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send us an email. We'll talk about special operations over ask me in the
Team House with your hopes. Jack Murphy, David Pare Hey everyone, welcome
to episode two hundred and twenty eight of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy
here with David park. Our guest on tonight's show is Aaron Hale. Aaron
served in the as an explosive ordinance technician in Afghanistan. Severely severely injured but
made an incredible recovery. There's a lot to talk about here, and we're
just really pleased, really happy to have you on the show tonight. Aaron
Bosses lows, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me on.
Really pumped to be on the show. Thank you, man, Thank you,
appreciate you having you here. So you know, I will ask you
the first question that we ask all of our guests about your origin story,
if you can tell us a little bit about your up your upbringing and that
path that took you towards military service. Absolutely yeah. In fact, you
know, mine isn't one of the you know gung ho kids played soldier boy.
Yeah, as a kid and just knew his direction. In fact,
just the opposite. I was a Midwestern kid, loved my childhood adolescence,
had enough natural belevated talent to just skate by. So I was. I
was really an all American slacker, and you know, bes cs and the
rest bs. So when I got to college, everybody he knew how to
work, you know, quickly passed me by, and I soon find myself
out of my butt a whole lot of tuition, pissed away and really embarrassed
and trying to figure out what to do with my life. So one thing
that I can do and have been doing for my whole life, is able
to you know, have this ability to just make decisions and act and go.
And I loved cooking, so you know, ever since I could reach
out of the counter, I loved. I love the culinary arts. I
decided, you know what, I'm going to going to hold another direction.
I'm going to go to culinary school. Except I need before I go to
another college, another university. And I tried first, I need those internal
you know, the internal values, the core skills at work, ethic,
ambition, all that kind of stuff, and you know, set and set
some goals for myself and be productive. And also I needed to earn some
more tuition money. So that's what I decided. The military was exactly what
could answer all of that for me. I joined the Navy in nineteen ninety
nine as a cook, and they gave me everything that I was looking for.
The early mornings, the fitness, the work ethic, and a whole
lot more. So that's that's what led me towards the military. It was
kind of failing up and I found that soon right after, right after basic
and the Navy's a school, cooking school I was in. I wasnt sure
duty in Italy, and I worked my way up to cooking for the commander
of the US sixth Fleet, three star, in charge of all the Navy
troops in the Mediterranean and Eastern Atlantic seaboard. And that was fantastic. Got
to cook real food, got to tour around the a terranean in the flagship.
And that's not you know, those those six months westpack cruises. It's
three months or less, maybe one or two months. You hit three ports
in the Mediterranean, run up the flag you hit a you know, throw
a reception, and then scoot right back to Naples, Italy. Okay,
to Italy. But uh, what what was that like, Nathan? Like
some of the differences just as a Navy cook. I mean, it sounds
working your way up. I mean there must have been those times where you're
cooking up slop for hundreds of sailors on the ship, and then it sounds
like maybe you had this opportunity where you were cooking like restaurant style food later
on, you know, the truth is no, I never did that.
Okay, I'm spent four years in Italy, first duty station was actually barracks
duty. No kidding. They don't tell you this at a school, they
don't tell I think they used to switch the jobs around a little bit,
but they used to look at it like hotel restaurant management on the civilian side.
So I get off the plane, they tell me I'm working shore duty
instead of sea duty on board of ship, and uh, you know.
My sponsor met me at the airfield and I for one of the first questions
was where I'm not gonna be cooking. They're like, oh no, we
don't cook on on shorter at it And what do we do You're gonna be
because you're the FNG, You're gonna be night watch at the b b EQ
the desk, Yeah yeah. I worked my way up to like the officer
quarters front desk and then the maintenance department. So it was taking trouble called
tickets from the residents and walking them over to the public works, the local
national Italians. The cool thing about that was I was I was escorting these
guys through the rooms and everywhere. I went almost to EJ colmost how do
you say this? How do you say that? And I was learning Italian
and drinking a ton of espresso in their office all day long. But the
funny thing was I was learning not Polatan Italian, which is about the furthest
thing you can get from book Italian, right right, and I was learning
it from these public works, roughnecks, electricians, plumbers. So anytime I
traveled, even off doing it, would do like MWR trips out to Rome,
Milan, that kind of stuff. I would try speaking the lingo because
I was actually enjoying my time there. Yeah, but you know, the
Italians would look at me, what are you doing? You must live in
Naples. It was. It was hilarious. Gave a quick shout out to
Augustus. I guess the Precious Metals, the sponsor for tonight's show. Text
team to six eight five to nine two or go to Augusta Precious Metals dot
com and we'll talk about them in a few minutes. Well please please can
tell you Aaron, sorry for the interruption. And so you had to fight
just to do your job in a sense, like you had to work your
way up to doing the job you wanted to do. Yeah, it's it's
what I really wanted to do at the time, at least, was cook.
Yeah, And instead I was wasted away at night at the night launch
and then no one's having fun hanging out with the Italians. But it wasn't
really know what you were looking for, you know. So, uh,
the base commander would sometimes throw parties literal receptions at his villa and ask for
cooks from the barracks to help cater the thing. So I would do,
would volunteer in my off time, and this was just to keep the skills
sharp, do some cooking somewhere, and when it was time to PCs it
just so happens about forty five minutes away in Guaya, Italy, there was
a billet open for flag duty and it was a special position which required letter
of reference the from you know, somebody higher up. And because I had
been working for the CEO and his wife, I got that letter and got
my foot in the door to cook for the admiral. And it's really cool
about cooking for flag flagships is that's often the the that wrung between you know,
the big, big blue Navy and places like Camp David and the White
House and even Air Force one. Uh, Eric, can you because you're
the first we've talked before about how hard cooks and the military work, but
you know, we've never actually had some many. Can you tell us a
little bit about the A school because the basic schools because one of the advantages
that people don't know about, and as a military, especially in the Navy,
because of the different mess decks that you can go on to very advanced
training and culinary arts. But can you tell us a little bit about the
A school? How long was it? And then like what types of things
did they cover? Over? Stuff? You know? In that school Navy
A school, there were two major areas of study, and I think it's
about ten weeks I think total, and eight of them were sanitation, don't
kill these seculars and the other two the other the other two weeks was how
to read and execute on the recipe cards. There it's like a publication,
like an Army reg on army publication on how to make food. There's a
recipe card for everything. If there isn't a recipe card, then it doesn't
exist and you shouldn't make it. And it was it was how to make
it perfectly bland. So everybody was pissed off, right right, that's amazing.
So I almost got myself in trouble by making guacamole not taste like well
making make it a taste like blacamole, right, So sort of the opposite
of like Hell's Kitchen or something like that, where everybody's tasting to be the
most bland and unoffensive as you can possibly be or inoffensive. Well, you
know, it's it's the training school for the Big Navy, and they want
to make sure that, like I said, the cooks don't kill the crew,
right. So it really was how to make sure that everything about deva
sanitation standards and cleaning and food cooking temperatures, all that kind of stuff,
and there is really quite a bit of it. And then the rest of
it was just making sure you can follow instructions on a recipe. Car.
Yeah, then once you get out there, there really are a lot of
opportunities for chefs to advance into some like like incredible billets and take some really
cool schools. In fact, every year, I think there's a joint Joint
Services cooking competition and it's it's on the like Food Network and stuff like that,
so it's pretty cool. So when you took this billet at the flag
position, did they offer you advanced turning before you went or did you just
kind of go as as you were. I went straight there. Okay.
I did get some training during and I also I was in Italy. I
got the O JT type of training and off duty training just being in being
in one of the major centers of culinary arts Italy. The funny thing was
though that you would it's homeported there forward, homeported in guy to Italy.
So everybody just it's like a floating office most of the time. When it's
in port, and the Admiral goes in for breakfast, lunch and close a
business, everybody hangs up, the uniform goes back out into the economy.
I made breakfast at lunch, and then I was, I was, I
was. I was done by like two o'clock, fourteen hundred. I was
gone and clean up the kitchen. And but the one major rule was the
Admiral say, absolutely no Italian food. My American cooks are not allowed to
make Italian food while we're in port. Why would I have you guys cooked
that stuff when we're here, right, right, So I couldn't practice what
I've learned on him, right, you know, we get out to see
of course we had a we had all three actually four meals to practice on
the guy and the rest of the stad. So when you say four meals,
are you including like midnight rats and that is that the fourth meal for
people who aren't familiar with them. Yeah, yeah, we would do mid
rats because even you know everybody the ship runs. And that was the difference
between It's kind of the difference in flagships. You've got the ship's company with
the skipper the CEO, and that's one whole command, and then you've got
the fleet command with the admiral and his that's a separate command altogether. So
it made for interesting rivalry sometimes being on the flag staff on board the ship
underway and they wouldn't be doing general quarters and something like that and running fire
drills, and I just kind of can I get by? I gotta get
come to, you know, officer country. But we had it was it
was a pretty incredible time and I learned quite a bit. And also it
was terrific having an especial machine on board. Yeah, it must have been
cool that, I mean, you were at that point exactly where you wanted
to be, doing exactly what you wanted to do. Actually, once I'd
reached I guess it was I guess it would say it was the pinnacle of
what being a cook in the Navy was going to offer me. I became
a little disenfranchised, became a little wrestless. Were I'd gotten those I'd gotten
those skills, that gotten those abilities, those core values that I'd come for.
I'd earned my earned the gi bill. Of course, now it's like
five years I was going to do the four now and it's already five six
years later. And I loved the Navy. I had salted my veins.
I love being at sea. I just h and I also loved cooking.
But it was something about being a Navy cook that just wasn't testing the skills.
It wasn't it wasn't it wasn't challenging me the way I wanted to be
challenged. Plus I actually did ninety nine Time of Peace. By the time
I had left the Admiral's command, we were two wars and we've been out
flood doing our figure rates and you know, in our body in the middle
of the Mediterranean and commanding you know, the navy. But I myself,
yes, all all of the jobs are important, every role business, you
know, necessary in the effort. But I was watching the war in Wars,
and I ran and Afghanistan on TV on the ship, and I just
I don't know it was there was something telling me I was not where I
needed to be. I wasn't I wasn't where I was supposed to be.
So when I got back to the United States, I volunteered to go as
an individual augment tee to a provincial reconstruction team in far Afghanistan. Of course
I'd still be cooking, but now I'm I would be right in the middle
of it, right almost. We were way out west in Farra, south
of Parat. It was so so far in the middle of nowhere, in
the desert. Even the Taliban were like, you can have it, but
it was. It was. It was actually so quiet, there was nothing.
People were getting in trouble for being bored that kind of thing. But
I switched from cooking for the admiral and thirty five of his staff too,
like five six hundred ice AFT troops, Americans, Portuguese, Spanish, even
some Italian special forces down from Murat. So I got to practice some of
the lingo and trade firs more espresso. It was. It was fantastic.
It was a great experience and that's when I met some EOD technicians. Now
were they American? Were they Army? Were the Navy? Who were the
EOD techs that you met when you're out there? We trained up actually in
uh it was that was the funniest thing. A bunch of Navy and Air
Force components from all around the fleet, Cook's Admin, civil affairs all going
to Fort Bragg for a like slap together basic training to teach us how to
army and and that's when I met a few. I made a pair of
Navy EOD technicians and they helped us, you know, understand the UXO and
an ied threat that would be face we'd be facing out there or potentially if
we ever left a wire. And unfortunately, these guys were awesome. It
was a chief miracle and AO and poland did those guys were really really cool
dudes. But they switched out by the time we mated in theater, and
there was a few Air Force techs assigned to the farm, and those guys
rotated out, I don't know every three or four months, but it was
a little bit after. I mean, I'd already already learned what ud he
was about, but it wasn't until I've got to know these guys. And
I remember one day I was leaving the chow hall. I was heading back
towards the barracks area, and these Air Force techs had it just like dumped
out all of their gear to do maintenance checks on the everything, bombsuits,
the robots, all the other gear, testing batteries, making sure everything was
clean. And it was like a cool guy the yard sale. So I
when others struck up a conversation, learned, you know, just chatting away
and learning more about the job. You know, the tight knit brotherhood,
the technical aspect of the job. Yeah, the critical thinking skills it really
need. And the fact that their first responders on the battlefield, they're running
into the danger when everybody else is running away. Yeah, I mean everything
about it. It just collect in a place. And that's that's what I
knew I needed to do. So I put in a request with the Navy
to go from cook to bomb squad And what year was that it did?
It didn't go bre at all? Ye, No, they kicked it back,
said no, everything can be waived. Nobody wants to tell you my
my rank in that job was undermanned. So not only did they not want
me to leave cooking. I guess I'd like my cooking too much. No,
but they listen, we're going to promote me. Oh wow. So
when I returned from Afghanistan, my contract was about up. It was the
reenlistment. Or walked and I took my service record and what you know,
I walked and went over to the Army recruiter and told him what I wanted
to do, and they welcome right in. They did you a little dirty
there, that's too bad. Yeah, it was a shame because I really
loved being the Navy. It was cool. Yeah, and you fell in
love with Navy EO D first, and we're totally ready to go do that.
Yeah. Yeah, Well, you know, at the same time,
not only was my job undergrand but it was a transition period for Navy EO
D as well. Back in the day, EOD wasn't even its own rate
like it's own MS. He was a qualification, especially of suffix, so
you had to come from different source jobs, source rates, and you since
mate master to arms, you not cook. Yeah, so I had a
few things going against right, Yeah, Aaron, let me, I'm gonna
do another ad read here real quick, and then we jump back into the
interview again. I'm sorry for the interruption. Yeah. So, our sponsor
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Thank you guys for supporting one of the sponsors of tonight's show. So back
to you, Aaron. So tell us about how you made that transition then
from I mean you talked a little bit. You took your service record down
to the Army recruiters and they were like, hey, good to go.
It wasn't it wasn't like a smooth pronuiziation. I took about half a year
off, left the service entirely, moved to New moved to Brooklyn, New
York really and where we're at, went to work. What we're in Brooklyn,
I was, I was looking for the most affordable. I was almost
out by Corney Island by the time I can find a place I can afford,
I think raves and yeah, anyway, so yeah, I was right
on Ocean Avenue and King's Highway, yep, about there. But I was
I was teaching builty in Lower Manhattan, so I'd take take the you know,
the subway in and I was working with a wadi of mind, teaching
computer applications to the corporate setting like City Group and stuff like that. Uh,
and Aaron, You're you're just one of those like what do they say,
like thesbians, like the type of personally and just like do anything.
What's up? Like the type of person I can just like like a jack
of all trades. Yeah yeah, or you know some people call that yeah
yeah, So how did you like he taught you how to use the applications
or you had been using those applications and then you turn around in like when
look, you know, I had a buddy, and it's it's not as
hard. I mean, I was teaching Excel to all the it was like
I was teaching the City way of formatting stuff that you know, there are
new hires which are all like all sixteen SAT scores in the entire room,
you know, so I was just teaching them how to put that particular type
of blue fade in the background and stuff like that. But the truth is,
well, when I was when I was teaching these things, you know,
you get Microsoft Project, Microsoft Office or anything like that, and they
somebody hires you to do a level one. You buy the Level one and
the Level two book, right, and you read it the day before and
it's pretty straightforward and you just regurgitate level one and by the end of the
day, when you have a couple of minutes leftover, or somewhere in the
middle of the day, you just throw out a couple of pointers from level
two and they think you know everything. If they teach you, if they
hire you for level one to level two, well you take a couple extra
days and then you of course you buy a level three buck and you do
the same thing. Right. So I learned it all on the fly and
it worked out pretty well. The only thing was it wasn't for me,
and I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to go with her,
but it was I was pretty pissed off about not doing in the Navy.
Took that little time off just uh, not shaving stuff or not.
You know, it grew out a nice beard. But then I decided,
you know, I was going to go go to that armor recruiter and get
back into the fight. Yeah. So you hadn't been on like the delayed
entry program or anything. You were just taking like a person break, decompressing,
uh and teaching excel and whatnot. Yeah, my own personal own delayed
injury program, I guess. And you'll earn enough money to get buy in
New York. It was actually a pretty cool experience. Yeah, definitely a
learning experience, but I quickly got claustrophobic. I was used to wide open
seas, wide open deserts, wide open country of you know, the Midwest,
and even going for a run in Brooklyn. You know you gotta get
you go block stop, go block stop right, trip over or trash bag,
you know, a dog or something. But you know, I went
to the owner recruiter and they welcome me in. I did do it was
it was like I didn't go to basic training or did this gentleman's course.
It was like a what was it like like a pilot program for prior service.
It was so funny. All these guys have been out for at least
different service or out of the army for at least three years. And because
it was it's all of the knowledge based stuff, none of the inductrination stuff,
you know, the dogma. So I got the knowledge I needed to
go soldier, and I got the uniform, but I still felt like a
sailor at heart. I felt like an inntial trader. Then after after transitioning
uniforms, learning some of the lingo, and I went to the EOD School
and that was pretty cool. I mean, you train together with all the
branches, so we all learned the same language language anyways, and we're all
you know, it's it's every branch comes together to teach the EOD techs the
exact same knowledge so that I could be paired up on the battlefield with an
Air Force tech, a Navy tech, a Marine tech, and we can
all do the job together without skipping a beat. There's no friction, no
lag time in understanding each other. We just know how to do the job.
And it also is great for actually when we have to do joint operations
and there's there's no cross branch rivalries or anything like that. Yeah, it
did, no click type of things. We're all in the same EO D
family and I love it. Still are to get today. Yeah, so
can you tell us a little bit about the EO D School. How long
was it? You know? I think that for a lot of us,
who you know, when we watch EO E stuff you know on TV in
a movie, if there's EOD person, they're always trying to defuse a bomb,
but really a lot of times out in the field you're not diffusing like
you're pipping them or whatever. But can you tell us, like all the
things you learn, how long it was things like that. Yeah, I
went through I think each of the branches have their own individual Phase one.
And the Armies used to be at Redstone Arsenal Huntsville, Alabama. They moved
it to Fort Lee in Virginia. I went through Redstone and that's about ten
weeks of really the kindergarten of EOD and it's stuff like ordinance identification would kind
of what if it, what does it tell you if it has fins or
a pin or a parachute, you know, different colors or what different colors
are marketing signify that kind of thing. Electronics basic, basic circuitry physics.
You know, the different forces at play if a thing is dropped, fired,
throne, buried, and how the different forces engage and activate, diffusing.
That's all there, and it's all actually very basic stuff to then dig
dig deep into. You know, the hundreds of thousands of different types of
munitions have been made domestically and abroad, and that's you know, when you
get to the joint school run by the Navy on Eglin Air Force Base here
in the Panhandle, you start right back from the beginning with electronics and basic
physics. But you got a got a primer at your Phase one school and
then and then you know, we're all trained together and you can't take any
of the material out of the school. So your train you're studying all day
long. They learn all day long. There's about an hour or so mandatory
study hall right after and then you got to leave it all at the school
till the next day. There's there's a an exam or practical test on average
every two to three days, and the the nutrition rate in that school is
pretty high. Just knowledge based, there's there's definitely a physical component to it.
You've got to be able to physically fit enough to wear that bomb suit,
and of course you got to go through the bomb suit test just to
get into the school, and it's like a like a PT test in the
bomb suit, of course. But then the real test comes when you know,
they start asking you basic cognition questions to see if while you're smoked you
can actually think, you still maintain your basic critical thinking skills. And that's
really what the test is about. That do you never quit and you can
you can keep your head on while you're huffing and puffing, and and then
it's about basic you know, pt maintenance while you get your skull crammed full
of knowledge on everything that goes boom, from bullets to weapons of mass destruction
and nukes. That's amazing. Do you do you recall how much that bomb
suit weighs? So do you recall how much the bomb suit wags? There
are different models, and the latest model I think is somewhere ninety pounds with
the helmet. Yikes. Yeah, that's that's something else because it's not just
ninety pounds that like you're carrying like on your back in a focused place,
like you have to be able to lift your legs under the pressure of the
side. Does it Does it feel like you're trying to you know, render
safe bombs like while you're underwater at that point? Duh? I don't know.
The first few times, it was definitely very very alien, very foreign
being in this thing. And over time though practice it just don't think about
it. Yeah, bomb suit time right to get on and get and the
transition is it's pretty fast when you consider that what's in front of you is
it could possibly explore it and kill you. You don't think much about the
bomb suit at all. I just put it on adapt And at this phase
when when you went through EO D school, what stage were like the robotics
at at that point as far as using the robots and the Johnny five model
to go out there and diffuse some of these things. Yeah, I went
through this is I went through an OIY and this was just a few I
mean Iraq. You gonna consider, you know where we were in that timeline
of Iraq and Afghanistan and how slow you know, the trade doc and you
know the other training branches and you know, the military aren't a really catch
up to you know, the battlefield and we were. We weren't too bad
about it, but all the same, remember, ordinances are bread butter,
it's in our name. And i EDS was actually still relatively new though it
was all over both battle fields mostly are rock at the time, but we
didn't have Actually i EEDS was only about two weeks of the forty three we're
Eglin Air Force Base. And that's for everything. There's really not a whole
lot to teach when it comes to I D S if you already know basic
circuitry from the early stages, because they want the thing about I mean,
there's there's, of course, lots lots of know about IDs, switches and
you know, fusing. But the thing is about IDs is that there's it's
it's made of anything and everything, and the limits to what how you can
make an ID is the only limit is the bombmaker's creativity. So how do
you how do you really teach a class on that except in basic you know,
the basics. So we learned a few of the most popular switches,
that kind of thing, we do remote renter save procedures or disruption procedures.
We learn different tools to engage these different IDs and robots. Wasn't really that
important. In fact, everybody at the schoolhouse knew that they'd get plenty of
robot time once they got to their units. So maybe a few days out
of that week they would play, you know, to get let let the
students go out there and play with the robots. And like you said,
the course was what forty three weeks long, but that's to teach the basics.
Yeah, yeah, the basic like basic laws of science, physics,
electronics, chemical analysis, that kind of thing we would have a few weeks
of because everything's broken up into different divisions from biochemical to weapons of amous destruction
nuclear air is what are the most dreaded, most dreaded divisions in the school.
And that's everything. That's everything that could be inside or inside an aircraft
or dropped from its wings or chaff flares, everything that has an explosive on
an aircraft. And that's think about it inside a cockpit, everything explodes from
even there, from on the rocket rockets under their seats. The canopy explodes
before they even but you know, the pilot eject the even their harnesses have
explosives and that activated by sea saltwater, so ink that goes out. Think
about what I want to do. Probably we're just saying that when you're talking
about as far as the explosives and the harness, Dave was saying, is
that does that deploy like an ink so that they can be spotted or is
that for their their like water wings like the life preserver that's a release them
if they go unconscious. Yeah, yeah, so and even the ejection handle
that like starts all of the other stuff that's that's like a little shotgun shell
that that it's like a primer that sets it all off. So imagine you're
a student maybe halfway through the EO D School and you face this thing that
looks like a like a great big explosive cactus. You know that you're you're
about to go hug and everything has to do everything is remember your safeties.
Right. We have I think it's twenty six different safeties and we have to
remember and on a test forgetting one of the safeties. Each one of these
tests, the minimum passing grade is an eighty five because you don't want to
see student in a bonus here and like a parachute, we're not sure if
we're taking the sea on this. Yeah, and any safety infractions is it's
an automatic sixteen point hit. Wow. So when you come up to an
aircraft and you've got to render safe maybe the ejection seat because it had a
quote unquote hard landing. You've got to pass everything that's mounted under the wing
of the aircraft and say, I'm recognizing heat, shock, friction, eject,
laser, emar, static, anything that might set that thing off for
every single piece of ordinance, and you can't miss any of them because each
one of those, each one of those safeties on each one of those pieces
of ordinance is a sixteen portant hit and sometimes to render safe, say the
like the gut eight alpha the gun on the A ten to render safe that
thing, it's just sticking like a cutter pin in you know, a piece
of the mechanics to render the safe the weapon, right, but you to
get past all that ordinance to get there, and it was, Uh,
it's a pretty harrowing experience. It's pretty nerve wracking, but that's that's how
you get Did you also get some extra love in the MOP four protective suit
during that course? Well, the that's in the eeds. Uh. The
division part of that is the bomb suit test. And other than that though
you don't you'll put on a bomb suit for a known the hazard if you
know what the hazard is, uh, and you you probably don't need the
bomb suit. And imagine any time you're on deployment and you're on like dismount
of patrol, you know, like UD decks are going to carry that thing
around until maybe they need it. So bomb suites are a tool for certain
situations, certain places and time. But once you train how to use it
and when to know when you need it, then you move on to the
next division. Aaron, you know you you're talking a lot about render safe,
which I think is you know, it's what we normally think of when
we think of E O D. Right, finding something in a populated area,
or like you say, with the aircraft, uh, with you know,
with Afghanistan Iraq. Obviously we move on to this model of you know,
disposal actually like rendering or not rendering it, but like blowing it or
whatever. Did you guys cover much about demolitions itself? Did you guys learn
how to place charges? You know a lot? Obviously you are already covering
explosive theory, but were you getting the hands on practical like a demolitions you
know, training in that also? Absolutely of course act part I mean,
the majority of our job is using explosives as a tool. So and I'm
not just saying slap a couple of blocks of C four, make something to
go away, bip, blowing place and you know, making something to go
boom as sexy for the cameras. And of course of course we like blowing
stuff up. But but we also have explosive tools that I no kidding,
I have. We have tools we can shoot a bomb with a bullet to
make it safer and never blew my mind first some I heard about that,
But we're using you know, specific charges to shear or cut or impinge a
piece of diffusing or to cause it to low order rather than high order,
to blow small rather than big, or to burn instead of explode. And
yeah, we're we're like surgeons when it comes to explosives. And of course
there's plenty of times when we've had to dispose of just huge caches of ordinance
and a lot of times they don't have using so there's no reason to render
and safe. They're already safe. They're just piles of explosives. We have
to make them go away. And well, we have specific procedures for where
and how to place the you know, the shots and tie it all in
with debt chord and primate and all of that, and it's all essential to
making sure that it's done safely and you don't have to go back and do
it a second time to clean up. I've I have had to go back
on botched shots to go pick up blocks of C four that were punted into
the battle space just sitting there for the enemy to pick up. Or you
know, something went boom and like maybe maybe somebody was trying to bring down
a mud hut. Instead, all they did was brought down part of a
mud hat on top of a whole bunch of on exploded blocks of C four
And then what do you do somebody else? You know, the army is
not going to want to sit around forever, as you know, pull brick
by brick, But guess who wouldn't mind digging through the you know, the
mess to get at that explosive. So yeah, it's it's to be safe,
not just in the immediate future, you know immediate like like on the
shot, but it's to be safe to make sure we're not leaving anything behind
for the enemy. So it almost sounds as though you're saying eighteen Charlie's were
the bane of your existence. Well, we're jump we're jumping a few a
few steps here. But I wasn't gonna say anything. Crams over castles,
p for plenty. It doesn't always work, is that what you're saying.
I wasn't going to talk about the efforts at all. But that's hilarious.
So was there any part of you know, this forty three week of course
you were just like blown away by that. You know, you're like,
this is the coolest thing ever again, was there any part of the E
O D Course that you were just absolutely blown away by where you're thinking,
like, this is the coolest thing ever. I never imagined I would see
something like this. I don't know. I was so amped, I was
so excited about the whole thing. Yeah, I was having I was actually
having a really good time. It was hard, it was a challenge,
and it was it was it was really what I was looking for, you
know. And I was around all these other people that were like alpha type
nerds that competitive, smart, wanted to take charge, and yeah, I
was. I was. I was in this. This is an amazing crowd
of people to be you know, these these warriors learning this amazing skill.
So any one particular thing, I don't know, I get tired to pick
one out. That's awesome. And so after you graduate from the course,
tell us about, you know, landing in your unit and what that was
like and when you know, you came down in deployment orders sort of what
the next stage was for you. After I graduated from Eyota School, I
went to Fort Drunk upstate, New York, and it was immediately put in
a company that was on the nod of war and two nine ten tennis is
when my company went to Iraq, I was a new eoity tech, but
I kept my rink from the Navy. So I went from petty Officer second
class to sergeant. And that was tough because as an NCO, I was
expected to get my team leader certification. And the team leaders, the guy
that actually gets into bombsuit makes that long walk, he's the most experienced,
you know, the highest drinking guy on an EOD team. And some of
these these you know privates had had come up through EOD from the beginning and
had had far more badge experience than I did, you know, having been
a cook for my entire military career. So you know, there was a
little resentment, but everybody understood it. I was I had just had to
work twice as hard to get up to speed. I was the I was
placed as a fourth man on a three man team when I went to Iraq,
and it's kind of like tits on a bar. I was a team
sergeant that didn't need a sergeant, but I was there. I was learning
my team leader, the other sergeant on the team was teaching me as much
as he could, as fast as I could. I could you know,
take it in. And I think my first sergeant recognized what was going on,
so he pulled me from the team and he sent me to keep victory
or liberty whatever, you know. I went, you know, right by
buy Up and Baghdad, and I went to the higher level the Counter Explosive
Exploitation Cell at Task Force Troy and that's the Joint id Operation Cell. That's
where they take all of the the evidence collected from the teams off the battlefield
and they they trulyage it and they examined it. So but they put me
right in the triage they receiving area, and I would take these boxes of
evidence, the evidence kits you baggies and boxes of tape and pressure plates and
batteries and debt core samples of all sorts of stuff, and I would I
would better package it for the next steps. Triash is really like if you
think of role one, two three in the first aid on a battlefield,
we we just cleaned up the evidence samples and then send them off to the
different departments like chemical analysis, by biometrics, electronics, that kind of thing.
And from from there that and the storyboards would go to a t F
FBI D EA, D, I A and so on. So I got
to learn exactly how you know, they wanted. They wanted to see the
evidence presented from the battle, you know, from the front. So when
I actually did get my team litter certification had my own team, I knew
how. I knew what the best way to present the evidence so that we
could more quickly and more effectively get to the left of the bang. And
you think, consider like, you know the timeline, you know, from
explosion backwards. You got the bomb placer, the bombmaker, and the bomb
financer, all of those guys, and that's really what it was all about.
We want to get there before they get to bury it. So it
was an incredible learning experience and really handy when I finally did get my own
team in twenty eleven, I earned my team to those seprocation and was heading
back to Afghanistan for my third deployment, second time as an EOD tech and
second time in Afghanistan, but first as an EOD team. Later I went
to we We were we were placed in support for CAV scouts out of Riley,
and we just it was really busy, little west of Kandahart and a
little town called a joy and he has to turp what that meant and he
goes, I think it means cemetery, and it really did. It felt
like I was in tombstone. I mean there's just IDs everywhere. I remember
hearing one guy say, uh, what we got there? It's like around
here, every step is a uh is a decision? M yeah, this
is was This step is deliberate? What was this far enough along in the
war. It's not just roadside I eeds, but it's also like as you
approach to target, it's along trails. It becaming like increasingly intense, right
absolutely, And we we had had we had all the crew systems and the
you know, the armored trucks, and then of course we have to leave
them all behind because everything's on dirt trails. So we have we have these
metal detectors and those those guys, those uh you know, the privates that
get the metal detectors and go pulling. I got a handle of those guys.
They those guys have some balls. They are in their chops and uh
that was amazing what they did. They had some spiky scents sometimes and they
were also I would try try my best to educate and inform uh, these
these this component that I was supporting, my team was supporting while we were
inside the wire the best I could. Any of those uh you know,
uh red sheets with the new intel that come out for the area, I'd
get that out. Anything we were seeing as a trend and maybe bondmaker's migration
type patterns, anything like that. I wanted to train them up the best
I could and get them all the information they could, and even if it
wasn't new information. I don't just teach them some of the skills of what
to do if what to do if we were to run, or how to
handle certain unitions and certain situations. I didn't want to give them license to
do EUD procedures, but we can't be everywhere once and if there's a dire
situation, I want to make sure they were prepared. What were some of
the ways that EO D the texts were being used, because I know that
a lot of times you guys were doing route clearance where you were ahead of
an act of patrol, you know, the vehicular patrol. Were you also
embedded in the wine squads as they would go out, Like, what were
the different ways you guys were being utilized? We we did quite a few,
quite a bit of age. We would go out, in fact,
where we were most of that time, we were actually the the cascouts were
building up command outposts all over place, almost within visual distance of each other,
just to deny the enemy any area, any terrain. So we we
would walk behind the We had that was hilarious. We had the was it
Puerto Rican National Guard engineers, you know, driving these the D two dozers,
just cutting a road right through great great rows and poppy fields and marijuana
fields, just digging a road straight through, and we'd walk right behind them,
and then they would cut a two hundred and fifty meters by two hundred
fifty meter square and then we would set up our cots or whatever. We
just lay out there, and eventually HESCO barriers will go up around us.
And the whole time we just in fact, most a lot of that time,
the dozers did have to work for us. They would just turn up
the soil and then all you know, vigial oil jugs just sitting there in
the open, and usually they kicked them around so much that they were already
separated. We just had a place a charge on them, and debt made
them so that was great. But then of course with all these dirt roads
cut, there was a lot of soft soil left. And you know that
Afghan dirt, it's got three different forms. It's got the hard packed concrete
like dirt. When it rains it turns into that slicks not then just walking
from your your hoot to the chowd hall you get six inches taller. And
then it's got that baby powder moon dust. It's so easy to just you
do. All you have to do is drop an ID and the dust cloud
will settle right back down on it and bury it. So that was what
was happening, and the route clearest packages were losing a truck on average every
other day. Wow, So the mechanics were busy. We were busy doing
post blast analysis. Most of the time it was just a post blast analysis
on a vehicle. Thankfully sometimes it wasn't. So that's what we do.
We were cleaning up all the IDs in the area and if we didn't get
to the id left of the bang, well we do our best to analyze
right at the bank. So can you for people who you know, I
mean, this is fascinating to me, but for people who don't have any
idea of like how EO D operates, Like, so you go out there
and one of the point guys on point see something suspicious, how do you
proceed from there? Well, of course we'll We'll come up on who whomever
is the closest you know on the scene. We'll make sure that everybody knows
they keep good distance from any suspect item, and then we'll ask all the
information that we can, whether it's you know, some local or if it's
when somebody in our element, we'll ask him as much information we can.
We haven't pointed out from where we're standing, if it's not too close,
and we'll get as much information as possibly can. Then we'll make sure that
everybody's in a safe standoff distance and setting a cordwn around the area, making
sure that we don't get any surprises while I'm focused in on the suspect item
and everybody else's eyes are facing out, and then my team and I will
just get to work if if we do find it that it's an ied and
here's the thing, if it's an unknown hazard or number one approach, Our
first approach was always either a bomb suit or a robot, and since most
of the time we're on foot patrols. This amount of patrols, a lot
of our guys would be carrying one of those man portable robots. So let
send the robot down more often than not, you know, it would turn
a little corner of one of those three foot thick your mud huts and that
would be the end of the robot. Uh, just new signal whatsoever.
But that technology got a lot better. But then it was a it was
me doing a I e ed you know, me walking down on the id
and also rescuing a robot. But then it was it was doing whatever remote
uh procedures I could possibly do if it if it was separating almost everything,
I'm gonna talk about ninety eight percent of the stuff we ran on not deployment.
It was an oil jug with homemade explosive nine volte battery, pressure plate
with your just you know, a particle board or I would and then it
all connected with lamp cord. Super simple, super low tech and really really
hard to detect except for the nine bold battery because there's almost no metal there.
And the talent band, the insurgents, they didn't know this magic wand
we swung you know what the magic was that found all of their IDs.
But somehow they learned that we were finding the batteries. They didn't know why.
But what they learned how to do was give They did a little standoff.
They fair they would they would fair lead the battery so they'd get a
little more lamp court and run the battery around the corner so or it just
run it off the side of the the trail, and right in the middle
of the trail was the ID. It's almost no metal, and that was
what was getting a lot of us, thank goodness. Maybe after say twenty
four hours, the dirt would start to settle and it would start to get
concave a little bit, so it began to show telltale signs of something to
be buried there, and then there'd be this little concave ant trail going off
the side of the road. But sometimes it was just pressure than that,
and it's really hard to phone, I think, and you can correct me
if I'm wrong, but I think they started doing that with their cell phone
switches too, that once they learned about the jammers, they started experiment to
find out how far out of like the jammers range the cell phone needed to
be, and then it would connect the circuit back into the explosive that was
within the range. M Yeah, well in Iraq especially, they were far
more sophisticated with their id is. I think I think I might have run
one electronically controlled device in Afghanistan that whole deployment. Granted I only got to
spend eight months of the twelve months there, but I wasn't I was going
to find too many electronic devices. Yeah, even in my last few months.
But I some knuckleheads because I told you, they don't know the magic
we were using to find those batteries, so they would they would connect the
same kind of circuits whatever they could the explosives they could find. Most of
the time it was the oil job with homemade explosive. Sometimes it was a
pair. One time it was a pair of eighty millimeter Chinese mortars which are
encased in iron. So it was buried right in the middle of the goat
trail. The you know this dirt trail with the pressure plate right on top,
but it was pinging off the metal detector like crazy, and like what's
going on here? And you can still see that trail leading off to the
battery around the corner, like you guys come on. Yeah, so sometimes
we didn't find them. M find until you know, with our metal detectors
and so something. A lot of times you even find up with a freet
find him with what oh with the feet? Yeah, like like I did
eight months into it. Yeah, you do you want to, you know,
if it's okay with you telling us about or that incident and how that
went down. Of course, it was about eight eight and a half months
into the deployment and we were starting to see the you know, the end
of the end of the road. With this deployment, most of the guys
had gone on their you know that two weeks of R and R, and
I let my whole team and most of the company go before me. I
waited till the end, one of the last guys in the company to go
do my two weeks of R and R because it was Thanksgiving and my firstborn's
first birthday. I only had a few weeks with him before I deployed,
and I got to go home see him turn one, got to see the
whole family for Thanksgiving, gather around the table. It was a pretty fantastic
I call it my my last page in the photo album. And then I
got back on the battlefield. My team picked me up in my armored truck
from Candaharn. We jumped in a supply convoy to head back out to see
a joy And I wasn't weren't on duty or anything, and I didn't even
reported back to the cop command outpost. But we were there. We were
in the convoy and there was something found inside. Would so you know that
we set up that quote on They asked me to get to work, and
of course, why wait for QR REF when I'm right here that would be
a deck of This ain't my AEO. But I threw the luggage off of
the robot. Robot out of the truck. It got to work. It
found a pressure play with a jug and it pulled the pressure plate away and
separate the components, so we're essentially rendered safe. But it couldn't get the
jug out of the hard pattern dirt, and I wanted my evidence. If
I could do it safely, then that's what I would dirt. So I
grab my evidence kit and my bottle of the detector and I jumped out of
the truck and I started making my way towards it. No bomb suit because
it's a it's a known hazard. It was rendered safe. There's no sense
and getting in the bomb suit, and I'm not going to suit up for
every unknown hazard that might be out there. That would be silly. But
about twenty or thirty meters from the original device, there just happened to be
a secondary device that hadn't been detected until my metal detector was trying to tell
me something really important. And that's when I got punted. The lights went
out. I kind of kicked into the air, landed on my knees and
elbows. I was still conscious. I couldn't see anything. It seriously rung
my bell and I had like a gong was going off my head, and
I thought that my helmet had gotten pushed over my face. That's why I
couldn't see. The first thing I did was warded all the fingers and toes
and knees and elbows and make sure everything was where I left it. And
while it's more or less I could taste like explosive and dirved, and maybe
I was crunching on my own teeth. I don't know. It tastes that
the crap, but I was more or less intact, except I just gotta,
you know, move my helmet back and place and get back in the
fight. So and I went to grab my helmet to find that it was
gone. Oh wow. Yeah. That's when I thought, Shit, a
first sergeant's going to kill me for losing nothing but stuff that goes through your
head, right, Actually, somebody, somebody asked me, what's the first
thing that went through your head when that explosion happened. I said, over
pressure. But I did realize at that moment that something was really wrong.
I'm taking it, taking some damage. I knew that the first thing that's
going to happen because the training is still kicked in. I don't know how
lucid I was, but I was thinking, okay, complex ambush. Are
they gonna start taking pot shots? Are they gonna start attacking with small arms?
Is everybody in that security court on now looking directly inside at me?
Is in my team? They knew what they're supposed to do when a team
later gets injured. They're going to clear a safe path for the medics to
come get me out. And I decided I didn't want my team and potentially
hazard a situation. So I started up and I started making my way back
towards the truck well the problem as I couldn't see. I had no idea
where that damn truck was anymore. So I'm just doing this zombie walk across
the battlefield, probably making it worse for my my team to get me.
But they grabbed me, dragged me back to safety, and the medic starts
comes running up, huffing and puffing because he's coming from like three hundred meters
away. The first thing he does is complaining about making him run. I'm
like, sorry to ruin your day, dude, but you know that's yeah,
warriors and you know, joking with each other. It See, the
same time I asked my team, I housed my face and somebody said,
well, you're not gonna do any modeling when you get out. But you
know the medevac chapter. Remember we're just out of Candahar. So medivac came
in fourteen minutes and within forty eight hours, I was in well to read.
But as to Maryland, it's in that hospital. But and was that
about the time that you realized, you know what the extent of your injuries
were kind of a whirlwind, you know, I was. I was,
of course i'd received TBI. I actually would have made it back to the
States even faster, but they helped me for twenty four hours in landstool just
to let the swelling go down so I can do the cress across the Atlantic
flight. But it was it was you know, hoses and tubes and nurses,
doctors, admin staff and paperwork, and thankfully I was glad to have
an excuse not to write anything because I couldn't see people coming and going,
and of course are on the belt Way and there's like elected officials and dignitaries,
a veteran service organizations with people coming and going. And also I learned
something new that when when you have one hundred percent blindness, you get the
added bonus of a sleep disorder because you can't reset your Cicadian rhythm to some
light. So I was wide awake every night trying to figure out why I
wasn't sleeping, and zombie during the day, just hoping somebody would like lock
my door, leave me a loan so I could fall asleep. But eventually,
you know, I started thinking about in my situation and the fact that
you know, the doctors tried to save one of my eyes. The blasted
take completely taken one of my eyes, my right eye, and actually fused
my eyelids together, so I had this permanent rink and a gutten thing going
on. But the blast and there was a piece of frag that cut right
across the bridge of my nose and gashed the other eyeball. They tried to
save it, but it was an og and the blasted I also blown up
both my ear drums, though I could still hear, it was just less.
And the blasted also cracked my skull, suppose leading spinal fluid right through
my sinuses, not my notes. They did what they could for the burns
and the scrapes and my eyes. They too took a piece of my septum
and patched the cracks and my skull, though we'd find out a couple of
years later that it was never completely patched. That's all they could really do,
and I would have to learn how to be a blind guy for the
rest of my life. So that's that's what I did. After after you
checking out of all to read four or five weeks later. There's some things
who Tampa to the VA hospital there just for some scans and TBI had my
old moderate TBI. But then it was to the VA Hospital in Augusta,
Georgia, where they've got one of the blind of rehabilitation units in the VA.
You know, the VA's got i think fourteen up them around the country.
And that's where I'd spend about six months learning how to use my accessibility
tools like talking computer and Texas speech software on my phone and barcode scanner for
the you know, anything in the pantry, and of course that white cane,
the long cane for navigating. And you would be surprised things like learning
how to pair your socks and how much, how to how to gauge how
much toothpicks to put on your brush. The thing was when I was still
sitting at the hospital bed in Walter Read and I was pissed, man,
these low tech cave man. I was so mad that they got me with
that there. You know, we've been so highly trained. It was the
best fighting force on the planet in history and this and I was mad at
my I was mad at the army for some reason. I was mad at
the President, I was I was mad at everybody I was. I don't
know why. I was mad at some people, but they deserved it.
I don't know why. Actually, you know, mostly mad at myself,
right, Yeah, but uh, it was it was always asking those questions,
right, the winkies, the what if? What if? What if
I'd done a differently, taking a different route, approaching the idea? What
if I set the robot out again? What if I if? And why?
Why me? Why? Why did this happen on that I wasn't even
supposed to run that incident? I supposed to just had, you know,
all these questions, what is this happening to me? Yeah? Why my
eyes? Why? Why would why didn't they just take a leg or something?
I mean, it was buried on the ground. Why didn't you?
I was virtually untouched from my neck down, almost not a scrape. I
don't even know how that happened? But why? And like I couldn't nobody
can answer. I couldn't answer any of those questions. It's it's they're impossible
to answer, and then it just leads to that downward spiral. Right,
So I had to change my questions, and it was thinkness, my family,
the military training, you know, all that resilience training, that welcome
to the suck in Afghanistan, Embrace the suck. The type of mentality you're
here, so you better do your best at it, right? And I'm
there in Walter reed, and I'm not They only won in that hospital that's
injured doing a whole bunch of Joe's and James in there that we're all fighting
their own battles. These warriors weren't quitting. Was I to say that I
had my monopoly on pain or shitty days? Right? So do I really
have a good excuse to quit? And what am I going to do other
than just sit here? I better get to work, to get busy doing
something if I'm not going to allow myself to just piss and moan all day.
So I decided if I was going to be blind, I was going
to be at the best, best damn blind guy I could be there.
I'm sorry, I just curious. Was this all, you know? With
the anger and the and the the non official questions that you were asking yourself.
Was there a particular moment or reason that you sort of turned around.
I'd say it was incremental, but it was definitely, Yeah, it was.
It was definitely at one moment. I'd love to it really paints a
great picture. And I didn't mention this, but when I was home on
our and our just two weeks before. Uh you know, I I was
visiting family in the DC area, and I'd gotten word that another team leader
in my company, a friend of mine, Kyle Vickers, had gotten injured.
Well, we were right there, so I'd hurried over to Walter read.
We got right to the unit and we get to the nurse the station
found out that he hadn't even gotten out of my cu yet. So we're
the first ones there that knew him. And of course I wouldn't tell us
anything about his injuries confidentiality, but they said. One of the nurses to
said, well, you can go wait in his room. He should be
out any minute now. So I went to his room and saw his bed
was just waiting for him, and right beside his bed was a pile of
clothes and you know, one of those veterans organizations then no profits come with
you shorts, sweats, T shirts. I didn't. On top of this
neatly folded pilot was one shoot, okay, yeah, I don't have to
be rocket scientists, all right. So then kind of gets wheeled in and
there he is, and then gurney under the sheet. You can definitely tell
there's only one leg, and he he sees me, and he's got a
terrific personality, but I think it was assisted by dynastysa. You see this
huge smile as he goes, hell, dude, what are you doing here?
It might must have been a surprise because the last time we saw me,
I was in Afghanistan with him. He kind of looks at me conspiratorially
and whispers, man, I think I kicked myself in the face, and
the worst thing you can say about it that day was that it ruined a
terrible calf tattoo. Two weeks later, I'm right down the hallway from him,
jeez, and I'm in a really really bad mood. Yeah. Kyle
comes wheeling into my room one of the one day, maybe two or three
days after I've been there, arrived, and he goes, heil, Man,
give me your hand. You gotta feel this. I'm like, okay,
I'm not playing that game. You know, I don't know. I'm
way too suspicious. Joke right, touch this right, So he grabs my
wrist, he puts it up under his chin, and I feel this,
you know, stubble. He's like two weeks of growth, my man,
apparently, and is another one of those conspiratorial things, right, he's and
I can I can hear him smiling as he's like. You know, the
Marine uity texts they've got this Leason guy. Uh here, Walter Reid.
So when they get out of surgery, the first thing the guy asks asks
is how are you feeling? If the marine says he's feeling fine, which
every marine supposed to, he the guy, the liaison guy hands him a
razor and says it great, get back into riggs. We don't have that
liaison in the army, so grow your beard out. It's driving the marine
text crazy and I couldn't. I couldn't help it. You know, I
had to crack a smile. You know, I'm sitting there going going that
downward, you know, spiral of defeat, and it was me beating myself
down and thankfully Kyle full Bay out of him. But you know, he's
here, he's he's gonna have one leg for the rest of his life.
He's gonna have to deal with that. And I learned about about his incident
later, and that's a whole other story. But he he was here cracking
jokes and playing games with the marine eority tacks and he was making the best
of it, and I had to snap out of it. I had to
get on his level, or at least come close to it, And I
had to get I had to get busy instead of just sitting there moping.
Thank goodness for him and those other warriors guys. That was it was definitely
a tough time. Yeah, what form did that take for you? I
as far as getting busy, you know, get put throwing yourself at something,
and of course learning to to you know, live with these injuries or
live around them in a sense. Right, How how did that sort of
how did that progress take place for you? Well, you know, frankly,
there wasn't really much for me to do at Walter Read except you know,
sitting in the hospital bed and get healthier eventually. Yeah. I mean,
like I said, I was just hit in the head and thankfully,
you know, we hail boys are really thick skulled. It was the perfect
place to hit me. But I was perfectly ambulatory. I could get up,
I would walk around, and they gave me a cane. I really
didn't know how to use it. It was mostly just a sign for other
people to let them know I wasn't getting out of their way, right,
but you know, I had I had my family in town, my mom
from Ohio, my dad from California. My aunt actually is in the DC
area, so we kind of I would check out in the afternoon from the
hospital when the staff, yeah, when the regular doctor's staff left, and
I would go have dinner at my aunt's house with my family, would go
out to eat stuffing like that. Oh. Man, I went to a
David Buster's. That was a mistake. Man, blind and overwhelmed right off
the battlefield and all those you know, ourcade sounds, It's like I have
to leave. Other than that, it was just about they really couldn't do
much for me. They were leading the way in prosthetics, but I didn't
need any. So as soon as I was healthy enough to leave the hospital,
I went to Augusta and I started learning what I could learn, and
that was I just threw myself into this whole learning how to be blind.
And as soon as I got my iPhone with a voice over the text to
speech software and I learned how to search things on the internet. Man,
I was pumping blind keyword in plus outdoors plus hiking, climbing, running,
whatever, and trying to figure out how because I'm not the first blind guy
in the world. How how do people live? How do people do things?
And you know, there was a couple of couple of names that kept
popping up. One was Eric Windmer. He's the first blind person to climb
Mount Everest. I thought, Dan, if if he can do that,
I could climb a mountain. So I looked him up and I want to
mountain climbing with him. And there was a guy named Lonnie Bedwell, another
Navy guy, though he didn't go blind in the service. He was Turkey
Hunt of thinking says his body Dick, she need him. And Lonnie,
Lonnie's the first blind person to kayak the entire Grand canad So I looked him
up and I want kind of kick with him. We did sections the Yellowstone.
It was amazing, and you know what I mean, I was,
I was like it was a It was a Army ranger, Ivan Castro.
It was right at Bragg's Special Operations recruiting brands. He stayed on active duty,
like Captain Scott Smiley active duty blind guys. They were working in more
administrative roles, but they kept the uniform on. I gave Ivan a call
one day and that was hilarious. He is a way of turning the whole
conversations into the Evan show. But it's a great guy. He said.
He made we did a point every year to run the Air Force Marathon,
the Army ten miler and the Marine Corps Marathon. And I thought, oh,
that sounds like a great idea. So I've registered for all three of
those, and then I got talked into By this time, i'd moved to
England Air Force Base. They asked me if I would where I wanted to
retire and I said I don't, and I asked him to send me to
the year to school. I'd started instructing, so as I was learning,
I was instructing, I registered for those three races. I registered for the
Pensacola Marathon, something local, and I got talked into the San Antonio Marathon.
I don't even know how, but before I've registered four marathons and the
Army ten miler, all within the span of four months. And I'd never
run anything longer than ten k in my life. So more learning, more
learning, I'd have to do that random and the three of those races qualified
me for Boston. Wow, what can can I ask? What is the
process for running one hundred yards, let alone a marathon. When you're when
you're blinding, you can't see the route. Oh yeah, you gotta pay.
You gotta listen really hard for the traffic. No, we had a
marathon, I would just start yelling marcom let's see what happens. Actually,
the truth is there's a couple of different methods. But what I started using
was just a simple short tether. I would hold one end and my guide
would hold another. In fact, my very first tether was a dog talk
a war rope. You know. I'd hold a fat knot and my guide
would hold a knot and I almost wouldn't have to talk. I would get
all my cues from wherever that rope went. And there was a couple of
different signals for like high stepping it or if we had to go single file.
And then of course this is encumbent upon my guide to just work around
any like open manhole covers or something. But that's that's how I ran.
For nine years. I've been running marathons and then ultra marathons with a sighted
guide or guides side by side. That's hardcore, man m Actually it was
just a side effect of trying to get ready for the mountains. You know,
it's really hard to find a decent mountain of train on in Florida,
but I would. I would pack, yeah, rock, are you one
of those expedition packs and go find the tallest kind of condo building and go
up and down the stairs, and then I'd find a guide and go for
go for a run and train for these marathons. And that's how, you
know, besides kettlebells and stuff like that. It turned my garage into a
pretty decent gym. It was. Running just happened to be a lot easier
than getting to the condos or getting to an actual mountain, and it was
a great way to socialize. I mean, everything now days is a team
sport. So I love getting running with locals. And and there's a lot
of times I run with first time guides. They're like, how do you,
how do you? How do you? How do you do this sighted
guide thing? That's gonna be dealful of this? Yeah, and and then
you know, I've gotta I gotta you know, I've got somebody trapped as
I you know, I can talk to them. But right right, well,
it sounds like you were probably dragging the guide after a little while,
well, you know it is that is one of the challenges. And beyond,
of course the obvious is also finding somebody that was wanted to good do
the same distance or pace that I was doing and our schedules match up.
So it's it's some somewhat of complexity. I would love the mention here that
one of my friends, blind Marine Runner, who started a site. A
website is called United in Stride dot org and that's where interested people cited.
People couldn't go and find blind runners around the country, I think even around
the world, and you know they might be in their neighborhood and go running
with them. But so I actually at the time I reached down to Team
RWB and found the local chapter went running with them. This is really cool.
They started a Sunday marathon training run specifically to help me get ready for
my first marathons, and with they invited everybody who wanted to come out at
all ability levels, and they had like a paste vehicle loaded with the refreshments
and stuff and more and more people every every week every Sunday will come out
and would come and run, and before long it wasn't Aaron's marathon training day.
It was just training day and as far as I know, it's still
going and it was it was it was great to be a part of something
that grew beyond yourself, you know, grew beyond me. It was helping
others somebody, you know, I know more than one person in that group
was just getting ready for their first five k and that was That's the coolest
thing ever. Yeah, yeah, so that was that was really like that
special. I also want to touch on you mentioned that you were allowed to
stay in the Army and instrucked, which is really cool and I'm really glad
that they're doing that. The Army has gotten better about that over the years.
You talk a little bit more about what that was like. Well,
this was I started, like they asked me at first, right at well
to read where do you want to retire? And I learned in that time
that there's something called a continuation of Active duty service or co AD for short,
and you still have to go through the medboard process and that's a nine
months a year long. As they go through, I mean, there's a
huge review process. But once the Department Army, Department of Defense, we
have their findings, that's what they send over to the Department of Veterans Affairs
as a recommendation for retirement and like a transfer from one department to the other,
and that's when you can put in your request for a co AD.
So in the meantime, I can't just stay in patient at AUGUSTA, you
know, a graduated line school. And then as soon as you're as soon
as you get to the health point where the military, you're like, the
military can't do anything to improve your situation. I guess it is. That's
when the medboard process begins. So I asked them to send me to the
year at school. Now, of course, you know the military does have
these Warrior transition units there. The Army and at least did this, and
it's like full units comprised of wounded wounded service members that wounded army well wounded
soldiers that their full time occupation, the full time job it becomes and getting
well, completing that medboard process. So if they have ongoing treatments, that's
the first priority. If they then it's you know, completing everything they can
for the medboard process. And if they're there and everything along that ends,
then it's then they're actually ordered to get an education while they're waiting for you
know, the board finding stay to complete it. Well, I asked to
go to work. I hadn't go to the un school. And it was
funny, I didn't realize what kind of red tape it would take to it
would send me to a war the closest warrior transition here and it and then
my place of duty in place of work. It is the red tape in
all of that, being sent to a Navy base or a Navy school on
an Air Force base in the army warrior transition here in it. So it
got so confusing that nobody knew who I belonged to, which is also cool.
But yeah, I went to the school house, I started started teaching.
I actually went to the IEDs. I went. What I did was
I helped build up and out of cycle training course. In a lot of
military schools, you know, it's there's cycles, you know, the classes
and a pace that the classes go through. And if somebody you know,
you know, fails a test or has some kind of a medical thing and
they miss too much of their class, they can't continue on with that class.
They can't miss that material, or they maybe because they failed that they
have to retake that material. They have to go out of cycle and wait
till there's a spot opening in another class behind them to retake that particular part
of the course and continue on. Sometimes there's days, maybe it's weeks or
even months. But when they're out of cycle, our EOD detachment, the
Army detachment there at the EOD school didn't have a whole lot for them to
do. They would put them on these working parties, you know, filling
sandbags or doing bass cleanup or something they ever read, uh tried it decent
Redman when he's at Ranger School and he's one day he's picking up cigarette butts
and you know, they got EOD texts that had nothing to do. So
back in the detachment in the backyard, we've built this huge sandbox training pet
and started training the outer cycle guys wherever they wherever they were supposed to jump
back into the class. That's where we teach them and keep them sharp on
the material that they're about to go back into. And I kept them sharp
on the I EED stuff. And I did that for about a year and
a half or so and until my my, you know, the medboard came
back. And of course findings that I guess blindness and means I'm allowed to
leave the military. In fact, I would do you're not even allowed to
be color blind, and do you what you work? So at that same
time I was running this was it was taking time off. If I was
running these marathons, I was climbing mountains, I was being asked to speak
around with the country, and I was actually finding you enjoyment in sharing the
story and doing these finding these other accomplishments, these other challenges, and well,
when I was sitting at that you know, the hospital, men well
to read, I might have been in definitely wasn't a bit of denial,
Like I didn't want to let go. I could still do this, I
could still do something. I could still serve. I don't have to let
go of the middle the uniform. By the time the medboard came back at
the findings in the decision, I had nothing left to prove, especially not
to myself. I retired. It's it's truly fascinating in your relations and sort
of in the blind community. What are some of the biggest difference you find
between like, you know, men such as yourself, you know, especially
the veterans who as adults, you know, became blind, and then people
who have been blind either since early childhood or the whole lives. Like,
what are some of the differences there that you've found some of the different understandings.
Yeah, yeah, I guess, like because because there's sort of really
two different sets of the subsets of the blind community. Correct, Like people
who have who were cited for a long time and then became blind. Misconceptions.
Yeah, but the first thing is we don't we don't touch other people's
faces. That's girls, I don't want to. I don't want to touch
your face. And you have no idea where my hands have been. Those
are my eyes, remember, right? And if you ever see a blind
guy at a like a buffet, just walk out, just just go.
I'm gonna be it will be me at the buffet and I'll be just sticking
my finger in there. Yeah. But yeah, there was so many misconceptions,
so many things I didn't realize blind people could do. For for example,
while in Augusta and learning how to be blind, there was this and
I actually never knew this was even existed, but there was a recreational therapist
on staff, and this guy, his old job was to have fun basically
recreation. So he would come into my room and say, hey, Eric,
you want to go golfing? I come on, Dard, you know
what the funny thing is like even when after you go blind, golfers are
serious golf like about golfing. You don't how they get right even after we
go blind. I mean there's there are two national associations, the US Blind
Golf Association and the American Blind Golf Association. Apparent like one faction, uh
split off from the other because a difference in like the rules, like an
argument of the rules. That's that Look, these are blind guys that take
golf seriously. And so then this uh wreck therapist caring in the room another
day and he goes, hey, Aaron, you want to go for a
bike ride? Might come on, put messing with you, Dared. That's
that's nuts bike rid And apparently yeah, like yeah, blind tandem cycling is
a serious sport. That's a Paralympic sport. I mean there's real athletes you
know that are blind and do cycling. When I when when when I got
to the blind school in AUGUSTA, I was just a few months behind Brad
Snyder. There's a Navy EOTI tech who had lost his eyesight, and he's
he's just he's just amazing dude. But being a Navy guy, he's a
swimmer, he's a diver, and when he got to Augusta, he would
train in the you know, the pool you to buy And every time I
saw him, he's like, hey, Eric, you wouldn't go swimming with
me, And I'm not haven't had much of a swimmer in a long time.
And I'm like blown out of ear drums. I have to wear cotton
balls into the shower. I can't. I'm sorry, Mike. But after
after he graduated from blind school, he went to the London Paralympics and won
three medals. Then he's been to the next two Summer Paralympics and won more
medals. I mean, the guy's a heck of a swimmer. Yeah,
and now he's doing triathlons. So it was it was just this definitely this
misconception about what we're capable of, and it was just for me, it
totally broke through this glass ceiling. And then I was just thinking, Okay,
I don't It's not that I can't do anything. I just got to
figure it out a new way. To do it. And my whole philosophy
was you gotta figure out It's not that I can't, it's just how can
I? Right, It wasn't why is this happening to me? It's why
is this happening for me? What can I learn from? And that's what
I did. I started running marathons and I started look climbing these mountains.
I joined Eric Wyne Merritt on the tenth anniversary of his ever summit. He
took a whole team of wounded veterans because his dad's a marine, and he
took the whole team wounded veterans up of nineteen thousand foot peak in Proving.
Andy's called it Soldiers to Summits, and oh, I was on that team.
The funny thing was we started off towards our towards the summit on on
that you know that day, at three to four in the morning, and
it's so dark. Everybody's complaining that they can't see you where they're putting their
feet and I walking to my world crep and this was an amazing experience.
But then it was it was just Okay, nothing is off off limits except
maybe helicopter pilot, but almost nothing is off limits for me. I just
got to figure out how to do it, and then it was the whole
My whole life became an adventure all over again. It's I mean, it's
truly fascinating. It's it's incredible. It's a testament to you and all and
everybody else, you know, every other service member, but everybody else who
is blind. Like, yes, I would never even think. It's so
hard to imagine of all the senses, of all the things. It It
feels as though for you know, yeah, just it's so hard to imagine
what that would be. I saw I listened to I'm sorry, I don't
see much anymore. But I listened to another podcast and somebody was talking about
was a blind guy that it was a food chemist, and I was talking
about how most people, most humans get about ninety six percent of their information
through their eyes. That's not because it's it's mostly because we stopped. You
come to relion on our eyes and we don't pay as much attention to other
senses. And that's that's when it's funny when people ask if the other senses
have gotten stronger. Uh, well, I'm deaf, and you know,
the blast cut right across my nose. I kind of have a demandish sense
of smell, which is linked to my taste. Don't ask me, but
I can't tell people, you know, if I need to navigate. I
got a good go down on the you know, hands and knees and lick
the concrete. But it's it's true that we don't pay attention to other senses.
And every once in a while it really is a good thing to it
close our eyes and just take a deep breath and listen really hard, beyond
that point of boredom, because that's when we really start paying attention. But
I think everything was going going really well. I don't know these these ventures
I was speaking, I was I was teaching for a while, I was
running the marathons and two summer spring of spring and early summer of twenty fifteen
or epic. I went to Colorado and climbed three fourteen ers in a day.
I went hunting in Texas. I don't know, you guys can see
I'm above there, that dude. I went to yellow Stone in Montana with
my body Lawnie went kayaking skydiving, which I don't know. That was okay,
but it's kind of like sticking your head out of car for me,
and I was two weeks away from heading out to Tanzania to climb kilman Jarro
when I got h knocked down to the mat again. I contracted bactilomategitis and
I was sent right back to the hospital. Man the cracks in my skull
that hadn't been fully patched four years later. A path out is also a
path in, and the bacteria crept right into my brain and was trying to
kill me. And in the process, Yeah, I survived, but it
had also stolen what was left of my hearing and it left me completely deaf.
So you know, the when the doctor was breaking the news to me,
it actually felt like I was underwater. It was so congested, and
I had my mom in the room, my girlfriend in the room, and
talking to this doctor. It's like, don what you're telling me is I'm
going to be completely hundred percent blind and a feud percent death. You mean
I'm never gonna have to pretend to pay attention ever again, sever line and
everything. Yeah, of course I blamed the meningitis, but I didn't.
I didn't hear my mom or my girlfriend in life. But even though I
really do like using humor to diffuse the situation. Yeah, it was awful
news. Yeah, kicking the balls, man, I was, I was
just hitting my stride, Yeah I was. I was just I was.
I was on my way to mastering this blind thing. And there are was.
And also just like the blindness had an added bonus gift the because I
lost those inner ear the little hair fodicals in your coclea. That also I
also lost my vestibular balance, the inner ear gyro. So I lost.
I lost my sense of balance. It was like vertigo, but weirder because
it was like all the ways. So and we thank goodness for those handicap
rails in the in the bathrooms, because I would fall right off the toilet.
I came home in a wheelchair, and man, I was passed again.
Is the same calm my my demons, that what ifs the limes?
I? When has this guy paid his fair share? When is enough enough?
You know? When has this soldier sacrificed? Right? You know?
When can you just give it to another guy? You know? Yea one
more thing taken from you? Yeah m hm. So I'm sitting there like
that the counter in my kitchen, right holding on to the counter kind of
fall off the stool and there would be a chance I could regain some of
my hearing with a cochlear implant, which is not a hearing aid, like
my ears are turned off permanently, but uh, there'll be I'd have to
wait till the nangitis, let the infection cleared up. Then they would do
surgery on my right side, the more damaged ear. And for anybody watching,
I'm not wearing one right now because after getting the surgery, waiting weeks
for it to heal up, then getting the process external processor tuned in,
found out that it didn't work. It was just too much inner ear scarring
for the endplant to work. Then I have to start the process all over
with the left ear. And it was over six months from you know,
infection to the first sound whatever you want to call. It's a digital signal
scent right to my auditory nerve. My brain had to learn how long to
hear again a different way, how to interpret this different sign sound. And
it's nothing like the real thing. It's kind of like calling a friend at
at a restaurant and he just puts it on speaker and puts in the middle
of the table. You just hear every imperfection on the table, around the
table, clinking, the other conversations. It all kind of mixes into a
wall of sound. Yeah, but fifth way better than the alternative use.
For six six months, I was locked inside my body, but it was
just trapped silent, dark, could not get a message in. I was
thinking, damn, I should have learned brail at blind school. But all
the tech, it's just made me lazy and it's hardness. And we just
wanted me to say, but you know, the only thing I can like,
even think the liking it too is it's like you're in a submarine by
yourself with no sonar, like just isolated m h and photosophial guy like me.
That sucked. So I mean a frustrating and lonely it is. And
uh, you know, people we went through the whole COVID quarantine era,
you know that period. People were complaining about the isolation, like that's nothing
right. But I'm sitting there again, pissed off, and this ironic thought
came into my mind. It was like, for four years I've been talking
about triumph over tragedy and success through struggle and all this kind of stuff,
and God was telling me to put my money where my mouth was like jerk,
but it was it was like, okay, won't prove it. And
I just remembered all the stuff that I went through the first time, and
and I just like I told myself, like, this isn't your first radio,
You've already done it. You know how to do this, And I
remember just just as in like an EOD team, we get this like a
Tricondra quad cons shipping container full of tools and the bombs, says the robots,
and it hasn't at kids and all sorts of things. But then you
get it on deployment and you get that armored truck and it's just not as
big as the shipping a tighter and you can't fit at all of your tools.
So this one three person team has to do the prioritize what is most
likely to be used in this battle space and then leave some of the tools
behind. And then of course we're going on these dismounted missions. You know,
we're walking on foot on these dirt trails, and you only you can
only bring what you can you can hump on your back, so you got
to leave a lot of tools behind. And I love, how is it
General Jim Mattess put it in call sign chaos said, at least in the
Marines. Yeah, things being hard, we're never a good excuse for mission
failure. And you know, I've got a family, I've got a son,
this this amazing girlfriend I've got, I've got that my fellow warriors to
think of. My life doesn't belong to just me, and I'm responsible to
them and for them, and I got to figure this out. So I
left some tools behind. The mission continues. So I did what anybody in
my situation would do. Started a fudge company. What m besides getting on
the treadmill and holder going for digger life because I just hit the vertigo and
quick start button, just walked half a mile an hour. I was.
I was also I was also taking my trekking poles that I was using in
the mountains, and I would did this weird daddy long legged crab walk thing
out to my my mailboxing back and I'd be exhausted, but would I would
do it every single day, a couple of times a day, and then
I'll go a little bit further, go a little bit faster on my treadmill.
And at the holidays, we're common Thanksgiving us around the corner, and
I decided to stop worrying about myself. So I stop thinking about my situation.
And I was just going to throw a huge Thanksgiving faced. So I
started cooking weeks in advance. I started making the cakes and the pies and
cookies just throw in another the freezer until the day I started making batch after
batch of fudge, one flavor after another. The combinations were infinite, and
I was going to explore the mole and I just I just can't do it.
I have to throw nuts it and spices, and I got the lick
a cabinet and dump a little there and double in the mouth. And and
Michaela, my now wife, said she noticed two things. One was I
had a smile on my face for the first time in six months. And
two, the fudge was paneling up. So she snuck it out the front
door, like you gotta be a restell, they round a blood deaf guy.
But she was giving it away to your friends and family, friends and
neighbors and whoever. A couple of people came back and said, yeah,
hey, this is pretty good. Can we buy some for birthday or something?
Party? Office party, And the capitalist in me said, well,
of course you may, and all of a sudden we had this business and
it was so funny and for look, just months into it, I you
know that home gym and micarad I had the light in line, I had
the treadmill, the rower, the stationary bike and then the conveyor belt shrink
rap machine. But it was it was something to do. It was a
project. It was a challenge, and we threw an awesome Thanksgiving. I
was happy. We had even some of the stranded u uty students that you
know, I didn't have enough lee days or everybody saved up for Thanksgiving.
We'll say it for you know, Christmas or New Year's and the other During
the holidays, the basics shut down, so we I had a few students,
however, share our table and it was great. It was fun.
I didn't worry about not hearing, and the fust business started taking off.
I started running again, and a year after the meningitis, I ran my
hometown marathon in epern Ohio the same week of my twentieth high school reunit and
got my first sub for our marathon. That's pretty cool. That was that
was awesome, unreal and Aaron I would like to take just a moment to
put a pin or point out that I think you mentioned a little bit before
we started recording. Actually, had you been a World War Two veteran or
a Vietnam veteran, you'd be in a very different place. Because medical science
has advanced so much number of the decades. I'm just interested to hear kind
of your your thoughts of you know, I mean, in some sense,
when we start talking about ocular implants and all these it almost is like a
miracle, right absolutely, I mean, the technology science medicine, it's absolutely
amazing. This co clear implant is literally implanted in my head, and it's
an electrode that goes into the couple a bone and the inner ear, and
there's an electrode that connects to the branch that basically there's a bundle of nerves
that's the auditory nerve. And if you can imagine like a big trunk that
goes into smaller and finer roots until it goes into the cocleum becomes the really
fine hair cells that are the actual things that pick up the sound and then
bring it of course into the brain. Well, the coupling implant is the
electrode that attaches a little higher up on the trunk the roots and the way
I imagine it is, it's not it's just not as sophisticated as sound.
It's getting better all the time, and the processor is actually pretty smart,
has different types of modes. But it's more like, in fact, it's
like when they first turn it on, they only they can only give you
the primary colors of sound. It's a very limited amount of data so your
brain can start learning. And then every few weeks you go back into audiology.
They tune it in with like the sound board and the computer give you
a little more data and you learn a little bit more, and they keep
tweaking it until you get something that resembles sound. But like I said,
it's kind of like, you know, trying to listen to the whole world
through a drive through speaker. But it's it's it's amazing. You're forty fifty
years ago I would have been pulling the full hell and color. Instead,
I'm you know, connected via bluetooth to my phone, my computer, we're
talking to each other via the Internet. It's absolutely amazing. Of course it's
also a hundred one way, so I could screw something up. But definitely
way better than the alternative. Yeah, do we have any questions for Aaron?
We do. Let's see here. Let me switch over real quick eron
where can people like find you right now if they're you know, any of
your products, any of your social media anything like that. Absolutely, I'm
I have a podcast, Point of Impact with Aaron Hale, and you can
find that at Point of Impact pod dot com or on any of the major
podcast athletes and on YouTube. And you can find me on Facebook, Instagram,
TikTok. I think I don't know Instagram. I'm not very gonna take
it photos. But that's at eight lay hail. And of course the main
thing is the podcast. And then you're also in your brio. Didn't I
read something you're also involved or you started a charity for building homes for veterans.
Absolutely well. I am ambassador advocate for a tourismic organization called Building Homes
for Heroes, and that's Building Homes for Heroes dot org. They're the ones
that build or adapt especially adapted homes for severely wounded servicemen, veterans, first
responders, and Gold Star families like this house. I'm there right now,
and that's the organization. I ran to raise money. I ran bad Water
one thirty five this last this July for to raise money to raise money for
building those for years. Serbaty please check that out building Homes for Heroes dot
org. Look, if you got a few bucks, it doesn't take a
lot to help out. You know, we'll have a down the description for
you guys, can you can you tell sort of like how your house is
set up for you in particular that helps that helps you you're blind, your
effectively death except for the cochlear implant, Like what are the things that people
might not know of or that help you? Know? That help you?
Wow? Could others help me? No? No, I'm sorry? In
your home? Like, what are the sort of accessibility that was? It's
actually funny because it was right. They found me right after I left blind
school and they asked, how do we we I don't think we've ever adapted
a home for the blind? How do we do that? What kind of
special adaptations could use? I'm like, I don't know. I've been blind
for like ten minutes. And this was also almost twelve ten, twelve eleven
years ago, and there wasn't a whole lot of the smart stuff it wasn't
as prolific as it is now. So they put in a talking cinmostat and
stuff. Had to go to it and press the buttons and stuff, and
it just told you what. You know. They did put a different flooring
in every room, so as I crossed the threshold in one room to another,
I could feel it in my shoes, my feet. One special adaptation
really had nothing to do with blindness or not a whole lot. But I
asked him to put one of those pop fillers over the stove. Yeah,
the cook guy always wanted one of those, right, So it was a
really a whole lot of adaptation for me. I was just extremely grateful that
I got in just an incredible home in the Florida Panhandle, mortgage free,
and it was a wonderful gift. Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah, everybody
please check that out Building Homes for Heroes right, Building Homes for Heroes dot
org. So Lewis Vascas, thank you very much for your donation. Here's
this question, what is your favorite Italian dish to cook? And what's the
recipe? Well, do you want pastry? You're talking dinner, talking breakfast?
I could this could fill an entire episode itself. I think one of
my favorite go twos is a spaghetti carbonara, very simple and very delicious.
Yeah, essentially you can use panchetta or another type of Italian you know,
cured ham bacon, the bacon, but really any kind of bacon will work
for spaghetti. Little oil, garlic, of salt and pepper, one egg,
and you've essentially got it, and you can customize it all you want.
I've had some fantastic wild boar and truffle carbonara, so it's definitely open
to customization, but it's really simple and always delicious. Sean Walter, thank
you very much. Great chat. Aaron just mentioned creating out of cycle training
courses for EOD text. Why wasn't that institutionalized? Cost? Personnel cost question
mark? Personnel question mark? Like, why wasn't that institutionalized from the beginning?
Last questions? What the the out of cycle training that you helped create?
Why wasn't that institutionalized from the beginning? Well, I'm not sure why
I hadn't begun until you know, I was there. I wasn't the one
who dreamed it up. I just happened to be there when it was when
it when it started and helped it, helped build it up. But you
know, asn't live the service even over you know, a couple hundred years,
we haven't gotten at all perfect. And it takes it, you know,
just one person to say, you know what, we can do something
a little bit better. And so a few Joe's a few students that we
weren't serving, and we're just sitting around getting getting a paycheck, but actually
not getting better, probably getting worse by sitting around doing nothing, and say,
you know what we can do. Let's let's help him out and let's
make sure they earn their paycheck. But there's always a way to improve the
situation if we just look around. Thanks a dog point, Thank you very
much. Did your EO D unit have its own culture? Did you guys
complete or compete to diffuse the most bombs or have bomb jokes? What kind
of stuff is in the team room? Of course we're doing there's always competition.
There was always practical jokes, uh we The practical talker was one of
the big things. You know, an electronics class we would get we would
build a circuit using the capacitor from a you know, one of those disposable
cameras. If you could even find those anymore. But you charge up the
flash and then we'd do like those little gator clips on each of the Anno
catherde of the capacitor and it takes basically, you know, you either hook
it to a circuit or you just complete the circuit with somebody's skin and turn
it into a taser. So what we would do is we would conceal this
little uh flash you know, disposable camera taser thing all over the place,
especially under people's chair arms. So you know, they grab each arm and
there's a lead on either underside of the arm chair and zap. They just
completed on the circuit. And so every once in a while you'd see somebody
jump and everybody start cracking on them, but it's it's pranks. But then
we're always it was it's like that mentality, you always always trying to find
a way to kill each other and think of new ways to build our own
idis so that we're better at building them and dismantling them than the enemy.
Plus shocking your body is hilarious, right and also doc point, thank you
very much. Could you describe your experience diffusing your first few bombs? How
did your reactions before you're after and during change as you became more experienced.
Yeah, there's definitely that nervousness excitement of being a novice. So we're just
between so hard and I'd spend time in Iraq and then it spent time stateside
working state side response. Yeah, just things in you old things of T
and T from you know, farmers, you know, barn to something Grandpa
brought back from you know, the old War as a souvenir. And I'd
had had practice on some of these things before getting out to Afghanistan, and
yeah, you know, hit the prime time. But yeah, that that
first time, it's pretty nervous. It's good that we do that right seat,
left seat thing. You get to be right there next to somebody's been
doing it for a while, and then the watch over your shoulder as you
do it, and then yeah, you know, the last handshake, high
five, whatever, fist bump and it's your AO and by then pretty comfortable
in in the role. And before before you knew it, we were really
you know, running and gotten and doing doing tons of these things every day.
So it never it never gets boring, never never. Really, you
shouldn't ever get complacent. Or anything like that. They're explosives. Who knows
if the next next one just goes wrong. So it's always alert. But
you get more comfortable in your own skills, right become you trust yourself a
little bit more to be able to handle the situation ahead. And it also
is all about trusting your team and their abilities. And you know the other
resources, the other team, you know the key players on the battlefield in
battle space. There's a lot going on there and there are a lot of
resources at your disposal. You just got to remember that all of that is
part of your situational awareness. And Aaron, this question is for me,
how horrible is the hurt locker? And why start? And I don't even
call it that. I call it that ounch closet or pain cabinet or something.
It was so funny, you know, I was. I was at
the FBI Anti Terrorists office in Manhattan, you know that Joint person Center there,
and somehow that movie came up and I'm like, I was just complaining
about how stupid it made us look, and the guys like, have you
ever watched a movie with an FBI agent in it? The make it make
it all of us look stupid all the time, so welcome. Yeah,
yeah, you're right, you guys look awful. Yeah, I'm trying to
go ahead, please no, no, no, it's just that you know
who picks up It was like five one, five fives, all Daisy Jaine
together with that guard who just picks them up. By the way, you
can't do that with one or yeah, he's throwing smoke between him and his
like security. Like I just I had a couple of civilian friends like introduced
me that movie, like, oh, you gotta watch this, so amazing,
and I was like so angry during the entire movie. Though you guys
think this is good. There there there is one scene in that movie that
I liked that I can relate to this, the scene where he comes back
from Iraq and he's in Walmart, the grocery store, and he's just completely
overwhelmed by all the lights and all the the like super abundance of it,
right like and I had that exact same experience, like standing there for like
forty five minutes, like I don't know what to do. Yeah, like
what am I doing? It just left it was it was the only the
only pigs of truth or yeah, I didn't understand it was even if you
put aside all of the artistic license with the operations of Egody, it was
a terrible story. It didn't It was so disjointed. I didn't know what
was going on. There was the it. We just went from one stupid
act to another. There was no plot at all. Who is he fighting?
What was the what was the meaning of any of it? He just
did this, did that, said something stupid? And if I'm going to
die, we're uncomfortable. And then he's staring at some guy holding a battery
or a cell phone or something. They have a meaningful moment as they look
body broody at each other, and then he's standing in a grocery store and
then he goes back on the planet. Yeah, it didn't make any sense
to me. It was a terrible, terrible story. Yeah, and Aaron,
as we as we wrap up here tonight, is there any questions or
that we failed to ask, or any final thoughts that you want to throw
out there, anything you think we missed. No, you guys have let
me talk far too long. I really do appreciate you having me on and
and you know, have your ear and your audience here for a little while
telling my store. I hope it was worthwhile. I hope everybody enjoyed it.
I know I am. Sometimes it's not the best days, but most
of the time, I love my life all the time. I love my
life. Most of the time, I'm having a great day and I'm just
doing it because I love my fellow you know, service members, love the
you know, the veterans, my family. I love getting out there,
running, doing adventures, looking on my podcast, or you making fudge,
or investing in real estate. All of it is a really cool challenge.
Every day is a new opportunity, and I'm glad I got to share a
little bit with you. Guys. Well, thank you for so much for
coming on the show and sharing it with us. I mean, it's a
it's a great story. I mean it's a great life, and I really
appreciate you kind of like giving us a sort of like very personal insights into
it. We deeply appreciate it. For sure. I didn't even engine My
wife and I had identical twins, so I wouldn't be the only one that's
con choosed. I mean, there are a couple of things that have passed
by in the sense of you went on your first hunting trip and you or
you went on a hunting trip, you have the trophy behind you, and
you didn't Dick Chaney anybody. So Dick Cheney really has no excuse. Nobody's
gonna know about that in a few years. It's not gonna be funny.
What are you talking about? What the hell's dictaining? Maybe they'll google it
after they listen to this podcast. Oh he's been. Oh that's cool.
Yeah, to tell them. Uh. And then I think that you know,
with you know, you're running your mountain climb and you're kayaking everything you're
doing. The only with with Jack and I both been comic book gigs.
The only question is when are you going to dawn a mask and start fighting
crime. It sounds like you're ready for it. Let's go after bad water.
I don't know. I'm just taking a little time off, let my
toenails grow back. Darf man. You know, my wife and I really
love doing the fix them up our houses, turning them into rentals, and
building a portfolio. So I really think I'm just gonna focus on business a
little bit more, do the maintenance, maintenance, miles and you know,
stay fit. I'm definitely not going to be able to stay off the road
for very long. And I'm not gonna find a pretty cool ultramah thon out
there fair fairly soon. Amazing. Yeah, please stay in touch and you
know, happy to promote some of these things and put them out there as
they come about. And again, just thank you so much for sharing your
story with us. Thanks for hamm me on guys absolutely, and for everyone
out there, We'll see you guys on Friday with Tommy Shook, inductee into
the Ranger Hole of Fame, had a very long career. Excited to talk
to him this Friday. And Aaron you can hang on for a second,
and everybody else