Overcome

In September 2007, I awoke groggy in Bethesda Naval Hospital with tubes running from every opening in my body, the heart monitor beeping. The previous week had been a total blur, with vast periods of time completely lost. I remembered waking up in the Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad, where I’d been medevaced after my team was caught in an ambush. I remembered waking up in Balad, Iraq, where they take soldiers with combat head wounds for treatment. Time vanished, and then I woke up in Landstuhl, Germany, for more emergency surgeries and blood transfusions. I remember the chaotic flight home where multiple times I thought I was going to suffocate due to excessive congestion in my tracheotomy. And I remember the surreal feeling of being back on American soil, riding in the blue bus to Bethesda Naval Hospital.

Now I was lying in my hospital bed, weak and barely able to move, as a young, energetic doctor talked me through the path ahead. Despite everything, I was determined to get out of the hospital as fast as possible. But I couldn’t say that to the doctor, due to my extensive facial wounds and the tracheotomy. I couldn’t move my left arm after it was nearly sheared off by enemy gunfire. The only way I could communicate was through writing.

“Doc, how many months will it take to put me back together,” I wrote on the pad on my lap, “so I can get back to the fight and my teammates?”

Her face registered disbelief. She shook her head.

“Months?” she said. “Lieutenant, we’re talking years to put you back together.”

I sank back into my bed. Years.

When I had been selected for the Seaman to Admiral program and spent three years at Old Dominion University to get my degree, I had missed years of experience with my teammates. I wasn’t going to miss years alongside them again if I had anything to do with it. I’d had moments of disbelief, grief, fear, and pain as I lay there in the hospital taking one day at a time, but thinking about my teammates fighting in Iraq without me had kept me determined to get back to combat as soon as possible. I knew I could defy the odds like I had so many times before.

A few days later, two visitors came in and began to talk about what bad shape I was in.

“What a shame,” they said, as I drifted in and out of sleep. “What a shame we send these young men and women off to war and they come home broken. They will never be the same. Most will struggle to make it back into society. Most will never be whole. What a waste.”

I couldn’t talk, and although I still had some ringing in my ears from the bullet that had torn half my face off, I could hear just fine. As I listened to them talk about me, I felt something stirring in my gut.

For my entire life, I had beaten the odds. I made it into the SEALs, the most elite fighting force in the world, despite being a small, skinny high schooler with discipline problems and unimpressive grades. After almost being washed out of the Navy because of a leadership failure early in my career as an officer, I had fought my way back to being a respected officer and leader and was ready to assume the first major level of SEAL command, platoon commander. I was at the height of my career.

But all of that was before I had run into the devastating ambush that had wounded me and two of my teammates and left my blood and pieces of my body on the battlefield in Iraq. Were these people, these supposed friends, right? Was this how things were going to be now? Was this how people were going to see me? A cripple, a disfigured man forever ruined by a war that had claimed so many, a powerless victim?

Was I going to be looked down on for the rest of my life as an object of pity?

These questions rattled through my mind, and I broke into a cold sweat as I replayed the events of the night only a week before when everything changed.

That night, my US Navy SEAL task unit had received last-minute intel on the location of a time-sensitive target in the Al Karmah area of Al Anbar Province in Iraq. A senior-level Al Qaeda commander had been reported in a compound in our area of responsibility. He was a dangerous individual we had been tracking all deployment. Once our mission was cleared, I began preparing, triple-checking my gear, running over the battle plan in my head until I knew it inside and out. Then, my team and I boarded the Black Hawk helicopters that would drop us into battle.

When my team landed, we easily took over the compound, encountering no resistance. In the main building, we uncovered a weapons cache and jihadist propaganda, but either the intel was incorrect or something had alerted the enemy that we were coming, because our target was nowhere to be found.

Our snipers on the rooftop suddenly began notifying us of activity nearby.

“Red, there’s movement outside…”

We soon discovered that our enemy was in a house roughly 150 yards from the one we had cleared. We pushed an Air Force AC-130 gunship overhead. The gunship reported that men were in motion from the other house, so I took my assault team and patrolled in their direction. As we approached their position, my team got separated because of a radio frequency miscommunication.

We quickly maneuvered through a dense thicket to combine our forces, but as we struggled through the Iraqi chaparral, my team and I were caught in a deadly, well-executed ambush with the Al Qaeda commander’s handpicked personal security detail. In the ensuing thirty-five-minute firefight, three of us were severely wounded.

I was shot the first time when a hidden machine-gun nest just ten yards from my position opened fire. I was hit immediately, bullets stitching across my midsection. Most embedded themselves in my body armor, but two rounds struck my left arm, nearly shearing it in half. In the confusion of the fight, I thought my arm had been severed from my body. Bullets continued to ricochet off my gun, my night-vision goggles, and my helmet as I struggled to understand the ambush and lead us out of it. There were two enemy machine guns firing from only fifty feet away, as well as a dozen enemy AK-47 shooters. I was stranded in a devastating cross fire of thousands of rounds the size of my thumb.

Fear and terror attempted to grip my mind, but I pushed them away. I knew I had to get to cover or I was going to die right there, on that spot. I looked behind me and saw nothing but thousands of yards of empty Iraqi desert. Then I saw muzzle flashes from my teammates shooting past me at the enemy. There was a large John Deere–style tractor tire my teammates had jumped behind to make their last stand against an overwhelming enemy force. Cover. Something that would stop bullets and give us a position to fight back from.

Despite my injuries and pain, hope welled in my soul. I had to get to that tire. I rose to run to the only cover available, but as I leapt forward, a bullet struck in front of my right ear and traveled through my face, blasting off my nose, blowing out my cheekbone, vaporizing my right orbital floor, and shattering all the bones above my eye. The guys at the tire saw my head whipsaw forward and watched me collapse and crash into the ground ten yards in front of them. I blacked out as my blood soaked into the foreign soil.

When I came to, I was caught in the open, on the X, the kill zone, the point of attack, while the firefight continued to rage over me. I was bleeding out, caught between my team and two machine guns that had nearly killed me. Anger that I had allowed us to get into this situation slowly gave way to the realization that I was going to die.

If you have studied the body and trauma long enough and witnessed others sustain grievous battlefield injuries, you recognize the error codes as they come. It’s similar to a mechanic with a diagnostic computer coding a broken car. This amazing machine we walk around in operates off specific pressures, and if you spring a leak—due to large bullets tearing through your body, for instance—your pressures start to drop and the machine goes into emergency mode. Without enough blood volume to push to the entire body, it starts to pool blood into your most vital organs. When this happens, your extremities go numb and get cold, and your body goes into shock. This is what I was experiencing. I knew I was dying.

I could feel the life slipping out of me. To be honest, it was a luxury, knowing I was dying. For some people, death comes in a millisecond. They don’t even realize it’s coming. For me, I was lying in that firefight for thirty-five minutes, which left ample time to reflect.

Drifting in and out of consciousness, I could feel myself going through the different stages of shock. I started getting really cold. I couldn’t feel my extremities anymore. I tried to move my right hand, which wasn’t injured, but I couldn’t move it. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Every draw of breath took more and more effort, and it got harder and harder to think.

In the moments when I could think, my family flooded my mind, along with the grim realization that I would never go home again. I would never hold my wife, raise my son to be a strong man, walk my daughters down the aisle, celebrate Christmas. It was a crushing reality.

I remember regretting my poor decisions as well as the opportunities I’d passed on, and more than anything, I wanted just a few more seconds to tell my family that I loved them.

I lay there dying, knowing one cold, hard fact of combat: my teammates could not rush out and save me. Warriors have learned the hard lessons of rushing into open gunfire to save fallen comrades and getting wounded or killed themselves. The rules of warfare are simple: kill or be killed. The rules of an ambush are simple: fight back and win, and don’t put yourself in a position where you can’t fight. We have been trained to win the firefight first and save our teammates second, because you cannot win and save them if you are wounded or dead. I lay there in this grim reality, knowing I had to be patient and trust my teammates. But I knew I had limited time. Every pump of my heart pushed more and more blood out of my body and sent me one additional step closer to the end.

As I struggled to focus and think through the fierce gunfire, I called out to God: “Lord, give me the strength.”

Upon that prayer, a thought popped into my head. I had watched a documentary by Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill called Baghdad ER (2006), and I remembered a line from it: “Our military trauma doctors are so good that if you can show up at the Combat Support Hospital [CSH] with a pulse, you have a 90 percent chance of surviving.”

I wrapped my head around this singular thought: Stay awake to stay alive. In the midst of the chaos, that became what I focused on. I said to myself, “I don’t care what happens. If I have to reach into my own chest and pump my own heart with my bare fist, I’m going to arrive at that CSH alive.”

With my team holding ground, the AC-130 finally released their first fire mission, and they took down the last of the enemy with precision fire. I had called in danger-close fire missions before, but this was closer than anything I’d ever seen. “Danger close” is a military term for the proximity to explosions and fragmentation from aerial munitions. Much smarter people than me had performed countless tests on every type of military bomb and bullet and measured the farthest distance the explosive shockwave and metal fragmentation traveled from the point of impact. These “danger rings” were called “danger-close” parameters, and as a leader on the ground we knew depending on the munitions being used how far we had to be from the enemy to be out of the danger zone. If you were inside of the danger zone, you were danger close or within the impact area. Pilots and flight crews tried to actively avoid dropping danger-close munitions because they knew the possibility of wounding or killing friendly forces was incredibly high the closer the danger-close mission was to your position. My team leader had to call fire directly on our position, literally only a few yards away from me, to push the enemy back. This was as danger close as it got. I watched the rounds impact the ground directly in front of us and explode, sending dirt, debris, and fragments directly over our heads. These fire missions ended up being the closest rounds dropped near friendly forces in the entire Iraq War, and they also saved our lives and enabled us to finally win the gunfight.

The medevac landed about seventy-five yards from my position, and my team leader said it was time for me to go. The average human body has eight to twelve units of blood coursing through it. Later, when that helicopter arrived at the combat hospital, I would need four units of blood. But despite my severe blood loss, despite the fact that I had been completely unable to move minutes before, I somehow got up and hobbled to the helicopter under my own power. Later, when the docs at the Baghdad hospital heard this, they couldn’t believe it. Considering the severity of my injuries, most people probably wouldn’t have survived, let alone made it out under their own power.

Stay awake to stay alive. Overcome.

Back at the hospital in Bethesda, as the pity and stares of my guests bounced off the inside of my damaged brain, that was the moment I thought of.

I was lucky to be alive. I knew that. Shouldn’t that be enough? the looks and whispers seemed to say. I began to doubt myself. Was a full recovery too much to hope for? Shouldn’t I be content to just be breathing? Wasn’t getting my hopes up for what seemed impossible—getting back to the man I had been—just setting myself up for a bigger fall later?

Maybe this was it. Maybe I needed to accept the fact that I would always be less than I had been.

But why did that feel so much like quitting? Why did it feel like giving in?

That stinging in my gut turned into a burning.

I thought back to my failure as a leader and hitting rock bottom, and my journey back from failure to growth and from growth to redemption.

No, I had been in harder, deeper, darker pain and adversity than this.

The pity party left. My wife, Erica, the Long-Haired Admiral, returned to my room. I motioned for her to hand me my notepad. I began to write furiously, my one good hand racing across the page.

“Attention: to all who enter here,” I wrote. “If you are coming into this room with sorrow or to feel sorry for my wounds, go elsewhere. The wounds I received, I got in a job I love, doing it for people I love, supporting the freedom of a country I deeply love. I am incredibly tough and will make a full recovery. What is full? That is the absolute utmost physically my body has the ability to recover. Then I will push that about 20 percent further through sheer mental tenacity. This room you are about to enter is a room of fun, optimism, and intense rapid regrowth. If you are not prepared for that, go elsewhere. From: the management.”

I set down my pen, took a deep breath, and motioned for Erica to tape the note to the door.

Never again, I thought. Never again would I let anyone look at me with pity. Never again would I look at myself with pity. I would OVERCOME.

Since then I have undergone forty reconstructive surgeries. I have had six blood transfusions, and I wore a tracheostomy for seven months and two days. I’ve had approximately 1,500 stitches, two hundred staples, five plates, a titanium orbital floor, fifteen screws, eight pins, twenty skin grafts, and four bone grafts, including a calvarial bone graft. I have had my jaw shattered, broken, and rebroken three times. My mouth was wired shut for over twelve weeks. I lost over fifty pounds. I have spent approximately 190 hours in surgery under anesthesia. Despite all that, I’m still standing, I’m still breathing, and most of all, I am still in control of my destiny. In the immortal words of my favorite poem, “Invictus,” I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.

As it happened, on the day I wrote and hung the sign on my hospital door, there was a legendary New York fire captain and marine named John Vigiano visiting. Vigiano had lost both sons on 9/11. To heal his broken soul and to motivate wounded warriors, Vigiano started making regular pilgrimages to Bethesda. That day, he saw my sign, took a picture of it, and posted it on social media.

Then something amazing happened. Within a few days, his post went viral. CBS This Morning and other major news programs talked about it. National newspapers wrote articles about it. President George W. Bush invited my family to the White House, and I got to shake his hand in the Oval Office and look him in the eye as he thanked me for my service to our great country. What came to be known as “The Sign on the Door” was seen by many people as a perfect illustration of the American spirit to persevere in the midst of challenges. For me, it was a message to the world that I was ready for the next challenge.

After the Sign on the Door went viral, I was approached about writing a book to share my SEAL career, my near-death experience, and my rebirth with the world. The Trident: The Forging and Reforging of a Navy SEAL Leader was a huge success and led to appearances on national television, speaking events all over the world, and thousands of conversations with wounded warriors and individuals seeking to recover from their own life ambushes—those traumatic, catastrophic incidents in our lives that threaten to kill us or keep us from truly living afterward.

One of the wounded warriors I met during one of these events was James. During a Q&A, he raised his hand and proceeded to tell me in a quiet voice that everything I had just spoken about might sound great, but none of it could fix his problem.

I might have brushed him off as an angry guy who just didn’t get it, but that day I felt like I needed to hear James out. So I asked him if he was comfortable sharing his story, and reluctantly, he agreed. In front of the room, he told us he had been in Iraq with a Marine unit, when his convoy of heavy armored vehicles hit an Improvised Explosive Device, more commonly known by the acronym IED. The blast was deafening, and as he scrambled out of his Humvee, he saw that the vehicle in front of his was on fire. Preparing himself to save the passengers, he scrambled toward the vehicle, which now was engulfed in flames. When he got there, he saw the driver through the window screaming in excruciating pain, struggling to get out, but the blast had crunched the frame of the vehicle. Risking severe burns, James grabbed the handle and pulled at the door with everything he had. But no matter how hard he pulled on that door, no matter how he tried to lever it, he couldn’t open it. James had to watch this young marine burn alive before his very eyes. He was helpless.

James told me that from that point forward, for almost a decade, he had carried the guilt of not getting that door open. He shut himself off from society. He quit leaving the house. He stopped functioning. He was unwilling to move forward in his life because he couldn’t face the horror of that moment or the blame tied to what he saw as his own failure.

As he told me this gut-wrenching story, a thought slammed me in the head as forcefully as if I had just been punched in the face.

“Dude, you never left that ambush in Iraq,” I said. “Not only are you stuck on the X, you’ve chained yourself to it.”

I couldn’t help but think back to my decision in Bethesda, and how close I had been to making some of the same decisions James had made. But I hadn’t. Invictus. Overcome.

Since that moment, I’ve talked to thousands of people, military and civilian alike, who are stuck on the X—that place where the traumatic or devastating event happened—sometimes for years. There was the corporate manager who had been fired and had gone back to work at the same company as a contractor despite resenting it every day. There was the woman who came up to me in tears, telling me her mom had passed away from cancer the year before and she had been unable to move on.

At dozens of speaking engagements and coaching sessions across the country, I’ve been able to share the story of my ambush and how I managed, despite everything, to get off the X. I’ve been able to challenge people who have experienced trauma, loss, grief, despair, and even suicidal thoughts to not just survive the ambushes life has thrown their way, but to overcome.

This book is my invitation for you to nail your own Sign on the Door and say, “I will not be limited by the pain and trauma in my past. I will not be held back by the challenges in my future. I will be forged by them because I am the master of my fate. I will overcome.”

In military terms, an ambush is an unexpected attack. Ambushes are often deployed in terrain that can trap you between canyons or tall buildings where the enemy can gain height advantage to rain devastating fire down on you. Roadblocks or debris block your path forward. Obstructions or your own troops block your retreat. You are funneled toward a single spot, a kill zone, the X, and from the high ground or position of tactical advantage, the enemy unloads their firepower. Their goal is to overwhelm you, to devastate you, to kill your will, to make it impossible to escape their onslaught. If you manage to fight your way through a well-planned ambush, it’s very likely you’ve only done so with heavy casualties.

A life ambush is the same—a catastrophic series of events that knock the wind out of you, pin you to the pain, and forever alter your reality. You can’t avoid a life ambush. The average human being will endure at least five major life ambushes over their lifetime. Some you will see coming, and some will hit you like an unexpected tidal wave in the night. And no matter how hard you try, you can’t pretend it’s not happening. Just like that marine who was broken from watching his friend burn alive, you’ll never fully recover from a life ambush. Life ambushes come in all shapes and sizes. Some might be a grievous physical injury or illness, the unexpected loss of a job, a financial catastrophe, the loss of a loved one, and the highest level I have seen is the loss of a child. Even lesser events can become a life ambush.

You might have experienced a life ambush if you have ever been:

• overwhelmed to the point of shutting down
• filled with anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability
• rehashing shame, guilt, and anger
• buried in conflict, miscommunication, and chaos
• dogged by emptiness and a lack of purpose or meaning

And the reality is even if you don’t identify with any of these, you are almost certain to experience these things someday. It is an unfortunate part of human existence that at some point we will endure suffering. Life has a way of ambushing the best of us. If you haven’t experienced one yet, you need to be ready, because it might be around the corner at any moment.

But even though a life ambush always leaves scars, it also offers an opportunity. In my work with wounded warriors and people who have experienced trauma, I’ve found they respond to life ambushes in three ways.

When a life ambush comes, the first group is destroyed by it. They’re never the same and never recover. They become paralyzed by the past, unable to stop rehashing what happened to them. Forever the victim, they use their ambush as an excuse for their own poor behavior. Instead of owning the conflict they’ve caused, the abuse they’ve put themselves and others through, the addiction they’ve allowed themselves to fall into, this group blames it all on their ambush. In the end, they don’t just lose the person they used to be; they transform into a lesser version of themselves.

For the second group, the majority who suffer a catastrophic event make it through to the other side, but it’s always a point of struggle. They go through the motions of their lives, content to maintain the status quo. Fearing further loss, they reject opportunities for growth and new challenges. They become stagnant, their main purpose survival, rigidly clinging to the person they used to be and never growing into something better.

Then there’s a third group, the smallest group. These rare individuals turn their ambush into a launching point. Instead of being defined by their loss, they choose to define themselves by the challenges they’ve learned to overcome. Their resiliency empowers them to grow stronger each day, and the ambush that nearly destroyed them becomes the primary lesson, even the catalyst for the new mission of their lives. They are not overcome by the ambush. They overcome because of it.

This is the story of so many of the wounded warriors I’ve worked with. Like Tyler Southern, the young marine who stepped on an IED and lost both legs and his right arm. Despite these grievous injuries, Tyler married the love of his life and is now an amazing dad. A better dad than many dads I know who have all their limbs.

Or Mary Dague, a US Army explosive ordnance specialist who lost both arms above the elbow in Iraq. She came back and set the example for so many other women, only to be diagnosed with breast cancer. With a life ambush on top of another life ambush, she could have given in to despair, but once again she used the ambush to launch herself and set the example for so many other women to crush cancer.

Or Ozzie Martinez, a wounded marine who came home with post-traumatic stress so bad that he stopped going out into the world. His wife left him, and he spiraled downward until he was suicidal. Ozzie finally “got off the X” and is now a huge advocate for veterans and wounded warriors. He is back with his wife and kids and is a full-time student and a member of student government.

Or Natalie Lopez, who suffered a traumatic incident in Iraq. When she came home from war, she stopped living. She lay down on the X and let her soul disappear into the darkness. As she went through the principles of the Overcome Academy, I watched her let go of her demons and forgive herself. She recognized the power of her story to help other young women, and now uses art to help others. By the time she left our program, she had not only gotten off the X, she had launched from it!