A Mother's Day thank you from a Green Beret

Sat, 12 May 2018 04:00:00 -0400

This may be in sharp contrast to what popular culture expects from a career Green Beret, but over and over in my life I’ve found that love and compassion are the basis for just action – this includes all that our Special Forces are tasked to do.

This means, first and foremost, our actions must be predicated on what our mothers taught us, or should have, by loving and protecting us.

For America, this has mostly been the case. America has fought around the world and throughout its history mostly in support of freedom. Americans love freedom and we show great compassion for the human condition.

You’d be hard pressed to prove to me that our motivations have been lesser ones, as I have spent 23 years as a warrior in our Army. I spent years in many countries around the world in pursuit of foreign policy interests. I’ve risked my life many times to pursue these ends. I have an extremely honorable feeling about my service to the United States of America. I am proud of our pursuits for freedom, security and stability around the world, and I’ve seen the positive effects on populations that had not previously experienced such blessings before.

As a Special Forces Medical Sergeant, I’ve rendered care to people in lesser-developed places who had never seen a doctor or a dentist in their lives. I’ve pulled teeth for people who were miserable with dental pain. I’ve handed out prenatal vitamins and made small but real contributions toward reducing infant mortality rates, and even delivered babies in the absence of medical facilities. I’ve provided trauma management for the seriously injured and wounded. Even if we were handing out blankets or digging wells for hygienic water sources, I have always felt like we were doing great things to influence populations with love and compassion.

I attribute so much of this to a maternal nature that compels us to love, support and to protect – to what mothers provide. This is why I dedicated “Conquer Anything – A Green Beret’s Guide to Building Your A-Team" to mothers.

The beauty in a mother’s love is that her fight to safeguard her child is a justified one. She won’t have to regret what she did, and she will certainly win the fight with whatever resources are available. A mother will tend to make decisions less in favor of herself and more in favor of us.

In contrast, if anger, vengeance, reputation, identity, competition or any of these lesser and selfish reasons are our chief motivating force, we are likely to regret what we do.

This is why, as a nation, if we pursue our goals out of love and compassion in an unselfish way, we’ll never have to regret what we do. This is why I resolve to attach myself to feminine virtues, rather than resist them.

In contrast, I’ve too often witnessed ugly outcomes as a result of people being too macho. Testosterone is very necessary, but it must be tempered with a mother’s love and compassion. We are better and we even fight better when we are strong enough to love in any environment, just as our mothers, when at their best, show us.

This must be said because popular culture today too often defines soldiers, or even manliness itself, in a simplistic and even boyish ways that only concentrate on stoicism and tough-guy combat skills. As a soldier who spent a year recovering in a hospital, let me tell you, if I’d developed that other side of myself, I would have had an easier time recovering, as my perspective of myself would have been more well-rounded.

As it was, my warrior persona had been blown away and I was left empty. I didn’t know the rest of myself. I didn’t even realize I wasn’t well rounded. If you’re only an alpha man or woman who charges forward without looking left, right or behind, then, sooner or later, you’re going to trip, and no one will give you cover or help you up.

It took a horrifying year in a hospital to make me aware that I have been supported more than I’ve supported others.

As I try to make up for that, I want to say today and always, God bless mothers everywhere.

Green Beret: The Left is wrong. I am a warrior. Not a victim

Sun, 22 Apr 2018 13:15:00 -0400

You think about a lot of things when you’re in a hospital bed with tubes in you and pieces of your body sewn back on, all the while knowing you really should be dead. At first, how you judge yourself is the worst of it.

I had been a Green Beret for 18 years. I was physically tough and had all these skills earned in sweat and blood. But after being blown up, shot and badly burned on a battlefield in Afghanistan, I found I’d only worked to harden the parts that had been blown up and burned away.

I found that everything I needed to really be strong was undeveloped and little understood, and that mainstream society, and even the Army, didn’t grasp this.

I was aware that other soldiers in the hospital with me had taken their own lives. I knew others who’d gotten out with missing limbs and PTSD who’d turned to alcohol and drugs.

I was a warrior, which meant I always trained for external threats. Now I had to look inward to avoid these traps.

After a year in the hospital recovering, and after years of telling my story and giving my hard-earned perspective to audiences first as the official spokesperson for the Green Berets, the first they ever had, and then later as a retired soldier, I came to understand what had to be said. It was then that I sat down to write Conquer Anything—A Green Beret’s Guide to Building Your A-Team.

Still, I don’t see myself as a hero and I didn’t want to write a book casting myself that way. If I was going to write a book it was going to be about something bigger than myself.

A first clue had come when my father, a career soldier who also had to overcome horrible wounds, visited me in the hospital and told me, “Son, remember when I told you that if you want sympathy you’ll find it in the dictionary between ‘sh%@ and syphilis?’”

I nodded and tried to smile.

“Here’s something else,” said my father. “I need you to know now that sympathy may pay well in the short term, but if you cash in on sympathy it will take everything from you in the long run.”

This led me to the realization that it’s a mistake to define a soldier wounded in war as a “wounded warrior.” Doing that defines them by their wounds and makes them look for sympathy. They begin to think of themselves as victims. If you volunteer you can’t be a victim. The way to recover, I found, is to define yourself not by your body, but by your soul.

Defining yourself according to perceived limitations, after all, is to concede defeat before you even begin. Nevertheless, that is what popular culture so often does. And not just for “wounded warriors,” but for anyone with an addiction to overcome, an illness to beat or any other perceived physical or psychological limitation.

Next, I found, comes taking the positive steps I learned in the Green Berets, the methodology I taught when I was an instructor at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School.

Special Forces’ teams have a mystique about them, as they work expertly to execute complex and deadly missions, often behind enemy lines. What I learned in my recovery, however, is that the system they’ve developed can help all of us build our own A-Teams to conquer anything.

Doing so means first defining ourselves by what’s inside of us. Next are the steps to lead. This begins with defining the mission, understanding our code and then recruiting a team and understanding how a diverse team becomes one. It begins from inside and then moves out, but we must stay true to who we are.

We are all individuals. We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be deceived by the left’s identity politics. The left too often insists we behave as victims of the powerful, of our physical limitations and more. We must instead define ourselves by what’s inside of us. At the same time, we must respect others as individuals, all with human dignity.

From that basis we can conquer anything.

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A Mother's Day thank you from a Green Beret

Green Beret: The Left is wrong. I am a warrior. Not a victim