19 Medal of Honor Recipient Ed Byers

The Official Navy SEAL and SWCC Podcast

The Medal of Honor is our nation's highest award for bravery in combat. We asked Senior Chief SEAL Ed Byers, Medal of Honor recipient, what it means to serve to our country during dangerous and covert operations. For more, check out www.sealswcc.com
00:00:21:23
Daniel Fletcher: Senior Chief Special Warfare Operator Edward Byers is the 6th SEAL to earn the Medal of Honor for his heroic actions during Operation ENDURING FREEDOM on December 8, 2012. He discusses the challenge of going from a life of secrecy to the responsibilities of a life in the limelight. He says he wears the Medal to honor his fallen teammate from that mission, and continues to humbly serve as a mentor and inspirational representative of the Naval Warfare Community. Here’s his story:
00:00:55:17
DF: The main objective of this podcast is really to assist in continuing or growing the quality and preparedness of NSW candidates, specifically SEAL/SWCC guys. In many ways, you set the bar for standards for people in other branches of the service and as well in the Navy, but at the same time I think if people that are coming into this process are trying to shoot for fame or success that they’re probably going to miss their opportunity to be successful because, as I’ve learned, so much of success in the teams is about that team, not about the self.
00:01:34:19
DF: How, how can people that are intending to become high performing NSW operators kind of navigate that duality between self and team to be successful team member?
00:01:44:14
EB: Well, one of the, one of the fundamental principles of, of BUD/S is in the very beginning, is they have to have, they have to start off with a clean slate with the people that make it through the pipeline and actually show up to the teams. So, what they do through a whole lot of pain and some suffering and trials and tribulations is they get you to repeatedly fail or struggle through things in the hopes that you start to realize that you cannot do this process alone. You can’t make it through BUD/S alone. So, they strip away your personal identity in the very early stages, and they do that through a multitude of different exercises, and while you’re going through that, you really don’t understand it at the time what they’re trying to get to, and what they’re trying to get to is to make you realize that you have to start thinking about team before self. And when you start to do that, as pretty indicative of each class, is the class will start to grow together, and they’ll become more efficient, which means they’ll get beat less, and you’ll end up with this core concept of, you know, team gear, your gear and then yourself, and that’s the order in which you take care of things.
00:03:10:19
DF: So, do you think it’s fair to say that maybe in the beginning parts of the process or even through professional development after BUD/S, that there is more of a focus on self because obviously when you’re working together, there’s a big aspect of like you’re saying, you’re kind of almost becoming, the team is yourself, right, or kind of becomes yourself, (EB: right) so that is where you’re focused on, where success is. Are there aspects of your career in NSW that are more focused on yourself, like whether it’s professional development? You think that’s something that people should hone in on, the ability to kind of switch back and forth and have that awareness?
00:03:47:23
EB: Well, there’s always going to be an aspect of self. We are individuals. We, everybody has their own personality and their own, their own things that make them tick and what defines them, but just like any good building, it has to have a good foundation, and that’s where BUD/S comes in. They have to lay the foundation first and teach you these inherent traits that our community believes makes a good team guy. Eventually, there will be times where you’ll be out on your own. It’s no secret that at any one time in this world right now, Special Operations are in over 130 countries around the world. So, a lot of those countries may only have one or two people in them, (DF: right) so there will be times if you’re at a certain level or on a certain team where you will be on your own, and you may be the only representative to the US government in that country, so you absolutely need to have a person who can fluctuate back and forth between team and then knowing that you might have to do some alone. But while you’re doing that alone, you’re always thinking about how can then I best support my team. It always comes back to supporting the mission, you know, the cause, your brothers, the team (DF: as your foundation)…as your foundation.
00:05:19:03
DF: What do you want to see in a teammate that may be new to your team as an indicator that they’re going to gel well with you and there’s going to be success?
00:05:27:24
EB: Naval Special Warfare community has a very unique advantage, and the advantage is that is first of all, we have a volunteer military, and then we have individuals then that want to volunteer again for what they already know as being the hardest military school that exists. So, if you make it through that, you already have a person has an innate nature to want to be part of the best team there is, (DF: Right, right) that is incredibly driven. They have an intense desire and passion cause there’s no way you’re going to make it through that pipeline, BUD/S is the end of pipeline, if you don’t, and they’ve learned that they need to work together as a team. So, when you show up first to your team, then you kind of start right back over again because you become close with the people you go through BUD/S with, but you may be the only guy, the new guy that shows up to your team, and they have no idea who you are. There’s a saying in the community that’s, you know, “You earn your trident every day.” It’s every day you have to come and bring the best work ethic, the best mentality that you can bring and show that to people. There is no mistaking that BUD/S is the easiest part about being team guy, hands down. It’s a hard school, and a lot of people fail, but that is the easiest part about being a Navy SEAL. Showing up to the team and doing this day in and day out, going on deployment after deployment is where it takes a whole lot of resiliency, determination, dedication and commitment. So, when you show up there, and you have a new guy that comes in, and the first thing you’re going to look for is when are they going to start to broaden, spread their wings a bit, show a lot of initiative fundamentally, be the last one to leave at work, is able to look more at the broader picture and go, “What else needs to be accomplished?” and not have to be told what to do. Those are the things right off the bat cause I know the guy is (DF: proven, right) hard, right. He’s in good shape, that he has some fundamental, you know, core concepts built into him from what the pipeline is, but now we’re looking to expand him and grow him as a person, (DF: right) right. So, those are the things that were expected of me, and that’s something I would expect of somebody coming in to my team initially looking at them.
00:08:15:15
DF: Something that I’ll reiterate that you said about starting over again, and when you get to a new team or whatever, it’s really even more than that starting every day, you know, you need to earn it every day, and I think that kind of plays into the answer as well as far as like what you look for in a person that is going to be functioning at the highest levels, is are they willing, or are they able to come in with that mindset, a little bit of humility but then at the same time, like stick with it. How do great team members, and yourself included, balance that need for grit and toughness with the peace of mind and maybe calmness that’s needed either on mission or through training?
00:09:02:01
EB: So, the easiest way to balance that is, is what’s fundamental to our community. We’re Naval Special Warfare, and we’re the maritime Special Operations branch. So, with that said, water is fluid, and we spend our life around water. You have to be able to ebb and flow with the ever-changing environment and mold yourself to the situation and fill in where it needs to be filled in and bend around situations that, frankly, can’t be solved or maybe too hard or complex at that time (DF: right, right) to tackle. So, that’s step one. The next step is there’s a lot of compartmentalization. You can’t take what you do overseas in a battlefield environment and apply that same tactic and aggression (DF: right) and grit and toughness when you’re back home in a training environment, and you’re around people that’s never experienced that or have (DR: right, right) no idea what, no concept to be able to relate to you. So, you have to be able to push back and forth between environments, and make yourself able to be able to communicate in both environments and work in that battle space.
00:10:25:02
DF: Do you think how quickly you’re able to make those changes is a distinct advantage? Cause it seems like that kind of stuff comes and goes pretty quickly, you know, changing between staying calm and pushing through, whether it’s when you’re physically pushed in demand, and there’s a lot of demands and having that perspective, that ability to switch back and forth, do you think that’s something that has given high performing members an advantage or even enabled them to get to where they are?
00:10:53:15
EB: It definitely gives the community an advantage. I mean the community as a whole is a pretty smart group of individuals, and I don’t have the exact figure. I think it’s well over, you know, 50% of people have degrees and even advanced degrees, and that’s across the entire community. So, we take a lot of pride in the fact that we’re also freethinkers. It’s back to that concept of you can be operating a team in one environment, and then, you know, six months later, you could be on your own and having to solve these problems with absolutely no supervision and just making decisions as you go. So, we 100% rely on the fact that guys can switch back and forth, understand situations and blend themselves into that appropriate environment.
00:11:47:14
DF: Yeah, I think that, that’s something that there’s maybe a misinterpretation or misrepresentation, or people are confused about as in the civilian space or even in other armed forces that, and we’ve touched on this numerous times, that operators are a certain way, and generally they don’t realize how academic these people are. It’s even more so the mental aspects of the job that are what’s more required cause the physical will get you so far, but do you think that’s kind of in line with your perspective of the teams in general?
00:12:26:23
EB: Being a team guy is extremely complex. You got to know the basics from, you know, how a gun works to advanced ballistics if you’re a sniper, to advanced explosives, which is physics and chemistry (DF: Right, right) if you’re a breacher, maybe you’re a medic, and maybe you’re all three, (DF: Yeah, right) and then maybe you might be a communications guy that has to know advanced communications, and that’s just on a military side. (DF: Right) But then you get put in environments where you have to be able to speak, talk and act like a businessman or how to navigate embassies and do all that. So, you’re having to bridge both the civilian side of the world or non-military agency side of the world and also know how to handle all your military knowledge.
00:13:20:12
DF: Are there any parts of your childhood that you think uniquely kind of set you up for success as an operator with your background?
00:13:27:26
EB: Absolutely. I fit the typical majority of team guys, and I’m a Midwestern boy that, you know, grew up in Ohio. I grew up on a farm that was on a river, so I was around water, and I was around woods, and my dad was a, a general contractor, so he was in construction, so it just lends yourself to always being thinking about things and building things and unique challenges that come with that, and then it gave me the opportunity to also get out and be in the environment and be around water, and fortunately, came from an era where we didn’t have, you know, smart phones and iPads and everything else that pulls at people’s time and bandwidth. And it drove you to be outside and do these things. And then there was a lot of, there was a few key factors that came out, like the first movie Navy SEALs came out, and there was a handful of books coming out about team guys in Vietnam, just right around that time when I was fairly impressionable around, you know, ten, (DF: Right, right) ten to twelve year, you know, age range. So, my father was in the Navy at the very end of World War II, but it wasn’t really talked about in our family at all, and that was the only part of our family that had military. There was just something that just was always innate to my desire of everything military was intriguing to me (DF: kind of planted a seed a little bit)…I don’t know if it was necessarily planted. It was just, you know, it was the, the Rambo era and Rocky. It’s that growing up in that scenario where those were the cool movies of the ‘80s. So, as a young boy, that drove a lot of my mentality and especially being in the country. I mean country is going to be more, more of a tendency or lean towards, you know, hunting and shooting and fishing and all that stuff, it helped me get to where I wanted to go. And by the time I was in high school, that was the only thing on my mind, was, “I’m going into, going into the military.”
00:15:48:25
DF: Did you, at that point in high school, did you know that NSW was kind of your track, or you kind of just a little bit more vague at that point?
00:15:55:10
EB: I had it narrowed down. Northwest Ohio was not, is not a very big military area, (DF: yeah) so I did my due diligence of narrowing down the branches, and it came down to the Marine Corps and the Navy. But I already kind of knew I wanted to be a SEAL. I think I was just checking my last box and going, “Let me just see if the Marines is where I want to go with Force Recon.” Ironically, my first tour did, was with the Marine Corps, so I spent my first three years as a medic down at Camp Lejeune, which was a great tour of duty for me and really set a, a very good foundation of becoming a SEAL in the fact of I realized what I had during those three years in the Marines was not a lot, and then going into the Special Operations community, all of a sudden you’re just inundated with the best technology and gear and training possible, so it makes you really appreciate even more, at least from my perspective, where I was at.
00:17:03:05
DF: We talked a little bit about your growing up, and in light of that, do you, see people that have children that grow up to be successful military members or just successful in general, people that are either team members with kids or in other military branches, is there something different you think that they do that gets their kids prepared for success in the military than maybe other families?
00:17:29:09
EB: Well, I definitely think parental involvement in a child’s life is going to help them for sure. (DF: Yeah, right) I have a daughter that’s a competitive figure skater, and if we didn’t constantly pour into her to, you know, about her training and nutrition and everything else, she would not be at a national level like she is right now. Just like any parent would prep their kid, they want them to go to, you know, Stanford or Harvard, and they put them in prep courses and get them surrounded in test taking and being book smart, becoming a Navy SEAL would be the same way, but I didn’t have any of that. (DF: Right, right)
I grew up. I didn’t have, there was no one around me to motivate me to do anything special. It was something inherent inside of me that it was in my mind and in my heart that that’s what I wanted to go do. I wanted to become part of the best and be part of a group that’s incredibly unique and special. I wanted to be someone special. And that is the greatest thing about human nature, is you can never, just like a book, you can’t judge it by its cover, you never know what’s inside a person’s mind or in their heart or in their gut, and that drive of personal tenacity can make people do some incredible things. You see that a lot in BUD/S, where you have the collegiate level swimmer or the cross-country runner that was the state champion and you’re like, “Yep, those are the guys that are going to make it,” and then what will happen is that those guys that you thought would make it are the ones that quit during Hell Week. And the guy that you looked at and go, or would have never have guessed was going to make it through is the one leading the pack and the charge throughout the class and there at the end.
I talk about this when I go to schools, and I speak to, to all ages of, of kids. I can count on my hand the amount of people that actually thought I was going to become a Navy SEAL. The majority of people thought, you know, it was a pipedream and that I was wishing. There was no way this kid from northwest Ohio, doesn’t have any military background, was never really physically active other than playing soccer until my senior year in high school, was going to go on and be part of a most elite Special Operations unit in the military. So, while it’s great that parents should be absolutely part of their kids’ lives, and if that’s what they want to do, you know, help them and give them opportunities to do that. At the end of the day, it comes down to that child to have that desire to want to do it, and it’s what we always tell our daughter, too, “You can quit any day you want. We’ll love you the same, we’ll stand by your side,” but I have to see it from her that that’s what she wants to be, and every day, she gets up, puts on her skates and hits the rink, and that’s the same as a kid that wants to become a SEAL. Parents provide them the opportunity, but they got to be the ones going, “I need to go to the pool and put some laps in,” or, “I need to hit the gym,” or, “I need to go for a run.” My training when I growing up on a farm was I would do breath-holding contests in the bottom of my pond for minutes at a time, you know, cause I thought you had to be able to hold your breath as a SEAL underwater and be comfortable in the water. That’s what I had access to me, and that’s what I did. I see its absolute advantage to have that, as a child or a young adult with your parents wanting to drive you to that way, but you don’t need that.
00:21:25:11
DF: Yeah, it’s almost even a detriment, you know, if you don’t have it inside you, then it’s an external thing, and that goes away when you’re tired…that goes away when you’re hungry…
00:21:33:07
EB: Living up with expectations can be a hard, a hard thing, and if you’re, you know, that’s another balance of if your parents drive you, are driving you to that, and they want it more than you do, that scenario never goes well.
00:21:45:16
DF: That’s dangerous.
00:21:46:15
EB: Cause it’s not going to be your parents that are going to be holding the boat over your head when you’re cold, wet and tired.
00:21:51:05
DF: It’s almost like the flipside of that. You talked about adversity yourself, people saying, like, “There’s no way,” like, “All right, have fun,” you know, and that’s got to drive you more than someone telling you that you can do it almost sometimes.
00:22:03:29
EB: I think that’s probably one of the biggest motivators of all time, is when people say to other people that they can’t do it. I mean and the people that come back and go, “Who are you to tell me what I can and cannot do?” (DF: yeah watch me!) and that’s a big driver for sure.
00:22:21:06
DF: Yeah, I kind of think that’s a pretty consistent thing for, through the people I’ve spoken with in the community there, “Yeah, I can do it,” like just confidence. I mean it’s tough because there’s some times not even really a word that accurately describes that kind of level of drive of just seeking challenge in general, you know. You see somebody else do it, you know it can be done, like, “I can do that,” or, “I want to prove I can do that,” even to yourself. I think that’s kind of what you’re talking about a little bit at the core, people having that as kids, you can’t really just, you can’t necessarily make your kid feel that way.
00:22:52:02
EB: You can’t make your kid feel that way. Fundamentally, as Americans, our nation was founded on a rebellious nature, and we’re fighters to the core, and that’s what makes our force so unique is we are individuals out there, and it starts in their youth, just like it did with me, of those that just want to be part of something special, and they know in their mind and their heart that no matter what, they’re going to make it through. They’re going to suffer whatever amount of pain, they’re going to put whatever amount of risk to their personal safety on the line to make it happen, and it’s what they want cause it’s, that’s what they envision. That’s their dream.
00:23:28:24
DF: You talked about the difference between going between, you know, deployment and being back home or that kind of switch. Is that similar to what you deal with being in the public so much being a team member that has to make the switch? Is that, is that in line with that kind of skill that you need to be able to be a good operator?
00:23:47:26
EB: One of the aspects of being a Navy SEAL or Naval Special Warfare as a whole in Special Operations in general is that, and it’s what drove me to want to become part of that community was the, the secrecy that surrounded the community. So, the people that want to be a part of that want to be a part of it because they just like it for the job. You’re not doing the job to become famous (DF: Right, right) or seek that, you know, recognition. Another tenet in the community is, you know, “The deed is all, not the glory.” So, it’s very hard sometimes to make that transition. 18 years of my life I didn’t have any sort of social media interaction. Nobody knew who I was. There wasn’t a single picture of me on the Internet.
So, the day that the president put the Medal of Honor on me is the day that changed my life fundamentally forever, and then you’re thrusted in the spotlight. So, like anything, you can take that as being another stage in your career and your duty and your job and the next mission line, or you can complain about it. Well, it does no good to complain about it. It’s not going to change the scenario. You have to learn how to operate and work within that environment.
The Medal of Honor is a very, a very humbling to be a recipient of, and it plays an incredibly important and unique role within our nation. You know, there’s 73 living recipients in our nation right now that range from World War II to the global war on terrorism. And it’s a representation and validation of the type of heroics that are continuously witnessed within our military and our modern day warriors. I just happened to be a beholder of one of those, but it represents a culminative effort of what our entire group does within Naval Special Warfare. We’ve been, you know, had the distinct privilege, cause it is a privilege, to work with the most incredible individuals on the face of the planet. And if anyone was to listen to this and go, “What do I want to do in life if,” you know, to be a banker or finance or want to be a SEAL, or what have you, is, this is the most exclusive job in the world that you can do because it’s a job that no matter how much money you ever have, you, you can’t buy it. You have to earn it every single day.
So, I got to be around for 20 years of my life these individuals that I’ve seen time and time again do the most heroic things in the world. But true to the nature of what our ethos represents, they’re probably never going to get recognized at a level where an entire nation is going to know who they are. They’re going to be a name on a wall in a building that you can only get to if you walk through the gates of BUD/S in Coronado. When I look at it from that perspective, it becomes an obligation and a duty to have to be out there and represent what it is our community has done, and to pay homage and tribute to all those who, especially within our community, who have paid and sacrificed with their life, in particular, Nic Cheque, who was killed on that hostage rescue mission in 2012. So, when I think about that, when I wrap it all into that, it becomes something I’m comfortable with doing. But for the majority of people out there, that’s within our community, they’re just wired that way. They don’t want to be known. They don’t want to, anyone to know who they are, and they like it that way. They like living in the shadows and going about overseas, doing our nation’s work protecting…
00:28:21:26
DF: It’s certainly a lot easier that way.
00:28:23:23
EB: It’s definitely a lot easier that way, so the community has to be that way.
00:28:28:13
DF: Well, I will say that your malleability or flexibility there that you did mention earlier, kind of talking about kind of being like water, I mean it does speak to that and your own personal character. You know, you get dealt this hand, and then you’re going to make something fruitful out of it as opposed to whatever the alternative is. So, I think people can take that away from the discussion even a little bit to know that things aren’t going to go always according to your plan or expectation, and if anything, it’s usually not that way, so if you’re unwilling or unable to adapt, then you’re kind of stuck in the water for lack of a better phrase, you know.
00:29:05:09
EB: Very rarely in life does anything go according to plan, so.
00:29:09:28
DF: I guess that’s kind of a bigger, overarching kind of thing, word of wisdom I think for people for any point in their life, not necessarily just for BUD/S or NSW or the community at large. You mentioned that you were traveling around, where you speak to schools or whatever. Through that kind of exposure, is there anything that you’ve kind of come to have as a piece of your own personal voice that you try to communicate to people, kind of something that you like to, to remind people that’s unique to your experience?
00:29:37:27
EB: Yes, there’s definitely when I speak to the younger generation, there are a few core concepts. And I’m always going there in the capacity as a Medal of Honor recipient who happens to be a Navy SEAL. There’s six tenets to what the Medal of Honor represents to the nation, and it’s embedded in what they have, it’s called a character development program, and it’s sacrifice, integrity, patriotism, commitment, citizenship and courage. And the core concept around that is anyone can be a hero. You don’t have to serve in the military to become a hero. You can be an everyday citizen who is just, does the right thing at the right time, and that’s what would define you as a hero. We see this in papers all the time with younger people or just general citizens that rescue other people or put their life in danger to save someone else. That is an absolutely a definition of a hero.
What you see a lot in, in the younger generation nowadays is they have, there’s a huge problem with, with bullying, so whether through cyber bullying or just within the school, and the environment is much different because back when I grew up, there was, if you did something, it would take a, it would take a minute for people to hear about what you did. Nowadays, everyone can hear about it in your entire school in the matter of a minute, and that brings on a whole lot of unique different pressures. They still have the same type of struggles of, “I don’t have any friends,” or a small, a very small group of friends, or they don’t see themselves as being courageous or that they can do something unique. And my message always to them is, “Don’t let anyone ever tell you what it is you can do in your life,” cause if I did that, I wouldn’t have been standing on that stage talking to them. If you listen to what other people tell you, then you’re never going to accomplish what it is you think you can do.
I see the most incredible young boys and girls that you would never think when I ask them, “Hey, how bout you tell me about a problem you are having in the school today?” and then you’ll see that this one little hand, you know, raise up from the crowd, and they bare their soul in front of 1,000 other classmates, and it was a person that come to find out has no friends and is dealing with a lot of this internal burden of self-doubt and, or maybe depression or what have you, and I look right at them, I go, “You’re going to be someone absolutely incredible,” cause that takes the most insane amount of courage to be able to do that and have everyone in your school judge you, and it changes their life. I’ll follow up with them six months later, you know, ten months later, with the teachers or what have you, and that person’s, those few sentences that you said in front of their entire school completely change their whole persona and their confidence and everything. So, it’s just quieting the noise around you and not listening to all the negativity and looking yourself in the mirror and believing in who you are and what you can accomplish.
00:33:19:15
DF: I think that’s a pretty big thing to do for the community at large, that’s huge. A lot of people I think would maybe take the easier way out as opposed to really trying to lift people up like from the core like that, so that’s pretty powerful you get to do that a lot.
00:33:35:19
EB: I don’t get to do it as much as I’d like.
00:33:38:11
DF: Earning your Medal of Honor, it’s obviously a huge life-changing event, but for people that might not know about it, um, you can give us as brief of a version as you feel comfortable kind of explaining just to give our conversation a little context.
00:33:52:08
EB: So, in the history of the United States, there’s only been 3,500 Medal of Honor recipients. Half of those came in the Civil War, and President Lincoln designated the Medal of Honor to be the only award given for battle. That’s out of the 42 million Americans that served in the armed forces. To equate that, it’s one ten millionth of a percent to become a Medal of Honor recipient, and the reason they designated it as a recipient is because you don’t, we don’t win awards in the military. You never come in the military because you want to get accolades and different awards for going to combat. So, that number is unique, extremely unique and small within itself.
Now, if I jump to Naval Special Warfare as a whole, I became the 6th Medal of Honor recipient in Naval Special Warfare history out of, there’s currently seven, and that happened in 2016, about three and a half years after the operation in 8 December 2012. This was the first time that the Navy had a living, active duty recipient in 45 years. (DF: wow) So, the reason I say that and why it becomes so important to who I am now is because of with any great honor comes that great responsibility.
You become a recipient of this medal because your peers thought you did something that was worthy of this. But I personally wear this to give tribute to Nic Cheque. And on 8 December 2012, we were based out of a remote base in eastern Afghanistan, and we got intelligence directing us that an American doctor, Dr. Dilip Joseph was taken hostage by a bunch of Taliban captors. So, we were under a time-sensitive target. We had some variant intelligence over whether or not he was going to stay within country or leave, so we had to go and execute this operation on little fidelity surrounding his situation. Hostage rescue at the tactical level is the hardest thing a military unit can do in combat. There’s so many complexities. It’s, you don’t know the state of the captors, you don’t know the state of the hostage, you don’t know the internal dimensions or things that are happening in the building. There’s a lot of things that can go wrong, and there’s, you can’t just, unlike movies, you can’t just fly in your target and be inside the room in a matter of minutes. So, that night, myself along with my team, we launched, and we patrolled for about five hours through the mountains, pretty cold night out. Like I said, it was December. And as we were approaching the target building, Nic Cheque, who was our point man, was right in front of me, and a guy and one of the sentries came out to go to the bathroom as it was getting close to sunrise and call for prayer. Nic saw him and immediately engaged that individual, and we started sprinting towards the door. It wasn’t a normal door, though. It was layered blankets, so they were very hard to weave through, and we tried ripping them down, and we couldn’t, so it wasn’t like you could open a door and make entry.
By the time I finally got in, I went to my area of responsibility, and there was an armed Taliban at the end of the other side of the building that had an AK-47 pointed right at me. Fortunately, I was able to kill him, and I saw someone else moving across the floor, and I didn’t know whether or not that was one of the hostages, or it was one of the terrorists that was trying to go towards some more weapons. So, we thought that could have been three hostages, two other doctors along with Dr. Dilip Joseph. So, by the time I got to him, I was able to straddle him, and I had to adjust my night vision and look down, and I had been trying to get some facial recognition. The same time this is happening, calling out for the doctor to answer, “Hey, are you in this room?” just something. Right about that time all that happened, he rogers up and says, “Hey, I’m over here. I’m over here.” And so, I engage the person I was on top of, and then I got up off of him as fast as I could, ran over and then jumped onto the hostage. When I did that, I grabbed him and brought him in close to my body armor to shield him from everything else that was going on, and there was another one of the terrorists in the corner who was just waking up. It was very early morning, and this all happened relatively quick. So, fortunately, he was within arms’ reach, and I was able to pin him by the wall by his throat and was basically choking him until the rest of the team was able to get in and eliminate the threat cause he was reaching for guns.
00:40:25:21
EB: That all happened in a matter of about a minute, a minute and a half. Everything happened really quick. We didn’t know at the time was that Nic entered the room first. He had been mortally wounded. He’d been shot. So, as we’re pulling the doctor out of the, out of the room, I noticed that Nic was being worked on by our medics, and being a prior medic myself, I went over and started helping doing CPR on Nic, on the helo flight back to the base where he was pronounced dead. That one evening is without a doubt, captures to a T what it is to be a Navy SEAL. It was a, a mission that was completely successful. That is success in the military world, even at the expense of losing Nic because that’s the job you sign up to do. With Nic was what it meant to be a Navy SEAL. He was like the hardest guy I ever met, incredibly resilient, just tough as nails. The guy would get knocked down, get right back up again, and he portrayed every part of our ethos that night. And it’s the reason why I continue carrying on the mission of getting out there and speaking about that night to be able to tell people about Nic and what he meant, and will always mean to this community.
00:42:29:02
DF: And about sacrifice, yeah.
00:42:30:25
EB: Sacrifice.
00:42:34:12
DF: I can’t thank you enough for your time. We really appreciate your words of wisdom. I think that some people will gain a lot from this conversation, so thank you.
00:42:40:25
EB: I appreciate it. Thanks.
DF: Find out more at SEALSWCC.com and join us again for the next NSW Podcast