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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on
the show former Navy SEAL, law enforcement officer, flight medic, secret service agent
and current firefighter paramedic, Frank Larkin.
Now in this conversation we discuss a host of topics from his journey into the military,
his transition as a Navy corpsman into the SEAL teams, law enforcement, paramedicine,
his transition story, his son Ryan's enlistment into the SEAL teams, traumatic brain injuries,
how he worked through the grief of losing Ryan to suicide, the mental health crisis
and so much more.
Now 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 five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier
for others to find.
And this is a free library of well over 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 that being said, I introduce to you, Frank Larkin.
Enjoy.
Well, Frank, I want to start by saying thank you so, so much for being so generous with
your time and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Yeah, thank you, James.
Again, looking forward to this conversation and we come from common backgrounds and certainly
interested in hopefully informing some of your listeners about what we're dealing with
and trying to do about it.
Absolutely.
So very first question, where on planet earth are we finding you today?
I am hailing from Annapolis, Maryland.
It's a sunny, somewhat tepid day here.
We've been beaten by brutal temperatures the past number of weeks, but today's actually
a pleasant day to be outside and doing stuff.
Brilliant.
Yeah, it's like they left the door open in hell here in Florida, if I'm being completely
honest.
You just have a shower and then two minutes later you're drenched again.
I would love to start at the very beginning of your timeline though.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what
your parents did, how many siblings?
Sure.
I was born in the Philadelphia area.
I grew up in the suburbs, family of eight, two parents.
My father was into advertising.
My mother was a homemaker that then self-educated herself, became a nurse and then eventually
into real estate.
I have five brothers and sisters that each in our own way are different, but have been
fairly successful in life.
Like I said, a middle-class upbringing, fortunate to have a fairly stable household environment.
You mentioned that your mom was a nurse and obviously that's a form of service, no doubt.
Were there any other members of the extended family that were in the military or first
members?
No, no.
I was the first started out as a volunteer at the age of 16 in my community with an ambulance
squad.
This is before they had EMTs and doing our best to help people out of tough situations
back then.
What were some of the calls that you remember from that chapter of your life?
I think probably the thing that got me into it was my sister on Easter day one morning
was riding down a sidewalk in front of our house, a little bit of a hill and flipped
over her handlebars and wound up striking her head.
Just having a compound fracture of the skull was knocked unconscious and was not in good
shape.
I remembered that as we ran to help her, and I would say I was probably my early teens
at this point, I was a boy scout, had had some first aid training, but I saw my parents
completely lose it, which is understandable, but they had no training.
They had no background on what to do.
I wound up calling an ambulance, at which point my father just couldn't even wait the
time for it to respond.
Picked up my sister and drove 100 miles an hour to the hospital, carried her in through
the emergency department where they proceeded to work on her and fortunately she survived.
But I said to myself at that point, I'm never going to be in a position where I'm not going
to know what to do and how to handle a situation like that.
That kicked me off in the direction of EMS.
What sent your mom into nursing as well?
I think she was always a caregiver.
She was a very compassionate lady, had a great bedside manner.
In some cases, I think she was gaining some independence from my father, cutting her own
path.
She had always followed somebody else.
She got older and got more confident.
The kids grew up.
She decided, hey, I'm going to step out and do something that I want to do.
So she did it.
Going back to your earlier life then, when you were in the school age, you ended up being
in a very, very physically demanding profession.
What were you playing and doing as far as sports and exercise back then?
I played football.
Actually, here we call it soccer in the States, but awards mean things.
So I was a soccer player.
I also ran track, did a little bit of wrestling.
My 5'8", 150, 160 pounds, as large as that sound, was not a competitive size on the football
field, though I love football.
Then eventually went on to play rugby.
That was ultimately my favorite sport.
I always find it interesting when people have done team sports and then individual sports
because on one side with the team, there's an element where you can get away with having
a bad day, sandbagging a little bit.
But obviously there's that team element where you're going to rise up and make sure that
you are a solid link of that chain.
Then the individual side, whether it's a competitor as far as wrestling or literally the competitor
is in your mind when you're doing track and you're running and your competitor is a person
that's telling you to stop running.
That's another kind of mental skillset that you bring to the table.
When you reflect now, how did some of those sports factor into your success in BUDS and
beyond?
Yeah, I think it's really that team dynamic, being accountable to your teammates, being
able to work as hard as they do or get on the practice field, make sure that things
are coming together for game time.
I think it's also a great opportunity to develop interpersonal relationships.
Everybody comes from a different place.
We're not all carbon copies of each other.
We have different physical bills.
We have different genetic structures.
We think differently, race differently.
But when you come together as a team, it's how do you integrate that?
How do you blend that together so that you're effective on the field?
I think a lot of that really comes down to respect for each other, the ability to communicate,
which is all hinged upon the ability to listen.
What about the individual sports?
How do they factor?
I think the individual sports kind of test your personal limits.
There's no passing the buck.
Who else do you have to blame but yourself when something doesn't go right?
I think that brings a whole different dynamic.
It's one thing when you lose within a team dynamic.
That is something that you've got to resolve together with your teammates.
Very often that is what we do after some of our fire calls that go a little rough.
We do that post-mortem rock drill, so to speak, who is doing what when.
You find out during that exercise that some of the things you thought were happening were
not or other things were taking place that filled in the gaps.
That's why I think we do it, because it's a healthy debriefing, offloading session to
get the big picture.
When you're by yourself, when you're on the field as a single athlete or performer, it's
you.
I think that takes a different approach.
You've got to be able to look at that person in the mirror and peel back and have that
honest conversation.
I got nobody else to point at on why things didn't go right.
Why didn't they go right, dude?
Tell me and be honest.
I think that that part and parcel folds into what makes people and how they deal with situations
in life and how they deal with others, certainly in stressful situations.
Absolutely.
Well, you mentioned about working with the ambulance squad.
When you were in the high school age, what were you dreaming of becoming?
Was it in the EMS side or was there something else in mind?
I think like most kids, I wasn't sure.
I was kind of groping for that handhold as far as what I wanted to do.
I will tell you this, I got into the high school age.
I was kind of an average student.
I really wasn't kind of, in many cases, academics wasn't a priority to me until I got to my
senior year where finally the light went on and I put a lot of effort into it and did
very well.
But unfortunately, I lost a number of years before that to kind of set a track record
of my ability.
But even with that said, I felt that I wasn't ready for college.
At the time, Vietnam was still underway.
It was starting to wind down, but the draft was in play.
I had a low draft number and I had always been told from an early age that you need
to control your destiny.
You need to grab onto the wheel and steer your way forward because if you depend on
somebody else to do it for you, you're going to be disappointed.
So I went ahead and enlisted in the Navy and because of my background as a volunteer on
the ambulance squad, I gravitated towards medical training and became a Navy corpsman and initially
started with the Marines out on the West Coast at Camp Pendleton, which was a great experience
for me, which ultimately led me towards BUDS.
You joined the military in a very interesting era because I've had a lot of conversations
with people that were in the last 20 years and it mirrors police and fire.
You used to have the kind of multi-generational element when it came to wearing a uniform,
whether it was in the military, whether it was in the first responders, you had this
kind of generational element.
But as we've seen the real cost of serving as a police officer or firefighter, there's
a massive decline in recruitment.
There's other elements too, but really people are realizing, okay, this is what it actually
looks like.
And so rather than children looking wide-eyed saying, I want to be like that or mom, they're
losing that a lot now.
I would imagine that what we're seeing now mirrors post-Vietnam.
So what was the kind of feeling about joining the military as Vietnam was winding down in
the US?
I think society's reflection on the military or on law enforcement has a lot to do with
how people look at the profession.
And fortunately, we still have people that can look past that despite a lot of a negative
media attention, especially now on law enforcement.
In the past, there was negative attention on the military.
When I came out of active duty and started college, it was not the university I attended.
It was not a positive attribute to be a military veteran.
As a matter of fact, you almost became a target and a target by people who, as you looked
at them, you wouldn't even be able to protest.
You wouldn't even be able to say what you're saying if it wasn't for people like me and
others who stepped forward to try to protect this nation and its ability to preserve an
environment where you can have your free speech.
But somehow that gets lost in the translation and you become the focus of their hate, their
discontent.
And I go back to being able to develop the skill of listening.
I think that is something that is tough for our society to do on both sides of any discussion.
I think it underpins what we're seeing right now with law enforcement is that people on
both sides of this discussion have not been listening to each other.
And when that happens, you start to move away from each other and the gaps build.
So you have the media side, but what I'm also hearing a lot is it's the children of soldiers
and first responders who their parents were never there or their parents came back different
than when they went away.
And so that's an interesting perspective because we're obviously going to talk about areas
that need to be improved when it comes to the wellbeing of our military and our first
responders.
So if we don't change, for example, the profession that I know and understand the insane work
week at the fire service, young people are going, well, that was never home.
Even when he was supposed to be home, he was told he couldn't come home.
He had to do yet another shift, yet another shift.
So we are really at a kind of paradigm shift potential, like a critical mass, if you like,
where if we don't fix this, we are going to see less and less and less recruitment and
it is going to be dangerous for us.
But if we actually have the humility to address the things that are hurting our people and
give them the support rather than defunding or whatever the term is, then we can absolutely
turn a corner if we address it.
But if we don't, then I think it could be very deadly for the national security outside
the nation and obviously the ability to deliver a service of EMS or law enforcement within
the nation itself.
James, I couldn't agree with you more.
And I think that the negative cast from Vietnam and the 70s, the 80s did impact our ability
to recruit, did impact the funding of our military.
And subsequently, we paid a price for that.
And I do think that, as you point out, during the past 20 plus years of persistent conflict,
where mothers and fathers have been deployed in military uniform and their children have
been raised by grandparents or others or by one parent versus the other, especially if
both of them were in uniform, which there were a lot of families where both the husband
and wife were in uniform and deploying on separate rotations, which adds a significant
strain.
But during those formative years for those kids, all they're seeing is that revolving
door that doesn't stop.
One parent coming in, going out, staying for a bit, leaving, missing birthday parties,
sports events, other things that are key to a kid's development.
And I think you see that some kids deal with it better than others.
And certainly, as they get to more of a formative age, in adolescent and into their teens, it
either manifests itself as increased individual strength and resiliency or it turns the other
way.
It almost creates a serious divide between the parents and the kids, almost an animosity,
which is a shame on the police fire side of this right now.
And I'm glad you brought this up because I see this every day.
I think the threshold event was COVID.
And then for the EMS medical community, where we had a very tough environment, where we
had a mandatory obligation and responsibility to take care of those in our society who were
being taken down by this disease.
And it took a toll.
People left the profession because they were in fear of catching this disease.
Every one of us knew somebody that we lost to this disease.
So it became very personal quickly.
And a lot of misinformation out there, misinformation that in some cases fed into this.
And that happens when you don't have the science at a point where you can fully understand
what's going on.
So the gaps are filled by opinion and innuendo.
But we see it right now with a national shortage of paramedics that's taking place.
Paramedics are burned out.
And to train up a paramedic, let alone an emergency medical technician, takes time.
But we're bearing the brunt of that right now.
And these departments need to be able to staff their equipment.
And so even though you're finishing up your shift at 7 or 8 o'clock in the morning, after
being pounded for 24 hours, you got your battalion chief or your captain coming up to you saying,
not so quick.
We got a gap and we're holding you over.
And those holdovers, as Murphy's law would dictate, come at the worst time.
It's the day of your kid's birthday.
It's the trip that you planned to the zoo.
It was you're leaving on your vacation.
And I think we all experience it.
But I think it's at a point now that it's been somewhat unprecedented.
And then when you transport, for instance, this past Monday, and some of your folks may
not have figured it out yet, but I still work as a firefighter paramedic in my retirement
years just because I needed something to do and I can't stay still for more than five
minutes.
So in my position as a firefighter paramedic with the city of Annapolis here in Maryland,
we all experience what we call medical Mondays.
And this past medical Monday was just probably one of the worst that I've seen.
It was hot.
We were overburdened with more calls than we had units.
We get to the hospital, the waiting room, the walk-in waiting room is overflow with
people sitting on the curb outside.
You've got medic units lined up at one point 12 deep trying to get into triage to offload
their patients and transfer care.
And then you talk to hospital staff and they're just at their wits end.
They're having a shortage of nurses or they don't have enough beds available.
They can't move people out of the emergency department fast enough.
And the emergency departments have become the easy button for any medical issue.
Our healthcare, the balance of our healthcare has changed where the primary care site now
is the emergency department as opposed to people having a personal physician or a primary
doctor's office that they go to.
So we're seeing this all the way around.
But to get to your original point, it cascades back down to the families.
When you're not coming home or you're coming home beat, your wife's asking you, how'd
your day go?
And all you can do is growl because you're in that decompression mode.
All you want to do is just create distance from the job.
The kids are jumping up and down on you.
They haven't seen you.
They want to do stuff.
And all you want to do is just chill and watch some mind numbing thing on TV to just get
away from it.
And so it's tough.
It's tough both for our military families and our first responder families to include
our frontline healthcare workers.
As we not only come out of the 20 plus years of conflict, by the way, we're still in conflict
around the globe.
Even though the wars technically have ended, we are still actively in conflict around the
globe.
And then on this, certainly this COVID, post-COVID period where we're still under the strain.
And I don't see a clear light at the end of the tunnel on when we're coming out of this.
One of the things that was so maddening about the way the pandemic was handled, because
I stood squarely in the middle, which I'd seem to do in most things, because that's
where the normal people are, is that it was absolutely a real virus and that it was also
most dangerous to people that already had underlying health issues.
And so the answer was as we start navigating and if we're able to find a vaccine that truly
is effective and safe or whatever the other plan is, in the meantime, let's make the nation
healthier.
We have a nation of 70% obese or overweight.
We have an opioid crisis, we have all these things that we can make a huge dent in.
But even though it was being touted as it's for the health of the people, there were no
PE programs posted.
There were no real foods put back into schools and soda machines removed.
There was no bolstering of local farmers to create organic food and they leave that bottleneck.
Instead, they closed the parks and the beaches.
They had fast food and alcohol delivered to the homes and they were told to just stay
there, shut up, we'll let you know when you can come out.
And so we emerge worse than we went in.
And I think that is the real tragedy of this whole thing, aside from obviously the Americans
that we lost to this virus.
With you now being an active duty firefighter paramedic still in great shape after the career
that we're going to get to, what are your reflections?
If you were king for a day, what would you change so that we could actually move the
needle towards health again?
Yeah, I think that is really a great question.
And we're going to be a lot smarter about this 10 years down the road when we can look
back and understand what really happened.
Once we kind of filter all the politics out of it, you got a lot of politicians, they
got the answers to every question, right or wrong, but they got an answer.
I think that as soon as that epidemic hit, I went back and read the book, I think it's
The Great Influenza.
It was about the virus that hit back right at the height of the World War I.
And actually it was, I believe the military that was one of the key vectors for the spread
of that virus in Philadelphia was the center of gravity.
Once the virus that originated, I believe out in Kansas, made its way to a major military
depot where those that were infected then infected larger numbers that then spread out
to, you know, tentacled out.
There were great lessons that they learned back then, such as washing hands, masking
up, creating distance, educating.
But you know, like in a similar context, they were fighting, you know, their own media who
was mischaracterizing, you know, what was happening.
They were fighting politicians who were ignoring the fact that they had a national epidemic,
international epidemic, disease epidemic going on.
I think, you know, in the book, it referenced that the president at the time only mentioned
it one time during a speech throughout the whole epidemic crisis.
So then you fast forward to what we just, you know, experienced.
And I think that really, you know, what I've come away from these two events, or at least,
you know, reading about the first one and experiencing the second one is, you know,
we have to let the science, you know, we have to give science a chance to tell us what's
going on.
And I understand that when you're in the heat of battle and you have people that are, you
know, becoming seriously ill and dying at a rate that is, you know, beyond our tolerance,
then you've got to start doing things.
And they're not always, you know, black or white as far as with clear definition.
You know, we sit in that gray zone and we have to make at times our best guess on what
to do, you know, what's best for the public in order to preserve life.
And I think that's kind of what we were in.
And that's why I say, you know, we'll be a lot smarter down the road once we've had a
chance to analyze all the data and, you know, be and benefit from the research that has
come from exploring this disease.
But you know, as far as how we handled it, I just, you know, I think that, you know,
the propagation of information about the disease, about what to do about it, the open debate
that occurred within our society that created a lot of confusion.
But I think ultimately it was the politicization of this event that was probably the biggest
negative.
It really kind of pulled us away from the center of the road and I think incorrectly
shaped some perspectives all the way around.
And that's not a statement that goes, you know, to the left or to the right.
I'm talking about we lost our minds.
We lost our common sense approach to dealing with this and it became very political.
Absolutely, that was the problem.
I mean, you know, the end of it, people just thought, we don't want to talk about it anymore.
It's like, well, we need to, you know, history is doomed to repeat itself.
It's the same as tearing down statues.
And we talked about this in previous conversations in Bristol near where I grew up.
They tore down the statue that had been in the city for forever because he was a slave
trader.
And I always said, well, don't take the statue down, just change the plaque saying this guy
did some good, but basically this is what a shit bag he actually was.
I'll just leave it there.
You know, so now we can be reminded, like, you know, are we going to just remove the
whole Holocaust because we don't want to talk about it anymore?
No, it needs to be there front and center to remind us of the tyranny that can occur
if we, you know, just don't do anything.
And it's the same with the pandemic.
Some horrific decisions were made that we need to learn from and make sure they never
happen again.
And I think the biggest truth that came away was the healthier the population, the less
deaths we'll have no matter what the next virus is called.
You know, but if we are just doing nothing and allowing kids to get fatter and sicker,
the next thing that comes around is going to kill even more people and shame on us for
not changing it.
Yeah, you know, definitely, you know, the health as a baseline, you know, the healthier
somebody was, you know, if they didn't have the comorbidities of diabetes, respiratory
disease, obesity, other hypertension, they did much better.
But if they fell into one of those or a number, usually it's a number of those categories,
then they had a tougher uphill battle.
And very often, I think what people don't realize is that their body, even before they
got hit with that disease, is struggling, is under load.
And then that disease comes in and just, you know, punches them square in the face.
And there's a very brittle period there, whether, you know, they're able to transition, you
know, that difficult time or not.
And once they get into a spiral, it's hard to pull them out.
And that's what I think we saw with the disease.
We also saw that there were segments of our population that had greater vulnerabilities
with regards to, you know, our homeless, with disadvantaged neighborhoods and so forth,
you know, in the efforts to, you know, try to get health care to them, to try to educate
them, you know, just in the basics of, you know, protecting oneself, you know, informing
them on what you can do within your space.
I mean, we're not going to cure society's problem, but within my five, 10-foot radius,
you know, what can I do to minimize, you know, my exposure?
But I do think, you know, your point is very valid that is just not related to this pandemic,
is if we don't start embracing a healthier lifestyle, we are just going to dig ourselves
into a deeper, deeper hole.
I mean, I can tell you from my own personal experience, which I'm sure you can validate,
the amount of patients that we're encountering now that are literally train wrecks because
of the way they eat, you know, lack of exercise, the lack of, you know, medical, you know,
surveillance or monitoring, just, you know, kind of gravitating more to a couch potato,
as opposed to one that's, you know, active, outdoor focused.
I think all this is just feeding into, you know, creating a society that is becoming
weaker and more vulnerable to these diseases, and as you said, these diseases cycle.
You know, we've been able to kind of, you know, take down this current pandemic, but
let me remind you, 100 years ago, we were dealing with the same thing, and to your point,
we forgot those lessons learned, and we wound up repeating them again this time around,
and we're at risk for repeating them again the next time around, because there will be
one, because we failed to remember, we failed to, you know, incorporate these lessons learned,
and therefore, we pay the price again.
Absolutely.
Well, going back to your kind of military track, staying on the medicine theme, so you
said you entered the Navy as a corpsman, walk me through what made you decide to enter the
SEAL program, and then what was it about you mentally and physically that allowed you to
succeed through BUDs when so many rang the bell?
Well, you know, medicine has always been kind of an interest.
Again, I explained the, you know, the motivation from my sister's accident, and then certainly,
you know, got bitten by the bug as a volunteer on an ambulance.
You know, it's a good feeling when you can help somebody out, and certainly with your
knowledge to either stop them from getting worse or, you know, even better, helping them
improve their situation.
But you know, going through that training, I think it gives you a, you know, it maintains
your contact with, you know, empathy, compassion for others, and that, you know, not everybody
is going to wake up and it's going to be a good day.
And so, you know, and the unpredictability of that, I think, is part of the challenge.
I thrived in that environment.
I loved the gray zone.
For me, you know, if things are too structured, too black and white, you know, too disciplined,
it drives me nuts.
I got it.
You got to have process.
You got to have some hierarchy.
You got, you know, but I really like being thrown into stuff where I've got to figure
it out on the fly and have the, hopefully, the license to be able to develop solutions.
I get very frustrated when, you know, somebody is telling me how to get to the top of the
mountain their way instead of just telling me to get to the top of the mountain.
What time do you want me there?
And what do you want me to do when I get there?
Let me figure it out.
That's what I thrive on.
And that's how I have personally led others is I'm very clear about what my expectations
are as far as, you know, our mission goals, but pretty much toss it to them to figure
it out.
And I'm there to help guide if needed.
But I recognize there's more than one way to the top of that mountain.
And I'm not the smartest person in the world.
But you know, when you surround yourself with teammates who are, you know, motivated to
do the right thing, it's amazing what they can do.
So my motivation to get into the teams was really kind of in line with that.
I had a friend that, you know, back in the day, you know, nobody really had an idea of
what the SEAL teams were all about.
And I had a buddy that was, you know, in the teams.
And we got together one weekend, he was telling me about what he had gone through and what
he was doing.
And it was like crack cocaine.
I mean, I mean, I wanted more.
I wanted to find out about this.
And so I volunteered with a little, you know, bureaucratic difficulty because the Navy at
the time was not a big supporter of the special ops community.
It's special ops community, especially post Vietnam era.
But I made my way toward tornado and, you know, just embraced whatever they threw at
me.
I went in there, I think, with a mindset that, hey, I think I know what I'm doing, but I
really don't.
But yet they can't kill me.
At least that was my thinking.
You know, that's not going to be a good thing.
So if I can just, you know, and the best advice I got was, hey, it's hour by hour, you know,
day by day.
Don't look beyond that.
If you're looking way out to, you know, the far ridge line as you're going through that
training, you're going to wind up, you know, chewing yourself up.
So I kind of approached it that way.
It's hour by hour, day by day, you know, working with my teammates.
You know, not every day was a great day.
But you know, once we got into the rack at night, if we had had that opportunity, then
that was another day behind us and one less in front of us.
And there's great bonds that you build when you go through an experience like that.
It was foundational for me for the rest of my life.
It gives you a sense of confidence and that you can do things beyond your expectations.
It also gives you a sense of limitations, which is powerful, too.
You know, we're all kind of wired differently, built differently.
And some of us can do some things better than others.
But you know, this is where the power of that team comes in when you respect each other's
abilities and you recognize those that have expertise or capabilities in some areas a
little bit more than others.
But yet you're coming together as that homogeneous team element.
And you know, you're you're parking your you know, let's fake it.
I mean, for me to say the seal doesn't have an ego would be, you know, my nose would be
growing, you know, growing, you know, right before your eyes right now.
I mean, we all have egos, but you got to know when to park it in order to get the mission
accomplished.
Same with fire in police.
You know, many of the the incidents that as they look back where people got into troubles
because they allowed their ego to get out in front of the common sense and you know,
that's kind of how you know, that experience with the teams was it was very formative.
Wouldn't trade a minute of it.
Well, maybe a few minutes of it away.
There's some very painful points that, you know, I think we all go through.
But but in the end, it just makes you a better, stronger person.
And I think that, you know, it certainly set me up for the rest of my life and how I approached
different challenges.
A question I always ask anyone who's been deployed, and especially with with your community,
you know, there's a lot of specifics that none of our business, to be completely honest.
But when it comes to being a civilian, the war is really painted in a very polarizing
way by the news channels, either kill them all, like God sort them out, stack bodies
or they're all baby killers, you know, and rarely do you hear the kind of men and women
on the grounds perspective.
So it's a two part question.
The first part, regardless of the politics that sent you there, was there a point in
the teams where you realize that there was some horrific human beings that needed to
be taken care of?
Yes, there's just some people that are not going to be receptive to hugs and kisses and,
you know, a kinder, gentler approach.
You just have to take them out.
You have to take them off the battlefield because they will continue to come at us and
come at us with a passion that that completely disregards all the fundamental, you know,
moral code that we've been raised by.
And that's hard for people to understand because they want to apply, you know, the conditions
of Main Street USA or Main Street London to a battlefield and to some of these horrible,
you know, points of conflict where the value of human life is so upside down from how we
have been raised in a civilized society.
And that's what I think our public fails to understand.
That translation does not, you know, cultivate a sense of understanding.
And therefore, I think what it does is breeds disconnect between a lot of our active duty
veterans, you know, police fire, because the general public who we serve in many cases,
they don't understand.
And as I've always thought about this, and I don't know what your thinking is, you know,
I would almost look at that as a negative.
Hey, you don't understand what I'm trying to do for you or you don't understand my job
and so forth.
And then I've gotten to this point as I've gotten a little older, I said, you know, maybe
you shouldn't understand because it would mean that you'd have to acknowledge that there's
some, you know, sides of humanity that are not, you know, very pleasant.
And maybe it's better that you just don't know about that and let those of us that can
deal with it deal with it.
But in that regard, then have the confidence in the fact that we can deal with it and support
us.
If you could extrapolate common denominators, knowing that most, you know, communities around
the world had, you know, periods of peace, periods of community and tribalism.
What is it about these individuals that become tyrants?
You know, are there any kind of common denominators that you notice to the creation of tyranny?
Because it seems like over and over again, whether it's the slave issue that we had here,
whether it's, you know, again, the Holocaust, it's usually a few horrendous people that
then poison an entire nation.
I'm not saying that the entire nation of Germany was behind what happened, but they were, you
know, that the opinions of the few were projected to a point where they were actually dragged
into it.
So of these horrendous people that you witness, could you see any common denominators of how
they got there from, again, a giggling toddler to someone who's massacring people?
Yeah, I think probably one of the key factors is if there's no opportunity for them to achieve
a better life.
So in other words, if they can't get a job, if they can't, in many cultures, you can't
marry unless you can prove that you can support a family.
And those families are not your immediate nuclear family, but it's also your extended
family.
So if you have, and this is what I think we certainly saw in Iraq when we completely leg
sweep their whole society and threw everybody into a state of unemployment is, you know,
one minute you had a shopkeeper who was, you know, trying to make ends meet, you know,
had a family, you know, trying to keep a roof over the head of that family, create a secure
environment.
Next thing you know, you can't afford to buy food for that family because their society
was completely upended.
So now they're digging holes in the ground and dropping explosives in there to blow us
up because somebody's paying them 75 bucks to do that.
You know, they have no opinion about us one way or the other, but, you know, the higher
priority is I've got to feed my family.
So I think in those societies or in those environments around the world where you see
the level of disadvantage where, especially with the youth population, where they don't
see a way forward, you know, there's no jobs, there's no education.
They become very vulnerable to those extremist influences that give them a hope for something
in the future, even though by our standards, our definition, that hope is evil.
To them, it's something better than what they have.
And so I think that, you know, I saw that happen in Yemen and in a number of other areas
in Africa, many, you know, Afghanistan's kind of an interesting place.
You know, it's very tribal as, you know, every valley is different.
You know, there was really no central government that really had influence over the whole country.
It was more of a shadow governor influence, you know, personalities within certain regions
that really dictated the behavior of that region.
I think the other thing too is when, you know, you see some of these extremist factions start
to gain momentum, it's one thing to be able to operate within their immediate area of
influence, but at some point, you know, just like a festering, you know, boil or lesion,
it's going to burst.
It's going to need to spread out.
The pressure from within that local region is going to become so great that it's going
to wind up technically to other places.
And that's when you start seeing, you know, some of the effects that we've seen here in
the past 20 years.
How do you cure it?
You know, great question.
I mean, some of this is, you know, certainly fueled by religious fundamentalism.
It's fueled by individuals who, you know, are motivated by power and the ability to control,
you know, and sometimes leveraging religion as a way to do that.
And then you have, you know, other, you know, I think legitimate, you know, oppression that,
you know, the prevailing government or ruling body is, you know, so brutal that, you know,
that population just rises up, you know, it just gets to a point where it's had enough.
And then it turns into, you know, violence as an answer to, you know, dealing with that
problem.
And that comes with second, third order effects.
Yeah.
I mean, such a powerful perspective, you know, from the lens that you have.
And it's interesting because it really parallels what we see here in the U.S. too.
I mean, our desperate neighborhoods, regardless of race, are the ones where you see the most
crime, the most addiction, the most gang membership, et cetera, because, you know, mentorship,
I talk about this a lot, mentorship programs in the first responder professions are the
answer to diversity in uniform.
But if you have an underserved population that's not being reached out to by police
and fire, then their only option might be sports or joining a gang, you know.
But now all of a sudden, the policeman or a firefighter comes along and says, hey, we've
got this free program.
Well, we'll give you the equipment and we'll train you.
And there's a fire academy with scholarships and then employment on the other side.
Some of those kids are going to go, oh, thank goodness, because I was about to join a gang,
you know.
So whether it's internationally or here at home, if you proactively invest in your people,
you reduce that desperation and therefore the level of crime and violence.
Yeah.
And again, I think that that is you have to be able to put yourself in their shoes.
You know, it's tough to do because you're not living in their environment.
But you know, I'll go into the projects now, you know, housing development.
And you know, it's interesting.
I can go into, you know, an apartment and, you know, I just shake my head and say, you
know, how can somebody live like this?
I mean, it's just horrible conditions.
I mean, you see it, your listeners see it.
And then, you know, you go back a couple of days later to a different apartment in the
same complex.
And it's and, you know, there's there's books on the table.
You know, the place is, you know, in complete order.
There's pictures on the walls.
There's, you know, there's a sense of family there.
So you know, you just can't.
I think that's the thing that I'm constantly reminded of in this business is that, you
know, you you cannot, you know, fall into that trap of the whole communities like that.
You know, there are people that are trying their their, you know, in their own way, within
their own means, they're trying to to improve.
It's it's, you know, and again, they're the folks you want to get to, you know, and I
agree with you.
You know, the time to get to them is when they're young, you know, before somebody else
latches onto them, you know, before, you know, they see the example that drug dealer who's
driving a fancy car, you know, wheeling around the neighborhood, poisoning the community,
you know, to be able to give them an alternative, you know, whether it's through sports, whether
it's through alignment with some type of, you know, mentorship program.
And again, I think, you know, that's where you have the and that's why the military becomes
so attractive to a lot of these men and women who come from a disadvantaged neighborhood,
because in many cases it offers opportunity and structure.
And and and this is just not my opinion.
I've talked to, you know, a number of my colleagues from the military that have come from those
conditions and have said that, you know, if it wasn't for, you know, enlisting in the
military and making the decision that I need to, you know, as I said earlier, you know,
at the discussion to grab the wheel and start steering my life, then, you know, I recognize
I wasn't going to go anywhere.
I was going to be trapped in this environment.
And so, you know, you know, and we do see this in our society, you know, and there are
communities and this is where this has to be addressed is at the community level.
This is not national policy.
National policy is going to not going to have an effect, you know, at the dirt level, at
the deck plate of our our communities.
This is really something that has to be embraced by the community and all those elements that
support the community to be able to, you know, open up those opportunities.
But I think when you can, you can see some great results.
100 percent.
The question I asked before, like I said, is a two part question.
The other side that we also never hear about through the screens is the kindness and compassion
from our men and women in uniform when they are serving.
And I've heard so many stories from schools and hospitals being constructed to military
veterinary surgeons helping indigenous animals.
So many great stories.
When you reflect on your time in the SEAL team specifically, what are moments of kindness
and compassion that you remember?
Well, I think it's it's really goes to with the kids.
I mean, that's the first point of contact is is if you could bridge a relationship with
the kids, then very often the parents will follow.
Because I think every parent, you know, wants their kid to do better, have a better experience
or opportunity than they have.
You know, they they want to make sure that, you know, their kids, you know, succeed.
And I've seen that across all cultures, you know, that are, you know, again, I think it's
a fundamental need, you know, from a parent to to provide that that safe haven, that opportunity.
So to me, my my my first, you know, point of approach was with the kids and just, you
know, getting down on their level, eye to eye contact, you know, showing them that,
you know, you're not someone, you know, that they should be scared of, that, you know,
they can talk to you, they can they can touch your equipment, they can, you know, they they
can, you know, experience, you know, some of the things that, you know, that that you
have.
And so I think that, you know, again, that's that's the outreach and and kindness, just
a simple, you know, nobody I go I go back to listening.
So when you have an encounter.
I see a lot of these these calls and these situations go bad is that when folks from
our our side of the equation come in and are instantly judgmental about what's going on,
don't take the time to listen and and, you know, kind of go in with eyes wide open.
Hey, one of the some of the best advice I ever got as a young provider was, hey, before
you go freaking rushing in there, just take a deep breath and count to 10 and look around.
It's going to save your life.
It's also going to help you be a better provider, because you're going to see something within
those 10 seconds.
That's going to inform you on how to approach that call.
But if you're rushing in there, you know, kicking the door open, you know, you know,
coming in to save the day with or without theme music, you know, you're going to miss
stuff and you're probably going to set yourself up for for a fall.
So I think listening, giving them the respect, no matter what conditions you're in, you know,
if you if you take somebody's dignity away, you you instantly have a fight.
It's been my experience.
So it does it does not hurt to show a little respect, compassion, empathy and and and and
to preserve their dignity.
You know, treat them the way you would want to be treated.
But I also encourage a lot of my my young officers I deal with and and and providers.
You got to ask the question in reverse.
How do you think they need to be they want to be treated?
You know, it's a two way street.
And if you can ask that question before you make your judgment, then things go a lot better.
When you're talking about that 10 second pause, I immediately think of the firefighters that
beat their chest talking about clean cabs, stop grabs.
And the fact that, for example, I experienced as a tillerman in California, my air pack
was on the outside.
The literally 10 seconds it takes to throw a pack on your back and click in.
You're surveying the scene, you're listening to your company officer and what they're going
to say you're doing a quick scan, you know, anyone hanging out windows is looking like
it's going to collapse.
And then, you know, you you listen to orders or if you're officer, you give orders.
But this idea that you're going to be all bunkered up in the back of a rig and just
leap off like Superman on crack and go flying into a burning building because you saved
10 seconds is insane versus trying to be a little bit more diligent so that you're not
the next firefighter that they bury because of cancer.
I think, you know, that that kind of cartoon esque, ridiculous, narcissistic version of
the hero is tactically so unsound and having the humility to take a beat and listen to,
you know, your your officer or make this decision yourself.
But in this example, take the pack from the outside, throw it on, click it on what he
doing it.
Now you've not only, you know, not exposed yourself to the off gassing from the previous
fire, but also you've given yourself a tactical pause to make a calm decision before you act.
Yeah, I agree.
It's so much can be learned in that 10 seconds so you can discipline yourself to kind of
take advantage of that.
I think, you know, we're our own worst critics, you know, whether we're, you know, in an active
knife fight or or after, you know, an after action review, you know, you know, why that
battalion chief tell me to do that or why that battalion chief, you know, you know,
stop me from, you know, doing my interior fire attack.
You know, part of it is, yeah, it's it's great to be able to, you know, drag that hose, you
know, through the front door and and knock down a raging fire.
But if everybody's already out of the house and, you know, we don't have anybody trapped
and that house is, you know, without a doubt, cooking off, then that's where the the maturity
of leadership comes in and the responsibility, you know, on that captain or that battalion
chief that, you know, they want everybody to go home at the end of the day.
And sometimes, you know, we live in this profession where, you know, you got to prove yourself
by, you know, running into a boiling fire, you know, with a house that's completely cooking
off that we have a high degree of confidence that nobody's trapped.
And even then, it's a tough call sometimes, even if you have somebody trapped, because
sometimes those situations are unattainable.
You know, there's no way somebody, even if we get to them, are going to survive this.
And that's part of the reality.
So, you know, I think that, you know, if we're going to be around, you know, for a full career
and then, more importantly, to be able to have a quality of life in our after, you know,
after our career, we've got to pay attention to this, you know, and, you know, as we talked
a little bit earlier, you know, it's just not the hazards of fire attack, whether, you
know, you know, you know, it's an interior operation or you're in a defensive operation
on the outside, where obviously there's, you know, a lot of, you know, ongoing, you know,
dynamic hazards.
But I think very often, and we're getting better at it, but, you know, once that transitioned
into, you know, rehab, everybody kind of dropped their guard, you know, they flipped off their
mask, you know, they went off air, you know, they loosened up their coat.
They, you know, weren't paying attention to what they were touching and not touching.
And then, you know, once they got back to the station, after they threw all their smoky
fire gear into the cab of the truck and pulled it out, you know, it was, you know, dragging
all that contaminant off gassing gear, you know, back into the station where, you know,
for days you smelled that fire, you know, the remnants of that fire.
And now, you know, we're learning that, you know, hey, all that off gassing, that smell
that we have is actually, you know, contaminating us and creating a health risk.
You know, there was a study that came out recently that, you know, for a long time,
everyone thought that, you know, a lot of the fire deaths were as a result of, you know,
carbon monoxide, you know, from the smoke exposure.
And now we're finding out it's predominantly cyanide because of the materials that are
burning in these fires, whether, you know, it's contained, you know, interior fire or
it's something that's on the outside.
You know, my kind of standard is if I could smell it, then it's getting into me.
So you know, we just had here in Annapolis a couple of days ago, a lithium battery fire.
And I don't know if you've had experience with that, but it was an eye opener.
And I know FDNY has really done some great research and reporting on this.
But you know, every one of the firefighters that engaged that attack commented on how
black and forceful that smoke was coming out of that lithium battery and how difficult
it was to put that fire out.
And that's, I think, going to be a growing trend, but it certainly highlights the hazardous
environment that we're confronting right now.
We need to understand it.
We need to get better at it.
It's much like what I'm dealing with on the blast over pressure issues with the military
right now off our weapons systems.
You know, we need to be better informed so we can make better decisions.
I just saw, I think it was the BBC, shared a story.
I think North Korea, it was a factory.
They had a lithium battery fire and 23 people were killed.
So I'm assuming it probably just lit off and that was it engulfed pretty much everyone
that was around.
You know, you think about a pallet or something else, you know, you catch fire.
Most people have got plenty of time to get out before that's going to turn into something
bad.
I mean, even Christmas trees as fast as they burn.
So you know, this lithium issue, and I've had even people talking about, you know, terrorism,
you know, what if batteries like that are just parked under buildings and then deliberately
ignited?
You know, what a nightmare that's going to be for law enforcement and fire to suppress.
So it is, you know, a very, very important conversation.
I do want to get to, you know, the blast injuries and that side as well, though.
So what was it that made you transition out of the teams into law enforcement?
And then let's kind of parallel that with Ryan's birth and you can start talking about
him as a young man.
Well, I think that, you know, the team's great experience.
Teammates are, you know, they're teammates.
You know, they become closer than your own, you know, family members.
And I think a lot of that is the bonding that happens, you know, from doing, you know, some
pretty spectacular things.
And you never want to let them down.
And whether it's in the SEAL teams or any other special operations environment to include
police and fire, you don't want to let your teammates down.
So you always want to be viewed as a value of being able to carry the load.
And that's a very important thing for folks to understand is that when, you know, there's
a challenge to that balance is bad things can happen.
You know, you can see people drifting from the tribe.
You can see them get isolated, you know, lose confidence in themselves, you know, especially
if they're starting to question how their peers are viewing them.
And this is kind of a very unstable terrain that exists when we have somebody that needs
to get help or has been hurt as a result of their service is being able to have that conversation
that, hey, you're injured, you're, you know, you know, we got to heal you up.
You know, we got to make you better.
My transition to the out of the teams basically was late 70s, early 80s.
You know, at that point, you know, we were in the post Vietnam era, you know, much like
what we're seeing now, where the emphasis on military investment and so forth is is
being questioned.
And and also, you know, some dynamics, you know, with regards to leadership and, you
know, what, you know, do we need to focus on and, you know, kind of staying true to
planning and preparing for the war that we're going to have to fight, not the war that we
want to fight on paper.
So you know, I made the decision that I wanted to get out, get some more education.
As I said, you know, when I enlisted in the military, I felt I wasn't ready for college.
You know, I needed to, you know, grow up, you know, kind of taste the world a little
bit.
And, you know, now that I had the experience in the military, I was still, you know, intended
to stay active reserves.
I wanted to go out and kind of expand my headspace as far as, you know, in the academic arena.
So I started at the university two days after I left active duty and wound up getting my
undergraduate degree and then moved into law enforcement.
And that was not something that was planned.
I had intended to come back into the teams, you know, with or without a commission.
You know, that really wasn't my focus, but I just wanted to, you know, get away for a
while, get some schooling and then, you know, come back in.
But then I got bitten by the law enforcement bug, wound up being a beat cop up in the Philadelphia
area for about a year, you know, walking the beat in a predominantly black area as a white,
you know, suburban bred, you know, kid.
Yeah, I got it.
I was coming out of the teams, you know, but I'll tell you what, my experience in the teams
and BUDs and everything else did not prepare me for, you know, walking the beat in a neighborhood
where I definitely was the outsider.
And for that year, probably one of the most valuable growth experiences next to the teams
was the ability to integrate with that into that neighborhood, you know, build, you know,
relationships, build trust that really, as we, you know, kind of alluded to earlier,
initially started coming about and dealing with the kids, you know, helping out, you
know, the young ones.
You know, I'd see, you know, a kid who, you know, there'd be a pack of, you know, five
or six kids and, you know, four of them would have bicycles in all different shapes, sizes,
conditions.
And then, you know, one or two of them wouldn't.
And you know, the kids on the bikes would go riding off.
The other two would be, you know, left there, you know, on the sidewalk, you know, kind
of with, you know, that expression on their face that, you know, you know, I don't have
to describe it, but, you know, just disappointment, you know, that being left out.
So you know, I'd help them get bikes.
I mean, we were always picking up abandoned bikes.
And so, you know, wound up giving them bikes, you know, and then, you know, occasionally,
you know, buying them ice cream, you know, you know, which was a treat, you know, so
little things, you know.
And you know, and then the kids, you know, we started talking.
And the next thing you know, and it wasn't my intent, but, you know, they would start
telling me things about what was going on in the neighborhood.
And then I see, you know, you know, an elderly woman, you know, walking up the sidewalk,
you know, dragging some grocery bags, you know, just, you know, trying to put one foot
in front of the other.
And I, you know, I go up and I say, can I carry your bags for you?
And, you know, you know, you can see the look on our face, like, really?
You want to carry my bags?
I said, yeah, let's let me carry your bags.
And then we just walk and, you know, it's just little things like that, you know, that,
you know, I really got an education and that, you know, really proved its importance when
about nine, 10 months after I started, I wound up in a street fight, pretty violent street
fight.
And one of those fights where, you know, everything just starts to close in on it and things get
real narrow and you're just reaching deep for everything you got.
You know, I'm trying to hold onto my weapon that, you know, was actively trying to be
removed from my holster.
I barely got, you know, a call out on the radio, didn't even know if it was received.
And then things went black.
And the next thing I know, you know, I was being helped off the ground and, you know,
kind of regaining my senses, sirens, you know, blaring, you know, all around me.
And here are three people from the neighborhood helping me up.
And, you know, the street gang that I confronted were basically, you know, all for the leader.
They were laying either unconscious or severely injured on the sidewalk.
And I'll never forget this one rather large lady from the neighborhood, it was grabbed
a hold of, had grabbed a hold of this, you know, gang leader and was slamming him against
the brick wall of a house, you know, telling him, you don't, he's our cop.
You don't ever touch him.
You know, you're not welcome here, you know.
And it just kept, you know, beating this guy until they pulled her off of him.
But it was to me, that was a threshold moment when I knew that I was part of that neighborhood.
And then, you know, it was a sad day when I had to leave, you know, when, you know,
finally, you know, they said, hey, you know, you can go ride around a patrol car now.
And I really, you know, was torn by that.
You know, I, you know, I walked that beat and the sun, rain, snow, sleet, you name it.
You know, they tell you never get cold or hungry, but, you know, so you learn those
skills.
But again, I think that really applies to what we do.
And I've always leaned on, you know, kind of the three legs of the stool, you know,
treat everybody the way you want to be treated.
And like I said before, you know, you got to ask the question, how do they want to be
treated?
The second one is treat everybody with respect, no matter what.
And the third is never take their dignity away.
Otherwise, that stool is going to come collapsing down on you.
I just want to segue for a second and then move forward again.
But this is the perfect time to ask this question.
You have this background, obviously, in Naval Special Warfare.
When you enter multiple first responder professions, and now in 2024, we're reflecting.
What is your opinion on the lack of fitness standards in police and fire coming from,
you know, an organization where physical performance was held so high?
It's going to come back to bite us in a big way.
It will.
I mean, it really points to everything that we were talking about.
You know, we're in a high stress profession.
And unless you are exercising, you know, your body, you're maintaining a level of nutrition
and fitness and mental health preparedness, then you're going to be vulnerable.
How can you go out and fix other people's problems or help them with their problems
if you are vulnerable yourself?
And this is a big part of why I think we're seeing some of the challenges we're seeing
within our own profession right now is because in some cases, that emphasis is not high enough.
It's not a level of priority.
And you know, this is certainly influenced by the dynamic of staffing shortages, where
I think the worst thing you can do is reduce your standards in order to elevate your staffing
opportunities.
This will always come back to bite you.
I can say that without hesitation, you know, in over 45 years of being in this profession
at various, you know, angles, that is probably a disastrous leadership decision when they
take the easy way out and lower standards because it will come back to bite them.
I think one of them, I've seen this firsthand when I work for Anaheim, California, their
standards all over were incredibly high and they would lose 25% of every academy class
through attrition, the new hire class, by the time they got to the end of the probationary
year.
Conversely, the last place I worked at the bar was in a trench.
And you know, it was almost no one was lining up to join them.
And Anaheim, there were thousands of people trying to work for them.
So lowering the standards may sound like it makes sense, but it's actually counterintuitive
because you attract the best people by challenging them.
What really scares me about the recruitment crisis now is because of that, Anaheim back
in 2005, there was 30 spots and over a thousand people testing, like qualified resumes thick
testing for that position.
They got to choose what they deemed as the top 30.
Now you're having agencies as 30 spots and there's 30 candidates that have taken them
all.
And so that bar, you know, not only have you lowered the bar physically and maybe even
educationally, but now you've taken not only the great candidates that absolutely going
to be in there, but the ones that are going to be a complete liability, whether it's at
that rank or maybe rising all the way through to chief.
And you know, James, you point something out that really, I think, breeds disaster in that
dynamic where you see the 30 candidates for 30 positions.
What tends to happen is those folks that are the high performers wind up being pulled down
to the least common denominator of which, you know, to get people through the door,
minimal level of performance and expectation.
And because these high performers, you know, no matter what, you know, as they continue
to try to perform at a high level, do not get support from their leadership.
And through time, they start to erode.
They start to come back down to this level of mediocrity, you know, this minimal level
of performance.
And that's when you see, you know, a collision.
It's going to catch up.
And that's exactly, you know, over the years in those situations, you know, witness firsthand,
you know, that that dynamic and, you know, leadership takes strength.
And you're not always going to be the decisions are going to be tough, you know, and the buck
stops here.
But sometimes it may be better not to fully staff the vacancies with the right people
as opposed to filling all the vacancies and assuming the risk of getting the wrong people,
because those wrong people will come back to bite you.
They will come back and they will they will cause you problems down the road in ways that
you hadn't even dreamed of.
And and so I think to that point is, you know, having that discipline, having the commitment
to maintain those high standards that esprit de corps, that that, you know, those bragging
rights, you know, that that you had at Anaheim to to say, hey, you know, we're the best of
the best.
And and, you know, if you want to be part of this department, you need to walk the walk.
You need to walk this line the way we want you to walk it.
And you need to be able to, you know, prove yourself, you know, competent to be part of
this this tribe.
Absolutely.
Well, speaking of high performers, let's go to Ryan then.
So talk to me what he was like as a little boy.
And then again, earlier question, what was he playing during school ages as far as sports
and exercise?
You know, he was a happy, lucky kid, you know, always smiling.
You know, he was, I would say, more quiet than he was, you know, outgoing, but yet,
you know, very engaging in sports.
You know, he wasn't a standout athlete, you know, played a little soccer, loved lacrosse.
And then in high school, he became through a neighbor who had a business in in in the
local area, had a diving salvage company.
He you know, I got him, you know, scuba certified.
And then he started, you know, in his high school years working for, you know, my neighbor
and his side business.
And then I was joined by a couple of his friends.
And they wound up diving year around, you know, doing all the scutt work that you can
imagine here in the Annapolis area, cleaning the bottom of rich people's boats, you know,
so that they can compete in their, you know, Wednesday night sailing races, retrieving
things that fell overboard, you know, replacing zincs and other hardware.
It was it, you know, he loved making money and loved the freedom that he had, you know,
doing that job as as as dirty as it was sometimes.
And then he also worked as along with his sister as a waiter here at a local restaurant,
which taught him how to deal with people of all, you know, you know, different backgrounds
and under different conditions.
And but but he was a regular kid.
He loved music.
He had a tremendous ability to.
He could listen to a song and then pick up a guitar or, you know, a couple other instruments
and start playing that song without looking at a sheet sheet music.
I you know, I know that there are other people out there that, you know, have that same,
you know, you know, talent or or ability.
But I was able to witness that in him.
He was he was great with musical instruments and.
But you know, again, I'd say he was an average kid.
You know, he he was not, you know, above the fold standout athlete or academic.
He he had an unusual ability to abstract.
He could he could think second, third order effects, which later in his seal career became
a real attribute because he was one of their one of their operational planners and and
was was recognized for his ability to to play in difficult missions.
So what was it that made him decide to follow in your footsteps and enter the teams?
Yeah, I'm not sure.
I wouldn't characterize it as following in my footsteps, though.
A lot of people, I think, make that assumption.
I will say, you know, he's pretty much, you know, an independent kid.
I could see reflections of that as he was growing up.
He wasn't always a follower.
He kind of would, you know, do his own thing, you know, separate from, you know, the rest
of his crew.
But then other times he would be right right in there with him.
I'll tell you what what what it was, and and this is no different than many of the folks
listening.
You know, we went through 9-11 experience, you know, at the time I was a supervisory
special agent with the Secret Service up in their New York field office, which was located
in the World Trade Center.
And on 9-11, you know, kind of go quickly through that day.
The attack occurs.
I always had a routine where I go in early in the morning and run along the Hudson River,
you know, before traffic, you know, bottlenecked, you know, at the bridges and tunnels.
And I had just finished a run when the first plane hit Tower One.
And you know, we wound up evacuating our building, went down to the street.
And you know, as the rest of our office was evacuating and relocating, I was interfacing
with police and fire command that was assembling at the time with the police commissioner,
fire commissioner, head of OEM.
And that's when the second plane hit.
But you know, once that second plane hit, you know, everything went to shit.
You know, command structure, you know, in many ways became chaotic.
The integrated command kind of started to separate.
Police went one way, fire went another.
And you know, got caught in both building collapses.
Got involved in rescue operations.
Probably should have been dead about five times that day.
You know, almost had one of the unfortunate folks who, you know, jumped, almost land on
me.
But it was a surreal day.
It still is even now when I think about it.
I initially had gotten reported as missing.
But through that day, as all that was unfolding, my wife was a nurse paramedic taking care
of a hard intact victim.
And her first realization of what was going on is, you know, it was on this gentleman's
TV as he's, you know, having an active chest pain.
And she had to pull herself together to get him to the hospital before she kind of, you
know, lost her shit.
And then my two kids were, you know, in middle school, early high school, and had witnessed
this all unfold from a hillside west of the city.
I had initially been reported as missing.
But, you know, going through the day, eventually came out, got decon'd.
But I knew I had to get home that night to see them.
And about midnight that night, I walked through the door, you know, wearing a pair of sweats
that's, you know, three or four times, you know, too large for me because my suit and
everything else had been torn to shreds.
My eyes were beet red and, you know, just, you know, all scratched up.
And I just looked at, you know, the family and they were looking back at me and they
just, you know, it was that look that you can't even define.
We just all hugged each other.
But that was the first time I realized that both buildings had come down.
And, you know, realizing that we were in so deep that we were on the leeward side of all
the smoke and fire blowing over the top of us, didn't realize that the top of the buildings
had come down or the whole building had come down.
We just thought a section of the top had come down.
It wasn't until later that night I realized that, you know, both of the, you know, tower
one, tower two, and then eventually our building, tower seven, which is a 49 story building,
came down later that afternoon.
That affected my son.
He really kind of closed up.
He, you know, kind of went into a period of, you know, he wasn't communicating.
He wasn't coming out of his room, didn't want to go to school.
About two weeks after 9-11, he came to me and said, Dad, I want to go down to ground
zero.
I have to understand what happened.
I think he's 14 years old at this point.
And I said, it's not a good idea.
Your mom's not going to go for it.
And he says, Dad, I just need to understand.
You know, a bunch of his friends had lost their parents around us.
I mean, this had ripped in our community, you know, pretty hard.
And you can imagine two weeks after that event, you know, our society was still, you know,
kind of, you know, in a head spin.
So something told me that he needed to go down there and see this.
Of course, his mother, you know, was completely against it.
I said to her, look, you got to trust me.
I think some, you know, he needs to see this.
So we got down there to ground zero.
And I was one of the ground zero supervisors, you know, by the time they we got down there,
you know, the transition from a rescue and recovery operations.
And they figured out that the air was not good to breathe, you know, after, you know,
almost two weeks of, you know, no respirators or anything.
So now everybody was in respirators, wearing helmets, you know, you know, OSHA had shown
up.
And so I dressed them up into a police jacket, you know, put the gear on them and, you know,
you know, walked them around the site.
And the deal was, hey, if I see that you're not handling this, we're out of here, no questions
asked.
And he said, agreed.
So the site was so immense, it took us about three, three and a half hours to walk around.
And I tried to explain what I remembered.
There's a period of time during that day that I was, I don't know what happened.
I just can't put together some things.
And you know, at the end, I said to him, you know, have you seen enough?
And he looked at me, he said, I appreciate you bringing me down here.
And so, you know, life goes on.
I wound up getting transferred back to the White House to take over security operations
there.
It was, you know, getting uprooted after 9-11 up there was not a popular thing with the
family.
But we came back to the Annapolis area.
And a number of years later, you know, he graduated from high school.
As I said, he had been diving for a salvage company, doing some other jobs.
And I said, so what are you going to do?
And he said, well, I'm trying to figure it out.
I said, well, you got a year.
You can live here a year.
But after that, you're out and you're on your own.
About nine months later, he came home, walked in the house one day, said, I just listed
in the Navy.
And oh, by the way, I volunteered for the SEAL program, at which point I looked over
at my wife and she's reaching into the knife drawer.
You know, this is your fault.
You know, you've done this to him.
And I said, no, I haven't.
I said, he needs to cut his own path and I have to respect that.
We have to respect that.
And I said to him, you sure this is what you want to do?
Because there was nothing in his makeup that really kind of pointed towards, gave me the
confidence that, you know, this was the right decision for him.
But I said, you know, I just want you to do me one favor.
I want you to talk to some team guys because I want you to fully understand what you're
getting yourself into.
And so I got him, you know, obviously in Annapolis area, we got a pipeline of SEALs, you know,
going through the Naval Academy and other, you know, local programs and had him sit down
with some, you know, recent combat vets from, you know, coming in from Iraq and Afghanistan.
I told the guys, I said, look, don't pull any punches, you know, give them the good,
bad and the ugly.
And so they did.
And afterwards, he said, hasn't changed my mind.
This is what I want to do.
And you know, a little less than two years later, pinning a trident on his chest.
So I know he followed kind of the medical path to and again may not be followed, followed,
but he found himself as a combat medic and walked me through, you know, the roles that
he played in the teams and then where he found himself deployed.
Yeah, he went to his special ops medic training, 18 Delta down at Fort Bragg.
I think now it's called Fort Liberty and came back out of that, graduated the top of his
class, immediately deployed to Iraq, you know, within days of being in Iraq out in the Al
Ambar area.
I think they were playing around Fallujah, Ramadi, you know, on missions.
He was immediately in contact with the enemy.
That was his first deployment.
So it wasn't, you know, but days or hours that he, you know, got his, you know, cherry
broken, you know, in combat.
And then went on to second deployment that was up in northern Iraq in a what we call
an HVI high value target hunt.
He was assigned to a tier one special operations unit up there as an ONT and wound up being,
you know, very integral to that unit as a SEAL.
It was an Army tier one unit.
And you know, they saw a lot of action, a lot of nasty stuff up in that environment
and wound up actually being recommended and awarded the Bronze Star for his actions during
that deployment.
Towards the end of the deployment, they got word that a medic in Afghanistan, a senior
medic had been they had lost a, you know, him and needed to have a replacement.
So Ryan raised his hand and said, look, I'll go.
At that point, he was single but living with a steady girlfriend in the San Diego area.
So he came home, dropped his, you know, Iraq kit and build out his Afghan kit and deployed
two weeks later into the Aruzgan, Taran, Kowt area of Afghanistan, where again, the whole
different terrain.
And you know, I had been in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan before him, because at that
point I was a senior leader in the Department of Defense working the counter ID and counter
terrorism problem.
So I've been bouncing in and out of theater.
And I told him, I said, hey, you know, I got it.
You know, you've had your two pumps to Iraq, but Afghanistan is a whole different ballgame.
I said, don't think that, you know, you're stepping into the same onto the same field
is completely different.
And you know, sure enough, he came off that deployment and he said, you're exactly right.
It was a different world.
And in between his back to back deployment, which was almost a year's worth of being
deployed half the time in Iraq and then half the time in Afghanistan, came home.
And that's when we started seeing the first signs that something was changing, was having
difficulty sleeping.
You know, his personality was, you know, coming, you know, harder in the sense of.
And again, that could be maturity of operations.
He's growing up.
But something was something was starting to shift.
He wasn't smiling as much and became, you know, short fused at times, wound up breaking
up with his girlfriend that he lived with for five years.
Went to sniper training during that break between the third and fourth deployment and
then went back to Afghanistan, back to the Helmand River Valley, where, you know, that's
where the heart of all their opium growing in production was.
And went to an outpost.
It was like Fort Apache.
You know, they were constantly being harassed and attacked by the enemy there.
You know, high op tempo.
You know, you know, another tough deployment.
He comes home from that experience, which during that time, the IEDs, especially the
pressure plate IEDs were prolific.
I mean, they were all over the place.
And my fear is the person that ran that organization is that, you know, I was going to get a message,
you know, that, you know, he had been injured or worse, you know, stepping on one of those
things.
And Buddy made it through the deployment.
You know, they all got banged up and but came home and he was immediately, you know, assigned
to, you know, the training division because of his combat experience and his reputation
as a senior petty officer to lead the special operations urban combat training.
They called it Salk there on the West Coast.
And at the same time, you know, those changes continued to manifest.
You know, he started complaining he couldn't sleep that, you know, when he did get to sleep,
he'd have nightmares.
Alcohol usage increased, you know, to deal not only with the sleep, but also with, I
think, some of the anxiety that he was starting to experience.
You know, he was losing that edge that he had had.
Starting to doubt things, you know, you know, as time went on, became hyper vigilant, you
know, went to get help.
And and that's when the prescription drugs started, you know, drugs to help him go to
sleep, drugs to help him with his anxiety.
The alcohol continued because, you know, it's readily available and kind of, you know, they're
just trying to kind of stay normal, stay above the water line.
And and then we started seeing decline in cognitive functions had problems with his
balance and memory and his memory issues really started to frustrate him.
He started questioning whether he was, you know, becoming a safety factor for for, you
know, his teammates and went to get help.
And the system initially, you know, kind of directed him towards a low hanging fruit,
as I said, more more prescription drugs, really, you know, focusing on PTSD and, you know, the
mental health aspects of, you know, what he had been through or what he was presenting
and very little talk about traumatic brain injury.
And, you know, they focused on his alcohol issues and, you know, but we just continue
to see a steadily, you know, downward spiral, no matter what we did.
The system, you know, started to turn against him, you know, as he stepped forward to get
help, started to weaponize, you know, you know, his his his pleas for help, you know,
his his his complaints against him.
You know, I believe the system just didn't know what to do.
And and when the when the low hanging fruit, the easy stuff didn't work, then it was, look,
we don't have time for this, you know, let's just get rid of the problem.
And so there was a sea change towards, you know, trying to help him out, you know, maybe
trying to do the right things, you know, for the right reason, but all the wrong way, because
they didn't know.
And it became, you know, now you're a problem, you know, you know, started focusing on discipline,
you know, looking for, you know, reasons to to move him out of the community.
And this is this is a, you know, highly revered seal, highly revered, highly decorated, highly
experienced seal operator who suddenly start to have manifest these problems.
And nobody's standing back saying, hey, WTF, what just happened here?
What's going on?
Instead, it was, you know, you know, to me, leadership failure, leaders who violated our
core ethic of not leaving anybody behind because they didn't want to deal with it while others,
you know, we're trying to deal with it, but handicapped by not knowing exactly what was
going on.
And the drugs were just making making it worse.
You know, he felt like what he was in his own body.
And so eventually got to a point where, you know, he pulled himself out of, you know,
that South role and he was reassigned to a less demanding task as he, you know, went
through some different programs.
Nothing was nothing was, you know, happening in effect.
So, you know, eventually, you know, you know, he started separating, you know, started to
become disconnected from, you know, the tribe.
You know, he I mean, this was eaten away at him.
He felt like he was letting his boys down.
He decided that, you know, we're trying to get him into a poly trauma program up in Palo
Alto, allied to the VA in Stanford.
And he agreed to it, but he said, I want out of the Navy.
And he had just before he got out, he really went into a dark place and they took him in
for a mental health evaluation where ultimately, you know, physically holding him down in an
emergency department.
And you know, he's telling them, hey, look, I want out.
You know, I just, you know, I'm just tired.
You know, you're hurting me.
And you know, made some threats.
And that was enough for them to lock him up into them into a lockdown unit where he spent
the next month.
It was it was to see your son in a state like that.
It was it just ripped my heart in half.
I didn't even recognize him.
I mean, he had, you know, when you talk about, you know, it just seemed like, you know, everything
that I had talked about earlier, you know, in my law enforcement days about respecting
people, treating them the way you want to be respected and understanding how they want
to be respected and dignity.
Every one of those freaking tenants was violated.
And and then, you know, once you put somebody in a lockdown unit like that, you know, that's
it.
I mean, that's a stain that's going to follow you for the rest of your life.
And so at that point, he was he was moving towards discharge out of the Navy, you know,
completely away from what, you know, he intended to do, you know, less than a year before.
And that was making the teams a career.
I mean, that was that was his objective.
He was discharged the day.
He was discharged from the Navy simultaneously as he was discharged from the lockdown ward
at the Naval Hospital of San Diego.
The people there said they had never seen anything like that before.
He was just a shell of of the human he once was.
And I remember as we walked out, he was wearing a hospital, you know, a scrub top and a pair
of board shorts and some flip flops and and all the emotion was completely out of his
face.
He was just as if he was wearing this stone mask.
And as we're walking towards the car, he stops and he turns to me, he says, hey, dad, why
did they do this to me?
All I was trying to do is help my boys.
Why did they do this to me?
And then he turned back around and just shoveled forward.
Never got any closure with his teammates.
They were never told that he was discharged.
He carried this burden that he let them down.
He was their doc.
You know, he was their, you know, their, you know, their enlisted leader.
And now he was gone and nobody knew why.
And you know, real tough time, real tough time for him, for us, for his teammates.
I'm still trying to resolve, you know, some of the leadership behavior at that time and
how they could still look themselves in the face with the knowledge that they had gotten
so wrong.
Going back to some of the factors before we obviously get to the next part of the conversation,
you know, we have the TBI element and I think the macro traumas are evident.
You know, someone was blown out of a Humvee or whatever it was, but it's the micro traumas,
the breaches, the explosions around, you know, firing their own weapon that we hear about.
But aside from that, over and over again, one of the most toxic things that you can
do to someone who has served for years and years and years and pointing out to exactly
what you said when they were hired, when they were earlier in their career, they were phenomenal
at what they did is the moment they start having problems, they're ostracized and they're
thrown from the tribe, the very tribe that they were a part of, they swore to serve.
And there seems to be a lack of the ability to just step back and go, wait a second, they
were great before.
What's happened?
They were hired and they were a complete turd from day one.
Whole different story.
We should never have got that person in.
But so many firefighters and police officers and SEALs and, you know, so many other people
in uniform, they were great.
They were doing really well.
And then the job started changing them.
And I don't know why there's a complete lack of empathy and compassion when looking at
the through line between someone's service.
Like if they were an absolute disaster from day one, you can go, well, look, you know,
they brought it in and they've never improved.
They're still the same.
But so many of these men and women were stellar firefighters and, you know, operators, whatever
role they played.
And then there was this decline, whether it was slow or whether it was acute.
And the perfect example, I had a widow of a firefighter who took his own life and he
was winning firefighter of the year.
You know, he was just a stellar employee.
And then there was this massive, you know, just psychosis in a breakdown and he himself
was isolated for a long, long time.
And when I speak to people in the psychological world, they say of the detrimental element
of that.
And then when you speak to the same people about the side effects of psychiatric meds,
the detriment and the lack of efficacy of so many of these meds that are thrown are
first responders and veterans.
So now, you know, eight years into this podcast, when I hear this story, you just like, oh,
my God, there's just this Jenga tower building of all the wrong ways of treating this person.
And then more often than not, it ends up with a suicide.
Yeah.
So the word is institutional betrayal.
It's a new term that's come forward.
And it really describes what you just talked about.
You know, you give it all for, you know, your team, for your unit, for your service, for
the nation, and then, you know, when you need help or things don't go right, then the institution
turns on you.
And I'm trying to, you know, that's one of the things I'm trying to resolve and rectify
in my own head is why.
And you know, I've come to understand that, you know, when, you know, it's almost like
a human factors dynamic that if there's something that you don't understand, very often you
start to fear it.
And then in that fear, you start to demonize it.
And this is where, you know, these false narratives, these stories start to surround these individuals
and, and very often I can trace it back to, you know, the system fails to listen to them
and it's quick to judge because it, because what they're bringing forward doesn't fit
within that comfortable dynamic of the environment that they're in, especially if we don't have
any answers.
And, and, and, you know, you know how you feel when, when, you know, you get the impression
that somebody's not listening to you.
You know, you're trying to convey something, you're trying to express something and, and
they're just blowing you off or they got a, you know, deaf ear to what you're saying or,
you know, whatever it is, they're just disregarding you and, and, and, and you, and your opinion.
And, and that, that can have an almost an instantaneous, you know, detriment to any
relationship dynamic.
And this is what happened with him.
I mean, they stopped listening to him.
I mean, and he was telling him, you know, as we'll go along with the story, you'll,
you'll see that all along he was telling him, them, you know, what they needed to focus
on what, what was happening, but they weren't listening because it didn't fit in their start
line.
And I think that happens whether, you know, it's, it's a military unit, whether it's the
fire service, whether it's police, and I think that I had a senior chief, SEAL senior chief,
tell me one time, you know, this is the bent measuring stick analogy.
And I said, what do you mean by that?
And he said, well, you know, we're all banged up and including a lot of the leaders, both
mid grade and seniors, and, and we're expected to kind of evaluate each other or evaluate
our subordinates.
And so that, that center line, that balance line starts to shift and becomes somewhat
askew from what truly is normal.
And so, and in some cases, what I think is happening is that we're looking at somebody
that, you know, has been brought to our attention is having some issues or they, they have stepped
up expressing issues.
And it's almost like we don't want to acknowledge it.
We don't want to recognize it because it almost means in a subconscious way that, you know,
we're admitting that's happening to us too, if that makes sense.
And so it's easier to demonize it.
It's easier to push the problem out than rather than to deal with it.
And to me, this is so counterintuitive, especially after you've made such a great investment
in a particular individual.
And usually, and you pointed this out, a lot of these people are extremely high performers
at the top of their game, at a point of, you know, operational and leadership maturity
where we don't, we can't afford to lose them, but something starts to happen to them.
So what do we do?
We throw them to the freaking curb instead of trying to figure out what's going on, what's
at the root cause.
But you know, we get stuck into this and I think a lot of it's mental health focused
is you know, we get stuck into this, you know, let's treat the symptoms approach instead
of, Hey, what do we need to peel back here to understand, you know, what's causing this?
One of the truths that emerged, I mean, I'm at almost a thousand conversations now and
easily, I mean, literally probably two thirds to a half of the guests have at some point
been at that point of near suicide.
Some of them even went through with their attempt and they survived, thank God.
But you know, we come from a culture that used to think that suicide was cowardly and
selfish and how could they and think about your family and then fast forward eight years
and my evolution of understanding this topic, you hear the same thing over and over and
over again.
And you realize that through the combination of all the things that we've discussed, including
you know, actual physiological damage of the brain, we should come from trauma, should
come from sleep deprivation that the brain becomes miswired.
And it seems like literally almost all of these men and women get to a point where they
truly believe that they are a burden to the very people that they love and that, you know,
skewed sense of reality, suicide then becomes selfless and courageous because they believe
to their heart that they are the problem.
So they are going to remove themselves from this issue.
And then you add to the fact that they're in uniform.
So they've already come to terms with the fact that they will be willing to die for
someone else.
When you kind of look back now at Ryan's path, was there any element of burdensome that you
observed?
Yeah, absolutely.
I think, you know, I've come to the same conclusion, you know, as he became disenfranchised from
the community that he loved, separated from the team, certainly, you know, because, you
know, there was things going on, you know, without question, there was things going on
that he was struggling with.
But that sense of letting down your teammates and the haunting, you know, aspects of how
are his teammates viewing him, which is important to understand, because we all, you know, need
qualification and validation from our teammates, from our family, you know, from those around
us.
And when that's not happening, or it's in doubt, that is not a trivial issue.
And as he became more separated, that starts to affect your sense of purpose.
You know, why am I here?
You know, I no longer can do the things that I was the best at, that I want to do.
And, you know, I got all these people trying to help me, and in some cases, not help me.
You know, they're trying to push me out.
So obviously, I'm somebody that they don't want around anymore.
And you know, so this, it's amazing how this turns to personal shame.
And that shaming is, that's something that needs to be studied, you know, in the context
of this institutional betrayal.
Because I really think that, in some cases, the way we deal with these folks, we're actually
setting them up for this.
You know, maybe not intentionally, because we don't know or we don't recognize, but we
need to approach this a whole different way, in my opinion.
And for Ryan, yeah, I believe he did feel that he was a burden.
But there's another aspect of what Ryan did, and I think you alluded to this.
He knew all along that something was wrong with his head.
And he kept saying, something's wrong with my head, but they're not listening to me.
They keep telling me I'm crazy.
And you know, after he took his life, we found out he was right.
He was right all along.
And things fell into place.
So why does somebody have to take their life before we finally wake up and realize what
just happened?
And why did we miss all the signals that were there where we potentially could help this
individual?
I think that, you know, a study was done this past year.
It highlighted the Purple Heart and how that could be a viable kind of solution to those
military folks that are burdened with invisible wounds.
And that's what we've been talking about.
We're talking about invisible wounds.
We're talking about men and women within, you know, the military, the police and fire
service who look normal on the outside.
I mean, they don't have any disfiguring injuries.
They're not limping around.
They don't have a missing arm or a leg.
They look like everybody else.
But on the inside, they're banged up.
And instead of treating them like they're injured, we're treating them like they're
mentally ill.
And it's not to say there's not mental illness that goes hand in glove with a lot of this
because I do believe that, you know, there is.
But we need to find out, is there an underlying injury?
And when you look back at their operational profile, again, whether they're military,
firefighter, you know, police officer, when you start looking at the physical, you know,
exposures that they've had through their careers and what they've been involved in and, you
know, their profile of injuries and so forth, how could you not step back and say, I think
this person's injured?
They're hurt.
You know, there's a great book out there that the body keeps the score.
I mean, it doesn't go away.
I mean, it ebbs and flows as far as how you feel on a daily basis or a weekly basis.
But the body still, you know, racking up every time, you know, you go into a burn building,
every time you fall off a ladder, you know, every time you don't get a good night's sleep,
every time you eat, you know, greasy, you know, fast food, the body's, let's not forget
that.
It's just, it goes, it's another entry on the ledger book.
And at some point, you know, you start crossing these tear lines of, you know, where it's
starting to affect your body, it's starting to affect your mental health.
And what I'm saying is we need to have more of a holistic approach to this.
It's just not solely mental health.
We need to evaluate, you know, and I think this is what you were kind of pointing at
about, you know, the underlying behaviors that we engage in and how they could multiply
or compound themselves into some of these situations.
You know, if you're not sleeping, if you're not eating right, if you're not exercising,
if you're not taking care of mental health, there's going to be a price to pay for that.
And that's injury.
But with that injury, we also have to incorporate, you know, good behavioral and mental health
practices.
So I'm not against mental health.
I'm fully, you know, in favor, but we've got to treat our brains like the rest of our body.
It's you know, and recognize that it's command and control center for everything that goes
on in the body.
It's absolutely critical to maintain balance in the body.
So yeah, Ryan and like so many others, you know, in this business, they're all about
solutions.
And so when he took his life, he knew what he was doing.
I didn't like what he did.
I didn't support what he did, but I've grown to understand why he did it.
And it was to help his brothers and sisters out to prove that he was right, that something
was going on.
And in the end, he was right.
Painfully right.
Did he do it in a way where his brain was preserved so they could study it post-mortem?
Yeah, so let me go into that.
He'd gotten discharged from the Navy, as I mentioned earlier, and then immediately went
into VA care.
He was up in the polytrauma program, palliolatip, for a little bit and then came back east,
spent a year in the Annapolis area tied to a couple of VA facilities here, whole time
continuing to get more medications.
I mean, over the course of the two years we tried to rescue him.
He was prescribed over 40 different medications, everything from over the counter potions,
lotions and creams to high-end psychotropics, mood stabilizers.
It just, you know, he would say, Dad, I'm not even in my own body anymore.
And every day a new package of drugs would show up in the mail.
Very efficient, the mail order process now these days with our drugs distribution.
And we've tried to get him into some programs to help him out.
And you know, one thing I will say as a parent who loved his son very much, very proud of
him, you in whether it's Ryan or someone else's child or significant other, when they're in
trouble you will do anything, anything to help them survive.
And you become very vulnerable, very vulnerable to, you know, snake oil, you know, quick fixes
because you get desperate.
You see them unraveling and they, to every man and woman who's experiencing these invisible
wounds are, you know, they were once at the top of the peak of this mountain and then
they're in this almost a terminal slide down the mountain.
And they're just trying to, you know, grab onto anything to stop the slide.
And they're not getting any answers about what's going on.
And you know, the system is hanging labels on them, you know, they're making judgments
to justify their assessments and their actions.
And that just has taken, every time that happens, it's taken a bigger chunk out of them.
And they're just sliding and trying to stop that slide.
And the further they slide, the darker it gets and the more isolated they get.
And that's when bad things happen.
Ryan and I were sitting around a fire one night in the spring of 2017.
And we were just talking and, you know, he says to me, you know, he reiterates that,
you know, nobody's listening to him, but something's wrong with his head.
You know, he's, you know, by then he'd said, I'm not taking these drugs anymore.
You know, and he said, you know, I'm broken up inside.
And you know, I'm not going to live till an old age.
I know that.
And if anything ever happens to me, I want you to promise me to donate my body for traumatic
brain injury or breacher syndrome research.
And breacher's are the explosive experts that blow through walls and doors.
And I said, hey, look, pal, I mean, I'm in this I'm there with for you.
I mean, you know, in the teams we see, you know, you get your buddy line, you know, your
swim buddy.
You know, I was his swim buddy and I'm not going to leave you.
And he says, I got it.
But I just want you to promise me that.
And then on April 23rd, 2017, we came home from an overnight trip to Philadelphia, the
family event and pulled into the driveway and something was was not right.
And you know, remember walking up to the back door of the house and his dog was just beside
himself and let the dog out and dog immediately ran off.
And then I went into the house and started calling his name and didn't hear any response
and went down to the basement and I found him.
He had taken his life, you know, basically, fixated himself.
And you know, he was wearing his SEAL Team 7 t-shirt and red, white, blue board shorts
and had illuminated a shadow box next to him that had all his medals and, you know, six
signeas and, you know, artifacts from his service and then burn a hard drive of all
his deployment photos in the in the fireplace.
And I'll tell you what, you know, I have been in this business, you know, in different capacities
for, you know, 40 some odd years.
I'll tell you, James, you know, I bear the burden of not being able to rescue my own
son, you know, despite a career of rescue and other people.
And that's something that will never go away.
But you know, my heart was immediately ripped in half and, you know, it stayed that way.
I mean, every day I think about him, but he took his life in a way that, you know, absolutely
preserved his brain for the next, you know, to really accomplish the wish that he had expressed.
That was, you know, to examine, you know, if there was something wrong with his brain.
Two months later, we were called into a research project that was examining military blast
exposure.
It was out of Bethesda Walter Reed at the National Military Medical Center and a brilliant
internationally regarded neuropathologist was conducting the study.
And so he examined Ryan's brain for it, you know, it's quite a process and called us in
and said, hey, I want to talk to you about what we found.
And I told him, I said, hey, doc, first of all, here's the deal.
I said, I don't want you to tell me what you think I want to hear.
I just want you to give me the straight scoop.
If you didn't find anything, then you didn't find anything.
He says, that's not the case.
He says, Ryan died because of an undiagnosed severe level of microscopic brain injury uniquely
related to blast exposure.
That every time these energy waves salt the weapon systems from the breaching charges
from IEDs, improvised explosive devices, you know, this energy wave, this invisible wave
would just rip through his brain and cause micro tears and micro tears involving astrocytes,
which are literally the conductors of the brain, the circuitry of the brain.
And it was all through his brain and particularly in the frontal lobe where the executive functions
are based.
You know, your regulatory functions, your emotions, you know, the base of the brain,
the lower brain was affected, which, you know, regulates your sleep and your hormones and
so forth, which explained why his hormone levels are so out of whack.
And his other neurochemicals, it was, you know, we got some answers that a lot of people
don't get.
And it lifted a burden off of our heart.
You know, as I said, I didn't like what he did.
I didn't support what he did, but I've grown to understand why he did it.
I was able to get into his computer with some help after he passed.
And what I found, James, was that he had downloaded dozens of articles on traumatic brain injury
and also had been researching all the drugs that he had been on, which most of them carried
a warning of suicidal ideation.
And so, you know, I took those results and a couple of months later, I had to sit down
with the Admiral and his senior staff of the SEAL community.
And by then they had constructed a story around Ryan that, you know, he had a drinking problem,
you know, he fell and hit his head and, you know, we did everything we could, you know,
he was a treatment failure.
You know, I'm sorry, but, you know, the VA was a better place for him.
And I said, not so fast.
And laid it all out.
And, and I give credit to the two star SEAL Admiral that was running the command at the
time who took that information and said, this isn't the story I was told and started peeling
into it.
And as a result, Ryan's story has become a catalyst for a lot of change that's happened
within the community and still is changing.
It has increased, or at least started this dialogue that something's going on beyond
just the mental health aspects of the changes that we're seeing in these operators.
And you know, I think there's also an acknowledgement and a realization that it's just not in the
special ops community where we've lost too many special operators to conditions that
literally overlay the story I've just told you about Ryan.
This is Ryan's story is not a one-off.
It is exactly an exemplar of too many, way too many losses that we've experienced as
recently as yesterday in our special ops community.
And that's not to mention our conventional community, which has fought equally as hard
in these conflicts and have experienced challenges that, you know, many of your listeners probably,
you know, have experienced.
These invisible wounds are not trivial.
The you know, so we need to research it.
We need to understand what's going on.
And when I go to the Pentagon and I talk about this, I'm very quick to point out that whatever
solutions we come up with, it cannot affect or in any way degrade our operational effectiveness
or our lethality on the battlefield.
Just like it can't, you know, as we crosswalk a lot of these exposures and similar situations
to our law enforcement and fire rescue community, we still have a job to do.
We still have to get after it.
But why are we not embracing the science that will help inform on what's going on here and
support the decisions that will buy down the risk on the front end, increase the effectiveness
of our monitoring programs, you know, create the diagnostics where we can see this in the
living person, because right now our current diagnostics cannot see down to the resolution
where these injuries exist.
And you know how it is, you know, within our current medical enterprise.
If you can't see it on imaging or through a blood marker, it doesn't exist.
So by virtue, it's going to default towards a mental health diagnosis.
And one of the reasons it defaults almost completely towards a mental health diagnosis
is because that's where the reimbursement codes exists.
The ICD-10 codes.
There's only one right now that exists for TBI, and that's for like a major TBI where
you got brain matter and everything else leaking out of the head.
But this subconcussive exposures, you know, whether it's repeated, you know, hits to the
head that you get from playing football, which you've heard profile, you know, with the chronic
traumatic encephalopathy, the CTE, or it's this unique pattern of injury related to blast
exposure, which is different.
And please, I need to double underline that for everybody.
It is different than CTE.
The blast exposure injury is a unique pattern of injury that goes all through the brain
as opposed to, you know, direct point blunt contact that occurs in football, martial arts,
you know, soccer.
So two distinctive patterns of injury, but they all, they both share the same challenge
that we can't see it in a living person right now.
We're getting close, but we still can't see it.
And we don't have a blood marker like we do with like heart attacks and other disease
processes to further qualify that something's going on.
So again, everything comes back to money at some point.
And without reimbursable code to look at subconcussive, you know, impacts or blast exposure, then,
you know, we're not going to see the investment in the research.
We're not going to see the investment in that and other treatment modalities that potentially
could be valuable in addressing this.
So we're operating very much in a gray zone right now.
And I'm hoping that some of the recent research that has come out is amplifying the need to,
you know, research these conditions further, peel back the onion, qualify the injury processes
that are going on here and get after this in a more appropriate way.
And you know, for your listeners that may be wrestling with some of these conditions,
I want them to understand, please don't lose hope.
There are people, you know, working very hard to try to advance the ball here.
Though in some cases, the bureaucracy is resisting us because it's the old Pandora's box syndrome.
They just, in many cases, don't want to open up the lid to this thing because they're afraid
what's going to fly out.
But we have to.
We have hundreds of thousands, not millions of folks that potentially could be affected
by these conditions within our military community, within our police fire and other like, you
know, occupational exposures.
It's the only way we're going to deal with this is to get smart on it and we can figure
this out.
And it's not because we lack the intellectual capability or the capacity.
We just need the will, the will to come together, you know, work in an integrated way, holistic
approach and develop the precision treatment solutions that every one of these men and
women need and absolutely deserve.
Absolutely.
Well, firstly, I mean, again, thank you for sharing my story.
And it's so sad because it does mirror so many other ones I've heard.
Sarah Wilkinson was on here talking about her husband, Chad, and Jamie Metcalfe was
talking about David.
And it's the same thing.
My brain is broken.
You know, I know certainly Chad, you know, did complete suicide the same way so they
could study his as well.
And over and over again, you're finding this physiological damage that goes back to the
mis-wiring.
I mean, you can literally see, you know, in these imagery, you know, post-mortem, sadly,
that, yeah, oh, oh, now we get it.
Now there was.
You talked about the hormonal disruption.
I think that even on a lesser case, this is a massive problem in military and first responders,
especially the fire service with such horrendous shifts and mandatory overtime that we're seeing
at the moment.
What were you, if anything, kind of seeing as far as Ryan's journey and treatment with
the testosterone and that kind of thing?
Because that alone, you know, with some of these men and women can help them turn the
corner if they discover that their testosterone is completely in the toilet, whether it's
because of seed deprivation or micro traumas or more often than not, a combination of both.
You would think.
But you know, the military bureaucracy has in many ways ignored that.
You know, many of these operators are coming back, as you point out, with low testosterone
and high cortisol levels and other hormonal shifts and neurochemical shifts that are all
tied to the quality of sleep, your cognitive functions.
As I said, finding that homeostasis, that balance in the body, as long as we ignore
this because, you know, unfortunately, this whole discussion about hormones is being contaminated
by the behaviors that we've witnessed where many of these folks go to street star lights
to try to fill the gaps.
They're in the deployed combat environment and they, like I said, it goes back to the
team dynamic.
They want to be there 100% for their teammates.
They don't want to be operating at 70%.
This is a high stress, physically impacting environment where many of them will take human
growth hormones and others, you know, compounds in order to stay in the game.
You know, they'll take painkillers.
Every one of these folks, military, police, fire, you know, they're all dealing with pain.
Every single day, they're dealing with pain, physical pain, you know, emotional pain, spiritual
pain.
We look at the shit that we see and then we at the end of our shift, we're supposed to
come back to, you know, walk through the front door like nothing ever happened.
You know, really?
I mean, I don't care how freaking tough you are.
At some point, you know, that's going to catch up to you.
And especially if, you know, you have no way of letting that pressure off, no way of talking
about it because you operate in society or you're part of a society that doesn't understand.
So yeah, I mean, we need to kind of push the, you know, park the egos at the door, push
aside our prejudices and look at this for what it is.
And so if we have operators and when I say operators, I'm talking about our military
operators, our first responders who need supplemental hormone therapy.
Why not do it under controlled conditions instead of forcing them to go out to the street
to try to rebalance themselves without any guidance or level of competent monitoring?
Because you know, I don't care what drug you take, it's going to have a consequence.
You know, nothing's clean.
So and I'm not, you know, against pharmaceuticals, but you know, I also believe that there's
a responsible use of them in a positive way that can help.
But then on the other hand, a lot of the pharmaceuticals that we've seen, you know, employed are just
a quick fix to deal with symptoms and don't go to after the root cause.
Absolutely.
Well, just speaking of the hormone replacement and supplementation side, there's an incredible
company out there called Transcend who actually hunted down like a dog.
And they're one of the sponsors of the show now.
And the reason being their military owned or veteran owned, excuse me.
And I've seen them donate so much freaking money to nonprofits and even 7X with Ryan
Parrott and we went around the world.
They were a big supporter of that.
But they do an incredible deep, deep dive blood test.
They have everything from TRT through to just simple peptides, you know, so you're boosting
your body's ability, which I think is so pertinent for first responders because a lot of these
young men and women don't need testosterone.
They really need to sleep, exercise and good nutrition.
But if they're not able to do that, this is a great way of helping their body make it
without becoming a complete, you know, dependent on exogenous testosterone.
So for people listening, if you are looking for someone like that, Transcend is an amazing
company.
They even have a nonprofit, the Transcend Foundation that does put through veterans, military members
and first responders through and they help them with supplying them.
They'll actually some of my friends get the treatment from a sponsored point of view.
They don't have to pay themselves.
So there are some great places out there to get it.
It's just a shame that the first responder professions or the military organizations
aren't the one that are actually supporting their people and, you know, not just allowing,
but empowering them with the knowledge that, yeah, you can address your hormones to get
to that optimal level, which is not only going to affect you, your ability to perform as
a firefighter or a police officer or a, you know, a SEAL, but also with your mental health
and the sleep and your relationships and everything else.
So there is an alternative to these fricking gym locker, you know, roids that people were
using before.
Yeah.
And it's all interconnected, I think is what we're saying is that, you know, again, this
is where I think that, you know, we can turn this is as, as, as we, you know, you know,
encourage good quality research and science to inform us, then we can make better decisions
all the way around.
And yeah, this doesn't mean you can't just stop into it, you know, a fast food, you know,
and, you know, pick up something on the fly.
I mean, we all do or, you know, go out on the, you know, occasional weekend and, you
know, have, you know, a couple pops.
I mean, I don't have that problem.
They call me three beer, drink one, spill one, give one away and I'm good for the night.
But I think we're similar.
But yeah, yeah.
But you know, there is and you know, what qualifies this is when you talk to somebody
that has kind of come out of a bad place and they've been able to kind of make the shift
and they're eating better, they're getting better quality of sleep.
They are exercising.
It's amazing what the exercise can do for you.
And it doesn't need I mean, it doesn't mean you got to go into, you know, a freaking high
end gym and, you know, with the latest, you know, spandex tire and, you know, pump, you
know, thousands of pounds of, you know, weight.
I mean, the exercise we're talking about, you know, literally can be done with walking,
swimming, you know, just some stretching exercises and so forth.
But the basics and how much better people feel when they start engaging into a regular
program like that is, you know, you just hear, you know, the positive reflections time and
time again.
So but it's hard at times to get started.
And I think that one of the best ways to kind of cross that bridge is partner up with people.
There's nothing like, you know, being part of a group that can hold you accountable for
getting out there every day and doing something.
So, you know, if you're one of those folks and it's not a negative statement that, you
know, it's hard to kind of get yourself up and out to do your own thing, then, you know,
join a group become it doesn't need to be a big group, but just enough that, you know,
you're poking each other in the chest saying, hey, hey, you know, you're five minutes late.
You're supposed to start, you know, you know, we're we're going to go and, you know, do
this.
We're going to go do that.
And and I don't know anybody that after they've had a good workout of some sort doesn't feel
better.
Yeah, it kind of sucks why you're doing it.
I mean, it's supposed to.
I mean, that's the point.
Yeah, it's supposed to.
But but, you know, you're conditioning your body to endure those stresses and and your
body will reward you with feeling better.
Absolutely.
Well, we've been talking for two and a half hours, so I want to be mindful of the time
and I've actually stomach I've been hearing on the other side.
But I do want to just make sure there's anything else you want to impart to the audience before
we close this out.
Yeah, I mean, you know, Ryan's here with me as we're talking, you know, he, you know,
he's constantly poking me saying, you know, make sure you say this, make sure you say
that, you know, you know, so I a lot of what I'm saying is actually him speaking through
me.
You know, he was all about his boys.
He loved being a seal, loved deploying.
You know, this wasn't about failure or weakness.
But I do think that it's a real world condition that we need to get on top of.
It potentially is a national security threat to our force.
You know, as we are growing more and more into a modern warfare construct, you know,
we need to prepare our men and women to be able, you know, to have the real resiliency
and the endurance to operate in these different environments, whether it's overseas in a conflict
zone or it's here domestically.
This isn't going away.
I just hope that our society doesn't lose sight of, you know, where we've been and
we keep an eye on where we need to go.
And it isn't always going to be pretty.
And you know, it's it's I think that almost every one of these folks that we've been talking
about, you know, deep down wouldn't trade away, you know, their experiences as painful
as they've been.
You know, they loved doing what they're doing.
They loved doing what they did or doing what they're doing now.
You know, it gives them purpose.
It gives them pride.
And this this nation needs to to, you know, be, you know, respectful of that.
You know, tomorrow is July 4th.
And you know, this red, white and blue flag that I have behind me, you know, represents
so much for this nation.
And as we have these debates that go on in our society about different kind of flags
that are being hung around our communities now and so forth and different signs and different,
you know, behaviors and conditions, none of that would be possible without this flag.
Because if you've had the experience to travel to other places around the world, you quickly
understand that not everyone has has the freedoms and the level of security that we enjoy in
this nation.
And we can't forget that.
And hopefully we never have to experience a condition where, you know, we have lost
that.
I want to thank everybody for their time.
James, great conversation.
I'm glad to come back at some point if if worthy, but just for everyone out there that,
hey, we're still working on this.
We're not giving up.
We're going to take this into the end zone.
We just need your help.
So enjoy your July 4th and happy birthday, America.