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I'll be asking a bunch of questions.
- Some about your combat experiences. - Okay.
This is the shitty part, I guess, huh?
When in the military, how often did you fire rounds
at the enemy?
On multiple occasions.
Did you ever see people actively being hit?
Oh, yeah.
And how often were you in danger of being pinned down,
overrun, ambushed, injured, or killed?
One to two times, three to 12, 13 to 50, 51 or more?
Fifty-one or more.
Have you been having pessimistic or self-critical thoughts?
Absolutely.
- Anxious or nervous? - Sure.
Have you been using medications to manage?
Yeah, like, uh, cyclobenzaprine and Ambien.
Flowed like rivers in the SEAL Teams.
I guess when I look in the mirror, I don't see anything.
I just see a shell of somebody trying to pretend.
Have you been feeling sad or unhappy?
Uh, sad, yeah.
Do I occasionally think that sometimes it'd be better if I just didn't wake up?
Sure.
I lied to you last week when you asked me if I wanted to kill myself.
I did want to kill myself.
Have you ever used hallucinogens before?
No. No.
No.
Marcus,
tell me about your first experience with the psychedelic treatment.
I wanna be a Navy SEAL
At first, I was just wondering you know, what was going on.
Like, when is this gonna start?
Then I began to get a buzzing around the ears.
All of a sudden, I was in, like, hyperdrive to different parts of my life.
There's a lot of shotgun images of just everything.
Navy SEAL Petty Officer First Class Joshua T. Harris drowned
in rough waters in Afghanistan during August of 2008…
That's my dad right there. We have to be quiet.
The medicine brings out things it wants you to see,
and you don't know why.
But it's always telling the story.
During the treatment, I got pretty sick… for hours.
The therapist said she doesn't think in her 20 years of administering medicine
that she saw anybody have such a tough time.
So, I don't know if that was good or bad.
I took it as a badge of honor…
…that, um, I had a lot of shit to work through.
I wanna be a Navy SEAL!
I wanna be a Navy SEAL
I wanna cut off All of my hair
I wanna be a Navy SEAL
Run with me if you dare
Navy SEAL training is physically, mentally
one of the most demanding things on the planet.
That's why it's such a draw.
We started with 175,
and we ended up with 23 original.
Get up. Yeah.
Get you up.
Come back to the light.
A lot of people come out of SEAL training with lifelong injuries.
But I never had a doubt, never thought I was going to quit.
That wiring started at an early age.
You had to succeed. You had to throw a touchdown.
You had to hit home runs to be accepted, to be loved.
I definitely felt like I had to perform for acceptance into the family.
I was this tall, skinny kid that was picked on by others.
I got my nose broke in seventh grade by the school bully.
Then I went from 180 pounds, six foot four,
to like 220.
I didn't take shit anymore after that.
When I got to SEAL training,
the passion I had at that time was unbelievable.
I gotta go run ten miles, 13 miles, or swim five and a half?
"Okay. I mean, I guess that's what I have to do."
If I were to look actually at my speedometer,
we are actually going below zero.
We're not going to kill you. I mean, not intentionally.
I mean, we're just gonna do push-ups.
Forever.
Let's go!
My dad was a SEAL.
He had his moments where he was awesome.
And then he had moments where he was a fucking nightmare to be around.
You know, Dad being in the military, just gone a lot.
Gone 300-plus days out of the year.
Spent a lot of time in isolation.
Watched a lot of TV.
When I'm 17, I fly out to California, and I joined the Navy.
You forget how young, how juvenile you are at 17.
It used to be largely physical.
All we wanted to know was, can you take the pain?
We discovered, after time,
that you really want to have both, you know, physical endurance.
But you also want to have a character component.
Uh, and you want to groom that character.
Are you a good teammate?
Are you thinking for the whole and not just for yourself?
I was a nervous kid.
But once I found out about becoming a SEAL, I was obsessed.
From that moment on, I was obsessed.
I… I played war when I was a kid, past the point where it was cool.
I just wanted to be in the woods with cami paint and a toy gun.
I hated school. I hated everything about it.
And so, being the antisocial fuck I was,
I had never been in that intimate team mentality,
and that was a struggle for me.
But when I figured it out, it was heaven.
You could offer me all the money in the world to not do this.
And I would say, "Fuck that. I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be."
You know? I don't think most people find that in their lives.
And I found it. It was the love of my life.
People speak about the brotherhood, and most people have never really felt it.
Like, to me, that's… that's what being in Teams is.
This just in to our newsroom.
A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.
Let's get this live update from 1010 WINS correspondent Joan Fleischer.
Joan, what do you see?
When 9/11 happened, they marched us into the TV room.
We got to see it for like… 30 seconds.
There is now another explosion occurring
right at this moment in the other building.
- Which means-- - God!
We're switching to ABC coverage.
The other tower of the World Trade Center has just exploded.
- This is ABC's continuing coverage. - Oh my God!
We didn't understand it.
We were still just trying to get through training.
'Cause, you know, prior to 9/11, there wasn't really a lot going on.
We didn't know what war was.
The fantasy, I think, we thought was, you were always like Superman.
We're gonna set up an ambush, and kill everybody, and whoo-hoo,
save the princess.
Um, but you never think about any of the bad stuff. Ever.
Sonar Technician service, Third Class, Marcus Capone,
SEAL Team Ten.
In a very, very short time span, I went from being a college sophomore
to, you know, being a… a mom and a wife
and moving to Coronado, California,
from the Midwest with a little baby
and a husband that was very committed to this new quest.
I thought that it would be a matter of going to get this terrorist,
and guys like Marcus are the ones to do it.
And I think, naively, I thought,
when the mission is over, we'll just be a normal family.
The war in Afghanistan is essentially a manhunt.
The troops that will, or indeed, may already be engaged
in the hunt are the men of Special Forces, Rangers, Navy SEALs as well.
The Pentagon has confirmed the US has Special Forces teams
on the ground, coordinating air strikes.
With America at war in two distant lands,
the war may be longer than is widely expected
and predicted at this moment.
My platoon wanted to go to Afghanistan first
because you were ready, you were hungry.
The worse the place was, the more we wanted to go.
Those were the biggest bullies,
so we wanted to go and punch 'em in the fuckin' nose.
Matty was in our sister platoon,
but one of our platoons will go to Germany,
and the other, uh, will go to Afghanistan.
Yeah, we flipped a coin to decide who was going to Afghanistan first.
So when we lost, we were pissed.
Like, they were fucking furious, which I would be too. I… Yeah.
So we were trying to, like, keep it tight,
but we were, like, giving these little low fives to each other. Like…
"We're going to Afghanistan. We're going to Afghanistan."
I mean, you tell a Team guy he's going to get some,
shit. That's all you gotta say.
So Matty and our sister platoon,
they deployed to Afghanistan, and we deployed to Germany.
What happened from there?
June 28, 2005.
Operation Red Wings.
That was the greatest loss of life in SEAL Team history for a long time.
A team of like four SEALs launched out a reconnaissance mission
out into the Kunar.
Really nasty terrain.
They fast roped in, and…
A bunch of little things kind of added up and put them in a bad spot,
behind on timeline, in a spot they weren't supposed to be.
And just everything that could have gone wrong went wrong.
They got discovered.
And then they got contacted by the enemy.
And so we got the word.
We were part of the quick reaction force.
We were literally sitting there on the bird.
The rotors are going.
We were just waiting to go.
The elevation up there was high enough
to where it fucks with the capability of the helo.
So the plan was to take guys off the birds to lighten the load,
go in, come back, pick up the rest.
And so we got off.
We were just waitin'.
One of the guys has a sat phone, and he's like, "Say again. Say again."
And then he just looks at me.
And he said, uh,
"One of the birds is down."
That was the helo I was just on.
That was supposed to be me.
The CH-47 helicopter crashed west of Asadabad
during Operation Red Wing.
Initial reports indicate the crash may have been caused by hostile fire.
The status of the service members remain unknown still at this time.
We flew in at night to the crash site.
We were with the Rangers. They set up a big perimeter.
And then we basically searched
all day and then all night.
It was horrible.
There's a thing in us.
I always call it the Team guy in my head.
It gets you through training.
You know, it gets you through deployments.
It gets you through… you know, bad shit.
You're overseas, and you see half your platoon get killed.
It just keeps you going, keeps you going,
and it's just this voice in your head that's like,
"This is what you're gonna do," and you do it.
In Germany, we were getting updates
from our spouses back home
of, you know, so-and-so
had, you know, two gentlemen show up to the house
in full dress blues.
It was like… Then it was like, "Oh no."
I just remember, one time, throwing my phone.
Uh, and, uh…
just, you know, breaking down over,
um, friend after friend that I worked with.
And not being able to do anything at that time.
That was frustrating.
You know, and then went from sad to angry.
When we did the ramp ceremony…
It's one of the heaviest things I've ever had to do.
You know, this is like all the caskets on one bird.
You go on the ramp, and then go out the side door of the bird.
So we had done the ceremony. Bagpipes were playing.
I got to the side door,
and I turned around, and I was like, "I don't know what I'm doing."
Uh…
I don't… I don't know how to get off this plane. Uh…
You know?
'Cause we're not supposed to leave 'em.
The president of the United States takes pride in presenting
the Silver Star Medal, Purple Heart Medal,
Combat Action Ribbon, and Afghanistan Campaign Medal
posthumously to Gunner's Mate Second Class Danny Dietz,
United States Navy.
I didn't know Danny. I'd never met Danny.
His wife, Patsy, was the only wife out of all 11 that stood up and spoke.
The only one.
And when she did, it was moving, man.
She's young, 22 years old, and you just see it. It's…
Her life just ended.
Danny, as I talk about you, I get butterflies,
like the first night our eyes met.
I remember getting lost in those dark eyes of yours.
I'm so sorry you had to die in the way you did.
I just hope you can leave Earth and go to Heaven
with memories of our intense love of four years.
I would just give my life right now to just have one more day with you
and one last kiss.
When I graduated high school,
I signed my papers to join the Navy, and once I got to my first command,
which was here in Virginia Beach,
it was life-changing.
I was in the Navy, but I didn't know really that there was even SEALs.
What was a Navy SEAL? I just never heard of it. You know?
And Mom asked me, Like, "Hey, there's a barbecue."
"Would you like to join us?"
And I remember her telling me, "There's a really nice gentleman here."
His name was Danny, and, um…
When I got there, sure enough, Mom introduced me to him.
And… after that, we just never separated.
It was just crazy.
It was just a really beautiful, innocent… love.
I promise you that one day I will meet you again,
and we will pick up and complete the fairytale life
where you left it.
I love you. Always yours, your wife, Mrs. Dietz.
You've got a… a group of folks predominantly from one unit.
They are the tribe.
And then you have a mass casualty.
All of a sudden, a bunch of guys don't come home.
What are we gonna do here?
Well, we're gonna get back on the pony and kick some ass.
That's what we're gonna do. There's no other choice.
When we first got in country,
we went out literally two days after we showed up.
First light, direct action.
Raid on a compound.
Helicopters, Black Hawks.
Wind's blowing everywhere.
I was a breacher. A breacher gets through doors.
Could be a sledgehammer.
A small explosive.
Or a very large explosive.
It's like getting a huge hit in football where you just laid somebody out,
and your bell's a little rung, and you're just like, "Oh, fuck yes."
At that time, my close friends,
myself, you know, we… we wanted to go to war.
After Red Wings, we had like a month-and-a-half
or two-month decompression time or some shit.
And Marcus and them took our places in Afghanistan.
So we go to Germany, and, uh,
one of the shrinks came out.
And we all had to talk to this guy. Like, it was mandatory.
No one wanted to. Everybody was like, "Fuck that."
And then everybody ended up spending two hours with this dude. He was awesome.
And I just remember him telling all of us, "Hey, listen."
"When you guys get home, don't make any major decisions."
"Don't start a relationship. Don't end a relationship."
"Don't do anything 'cause you guys are not processing this shit yet."
And then of course, I go home and wreck everything.
And then we jumped right back into a platoon and started doing workup
which was a… …horrible idea.
Not long after we got in country, we went out on an op and came back.
And… I just laughed.
And I don't remember who was in the back seat.
But I remember him saying, "What are you laughing at?"
I was like, "Man, this is the first time I've been able to sleep in months."
Like, I couldn't find a fucking second's peace…
at home.
And then as soon as I get to Fallujah, I can sleep like a baby.
It's… it's kinda weird.
Started my second rotation, 2007, going back to Iraq.
We got Matty Roberts in the troop, and he had a, uh… a very solid reputation.
And you could tell he was searching for a family again.
And I definitely looked at him like a big brother.
The team that we were with, it was everything I ever wanted.
It was like being drafted and going to the Patriots.
You had all the assets, you had all the intelligence folks,
you had every supporting system you could ever want at your disposal.
And people worth going after.
It motivated you.
You woke up every day, and you swung your feet out of bed with a purpose.
At the same time, you become numb to the risk.
I've been in a bunch of situations, a bunch of really bad ones.
Like, you get shot at from 200 meters, that's bad.
Fifty meters, that's bad.
Five meters will change your life.
- Guy up on that ditch was moving. - Yup, I see him.
- He's forward of you. - Okay.
We went out on an op one night.
The bird spotted some people running out into a field.
And, uh, we got picked to go after 'em.
It's this thick overbrush.
And it's high. You know, six foot in some spots.
And the plane puts a night vision beam of light
on this guy so we can see it.
And we're all looking at the ground.
Take a step.
Four feet. Everybody's whispering. We're just listening to the communication.
It's a pilot, and he sees a single individual inside that field.
So he can watch us walking on him.
Three feet.
Two feet.
Heart rate's at 190.
I'm just about to jump out of my skin, I'm so scared right now.
"Third guy from the right, you are standing on him."
One, two, three.
That dude's not there.
And at one point, Jay hears something.
And I remember he yelled, "Hey."
"Hey!"
The moment he finished that "hey," that dude opened up.
So we sprinted to the single tractor tire about 15 feet behind me.
A bunch of bad guys had left the compound, had doubled back.
And now it's just all-consuming.
But I can't fire back, 'cause I can't see anybody.
My NODs are cockeyed. There's dirt blowing in my eyes.
Man, you can't see shit.
A corpsman went down.
And I ran up, grabbed him, and started pulling him back.
And then I got hit.
It spun me around.
I thought my arm was gone. I thought it was completely gone.
When I looked down under my NODs,
all I could see was the end of my… my T-shirt.
So… And I can't feel anything.
I'm bleeding out, for sure.
And I had about a half a second of panic.
I was like, "I gotta get the fuck outta here."
Team guy. In my brain.
It's like he literally slapped me across the face and said,
"If you leave him and you survive, you will never look in the mirror again."
I said, "Look. I'm gonna drag you as far as I can."
"If I stop, you just keep going."
Grab everybody, bring 'em behind the tractor tire,
and we start going to work.
Now we're trying to work through blowout kits.
We're trying to put on tourniquets.
Matty's bleeding out.
I'm trying to apply a tourniquet to Matty's arm.
And he is screaming. I remember him looking on the ground.
He thought his arm got shot off just by the way it flipped.
He's looking at a stub.
But at the same time, these dudes are shooting at you. Continuously.
Since he was so close in proximity, if you would have leaned over,
he would have shot you.
The only thing we can do is we can call in a fire mission.
We need rounds down and out. We do not see him.
We have multiple wounded. We need rounds down.
I remember the pilot saying no. He said, "It's too close. We can't do it."
Focus ready, danger close…
Jay said, "If you don't, we're all gonna die anyway."
Gave his initials. Juliet Alpha, send it.
Juliet-Alpha.
Cleared for fire. Go ahead on two.
Two is armed!
Okay, that was right on top of them.
- Give me some more there. - Roger that.
We call in the helicopter, and we load everybody up, and I jump in.
The back of that helo looked like Black Hawk Down.
Just blood and blowout kits and bullets and magazines
just spewed all over that thing.
Fuck.
You know, I'd rehabbed and gone surgery, surgery, surgery.
You know? And I, physically, was healed.
You know, at least I thought.
But mentally, I went so fucking downhill.
It was insane. Like, it was horrible.
I had one doctor tell me, "You've got traumatic brain injury."
"You've absolutely got post-traumatic stress."
He said, "Our recommendation is you're done, man."
I told him I wanted to stay in, but I would finish at training commands.
Even though I was still in the Navy, my ego was just raging.
Like, I felt so guilt-ridden.
There are times when I wish I would've lost my arm.
Because it would've been easier to accept.
What's this brain shit? You know? What's this PTSD shit? What the fuck?
I didn't want to see DJ.
I didn't want to see Marcus. I didn't want to see any of 'em.
Now… the Team guy in my head becomes toxic.
That voice is like, "You fucking coward."
"You motherfucking quitter."
"Those guys are over there, and they're still doing it."
"And you're sitting here."
"What the fuck is wrong with you?"
In my head, the brotherhood was gone.
I came back from that. Um…
I noticed the anxiety.
I noticed the depression right away.
I tried to be normal. I tried to generalize it.
That's what happens. You know?
The TBI and with the memory loss, I'd meet someone,
shake their hands, "I have no idea what you just said."
"I don't know what your name is. No idea."
- Did you tell anyone? - No.
- How long until you did?
Oh, five or six years.
All the wives that I hung out with from Danny's platoon,
we now didn't have husbands.
So we had each other.
And we became best friends.
One time they had a dinner out in town, and one of the wives called me.
They're like, "The guys from Team Ten came back."
"Would you like to join us?"
They warned me.
Like, "Patsy's coming. You finally get to meet her."
"Cool."
Like, "She talks a lot of shit. You gotta be ready."
"I got it." I'm like, "I got it."
But I remember this cocky little young SEAL, out of nowhere…
Didn't know who I was. I've never met him.
And she proceeded to ream my ass about five minutes. It was perfect.
And finally, he got my number
and just started texting and saying, "Would love to take you to lunch."
And, uh, one thing led to the other.
I was concerned she was gun-shy after Danny.
I didn't think she had another deployment in her,
and I was very open.
Like, "I'm gonna keep deploying, and I don't want to stop."
"And if you can't do this, I understand it."
Uh, that's not something I wanted to go through again.
But he was just different, and he was just…
Um, there was something about him that felt like home again.
And after so many years, he made me laugh.
And that was something, you know, I missed.
We had been together for almost a… a year.
And I was going to visit Danny's grave site in Colorado.
And he wanted to join me.
And he dropped me off at the cemetery, and he went off, gave me my space.
He came back to pick me up,
and as I'm getting in the car, he's like, "Hey, um,
do you mind if I go see his grave site?"
"I've never met him when he was alive. I would just like to pay my respect."
He went to his grave site and kneed down.
And I could tell that he was tear-eyed, and then he came back in the car.
And then we got back on Thanksgiving night.
We had friends. We had, uh, family here.
And he got on one knee and asked me to marry him.
Come to find out, he wanted to make that trip
so he could ask Danny permission to marry me.
And I just felt like
if there was any guilt of moving on with my life
and being with him,
that just solidified that he was the right person.
You know, from 2005 to 2010, it was just a busy time.
The amount of operations that, you know, we just did
as an overall special operations community was…
You know, it was huge. It was hundreds of missions every…
you know, every month.
So it was just nonstop.
Marcus was easily approaching 300 days a year away.
And so, when he came home from that, he was definitely getting
more and more… distant.
It felt like he didn't really want to even be home a lot of the time.
Out of a tremendous degree of dedication,
a lot of the folks that deployed would not get off the merry-go-round.
And I think that, uh, a couple years into it,
we really started to see, you know, the impacts of not taking a break.
A military Chinook helicopter was shot down
in the dark night east of Kabul,
killing 30 US troops and eight Afghans, everyone on board.
Among the Americans killed, 22 Navy SEALs, most of them from Team Six.
The deaths continued, deployment after deployment.
It was just unheard of.
Nicolas Checque was just 28 years old.
He had been a Navy SEAL…
27-year-old David Warsen was an East Kentwood High School grad,
a man who loved his family…
Navy SEAL Petty Officer First Class Joshua T. Harris
drowned in rough waters in Afghanistan during August of 2008. His parents…
Josh Harris was definitely, you know, one of my best friends.
He was doing some reconnaissance.
He swam out, and he was on a tether,
and the tether just snapped,
and basically, he got swept down the river.
And so we didn't find him until 12 hours later.
It was like 35 miles, 50 clicks down the river.
I… I think he had to have felt some level of survivor's guilt.
You know, there was a lot of masking going on.
A lot of self-medicating, across the board, not just with him.
It really felt like Russian roulette.
I mean, it felt like every time he would leave,
he may not come home.
I remember we were dropping him off at the command.
And, um… …I remember just screaming.
You know, screaming and crying.
Like, "Please, don't go."
The last deployment, both Caden and Maggie were hysterical crying,
and that really hurt.
And so,
it was time to, like, take a… a knee for a while
and try to put my family back together.
This letter was written in 2013 to receive a medical retirement.
"I am soon separating after 12 and a half years of naval service
with my entire career spent in the SEAL Teams."
"My mental condition has diminished."
"I've tried to hide this for the past couple of years,
but it has been painfully obvious to the people close to me
that I am struggling in many aspects of my life."
"I pulled my pistol from the safe more times than I can count,
just from the doorbell ringing."
"I've lost contact with many close friends."
"My temper is sporadic. I find myself easily angry,
and I am in constant struggle with anxiety, nightmares, depression."
"With all this, I am ultimately proud
of the career I have chosen for the last 13 years."
"M. Capone."
I was concerned about
how he would function outside of the Teams,
but I was also grasping at any sense of normalcy.
That's when my dad was transitioning out of the military.
It was like, "We're moving to Texas."
"We're gonna be together as a family. Like, everything's gonna be great."
Really quickly, I think we all realized that was just not the case.
When you separate from the tribe,
you look for anything you can to fill that void.
I'm bored, so I just wanted to take a video.
Let's go.
I started drinking hard.
I got put on antidepressants.
I remember throwing mugs through windows and just flipping out.
He would never, like, beat me up. Maybe shove me.
But he had that look, and once he got that look, it was like,
get the fuck out of his way.
That's my dad right there. We have to be quiet.
I remember one time,
I was trying to get between the two of them,
and I can't imagine the fear
that Caden was feeling,
being chased by this monster that you have idolized your whole life.
I was getting in trouble at school,
doing a lot of drugs.
Like, the family was there for him.
He… he was the guy that got back from war.
What we were going through was never really as important
as what he was going through.
I thought Amber and the kids would be 1,000 times better
if I wasn't here.
You know, I come home, it causes… all types of problems.
Everybody.
Kids don't want to hang out with me. Amber doesn't want to talk.
Like, they would live a much better life if I wasn't on this earth.
One night, Marcus was watching some old training films.
And I went to bed.
And at like five o'clock in the morning, I go in,
and Marcus is sitting there with an empty bottle of whiskey
and a loaded gun.
And…
…he picked it up and said, "Get the fuck away from me."
Marcus went through the VA.
They did sleep studies.
They did imaging.
They did psychological measures.
None of those things were working.
He was on, you know, ten medications.
He was on something to sleep, something to wake up,
something for focus, something for energy, something for nightmares,
something for depression, something for anxiety.
He was taking the medications.
He was doing talk therapy.
All of the things that he was being told to do.
And he was actually getting worse.
I got his medical records, and I found an evaluation
and Marcus said on there,
"I frequently forget the names of my coworkers."
And I was floored by that.
I was desperate at that point.
I completely changed my approach.
I started really putting my focus on alternative treatments.
The wife of another SEAL contacted me and said,
"I think that there's something you may want to look into for Marcus."
Of course, this sounded, like, completely foreign to me.
We've known about ibogaine and iboga
in the Western world as a treatment for addiction
for about 50, 60 years.
Bwiti peoples of Gabon
have been using this substance for, um, seemingly centuries
as a spiritual-medicinal rite of passage.
Ibogaine comes from the root bark of a shrub grown in Gabon, Africa.
And 5-MeO-DMT is derived from the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad.
The ibogaine treatment, you know, does the physiological reset
of the nervous system.
And the toad medicine allows you to release everything
that ibogaine brings up to the surface.
As a protocol, taken sequentially,
ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT prove to be very effective
in dealing with trauma.
But both are illegal in the United States,
so Marcus would have to travel to Mexico for this opportunity.
And when I brought it up to Marcus, he was like, "That's absolutely insane."
Like, psychedelic medicines?
You mean, what? Timothy Leary and Woodstock and stuff?
People dancing around in circles with flowers in their hair?
Like, I don't understand that at all.
You are looking at a traveler who just bought a ticket
for a very special kind of a trip.
The cost?
A few dollars and his mind.
All I knew was the stuff I was taught when we grew up.
Psychedelics were a recreational drug that's addictive.
You'll lose your mind.
You'll fry your brain.
And this is supposed to save our hardened warriors?
You know, having grown up in a very conservative Christian home,
I thought, "Is this voodoo witchcraft?"
"Is this opening up portals of darkness?"
It was terrifying to me.
So I come home from 2012 deployment.
Moving into 2013.
Lola was born in May.
I deploy May… 15th.
I get really hurt on that deployment.
Eardrums are blown out.
You know, bleeding out of your ears, out of your nose.
Just a lot of concussion stuff, back to back to back.
Explosions are happening in close proximity,
and just the orthopedic injuries have stacked up so bad at this point.
We go into this French hospital, and they put me in a machine,
and I've got a hematoma on the back of my brain about this big.
It's jet black.
My headaches were so bad,
and they were light induced, like photophobic.
You could shine a light in my eyes, and I would throw up.
I land in Virginia Beach.
I came in, and it was like, "Hey, welcome home."
"Here's a four-month-old."
I don't know how to do anything. Like, I am worthless.
And I can't remember her name.
I had dinner on the table, and we're eating,
but he wasn't saying much.
I thought it was like deployment blues.
Maybe just coming back home.
It was just maybe too much.
Then finally he looked up, and he had tears in his eyes,
and he's just like, "How long have we been eating dinner?"
I was already done with my dinner. I was like, "We've been here a while."
And he just looked at me and just ran out of the room and…
…and literally went to our guest room in the fetal position,
just crying, bawling.
These guys don't want to show weakness.
That's just not what you're supposed to do.
You're not supposed to open up or communicate these things.
You're just supposed to… keep going.
I made it about another four or five months,
and we were getting ready to go on a big breaching trip.
And my boss at the time, he looked at me and he's like,
"Hey, man, I don't think you need to go on this breaching trip."
"Why don't you stay back here and chill out for a little bit?"
I was like, "No."
He's like, "Well, I'll put it to you like this."
"You're not fuckin' going."
And about five days later, I was in NICoE.
It is essentially a super-advanced rehabilitation clinic.
Big orthopedic injuries, but really, it's all the brain stuff.
And they analyze you head to toe, everything in between,
for four weeks straight.
And they started giving you meds, and they saved you.
I needed these tools to continue to wall myself up to get to retirement.
We come back from NICoE, I feel like a million bucks,
and we'd just gear it up, send it again, send it again, send it again.
We'd do another four rotations.
Everything I read on ibogaine, you know, it sounded horrible.
It was a lot of personal stories of individuals visiting
just the deepest, darkest pits of hell
during their 12-hour journey.
I remember even fighting about it.
I told Amber, "This is crazy. Literally crazy."
So that's how that conversation went for about a year.
We've got kids that are watching, and this is not sustainable.
And so, I basically just said to him,
you have to try this, or I'm taking the kids
and I'm leaving.
I feel like I exhausted everything.
So, I think you'll do anything when,
like, you're so desperate.
He had gone to so many brain treatment facilities
and done so many different things,
it felt like, "Oh, this is just bullshit. This doesn't mean anything." You know.
I've… I've heard this a million times.
The protocol in Mexico is you do ibogaine first.
And then a couple days later, you do 5-MeO-DMT,
also known as "the toad."
Had my therapist there, ER doc, a nurse was there.
You know, my intentions that night were just…
I just wanted to be whole again.
The music started.
I kind of sat back in the bed and, uh, just waited.
Waiting for no clue what was about to happen.
I just remember, at one point, it was just, like…
like loud, almost like chainsaws buzzing, and like just complete chaos.
You're just getting kicked in the nuts,
and kicked in the nuts, and kicked in the nuts,
and you can't escape it.
I would see shuffling. Like almost like cards.
Just thousands of pictures, that fast.
I saw images of my childhood.
And I would see images of my dad.
I don't know. Maybe something happened around that.
Maybe it was, uh… an incident.
You know, and then I saw images of Josh.
You know, I didn't talk about this, but I was supposed to cross the river.
I was supposed to be the individual that went to look for
a place that we can find our way across, but I wasn't there at that time.
Um, that was definitely weighing on my mind, my soul.
But it was a vision of him, that smiley face, curly hair.
It was a happy image. Like, he's good.
I was able to see these difficult moments
from my life from a different angle.
And it made me realize that none of this was my fault.
The weight was getting lifted off.
I felt, uh… like almost like a defragging of my brain.
All the walls you put up, all the body armor you put on,
that all goes away.
The ego goes away,
and you're just a pure version of an individual
that just loves everything.
I felt lifted, felt light.
You know, it felt like it was like a new day.
When Dad came back, I don't really know how to describe it.
Just something about him was much more peaceful.
The look in his eye was…
It was like… It was like less dead.
For a long time, you'd look at him, and you'd just look right through him.
Once we all saw that my dad was putting in an effort,
everyone began to work on themselves.
Our family unit just kind of started to work again as he began to get better.
After my ibogaine experience, when I saw Amber,
the first thing I said to her was,
"All our friends that we hear about that are suffering,
like… we need to introduce this to them and get them better."
That's kinda how… That's kind of how it started.
I had met with Marcus and Amber.
I'd spent, like, 30 minutes talking to Marcus.
I was talking to this humble, very thoughtful,
very normal-seeming, to me, guy.
Then Amber tells me this story.
Basically, he couldn't screw a light in a light fixture
before he went down there.
So he went from really bad shape to, like… normal.
That really is what locked me in.
This is just one of those points in medicine
where you've just got to have the courage to jump.
In terms of other soldiers in your unit,
what percentage of them would you say
were either killed in action, wounded, or missing in action?
Well, 25%, 30%.
How much time in a typical week
do you feel cut off from other people?
Like, just not interested, not engaged?
- Every day. Yeah. - Every day?
Kind of all the time.
Do you experience feelings of guilt?
I think so.
Well, I know so.
This will be the first human neuroscience study of ibogaine.
The goal today is to look at the utility
in treating the psychiatric neurological illnesses
that veterans suffer from, right?
A lot of the veterans are exposed to multiple blasts.
And in the recent Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts,
TBI is a signature injury.
Are these feelings of guilt and shame
related to your military experiences?
- Yeah. - Okay.
You know, I have a lot of… a lot of issues with…
…with the direction I allowed my life to go when I was in the SEAL Teams.
Your headaches you experience,
remind me again the year they started.
- 2007. - 2007.
Yeah.
Like, it's usually…
Like, right now, it's just… it's hemispherical.
Just this side of my head just always hurts.
- Okay. - Never gone away.
One second.
Oh man.
Sprint up that hill!
Get that gun up!
A lot of us get into this line of work because we feel like it's who we are.
You're born for this, right?
But the reality is it's a jacket, just like any other jacket you put on
in any chapter of your life.
You're gonna take this off.
For me, the jacket's off.
Who the fuck am I now?
I go to work, and I go work out, then I go home, and I sit on the couch.
And, uh, I keep looking back. All I do is look back.
And I can't get my head to look this way.
'Cause I don't give a fuck about anything this way.
I have enough sense to know that I can't live the rest of my life that way.
But I just don't know how to…
get out of that.
If that makes sense.
2018, started medical retirement.
Left the team. Started a skateboard company.
And from the surface, I had everything.
I got a beautiful wife, got two healthy kids.
Ten fingers, ten toes. Live in a beautiful house.
I don't have anything to complain about.
Except I want to die.
It's like once you leave the Teams, you lose your why.
You lose the purpose to swing feet out of bed at 5:00 a.m.
And it crushes.
I was as low as you could be.
I would have accepted terminal cancer as a gift.
He probably didn't see me anymore as a wife.
He probably saw me more as a caregiver.
I mean, it would come the end of the night, and I was just exhausted.
I just wanted to go to bed. Because I did it all.
And I also was a mom.
So I had to protect them and keep that train going
without them noticing that dad was… broken.
I was like, "What is going on with you? Please tell me."
He's just like, "I think every second of the day that I want to kill myself."
"I want to kill myself right now."
And I was like, "Okay."
And I felt like this is my chance to get him that help
because he's crying out loud for it.
For those of you that don't know, um, the SEAL community suffered
two suicide losses over the last two weeks.
Two very beloved members of the community, and…
Uh…
It's just happening too much.
And so, we thought it'd be a good idea to do a public service announcement
and say, "Hey, some of us here have been right to the edge and have come back."
And so, um, I hope many people see it,
and I hope some of our teammates
um, that are struggling and that may be thinking of… of crossing over,
don't… you know, don't do it yet.
So… yeah.
- Wanna run through it? - Let's do it.
Okay.
It's been a rough couple of weeks for a lot of folks in our community
since we lost two more teammates to suicide.
We're all struggling with something, and we all have a story.
You don't have to fight this alone.
Let us fight alongside you.
Since 9/11, there have been 7,100 combat casualties, killed in action.
In the same time frame,
uh, what is accounted for is roughly 30,100 veteran suicide,
growing by approximately 22 a day.
So when you do the simple math on that,
we are basically losing 4.3 times the number of service members,
or veterans, to suicide than we lost to actions against the enemy.
So, probably late 2019, Amber and Marcus did a video.
And I remember me and DJ were in bed, and we…
I saw it on her Instagram.
And I cried.
I cried a lot. So did she. She even bawled.
I met Marcus in late 2003, early 2004.
He looked like an NFL linebacker,
and he was known to be an exceptional Navy SEAL.
And in that video, he went on about how dark it was for him,
how bad he really was.
I couldn't believe his honesty.
I felt like I was the only guy in the Teams who was hurting
until I saw that.
So that's when I called Amber,
and I was like, "Amber, can you please help me?"
I was just begging her, "Can you please get him out there?"
And Patsy said, "If you love me, you'll go."
It's kind of a weird thing to say.
Like, if you love your wife, you'll go to Mexico and do psychedelics.
I hope everything goes well for you, uh, this week, and…
Me too.
Look forward to seeing you on the flip side.
Yeah, same here. I'm really excited.
The hardest thing was coming off all the meds.
I was on, I'd probably say, 60 pills a day.
You gotta come off everything.
And ironically enough, they give you a drug test when you get there.
But it's for Adderall. It's for stimulants.
To make sure you're not gonna die.
- Good. - Yes.
And you start off with ibogaine.
A little campfire circle.
A vow of gratitude towards the iboga plant and to the Bwiti tradition.
But it was so foo-foo. It was just so out-there.
I was like, "I can't believe I'm gonna do this."
Like, "Okay."
We'd talk about all the things we're trying to get rid of,
and write it down on a piece paper, and throw it in the fire.
Well, I threw a blank piece of paper in the fire
because I was most certainly not writing down what I'm trying to get rid of
because I can't.
- Which is? - Everything.
Take the ibogaine. We all go up,
and we put on our little shades, and kinda lay back.
They're playing bowls and doing the whole thing.
And… I thought I did it wrong.
I'd laid there for a little bit. I heard some bees buzzing in my ear.
Everything they told you you'd hear and then nothing.
I fell asleep.
I thought I fell asleep.
There is a point that medicine takes you right to the crest.
And you fall off.
It was like there were dresser drawers that were flying out.
They were all rainbow-colored, but they were memories.
They were thoughts. And I could pick one and fall into it.
And I'm back in it, wherever I wanted to go.
Anything I wanted. Anything.
I'm there.
I wanted to see dead friends.
And I never did.
You lose track of time in there, but I spent a significant amount of time
on the set of The Wonder Years.
Fred Savage, Ann, Wendy.
They were eating TV dinners on little microwave plates.
The whole thing.
I sit there on that brown couch, and I just watched them.
Living a normal family life, talking about school, and…
This on the bus and that and what we gotta do for work.
And just normal family dinner.
I was just enthralled by it.
It made me feel normal.
Maybe that's the family that I wanted 'cause I grew up with TV.
I thought, if I could just create that for my children,
maybe I'd put them in a better spot than I was.
I didn't have really any big memories pop up past maybe 13, 14.
DJ, shh.
Tag-team. Shh. Shh.
I saw my father.
Every time he belittled me or tried to humiliate me
in front of everyone.
You are never gonna get in the military.
Everything was just pounding on me, over and over and over again.
You wait till I get your fucking sorry ass home.
We had a five-acre farm, big backfield.
He'd make me push-mow it.
And I'd do it early in the mornings. Dew would be out.
Push three, you gotta roll it back. Push three, roll back it back.
And it took hours.
Multiple tanks of gas.
I could feel the humidity in Virginia.
Like, I could feel the weight of the T-shirt.
And in and around the trees, there'd be exposed roots.
And I clipped one of the roots.
And it made a clicking noise.
And he heard it.
My old man was big.
Like 250 pounds, covered in tattoos.
He was sprinting at me.
It scared the shit out of me. I thought he was going to fucking kill me.
I watched him grab the handle and swing it over the top of his head
and smash it and broke that thing into pieces.
I could feel the heat radiating inside him
and how fucking mad he was at me.
And then I could shift it, and then he's not yelling at me.
It's me yelling at Lola.
I've done the exact same thing.
I remember breaking a dollhouse, shattering it into a million pieces.
My face mirrors his.
And then it would shift, and I would see Patsy come in.
- I would feel her emotions. - …the first night our eyes met…
I would feel the trauma that she had been through.
Really, the trauma that I caused.
…I'm so sorry…
Like all the times that my father cheated on my mother.
I mean, I'd been cheating on Patsy.
Multiple affairs all over the place.
I was so clear-minded and focused.
I knew exactly what I had to do.
I had to go home and tell her everything I'd ever done.
We pack everything up.
Drive back across the border.
We had a flight leaving at 5:00 p.m. that night.
We all broke to our little corners, and everybody called their wives.
You hear 'em like, "Hey. Hey. Hey." Straight to voicemail.
Called the house phone.
Nothing. Nothing.
Okay.
And I get an email notification.
"The password to your Instagram has been changed."
I don't remember doing that. Hmm.
And I look down, and it is my ghost account.
It's the account that Patsy doesn't know about.
It's the one that I'm leading all these affairs on.
Now she knows.
I knew that that night he was doing ibogaine in Mexico.
I just started thinking, like,
"Why now did he cry out for help after four years?"
Like, what caused that?
And so, I just was able to look into his email,
and it's something that I never did.
And it… it was…
I mean, it was just shocking to me. I can't explain the feeling.
Just like how it's… it's something that somebody has to go through.
Like when you get the knock on the door to tell you your husband is dead.
It's a feeling that only people that have been betrayed knows the feeling.
Clearly, I'd lost him.
My DJ wouldn't do that to me.
I land in Norfolk. We all get in cars.
We all drive back to the shop.
All the wives are there, except for mine.
I walked upstairs, and I opened up my office door,
and there were probably 20 Home Depot boxes,
stacked up floor to ceiling,
labeled pants, sweatshirts, T-shirts, shoes, everything.
Obviously, she's not gonna take me back. There's no working through this.
I've gone too far.
And I drove straight out to the oceanfront.
I parked in this little private beach and backed my truck up to a gate,
and I just sat there.
Contemplated everything I had ever done, everything I experienced in the ceremony,
and everything in between, and the walls I had built up.
And she called me… right then.
Fuck.
I saw her pull up, and she parked next to me at 20, 30 feet away,
and I was sitting on my tailgate.
I could see him with his head down, and I could see the gun next to him.
And all she could say is, "I don't know how you could do this to me."
And, uh…
She's bawling her eyes out. I'm bawling my eyes out.
And she pulls my sunglasses off.
And that's when I saw him for the first time in four years.
Because his eyes were always so dark and sad and there was just no life.
She backs up, and I was like, "Patsy, I am so fucking sorry."
She sat down and looked at me.
We stayed on the back of that truck for two hours.
And she sat down, and she went,
"Tell me."
"Tell you what?" "All of it."
"Every ounce of it. Every detail."
I didn't want to completely leave his life and just leave him like that.
And we've gone through a lot, and we finally did it,
and we found something that helped him.
We just fought so hard for this
that I was just not willing to let go of… of what we had
and the man that got on his knees to ask Danny for my hand.
I'm unfortunately hit with the depression bug.
You know, I don't know why, but it comes and goes.
And, you know, when I have those days, yeah, they're bad.
I think that's the misconception about psychedelic medicine.
Uh, that it's a one and done,
where you take a pill, and you're all better.
It cracks you open.
You know, it gives you a new white canvas to paint whatever you want on there.
But you have to put in plans and integration afterwards.
You gotta put these things in place. Otherwise, you potentially can go back.
These are the things that people have to do
after they open themselves up.
Dude, you look good, man. You look better than last time I saw you.
Uh, I think I look worse.
I think I'm okay. I don't know.
Some days are worse than others. But I don't think about the physical part.
I just think about all the brain stuff and the mental part of it.
I'll be honest, man, I thought our 2007 deployment was
a large reason why I was the way I was.
Right? We never talked about it. We never even had a fuckin' debrief.
We had a five-minute conversation. We never spoke about it again.
- Never. - Yeah.
When you were in the hospital, I met you back there. They flew me home.
I never talked to the dudes about Red Wings.
- No? - Never.
What do you think about going down to Mexico?
Maybe. Like, just to be trapped inside your own fucking head.
Like, that seems like you're gonna lock the door
and somebody else is gonna have the key.
And you're gonna just be in there until, what?
Thirteen, 14 hours?
Or however long it fucking takes.
I think it depends on your intention and how much you've prepared for it.
Knowing what I know now, I tell dudes,
since you've never done it, I'd lean all the fucking way in.
I mean, we went down with some heavy hitters.
Some of the baddest dudes I have ever met.
Like, there was some heavy shit dropped on the table. Like…
- How much of that was military? - None of it.
None of it, dude. A bunch of childhood shit.
And when you hear it, you're like, "Fuck, man."
"You've been living with that for 40 fuckin' years?"
What are you most hesitant about, about going down?
Do you think it's childhood stuff, or you think it's more Team stuff?
I think it's all of it.
But just keeping it inside ain't fuckin' working.
- Are you gonna do it again? - If you wanna go, I'm in.
I don't trust anybody. Any of my good friends will tell you.
Uh, but if my buddy says something to me, I… I can trust it.
So if this crazy, hippie-ass shit helps,
if it helped them,
maybe I should do it.
That's kinda how I'm thinking right now.
It never ends.
Where's Matty? Trying to jump out of this thing? Trying to hide?
I'm proud of you.
I'm trying to… Hope I don't shit myself on camera.
You're good. You're good.
- You say the hill's too steep to climb - All right.
I feel like you guys are getting ready to deploy.
I feel like… feel like that, actually.
You say you'd like to see me try…
I went down for Matty because I thought I could get him to go.
Climbing…
And for me,
I am definitely light-years where I was in 2019.
But you can always be better.
And I'll climb
The hill in my own way
Just wait a while
For the right day
And as I rise Above the tree line and the clouds
I look down
Hear the sound of the things…
How are you feeling about tonight, Marcus?
- I feel wonderful. - Yeah, 'cause you already done the shit.
I'm gonna hold space and support these two fine men.
How you feeling?
Don't know if I'm looking forward to it or dreadin' it.
- You ever done anything like this? - Nope.
Nothing?
Sometimes it can be where others will show up.
It could be like other people.
Other times, it's like voices,
or sometimes it can feel like you're interacting with something.
Like, there's a little bit of back and forth with the medicine.
Does it wipe you out physically? Like you can't get up?
Um, if you're used to doing hard things, I think you have already the kind of,
you know, mental stamina to get through it, but it's… it's hard.
Yeah.
Jesus Christ. What have I got myself into it?
All right, gentlemen. Welcome. We're thrilled that you're here.
Honored that you're here.
"The shit I am getting rid of."
"Shame, guilt, self-doubts,
regrets of my past, and unresolved conflicts."
"What I am trying to find is my inner peace."
"Put my priorities back in line."
"And spend my next 40 years devoted to my family and my friends."
And I'm not gonna waste a single day of it.
Uh, I'm not much for speeches.
But the biggest thing on here is I don't wanna live in fear anymore.
- Amen. Amen. - Amen.
Marcus, any words of wisdom from a guy who's been down the road a few times?
I'm just grateful every day that, um, the medicine spoke to me five years ago.
And… and I'm able to just pass it along to my friends who I love, my brothers,
my teammates.
You deserve to be happy… and live a good life.
And you got it inside you, and I just want you to heal tonight.
You know, I'd never dealt with Red Wings.
And, uh, just not been able to look in the mirror for a long time.
- All right? - All right, brother.
- Have a safe trip. - Thanks, man.
You… you carry your buddies' bodies.
Just, you're never gonna leave that.
It never goes away.
I can't believe I did a platoon after that, man.
That's insane.
Being a Team guy was everything to me,
and now I just kind of want it to go the fuck away.
I guess I'm just trying to get answers that I've never gotten before.
I saw a group of people.
One of 'em starts to walk away.
It was like looking in a mirror.
He's staring at me, and I'm staring back at him.
And it just did that over and over and over.
Until I would throw up.
If I got that look from somebody out in public,
I'd be like, "That's a problem."
Maybe that was my ego.
Your ego is your perception of yourself in the world.
It's crafted and shaped by your experiences.
And God, it's a fuckin' monster.
And I do not like it anymore.
- Is it normal to be nervous? - Yes.
- Yeah. Yes. - Yeah.
I've already done it, and I'm fuckin' nervous.
I like to say that ibogaine sandblasts you from the inside out,
and then 5-MeO, like, gently polishes you.
It's like tapping into the ocean of being itself.
And I think what it's really good at is breaking down that barrier
between us and everything else,
which is really just a psychological barrier.
I worked with a great practitioner once who said,
"You might feel like you're gonna explode."
"Just explode."
"You might feel like you're gonna die. Just die."
Like that's kind of exactly what we're aiming for here.
Thank you. Thank you.
Fuckin'… it's all just love, man.
Oh, this is all I ever wanted was just to feel.
Come here, dude.
- Yeah. - Thank you so much.
- Thank you so much for this. - Yeah, man.
- God, my kids thank you. - Yeah, man.
I love you, bro. I love you, brother. I love you, dude.
Oh, fuck.
You got a lot of shit to do ahead of you, so good stuff, buddy.
Let it go.
All right, that's enough.
Just stay in it.
I have no idea.
You're still in it.
I don't like this.
It'll pass.
- I'm still looking for war, Marcus. - You're good, man.
You are good. You are good.
I had a notion it wasn't gonna be military stuff,
but it… the way it did, it wasn't what I expected.
It's like being in a room and holding up these expectations.
You're like, "Take care of this. This is my problems. It's this and this."
The toad, or the effects of it, step in.
Those are just curtains, man.
Moved 'em out of the way and was like, "Don't worry about this."
"What's behind you?"
"That rusty-ass box that's back there
with fucking chains and cobwebs all over it,
that's leaking out all over the floor, that's what we're gonna talk about."
"That's what this is gonna be about. It's not gonna be about that."
Fuck!
It encompassed a lot of shit.
Shit from childhood.
It's just trauma.
My family didn't know anything about it.
I ditched belief a long time ago.
Um, I… My faith was broken a long time ago.
I'm tired of being afraid, man.
It's the only thing I remember.
You are fearless.
It's done.
Done.
It's done, Matty.
A long time ago.
Want to just lie down?
- I just want you guys right here. - Okay. We aren't moving, then.
Do you want to tell me a little bit about your experience?
Towards the end of it… it showed me, like, my soul,
and it showed my body, and it showed my consciousness.
And then it was like, "Are you ready to be whole again?"
And just metaphysically, like, slapped me back together.
For me, I saw the perspective of those young men
that were opposite of me on the battlefield.
It was being shown the other side.
My thing is,
if we didn't abuse children, would we have a military?
Like, that's a question that I have now.
Since the treatment, have you been feeling down at all?
No.
Not in the least.
Not at all.
What about when you look in the mirror?
Do you see a difference?
Yeah, I love myself.
Um, this morning, brushing my teeth, I was like, "I love you."
You know? It's like I can't help it. It's just pouring out of me.
Um, there's a light in my eye that I haven't seen since I was a child.
Nice.
The vast majority of the subjects not only responded to the treatment,
but are now below what would even be considered mild PTSD severity.
I feel light. All the tension in my body is gone.
My headache that I've had for 12 years is gone.
And I felt like my… I felt like my brain was, like, regenerating.
It was, like, growing or something.
Since I last spoke with you, have you been feeling self-critical,
guilty, feeling like a failure, putting yourself down?
No.
Self-critical, like a failure, putting yourself down?
- Giving yourself a hard time? - No. Yeah, no.
Have you had thoughts of wanting to hurt yourself
or wanting to die?
How have you been feeling about that? Any changes?
Yeah, um…
Man. Yeah, that's gone, for sure.
I just can't believe that I got to that place.
Yeah.
Really, what we need is a larger sample.
And it would be better with more time points as well.
Then we can have a better idea as to what it's really looking like.
This is the first shot.
We have a lot more work to do.
But the idea that, you know, there's a tool out there
that could mend the mind at this level, it's… it's pretty unheard of.
So I'm just wondering how you're doing.
Mexico just beat the crap out of me.
Mm.
But I could feel a connection to everything.
- Yeah. - Everything.
And I've stepped back toward my faith,
uh, that I had just walked away from.
I mean, I'd… I've come close to dying.
You know, death is terrifying.
But what I also realized after Mexico is I've been even more afraid of life.
Mm.
That's been there since I was a kid.
And it was such a drive for everything I did.
I became this to be scary.
I became this because I wanted to be dangerous.
I wanted to be somebody that
would not have to worry about being the victim.
You know?
And I thought that if I did that, I would not be afraid.
I wouldn't have to be afraid anymore. And that was a lie.
- I… It was a lie. - Mm-hmm.
I was always… I was still… I was still afraid.
Mm-hmm.
I think that we're all born really innocent.
And then life begins to happen.
And we begin to listen to this voice in our head.
And then it hijacks us.
If I go into a dark place, now instead of being in it as a captive,
I'm in it as an observer.
- But it doesn't have to trap me anymore. - Mm.
Free
All right, come on, crazy.
In the knowledge
That one day this will end
Free…
We've served about 400 veterans.
Um, we're on track to hit 125 this year.
Everything is changed
And this
Was just a bad moment…
They're feeling connected again.
They're feeling like their life has purpose and meaning again.
And for every veteran we support,
they know two to five veterans that are struggling.
They want to tell all their friends.
With soldiers on our backs…
What's up, man?
How you doing?
We won't get caught like that
A face
Using fear
To try to keep control
When we get together
Well then, who knows?
If this
Is just a bad moment
And we are fumblin' around
But we won't get caught like that
Soldiers on our backs
We won't get caught like that
I talk to the face in the mirror
But he can't get through
I said, "It's time that you deliver"
"We see through you"
I talk to the face in the mirror
Now, he can't get through
Turns out we're in this together
Both me and you