too, right? Well, remember CJSOTF AP was the entire Arabian Peninsula. So all of SOTF, whether it was NSW or SF or MARSOC or whoever, they all reported to that command. So it was tracking everything that was going on. And you know I never realized until that point, until working with those guys, the fifth group guys, I never realized how hard the SF guys had it after 9/11 for years after 9/11, man. Fifth Group was the first group on Afghanistan.

I mean, there were Green Berets who you know you’re talking about in the beginning of the invasion, two dudes sitting on a mountaintop, calling on airstrikes nonstop by themselves for days on end, waiting for relief. I mean, to use a Navy term, those guys were port and starboard for the longest time, man. Six months at home, six months gone. Six months home, six months gone. And when they were home, they weren’t necessarily home. Because a lot of training was away from home stationed for those guys. And I know a lot of. Well, and just for the background, part of that, you know each FS group is assigned a region of the world. Fifth group has Southwest Asia. That’s their area of expertise. So it was natural that they were the first group to go and it made sense that they were you know part of that whole deal. Yeah. Yeah. Those guys deployed a lot. My hats off, all of SF, all of SOTF. But being part of an SF group for deployment was very eye-opening for me. Yeah. I mean, is this where you get your first true taste of you know kicking in doors kind of combat?

No, that was in Fallujah because the guys would take me on you know they felt bad for me, man. When I was in that Fallujah thing, they’re like, “God, you’re hanging out with fricking General Allen in the Marines, and you’re doing staff stuff at the talk, man. Come with us. Come out tonight.” And you know so they would do that a lot. And that was fun and got you know some stuff going on with that. But the Belida deployment, you know some of the same thing. You know I’d get on the bird and fly out to see different guys. But at the end of the day, yeah, brother, it was still staff. I mean, it was combat staff, but it was still staff work, man. Do you get an appreciation for how difficult combat can be at times? I mean, and I guess I asked that question under the guise of what difficult task you had just completed swimming across the English Channel. You know Is there a way to compare the two as far as the difficulty? No. Combat is the hardest thing a human will ever go through, in my opinion. You take the lack of sleep, you pile on the stress, you pile on that cumulative subconcussive act or issue that almost all of the guys are dealing with.

So just as a quick sidebar, think of a concussion, right? If you’re in a 24-month cycle and you go on a deployment and you get your bell rung a couple of times and you come home and you’re home for a year and a half, you’re going to be you know more often than not, you’re going to be fine. Your body’s going to have an opportunity to recover. When guys came after 9/11, when the deployments turned kinetic and the guys were getting their bell rung a lot, you know just from breaching alone. And then they go home. And now you don’t have that year and a half for your body and your brain to recover. Now it’s only six months. But that six months is in no way, shape, or form, truly a recovery because you’re taking a year and a half of workup training and squeezing it into those six months. So the guys were just gone all the time. And when they were gone, they were training. They were training hard. And everything counts.

Every time you fire a Carl Gustaf, a law rocket, every time you open a canopy and a free fall jump, all of those are little concussive events to the brain. So you have blast over pressurization. You have concussive events. So that was an issue, man. Now back to your original question. So now guys are on these deployments, these repeated rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. And they’re not getting the opportunity to kind of come out of that hypervigilance state. You know You have your parasympathetic and your sympathetic being fight or flight. It takes time to come out of fight or flight. It takes time to get out of that hypervigilant state when you’re on deployment. And so now stress, concussions, blast injury, sleep, disrupted sleep cycles, sleep dysrhythmia, all this shit happening at once, and it starts to become a real issue for the force. And I don’t think it all really started coming to a head until like ’08. I think that was about the time that Admiral Olsen was like and he was the silicon commander at the time.

And he was like, “Hey, we are getting a lot of feedback on alcohol-related incidents, abuse, just a lot of things happening, like starting to have a steady climb across the forest of what was going on.” And I think that when Admiral Olsen pushed out these teams around the force to see kind of kind of take the temperature on the force and the families to feel out what was going on, I think that’s when everyone started to realize, “Okay, we can’t keep going at this pace. We’re going to quite literally kill ourselves.” So it was ’08, ’09 was an interesting time. And then when Admiral McCraven came in to so come after Admiral Olsen and Olson hands McGraven, “Hey, this is the pressure on the force that we found during all this you know peeling the onion back on the force.” Handed it to Admiral McRaven. Admiral McCraven said, “Okay, let’s do something with this.” And that’s where the acronym preservation of the Force and Family came from. And I’d love to talk about that a little bit, too, with you. I know 100% because it obviously leads into a lot of what you’re doing in your post-military career. But for your personal combat experience, you know I see you have this sort of semi-dramatic pause before to use an appropriate term, you engage the conversation.

What are you prepping yourself for? What’s going on in your mind when I ask about your combat experience? I don’t think I really was in it until Afghanistan. Afghanistan. Okay. In 2010. And that was a year-long deployment working in the Polish battlespace, in Gosney province. And that’s where I really became aware of the whole hypervigilance thing and my sleep cycle and all that stuff. That year, that was kind of fraudy. It took me a while to come back from that one. Give me an experience there that stands out to you in Afghanistan, like you know one that just when you have a sort of thought that brings you back, that flashes you back, where is it taking you? Oh, wow. We could go on for hours. I know. Listen, but there are two or three for me that are just constantly top of mind, right? Yeah. I mean, there was one that I thought was a pretty good one. I was working up in Fab Ghazni, and we had access to a caravan of vehicles. And we had our own wrecker truck. And there was a small group of guys down near the border, just right outside Fab Warrior, right at the border between Gazni and Zabel. And there were guys, it was like they were southwest of Fab Warrior, and they were pinned down. And the reason they were pinned down is they had an MRAP that they were told they could not abandon. Well, they didn’t really have the ability to abandon it because that was their ride. And so they were kind of pinned down. They were pinned down. And the guys at Warrior didn’t have a wrecker, and they didn’t have the ability, apparently, to go out and get them.

So we had that ability at Fab Ghazni, but the problem was that was like a three and a half hour drive down there over sketchy terrain and along Highway 1. Highway 1 was that road that went from Kandahar to Kabul. And if you draw a line from Canada to Kabul, right in the middle is Ghazni Province. And that road goes north to south all the way through the province. And it was you know IED Alley. There were 300 and some odd culverts on that road. And as your listeners know, the culverts are where the IEDs 9 times out of 10, that’s where they put the IEDs. And you know whenever we rolled as a convoy, if it was daylight, we’d have the ANP, the Afghan National Police with us, and they would roll in front of us. And they would physically this was kind of cool, man. Colonel Zelawar Zaheed. He’s passed away when he made general. He got in a tick and he got killed. But his guys, the ANP, would roll in front of us in broad daylight, and they would crawl down in these culverts to see if there was an IED in there. Unfreaking believable. That’s a whole ‘nother story.

Yeah. Well, you know the RCT guys, the route clearance team guys, they would roll on these culverts and purposefully either detonate them with the rollers that they’d put out in front of their trucks, or they’d find them and have EOD go and blow them in place type thing. But the ANP guys, Colonel Zelowa Saheed’s guys, they would just drive in front of us, and they’d find them, and they’d wave us down, and they’d have us drive around. They’d give us the big X, you know showing an ID. And that was just incredible. But in this scenario, the guys that were pinned down down near the Zabel border, we needed to go at night. So ANP wasn’t an option. RCT wasn’t an option because the guys were in trouble, and we had to get down there fast. And that was froggy, man. That was drive on highway one, three and a half hours, high speed, middle of the night, and get down there. And the guys did awesome and drove a wrecker down there. And as the sun was coming up, we were able to kind of surround the guys that were pinned down. We took the wrecker. We hooked up the MRAP that was just completely destroyed and got them all out of there. And the crazy part of that whole story is there were only a couple of team guys on that convoy.

That was a provincial reconstruction team tour. So I was the CEO of PRT. And so I was a frogman. The senior enlisted was a frogman. We had some frogmen that were working with the Polish Grom there locally that were with us on that op. I think we might have had one or two. Grom’s the Polish kind of our counterparts in Poland. Total studs. I love those guys. But the vast majority of what we brought down there to do that was Boston National Guard, our civil affairs team, our engineers, you know these were not SOFT operators, but they were able to do a pretty much a SOFT operation and crush it, man. I’m really proud of those guys. But we had a lot of we had a lot of froggy incidences like that. And you know it was good. Every now and then, us regular army pukes can step up and do things that were not expected, so. You know Hey, man. I’ll tell you what, man. Our senior chief, I’m not going to throw his name out there, but from day one when he was with that PRT, his goal was to be able to get them on Nods, driving on Nod.

All the stuff that we would do in a workup with land warfare. He’s like, “Hey, they’re not going to be team guys, but we’re going to do some team guys stuff.” And yeah, Tim, if you ever listened to this, brother, I really appreciate what you did because you saved a lot of cats by that training. It was awesome. Yeah. Good stuff. So the Afghan experience in and of itself is the most trying one for you when it comes to combat. When you look back on that experience, not that necessarily is there anything you could have done different. I do always ask the question, though, do you wish you had allowed yourself more decompression time while on deployment, right? Because that’s the one thing we never did. I mean, none of us ever said, “Well, I’m not going out today. I need a break.” you know Somebody else will take it. No, man.

Even a 12-month long one, when you’re in it, the inner back to that energy, it’s so high, you just never really feel that. None of us did. I look back on it now, and I realized you know there were probably some things we probably should have taken a step back and taken a knee. But man, when you’re in it, it’s just go, go, go, go. But to your question, after that deployment, I should have taken some time off. I went from that CO tour to right into another CO tour. Yeah, man. Let me ask you this. Let me ask you this. Yeah. Did you not know that you were you not aware that you needed time? And if you had been, do you think you would have asked for it anyway? I don’t think at that time, I knew. I don’t think I knew I needed some downtime. That deployment was summer ’10 to summer ’11, and it wasn’t until December ’12. And we gotta talk about this.

I think this is important. And we come back to it if you want. Oh, go ahead. In December 2012, that’s when a good friend of mine died by suicide downrange. And when that happened, we as a community, we as a community, we had dealt with a lot of stuff leading up to that, of course, and suicide was part of it. But for me personally, when that happened, that was like, “Holy shit. What is going on?” Because this guy was one of the most resilient dudes I knew. And he was a commanding officer, leading troops in combat. You know It’s kind of the pinnacle of any SEAL officers, be commanding officer, downrange, getting after it. His 14th deployment. And anyway, when that happened, I think all of us kind of took a step back going, “Okay, now, wait a minute. If that dude had a breaking point, we probably all collectively have a breaking point.” And so to your earlier question, yeah, I needed some time down after that one-year Ghazni deployment, and I didn’t give it to myself.

But I don’t think I knew at the time how important it was. But genuinely, do you really think even if you knew, do you think you would have given it to yourself? Do you think you would have went to your command and said, “Look, I can’t take this next CO assignment. I can’t do it. I’ve got to get my head on straight.” Oh. After Job killed himself? No, yeah. Well, yeah, after that, after Job had. But I’m saying you said you jumped from that one Afghanistan assignment right to the other one and didn’t take a break.

Am I getting things correct chronologically? What I’m saying is if you had recognized after the Afghanistan deployment that you needed a break, do you genuinely believe you would have said to your command, “I need a timeout?” Even if you knew that you did, and again, good, bad or indifferent. It’s not really in our DNA to ask for you know let me take a knee here on this next assignment. Yeah. I mean, it’s a hard question to answer because after having gone through Job’s gig and after having done the potive gig and being exposed to all the family issues and all the suicides and all the suicide ideations and all that stuff, my answer would be, “Of course I would ask for a break.” But you’re asking right back after that high adventure, 12 months, no, I just didn’t know. And knowing what I know now, yes. Sure. I would have appropriately said, “Hey, can I take something that’s going to give me a little more downtime?” But it doesn’t work that way. You know I think it works that way now better than it was you know 10, 15 years ago. But it’s a constant challenge. You know Yeah.

Did the suicide of your friend make you have a desire to leave the organization? I mean, did you realize that you know irreparable damage may have been done that you know you didn’t need to live this life anymore? No. No. I wanted to try and help. I wanted to try and help. I wanted to do what I could inside the organization to try and help avoid that from happening again. Now, you know for your listeners, the guy we’re talking about went to the Air Force Academy with me. His name’s Job Price. I was a ’92 guy. He was a ’93 guy. We were both at SEAL Team 2 together. So we both did the interservice transfer. He was a year junior in me, but he went through Buds before me. And we were close. And at the time, I was the CO in December 12 at our unit in Germany. He was the CO, downrange, CO of Team Four. And he had a task unit working for me. And I had guys working for him in Afghanistan. So we would have these face phone conversations kind of like this once a week. And during that deployment, some things went really south and his team lost a couple of guys and three, exactly three. And Job blamed himself a lot for that. And I remember having these conversations with him, and he wasn’t sleeping well.

You know There’s a lot of details I don’t want to go into in this podcast. But suffice to say, he was blaming himself a lot for what happened. But he wasn’t sleeping. He stopped working out. And yeah, anyway, every time we talk about Job, I get sidetracked, man, because that was a tough one for me personally. Yeah, go ahead. You know Let’s just kind of put some background to it. You know What happened with Job was it was in late 2012. You know We are at war now for a decade straight. And the level of optempo is off the charts, especially in the special operations community, which has already been asked to do a ton, but to this point in combat, is asked to do more than it ever has for longer than it ever has in any period of special operations in American history. That’s just a fact of the matter. And nobody ever bothered to stop and say, “We’re pushing these guys too hard.” In fact, they did the exact opposite. We need more. We need more.

We need more. We need more. So much so that we started trying to create more special forces, right? Yeah. You’re right. And so you know it was on a deployment that just wasn’t very fruitful, I guess, is a fair way to say it, right? You know There were people who had there were other people who had called it cursed. And I’m quoting from an article I read on all this. Called it a cursed deployment. And I can’t speak to that. I’m just you know quoting the article. I say all that to say that you know leaders when they are in a position and commanders when they are in a position of taking care of others. And that starts to go wrong. Internally, we are always going to blame ourselves. The good leaders are, right? There’s a crop of people who will play the blame game and plausible deniability and it’s not my fault and everything else.

And you know I’ve learned this in the latter part of my career. If you aren’t willing to accept the very worst of headlines and outcomes when you take command, then don’t do it. Period. If you are not willing to accept the very worst of outcomes and say, “That’s on me.” Three simple words, “That’s on me.” If you can’t do that and don’t agree to do that, then don’t take command, period. Because ultimately, that’s the only right answer to when things go wrong. Not well, this, not well, oh, if X would happen. No, oh, I didn’t get the resources they needed. Those aren’t the answers we’re looking for. We’re looking for, that’s on me. And the people who believe that accept that burden and take it within the depths of their soul. There’s no way you’re going to convince them that it’s not on them. No matter how much was out of their control, out of their decision-making process, everything else, it’s still, that’s on me. That is the responsibility that many of us assume.

And again, never having met Job and I don’t know, and I haven’t you know leave the prologue, so to speak, to you on this, but I can only assume that it’s that sort of weight that ultimately led to the decision down the road where he decided to take his own life. Yeah, I think a big takeaway from that whole experience, at least for me, was everybody’s got a breaking point. Everybody’s got a breaking point. I mean, Job was he was the go-to guy, man. He was the first to raise his hand every time they needed something when he was I don’t want to go too much into the operational details, but he was the send me guy. And people knew that. And people liked working with Job. He was funny as all get out. And he was just operationally sound, and guys liked working for him. And the fact that somebody like Job was able to break like that, I think that was a big aha moment for a lot of us that, “God, if it can happen with him, it can happen with anybody.” And it really caused a lot of us to kind of peel the onion a little bit on what we were putting the force through.

And then back to that you know very compressed workup cycle and a lot of exposure to BLAST TBI and cumulative subconcussive issues, thinking brain health here. And that was in 2012, December 22nd, 2012. And it’s not just that one event. There were other suicides with family members. There were suicides with operators. There were suicides with veterans. Of course, we all know about that. But there wasn’t a whole lot of awareness of what was going on in the active-duty force with suicide ideation and completed suicides. And it was around that time, so call it early 2013 when you know we really started getting a lot of support from Congress because in 2012, SOCOM as a force had the highest now, you got to be careful with using the word rate. But you know SOCOM now is about 73,000 personnel at the time. I think it was like 69,000 personnel. But as a rate of active duty personnel in the organization of call it 69,000, it was the highest completed suicide rate of any government organization in 2012. And I’m talking about outside the military as well, USAID, the agency, everything.

The highest suicide rate was 2012, and it was SOCOM. And that’s when I was in the well, soon after, that’s when I was in the POTIF gig. It was actually a buddy of mine, Tom was in it at that time. But that’s when we really started to see support from Congress. It was like, “Okay. Wait a minute. How can we help alleviate this?” And there’s a lot of things that came out of that, but the biggest was money. And the money went to putting resources inside operational commands. And the resources were a lot of things on the physical side. So things, strength, conditioning coach, PTs, sports psychologists, things like that.

But more on the behavioral health side, we started seeing the ability to embed counselors, LCSWs, licensed clinical social workers, operational psychologists, not just active duty, but contracted resources in that world and embedding those resources into operational commands. I think that truly started to turn the tide because then what you started to see was inside a command, having a counselor inside that command, and the commander or the senior enlisted advisor leveraging that counselor, the more junior guys and gals, seeing the leadership leveraging that helping resource. And then that helped with the stigma of guys getting care.
You know This whole idea you know early on when we started seeing some of these active-duty suicides happening, this whole idea of, “Well, just have people go see the shrink.” Well, going to see the shrink meant getting in your car, driving across the base, waiting in a line, you know that whole thing. And guys just didn’t want to do it. And they refused. And I understand why they refused you know because that idea of being tainted and taken off the line.

But when you took those resources sorry, man, I’m kind of on a soapbox here. But when you took those resources and you embedded them in the command and the male-female counselors and psychologists that were using the gyms and using the same chow hall and in the hallways with the guys, then the trust factor was built. And people started using the and it’s a constant. It’s a long road and it continues. But that really started in 2000, I’d say ’13 is when we really started to see the benefits of that. And yeah, that’s helped a lot. All right. So you have you know loss at this point in your career between Neil Roberts, Job Price, you know that is very, very close to home. Lots of guys. Lots of guys.

Yeah. And just the two that we’ve talked about. And you start to see you know even if you’re not realizing you’re showing us you know all the post-concussive blasts and everything else. And everything is cumulative, right? There’s no escaping it. It’s all compounding to one another. They’re not separate incidents anymore. At this point, they are all related in some size, way, shape, or form. Before you end up taking the job at POTIF, are you thinking that I’ve had too much? You know Are you starting to realize that the weight of all this is you need to transfer your focus from this part of your career to a different part? Yeah. I mean, when I came back from that Ghazni deployment, it actually was over 12 months because there was some other stuff that we were gone for. So I came back from that, and my middle son, Ryan, pulls me aside and goes, “Hey, Dad, can you not do that again, maybe? Because you missed two of my birthdays.” And that’s when I was like, “Whoa, whoa. Wait a minute.” And I’d forgotten about one of them. But he was right. I missed his birthday twice. And I think that was kind of the that was the beginning of, “Okay, maybe this train is nearing the final station for me.” So when I went to that POTIF job, I knew that was the last job I was doing.

When I went to SOCOM and did that POTIF gig, I knew that was my last thing. I didn’t know what was going to be next, but I knew we would be retiring out of SOCOM here in Tampa, Florida. Is that where you’re going with it? Well, yeah. I mean, I guess it was just more of I probably phrased the question poorly. Did you realize that the combat stress to you had put you to a breaking point where you needed to exfil from that and change and do something else? But I think you know what you find is that you were able to pivot into the perfect job that you needed to, not only to take a knee, but also to give you validity and sort of prevent and head off some of the problems that the force was looking at at this point in time. Yeah. And ironically, I was dealing with some of those issues myself.

And you know for about the four years after getting back from that last one to include the next CO tour, my sleep cycle was never right. For those four years, I never slept or never say never. But I rarely slept past 3:00, 3:30 in the morning. I was just on this weird thing where at 3:30 in the morning, I was up, wheels turning, everything going. And that’s when my day it didn’t matter if I went to bed at midnight or 8 o’clock at 3 o’clock in the morning, 3:30. That’s just kind of when I was up. And you know a lot of interesting things happened along that road. But a couple of them drove me to finally agreeing, “Okay, I need some treatment or professional help or what have you.” And so I went into an inpatient program at James Haley VA up in North Tampa. And that was a godsend, man, because I did not realize how jacked up I was. But that’s part of the journey, right? I think a lot of guys go a while in not realizing how bad it really is for them. And once I got the sleep better, everything got better. And that’s one of the things I always tell people is if you’ve been in this world for five years or 35 years, it doesn’t matter.

The sleep piece, in my opinion, is the most important thing to get back on track. Because if the sleep gets back on track, the short-term memory gets back on track. The blast injury, the you know concussive syndrome, everything gets better. And I did that while I was at SOCOM before I got out. And it prepped me for transitioning out of the military. But I’d encourage guys that while they’re still in, get fixed, whether you’re talking orthopedically or mental health, behavioral health, get as fixed as possible before you get out. Because once you’re out, it’s very hard, man. Especially if you start going into another career because all of our, I don’t know, our natural inclination is our type alpha foot on the gas. The foot’s either on the gas or it’s off. And when you transition out of the military, most of us are going to put our foot on the gas because we want to succeed. And we want our new team to appreciate us. And we want our new team to value us. And the way you do that is you put your foot all the way down on the gas and you go. And that’s a problem if you leave the military and you’re not good upstairs. Physically, mentally, you got to be good. And I appreciate what the military’s done over the years to help prepare people for that transition. Some of the programs have been good. Some have been failures. I get it. But one of the success stories, I think, is this whole SkillBridge program. Are you aware of what that is? No. Okay. So SkillBridge is a way while you’re still active duty to go and become kind of like an intern for some company.

It used to be only like one or two companies in all of America did SkillBridge. And the command had to release you in order to do it. But like way at the beginning, Microsoft was one of them. So you could go work at Microsoft for four months, six months, or whatever, not get paid. It was kind of like an internship, but you were getting paid because you were still on the military’s dime. And it was a way to help bridge that transition to civilian life. The SkillBridge program, from what I understand now, is pretty significant. And most of the commands are working with personnel to give them that opportunity. So it’s pretty powerful and it helps. But that’s just one way to get yourself physically and psychologically ready for a whole ‘nother career, basically. Because most people, when they get out, you know they’re in their 50s, man. They still have a lot to give. You know That’s the world I found myself in. I was in my late 40s. I’m 53 now. I’ve been out for five and a half years. And yeah, it’s valuable to prepare yourself as much as possible. And that preparation really starts like a year before you’re done, if not sooner. Yeah. Going through it now so I can.. Are you? Congratulations on your promotion, by the way, man.

You know what I mean? Between you and me and the Hazard Ground community, I’m bummed about the next promotion I’m not getting, but you know it’s a whole different conversation. You just got to get in the right mind frame that not becoming a flag officer is not a failure. You know. Be careful what you ask for. Yeah. Well, you know there may be some of that too. Yeah. Yeah.
When you do it as long as we have and you go, go, go, and you don’t know any other gear, when someone tells you you have to stop and you don’t get to you know make that decision on your own, you feel a little bit helpless and a little bit lost. But in the same respect, you know a mentor of mine and a former guest here on the show, I reference him often because he’s a really, really sharp guy, Mike Jason. But he said to me, he goes, “For the first time in your entire military career, you get to call the shots.

So take advantage of it. You decide how this ends. You tell them where you want it to go and what you want to do and how you want it to end. And people will willfully accept you as you start walking out the door. So got to figure out what that looks like. Got to figure out you know when the end is. You know But it’s a wake-up call. It’s a different sort of wake-up call you know when you have to start planning for a life outside of a uniform that you’ve put on for more of your life than not, right? If you’re like me and you and even if you don’t include my ROTC time, still, I’ve been in uniform for over 50% of my life. I don’t know a life without it. But eventually, I’m going to. So yeah get it figured out. So speaking of which, you retire, you take off the uniform, and you know you’ve done the potif thing, and you still have this sort of strong desire to give back and help and want to do other things.

I know you’re associated with the Navy SEAL Foundation and the Frogman Swim. And then also, we mentioned at the top of the show, KAATSU. So how does all this shake out for you over the course of the next you know once you hang it up officially, how does it shake out to get all these things in place? Well, thanks for bringing up the Frogman swim. That’s near and dear to my heart, man. That’s here locally. Quick story.

Dan Knaussen, Frogman, lost both legs above the knees. When that happened, that was during one of my tours. It’s so common. There was a small community of us that came together, and we wanted to kind of raise some money for that family. We heard that the Canason family could use some help. And so that’s what we did. We put together a little swim across the bay. You know When you hear Tampa Bay frog, it’s not all the way across Tampa. It’s just from the point of St. Pete where the Gandhi Bridge is and head over about 5K, so a little over three miles to the Tampa Peninsula that SOCOM’s on. And so some of us got together. And the idea was we were hoping we could kind of have a check of about three grand to hand to the family. And so we all kind of reached out to our Christmas card list or whatever, you know just friends and family and said, “Hey, I’m going to do this thing, try to raise some resources for this guy who just lost both legs.” Total stud, by the way. So that’s what we did. We finished the swim, and it’s great. We’re at the American Legion over in Tampa. And wads of cash are coming out of pockets, handwritten checks, IOUs on bar napkins, all this stuff. And it gets put on table. And this guy, Dan, starts going through and adding it all up. And it wasn’t three grand. It ended up being about $30,000. Wow. And this is like 14 years ago. And we’re like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute. What just happened?” And it was that realization that there is a lot of people that we all know, you know friends and family.

I call it the Christmas card list, you know the people that you kind of are in contact with, but not all the time. But at least once a year, you reach out to them. And what we decided to do was go with one of the nonprofits, one of the organizations that could help us build this up. And it just happened to be the SEAL Foundation, Navy SEAL Foundation, nothing against the other foundation. There’s so many foundations doing incredible stuff. It’s just that at that time, that’s what we decided. That’s what made sense. So that’s what we did. So they agreed to kind of subsidize these swims and you know pay for the party afterwards and that kind of stuff. And what happened is each year, we started inviting more and more Gold Star families to the swim. So the way it works is early in the morning, it’s in January when it’s fricking cold. Well, cold for Florida. Yeah yeah So it starts on the Gandhi side. We do a memorial service, a reading of all the names of the fallen Naval Special Warfare operators that we’ve lost since 9/11. We got to cut it off somewhere. So since 9/11, the reading of the names, there’s a memorial ceremony. The sun’s coming up. The SOCOM jump team jumps in. Then the swim starts. Every swimmer’s got a kayaker. But to do the swim, each swimmer has to agree to raise at least $2,000 for the Navy Seal Foundation. And that money is earmarked to help with Gold Star families. So surviving spouses and kids. But what happens is most of the people because we cut it off at 150 people, 150 swimmers, 150 kayakers, 300 people in the water. We figure from a safety perspective, that’s about max.

And what’s happened is each year, the swim makes more, and more, and more. And this last January was the 14th iteration. Two of them got canceled for weather, but we still kept the fundraising going. And this last January, we made a ton of money for the foundation, north of a million dollars. And then after the swim, we have party at Hula Bay. That’s a bar in Tampa. And this last swim, we had 25 Gold Star families, so about 75 Gold Star personnel there at the finish line and at the party. And it’s freaking awesome, man. It is so cool to see these Gold Star family members that no longer have their son or their husband or their dad anymore interacting with team guys and team guy families and just the Naval Special Warfare community in general to see them all interacting, memorializing their loved one’s sacrifice to this nation. It’s just incredible. And it really hammers home the sacrifice not of the fallen, but the sacrifice of the families. It is truly one of the coolest things I’m involved with. And I’m so grateful for guys like Kurt Ott and Dan O’Shea and Rory O’Connor and his son, rest in peace. Tom O’Connor helped start this thing. And Terry Tomlin, rest in peace. I don’t know what it is, but a lot of guys have died to associate the swim, but it’s just freaking amazing, man. Thanks for letting me talk about it for a minute. No, I mean, listen, absolutely. You know How do you balance the mission and the job of SOFT? It’s Navy SEALs, but you know in general, SOFT because I think in some size, way shape, shape, or form, they’re all dissimilar but different and the same, but not.

But how do you balance that mission, the requirements of that mission, with the side effects of being one of those individuals and find a way to keep them the sharpest point of the spear without breaking the spear? Are you talking about me personally? Yeah. Well, I mean, you had the job with the preservation of the force and the families, right? You’re working with veterans now, amputees, and everything else. And you see all these gold stars. You know what happened to your friends. It’s not about what you can do different. What could have been done different? It’s what are we doing different now to prevent these things? What steps are we taking in a preventative measure to make sure that they can still be as combat effective as we need them to be without personally becoming ineffective? So how do we do that? I think I can speak to the SOCOM community by saying a way that we have made guys more effective, more resilient. Is this whole human performance program? Because all of the POTIF, it falls under the human performance umbrella.

And you know if things were in place 20, 30 years ago when we were going through training and we were going through workups that are in place now, guys would not be nearly as broken, nearly as broken. And I’m talking psychologically as well as physically. The whole approach to mental and physical health is so much better now than it was. So I mean, I’m not going to sit here and say, “Hey, you know there’s all these things that still need to be done to make it all better.” I mean, of course, you can always make it better. But it is so much better right now, Mark, than it was just as recent as 10 years ago. Sure. Let me counter with this. I’ll ask the question this way. Does the need to care for the person soften the warrior’s ability to be as good as they are?

Because, look, I mean, the fact of the matter is, is that some of this is counterintuitive. We’re there to train killers. We’re there to train people who can do things that nobody else in this world can do. And it’s a fair question to ask. I think those people have a certain mental makeup that the rest of the population doesn’t, which is why it’s small and why it’s elite. If you start giving them the same treatment that the rest of the population gets, that sort of detracts from that eliteness, if you will, or doesn’t it? I guess you understand what I’m asking now? Yeah, I think I disagree with you, man. Because I think when you take somebody that’s in that world, that was developed a long time ago. That whole training cycle, the whole way we create an assessment selection and create a special operations soldier or warrior. That was developed a long time ago when guys would I mean, the average deployment, the average number of deployments in Vietnam was two, right?

And a lot of guys just did one. You know They were drafted and they did one deployment. A lot of guys were not drafted and they did two. Or some that were drafted went and did three. You know Mike Troy, volunteer, did three deployments. That was a lot back then. Okay. Job had 14. That was in 2012. There’s guys out there that have 18-plus combat deployments. And if we learned if we didn’t learn anything from Job, we absolutely learned this. I don’t care how much of a stud you are. I don’t care how resilient you are or how resilient you think you are. Every human body and every brain has a breaking point. And knowing that and understanding that now mandates us as a nation to, in some ways, protect the guys from themselves. And that’s where this soft care not soft, but to use your word, the softer side of the care, it’s super important, super valuable. And it makes the guys more effective. I think the answer is, is that you know when you say you know you have to protect them from themselves, the idea is that in a macro level, you know you’re not getting 14 deployments. Why? Because I’m going to make sure you don’t get 14 deployments on a macro level. Your unit is physically going to take a break.

That way, much like it’s crazy how he had 14 and it took you forever just to get one, right? Like there’s an imbalance there that shouldn’t be given the nature of the assignment. So in a roundabout way we got to the answer I was looking for, at least you gave me an answer I was satisfied with, that you know it’s big, big military’s job, big Navy, big Army, you know big DOD, their job to ensure that, look, you know we need to protect these folks who don’t know how to say no from themselves. To a degree, yeah. Yeah. I agree with that. I think it’s fair. I mean, you know again, and it should be put on them. In reality, it should. But in the crossroads of political and diplomatic wishes, as war is a continual physical extension of politics, you know the guy in the suit doesn’t want to lose. The guy in the Pentagon doesn’t want to lose.

The guy on the ground, they have different goals. They have different wins. They have different ideologies. And look, the bottom line is you’re never going to bridge that gap, period. It’s impassable. They’re never going to be the same thing. They’re never going to want the same thing. So the idea of the best you can do is make the impasse something you can jump or a reasonable human can jump, right? Because you’re not going to bridge it. It’s just impossible. Yeah, it’s a tough problem. But you know hey, man, we’ve been in sustained combat operations for well over 20 years, and it’s never, ever happened in this country, in this country’s history. So there’s a bit of building the airplane as we fly it going on right now. Yeah. And the behavioral health, mental health of the force and I’m talking military-wide, is absolutely an essential continuing conversation that needs to happen because this whole 22 a day or whatever the number is now, a lot of that data comes from the Vietnam veteran population. So my opinion is that number is going to keep going up. And as a nation, now we got to work our ass off to do everything we can for these men and women that have not done an average of two deployments, but have done a lot more. Give me the elevator speech on KAATSU. I’ve had 13 orthopedic surgeries.

And the last two I had when I was at SOCOM, the PT there. Hey, Jim. How you doing, brother? He was the first one to introduce me to KAATSU. They used it for two of my orthopedic rehabs. And it’s just a way of tricking the body into thinking it’s working much harder than it is. So this is a device that you wear that it creates pneumatic elastic pressure in these bands. These bands are not tourniquets. They’re elastic, pneumatic bands. I know a lot of your listeners are listening and not watching, but I have the band in my hand, and it’s designed to give and move with the limbs. So you put these things on up high on your arms or the leg bands are bigger. You wear them up high on your legs. And what happens is that device puts pressure in this elastic pneumatic band for 30 seconds, and then it releases it for five. And then 10 millimeters mercury higher pressure goes into the bands for another 30 seconds and then releases it. And it happens over and over and over again automatically. You don’t have to think about it. You just put these things on. And then you start doing any kind of movement when the limb is fully engorged with blood.

Again, not a tourniquet. We’re not cutting off blood. We’re actually stretching open tissue. Something like blood restriction therapy, BRT? Yeah, BFR. Blood flow restriction. Yeah. So this is the original BFR that came out of Japan in the ’70s. It’s like one of those. For those people, I mean, just so basically you put these bands around and then they ask you to like they say do 10 squats real quick and you do 10 squats and then they put the bands on and they say do 10 squats again. And by the 7th, you’re like, “Oh my God, I can’t stand up.” Exactly. Exactly. Your body weight feels like an extra 225 on your shoulders. But the beauty for orthopedic rehab and for the docs, the reason they love it, is you’re getting the metabolic or you’re getting a hormonal and metabolic response of moving heavy weight, but you’re not straining the skeletal system. That’s why the rehab guys love it. But that’s not why it was developed in Japan initially. Initially, it was all about that’s the oldest demographic on the planet. It’s a crazy aging population. It was developed to eliminate sarcopenia. That’s the muscle wasting as you age. It was developed to help the aging population in Japan and for cardiac rehab. The outcome measures that came from all that are why the orthopedic rehab guys got interested.

And now, I mean, it’s a global movement. We have like 40 knockoff products out there in the industry. So you know it’s been crazy. But I love it because on the wounded warrior aspect, it helps with residual limb discomfort and pain to include phantom limb pain. So if you have a limb that’s amputated and you wear this above the limb, you’re engorging all that capillary, all that vascular tissue around the nerve endings, and the brain treats it as intense exercise at the residual limb, which helps with a lot of the neuropathic pain. So I’ve learned a lot about anatomy while being in this job, but I love it, man. It’s great company. It’s helping a lot of my teammates. It helps with sleep. That’s a whole ‘nother conversation, flight dysrhythmia and jet lag. The International Olympic Committee is using it with a lot of the governing bodies as a recovery device. There’s a lot to it. But for your listeners, KAATSU.com K-A-A-T-S-U.com, KAATSU.com. And yeah, Mark, we should make you a freaking affiliate, brother.

I mean, your tagline, KAATSU, you gots to. There you go. You’ve got to. KAATSU, you got to. Japanese word ka means increase. Atsu means pressure. So think like shiatsu. Atsu is pressure. There we go. Increased atsu pressure. Nice. Well, JD, look, you know it’s been too long since we last did this and it’s great for you to share your story again. And you know I had genuinely forgotten how much, God, you know 25 years a lot, man, you know and everything that you did in it and you know obviously the channel swim and all that. I mean, and blessings to your wife and your kids because she’s still around. Your three kids are almost all in college now. And you know a lot of people, a lot of families don’t survive 25 years of what you have gone through. So credit to your wife and your kids and you, obviously, for holding it all together and now thriving in a post-military life because I think that you know if you write down wins, if you go back and talk to your 18, 21-year-old selves and say, you know I’m going to give you all the wins that you want to get out of your military career. Family intact, life intact, you know spouse intact, whatever it may be, are the ones that I think that we don’t share enough of those wins. So blessings to her. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Mark. She’s amazing. She’s a godsend. I’m glad she never dumped me along the way. You know drown on the English Channel. Neither one. Well, that was a challenge. That was a challenge. But she’s just been absolutely incredible. We have three wonderful kids. One’s a sophomore at UCF, one’s a freshman at Auburn, and one’s a sophomore here locally in high school. And yeah, absolutely, man. You know I do a lot of public speaking, and I always close it with a picture of my family and a picture of a bunch of friends on a beach here locally at the sun setting.

And I always tell people, you know when all this military stuff’s done, when all this industry, work, professional, career, whatever, when all of it’s done, all you have is your faith, your family, and your friends. So no matter how busy you get in your professional life, in your professional career, and this applies to you, Mark, no matter how busy it all gets, especially as you transition out of the military, keep all that stuff in mind. And don’t let those relationships atrophy because when it’s all done, that’s all you’ve got, brother. So to your listeners, faith, family, friends, I always got to throw the faith in there as a good Catholic boy. Yeah And then I’ll close it with this, if you don’t mind. This is a little self-promoting plug here. If you are at a university, at a college, at a service academy, at an ROTC unit, at a Boy Scout unit, whatever, go to John Doolittle.com, J-O-H-N-D-O-O-L-I-T-T-L-E.Com.

That’s my name, John Doolittle.com. And I do pro bono speaking to all those kind of groups because I just flew back from the Air Force Academy yesterday, and I got to speak to the class of 2025. It’s the second time I’ve done this. And you want to talk about a cool feeling. Talking to people and I was in their seats 33 years ago, talking to them and being able to say, “Hey, this is stuff that I wish somebody had told me,” in their case, 33 years earlier, that nobody told me when I was in those chairs. That’s gold. And it’s a cool way to pay it forward. So I love doing that. Well, again, John Doolittle.com. Great place of information to learn more about you, you know speaking events and everything else. But look, I’m glad that we got a chance to do this. You know As a friend and somebody who kind of looks up to you a little bit for everything that you’ve done throughout your career, you know I’m always enthused for you to share your story because it has so much value. There’s so many highs and lows and getting through them all is never an easy thing to navigate.

And I think that you know when you put this sort of diversity and dichotomy of the things you’ve done throughout your entire career together, it all seems to make sense and ends up in a spot where you’re still giving back all these years later. And that to me is the ultimate sign that you’ve taken something valuable from your career and your life and are paying it forward, right? Because it’s the best thing that we can’t always continue to serve in uniform as we discussed before, but we can always continue to serve. And I think that’s something that is paramount for us. So you know I think everybody wants to, man. I would hope so. Everybody that’s served in some capacity in this country, when that piece of your career is over, that leaves a gaping hole in your psyche. And I think everybody wants to keep doing it in some way. So KAATSU and Public Speaking have been that for me. And yeah, I thank God for that company, man, because I’ve had some tough times over just these last five and a half years, and they’ve always been there for me, always been there for me. So find a good company to work with when you get out. It’s important. Keep good company around you. And on that note, we’ll say Sayonara is Japanese, I think. Domo arigato. There you go. John Doolittle, thanks for being part of the Hazard Ground. Thanks, Mark. Appreciate the opportunity to be here.

You’ve been listening to the Hazard Ground Podcast, hosted by Mark Zeno. If you have an interesting story to tell and you’d like to be on the show, send us an email at producer@hazardground.com. And if you like the show, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.