This episode is sponsored by Transcend, a veteran owned and operated performance optimization company that I introduced recently as a sponsor on this show.
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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 Firefighter Turn Chaplain, Joshua Strom.
Now in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from his early life, his journey into the world of scouting, wildland firefighting, the unique responses of the Grand Canyon Fire Department, his journey into Chaplaincy, responding to Hurricane Helene,
the emotional ripple effect that that disaster is going to have on the first responders and civilians 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 almost 1000 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Joshua Strom. Enjoy.
Well, Joshua, I want to start by saying simply thank you for reaching out.
We're going to talk about a bunch of things today, including not only what happened post Helene, but also the impact of responding to that or living in that area and, you know, our our rescuers and the ripple effect from that.
But I want to begin by welcoming you onto the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thank you.
So where on planet Earth we finding you this afternoon?
So I am in Keene Sport, Tennessee, which is the northeast corner tip of of Tennessee.
If you're looking at a map, so we're about an hour north of Knoxville.
Beautiful.
Well, I'd love to start at the very beginning of your timeline.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings.
OK, so I'm born and raised from this region, even though my family's from Texas, my father's came up here for work and from Texas.
And so if I sound more Texan and Tennessee, that might be the might be where it got it from.
But but yeah, we, you know, I kind of grew up literally with bunker boots on.
My dad was a volunteer fire chief, worked in rescue services.
So there's a picture of me at three years old sitting in his bunker gear boots, trying to put his gear on.
So kind of was grew up into emergency services.
And but yeah, born and raised and worked here locally in my own county and the next county over and also worked several different areas around the country.
But this is this is even though I've been pretty much in a lot of this United States, I've always come home.
So this is home to me.
What was your father doing outside of the fire service?
What was his career?
So my dad, not only was he a volunteer fire chief and also a rescue squad chief, he he worked for Eastman Chemical Company.
So he was a hazmat material specialist.
So basically anything that went wrong, hazardous materials, it's his job to clean it up, take care of it, dispose of it.
He also worked on the fire side of it at the plant.
So heaven forbid, I would much rather have a house fire than a chemical fire.
Chemical fires are scary, but he loved it.
He enjoyed it.
That's what he did for 40, 42 years.
So what about sports and exercise?
What were you playing and doing during the school ages?
So I wasn't your, I guess, typical teenager.
I did play baseball.
Baseball is my sport better than football because I didn't like getting crushed.
Football is strong in Tennessee and I just wasn't a big enough boy to play it yet.
But no, I was mostly in outdoors hunting and fishing, backpacking.
My father was heavy, heavy into the outdoors as well, and dog hunts.
And so, but I'm third generation Eagle Scout, so I was heavily involved in scouting.
And so that was a part of my life as well.
So even though I played baseball, it was just more for fun.
Played a little league here and there, but didn't really play team sport as much.
And yeah, so mostly stayed in the outdoors.
So I was an outdoorsman.
Going back to your dad for a second, a question just popped in my head.
Were there any things that he mentioned, obviously being so well versed in the hazmat side
from a career perspective that maybe on the fire side, we were kind of naive about
or some of the mistakes that were constantly being made?
Because I can think immediately from my career, some hazmat calls where my men,
in this case, my brothers, were very, very lucky to walk away.
And I hope to God there isn't a ripple effect later in their life.
Right. I think my father was a pioneer as far as clean gear.
So I was still when I was cutting my teeth in volunteer fire service and professional,
you know, the big thing then was salty.
You got to be salty.
Your helmet nasty, your gear nasty.
You know, if it stands upright, you know, it's you're great.
And we have always had that one firefighter.
It's like, I got to look dirty.
And so he's rolling around in the muck just so he looks like he done something.
But, you know, my father was very he's two things stickler with
clean your gear always after every call.
And he he was always like, hey, don't be a hero.
Put your mask on. Put your SCBA on.
And, you know, be safe about it.
There was, you know, some of the guys really like, hey, it's just a simple car fire.
It's like, no mask up.
So he was a very strong opponent before the research ever came out of being,
you know, exposures out there.
Of course, he saw a lot in the chemical plant.
So that kind of prepped him for the the the real world a little bit.
But yeah, he was he was a stickler.
If we ever had a structure fire, you know, he was, hey, clean your gear, clean,
clean yourself, you know, he always after every fire that I remember as a kid,
he would go and shower off clean, try to detox because he and that was in the 80s.
That's the head of his time.
There wasn't really until a recent recent change.
So it must be fascinating going to work and seeing what the procedures are and the PPE
and the decon for being exposed to certain chemicals and carcinogens and contrasting
that, especially in the 80s, to the complete disregard.
And it's funny because if you parallel with, you know, a biohazard, you know,
I had the anthrax suits and all that stuff that were given to me.
But as you said, a car fire or dumpster fire, I mean, that's an absolute carcinogen
cocktail, you know, class B's and all the other things.
So, you know, I'm sure the professional hazmat industry must look at the way that we
do a lot of things and go, they've lost their mind.
What the hell are they thinking?
Right.
You know, I just remember, if you've ever had a decon shower out in the middle of nowhere,
it's not the funnest thing to have.
But mine happened in the 4th of July.
And, you know, it was a meth lab.
I started my fire service in EMS through the meth explosion.
And so it was another meth lab fire.
And then when we found out it was a meth lab fire, we started taking deeper protocols.
And, you know, some of the guys took it seriously, you know, because we're volunteers
and some of them didn't.
And it's like, hey, guys, you know, and that was kind of part of my dad's training,
harping on the, you know, limited amount of exposure as possible.
And he'd always say, don't be a hero.
You know, don't go out there, be a hero, do it smart.
So, absolutely.
Well, I think that's what a real hero is.
They make calculated risks, you know, not just, you know, cautions of the wind.
All right.
Well, then walk me through your journey into scouting.
So, you know, some kids hit baseballs and have a high batting average.
Some kids, you know, play football.
I was the kid that knew every knot.
You know, before I could even use the knot in the fire service, I knew it.
And, of course, you know, having my father like, hey, here's how you tie a clove hitch
around an axe.
And a funny, quick story, he taught my brother and I, we had a very tall house and he was
like, hey, if you guys ever get trapped in this house and you got to go out the window,
he showed us how to bundle up our bed sheets and create a fast rope.
And so that was probably a bad experience for me.
I had to go out the window and get a fast rope.
And so that was probably a bad move for like, you know, middle school age boys, because
one summer my mom's going by and she's watching us zip down out the window, practicing what
dad taught us.
But, you know, in scouting, it was very heavily, you know, it's just a part of our family.
It's something we did every Monday, every weekend.
It's something I do with my son now and with my daughters.
That was my sports, I was very well versed in knots and camping skills, hunting skills,
fishing.
And I kind of missed those days of just getting on my bike and biking to the lake down the
road and just throwing a pole.
And it didn't matter if we caught anything.
But all those skills were enhanced in scouting and all the way up from my childhood until
when I got my eagle, my father was right there every step of the way with us.
And still is involved in somewhat with the local community today, even though I'm grown
up and I've got my own child and children to raise, he's out there helping.
So amazing.
Now, what was that kind of perspective or lens that you have when you started being
a leader within the scouting community?
Well, you know, scouting, you know, it teaches leadership.
And the thing is that I can't imagine I can't imagine a world without it because it was
so part of it.
But, you know, you laugh at the Girl Scouts for selling the cookies, but it's a life skill
they're learning.
They're learning, you know, so many life skills.
The same thing is Scouts.
I think we sold a bunch of stuff to and Boy Scouting.
But but it's boys leading boys.
And so it gives you the opportunity of mentoring and developing a team.
And I think that's, you know, as well as I do in any type of emergency service environment,
there is a team format.
And so it kind of I think in a way prepped my dad for what he did.
And it prepped me for what I did because I already had that team environment growing
up and working together.
And it was boys leading boys.
So the older boys, when they learned it, taught it to the younger boys.
So they just trickled down.
And there's so many gentlemen, there's so many people.
I lose track of how many people out there I've met through Scouting.
And they're in very high, you know, one's a Federal Circuit Court judge.
Another one is an eye surgeon, so many different variety of and not just an eye surgeon, a
leader in this field.
So I think it takes us to the next level from a child, a young adult to the adult.
We're going to talk obviously about, you know, mental health.
And this is something that became apparent early when I started doing these interviews.
The impact of our early life on our mental health as we progress, whether it's into a
first responder profession, whether it's simply just becoming an adult.
When you reflect back now, you've obviously got a lot of warm memories of your childhood.
Were there any elements of your upbringing do you think that contributed to struggles
later in life?
Yeah, I think so. We touched on this offline.
You know, I grew up at the end of that generation of boys don't cry, rub some dirt in it, get
up, walk it off.
And I did that to my own brother.
My brother's two years younger than me.
We were BMX bike and I said, just walk it off.
And he had a multiple complex fracture in the ankle.
And then the next step was crick crap crunch.
And so here I am taking him to the hospital.
It's like walk it off.
But we grew up in that generation and we grew up with, you know, I didn't get to see my
father cry until we both lost a person in the lot of duty.
So you know, there's five times in my life that I've actually watched my dad just fully
weep.
And so when my dad would come home from a bad day, and a lot of these bad days were
told to me by the old timers later on.
And so guys that took me under their wing and say, let me tell you about your father.
Let me tell you what he did here.
Because they were too painful for my dad to talk about.
So my dad's way of dealing with it was not to show that side of it.
So I think growing up and not having that, you know, I guess positive, it's OK for a
man to weep.
It's OK for a man to let go.
So my dad would do that in private.
Still does a lot, but, you know, it wasn't until we both lost somebody in the line of
duty that we cherished greatly that we wept together.
And that was, I mean, both of us, you know, adults.
And I was in my 30s.
And so, you know, it's it's that's something, you know, that we were just talking and, you
know, suck it up, go on.
And so you can only suck it up so much.
And so, yes, I have all these warm, fuzzy feelings.
But yet there are some things there that byproduct of the 80s childhood, you know, that, you know,
it just wasn't a good role model behavior of what men can and can't do.
That's interesting.
When you're talking about that, you know, there was a point where he was unable to resist
that innate need to simply cry.
And you think about the wall, you know, you can build it and build it and build it.
But something is going to overwhelm it.
The loss of a brother or sister, the loss of a family member.
And so then you take a step back and go, well, then why have I built it so high?
If this needs to happen when these circumstances come together.
And I'll be honest, this week, for some reason, I've had a couple of times where I have and
I don't even know where it's coming from.
But it's always obviously a sign that, yeah, there's a little overload going on.
But having that wall low allows you to see, you know, to kind of feel the overflowing
cup as it were, a lot, lot sooner than if you've built this kind of two dimensional
Terminator esque facade of stoicism.
And then it's only something that a critical point where you finally are allowing what
your body wants to do the whole time to actually happen.
Right.
Yeah.
And that's the thing.
It's a stoic wall.
You know, I want to consider my dad the this superhero.
You know, I grew up, you know, the funniest I'll share in my childhood is that my mother
was working.
My father was, you know, your volunteer fire chief, you wear many hats, you know, and he
wasn't working at the chemical plant that day.
The pager goes off.
And so, you know, it's the old school pagers where the dispatcher gets on, starts repeating
what call is going on.
And so so he's looking at us, he's looking at no babysitter in the parking lot, you know,
in the driveway, and he's like, Come on, boys.
And so we get in the truck and and and we drive down to the station and there's still
not anybody to watch us.
So he's like, Come on.
And here we are as you know, I think I was seven or eight, my brother's two years younger.
And we're riding down the road, buckled into this fire truck, run into a brush fire.
And then he's like, you know, don't touch anything and don't get out of the truck.
And you know, so we're sitting there like plaster against the window watching our dad
fight this brush trash fire, you know, and we got to watch a couple of other fires as
a kid him on because he just didn't have anybody to watch us.
And you know, I could go down to my local volunteer fire station where I volunteer and
heaven forbid if I took one of my children on the truck, it would be some serious trouble.
So so that was, you know, growing up watching that and watching my dad be this hero, but
not the walls, very strong stoic, you know, not a fear, but just, you know, the man, you
if you meet him, he couldn't he can't be the stranger.
When it came to the job, there was that that different persona that different I got a job
to do.
I'm in job mode.
And and that was I saw both sides of that as a kid.
You know, the dad would get around and wrestle with me on the ground.
And then the dad that was on the fire scene, it's like, you know, different person.
Yeah, I think that that stoicism is where it's needed.
But then there has to be the unpacking as well.
And I think stoicism has kind of been misinterpreted as the kind of John Wayne, you know, Stallone
two dimensional caricature of you know, what a quote unquote man is.
And that's absolutely not as we know, some of the most fearsome warriors on this planet.
You know, I've had many of them crying on my show.
So there we go.
You know, that's what a man has to do.
Right.
Well, you mentioned brush fires, walk me through your journey into the wildland firefighting
community.
So, so the funny story is, is that when you turn 18, you're like, what am I going to do?
And so I wanted to be like this well rounded forest ranger slash park ranger.
And so I everybody gave me chunks of advice.
So I got my EMS certification.
Of course, I had firefighting structural firefighting for being a volunteer.
But I got into wildland firefighting.
And if you're somebody who loves to hike, and you love to get out in the woods, and
then you're like, Oh, yeah, yeah, I'll go out and fight wildfires.
And it is a totally different ballgame.
So it looks cool in the movies.
And I don't think there was a movie out there yet about wildland firefighters.
But, you know, it looks cool.
And then you get out there on a 16 hour day with a chainsaw, or a an axe or Pulaski.
And you're just chopping away creating a fire line.
But you know, I talked about being on a team environment, you really want to bond.
There's 12 guys I was on a fire crew with and I know their children's names and their
spouses and what they're doing like, and we've been years apart.
We developed this friendship that lasts forever on a fire crew.
But I got into wildland firefighting to add to that toolbox of I'm going to be this well
rounded park ranger and have all these multiple hats.
Because I was fascinated with somebody I was mentoring when I was younger 18 19.
And he he was a fire chief and he was wildly and fired.
But he was over a fire district for the National Park Service.
And so he just had so many different tools and so many different like hats he could do.
And so I just started kind of emulating him and wildland firefighting was a part of it
and got into doing that more than I actually enjoy that more than structural.
And you know, everybody, you know, I talked to a structural firefighter and they're like,
no, pack me up.
I'll go into house fire any day.
And I'm like, I'd rather sit on the ridge and watch the fire line.
And there's a term spin the weather.
That was my favorite job was getting out there with a barometer and spinning, checking wind
direction and just watching the weather.
And so that's a skill that when I'm with my kids and we're out hiking, I'm like, no, that's
that's not going to touch us.
Well, how do you know that?
Let me show you how to read the clouds.
And you know, and then they just think that's the coolest thing.
And to me, it was a Tuesday, you know, when I worked.
So but but I loved every aspect of it.
There's you know, there's not any other job on the planet where you can sit at a 12000
foot peak and overlooking a fire line that's 80 percent contained.
And you're just hoping, you know, your your job is to make sure you you get somebody down
there if it does jump containment.
So you're sitting there 12000 foot elevation and you're on this peak and it's three in
the morning and you're drinking a cup of coffee and you're just like.
Wait wait for the sunrise.
What other what other job can you do?
That's just that to me that more enjoying.
And so, yeah, I got into it to get that tool, the toolbox metaphorically.
But I ended up enjoying it way more than the others.
So how did that take you to the Grand Canyon Fire Department?
Because that's that's you know, you think of the Grand Canyon, obviously you think about
the massive gorge.
But I don't think of a fire department attached to that.
So this is interesting.
Yeah, it's very interesting.
So so to give you a little quick Grand Canyon is 280 miles long east to west.
And depending on where it adds and you were from 10 to 25 miles wide, it's vast.
And so my role at the Grand Canyon, it was one of those multifaceted, you know, you everybody
brought a skill to the table.
And so you had eight thousand foot elevation at the rim, the elevation was anywhere from
five to eight thousand feet.
You had the Kaibab Plateau, the Kaibab Forest.
So you had these very heavy ponderosa pine conifer forests that, you know, they they
when it gets dry, they love to go up like matches.
You know, so you had that on top of but up against a hundred year old buildings that
were built at like the 1900s, 1902, 1903.
And so our job at the Grand Canyon Fire Department, South Rim, because we were on the south side
of the canyon and it's divided in two sections, north and south.
South is a bit bigger as far as this is what the National Park Service main Grand Canyon.
People go visit the Grand Canyon.
They usually go north rim, south rim, or they go all the way to the west side of it towards
Vegas.
That's all Native American, mostly controlled.
So a lot of visitors that come and visit the west side towards Vegas, that benefits the
tribes that live in and around the canyon.
The section I was working for was the small section.
I say small, it was very fast, but the east side of the Grand Canyon, the eastern end.
And so but we were urban interface.
So we had to protect the structures that can't be replaced and monitor them.
And I'm talking about like everything from checking, you know, you're doing your basic
checking fire extinguishers, checking.
We had sprinkler systems that would pop out.
Yellowstone has this too.
If there's ever a fire, we could pop them through the roof and it's just starts deluging
the just the building with water, massive amounts of water so that if there was ever
a fire, it's protected.
And so you have to check on those things.
And so we're constantly in the fire season, you're in fire watch, making sure that there's
not a fire because these buildings are so old, they can't be replaced.
There's so much history in them.
So you're kind of an urban interface firefighter.
But in the wintertime, you're everything.
You're EMS, you're rescue.
There's rescue that needs to be done.
You know, we were multifaceted.
Every person that had a job and I was on the fire side of things, you all did multiple
hats to get it done.
And I was thankful in the two years that we only had actually one active what you would
consider an urban type fire was the wildfire.
It was one of the propane tanks that from the laundry because there's massive amounts
of laundry to be done with these lodges that are in the canyon, these historic lodges.
And so one of the propane tanks, it's heater box to keep it from freezing short circuited
and it basically created a giant flamethrower.
And so it was the only time in my ever career that I got to do what I was trained walking
up to that, creating that fire blanket or that blanket with water, creating that blanket
to insulate us and walking up so we could shut off the gas.
You train on the propane tree three or four times in your career, maybe five, fighting
propane fires.
But this was actually the real deal.
And then, you know, making sure that we evacuate the surrounding areas.
And so that was the only the wildest thing we had.
Most of the time it was, hey, put that campfire out.
Somebody starting to fire, they shouldn't or a dumpster fire and having to find a dumpster
fire because they threw their coals from the campfire into the dumpster, which and, you
know, bandaging up people who feed the squirrels.
So this is just a short PSA.
But if you ever go to the Grand Canyon, do not feed those squirrels.
They will take a finger.
I don't know what it is about the Grand Canyon squirrels, but they're vicious.
They claim lots of fingers every year.
So because people they treat the parks like a zoo and they're like, oh, look, this is
wildlife and it's still wild.
And so, you know, there's very simple, mundane things we did.
And then there's some things that we did that was pretty cool.
It's like, hey, I'm glad we're here because it would have been worse if we weren't.
What about the hikers?
It seems like every year you hear of fatalities of people that have underestimated the condition,
especially if it is a rim to rim, the kind of extreme trek that people do.
So again, PSA for people listening, do's and don'ts when it comes to the hiking side of
the Grand Canyon.
So the Grand Canyon, when I was there, they had started a program called the PSAR, Preventative
Search and Rescue.
And so basically they had a team of people.
All they did was hike the trails and they would hike five miles in and five miles back
and they would just look for, for lack of a better term, a stupid person or an unprepared
person.
And you would get a lot of people in flip flops, shorts, Hawaiian shirt with a little
water bottle the size of a 20 ounce soda.
And they were like, well, I saw in the telescope up here at the visitor center, the river,
I'm just going to go hike down there real quick.
Well, real quick, that's 15 miles down and 15 miles back, you know, 33 miles round trip
and you're not going to get there until late at dark.
So how are you going to get back up?
And the temperatures in the bottom of the canyon might be 90 degrees at night or day
and it's going to be 20 or below at night.
So you know, you're going to freeze to death by the time you get down there.
So a lot of it was catching people before they come.
And so it's very heavily regulated and permanent.
You can hike down a couple of miles down to what they call like a watering hole or a little
spot to rest and, and, and hike back up.
That's a fairly decent hike, but they've got, they've got to keep people.
The parks do in the peak summer.
They got to keep people from going past that mark if they're not prepared and checking
permits.
And, and here's the thing is some of the rescues I was involved with, I was rescuing people
who were very competent in the outdoors, very well-prepared, very competent and still had
an emergency.
There was a, I say young lady, she was in her sixties and her husband and her had on
the bucket list to hike the Grand Canyon.
And, and they, she did it.
She went down to the bottom, spent the night hiked back up.
It was a very cold weather and even somebody who was been accustomed to the Colorado winters
got hypothermia.
So you're talking about a very well-prepared hiker, very well-prepared outdoors person,
and they still were, you know, met some challenges.
And so think before you do and, you know, plan, you got to plan everything when it comes
to the parks.
If you don't have a plan, even in the smokey mountains, you can get yourself in trouble.
Yeah.
You know, it's, it's, it's very well, you know, 45 minutes from Knoxville, it's, you've
got Gatlinburg, you've got Pigeon Forge, you've got these communities around it.
But when you get in there, you finally get in the back country and you're stuck, you're
stuck.
And so a lot of people forget that.
So you got to plan ahead and prepare.
So beautiful.
Well, I know obviously the, that element is going to factor into our conversation in a
little bit as well.
You've been through, you know, you've worn all these hats from volunteer to, you know,
wildland firefighter and then now the Grand Canyon.
Walk me through, you know, the next few years and your own mental health journey.
Obviously we're going to talk about the impact of some of the rescuers and, and, and Helene
and the, and the residents, but what was your kind of roller coaster ride yourself and where
was the darkest place that you found yourself?
So you're going to try to make me cry on camera now.
So here's the thing I feel comfortable about sharing that in a way that that's part of
my healing.
People realize that it's like a, you know, the early days of we're going to put everything
in a basket.
We're going to seal it off and forget about it.
We know now that doesn't work.
And sometimes just releasing it bits at a time.
So, so, you know, I've had multiple different facets.
EMS was probably the hardest for me.
I am a, so I'll just tell you, so I'm in, I'm in, I'm in the medic school.
I'm getting my EMT at that time, EMT basic.
I'm doing very well.
Trauma was my game.
I could, I could do trauma inside and out medical a little harder, but trauma was it.
And I was working on one of my clinicals and my instructor looks at me and I love him.
He still teaches to this day, but, and he oversees our EMS program up here in this region,
but he looked at me and he goes, you got a backup career in mind?
And I said, uh, uh, yeah, yeah, it's not going to be my end game.
This is going to be part of it.
He's like, good, good, good.
I'm like, why are you asking?
He goes, you're just one of those individuals that if you, if this is going to be a long
haul mode for you, you're going to have to learn some things.
And I kind of got really angry a little bit with them.
I was like, what are you talking about?
I'm tough, you know, and flex the muscles.
But he just saw a little bit of himself in me and he had been doing it for, you know,
20 plus years before instruction.
So we joke around his EMS license says zero, zero, zero, zero, zero one.
But, but he's been around for a while.
So he was just kind of like making sure that, you know, if I was going to this for the long
haul, he was going to use his tidbits of wisdom.
But I worked, I mean, that's, I put myself through college working as an EMT, you know,
I got out of a couple of exams.
I got to come in looking like I'm full of soot one day or looking pretty rough dragon.
And the professor looks at me and goes, what happened to you?
I was like, well, I'd love to tell you.
And so I was able to take an exam or two later to get some time to rest and recoup.
So I put myself through college working as a EMT in this county and a neighboring county.
And so I kind of look at it as a, it's not, and I think I said this on the dark side project.
I shared a video with you years and years ago when I started my journey of healing and
it wasn't one call.
It's never just the one call.
It wasn't for me.
It was a, you just keep packing that suitcase, keep packing that suitcase and then it gets
full.
You can't cram anything more on it.
And everyone knows this analogy.
You pack the suitcase, you try to sit on it, you're pushing, you're shoving, you're doing
everything you can to get it all in the suitcase.
And that was me with every bad call.
I think one of the darkest was working four fatalities in one month, one a week.
They were all teenagers.
They were all on a busy thoroughfare.
They were all five minutes with my house.
I had to drive either way back home.
And that wasn't, how do you prepare yourself where you got to drive back on your way home?
You just drove by that fatality.
And so, EMS, working full time EMS, working full time emergency services, I am divorced.
I've had one wife or two, I'm married now.
I have two wives, but my ex-wife and then my current wife.
And so it cost me a marriage.
I never got angry.
I might have drank a little bit to mask.
There was some masking behaviors, but I was really good at packing that suitcase.
Really good at packing that suitcase.
And then I have moments that I would flare up and then I would pack that suitcase again.
But it got to the point, I'll tell you, I had a son in NICU and he was fine.
He was my wife.
He was born premature, almost a month premature.
And so I'm sitting there working a double fatality car wreck with a son in NICU with
a wife by the bedside of my son.
And I was emotionally done.
The chief at the end of the call could look at my eyes and go, don't walk out.
I was getting my gear clean like I always do, but he knew it was something a little
extra in that just a little something was there.
He's like, just go home, go be with your son, come back next week.
And I didn't come back next week.
I took some time off.
I took some time away.
But I had a wife that going through, my son is fine.
He's happy and healthy.
He's almost nine years old now and I've got three kids.
But it was that and that's I think my wife, my second marriage, my wife, she came from
working in emergency services.
Her mom was a trauma nurse.
So she kind of was, I'm ready for this.
I'm ready for a little bit of you're going to have bad days and you can't talk about
them.
And how do you go to your wife and your spouse?
You talk about everything too and say, hey, I just watched a whole family die on the interstate
like that and your son's a NICU and you're already emotionally compromised.
So I'm not going to share that.
I'm going to pack it in that suitcase.
And she was really good at really realizing that I wasn't well.
I think without her in my life, it wouldn't be my parents that would keep me out of the,
you get to a point where you start contemplating.
I wouldn't say I was planning suicide, but my idea or my version of it was strapped on
a backpack, covered myself with honey and walk into the woods and let the bears get
me.
I mean, I was thinking that I was so overwhelmed.
I was so like, it's like you're walking and the world's on fire.
All right.
You get up in the morning, you put your uniform on.
And I've said this to a couple of friends of mine, I've counseled, I've said this to
a couple of, we've said to small therapists that I still see the therapist to keep myself
mentally healthy.
And when you put the uniform on and you want to vomit before going into work because you
don't know what the day is going to be like.
And it just, so yeah, it was just the weight is hard to describe.
But I'll tell you, like I said, a wife that recognized something's not right, honey.
You're not right.
You're emotionally distanced from the children now.
You're emotionally distant from me.
And she was pretty, I wouldn't say brute force.
I married an Italian.
If you're familiar with Italians, they have a personality for being forward.
And she was very forward with it.
I think it's great.
But the thing that she says to women.
Well, the reason why I'm the co-founder of this, my wife and I created this ministry.
And so, she on the spousal side of things, when she speaks to women, she's like, I realized
I can't fix them and I don't have the tools to fix them, but I can have the tools to send
them to somebody who does.
So she was really good at like, hey, why don't you go talk to so-and-so?
Why don't you go just have a conversation or go out to lunch?
She was really good at pushing me to make that step because I was drowning.
I couldn't push anything in there anymore.
But when it all broke, it was a call.
My first true fatality.
And I say true fatality, like I was, it's funny how when you, when all that, when the
suitcase unravels, right?
You have that, take that same analogy.
You sit on it, you get off of it and it springs out and there goes all your laundry.
And that's what happened to me when I finally blew.
When I, and it wasn't, it wasn't a physical yelling at my children.
It was just in a ball of tears, not knowing how to deal with that emotion because I was
never role modeled it.
But and I'll share this and I'm trying to choke back a tear, but the call that was deep,
the deepest call inside was losing two children.
And all I could do at the time while we were cutting them out of the car and their mother
was stuck in the car was rub the mother's hair and just say, Hey, I love you.
Jesus loves you.
Let me pray for you.
And just comforting the mother because I didn't want her to go into shock.
And so I was doing everything I can to keep the mother.
That was my job on that call was while we were cutting the car was to keep the mother
focused on me because out of all of the surviving injuries, soon as the mother and her two kids.
So I realized when it did the damn broke and that call was the bottom.
I mean, I carried that through my first marriage.
I carried that through the in between the first marriage and the marriage now, but that
call came up and it broke everything else loose from me.
But when I was able to get that out, it was like I was a hundred pounds lighter.
I could float and I was sharing it with somebody that was ready and able, but that was a long
journey to get there.
But that was the, it was not, like I said, you could pile it up, but the biggest call,
the one that hurt the most was that.
And it took me a little, little while to realize what's what caused it all to blow.
Well, those children at that time were like young six and I think maybe eight.
So when I had my son, my, my two daughters were the same age as those two girls.
So I'm, my son is born.
I'm, you know, he's in the hospital, he's doing fine, but he's got some road to go.
And I get that family that's taken out of the interstate and it just all unravels because
it brings back the last call, the first call and everything in between.
And it took a while.
It took several weeks to, to get there to talk.
I mean, I'll still talk about it.
I don't know if you can see him.
I'm choking back a tear or two, but it's, uh, it was, it was tough because that's something
that, you know, I held onto for a decade or more.
That one call, you know, and they pushed every single thing in front of it as I kept going
along my journey.
But that one call, the call that I should have been properly debriefed on, um, the call
that, um, no one saw the overwhelming potential.
Um, I had a bystander come up to me.
He met me years later.
He was like, I was on this call and I was like, well, what were you doing?
It was like, I worked in that business that this car wrecked in front of.
And I thought you were her husband the way you were loving her.
And, uh, and I didn't realize because I was so focused at my job that my love for the
job, my love to save a life, uh, my love to, to emulate my father.
Cause I watched my father do it, but all, I mean, I was pouring everything in that moment
to keep her stable.
And I didn't know what was going on around me.
I knew what was going on with the kids.
We were all in tune.
Like when I was watching him getting pulled out, but I was, my job was don't let her go
into shock while we're cutting her out of this car.
And so I was doing everything I could.
I was pouring everything of myself into that patient and, um, I could not talk about that
call.
I didn't talk about that call, um, until a decade or two, almost a decade and a half
later and, but it was once it unraveled, once the suitcase exploded and all your laundry
goes everywhere.
And I love that metaphor because it's dirty laundry, right?
Cause it's all the deep dark stuff that you don't want everybody to see.
Um, and you're trying to stuff it.
It just goes everywhere and it does.
Um, I was fortunate, very, very fortunate to be married to a wife that I've been married
to 15 years now, um, that recognized that I was exploding, recognized I was spinning
out and, and would not stop until I got help.
Would not stop.
Well, thank you for sharing that first.
I mean, this, this is the, this is what I always say, courageous vulnerability.
This is what we need to hear.
Like how, if you are not moved by trying to distract a mother from her two dead children,
which I wrote about a very similar one in my first book, or I had a little three year
old who was decapitated and my son was almost the same age, you know, fucking horrendous.
It really, there's no other way to describe it.
So to not be moved that by that would make you associate path.
But, you know, we have come from this generation where, you know, you think you're not supposed
to be so you, you bury it down, but it couldn't be further from the truth.
I wanted to ask you about that kind of, you know, putting on honey and walking into the
woods, something that has really emerged as a truth for a lot of people, not everyone,
but most people when they get to crisis that you just don't really hear discussed is that
sense of being a burden that all these contributing factors, you know, and everything from, you
know, relationship issues and finances all the way through to see deprivation, organizational
betrayal, you know, the perfect storm literally shifts someone's reality.
There's an actual miswiring of the brain.
And over and over again, you hear these men and women that at that moment were convinced
that they were the reason for their loved one's pain.
And if they just remove themselves, then their pain would go away.
The loved one's pain, which, which takes that, you know, element that we were raised on suicide
is cowardly and selfish and a sin and how could you, and you hear these men and women,
some of whom are Christians, despite maybe believing that they were going to be condemned
to hell.
That was still the better choice for them than, you know, what they thought.
So in a way it makes it selfless and courageous at that point in that state of mind.
Now it's not the right state of mind, but it does reframe.
Did you have that sense of burdensome yourself when you were at your deepest point?
Yeah.
I mean, I had those conversations of, I'll tell you, I was so, so my days off were not
off.
It was my brain and turning and you know, um, sitting there with a child on my lap,
my child and rocking them to sleep and just bawling because I was given that moment of
vulnerability.
And then, you know, not thinking that my wife's in the background listening or watching and
she, you know, she, she's knowing that those are not tears of joy, but I'm just decompressing.
And so I had those thoughts.
I had those thoughts of, you know, I was raised in a strong Christian environment, strong
spiritual environment.
I am a grand, my grandfather was a preacher for most of his life.
He was unique that he mined coal Monday through Friday and preached in a little country church
up in Southwest Virginia on Sunday.
And, and so, you know, I, I, I was in a very, every little piece of my environment should
have been stable and healthy.
And I was still at a place of if I just exited this earth, everybody else's life would be
okay.
That thought got into my head and it's a whisper.
It's these little subtle whispers.
It's not a faint, uh, it's a whisper and it's a slow over time.
And as you start stewing on your unguided emotions, when you start feeling like you,
you have those emotions of no, I'm a burden to my friends.
I'm a burden to my family.
I cannot share it with the mother of three, everything that's gone on with me in the last
decade.
And there's some really great moments, really great saves where, you know, you just go,
wow, you know, I was a part of that, you know, but, you know, there's also those moments
that are dark and you can't share those with a loved one in the same way you would share
with a coworker or a friend.
And sometimes you can't share those with a friend, especially in EMS because they're
going through the same darkness.
You know, one of my best friends to this day and also a partner of five years in EMS, you
know, she lost her own father, uh, to suicide.
So there was moments of when we would have that call.
And I think we all would get that call at least once a year where you'd have to go.
And, you know, it's a coroner call, but you're still being called.
She would have to sit in the truck.
And so, because she couldn't, she couldn't get there.
She couldn't.
And so how do you have these conversations when your ambulance partner, when they're
walking through their own, their own ordeal, their own baggage.
And so, um, so yeah, you, you get there, even as some, I was, I was doing what you would
say the right things.
I was recreating with my children.
I would occasionally go out.
Uh, I played disc golf.
I don't golf golf.
I throw Frisbees.
Uh, but, uh, you know, I go out and disc golf, but there was still a, a little bit of me
that had that wall up at the time, um, that was still good at keeping, keeping the very
dark stuff away from everyone else.
Um, and I wasn't dealing with that.
Um, and I wasn't, uh, talking it through.
I wasn't, um, and until I broke, I wasn't able to deal with that at all or have anybody
to go to.
So how do you, when you feel you're feeling isolated, you feel alone and I should, I was
raised in an environment with all these good mechanisms, but I wasn't taught how to cry
as a man.
I wasn't taught it's okay to sit down and let it all out.
And if you need a friend, that's okay too.
Right.
Cause it was the tough, I got this, I'm a man, suck it up.
Let's go.
And so, um, so yeah, I was very isolated and lonely and those thoughts even creeped in
and the strongest, deepest core of me knew that it shouldn't be there, but those thoughts
were there.
Well, I think that's where alcohol becomes such a danger.
I've had this conversation a few times.
Um, even my son, I think it was my son just asked me about it too, which was really interesting.
But, um, when you have that little part of you that still believes that that's wrong,
you're not wrong morally, but that voice is lying to you.
It's not your reality, um, but it's so dampened, but then you introduce alcohol.
It could be something else, but alcohol just seems to be the catalyst so many times it's,
it quietens the voice of reason, which is so tragic.
And I would say, and put it in a kind of a tongue in cheap analogy, a lot of us listening
have gone out with friends, had drinks and then had a, uh, you know, an encounter with
a person sexually.
And the next morning gone, Hmm, if I hadn't a drank, I probably wouldn't have been with
that person.
So we know that alcohol distorts our mind, but this is what's so heartbreaking is you
get someone and that whisper is in their ear and there's a little voice behind it that's
saying no, you know, they're wrong, but then you introduce the alcohol as well.
And I think more often than not, it gives that Dutch courage to then go through with,
with the suicide.
Yeah, because you know, I've lost two friends, uh, two suicide, two friends in emergency
services and drugs and alcohol was one of the primary factors.
And um, I can tell you with my own journey, um, there's a lot of times that we, Hey, let's
go after a shift, go grab a beer.
And before I met my wife, um, you know, uh, there was, you know, years between my first
wife and, and when I got remarried, uh, the second time.
And so, um, I would go from the 24 hour shift, go out with friends, not come back home until
the next 24 hour shift.
Because even being at home was painful, right?
Being at home, sitting in a, you know, sitting down in, in, in, at that time I was single,
uh, and I had my family, but sitting down by myself was not a good place.
I kept myself occupied.
Um, and I'll tell you the wake up call, and this goes back to my grandfather, who's the
minister.
Um, he saw a pattern and he called me one day at four in the morning and he's like,
uh, you didn't come home in 24 hours.
Your parents are worried.
And at that time in between marriages, I had a little apartment, uh, above the garage of
my parents' house.
And uh, that was my space.
Um, and uh, they helped me out by, uh, Hey, do some chores, we'll let you have that space
rent free.
And, and so, um, they, they were, they were like, Hey, this card didn't come home, but
he's a grown man.
He's 27.
Uh, but they, you know, she thought well enough to call my grandfather.
My grandfather thought well enough to, I don't care if it's four in the morning, I'm calling
him and I'm sitting in an IHOP and I'm ready to go in for the next shift.
And he's like, did you go to bed?
I was like, no.
And he goes, why?
I said, when I lay my head down, I don't like what I see.
Like I don't like, I, I'm having to deal with myself.
I don't want to deal with it.
I'll just keep going.
Right.
And he goes, he said, Hey, finish your shift.
If you need to go home and rest, do so.
You've got, you know, you're an adult.
No one's telling you how to be there.
But he said, when you finish that shift, instead of going out with friends, come see me.
I don't care how late it is.
And so I did come see him and we talked all through the night.
And you know, he's, he's, he's a little country preacher and, you know, and, and it was a
coal miner, you know, but he, he was a man of wisdom and he did more for me than, than
say the initial counselor could have done at that moment.
And, and, and he kept me from going down an alcoholic path.
And why was that?
Because it was prevalent in our family.
It was prevalent.
He had had that same habit.
He had a break it.
My uncle, God bless, he's, he's broken his, he's sober.
And so he saw the same province because it was in his life.
And, and so he was trying to help me break that cycle.
And I, my respect, the respect he had for me and my respect for him, it kept me, yeah,
okay, I'll go have one drink, but I can't have more.
I can't use substances to just dilute myself from the world.
And it's not healthy.
And you're right.
It does.
When you're in that altered state, those whispers get louder.
Absolutely.
Well, then you have this kind of literally come to Jesus moment, I guess, in that particular
case, talk to me about the upswing.
What were the things that you started using the toolbox that you accumulated to get yourself
out of that darkness and to a path of healing?
So, and I just got goosebumps because I'm sharing the positive.
So when I got to this point, when I'm married, my son is four and a half pounds, his diaper
would fit in the palm of your hand, a little tiny guy, and I'm working through all that
and I broke, I finally broke.
And, but I broke in a safe environment.
And I was able to share and my wife pushed me to go see a counselor.
And so I went to a nonprofit Christian based counseling.
So these are trained counselors.
They consider what they do as a ministry.
So they have the local churches help foot the rest of the bill.
So there's not many places you can go and pay 25 bucks and see a professional therapist.
And so, but they do it as a ministry.
And so I went to this counseling center and funny thing is, is I was her first emergency
services worker.
She dealt with her, her main thing usually was children, but she also dealt with grief.
She was really good at grief.
And in a way, that's what we're dealing with emergency services.
We are the grief mop, right?
Quoting, bringing out the dead, you know, the good book.
He said they felt like he was the grief mop in New York city.
That's what we kind of are sometimes is we're mopping up everyone else's grief.
And so, so I was grieving and, and multiple different things.
When I walked into that first session, you know, I'm more antsy than I am now talking,
right?
And I was just, I was, I was vibrate is the words to describe it.
And so she was, you know, we talked and I talked in circles and then, then after I was
done, she's like, Hey, why don't you come back tomorrow?
I got some time.
And she's like on her phone, canceling all of her appointments from like 10 a.m. to 1
p.m.
And I was like, okay.
She said, come back at 10.
And I came back in the second day and I remember saying her, I don't really know what I'm
talking.
I've said all I needed to say.
And she just said to me, she said two things to me.
She said, I love you.
I love you as a human being and it's okay.
And you can share with me what needs to be said.
So tell me what is the hardest thing to talk about.
And it was like the balloon that popped, you know, it just, I was two hours long, just
bawling and weeping and just getting what I've compressed in a decade and a half out
to a total stranger.
He doesn't know me from Adam because this is the second session and she knew, she knew
I was ready to bust and she knew to be very, I need to get him in here tomorrow.
She knew I was also, I was textbook at that point of, hey, if we don't like start down
this road of healing, this guy's going to become a statistic.
And so, and I didn't know that until I started getting my own training to do the same thing.
And so when I popped and to her, when I, I mean, in a healthy, loving, supporting, you
know, she had to get up and go get me a couple of bottles of water.
I was crying so much.
I was dehydrated, you know, it's just, it was just, but goes back to that free moment
when you're able to just let go of all of that you've held onto that you think you have
to hold onto it.
That's another lie that's being told.
You got to hold on to this.
No, you don't.
You got to let it out.
You got to have the vulnerability to let it out.
And so I was vulnerable.
I felt safe enough to let it out.
You know, I look at the clock, it's 2pm.
You know, so from 10am to 2pm, she helped shepherd me through some dark moments that
I have stuffed up.
And it went on, I'm not going to say it happened overnight and it wasn't like, okay, thanks
Doc, I'm healed.
It was a once a week for six months that it was a once a month for six months.
And then it's now once every three months, or if I have a moment I need to go in.
So I learned the value of having that mental health checkup.
It's just like going and seeing a doctor getting a physical.
It's a mental health checkup.
I had to learn like there's so many different things I love to do.
And I shut those all down.
The thing is, when you start seeing somebody isolate from the world and turn away, it's
a scary moment because there was things I love to do.
I love to go outside.
I stopped doing that.
I love to fish.
I stopped all the behaviors that were helping me.
And I just kept isolating myself and I kept internalizing.
And so going out and doing those things again, it was like, oh, I can do this again.
I felt like I had permission to do it again.
But my wife and I went into a marriage that was so healthy in the fact of we're here to
help each other, but we can't fix each other.
And so when she goes and speaks to spouses and they just they gasp when she goes, what
did you say to him?
I told him I can't fix them.
And they all gasp and they're like, why can't you fix them?
You're his wife.
And she goes, no, I can't.
I'm emotionally in that.
I can help him get fixed.
I can help lead him to that.
But I'm just a helper.
I can't fix him.
He's got to fix himself.
And they still look like eyes.
That's why.
So she's helping train on the spousal side of things of what to say, what to do, how
to lead.
But don't get into that.
I'm going to fix the mode because I think I really think if she got into that mode,
I would have shut down even more.
But I needed at that moment somebody to give me permission to go somewhere and be vulnerable
and come back and tell me about it.
What impact do you think?
The fact that your counselor was a child psychologist had on her ability to help you unpack, because
as you mentioned, you've got the grieving side, the calls.
But I would imagine I never thought about this until this conversation as someone who
literally works with children every day.
It doesn't mean that they should now suddenly start working first responders, but you're
constantly having childhood conversations.
And there's so many of us, as we touched on earlier, that the calls are only part of the
jigsaw puzzle of their mind.
Oh yeah.
It totally because what she saw when I started talking, what she saw as a child psychologist,
it's like you and I in the beginning share, I share a bit of who I am, where I came from
my background.
It's obvious I came from a very loving family, but just like in every family, we all have
something that wasn't either properly instructed or properly said or done.
And so there's a lot of childhood.
Something I didn't share earlier is I was born with a speech impediment and I had a
stutter because of that.
It took me 18 years to get past that.
So there was a confidence issue.
And so part of my struggle when I'm sharing with her some things, it's just a light bulb
went off in her.
It's like, listen, this guy's got obviously a loving family, but was it role modeled how
to handle these behaviors?
I was role modeled all right.
I was role modeled to suck it up.
And there's calls that my father and I have run together.
And that's another thing too.
I love the fact that I'm like, yeah, my dad and I, like working EMS in the field together
was just phenomenal.
I miss a little bit of that part of it because it's just, it's different when it's your father.
And my dad's kind of a bit of a cut up on the job too.
It was just fun to see because for so many years I saw the very stoic, but then him and
I working on the emules together, cutting up just like he was one of the partners I
worked with.
It was great.
But to this day, there's calls that we'll look at each other and go, you remember that?
Yeah, I remember that.
That's all you say because he's not ready to talk about it.
I might have already talking about it to my therapist or someone else, but so he still
has troubles being 63 years and retired now, 64 years and retired, bringing up some of
those calls that we've ran together.
But the moment my dad was able to cry in front of me, I said, we lost a loved one in EMS.
We had a coworker crash on our way to a call in her patrol truck.
She was a supervisor and hit a guard rail.
You remember those moments.
You remember hearing the cry out on the radio, 318 is down.
And you're way on the other end.
We've got a large county, it covers two cities, about 200,000 people in the county.
And that's a large county for up here in this part of Tennessee.
And so you're on one end of the county and you can't go anywhere because you're in that
zone and you want to run over and help your coworker.
She was like the mother.
There's 75 of us that worked in this EMS agency, three shifts, and she was the mother for all
of us.
She was the mother hen and we lost her.
And that night, my dad's coming off of his shift.
And so here we are, two men in uniform.
And we're like, we're going to go to church together.
And we went to the church service that night and we just sat in the back and cried with
each other.
But that moment was a good moment because I don't think I've ever, like I said, on my
hand five times, maybe.
And most of those were as adulthood.
And so we felt strong enough together to let all that out, let all that emotion out.
We were kind of doing our own debrief a little bit.
And we still had the funeral to come up and things, and that was hard to get through.
But I think in that moment, that's one of the things that we could bring up.
Her son that she left behind, he has 73 parental figures plus in this community that checks
up on him regularly, including my father.
And we were able to bring that up and not be emotional because I think we gave ourselves
permission to be emotional in front of each other.
But then there's moments, like I said, that, hey, do you remember that?
I'm not ready.
It doesn't say the words, I'm not ready to talk about it.
So as that child psychologist, she could see it's not just my dad and me, it's my dad's
dad.
It's deeper issues that led me up to the moment I made it.
Even my EMT instructor, going back to earlier in the conversation, hey, you have a career
path other than this?
Because I have that, I am the child whisperer when I was working at EMS.
I mean, it's really good with children, it's really good with elderly, because I have that
warming nature when I'm working.
And I have that comforting nature.
And so, and I'm going to use the word shepherding because that's what I'm doing now, and is
shepherding nature.
And so, and that was great.
That was a great thing that I've learned from my father and grandfather.
But I didn't learn the emotional deeper stuff, how to deal with these emotions that men don't
talk about.
And so she saw that.
She saw something that she saw in other children that she's counseled.
And she had also counseled people, women through grief and men through grief.
But she said to me, and she didn't tell me this when she saw me, but a year later, she
said, you know, you were my very first, first responder with PTSD.
That I mean, she said I took all the training I've had.
I mean, I've had kids with PTSD and abuse.
I've had women.
But your actual very first and she is it's funny we joke about I was her first, but now
she's up to 30 people like myself.
And I feel like maybe I was her test case.
You know, I don't know.
And but she is definitely a huge part of our industry, too.
Well, what she said about not just your father, but your father's father, I just wrote a second
book and there's that multi generational trauma woven in.
I mean, you talked earlier about West Virginia.
You know, you look at that as being one of the hubs for the opioid crisis now, you know,
and there's no surprise that that was probably lining up with the closing of the mines.
So, you know, I've talked about this.
Yes, we have our struggles in uniform, but you know, what did our household look like?
And then what forged our parents to be that way?
And you know, you go back to World War Two, World War One.
I mean, you know, there's there's all these significant events.
A lot of these people came home from that then, you know, fast forward in 100 years
and here we are.
So that is another big part of it.
Not just, you know, your childhood specifically, but, you know, when you go back and you see
these dominoes that empowers you then in modern day to finally stop that next domino falling
and affecting your children.
Exactly.
Breaking the cycle, you know, and it's not just a breaking of a cycle.
It's hey, it's learning from it.
It's you know, I can tell you that my kids are getting a different.
It wasn't what I got was bad.
I love the 80s.
I loved every aspect of my childhood, you know, collectively.
But it's like, how can I be just one more when you break that cycle?
And you know, I have a son who goes through the same exact speech impediment that I did.
So I feel like, OK, well, now I know how to parent this kid because I was that kid.
Right.
So so, yeah, it's and then when I tell my son, like, hey, your dad, your dad was just
like you.
No, yeah, yeah.
So it's great to see that he's working through that and he didn't develop the stutter because
he's got the confidence of my dad got through this so I can get through this.
Right.
So and but yeah, it's a multi generational definitely because my father's father was
in the Korean War, three tours in the Vietnam War.
You know, we had to wake him up shaking his foot.
You know, like you want to talk about somebody he never talked about yet, ever, never brought
it up, brought it up one time when I asked 14 years old.
And he you know, he was also one of my great sources of if you ever get the everybody gets
the Steven Seagal or the Chuck Norris vet in the back of their ambulance.
You know, I did this, I did that.
And you know, they probably cleaned the motors or something.
But but his biggest thing to me was not everybody was was that.
And but you know, his job was to demine a harbor and why he was being shot at.
And that was all I got out of it.
That's it.
And the story.
What I mean, well, you were over there from start to finish in Vietnam.
What else?
Done in the chapter, right?
Heard everything about before in the Navy, everything after the Navy.
So there is there is a lot of it's it's you look back at it.
The PTSD goes through the generations.
Well, I think one thing that I believe will open the door, especially for that generation,
you know, because I've said this many times, I've had World War Two veterans on the show
actually interviewed to Iwo Jima vets a few months ago live on stage.
And you know, you think about how our generation talks about them or the greatest generation,
they just rolled up their sleeves and they got back to work and they were hurting.
And I could see these men on the stage were hurting, you know, all this time, 80 plus
years later, I could see it in their eyes.
And so we kind of closed the door on their ability to actually talk about it.
And one of my guests did he wrote a book about it.
He's an amazing guy.
He would you move there as well.
But I think where we have an amazing opportunity to open the door a lot wider and you are literally
a walking example of this is that post traumatic growth conversation that the other side of
the struggle, you know, using your toolbox, the other side is as a more resilient Joshua,
a more resilient James, you know, and you look back and go, oh, my God, I can use this
now.
I can I can literally be a beacon for other people standing at the side saying, come fruit.
No, it's worth it.
I promise you.
And now that takes away some of that despair because I feel like the PTSD conversation
kind of got the trouser leg stuck on stigma.
We've got to smash the stigma.
It doesn't inspire people's don't smash the stigma, you know.
So the hope of post traumatic growth, the hope of resilience, the hope of stopping that
multigenerational trauma that I think needs to be the conversation to get people excited
about doing the work and being this this better version of themselves.
Yeah.
And the thing is, is as I was struggling through the aftercare and I say it wasn't just this
share, you got those two sessions out, it was a it was a growth.
You know, there was ups and downs.
You know, I was on I'll just be frankly honest, I was on some some anti anxiety, anti anxiety
medications that I'm not on anymore.
And but it took a while.
You know, so but as I was in my growth journey, you know, the light bulb, what made me start
my ministry, what made me start this zeal to to share the love I have for my first responder
was sitting there working through the grief of one of my friends who committed suicide,
who was also a first responder, who was a very quiet person, very loved.
That was the thing.
Everybody will tell you, these people are very loving people.
And why would they do this?
And I knew why.
Right.
And I knew that I could answer those questions.
And so I'm sitting there and I'm struggling, working through just losing that friend, working
through it.
It's like there's got to be more.
And so it just it was like it was like a snowball effect.
And I was working for a job doing consulting.
And I was in West Virginia in my hotel room and I call my wife and it's like midnight
and I didn't look at the time.
Granted, we have kids three.
Right.
So yeah, we had three kids.
And so, you know, once, you know, an infant, you know, my son, he's six months old.
And I'm like, I just have this idea.
And and she's like, do you realize what time it is?
But when I had that working through my process, working through journaling, you know, journaling
was a huge step for me, writing down these thoughts, writing up these letters.
I've written prayers for myself that are just for me and the Lord.
And so for and this was to help me heal.
And seeking out that healing and and it's so sorry about my dog.
You can hear him.
So so anyway, he he will stop here shortly.
So so I have this snowball.
I have this idea pops into my head.
And we we probably my wife and I discussed it probably for a month.
And then she looked at me and she goes, it needs to happen.
It needs to happen.
And so we start laying it out and I start laying it out on paper and I start as I'm
working through my healing journey, I start looking at what I can start flushing this
thing out.
And so, you know, I look at how can I support chaplains in their their mission, in their
individual departments, and how can I support these folks and and then, you know, connecting
these folks to the community in the churches.
And as I start going through it and I start talking to people who have gone through the
similar similar story as I, they feel the call to I want to I want to share how I feel.
I want to share.
And so, you know, in the 12 steps, you know, we have small groups and we share and we so,
you know, we started creating a group of us that are responders.
And it's like, OK, I need to do more.
So what that fleshed into, there's a team of five of us.
We are roving chaplains.
We're trained as chaplains.
And we go into these departments.
And the reason why we stay as a nonprofit is we have no allegiance or no ties to any
one agency.
We have this anonymity that I knew I blew that word, but we'll go forward.
We're anonymous in the sense that, you know, we don't report to anybody but ourselves
and in our church that helps us.
And so we can get in there and we go about every Wednesday and we pick a few stations
and we kind of popcorn around the county and the cities and we just kind of walk in, spend
a day walking in and say, hey, guys, how are you doing?
Developing those relationships.
All right.
So we're we're we're not just meeting somebody and say, hey, we're here to pray for you.
Here's Jesus.
But we're meeting we're meeting somebody and we're getting to know who they are, getting
to know their family, their life dynamic.
When I started this during COVID, when I say we really launched this thing because COVID
happened, it was like, bam, there's a whole different service.
EMS, fire, police, it all changed overnight.
Right.
And I was still working a little bit of part time then.
And so they were calling me up.
Can you work?
And I'm like, I don't want to work and bring this on my kids.
It was crazy.
But I know we still did it.
We had a shortage of EMS workers.
But so isolation was really creeping into the services.
And so when we were going in and just getting to know someone, I just walked into a random
station one day and the guy says, I'm here to pray with you.
I'm a chaplain.
This is the agency I work for.
And I start talking to the guy.
And before I leave, he walks me out to the parking lot and he's he's in tears.
And he said, my life, my wife left me today.
And I was like, oh, man, you know, and so we're sitting there in the parking lot, one
on one.
I'm using all that chaplaincy training that I've I've I've taken to help.
It's psychological first aid.
I am not there at the clinician level, but I'm there at the psychological first aid to
help help the bleeding stop and get them to the much higher care, just like in EMS.
We're not we're not the doctors.
We're there to get them to the much higher care in the cycle.
So in the system.
So I'm sitting there and he felt comfortable enough to share to me, just like I felt comfortable
enough to share to that outsider, that therapist I never met for the first time.
And so that's kind of what we do is develop those relationships when we go in with them
and talk with them.
And and just just just love up on them.
And I say, love up on them.
Just listen.
Just be there to listen when the opportunity arises.
Be there to, hey, here's a card with my number on it.
Here's my number, you know, and and and and and just try to, you know, be that extra tool
for the chaplain in that agency.
Because let's face it, I had a chaplain in my own department.
Did anyone feel comfortable sitting in front of the chaplain's office waiting?
You know, no, you're being looked at.
It doesn't matter.
It seems like they put the chaplain's office right there near all the supervision office.
Right.
It's not somewhere else where you know.
And so so it's it's sometimes not a comfortable thing to talk about.
We're working on it.
I am blessed to have one of my former agencies I worked for, one of my supervisors, best
friends and colleague.
He's running the department.
He's running the county EMF agency.
And so that's something that we get to call.
So I have a relationship with them going back.
We're bringing mental health as a component to how they operate and using every tool in
their toolbox and using our agency.
And, you know, like I said, we're just being there, being able to provide that psychological
first aid, providing prayer, providing mentor support.
And and then we do things occasionally.
We do we every Christmas.
We it's it's when you calculate all our shares, fire, police, CMS and dispatchers.
That's another thing.
We don't make sure that they are forgotten.
A lot of times our dispatchers are forgotten.
If you look at our logo, we have 911 in our logo because they're the person sitting at
the phone with the one that has the least amount of closure.
They hear all of it coming through the radio on the phone and they get no closure.
And so we we we make sure we love up on them.
And so what we do is about 450 gifts.
We do like Christmas cookies, the card.
We get the kids in the local churches to do Christmas cards and we go out and we share
Christmas with everybody, all three shifts right before Christmas.
Because, you know, as well as I do, the holidays are sometimes the toughest.
And so we just try to look for every opportunity we can to to to to love those, to serve those
who serve others is our tagline.
And that's what we're doing.
We're serving those who serve us.
We're giving them a thank you.
We're giving them love.
And and so, you know, the why I put Lifeline in the name, you know, my search and rescue
training.
You remember there's that one line, you don't touch that one line.
That's your line of life.
Right.
Any type of rescue that that one line you don't ever touch.
And so I kind of use that in the in the in the logo and in our in our name is because
we are a lifeline.
We want to be that lifeline.
We want to be that tool.
And and it's it's it's my hope that if it's just one person that we're able to like help,
then that's one one more.
You know, that's just, you know, just keep adding the wins.
And and then, you know, I'm trying to find people like minded.
I started out with myself.
I now have a team of retired.
I've got a guy retired, D.A. I've got a guy who's retired fire, you know, and they're
healing as their training.
They're working on their healing.
It's not an end of my healing.
This is just adding on.
This is a supplemental.
We talked offline about I'm in the middle of a chaplaincy training course and we're
talking about grief and we're talking about and I just I'm over there in the corner and
I start crying and the instructor's like, we good.
I'm like, yep, working through the problem.
Right.
And and but that's, you know, that's that's part of my healing.
This is part of my journey.
This is part of the guys who's on my team's journey and many more people that we want
to add.
But anyway, that's, you know, it's part of the process.
Well, I'm glad you mentioned dispatch as well, because, I mean, they are the kind of forgotten
link of the chain and, you know, people also forget that they a lot of times are working
a 12 hour shift, so they go in when it's dark, they leave when it's dark in a dark room.
They have these stress responses.
But unlike us, when we're having them maneuver patients and stretchers or, you know, operate
an extrication or a structure fire, there's that physical offload.
Well, they don't have that.
And then as you said, they don't get the conclusion of the of the call either.
So they're an extremely important group that, you know, we need to keep talking about.
With that all being said, you know, you've you've had this incredible journey yourself,
this journey of healing, the creation of lifeline ministries.
Talk to me then about Hurricane Helene.
We were sitting in Florida and again, early on, we thought we were the ones that are going
to get smashed.
It ended up literally skimming where I live.
So we got some some gusty winds, but that was about it.
But then it goes north and hits your community and obviously a kind of topography that isn't
used to hurricanes in the first place.
So walk me through the actual hurricane and your experience of it.
And then let's talk about the the people affected and the people responding.
Sure.
So so to just kind of go into a so this hurricane, which was bigger than Katrina and, you know,
hurricanes in southern Appalachia never really affected us.
I mean, our mountains protect us so much so that they either go very, very far left into
Nashville, Memphis, which is a much lower topography, or they go to the far right into
the coast of Carolina.
As the mountains kind of diverted one way or the other, east or west.
This hurricane and here's here's going back to the Navy days.
My granddad taught me weather.
I learned weather in the Forest Service.
I'm fascinated with weather.
So I'm watching this and I'm tracking this and it went straight up the Appalachians straight
up that that corridor that never gets hit with anything like this.
And so we got anywhere.
So we had a weather system before this that went on for four days.
So most of our rivers, most of our streams were already at a flood stage capacity.
They were already at that, hey, we really shouldn't take too much rain here.
You know, they were full.
There was nowhere else for the water to go.
Then pops up this hurricane that dumped most of its moisture in the Appalachians, South
Carolina, North Carolina, Atlanta even flooded parts of it.
Atlanta is never that I can recall flooded as bad as they flooded.
But so all this rain gets dumped and it gets dumped in the mountains and else all got to
trickle down.
So I've heard estimates of anywhere from 30 to 48 inches of rain in three days.
When we we don't ever get but maybe 20 inches of rainfall a year, 30 if it's a very wet
year or so.
So we're already full.
We've already had our peak rainfall for the year.
Most of these areas were, I mean, there were streams were very full and then you get more
rain on top of that.
You get the mudslides because the rain, the water's got to go somewhere.
The soil is already saturated.
So it's a combination of flash flooding, mudslides mixed with slurry water.
And it's just like a tsunami effect in some of these mountain communities.
So and we got wind, 115 mile an hour winds.
We never get 115 mile an hour winds in the mountains around here.
So that's the biggest thing.
I've worked a hurricane for Tennessee Task Force within cooperation of FEMA down in Destin.
That was just a mop up operation.
And you see trees and power poles and just snaps and half like you don't see that in
any storm up here in the Appalachians.
And so we got a combination of all that.
And people don't realize is that it wasn't the actual Friday event that really triggered
it.
It was when so it comes and it came fast.
It didn't sit.
It didn't get it.
It just came and it dumped all at once.
And so a lot of times when the hurricanes come in and tropical storms, they come up
here, they sit for a while.
They slowly dump rain.
This dumped rain all at once.
So and when the weather stopped and it started going more towards Memphis and Nashville and
then it kind of did its thing and went back into the jet stream.
That's when the trouble began.
That's when all that water had to go somewhere and it was like it just broke and it broke
in a.
You know, in Northeast Tennessee alone, we had five counties affected and then 20 some
counties in Western Carolina.
They got hugely impacted.
And you're talking about people you're living at 3000 feet elevation.
There's no stream or creek in sight.
You would not even think your house is going to be washed away with water.
And that's what happened here.
Whole communities, churches, cities, towns just gone.
I think what's so unfair is, you know, and again, this isn't like the majority voice,
but then you hear people, oh, they should have.
They should have been prepared, blah, blah, blah.
But like you said, this when it's an event that you are not expecting, like the tsunami
on the Thai beach, you know, no one realized that the regression of the ocean was going
to be followed by a tidal wave that would flood miles inland and take hundreds and hundreds
of lives.
So I think it's so I don't know why people feel compelled to say that rather than just
have empathy and compassion and be like, that is horrendous.
How can we be part of the solution?
Yeah.
So, yeah, I've seen a lot of that.
As you start seeing social media posts, you would see people say, well, why didn't you
evacuate?
Well, where, you know, some of these people, this is it.
This is I mean, you don't have anywhere else to go.
You can't go far, you know, any farther than three, four thousand foot elevation.
So what I saw the after effect, the aftermath, the after effect of this is that I saw whole
communities that had been decimated, but they still came together and they still took a
head count.
I saw pastors become incident command, incident commanders, and then start basically in a
crude way of creating an incident command structure.
I saw fire departments, volunteer fire departments do the same thing.
Of course, they're trained in this.
But at that moment in time, they were cut off from the help or the county.
We had we still have counties.
Here is almost a month to the day and we still have counties that are cut off from parts
of itself.
There's no bridges in, there's no waters in, there's no roads.
They just today got a makeshift road into chimney rock.
And it's been today was the first day they got, hey, we got a road open, but it's only
open to ATVs and construction vehicles.
I've climbed chimney rock before, so I know exactly what you're talking about.
It's a gorgeous, gorgeous area of North Carolina in Asheville, outside of Asheville.
So I saw these communities just come together and do what they have to do to survive.
And I saw communities who weren't affected.
So our area, we got wind, we were out of power for 48 hours and it was like nothing happened
here.
It was the, for whatever reason, we didn't get it.
And so I saw a lot of churches, a lot of people, you know, with my ministry, I put the cry
out on online, hey, Mitchell County, North Carolina is the poorest county and smallest
county in North Carolina.
It has the smallest amount of resources.
And the volunteer fire department and the EMS of like, they have two ambulances and
they're lucky if, you know, that all two are working, right?
I mean, it's just this very small town.
So on the backside of Rhone Mountain, it's up at high elevation.
When we finally were able to get in there five days, six days later, because that's
how bad it was hit.
The winds, that 115 mile an hour winds took the whole mountain side of Iron Mountain and
just snapped every tree and laid it down.
I'm talking about trees as big as buses.
So we were able to get in there and it was very sketchy and getting in there.
And I just made a plea out like, hey, we need to get in here and see what we can do.
And so, you know, I had people call me up, hey, what do you need?
And so we loaded a truck up and we took chainsaws to work and we just started heading in that
path.
Here's our goal.
We're going to go to the incident command post in Mitchell County and see what we can
do to help them.
Because all we could get out at that moment, because they had no power, no water, no communication
to outside world, no communication.
The only thing they were communicating was ham radio.
So we're getting very little out.
And Tennessee side was the only side open.
That was another thing, too.
They were cut off from their own state and no bridges, no access of getting their own
state help and resources.
And the helicopters weren't flying yet.
It was still very early on in the rescue efforts.
And so we were able to get boots on the ground as a ministry because we don't, I mean, we
weren't answering to anybody but ourselves and just walk in and ask the question, what
do you need?
And then getting up to a point where we can communicate and calling it out and say, OK,
this is what we need.
And it was our local hometown churches, our local community members, our local businesses.
Hey, I want to need a thousand more mills.
Check.
I'm going to need generators.
Check.
And it just started all flooding in.
And it was just people who were not affected helping people who were affected.
And it's been going like that for the last, you know, since this thing started.
And we're starting to wind down.
And I said, we're starting to wind down in a material sense, but we still have gutted
houses.
We still have a lot to do.
We still have houses that are gone.
But the actual life and death situation is starting to calm down.
And it's now more of how do we help rebuild these communities?
But it was people helping people in this region.
And everybody's like, well, where's FEMA?
Where's the state?
It was some places impossible to get into.
And so it's a triage situation.
How do you triage a nation when three of your states were hit so hard, so fast and so quick?
I mean, you couldn't put boots on the ground fast enough and still do any good in these
areas.
I mean, you almost had to wait for the floodwaters to recede before you could go in and act in
some of these regions.
And like I said, I've seen areas with no creeks, no streams, nothing.
And it's just a wall of water came in and took them out.
Speaking of the FEMA conversation, obviously, there's been times in history where the teams
in the organization has been stellar and other times where, obviously, failings were evident.
And hopefully, they learned and grew from that.
What was interesting is when you reached out.
And I love the fact that the origin story of this relationship now is a dark side project,
which is something I put out eight years ago.
It's a standalone thing now.
But talk to me about the polarization of the reporting versus actually the middle ground
storytelling.
I see this so, so often, even in my questioning to the military.
It's either, you know, let God kill them all, let God sort them out, or they're all baby
killers.
And in the middle is our men and women who do amazing things, you know, sometimes not
amazing things, but in the middle is the human conversation.
So what have you been up against as far as simply reporting what is going on there?
So without getting, I think you and I talked offline about, you know, going down rabbit
holes and conversations, political, apolitical, whatever.
The numbers of who's actually perished is not really, if you notice the ticker, the
ticker has gone away from the news.
The news has moved on to something else shiny.
And it's now the election, really, and everything else going on in the world.
So the world is left off with, okay, well, only 200 people have perished.
And they're not reporting on it.
So it must be everything's fine.
I've had conversations with people in Kansas City.
I've had conversations with people, you know, other parts of the U.S. and they don't get
why we're still calling for help.
And I'm like, well, it's a different call for help.
We've switched what resources we need, but it's a different call for help.
You know, some of the people, when I put boots on the ground and this ministry kind of took
a new turn very fast, very quickly trying to help in our backyard.
And so my access to some of these guys who were, I guess, first in line, right, the first
out the door and listening to their stories.
There's people on the missing list that we know where they're at.
They just haven't been identified.
And for whatever reasonings that each state has, they're not being added to those totals.
So I think the general public sees it as, oh, in all these states, only 200 people perished.
There's still 5000 people missing in Western Carolina.
We still have 50 people missing technically here in East Tennessee.
Some of these people, we know where they're at.
Some of these people, when the flood waters, I did one swift water rescue class and said,
no, not for me.
I'll stay on dry ground.
Thank you.
So I knew what my expertise was.
And so in your wet water rescue training, you know, these rivers are so churning and
turning that it's like a meat grinder.
So even if you have a person that gets in that river, we might not ever find that person,
right?
Or we might find some of them later on in the rescue and recovery efforts.
So talking to those guys on the ground who've actually picked the bodies up out of the river,
they're frustrated because they're like, listen, I look at the ticker on the news and I see
only 200 whole event wide.
And it's like, we know we just picked up 50 bodies yesterday, right?
But we can't identify them yet until we, you know, DNA or whatever the protocol is in that
state.
And so because it's not being reported, it kind of gives us false sense of everything
must be okay or back to normal here because we haven't seen that gone up yet.
And that's not true.
And in a mental health cell, mental health area, and what we are seeing is that these
guys who've picked up those 50 bodies, they're like, I'm trying to tell people what I just
did and no one believes me.
And I believe them.
I mean, I believe them.
And not only do I believe them, I've been to some of the morgue facilities because you're
asking people to help out in these rescues that are, this is not their normal job.
You know, in one of the counties, the logistics coordinator for the emergency operations center,
the lady in charge of logistics was a realtor who had some training with her local rescue
squad.
So you have people, this is not their everyday job function.
And so they put their personal life on hold to work on this rescue.
And you've got those people that are doing the coroner side of things who are just lay
people, they're lay persons.
They're just people that want to help.
And if they're asked, hey, can you help the coroner?
And they don't know what that entails.
Sure.
All right.
I want to help.
And so I've counseled some of those folks here in the last couple of weeks who I'm glad
that we were able to talk to them because that's part of the first step in healing is
tell me your story.
You know, tell me what's going on.
And so they're feeling frustrated because if they talk to somebody that lives in, I'm
mentioning Kansas because that was the conversation I had with somebody I know there.
But like, you know, somewhere on another part of the world, if you have that conversation,
they're like, well, on the news, it said, you know, 200 people perished.
I guess that's bad, but I guess it's OK.
It's like, no, it's much bigger.
It's much bigger.
And the destruction, I just don't know how much is getting out on social media.
Like I have switched my social media reporting to one of negative stories to positive stories
because I don't want to be a part of that disaster trend, which is like negative, negative,
negative.
But I want people to see the story, but then see the positive.
And I'll tell you right now, I mean, I've watched baseball coaches become triage captains.
I've watched a guy who owns a restaurant feed 10,000 people.
I've seen so many different people put on hats that they never knew they had because
our community is hurting and somebody needs to do it.
Well, this is what I try and do even with my social media.
And it's just obviously just kind of a platform to promote the podcast ultimately, because
that's the solutions for people's problems.
Every person that's coming on here hopefully will help someone who's suffering or maybe
even save a life.
But where I found there's so much value is that there's just so much humanity out there.
But if you watch Fox or CNN religiously, you're not going to see it.
If you have your social media groomed, hashtag shitbag, you're going to see, you reap what
you sow.
But there is so much beautiful humanity.
I think this is what's so sad.
This whole weather machine conversation is like the adrenochrome conversation.
It just distracts from the real world.
So for example, yes, with children, there are predators out there and we need to focus
on them, but they're not a bunch of rich people kidnapping children and sucking things out
of their adrenal glands.
Because as one of my guests came on and explained, adrenochrome is a byproduct of epinephrine.
So you can just go to your local pharmacy, get some and then boom.
But it's being groomed through social media.
And there's that story has just come out of, I think it was in Ireland, of a guy grooming
all kinds of people and basically holding these kids to ransom.
And they were doing things virtually for this whole ring.
That's what we need to be looking at.
And it's the same with this whole weather machine ridiculousness.
There are men, women and children in the Carolinas in Tennessee who need our help.
And every time you pump up that ridiculous story, you're basically telling the world,
we don't care about the people.
We just want to get clicks, likes or sell our advertising space between our shitty news
stations.
Or whatever theory, and I have my own theories and I have my own opinions and like everyone
else does.
But the reason why I reached out to you and the reason why I feel it's important to give
that message off is that, yes, the humanities side of things, these people that did extraordinary
things in an just an unfathomable event.
No one could have planned this.
No one could have thought this was going to happen.
This is a what they went from saying, oh, this is a 50 year flood to a hundred year
flood to a thousand year flood.
All right.
I mean, it's but you see these people rise to the occasion.
But here's the thing.
Our aftercare couple of months out, these people that had to put on these hats that
had to see this tragedy, including our first responders that do it day in and day out,
they're going to need that help, mental health.
They're going to need that that the folks to care about that because we have seen so
much tragedy in such a short amount of time in such a wide span of this region that we're
going to have it.
Mental health is going to be an issue three months from now, six months from now, a year
from now.
This is going to be one of those stories like you hear those stories in history.
Ramal Ethel sat on the porch and watched this category five hurricane rip through Kansas
or the story of the Galveston just being destroyed by Hurricane Camille back, you know, way back
decades ago.
And everyone knows that story because everyone retold that was there that story.
This is going to be a similar event.
But right now we need to have an our forethought and in our minds of being prepared for the
mental health, mental health issues and the opportunity to rise to help with those issues
that that's going to come out of this, too.
I've had, you know, numerous people that have been on task force.
You know, one of the really notable ones I think was extremely underreported, certainly
the death toll was Hurricane Ian that hit the Sanibel area.
And I've had several friends that have come on that were there.
One of them was literally the first team.
And then I forget exactly why, but the following teams were cut off for a while.
Yeah, the band of weather or something like that.
So this one team was on their own on Sanibel Island, having to evacuate all these people.
And I know the impact that some of these deployments have.
And if you think about it from a fire department point of view, your men and women leave.
They're gone for a few weeks.
There's all that kind of conversation about, oh, they'll be racking in the overtime.
And then they come back because it was, you know, out of my outside, out of mine.
But you know, as you said, we got to factor in what did they bring that with them mentally?
Talk to me about the diversity of the rescue teams.
You mentioned, for example, Ireland and some of the the the stories of humanity that you've
heard through all these teams over the last few weeks.
I mean, we've had people like I mentioned to you offline, you know, a group of team,
a rescue team from Ireland.
And I was like, hey, did did FEMA call you?
No, no, we just got on the plane and came over.
And it's like, you know, every story is like that.
You have charities like Samaritan's Purse, you have charities, small charities that just
show up.
The Cajun Navy, who showed up during Katrina is here on the ground.
And they have multiple facets.
Several different outreaches of the Cajun Navy nonprofit.
And we were our our ministry was kind of honor honored Cajun Navy, whatever you want to call
it.
Yeah, yeah.
So we've we've we've worked well together through this.
And and so, you know, there's people from all over our state, Chattanooga, Nashville,
Memphis.
There's people from all over the southeast San Diego.
There was a type one rescue team.
You know, you saw a rescue team from San Diego and they just got on the plane and they dropped
in and just went to where I mean, they reported it.
OK, what's the worst hit area?
We're going to go here.
I've heard of National Guard units when it first started deploy themselves.
Hey, we're not going to wait for the governor's orders.
We're just going to go out here.
You're not going to get paid.
None of the men groveled.
None of them said, OK, we'll wait here until the governor orders are done.
Until the governor orders is that way, we'll get paid.
No, they got in their trucks and they took off.
And by the time they were there, the governor said yes.
But they were prepared to do this without pay.
And so, you know, all walks of life, there was a gentleman from New York City called
Cops Helping Cops.
He has a nonprofit and he basically does what I do, but for a cop centered mission.
So he he's out there helping law enforcement.
So he came up and and was helping us.
And so one of the things that we did as a ministry was, for example, Green County, Green
County had no power, no water for for weeks and just like an asphalt.
And so how do you provide food for an army of rescuers and recovery folks on the ground?
You're talking about four or five, six hundred plus people.
How do you provide food?
How do you provide water?
How do you provide shelter?
And we were able to get plugged into that equation and just start networking with people
who's got what and where and then bringing it in.
And so what Green County did was they just started relying on all these nonprofits to
come in and we were keeping them as a ministry.
We were just one of many nonprofits keeping the rescue effort fed and keeping them hydrated
because they had no access to water.
And and you'd be surprised.
I'm not called up a local beverage company at Bottles Soda's.
And I was like, hey, we're this ministry and this rescue effort's going to need some water
and need some soda and whatever they're going to need to get through the day.
And they're like, OK, we'll send a truck.
And I'm sitting here thinking like a little box truck with a couple of pounds on it.
They sent an 18 wheeler fully loaded and said, well, this work.
Yes.
You know, like and we started divvying out, getting them stocked up, then go in the next
rescue effort and getting them stocked up.
So, you know, there was a lot of outside the box thinking here.
And I got an opportunity to meet a lot of people, some Cajuns coming up cooking for
the volunteers.
Somebody had to feed the volunteers here, too.
And so just kind of whatever need, oh, here we see this need.
Somebody else answers it.
And seeing people from all over the country, from other countries just jump in.
There was two gentlemen I met.
They had a cadaver dog and they were specially trained.
They usually do like water recoveries for sheriff's departments.
So they will go out.
The dog's trained to smell through water in this sense.
In this situation, in this instance, this was a perfect situation for that dog because
in some areas that go out and boat.
Some areas were just covered thick in mud.
And but these two gentlemen had this dog that was trained.
They were out here on their own dime, jumped in their truck, lived on the Mississippi side
of Memphis, jumped in their truck, made it to Elizabethan, Tennessee, which is one of
the areas that was hit hard in Tennessee, and just showed up at the command center and
said, put us to work.
These guys, I mean, other than being members of a volunteer rescue squad, they're very
young.
They're in their 20s.
They just had a heart to serve.
And I was like, hey, what do you guys do when you're not doing this?
Oh, I'm a welder.
The other kid was like, I want a plumber.
Like they just have normal everyday jobs.
But they had this one unique skill that they use locally in their region.
And they just jumped.
No one asked them to come.
They just jumped in and did it.
And we were, I mean, there was so much here that we didn't turn away help for a long time.
And I'm going to tell you, like I burnt so much gas, but it was worth it.
It was worth going every day and checking on the main three incident command centers
in my region.
And then every weekend going into these areas that we couldn't get into along the North
Carolina Tennessee border and servicing those areas and seeing what they need.
And then there was churches and groups that would just show up.
Hey, I saw on the internet, you needed 200 generators.
Here they are.
Stuff like that.
Just, it blows my mind.
But it happened everywhere.
I mean, we're a little nonprofit with not much in our checking book.
We don't need a lot to operate right now.
And so how do you feed 600 people times three incident command centers for a week?
Well, we made this goal.
We're going to just go ahead and feed these three groups for this week.
And when we run out of money at the end of the week, then we'll back up and putt.
Every time I needed the money, somebody else had the money.
It was insane to see that happen.
And it was almost like the fishes and lo story out of scripture of Jesus feeding the 5,000
because every time we need, I would get a phone call from one of these incident command
centers.
Hey, we're going to need X amount of gloves and socks.
Okay.
I would get on the phone and put the word out.
I'm going to need this.
Boom.
Needs filled by some stranger.
So it just, it was amazing.
Something that's also, I don't know if you're aware of, but the water is so toxic right
now that the recovery efforts, some of the water, the water is so toxic with all the
debris and chemicals and just junk in it that the rubber is eating away on the boots, the
rubber soles.
Oh wow.
They're wearing down.
It's just the water is so toxic.
It's not drinkable right now.
And so, so there's a call for rubber boots in some regions.
And so, you know, I'm getting those reports back.
Hey, we need some boots.
You know, that, that's something too.
You can be prepared for every incident, but I don't think any County in the South Appalachia
region was prepared for a long-term plus three week deployment of an incident command structure
and incident command system.
You're prepared maybe for days or a week, but not, not in this scale.
So it was truly the people that just jumped in their car and came up and helped were put
to use.
And that's awesome.
That is awesome to hear.
I think we kind of learned lessons from Katrina.
There were so many Monday morning quarterbacking on it.
And some people kind of had their mind, we're not going to let this happen again.
And so there was a lot of those people that are like, we're going to be the doers.
We're going to be the helpers.
You know, and they just went and did it.
They just went and took care of it.
With September 11th happening somewhat recently, you know, I always revisit the, I miss September
12th conversation because that's when America came together.
And if you look at it statistically, Americans are a very charitable nation.
And you mentioned about the election being the shiny object.
I would say it was a very tarnished object.
I mean, it's awful.
It's divisive and, you know, setting people against each other.
But this is what America really is.
And over and over again, when you see these tragedies, you see people come together, good
people come together, not everyone.
You know, there's the ones that are using it for their own personal gain or political
gain or whatever.
But most people roll up their sleeves and they do want to help.
So I think it's so important to highlight these stories and hear about what America
really is.
Because within all those groups, depending obviously on the demographic of the population,
I'm sure there was gay and straight and black and white and Muslim and Christian, but they
were just Americans coming together.
It didn't matter at that point.
It still doesn't matter what you know, who you are, where you are, where you come from.
And that's what like as a ministry, you know, I, you know, the guys from Ireland, when I
talk to them, I said, let me pray for you.
We're Catholic.
Doesn't matter.
I'm still going to pray for you.
I still love you.
And I still love that you're here.
You know, we I hope that that resonates.
We're very resilient people.
You know, I can say that being born and raised here, you kind of grow up a little self-reliant
in this area and probably not as much as my my grandfather's generation.
But you definitely have some good mountain people that if they were cut off for a month
from society, you probably wouldn't miss much.
They are that well prepared.
But even their resources were taxed.
Even their resources were either what they prepped for was washed away.
And but, you know, when we got into some of these smaller mountain communities where there
was nothing much left, I wept.
I mean, the first lady we met collapsed in our arms.
Now, this is six days after the event.
And this is six days after them seeing somebody from outside their community coming in.
And it was like an army of rednecks.
And I say this army of trucks and chainsaws and whatever we could think of loaded in the
back.
Right.
And they were there with chainsaws and then going, OK, what's your needs?
What are you out of?
I mean, they had to raid local stores like local convenience stores.
Like everything in the store is up for whatever rescue efforts we don't.
We're going to work it out with corporate, but we have no power.
We have no way to just we need to help our people.
Right.
Because that was the small the only store in that town.
And so they just so they were fine for a couple of days.
But when we came in there with resources on the Tennessee side, they were getting pretty
close to.
Trying to figure out what we're going to do next.
They were taking that toxic muddy water and trying to find a way to boil it and drink
it because that's all they had.
And so when we walked in there six months after or six days after the event and that
lady collapsed and we were helping her because she's just overwhelmed with joy seeing this
in what she wasn't collapsing because she was just overexcited to see help.
And so I got back in the truck and I was on my way to the incident command center for
that county, Mitchell County.
And the gentleman with me, he goes, let's stop here and just give ourselves a moment.
I can't cry in front of police officers.
I can't cry in front of firefighters.
I'm too much in for this.
And we just sat there and wept a bit.
But you know, it was we were weeping in for joy also because all these people behind us
coming in with trucks, none of us knew each other.
It was just people who got in a truck, loaded our stuff up and ran to help.
And I think at the end of the day, that is what an American does.
That is what, I mean, it's not just the Southern Appalachian region, but we had, like I said,
people from San Diego, people from Texas, people from all over, people from Ireland.
I'm sure there's other countries here I haven't met yet, but we've had people just come from
all over and say, hey, I'm here to help.
And you know, going back to that, what's going to happen now is now that we're over the life
and death of the physical event, the emotional and spiritual toll is going to come next.
And so, you know, I'm hoping there's still that same zeal and that same drive that we
help rebuild our neighbors' houses, you know, physically and spiritually.
Well, you hit on a really important and interesting point as well for the people locally in the
areas that were hit.
Just like yourself, you know, a lot of people are, you know, hikers and fishermen and, you
know, and hunters and their environment has been destroyed.
So just expand on that.
Yeah.
So, you know, part of my aftercare, part of how I help my stress levels is I recreate.
I go out in the outdoors.
That was me from the beginning.
But some of these regions, the forests are gone.
So if you're a hunter and you enjoy this time of year because this is the time of year to
do it, you might not have the resources to hunt or fish.
A lot of our streams, even our local streams, the ones touched by the floods and the mudslides
are toxic.
They don't know when it's going to be safe to eat the fish.
You got to also look at the massive amounts of fish kills in these streams and rivers
that happen because of it.
There's fish floating up.
And so all that gets, all that dead, all that muck, all of it's toxic.
And so if you're a fisherman and we had some of the best and we'll, we still have some
streams left that were untouched, but we had like the Wataga rivers, the Wataga river,
the Nolichucky river.
Those were the two biggest and the French broad are the rivers that have huge amounts
of trout, huge amounts of fish.
So you have that fishing component to it.
The Appalachian trails snakes through all this.
People that love to go hiking, those trails are shut down right now because they're just
some of them are washed out or too dangerous.
The Blue Ridge Parkway shut down.
Some of our state parks are shut down.
We might not open them up this year.
They might be open at the end of the year.
We don't know.
So there's a lot of the, what you would normally do to recreate, to wind down as a person,
it's a lot going to be a lot harder to do.
And then you also looking at the economic impact of these economies thrived on that
tourism.
You know, Boone, North Carolina, Banner Elk, Spruce Pine, Asheville, Chimney Rock.
You said yourself, you climbed to the top of that.
That it's a huge, like going in there, that economy is going to be changed for a while.
So and then these smaller mountain towns that were cute and quaint and have been there for
like 150 years.
Give you an example, Marshall, North Carolina had this beautiful quick, like just like out
of nowhere, just it looked like somebody just popped up a town out in the middle of these
mountains and it goes back a hundred years.
So these buildings are old.
These buildings are part of history and now they're destroyed.
And so their economy was, you know, people coming in to see this beautiful hundred year
old architecture town in the mountains and get the, you know, bread and jam from the
local diner and whatever they were there to buy that that that commerce is gone, that
that economy is gone.
And so it's almost the same as the coal mines shutting down in West Virginia.
So these communities are going to struggle with the economic impact.
Absolutely.
Well, I want to get to where people can find Lifeline Ministries, but just before we close
out, is there anything else you want to add to the conversation?
I just want to echo again how amazing.
So many people would, you know, we would be in the field, they would say, thank you so
much for what you're doing.
Thank you so much for what you're doing.
And I would say to them that I'm just a dot connector.
I'm just connecting the dots.
God has lined up opportunities for me to connect those dots.
There's so many people that you would never know and never meet until something like this
happens that were like me just connecting the dots.
And so I want to say thanks to those people and thanks to those who have been serving
not just our ministry, but other ministries and people giving up whole businesses.
Have my building so you can stock it full of disaster supplies or have my whatever so
you can feed people.
So I just want to say thank you to those people that have done so much.
And you know, it's you just that that makes me want to cry just thinking about the people
that are willing to give up their personal comforts, their personal safeties, had no
or zero training and are just we're willing to just say I'm willing to help.
I want to say thank you to those folks.
But yeah.
Well, for people listening, if they want to learn more about you and your ministry, if
they want to contribute, where are the best places online to do that?
So we are on Facebook.
So with our official official nonprofit is First Responder Lifeline.
So you can go to First Responder Lifeline dot com.
You can also check us out at First Responder Lifeline on Facebook and you can check us
out.
We try to post things on there.
I try to keep that we're very well up on our Facebook page.
And but, you know, as I said, our coffers are quite small, but it does take some money
to keep the things going on an early basis and training up.
We want to get bigger.
We started this as a we're going to be a small hometown ministry.
And now we're now we're in multiple counties because we saw a need.
And so anywhere you could help be praying for us daily, reach out to us, give us words
of encouragement and help plug us into other ministries like ourselves.
And so we can network together.
We're only going to be stronger if we're together.
And but if we stay divided, we're not going to be strong.
So hundred percent.
Well, I want to thank you so much not only for being the voice of the people still dealing
with this and, as you said, the voice of the responders and and the community themselves
of the ripple effect, acknowledging that this is not just going to go away when the roads
are rebuilt and the banks of the rivers are repaired.
But it's going to have a long lasting effect.
But I also want to thank you personally for your courageous vulnerability and telling
your own story.
So I want to thank you so, so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the
Behind the Shield podcast today.
You're welcome.
And, you know, your dark side project is what sparked this.
So I want to say thank you because when I was working through my journey and you launched
that page was the same time.
So what you did helped launch something like this.
So thanks, James.