back to indexKelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love | Lex Fridman Podcast #230
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The following is a conversation with Kelsey Sharon, Canadian forces veteran, artillery
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gunner who served in Afghanistan at 18 years old and came home with severe PTSD.
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She went on to found Brass and Unity, which creates unique jewelry, large part of the
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proceeds from which go to help rehabilitate the lives, limbs and mental health of veterans
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and first responders.
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She has a big personality, big heart and an intense passion for life.
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So when our paths happened across, I knew we needed to talk.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, here's my conversation with Kelsey Sharon.
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You mentioned that studying history had a big impact on you and that your grandfather
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was a World War II vet.
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So people that have gone through World War II in my family too, they don't seem to talk
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Like, the worse the tragedy, the less they talk about it.
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I mean, it's understandable.
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I can respect that, but I don't think people fully understood the value in human stories
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over time and sharing that, that certain civilizations don't have written language.
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The value in that being passed down is extraordinary, but we didn't really have that with the World
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Well, they kind of want to protect you from the pain.
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Like my grandfather, my grandmother went through Hollywood, which is the Ukrainian starvation
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of millions of people, and then obviously went through World War II with the Nazi occupation
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and same in the grandfather side, who on my dad's side, the grandfather fought in World
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They seem to not want to talk about those experiences to protect you from the suffering,
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to protect you from the evil that they've experienced, which is sad because the lessons
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from that history are not then propagated through you.
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And also, there's something about the strength you carry with you knowing that that's in
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Those great heroes are in your blood and that's suffering, overcoming that suffering is in
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I would argue that's exactly correct.
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If you have someone you know that comes from your lineage that has done something super
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gnarly, that's just been a badass in so many different ways, you want to know about that
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You have that person's blood in you.
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That's important to acknowledge.
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And when that isn't shared, I feel like it's just a detriment to that individual.
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What do you make of World War II in terms of history?
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Do you think about those kinds of wars where two times more civilians died than the number
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of military personnel.
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So most of the war is basically just the death of civilians and the invasion of homes, the
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burning of homes, the bombing of homes, all of that.
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World War II, for me, I find that was the first experience where I became just obsessed
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World War II really did it for me.
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I'm not sure if it's because of the dramatization of film and in TV and the way that our generation
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has looked at it, but for me, it was more than that.
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I felt a deep connection to it and I still can't figure out why, like a pull almost.
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People joke around about those past lives and those things or those connections and
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there's something deeper within me that feels a pull towards that.
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And I'm not quite sure if it's because I had family that escaped Hungary once the Soviets
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came in, so thanks for that.
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Or if it was because my grandfather served in it or for whatever reason, I have this
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And so when you think about the mass casualty of the civilian population, that's very difficult
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for me to wrap my brain around after being in a war and seeing when you have a small
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subset of civilians die, how much of an impact that has on that community right there in
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So to try to wrap my brain around what happened in Europe and all across and all of that,
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I really struggle with that because I don't know that I can comprehend what that would
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truly mean to somebody if I didn't experience it or see it for what it is.
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Does that make sense?
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But so first of all, you're right.
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A lot of people are drawn to World War II for different reasons.
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The one is Hitler and Stalin trying to understand how it's possible to have that scale of evil
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in a very different flavors of evil.
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It's almost fascinating that human nature can allow for that.
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And then also it's fascinating that so many people can follow leaders like that with the
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pride and with the love of country.
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And it's almost like this weird experiment is like, wow, I wonder if I'm made from the
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same cloth as those people.
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Would I be a good German if I lived in Germany and was during the time of Hitler?
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Would I believe that Germany has been done wrong?
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I'm Jewish, by the way, which makes me a little bit more comfortable talking about this.
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Would I believe in the dreams sold by a charismatic dictator who says that wrongs have been done
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and we need to correct those wrongs?
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That to me is the compelling thing that draws me to World War II, the human nature question.
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I would agree with you on that.
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I think there's a way to look at people like that.
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And at that time, there was no real, well, there wasn't a full understanding of the psyche
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the way that we're starting to, I mean, we still don't understand any of it.
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But it seems like the time gap back then, there was no real understanding of sociopaths
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and narcissists and psychopaths and really what those traits were.
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And I feel like people will follow blindly if they're given a good enough reason.
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Well, if you have an individual who is ranting and screaming at the top of his lungs in the
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middle of these town squares and he's getting this attention, it's human nature to want
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to understand and be a part of a group mentality.
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It's human nature to want to fit in.
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And so I don't know if it's more of people were at the beginning were just, this is the
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cool thing to do, or if it was, they were genuinely terrified, or if there was an aspect
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that was like, this guy is saying something that resonates with me, there could be a lot
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of different things.
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I think it's unfortunate that we didn't get to or no one got to really examine this individual's
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brain and this person and why they thought the way they thought, because that's always
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been the biggest thing for me is I'm really curious about why people do what they do.
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Like deeply, deeply curious about it.
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I'm not sure who's more interesting, the people that follow Hitler or Hitler himself.
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So I mean, the question that's coupled with that is, would history roll out in similar
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ways even if there wasn't a Hitler?
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It's the people that created a Hitler or did create the events of World War II.
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I think the people would be more interesting in my opinion.
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That seems to be the, that the charismatic leaders are all out there, the failed artists
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in the case of Hitler, they're all out there.
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And it's just, when there's this environment of anger and fear, charismatic leaders can
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take over and it doesn't matter if they're evil or good.
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It's like a roll of the dice in terms of history, what, how evil, how truly insane they are.
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Like I think Stalin was much more cold than calculating.
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He wasn't as insane as Hitler, Hitler was legitimately insane, like especially later
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on in the war where he would do irrational actions, I would say.
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But that, that's like a weird roll of the dice.
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You could have gotten a totally different leader, wanting to take over the entirety
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of Europe and then invading Russia.
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That's like insanity.
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That just even, just the first part of that wanting to take over Europe.
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If you really think about the scale, if you really sit down and go, this one individual
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was like, I want all of this.
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If you really sat down and you were to sit down and put him in his traits that we know
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of into any sort of document nowadays that, that deems somebody a psychopath or a narcissist,
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this guy would set it on fire.
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There's, you know, he himself was so, I think so damaged.
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And he reminds me a lot of people now who, who struggle to find their way.
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He reminds me a lot of angry individuals who are told no, either by women or by business
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or by whatever the sector they're in.
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He reminds me very much of that, like, what's the word I'm looking for?
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Just that individual who is just like, the world is shit and the world owes me everything.
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And just, it's that mentality.
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He really came from that, it seems like.
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And when you foster that too long, you get that.
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There's a book called, what is it, Man From Underground by Dostoyevsky.
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I might be misnaming the book, but it's about the bitterness of a man.
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It's like, it breeds within his mind and it just grows that bitterness.
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I mean, we all have that sort of resenting of the world when you're younger.
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You have a choice.
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When you fail, do you blame the world or do you hold, it's the jocco thing.
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Do you hold, do you carry the responsibility of that and become a better man or woman because
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That's the decision.
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And in some sense, I mean, unfortunately, see, that's because he took responsibility
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I know you can't, you can't say he wasn't a leader.
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So it's not that he's a failure.
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He's not a person, not a failure, but it's, you can't say he's powerless, did not take
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I think he's just basically embodiment of the anger and the fear of people at the time.
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But the insanity of obviously many of my relatives, not just murdering them, but putting them
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in camps and torturing them.
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But many of those people, Jewish people, were also some of the best scientists.
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The insanity of murdering some of the best Germans is, it makes no sense.
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And so that's why it's fascinating to kind of look back at that time in history and think,
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are these the same humans?
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And also, are there echoes of that now?
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And are we, is that going to happen again?
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Is there going to be a World War III in some other kind of way?
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Is there going to be some mass scale injustice in some other kind of way, which we're not
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yet, like because of our blindness and maybe not learning the lessons of history will allow
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it to happen again.
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And then obviously it's a very common thing to whatever political leader you don't like
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to call them Hitler.
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Of course, which is, that to me, I got to tell you, when somebody calls somebody Hitler,
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the weight behind that has been completely lost in this generation.
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This generation does not understand what that truly means to call someone Hitler or
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Or Stalin, to be honest, the starvation, as I've just been talking to a lot of folks
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recently, especially like North Korea, why you own me Park, starvation.
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And I remember from my grandmother, it wasn't any time and time again, not having food to
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eat is the thing that people say is the worst, everything.
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It's way worse than murder, not having food.
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And the places that takes your mind and the actions that forces you to do, that's terrifying.
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And all of that seems very distant in our history.
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I watched that interview with her.
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She is, I want to talk to that woman so bad because when she was on Joe and she sat there
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and said, Joe's like, do you, have you done any therapy?
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I was like, oh, that's my girl.
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It's such a fascinating.
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I mean, I would love for you to kind of talk to her and explore her mind because we kind
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of explored her story and that's, there's power and the importance of her story.
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But it's so difficult to understand, like how does she become healthier and better even
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more so than she's already, she's, she's recovered quite a bit.
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You know, she's found herself quite a bit, but I wonder is she haunted?
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You're saying questions I want to ask, like that's what I mean because after being in
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a war, there are certain things, there are certain atrocities that you see that it doesn't
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matter the therapy that you do.
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And I don't care what all the special ops guys say, like, I know plenty of them that
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have a light switch and they turn it off and they can function.
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But I also know them when they've been out for 10 years.
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There's things that haunt people differently, but there's no way there's not something going
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Yeah, but it's also extra levels of complexity in her case because I mean, this is what just
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looking at history about family is she spent much of her early life loving the dictator.
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We like the water or something.
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We like water or we like this because there is no like individual, like when they said
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there was no love or anything.
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But there is a love for the...
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Just that individual.
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For that individual.
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And so, I mean, it's like the ultimate abusive relationship.
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And but it's still love, the experience, like you don't know the alternative.
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So it's not even, it's complicated because like, I wonder if you truly explored it what
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you would find because the trauma, much of her trauma I think comes from when she was
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escaping North Korea, treatment by China.
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And her mom and when she had to witness within that and being helpless with that on her own.
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So it's like evil men essentially abusing her, trading her and doing so nonchalantly.
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Like it's part of just the way of life that I wonder if she sees kind of, yeah, it's so
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complicated because childhood...
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It would be normal to her because she didn't know any different.
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Like I grew up poor, but I never sensed that because everyone else around was too.
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And so you don't notice it.
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I mean, it's a cultural thing.
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So the way you grew up, you only start to notice it when you compare yourself to others,
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when you learn of the alternative.
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That's a dark reality when you're abused.
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You...I wonder...I mean, you truly begin to suffer in some kind of way when you understand
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that you were being abused.
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That's a dark kind of thought that I wonder if you live your whole life just in that abuse.
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If you don't know better, that that's a safer...that's like, what's a better life?
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Suffering and then learning that you are suffering or just suffering until your last days?
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There's two ways to look at this.
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I'd argue on one side that suffering and suffering till you die, you know no different.
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So you can't have hope.
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You can't have this idea that there's better.
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And sometimes that's...keep that in its box.
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But then if you have kind of what you have with Park where she knows now that there's
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different, she knows that there's better, then you run into those, what is the damage
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that has been done?
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What is going to be passed on as intergenerational trauma?
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I know she's a mom.
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So it's like, now you got to look long term a little bit because now she's an influence
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And there's a positive to looking at both, I would say.
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And I know that sounds horrible for the living and trauma your whole life and just not knowing
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But there's, I don't know if that saves the brain and the body and just that overall or
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if it actually would be better because there's no way to really find that out.
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But the reality is when you give people hope and you make them realize that they're suffering,
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you're putting a burden on them, that's the first step on a long journey.
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And obviously she, now that she knows that the suffering she wants to make people in
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North Korea currently suffer less and that's the admirable goal.
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It's what we do to each other is try to like, when you see suffering in the world, you try
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to make it better and unmask that's probably in the long arc of history going to make for
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I'm hopeful at that idea for North Korea.
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I'm hopeful for that because you never want to leave individual suffering when you know
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that they're actively suffering while you're just living your day to day life in the Western
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world just out grocery shopping and you see all this food and you know in the back of
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your mind, like that interview fucked me up a little but I won't lie, like I had some
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of the girls in my office listen to it, they're just bawling because there's, we're all parents
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and there's this idea that not being able to feed our children, that just the idea of
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that damages the psyche.
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It brings up the pain in the chest, like just the idea of it and so going to the grocery
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store for about a week after that.
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I just remember standing there looking and just going, fuck, what are we doing?
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But then there's that snap reality that comes into play and goes, so how do we fix that?
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You got to take on China.
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That's never going to happen.
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And the reason that's not going to happen, it's happening again.
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So Akani comes down through Afghanistan, Chinese are all through Afghanistan, Iran makes the
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deal with China for the roadway to get the oil, well that's done in the blink of an eye
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without anyone knowing.
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There's no way, there's just so much at play with China, they control such a large aspect
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of our world, unfortunately that to take and free North Korea, a drastic action would have
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to happen and then your people would come in, it would be a mess.
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What do you mean your people?
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What do you mean your people?
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Did you hear what she said about Russians?
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Did you hear what she said?
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You know what I didn't love?
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The Russian recruiting video that came out, that shit was terrifying.
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I told you about it and of course you didn't watch it.
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I didn't watch it.
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The USA put out a recruiting video and then a day or two later Russia put one out and
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the recruiting video in the States was an animation of a female soldier with two moms
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and she was going to go change the world, right?
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Russia came out with one.
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It's the character from Rocky essentially and there are guys in the mud and just in
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the rain just fucking do and push, I'm just pushing it out, they're just like, they see
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their boot, they're just like crushing things and I'm like, and it's all like, and the deep
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Russian voice, I'm like, oh my God.
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Which one is better, would you say?
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Which bothered you more?
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What do you mean by bother, specify?
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So deception is a funny thing because when you're young and you're choosing to go to
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the military or not, it's not like you know, like none of us know what the best trajectory
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For many people go to the military is it really makes them incredible human beings.
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Some of the best people in this world, I know are soldiers.
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So it's, I'm not, I don't mean like it's somehow bad to go to the military.
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I think it's a great choice, but there is something, the honest truth is I just don't
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like marketing people.
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And so this is essentially a marketing effort.
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Yeah, it is a marketing effort.
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And so which one do you like as a marketing effort better?
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Because Canada doesn't, you know what our recruiting videos are?
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It's like, I love it.
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Oh, fuck, here we go.
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So Canada does these ones where it's like that'll have a bunch of like soldiers doing
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movements and then they'll like snip it together really quick.
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It'll be like a Navy one and then a guy jumping of a plane and then it'll be like an artillery
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and then like an armored and it'll be like, join the Canadian forces today.
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And like that's like their, their videos.
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So it's like very marketable, very palatable to Canadians who don't really want war and
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who don't really acknowledge their military in the first place and do everything they
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can to make sure that vets don't get any support when they come home.
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So they, I can see why that one is acceptable.
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What Russia did was meant to be more of an intimidation tactic, in my opinion.
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I like that style better though.
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I think we need harder, I think we need people to be harder.
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I think it's acceptable and okay to say that our soldiers need to have a harder mindset,
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a stronger mindset, a better mentality and mental health support going into the service
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and a harder body because I know when you go to the US, I've also encountered plenty
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of soldiers that are 600 pounds.
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What are you going to do?
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So we should say that you, when you joined the military, you were in incredible shape
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or not maybe incredible, but very good shape.
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No, I was in incredible shape.
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It was the best shape in my life.
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I'm okay with that.
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I used to do setups.
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Like no, I would do setups in the morning when I was little until I could see my, like
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I always had a six pack because all I did was train.
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But like if I couldn't like see it, I would just sit there in morning cartoons and just
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And my mom and dad thought that was like normal acceptable behavior.
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So if you had like Instagram back then you'd be a David Goggins, you would be just like
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Without the cursing.
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That cursing started once the military started.
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So I mean, the people should know, is it probably already know that you also competed
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Like you were an athlete of all kinds.
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They even saw rugby in there.
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I was, I was, I was good at rugby.
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I played that for seven, six years, I guess you could say total.
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I think the worst injury I ever ended up having was I tore my right eyelid off.
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We were doing an exhibition game.
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I don't do exhibition games.
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Well, I don't do like for fun.
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Well, I don't do like very competitive.
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So you're being funny.
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You see, he's not.
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What I was saying though to you was that we did an exhibition game and the team ahead
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The team we were playing was winning, which was annoying.
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And so there was an opportunity to take out a girl that was going one end of the field
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And she just kept hitting tries left, right and center.
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So I figured if I just aimed her up, like she's a target and I just run full force at
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her because she was really, she was a tall individual, but I just, if I do that, I'll
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take her out of the knees.
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But what that resulted in was she put her tooth through her mouth guard and knocked
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out and didn't just, she just stayed there.
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But when I stood up, I tore the right eyelid off and it was hanging from the inner corner.
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My mom was there because mom was my mom's my biggest fan and she's supportive of everything.
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I shouldn't miss a game.
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She didn't miss anything.
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And I stood up and I kind of turned around and we had already had a girl break her nose
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So she was on the sideline with her nose sideways and just bloody.
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My mom was like, I'll take her to the emergency after once the game's over.
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And so I turned around and looked at her and she just, she almost vomited on the spot and
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I was like, what's wrong?
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She's like, don't move your eyelids off.
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I'm like, but I can see like I was trying to blink.
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But like it was just down so I could just constantly see.
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She's like, we're just, we're just going to go to the emergency.
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We're just going to go there now.
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There's lots of it.
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But I didn't, I couldn't really tell.
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Were you okay with blood?
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I guess you did taekwondo and all that.
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I didn't get knocked out very often.
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I didn't really, when I was younger in taekwondo, I was really good.
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I only lost a handful of times.
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So when I did lose, that was bad.
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But I never had like a broken nose or a lot of blood on my feet, like nothing like that
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So nothing freaked me out too much.
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Was there aggression there or just purely competition over skill?
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I was, this was right after not too long after my coach went to prison for statutory rape.
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And that was like how you talk about Park talking about how that was like, she knew
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love because of that person.
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That person was like a God to me.
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And so when that happened, I was just an angry individual from that point on.
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So there was competition and aggression mixed in there.
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Oh, like it was betrayal that there's somebody that is, was a symbol of love for you, could
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also be a very bad person.
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I used to eat, sleep and breathe, whatever that man said from four years old on.
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I lived with my coaches at a point.
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So I could train that much.
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I helped look after their daughter.
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I was at the club 24 seven.
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It just the idea that somebody could do something like that.
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That really messed me up.
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Where were you on 9 11?
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I was 11 and I was in my parents basement in where Ontario, Ontario, Canada.
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What did you think of 9 11 at that age from Canada that have an impact on you in terms
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of changing the, the level of evil you thought is there in the world today?
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I remember it really vividly.
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I have a decent memory for certain things.
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It seems like stuff like that I'd stick with really well.
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I remember watching and I was sitting in the couch and my mom, my mom called my dad because
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my, my parents are truck drivers.
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My dad was on the road.
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And he would go in and out of cities all the time.
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And I think he was on the East coast.
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My mom was like a little panicky.
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So she, she tried to get ahold of him on the, I think she, the time it was like beepers
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and um, yeah, so he would get a beep, he would go to a payphone to call us and he was fine.
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And um, I remember my mom being like really upset and I couldn't quite grasp why she was
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I knew something really bad had happened.
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It's when I then saw the second plane go into the tower and I remember her just like
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the stereotypical like hand over her mouth and she just felt sick and she just was so
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confused and I knew it was bad, but I didn't fully grasp it.
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And we went to school that day and they had talked about it briefly.
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You could hear the teachers kind of reminiscing about it.
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There was a point the, that week that all of a sudden all of the children who were from
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a Middle Eastern family were not the school.
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I just remember them saying like a lot of people aren't coming to school, but it was,
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it was in particular that I think parents were afraid once it got out that it was of
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a certain group, they were afraid for their own kids.
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And fair enough, I mean, you never know, you don't know.
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And I knew it impacted me enough that I did write, I remember I, the school was doing
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a memorial for it and I remember they asked, I wrote a poem and a reporter was there and
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That's like, I remember like, it was, it was like, it was a very short one, but I remember
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I wanted to do something, but I didn't know why or for, for what reason, I just, I knew
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I wanted to do something to honor it, but I didn't, I couldn't grasp why.
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You eventually went to Afghanistan.
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Did that begin to plant the seed of thinking about conflict in the world?
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It's a good question.
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I never thought about it that in depth.
link |
I mean, I've done 12 years of therapy.
link |
You think that would have come up, Dr. Passi, but apparently not.
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We'll work on it though.
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I mean, when did like, when did the idea of war start entering your mind?
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I think it was for me.
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Um, I was, I finished high school at 17.
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I moved away and went to college and went to Algonquin college because I wasn't smart
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enough to get into Ottawa U. So I was like, well, Algonquin, she is, I just wanted to
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play sports and frankly, I wanted away from my small town that I was living in.
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I went through like a bad high school breakup as a kid and you know, that where you think
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that's like the love of your life and you just can't bear to be anywhere near anybody.
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And so I, I moved away as fast as I possibly could.
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And I didn't grasp it still at that point.
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Love and heartbreak.
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Why did you become a soldier?
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Why did you want to become a soldier?
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My parents told me from an early age, they always figured I would either be a cop.
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I would do, they didn't think military, but they thought it would be like a type A personality,
link |
possibly carry a gun situation.
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And um, I had never hunted before.
link |
We never had guns in our house.
link |
I was never exposed to weapons of any kind.
link |
If anything, it was, it was the opposite.
link |
We just, all the hunters on the property, like all the deer would come to our property
link |
and all the hunters would be, no, I'm not, my mom would put salt looks out so that they
link |
wouldn't get killed.
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Your property was the safe space for the deer.
link |
So they had guns of forest and they just, we had two turkeys that used to walk up and
link |
down the driveway every day.
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We had bears in there and nobody bothered them.
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And so there was no aspect of like, I want to go kill shit.
link |
That was not like a thing.
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I wanted to take anybody off the face of the earth or anything.
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I went to school and because I'm a history person, I, my parents has always, always made
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it really important that remembrance day is the thing in our life.
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So that's veterans day for you.
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So it's November 11th and it's, you go, you honor.
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I don't care if you don't want to go, I don't care if it's raining, you go.
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And so I went to the remembrance day ceremony in Ottawa that year, which was, it's our capital,
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which is, yeah, it's our capital and it's really small.
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And so I went, but I took the bus and I was on the bus back to Algonquin and I met a lady
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who was like a World War II vet, really old lady.
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She had an Air Force uniform on and just like this row of medals.
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And I mean, I think you can tell by our limited to extreme interactions we've had over the
link |
short period of time.
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I'm curious and I'll just ask you.
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And so I just got up and talked to her and just started talking to her.
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And she didn't say like, I don't remember exactly her words, but she'd served.
link |
She was one of the first females to fly and, you know, all, all of these kinds of things
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that stuck in my head and we just kind of kept talking and I missed my stop.
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And then I finished talking to her and I got back on the bus and went back to the college
link |
and walked into my, uh, my small apartment where I had two roommates, these two guys
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I went to high school with one of them I went to high school with one was from out of town
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and I just didn't like what I was.
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I wasn't doing what I wanted to do.
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And I didn't know what I wanted to do truthfully.
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Something just said, why don't you join the army?
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Like in myself, my, my self talk was like, let's just join the military.
link |
Are you in general?
link |
Some of me, it just falls the gut.
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Like when your heart tells you something, you go with it.
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For the most part, because I figured out at least now I figured out what parts I could,
link |
like what feeling I can trust and which one I can't, which ones anxiety versus which ones
link |
my actual intuition talking.
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So why did you sign up to be an artillery gunner?
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Because they wouldn't let me be infantry.
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I mean, why, why would you want to be infantry?
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I mean, this, you're, you're, you're, you're naming a lot of dangerous activities.
link |
But that wasn't a thought in my mind at the time.
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My idea was if I was going to do this and I was going to put myself through the bullshit
link |
and the training and all of the hell and the pushups and the things I screamed at, I wanted
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to do something that I know was actually going to be affecting something.
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And what I knew was making change or affecting or on the front lines was infantry, artillery
link |
So I was like, one of those.
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Can you explain the difference, infantry, artillery and armored?
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Do you want like the layman's term or do you want me to actually explain, explain?
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Well, listen to your conversation with Jaco, especially I love how you get into details.
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So let's detail this one.
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So infantry is your frontline door kicking, you know, blasting the door open, running
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and get the fuck on the ground just that they're the guys that, you know, the double tap you
link |
in the face and they show up in the middle of the night and put a barrel in your head.
link |
Like those are the guys that are sleeping in the trenches that are eating MREs who are
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being shot at who are being blown up, who are doing the dirty work and not sleeping and
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carrying the hundred pound pack and, and are side by side with your buddies in the trenches.
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I wanted that, that they said it was too small for that.
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You were sorry to interrupt, you were too small under a hundred pounds?
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At the time I was about 103 and I'm, I'm five foot like on a, if you roll my back out like
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I really try, I'm five foot.
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At the time though, I think my, my license said 411.
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So you were too small for infantry?
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They just like, there was no mandate at which they said, you can't be, but they said, you
link |
know, we don't want to put you through training that you're going to fail out of and then
link |
have to recourse you and then find a new job for you.
link |
And we, they want to try to, if this is what you're going in for, they want to have you
link |
follow through that path.
link |
So then there was armored, which are your tanks.
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So that's your movie like fury where your tank battles in, which we don't really do anymore,
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but you're rolling around in tanks, you got guys in the back or you're a driver or you're
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a turret gunner, which I would have enjoyed, but the idea of being in a closed metal box
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or something about it made me panic.
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So I was like, maybe not for me.
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Oh, there's of course power to that kind of big gun.
link |
Well, that's why I went for the bigger one.
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By the way, I think Russia leads the world in number of tanks.
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They're still, it's very like, what is it, alpha demonstration of like four sick, look,
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we have largest number of tanks.
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You know what takes tanks out though?
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Some gasoline, some old batteries and a wire.
link |
But tanks still look badass.
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They look great, but they don't last.
link |
But so much of the military, like we said with the recruiting videos, it's a display
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of power versus the actual implementation of power.
link |
So I'm doing my best here.
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I don't even know what double tap means, which you said earlier.
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So it's double tap is like two shots to the face.
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You guys, tax payers pay for the ammo.
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So, but you don't want to do three because it's wasting the ammo.
link |
Well, that's now that's a waste.
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Double tap the face.
link |
There's so much awesome terminology here or gruesome terminology, depending on your
link |
So that's the hand of God.
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No, I, that's, that's intensely romanticized version, but okay, artillery, the hand of
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Because it will reach out and touch you from wherever we want.
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It's like, it's like F, F 18 pilots or bombers, they'll, you won't know they're there until
link |
And so for artillery, I really honestly didn't think artillery would be a fit for me.
link |
I didn't know much about it.
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They were just like, these are what you couldn't pick from.
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And I was like, I'll go here.
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So in World War II, they used much closer artillery.
link |
So it's the, we were called the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery because the queen made us
link |
Royal Canadian artillery.
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And we, we shoot these rounds when you're in training, you shoot smaller, smaller ammunition.
link |
They're about 40 pounds.
link |
I'm going to get this wrong, 20 K, 20 kilometers, so whatever that is in your mile things.
link |
And they have a casing on them and they're much easier.
link |
They're easier to handle.
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The guns are smaller.
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You need less people for them.
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They're basically what you train on nowadays.
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It's not what we use overseas.
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What we use overseas, now those things are beautiful.
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Those are just a sheer work of the engineering behind them just makes my heart skip a beat.
link |
The engineering of modern guns is amazing.
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So are we talking about machine guns here?
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So like fully automatic?
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No, you're talking about artillery guns.
link |
So what it is, it's a one five five millimeter howitzer that shoots up to up to 40 kilometers
link |
accurately, 45 unrecorded and it shoots a hundred pound round.
link |
So that, but there is still precision.
link |
So how, at which stage of the warfare do they come in?
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Are they saving you?
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Like say a bunch of people get rated, a bunch of the infantry get rated and then the artillery
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saves them or are they the first line of attack or where are they, where is the artillery
link |
Like the hand of God presumes they're helping.
link |
So depending on the operation or whomever is running it or how they want it done, sometimes
link |
if they just know there's targets, they'll use us, you know, high value targets.
link |
So we have this round, it's called the X caliber round.
link |
It costs about half a million dollars per round.
link |
It comes in a special tube that is like sealed and locked and you have to get permission
link |
from Ottawa to shoot it and it's only used for VIP targets.
link |
So like we have VIP for everyone and it will, it's GPS guided, it's rocker propelled and
link |
when you fire it, it will, if this is a wall and somebody's standing on this side of it
link |
will hit you right there.
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We won't touch that wall.
link |
It will hit you pinpoint.
link |
It'll go right through whatever concrete, whatever and then it will destroy.
link |
So it's basically the same thing as being a sniper, but with a much more damaging weapon.
link |
We don't use that round often.
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I think it's only been used a handful of times max in Afghanistan that I'm aware of.
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And I haven't, I wasn't there from 2009 until 21, but I know people that still deployed
link |
in that, in those units and I don't know that it was used very often.
link |
But the regular round, so there's HE, there's loom, so HE is high explosive.
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There's loom, you shoot that, it explodes in the sky, it lights up the sky for the infantry
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below and then there's shrapnel rounds that will explode in the sky and then shrapnel
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just rains down hell on you.
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HE is what you use normally in my, I'm trying to say this right because I know people squawked
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at me about some of the stuff on Jocko, so I'm trying to be very accurate.
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In my experience, we used HE rounds to wipe people off the face of the earth when the
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infantry needed us.
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So we would get a call at any time and there's always two guns together.
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So you never, you never go solo gun ever.
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If you are, it's sketchy and there's bad shits happening.
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Can you explain that so there's two people, two guns?
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No, two guns with each gun troop.
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So each gun troop has five to seven people running a gun at all times.
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It takes a lot of people to run one of those.
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How much electronics is there?
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The GPS, like the computer system that's on it itself, I never ran that much, but it
link |
is completely technologically, it's GPS guided.
link |
All you have to do is literally type in the coordinates, then you've got the two big,
link |
there's a technical word for it, but basically wheels.
link |
And one does the trajectory, you know, you do your, and you're just kind of doing this
link |
and you're watching the, watching it.
link |
And once you hit your target, that's, you know, it'll tell you, that's where you need
link |
Do you know if there's any like AI stuff, like computer vision, like where there's cameras
link |
and they help you target using like all different kinds of cameras to see through, like the fog,
link |
all those kinds of things.
link |
No, we use the FU, which are forward observation officers, which are an artillery individual,
link |
that is embedded with an infantry unit.
link |
They call from the front, give us their grid coordinates and basically say, like, don't
link |
So, well, you know what not to shoot, which parts not to shoot.
link |
And then there was no one moves.
link |
But you can hear it coming.
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But you can't hear it until it's too close.
link |
So like when I went, sorry, go ahead, you were going to say something.
link |
No, I was going to say, what's the experience on the other?
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Like what does it feel like to be maybe infantry or underneath it underneath the artillery?
link |
Well, I, I had the rare opportunity to do that and I have a video I'll show you after.
link |
It's terrifying because I know that people that were shooting it and I know them personally
link |
and I know what they're like as humans.
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And for the most part, they're dialed, but you get the odd duck where you're like, I've
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seen people have an ND, which is a negligent discharge.
link |
You basically get charged for it, you get a lot of trouble because you can blow people
link |
up and it like accidents happen.
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And so I know accidents can happen in stressful situations.
link |
And when I was with the Brits, we had to call Danger Close Artillery.
link |
And when it goes over top of you, it sounds like thunder and lightning.
link |
So you fire it and it's not the stereotype that you hear in World War II where it kind
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of like that, it's more of like a crackle.
link |
And then you just hear like a whiz and it just goes everywhere.
link |
It shakes the ground.
link |
Is there some more words you can put to like the experience of what it's like to be in
link |
the heat of, of, of battle there?
link |
So what is, is there literally, is it hot?
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Is it talking about being under it or shooting it?
link |
It 55 degree heat.
link |
You know that you're waiting for it to be called.
link |
You feel an overwhelming excitement to start because for me, I'd never been under it.
link |
So I was like, okay, I had my camera ready.
link |
Like I was a kid at a candy store and I'm like, I want to watch this happen.
link |
And once you hear the crackle, I got really fearful.
link |
My anxiety kicked up significantly.
link |
I got to the point where I got numb.
link |
Like I was, my nerves were on overdrive so much that like my body would go like numb.
link |
Like I could move, but like my nerves were numb, if that makes sense.
link |
What, what were the nerves like?
link |
And we're talking about fear or is it just anxious, excitement?
link |
Anxious excitement, hopeful that they wouldn't blow it up on us.
link |
And there was this, there was this excitement that's hard to describe because you don't
link |
want to be excited that you're dropping bombs on people, but when you just saw their faces
link |
and they're shooting at you, there's this overwhelming feeling of got you, motherfucker.
link |
Well, we'll talk about that because that's such a difficult thing about wars.
link |
You forget that other human beings, because those other human beings are doing really
link |
bad things to you.
link |
And so the very basic anger takes over, hate can take over, and then also just the excitement
link |
of almost like video game like, you know, aspect of war, like sport, it's like sport
link |
that all of those elements are all baked in and it's, it's hard to be philosophical in
link |
I've never played video games, so I can't compare it to that, but like from, from like
link |
a sports perspective.
link |
I could, I could argue that.
link |
Like I felt like we won there for a second and it's, it's not just like a heat from
link |
outside, it's like this radiation within you that is something I've never felt since.
link |
You just to take a small step back to the weapons training.
link |
What kind of guns did you train on?
link |
Because you also mentioned a rocket launcher.
link |
I love Carl Grassoff's.
link |
What's, what's it like?
link |
My only experience with the rocket launch is from the movie Commando with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
link |
And we've all discussed.
link |
I haven't seen that yet and I've heard about it and people have made me tell, yeah, I know.
link |
I feel like you haven't seen a single movie that's relevant to war military because every
link |
time anyone brings it up, you haven't seen it.
link |
I don't have time to watch movies, Lex.
link |
You haven't seen platoon, which is.
link |
You're the scientist.
link |
How do you have the time?
link |
I'm not a scientist.
link |
I just play one on TV.
link |
So what, can you talk about the rocket launcher and maybe any other.
link |
Well, both engineering actually, to me, those guns are very interesting from an engineering
link |
Well, they should be.
link |
They're fascinating when you take them apart and you see how small the parts get down to
link |
and how, how necessary every single little piece is to make that thing run.
link |
And even without the tiniest little BB smaller than a piece on there and artillery gun might
link |
So we were trained on Carl G's and called M72s, which are disposable rocket launchers
link |
These are around, I don't know the exact millimeter of the round.
link |
It's been a while since I shot them.
link |
We only did those in training, but essentially it takes, most people, one person can fire
link |
it, you know, effectively hold it and fire it.
link |
It takes another person to load it.
link |
So you put it onto your shoulder and in ways I would, I don't know, 30 pounds, 40 pounds.
link |
It's been a minute.
link |
It's been a minute.
link |
One person can carry it.
link |
So I don't know, it just seems like a rocket launcher is a pretty intense kind of device
link |
I mean, it's the diameter, I can't even tell you the diameter, they're about that big.
link |
And it goes on your shoulder.
link |
It goes on your shoulder and then it has a little sight that pops out.
link |
That's almost like plastic like, which is kind of funny because it reminds me of like
link |
the little green army men.
link |
I just felt so flimsy to me.
link |
I was like, this is hilarious.
link |
And then another person stands behind you and opens the hatch.
link |
And so there's this, there's these two levers and you just kind of open it.
link |
And then the back end, which is flared, so it's just a tube and then it's flared.
link |
That will open it and drop down and you load around into that and then you load it back
link |
And you're never supposed to stand behind it because the blast behind it will kill you.
link |
But in my case, when I fired it, it was me and another individual, I want to say, it
link |
wasn't Sarah Pellegrine, but it was another girl that was smaller and the person is supposed
link |
to wrap around your waist and tuck low and hold your stability.
link |
And we were just aiming at tanks that day and they were just concrete heads.
link |
So they would just either, they would hit and bounce off or whatever.
link |
And so when my sergeant saw that, he just kind of looked at both of us and was like,
link |
no, I'm just going to... and he got real low and just like wrapped both of us.
link |
And then we'd fire it and it feels like you're getting punched in the side of the head on
link |
You lose all your hearing, you just like, it's not comes out of your nose and you're
link |
just kind of discombobulated for a minute.
link |
It's a real mind fuck.
link |
Is there any other kind of guns that at that time, because you were new to this, you haven't
link |
shot guns when you were younger that were really impressive to you in the training process?
link |
All of them because I've never fired a weapon.
link |
So we had the C7s, which are like your M16s, I believe, the long barrel.
link |
The cute thing about those is when I have that slung, my barrel drags on the ground.
link |
And they shoot, you know, your 7, 6, 2 or your 5, 5, 6 round.
link |
I preferred the C8, which was a short barrel, which is what the SF guys use.
link |
Not because it's cooler looking, which it obviously is, but because it was functional
link |
for my body height and it didn't drag on the ground when I ran.
link |
I loved those, they're your personal weapon.
link |
Being an artillery gunner, if you're not an officer, at least in our unit, you didn't
link |
I didn't have a slide piece, Lex.
link |
So I never had a handgun of any type.
link |
I fired those in training.
link |
You can't get over that side piece comment.
link |
I was going to say, I know what a side piece is.
link |
You don't have to explain to me.
link |
But you're single.
link |
So how do you even have a side piece if you don't have a main piece?
link |
The joke would be the fact that we have a total misunderstanding with side pieces.
link |
You didn't have a side piece as a non officer.
link |
So I never fired those much.
link |
We did grenades in training.
link |
Yeah, grenades are fun.
link |
I have a massive one tattooed on me.
link |
I have them all over my office.
link |
How does a grenade work?
link |
There's the spoon and the pin.
link |
So the pin holds the spoon in place.
link |
When you pull that pin, the firing mechanism inside, as long as that the spoon is up against
link |
it, it won't fire.
link |
As soon as that spoon goes, I believe it causes a reaction on the inside and you've got about
link |
five seconds to check it.
link |
You'd be better to ask that question too.
link |
I don't want me to get those off go on.
link |
But there's something about a grenade because you're essentially committing suicide unless
link |
you get rid of the thing.
link |
There's something like...
link |
Or if you're unlucky and it just goes off when you pull the pin, which has happened to tons
link |
So it just feels like a very kind of, it's a dangerous leap into the abyss every time
link |
you use the thing because when you shoot a gun, the gun is much less likely to malfunction
link |
in terms of all the possible ways to go wrong.
link |
It just seems like grenade is like...
link |
Yeah, it's primitive.
link |
It's also real in the way that a bar fight is being punched in the face is real.
link |
It's like, you're here with a weapon of destruction, it's just you and the thing and you have to
link |
Is that terrifying to use?
link |
Do people still use grenades in warfare?
link |
Yeah, those are fantastic.
link |
The Taliban were throwing them over the wall at the airport in Kabul.
link |
People use them all the time because when you're in Afghanistan, if you're in a rural
link |
area, you're going from village to village and they're mud hut walls.
link |
You're tall, but you're walking through corridors and stuff, all you got to lob one of those.
link |
It's going to take the whole unit out that just walked by.
link |
They're accurate if you're close enough and they're effective if you're close enough.
link |
I love them though.
link |
I think they're fascinating to me because there's such a tiny little thing with such
link |
They just can cause such devastation.
link |
But for me, when I had them, some of the Canadians would make fun of me because when
link |
I did go outside the way with the British, I had two right here.
link |
I remember I put a piece of tape over the spoons because in my mind, I could picture
link |
myself searching someone and grabbing me and pulling that.
link |
That would have been like, yep, if anyone that was going to happen to, it was her for
link |
So you were deployed to Afghanistan in 2009.
link |
Like we said, you were in great, no, perfect physical shape.
link |
Fucking epic shape.
link |
Epic shape six back or I mean, yeah, okay.
link |
So you could do pull a lot of pull ups and push ups and yeah, okay.
link |
And well trained, would you say where you're already what like, no, no, no, I'll argue
link |
that point till I'm blue in the face.
link |
I spoke to recently, I actually spoke to my surgeon.
link |
He's not a surgeon anymore, but Sergeant Mark LeBlanc, he's in Africa right now in a deployment
link |
he gave me a call the other day and I remember talking to him about this and it's frustrating
link |
because we were at an active war.
link |
We were involved in an active war where we, the units that I were in were tagged red,
link |
which meant they needed people.
link |
So when you need people, things go quick.
link |
Whether or not that's right.
link |
I mean, you could argue that's the similar thing to what's happening in the world right
link |
We needed a vaccine.
link |
Is it the best it could be?
link |
Could it be better?
link |
Could it do more things?
link |
Sure, probably, but with the time that we had, we did the best that we could.
link |
That's my logic on that.
link |
For me, I joined the military in November of 2007.
link |
I was in basic training in January of 2008.
link |
I was graduated basic SQ, which is all your weapons training, your DP one, which is your
link |
trade specific training.
link |
So whatever trade you're going to go into, whether it's infantry, armored, artillery,
link |
medic, whatever, that's your DP one.
link |
It's called different things in different units.
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And then I got posted to my unit in September.
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So January to September, I had done all my training and I'm an English speaking individual.
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I got posted to a French unit that only speaks French and had to learn all of the weapon systems.
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Everything again that I just learned in that short timeframe in French.
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This part of your story that you're telling this to Jaco, one way to say it is very impressive
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that you had to learn all of this in French.
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So there's also the camaraderie, the social aspect of it, which is difficult probably.
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It didn't have any.
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Yeah, it didn't have any.
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But it also would make you a more effective soldier to be socially for that cohesion
link |
to be there, right?
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But also just understanding the basic terminology.
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The right way to say something on the radio, the right way to run a gun, the right way
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Because you got to move with those guns.
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If you've got seven people, it's really magical.
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I'll send you a video.
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When we did some live fire in workup training in Texas before we left, we did a competition
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between the other gun to see who could fire 10 rounds faster.
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It is truly beautiful to watch an artillery unit fire a gun because it's like a symphony.
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And has their parts and everyone knows and everyone's yelling, but they know why they're
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yelling and everyone, this guy's got to do this in order for this guy to load the round.
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It's just, it's beautiful.
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It is gorgeous to watch.
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Is there, by the way, for a gun, is there like one person responsible for the aim or like
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the specification of the location and somebody else that pulls it?
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Is that the lanyard?
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Is there a button?
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It's better than a button.
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I'll tell you in a second.
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There's your sergeant in charge and then they have their two IC and so the comms come in
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to the sergeant and the sergeant is the, or your master bombardier, Bombardier chef.
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Oh, that's a French.
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Master bombardier.
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So it goes like private, in the north, like in an infantry or in a regular unit, it's like
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private corporal, master corporal sergeant.
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In artillery, it goes gunner, bombardier, master bombardier, sergeant, and off like that.
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So you have two people, but the serge is like, you don't move till he says move, you don't
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fire till he says fire, like he's your guy, he'll give you the coordinates, he'll feed
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him to the guy that's doing the GPS, that portion, I really never did it much.
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I wasn't tall enough to see it.
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Like legitimately, the way, how high it is up on the gun, like it was, I couldn't see
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clearly enough, it was not good.
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So obviously you have a big personality, you're a strong person.
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And you have a big hat currently.
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I always wear a hat, Lex.
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It seems like your height and your size was a factor.
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How were you able to step up in all those moments and how difficult was it?
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I don't know that I'd realize it was difficult while I was doing it because that's just the
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I've always been the short person.
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That's life, nothing I can do to fix that.
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So there was no point, when am I going to whine about it, I'm going to break my femurs
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and insert things to make me grow a little bit, maybe, maybe since you're in robotics,
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you can figure that out.
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That's your task now.
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Make me be five foot three, that'd be great.
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For artillery, really what it came down to was the unit, when I got there, there was
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only a couple people who spoke any sort of English and my sergeant was not one of them.
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But once he started to get to know me a little bit, the best that he could, he started to
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put effort into making sure I could lift the rounds, make sure my capacity to do my job
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And so he took me under his wing in that aspect.
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So he would take me to the gym with him and he would show me exercises that would specifically
link |
help me load the rounds.
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So pick the round up from the ground, pick it up like a trick to put your knee under
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it, use your legs, instead of just pick it up, use your back, pull your back out.
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He would work on that.
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And then depending on the position I was running the gun in, if I was running the side that
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had the charge bags, I'll explain that in a second.
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But if I was running the side that had the charge bags, I could step up onto the gun.
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And if I leaned inward enough with my right hand with the charge and I kind of kicked
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off, I could kind of jump and shove it up the tube.
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If I was running the lanyard, which is the thing that makes it go boom, it's really easy.
link |
You hook it on and you put it, your right hand on your hip and on your left and you hold
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it there and you just stare at your sergeant like this and you just wait for him to yell
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And he points at you when he does it.
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And when you do it, you turn your whole body with it.
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And when you do that, it alleviates a misfire, essentially, because if you just pull it sometimes
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that's not enough.
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You got to really give it your whole body into it.
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And so he would train me on how to do things differently so that I could do them effectively.
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And I wasn't a ship pump.
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So ship pump is a term that we use in Canada to call somebody useless.
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A ship pump is a useless soldier who is just, you're there and that's the ship pump.
link |
And so we all just deal with it, but somehow they're still there.
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What were we talking about?
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We were talking about the artillery guns.
link |
So those things though, what you would find fascinating is just how they break down when
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you have to take one of those apart.
link |
I think your mind would really find it fascinating how a breach comes apart all the way down
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to ball bearing size.
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And there's a way to just make that gun complete ineffective and all you have to do when you're
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on the charge side, there's a magazine that's a long linear magazine and it holds like 15
link |
If you just take that thing out, nothing's not firing.
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How many people does it take to move that?
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How easy is it just to move that thing?
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To move a triple seven?
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That's what they're called.
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Is a lot of the terminology crossover the same in English and French?
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I mean, M triple seven does because it's an obvious, how it's, sir, I'm sure has a separate
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word, but like if you're running it, you're running it in French.
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So like when I'd be running the, when I'm doing the charge bags and I'm doing, I'm doing,
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you know, I'm loading everything and I'm getting that ready and that's my position that day.
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I'm also controlling the breach.
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So like how it opens, how it closes when it locks.
link |
And so, but you have to yell that as you do it.
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So you're yelling like, My Lib, Kolas, Orvet, like you have to yell all these things.
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You have to learn them though.
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And so for a long time it's, it's, it's, it was a little frustrating.
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It was really exciting.
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I took a lot of French, but I forgot all of it, but I think it's a beautiful, romantic
link |
It's a good language.
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If it's from Quebec, it's a.
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It's a good language to fall in love with.
link |
Not as good as Russian, but I mean, English is, all right.
link |
I mean, Russian, really, is that like a love language?
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I mean, because you're Russian, but like if somebody walked up to me was like, Hey, Kelsey,
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I'd be like, Oh God, he's going to put me in a camp.
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That's because you don't understand love at Kelsey.
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We'll talk about that.
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How many people does it take to move them triple seven?
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If you're moving it by ground, you're moving it on a truck and when you're moving it on
link |
a truck, you're hooking the back of it onto, you're hooking the front of the barrel onto
link |
one of those big transport looking trucks that has those cargo tents that's got soldiers
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You don't want to ever move an M triple seven by that way if you don't have to the barrels
link |
worth a million dollars.
link |
So this is like a serious piece of equipment.
link |
You don't want to move them.
link |
When we got to Kandahar, we were there for a couple of days.
link |
We got flown out to the fall we were going to be at for an observation base.
link |
Kandahar is the safe space or was the major base in Afghanistan that we were at.
link |
There's things like Tim Hortons there.
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There's Canada house, there's a British side, an American side, a Canadian side and that's
link |
where you see all the different countries in the world kind of come together.
link |
You would see Italians, you would see Germans, you would see French, you would see all these
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different uniforms and you never know who to salute because you don't know what each
link |
It doesn't feel like a war zone.
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There's a boardwalk.
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There's hockey there like floor hockey because Canada had to have that.
link |
There's a Tim Hortons a subway, a Pizza Hut, a PX.
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I think there's a restaurant there somewhere, but I never, I didn't get to go, you know,
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You can run around it.
link |
You feel fairly safe.
link |
You always have a weapon on you, but you can, you know, live your life.
link |
When you get out to the fob, the guns are already there.
link |
So those M777s get lifted by a Chinook.
link |
Normally, if they're going by air, they go by Chinook because they're heavy as hell.
link |
And Chinooks can hook them under the bottom and they fly them and then they'll drop them
link |
They have wheels on them, but you don't need them if you're going to leave it in place.
link |
And you're getting information about IEDs.
link |
You're getting a land, a lay of the land as to what's been going on in the country for
link |
the past six months.
link |
And this, you know, nothing, you're just like, this is your first time you're getting deployed.
link |
So what was your deployment like?
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Can you tell the story of your deployment to Afghanistan?
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Like the whole deployment?
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Getting like actual deploying, not the deployment itself.
link |
What's the difference between the two?
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Well, actually getting ready to deploy is a little different.
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So I mean, the emotional buildup to it and some of the memorable things that kind of,
link |
you remember from that experience, both on the excitement, I get to see battle, I get
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to be part of this and the fear and also like being surprised like with the Tim Hortons
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
So like the lead up before everything hit the fan.
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So you're such a fascinating person, but yes, something like that.
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I've been called many things that start with the letter F.
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I don't know many words with the F. Okay.
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So with the buildup, so the deployment, so for the buildup for the deployment, I was
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in Quebec and my unit was deploying from Quebec.
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And at that time, you kind of get your marching orders.
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You know, you're deploying.
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I knew I was deploying before I even graduated.
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That's how much they needed people.
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So once I did all that training on graduation parade day, a couple men from Quebec in uniforms
link |
came over and said, you, you, you and you are all being posted to back yet today and
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you're going to deploy with us in April.
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So that's how I found it.
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Why was there such a need for troops in August then is that, is that was a well known thing
link |
that there's a scaling up of troops and 2007 on Canada really started taking a combat
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role before it was very much more a UN type deal where we're doing what we normally do
link |
in most wars where we just, we wear blue and we don't shoot anyone.
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And so we're there to help.
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And so they were really, they were scaling up.
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And there wasn't a lot of people in those trades initially, I think when the war kind
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So Canada really started to scale.
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And so when I got to Quebec, we've kind of found, oh yeah, we're deploying.
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And it was a weird situation because I've never actually been at a unit on a non deployable
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So I don't know what they do day to day.
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That's different from what I did.
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I just know what I did.
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So we would do things like in the morning, we would get up and we would meet for PT at
link |
And that would include going for a 10k run or playing ball hockey for a few hours in
link |
the gym or lifting weights together or, you know, just going on a Rock March, a long Rock
link |
March should just stuff like that.
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You would have a shower, you would meet, and then you would just sit around the regiment.
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And you would, if there was busy work, you'd mop the floors, you would clean weapons.
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There wasn't a whole lot until there was a whole lot to do.
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We did a lot for a while.
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And then we went away on workup training to Texas for a week.
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We came down here and we did live fire with our other troop that was going to be with
link |
So Alpha had two guns and two guns has two groups of people.
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And so we all would go down to Texas and we did live fire here for a week and I ended
link |
up getting gastro, which was awesome.
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So thanks for that.
link |
Apparently there was, there were having water problems and sanitary problems.
link |
So everyone was getting it on the base.
link |
So it just makes your life way harder.
link |
I didn't get it towards the end till towards the end.
link |
So that was fortunate.
link |
So we would fire live fire.
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We would go out to the middle of nowhere.
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The guns would be there.
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And we would get, offload a truck of rounds and we would do live fire and we would practice,
link |
just constant practice.
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What's that saying?
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Perfect practice makes perfect.
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So this is a sensory, like a shooting range for artillery.
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So what does practice look like?
link |
So you roll up in your trucks and you're, you know, you've got each group of people.
link |
You've got two trucks and then you've got like a medic vehicle and then you've got like
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Then you've got like a medic vehicle and then you've got like an officer vehicle and a comms
link |
vehicle and you, you go to your perspective guns and then you offload your ammo and then
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you basically wait for them to send you like a, a fire mission.
link |
Get that together.
link |
They would call, they would say, and miss yall sit.
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So it'd be a fire mission.
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So we'd wait for that.
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And once we got that, then you all run like a bunch of scattered rats to the gun.
link |
Like it's like the greatest thing you've ever seen.
link |
And then you just wait, you wait for the call for the sergeants to say, and then you'll
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Cause it's not headphones.
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You can hear it on a speaker and it'd be like, I'm not going to do in French.
link |
It'd be like, um, uh, so and so 10 rounds, um, fire when ready and then you would get
link |
your rounds ready and everyone would have them ready and would be in their perspective,
link |
um, respective positions and then you would wait and then they would say fire when ready
link |
and as soon as they say fire when ready, that means just start going, just start.
link |
And then that's when the magic starts.
link |
You go like the loop, like you shoot one or whatever.
link |
There's a reloading process.
link |
So what you would do, you get the fire mission and you would find out the rounds.
link |
The two I see would be standing by the rounds and it was his job to make sure the amount
link |
of rounds that was told would be the only rounds that would go down range.
link |
And so he'd stand there and on each round, depending on the type of round is a fuse,
link |
which gets screwed on to the top of the round.
link |
So they're about that big and it's just a point.
link |
And then you would have to put it on, give it a spin.
link |
And depending if it was a time release, you had a little, um, what do you call it?
link |
You get those at Ikea when you have to build everything.
link |
You know what I'm talking about.
link |
But like a big one or something?
link |
No, just a little one because it's a tiny little hole and you just got to click it to
link |
where it's supposed to go.
link |
And it depended on what the call was for and it was a timer.
link |
When you said like wheel, you mean like a little thing then is that, is that what we're
link |
No, I'm talking about the round itself.
link |
So you would put a fuse on top of the round.
link |
So you would unload the ammo and then you would put fuses on them and the fuses are
link |
on the top and they're like a little like a ice cream topper kind of thing.
link |
And you would spin those on.
link |
And then once they're on, depending if it's a time release or not, you would take this
link |
little thing and you would move it the top and that would, it's almost like a little
link |
So you're assembling a bullet?
link |
A very big one that goes up to my waist.
link |
This is very cool.
link |
And you're a fascinating person.
link |
So just that you still, even years later, have all this in your memory in some way.
link |
It's not all perfectly accurate and that's what irritates me though is because it bothers
link |
me when I can't remember things accurately, but I have a lot of, I've had a lot of memory
link |
issues and problems after like having too many hits to the head and.
link |
This is from earlier in childhood or later?
link |
The military did not help it.
link |
Where was the hits in the head in the military?
link |
Well, when you have a car, it'll go stuff beside your face like this and it shoots around.
link |
It gives you a concussive blast.
link |
Also there's new research being done.
link |
I'll find out exactly what it is, but there's new research that's being done that shows
link |
that if you're an artillery gunner and you stand within a certain range of that gun,
link |
you get the same amount of concussive blasts and there's a range.
link |
I had no idea, but you feel it when it goes off.
link |
Like it hurt, your whole body feels it.
link |
Your mind is fascinating because it's like literally the opposite of mine.
link |
One you're able to speak very quickly, very clearly, very sharply.
link |
I talk too fast and I'm really loud because of my hearing.
link |
No, that's perfect.
link |
I mean, I admire that very much.
link |
I can't do any of that.
link |
And you listen extremely well and you're extremely attentive and you have a good memory.
link |
So anyway, it's just fun, fun to watch you at, I can tell you were a great soldier and
link |
just all different aspects of it.
link |
But what the heck were we talking about?
link |
Build up to the deployment.
link |
How did we get to Texas?
link |
Because that was part of the build up to my deployment.
link |
And Lifi, you got to, did I feel good?
link |
What's the best part about shooting artillery?
link |
What's the thing that feels good?
link |
Well, the feeling of power.
link |
Gun is the best moment of, the highest moment of the feeling of power.
link |
Is it the whole process that you love or is there like when you actually shoot it?
link |
It's a beautiful thing to watch.
link |
To know that a gun can fire and it takes kind of a dance to make it work.
link |
There's something about that to me that just got my heart racing.
link |
When you actually shoot the round and you see it go and you hear it, it's unlike you
link |
You know, I've never felt another feeling.
link |
I've also never been in like an F18 or an F16 or like any, I've never been in anything
link |
And I've, you know, I've never, trying to think of something else that'd be comparable.
link |
I've never been in like a Formula One car.
link |
Those are the only things I can picture being that much for me because to shoot one of those
link |
and to know that you've done your job right means that you've helped.
link |
And that to me was really what it did it for me.
link |
When you hear your sergeant say, mission accomplished, target hit, tired, acquired,
link |
then you're like, that's a good feeling.
link |
Take a break, Lex.
link |
So live fire in Texas, we're in Texas by the way.
link |
Fort Worth or Fort Hood, one of them.
link |
So like it's, what is that close to a big major city?
link |
Do you remember visiting a city?
link |
We fly right into the tarmac and they're like, don't touch the snakes.
link |
And then they send you out to the field.
link |
Those are the only instructions.
link |
We went into a classroom and they're like, these are the animals that are in the wildlife
link |
If you see any of them, do not approach, do not go pee outside.
link |
Do not squat down.
link |
It is snake season people.
link |
And I was like pee and squat down.
link |
Why Texas and from like Canada, is it a simulation of Afghanistan?
link |
So you're getting, and that's the way the live fire was seen in artillery is like you're
link |
trying to simulate certain aspects of what you might actually see in Afghanistan.
link |
I mean, we, it looks like it's hot like it, you're out in the middle of nowhere.
link |
Very similar terrain.
link |
That's the first time we started to get to wear our tan boots and our tan, like our
link |
combat tan stuff before you couldn't wear that.
link |
So it gave us an opportunity to kind of break in, break in how we were going to be doing
link |
this, what it was going to look like, how the guns were going to work and all of those
link |
How do you go from there to being deployed?
link |
What was the next part of the journey?
link |
So then we go to Wainwright, Alberta, often called or referenced as Waincock, because
link |
It is a massive open space in Alberta, which most of Alberta is, and it's outside of a
link |
small town called Wainwright.
link |
And it is a field X training area for all of the Canadian military.
link |
And it's where you do live fire, but you also do workup training.
link |
So you go out there for a month or two, I think it is.
link |
I don't remember the exact time we were there because it was just, you sleep in a tent, you're
link |
in your cot, you're in like full mission mode.
link |
And you go outside and we did this operation called Operation Maple Leaf, I think it was.
link |
And you put on these little suits, they have haptic, you can feel when you're shot.
link |
And then there's a little camera, sorry, screen in the front of it, and it's got button options.
link |
And so it's to mimic if you get shot, it'll say gunshot wound, and then you have to choose,
link |
okay, do I do this or do I do this?
link |
And depending on your response, person dies or lives.
link |
And they have other people who aren't on a rotation for deployment come and act as the
link |
Taliban and attack you in the middle of the night.
link |
Is there a good understanding of the tactics that the Taliban used to attack?
link |
I mean, this may be fast forwards to our conversation a little bit, but is there predictable strategies
link |
on the other side that are being used in Afghanistan?
link |
Like suicide bombers, vehicle born IEDs, their standard way to hit people really was IEDs
link |
and vehicle born IEDs, suicide bombers, they'd put like backpacks full of an IED and then
link |
put like toys around it and then just be like, so they will conceal it certain ways and probably
link |
And women were a great way to get close to the soldiers because women seem nonthreatening.
link |
When you see a burqa walk up to you, you're not expecting an AK47 to roll out of that
link |
and then, or, you know, but there are great ways to get close.
link |
So, Wayne something?
link |
No, that's not how, Wayne Wright, let's go to Alberta.
link |
I mean, we don't have to go to Alberta, no one wants to.
link |
No, let's, in our minds, in our imagination, so, okay, so that's getting you closer to
link |
What was that like?
link |
I mean, are you getting anxious at this point?
link |
Is there a buildup?
link |
What are you thinking?
link |
Or is this just all part of the training?
link |
For me, it was more part of the training.
link |
I was excited to go because I did know that we were going to do some live fire.
link |
I did know that we were going to be doing more of the military type job I thought we
link |
were going to be doing because up until that point, I had just done training.
link |
So I was learning how to march and salute and who to salute and not salute.
link |
Like that was the focus of, that was my experience of the military.
link |
And then the next experience was sitting in a regiment, just working out a lot and going
link |
for breakfast a lot and drinking.
link |
Like that was, I was like, this is the army.
link |
So when I actually got to go to Wainwright, I got my first full taste of, okay, well,
link |
there's fire picket duty.
link |
So one person gets picked every night to, you know, do sentry.
link |
There's a little less sleep.
link |
You're eating out of a canteen now.
link |
You're drinking a canteen.
link |
You're when you're kit more, you're in your deployable kit.
link |
Now you're in your, you know, you're wearing your tack vest.
link |
You're getting ready to practice having plates on.
link |
You're having ammunition on you.
link |
You've got your weapon with you all the time.
link |
When you're on base and that kids say in Quebec, you're, you're just like an everyday job.
link |
Maybe you can paint a clear picture to me.
link |
When was there an understanding that you're actually getting deployed?
link |
Was it just a sense that you're getting deployed or was this officially told to you?
link |
I was officially told on graduation day, you're deploying in April with that kids.
link |
What happened is the reason that Vecchia unit needed more people.
link |
So they came to that and they picked five people.
link |
There was five English speaking people that went to Vecchia.
link |
It wasn't just myself.
link |
There was a couple other people I knew that were English speaking that got put on other
link |
guns within the regiment.
link |
I wasn't with any of them.
link |
We all kind of got split up.
link |
And so there was an understanding that we were going to always be deploying that next
link |
It was like 2009 and you're deploying.
link |
Whether you left in May or April, we were deploying because that was the rotation time.
link |
So each Canadian unit did between six and nine months.
link |
And then you knew right around that point, another base of individuals would then deploy.
link |
So you would go on these rotations.
link |
And so even when I was on my deployment then I was slated to go again the following year
link |
but towards the end of the year.
link |
So there was always a rotation.
link |
If you were in a combat arms unit and you were in one that was a deployable unit.
link |
So if you were from Edmonton, a PPCLI, which were the Princess Patricia's, which were their
link |
If you were RCR out of Petawawa, Ontario, you knew you were deploying.
link |
If you were at Vecchia, you knew you were deploying.
link |
There's combat arms bases and then there's like naval bases.
link |
I didn't know their deployment structure.
link |
I didn't know how they worked.
link |
I'm on the ground.
link |
I don't worry about the boats.
link |
So I didn't know how the Air Force deployed.
link |
I knew Vecchia was deploying in April, you were going, get ready.
link |
So you show up to Afghanistan.
link |
What is a combat arms unit looks like?
link |
What's the situation look like?
link |
How much chaos is there?
link |
How much clarity about mission is there?
link |
What are your feelings about the whole thing?
link |
So when you leave, the day you leave, we left Quebec, we got driven to the airport and then
link |
we walked on to the tarmac and we load our own bags and we got on a plane and it's just
link |
It's just, it's our plane, right?
link |
And you don't go right to Afghanistan.
link |
You go to a stopover point, which I don't know if I'm allowed to say where that is,
link |
So I just say it's somewhere overseas and you go there and you go there for a couple
link |
I think it's like a day or two and that's where you get like your kit.
link |
That's where you get your bulletproof plates for the first time and realize how heavy those
link |
fucking things are.
link |
It's where you get your weapon and your ammunition, your first few mags.
link |
It's where you get your helmet and your vests and you get everything that you need.
link |
While you're there, it's pretty nonchalant.
link |
It's your first time being in that kind of heat.
link |
So you just never stop sweating.
link |
The place we were in, it's just the second you got out of the shower, you were still
link |
wet after you got out.
link |
What the hell is happening?
link |
And I'm like, is this going to be like this in Afghanistan?
link |
I'm like, no, it's not humid there at all.
link |
I'm like, why is this so bad here?
link |
Like, it'll be fine.
link |
Don't worry about it.
link |
So and where we were there, it was kind of cute.
link |
We were like in a base, within a base and they had like turf and we had like ice cream
link |
and fruit and you could go get on a computer.
link |
You could go make calls.
link |
You had a real bed.
link |
It was very kind of okay for that point.
link |
And then you got all your stuff and then okay, we're rolling out, which is about a five hour
link |
Again, my experience with helicopters is mostly from another Arnold Schwarzenegger movie,
link |
I'm not, do you want me to say I've never seen it?
link |
I've never seen it, Lex.
link |
You feel better about yourself?
link |
You want to tell the audience the, all the excellent shows that you mentioned me offline
link |
that you watch instead, instead of platoon.
link |
This nine is Sex and the City.
link |
Was that more important than platoon?
link |
Oh no, I've never seen that.
link |
Don't put me in that category.
link |
Did you just put me in a box?
link |
I watched like Homeland.
link |
I watched, no, I watched like.
link |
I watched a lot of documentaries.
link |
I watched, I like to watch real, real things more than, than, than just film.
link |
I did a little bit of film stuff when I got back into Canada.
link |
And I was like, once you're, once you've seen how it's made, I'm like, I don't want to do
link |
I mean, I'm the same way as superhero movies.
link |
It doesn't, I want, I want, I want something closer to reality, but then movies like platoon
link |
reveal some deep aspect of reality without it.
link |
I did Superman, Man of Steel.
link |
You, you were, what do you mean you did?
link |
I was not a military expert, but I was a stunt expert.
link |
Even though I didn't actually have to do any stunts, it's just because I had previous
link |
military experience and they were going to have me as an extra, as a military person.
link |
But if you have previous experience, they have to make it as like a stunt role, like
link |
so you get paid more.
link |
So I got to sit at a desk and I was in that, I was in that like, you see me like for like
link |
So what you're saying is you were the mastermind behind that movie?
link |
For the entire thing.
link |
You're so accurate.
link |
Your representation of me is just fantastic.
link |
The combat arms unit in Afghanistan, the ice cream machine, what, like when you actually
link |
get closer and closer to the mission, what, when does that happen?
link |
When I, you know, got to where we were before we were leaving to get on the plane.
link |
I don't really, really, I don't think I realized what the hell I was doing, truthfully.
link |
Like you're asking me all these like, what did you feel?
link |
How do you just like, when I really think about it, if I sit there and really think
link |
about it, I was deploying, I was aware, I knew what I was going to do.
link |
I knew my job, but once we actually stepped onto that herk to leave to get into the Afghan
link |
airspace, I think that's when it hit me.
link |
I think it's smacked me in the face so hard.
link |
And that's when the overwhelming just reality was that, oh fuck, oh, oh, oh.
link |
So, when they said, make weapons ready, put the barrels of the ground, put your helmets
link |
on, that's when they start flying tactically, which means they're going between the mountains.
link |
That means we're going to land soon.
link |
Which means if you're flying like this, it's because RPGs can hit you.
link |
So that was my first moment of, oh, I could like just be shot down right now.
link |
Like I couldn't, I didn't grasp it.
link |
I was, how old was I?
link |
That's why I feel bad when I'm trying to explain to you because it's hard because I don't know
link |
that I actually did grasp it until I was in the air getting ready to land in Kandahar.
link |
What was the first time you heard bullets, enemy bullets or enemy explosions?
link |
Well, when you're in Kandahar, when you're at calf, you're fairly insulated away from
link |
You would hear stuff go off or you would hear the rocket sirens would go off.
link |
So you would hear them and everyone just kind of just got down on the ground and just waited
link |
for the all clear and then got back up.
link |
I didn't hear any actual live fire until I got to the fob.
link |
It was more just a lot of noise.
link |
You would hear a lot of helicopters, a lot of planes going in and out of the base.
link |
So there was that sense you could feel the ground shake when they took off, but there
link |
was that sense, you know, things were going around, things were happening.
link |
You just weren't far enough, you were not close enough to the edges of calf to see it.
link |
The fob is a forward observation base, which is a small little base out in the middle of
link |
And that's specific to artillery that's in general just an observation base from which
link |
For infantry to go in and out of, for armor to go in and out of, special ops go in and
link |
They'll stop there.
link |
They'll go out of whatever, then they'll go out.
link |
So it's a forward observation base is used essentially to have eyes in that area without
link |
having to be doing patrols every five seconds.
link |
But there's not, is it like, is there like medics there, is it stopped?
link |
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
link |
So it was actual base?
link |
I was, it's a, I don't call it an actual base.
link |
These sleep intents and cots and it is the walls are this mesh material that are filled
link |
with gravel and that's the walls.
link |
And then you have towers.
link |
You had five, I think we had five towers because the Americans ran four and we ran one.
link |
And so it was an American fob.
link |
It's called fob ramrod.
link |
And there was a, whether I'm Marines, no, I think they were the hundred and first.
link |
They read of their, this is where I get dicey because I was moved a lot.
link |
So when people are like, who are you with?
link |
I'm like, I know what their patches looked like.
link |
I don't know the full ins and outs.
link |
So I'm working on getting that back so that I can tell it accurately because I believe
link |
it deserves that type of respect, but that being said, I'm still trying to wrap my brain
link |
around all of this.
link |
You almost have to go back and do like research to understand the full details of all the
link |
things you were experiencing.
link |
And so I reached out to actually a bunch of people even before I wrote the book and I
link |
didn't get a lot of answers.
link |
Well, once I did Jocko, all the people have reached out to me and were like, Hey, now
link |
I'm like, called you.
link |
So now I'm worried.
link |
That's why I'm doing the rewrite is I'm working on making sure that things are exact.
link |
And so there was infantry units going in and out of that fob.
link |
And it was a really tiny fob.
link |
It was run by the Americans.
link |
And then there was a tiny little corner that was the Canadian artillery unit.
link |
And the Americans, normally it's Americans shooting for Americans, Canadians shooting
link |
The rest of the regiment that deployed.
link |
So Bravo and Charlie, they were at Canadian fobs, Massumgaard and another one.
link |
And these were huge fobs.
link |
Where's was this tiny, like three kilometer around place?
link |
And we had this tiny little subsection of it.
link |
And the rest was so it was like this and then all American here.
link |
And when we got there, we landed, the guns were already there.
link |
So you ripped out the unit before you.
link |
So those guys were just leaving and we were just replacing them so that we knew the guns,
link |
they were Canadian guns.
link |
We understood, you know, how to run those, that was fine.
link |
When we got there, though, we had come in on Chinook and Chinooks are super loud.
link |
And they're like, we're hearing protection.
link |
They don't, you know, no, this is not reality.
link |
Like this is why I'm partially deaf now.
link |
Like this is not reality.
link |
So sorry to take a tangent, but do you usually wear ear protection in any aspects of warfare
link |
of this whole process?
link |
You wear comms, like you have a calm on like and a radio if you're outside the wire.
link |
So comms, is that like a Bluetooth headset?
link |
Yes, it's a Bluetooth headset.
link |
No, like from Nike or like I bought a pod.
link |
Maybe Apple was involved at some point.
link |
This equipment looked like it was from World War II.
link |
So it's comms, but is that having ear protection?
link |
Like, no, no, and I didn't wear them.
link |
That's just what some people wore.
link |
People when you were as low as me, like we weren't privy to conversation.
link |
Like we were just told what to do and you do it.
link |
So when you're doing like on the OP tower, you have a radio you pick up and you call
link |
in and then you put the radio down.
link |
But for hearing protection, I mean, I would put in earplugs, but those things are so violently
link |
loud that earplugs, they don't do it justice.
link |
I feel like when you go shooting, there's certain kinds of earplugs that you, it blocks
link |
out the gun, like certain kinds of sounds associated with guns and you can still hear
link |
other types of stuff.
link |
So the ones they issued us were these big things that had like a headpiece like here,
link |
but you have to wear your helmet when you're firing.
link |
So you can't have both on.
link |
So how much are you aware of the logistics of the whole thing?
link |
That's always fascinating with warfare.
link |
Like in terms of setting up, you mentioned gravel and the fobs, like setting all those
link |
Were you seeing any of this or again, it's a 19 year old kind of just.
link |
Well, it's not that I was oblivious.
link |
That's the one thing I would say I wasn't.
link |
I was, I'm very aware of my surroundings.
link |
That's something that's always been taught to me from a very early age because I travel
link |
a lot with my dad in the truck.
link |
And so my dad would be like, you're going to go into that bathroom and I'm going to
link |
watch you come out and you're going to watch everyone around you because people get kidnapped.
link |
Like that's just the reality.
link |
I was always very paranoid.
link |
So, so you're paying attention to surroundings.
link |
But the Bob was already built up when we got there.
link |
This is already like well established bases already like there's, there's established
link |
And that is one of the first times you've heard actual fire.
link |
That was like the, I mean, I'd heard it on the, when we, when we shoot and when we,
link |
you know, zero in weapons and we do all that stuff, but I had never heard it, heard it
link |
And then you would see the, the guys, the Americans would roll out every day and go
link |
on patrol and come back, go back, back.
link |
And so you would see them, you would hear them, they would tell the stories, those
link |
But I never experienced it because we never, we never got attacked like our base never
link |
We were really lucky that way.
link |
There were other ones around us that were getting hit, but we weren't, we weren't getting
link |
So we were very fortunate.
link |
At least we didn't get hit when I was there.
link |
I believe the entry got, there was an attempt.
link |
There was an attempt at some point in a past, but I, I wasn't privy to that.
link |
But we were in the OP towers.
link |
So we had to do our own security, but because we were such a small subset of Canadians and
link |
we always had to have people running the guns and ready to run the guns at all times.
link |
We only had to man one tower.
link |
So you would do four hour shifts with a fire team partner in the tower, depending on whatever,
link |
but you would do it every day.
link |
So I would look out into the, the rest of Afghanistan at that opportunity.
link |
Otherwise it was just like your walls.
link |
What do they look like?
link |
Just the full landscape?
link |
Where I was, there was mountains in the distance, it was just very sandy, very flat.
link |
And there was a couple of small compounds on the outside.
link |
It wasn't a lot to look at.
link |
There was a long road that you knew that got hit all the time.
link |
There wasn't a lot to look at.
link |
Such a strange place to be the center of superpowers over the decades.
link |
Like, and, and the fact that the populace, the civilians are almost completely clueless
link |
to the full history of things in terms of globally, the geopolitics of it all.
link |
Yeah, well, if you look at the location of it, right, on a map, it makes more sense.
link |
You can wrap your brain around it.
link |
But I met plenty of people who had never even seen a picture of themselves when I was
link |
So, I mean, how much more are they going to understand if they don't know what even
link |
You tell a small story of taking a picture of a girl and showing it to her, an Afghani
link |
We were, I was with the British at that time, and we were on that operation that gets
link |
highlighted quite a bit.
link |
And we had stopped and we, the icon radios were pinging, and icon radios are a radio
link |
that we have an interpreter on that the Taliban, basically we can hear what they're saying.
link |
It's us tapped in.
link |
When it's really clear, they're close.
link |
When it's scatty and it's, they're far enough away.
link |
Normally, you know, they're not planning an attack, although you never know, really.
link |
And we, we were going door to door, kind of like what they're doing now.
link |
And we were pulling people out of their houses and we knew there were, there was people in
link |
there that were active Taliban and we knew the icons were pinging.
link |
When we got in there, they had hidden all the women and kids and locked them inside
link |
the house because often nowadays women, the women, they would hide things on them that
link |
they shouldn't have because no one would be ever there to search them because there isn't
link |
a lot of women on the front lines, but I got borrowed to go specifically search women and
link |
So they had me and one of the little girls kind of snuck out and was kind of sitting
link |
near me and I was eating something.
link |
And I had like these little, these little candies that are called little sweeties.
link |
The British have them in the ration packs.
link |
They're good though.
link |
And she saw me eating them.
link |
And so I gave them to her and then her brother came over and slapped her upside the head
link |
and took them from her.
link |
So then I just went over and slapped him upside the head and just pointed my gun at her while
link |
she ate them all because I was like, no, like you can have these.
link |
I mean, I'm going to stand here and make sure you do.
link |
And I remember asking, can I take a picture with her?
link |
Can I take a picture with her?
link |
And she was very confused and when you look at the photo, you see her face, she's very
link |
She's very stunned.
link |
And it wasn't my camera.
link |
It was my officer's camera.
link |
It was a hot pink, like fluorescent pink camera.
link |
So I pulled this like huge pink thing and I'm like, let's take a picture.
link |
And so she stood there and took a picture, but then she grabbed the camera because I flipped
link |
it and showed it to her and her eyes got huge and she grabbed it and she ran inside.
link |
And they're like, oh, that's gone forever.
link |
Like that's, that's over for you.
link |
And then she came out and she kind of snuck out and I went in and grabbed it and the mom
link |
lifted up her burqa and was showing me that she like shaped her legs to be more Western.
link |
And I was just, at that moment, I don't know that I could have realized how much that moment
link |
affected me, how much, how much that moment would affect me later on in my life until
link |
it's been later on in my life.
link |
There's little like glimmers like that in, in parts of the world that are basically you're
link |
taking away everything from the populace, like freedoms and so on.
link |
And when they, when you see that glimmer of humanity, like, yeah, shaved legs or, or like
link |
using technology for the first time, it's magic or like food and being presented with
link |
certain kinds of foods that you've never tried.
link |
I mean, you want to see true like joy of discovery is you bring basically the American supermarket,
link |
anything from it to most parts of the world.
link |
And they, I just, I mean, I remember even, I mean, we weren't like in poverty in Russia,
link |
just poor, but just the supermarket was full of joy.
link |
I, I thought I could just die happy in an American supermarket when I first saw it.
link |
And how old were you when you came here?
link |
Did you speak English?
link |
Yeah, not, well, I thought I was, I never was good at languages.
link |
So I, it was very much like, why would I need to learn another language?
link |
It was that attitude is very like, doesn't, I don't, well, no, I think culturally in,
link |
not in America, but everywhere else in the world, it's constantly kind of seen, it's
link |
a good thing to do to learn other languages, because especially English, because it's like,
link |
that's the language of the world.
link |
And I just thought like, I don't need English to discover the beauty of the world.
link |
Like what, it just doesn't like, I enjoy life.
link |
I enjoy, I don't remember what else I enjoyed in life, but math, like, why do I need English
link |
for this, so that kind of attitude got me in a lot of trouble when I came here, because
link |
You were reluctant?
link |
Yeah, but also just couldn't speak well.
link |
And when you move 13 years old, middle school, you get made fun of a lot, you get bullied
link |
and all those kinds of things, which in retrospect is a very positive thing, because it makes
link |
I thought being Russian would make, be like hard enough.
link |
Well, me, everyone is different.
link |
I mean, the part of the Russian thing is, is kind of, you know, I'm joking, because
link |
if you know me, I admire being hard.
link |
I admire fighting and these kinds of things, right, these, what would you call them?
link |
Struggle in all of its forms, martial arts, wrestling, all those kinds of things.
link |
But I'm all, ultimately, like I'm so much about love, like I'm clearly sensitive to
link |
the world in some weird genetic way, that it was important for me to harden up when
link |
I, when I came here and I was in love with people and it's like, and everybody's being
link |
And it's like, what, that, it's like, it's a little like, like slap, like, okay, like,
link |
it's not, like life is not often fair.
link |
And then that's one for me personally, everybody has, has different journeys of hardship that
link |
are much, much more difficult.
link |
Like your story is much more difficult is, you know, I started to read a lot.
link |
It's like, something happens, some kind of challenge where you start to think about the
link |
world, start to think about yourself.
link |
That can ultimately create really interesting minds.
link |
It can break some people, it can create interesting minds and it's ultimately your choice.
link |
But those people are weak and then they just need to be weeded out.
link |
I thought we talked about this, you know, the strong will survive, the weak will die
link |
Now, now you're talking Russian to me.
link |
I'm not speaking Russian.
link |
I'm just giving solid life advice.
link |
Just be harder and then everyone will be fine.
link |
That's your inner David Goggins coming out real quick here.
link |
And then I was just explaining to you that the way it is run, you're going to love this.
link |
When we walked up to those tents for the first time, the people that were there before
link |
us left us a noose.
link |
I have a photo of it.
link |
Like hanging from the tent, like at the front of the tent, like welcome.
link |
I feel like you were also mentioning like the dark humor that is a basically a funny
link |
It was funny at first.
link |
That's pretty funny.
link |
It was funny during the time.
link |
Now when I look back at it, I was like, come on.
link |
I mean, I get it because they had already been there and like so afterwards I can see how
link |
Now with like the suicide epidemic in the veteran community now, I'm like, I don't post
link |
Doesn't that dark humor still somehow help even when you're considering suicide?
link |
Doesn't that some of it somehow?
link |
It's like you're not hiding it.
link |
It's like humor is one of the way to reveal the reality of abuse, of suffering.
link |
If you look at, there's this photo that generates around right around suicide prevention month,
link |
which is September.
link |
And it's always like a photo of like Robin Williams and Bourdain and all of these other
link |
individuals who were comedians who all took their lives and they're all smiling.
link |
And they're like, this is the face of depression.
link |
There's a way our brains work where humor is a necessary part of survival, whether it's
link |
used for joyous things or it's used for ways to cope through life.
link |
For me and the military, humor was one of the things that helped get me through.
link |
And it still does to this day, frankly, because humor, humor makes some of the horrific things
link |
I say not seem so horrific.
link |
And people can digest it rather than being like, you need to be locked up somewhere.
link |
And that's why I mean, one of the aspects of Russian humor, there's a darkness to it
link |
because through it reverberates all the millions of people who died.
link |
And it seems like the only way to make sense of it is to joke about it.
link |
Because if you don't, it'll break you.
link |
Something like that.
link |
Also, humor just seems to be the highest form of us humans and the human experience.
link |
It just seems to somehow accumulate the full thing, the absurdity of it, the unfairness
link |
of it, because ultimately all of the suffering is like it's all just apes fighting for power
link |
and love and somehow torturing each other in the process.
link |
Hello podcast listener, Lex here.
link |
Quick intermission to say that some of the names in the following story have been silenced
link |
out to protect their privacy.
link |
The story of witnessing, I think you're first, somebody you met, somebody you saw, somebody
link |
you began to be close with, his life, him dying.
link |
Can you tell the story of it?
link |
That's no problem.
link |
I will tell you that I am going to leave some of the names out of the people because they
link |
have reached out and asked that I do such.
link |
I've also been informed of other things I forgot that happened during the thing that
link |
were way worse than I thought.
link |
So I'll try to add those in because that's new information to me because my brain has
link |
But I've been told, which is good because it's better detail.
link |
So we were doing a movement that morning and we were going from compound to compound.
link |
I was never told what we were doing.
link |
I knew what my job was.
link |
I didn't know the operational overview.
link |
I didn't know who we were looking for.
link |
I wasn't there for that.
link |
My job was specifically to look after the women and children and to provide support if need
link |
And when you have certain people, i.e. the bomb dog handler and the bomb dog, and then
link |
you have the medics and then you have a female searcher, there's only one of those in each
link |
unit or if there's even one in each unit.
link |
I got passed between units so that they could have access to me for both.
link |
And we were kind of sitting and we were waiting for the all clear to move.
link |
And at that time, the compound wall I was leaning up against, I had my back up against.
link |
I wasn't facing the direction where it actually blew up.
link |
I had my back to it and I had happened to turn and look to the left.
link |
And on the right hand side, across the road of where we were leaned up against, was another
link |
compound two stories high, people inside a sniper on the roof and a spotter.
link |
There was a handful of us on this wall and in front of me, there was a road, the road
link |
went straight, that compound's here, there's another road here on the right hand side in
link |
And then this road went along here and this was a wide open space, just a huge...
link |
You hate those because it's too much space.
link |
It's like fishing a barrel.
link |
You don't want to be in that field because there's too much line of sight.
link |
Line of sight could be IEDs, it could be anything.
link |
And so when I was leaning up against the wall, we had sent a couple of people ahead to go
link |
and clear the road so that we could all go along it and then clear the grape up off to
link |
the left hand side.
link |
We were doing that because they used those locations to put IEDs so that when you're
link |
going to search it, it's a better chance of you blowing into a million pieces, essentially
link |
why they love that.
link |
Put bombs in small places, send people into small places, small places go boom, they
link |
So we were just kind of sitting and waiting and then I happened to turn and I was looking
link |
in that direction and I heard the ground shake before I even realized what I was seeing with
link |
my own eyes, the ground shook and I saw a big piece of a body.
link |
I think it was the torso just kind of fly through the air and land into the field.
link |
And as soon as that happened, all hell broke loose.
link |
It was like the, they were sitting and watching and waiting and they do that.
link |
And I say they, I mean the Taliban, they do that, they love that because then they can
link |
record it for propaganda and they can use it against us and they just love being able
link |
to take our people out.
link |
And we had the interpreter sitting beside me and he had the icon radio on and as soon
link |
as the blast went off, I heard just the scream of, I heard it and I knew what that meant
link |
but I couldn't, I didn't understand what was about to happen.
link |
I couldn't, I couldn't wrap my brain around what was about to happen because I had never
link |
been outside the wire.
link |
And people are like, people say to me now, they're like, no, no, there's no way that
link |
There's no way that she was involved in that and then that and then in that and then in
link |
Well, let me explain.
link |
I was being passed around to units.
link |
I was with a ton of different people.
link |
I had no comms and I was just being told where to go.
link |
And I just happened to be like a shit hit the fan magnet, it felt like.
link |
And then I found out later, it was not just me, it was all of us were getting it.
link |
So that made me feel better because then I was like, well, I have a lot of survivor's
link |
That's like a thing that's still stuck with me.
link |
I've worked through a lot of shit, but survivor's guilt, that's a big one for me.
link |
Certain food is a big one for me.
link |
So like chicken with skin on it.
link |
Oh, just because of the biology of death.
link |
Well, when you hold people's bodies in your hands with no gloves on, you know what that
link |
Well, when you touch raw meat again, it's the same thing.
link |
That's what that feels like when it's a dying or dead body.
link |
Well, my friend was blown into a million pieces, so I just had pieces of him.
link |
So there was no, there was no differentiator of like, this was his thigh or this was his
link |
torso or there was like, there was none of that.
link |
There was only one instance with the boot, but what I, at that point, we had been in
link |
We had been taking some rounds, but it was more like, take a round, you know, get hit
link |
and then we duck into a compound and we would set up and then we'd be firing.
link |
I wasn't, I wasn't really involved in a lot of the firefights until after this.
link |
After that, the rest of the week, I was like, I was angry and I wanted them all to go and
link |
I wanted to be in every position to take them out myself.
link |
So I put myself in every position.
link |
So I made sure I was on the roof.
link |
I made sure I was there.
link |
I made sure, hey, you need something.
link |
I'll fucking run it.
link |
I don't know if I die anymore because as soon as that happened, my light switch went off.
link |
It didn't matter anymore to me.
link |
Can you go through what happens?
link |
So are you hearing these screams?
link |
So the ID went off and what had happened was they put an ID inside of a grape hut and the
link |
grape hut has rectangular wall, rectangular holes in the wall and there's just like one
link |
door and it's this tall mud hut with just all these like holes in it.
link |
And they had put an ID underneath a pile of sticks and had a metal detector.
link |
I've never seen, I think other countries have them, but I've only ever seen them use it.
link |
And that's how we were kind of detecting if there was an ID.
link |
We must have hit it, the sticks or something and set it off.
link |
And it just, it was over.
link |
There's no way he felt anything.
link |
And then there was another guy at the door bent down on one knee and he was facing and
link |
kind of watching for and then the blasted him on this side.
link |
And so it took him out and pulled his kid off, pulled his helmet off, pulled everything
link |
off, fucked him all up.
link |
But it was in a contained area and he was in the doorway up and out.
link |
Can you explain what an IED is and how does it work?
link |
They're improvised explosive devices.
link |
They can be used pretty much out of anything to make anything.
link |
So garbage, when we got to Afghanistan, they did the IED meeting with us.
link |
They're like, these are what we're finding that they would show us diffused IEDs.
link |
So they would see those big blue drums filled with gasoline buried in the ground.
link |
You would see a wire.
link |
It would go to a pressure plate.
link |
You hit the pressure plate.
link |
That would hit that and it would go.
link |
You would see IEDs, some of them were ridiculous.
link |
The engineering that went into some of these was hilarious because they were thinking.
link |
They were thinking to use everything they could.
link |
There was a cigarette pack they had used.
link |
They lined the inside with tinfoil and when you stepped on the tinfoil, it had a piece
link |
of wire and it was enough of a spark to set off a line of batteries that we had thrown
link |
out that were all dead.
link |
When you fuse them all together, there was enough juice to make it go.
link |
Then they would attach that to like phosphorus or gasoline or whatever they could that would
link |
They would use, yeah, that's why you never kick garbage on the ground.
link |
You'll never see me kick something on the ground.
link |
You'll see me walk around it always.
link |
If I ever see a pile of rocks or something that looks like it shouldn't be there, I
link |
won't walk near it even now because they use that pile of rocks to remind people there's
link |
We don't know what that means, but we know that something's there.
link |
Very often, they would use anything, garbage, wires, we had to burn everything for a reason.
link |
It's so terrifying for the source of death to be like little parts of the environment
link |
and then people that don't look like they're not dressed as soldiers, like civilians and
link |
like regular because then when you have to come back or even there, you're just surrounded
link |
by danger and then you distrust everything essentially.
link |
That's the problem and that's why you have such PTSD issues with the soldiers we have
link |
now because you're in the environment in which it's very similar.
link |
So there's this one IED.
link |
So this one IED, I still don't know what it was, went off, body flew, the guy at the door,
link |
He was all broken and bleeding and a mess.
link |
At that point, the radio started going crazy.
link |
I could hear the guys yelling and screaming, trying to figure it out and then you could
link |
hear the numbers being called, KAA, number, number, number, number.
link |
I don't know anybody's service number.
link |
I don't know what's going on.
link |
Next thing you know, mortar rounds start coming down and live fire starts happening and I'm
link |
like, holy fuck, things are popping off.
link |
I remember just looking at it and being like, we need to go now and I just got this.
link |
I was like, we're going and they're like hold on burns and I'm like, we're fucking going.
link |
I wasn't dealing with it well and they're like, all right, all right, go, go, go, go.
link |
So we went and I helped out with that to other individual, kind of held him down, started
link |
doing medic work on him and he just kept saying, where's, where's, where's, he was in such
link |
I've never seen somebody's eyeball so big in my life.
link |
He's like, where's, where's, where's, he's good, buddy, he's good, he's good.
link |
Picture like a super thick Scottish accent though, because these guys were just, oh,
link |
and when they talk fast, it's even worse.
link |
And then so I ran over and we jumped down into the ditch along the side of the road
link |
because the road hadn't been cleared and we're running through these tall, they look like
link |
cannabis plants, but they're not, but it just, it's just very thick bush.
link |
And I felt like I was running in slow motion.
link |
So if you picture one of your video games where like the tunnel vision and you're just,
link |
you can hear your breathing is like that and you're running and you can't move fast enough
link |
and you're like trying to get there.
link |
And we hit the road and the rounds are coming down and mortars are coming down and they're
link |
like, okay, on three run.
link |
So we run on three and we run into the compound, I mean, into the great putt and I remember
link |
looking around and very seriously going, where is he?
link |
Just genuinely asking, I think it was been messaging me and he's been incredible.
link |
He's one of the best soldiers I've ever served with.
link |
He was a higher up, so he was running part of this.
link |
He's messaged me and he was giving me some information and he's like, I was in there
link |
And he goes, I remember because you handed me the boot and because I walked over and
link |
I, all the rounds were like, we were being shot at mortars were coming down, but it was
link |
this slow motion and I remember walking over to the hole in the ground and seeing his boot
link |
in the ground, but it was, his leg was still hanging like, but just below his knee was
link |
still in it, but the boot was perfectly laced up, like the boot was fine.
link |
And I just, I held it and I turned and I looked at the guys and I was like, we could reuse
link |
Now, that wasn't even, what is that?
link |
Was that actually an intelligent attempt at humor or was it some kind of deeply lost,
link |
like you were completely just lost?
link |
I think my brain broke.
link |
I think my, that's the moment I call my life switch went off.
link |
Did you understand that he was dead at that point?
link |
Like intellectually, you were just something that just broke.
link |
Like, it just broke, it just shattered.
link |
I felt it happen, felt, I didn't feel, I didn't feel anything, it just broke.
link |
And at that moment, because later there's some anger almost at that moment, none of
link |
I couldn't comprehend what happened.
link |
I knew he wasn't there anymore because they looked at me and said, what's here is here?
link |
We're grabbing pieces we need to fucking move.
link |
And so I handed the boot over, they took it, and then I started just grabbing anything
link |
out of the walls, because those little rectanglers just had flesh hanging from it.
link |
And I didn't have my gloves on, because I only used them to search.
link |
And so you want to bring everything back like this is what even if they're dead, do
link |
you want to save those you served with?
link |
Yeah, because they deserve that.
link |
They don't deserve to have a piece of them drug behind a truck for propaganda.
link |
It's not, it's not fair.
link |
What are the others, I mean, was there just a focus on mission or was there a panic?
link |
No panic with these guys.
link |
These guys were the most switched on motherfuckers I've ever seen in my life.
link |
We started grabbing and remind me, he said, you know, you, that's not, he goes, when people
link |
say that's the worst part of your day.
link |
That wasn't even the worst part of your day.
link |
Do you remember when you handed me the bag of intestines?
link |
Now I do, though, thank you for that.
link |
So there's parts you don't even, they're just not, they don't register, because I had some
link |
people contact me and be like, you didn't tell it, right?
link |
And war is subjective and war is from your perspective and war is messy and horrific
link |
and war is graphic and violent and painful.
link |
Your brain remembers what it wants to remember and your brain allows you to remember what
link |
it allows you to remember.
link |
And there's reasons that you don't remember everything.
link |
And so we were getting, we were really getting hit, we were getting, it was bad.
link |
And some of the guys, machine gunners that come up to do cover fire.
link |
And I know we were calling in for air support to come pick up the guys because they had
link |
to go and we, we just collected everything we could, but I did remember screaming like,
link |
we didn't get them all.
link |
We didn't get them all.
link |
There's no way we got them all.
link |
And I remember one of the guys looking at me and be like, we got him, we got him.
link |
I'm like, we didn't fucking get him.
link |
We didn't get him.
link |
We're like, no, we got him.
link |
And I couldn't say it enough.
link |
And so I grabbed as much as I could.
link |
I, I, I slung one of their weapons and it was just a twisted heap.
link |
And I had his helmet, someone else's helmet in my arm.
link |
And then I had my weapon in front of me and I was carrying it.
link |
And then we, we piled everything we had onto a stretcher.
link |
Those things are super fucking flimsy anyway.
link |
And there was a couple of guys in front of us and there was a couple behind me and I
link |
was kind of in the middle.
link |
And we, we said, okay, we're just going to have to run.
link |
We're going to have to fucking run the road.
link |
We're going to have to run it.
link |
There's a chance it.
link |
And that was the closest, well, that was, I guess not the closest, but it felt like
link |
it was the closest I could hear the, the whiz of the rounds going by me.
link |
It was a weird noise when they're coming at you than when you're leap.
link |
They're leaving you.
link |
And so they, that slowed everything down for me.
link |
And then one of the guys accidentally dropped the edge of the stretcher and everything fell
link |
off into the ditch.
link |
And then we had to go back down and get it back up.
link |
And so we kept running and we finally got back into the compound that that sniper was
link |
sitting off on the right hand side and we got all in there.
link |
And I know the, I think said there was two flights.
link |
I only thought there was one, but apparently there was two flights.
link |
So went on one, his body went on one.
link |
And then I think, I think he said went on the other.
link |
And then they took off and then when they leave though, they rain hell down on anything
link |
they can see on the ground.
link |
And that is a beautiful sight because they had mortar rounds coming down and it just,
link |
it was getting really, really bad.
link |
And then as soon as the Black Oaks took off, all of a sudden it just stopped and went quiet.
link |
Like deafening quiet.
link |
And we were sitting inside the compound and I, one of the medics looked at me and you
link |
could see, and I still do it now and I, I'm working on not doing it, but I do it when
link |
I get really overwhelmed because I didn't have any gloves on.
link |
I had blood over my hands and just like body and stuff.
link |
So he came over and he just gave me like sanitizer and I started rubbing.
link |
And so I rub, I do this when I'm stressed, I'll rub my hands.
link |
And I still can't, I still can't do, I still can't eat food with skin on it.
link |
And I can't like, like salmon and stuff, like I can't, I can't touch it.
link |
And like if I'm making meat at home, like for my husband and my son, like I have like
link |
meat gloves and then I have like a fork and a knife and I'm like cutting it, like I never
link |
So there's something almost like the texture of the biology of a human flesh that just,
link |
that's at the level of, that's the level of your trauma.
link |
And it's been, I mean, it's 2021, this was an O9.
link |
And I've worked on this like, and I mean, I've been in like treatment religiously just to
link |
be able to keep me alive for this, this decade.
link |
And so it's not like, it's like, oh, I've never, you never even tried to get better.
link |
It's like, I never used to leave my house.
link |
I used to call people that looked like that horrific names in public.
link |
I used to want to kill people on a regular basis.
link |
I'm a fairly happy individual now.
link |
What about, you're talking about sort of skin and parts and, but there's also just the fact
link |
that we're mortal and there's somebody close to you who dies.
link |
So you watch, walk up and then never come back out again?
link |
It's like you're facing mortality in a very real way.
link |
And in a way that's not the same as somebody dying from cancer in a hospital, although
link |
it has echoes of that because that's also absurd and like, it doesn't feel like there's
link |
justice to it in any kind of way.
link |
But it's so sudden, like, have you been able to make sense of that, of your feelings about
link |
Like how do you feel about it?
link |
Or is everything just shrouded in this like trauma that you're not able to just feel for
link |
the loss of a human being, like mourn the loss of a human being?
link |
I think I had, when I realized he wasn't there, when I realized that he, that was what was
link |
left of him, I found out afterwards there was other parts that were outside and went
link |
I think he said went back and they got, they ended up getting the rest of him.
link |
So that made me happy because I just found this out this week.
link |
So that means you have a feeling like you still feel like parts of him were left behind.
link |
On the ramp ceremony, when I lost my mind, literally, I lost my mind and I was screaming
link |
that he wasn't all in there.
link |
I'm happy now knowing that he was, but I held on to that for 10 years.
link |
Yeah this, yeah, the sandbags, like it's the bulk of the weight, it's not from human
link |
He was a young kid too.
link |
It was, I think it was his first deployment as well, like he was a young kid.
link |
And he was just, just going to clear the road for the rest of us, right?
link |
Like not, like, you know you're in war and you know that you're outside the wire and
link |
you know things could happen.
link |
You understand that to the extent you can understand that.
link |
When it's happening, it's something very different.
link |
Also maybe you can correct me, but there's something much more like brutal about an IED.
link |
Versus like a bullet.
link |
Because a bullet, you still, watching somebody close to you die from a bullet, you still
link |
get the basic humanity.
link |
So IED basically converted a human being into sort of parts, biological parts.
link |
Yeah, I mean I don't, that's tough.
link |
It's tough because it's like, because it's hard for you to remember them as a human.
link |
You remember them as parts.
link |
For me, that's how I remember him.
link |
I would like to, I have a picture that I post every year about him.
link |
I see that, but I don't put two and two to get, does that make sense?
link |
So I even, I listened to your story and, you know, thank you for sharing it first of all.
link |
It's not my, it's, well, I'm just the one to tell it, I was just involved.
link |
One set of eyes on this particular human being, but even I get angry.
link |
I can't tell if it's exhaustion or anger.
link |
I'm sorry, I look always exhausted.
link |
Oh, that's okay, you're into robotics, isn't that like your guy's this thing?
link |
You guys are just always working on tech?
link |
I think because I feel so much for the world, I just don't do, we were talking about resting
link |
bitch face earlier.
link |
I just don't feel the need to maintain all the effort of the musculature for presenting
link |
myself to you visually.
link |
So I just focus on the feeling and then let the face show whatever the hell it shows.
link |
Can you just talk through your feelings of what you remember?
link |
So after that operation with the British, I went back to the Canadians and I didn't go
link |
back as even remotely close to who I was when I left.
link |
And that was really troublesome for a lot of people around me because the level of anger
link |
and hate that came out of me was palpable when I just walked by.
link |
I got shockingly quiet.
link |
You understand how you're learning.
link |
That'd be terrified if you were quiet.
link |
And I don't know if hate and anger do that justice.
link |
I don't know another word, but I don't think those two words do it justice to the extent
link |
that I was feeling.
link |
I got to a point when I got attacked by a woman with some scissors, the idea crossed
link |
my mind, I could bootstomp her to death and not feel anything about it in front of her,
link |
all of her family and her kids.
link |
Was it more like just not recognizing the basic humanity or was it legit hatred?
link |
It was legit hatred, but also I no longer saw those people as humans.
link |
It took one event and when that happened, the rest of the operation, that was echoed
link |
in the way I was to those people.
link |
And to what level can you see those people as human?
link |
So this is where, well, like this is where Jaco shut down.
link |
I still think I'm right.
link |
There's a dire straight song called Brothers in Arms and actually, anyway, we're fools
link |
to make war on our brothers in arms.
link |
And I brought that up to Jaco because it's humans on both sides.
link |
But he said, not in Iraq.
link |
To him, he's like, no, that's the enemy.
link |
These are people who use the civilians.
link |
They rape, they torture, they'll do anything and they put evil onto the world.
link |
And then it's like, so they're stood on at that moment, like these two were humans and
link |
it's politicians waging war and it's kids on both sides.
link |
But then Jaco was like, no.
link |
So can you carry both things with you as a soldier?
link |
I think when I was a soldier, I could only carry one thing with me.
link |
I think my perspective has changed drastically, but not because I've lost the reality that
link |
they are the enemy, but I've gained my humanity back again.
link |
And that's what I lost when I was there.
link |
I lost all humanity.
link |
I lost all hope for humanity.
link |
When he says the Taliban or like when he was in Iraq, but for me, the Taliban are evil.
link |
I still hold a spot of hatred for them that could set this building on fire.
link |
You don't, I don't know that anybody can fully understand that.
link |
When you watch what they do to women and to kids and they do it in the name of God, they
link |
They are less than they don't exist.
link |
They're barely worth the bullets we put into them.
link |
But then because they use civilians, so like then everybody becomes the enemy and how are
link |
you supposed to make sense of that?
link |
You can't, but here, Lex, you can't make sense of it.
link |
This is why they've done a really good job of blending into the civilian population.
link |
They've done it intentionally.
link |
They've done it on purpose.
link |
So they're brilliant.
link |
This is why you guys couldn't beat them.
link |
This is why we couldn't fucking beat them.
link |
They use their people so effectively.
link |
They have no shame in that.
link |
They have no issue with that.
link |
They take no qualms with wiping a kid off the face of the earth if it means they can
link |
get close enough to a soldier to throw a fucking bomb into their tank.
link |
This is why they're affected.
link |
How do you beat them then?
link |
Is this, there's no winning that you just basically do policeman type work or you do
link |
I mean, that's one way.
link |
So the other is, you come from an artillery background.
link |
A fucking hellfire missile, you get the whole place off the face there.
link |
You can't beat radicalism like that right now.
link |
The problem is, is we've let it go unchecked.
link |
We had it kind of in check for 20 years.
link |
We just shot ourselves in the foot, the chest and the face.
link |
So the problem with force is it creates long term hate because young kids in propaganda
link |
and like propaganda works.
link |
So you see your father, your brother die because of a bomb.
link |
It's very easy to convince that person that they died because of evil Americans and tell
link |
whatever story you want about America or Canada, Russia.
link |
That's the biggest problem.
link |
So it seems like there got to be better solutions because, I mean, I talk about love, but it's
link |
honestly basically figuring out sneaky ways of empowering women, of educating people of
link |
like, and like, and not in a, not a cheesy way, but not like, like in the same level
link |
of like mass warfare, but with love.
link |
So you're talking about DARPA budgets, DOD budgets, but like do that where you educate
link |
and empower women by force, you know, they want to learn, right?
link |
I mean, you're not like forcing anybody, you're setting them free.
link |
That's exactly it.
link |
Like combat flip flops does this, they do this, they give literacy, they teach girls
link |
to read nothing else to read, because as soon as you can read, you know what that happened.
link |
You know what happens then.
link |
What's combat flip flops?
link |
That's the scarf right there that's made in Afghanistan.
link |
So when you buy something from them, the proceeds go to literacy in Afghanistan for girls.
link |
They've given literacy to 800 girls over there.
link |
They're really cool.
link |
Griff owns the one.
link |
He was an Army Ranger and his buddy, but Lee, I think is his name.
link |
They were on Shark Tank a long time ago, but they, they do shoes and I think they're called
link |
I don't know how to say it properly.
link |
Built in Afghanistan.
link |
And then the proceeds go back there.
link |
They do great work for literacy and you know, as well as anyone, if you can teach someone
link |
Dark like your soul acts on the inside.
link |
Just on the inside.
link |
The outside is just the, it's just the suit.
link |
I feel like you think that's your suit of armor, but I feel like it's, it's there.
link |
What were you saying?
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What were you saying?
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I will allow this.
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If you teach education, the problem is we've taken a massive step backwards.
link |
I know that the Taliban have just instituted this week, honor killings will be back, stonings
link |
are back and dismemberment as well.
link |
Holly McKay is the reporter that's been reporting that from the ground.
link |
She's still there.
link |
The way to pull people, in my opinion, out of something like that is through education.
link |
But we just took all of that away, which is pretty horrific in my opinion because you've
link |
taught over 20 years, you're perfectly right, Lex.
link |
When you say that hate and violence won't work, it won't because you see dad get killed
link |
on the battlefields.
link |
Well, that 14 year old little boy is going to pick up an AK47 and go avenge dad's death.
link |
That's just the way it's going to be.
link |
Well, we think about it.
link |
You were there for 20 years.
link |
There's a couple of generations in there.
link |
There's another generation that's either grown up in this or is seen enough of this.
link |
So they're always going to be a subset that think that we're the enemy and fair.
link |
We haven't done always the greatest things.
link |
But the one thing that we have done that I did participate in was giving literacy, giving
link |
girls an opportunity, letting them know that you aren't second class citizens.
link |
You can do things too.
link |
And that's why we have to look at war differently.
link |
There's times for violence, oh, there is time for violence.
link |
And there is time for missiles and there is time for detainees and there's times for
link |
bag and tags and double tops of the fucking face.
link |
There's times for all of that, but there needs to be more time to educate.
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The problem is you can't educate if you're in a country where the culture doesn't believe
link |
You're fighting so many different things that you eat.
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It's in almost an impossible situation.
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When you look at the 20 years in Afghanistan and we just pulled out, there's a sudden pull
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out of troops, what do you think about those 20 years?
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Let me ask a hard question, which is, was it worth it going into Afghanistan?
link |
When you're one person, you have experienced a specific set of extremely difficult things.
link |
You've met a lot of humans.
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You understand certain aspects of the way this war is carried out, but if you zoomed
link |
out at the big story, you like history too.
link |
When you think of the history, 100 years from now, we look at the invasion of Afghanistan.
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I don't even think you need to go far that back to know that we went in on false pretenses.
link |
That's not a good start.
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What's that saying?
link |
Future behavior is a good indicator of future behavior.
link |
I struggle with that because when I first found out that the pullout was going to happen,
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I got really angry because my government skated the whole situation because he's having a
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Canada's having a snap election.
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It's happening on the 20th.
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That was beautifully planned by my government to hold no accountability, zero accountability.
link |
The media won't talk about it.
link |
They reached out to me to do an interview about Afghanistan and then I told them what
link |
was going on after I talked to my people that were on the ground and then they canceled
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When you say my government, is America any better at this?
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It feels like there's no accountability.
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The American government is a dumpster fire.
link |
I'm not saying that, but what I am saying is at least they sent people to pull people
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or pull some people.
link |
We sent no one to pull anyone.
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I know for a fact, because I helped move a family, I was fortunate enough to be given
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an opportunity to help move a high value nine person family out of that country that worked
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in the government, that worked in prosecuting the Taliban, that were on the top of the list.
link |
I learned really quickly the ins and outs of things and I'm really disgusted by it.
link |
I learned that Canada had the one email address that all Canadian, Afghani, or visa holders
link |
were supposed to email, Ottawa put two people on that email address.
link |
Canada put no more than 70 people on the ground for that pullout and they were not allowed
link |
to leave the airport and they left well before the pullout date.
link |
They left on the Thursday before the Tuesday that was the 31st.
link |
There were high value Canadian visa holders that are still in that country that are on
link |
the top of the kill list.
link |
Canada's not doing anything about it.
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I'm disgusted in the way my government is acted because number one, there's an active
link |
lawsuit with veterans against the Supreme Court of Canada right now.
link |
We are leaving our vets and our Canadians stranded over there and we are leaving the
link |
vets that have been maimed by this war in Canada.
link |
They're turned down for everything.
link |
I've been turned down for hearing loss.
link |
They're saying it's not military related.
link |
They have PIs follow me.
link |
This is normal behavior.
link |
There's a veteran named Brock who was told by Trudeau in a meeting that after he lost
link |
his leg, he was just trying to get a new prosthetic because it was just killing him.
link |
Trudeau stood up in a meeting and said, you're just asking for too much.
link |
Less than six months later, he gave $10.4 million to an Afghan terrorist that was in
link |
the Canadian prison system.
link |
He won and got $10.4 of our million taxpayer dollars.
link |
I don't know that American government is any better, but what I do know is that the absolute
link |
fucking machines of human beings that stepped outside of the chain of command to pull my
link |
family out for me, I know they were there.
link |
The British that stayed on the ground that I contacted to literally confirm my biometric
link |
data and passports to get that family moved, they weren't there.
link |
That family would still be there.
link |
That three year old that got the shit kicked out of him by the Taliban that I was trying
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to ex fill, Canada left him.
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What is it about politicians and governments not willing to do their job?
link |
Well, not willing to do that big part of the job, which is you send people to war.
link |
These are heroes, and then you should spend most of the time repaying the debts to those.
link |
What is it about, why can't we?
link |
Because we're disposable numbers, and we hire them out of high school when they're stupid
link |
enough to not understand what they're going to get themselves into, and then we blame
link |
it on themselves for making that decision by volunteering.
link |
Yeah, but I mean, that doesn't, this still doesn't make sense to me.
link |
Oh, it's a cop out.
link |
I mean, Trudeau, I feel like he is a good human being that wants to do good for, I mean,
link |
I tend to, I want to believe that leaders want to do good by the heroes of this world,
link |
and it doesn't, like, I don't understand the system of delusion you have to live in to
link |
not understand who the heroes are.
link |
Like I refuse to believe Trudeau is somehow a bad person.
link |
You haven't met him, though, have you?
link |
I don't, actually, I'm speaking about Trudeau without knowing, but I mean, in general, think
link |
that way about leaders.
link |
I just think they surround themselves by people who delude them, who like, they're yes people.
link |
Yes people that lead them into a kind of reality that becomes detached from actual reality.
link |
And so they misunderstand the priorities of this world.
link |
They think maybe some kind of special interests, they focus on that versus like the humans.
link |
If you look back, was there a way we could have done something better in Afghanistan,
link |
assuming we'd do the invasion, so is it ultimately about taking care of the veterans, like investing
link |
more money in the education of women and liberating people who are suffering injustice in those
link |
parts of the world?
link |
Like, what's the better way to do it?
link |
And one other aspect is on the US side, paid over $6 trillion for the wars in the Middle
link |
East since 9 11, so the financial side as well.
link |
Is there something you can comment on things we could have done better?
link |
That's a loaded question because you're talking to someone who had no hand in what happened
link |
other than do this and do that.
link |
So I can go from my perspective, which is there was probably plenty of things that we
link |
could have been doing better.
link |
I think there was a lack of leadership from the get go.
link |
I think the preparation that the Canadian military gave me was nowhere sufficient for
link |
a deployment of that level.
link |
Mind you, things happened.
link |
They didn't realize things would happen, but yet they happen with little to absolutely
link |
no cultural idea was that I was walking into.
link |
Like when the man, one male and the family grabbed the back of my vest because my hair
link |
was tucked in and he thought I was a man going into a room with a bunch of women.
link |
I couldn't understand why he was attacking me.
link |
There was no real breakdown of this is what you're going into.
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This is the culture.
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This is why they do what they do.
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This is how they do it.
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This is how you should handle a situation like that.
link |
There was none of that and something I speak about frequently and I think it's important
link |
to acknowledge is when you're doing any of that training, we are giving none of our soldiers
link |
proper mental health training tools in that fucking toolbox or ways or things to look
link |
for on their buddy because we've created a system and a problem where if you say that
link |
you're ill or that you're struggling with PTSD, you're done.
link |
No one's going to say that.
link |
They're going to keep struggling with it.
link |
That's when you get loose cannons, when you get problems happen, so you get fractures
link |
start to happen in leadership and that's being seen and has been seen now for a while.
link |
In terms of what we could have done, say for a better way to go into the country, a better
link |
way to help the country, I can't speak to that as much as I wish I could because I don't
link |
know that I would have all the answers.
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What about withdrawal?
link |
Do you think more gradual, you think it's better to maintain presence there for indefinitely?
link |
I don't know about that, but I do know we have bases, I say weeks, I serve with them.
link |
Americans have bases in Japan, Americans have bases in Korea, Americans have bases in Germany.
link |
There's reasons there's bases everywhere.
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There's a smart, there's an intellectual way to look at this.
link |
You want to be able to have eyes and ears, can't have eyes and ears when you do things
link |
like you just did.
link |
The way that we pulled out of that country, sorry, the way that I hate saying American
link |
British because it puts like a blame on them.
link |
I say we because I'm a soldier, I'm a NATO soldier.
link |
The way we pulled out of that country, my five year old could have done it better.
link |
He could have said, mommy, why are we not keeping that bottom base?
link |
Mommy, why are we not keeping that base just until we get everyone else that we need?
link |
Why are we going to a civilian airport that we don't control, that we don't understand?
link |
Mommy, why are we doing this when there's only one road to it?
link |
My five year old would have that conversation with me.
link |
It was so poorly done, it was so poorly executed and no fault of the soldiers on the ground
link |
My God, I can tell you there's operators, I just call them A, I don't say who he is
link |
because he's told me not to.
link |
There's a guy named A and there's another guy named R and there's a few other named
link |
D and these guys gave everything to try to pull my family when no one else would pull
link |
They just got me on the phone and said, I don't know who the fuck you're talking to.
link |
I don't know how many people you're trying to get a hold of here, but you've got everyone
link |
looking for your family.
link |
Sixth, I've gone to everyone I know.
link |
I've done stuff on Instagram, I've got a contact, the contact called me.
link |
I was handling this family and when they call you and say, we can't go back to the gate,
link |
my three year old just got beat up by the Taliban and they say, what do we do now?
link |
Why am I being left to deal with this?
link |
Why is the civilian and ex military population being left to deal with this?
link |
Why was this not thought out?
link |
We knew this was coming.
link |
We knew the timeframe.
link |
Yeah, I ultimately blame, it almost starts at the top, sorry, this is the civilian leadership.
link |
I think probably the generals know the right thing to do here.
link |
Even if there are sometimes overzealous in terms of being wanting to increase, I think
link |
the great generals understand what's needed and then it takes great leadership on the
link |
civilian side to listen to the generals and understand that war is not just about like
link |
Yeah, and it's not about the invasion and saying mission accomplished.
link |
It's not about the PR, it's about the full complexity of geopolitics.
link |
Can I ask you this?
link |
Can you ask me whatever you want?
link |
I'm looking at a book that you gave me, Do the Fucking Work.
link |
It's very motivating.
link |
Good fucking design advice.
link |
That's their company called Good Fucking Design Advice.
link |
I know, they're great.
link |
What's the website because...
link |
Okay, so the F is for friendship.
link |
Something like that.
link |
They are a design company.
link |
They've worked with Apple and Nike and this is their book, it's been published by Harper
link |
Collins and it is really just... It's an incredible... They're an incredible company.
link |
They're artistically... They're a design company, so you can see that.
link |
You can see it's a design company.
link |
Oh yeah, they signed it for you.
link |
The pages are beautiful, but they have a saying and then a paragraph about each saying.
link |
Good fucking started, obstacles are fucking opportunities, fail, fail, and fucking fail
link |
Ask for fucking help, show some fucking passion, finish the fucking job.
link |
We should send that to Biden.
link |
I should also send it to Trudeau as well.
link |
He probably wouldn't know how to read it.
link |
He just taught drama instead.
link |
I'll send it to the previous four presidents.
link |
We can also send it to them too because they're all just as much at fault.
link |
They most of them have all the same last names, but okay.
link |
Let me tell you about them quickly because we did a mug with them and I was really excited
link |
Not because it was a mug.
link |
I'm a mug person, but I'm obsessive about my mugs.
link |
What's your favorite mug?
link |
Currently it's mine right now, the one that I have with them, the GMDM mug.
link |
What does it say Anna?
link |
Do you want me to read what it says?
link |
Because I'm really happy about it because we created this with them with GFDA.
link |
I found out about them because my husband's office, Atlas Neckbrace, he had his very first
link |
He had one of their prints done and it was their original, like do the fucking work.
link |
I was really excited about them once I found out because I'm like, well, fuck is my middle
link |
name and I want to make sure that I am going to whoever I work with, I want to make sure
link |
that I'm working with people that I believe in, that I believe what they stand for and
link |
I just think they're brilliant.
link |
So I got on the phone with them and I said, hi, I would like you to sponsor my podcast.
link |
And they said, cool, what's your podcast?
link |
And I was like, it's called Brass and Unity podcast and I want to work with you guys somewhere.
link |
And they're like, okay, so like, what are you thinking?
link |
And I said, you know, I'm looking to do, I would love one day to do something with you.
link |
I don't know what it would be, but I would like it to be something.
link |
And they said, you know, we do like, we have this book, but we also have like shirts and
link |
mugs with our sayings on them and prints.
link |
And so I was thinking to myself, I was like, well, if I just did like a mug with them,
link |
well then I could, you know, that could work for what my company does, which is it's a
link |
jewelry company and sunglass company, but it could be like an add on kind of deal.
link |
It's guessing really good designers that can tell.
link |
Yeah, I knew you would like this.
link |
So I'm like, certain people would appreciate this.
link |
And so my whole thing, my, my like hashtag is work hard, help harder.
link |
And that's the whole concept of what I do now.
link |
And so we did a mug and it's called fucking help somebody.
link |
That's their like first tag.
link |
And then the rest is kindness is a wealth that increases as it is given away.
link |
What you get in return isn't passed between hands, but felt between hearts.
link |
It's precisely because you've been at the bottom that you can raise others up.
link |
It's because you've, sorry, I'm reading a photo here.
link |
You've been lost in the dark.
link |
You can lead others to the light.
link |
It's because you've fought with yourself that you can bring peace to someone else.
link |
You now have the strength because you've once struggled the best you have to come, the best
link |
you have to come from the fucking worst you've had to take.
link |
So it's, this is the mug there and we're sold out of them.
link |
We just got a bunch.
link |
Fucking help somebody.
link |
Fucking help somebody.
link |
And so we did, they were so gracious enough to sit with me and be like, what do you want
link |
the copy to be like?
link |
And I said, what do you think I want it to be?
link |
Like, what would you, if you could write one for me, what it'd be and they're like, it's
link |
going to be around lifting people up and I was like, okay, cool.
link |
And they're like, do you want to fuck in the title?
link |
And I was like, every other word, if we can have it.
link |
And they said, we'll just do once.
link |
And I was like, okay, I compromise.
link |
And so we came up with that copy and we put it on a mug and we're going to be doing a
link |
But the whole thing to me was that that embodied what I stand for now and the healing I've
link |
gotten to now and the point I've gotten to now in my life because that fucking sand pit
link |
almost broke me like off the face of the earth broke me.
link |
First of all, can we go through the full journey of that in terms of your psychological development?
link |
Who were you before?
link |
Who were you after?
link |
Can you think about that?
link |
Like what was your, if you had put a brain on the table before and after and tried to
link |
Well, they both have CTE.
link |
So we know that they're both bruised and gray matters, a little dicey on them.
link |
And it may sound the same and it's not.
link |
So I'll try to explain it to you.
link |
Before that, don't you laugh because I know it's coming.
link |
I was even louder, even more obnoxious, even more outgoing.
link |
I know it's hard to believe.
link |
This is you humble and quiet right now.
link |
This is normal me now.
link |
This is who I am now.
link |
But who I was before was, you know, motocross, taekwondo, tomboy.
link |
I didn't know how to dress.
link |
I thought that if you just wore like the same jeans and T shirt all the time, that was like
link |
acceptable behavior as a woman.
link |
I wore skate shoes.
link |
I went to a Catholic school that I refused to wear skirt at.
link |
I played hacky sack.
link |
I was so into sports, I cut and split wood with my dad on weekends.
link |
We heated our house that way.
link |
I would go in the transport.
link |
I stayed out of trouble for the most part.
link |
I think I was a fairly good kid.
link |
I was pretty angry though for most of my teenage life after my coach.
link |
I lost my way a little bit there.
link |
I was just crazier.
link |
I don't know if I was happy.
link |
I'm realizing that now.
link |
I think I was, I think anger overtook who I was, and I think that's why I was such
link |
an angry individual towards my parents when I was in high school.
link |
So parents was a little rough relationship with parents?
link |
I mean, my dad was gone a couple of weeks at a time.
link |
So my mom stayed home, mom had to handle me and my brother.
link |
We're both competitive athletes at the time by herself.
link |
And when you come home and you have a daughter that just calls you like a bitch to your face
link |
because she can't, she's being bullied so bad that she can't understand why, but also
link |
doesn't know how to fix it, but has no other outlet anymore to kind of get rid of it.
link |
I was a really mean person.
link |
I remember the day she stopped yelling.
link |
That's the day I know I broke her.
link |
Did you have a source of discipline in your life?
link |
Like maybe like we are dad, somebody who says you're being a bitch, like who would call
link |
Oh, no, no, no, no.
link |
My parents were incredible.
link |
And my dad came from like a family of like a bajillion kids who lived in a farm with
link |
no running water with like super, my dad was brash and abrupt.
link |
So like I've caught myself doing that once in a while.
link |
So like if I did one thing wrong, if he was just in a mood, I would know it.
link |
So we, you weren't, okay.
link |
So that, that anger just took different forms.
link |
It took different forms, but it mostly would be directed at my mom because I know she would
link |
take it and that was who I had and I feel bad about it to the day.
link |
Like I still, she listened to the Jocko podcast and so did my dad and my mom promised me she
link |
would never read my book because there's certain parts.
link |
I just, my dad on my deployment when I called him and told him some of the stuff, he started
link |
My dad doesn't cry.
link |
And he just said, please never tell your mother this.
link |
Don't do that to your mom.
link |
My mom, like my grandfather came from Hungary.
link |
He escaped when the Nazis left, when the Soviets came in.
link |
He wasn't great as a dad.
link |
My mom went through a lot as a kid and that was because her dad was in the war.
link |
That was because her dad didn't know any better and she knew she couldn't be like that.
link |
So her way would be yelling.
link |
And then I hit about 16 and I wore her down and I broke her.
link |
I shattered her ability to think that she could have any sort of relationship with me.
link |
You wouldn't want to have had a relationship with me.
link |
But the funny thing is you've rediscovered that now.
link |
So is she, are you guys close now?
link |
She's, she's so funny.
link |
She's coming out to help out again.
link |
She comes out to help out with Jack all the time and my dad, they're still, they're still
link |
They're still on the road.
link |
They take their dogs and they go and they do their thing and I've had that relationship
link |
It's, it's still strenuous.
link |
Like I still, when I'm having a hard time, she'll be the person I'll take it out on because
link |
I know she can take it.
link |
Even though I know I shouldn't, it's like she's my safe space to be like, blah, about everything.
link |
And she'll just be like, well, that's not nice.
link |
I'm like, well, you're not fucking like, I, and I'll take it out on, she knows I don't
link |
mean it and I try, but for whatever reason, she just, she takes it.
link |
And it brings it out of you.
link |
Can you describe sort of the various characteristics, the, the shape of your PTSD, the, the trauma,
link |
how the anger and hate took shape in you in the, in the seconds, minutes, hours, months,
link |
years after, and after the full trauma of all the things you've experienced, you know,
link |
So it's funny because Jocko asked me something and it made me, it's made me, I've really
link |
been thinking a lot about it.
link |
And he's like, do you think if somebody of a leadership would have just sat you down
link |
and said, Hey, Burns, what you're feeling is okay, what you're feeling is normal, what
link |
you're feeling is what happens when you're in something like this, do you think you would
link |
And they said, well, I thought about it and I'm like, you know, I don't think I would
link |
be because I wouldn't have been medicated out of my mind.
link |
I wasn't able to process anything because I was just given medication right from the
link |
So for me, what happened was once that light switch was off, I was sent back to Kandahar
link |
to, once the operation was over, we flew back to Kandahar like with the Brits.
link |
And then because there was deaths and we lost people on that operation, I had to go to the
link |
British side for the next, I think three or four days and recant word for word why, what
link |
happened to a British MP who handwrote statements, but we had to do that on repeat to make sure
link |
we all had the same story.
link |
There's nobody shot anybody in the back.
link |
And so that I don't think is a great way to do that after an after action, after action
link |
reports happen, but I don't think beating a dead horse and having somebody repeat, repeat,
link |
repeat and then just imprint more and more and more.
link |
I don't know that that is a great way of doing that.
link |
And especially from a perspective of what are they liability, almost like legal that
link |
kind of that perspective as opposed to the full perspective.
link |
I mean, so for people who don't know, one is the over medication that you had to undergo.
link |
And then the other is the social isolation in terms of, I mean, more than what Jaco,
link |
you just mentioned, you also kind of mentioned that just being with other soldiers you're
link |
close with, just sitting there in silence and just sitting in that shared understanding.
link |
Even that in itself communicates like these feelings are normal.
link |
Like you don't have to talk and you were robbed of that as well, essentially.
link |
Because I was, because I was borrowed, I think Jaco had a name for us when we get borrowed.
link |
It was like, there was like a, I don't know what they call us, but it's like when you
link |
take a person and you put them in another unit, there's a name for it.
link |
I don't remember what it was.
link |
You never see those people again.
link |
But because I was in Kandahar, the doctors gave me the medication because I, I think
link |
I was the one who said, I don't, this isn't right.
link |
I don't feel right.
link |
Cause when I got back that night, there was supposed to be somebody there to pick me up
link |
to take me the other side of the base and no one showed.
link |
So I, I humped on my kit back to the Canada house and I remember getting in the shower
link |
and the rule was quick fucking showers.
link |
I must have sat on that floor of that shower for half an hour, 45 minutes.
link |
I just held myself and cried.
link |
I didn't even know I was crying.
link |
I just knew I needed to cry and I still this day, I, I, and when they sent me back to Canada,
link |
when they sent me back to the fall, they sent me back with all this medication after spending
link |
that time with the Brits.
link |
And they put me back on the guns, medicated out of my fucking tree.
link |
I almost shot someone, but they didn't tell my staff that was on meds.
link |
So when the artillery gun was going off and I didn't run to the gun and I was still asleep
link |
inside the tent with the gun beside my head, they didn't know I was just drugged.
link |
They just thought I was fucking off somewhere hanging out with some Americans.
link |
They just thought I wasn't doing any of what I should be doing.
link |
And then I remember the moment my sergeant, we did a night shoot and he, he's so funny
link |
because he called me and he goes, ah, I fucked Bernzac, go Alice, I remember this, yes, you
link |
were standing there with me and I look at you and go, Hey, Burns, are you okay?
link |
Cause your eyes are all fucked.
link |
And I, I looked at the sergeant Leblanc and I just remember going, yeah, I'm good.
link |
He's like, I still remember that.
link |
And I'm like, I know because they never tell me anything fuck Burns, I did not know the
link |
drugs you were on.
link |
And as I was on all of them, he goes, I know I walk in, you show me the bottles, fuck Burns,
link |
you should not been there.
link |
I guarantee he sounds just like that.
link |
I mean, I suppose this is a lazy way of dealing with trauma and it's for the military in some
link |
If you don't have a good program in place, this makes sense, but you should have a good
link |
Just as you said, on the prep, on the mental prep side, like, just any prep, like training
link |
people, training people on the, I suppose to, I guess train the fact that you're going
link |
to have somebody close to you blow up, like you have to probably visualize that.
link |
You have to think through that.
link |
You have to have a process of how to deal with something like that with that kind of
link |
And then that's it.
link |
So it's in the toolbox of what the doctors call it.
link |
I mean, and it's not like weakness, it's actually strength.
link |
It's like, you have to be mentally strong enough to process that.
link |
That probably takes a lot of training, but it's a great training, right?
link |
Well worth it to, to protect your investment training.
link |
That's a very cold, but correct way to put it.
link |
I mean, it's cold.
link |
I thought you would appreciate the coldness of the way I articulated that.
link |
I mean, I'm off two minds on this.
link |
I don't sometimes wonder like what I would be like as a soldier, actually.
link |
I don't know, because I love country and I love all the things you're mentioning.
link |
Like I could see myself probably dying for my country and also enjoying the skill of
link |
The, the, the, the very like OCD, like very proficient.
link |
But then also the human side, I fall in love with people.
link |
I fall in love with everything.
link |
I don't, I suppose you have to shut off the part of your brain when you're executing a
link |
mission that cares about the, about other humans, uh, outside your close knit group.
link |
But like there's no time for philosophical thinking.
link |
I, I suppose that's why it's better to be young.
link |
You're not necessarily dumb.
link |
It's just like you were over that energy of excitement, of proficiency and excellence
link |
is, is just higher than it is later in life.
link |
You're, you're not dumb.
link |
I was not dumb, but I was naive, uneducated, not well trained and had an arrogance because
link |
we were told we were the fucking shit.
link |
So I wonder, do they think if we do mental training, that makes you weak?
link |
Do you think they, the military thinks that makes you weak?
link |
And the reason I can say that is because it's, it's obvious in the way that they handle
link |
So like if a soldier says, Hey, I'm really struggling with that last op we were on, man.
link |
It's just really, it's getting to me and I'm having a hard time sleeping.
link |
They're going to go, okay, well, how, how hard of a time sleeping are you having?
link |
And then you get that re and you go, Oh no, I'm not, it's not that bad.
link |
I'm not, I don't need anything for it.
link |
Like I'm just like once in a while I'm losing some sleep.
link |
Okay, cause you know that pen moves, it's all getting written down and then you're
link |
tagged red, you're tagged red, which means you're not deploying again.
link |
And then you're not able to do the thing you love the most with the people you love the
link |
I mean, but also this is really difficult and I'd love to talk to you about PTSD, but
link |
So I'm, I'm hoping to like launch a company, you know, in the engineering space and the
link |
and I currently leave, I've led a few people and it's always this kind of like how much
link |
are you supposed to push people because people are, everyone is weak and lazy.
link |
Are you quoting her text messages from early?
link |
All I have is just quotes from you.
link |
Tells me how much we've spoken in the past week, your soul.
link |
I just, I don't know what to do because sometimes people are really struggling, like really
link |
struggling in a way they're being, they're like, it's the dig, it's the Goggins thing
link |
is like, where's the line to where you're actually breaking the human being versus
link |
where you're breaking them at the places where they will grow back stronger.
link |
Like in that line is tricky to truly understand.
link |
I think the military errors on the side of like, they, you know, like push them beyond
link |
all limits, physical limits, physical, but mental, they don't, they need to respect
link |
Uh, they fuck with the brain a little bit.
link |
I mean, in basic training, they like screaming your face and to see who's going to crack
link |
and they, they put you on sleep deprivation to see who's weak enough that they can't handle
link |
They do stuff to you, like, I know if you're a downed pilot, you have to go and you have
link |
to do this training and like it's, you'll get captured.
link |
It's like this whole thing and they fuck with your brain, but there's a line.
link |
My issue is go to the line, cross the line, give them the tools to come back from the
link |
We, we know there's PTSD.
link |
We know there's a such a thing.
link |
We understand there's anxiety and depression.
link |
We understand there's major depressive disorder.
link |
We understand that there are precursors.
link |
There are signs and symptoms.
link |
We understand that.
link |
So why are we not building enough of a toolkit?
link |
Whether that be, I'm not talking medication.
link |
I'm talking, it sounds woo woo, but fucking trust me, it works.
link |
I'm talking meditation.
link |
I'm talking about peer group support.
link |
I'm talking about if you go to your doctor and report this, there's, you're not automatically
link |
going to be losing your job.
link |
Why aren't we giving the proper tools and the education needed?
link |
These things are not difficult to teach.
link |
They don't take a lot of time.
link |
They don't take a lot of money.
link |
The only time it takes a lot of money is when you want to medicate.
link |
We don't need to medicate you yet.
link |
You only need to be medicated if you're a danger to someone else or yourself.
link |
And most of the time, because of the way the system is set, you'll lie about it through
link |
your fucking teeth just so that no one touches you.
link |
So from the perspective of the military, do you think you can still be a bad motherfucker
link |
and do all the mental work?
link |
Some of the baddest dudes I've ever known are like, I got to go to yoga.
link |
I got to go meditate.
link |
I go do Aya with those guys.
link |
Because they know that that's not okay to be like that in your life.
link |
Can you answer the ridiculously big question of what is PTSD?
link |
Do you understand the basic characteristics of it?
link |
Is there universal characteristics from your own unique experience, from what you've understood
link |
Of course there are.
link |
So there's the basic things that a doctor looks for when they're diagnosing PTSD.
link |
Let me make that fucking clear.
link |
But there are things that you look for.
link |
You look for insomnia.
link |
You look for anger and aggression.
link |
You look for people to fly off the handle.
link |
You look for avoidance.
link |
You can tell in somebody's body, people who can't sleep, if you can't sleep, you know
link |
that after a certain amount of time, they're just going to deteriorate.
link |
Sleeplessness triggers.
link |
When you say avoidance, do you mean avoidance?
link |
So like when I first got back to Canada, I avoided everybody that was Middle Eastern
link |
at all costs, no matter how much of a difference it made in my day.
link |
If I had to not go somewhere from one of the greatest events of my life, I wouldn't have
link |
But isn't there some aspect that are combined with the triggers?
link |
Maybe it's wise to avoid triggers even for your own personal health, well being.
link |
For me, that was one of my triggers.
link |
So you have triggers.
link |
And then you also deal with things like sounds and smells.
link |
You can tell when someone's triggered.
link |
A lot of vets don't like fireworks.
link |
It's like, okay, well, remove yourself from the situation.
link |
So there's other things within PTSD that kind of rear its head that with PTSD kind of attach
link |
So like when I was diagnosed with PTSD, I think it was like four years later, I was
link |
diagnosed with major depressive disorder.
link |
And that was kind of a compilation of things that was just like a shit show there.
link |
What is major depressive disorder?
link |
Is there an answer?
link |
I was told I had it.
link |
Okay, so I mean, what does your mind go through?
link |
Where are the places that my mind goes?
link |
Your mind goes like the dark places when I get triggered and when it was like really
link |
So you thought about suicide every minute of every day.
link |
What are the pros of suicide in your mind at that time?
link |
What at that time?
link |
The pros were no one has to deal with this anymore.
link |
I don't have to feel this way anymore.
link |
I'm a burden to my family.
link |
I'm a burden to the military system.
link |
I'm a bad soldier.
link |
I didn't do my job.
link |
I don't deserve to be alive.
link |
I don't deserve veterans affairs support.
link |
I don't deserve my, my parents don't deserve to watch me go through this.
link |
The guy I was dating didn't deserve to put up with the bullshit I put him through.
link |
The people who drive with me in cars didn't deserve to almost hit medians because I swerved
link |
because of a piece of garbage.
link |
People didn't deserve my racist outburst.
link |
People didn't deserve, people didn't, I did not deserve to be breathing anymore.
link |
I should have died there and I wished I died there.
link |
So self hate there too.
link |
Oh, so that's not even a big deal though, right?
link |
That's at the core of it.
link |
So how do you escape from that place?
link |
How do you overcome that depression essentially at the core of the desire to kill yourself?
link |
What basic principles, I mean we could talk about ayahuasca, but basic principles of like
link |
literally like how do you escape that moment?
link |
Yeah, previous to any of that.
link |
I got out, so I was medically, I was 3B Medical Honorable Discharge in 2011, May 23rd, 2011.
link |
So I left the military then.
link |
And so it's been 10 years, just over 10 years, oh my God, it's 10 and a half years.
link |
I just realized I don't know, oh my God.
link |
Happy anniversary.
link |
So I've been out for 10 years and I would say the reason I didn't kill myself for the
link |
longest time was the individual I was dating, that was straight across the board, that was
link |
And for me, there was no relief for about six years of the thought of just kill yourself,
link |
kill yourself, kill yourself.
link |
So it's easier if you just do it.
link |
Like that voice was so strong for that long, there was really no relief.
link |
What there was though, was implementation of different medications, realizing they weren't
link |
working, trying different things, getting myself to a point where I could leave my house
link |
comfortably ish again, and it wasn't triggered, which then allowed me to travel, which then
link |
allowed me to slowly try to go back to school, which by the way, it was a very bad idea.
link |
That was a bad idea, that was bad.
link |
I went too early, they started practicing active shooter drills in our school.
link |
It was bad, my professors understood.
link |
Schools full of triggers, it turns out.
link |
It is when you live in Vancouver.
link |
Here's the theme to this conversation about your love for Canada.
link |
I love my fucking country.
link |
I am one of the most patriotic people you will meet in it.
link |
I think Canada is one of the greatest fucking places on the earth.
link |
I think in the past two years or three years, I have seen what I loved so deeply, so proudly
link |
preached about so... I'm so proud of what I did there, and I'm so proud of the country
link |
I got to represent because I was good at my job.
link |
Being great at your job for a country you love, you just don't like some of the politicians
link |
It's not even the politicians anymore, it's the state of the country.
link |
I'm a second class citizen in my own country right now.
link |
I can't travel to see my parents within my own country.
link |
I'm not allowed to step foot in my son's school.
link |
I am not allowed to go to a restaurant with my family.
link |
I'm not allowed to leave Canada without... I told you all the stuff I have to do to get
link |
To even get home, I have to do the same.
link |
I'm watched by the RCMP.
link |
I'm neighbors rat you out.
link |
So for somebody who fought for their country.
link |
It makes me so sad.
link |
To go through this process of what many consider to be power overreach by government in the
link |
face of this particular pandemic.
link |
I always knew I had a hard time with... I loved Canada.
link |
The day I got spit on when I got home was not ideal, but...
link |
But the thing was, I knew long enough that if I just put one foot in front of the other
link |
and kept going to treatment and kept doing what my doctor told me to do, that I could
link |
pull out of this if I tried.
link |
I was told that I could do anything in my life.
link |
It didn't matter as long as I tried.
link |
Was trying really hard?
link |
Trying was harder than breathing.
link |
It was exhausting.
link |
I would be awake for like half a day and every minute of that day, I'd just stare at the
link |
wall and just want to kill myself.
link |
That's what I've had people close to me who suffer from depression and it was like, it's
link |
unclear how to escape, but it's clear that you need to try something and they didn't
link |
Because you have no try in you.
link |
I'm watching a person who has no energy essentially to do any of it and it's so hopeless, but
link |
I think some of that has to do with all the different physical feats you have to do.
link |
When you have nothing left, you still keep going.
link |
That same weird drive when you're empty, you still keep going.
link |
I wanted to give up.
link |
I'm really lucky because it really was the one person that I'd wake up to every day and
link |
he'd be like, hey, so that new drug you're on, fun fact, if you don't go to sleep right
link |
When you talk, you just don't fucking stop and you go off about everything that's horrible.
link |
And I'm like, what are you talking about?
link |
Yeah, you took that pill.
link |
You just, you didn't stop.
link |
I'm like, I have no recollection.
link |
I'd get up in the middle of the night, I would cook food like on a stove and it would
link |
be hopefully we don't die because I would have no recollection because of the drugs.
link |
The idea that when people say, well, just put yourself out of depression, I'm a highly
link |
motivated individual, the idea of lifting my head up to turnover was daunting.
link |
It's like for somebody so as driven as you to completely lose all of that for moments
link |
of time, for stretches of time, fuck, the mind isn't motherfucking, this is, I can't,
link |
for somebody like, I can't, I can't, I'm so, I'm so grateful for people like you to be
link |
able to pull out of that.
link |
I've been always the opposite.
link |
Like, I've been very fortunate to just always find joy, meaning in everything, even the
link |
Can I ask you something?
link |
Do you think that's because you, how you were raised, where you came from?
link |
No, no, it was my own person.
link |
I honestly think it's the biology, this, because I had, my parents, I'm very cognizant of
link |
had nothing to do with that.
link |
They never understood this little engine I had.
link |
I always liked just sitting, looking at people and just enjoying how amazing they are and
link |
just looking at, I think it's straight up just biology, whatever the neurochemistry
link |
I'm just getting a good drug.
link |
You're just getting hit.
link |
Yeah, I'm getting hit.
link |
All the time from stupid shit.
link |
And it doesn't, and yeah, so that's why I can be, sometimes I'll talk very self critically
link |
about myself because that's almost makes me, it makes life more fun and challenges stuff.
link |
It makes you more productive, but ultimately it's because I'm getting that like, I'm getting
link |
the good stuff all the time.
link |
I wondered about that.
link |
I was thinking about that when I listened to you for the first time on, I think when
link |
you're on Rogan for the first time, water shouldn't do that.
link |
Oh, it's not water.
link |
You shouldn't trust.
link |
See, this is the thing with the Russians.
link |
It's not by Coca Cola.
link |
Well, no, I had to resealed.
link |
I mean, I didn't go that far, but now I'm really starting to question what's in this,
link |
If I offered you tea, you should really be worried.
link |
I mean, that's the, no, that's the, the, like the more famous way that Russians usually
link |
assassinate, they put poison in the tea because a lot of Russians drink tea and, you know.
link |
I mean, there is a blade right there.
link |
Wait, that was somebody, um, Andrew Huberman gave that to me.
link |
You, I don't know if you know him, but he's a cool.
link |
I don't know all the people you know I'm new.
link |
I'm new here, Lex.
link |
You're gonna have to.
link |
I'll send instructions.
link |
You're gonna have to send, what is, what does my friend say?
link |
He says, uh, an ex operator and he'll message me once in a while and ask me something and
link |
If I answer in the correct way, he'll go, candidate meets expectations.
link |
Like, fuck you, I'm not a candidate of anything.
link |
But yeah, it's essentially it.
link |
Well, Andrew Huberman is kind of a celebrity, Andrew, you should check her out, uh, you're
link |
an interesting person, you guys should connect.
link |
He's, uh, Stanford neuroscientist was, uh, I think the number one podcast in the world
link |
Is he the one, the beard, does he feel like a, a beard thing going?
link |
I'm, I'm, I'm knocking him down to it.
link |
Like, does he have a beard?
link |
I don't, I don't look, I don't look at people's visual appearance, man.
link |
You're full of shit.
link |
I don't, uh, does he have a beard?
link |
I think he has a beard.
link |
I think I know who you're talking about.
link |
He's a very handsome gentleman.
link |
I think I know who you're talking about because I think I was looking at his stuff this morning.
link |
No, seriously, on Instagram.
link |
You probably know him.
link |
That's, I mean, I don't know him.
link |
But it's very, very humble, very intelligent.
link |
Probably would understand.
link |
Like, I'm very kind of poetic and so on.
link |
He's, he's probably the most like rigorous, um, reference machine of science.
link |
Like, he's a legit scientist.
link |
Like, he knows every paper and everything has to do with the mind and your science.
link |
Like, performance.
link |
He's much more, he's, he's, he's much more actually, and the focus is always on, um,
link |
how to help, how that helps people select protocols.
link |
Like, like, here's what you need to do to get better sleep.
link |
He cares like a thousand papers.
link |
And he just goes like, hammer's nonstop.
link |
I mean, he, um, he spent a week in Austin, he's coming back and spending, uh, a couple
link |
of weeks in Austin.
link |
And it's like, you think that was like a teleprompter or something.
link |
Like the way he does his podcast.
link |
But like in person, he's the same.
link |
This is, this is intense, but I like it.
link |
You know, why do we bring him up?
link |
We brought up knives we were talking about.
link |
And then you talked about poisoning and how you were poisoning me.
link |
And I said knives.
link |
We're talking about Russians.
link |
And then we were kind of talking about the brain and PTSD.
link |
And I think for, for most people though, the biggest thing when they see somebody who's
link |
struggling with PTSD, their, their first, you know, reaction is, how do I help them?
link |
Well, often just saying, Hey, I'm here when you're ready to talk and you're going through
link |
something, whether you want to talk about it right now or not, I'm here.
link |
And then keeping a close eye on behaviors.
link |
When you start to see somebody having, you know, four, five, six beers at night, ask
link |
why when you see somebody, you can tell they're not sleeping.
link |
Hey, buddy, are you sleeping?
link |
I just am not sleeping.
link |
Instead of just going, Oh, that sucks.
link |
Hey, why aren't you sleeping?
link |
You having nightmares?
link |
Are you, you just have an insomnia?
link |
Are you just eating sugar before bed?
link |
You just care enough about your people to just ask one follow up question because often
link |
that's really all it takes because then somebody goes, somebody cares enough to ask.
link |
And then they'll just, yeah, just showing that you care.
link |
It honestly grocery store lineup, I'll say, Oh, I like your dress.
link |
And then I'll go, how's your day going?
link |
They're like, actually, it's going all right.
link |
It's not as great as I thought it would be today, but I'm doing okay, but like they'll
link |
give you a, instead of good you, instead of just giving you this fake, false reaction.
link |
If you just show any effort in somebody that you care at all about someone's well being,
link |
you'd be amazed, amazed.
link |
And some of it is just energy.
link |
The reason honestly I moved to Austin is some lady at a Walmart said, honey, you look
link |
handsome in that suit, but the care that she put in that, she just looked at me.
link |
It wasn't like hitting at me or something.
link |
She was like, the love, just love.
link |
And I was like, okay, I'm moving here, I guess.
link |
There was a, that's so funny you said that because I told my, I told my husband this
link |
happened and it was, it threw me off.
link |
There was an older lady at a store and this was right after we, we got a brief period of
link |
no masks in Canada, like just like a brief like five minutes.
link |
It was not even that.
link |
And I, I had come from like an interview or something.
link |
So I had actually had makeup on that day and I had my hat and I was, you know, just at
link |
the grocery store.
link |
And she walked up to me and she got real close and I didn't know what was happening and she
link |
got closer and then she just grabbed my arm like this.
link |
She goes, I love that hat on you.
link |
And I looked at her and I was like, she touched me during a pandemic and she's old.
link |
Thank you so much.
link |
I said, you're so amazing.
link |
I just, and I just sparked a conversation.
link |
It doesn't take much.
link |
That little moment of genuine care.
link |
I mean, maybe you can tell me actually the, the journey you took with ayahuasca.
link |
So that's such a fascinating journey.
link |
So like letting your mind go to different places in order to rediscover itself.
link |
Like, like, what is it?
link |
Like a rocket ship to somewhere else so you can land in a better place.
link |
How about I show you something that'll help your brain?
link |
This is not for you to lift up either and show on the camera because there's leaves in
link |
Like there's leaves in some pages.
link |
So just don't dump it out because it'll go all fucking everywhere.
link |
Um, ayahuasca is a beautiful psychedelic that we have been so blessed to have on this
link |
earth that we have so underutilized and could be saving humanity, but just, you ever hear
link |
that saying, if you could just give everyone mushrooms one time, the world would be a better
link |
So psilocybin is I use for micro dosing for depression.
link |
I did ayahuasca in January of this year.
link |
Um, and I've at that point, that was the last time I was on a pharmaceutical drug.
link |
I've been off everything ever since 10 different ones.
link |
So if you backtrack a little bit just to, so you'll understand my doctor gave me the
link |
opportunity Dr. Greg Passi.
link |
He is a veteran himself served in Bosnia and Rwanda is a medic.
link |
I think colonel lieutenant.
link |
He's gonna punch me right in the face for that.
link |
He's high up officer.
link |
He is one of my saviors.
link |
He's like my old, I call him my old man.
link |
He's my favorite and rides a Harley like that kind of guy.
link |
And, um, he said, you know, Kels, this is, I just don't, I was hitting a wall.
link |
I wasn't getting any better.
link |
And he goes, what, how do you feel about cannabis?
link |
And I was like, I don't feel good about it because family histories or my parents always
link |
told me if I smoked weed, you know, it's just this, this perception.
link |
Because I just want you to try it.
link |
Just what would you be willing to try?
link |
So I was like, okay.
link |
So I was willing to try it.
link |
Then I started going to these groups called women grow and, um, learning about it.
link |
And then I realized, oh, I'm starting to sleep a little bit.
link |
I don't feel groggy in the morning.
link |
I don't feel like a bag of shit.
link |
And I also want to have a baby one day and I can't have all this stuff in my system.
link |
So I started using cannabis and then I started using it as a main medication.
link |
And I'd been using it now since 2000 and 14 got married, 15, 2015, I started using it.
link |
And then I've been using it ever since.
link |
And that was the way I got off of all the pharmaceutical drugs was keeping cannabis,
link |
the constant, finding the right strains for me, and then slowly with the doctor's advice
link |
and under supervision, going off of those medications.
link |
Cut to January of 2021, I had hit a really bad spell last year.
link |
Um, and the year before was a really big struggle.
link |
Uh, I almost lost my company last year due to COVID, just like many, many millions of
link |
Um, and instead of me just laying down and taking it.
link |
I pivoted really quickly and called the factory and said, do you guys make masks?
link |
They're like, yeah, we're making masks.
link |
I was like, I'm going to call the Canadian government.
link |
I'm going to get my medical license and I'm going to try to sell the masks and see if
link |
And so we did that.
link |
And so we did 200,000 masks for Ontario hospitals, um, which ironically went to my entire community
link |
I was born and raised in.
link |
So it was really weird.
link |
And that kept us afloat long enough.
link |
Um, we lost 200 retail locations that I all single handedly spent five years going like
link |
door to door getting myself.
link |
Um, and we should say this is brass and unity, uh, jewelry, the jewelry and sunglass company.
link |
And I started speaking to which looks like a serial killer, I mean, you do look good
link |
We'll call them the Lex.
link |
That's those are now called the Lex.
link |
Fuck the gun or the Lex.
link |
You know, bear with me.
link |
I, I started, my doctor suggested art therapy, Dr. Passi did.
link |
And that's really how the company started.
link |
I bought beads and a pipe cutter and a hammer and a drill and I fucked up our kitchen table
link |
and I taught myself how to pull jewelry because my husband was like, you can do it.
link |
So I was like, okay, he says I can believe in me, so I guess I can do it.
link |
No idea what I'm doing.
link |
And then I got to this point, um, you know, when COVID hit and people lost companies and
link |
we pivoted and we did what we could.
link |
And then I really started to go downhill psychologically.
link |
I've found purpose again with this company.
link |
I found a way to help again.
link |
I found myself again.
link |
And then that was in danger of being gone again.
link |
So the company is 2015.
link |
We started, I started, um, building jewelry in 2015 under like a, just, it was called
link |
her wearables and it was really small and it was just, I was just trying to make stuff.
link |
It wasn't supposed to be a company.
link |
And you were on a ton of medication throughout the whole process.
link |
And my mom being the tenacious truck driver she is, she was driving for Kevin Hart's
link |
And so she got, she just harassed them was like, you need to meet my daughter.
link |
I saw the picture of you and Kevin Hart.
link |
But he just gave me a good piece of advice.
link |
Hey, if you're going to make this something, you can't really.
link |
If you want it to be for everyone, you can't call it her wearables.
link |
And then we drove home that night and then he tweeted it out to people, to 24 million
link |
This was before he was like, who is now?
link |
And that was a giant deal.
link |
And then my husband kind of looked at me and being, he's so fucking brilliant.
link |
He looked at me and goes, all right, yeah, we got to come up with a rename.
link |
Let me start thinking.
link |
Let me start brainstorming.
link |
Like, let's make, you want to make this real?
link |
Let's make this real.
link |
And he was like, what do you think about like we were doing like brass, collective Co brass
link |
I knew I want to brass in the name.
link |
And then he's like, what about brass and unity?
link |
You're trying to like unify people.
link |
Like why wouldn't you do it?
link |
I'm like, what's the name?
link |
Of course you can name up with it like everything else.
link |
That's a great name.
link |
Well, he's a brilliant person.
link |
So the idea of losing this thing that we had just built and just got me kind of functioning
link |
with was devastating.
link |
So I got this opportunity given to me by Griff, Combat Flipbops.
link |
Again, Brady, my husband was like, hey, you should get sponsors for your podcast.
link |
Hey, have you heard of this company, Combat Flipbops?
link |
Remember, we watched them on Shark Tank.
link |
And then I reached out.
link |
He emailed me back.
link |
He's like, yeah, we go together like peanut butter and jelly or companies.
link |
That sounds great.
link |
And then I was like, hey, also like, do you think one of your owners would want to come
link |
Just like tossing it out there kind of like I did with you.
link |
And he was like, yeah, I'd love to come on.
link |
And I was like, oh my God.
link |
And he came on the podcast and it went great.
link |
And then at the end of it, we stopped recording and he just kind of did this thing.
link |
He just like leans in real close, just looks into your soul and goes, how are you doing?
link |
And they're like, great.
link |
He's like, how are you really doing?
link |
Just this whole, just like waterworks happen and he goes, listen, have you ever heard of
link |
And I was like, yeah, like in movies and like psychedelics in the 70s, you know, and he's
link |
like, no, no, no, no, let's like have a talk.
link |
And he goes, I've got an opportunity for a spot.
link |
I'm going with this charity called Heroic Hearts.
link |
They have spaces in the UK, Canada and the United States.
link |
They're owned by an army ranger named Jesse Gould.
link |
You know, they're really trying to help vets.
link |
And this has worked.
link |
Would you want to come?
link |
And before he even said, like, would you, before I even got like an invite, I was like,
link |
When can I, when, when do we, when do we go?
link |
And he's like, oh, it's in like three weeks.
link |
You can't be on any SSRIs.
link |
If you're on any, you're going to have to wean off.
link |
And at the time I was on my last one, and so I was like, I called my doctor and I was
link |
And he was like, what?
link |
And I was like, guess what I'm about to do.
link |
And he's like, am I going to go do ayahuasca?
link |
And he goes, you could, he does the same.
link |
He just goes, all right.
link |
Because he knows he's not going to win.
link |
He knows I'll just fight him on it.
link |
That's just called that like the, the Jaco reset.
link |
Because he does a pretty much.
link |
And he goes, I said, but here's the kicker.
link |
I have to go off of this medication.
link |
And he goes, well, you know, we're supposed to do that in the summer months when the depression
link |
is not going to bring, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, listen.
link |
I hear you, but I'm doing it whether you want me to or not.
link |
So I'm letting you know, hey, this is going to happen.
link |
And he's like, okay, just try to do it properly.
link |
I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
link |
I know the drill, whatever, whatever.
link |
It went to school to be a paramedic.
link |
Go off of it properly.
link |
I dropped that within a week that stuff was, I was done taking it and I was going through
link |
like the world's worst just withdrawals.
link |
It was like you were at a rock concert and your head was banging up and down, but you
link |
were sitting perfectly still.
link |
But you had like a thing to look forward to with the sidewalk.
link |
I had a light at the end of the tunnel and I knew if I got to the light was the worst
link |
that's going to happen.
link |
Just get to the light.
link |
But at that point, again, I had a son, I had a husband, I had a great company, I have a
link |
great house, I have a nice car, I have everything.
link |
Why did I want to die every minute of the day?
link |
I was at that point again.
link |
And I'm like, this has got it.
link |
Something's got to give.
link |
And so I went and I got there and she is the most intense, beautiful, divine deity or entity
link |
or visualization, whatever you want to deem ayahuasca as, mama ayah is real.
link |
And she takes no prisoners.
link |
She shows you exactly what you need to see to help yourself, but she does not discriminate
link |
against whether you're ready or not.
link |
If you've ingested it, she's coming for you.
link |
She's going to be either gentle or she's going to beat your ass.
link |
And sometimes that's what you need, but she does it in a way that is profound.
link |
So what were some memorable, profound moments for you?
link |
What were the places it took you?
link |
People had you meet?
link |
For the first time, I got to be in a group of people who didn't judge me or question
link |
my service, they just respect me.
link |
That was number one.
link |
So that group I lost, I just found again.
link |
I was the only woman there again seems to be the thing for me.
link |
And so I was surrounded by all these special operators like these aren't like normal soldiers.
link |
Like these guys that I'm with are like bronze star, fucking purple heart, just the coolest
link |
people, people I've always wanted to be like, that's my buddy.
link |
Now I can be like, those are my buddies.
link |
Like those motherfuckers will go to bat for me.
link |
They will bend over backwards.
link |
They will X fill me out of anywhere.
link |
They will take a bullet for me.
link |
And these guys welcomed me in in a way I didn't, I didn't expect.
link |
So that hit me weird right off the get.
link |
I was nervous and now I was just felt that home for a minute.
link |
And then when I stepped into ceremony, the first night because you do, you do three nights
link |
over like, over like Friday, Saturday, Sunday, the first night, I was so nervous and so anxious
link |
because you go up in ceremony and you're, the shamans come in and they, they cleanse
link |
themselves and then you get served the IA individually, you go up, they give it to you.
link |
You can take your time and pray, you can do whatever you want and then you drink it.
link |
I was so just like, I got back to my mat and I sat there and I was like trying to keep
link |
it in, but I could feel that like heat come from my toes all the way up and you're like,
link |
your mouth starts to water.
link |
I'm going to throw up, I'm going to throw up and I looked over to griff and I looked
link |
at Bishop and I was like, swallow it and I was like, okay, and you can't talk or anything.
link |
So I like, my buddy, we call him the Viking, a soul Viking.
link |
He looks like a Viking, his head's tattooed, he's, he's been on the show, he's so cool.
link |
He's sitting directly across like you and I and he can see him and he's looking at me
link |
and I'm throwing up and I do it about three times and then the last time he just saw me
link |
and I couldn't do it and I just, I threw it up and so I like to think that was her way
link |
of easing me in so I didn't get like a full punch to the face, but I gotta, let me take
link |
your hand and show you what I'm going to show you.
link |
We're going to make you better.
link |
We're going to take the pain away.
link |
Aren't you supposed to eventually throw up no matter what?
link |
It's not supposed to.
link |
Some people don't.
link |
If something's happening, you're going through something.
link |
Yeah, you purge, but it doesn't have to happen.
link |
But this, I mean, within like the first 20 minutes, no, this takes like, you got to sit
link |
and meditate for, or sit still basically and meditate in the pitch block for about 45 minutes
link |
before the effects even, before you even feel her.
link |
So here she figured out the right dose you need.
link |
Well, because I did the same dose as everyone else.
link |
I think it was 20 mils, which doesn't seem like a lot, but when you've never done I had
link |
it as, so I felt like such a bitch, God, I felt like such a bitch.
link |
That was the thought going through your mind.
link |
Oh, you just fucked it all up.
link |
You ruined this again.
link |
You couldn't do this, right?
link |
And so at that point, we went through the meditation part in the shamans where they
link |
literally sing for like six hours straight.
link |
So you said that you take it and then there's just what you're quietly listening to the
link |
meditate and you wait, and you wait, and you're in pitch black, like can't see this
link |
far in front of your face.
link |
And you have a little puke bucket and then you have a little light that has a red filter
link |
If you have to get up to go to the bathroom to get out of the year, you use that so you
link |
don't turn lights on.
link |
And me, I brought like what?
link |
No, it's just a cool visual of just a puke bucket and a little light for the, like I
link |
can imagine these like little lights go never once in a while and then the rest is just
link |
in darkness meditating with this, with this singing.
link |
It's so beautiful.
link |
I'll take you sometime because trust me, I wouldn't offer if it wasn't the group I would
link |
You had a very interesting group.
link |
So it's the Heroic Hearts people.
link |
So yeah, this is my, Jesse gave us all these journals.
link |
They're like, you're going to want these.
link |
So he gave us all these journals and now this is like my Bible, like my work, my everything
link |
goes in this with me everywhere.
link |
It's just this like silent reminder for me.
link |
And so Heroic Hearts does fantastic work.
link |
I'll get into them after it.
link |
The thing with this group is there's such care.
link |
It's not like go do Aya and like you're done.
link |
There's like integration coaches and there's like doctors and there's like people to make
link |
sure that you're doing the work because Aya is just the, is just the gate.
link |
Now you have to take it and you have to implement it into your life.
link |
People don't do that though.
link |
Did you do like integration?
link |
Did you do conversations with somebody?
link |
Did you talk to your like, is there a process to, because I've a similar with psilocybin
link |
you mentioned, I've, as I understand, it's exceptionally beneficial for when you also
link |
do like talk therapy, like you couple that with the integration in some form where you
link |
talk through your experience and you talk through different things like that.
link |
That seems to be a really, you know, I know.
link |
I need to do that more with basically every substance I take, like if I get what you have
link |
been every once in a while known to do a bit of vodka or whiskey or whatever, like do integration
link |
Well, what did you learn?
link |
What did you get from that?
link |
Because you learn a lot, but you sometimes kind of just move on and you celebrate that
link |
that happened, but like really kind of think through it.
link |
It's important because that's what this was.
link |
So the first night, I'll give like a very cause, trust me, we could spend a whole podcast
link |
on both of the, all three of those nights, but the first night, the biggest thing that
link |
happened for me is I got to see my daughter, which was my first baby.
link |
And so people say, well, you know, blah, blah, blah, fuck you.
link |
That was my daughter.
link |
And I'm very where it was.
link |
I'm very conscious that it was.
link |
And at that point, she just eased me in enough to let me know and showed me enough that this
link |
This wasn't the end all be all where you are right now on this plane, on this dimension
link |
This is, this is a blip and it is, it is so minuscule to the big picture.
link |
And so she really did that by, she showed me just a black and then like a crack.
link |
And then these vibrant colors that I can't describe because there aren't words.
link |
Alex Gray does really great art and that is like been the closest thing I've been able
link |
He's a famous guy who does ayahuasca and he's an artist.
link |
I think he's got stuff in New York as well, but she just, she eased me in and gave me
link |
some relief and showed me enough that I could go, I could wake up the next day and not want
link |
to die the next day.
link |
And so what Heroic Heart said because it gave us all these journals, they're like, you know,
link |
the next day you kind of wake up and you, you do a meet, like a meeting, you do like
link |
a circle, all of us sit in a room and talk about what just happened the night before.
link |
People are crying and people are quiet and you just listen and that's what you do.
link |
And then you write on your free time.
link |
So after that, it's like up to you what you want to do.
link |
Do you want to just go walk in the woods?
link |
Well I chose to go find a fence post and lie on it for an hour.
link |
I lied there and stared up at these two eagles that were just in like the, I'll tell you
link |
where we were after and you'll be like, oh, okay, I get it.
link |
And then I found a forest and I just walked up with my book and I just lied there for
link |
And then she all of a sudden started giving me what you call your downloads.
link |
So the stuff you learn, the stuff that you were, all of a sudden you're remembering and
link |
these messages that come through and that's what this is.
link |
What kind of things are we talking about?
link |
So my biggest thing that she tried to reiterate to me at the beginning of that first night
link |
was that I don't breathe.
link |
I just, I don't, I don't breathe, I don't fucking breathe at all.
link |
I just, one thing to the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, the next thing just
link |
I don't take a minute and breathe.
link |
And so she made, when I say she and I say it because it's hard for people to understand,
link |
but I showed this to my husband, I showed it to my doctors and they're like, bitch, that's
link |
You don't talk like that.
link |
So like you can flip through it, but it was like, I'll just give, I'll just let Lex read
link |
for a second and just, I'll just do, here, let me do, I'll do an ad for heroic hearts,
link |
Here, I'll get my papers while you read.
link |
Connect to her, listen to her, open to her.
link |
Do you mind if I read some of these things?
link |
You can read some of it.
link |
The dark has lifted.
link |
Judge my spelling and I'll punch you, read the face.
link |
Well there's like, it's very sporadically, sporadically written.
link |
It's okay to be still.
link |
It's okay to be quiet.
link |
This is good, like, and these are overstretch of...
link |
That was the first couple pages were from the first night.
link |
This was just that weekend.
link |
And you just, they're laying looking at the eagles.
link |
Yeah, with the pen just frantic as well, Lex.
link |
Not like writing where you're like, oh, I'm just writing.
link |
It's like, I had to get it down or I was going to lose it.
link |
You can choose now, breathe now, be now.
link |
Be present, be warrior, be strength, breathe.
link |
You are the strength.
link |
There's some soul searching going on here.
link |
This is incredible.
link |
We wait till you get through.
link |
She gets deep, real aggressive, like, crack the door for I am the light, the giver, the
link |
This will, this can.
link |
This will, this can.
link |
And there's a leaf here.
link |
What's the story with the leaf?
link |
I was walking and every single time over the, over those three days, any time I like went
link |
for a walk by myself, I would just hear like, take this, like just almost like as if a voice
link |
was standing there and be like, you need this, take it, take it with you and keep it in your
link |
And it just goes off.
link |
So this is from there.
link |
It's so cool to have sort of, it's almost like time travel.
link |
I have poppies from France too when I did a, I did a 75th anniversary D day ride in France
link |
where we rode 600 kilometers on our road bikes for charity and we landed on the beaches of
link |
Juneau on the 75th and we got to go buy the poppy fields and I'm like covered in poppies
link |
and I have some in a book.
link |
I don't know why I do that.
link |
I just, I do that.
link |
That's cool because like these are your thoughts and those are the physical items as it really
link |
helps transport to that place somehow.
link |
Let the light in, let her in.
link |
And she would show me these visuals so my drawings are just like, yeah, there's drawings
link |
here and you're seeing this stuff.
link |
I can't draw either.
link |
So that's why there's, so I wish I could draw because if only I could translate what I could
link |
see visually on the paper.
link |
And you're talking to her.
link |
I'm here to listen.
link |
We call her Mama Aya.
link |
So who, who are you seeing?
link |
So for me at first, it was just eyes floating in the sky, these unbelievably gorgeous beautiful
link |
eyes that I, and I was like literally looking up at the top of the year and I kept going
link |
to myself, is anyone else seeing this?
link |
There's eyes in the sky.
link |
And so there's these eyes floating and they just kept looking at me and I remember when
link |
I kept telling myself like, oh, don't worry about nothing there, should we get angry?
link |
I'm right here, pay attention to me and I'd be like, okay, like forceful, like very forceful.
link |
So at first it was just the eyes.
link |
The second night is I'm crazy when I say this.
link |
That's going to be my clip.
link |
Ain't they all crazy?
link |
It's what I do when I get uncomfortable.
link |
I do weird hand gestures and movements.
link |
I like voices, I like it.
link |
You would hate to be in my office because most of the day it's just this weird lunges
link |
and uncomfortable moments.
link |
She turned me into a wolf.
link |
I know I said it out loud, I hear it, I said it, head to toe.
link |
And her takeaway for me was I'm trying to be this pack leader.
link |
I'm trying to be this leader in my life.
link |
I'm trying to do these things, but I'm going about them the whole wrong way.
link |
So like when the shamans call you up to do their special prayer over you, you go up,
link |
you don't touch them.
link |
They flash their little light.
link |
You see the little light spot, you walk to the light, you sit down on the light.
link |
And then my shaman, he's so funny because he's got this great tone in his voice.
link |
He goes, how are you doing, Kelsey?
link |
And I'm like, so, hi, yeah, I have a problem.
link |
I'm a wolf and I need it to stop.
link |
And he'd be like, don't you worry, girl, I got you, you ready?
link |
And I was like, uh huh, uh huh.
link |
So I'm sitting there cross like I've got my palms out like this.
link |
And I had a really traumatic shoulder injury.
link |
So I don't just sit slanted like this.
link |
My shoulders actually permanently detached and no one in the world will touch it or
link |
My collar bone comes out my back here.
link |
And I don't have any collar bone here.
link |
So nobody will fix it.
link |
No one will touch it.
link |
And I've had specialists, I've had surgeries, no one will do anything with it.
link |
So I'm permanently down and forward.
link |
Horrible functionally too?
link |
Oh, there's nothing.
link |
I can't do a pull up anymore.
link |
Oh, you should, I'll show you how to do a pushup after you'll fucking throw up an embarrassment.
link |
So before I, though, chronic pain like had to drink a bottle of CBD every day just to
link |
the pain is so bad because the trauma in it was so bad.
link |
The surgery went wrong.
link |
The collar bone dissipated and no longer exists.
link |
Like there's just, and they're not sure how I lift things with it and do stuff with it.
link |
It's like overcompensation everywhere.
link |
Like my, my back, like my scapula like flares out where it's, I'm all messed up from it.
link |
And so I was in chronic pain.
link |
So he's praying over me.
link |
And all of a sudden, all I feel is this arm just start just fucking vibrating and my hair
link |
And I feel somebody grab the back of my ponytail and snap my head back like this.
link |
And it felt like something was coming out of my throat, like being pulled out of me.
link |
And the takeaway that I ended up in the whole the rest of the night, there was a million
link |
And the takeaway was you no longer need to bite.
link |
You may only show your teeth.
link |
You can be the leader that you want to be.
link |
You do not always have to be the traditional type of leader.
link |
You can be in the back of the pack.
link |
You have to watch the rest around you, be, be mindful of those around you instead of
link |
just being upfront, be, be behind as well.
link |
Make sure that everything that you're doing is all being looked after because my thing
link |
was I will rip your fucking head off if you just say the wrong thing to me before.
link |
The whole thing was you can just show your teeth and that is more than enough.
link |
Stop trying to be, stop trying to overcompensate.
link |
You don't need to do that any longer.
link |
And then I had this weird astral projection thing happen, like where I was in my house
link |
and there were these flyers all over my husband and my son and like I went ham on them.
link |
I like shredded them to pieces.
link |
Like I was this protector and it's crazy because the guys told me after like someone
link |
would be like, there were flyers all over you the whole night.
link |
They were just all over you.
link |
And I'm like, I was snarling when I was sitting there.
link |
Like the shaman had to be like, I need you to try to calm your breathing after I could.
link |
But before like I was like attacking things beside me that people could see and I could
link |
see but couldn't wrap my brain around that they were real.
link |
Like it was weird.
link |
It was crazy, man.
link |
So what's the big takeaway there?
link |
My takeaway was I needed to be, I needed to stop trying to stop trying to push everything
link |
too hard, stop trying to force everything.
link |
It's all going to come.
link |
It's all going to happen but you are too aggressive, you're trying so hard that you're missing
link |
That's just how to be a better human kind of thing.
link |
This is getting intense.
link |
Yeah, it gets aggressive.
link |
Yeah, it gets aggressive.
link |
I mean there's love and light still.
link |
Love and light, love and light, the warrior within is calm.
link |
She will test you daily, show her respect.
link |
So that's what I mean.
link |
You've read my book.
link |
You know I don't write like that.
link |
Because people don't understand when I say I didn't, I don't feel like I wrote that.
link |
I feel like she gave me, I reread this all of the time.
link |
So I wonder, I mean, well not obviously but this is somehow part of you.
link |
I think it's a part of me obviously because.
link |
Reconnecting you somehow to that part, it kind of is incredible to think of what are
link |
the things that are part of us that we haven't really explored, you know.
link |
And there's so many.
link |
We just get in the talk.
link |
There to connect to her, feel her flow through them, use them for the strength for each day
link |
and you challenge will present itself.
link |
Love, light, breathe.
link |
Sorry, I have too much hair.
link |
I used to have long hair.
link |
What about day three?
link |
So day three is the, the stuff I talked about on Jocko.
link |
When I got taken over to the other side, I almost missed that night too.
link |
I almost missed that ceremony.
link |
I got a false positive on my COVID test and I got a call from the medical clinic that
link |
night being like, you need to come in.
link |
You got a false positive on your COVID test and if you're going to travel, you have to,
link |
we got to figure this out.
link |
You got to come do blood work.
link |
You got to come do, you know, whatever it is you need to do if you want to get home,
link |
but you got to come do something.
link |
And so I didn't think I was going to be in ceremony.
link |
So I left and, you know, they waited, they waited for me.
link |
And so I think the biggest takeaway from all of this for me was this isn't it.
link |
This isn't everything.
link |
This isn't the end all be all.
link |
You can fight through this.
link |
It's going to take work.
link |
It's going to be fucking hard.
link |
It's worth it though.
link |
And if you just keep going in the right direction, everything that I wrote down, everything, every
link |
goal, it'll happen.
link |
Tell me about your husband, Kelsey, what role did he play in your life?
link |
The most pivotal role.
link |
He kept me alive and made me feel worthy enough to, until I knew that I was worthy enough
link |
Can you dissect that a little bit like what role does love play in the human condition?
link |
I think love is the only reason that we haven't destroyed ourselves.
link |
I mean, we humans in general.
link |
I think there is a subset of people where love will always be, you know, love conquers
link |
all, you know, but that's not always the reality.
link |
The reality is life is messy and humans are messy.
link |
And the way we choose to deal with things are messy and complicated and difficult, but
link |
at the root of all good is love, I think.
link |
And for me, I was fortunate enough to meet my husband through a friend, which you listened
link |
So I don't know that we need to, unless you really want to go into that story again, how
link |
Well, the only part of that story I like, if people should just go listen to the Jocko
link |
podcast is how you made him uncomfortable, I love it.
link |
So how it works, let me explain.
link |
In the supercross and motocross industry, it's really small.
link |
The people who are professional, it's a small subset of people.
link |
It's kind of like Formula One, 21 cars.
link |
That's what there is.
link |
That's the amount of riders.
link |
And we should say your husband is a motocross guy.
link |
My husband was a professional supercross and motocross racer for his whole life.
link |
And he raced for Kawasaki in Suzuki.
link |
He lived in California and raced all down there.
link |
And when I met him, I met him at the tail end of his career.
link |
And so I went to Montreal with a friend of mine to see somebody that I was currently
link |
sleeping with, who was a friend of mine and end up meeting Brady instead.
link |
And the funny moment in Jocko's podcast was saying that I was fucking him instead of just
link |
sleeping with him.
link |
And then Jocko's face exploded and Jocko was like, Oh, sleeping.
link |
So like he was, he was trying to get details of the sleeping quarters that you're, he's
link |
trying to get you to define as a good interview would, Oh, sleeping.
link |
And then you were like, it's fucking Jocko or something like that.
link |
But that's true because in that industry, it's like we, it's small.
link |
We all share, trust me, this is what it is.
link |
And it was, so I met him there and he had broken his wrist really, really bad.
link |
And I was, this was before I deployed.
link |
So I met him and I, we stayed in touch and just became friends and just texted.
link |
And I was deploying though.
link |
So we disagreed, you know, we'd be friends.
link |
We weren't actually talking about anything romantically at all.
link |
And then I deployed and we got talking and to know each other a little more, a little
link |
And then we decided that we liked each other and we wanted to try to give it at least a
link |
And so when I got home from Afghanistan, I went and watched him race his last, one of
link |
his last two races that he did professionally before he retired, excuse me.
link |
And it was a Montreal one was in Vegas and I hadn't seen him and he didn't really know
link |
We didn't really know each other.
link |
We, you know, we met.
link |
I slept in the bed beside him because my girlfriend didn't want to get in trouble from her boyfriend
link |
from sleeping beside a random dude.
link |
And then, um, yeah, we just, we, we started dating and he really slowly became my rock
link |
and he understands trauma.
link |
He had some stuff happen in his life and his family that he went through a lot of therapy.
link |
He went through a lot of shit.
link |
He went, he saw what traumatic situations can do to a family and to people and those
link |
that are suffering with it.
link |
And so he was well equipped to handle me, um, thankfully.
link |
And it got to a point where we were doing the long distance back and forth, back and
link |
forth and back and forth.
link |
And I finally got the call that I was going to be released from the military.
link |
And I wanted to live near him, but I couldn't afford to live in British Columbia because
link |
I was from Ontario and BC is like, it means bring cash for a reason.
link |
I'm like, no, I can live there.
link |
And then his family was like, come live with us.
link |
Like they had a big enough, they had a big enough house.
link |
Maybe it was fine.
link |
So I was like, okay.
link |
And so I went from like dating this guy long distance to over, you know, from 2009 to 2011
link |
just back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
link |
And then finally his parents were like, shit, or get off the pot here with her.
link |
You know, it's obvious she loves you.
link |
And I would never say it.
link |
That word just as a love, like it was just like,
link |
You guys didn't say, uh, for a long time.
link |
Because I was dead inside.
link |
I didn't know what that meant.
link |
I didn't feel anything.
link |
He loved it because he like, we, we go, we go do something.
link |
You would never complain about anything.
link |
You wouldn't say a fucking word.
link |
You just sit there and now you got all your feelies back and your emotions back and now
link |
you're too hot and you're too cold.
link |
Anyway, so yeah, he loved it.
link |
I was numb and dead inside seriously when we, when I call him back.
link |
But you, were you still able to have fun together?
link |
That kind of thing?
link |
Like when you say there's no emotion, there's more emotion around the basics of like everyday
link |
life, but you're still able to just like enjoy shit together or is it?
link |
I was enjoying stuff, but I wasn't feeling, feeling.
link |
I was like, this is fun.
link |
That was surface level.
link |
Like Lex, this is fun.
link |
Oh, there's nothing there.
link |
No, there's nothing there.
link |
And then I lived with his parents and we, we lived there and that was, you know, God damn
link |
His family was so good to me because I was a nightmare.
link |
I was a nightmare, couldn't cook certain food around me anymore, couldn't, couldn't
link |
go certain places with me anymore, couldn't, you know, crowds were in hard, no, we didn't
link |
And I'm like, I just changed.
link |
I, I moved in and was like, shit's got to change if you guys don't want me to kill
link |
Like, and they were willing and they were accepting and they were amazing about it.
link |
And then we finally said, okay, well, like, is this, was this, we're good.
link |
We're like, I, I said, I used to say like, I L you, like, I couldn't say love.
link |
It freaked me out for a long time.
link |
And then I finally said it and then that shithead said it like a month later and I was like,
link |
You should have said at the same exact time.
link |
I wanted the response.
link |
And he goes to treatment with me, he, whatever I need, he knows that like, hey, it's more
link |
for like him and like, how do I handle her?
link |
And then we moved out and we bought a house and then he took a sweet ass time.
link |
We were dating for four years before we were engaged because just to be sure the crazy
link |
He waited four years on that.
link |
Or you could, you could say he's just a terrified of commitment, but both.
link |
A little bit of both.
link |
Hey, when you were the guy on the posters that all the girls sign up to that send all the
link |
dirty pictures, why are you giving that up?
link |
Commitment is a real commitment then.
link |
This is the jacquery set.
link |
We talked about Brass and Unity a little bit.
link |
What's the longterm mission goal and dream of your company and the podcast of the same
link |
So for me, what I've been trying to do with this company is create a community that can
link |
really work together to not only help vets first responders, but to really bridge the
link |
gap with the civilian population and letting them know what we go through and why it is
link |
such an epidemic and why there is over 22 suicides a day and we are losing people.
link |
Like it's going out of style.
link |
The amount of vets that are questioning the last 20 years of their life right now is terrifying.
link |
I work with organizations that are doing this outreach and they're overloaded right now
link |
like they have never seen before because this whole thing is just, it's hit ahead here.
link |
So what Brass and Unity tries to do is it is really just a vehicle to get the money
link |
in the hands of the people that are doing the work with it.
link |
I couldn't start a nonprofit because I'm not good at fundraising.
link |
I'm not good at being like, give me your money, I'm going to do this with it.
link |
The least I could do was come up with a product that I know I could give to people or people
link |
could purchase and if I gave pretty much all of the profit, like the actual profit from
link |
it to those organizations and I give them something to wear that is a touch piece or
link |
if they're out and somebody sees a bullet on the wrist to go, hey, what is that?
link |
It's a conversation starter and that's exactly what it's been and it's done its job is that.
link |
And so we, like I said, we are a way to get the vehicle, we're the vehicle, we're the
link |
money in the hands of the people.
link |
People don't always want to just get a tax receipt.
link |
It's great to donate to something, great on you to do that, but most people have a selfish
link |
But if you can tap into that, you can then fund these charities properly and give them
link |
the tools to do their jobs effectively.
link |
Up until this point, they just count on people's goodness of their hearts.
link |
Hate to break it to you.
link |
Humanity is rough right now.
link |
We need to look at something a little differently.
link |
So did these things spark, like a Julie's sparks conversations and then do you work
link |
I get up, I push jewelry and sunglasses on people and say, but now that you're going
link |
to wear that, now you're a part of the being you are me.
link |
Now you're a part of this community.
link |
This is speaking of which, let me put it right back on.
link |
Branded, this is a organic product placement.
link |
This isn't like marketing at all or nothing weird about this at all.
link |
And so we work with a lot of organizations and I'm very particular about where we send
link |
our money because there are, it feels like thousands of vet organizations right now.
link |
And if we were able to consolidate, it would be more ideal.
link |
I spoke about that on another show, but that's not currently happening.
link |
So I try to work with the nonprofits.
link |
I know number one are not paying six figure salaries, which trust me there's lots, a lot.
link |
Number two, I look at the actual resources that they're providing and if they're going
link |
to be something that are going to be useful in my opinion, whether or not they're actually
link |
useful and I just don't think they are, that's up for debate.
link |
I know it's worked for me.
link |
So I try to fund the things that I know have been helpful for me and the people I associate
link |
So that's why I brought all the paper because I didn't want to be an idiot and forget anybody
link |
that's really important because I get caught up in things and I think it's important to
link |
So number one, heroic hearts.
link |
We just started working to talk about them and really make them known, but we're going
link |
to be donating to them as well.
link |
Are they doing more stuff than the ayahuasca thing?
link |
So their points are, I got Jesse to actually, I'm like, what are your talking points because
link |
I need people to know exactly what you do.
link |
So veterans have had to take their mental and general health into their own hands due
link |
to the failure of the government system.
link |
So that is why they were created, but heroic hearts is a peer supported mental health network
link |
involving full preparation, integration, coaching and connection to vetted psychedelic
link |
So they don't just do aya.
link |
They deal with psilocybin, ketamine, Ibogaine, but they've got protocols in place.
link |
They've got locations you go to that are safely vetted and they work.
link |
They've got over right now, Jesse said they have 800 veterans on a waiting list for treatment.
link |
That's just before the spike of the end of this war.
link |
They have over 100, they've helped over 100 veterans, including dozens of special operation
link |
vets find effective care.
link |
They've now got branches in the US, UK and Canada, and the biggest thing about them and
link |
why we talk about them is because the problem of psychedelics and the stigma around it is
link |
so significant, but because of great universities that are now stepping up and doing the research
link |
behind it, it is being legitimized.
link |
So like they're doing that in Canada, there's a group called Therasil.
link |
They are currently fighting the government to get the rights for Canadians under section
link |
156 of our laws to get compassionate care for psilocybin use.
link |
I've done a panel with them on that really great base set of Victoria, really smart people.
link |
One of the other bigger charities that we work with, and they're honestly, they were
link |
my first and foremost charity that I ever worked with, and they're a big component in
link |
the veteran community in Canada.
link |
They're called Honor House, and Honor House was started by honorary colonel Aldi Genova.
link |
It was started because of a guy named Trevor Green.
link |
He was a Canadian soldier who deployed, and he was, so Captain Trevor Green, sorry, Trevor,
link |
Captain Trevor Green, he got an axe in the middle of his head, a Taliban member came
link |
up and put an axe directly into his head when his helmet was off, and he survived.
link |
He's done work with Invictus Games in Prince Harry.
link |
He has an exoskeleton he uses on the island.
link |
He hasn't changed one bit from the infantry captain you expect him to be, and Al saw there
link |
was a need for vets and first responders to get treatment because there's no real home
link |
away from home for people.
link |
Picture Ronald McDonald for cancer and families, this is vets and first responders.
link |
Their whole thing, and I'll read it so I say it exactly right, because I used to be on the
link |
board of their charity, but I ran out of time, so now I just consult.
link |
They are a home away from home for members of the Canadian Armed Forces, veterans and
link |
first responders, and their families to stay completely free of charge while they're receiving
link |
medical care and treatment in the Vancouver area.
link |
But since then, they've expanded since I've come on board, and they've opened on a ranch,
link |
which is up in Ashcroft, BC, and it's 140 acres, 10 cabins, and a main cabin.
link |
They do equine therapy, and they're more focused on operational stress injury clinics, sorry,
link |
operational stress injury within the veteran community.
link |
And they have specialists that do that.
link |
They have their own bracelet with us, so every time you buy an honor house bracelet, all
link |
the proceeds go to them.
link |
And it's actually the green one, so that one.
link |
So when you buy one of those honor house bracelets, they have those, they go directly to them,
link |
which is really amazing.
link |
They've been near and dear to my heart for a long time.
link |
You've got the All Secure Foundation, which is, these guys are super dope.
link |
I'm going to read exactly because Jen texts me.
link |
So Jen and Tom Satterley, I've had them both on the podcast.
link |
Tom was involved in Black Hawk Down.
link |
Have you heard of them?
link |
So Tom was involved in Black Hawk Down.
link |
It was one of his first operations.
link |
He's a Delta operator.
link |
And I asked her, I said, listen, I'm going to be doing these shows, and I think it's great
link |
that we talk about you more.
link |
So I said, give me your three points of importance.
link |
So the All Secure Foundation serves special operations combat families in healing from
link |
posttraumatic stress injury and secondary posttraumatic stress.
link |
So that's often what the wife or the other husband or the other spouse suffers from.
link |
And we're starting to see that be more and more of an issue now.
link |
So they also are devoted to rebuilding the couple's relationships on the home front after
link |
the separations of war.
link |
And 80% of their warriors went on, went, yeah, 80% of their warriors want their families
link |
to be more involved with the healing.
link |
The problem is, is very often, vets don't realize that they can have, or just because
link |
the system doesn't pay for it, actually have their spouse as a part of things.
link |
And the biggest thing that we find with special operations families, I think the divorce rates
link |
And so they work so hard with these families.
link |
They take them on retreats, these husband and wives, and they get them to connect again
link |
after being separated over such a long period of time.
link |
There's other places like Children's of Fallen Patriots at a DC, where they fund education,
link |
university for people who have lost their parents in deployments, whether they're kids
link |
If they're still in utero, they still pay.
link |
Then you've got people like in Canada, you've got vets Canada, you've got in the States,
link |
you've got True Patriot Love, you've got, who else in the States is really great that
link |
we've worked with?
link |
I know there's a Green Beret Foundation, that's great.
link |
One more wave gives amputees, teaches them to surf with amputees, like they're really
link |
There's so many organizations, but at the end of the day, I focus on a small subset.
link |
Because you cannot fix everyone's problems, the least you can do for people is focus.
link |
If you can provide focus, you can provide the proper amount of funding, the proper amount
link |
of funding can give the proper amount of tools.
link |
Those tools can actually be implemented properly.
link |
And then those people can go on to hopefully have successful marriages and families.
link |
And we don't have to watch our parents drink themselves to death and wonder why daddy's
link |
yelling at mommy all the time and daddy storms out leaves.
link |
Well, daddy had some shit happen in his life and mommy had some shit happen, but that does
link |
not mean that's who they are.
link |
And yeah, so trauma has completely destructive effects on family and relationships and correcting
link |
that as ripple effects.
link |
Oh, just astronomical ripple effects.
link |
Because the problem is we are so quick to tell people they're suffering from PTSD.
link |
We're so quick to give them drugs.
link |
We're so quick to kick them out of the military.
link |
We're so quick to let them be homeless on the street.
link |
We're so quick to let them fucking kill themselves.
link |
And then all of a sudden when a politician goes, veteran suicides an issue, that's when
link |
Well, if you prevent the problem from happening in the first place or you give people the
link |
right funding and tools to do the job, you won't have this problem.
link |
Do you have advice for young people think high school students, maybe unaggrads, college
link |
students about career, life, how to live a life they can be proud of?
link |
You've had one heck of a life.
link |
Some of them are really cheesy, but they're true.
link |
Live a life you can be proud of, number one, if you wake up every morning and you hate
link |
what you do, change the fucking station.
link |
Do not live and stay in that perpetual cycle of bullshit.
link |
It's not worth it.
link |
It's not what you're on this planet for.
link |
You're worth more than that than the monotony of waking up, going to work, hating your life,
link |
drinking yourself to sleep, and functioning.
link |
Do yourself a favor.
link |
The thing I scream about on the show so much is move your fucking body.
link |
Get your blood moving.
link |
Allow your body to do what it's here for.
link |
If you can't run, walk to the fridge three times more than maybe you did before, but you're
link |
Pay attention to the shit you look at.
link |
More now than ever, we are seeing our younger generation just be force fed information from
link |
one side or the other, and none of it makes sense.
link |
None of it's understandable.
link |
It just causes chaos in the brain.
link |
Really pay attention to what you listen to.
link |
Something I've had to learn to do is make time for myself.
link |
All of this working 18 hours a day, not sleeping, just work, work, work, work.
link |
That doesn't work.
link |
That's not sustainable.
link |
It's not healthy, and it's not anything anyone should be doing.
link |
Balance is important.
link |
But if you're going to take the time to do something for yourself, don't make it sitting
link |
in front of the TV for six hours eating a bag of chips, drinking a Coke.
link |
Make it, I'm going to go for a walk, maybe listen to a podcast where I can learn something.
link |
Make it, I'm going to go volunteer somewhere.
link |
Nobody does that anymore, but make it, I can go volunteer somewhere on our house.
link |
They have no paid employees, they have one.
link |
Everybody is a volunteer.
link |
They're fucking phenomenal.
link |
Do whatever you're going to do, do it with some fucking drive, put some goddamn effort
link |
into your life, and pick something in a career that's going to make you happy.
link |
Not something that's just going to give you six figures, because that's not going to make
link |
I can tell you right now, I have everything in the world, and the last thing I want is
link |
I want less, I want the woods, and I want quiet, because that's what's important to me.
link |
I want my family to matter, the people around me to matter, and the small group I keep that
link |
tight knit I have.
link |
I want them to wake up every minute knowing that they have a friend that they can call
link |
on the other line that isn't just like, how's it going?
link |
That can actually have a conversation, a meaningful, intelligent, caring conversation.
link |
We are just breeding these kids to be followers who digest bullshit, who reverberate things
link |
they don't fully understand, and have opinions on stuff they have no business talking about.
link |
Yeah, with an open mind, humbly, think deeply about the world.
link |
How has your relationship with death changed?
link |
This is a Russian program, I have to ask you.
link |
So you've considered suicide throughout your life.
link |
You have been in the line of fire, you have witnessed death.
link |
You as a human being, a mortal one, do you think about your death these days now that
link |
you have begun the journey with dealing with your trauma?
link |
Do you think about your death?
link |
Are you afraid of your death?
link |
Well you don't die, so that's why.
link |
What do you mean you don't die?
link |
To another plane, another vibration, whatever you want to call it, this isn't it.
link |
This isn't all of it.
link |
This is a moment, this is a... I used to be afraid of death before the military.
link |
I was always afraid of dying.
link |
I had this irrational fear that I was going to be kidnapped in my room, seriously, irrational
link |
And it's funny because I talked to McKayla yesterday and she said the same thing and
link |
I was like, oh my God, I know what you're talking about.
link |
You're being afraid of being kidnapped?
link |
Yeah, she had this fear that someone was going to come in and take her out of her room.
link |
I had the same fear.
link |
By a human being or a monster or some kind?
link |
No, I think by a human being.
link |
I had this irrational fear that something was going to happen to me.
link |
Like I said, I don't know if it's because my parents were always made me aware of my
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surroundings, people take people.
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This is a real thing that happens.
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I was really small and I looked like a little boy.
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My hair was like that when I was training.
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I had short, no hair, flat as a board, you would have thought I was a 12 year old boy.
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And so my mom's like, people take people, sweetie, that's just the reality of life.
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You need to be aware.
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So I don't know if I have this ingrained in my mind.
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I was always like training to protect myself or fight someone off.
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So I was like afraid of this irrational thing.
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And then I went overseas and then I realized that I could just be literally there talking
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to you, having a conversation and I could just be taken off the face there.
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And there's nothing I can do about it.
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And then I adopted this idea that when it's my time, it'll be my time.
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But the difference is now, at least I know that if I do go and I do cross and I am and
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I do move on, I know that I live my life the way that I always hoped I would be proud to
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Can I ask you a dark question?
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Because you mentioned Robin Williams, you mentioned Anthony Bourdain and your own struggle
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Why do you think they ultimately lost that battle?
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Why do you think they did their lives?
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Oh man, that's a loaded question because you could look at everything from biomarkers in
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the brain to know if there's serotonin and dopamine levels were crashed in the ground.
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There's biological reasonings for some people where they're born bipolar and they have,
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or they're schizophrenic.
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There's so many things we don't fully grasp about the brain.
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But what we do know from my perspective, for me at least, there really is no rhyme or reason
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why I survived and others didn't.
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Stuff and things don't make you happy.
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People don't always know why they're feeling the way they're feeling, but they also are
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not always willing to talk about it or they put on a good front.
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And if nobody knows any different, what do you expect?
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And it's especially clear with the two of them that on the surface they're exceptionally
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successful in so many dimensions.
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And still that means nothing, material possessions, anything really is not, doesn't guarantee you
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Well, that's terrifying, but when it's good, that's what makes it joyful, like that's what
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happiness is, is like holy shit, somehow, amidst all the absurdity, all the things that
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you can't predict, you nevertheless feel really good.
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That's why I feel really fortunate to be getting this feat of happiness all the time.
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Well, to be or not to be, that's a good place to end it.
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Kelsey, you're an amazing human being.
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I'm really fortunate that you would spend your valuable time with me.
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As I said, you're so good at not just talking, but listening.
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So I definitely will listen to your podcast, because I can tell you're an incredible person
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as an interviewer and as a storyteller.
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So again, thank you for talking today.
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Thank you so much.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Kelsey Sharon.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now let me leave you with some words from Herbert Hoover, older men declare war, but
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it is the youth that must fight and die.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.