Green Beret Amputee shares graphic combat stories and how to overcome adversity. PTSD Awareness

We have an expression in the military which is no plan survives first contact. You can train for anything all day every day but it doesn't happen in real life the way you prepare for it. If I'm looking at a specific moment in time March 11th 2013 is uh is when my life would take a pretty substantial change. Growing up I moved around a lot which as a child is is difficult you know constantly being the new kid in school getting picked on a lot. I was a small scared kid and deep down I was striving for strength. Athletics was kind of my anchor in life it was something I could always depend on to be there and with that did bring the confidence that I was looking for and it was through sport that I met my best friend my brother Jonathan Rizzo. John was the type of guy that everybody liked. Through elementary junior high school and high school we maintained our friendship. He's an athlete but also an intellect. He was just on the route to success in a variety of different avenues and it was the summer between freshman and sophomore year he was murdered and um that obviously had an impact on me. I think I was looking at myself as a failure. I accepted the responsibility to look out for him and not let anything happen to him and I failed at that and what that did to me even on a subconscious level I would not know for years to come and then a couple months later 9-11 happened. I'll never forget where I was in that moment. I was walking to my dorm turn on the television and obviously the same thing is on every single channel the towers are burning and uh it was in that moment that I knew I wanted to enlist and I felt confident that I wanted to serve in the special operations community. Not only did the army give me the chance to go straight into the special forces it was the one that I was drawn to most. It has a very wide array of core tasks unconventional warfare being at the top of that so I made the decision and enlisted. My first deployment to Afghanistan was a nine month deployment and uh our mission required us to do a variety of different things from getting on armored gun trucks to conduct missions to getting into a Toyota Corolla in plain clothes and driving through you know downtown Kandahar. The first engagement is one that you know that people typically never forget. For me it was based on my training my body was basically just responding accordingly. You know we train in a variety of circumstances so that we are able to react and respond really without much thought. It just becomes instinctual but on my second combat rotation to Afghanistan some of the key decisions that I made was against our training. My training told me to do one thing and I did something else which is is not something that I'm proud of. So throughout this deployment we were working with the conventional Afghan National Army we were working with the conventional Afghan National Police we were getting ready to do a joint mission. As we were getting ready to end the mission brief I began walking towards my truck. As I'm walking away I hear rounds being fired off from directly behind me. I realized that someone was decisively engaging us and I snapped my head around I honed in on the shooter and it was somebody who I had been training and working alongside of. He had gotten up on the truck mounted PKM it's a Russian machine gun and began shooting at the group. This was the initiation of a complex ambush. We also began receiving fires from outside of our camp as well so this was a coordinated attack. I processed the information and my training tells me to move to cover and eliminate the threat which I had rehearsed and trained for hundreds and hundreds of times prior. I don't do that. The reason why I don't do that is because one of our infantry soldiers that was there with us young kid first deployment was no more than 15 maybe 20 feet in front of the shooter and he was basically frozen during headlights. I recognized that and I decided to put my body in between him and the shooter and that was when I was hit the first time. Fell on top of him and as I'm laying on the ground I feel myself get hit another time or two into my right leg. I drag him and myself to some cover. One of my teammates eliminated that threat within our actual camp. We're still receiving some harassing fires outside the camp and this point is the time I first got eyes on my injury. I ripped my pant leg open and my leg it's just bone and tissue, flesh and a lot of blood. Apply a tourniquet, wrench it down, lock it in. The bleeding doesn't stop. Grab a second tourniquet, slap that on, wrench it down. One of my teammates got to me and the look on his face pretty much said it all. He breaks out another tourniquet, he slaps that on and as he's applying it to me I'm telling him to get away from me. I'm telling him to go work on somebody else. I'm convinced that I'm that I'm gonna die and I was relatively content with that. You know if I was going down then alongside my boys is where I wanted it to be and I was okay with that. As I laid there three tourniquets on my leg, bleeding out and thinking have I done everything I can do? So I pulled open my first aid kit, I grabbed some gauze, balled it up and I wedged this thing up into my leg. Now I'm rubbing my hand by broken bone. My femur had been shattered and it's searing pain is like launching through my body and trying to eject out of my eyeballs and at some point right around there I went unconscious and I came to and I was being loaded onto a helicopter. Flew me to Bagram, brought me to surgery. They hacked off my leg to try to minimize the amount of damage my body was trying to recover from. It took about five or six days for the medical staff to stabilize my body enough to put me on a plane to fly me to Walter Reed. Went straight into the intensive care unit and in there around 30 surgeries on my leg until they got a hold of the infection and you know I managed to survive. I accepted the fact that I was an amputee pretty easily. It's kind of amazing even to me to how fast my mind shifted on getting back to work. I desperately wanted to be back where I felt like I belonged but I was in Walter Reed for about a year so I had a lot of time to look back on that incident and ask myself the question why? Why did I do something that is counter to my training? If I'm looking at a catalyst that propelled that within my decision-making process it's losing my childhood friend Jonathan and that failure I felt with his death and that love superseding me doing what my body is trained to do. I did what I did out of love and that is a decision that I have to live with. It really wasn't until I started making some substantial progress you know a year into the process of recovery that I realized it was much bigger than than me. I was trying to go back to a team, a team that being the word I was trying to go back to a team. I was confident that I needed to do it. Things were looking like I had an actual shot at getting back but as someone who took pride in the physicality of what we do to go so far in the other direction that was tough because how do I increase my value otherwise? You know there's a lot of tasks and activities that are asked of us that require more of an intellectual approach. I honed in on those so I'm sitting in an office reading cultural dynamics of the Middle East. I'm improving my foreign language capabilities. I started pursuing my master's degree in psychology. All ways to increase my intellectual stock so I'm making gains and I'm making progress and eventually I got back to my unit. They were just as fired up as I was and then once we deployed on that first trip back as an amputee I was able to employ those different skill sets that I had learned but it was not this I got to the top of the mountain and now it's it's all downhill from here. I insisted on projecting strength 24 hours a day right. I would do anything in my power to avoid being seen without my prosthetic on and I realized very quickly there was a whole variety of things I needed to be able to do that I had not prepared for. Things that you don't even consider to be a challenge as a two-legged guy. Simple small things like getting in and out of a military vehicle now was okay how do I even do this. There's another ridgeline that I now have to climb and that started pretty much immediately. So in between operations or other training I would work on things like that. I would just try different techniques, different foot placement, different hand placement, find a method that I think works and then just drill it a million times. Eventually have my teammates out there videotaping me. I go back and watch the reel and see where I can maybe make up a half a second or two on a stopwatch. I was competing against other teammates that were doing the same thing and this is literally us getting in and out of a truck over and over and over and over and I realized having my teammates to rely on and to compete with that's a gift. The more I showed how comfortable I was with something that I originally perceived as weakness I was able to see that it impacted those around me. They were taking things to a higher level knowing that that was having those types of effects just made it easier for me to showcase those vulnerabilities. That was where I became not just fully comfortable with it but proud of it. I'd like to think that that had positive effects upwards and outwards. You know it's highlighting that it's not a sign of weakness to need assistance for something. You know the stigma associated with being in the military it's this hyper type A competitive environment and we oftentimes have difficulty accepting help from anybody. I get no I got it I got it and you'll hear that 100 times a day. That's what we are comfortable doing. No I'm good I got it. That's the easy route. The hard route is recognizing that you need help. Whether you're trying to pick up a bunch of boxes or you're having suicidal ideations. Recognizing it for one and then having the guts to seek out support. That's hot. That that is reserved for the badasses of our community because it's it's difficult. Those people are the ones I look up to because they're going the hard way. That deserves respect.