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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast as always my name is James Kearing and this week
it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show Marine and Wilderness expert Anthony
Droz and veteran multi branch military chaplain Brandon Harding.
Now in this conversation we discuss a host of topics, from each of their journeys into
the military, the family tragedy that challenged Brandon's faith, the motorcycle accident
that almost took Anthony's life, their transition stories, the healing power of the wilderness,
the importance of chaplaincy, the incredible program they now have within the military
and so much more.
Before we get to this incredible conversation as I say every week, please just take a moment,
go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and
leave a rating.
Every single 5 star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier
for others to find.
This is a free library of almost 950 episodes now, so all I ask in return is that you help
share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on
planet earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Anthony Droz and Brandon Harding.
Enjoy.
Well Anthony and Brandon, I want to start by saying thank you both so much for taking
the time and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thank you for having us.
It's a true honor and pleasure to be here with you today.
All right, well you're obviously two sitting in two very different places.
So let's start with Anthony, where on planet earth are we finding you today?
I'm currently at a wilderness base camp in North Carolina renewing a certification to
be able to lead these kind of trips that we're leading with the Navy.
So yeah, I'm in a wilderness base camp and hopefully it stays quiet for long enough.
Beautiful.
And then Brandon, what about you?
So I'm in that greater Seattle area.
I'm in a little village called Polsbo, which is across the Puget Sound from Seattle, just
sort of on the base of the Olympic National Park and Olympic National Forest, or just
right in my backyard.
Brilliant.
Well, I'm going to stay with you, Brandon, and we'll kind of pick one of you and then
the other and go through some of the background before we get to what we're going to talk
about today.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what
your parents did, how many siblings?
Yeah.
So I was born in a small town in Southern Utah called Cedar City.
I was the oldest of five children.
And I guess probably the biggest event that happened in my younger years as my father
was a pilot.
So he flew small commercial airplanes.
He ran an aviation company and did all kinds of stuff related to a small aviation company.
And one of the things that he did was he did gliding, so where you pull up an airplane
and you have a glider behind it and then it detaches and then it goes and flies around
without an engine.
And then he had become a glider instructor.
So he was teaching other people how to fly these gliders.
And one day in early March of 2000, or excuse me, 1986, he was tragically killed in an accident
and I was just 15.
So I was the oldest of five kids.
My youngest brother was four.
And that event really shook me for a while.
It was tough to work through that for a number of years.
And I would say I a little bit lost my way for a period of time.
We're going to get on to talk about the chaplaincy side that you brought to the military.
What was your faith environment when you were very young?
And then did that change at all after losing your father?
I grew up as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
They're more commonly known in the world as Mormons.
And that was the faith of my childhood.
And I think after my father passed away, for a time I was really like, okay, is this whole
faith thing a real thing?
Or is it just a nice story that's been handed down from eons past to kind of soothe people's
souls, that there is something better out there?
In complete transparency, I deeply doubted the whole faith narrative for probably five
or six years after my father's death.
I really struggled to think that there was a bigger purpose or a bigger plan.
Was there a moment, a pivotal moment where you found yourself leaning back into your
faith or was it kind of a slow drip?
It was sort of a slow drip, but I think so.
I joined the military right after high school, first in the Army National Guard.
And I went to Army boot camp and Army, the training school for the Army.
And then right after that, I realized I'm probably not going to function very well in
life in college or a regular job.
I think I'm just going to go on active duty.
And so I switched branches and joined the Air Force and went into the Air Force for
a few years.
And while I was in the Air Force, some friends of mine started having these discussions around
faith.
It wasn't anything planned.
We'd just be like hanging out in the barracks room and start talking about questions about,
you know, is there something bigger out there?
Is there a plan?
And so the four of us started going to church services every Sunday, just visiting random
faith traditions.
You know, we'd go to a Methodist church or we'd go to a Baptist church.
We went to like a revival, just trying to get a sense of, okay, is there something here?
And at one point I thought, you know, maybe I owe it to my faith tradition, to the faith
of my youth to kind of like, you know, take another look.
And so I did and started re-exploring that and essentially sort of re-engaged with the
faith of my childhood.
And that changed the direction of my life.
Like it really did change where I was headed.
When you were doing this kind of research, and it's interesting because when I did religious
education in school, we had it, I was at a Church of England school.
So, you know, the whole five years we had that class, you know, we were literally exposed
to all the different faiths.
And if you look at the UK and America as well, the real America, the one that, you know,
we don't like to talk about, the very diverse culturally, you know, beautiful integrated
country that we actually come from, you know, all the faiths are here.
And what I've seen is obviously, you know, there are great philosophies, but it depends
on the person that runs that church or that synagogue or that mosque.
What were some of the common denominators you found with the places that you immersed
yourself in that you felt drawn into versus maybe some that you felt you pushed away?
I think being drawn, you know, building on those common belief systems is there is a,
most people believe in a supreme being.
Like, you know, obviously there's those that are agnostic or atheist who've kind of, you
know, developed a different outlook, but even the non-religious, you know, people who don't
participate in a worship service or, you know, go to a church on or a mosque or anything
on a, you know, on a regular basis, that some level have a belief in something that there's,
you know, there's a higher power, there's the universe or something.
And so I was drawn to, you know, to that, that there was this common element among all
these faiths that, you know, there is something transcendent in the universe.
And you know, that definitely spoke to me.
And for most of them, there is this idea that we want to develop people.
We want to help people live a more abundant, more fulfilling, just a better life.
And I think, you know, faith traditions, when they're operating at their best, that's what
they do.
They help people live a more fulfilling life.
And so I think amongst all of them, that those are the elements that I was definitely drawn
to that, that reawakened something in me that had kind of gone dormant for a few years based
on, you know, some, some tough things that I had experienced as a younger person.
Yeah, no, I have the same exact thing.
I have kind of a universal faith.
And you know, I think I describe people, if you could, you could saw my holy book, it
would just say, don't be a dick.
That's basically, you know what I mean?
So there is that universal, you know, community, kindness, compassion, empathy, gratitude,
I think are in a lot of them.
So I think if you bury down into the nucleus of these religions, they all do say the same
thing, but sometimes people interpret it and go, ah, God loves everyone except the gays.
It's like, okay, hold on, I'm out.
I disagree.
It's going to deviate from that kindness and compassion again.
Yeah, for sure.
All right.
Well then Anthony, let's go to you first, get the the kind of genesis of your through
line.
Tell me where you were born and tell me a little about your family dynamic, what your
parents did, how many siblings.
I was actually born very far from any type of mountains.
I was born in central New Jersey.
And I never thought that I would be an individual that walked many days in the wilderness and
spent a lot of his life in the wilderness.
I didn't know much about it when I was a kid.
I've got a handful of sisters, the second to youngest, the only boy.
And growing up, my parents were divorced from from the time I can remember.
They split up very young.
My father was an army infantryman and he struggled very heavily with the loss of my brother who
was his first firstborn son.
While he was stationed in Germany, my brother drowned basically straight out of my dad's
arms.
And and that sent him into a whirlwind of depression.
And back then we knew nothing about PTSD.
And it wasn't a thing that the military even focused on.
And it was kind of the you know, take a teaspoon and suck it up kind of deal back then.
So he struggled really heavily.
And I you know, we often have this thing when we talk about suicide where you say, you know,
people quit or or their demons one or my dad went to war every day for you know, for years
and years and years with his demons.
And one night he just didn't win.
You know, I mean, he he put it around through his head.
And that was the end of that story.
And I was, you know, about to turn 12 years old.
It was about 30 days before my 12th birthday.
So obviously, Christmas that year was ruined.
Christmas every year thereafter was ruined.
I fell into a long, a long decade, two decade depression.
You know, my dad was my wrestling coach growing up.
He was my best friend.
He was my superhero.
I watched him on TV as a kid who is an executive protection.
So I watched him on TV at MTV Music Awards.
And and in practice, I watched him groom young men into warriors as a wrestling coach.
So him leaving abruptly in such a traumatic way left a very deep and visceral scar on
my heart and my soul.
And so my childhood was marred.
You know, my childhood was stunted.
My development was stunted.
I was very angry.
And I did what I own, what I what I thought he would have wanted me to do.
And I did what I thought I had to do.
And I followed in those footsteps.
I like to say that I I just chose a better uniform and going to the Marine Corps as opposed
to the Army.
But I also I also went to the infantry in the Marine Corps.
And so that was my leaving from the New Jersey, Pennsylvania area at 17 years old.
Yeah.
So that's that's a little bit of a backstory there of where I'm from.
And obviously that leads into why I'm here.
I think two areas that are very under discussed in obviously what we're going to talk about
today is the impact of multigenerational trauma on our modern day war, fire or first responder
and then their own childhood trauma as well.
And obviously with both of your stories, I mean, 12 and 15, you have significant traumas
and that's aside from divorces and other things that happen to people, too.
So I think it's such an important conversation.
I've heard this over and over again.
I've had people on here that have had horrendous combat experiences.
But when they reverse engineered it through psychedelics or leaning into their faith or
whatever their personal toolbox was, the early years were often more traumatic than some
of the things they saw in war itself.
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree.
It's very under discussed.
There is a percentage of individuals, a very large percentage of individuals that go into
the military with some type of trauma and then military trauma, whether it's combat,
military sexual trauma, cultural shock trauma that happens when you get into the military,
all these different traumas that can happen in the military.
Then it becomes a compounding effect when you get out and you're dealing with transitional
trauma.
So now you're talking about one, two, three, four, five, six traumas stacked on top of
each other.
Now you're a fully conscious and aware 25 year old human being in the world's ending,
as you know it.
And again, I fell into that very pool of individuals.
I made some very bad choices when I got out of the Marine Corps.
I was very headstrong.
I was very testosterone filled and I had been taught and trained how to fight and how to
drink and how to party and not how to calm the hell down.
So yeah, I think that there's a lot of merit to that.
And as a chaplain of decades, I'm sure Brandon will attest.
Yeah.
I saw that exact thing over and over where a young Marine would, I would connect with
him or her.
Usually it was males because I served with the infantry as well and then as we would
be having these discussions and would explore some of the effects that they were having
in combat, just like you said, as you pull that string, it's like, oh, actually its roots
are somewhere else that happened when I was nine or when I was 11 or when I was 13.
And so it was going back and helping that healing begin at that earlier age because
yeah, the military trauma was just, it was just stacked on top of other trauma.
And some folks is that the stack got too much.
They made choices that sometimes ended with their own life.
And those were always tragic.
Didn't happen in every case, but a lot of times as you pull the string on an individual's
life, the trauma that they experienced in the military was just the surface compared
to what some folks had faced as young people growing up.
We'll stay in with you, Brandon.
Your career spanned either side of 9-11.
So once you entered the chaplaincy, what have been your observations of the evolution or
devolution of the discussion and the treatment options for some of the traumas that the war
fighters that you worked with have seen?
Yeah.
So I came back on active duty as a Navy chaplain serving with CBs, which are engineers.
They're like heavy construction workers for the Navy, but they really don't do much for
the Navy.
They mostly work with the Marine Corps and they deploy into expeditionary combat environments
to do construction for the Marine Corps.
And so I joined in the spring of 2001 and just expected kind of a regular life in the
military.
It was going to have deployments and going to have things.
And then 9-11 happened six months later.
And that sort of changed everything, the whole trajectory of the next 20 plus years of my
life as a chaplain.
And so initially I think you saw when people would go down range to Iraq or Afghanistan,
when they would come back, it was sort of viewed, oh, well, if you have a combat stress
injury or PTSD, it's obviously because you just weren't tough enough.
Like you have some kind of like character flaw or you're just weak.
You're just a weak human being that just wasn't tough enough to hang in there and deal with
it.
Thankfully over the course of years, that evolved, that changed, especially as like
some senior Marine leaders came out and talked about the difficulties that they struggled
with and having that returning, coming back and going to the 4th of July fireworks and
finding themselves underneath the picnic table wondering what the heck was going on because
someone had been lighting off firecrackers or something like that, just these responses
that were uncontrolled.
And then they were like, oh, wow, maybe there is something here.
And so that was heartening to watch that evolution happen.
It doesn't mean it's perfect by no means.
I'm not here to say, oh yeah, the military is solved.
If you have a combat stress injury, people are just going to go, yay, and cheer, and
take care of you.
There is still an element of that, that maybe you're just not strong enough or you're weak
in some way, but it's changed over the course of time.
It has gotten much, much better.
And so like on one deployment in Iraq, I won't name names, of course for confidentiality
reasons, but there were senior Marines officers who were taking medications to help with their
PTSD symptoms.
They were seeking out help from psychologists, from chaplains, from other mental health workers
to deal with the things that they'd experienced.
Because when you take some of it, especially in the infantry world, if you look at a gunnery
sergeant in the infantry or at that time a major or a lieutenant colonel, they had oftentimes
they were on their five, six, seventh deployment in heavy combat every time.
And that just stacks and stacks on top of them.
So maybe their last deployment wasn't that traumatic, but maybe three deployments ago,
it was brutal.
I mean, I remember a staff sergeant that I got to know really well.
He had done four in a row combat deployments to include the big battle of Fallujah in 2004.
He was a part of that conflict and he'd gone to Afghanistan the year before that and had
been in significant combat.
So there were just some folks that were just in the mix on a regular basis.
And I think that was part of it.
I had a gunner in the Marine Corps, so it's this special title that goes with a chief
warrant officer in the Marine Corps.
But it's someone who came up through the infantry that they were a gunnery sergeant in the Marine
Corps and then they switched to the chief warrant officer program and they're known
as a gunner and they have a unique symbol on their collar.
And he told me one time we were talking, he said, you know what, I used to think that
this whole PTSD thing was a bunch of BS until I saw my best sergeant completely come apart
after his deployment to Ramadi.
He went back to Camp Pendleton and just completely decompressed, or not decompressed, but just
kind of imploded.
And he said, once I saw that happen with him, he's like, if this guy, if it could impact
him, then OK, I guess I'm a believer that combat does impact people.
And then it's not just being weak or not tough enough, but it impacts everyone.
Well, Anthony, from the other side of that, you already carry some trauma into the uniform
with you, then you're deployed to Iraq.
So walk me through the kind of the Marine's eyes of this hopeful evolution of the conversation
and tools for this problem.
That's a great question.
It's always very interesting because in the infantry, particularly, it's very taboo to
go and speak with a chaplain.
You would think that it was incentivized and you would think that this resource that we
have would be kind of push, it would push you towards it.
It would be who of the squad leaders and the platoon sergeants and the company commander
to do that.
But oftentimes on the lower level of the units, it's looked at as as Brandon alluded to, it's
looked at as weak.
It's looked at that you're weak if you have to go talk to the chaplain or that you're
tattling on something that happened.
And now I will say that there are some Marines that do use it that way.
And what's the saying?
One person can ruin it for everyone.
And so at some point along the way, the chaplains were used as that.
The chaplains were used by Marines who were trying to get out of some work or that weren't
cutting it mentally or physically.
And so they ran and they tattled or they cried to the chaplain and it ruined it for the rest
of the Marines.
So that was the that was the view when I was coming up.
And I can only speak to my era, which I was in from 06 to 10.
And that was very much of the view.
But I found it very ironic, very ironic that years later I would become such a good friend.
I mean, Brandon was the officiating at my wedding last year.
Me and me and Brandon, he's somewhere between a brother and a father.
I don't know exactly where he falls.
He's somewhere between a brother and a father to me.
And so I find it ironic that life, fate, chance, a divine appointment would have us link up
in that in that aspect.
But yes, I will back what Brandon said in that notion.
It definitely is.
It was a taboo thing.
I hope that it's not anymore.
And I certainly didn't have any long in-depth discussions with chaplains when I was in.
I think some of it had to do not all, but some had to do with a little bit of the personality
of the chaplain a little bit.
And I'm not trying to like toot my own horn, so to speak.
But I think one of the ways that I bridged that gap to get in with the Marines to where
there was like a trust that was there and I did have almost all of the Marines would
have deep heartfelt conversations with me about life.
And it was being willing to put myself wherever they were.
So I didn't go on what you would call an active combat patrol where they were like going to
go take down a house or something.
But I went outside the wire with them almost every day on meet and greet patrols on, you
know, just constantly spent as much time as I could with the Lance corporals and the corporals
because they were the ones that were outside the wire every day.
And I remember coming back on a foot patrol one time and as we came through the wire later,
like an hour or so later, I was talking to one of the guys that was up on one of the
posts because we'd go around and visit the guys on the post because that was like a captive
audience.
They couldn't go anywhere.
You know, they're stuck on post.
They go up and shoot the breeze with them.
And the guy's like, hey, I think I saw you come through the wire a little wire a little
while ago.
And I was he's like, was that you?
And I was like, yeah, he's like, but you didn't have a weapon.
And I was like, no, I'm a non combatant.
I can't carry a weapon.
And he was like, really?
So you go outside the wire every day without a weapon?
And I'm like, yeah.
And it just led to this whole, you know, deep conversation about the meaning of life and
what happened if you know you died.
And so I think part of part of, you know, being a good chaplain is figuring out how
do you bridge that gap?
Because just like Anthony said, there's this mistrust, like I don't want to be seen as
weak sauce by talking to the chaplain.
So what I did is I just made myself so common that they would forget I was even there.
Like I can't tell you how many times I would be in a conversation and guys would just be
talking like Lance Corporal's talk, which is pretty graphic and kind of rough language.
And they wouldn't even flinch that I was there.
They just sort of saw me as like, oh, the chaps is here.
And that was, you know, I took that as like a real badge of honor to kind of be included
in with the group.
And then what it led to is some really brilliant conversations with folks because I'd spend
time in all the little patrol bases where, you know, there would be 12 Marines and I'd
go stay with them for like two days.
So, you know, they would know me really well and I would know them.
And it led to some some really profound conversations with some of these young men that impacted
me and, you know, and I hope in turn impacted them.
Well, that mirrors what I've heard a lot, you know, for many years now, as far as the
the absolute need for culturally competent clinicians and or obviously, you know, clergy
because I've heard the horror stories.
So we have a thing called EAP in the first responder profession, which is like a, you
know, a government mental health, not a government, but a mental health group that the pack together
and then they're given to us as, you know, this is for your emotional support.
But it's like a Russian roulette.
Some of the people's numbers don't work anymore.
Some of them, they're, you know, waiting lists are six months long.
But I've heard so many horror stories as well from first responders sitting down in front
of them and starting to tell them their darkest thoughts and the clinician bursting into
tears or asking them to leave saying they can't help them.
So that's a really important side of the conversation is making sure that the right people are put
amongst our first responders or military.
Yeah.
And like Anthony said, like the chaplains are the first responders.
So one of the clinical psychologists that I got to know really well that informed a
lot of what I do, his name's Robert Grant and he figured out early on.
So when he started doing some work with the first Marine division back in early 2000s,
as you know, as the Marines were heading off to Afghanistan and then Iraq, he was spending
time with, with like the social workers and the psychologists.
But what he figured out real quick was they were sort of, they didn't really know what
was going on because they weren't the ones that were in the mix with the troops.
And he figured out it's actually, oh, it's the chaplains.
The chaplains are the ones who are there, you know, sort of living the life with the
Marines and they're the ones that have the credibility, hopefully if they're doing it,
you know, in a healthy way, that they're the ones that have the credibility.
And so that's where he shifted a lot of his work was equipping chaplains to go and help
to be able to be that frontline mental health worker, even though as a chaplain, you're
considered non-clinical, you know, you're not taking notes.
What you share, what anyone shares is confidential.
And this is one of the really unique things that at least in the Navy, the chaplain brings
is absolute confidentiality.
Like there's nothing someone says that I have to disclose, which is unique among all mental
health providers.
So if someone comes to me and says, I mean, they could say literally anything and I can't
disclose that.
And so people always say, well, what if, what about this?
And I'm like, nope.
Well, what about this?
Nope.
And so over the course of years, I've heard pretty much everything.
Like there's nothing someone can tell me, say to me now that's like shocking or like,
oh, wow, I've never heard that before.
I've heard it all and you have to keep it confidential.
And so I'll have a CEO that will say, oh, can't you tell me this?
And I'm like, no, I can't.
And the good ones come to understand why that's so important because the Marines need an outlet
because sometimes, you know, a Marine could be really, really struggling with something
and they think, oh, well, if I go talk to the psychologist, they're going to have to
report that up the chain of command and I'm going to get in big trouble or, you know,
something terrible is going to happen with my career.
But knowing that they have the chaplain, they can go talk to about anything, like literally
anything and it stays confidential.
That builds, you know, a real sense of trust.
And on the flip side, if a chaplain violates that confidence, it just burns everything.
Like that's the worst thing a chaplain can do.
And so hopefully they don't.
And that's unique maybe to the Navy and the Marine Corps.
I don't know if other organizations have that same type of confidentiality, but to me, that
was my most trusted or that was my superpower was having 100 percent confidentiality.
Beautiful.
Well, Anthony, I want to shift back to you and then we'll talk about the kind of outdoor
world that you inhabited for a while and then we'll bring these two kind of paths together.
Talk to me about your journey into the world of Spartan and the international nature that
you were working with.
So in 2012, I was in a near fatal motorcycle accident.
I broke my tibia and my fibia, snapped it in half and they had to put a rod down my
tibia to, you know, in times past, they probably would just cut it off.
But now with modern medicine, you know, they were able to fix me up and I was walking relatively
soon but I was in a wheelchair for about six months.
I broke all the ribs on my right side, collapsed my lung, broke my collarbone, my scapula.
It was pretty rough.
And so when I recovered from that or what I thought at the time was recovering from
that, you know, when I could drink and walk and be a knucklehead, one of the first things
that I did was I trained up and I ran a Spartan race.
And thankfully, I've always had a pretty good network.
And back then, a lot of friends and family and stuff like that were in the Spartan network.
And they very quickly kind of put me in a position to be able to get a job with Spartan
race, which I drastically needed at the time.
I was working at a casino and very miserable.
And so I ended up going on and becoming an instructor for the endurance component of
Spartan race, leading anything between four hour and 60 hour endurance and some semblance
of a survival event.
So I've worked with them in Mongolia and Iceland, in many places around the United States, leading
those endurance style events, which is it's really like a 100 mile an hour fastball of
endurance is really what it is where you it's very fast paced.
You get a gear list, but there's no deviation from the gear list.
If you don't bring it, there's going to be some semblance of a penalty.
But it does foster very, very quick team building and personal growth in individuals because
of how fast paced it is and because there's really no room for error in a lot of the things
that you're doing.
And then when you get into the longer ones, the 60 hour ones that are like in places like
Mongolia, they're just simply amazing.
Spartan has a great way of David.
David Watson is a brilliant mind and he has a great way of integrating the local culture
and the local history and all of those things into this endurance component.
In Mongolia, specifically, we had Mongolian archers, we had Mongolian wrestlers, we had
shamans come out and do shamans ceremonies and folks walked away from their altar.
You know, forever altered in a great way.
Not only did they experience a rise in self confidence and self reliance, which are the
building blocks of like kind of like who we are and who we see ourselves as, but it was
a spiritual journey as well, which is very important.
I think that those kind of events, the kind of events that Brandon and I have put together,
they focus on what I call like the four disciplines of fitness.
You've got physical fitness, you got emotional fitness, you got mental fitness and you have
spiritual fitness.
They focus on all four of the disciplines of fitness.
And that's what I've always sought to bring to an event that I put together.
I love crafting events.
I much more prefer crafting them than anything else, I think.
And I've always sought to bring that to it.
And Spartan does add an ample amount for sure.
I've had Joe De Sena on here a couple of times.
The last time was just about four or five months ago and we did it in their new headquarters
in Orlando now.
Joe was actually the one that gave me my job.
How was he?
Yeah, yeah.
I pulled him around.
So interesting story.
So Joe was challenged by a paraplegic to do an event in the way that he did an event,
which was strapped into a wheelchair.
Joe accepted.
He needed two horses.
They were like, hey, Anthony, why don't you be one of his horses, so to speak.
And so I pulled him around Opsicore's race in Ohio in a hailing storm.
And halfway or so through the event, he just stopped and he was like, hey, hold on, hold
on, hold on.
Very Joe fashion.
Hey, hold on, hold on, hold on.
And I was like, what's up, sir?
How we doing?
Are we good?
Are you feeling cold?
We had heat blankets wrapped around him to try to keep his body temperature regulated.
And he was like, no, no.
What do you do outside of this?
And I was very, again, I wasn't doing much of anything.
And I told him and he was like, no, I think you should come work for us.
After this, come see me and I'm going to give you a job.
And I was like, what job is that?
And he's like, I don't know.
I'll figure it out.
And so that's how I actually came to work for Spartan Race was literally at the hand
of Joe, who I've come to know a little bit over the years.
We randomly share emails and yeah, he's a good fellow.
But I was saying to him, because I think we talked before the pandemic the first time
and after the second time.
And I ran the first Spartan after that opened up here in Florida with Earl Granville and
some other guys that were there that day.
But what I saw was, again, a kind of commonality between the obstacle racing world and the
shared suffering in selection for, I would imagine the military, but I know fire.
And you obviously have the first couple of waves where it's competitive and those people
are off on their own and they're trying to win the race.
And then you have the other 90, 95% of people that are just getting from A to B and they're
doing it for different reasons and some of them might want to do it fast.
But what I saw, I was always with a bunch of fit lads and we'd rush to the next obstacle.
But then we'd spend a couple of minutes helping people over that were less able and then you
run again.
So it wasn't about the winning.
And by the time you get to the finish area, there's this real community, this sense of
shared suffering and unification.
And so the whole observation was how powerful that was firstly for recruiting for firefighters
and police officers and stuff.
Secondly, it was what the world needed more so during that time than ever.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I've always found the same thing.
I mean, the most inspirational people at Spartans to me aren't the people winning.
It's the people that are coming.
They're coming in first in their own mind and in their own heart because they're completing
something that they thought they couldn't even do.
And again, self-confidence and self-reliance.
Those are the building blocks of what we see ourselves as.
If you don't have self-confidence and you don't have self-reliance, which I would argue is
missing in an overwhelming sense of human beings today, if you don't have those two
things, you're going to have low self-esteem.
When you look at yourself in the mirror, you're going to be depressed.
You have to have self-confidence.
You have to have self-reliance.
And if you don't, Brandon and I both, we had what a lot of people call, it was adversity
that was not your choice.
It was forced upon you when you were young.
If you don't have that unstructured adversity when you're young, you need structured adversity
through collegiate level programs or some type of highly academic pursuit, something
that's going to challenge you on the level that it's going to give you self-confidence
and self-reliance.
Now, if you go through your whole life and you don't get at that anywhere else, you can
find it at Spartan Race.
You can find it at a wilderness expedition.
You can find it at so many different things.
If you don't get it in the military or sports or academic pursuits or firefighting, you
got to get it somewhere.
You're choosing it then.
It's chosen adversity.
I choose adversity all the time, almost every day, probably to the point where a lot of
my friends and family think I'm crazy.
They're like, why are you doing that?
Why are you?
I just crossed Costa Rica by mountain bike recently with no mountain bike experience.
Well, you're going to say no mountain bike.
That's going to be impressed for a second there.
That'd be legit.
I did not do that.
But I bought a bike two months before the race.
Spartan actually bought this company.
It's called La Ruta.
And I went and did it with zero experience.
It didn't turn out the greatest, but I finished.
Again, in my mind, I might have been like, OK, I could probably place in this thing because
I'm a little bit conceited in that notion physically.
But I got owned by like 60 year old dudes who have a gut.
And I was so confused.
But I proved so much to myself and my self-confidence, my self-reliance was boosted.
But I had to seek that adversity out.
I had to choose that adversity.
Well, Brandon, I want to go to you and pose a question for a second.
One of the areas that I feel is really needed as the next step in the mental health conversation
is the area of post-traumatic growth.
And obviously, we've been fumbling.
I mean, you've probably been in it more than me, but a lot longer than me.
But I've kind of really kind of found myself in this area about nine years ago now.
And so it was, you know, everyone's got PTSD and then, oh, wait a second, it's actually
moral injury and PTSD.
And then but it kind of still stops at that.
We've got to stop the stigma.
And what I realized through hearing not only other people's conversations, but my own.
I have I know so many people that were there with that pistol in their hand, you know,
in a bottle of whiskey and the other, just contemplating the last few moments before
some, you know, divine intervention happened.
And it just pulled them back, you know, to the normal way of thinking again.
But what I realize is we don't have any hope in the conversation if we're just talking
about stigma.
But the post-traumatic growth philosophy that I make sense to me is that if you have struggles
when you're young and by some fortune, which is what happened to me, I was almost killed
in the house fire when I was four.
Parents got divorced, another near death experience.
But I grew up on a farm and my dad was a veterinary surgeon, so we were healing animals.
I was around nature, people that came through the doors anywhere from homeless through to
members of the extended royal family.
Just all these things that you would identify as very positive healing mechanisms were by
pure fortune infused into my early life.
And so I never found myself, even though I had a very high, big highs and big lows in
my life, like all human beings do, I never found myself there.
And so when I hear the whole conversation about the processing of trauma and that post-traumatic
growth, to me, it seems like there's nothing special about the person who doesn't struggle
as much.
They just had that healing earlier in their life.
And as Anthony alluded to, you can also kind of create suffering later in a positive way
too.
But my whole idea is that if you can address that trauma, you can go through that thing.
There's a better version of yourself.
I'm going to live with my PTSD.
There's a better version of you, a superpower almost from that trauma.
So the conversation seems to be more, is it unaddressed trauma?
Because trauma is okay as long as you've addressed it.
Is it unaddressed trauma?
And if it is, then how can we identify it and inspire that person that it's worth the
work on the other side?
Yeah.
Great thoughts.
So this is something that I'm actually really, really passionate about because I'll give
you a couple of physical analogies.
So let's say James that you broke your arm and then you went to the doctor and the doctor
looked at your arm and he said, Hey, James, guess what?
You have broken arm disorder.
What would that mean to you?
I wouldn't be surprised in modern medicine to be honest.
Yeah.
What would it tell you if you had broken arm disorder?
What would the message be?
That there's something wrong with me.
There's something wrong and that it's probably always going to be messed up, right?
But if the doctor looks at your arm and he says, Oh, well, you have a broken arm, you
got an injury here.
Then the message is, well, that injury is probably going to heal.
We might have to set it.
We might have to put some pins in the bones like happened to Anthony's leg, but it's going
to heal.
So what we tell first responders, whether you're a police officer, firefighter, or military,
the message is, well, you have post-traumatic stress disorder and that sends an unconscious
message that you are broken and there's something about you that's permanent in a way that is
not healthy.
So I really prefer the term of a combat stress injury rather than a disorder so that it says,
you know, you've been injured, you know, you've been psychologically, you know, maybe even
broken or shattered, but because it's an injury, you can heal and you can get better and that
healing can take place in a variety of ways.
The most powerful ways that I've seen it have been in these nature-based experiences that
Anthony and I have done.
And it doesn't mean that someone goes on one of these trips and they never have any issues,
you know, ever again in their life, but there's an element of healing that needs to be communal.
And I witnessed this many times within the Navy and Marine Corps where the person who
was isolated outside of the team that wasn't really included, they always struggled harder.
They always had a more difficult time.
But if they felt like they were part of that group and they were able to process what had
happened as a group, that sharing of that trauma across the group normalized it in some
ways and made it feel like, oh, this is going to be okay.
You know, I'm going to be okay.
I've had the real fortune of taking some veterans groups on these wilderness trips now.
And Anthony's done similar trips as well with the same organization and getting these veterans,
many of whom have had some pretty severe trauma in their lives, and they're strangers.
They don't know each other.
And in those first few nights out in the wild as they sit around a campfire, and we have
a very structured process of how we process these things, them coming away, having hope
sometimes for the first time in their life that they're not just this jacked up individual.
Like we had a guy, I won't say his name, he came last spring to a trip that we did in
the mountains and he had every chronic problem that you could name from being unhoused or
homeless to hardcore drug use.
He was a Vietnam era Marine.
He was broken in all of the classical ways that you think of stereotypically of veterans.
Well after this trip, his whole life just reoriented.
I mean, he's just a different human being now.
You see him and his whole countenance has changed.
He's just a different guy.
And it wasn't just the wilderness trip.
There were a lot of things that came together, but the wilderness trip was the catalyst for
him making this change.
And what it did is it gave him hope, hope that he wasn't broken.
Anthony, anything to add?
Yeah, a lot to add.
But I think the most important thing that I'll kind of caveat to what Brandon was just
talking about is that it's not that the wilderness trips, and I mean, that's what helped me personally,
so I'm biased in this.
A trip with an organization in a veteran's capacity is what really helped me.
So I'm very biased to it, but I don't think that it's just the trip as Brandon alluded
to.
I think it's a bunch of different things that happen while you're on the trip.
So you're getting a detox from social media and from phones.
You're breathing fresh air.
You're getting plenty of sunlight.
Those things are kind of resetting some neurological deficiencies, most likely from being inside
all the time, not breathing through your nose a lot, breathing through your mouth, which
we know mouth breathing is a very bad thing.
There's all of those natural nature-based holistic things that are happening while you're
on course.
And then also you're being put in an uncomfortable position to talk about your feelings.
You're dealing with shared adversity with other individuals.
There's so many things that are compounding on a trip like that, that once you get out,
it's almost like you get out of the woods and you go back to the real world and you
question what is the real world?
Was I just in the real world or is this the real world?
Not to go play on the simulation theory quacks, but I mean, is it a simulation?
Is this thing that I'm living in?
Is it real?
Should I take it that seriously?
Is my mental health more important to me or is this thing that's going on over here more
important to me?
So I think that there's so many things that you need to unpack on a trip like that, especially
when you have, now there's a lot of organizations that will send people out into the woods and
they'll say that it's a facilitation based event.
Okay, but those individuals that are leading that trip, they basically just play on the
natural occurrences of nature.
When you're going out on a trip with an individual like Brandon, not to toot his horn, but when
you're going out, you're going to get, okay, here's an example.
All right, Brandon, I'm going to ask you a few questions and just give me basic numbers,
all right?
Just basic numbers, whatever first comes to the top of your head.
How many years were you in the military?
35.
How many deployments?
Six.
Okay.
And what's your degree in?
Clinical psychology.
Okay.
And how many marriage enrichment events probably have you led?
Multiple hundreds.
Okay.
How many group facilitation events have you led, like in the wilderness?
Hundreds.
Okay.
So I could go on like this probably for the next maybe five minutes, realistically with
different things asking him.
Now all of those things, if you take all of those things and then you look at that shelf
behind Brandon, all of those things in conjunction with all of those books that he's read, he's
read every one of those books, those are Brandon's toolkit, okay?
So his experience over the years and facilitation and helping individuals plus all of those books
that he's read, that's his toolkit.
Now when you go out with an individual like that, what you get is you get actual facilitation.
You get structured, you get thought evoking questions, you get systematic questions that
progress throughout the days that have actual definitive goals, and then you also get follow-up
because he also does like follow-up coaching and things of that nature.
So that is the difference, right?
So when you go with an individual like that, plus you experience all the things that nature
organically provides, you're going to have so much follow-up that you have to unpack
as you go home.
I could go on about that for probably more time than we have.
So I'll digress and chill out because I get hyped on that.
No, but they're great perspectives though.
This is what I'm talking about.
I mean, I think one of the problems is that people will try a thing and then go, it didn't
work.
And for some of them, that might be one of the last things they think, which is tragic.
But what I realized is that everyone has their unique toolbox that they need.
And understanding that it could be anything from Wilderness Retreats to psilocybin, now
you're like, okay, now I have some things to really do.
Okay, I did this one.
I did MDMA therapy and it opened the door.
And then I went and did a Wilderness Retreat with this open door and my God, this stuff
come out.
Okay, now you've got a few things.
So I think this is what's beautiful about this.
This is what gives people hope.
Stories of people who healed and then learning about the multiple ways that that can happen.
And I think it's different for every person.
It's not a one size fits all.
There's no one size fits all when it comes to transition in life, whether it be transition
from a career that you had for your whole life and you got fired or a marriage that
didn't work or getting out of the military or leaving any type of service or trauma.
There's no one size fits all.
And although I am very biased towards the way that's personally helped me, I do see
other people find healing in other ways.
And the one thing that I've become very good at as a growing man has been being a sponge
and looking at other men as not competition.
Looking at other men as like, give me what you got.
What works for you, give it to me.
Like I'm going to be a pirate about it.
I'm going to steal it from you if I can.
I'm going to adapt it to myself if I can.
And I think that is what has helped me in my transitions through life.
I mean, I've dealt with physical, I've dealt with mental, emotional.
I've dealt with all of the major traumas that went through a very big spiritual journey.
I've dealt with a lot of the transition traumas in the hardcore ways of experiencing humanity
and what it means to be human.
And I think the thing that's helped me is surrounding myself like individuals like Brandon
and like my father-in-law and like and so many great men that I've had the opportunity
to have around me.
And at a certain point in my developmental stage, I was like, these are competition.
These are guides.
These people are put in my path and in my sphere to help me.
And I think that there's a lot of young men that have their chest out like this and they're
just walking through life shoulder checking people and they don't have the awareness to
stop and think, you know, that fellow has got something for me.
That guy's got some knowledge, some guidance, some wisdom, some life to share with me.
And I guess that would be my overarching message to any young man that's listening.
Find yourself some mentors, son.
Like you need it.
I've been pulling on Brandon's coattails for a few years now.
Like, hey, give me more, man.
What you got?
That's probably going to be a sound bite just so you know, that was a great speech to the
younger men out there.
Well, Brandon, let's go to you and we'll kind of talk about how you guys met and then let's
walk through the creation of the program.
Yeah.
So a Chaplain friend of mine was hosting a deployment or not a deployment, a holiday stand
down.
And I think that's what's going on in the Corps and in most branches of the military.
Before you take a big holiday break, they always gather people together and, you know,
give some briefings and some training about some things.
And a buddy of mine named Mike, he's like, you've got to meet this guy named Rose.
Like he's coming to speak at our stand down and you got to hear his story.
Like this dude is just awesome.
Like his story is just incredible.
Kind of, you know, as he's shared about this journey of his father completing a suicide
and a motorcycle crash and just his journey, you know, of finding wellness through the
wild.
And he knew, Mike knew that I was like big into outdoor stuff, big into backpacking and
I'd had my own outward bound experience.
I went on an outward bound trip that was just for veterans in 2000 and 2010.
A bunch of veterans, we all OIF, OEF, that's went up into Maine and New Hampshire for a
week and it was incredible.
And so he knew that I loved to backpack and I'd done lots of trips on the Appalachian
Trail, not the entire trail, but just hiking in that area.
And he's like, you got to meet Anthony.
He's like, there's something about the two of you that you just need to meet each other.
And so I went and listened to Anthony's speech that day because the Marine Corps had brought
him in to share his story.
And again, I was just struck by like, yeah, this guy is somebody, you know, we need to
have a conversation.
There's like so much, you know, potential synergy here, so much like stuff that like,
wow, yeah, we got to talk.
So we met just briefly after and I introduced myself to him and we set up a meeting.
I don't remember how many weeks it was away.
It was one of the next times it was Lejeune.
So we met at a little coffee shop outside the gate and had breakfast and just started
just brainstorming about what we hope to do about kind of our both our unique paths and
the commonality of the things that we saw in life that we wanted to bring.
I'd just been put in charge of this place in the Navy called Credo.
It's an acronym.
It doesn't really have a big meaning, but what it means is I was getting, I was running
an organization that my job was to design and facilitate all kinds of retreats for leaders,
for couples, for individual Marines.
And I wanted to do a wilderness based event.
Like I'd already been talking to Outward Bound about putting something together and using
them as the go to.
And once I started talking to Anthony, I'm like, forget Outward Bound, like let's us
do this because Anthony had had three years of guiding trips at Outward Bound.
And so we brought this incredible wilderness background and experience with him.
And so we had this first meeting at this coffee shop and just sort of like laid out the outline
of what we thought this would be because both of us were huge fans of Outward Bound.
Like I did my Outward Bound trip and I was like amazed by it.
And at the same time, having already done a tour where I had designed and facilitated
retreats and led groups into the wild, I was like, man, that Outward Bound trip was awesome.
And if we tweaked it just a little bit and added some of these elements that I knew and
had been trained in, we could make it like even better.
And so that's where the partnership sort of began.
Now I'll leave, I'll stop there and let Anthony jump in.
Yeah, so throughout this event, massive event in my life, right, I was introduced to a saying,
a new saying by Brandon and it was divine appointment.
And I'm not a very religious person and I kind of shied away from the saying at first
until Brandon really artfully explained to me what it meant and what it meant to him.
And through that explanation and you could see, you could hear someone explain something
kind of like faith, but until you see them live it, it doesn't mean much.
You have to see them live it.
You have to see them be about it.
And through seeing Brandon be about it, I came to love this saying.
And so that's what that was to me.
When I was speaking that day, I was just doing what I was doing for the last four or five
years in an attempt to get the Navy and the Marine Corps to just listen to me and listen
to these things that I was saying about how we can help folks with mental health in the
wilderness.
And it was just all too synergistic, as he said.
So taking it from there, I leaned on a good friend of mine from a wilderness school to
help with the operation side of things.
And he brought in a wealth of knowledge from rock climbing and all these other things to
really kind of help cultivate and create this program.
And then Brandon and I worked on the overarching like programming side of things on the development
of the intricacies of the program and how it was going to run, how are we going to pitch
it to the unit commanders, how are we going to get them bought into it.
I developed an affliction for photography.
And so I did a lot of photography so that we could have some case in point pictures
to show folks like, hey, you're going to be on these awesome summits.
You're going to be on these awesome rock climbing things.
And we were able to captivate attention with photography.
I did a lot of writing for things.
I tried to help their program on a social media side of things.
And we really were able to create something that Brandon could correct me if I'm wrong,
but I don't think one trip went without a waiting list that was pretty extensive.
And so all throughout this evolution, we've created this amazing thing.
We've put our custom touch on it.
We've taken from our past to create this new thing.
And now there is this program in the Navy and the Marine Corps that is the first of
its kind.
It's running on both coasts.
Brandon's brought it to Washington.
He's done trips out in California now out there.
And now he's retired.
And now the sky is the limit.
Now the sky is the limit.
Now we can go to all of the different bases.
We can go to all of the different unit commanders.
And now Brandon can really speak to, hey, this works.
Here's my resume.
Get me in the door and let me talk to your folks about it.
And that really is what I'm hoping turns this toolkit that he has into a package that he
can deliver so that he can help so many more service members, as he said earlier.
We didn't walk out of the woods without anyone kind of, we had a, we had a, Brandon, do you
remember, do you remember the girl that cut her hair?
First of all, first of all, black girls don't cut their hair for a damn thing.
Right.
Like that just doesn't happen.
Like my Dominican family, they ain't cutting their hair for shit.
And this girl was just so moved by this whole event that she says, she goes, you know what?
I need, I need a physical representation to match what's on the inside.
That's changed.
Would you, would y'all cut my hair?
And we took trauma shears to this girl's hair and cut her hair and she burned it in the
fire and she left that, she left that woods with so much self-confidence, so much self-reliance.
She was a new person, visually, physically, emotionally, spiritually.
And that is, was a regular, the cutting of the hair wasn't a regular occurrence, but
that was a regular occurrence.
And so I think like what we've created through the synergy of our lives is, is truly unique.
And again, like it's, it's continued on, it's continuing on in North Carolina.
It's continuing on, on the West coast.
We're about, we're about to lead another trip June, June 5th in the Olympics.
And it'll be the first time that we've gotten to work together in a few years.
So I'm very stoked about that.
Yeah, I told you, I get hyped on this.
I'll talk all day.
Yeah, that was an amazing experience when she trimmed her hair.
I've been, I've like, okay, I got to get some kind of recording or evidence that you really
want us to cut your hair because she had this really like gorgeous, I mean, it was amazing,
these braids.
And I was like, you're going to leave the woods and go back to your unit.
She was a Sergeant in the Marine Corps.
I'm like, you're going to go back and you're like Master Sergeant is going to be like, what
did they do to you out in those woods?
And so I didn't want to like have anybody like come like, but yeah, you know, be all
upset at me.
So I'm like, okay, we got to get this documented.
But yeah, she went back and one of my favorite photos is of her and this giant smile on her
face after she had her hair trimmed, you know, all the way down.
And it was, it was gorgeous.
I mean, it was, that was an amazing experience.
Yeah.
Well, I want to go to, you know, a kind of overview of what these, you know, service
members at the moment are going through.
When I look at all the common denominators with a Venn diagram overlaps over and over
and over again, whether it's things that have worked for people's mental health journey,
or my closing question a lot of times is how do you decompress?
It's usually the same thing.
And ironically, when you charter this list, it's the opposite of what everyone was told
during the pandemic.
Your entire conversation, but it's no surprise that mental health got worse during that time.
But when I think of anything that involves community conversation, nature, daylight,
sunshine, you know, the grounding, feeling the earth with your hands on your feet, I
mean, that's just going back to our roots and it makes undeniable sense to me.
So talk to me about, you know, what your, an overview of what the experience would be
of someone going through the program.
Yeah I'll jump in and then if Anthony, you want to jump in and share too.
So I think what you just highlighted James around the pandemic and one of the real challenges
that it created was humans are built to be in relationships.
Like we are made to be in community and when we're not in physical community, it really
impacts the mental health.
So one of the overarching goals that we have when we take a group out into the wilderness
and most often they've, they don't know each other.
Like when they show up on day one and you know, we gather, you know, day one, they've
never interacted with each other before.
So what we want to do is to essentially create a tribe at the end of that week.
Like when they leave the mountains, they have brothers and sisters now.
One of the Marines who was a Sergeant Major in the Marine Corps, so you know, at the top
of the food chain on the enlisted side, he said to me, he said, Brandon, I haven't felt
this connected to another group of people since my tour in Afghanistan, which was amazing.
So that's kind of the, you know, one of the big overarching goals is to create that sense
of deep belonging and community.
And so one of the things that we do is this thing that we call a fireside chat.
And it was developed by this psychologist named Robert Grant and it is really, I mean,
it's a structured process, it's not just sitting around a fire and just, you know, shooting
the breeze, but it's a structured process where individuals really do connect at a very,
very deep level.
So there's that community piece that's happening throughout the week that really does leave
those individuals like deeply connected to the group.
And then another big component that Anthony talked about, like, you know, around the physical
thing, and I think you mentioned too, James, around the shared suffering is we make it
challenging, but it's not like, you know, it's not like going to like, you know, hardcore,
like it's not anywhere near like, you know, going to ranger school or anything like that.
You know, it's not that kind of a course, but it is hard enough.
And I think many Marines were surprised at how challenging it was.
Like they thought, oh, this is the chaplains leading this.
This is, you know, we're going to walk two feet in the woods and we're all going to sit
down and eat marshmallows or something.
And then, you know, halfway up the first mountain, they're like, mother, you know, they're just
like, what the heck is up with this?
This is not supposed to be like this.
And so there is that element of like shared suffering.
So this whole group, they're doing something hard, physically challenging.
We you know, we have this connecting piece that we built in there.
And so that begins to really build that.
And Anthony highlighted this already, but we do not let anyone take a cell phone.
Like they're forbidden to go.
So they're off the grid.
And I had a few senior Marines, you know, try to pull rank on me and like, oh, I get
to bring my phone.
And I was like, no, you don't.
And they're like, no, I get to bring my phone.
And I'm like, no, you don't.
And he's like, well, I'm going to write a complaint to the general.
And I'm like, go ahead, because I trust me more senior people to you have come out here
without phones and you're not bringing your phone.
And he, so he was, you know, all, all upset about it.
But I'm like, at the end of the day, you're not bringing your phone because that violates
one of the premises of the trip, which is to get off the grid, to not be digitally distracted.
Because even if you get out there and you don't have cell coverage, you could still
download games or movies or just stuff to like mess around with.
And we don't want that to happen.
The classic example I'll give to people is like, go to the grocery store, get stuck in
line for two minutes.
And what does everybody in the grocery store line do?
They pull out their phone and scroll social media or mess around.
We don't want any of that in the woods.
We want you when you're bored, boredom is good.
Your brain needs to be bored.
And it's good because now that you're bored, you might actually talk to the people on this
trip and develop a connection with them.
So that sort of serves part of the purpose.
I'll share one last thing and then I'll let Anthony jump in.
There's also a developmental leadership program that we incorporate into this that was designed
by two Harvard psychologists, Bob Keegan and Lisa Leahy.
They're both on faculty at Harvard and they designed a system that is to help leaders
really uncover what might be keeping them stuck and to really like grow as human beings.
And so that program is built into what we do out in the woods.
And that also produces some amazing growth because it helps people like really kind of
go internal and reflect and think about what their life is about and make some changes
based on that.
And then they have some accountability with the other group when they leave the woods
to help ensure they're making those changes.
So that's just some of what goes on.
And like I said, Anthony can share more and there's a lot to it.
I mean, there's so many layers to this, but I'll be quiet now.
So I wish you wouldn't.
So there's the facilitation piece, right?
Brandon has alluded to much of the facilitation that he had and I've been witness to so many
hours of it that I could probably lead it maybe to a tenth of the degree that he does,
but I think I can make it work and I would succeed at it.
But the other component, the other entirety of this is outdoor education, as we call it.
So infantry in the Marine Corps spends arguably probably the most time in the field out of
anybody in the Marine Corps.
Maybe with recon and some other cats might spend as much time in the field as we do,
if not more, but there's not too many.
And so you would think that an infantry Marine would know their way around the backpack and
would know their way around hot spots when you're hiking and how to pack a pack and how
to set up kind of rooms in the house when you're camping.
But no, no, no, we don't.
OK, we're not taught any of that.
What we're taught to do is suffer, endure, deal with deal with more crap with less good
stuff.
That's what we're taught how to do.
We're taught to go out in the middle of the woods and just endure.
That's it.
So when military members come into the field, right, first of all, the first thing is we're
trying to break down that stigma of the field.
We're trying to create a new experience in its entirety.
So out of the gate, one of the things that Brandon does that I love is that there's no
rank.
You drop rank at the door to the chaplain's office.
When you come in, he says, Hi, I'm Brandon.
And they go, Well, sir.
And he says, Excuse me, I said I'm Brandon.
And that's how the rest of the trip goes.
OK, we drop rank and that's at the door.
One is Bob Dylan, Sarah, Jeff.
We're all just people.
OK, and we're going to teach you by the numbers, although you may think you know what you're
doing, we're going to teach you by the numbers how to pack a pack, how to adjust the pack,
how to fit a pack, not so that you can endure, but so that you can thrive.
We want to teach you how to thrive in the wilderness.
When we are talking about cooking in the backcountry, you're not eating an MRE.
You're eating some dope meals in the backcountry that are prepared well in advance.
We have all of the materials.
We know how to cook it.
It's going to be delicious.
We're going to have a variety of different delicious foods in the outdoors that you've
never had before.
So we're going to eat as a community.
No one's going off sitting in the corner and eating.
We're all going to eat as a community like we've been doing for thousands of years, for
hundreds of thousands of years.
And that community is going to bring all of us together even more.
It's going to bind us.
It's going to bond us.
It's going to do all these things that we wanted to do.
Again, outdoor education.
We're going to teach you how to thrive in the wilderness.
We're going to teach you all the little tricks that we know.
I've been guiding on and off for the last 10 years, hundreds of trips that I've been
on all around the world.
I'm pretty sure I've picked up a little bit more than the average person that's went on
a few field expeditions.
So out the gate, a lot of people kind of put their chest out and they're like, dude, I
know how to pack a pack.
I was on the AT once.
And it's like, all right, well, struggle through it if you want to.
Or you can listen to something that I'm trying to pass to you that's trying to help you.
So we combine this wealth of knowledge that Brandon has and that the chaplains have with
a wealth of knowledge from in, honestly, I learned everything about the outdoors from
my civilian counterparts, from entities like Outdoor Bound.
I learned everything that I know about the outdoors from that because they have the ones
that have been out here doing this.
I'm currently at a wilderness base camp right now by a company called Solo getting my recertification
for my wilderness first responder certification.
And we learned so many things that are so applicable for the military that they just
don't take the time and patience to teach service members.
And so we're bringing them a lot of that knowledge so that when they go back, there's two things
that we're hoping, right?
We're hoping that when they go back, they thrive when they're out in the field.
They've learned so much new stuff that they can bring to the field with them and they're
going to thrive and they're going to be able to teach other people.
And two is that, Brandon, how many kids do you have?
Sorry, seven.
Seven.
Brandon has seven children and he takes all of them camping, right?
So he goes with a kindergarten class basically and he goes out and he goes camping with all
of his kids and his wife.
We're hoping they do that.
We're hoping that they learn something new that is so cool and exciting for them and
they feel comfortable doing it that they go home and they bring their families into that
so that when they're sitting around the fire with their families at night, they go, hey,
sweetheart, what's your high and your low of the day?
And when she goes, what does that mean?
He's like, you know, what's your high and your low?
What's your highest moment of the day and what's your lowest moment of the day?
So that they're doing what Brandon said earlier.
They're communicating at a level that they weren't before because that's what we need
as human beings, right?
So all of these things, you could take, we could take up the next 40 minutes, hour, two
hours, two days, and it will not do it justice, right?
You have to come into the woods with us for seven days or five days for you to get the
totality of the experience.
But if you take the last 15 minutes of the conversation, you smash it into a sandwich,
that's what I'm going to feed you.
Brilliant.
Well, Brandon, going back to you, another area where I've heard a lot of programs fail
is for two reasons.
Firstly, they have this amazing experience and then there's no kind of carry on afterwards.
And then secondly, the fact that a lot of times the families haven't had any of this
care so then they go back and they might feel miraculously healed and walk through with
jazz hands, but your family didn't have that kind of decompression phase or the healing
for themselves.
So talk to me about the importance of including the family in some of these areas.
Yeah, that's a great segue into kind of my favorite thing and what Anthony and I are
doing in three weeks.
So when we started doing this in North Carolina, these are infantry, Marines and mostly male
that are kind of coming out there, but I live on base.
And so my neighbors, it's all chatting up people talking to them and my wife's telling
them, oh yeah, Brandon's out in the woods again.
He's out in the woods again, which happened probably too many times.
But some of the spouses, some of the wives would be like, that is so cool.
I would love to go do that.
You should do this for couples.
And I was like, ooh, I don't know.
I don't know if I want to do this for couples.
I've done lots of marriage retreats, hundreds and hundreds of them, but it's always at a
really nice hotel and it's kind of like a spa type environment.
Like taking couples into the back country, like that's a little scary.
So decided to do it, rolled the dice and like, okay, we're going to see how this goes.
And we did the first trip with couples, so took married couples out into the wilderness.
And it was absolutely the most incredible thing that I've done professionally.
Like it was just amazing to watch what happened.
Cause some of the couples came and they weren't necessarily on the super hard struggle bus,
but there were some difficulties.
There were challenges in their family dynamic, in their relationship.
And when they took the time to come off the grid for five days and follow a similar program,
the connection that it built with those couples was, it was so impactful.
And then I was like, well, okay, we did it once.
That was pretty cool.
I wonder if it'll happen if we do it again.
So we did it again and the same experience happened.
The couples were just, they were blown away by what it did for them.
And then in turn, it blew me away to watch the dynamic as it happened.
So you're right.
There is a lot of emphasis placed on the individual Marine, the male or female who's gone and
served and so a lot of resources go to them.
But on the flip side, if the spouse isn't getting some kind of healing support in their
own world, it's really hard.
Like it's like they're not equally yoked anymore to use maybe that language.
And so by doing this for couples, it helps them be equal in the sense that they're both
experiencing this really powerful thing together.
And it's probably my favorite thing.
And so I'm super excited that the event that Anthony and I get to go do together is one
of these events for couples.
And when Anthony and I did it before, he had a serious girlfriend, but now he's coming
out as a married man.
So that's even more fun.
This is a success story right there.
Yeah, I'm going to kind of take this opportunity to kind of close my section out here, if that's
all right with you guys.
You guys can continue if you have time, but I've got to get back to class here.
They've been gracious enough to let me step out for this long.
As Brandon said, I was not a married man before.
Now I am.
Brandon came out to Park City, Utah this past year and married me and my wife, which was
an amazing thing, kind of a full circle, I guess, moment for us to kind of really solidify
our bond together kind of forever.
Not just me and my wife, but Brandon is in my wedding photos, which hang on my wall in
my home.
And so we are now bonded forever through that awesome thing that happened before the universe
and God and all of my friends and all of my family.
And my wife is also in the Navy.
She's a naval officer and she's currently studying to be a orthopedic surgeon.
She's in a residency at Duke.
So obviously it means so much to us for us to be married by Brandon.
Now I'll kind of use that as a segue to the married couples that we come that we're fortunate
enough to take out in the wilderness.
I can really remember one time we would set up repels.
And so you're going to be repelling next to your wife.
And I can really remember one time where this old salt dog is looking at his wife and she's
not repelling.
And he's like he's wanting to yell at her like one of his Marines.
And so I go up and I'm like, hey, why don't you just kind of like kind of coach her down
through it?
Not like you would one of your Marines, but like with like some compassion and kind of
just like take a step by step with her off the ledge and then step by step go down with
her.
Right.
So he listened.
They did.
And that was one of those moments where they came back later and they were like, you know,
this was the first time that we've actually had to work through something that was physically
an adversity for us.
We've had so much adversity with him deploying and with me having to continue my career with
four kids in the house.
But we've never had like a physical adversity where we had to work together and show each
other compassion for something.
And so I think like these kind of elements are the things that are that are very profound
for couples when they come out.
You know, it's not every day that you get to have a have a compassionate moment for
your spouse.
Right.
Especially if you've been married for 30 years and you've been through three war deployments
and you know, you don't have that opportunity.
And so what Brandon's doing is he's creating those physical moments as well.
But then he's creating those reflective moments around the fire later, which allow them to
see it for what it is.
And so those are very, very special to me as well.
And I'm very excited to kind of, you know, be a part of one of them as the guide, but
also as a married individual now.
You know, and unfortunately, my wife will probably be on her 15th day of night's night
surgeries so she won't be there.
But I am I am excited for that.
And I am excited for the for the future of the programs that were that we're creating
and we're continuing to create for the military.
And I hope that, you know, Brandon, Brandon has great aspirations to do these kind of
trips for civilians as well, you know, and to offer to offer his expertise, to offer
his toolbox to civilian entities that want to have these experiences, whether they be
married or not.
And so, you know, I have great hopes for that coming here in the future, you know, utilizing
some of the relationships that we have with different entities to create these types of
profound experiences in the wilderness where, you know, we all end up coming out of there
and thinking, well, you know, maybe this is the original church, you know, maybe the wilderness
is the original church.
You know, I feel more connected to whatever it is that created me when I'm here and when
I'm as Brandon said, when I'm experiencing relationships with other human beings.
And so I feel like the more people that get to go out and they get to do that, they come
back and they feel so relieved spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically, because
they went through this thing that is just so connected to us as human beings that we've
been doing forever.
So I hope that it continues forever.
And I think that's my last piece, unless there's any other finalizing questions.
No, as far as questions, I don't really have any others.
I know we got to be mindful of your time, but I just want to thank you, Anthony, for
now.
I've been talking to Brandon for a little bit, but thank you so much, mate, for coming
on the Behind the Shield podcast.
Yeah, I had a fantastic time.
It's been so great to chat with you and great to see my good friend and mentors face and
chat with him as always.
And just to continue this synergy that him and I have cultivated and created.
And I'll let you two gents get to it again.
I got to get back to this this wilderness first.
We're going to go do practical application of compound fractures in the rain.
So it's going to be great.
We're going to be we're going to be splinting with sticks and tree branches and all kinds
of hippie shit.
So it's going to be awesome.
Thank you guys so much.
I appreciate you both.
And I'll talk to you guys again soon.
Thanks, Anthony.
All right.
Well, Brandon, I got one more area that I wanted to kind of unwrap with you and then
we go some closing questions and I'll be mindful of your time and that you go as well.
But before we do, we've talked about, you know, the the the genesis of the actual healing
conversation when it comes to mental health.
And obviously we talk about a lot of the tools that are available to people now, especially
the one that you're offering.
One area that I've also really kind of been educated and learned from through this work
is a lot of the conversation 10 years ago about suicide was it's selfish, it's cowardly.
How could they?
And then I start listening to hundreds of people that were right there, you know, in
these conversations.
And I realize over and over again, you obviously have that they want the suffering to end.
I mean, that's a pretty obvious part of this.
But what I realized as well is there was a miswiring of the brain and a shift of an individual's
reality.
And over and over again, I heard basically, it's a paraphrase that that person genuinely
believed at that moment that they were a burden to their loved ones, to their family.
And so if you reframe it that way, that's your reality.
And you've signed up for a profession where you would die for complete strangers and you
truly feel that you're a burden that really reframes, in my opinion, suicide is very courageous
and very selfless.
It's wrong through the through healthy eyes.
But through that moment, it's the opposite.
So trying to remove some of that shame about that conversation in the first place.
But what have you seen as far as that element factoring into some of the people that you've
had conversations with?
And also, what about the the kind of broken element?
Because I mean, you add in all the things we talked about and then factor in sleep deprivation
and alcohol and drug use and psychiatric side effects.
You know, you have this perfect storm to shift the reality in an individual the same as it
would in a schizophrenics mind.
Yeah.
And I agree with you about this this evolution in suicide, that it's not this purely selfish
thing.
It's from my experience, what an individual when they get to that point where they're
thinking like, I really want to die, it's usually around ending their own personal suffering.
But it's beyond that.
They feel like you like you so eloquently said that they are a burden to the people
around them and that the people around them would be so much better off if they were no
longer in the world.
Now if you ask those people, they're going to be like, oh, well, you know, no, that's
so wrong.
But in that moment, because of the changes in their psychology, they believe that 100%
that life would be better if I wasn't in it, that I am creating more problems than I am
helping with.
And so I'm going to do everyone a favor by taking my life and helping them break free
of that is one of the challenges of helping people with, you know, deal with that suicide
and getting to a place where they don't see themselves as that burden that just needs
to end it because, you know, they're just creating more harm in the world than they're
creating good.
And that is one of the challenges.
But you're right, it's moved beyond like suicide is something you do when you're weak.
That's not been my experience with the folks that I've worked with.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I feel like this is what needs to be on some of the posters, you know, like if,
you know, if you're struggling, reach out, give me a call.
What does that even mean?
It's like saying, oh, I want to be fit or I want to look good.
Very, very kind of, you know, generic words.
But I feel like, you know, the conversation needs to be if your brain is starting to tell
you that you're a burden, that's a big red flag.
If you're hearing your friends say those words, that's a big red flag.
Because I mean, you know, as far as like someone struggling, I'm sure you probably heard this
a lot.
The number of times I've heard people once they'd made the decision to take their own
life and it might be a week, two weeks away, they all of a sudden felt a sense of peace,
again, because of that kind of dystopian view that their brain is telling them.
And that's where you get that, you know, I just spoke to him yesterday.
Everything seemed fine.
How did I miss it?
Now you've got the survivor going through stuff too.
Yeah.
And so that's one of those things to really like pay close attention to.
And one of the suicide prevention intervention programs, what they kind of frame this way
of like interacting with people is to view those things that we might call a warning
sign instead as an invitation.
So when you see somebody do something that you like, hmm, that's kind of interesting.
I wonder why they're doing that.
You take that as an invitation to begin asking them about things that are going on in their
life and to very clearly and directly ask them if they are having thoughts of suicide.
Because one of the myths that exists out there is like, oh, I don't want to put it in their
head.
Like I don't want to like talk to them about suicide and put it in their head.
Trust me, you're not putting anything in their head.
They're already thinking about it and have been thinking about it for months and months
and maybe even years.
And by you naming it, by just naming it and saying, hey, I've seen you do this and this
and this.
And sometimes when people are doing this and this and this, that means they're having thoughts
of suicide.
Are you thinking about suicide?
And there can be a great sense of relief on their part.
Like, oh, okay.
Wow.
I can actually talk about it.
I can tell you that I'm having those thoughts because one of the places where people get
into trouble with suicide is they isolate themselves.
Because they feel like they're a burden, because they won't talk to anybody about what they're
struggling with, that isolation leads to some really, really poor outcomes as they view
their life as just, I'm just a burden on people.
And so they won't tell anyone.
But if someone names it and begins addressing it to them, well, now they'll open up maybe
hopefully and they'll begin to share that.
And once you share a burden, the odds of someone choosing life rather than death increases
just to be able to share some of that internal burden that they've been struggling with for
so long.
Once they name it, it decreases the likelihood of suicide.
What about vulnerability in the person who is trying to help someone who seems to be
struggling?
And I've seen again through my own experiences and obviously listening to some very experienced
people, is that opening the conversation with, let me tell you about some of the dark places
I was in and a couple of things that helped.
That seems to really then create that.
And sadly, this phrase has got a kind of weird connotation to it these days, but that safe
space, like it's okay.
I'm on the same wavelength as you.
The same way as I've noticed even in conversations, if I talk to someone who swears like a sailor,
I tend to curse more and my accent changes a bit.
And if it's someone very posh, then I don't swear and my accent, you find that frequency.
So talk to me about that as far as initiating that conversation maybe with a story of your
own.
And I think that is a really profound way to come at this because one of the things
that people who are in this place of thinking about suicide is they look at other people's
lives, they see them as like, if I'm having thoughts of suicide and I see you, James,
I'm like, oh, James would never understand.
He's got his whole life is put together.
He's this brilliant person.
I'm just this piece of crap.
And so if you approach me and you say, hey, Brandon, I've noticed you're doing these few
things and I'm kind of worried about you.
And two years ago, I had this experience and I was really in this dark place.
Well, now it normalizes what I'm going through.
I'm not just this freak person that's weak and can't handle things.
I look at you and I'm like, oh, well, you've had struggles too.
And it normalizes it.
And once you normalize the struggle, then it leads people to being more open.
So being vulnerable and sharing some of your story, the caveat that I would put to it is
you don't want to say, oh, I know exactly what you're going through because even if
you've struggled with suicide or those thoughts, you don't know exactly any person's experience.
So I would not say it like that.
I would just say, hey, I've been in my own dark place as well.
And this is a little bit of my story to normalize those feelings that they might be having.
And then hopefully that leads them to open up.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, one thing I meant to ask earlier, and it kind of got lost in the conversation.
I've only had this conversation a few times, but I was listening to a Joe Rogan podcast
like about a year ago now, and there was a guru on there.
And the conversation was going back and forth and he was talking about all people are good
people.
And then I think Joe said something like, yeah, unless you own a pharmaceutical company
or something, which is exactly what I would have said too.
And then he said, no, them too.
And he said, they have the same struggles.
So I never thought about this before.
But some of the, let's say that the really tyrannical people, the heads of cigarette
companies and drug companies and the politicians that make terrible decisions that send a lot
of our men and women in uniform back home in coffins.
And yet apparently they seem to be able to sleep soundly.
And that's the extreme version.
But then you've also got the kind of really poor leaders, the micromanager, the fragile
ego types too.
You have a pretty interesting lens on over multiple decades.
What is your perception, if any, of mental health slash unaddressed trauma in the leadership
space, either create in a good leader or a poor leader based on that individual's ability
to address their own demons, for lack of a better word.
I think as I look at the leaders that I've had within the Marine Corps and in the Navy,
working for Navy and Marine Corps leaders, the best leaders tend to be those that are
able to have some vulnerability and insight.
So I'll share a quick anecdote, an interesting piece.
So one of the things that we developed in North Carolina with the Marine Corps was this
leadership development course where we would take Marines out into the woods, not for like
the really extended period of time, but for a shorter period of time and would do some
rock climbing and would do this leadership development exercise with them.
And the question that was posed to them is what's the one thing you need to develop in
order to become a better leader?
And so they would put down some attribute and they would begin to work on it.
And this process revealed an assumption that they would have that was keeping them from
developing this attribute.
And probably 80% of the Marine leaders shared the same assumption.
And the assumption was this, if I'm vulnerable, I'll be a poor leader.
And so that lack of them being willing to be vulnerable was leading to them not being
an effective leader.
And as they began to see, like actually vulnerability is not a weakness.
Vulnerability is a strength.
And when I had them reflect on the leaders that they actually trusted and respected the
most, it was always the leaders that were willing to be vulnerable and willing to, not
like inappropriately like sharing some really stuff that wouldn't, but this image of perfection
that I am perfect as a leader.
That is one of the worst ways that a leader can come across.
And so the ones that are able to have what I would call appropriate vulnerability, there's
a great book called Getting Naked.
It's not about taking your clothes off, but it's actually about in your role as a leader,
learning how to be appropriately vulnerable with the people that you lead because it inspires
confidence in them.
It inspires them to want to follow you.
I don't know if that answered your question or not.
No it did.
Yeah.
I think this is it.
I mean, I just never thought of that getting in the way, but you think about it on the
extreme level again, someone whose products are killing many, many Americans, there has
to be mental ill health to be okay with that, to be okay cashing your checks from that.
So that's the extreme one.
But then if I look at the fragile egos and the poor leaders that I've worked under, it
is that lack of vulnerability, the lack of humility, the lack of looking in the mirror
and going, as Anthony was saying, being a pirate, always learning rather than standing
there beating your chest, exuding perfection as you said.
So it may not be trauma specifically, but I mean, I think that even the leadership and
the mental health conversation have interesting parallels.
Yeah.
One other insight I would share about leadership too is that leaders that view the people that
work for them as objects tend to have the most toxic workplaces, whether that's in a
military institution or in a corporate or nonprofit environment.
If they see the people that work for them as objects in order to meet their specific
need or their goal, whether that's their unit goal or their personal goal, those are toxic
places to be.
Leaders that view the people that work for them and the people who they work for as humans
that matter like they matter, that have goals, that have challenges, that have needs, they
see them as like a person and they don't objectify them.
Those are your best leaders because they approach individuals as like a fully human and it's
just a different dynamic.
You think about a company that treats its people as objects, those people who work for
that company will only put in the bare minimum.
They'll only work in order to not get fired and to maybe get a paycheck.
But if their leader really sees them like they matter and that they are a person, then
those individuals in that organization, they'll work incredibly hard.
They will go above and beyond because they believe in that leader, but they believe in
the vision that that leader is putting out there.
It's so interesting we're having this conversation now because in the fire service in America,
more often than not, a lot of our firefighters are working 56 hours a week and this is basically
every third day you're awake for 24 hours or half awake waiting for a call.
What we found now in 2024 is not only just an absolute epidemic of ill health and mental
ill health and suicides and overdoses and cancers and all the things that you would
expect from that because as they become short staff, now they force overtime.
So now these firefighters in one week are working 80 hours sometimes, every two or three
weeks.
Yeah.
The public image of what we do is we sit around and we play jokes and play cards and go on
the occasional fire.
But the other side of this conversation is now it's created the recruitment nightmare
that we've got in police and fire and it's down to what you're saying.
They've asked the first responders to do more and more and more with less and less and less.
I would argue that a lot of agencies do view their first responders as just an object.
When I've tried for a long time now to get this conversation started, there's pushback
and I've highlighted recently the people that are voting against any improvements for this
work 40 hours a week and they go to bed every night.
It's a complete disassociation.
So this is exactly what people need to hear is if we want to solve the recruitment crisis
in the military or in the fire or police, you have to create an environment that A,
is built to nurture and train those people to a high level, but also will have their
back.
They can't suddenly leave a country they fought in for 20 years without any questions and
all their equipment and all their friends back there.
Or the police officer that's shot that gets fired a year later because of medical, I mean,
the organizational betrayal too.
So these all factor in to create an environment of inspired young men and women that really
want to serve and therefore the delivery of service, the level to protect this country
will return to where it's supposed to again.
Yeah, exactly.
And so maybe the last comment that I have on this is so dealing with going back to the
suicide conversation.
So having in the probably in the thousands of interventions with young men and women
and not all of them young, some of them were in their forties, Marines and sailors that
were having thoughts of suicide and not just like little thoughts, but like they had concrete
plans with action steps to go do.
As I spent a lot of time in that space trying to help these individuals work through what
they needed to do so that we could help them be healthy and whole and not struggle with
suicide.
One of the things that I learned was all of the individual work that I was doing with
these men and women was sometimes for not if they were in a toxic culture.
Like I could take them out, it's sort of like there's a poison well, you take the child
away from the poison well, you feed them healthy things, give them healthy water and then they're
back and they're healthy.
And then you put them back, you send them back to the poison well, well pretty soon
they're going to get poisoned again and then they die.
And a lot of times in the military there would be not I'm not saying the entire military,
but there would be pockets where it was so toxic it didn't really do any good to take
the Marine or sailor out of there and treat them and get them healthy because if you sent
them back they were going to be back in that cycle.
And so I sort of shifted a lot of what I was doing professionally to work with leaders
in those organizations to create healthy cultures to get rid of this toxicity that existed.
And a lot of it had to do with objectification of the people that were there.
When you could move them away from seeing their people as objects, it just changed the
culture like it just changed the culture of the unit.
And the irony is there was this worry that oh it's too soft, we're not going to be able
to hold people accountable and that's not what it meant at all.
Or that they weren't going to perform at the level that we need them to perform.
And in fact it was exactly the opposite.
They performed better.
They performed at much higher levels when they were in this place where they weren't
being treated as objects by their military unit.
And so now I'm doing that within the business world too but it's just really fascinating
work to be in.
Absolutely.
That was a beautiful kind of rounding of that conversation.
The first of my closing questions is normally a book but you gave us a book already.
So what about films and documentaries?
Any of those that you'd love to recommend?
Films.
I'm more of a book guy to be honest.
Like Anthony will joke with you that I usually go through six or seven books a month.
And there's a few, maybe if you're okay I'd recommend maybe one more book.
Yeah, several if you'd like.
A couple of my go-tos around this area around helping leaders like develop healthy cultures
is called The Anatomy of Peace.
It's not by an individual but it's by an organization called the Arbinger Institute.
And it's fantastic.
It's probably my top five go-to books that I recommend for people to read as a way to
develop as a leader.
I love The Comfort Crisis.
Michael Easter's book is, I was rucking before I read that book and then after rucking I
was like, after reading that I'm like rucking even more.
And he highlights just so many of the things about what Anthony and I have been doing in
the wild and backs it up with the research about why being in the wild and doing hard
things and doing these really challenging things are good for you and the power of community.
I love Sebastian Junger's writing.
Tribe is definitely one of my favorite books.
If you haven't read that, that definitely needs to be on the top five of any book list.
And for documentary, his film, Sebastian Junger's that he made a few years ago, Restrepo that
won an Academy Award is absolutely fantastic to highlight what the Marines and that that
case soldiers went through in Afghanistan.
And I think you kind of referred to it a little bit, but the pullout of Afghanistan a few
years ago, how traumatic that was for the military.
I was stationed at Camp Lejeune at the time with the Marine Corps and there were quite
a few Marines who were killed in that evacuation as it was happening as that bomb went off
there in Afghanistan.
And there was just this real deep sense of betrayal about what we had been doing within
the Marine Corps when we abruptly left Afghanistan.
That was one of those traumas, you know, maybe little tea, but there was a sense of betrayal.
I mean, that was hard for a lot of folks to wrestle with with that the way that ended.
That's obviously a conversation I have with quite a few of the war fighters on here.
And it's usually the same answer is there's definitely acknowledgement by most that they
did some good.
You know, they were obviously they were protecting people.
They were, you know, I heard stories from, you know, vet and resurgence helping indigenous
animals, you know, pets and donkeys and, you know, I mean, just amazing kindness and compassion,
schools being built and hospitals and all the rest.
So you have that.
So, you know, these these men and women can look themselves in the mirror and go, you
know, I did what I was asked to do and, you know, at that moment, we made it better.
But conversely, you know, the the why were we there or at least why we there for so long?
You know, a lot of the special forces groups said we should have been in and out within
a year and a half, taken out the key targets, taken out the training camps and then left
again.
So there's obviously that element of you create enemies if you stay there too long,
too.
So it is a nuanced conversation, but it's a conversation needs to be had.
You know, if you were in Ramadi and you lost all your friends and then Ramadi ends up falling
the enemy's hands again after we leave or you were in Afghanistan, you know, your interpreters
were all killed.
I mean, this is a this is an absolute part of this conversation.
And it's that betrayal.
That's a Sebastian's book.
And I've had him on multiple times here.
You know, you were a part of a tribe.
Your biggest tribe is the United States.
And then they pulled the rug from under you.
So it has to be in this conversation.
Yeah, I love I love his book.
And I absolutely love those thoughts.
So the one movie that I thought was pretty fascinating that came out this year.
Now I just had a blank on the name of it.
It was a Guy Ritchie's movie.
I thought that was fantastic.
It was about to pull out in Afghanistan and he went back to save, you know, save his interpreter.
The Covenant.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that was a good film.
So next to the closing questions, is there a person that you would recommend to come
on this podcast as a guest to speak to the first responders, military and associated
professions of the world?
Yes, the gentleman that I referred to earlier, Robert Grant, he's a clinical psychologist
and he is probably one of the foremost experts in trauma that I've met.
He responded for a lot of years to natural disasters and he would go all over the world
to work with responders to genocide, tsunamis, you know, you name the event and he was probably
in and around it.
And so I actually invited him to come to North Carolina a few years ago to train chaplains
in the process that he does to help people deal with trauma.
He was doing work with the Marine Corps in the early 2000s and also with the Navy.
And then before my battalion deployed to Iraq in 2007, we flew him out to 29 Palms, California,
and he came out and presented to our battalion leadership, to all the staff NCOs and officers
to help them know how to walk their Marines through those traumatic experiences that they
were going to face.
So he's fantastic.
I'll see if I can dig up his email and forward it to you.
But yeah, if you wanted to have someone on your podcast who's an expert in trauma and
who has the credibility from life experience to really bring those stories, he would be
the guy.
I would love that.
So let's make that happen.
Thank you so much.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, then the last question before we make sure everyone knows where to find the both
of you and obviously learn more about the program, what do you do to decompress?
I try to take my own advice and go to the woods.
Over the past few years, a lot of the times I'm in the woods, it's kind of their professional
link.
I'm there taking leading guiding groups, which is you're on the clock.
So while I love it, it's doing that.
It's also like, oh, I'm responsible for all these people.
So it's not quite the decompression time that maybe I would like to have.
But I have done that a few times over the past few years as well.
Last summer, I was in central California up in the Sierras and it was with a group and
we went there for four days and it was amazing.
And one of the things that I like to do that some of the other folks you probably read
or listen to is to do a solo while I'm out there and do a fasting solo where you're out
for a period of time, at least a day or two, just by yourself, not with anyone around.
And you do it in a fasted state, no food, plenty of water, but no food.
And just think deeply about life and watch the stars at night.
And that's probably one of my go-tos.
And then the other is my family, as was mentioned earlier.
My wife and I have been married almost 28 years.
We have seven kids and getting to spend time with them is definitely one of the highlights
of my day.
Probably my favorite restoration event at this point is reading my eight-year-old daughter
stories at night, like reading right now, we're reading one of the fudge books, if you
ever read those about the little boy named fudge and she loves that.
So that's definitely one of those pieces is spending time with my family.
Beautiful.
Well, you just made me think about something.
I think I've asked people before, but I've got a bonus boy who's about 23, stepson, and
my son is 16, almost 17, 17 in August.
And so for the very first time I'm having this realization, it may not be next year
because he's got community college, so unless he gets picked up on some scholarship out
of nowhere, it makes sense to do the prereqs locally.
However, I realized that as a parent, if you've been doing it correctly, you've literally
poured yourself into your child or children for, in my case, 18 years, and you should
be exhausted.
So there should be a kind of excitement for that child to go off into the world and then
some excitement for maybe some rediscovering with your partner and what that looks like.
But I also realized, again, as far as purpose, the same as transitioning from the military
or the first responders, as a parent, you had this purpose and one day your purpose
is going to walk out the door and go to college, go to the military, go to wherever.
And they might come back at some point periodically.
So you've got this lens of the military, you've got the lens of the family side too.
What is the impact of the empty nest on some of the midlife crisis or struggles of some
of our people around this age?
I think that is a great question.
And what I have witnessed is it can be a big impact and sometimes a not good way because,
for example, on the Marine Corps and Navy side, these leaders, especially as they reach
that retirement age and have done 25, 30 years in the Marine Corps or the Navy, a lot of
that time has been operational.
They've been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
They've been on ships out to sea.
And so their spouse, the focus was on maintaining the home and getting the kids and all those
things and then now too you're having more dual career, which even adds more stress to
it.
But then at year 22, 23, the kids leave and you've spent so much time trying to survive
this military life, you look over at your spouse and you're like, wow, I don't even
know you anymore.
And the healthy couples recognize that and begin to work on reigniting that sense of
love and connection and passion that they once had once the kids are gone.
And that takes intentional effort.
And so one of the things that I still do for the military is lead marriage enrichment retreats.
And so we'll have the range of couples.
A lot of the couples will come and they've been married a couple of years.
And then there'll be this whole other group of couples that will have been married 23,
24 years and they're actually having a harder time because they're doing exactly what you've
referred to.
They're having to renegotiate the relationship after the kids leave and they're realizing,
wow, we're feeling a little lost here because the kids were so much of the focus of the
last 20 plus years.
And it can be exciting for them to rediscover that.
And it can also be really hard as some couples unfortunately decide, yeah, I'm kind of done.
I don't want to put in the work to get it back to where it could be.
Yeah, this is an interesting perspective.
I'd never really pondered until I got close to that age and had this realization like,
oh man, I'm going to be really lonely when he's gone.
And of course, my wife will be here and that will be beautiful and it will reframe it.
But you have to share your love in technically eight ways.
And then obviously it diminishes as they walk out the door, but now you're down to two.
It's an interesting conversation that I hadn't had reflected on too much, but I think it
needs to be brought in.
Yeah, my recommendation would be go do a marriage enrichment experience together.
Go do a weekend or something where it's intentional about your relationship.
You can go on a vacation together and that's awesome.
Those are great.
I just went on a couple's trip together earlier this year and that was amazing.
And the retreats can be really good because they bring in a structured process that sort
of like, you know, I don't want to use the word force, but it kind of does.
It sort of forces the individuals in the relationship to start having conversations that maybe they
haven't been having.
And so you've got this weekend, you know, typically that's carved out.
It's like this space for you and your spouse.
And then on the retreat itself, you know, it's structured so that you'll have conversations
and that you'll go deep with each other and rediscover some things that may be of line
dormant, you know, that have gone dormant over the past, you know, years as the focus
has been on raising a family, which is, you know, rightly so, you know, kids takes, it
takes a lot of energy to bring up young people these days and especially to help them navigate
all of the challenges in this modern world with all of the things, you know, digital,
the digital life and navigating all that.
You probably spend a whole other podcast talking about that, but yeah.
Brilliant.
Well, I appreciate your perspective.
All right.
Well, then last thing, the Wilderness Program, where can people learn about that?
And then let's talk about where people can find you on social media or anywhere else
as well.
Yeah.
So we have the general sketch or outline of it is on our website, resetcoaching.com.
R-E-S-E-T coaching all together, resetcoaching.com.
We highlighted on there.
We also are in the final stages of forming a nonprofit to bring this work to more veterans
and potentially first responders too.
The website is still a little bit under construction, but it's a nonprofit called Veterans in the
Wild.
And so one of the things that I've recognized is while the active duty component has a lot
of great resources, once someone has served and they've been out a year or two, they don't
have the same level of ability to reach out for those services.
And as you probably know, as you've talked to lots of people about combat stress injury
and these kinds of things, a lot of times they don't actually manifest themselves until
three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine years later after their service.
They've been out for a while and they can't figure out why they're having some struggles
or they manifest themselves at different times in life.
And so we want to create the ability for veterans to be able to engage in this wilderness-based
type event after they've been out for a little while, because maybe that's when they need
it more than when they were on active duty.
And what about where to find you on social media, LinkedIn, those kinds of places?
Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn.
Brandon Harding, I think Brandon Harding is on LinkedIn.
I think there's a famous bodybuilder from England named Brandon Harding too, but I'm
on LinkedIn.
On Instagram, it's Brandon.s.harding and it's a public profile on Instagram, Brandon.s.harding
on Instagram.
Those two places are probably the easiest ways to track me down.
Beautiful.
Yeah, and I know Anthony is on LinkedIn and I think his Instagram, because it was in front
of us before, was a.j.droz, D-R-O-Z.
So for anyone listening, that's how you can find him as well.
Well, Brandon, I want to say thank you so much.
I mean, this was, you know, obviously we've been planning this for quite a few months
now, but this was absolutely worth the coordination.
I mean, the two perspectives that you guys have coupled with, you know, some pretty traumatic
experiences early in life, I think has been invaluable.
And what you're doing now makes a thousand percent of sense to me.
So I want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the
Behind the Shield podcast today.
Well, thank you, James.
I really appreciate this.
It's been a great conversation.
I love talking about the things that we covered today.
You know, I could keep going.
So but I'm honored to be able to come on your podcast today.
Thank you very much.