Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman
Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman is presented by The Mac Parkman Foundation
The mission of this show and the foundation is To serve as a source of information, resources, and communications to the community of parents, coaches/Athletic trainers, medical staff, and athletes that are affected by sports-related concussions and to raise awareness of the long-term implications of concussive and sub-concussive trauma to our children.
Broken Brains will also explore how Concussive Trauma impacts our Service Members and Veterans.
Join us every week as Bruce interviews leaders and experts in various Medical fields, as well as survivors of Concussive trauma.
Produced by Security Halt Media
Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman
Repetitive Brain Trauma, Moral Injury, and the Cost of War
Frank Larkin joins Bruce Parkman to discuss veteran brain trauma, moral injury, suicide prevention, and systemic failures following 9/11. A powerful call to action for reform and accountability.
Topics Covered:
- Repetitive brain trauma
- Veteran mental health
- Moral injury
- Suicide prevention
- VA treatment challenges
- Legislative advocacy
Chapters
00:00 Repetitive Brain Trauma in Veterans
03:40 Frank Larkin’s Journey and the Impact of 9/11
15:09 From Loss to Veteran Brain Health Advocacy
25:36 Modern Warfare and Neurological Damage
32:29 Understanding Moral Injury in Combat Veterans
34:46 Recognizing PTSD, Anxiety, and Brain Injury
36:50 Life After Separation from Military Service
39:17 Institutional Betrayal and Barriers to Care
41:02 Navigating VA Mental Health Treatment
43:36 Blast Exposure and Invisible Brain Injuries
45:36 Why Legislative Action Is Urgent
47:50 Gaps in Veteran Mental Health Care
50:37 Brain Trauma as a National Security Issue
54:41 Building a Unified Veteran Advocacy Front
57:19 Acknowledging Invisible Injuries
01:02:41 Call to Action for Veteran Mental Health Reform
Produced by Security Halt Media
Hey folks, welcome to another edition of Broken Brains with your host, Bruce Parkman, sponsored by the MA Parkman Foundation, where we look at the issue of repetitive brain trauma from two aspects. Number one, repetitive head impacts from contact sports. Number two, repetitive blast exposure from our military veterans and what these conditions are doing, not only to the brains, but to the mental health and well-being of our veterans, athletes, and children. And why is this important? Because the connection between repetitive brain trauma and brain damage and mental illness is not taught in any medical, nursing, psychological, or suicide prevention program in this country, which means you become the front line of defense for those that you love and those that you know may be suffering. So on the show, we bring in experts and researchers and scientists and doctors and authors and veterans and players and all kinds of folks so that you get that 360-degree perspective on this issue so you can protect those, uh the protect those that you love. On the show today, an amazing guest. We've been trying to get this gentleman on for months now, but he's a busy man, Mr. Frank Larkin. Mr. Frank Larkin is a national leader in veteran suicide prevention and traumatic brain injury advocacy. A former Navy SEAL, he currently serves on the board of Boulder Crest and partners with multiple organizations dedicated to improving the health and resilience of veterans and first responders. Frank previously served as the 40th Sergeant at Arms of the United States Senate, overseeing Senate security operations and a 2,200 member U.S. Capitol Police Force. He also spent nearly 15 years in the senior executive service, leading the Department of Defense's joint improvised explosive device defeat organization, GIO is a lot easier to say that, and the counter-IED operations Intel Center, the COEC, which I had the pleasure of working with and for in my early attempt stint as a CEO of a company. A 20-year veteran of the U.S. Secret Service, Frank held senior roles in criminal investigations, presidential protection, and technology innovation, retiring as a deputy assistant director for protective research and chief technology officer. In the private sector, he has held leadership positions with SAP, National Security Services, Raytheon, and Lockheed to support national security, defense, and intelligence initiatives. Before entering the Federal Service, if that was not enough, Frank was also a Navy SEAL, a patrol officer, and a homicide detective in Pennsylvania and Maryland State, and a Maryland State Trooper Flight Paramedic. He continues to serve his community as a volunteer firefighter paramedic in Annapolis and has been a nationally licensed paramedic for over 40 years. And he holds a BA in criminal justice, an MS in public administration, and we can go on and on in numerous awards as a Navy SEAL and as a dedicated civilian servant to this country. Frank, welcome to the show, sir. How you been? Man, I'll tell you, you made my brain hurt with that one. That sounded great, dude. And that's the short bio. You've been busy, man. No doubt it is.
SPEAKER_01:You know, life is one big adventure. You just got to keep, you know, adding chapters to it. So Amen.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Adding chapters and taking out what God throws at us, man, you know. So now all good, bro. So um, look, I don't even know where to start, but uh, let's talk about, you know, obviously you served the community for for many years, and you and you, you know, you were public servant. I mean, you did amazing things after 9-11 with the Koak and Jido, uh, no doubt about it. Let's talk a little bit about that, and then tell us how you transition into the area of brain health and mental illness here, supporting our veteran uh veteran.
SPEAKER_01:First of all, thanks uh for having me on. Obviously, you and I have been uh in the trenches, you know, kind of slay the trying to slay these dragons for a long time, and we'll we'll get into you know why. But you know, 9-11 was uh a hallmark event for many of us. It caused a radical shift in in uh the direction of this nation and certainly exposed our flank, so to speak. Uh you know, we had a lot of vulnerabilities that we weren't paying attention to, and and subsequently, you know, we had to jump on it pretty quick to ensure that, you know, it it didn't hit the homeland again. And that's uh, you know, as I I look across the you know, the you know, our our society, you know, there are a lot of men and women who just dropped everything and stepped up on the line and raised their right hand to make sure the sole purpose of this can't happen here ever again. And um, you know, they they put the uniform on and they went forward into harm's way to to make sure that the evil that was trying to take our society down, you know, you know, was stopped and and and effectively held back uh you know, paralyzed in in what they were trying to do, which they're still trying to do. And that's that's the big thing right now, that is that our American society, we have short memories, you know. Um we and this is why, you know, when we talk about 9-11, we we're we're constantly in the same breath saying never forget. And you hear that echoed by those that went through Pearl Harbor and some of the other major uh catastrophes that this nation has f faced and and endured. But hey, got me into uh I was up in New York on 9-11, probably should have been dead about five times that day. My office was in the World Trade Center. Really? Yeah, yeah. So uh it got destroyed uh along with, you know, it was just an incredible, undefinable day. I mean, up until that point, I'd had a lot of experience dealing with emergency situations, you know, coming out of special ops, getting into law enforcement, you know, national security events, so forth. But but I'll tell you what, that that went to the top of my list. Uh I mean, when you essentially witnessed 3,000 people, almost 3,000 people just perish around you, uh, and and then you know, you're trying to navigate that day with, you know, kind of relying on a lot of your experience and and and and and knowledge from you know things that you've been, you know, involved with before. It was a day that uh, you know, I got to brief the president a couple days later when he came came to ground zero and I and I told him, I said, life and death was measured simply whether you stepped right or left at any given second. And so I became part of that recovery operation uh up until uh December 7th uh of uh 2001, and uh I was pulled back to the White House to uh uh take over security operations for for the Secret Service. You know, as you r remember, and as everyone does, uh, because you asked that question, well, hey, where were you on 9-11? They they don't even hesitate. They they have an instant recall of where they were, what they were doing, and the impact that it's had on them. And just like yourself and our teammates, everybody rucked up and uh leaned forward to get into it, because that's what we do. Uh, you know, we we you know, we go, we're about solving problems. And uh and the last thing you want to do is poke us because, you know, you're gonna get something more than you ever asked for. So uh I got involved, you know, I I finished out my career with the Secret Service, which became a very high-intensity period for us post-9-11, influenced a lot of changes at the White House during that time. But then I I stepped out, retired, and then got into got pulled back into the Department of Defense to work the uh the IED problem set. And uh I remember uh General Monty Miggs, he was a big-brained guy. He had taken the baton pass from uh General Joe Botel, who had stood up the uh task force when basically our our department leadership, the president, said, Hey, you know, this IED problem is paralyzing us. It's it's what's bringing all our troopers home in caskets, it's it's what's maiming them, it's what's causing these horrific injuries. We've got to get on top of this. We got caught with our pants down, essentially. We lost all the lessons of the past and got caught with our pants down. And so the task force was to focus on the IED problem. They initially went after the low-hanging fruit of up-armoring vehicles, trying to design new vehicles that could withstand these, you know, uh improvised explosive devices, also putting sensors out, robots, you name it, a lot of technology, marshaling the uh brain power of academia industry, kind of lean in all this. My side of that was uh the manhunting side, where, you know, I said to to Monty Miggs and and some of these other leaders, why me? And they said, Well, we need somebody that thinks about this differently. I had a background in organized crime, financial crime, we're going after human networks, and they they recognize that, hey, the technology piece of this is just one part, but we really need to go after the human factors. And we have to hunt the networks. We have to map them out. We have to start, you know, touching them in places where they don't expect it. And so that's when my relationship initially with conventional forces became very tight in deploying my operatives, you know, forward to embed with the with the operations and intel bubbles that who were on the edge working in the last tactical mile to try to see how we we could help without being at that burr in the saddle that usually, you know, the guys up front say, you know, WTF, you know, these guys in the back, you know, they go home every night, you know, they get they get a warm cot to sleep in, they got mama to to you know to hug hug up against, uh, they're getting you know three or four good meals. What do they know about what we're dealing with? And that's that's that's really why we push people forward to embed and got a rotation going so we could understand, you know, intimately the challenges of their fight. Not not to come in as the know-it-alls, but to say, hey, where where can we be reinforcing fires to to help with you know your information gathering, with your analysis, with your operations, operational planning and so forth. And, you know, once that once that relationship and it all came down to relationships and trust and confidence, the magic started to happen. I put operators with analysts, with technologists who on the fly were building this stuff in flight and and giving stuff to the operators forward that they weren't even asking for, just pushing stuff, and they could pick and choose what they wanted. And we started seeing that we were we were starting to turn the tables on the bombing networks, on the extremist networks, and starting to push them up against the ropes. It was a non-traditional approach. We drew a lot of attention. JIDO at the time had a multi-billion dollar stack of ch you know cash to throw at the problem, to try to bust through the parochial bureaucracies that were just too slow for the warfighter. And uh so in that time, I was able not only to initially support the conventional forces, but we got into supporting special operations. So as they went out and the cycle of operations was just unprecedented, as they went out and hit targets and exploited sensitive uh information on those targets in order to develop new targets, we got involved in that. A lot of it was IED related. We started doing a lot of dumpster diving, that's a term from the from my police days. I haven't heard that in a while. Yeah, yeah. I I remember going into some of these units, SF units, going, you know, uh to some of our Tier 1 units and so forth and saying, hey, what are you doing all this crap that's laying on the floor? You know, because because they they were looking at for specific information. They wanted the next target, they wanted the next individual to go hunt down. I wanted the stuff that was on the floor. And because I had the computing power, I had the analysts, I had seasoned operators that could look at this stuff and make sense of it, that's where we were started mining a lot of the gold, a lot of the ore, and pushing it forward back to the to these elements that then took it, you know, you know, or or a final stage of planning and execution, which again, I think for me, it it just I jumped out of bed every day to get into work and so did my team. And and the relationship that we built with the operations forward was was just, I think, unprecedented. And you knew you were in a in a sweet spot when those battle commanders would fight you when when you had to do a rotation with some of your people, they would fight you not to take their person away from them because they had built a level of trust. And and we soon proved to them that we were going to send them the best that we had, not our mediocre folks, not our and we didn't have too many mediocre folks because they self-selected out, too tough for them. So the folks that went forward were were pretty high speed. And traditionally, you know, it's interesting. Some of them were high-speed operators, you know, had gotten out of uniform, were now kind of, you know, in a more of a civilian support role, while others were, you know, had never been in uniform, but they were just looking at this problem through a different lens and showed, you know, tremendous value in their being able to apply their technical expertise, their analytical, you know, acumen and so forth to a problem that, as I said earlier, was was the source of flag drake caskets and severely wounded coming home uh you know, back to the States uh with just these undefinable, uh comprehensible uh wounds. That you know, that that was the you know the kind of the gyod phase uh until I I left the organization in 2013, 2014, and then moved on to uh the next adventure. Good on you, sir.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean I I I remember back in the day, one of my first contracts, I I ended up installing those crazy jammers that look like the you know, the the things on the Humvee that they use for fording rivers. We created those. Now I mean other than I ended up uh supporting uh JIDA with some really unique network targeting stuff on some really highly classified e uh uh uh IEDs. So I mean it was an amazing time to see the country, country, and the equivalent right now is drones, right? Right now we're in the same position. We're we got our pants down right now. How do we address this drone track? So I think that you know we'd probably see something like a GIDO kind of task force get created. So you you did all this great stuff, and I mean, honestly, I mean it was a testimony to who you are, plus everything else you've been doing. But how did how did you get involved with, you know, veteran brain health, um, all the stuff that you and I talk about right now? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Um so you know, after GIATO, I did uh about four or four years up on Capitol Hill as a sergeant at arms, which gave me a kind of a good peek into Congress and how things get done up there. You know, I was an outsider. You know, I definitely, you know, I knew right from the beginning I was I was not one of them, so to speak. It was kind of an out-of-body experience, but very, very instructive. A lot of great people up there doing, you know, trying to do good things. But as we're seeing right now, you know, this is an unvarnished comment. I mean, it's kind of the institution's broken. They're not getting anything done. And uh it's a shame because the nation needs them right now, needs them to come to center line. It's not, you know, far right, it's not far left. It's about, hey, what do you need to do to accomplish the nation's business? And that's what we got to get back to. And but it was it was a good period. While I was up there, um my son had, you know, following 9-11, um, he he witnessed all that unfold from a hillside west of New York City where we lived. Um, and and there's a lot more background to that story, but you know, he was one of the ones that stepped up on the line, raised his hand, and said, I'm gonna be part of the solution. This can never happen again. Uh came home uh a year after uh graduating high school. I kind of gave him uh, you know, the warning order, hey, got it, dude. You know, you graduated high school, but you got a year to figure this out, and then you're out. And uh, you know, kind of that tough love. And so he he was uh you know, he was uh doing all kinds of kinds of things. I mean, he he he wasn't sitting around on his ass. Uh he was doing stuff. He was probably the most significant thing he was doing. He was a uh salvage diver in the Annapolis, Chesapeake Bay area, working year-round, you know, you know, you know, dropping into cold water, doing, you know, scrubbing the bottom of rich people's boats and stuff like that. You know, J O B oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, he was so uh he came home uh, you know, not quite a year out of high school and said, Hey, I just enlisted in the Navy, you know. By the way, I volunteered for the SEAL program. And, you know, I never pushed him in this direction. But, you know, as you know, with our boys, our girls, you gotta let them, you know. What do you know? Gotta let them cut their own path. Yeah. You know, and the worst thing we can do is interfere. We can give them we can give them sage advice and try to give them some counsel. But the bottom line is is they they gotta walk that path. And and if they trip and fall and you know, you know, bust their nose in the process, you know, you don't want to see them get hurt. But in many ways that's kind of what helps to, you know, them figure it out, so to speak. Yep, absolutely. And um so you know, he made it through uh SEAL training. Um again, some backstory on that. Yeah, no small achievement. You know, he broke his back in Hell Week, got through Hell Week, had a bunch of stress fractures and all, you know, you know, that you know, the day that, you know, they um he finished Hell Week, um wound up on the beach for about three months while he healed up and then re-reclassed, you know, with another class and then went through and got his tried and became a uh Sakam special operations medic. Uh, you know, went down to Fort Bragg. Great school down there. Yeah. You know, I, you know, I had a little taste of that back in my my young days. But but the school was just second to none. Yeah. And then immediately deployed to Iraq, uh, where he was right into the mix as soon as he got there. Came home from that pump. I went back maybe a year later to uh northern Iraq to on an HVI mission uh in support of uh Army Tier One unit, and which was kind of unusual to to see a you know a bunch of frog men kind of you know snapped into a uh a unit like that. But again, it's all about relationships. And once once once they realize they can trust you and you, you know, you can do the job and so forth, it's it all comes together. And uh and a great experience for him. He loved working with them. And uh a um an alert came out that they were looking for a medic in Afghanistan. They had a guy, uh one of the medics went down. They needed somebody seasoned, he had a great reputation, he raised his hand, he was single. He was living with a gal for about four years, uh, but single, so he had he had the maneuverability, and he said, Look, I'll do it, I'll jump. So came home, reset over the course of two weeks, and went to Afghanistan. And while I was home, I told him, I said, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan are not the same. If you're going in there, you know, Bruce, you know, you know this. You've had you've had these discussions with these folks. You know, they immediately assume that, hey, you know, I, you know, I got it on in Iraq.
SPEAKER_00:Combat's combat. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Afghanistan's gonna be, you know, walk in the park and and you know, they got there and found out, ooh boy, this we're we're we're not even on the same in the same, you know, you know, galaxy. Um I mean, it's like stepping back into time, you know, stone ages and and the terrain was much more unforgiving and different dynamics and than than Iraq, but but certainly a a great learning experience for a lot of these operators and units that were deployed in. So he uh he did his time there, came back home, reset. And in between these, as you know, uh especially SF kind of following their their you know, in between these major deployments, you're also doing these little training exercises. You know, you're you're launching the different countries, you're you're bumping up against their military, you're trying to share some of their knowledge and and expertise, especially in Central and South America, Africa and so forth. So he was doing that. And then you're still training to get ready for the next go-around. Hell yeah. Yeah, and still get and and the one thing and this is probably a good point to uh bring this up and and uh and pile on, but you know, you train like you fight. So, you know, you think so people automatically that don't understand this world think, well, you know, you're in training, so what the hell can happen in training? We lose a lot of people in training because we're pushing the envelope. You know, we're we're trying to make it as realistic as possible. And not that, you know, we're trying to get people hurt, but it does happen because of that. So he's training up um and goes for his final pump in Afghanistan into the Hellman Valley, which is where most of the uh the uh opium production's you know taking place. And and you know, the Taliban is very protective. It's also the the the highest volume of IEDs. And this was back in the uh, I want to say 2011, 12, 13 time frame when the pressure plates were really, you know, uh just, you know, uh it it was it was the the ability of the enemy to put these IEDs out was just unbelievable. And, you know, they they could build an ID for five to a pressure plate IED for five to ten dollars, put it in the ground and you know, hooked up to a little transistor radio battery and let it go. Uh and and at some point somebody would come along and step on it, you know, and you know, and it wasn't just our our warriors, it was the locals that would step on them. It was livestock that would step on them, but they they had a horrific effect. He came home from that, and and at that time, you know, I'm you know at Giato, and I'm just holding my breath. I know where he is. I tried to discipline myself not to read their daily reports.
SPEAKER_00:You got oversight over everything that's going on down ranked.
SPEAKER_01:Well, yeah. And then I got my dudes down there and dudets that are, you know, thinking that they're helping me out by sending me little messages back. Yeah, I saw, you know, your son, you know, he's doing all right. You know, their unit is doing this, doing that. So anyway, he comes back from that and uh winds up getting assigned as the senior instructor for the uh what they call special operations urban combat. And so getting the other platoons ready to deploy globally into their missions, you know, so it's you know, it used to be called close quarter battle, you know, the number of you know urban combat, all that stuff. And I'm not sure what SF calls it.
SPEAKER_00:We called it Safalk, Special Forces, Advanced Urban Combat, is what we call it. Then our high-end course was Safartec. That's where you know I went when I was I was assigned to the CIF. That was our close quarter combat uh elite school.
SPEAKER_01:And you know, Bruce, you know, when you're in that environment as an instructor, as an overwatch, um, and they're not putting anybody in in those those positions. They're putting seasoned people, people that have a reputation for for getting up and cl uh uh you know close and dirty with the problem, being able to bring back that knowledge so that you can you can move these folks forward with a level of capability and competency, you know, hopefully something that keeps them alive in that environment. But as you will attest, you know, as you're training these folks, you're constantly being subjected to those forces. You know, blast blast. Yeah. Yep. You know, you're you're you know, you got concussion grenades, you know, flashbangs, whatever, breaching charges, you've got you're firing rockets, you're you're dropping mortars, you know, helicopter operations, you're, you know, and and you know, you're falling off of stuff. And and in some cases it's it's a level of intensity that's even greater than combat. Would you agree with that?
SPEAKER_00:I would. I mean, a lot of training, I mean, especially for the range safety officer. I mean, you get into a combat engagement, you know, some of them lasted quite a long time from what I heard, you know, not having been in one, but the uh, you know, a lot of them were large-range firefights, and and now you're talking about, you know, continuous exposure because he's the range safety office, you're going in with, you know, team after team after team. They're coming in once, there might be four or five teams training, they're going around five times, you're going around five times with them. They're coming in once out of every five rounds to that house. So the amount of the amount of exposure is for a range safety officer training, that kind of stuff, whether it's AT-4s or whatever, is is enormous. There's no doubt.
SPEAKER_01:So as Ryan was in this as the lead petty officer and going through all this exactly what you just described, that's when we started seeing some of the first signs that something wasn't, you know, wasn't right. Something was kind of moving off center. And so that that's kind of an interesting term, moving off center. So where is the center line? So if if you're comparing it to normal society, uh I would say, yeah, we're way off center. We're way off center when we start. That's right. Yeah. So so it's but and and it's part of the problem because as as as that you know, that center line moves off the true center, it's it's hard to be able to kind of tease out who may be having some issues. Um and and very often a lot of the senior folks that are responsible for for more of the junior cadre are are banged up themselves. And so it's hard for them to say, yeah, that guy's banged up, or or maybe it's they see stuff in that that person that they also see in themselves, but they don't want to acknowledge that. And you see a lot of that, you know. So he started having problems with sleep was probably the b the first big signal, the red flag. And and, you know, when when he would get to sleep, and often with the help of alcohol, which was, you know, the easy go-to remedy for, you know, not getting sleep, for for stress, for pain. Because they're all in pain, every one of them. It's just that they just kind of put it someplace else. But they're in physical pain, they're in moral pain, they're in in some cases, you know, spiritual pain, you know, emotional pain, yep. Emotional pain. Uh, and so alcohol becomes a big source, over-the-counter source to to try to deal with all that. And when he would get to sleep, he'd have nightmares, you know, things that come back to, you know, kind of, you know, you know, haunt you, so to speak. You know, we're sending people that, you know, we and this is the other thing that kind of you know grabs my ass. Uh uh World War II people asked me, what's the difference between World War II and and this last 20 years? Well, World War II, the whole freaking nation stood up. I mean, you know, you had a whole society that was engaged in supporting that war effort. And now it's less than 1%. And so there's a lot of folks that don't understand, you know, in many cases what we're talking about and what a lot of our veterans are are dealing with right now from from a lot of that experience. We've trained them up to do some pretty extraordinary things, and then we've sent them places to execute, to accomplish, you know, some pretty tough missions, solve some some just, you know, indescribable problems. And to think that they're not going to come back burdened with, you know, some you know kind of uh cause and effect of what they've seen, what they've done, what they've experienced is I I think, you know, pretty blind on our part as a society. You know, these men and women have uh, as they said, stood up on the line, went forward to protect this nation. Now they're coming home, dragging, you know, some some pretty heavy burdens.
SPEAKER_00:So if you look also you look also look, Frank, at the different, you know, you compare World War II, where we had an army fighting an army, combatants fighting combatants. Vietnam kind of blurred that line. Afghanistan, Iraq took this to a whole nother galaxy, as you stated, where you got every, you know, you got women and children and being coerced, but you couldn't trust anybody, not to mention the the IEDs that would come out of anywhere. I mean, the the amount of and and then the just the confusion, right? That just the complexity of fighting these types of wars morally is almost impossible when you are out there trying to stay alive and and and complete the mission. And we put our men and women in some very, very difficult situations from a moral perspective, and they had to get the job done, and they did it. And so, you know, whatever has to happen out there to bring our boys and girls back, of course, has to happen. But at the same time, you know, those those environments, those decisions that you have to make, to your point, come back with them. And there's no easy way to process this when you are, you know, an American from a you're not a bad person, right? You sign a dotted line, you have to make decisions, you have to execute operations that you know that that really nobody else is trained. You're not even trained for these things, right? You're trained to go out there and kill somebody with a rifle. Now you're navigating, you know, dude. I mean, it's it's it's just, yeah, to your point, the the complexity of these types of wars is is is is very demanding on the the psyche and and and and and the and then the natural pure or the moral implications. I mean, we get moral people going to war uh to an immoral war, a f a war that I would say is fought immorally by the other side, pushing us into these situations.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I I hope your listeners are kind of picking up on what you just said. I mean, you're spot on. And then they come back to a society that's very judgmental.
unknown:Ha.
SPEAKER_01:You know, they zero defect.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. And they expect you to kind of, you know, proceed like you're on Main Street USA, you know, and you know, you what used to grab me is, you know, we we you know, they'd hook into, you know, one of these terrorists that, you know, were you know just killed a bunch of our folks. You know, had this this this dude had never ever stepped into the United States and they're reading him his rights. I'm like, what? What do you mean you're reading him his rights? What rights? Yeah. You know, yeah. I mean, so so and you know, to your point, you know, uh sp especially, you know, you know, in the warrior, you know, ecosystem that we live in and and the folks are living in now, I mean, how many times, you know, especially when the special ops uh arena, you know, you got you got the mission, and you know, your your your leadership that had confidence in you said, you know, you you'd say, okay, uh, how how do you want us to go about this? And you know what, more times than not, they turn they look you right back in the eye and they say, go figure it out. Amen. Figure it out. Because it goes back to your point. Hey, we were in a whole new place. And, you know, there was no doctrine. You know, stuff was changing faster than it got into print. That was, you know, part of the challenge we had. They were writing doctrine as they went, yeah. Yeah. You know, and we were not, you know, big army against big army anymore. And and and all the lines got blurred. So there was, you know, this whole thing about moral injury and and the um and just the the uh the degree of confusion, tension, just that the conflict that people came home with is real. And it's an injury. It's an injury. And and and so as we get into talking about the next phase, which uh I I'm sure here that that we're gonna evolve in, please keep this whole moral injury piece um as part of the calculus of what we're gonna be talking about here.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. Yeah, because uh the there's there's no doubt that a lot of the impact on our veteran population, uh, you know, especially from the, you know, the we'll just say the the mental illness part of this is not just that we have a damaged brain, but now we're not capable of processing, you know, the the the actions that we had to conduct in order to deal morally with an immoral situation. And and and then it could, you know, of course, sometimes that our hands cut, you know, commanders wanting to make, you know, decisions on the battlefield and all this stuff instead of trusting men and women to do the right thing. There's a there was a whole bunch of confusion there, as you said, because our doctrine, our our our moral approach to war was not adequate to take on these folks at the time. You know, we had to meet them at a very primal mode in order to get this job done. And um and they're the ones that pushed they they're the ones that pushed the limit. We didn't. We went in, and we I guess, and I will say right now, we fought both those wars as morally as possible. Whether, you know, my problem, I don't I don't, you know, whether they're justified or not, we still went. And and we did the best, you know, the we did a damn good job. And we did it as more you could not fight those wars any more morally than how we did it. And um, but I I think it also severely impacted our forces' ability to execute operations the way they should have. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And uh so, you know, as we look as as I looked at Ryan, you know, after he finished the the fourth head heavy deployment and then was into this whole Salk urban combat training mission, started to see more and more signs of anxiety. He became short-fused. You know, he he he was one of these guys that, you know, he didn't talk a lot, but when he said something, people listened. And but he was also a little bit of a prankster, too. You know, he he smiled a lot. He had he had the biggest shit-eaten grin that that he he would walk around with, but he stopped smiling. And that was a significant sign. His relationship with his significant other, you know, blew apart. He became, you know, more and more isolated, more of them against us, you know, hyper-vigilant. You could see degrees of paranoia kind of starting to, and this was all uncharacteristic of him. And so eventually, you know, we figured out something was going on. You know, they originally they immediately tagged him with, you know, PTSD. They started putting him on all these f freaking drugs, you know, stabilizers. He went to NYCO, which is the National Intrepid Center of Excellence in in Bethesda, to kind of do a tooth-to-tail assessment of what may be going on. They came out with a provisional diagnosis of PTSD depression, all things that were not him. Um and but now, you know, was him. And so uh, you know, as time went on, he got to a point where he felt that he was becoming more of a liability and asked to come out of the Salk position. He was afraid that and the worst thing that any operator, the thing that haunts every operator is I can't let my teammates down. I don't want to fail them. I don't want to be viewed as not carrying my load. I don't want to. These are all real. And and so, you know, they spent a lot of energy, you know, trying to assess how are my teammates looking back at me, especially when they're struggling with something. And it's exhausting. And so eventually it got to a point where things got pretty bad and he uh discharged honorably from the teams. He was gonna make gonna make a career out of it, but things unraveled to the point where he um he just couldn't do what he was doing, what he loved to do, and abruptly had to separate from the teams and and did not have a clean break, you know, did not have closure with his teammates. He he was further burdened by a sense of abandoning them, having um, you know, not having that and and I'll tell you, this whole segment or issue of separation is is really critical. How you separate from service really kind of in in my view dictates how things are gonna go once you leave service. If you're if you're separating because you've got a plan, you've got a place to land, you've got some objectives that you're gonna try to accomplish, it's all on a good note, you're going out on the high wave, that that's a better trajectory. You're you're you're most likely going to have a more successful outcome. But if you're leaving under any type of cloud, if you're being pushed out, if you're if you're leaving because you know you feel that you can't do the job anymore, that you know you're banged up, but you don't want to admit it, and you see a lot of that happen, then that sets up more um uh a negative, should I say, kind of a trajectory as to once they get out, often they they don't know where they're headed, they don't have a you know a landing zone identified. Suddenly they're, you know, they've exited this, you know, bullet train or this aircraft, uh, and you know, they don't even have a chute.
SPEAKER_00:I've got a stepson that just got out of the army, he's been out for a month, he's already trying to get back in.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, it's yeah, it is crucial that we separate. And um, you know, I I didn't separate well either. I mean, I didn't even have a retirement ceremony. I was not liked from my mouth, and I just came back, turned on my stuff, and I left. And that and that cost me a lot of you know pain. Nothing, I mean, compared to what your son must have been through, struggling emotionally, physically, and then, you know, basically feeling like he didn't even have the support of his brethren when he got separated because whatever was going on. That is a horrible place for our service members to land when they leave the military.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, it we're calling it, you know, it's kind of a new term institutional betrayal. Some people may not agree with it.
SPEAKER_00:I think that's a very apt term right there, man. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:You know, we stand up and you give it all to your organization, to the cause, and so forth, and then all of a sudden it turns on you. In Ryan's case, you know, they didn't in many cases they didn't know what they didn't know. So they were trying to do the best they could for the for uh for the right reason, but all the wrong way, because they didn't know. And and we'll talk about that shortly. But it goes back to your point. When he stepped up to get help and help for his brothers, which was a lot of his motivation about, you know, for why he stepped up, because I warned him, I said, be careful, you know, bureaucracies tend to shoot the messenger. And so as he was trying to get help, you know, initially it was about the low-hanging through. They've they focused on the alcohol, which was not his problem. And and, you know, they it uh then all of a sudden it turned adversarial, you know, and that's where a segment of his leadership, you know, had a perspective of, hey, I don't need this, you know. Yeah, I don't have time to deal with a broken frog man, you know, get rid of this problem. And that's when and that's that's a signal that I missed is that when I started seeing the Jags circle up um and and you know, accumulating, you know, the data, the evidence, whatever that they needed to kind of, you know, push him towards that departure door, you know, that's again, he didn't he didn't want to leave the teams. He loved what he was doing, but he came to a point where he said, I gotta go. You know, I'm I'm not gonna survive this. And and so he left. And their their view was, hey, you know, you know, it's it's better for him because the VA will do a better job taking care of him. You know, they're they'll be able to handle this. So he went, you know, out into VA care, which at the time was a shit show in itself. You know, all all all that happened there was he got interviewed by people who had no clue of what, you know, what he represented, what he had been through, but they were quick to write new prescriptions to to keep he keep him chemically sedated so he didn't hurt himself or hurt anybody else. And uh he bounced through that system for about a year. We were sitting around a fire one night, and uh it was in the March time frame of uh 2017, and he says to me, you know, hey dad, I'm uh um something's wrong with my head. He kept saying this all the time. He says, Something's wrong with my head, but nobody is listening. And he says, I'm busted up inside, and I don't think I'm gonna live very long. I'm just, you know, and I said, Hey, well, you're not thinking about hurting yourself, are you? And I he said, No, no, I never go that way. I'll never go that way. But but I'm busted up inside. And uh, if anything ever happens to me, I want you to promise to donate my brain to traumatic brain injury research or or breacher syndrome research. I said, you know, nothing's gonna happen to you. I'm here, I'm your swim buddy, you know, we're gonna get through this. And freaking month later, came home and found that he had taken his life from the basement of our home. Um He was uh dressed in a SEAL team seven t-shirt, red, white, and blue board shorts, and had a illuminated uh shadow box next to him that had all his medals, ribbons, other insignia that I had made for him the the holiday before just to kinda honor his service. Um I'll tell you, yeah, I I said earlier, you know, uh 9-11 like went to the top of my list as far as, you know, uh shitty experiences. Uh but that was quickly replaced by um, you know, losing him. You know, I I had been pretty efficient at packing all my shit away in little compartments. You know, I've seen some pretty horrible things. I was in Africa in the middle of the uh to seeing Hutu wars, you know, back in the um the 90s and uh, you know, World Trade Center. I've been to some, you know, as a paramedic, pretty shitty, you know, scenes, horrible scenes, but this this just kind of this this this cracked. This this put some major cracks in my armor. And we we accomplished his wish. We got him to his brain donated for a research effort at uh a Walter E. Bethesda, an effort done by a Dr. Dan Pearl, he's an internationally renowned neuropathologist, and he came back to us about two months later and said, hey, Ryan had a severe level of microscopic, undiagnosed microscopic brain injury uniquely related to blast exposure. We only see it in blast cases. You know, we don't see it's not a different injury than the and then uh the chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the CTE that you see in contact sports, which, you know, Bruce, you're very, very familiar with, obviously, you know, with Mac. And uh and and you know what we hear about with the NFL and so forth. But this this whole new category of uh blast injury was something that they had not seen before. And the more and more and more brains that they started to examine, the more they started to see that this was not a one-off. There was something going on here. And because we did not have the imaging technology or the blood markers to see this in a living person, it did not exist. It was not part of the calculus for a clinician that was evaluating somebody that was coming in with problems. And certainly our mental health community did not recognize it because this was a neuroscience, that this was a biological injury. It was not a mental health, a traditional mental health problem that they could score against the DSM V diagnostic chart, which is for the most part how they got reimbursed for services. Or, you know, it's it's what they had to put down in the diagnostic block. But but this we started to find out, you know, with a high degree of suspicion that this level of microscopic injury from blast exposure from our own weapons systems in many cases, not just the IEDs, might have been a key underlying factor, you know, that's that's contributing to why it's so difficult to deal with some of the veterans and our active warriors that are experiencing problems. And certainly, as we've grown to understand, a growing body of evidence connecting it to suicide. So that's what set me on this path. And right now, my high ground is to drive the research, to partner with guys like you and others to get the attention of Congress, to get them off their ass, to get shit done, to put pressure on the Department of Defense, the VA, HHS to take this seriously, make this a priority, because I truly believe that this is a key factor, especially in in the wake of the 20 plus years of persistent conflict that we've just experienced that may be plaguing our men and women that are struggling every day with a lot of the conditions we just talked about. And I'll get off the transmit by that.
SPEAKER_00:Ah, Frank, this is you know, I wanted the the audience to hear your path. I, you know, you know, as as dads, right, we share a lot in common here. And um that because this is uh I just like what my son went through, you know, this is another area where we have failed to, for some reason, associate a common aspect of military life and military training with an outcome of what we were, you know, when we start looking at the suicide epidemic and and the mental health uh pandemic that we have with our military veterans. And it's just amazing to me that much like CTE, you know, we didn't understand this. I'm not I'm a Cold War guy. You know, I did the GBEV calculation, I came out of like 1.8 million when, you know, but now we're seeing guys in, you know, coming out of Tier 1 units and the SEALs and SF with 28, 30 something million units of exposure. Why hasn't it taken us so long to understand that we know that blasts impact the body? Heck, the VA just came out with a blast exposure diagnosis code for the brain last year. They had one for the colon, for the gut, for the heart, for the lung. The brain don't count. The most critical organ that we have to stay on this earth doesn't count. Then, you know, not only that, since 2017 or even that's probably when just when you got going, that we started to understand as a society, I didn't know anything about this, that we have a problem here. Where has the VA been in looking at how we treat this? Because nothing's changed, right? Nothing's changed. Even in the military right now, having been one of you know SOCOM's brain advisors for a while, they're just getting a rope on this pony, you know? And they're doing a great job. I mean, they're looking at it, but it they're gonna impact soldiers for years to come. What about the soldiers now and back when Ryan served that have had had all this blast exposure and that are out there suffering in silence right now, thinking they're crazy. They don't understand they have a brain injury because this, what you just explained in terms of the evidentiary path to this, is not known. This is not just a it's it's not a well-known phenomena. And so your point about the mission, right, is enormous. I mean, there's so many gaps when it comes to awareness and when it comes to treatment, when it comes to diagnosis right now. And yet you and I know the answers. We know. We know how to validate this. We know how to diagnose this. We've got all kinds of scans that combine with a DD254 and histories and medical records can substantiate we've got blast exposure. And you and I know all these treatments that are out there that can help guys, that could have helped your son and could have helped my son. Had they been available or even knowledgeable, we would have mortgaged our homes and our lives for our boys. We all know this, right? There is nothing, nothing that would have that have come between us and our sons if we would had one chance to save them. And but they're available. And yet we cannot get anything going other other than foundational support for the few men and women that understand that, oh my God, my mental health could be tied to my service, could be tied to combat, could be tied to my brain injury.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and and you know, with the Pentagon right now, we have kind of recast this in a new direction, which I think is more appropriate. And that is how do we protect and ensure the readiness of the total force? As you said, special operations is leading the way, but it's not about special, just about special operations. The conventional forces is other supporting entities. So here's my my position on this, and whether you agree or but this is an existential threat to our national security, and why? What distinguishes us from other armies from around the world, other adversaries and so forth that are trying to hurt us is that right to the edge, the tip of the spear, it's the thinking warrior brain that has come through time and time again that has proven that our ability to adapt, to uh pivot, to innovate, to analyze, to create some level of action and outcome right at the tip of the spear, right at that warrior. In order to do that, your brain's got to be functioning. Gotta have a brain. Yep. And if if there's something that we're doing to our brains that's deteriorating that ability, then that's no kidding, that's a threat to our national security, let alone to total force readiness and resiliency. That's my position. Right now they've got some legislation. I know you're working on some. This may be tied to yours, but I guess they're looking in the new NDAA to put a provision in there for the department to look at those cases that had a sense of blast exposure and as it may have been the motivator or potentially an unknown factor for their discharge.
SPEAKER_00:Love it. Love it. I'll support that 100%. I'd like to know about that piece of legislation because all those BCDs and other honorable discharge that took place, you know, follow the path, the same path that your boy was on, where men and women become unstable, and it's so easy to just get rid of the problem than to try and fix it. And that zero-defect military is one of the reasons I retired as a very angry SARG major uh in early 2001, is that I continuously railed against a system that was not taking care of our men and women when people were making career decisions instead of military decisions. And where I'm a two-strike guy. You you mess the same thing up twice, I'm on you because you didn't learn from the first time. But the first time you can make a thousand mistakes. I really don't care. You're learning, you're evolving, you're maturing. And we never give our soldiers nowadays the chance to come back from a mistake. And then that's compounded when that mistake is caused by a biological injury that is a product and outcome of a dedicated warrior serving his country. And now we've got a huge problem where we're not only letting down the individual, we're setting them on a path to self-destruction because we are failing them morally as leaders and as an institution. We should be insulating, not isolating, as we used to say when I was a survival expert when I was a trainer in SEER back in the day. We have to insulate our people and take care of them instead of chucking them out there to survive on their own when they have no skills, they have no preparation, and they have a damn brain injury, not to include mental illness. So yeah, I would we have to go back. And not only that, Frank, not only just the BCDs and the OTAs, look at all the suicides that have taken place from men and women that have had that we could go back and look at their blast exposure. How the hell do we address that? And that's why people, I think there's that's I think that's why they're so flat, they're so flat footed when it comes to this issue, is that they don't want to open up this can. And we owe it to these people. We have to open it up. We have to show the moral coverage to crack open this can of pain and say, dig into it. And where we failed, we're gonna honor it, we're gonna admit it, and now we're gonna fix it. And we're gonna write that check. We're gonna make care coverage, we're gonna find those men and women that with BCDs and OTHs, and if they were blast related, guess what? You want to join back in or whatever, we're gonna fix it. You're gonna get a regular R1 code where you know you can get your benefits, you can get to the commissary, we're not gonna find you under a bridge. You know, and then for the suicides, what can we do for the spouses and the surviving kids when blast exposure even could be, I don't care if it we're not gonna be able to say definitively, but if it could have, even could have been a factor, given the fact that what these men and women have left on the ground and in the ground for this country, we owe it to them. And I think unfortunately, Frank, legislation is about the only way that we're gonna get this fixed. And um and you've been fighting that battle for a while. Where where are you seeing are we close to any wins? I know my legislation I gave to a congressman, I will not mention his name. It didn't go anywhere. So uh we're starting to pick that back up and start all over again with our piece.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, I think uh what we're finding is that we we need to link arms with other entities out there and and create a force that can is undeniable. That's where we're gonna see this because I've been guilty of this, you know, going after things onesie-twosies from my my my foxhole. We've got to bring everybody together and create an overwhelming force along with the VSOs to get the attention of Congress, get the attention because uh this was I was on 60 Minutes, as you know, beginning of the summer. That again was a tremendous platform, the 15, 16 minutes to help inform folks exactly what we were talking about. But it's that type of pressure that we need to put on Congress and onto the departments to move the ball. Unfortunately, right now, and you alluded to this, but we're into this construct of leadership. I call it leadership by lawyer. We have leaders that are not making any decisions without the freaking lawyer standing next to them. And and you know, to me, that is so disabling, so just it's a vulnerability that's going to come back to haunt us. And and I think that to your point, when I have conversations with veterans or warriors that are struggling, and I explain what we've just been talking about, and I say to them, you're not crazy. You very well may be injured because of this. You should see the sea change that comes across their face. Closure. Because because every one of them remembers what it's like to be on that freaking range or to be rocked by an explosion or whatever, where that that energy wave, that invisible wave has has passed through their brain. And now as we're starting to understand, creating these little micro-tears into the circuitry of the brain that create the challenges that very well uh I think uh explain why it it's so difficult for these folks to to kind of, you know, you know, remember things, to be able to put you know certain tasks together, that some level of organization through their day, to be able to deal with the the thoughts that they have and so forth. This to me, what once you see where the damage is occurring in the brain, it explains a lot as far as the projections or or the manifestations we're seeing in a lot of these operators and these folks that have been subjected to this. It it's like, but I think that the department right now is looking at this like a Pandora's box. Boy, we don't want to open this thing up. It's following the same course as Agent Arnes, Gulf War Syndrome, burn pits, you know, directed energy. Uh, hey, they know there's something there. And but the body of evidence is building. And and my counsel to the Department of Defense is look, I'm not looking here to put a big old chest wound. I'm here to help you. Let's hit this head-on. Because the more that we disregard this, the more that we ignore this and stick our head in the sand, the more it's potentially going to affect our readiness, especially as we're entering into this modern warfare construct, you know, where we're we're just saying, you know, this digital age, the issues with the drones, as you have alluded to, the the speed of innovation on a battlefield is unprecedented. And if and if we cannot preserve uh uh that human brain, that command and control center, that is truly what I think makes the difference. It's not the technology, it's it's that human brain ability to adapt. That's you know, the focus of this. And unfortunately, you know, you had to lose your son, I had to lose my son. We've had to lose a lot of men and women. Um, seven, eight X to suicide over those killed uh in action in in uh in uh OIF and OEF. Um seven to eight X. And that's probably undercounted, way undercounted. Way undercounted. Why isn't this uh uh an absolute priority uh within our society, within our military uh ecosystem and our VA system? Uh this is at epidemic levels, and and I'm trying to take the emotion out of this because you know, as a leader, a former leader in the department, you know, I see this as something that's really going to come back to haunt us unless we hit this head on and figure this out. Like I said earlier, let's figure this out and get ahead of it.
SPEAKER_00:And we have to. And like your point, Frank, I mean, we don't want this to be burning pitch. We have this big bag of cash for the lawyers to go after. Every person that I've talked to that's been harmed by this. And when I can't even say harmed, it's been impacted. Because harm means that, you know, they really weren't, you know, that they, that they, you know, they knew about it and they got hurt. No, they've been impacted. All they want is peace. They want treatment. And if they get disability, great, you know, they should they deserve that, right? But nobody's looking for a big settlement with the United States government. Nobody wants that. Not even the men and women want that. They want help and they're not getting it, and they're not getting treated. And then they become part of that problem that you talked about where we've got them leaving us because there's no other option for them. And they're at this, they're in these holes right now, and it's so hopeless. They call up organizations and they don't support psychedelic treatments, or I gotta, and there's 38,000 organizations out here talking about linking together, right? You got what, 36,000, 38,000 organizations, VSOs out here that are trying to help, and yet, you know, 90% of them don't even know that this is an issue, right? And so they're getting these mentally ill folks, they're they're putting them on horses, they're taking them diving. Great, man, that's all good. But until we touch this, we're we're we're not gonna we're not going to to make a diff. And it's uh, you know, and then and so yeah, I mean, that's uh to your point about whether it's the VA, whether it's HHS, whether it's, you know, the the Department of War, it doesn't matter. This is not something to run from. We've got to face this head on because this is going to continue to impact. You talked about an existential threat to our security. What if everybody looked at these jobs going, I'm not doing that? That's not gonna bust my brain. All right. I mean, I stood up in front of SOCOM and I told them all straight to my face. I said, look, when I put on that funny green hat, it was because I knew I was gonna get dinged up. I knew that I was jumping, I was blowing things up, I was running, I was gonna leave the military with with a significant impact of pain for all the fun that I had, and I'd do it all over again, but the VA was gonna take care of me. Now we have an issue that I didn't know about, that I was I was dinged up pretty bad. Uh that after 9-11, it got even worse. And now the VA is not there for our vets, and we have to fix that because what and that's the whole problem, that's the whole good thing about it, is that if the VA is going to have these programs during the military during, just imagine if you had an H-bot chamber at the union, you go put your head in it, whatever, right? And we're treating the brain, we're minimizing impact, you're not a range safety officer for three years anymore, you're not a swick boat guy for ten years anymore, three years and you're gone, your brain's had enough, right? And we start making all these changes, and then the VA's got problems to take care of whatever residual impact we have. Man, who's not gonna want to continue being a Green Brayer or Navy SEAL, all this other stuff, right? Because we're gonna be able to help. And that's where I think, you know, we we have to dive into this more and not just dive into it more. We we've to your point, we need a focused, just a what do you want to call it, a task force, a coalition of just a large amount of people hitting that hill and letting people know that we cannot turn our back on our veterans like this. And you can't just chuck money at it. They just doubled the size of the Fox grant right now. We have put, I don't even know how many billions of dollars against this issue of just mental health and suicide, and we have had no decrease in the rate for years. And that and so what does that tell us? You know, you know, we're doing it wrong. So let's get outside this paradigm. Let's have a you know, a shift, whatever you will call it, let's just blow it up. It don't work. So let's just detonate it, man. Let's put a slap a bunch of charges on it, let's blow the whole thing up, and let's start fresh with some common sense based on research and science and the fact that we know that our boys and girls are suffering, and let's address it. Let's just not chuck money at the same problem, and just because more more money doesn't mean better outcomes. You know, and it's just it's just nuts. And um, and so yeah, I I you know, I'll get off my soapbox.
SPEAKER_01:You know, I'll I'll close out with I'll close out with with this. So for your listeners, Dr. Jaina Mosseri Hyphen Brooks wrote a paper that talked about the issuance of the Purple Heart to those individuals that could demonstrate that they had, you know, a brain injury, blast injury like that, and how it could reduce suicides. And when you read this, and he talks she talks about institutional betrayal and so forth, it's very illuminating paper. It's one that and I'm not playing down the or minimizing or trivializing the a purple heart, but why wouldn't we recognize those men and women that have been injured in combat with this invisible wound and qualify for them that they have been injured and they're not crazy?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I mean, Frank, what's the difference between a bullet wound to the arm and physiological damage to the brain? Damage is damage. And I mean, grant granted, you know, some of it, most of it maybe could have occurred during training for whatever, but you cannot, you cannot negate the impact of incoming rounds and and outgoing rounds and explosions on that brain uh to a point where, you know, and to your and to your point, giving these men and women the validation of their injury as a result, it's got to be documented, it's got to be validated. Nobody's just gonna you were in Iraq, you had a bull a purple heart. Nobody would be saying that. But I I do I do agree with that approach to you know giving them some kind of just an incentive to stay around, you know, and and to store their dignity. Dignity, yeah. Good point.
SPEAKER_01:Something that they could could they could point at. What would this cost the department? Nothing.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. Yeah, and and Frank, to your point, too, is the good thing about when you see that look in their faces is because now you've given them a mission. You mean my bane, I gotta heal this? All right, this is what I'm gonna do. And here's a whole book on how to do it. So look, as as we close out, Frank, tell um you know, tell the folks how they find you, how they get a hold of you. Please bring up the 60 minute special so they can go ahead and look for that. And then um, you know, anything else you got going on in the brain health or Frank Larkin space, I don't care, man. Talk about yourself.
SPEAKER_01:Just go ahead and go to warriorcall.org. You know, this is a national movement what we have going on with other VSOs, simply to make a call to somebody that served in uniform, take a call from them and have an honest conversation. And if you sense that, hey, something's not right, get them connected up with resources. The big part of that is just to let them know they're not alone, that people care and that there is hope. So if you go to that website, you you'll see my contact information. You'll see the link to 60 minutes, which will kind of fill this in. And then if you Google my name on uh the internet, you know, there's a lot of, you know, stuff out there. You know, hopefully it helps. With with that bio, there better be. Well, hey, it's not about me, but Bruce, you and I lock arms to try to make a difference so that for those that come between uh behind us don't have to walk the same path of pain. That's what it's about. Just remember, folks, you very well may be hurt. You're not crazy. Let's you know, stay with us, help us figure this out. Um, you know, there is a way forward.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we love you, man. All right. Well, Frank, thank you so much for coming on the show, man. Sending our love to you. I'll be praying for you and your journey. And we are linking arms. I'm gonna be with you. Uh, I'll give you a call next week. Let's figure out to figure out what you're doing, what I'm doing, and let's just go, let's go kick some doors down on the hill, man. I'm all about it.
SPEAKER_01:Well, there's no nobody better than a sergeant major to kick ass. So I'm right there with you, brother.
SPEAKER_00:All right, bro. Thank you. All right, God bless you, man. See you in a bit. Folks, another amazing episode of uh Broken Brains. Remember, if you're if you know anybody that's hurting, if you're to help us and view yourself as suffering, as Frank said, reach out for help. You do not have to suffer in science. And when it comes down to repetitive brain trauma, there is hope, there are treatments, and we can help you. So reach out to us, anybody you know, and we will do everything we can in our in our powers, just put you on a path to health and betterment. If if you're interested in knowing more about this, go to our website, free book. I wrote it. Please get it. 88 pages. Become informed on the issue of repetitive brain trauma, repetitive head impact. The new book will have a chapter on veterans on repetitive blast exposure, and we are working on some articles for that as well. Don't forget our app on the Google and Apple store, Head Smart. Get it. The only concussion app, repetitive head impact on it. If you like this episode, please follow us on Instagram at Broken Brains Podcast, or subscribe to us on YouTube at Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman. And if you can, please leave us a review on Apple, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen, because it helps us get the word out. And the more people that are aware of this, the more that we, and mean like Frank and I can get the change we need to help our veterans, help our athletes, and take care of this issue because it doesn't actually have to be an issue. And over time it will not. Thank you so much. We'll see you again. Remember, you only have one melon. Take care of it. God bless you all. And thanks again for listening to another episode of Broken Brains with your host, Bruce Parkman. Take care.