Transcript
WEBVTT
00:00:00.341 --> 00:00:06.633
Hello everyone, thank you again for joining me on another episode of the Dorsurus show.
00:00:06.633 --> 00:00:10.907
Today we have a special guest with us.
00:00:10.907 --> 00:00:12.951
His name is Gary Durgan.
00:00:12.951 --> 00:00:39.314
He is the CEO and Senior Consultant of PTR Impact LLC, which is a consulting and training company focused on helping leaders define who has on their terms, who they can live fulfilled, meaningful lives with impact and not lose their faith, their family or their health.
00:00:39.314 --> 00:00:51.749
His work experience includes serving in the US Army as a combat medic, corporate training and fulfilled data and organizational development leader.
00:00:51.749 --> 00:01:03.503
He has led in combat guns and corporate officers learning the in and out of the building teams and trust through servant leadership 2015.
00:01:03.503 --> 00:01:18.534
Gary has been the host and producer of Beyond the Rock podcast, a short, shared, encouraging stories and practical advice to help pull listeners out of their rock and into the life worth living.
00:01:18.534 --> 00:01:23.632
If man loves to get out of a rut, he wants you to live beyond the rut.
00:01:23.632 --> 00:01:27.370
Gary, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
00:01:28.182 --> 00:01:29.105
Dorsey, I'm glad to be here.
00:01:29.105 --> 00:01:29.888
Thanks for having me on.
00:01:30.379 --> 00:01:31.703
Absolutely Well.
00:01:31.703 --> 00:01:36.662
First of all, thank you so much for your service in the Army and the military.
00:01:36.662 --> 00:01:36.923
Great.
00:01:36.923 --> 00:01:38.888
We appreciate you doing that.
00:01:39.762 --> 00:01:40.385
Hey, my pleasure.
00:01:40.385 --> 00:01:46.513
It was the one thing my dad told me not to do with my life, which was to follow his footsteps and join the Army.
00:01:46.513 --> 00:01:49.043
And he said and if you do, you better go in as an officer.
00:01:49.043 --> 00:01:50.206
I was like okay, dad.
00:01:50.206 --> 00:01:51.028
And then you fast forward.
00:01:51.129 --> 00:01:52.963
Eight years later I'm like dad, I joined the Army.
00:01:52.963 --> 00:01:57.721
And he's like hey, okay, did you at least sign up as an officer?
00:01:57.721 --> 00:02:03.251
No, dad, I'm going in enlisted as a combat medic and silence.
00:02:03.251 --> 00:02:08.181
It's probably one of the few times in his life I've made him go speechless, because he's a very down to earth.
00:02:08.181 --> 00:02:12.518
You know, go with the flow, I'll support you and your decisions kind of guy.
00:02:12.518 --> 00:02:16.967
And I got a feeling this is the one decision he didn't fully support.
00:02:16.967 --> 00:02:20.943
I did not go in as an officer, I went in as an enlisted man.
00:02:20.943 --> 00:02:26.467
He was enlisted for 20 years, so he knew firsthand the hardship I was going to take on.
00:02:26.467 --> 00:02:29.500
I mean, being an officer isn't that much easier.
00:02:29.500 --> 00:02:34.221
They just get paid a little bit more, but they have a lot more responsibility on their shoulders as well.
00:02:34.722 --> 00:02:40.478
Right, I usually start to show with a couple of easy questions.
00:02:40.478 --> 00:02:47.473
You know a bigger type questions, and my first one is what did you want to be when you were a kid, and why?
00:02:47.473 --> 00:02:49.062
Oh man.
00:02:49.763 --> 00:02:52.449
Well, being an Army brat growing up.
00:02:52.449 --> 00:02:55.542
So an Army brat born, raised and trained is what it stands for.
00:02:55.542 --> 00:02:57.066
So my dad was in the Army.
00:02:57.066 --> 00:03:04.368
All I knew was the Army growing up from when I was born until he retired, when I was about 15, 16 years old.
00:03:04.368 --> 00:03:05.711
That's all I knew.
00:03:05.711 --> 00:03:10.370
And so what did I think I wanted to be when I grew up was a soldier.
00:03:10.370 --> 00:03:26.647
I saw my dad get up in the morning with his uniform on, going off to physical fitness training and then coming home in his battle dress uniform and I thought, man, it's so cool when he comes into that door, gets greeted by the family and then when there's like an emergency, he's got to gear up and get out that door and get to work.
00:03:26.647 --> 00:03:28.153
I want to be like that.
00:03:28.836 --> 00:03:35.927
And so, even though after high school I told myself I was, there was like a four year window when I told myself I would not join the Army.
00:03:35.927 --> 00:03:43.657
Deep down the side it was ingrained in me the army life, the army culture, the inclusiveness, inclusiveness of the army.
00:03:43.657 --> 00:04:19.755
At the time I was growing up, I grew up in a diverse community my whole life without realizing that that wasn't normal, until I went off to college and found out that normal for a lot of folks who were my classmates was not having 30% of your community being black, 30% being Latino and 30% white, and then all kinds of other mixes in there as well, and so that that was alien to me, that there were people that lived in communities that were not like that, and so, yeah, that was that's what I wanted to be was to be a soldier.
00:04:19.755 --> 00:04:27.269
When I grew up, even though I didn't know there were other options, and even when I told myself there were other options, I still gravitated towards being a soldier.
00:04:27.880 --> 00:04:28.161
Right.
00:04:28.161 --> 00:04:31.449
Why are you passionate about what you do?
00:04:32.781 --> 00:04:34.690
A lot of it has to do with when I was growing up.
00:04:34.690 --> 00:04:48.584
My parents divorced when I was 11 years old and in that time I mean my brother and I we lived with my dad and the short version is during that divorce my dad became suicidal and attempted suicide right there in front of us, behind our backs.
00:04:48.584 --> 00:04:55.266
All those things and between 11, fortunately he failed at suicide.
00:04:55.266 --> 00:04:56.672
He got the help he needed.
00:04:56.672 --> 00:04:58.480
We stayed in foster care for a little bit.
00:04:58.480 --> 00:05:19.321
We got reunited with my dad and then we moved back to California where my extended family was Well, a lot of my uncles were also going through divorce and seeing the impact their divorce has had on my cousins on myself, my brother, and even being bullied by a couple of my uncles and some of my cousins, I just thought there's got to be a better way to do this.
00:05:19.480 --> 00:05:20.906
And my dad's not a bad guy.
00:05:20.906 --> 00:05:22.956
He's not one of these guys picking on people.
00:05:22.956 --> 00:05:26.975
If anything, he's just trying to heal, he's trying to make do, but he doesn't know how.
00:05:26.975 --> 00:05:41.071
And as I got older through the years, I started to realize that there are men out there who go through their entire lives just emulating what examples are around them, and for some of us those examples are very positive, very enriching.
00:05:41.071 --> 00:05:46.036
They encourage us to grow and be the best, well-balanced person we can be.
00:05:46.036 --> 00:05:49.949
And for others it's a caricature of what manhood should be.
00:05:49.949 --> 00:05:57.002
You gotta be a tough guy, manhood's about fixing cars and drinking beer and having lots of ladies, and you know.
00:05:57.002 --> 00:06:06.947
And then the unspoken messages are you're not really committed to your family, you're not really committed to your spouse, and I thought those aren't healthy messages either for men.
00:06:06.947 --> 00:06:11.730
And I want to draw a line and start a new direction for this family.
00:06:11.959 --> 00:06:15.750
And so, at 14 years old, I cast a new vision for myself, wrote it down.
00:06:15.750 --> 00:06:18.867
I just write it down for myself.
00:06:18.867 --> 00:06:25.209
I wrote it on a Christmas cards and I gave it out to everybody in the family and just said I want to be the first in my family to go to college and graduate.
00:06:25.209 --> 00:06:46.572
I want to be the first to be like our grandparents, who've been married their entire adult lives, and stay faithful to my spouse and be the kind of husband where she wants to stay with me and then want to raise my kids in a way that they grow to be the best versions of themselves, the way they are meant to be grown, not the way I want them to look or feel or be and all those things.
00:06:46.572 --> 00:06:53.966
And so that was at 14 years old, and just all throughout my life since then I've had iterations and updates to that vision.
00:06:54.367 --> 00:07:04.949
But that has always been that passion on my heart really to focus on myself first, to be that husband and father my family needs, and then, beyond that, how can I help my fellow man around me?
00:07:04.949 --> 00:07:09.230
And no matter how often I've tried to avoid it, it just keeps coming back.
00:07:09.230 --> 00:07:12.209
This is the thing people want to see and hear from you.
00:07:12.209 --> 00:07:13.302
And I'm not like.
00:07:13.783 --> 00:07:15.088
I'm definitely not perfect, no way.
00:07:15.088 --> 00:07:17.125
I make a ton of mistakes.
00:07:17.125 --> 00:07:18.088
You can just ask my wife.
00:07:18.088 --> 00:07:20.326
She'll tell you how many times a day she has to forgive me.
00:07:20.326 --> 00:07:27.427
But it's that attempt to be better than I was yesterday, and I love doing that.
00:07:27.427 --> 00:07:28.242
I love sharing it.
00:07:28.242 --> 00:07:33.992
I'm often surprised when a man reaches out to me and says I needed to hear that message.
00:07:33.992 --> 00:07:38.529
Thank you for having the courage to share your story, to share your struggle in that area.
00:07:38.529 --> 00:07:41.646
I didn't know, I thought I was the only one and so I was embarrassed.
00:07:41.646 --> 00:07:50.505
Now I can go get the help I need, and hearing feedback like that over the years has just been uplifting for me to let me know I'm on the right path, I'm doing the right thing.
00:07:52.504 --> 00:07:54.411
How did your faith grow up?
00:07:54.411 --> 00:08:10.608
I mean, I don't know when you get saved, and you can go deeper into that as well how did your faith gain you in your life and when did you get saved, and how has that had an impact on your life?
00:08:11.249 --> 00:08:12.211
Yeah, oh man.
00:08:12.211 --> 00:08:22.745
I mean, a lot of people would think I got saved at a young age or grew up in the church and the reality is I did not receive Jesus as my savior until I was about 28, 29 years old, somewhere in that ballpark.
00:08:22.745 --> 00:08:25.807
So up until then I had friends who took me to church.
00:08:25.807 --> 00:08:37.241
My grandparents would take us to church when we visited them and to me, growing up, church was really about two things Donuts after service and playing on the playground, and that was it, like that's.
00:08:37.241 --> 00:08:43.469
All I went to church to do was hang out with my friends to eat those donuts afterwards and play on the playground until my parents said it was time to go.
00:08:43.469 --> 00:08:49.403
And if I didn't go with my parents, it was just until I got on my bike and rode home or rode back with the family.
00:08:49.403 --> 00:08:50.187
That brought me to church.
00:08:51.399 --> 00:08:55.991
For a little while I did do Bible study with some Jehovah's Witnesses for a couple years.
00:08:55.991 --> 00:09:00.610
That was probably the deepest I ever delved into the Bible, from, of course, their perspective.
00:09:00.610 --> 00:09:02.684
And then I got away from that.
00:09:02.684 --> 00:09:06.850
You know, I think that would be like the spark that changed me, but I kind of leveraged.
00:09:06.850 --> 00:09:09.664
This is in high school and I leveraged a lot of what I learned from them.
00:09:09.664 --> 00:09:20.326
To just mess with the minds of my friends who are avid Catholics or Christians or Mormons and and just ask them questions from scripture that would get them to challenge their own faith.
00:09:20.326 --> 00:09:23.341
And now I just get a kick out of that and it was horrible.
00:09:23.341 --> 00:09:29.006
Looking back on it, I was yeah, and fortunately they all stayed with their faith.
00:09:29.006 --> 00:09:31.225
So I do feel better about that.
00:09:31.225 --> 00:09:37.522
I go through college and typical college kid, you know there's no one way to know who God is.
00:09:37.522 --> 00:09:39.407
You know there's more than one book out there.
00:09:39.407 --> 00:09:43.107
Read them and you know like I'm fine without God.
00:09:43.107 --> 00:09:44.563
Those are all the things I told myself.
00:09:44.563 --> 00:09:45.206
Join the army.
00:09:45.206 --> 00:09:47.265
I kind of just felt lost at that point.
00:09:47.840 --> 00:09:56.749
After a deployment to Kosovo I met the lady who would eventually become my wife and she's been my wife for the last 22 years and in the first year of our marriage she wanted to go back to church.
00:09:56.749 --> 00:10:09.552
She felt it was important for her that we raised our children up in the church, in the Bible and and design our home around those principles of Jesus Christ.
00:10:09.552 --> 00:10:24.922
Now that was kind of a sticker shock to me, but at the same time it wasn't that foreign of an idea, because I mentioned earlier that I stayed in a foster home for a little bit with my brother, and that family was a Christian family, you know.
00:10:24.922 --> 00:10:28.442
They prayed before meals, they prayed together in the morning, they went to church.
00:10:28.442 --> 00:10:31.443
They didn't just do these things, they lived them out.
00:10:31.443 --> 00:10:42.125
And so I knew when my wife wanted our children to grow up through the church even though I wasn't a believer yet, I knew that at least the foundation would be there for them to be that kind of family.
00:10:42.125 --> 00:10:45.888
That was our foster family and that was really the model I was going for.
00:10:45.888 --> 00:10:47.306
I want my family to be close.
00:10:47.306 --> 00:10:50.568
I want them to resolve conflict in a way that isn't violent.
00:10:50.568 --> 00:11:05.389
I want the husband and wife to just be on the same page all the time, willfully, not because the man pressured the woman to get in line or else, but because they both genuinely worked together to come to an agreement and execute the agreement together.
00:11:05.389 --> 00:11:12.732
So the O'Neill family was that model for us, the foster family.
00:11:12.732 --> 00:11:16.629
And so when my wife said I want to take our kids to church, let's do this.
00:11:17.480 --> 00:11:22.469
So we started shopping for churches and then this deployment came that sent me to Kuwait.
00:11:22.469 --> 00:11:24.947
This was in now, early 2003.
00:11:24.947 --> 00:11:35.561
I wind up going to war as we invade Iraq and by July 2003, I'm coming home Now.
00:11:35.561 --> 00:11:44.188
Some of the things that unpack what happened during then was that March 19th is the day we kick off the offensive going into Iraq.
00:11:44.188 --> 00:11:47.268
So the Air Force has started their bombing runs of Baghdad.
00:11:47.268 --> 00:11:53.926
The Marines they claimed the army jumped the gun first, but the report we got was the Marines went into Basra first.
00:11:53.926 --> 00:11:59.725
So I think to this day both the army and the Marines still blame each other about who crossed the border first.
00:11:59.725 --> 00:12:08.528
But it doesn't matter, because the bottom line is we all crossed the border eventually and I remember we were told to go ahead and suit up in your chemical suits, get ready.
00:12:08.528 --> 00:12:13.250
We're going to take off and do this thing at this time as soon as it's dark.
00:12:13.250 --> 00:12:15.745
So I'm putting on my chemical suit.
00:12:16.921 --> 00:12:24.669
I noticed a couple of my friends in the unit are writing those like just in case letters, you know, in case I die, send this to my wife, send this to my family, send this to my mom.
00:12:24.669 --> 00:12:31.841
And as a sergeant and as the medic I'm kind of a symbol for immortality in the army to that unit.
00:12:31.841 --> 00:12:42.385
So the last thing they need to see is that Doc is also afraid to die or thinking about death, because Doc is the guy who's going to be the angel of life and bring you back to life if you get hurt.
00:12:42.385 --> 00:12:51.990
So I needed to send my letter home just so I had that peace of mind as well, and I knew I couldn't hand it to anybody because the word would get out it'll freak them out.
00:12:51.990 --> 00:13:04.767
So I just wrote mine to my wife, but I had to write it in a way that did not freak her out either, so I couldn't use language like if you're reading this letter that means this is my goodbye, this is what I've done with my life.
00:13:04.767 --> 00:13:06.647
This is what I've always envisioned our life to be.
00:13:06.647 --> 00:13:08.446
I couldn't write any of those things.
00:13:08.446 --> 00:13:11.750
I could just let her know how much I love her.
00:13:11.750 --> 00:13:21.028
And I had like a little message in that letter for our son and then our daughter who was on the way, and so I said my goodbyes without them really knowing that could be the goodbye letter.
00:13:21.028 --> 00:13:26.288
And other than that, and besides handing it off to a friend, just in case, I put it in an envelope.
00:13:26.288 --> 00:13:27.331
I put the address on there.
00:13:27.331 --> 00:13:30.726
I wrote free mail on the envelope because we didn't have to use stamps if you're deployed.
00:13:30.726 --> 00:13:32.311
And I mailed it.
00:13:32.311 --> 00:13:37.190
I gave it to the first sergeant who was doing one final mail run and that letter went.
00:13:38.559 --> 00:13:43.371
And so I get my suit on my chemical suit, I get my body armor on and we're still two or three hours away.
00:13:43.371 --> 00:13:46.389
And I'm looking around still at all the other guys and they're younger than me.
00:13:46.389 --> 00:14:01.811
I was like 27 at the time and the guys around me are, you know, 18, 19 years old, mostly, some of them in their early 20s, and you can just see the fear in their faces and I don't know why, but for some reason I just started going through a checklist.
00:14:01.811 --> 00:14:03.205
Do I have everything covered?
00:14:03.205 --> 00:14:05.866
My will was taken care of before I deployed.
00:14:05.866 --> 00:14:08.346
I just wrote my letter just in case.
00:14:08.346 --> 00:14:10.384
I've got the life insurance already taken care of.
00:14:10.384 --> 00:14:11.187
That's automatic.
00:14:11.187 --> 00:14:12.090
I don't get a choice.
00:14:12.580 --> 00:14:14.144
So if I die, my wife's getting a payout.
00:14:14.144 --> 00:14:15.850
What else is there?
00:14:15.850 --> 00:14:24.706
My gear is ready, my weapon is clean, I've got all the bullets they're going to give me, because on the medic there was a limit and there was a little bit of a shortage too.
00:14:24.706 --> 00:14:27.923
I was supposed to have 210 bullets, they gave me 150.
00:14:27.923 --> 00:14:31.208
So I wasn't expected to shoot.
00:14:31.208 --> 00:14:34.769
They basically say, doc, if you're shooting, that means we're all dead, just surrender.
00:14:34.769 --> 00:14:38.205
I was like what so?
00:14:38.205 --> 00:14:40.453
But anyway, I covered all those bases.
00:14:40.494 --> 00:14:42.823
But then there was just one that felt like I was missing.
00:14:42.823 --> 00:14:47.068
And I was like just in case, because, again, I was not a believer at this time.
00:14:47.068 --> 00:14:54.686
But I remember saying God, if you're real, when I die you're going to replace me with somebody who is better than me.
00:14:54.686 --> 00:15:03.107
So somebody's going to love my wife better than I did and cherish her and just be her life partner for the rest of her life and be there by her side.
00:15:03.107 --> 00:15:10.024
And that same person's going to raise my two children as if they were his own children, raising them up the way they should go.
00:15:10.024 --> 00:15:11.524
And that's all I got for you, god.
00:15:11.524 --> 00:15:12.881
And that was it.
00:15:12.881 --> 00:15:14.508
I didn't even say amen at the end or anything.
00:15:14.508 --> 00:15:16.485
I was just like God, if you're real, you will do this.
00:15:16.485 --> 00:15:19.583
And then you fast forward.
00:15:19.583 --> 00:15:20.486
We're in Baghdad.
00:15:20.940 --> 00:15:28.639
I remember chasing some looters around our compound on a hot summer day in June, late June, no-transcript.
00:15:28.639 --> 00:15:37.865
You know, part of this was I mean, we were seeing the same looters come into our compound, breaking walls, breaking our walls down and trying to loot the metal inside our compound, which we really didn't care about.
00:15:37.865 --> 00:15:43.147
Like you can have the metal, but we didn't get to that common ground yet, and you know.
00:15:43.147 --> 00:15:49.412
So part of my deterrence was to strip the men of their clothing, set their clothing on fire, set their money on fire.
00:15:49.412 --> 00:15:51.336
Just tell them it's not worth coming in here.
00:15:51.336 --> 00:15:57.374
And we even had these little cards written in an airbreak that said we are authorized to shoot you and kill you, Please don't come in.
00:15:57.374 --> 00:16:03.471
We didn't count on you know only half the country being able to read, so those cards were almost useless half the time.
00:16:03.471 --> 00:16:06.394
So we'd see the same guys come in.
00:16:06.904 --> 00:16:15.063
But at one point a new soldier had walked up to me and he just asked Sergeant Dugan what's up with their clothes?
00:16:15.063 --> 00:16:17.854
And I looked at him like why is he questioning me?
00:16:17.854 --> 00:16:23.168
I thought he was coming here to help me pull security, like it's just me and I'm outnumbered Seven to one.
00:16:23.168 --> 00:16:30.591
It's just a matter of time before those seven guys realize they can overpower me, take my weapon and do a lot of damage to my buddies inside this compound.
00:16:30.591 --> 00:16:33.437
So I was like hurt.
00:16:33.437 --> 00:16:43.732
This guy wasn't offering any assistance with security, but instead it's questioning me about how I'm treating these men, these Iraqi civilians and he asks again what's up with their clothes?
00:16:43.732 --> 00:16:45.148
What are you doing?
00:16:45.148 --> 00:16:55.576
And again I'm dumbfounded and I turned it this private and I say, look, you can either help me pull security or can help them rebuild this wall.
00:16:55.576 --> 00:16:56.327
Which one do you want to do?
00:16:56.327 --> 00:17:03.850
And he just went to pray, rest at that point, which is, you know, almost like the position of attention, but different.
00:17:03.850 --> 00:17:05.791
It's what we do with senior enlisted people.
00:17:06.484 --> 00:17:10.471
Since I was a sergeant, he was a private and he just said I'll just go back to my unit, sergeant.
00:17:10.471 --> 00:17:16.627
And he turned around and he walked away and I'm sitting there thinking, wait, I didn't dismiss this guy, who is this guy?
00:17:16.627 --> 00:17:29.369
But you know that's going on in my head At the same time, like there was this like release, like let him go, and you know the look on his face I thought was him surrendering to me, like I can't convince him, I'm disappointed in him.
00:17:29.369 --> 00:17:30.468
Away, I go.
00:17:30.468 --> 00:17:43.336
Now, what he did not see was after he rounded the corner and went back to his guys, I looked at these six guys on the ground with the pile of clothes on fire and I just let them go.
00:17:43.336 --> 00:17:45.171
I told him to stand up.
00:17:45.171 --> 00:17:47.011
My voice, my tone had changed.
00:17:47.011 --> 00:17:51.075
Of course I'm seeing it in English, but I'm using hand gestures and like stand up.
00:17:51.075 --> 00:17:53.470
I saw my hand on my weapon just in case.
00:17:53.470 --> 00:17:55.174
But I told him go ahead and stand up.
00:17:55.704 --> 00:18:00.473
And I point to the wall where I had one person rebuilding while the other six watched.
00:18:00.473 --> 00:18:09.753
And that was kind of what I did, like I'm going to punish one of you and make the other six watch, and it didn't matter what size group, and sometimes that would work, but with this group it wasn't.
00:18:09.753 --> 00:18:22.834
This was like the third time I'd seen these guys in the week, but I just kind of slumped and I just told them to stand up, pointed at the wall, told them to go and she grew and they left.
00:18:22.834 --> 00:18:25.388
They didn't fix the wall.
00:18:25.388 --> 00:18:44.928
I think one of them gave me like a choice hand gesture, which I was pretty familiar with by then, their version of the middle finger, and off they went and I went ahead and I started rebuilding the wall myself and then, you know, patch that wall up, and it was probably better if I did it myself anyway, because that wall, that section, never came down again.
00:18:46.285 --> 00:18:48.939
And then later on that same guy that the leader of the seven.
00:18:48.939 --> 00:18:51.890
He came back through the front gate with a new, fresh set of clothes.
00:18:51.890 --> 00:19:03.654
But now he brokered a deal with the leadership at the gate and now they're coming through these big giant trucks, they're getting all the aluminum rods out of our compound, we're getting satellite phones that were like we don't even own this stuff.
00:19:03.654 --> 00:19:13.895
But I mean, if you want to work this deal as they did but it was that private that just changed everything and how I conducted myself in Iraq the rest of the time I was there.
00:19:13.895 --> 00:19:17.471
And I remember going back to my room and just crying out.
00:19:17.471 --> 00:19:33.509
You know I thought to myself, but you know in hindsight it was no, that that was not my second prayer in about six months or less let's see, about five months, whatever made of July is, or June, late June, so March to June, somewhere in that window.
00:19:33.509 --> 00:19:40.497
And I'm just saying, when I die, my daughter cannot know that I became a monster.
00:19:40.497 --> 00:19:48.334
I don't want to die as a monster, I cannot be a monster, and so I need to not be a monster.
00:19:48.334 --> 00:19:52.310
I just kept saying that over and over and over again to myself I'm supposed to be a good guy.
00:19:52.310 --> 00:19:53.106
What happened to me?
00:19:55.565 --> 00:19:59.676
And then you fast forward a month later they pull us out of Iraq back into Kuwait.
00:19:59.676 --> 00:20:15.252
They let us diffuse for about a month because my particular brigade of 3,500 soldiers, we were honed into such a razor's edge that violence was like choice number one and all the other things were not.
00:20:15.252 --> 00:20:22.914
They were like secondary to violence first, and we had all the rules of engagement that solidified that.
00:20:22.914 --> 00:20:32.194
So it was just a month of do nothing but write home, call home, spend your money on beef jerky at the PX, read your mail, get caught up, play video games.
00:20:32.194 --> 00:20:37.589
We're not doing anything except resting for a month, and that's what we did.
00:20:37.589 --> 00:20:41.454
And during that time I was just thinking, wow, I'm really going to go home.
00:20:41.454 --> 00:20:42.569
I didn't expect to go home.
00:20:42.569 --> 00:20:51.173
I thought I was going to die out there as the medic, as the short timer, go back to Georgia so that our home station was in Georgia.
00:20:51.664 --> 00:20:53.271
I get reunited with my family.
00:20:53.271 --> 00:20:54.931
I meet my daughter for the first time.
00:20:54.931 --> 00:20:58.711
She's three months old and this is at like two in the morning.
00:20:58.711 --> 00:21:03.430
So the marching band is there, families are there, posters, all that stuff.
00:21:03.430 --> 00:21:10.971
My mom and my stepdad even came in from North Carolina to see us and my brother came out from California as well.
00:21:10.971 --> 00:21:18.993
So my wife and I are in our car and I think we have our son with us.
00:21:18.993 --> 00:21:26.208
If I remember correctly, we had one of the kids and then my mom, brother and stepdad took the other child and we're driving home.
00:21:27.285 --> 00:21:28.770
So the original question how did I get saved?
00:21:28.770 --> 00:21:32.855
This is the start at well, I guess operational knock for you at almost the start of it.
00:21:32.855 --> 00:21:41.471
But on the drive home my wife asks me if she could tell me something and makes me promise I won't get mad when she tells me.
00:21:41.471 --> 00:21:44.656
Now, immediately my head goes to one of two options.
00:21:44.656 --> 00:21:57.932
Because before we came back to the US, our chaplain for the battalion he called himself the people's chaplain, very funny guy I think his name was Captain Greer, and he shared with us when you go home, how many of you guys are married?
00:21:57.932 --> 00:21:58.547
We raised our hands.
00:21:58.547 --> 00:21:59.028
Who were married?
00:21:59.028 --> 00:22:04.769
How many of you are expecting to have all that tax free money saved up in an account waiting for you to spend?
00:22:05.244 --> 00:22:07.292
We always raised our hand and said now, put your hands down.
00:22:07.292 --> 00:22:11.394
So we put our hands down, said if you're married, you've got kids.
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Deezer
iHeartRadio
Goodpods
