SFC Brian Maginn
19th SFG (A)
Special Forces Medic
Thailand, Bangladesh, Korea, Afghanistan
2005-2019
19th SFG (A)
Special Forces Medic
Thailand, Bangladesh, Korea, Afghanistan
2005-2019
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Thomas Paine
Brian Maginn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1976. He grew up in an athletic household with two older sisters, a younger and older brother. His parents worked hard to provide for the family which left a lasting impression on Brian. “They worked their butts off, so they set great examples.” His father played shortstop for the University of Cincinnati and was second team All American his senior year. He went on to teach middle school math for 31 years and provided well for the family.
Brian’s mother was initially a stay-at-home mom but there was no grass growing under her feet. “She would never rest. It was always cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, clipping coupons….she was always going 100 miles per hour.”
The Maginn’s lived a solid middle class life in suburbia, much like the Cleaver’s in the fictional TV town of Mayfield. Most of their time was spent playing outside with kids in the neighborhood. Whatever sport was in season, they played it. Of course there was schoolwork to be done. There was no slacking off there. Brian played as many sports as he could fit in, but his true talent was on the hardwood. He was a strong enough player that he earned a scholarship to Lambuth University, a small college in Jackson, Tennessee. “It was a great experience. We had people from all over the world” and students of every race and ethnicity.
Brian had a great college experience including basketball and extensive travel abroad during a study abroad program at Oxford University. “I literally spent my life savings” traveling. During the summers in college Brian worked on the road crews in Hamilton County, fixing stop signs, repairing potholes and painting roads in the Cincinnati area. He found this to be a great experience being exposed to blue collar workers doing hard work in the outdoors for four seasons of the year.
Brian always intended to join the military, and he didn’t put a lot of thought into picking his major. He chose sociology. “I wanted to travel the world with the military anyway, so I figured why not learn about different cultures before I actually go live amongst different cultures.” Brian graduated in December in 1999 and on January 4th, 2000 he reported to Fort Benning for boot camp.
“I always wanted to be in the military. I had to prove to myself that I could. I just assumed everybody was infantry and would serve in combat…I didn’t know there were all these support people…90% of people (in the military) were support people.”
Brian reported to bootcamp wanting to be a Ranger, but he did not have a Ranger contract. Boot camp lasted 11 weeks followed by four weeks of Advanced Individual Training (AIT), which for Brian was infantry training. During that time Brian had the opportunity to sign a Ranger contract and did. Upon completion of AIT Brian went to Airborne School. During the three weeks school Brian made five jumps to earn his Airborne Wings. “I hated every jump. I ended up doing 35-ish jumps in my career and I hated everyone.”
After graduating from Airborne School at Fort Benning, a small group of soldiers congregated as they waited to report to the Ranger Indoctrination Program (RIP). After a short wait the Ranger cadre arrived with hurricane force and the indoctrination began. “I’ve never seen a bunch of guys so mean…they came and just scolded us and told us we wouldn’t make it…playing mind games with us.” The Ranger candidates were told to carry all of their belongings and run from the Airborne compound to the Ranger compound.
Brian described RIP as a real ‘suckfest’. The cadre were constantly in each candidate’s face screaming about their unhappiness with some small detail which often had been done right, but the cadre said it was wrong. “The Ranger cadre were constantly in your face. Constantly trying to make you quit. You learn how much you can put up with.” Brian was able to maintain his focus and endure whatever was thrown at him by reminding himself that the program would eventually end and all of the cadre had gone through what Brian and the others were going through now.
For the four weeks of RIP the candidates lived off MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat). These are high calorie, low frills meals in a can designed to provide troops in the field the calories they need to carry out the mission and were far from an epicurean delight. A thriving barter market developed as soldiers tried to find something that appealed to them.
RIP was long days of endless harassment, classroom work, physical training (PT), land navigation, long marches, running and very little sleep. As Brian expected, RIP did eventually end and he was assigned to the 2nd Ranger Battalion in Tacoma, Washington.
When he arrived at the 2nd Ranger Battalion he soon realized that while RIP was over, he still had not earned the respect of the true Rangers. These were the soldiers that had a Ranger Tab on their uniform signifying they had completed Ranger School. Ranger School is a two month program broken into three phases and is a physically and mentally demanding school where you learn to become a Ranger with a serious focus on leadership skills.
At 2nd Battalion each morning when the men assembled there was often the command, “ab check.” If you didn’t have a Ranger Tab, you would be required to do additional pushups or rope climbs or some other exercise. This was to remind everyone that without a Ranger tab “you were absolutely nothing.”
The Rangers spent all of their time training. “It’s your job.” This was pre 9/11 and there were no wars going on. Brian likened all of the training to an athletic team that trained very hard but never had a game to look forward to. Soldiers too, want to put their skills to the test against another team (the enemy) but there were no wars to test them.
Brian went on leave and returned to Cincinnati to visit his parents. While he was home, he had a few beers with one of the neighbors who was a Gulf War veteran. He was a mechanic located far behind the front line. He told Brian that he was suffering from chronic fatigue, nausea, headaches, and being lightheaded most of the time ever since his deployment. This is what became known as Gulf War Syndrome.
He had been very healthy during his several years in the military prior to the deployment. He was too far behind the line to have been exposed to any chemical agents. The only thing that was different was he received the anthrax vaccination just prior to his deployment. He thought his symptoms were the result of the anthrax vaccination he received.
This really unsettled Brian. He was extremely health conscious and not interested in putting something in his body that would leave him feeling chronically fatigued or sick in any way. Up to this point there had been no discussion of requiring the Rangers to be vaccinated for anthrax. He returned to the base after his leave and didn’t give it any further thought, but a week later the order came down that the Brigade would be vaccinated for anthrax.
Brian did some research on the internet and found that there were a lot of threads connecting the anthrax vaccine to Gulf War Syndrome. Brian made up his mind he wouldn’t be vaccinated. This wasn’t well accepted. “The NCO’s and enlisted guys treated me like absolute shit.” He was threatened with prison time and a dishonorable discharge. Eventually Brian was summoned to meet with the Commanding Officer of the battalion. It was determined that Brian refused a direct order and he was honorably discharged in October of 2000. Brian was proud for standing up for what he believed but he was extremely disappointed that he would not attend Ranger School. “Just to prove to myself that I could do it.”
Brian thought his military career was over, and he needed to find a new path to follow. Brian had planned to go into law enforcement after completing his military career, so he thought he would start with a private law enforcement job. He was assigned to a bank in the Cincinnati area, and it wasn’t long before Brian saw some action. Someone had come into the bank and tried to cash a fraudulent check, but the bank employees identified the situation. When the man realized the bank employees were trying to detain him, he ran out of the bank. Brian thought, “I better stop him. That’s what I’m here for.” Brian sprinted after him, ran him down and tackled him. “I was politely told at the end of the day that I wasn’t supposed to do that, and I could quit or be fired. So, I quit.”
Brian again began contemplating his future. He knew he wanted to be involved, in some capacity, helping people. He decided he could do that as a firefighter/EMT (Emergency Medical Technician). Brian began his training to be a firefighter/EMT in the Fall of 2001 just before the terrorist bombings on September 11th. Around this time Brian became reacquainted with “Lisa”, a girl that he had known from high school and they began dating.
Brian completed his training and was initially assigned to a fire department in Colerain Township, just outside of Cincinnati. “It was a great place to be a firefighter. Super busy with very diverse calls.” Brian gravitated toward the medical aspects of firefighting/EMS and by January of 2004 Brian had become a paramedic.
In 2003 Brian had become a father to a little girl, Maddy, and in early 2004 he and Lisa were married. In 2007 his son Henry was born. Brian and his family were living a happy suburban life. “I was still bummed about not being in the military especially when we went into Afghanistan.” Despite that Brian felt he was contributing to the world in a meaningful way. “I’m doing my part. I’m a firefighter/paramedic, at a busy department, I’m close to my family. I had a good thing going with my wife and kids, but then the bug just eventually got enough of me and in 2005 I decided I wanted to go back in…and do something medical. I knew that would help me in civilian life.”
Brian spoke to a recruiter who told him the Army would be glad to have him back and initially his wife was supportive of Brian’s passion for the Army. In December of 2005 Brian joined the local Army Reserve unit as a combat medic. Joining the Reserves allowed him to keep his FF/paramedic job. He headed for three months of combat medical training at Fort Sam Houston. When Brian returned from training he reported to his combat support unit just north of Cincinnati. “I could not believe how horrible it was. We had no equipment and we did close to nothing on the weekends.”
A military unit often reflects the quality of the senior leadership and that was definitely the case in this unit. The unit leadership told the troops to come up with their own training. Brian took it on himself to borrow a cardiac monitor from a backup ambulance at his firehouse and brought it to weekend training. Brian taught the reserve members to read different heart rhythms and use the equipment. Brian questioned what he had committed himself to. He stayed with the unit hoping that they would deploy, but that never happened.
As luck would have it, Brian met a Special Forces medic at the gym during a Reserve weekend. He told Brian that there was a National Guard Special Forces unit. During his time in the Ranger Regiment Brian had thought he would like to qualify for the Army Special Forces. “They called it taking the long walk.” Brian did some research and found a National Guard Special Forces unit in Columbus, Ohio only two hours from his home.
Brian contacted the unit and they told him the primary focus of the unit was to prepare soldiers to get through the rigorous and difficult Special Forces Selection and Assessment process. If Brian made it through Selection he would then move onto the Special Forces Qualification Course, also known as the Q Course. If he didn’t wash out or quit, he would become a Green Beret. Brian went to Rickenbacker Air Force Base in Columbus to meet with the training team of the 19th Special Forces Group. They put him through a grueling physical fitness test. Brian had maintained his excellent physical conditioning that he had established back in the Ranger Regiment. He passed the test and he was offered a spot in the unit.
The sole function of the unit is to prepare soldiers to pass the Assessment and Selection test. Although they only met one weekend each month, that weekend left Brian completely exhausted meeting the high standards required to pass Selection. Training one weekend each month was not going to be adequate to pass Selection and Brian was working seven days a week to meet the standards. “I spent many days walking on the treadmill with a 100-pound rucksack at the fire station. I was the guy rucking all through our neighborhood.” Nobody could figure out why Brian was working so hard because he told no one. “The chances of actually making it were so slim, I didn’t tell anyone. Not even his fellow firefighters. When he was gone for the one-month Selection and Assessment program he said he was going for military training.
Selection takes place at Camp McCall, which is located just outside Fort Bragg. Brian recalled the program was broken down into three one-week sections. The first week is individual week filled with endless physical fitness training, rucking, long runs and road marches. Brian thought the most difficult part of the training was never knowing how much time you had to complete an exercise, or a walk or how far you had to travel. The cadre, or instructors, would not count pushups, sit-ups or pullups that didn’t meet the standard. Unlike the Ranger cadre that were in your face and trying to make you quit, these cadre were matter of fact about it. “It’s all a big mind fuck.” Brian was used to it all from his time with the Rangers and found it quite amusing, but the other candidates did not. “Being cool and calm was the most important thing.”
The second week is land navigation. First, they teach everyone the essentials of land navigation including using a compass and reading maps. After the candidates had been prepared to navigate their way from point A to point B and so on, they were sent on navigation exercises in groups and a few days later they went out as individuals. “The climax of the week was the Star Course. I believe we started at midnight and had until noon the next day to navigate to five different points in the woods and then meet at a rendezvous point.” Each candidate had two compasses, a 45-pound rucksack and a fake weapon made of rubber that they affectionately called their rubber ducky. They didn’t know exactly how much time was remaining and they were not permitted to follow any roads they came upon. “You’re totally on your own. There’s nobody else to help you.” If you failed to make it to the rendezvous point within the allotted time on the first night you had a second night to do it all over. Brian needed two nights but made it through.
The third week is team week. Everything is done as a team, and “you never do anything alone.” Each soldier takes a turn leading the group through a series of exercises designed to test problem solving, teamwork, leadership and organizational skills. “You’re worn out. You haven’t eaten a lot. Tensions are high because you are just miserable.” Typically, there was one exercise in the morning and then another in the afternoon.
Much of the program is designed to test the candidate’s willingness to endure anything and never quit. Brian was prepared for this, but others weren’t. Brian recalled men dropping out. Suddenly they weren’t with the group, and they were never seen again.
The last test was a roughly 31-mile trek that took nearly 24 hours. This created more attrition and, in the end, roughly one third of the 100 men who started completed the program. Those that survived were given various classifications according to the four different job specialties in the Special Forces; Medics, Engineers, Communications and Weapons. Brian’s MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) was an 18D, a Special Forces medic. That meant 26 more months of intensive medical, language, and field training that started immediately.
Brian returned home to Cincinnati and notified the fire department that he was going to be a candidate for the Green Beret and would likely be gone for a minimum of 26 months. “They were shocked.” Brian had told no one why he was training so hard because he thought his chances of making it were not great. “I’d always trained hard anyway. They knew I was a nut when it came to training.” No one ever suspected his ultimate goal.
Brian packed his gear, kissed his kids and his wife and headed off to the next step of Green Beret training, the Q Course. It was tough on Brian leaving his kids but his relationship with his wife had become strained and leaving was actually a relief for both of them.
Brian arrived at Fort Bragg on Easter Sunday of 2009. For the next 26 months Brian would be training to become part of one of the most elite fighting units the United States has to offer. Unlike Navy SEALS that have gained quite a bit of notoriety in the public domain, the Green Beret still adhere to the mantra of being ‘quite professionals. Often referred to as the ‘tip of the spear’, Green Beret operate in small 12-man teams training indigenous troops in counterinsurgency, guerilla warfare, direct action missions and unconventional warfare.
At the time Brian entered the Q Course it had four main phases; Language School, SERE School (Survival, Evade, Resistance, Escape) Small Unit Tactics, and finally, training in your MOS. Brian headed to the schoolhouse for language training.
Languages were broken up into long languages, such as Arabic and Mandarin Chinese and short languages, such as French, Spanish and simpler languages. Brian was part of the 19th Special Forces Group and at that time their geographical area of focus was Northern Africa. “So I got French.” For eight hours Monday through Friday and four hours on Saturday the men were immersed in their language. Brian recalled spending two or three hours each night on homework. Their instructor was the former Foreign Minister of Zimbabwe so in addition to being taught the language they learned a lot about the culture and customs of the people in those countries.
Small Unit Tactics was the second module and the men returned to field work learning guerilla warfare and how to operate in small 12-man Green Beret Teams. Brian recalled being in the field for four days, “dirty and miserable” and then back to the classroom. This was followed by SERE School.
SERE lasted three weeks and the focus was to teach the soldiers how to survive behind enemy lines, evade capture, how to survive if captured and ultimately escape when the opportunity presented itself. For the first two weeks they learned how to evade an enemy that is actively searching for them. They learned what plants and animals were edible, how to make a fire and not have it detected. In the third week each soldier is captured and taken to a mock Prisoner of War (POW) camp. There they are interrogated and waterboarded and treated like a POW. Here they tried to use the skills they had been taught to avoid giving up information, with the knowledge everybody breaks at some point. The idea is to delay that point as long as possible. At the end of four days the men are released and brought back to camp to shower, get a clean change of uniforms and they are given a pizza party. “We all got sick because we ate way too much.”
The final phase is hands-on training in your MOS and for Brian that was Special Operations Combat Medic. He did his training with SEAL, Ranger and Marine Special Operations medics. Although Brian had paramedic training when he was working as an EMT, there was very little trauma training. Combat Medic training focused exclusively on trauma injuries.
The training includes both human medicine and veterinary medicine. Veterinary medicine is taught because as the training progresses, they are introduced to live tissue training, and this is done by treating a goat for gunshot injuries and any complications that arise. This veterinary training will come in handy when a Green Beret team is inserted to live with indigenous civilians in remote areas where farming and animal husbandry is the focus of their existence.
They learned how to apply a tourniquet, insert nasal airway, insert IVs, catheters and NG tubes. “Stuff in the civilian world you would never do.” The learning was done by practicing on each other. They also learned how to stabilize an injured GI and transport him or her as they pulled back under fire with the enemy closing on their location. Brian really enjoyed this training, but he loved the second phase of the training.
The medics were sent out in teams of four to local hospitals for a month. They rotated through the various departments starting with the emergency room and ICU. “Depending on how much the nurses trusted us we would draw blood, give IVs…we did a lot of stuff. The main point was getting us to interact with patients as much as possible and doing as much as possible.” They did this for a week and then spent a week at the local fire department to work with the EMTs. “We would ride with them, and we would do whatever they allowed us to do with the patients.” The third week was back at the hospital, and the final week was back at the fire department.
The remaining time in this phase was spent in the classroom learning about the diseases we don’t see or hear about here in the states but are part of life in more remote countries. They also learned how to operate x-ray machines, ultrasound machines to perform sonograms, use lab equipment and perform their own lab tests. The final assignment was a rotation at a local Native American reservation hospital.
The last phase of the Special Forces Qualification Course is called Robin Sage. Since 1974 Robin Sage has been the final exercise to be completed before the candidates are minted Green Berets. Robin Sage is an unconventional warfare exercise that takes place in the fictitious country of Pineland (somewhere in North Carolina). The would-be Green Beret have been instructed in the tactics of unconventional warfare including guerilla warfare, insurgency, sabotage and subversion.
There was a planning period in total isolation that spanned a couple of days and then the soldiers implemented their plan to infiltrate ‘Pineland’ and execute their missions. The exercise takes place over a large portion of North Carolina and local citizens participate in the exercise as civilians, leaders, guerillas, etc. The soldiers form into 12-man teams and infiltrate Pineland. “The whole two weeks we’re out in the field are just scenarios” that the men have to navigate to complete their mission.
Brian graduated from Selection as a new Green Beret in June of 2011, 26 months after entering the program on Easter Sunday of 2009. “So I went home, went back to being a father, a husband, a firefighter paramedic and was immediately assigned to a National Guard Special Forces Team.” Brian had been able to spend time with his family over the 26 months. He was able to get home for Christmas; his wife brought the kids for a visit in North Carolina and in West Virginia during his medic training. Brian recalled that his children were resilient in handling his absence, but his marriage was showing signs of strain.
“From 2011 on it was a blur. Dates are hard.” Brian did his first tour of duty in Bangladesh where they taught the Bangladesh SEALs ship interdiction. It was called Visit Board Search and Seizure. “We didn’t get in their water…there were all kinds of nasties in that water, but that’s a third world country.” That tour lasted four months. “I think I was home for six months and then deployed to Thailand.”
Brian’s next deployment was to Thailand for four months where the focus was solely on medical training. “We taught the Royal Thai Police medical stuff.” The Royal Thai Police were a very elite group and had a number of female members. “They were studs. That’s the only place we ever trained females.” Brian and four other medics lived in a U.S. DEA compound in Thailand. “Who knew we had a DEA compound in the middle of Thailand.”
Brian’s next deployment was to Korea, near the DMZ, for roughly four months. “We never had a day off. We were out in the field four days at a time, came back and retrofitted and went right back into the field.” Brian’s team was charged with teaching the South Korean Army guerilla warfare tactics. Brian recalled the South Koreans showed no interest in learning guerilla warfare. They wanted real warfare and to charge across the DMZ to attack the North Koreans. The Green Beret were not there to start an international conflict, so they announced they were packing up and going back to the states. The next day the South Koreans were eager to learn guerilla warfare tactics.
Brian did a second deployment to Bangladesh but was unclear of where that tour fit into the chronology. In all of these tours the Green Beret did everything they could to blend in with the troops they were training.
Brian was itching for combat deployments and the Sergeant Major in charge of Brian’s National Guard Unit was a military contractor. There was a strong demand for medics, and a Special Forces medic was like hitting the jackpot. “I ended up doing four contract deployments…I interspersed my military deployments with those.” Brian told his fire department that he would be on extended military deployment. They were sorry to see him go but understood.
In his contractor role he had medic responsibilities but was also involved in conducting reconnaissance and gathering and analyzing intelligence. Brian was a medic in a security team that protected a wide variety of U.S. assets including ambassadors and the Army Corps of Engineers. “We would physically protect them…making sure the area was safe, having people on rooftops…”. On one assignment Brian was involved in the collection of intelligence in Kabul, Afghanistan. There was another assignment where he was the medic and 2nd in command of security on a land oil right in northern Iraq, near the Kurds. Brian worked with former British and Australian SAS operators. “Those guys were awesome to work with.”
Brian recalled ISIS was very active in the area. When it came time to rotate out, the contractors packed up their equipment. The Iraqis weren’t happy about this and “had a mini-riot and ordered that we take them out. So, we just abandoned our stuff, and we just left.” They loaded onto two buses and drove away. “We had some issues getting out of there, we got a couple of guns pointed at us.” Luckily, everybody made it out safely.
Brian had one combat deployment with his National Guard Special Forces team. The deployment was to Gardez, Afghanistan and he thought the timeframe was January through July of 2016. The Taliban, ISIS and Al-Qaeda were active in this area. Brian’s team worked closely with the Afghan National Army. “We always kept them at arms distance. The Afghan National Army has proven over time that they cannot be trusted. Number one killer of Special Forces guys are people turning their weapons on us…we stayed in a little base inside their base, and we had American infantry surrounding us.” Brian’s team was quite certain some of them were Taliban and on occasions the interpreters would tell the US troops, “they were calling their buddies and letting them know specifics of an operation.”
They also worked with the National Mine Reduction Group (NMRG). This is a group that the Americans could trust. The NMRG troops had a working mastery of English, and their job was to locate and neutralize Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). “Those guys were awesome.” Typically, the NMRG troops would walk on foot in front of a US convoy of Humvees looking for IEDs. The Special Forces unit would ride in the Humvees and provide protection.
“I would say they were greatly Americanized.” They would talk openly about their wives to the Americans, which was forbidden in the Afghan culture. They would also drink alcohol with the Americans from time to time. “We did everything with them. We worked out with them. We ate with them in our chow hall…we treated them like us. We considered them Americans.”
“We did a couple of things trying to turn the Taliban against ISIS. In some instances, it worked and, in some instances, it was really hard to tell if it worked.” All members of a Special Forces team are cross trained in all of the MOS on a team. During this deployment Brian was heavily involved in the collection of intelligence and was in his fair share of firefights. “A lot of firefights would begin with an IED that went off, and then snipers getting dangerously close. I remember a couple of times feeling a bullet ride past me.” Brian recalled hiding behind a two-foot wall and taking heavy fire as he peeked to see where the shooters were.
Brian talked about how the Taliban, ISIS and Al Qaeda used civilians as shields and rarely fought the Americans in an abandoned village “which led to some bad experiences.” Brian recalled a firefight where they were pinned down and they turned their trucks toward the fire and formed a protective barrier for cover. They returned fire but couldn’t stay stationary because they would be sitting ducks for an RPG (rocket propelled grenade). The group was preparing an assault on the enemy location when they saw a car driving slowly in their direction with its hazard lights flashing. Their concern was the vehicle was a VBIED (Vehicle-Borne IED). They fired warning shots from their truck mounted 50 caliber machine guns, first over the top of the vehicle and then in front of the vehicle. Their next decision was, did they need to destroy the vehicle to protect themselves.
Fortunately, their Green Beret training served them well. They held their fire because the vehicle came to a halt. The driver’s side door opened, and an old man emerged and appeared unarmed. He reached back into the car and pulled a lifeless body into his arms and began running toward the Americans. As the firefight raged on Brian could see the seriousness of the situation and cautiously approached the man with his interpreter. The interpreter told Brian the man was holding his son.
Brian yelled instructions to bring the man and his son behind a wall they were using for cover from the incoming enemy rounds. Now Brian had a much better understanding of how dire the situation was. The father was covered in blood and brain matter, and the son had a gaping head wound that was actively bleeding and gray brain matter was spattered everywhere. In that instant Brian thought about his son Henry, but then his training kicked in. Despite being unconscious and near death the boy was vomiting. “There was nothing we could do. The only thing that would help was surgery and we’re in the middle of a firefight in Afghanistan.” Brian gave the lifeless boy an IV and Zofran, medicine for the nausea. “We didn’t have anything else that would help.”
Brian advised the captain of the situation, and the captain recalled a civilian hospital the convoy had passed 2 miles back. They helped the father gather up his son, get him back into the car and gave him instructions to go to the hospital. “We had civilian injuries but that was the worst.”
It was very emotional for Brian to describe those events. “During the entire deployment, I never really processed it. You’re too busy doing work and trying to stay alive, and more importantly, trying to keep the rest of your guys alive.”
Brian talked about how three of the NMRG troops made it safely out of Afghanistan and into the U.S. when the U.S. pulled out. Brian named his dog Aktar, after one of the NMRG that is living within the US.
Brian’s deployment ended in early July, and he was hopeful to get home to Henry’s July 4th baseball game. He didn’t make it and he is filled with regret to this day. Brian estimated that the total time between when he walked out of his last firefight in Afghanistan and when he was sitting in his living room was one week. As you are reading this, give that some serious consideration. In less than a week Brian went from the exhilaration and terror of combat to a world full of people complaining about first world problems. Then the Post Traumatic Stress started to creep in. The Special Forces are unique in that they do not come back to a military environment like conventional forces do. They returned to their families and their jobs and had very little support from the brotherhood they trusted with their lives. Without a support structure of people battling the same daemons, PTSD roams about in the background until it surfaces with a fury.
“We had a guy who was a patent lawyer. We had another guy who was an executive at Coca-Cola. I couldn’t imagine going back to a job like that.” Brian wasn’t minimizing those jobs, but he felt his life had purpose and saw value in what he was doing in combat. These are among the silent struggles our veterans go through.
Brian recalled his PTS made him very angry and manifested in road rage. This surprised Brian because he had always prided himself for being calm, cool and collected, even under tremendous pressure. It got to the point “where I was following people and I wanted to do bad things to them at their house.” Brian recalled working out at a gym in Cincinnati when someone dropped a pair of dumbbells right next to him. The loud noise triggered something inside him and he “flipped out. I screamed at him…called him a loser and a fucking idiot. I stopped myself from doing something really bad and drove right to the VA.”
Within a week Brian was in outpatient therapy, and it helped him manage his symptoms. “It really sucked. I had to write about my bad experiences, and I had to read about them every day for three or four months.” These days Brian feels he is controlling his PTSD. Occasionally there will be a very loud noise that triggers a response. “I don’t flip out anymore. It’s more of a silent struggle…for about five seconds and no one knows what is going on but my wife.”
Brian and his wife got along for the first month he was back and Brian was hopeful their marriage would work. As time went on Brian felt she didn’t want to really want to understand what Brian experienced and endured during his deployments. The rest of his family had spent time reading about Green Beret and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to help them understand Brian’s experience and support him with his PTSD. Within six months they were on their way to a divorce.
Brian stayed on his National Guard Special Forces team for 18 months, but he had a difficult time staying engaged without a deployment to look forward to. In 2019 Brian officially retired.
Brian was 36 years old, a few years into his divorce and sick of on-line dating. On a whim he asked his brother if he knew of any single women. As luck would have it, his brother had been taking a yoga class with an instructor he really enjoyed, and he knew she was single. He thought they would be a good match ‘because they were both workout freaks.’ He introduced Brian to Christie, a Physical Therapist. A romance blossomed and they were married. Today they have a blended family of four children and live in South Carolina. Brian’s son Hank is attending Delta State College in Mississippi and playing basketball, just like Brian. When he graduates his goal is to become a Green Beret.
After all that he has been through, is he glad he served his country? Brian said he wouldn’t change anything. It was exactly what he wanted to do, and he was able to do it his way. Brian reflected on his career and said he wished he could have done more but at the same time he was able to say, “Yeah, I think I did enough.”
Brian has been working on a book. “I started off as a way to tell my kids about my military service and my fire and EMT service and it just morphed into a story of my life.” The manuscript is complete and he is. Working with an editor to get it ready for publication. “It’s called, Just Past Comfort and I’m excited to put it out there and let people know my story, especially the kids.”
Pop culture today often encourages people to ‘do hard things’. For Brian this wasn’t just a tag line, it was a way of life. He had the self-discipline, confidence and never-quit mentality to work his way through the extremely unforgiving training funnel of the Special Forces and work his way to the tip of the spear. He did not do this to gain worldly fame or fortune. He did it to help others who in many cases couldn’t help themselves. The motto of the Green Beret is De oppresso liber, or, Free the Oppressed. We can learn from Brian’s experiences the personal sacrifice that comes with being a member of the military and the lasting impact that service can have on each veteran…even if we don’t see it. Thank you, Brian, for all of your sacrifices and what you endured in helping others.
The noblest question in the world is, ‘What good may I do in it.” Benjamin Franklin
Brian Maginn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1976. He grew up in an athletic household with two older sisters, a younger and older brother. His parents worked hard to provide for the family which left a lasting impression on Brian. “They worked their butts off, so they set great examples.” His father played shortstop for the University of Cincinnati and was second team All American his senior year. He went on to teach middle school math for 31 years and provided well for the family.
Brian’s mother was initially a stay-at-home mom but there was no grass growing under her feet. “She would never rest. It was always cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, clipping coupons….she was always going 100 miles per hour.”
The Maginn’s lived a solid middle class life in suburbia, much like the Cleaver’s in the fictional TV town of Mayfield. Most of their time was spent playing outside with kids in the neighborhood. Whatever sport was in season, they played it. Of course there was schoolwork to be done. There was no slacking off there. Brian played as many sports as he could fit in, but his true talent was on the hardwood. He was a strong enough player that he earned a scholarship to Lambuth University, a small college in Jackson, Tennessee. “It was a great experience. We had people from all over the world” and students of every race and ethnicity.
Brian had a great college experience including basketball and extensive travel abroad during a study abroad program at Oxford University. “I literally spent my life savings” traveling. During the summers in college Brian worked on the road crews in Hamilton County, fixing stop signs, repairing potholes and painting roads in the Cincinnati area. He found this to be a great experience being exposed to blue collar workers doing hard work in the outdoors for four seasons of the year.
Brian always intended to join the military, and he didn’t put a lot of thought into picking his major. He chose sociology. “I wanted to travel the world with the military anyway, so I figured why not learn about different cultures before I actually go live amongst different cultures.” Brian graduated in December in 1999 and on January 4th, 2000 he reported to Fort Benning for boot camp.
“I always wanted to be in the military. I had to prove to myself that I could. I just assumed everybody was infantry and would serve in combat…I didn’t know there were all these support people…90% of people (in the military) were support people.”
Brian reported to bootcamp wanting to be a Ranger, but he did not have a Ranger contract. Boot camp lasted 11 weeks followed by four weeks of Advanced Individual Training (AIT), which for Brian was infantry training. During that time Brian had the opportunity to sign a Ranger contract and did. Upon completion of AIT Brian went to Airborne School. During the three weeks school Brian made five jumps to earn his Airborne Wings. “I hated every jump. I ended up doing 35-ish jumps in my career and I hated everyone.”
After graduating from Airborne School at Fort Benning, a small group of soldiers congregated as they waited to report to the Ranger Indoctrination Program (RIP). After a short wait the Ranger cadre arrived with hurricane force and the indoctrination began. “I’ve never seen a bunch of guys so mean…they came and just scolded us and told us we wouldn’t make it…playing mind games with us.” The Ranger candidates were told to carry all of their belongings and run from the Airborne compound to the Ranger compound.
Brian described RIP as a real ‘suckfest’. The cadre were constantly in each candidate’s face screaming about their unhappiness with some small detail which often had been done right, but the cadre said it was wrong. “The Ranger cadre were constantly in your face. Constantly trying to make you quit. You learn how much you can put up with.” Brian was able to maintain his focus and endure whatever was thrown at him by reminding himself that the program would eventually end and all of the cadre had gone through what Brian and the others were going through now.
For the four weeks of RIP the candidates lived off MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat). These are high calorie, low frills meals in a can designed to provide troops in the field the calories they need to carry out the mission and were far from an epicurean delight. A thriving barter market developed as soldiers tried to find something that appealed to them.
RIP was long days of endless harassment, classroom work, physical training (PT), land navigation, long marches, running and very little sleep. As Brian expected, RIP did eventually end and he was assigned to the 2nd Ranger Battalion in Tacoma, Washington.
When he arrived at the 2nd Ranger Battalion he soon realized that while RIP was over, he still had not earned the respect of the true Rangers. These were the soldiers that had a Ranger Tab on their uniform signifying they had completed Ranger School. Ranger School is a two month program broken into three phases and is a physically and mentally demanding school where you learn to become a Ranger with a serious focus on leadership skills.
At 2nd Battalion each morning when the men assembled there was often the command, “ab check.” If you didn’t have a Ranger Tab, you would be required to do additional pushups or rope climbs or some other exercise. This was to remind everyone that without a Ranger tab “you were absolutely nothing.”
The Rangers spent all of their time training. “It’s your job.” This was pre 9/11 and there were no wars going on. Brian likened all of the training to an athletic team that trained very hard but never had a game to look forward to. Soldiers too, want to put their skills to the test against another team (the enemy) but there were no wars to test them.
Brian went on leave and returned to Cincinnati to visit his parents. While he was home, he had a few beers with one of the neighbors who was a Gulf War veteran. He was a mechanic located far behind the front line. He told Brian that he was suffering from chronic fatigue, nausea, headaches, and being lightheaded most of the time ever since his deployment. This is what became known as Gulf War Syndrome.
He had been very healthy during his several years in the military prior to the deployment. He was too far behind the line to have been exposed to any chemical agents. The only thing that was different was he received the anthrax vaccination just prior to his deployment. He thought his symptoms were the result of the anthrax vaccination he received.
This really unsettled Brian. He was extremely health conscious and not interested in putting something in his body that would leave him feeling chronically fatigued or sick in any way. Up to this point there had been no discussion of requiring the Rangers to be vaccinated for anthrax. He returned to the base after his leave and didn’t give it any further thought, but a week later the order came down that the Brigade would be vaccinated for anthrax.
Brian did some research on the internet and found that there were a lot of threads connecting the anthrax vaccine to Gulf War Syndrome. Brian made up his mind he wouldn’t be vaccinated. This wasn’t well accepted. “The NCO’s and enlisted guys treated me like absolute shit.” He was threatened with prison time and a dishonorable discharge. Eventually Brian was summoned to meet with the Commanding Officer of the battalion. It was determined that Brian refused a direct order and he was honorably discharged in October of 2000. Brian was proud for standing up for what he believed but he was extremely disappointed that he would not attend Ranger School. “Just to prove to myself that I could do it.”
Brian thought his military career was over, and he needed to find a new path to follow. Brian had planned to go into law enforcement after completing his military career, so he thought he would start with a private law enforcement job. He was assigned to a bank in the Cincinnati area, and it wasn’t long before Brian saw some action. Someone had come into the bank and tried to cash a fraudulent check, but the bank employees identified the situation. When the man realized the bank employees were trying to detain him, he ran out of the bank. Brian thought, “I better stop him. That’s what I’m here for.” Brian sprinted after him, ran him down and tackled him. “I was politely told at the end of the day that I wasn’t supposed to do that, and I could quit or be fired. So, I quit.”
Brian again began contemplating his future. He knew he wanted to be involved, in some capacity, helping people. He decided he could do that as a firefighter/EMT (Emergency Medical Technician). Brian began his training to be a firefighter/EMT in the Fall of 2001 just before the terrorist bombings on September 11th. Around this time Brian became reacquainted with “Lisa”, a girl that he had known from high school and they began dating.
Brian completed his training and was initially assigned to a fire department in Colerain Township, just outside of Cincinnati. “It was a great place to be a firefighter. Super busy with very diverse calls.” Brian gravitated toward the medical aspects of firefighting/EMS and by January of 2004 Brian had become a paramedic.
In 2003 Brian had become a father to a little girl, Maddy, and in early 2004 he and Lisa were married. In 2007 his son Henry was born. Brian and his family were living a happy suburban life. “I was still bummed about not being in the military especially when we went into Afghanistan.” Despite that Brian felt he was contributing to the world in a meaningful way. “I’m doing my part. I’m a firefighter/paramedic, at a busy department, I’m close to my family. I had a good thing going with my wife and kids, but then the bug just eventually got enough of me and in 2005 I decided I wanted to go back in…and do something medical. I knew that would help me in civilian life.”
Brian spoke to a recruiter who told him the Army would be glad to have him back and initially his wife was supportive of Brian’s passion for the Army. In December of 2005 Brian joined the local Army Reserve unit as a combat medic. Joining the Reserves allowed him to keep his FF/paramedic job. He headed for three months of combat medical training at Fort Sam Houston. When Brian returned from training he reported to his combat support unit just north of Cincinnati. “I could not believe how horrible it was. We had no equipment and we did close to nothing on the weekends.”
A military unit often reflects the quality of the senior leadership and that was definitely the case in this unit. The unit leadership told the troops to come up with their own training. Brian took it on himself to borrow a cardiac monitor from a backup ambulance at his firehouse and brought it to weekend training. Brian taught the reserve members to read different heart rhythms and use the equipment. Brian questioned what he had committed himself to. He stayed with the unit hoping that they would deploy, but that never happened.
As luck would have it, Brian met a Special Forces medic at the gym during a Reserve weekend. He told Brian that there was a National Guard Special Forces unit. During his time in the Ranger Regiment Brian had thought he would like to qualify for the Army Special Forces. “They called it taking the long walk.” Brian did some research and found a National Guard Special Forces unit in Columbus, Ohio only two hours from his home.
Brian contacted the unit and they told him the primary focus of the unit was to prepare soldiers to get through the rigorous and difficult Special Forces Selection and Assessment process. If Brian made it through Selection he would then move onto the Special Forces Qualification Course, also known as the Q Course. If he didn’t wash out or quit, he would become a Green Beret. Brian went to Rickenbacker Air Force Base in Columbus to meet with the training team of the 19th Special Forces Group. They put him through a grueling physical fitness test. Brian had maintained his excellent physical conditioning that he had established back in the Ranger Regiment. He passed the test and he was offered a spot in the unit.
The sole function of the unit is to prepare soldiers to pass the Assessment and Selection test. Although they only met one weekend each month, that weekend left Brian completely exhausted meeting the high standards required to pass Selection. Training one weekend each month was not going to be adequate to pass Selection and Brian was working seven days a week to meet the standards. “I spent many days walking on the treadmill with a 100-pound rucksack at the fire station. I was the guy rucking all through our neighborhood.” Nobody could figure out why Brian was working so hard because he told no one. “The chances of actually making it were so slim, I didn’t tell anyone. Not even his fellow firefighters. When he was gone for the one-month Selection and Assessment program he said he was going for military training.
Selection takes place at Camp McCall, which is located just outside Fort Bragg. Brian recalled the program was broken down into three one-week sections. The first week is individual week filled with endless physical fitness training, rucking, long runs and road marches. Brian thought the most difficult part of the training was never knowing how much time you had to complete an exercise, or a walk or how far you had to travel. The cadre, or instructors, would not count pushups, sit-ups or pullups that didn’t meet the standard. Unlike the Ranger cadre that were in your face and trying to make you quit, these cadre were matter of fact about it. “It’s all a big mind fuck.” Brian was used to it all from his time with the Rangers and found it quite amusing, but the other candidates did not. “Being cool and calm was the most important thing.”
The second week is land navigation. First, they teach everyone the essentials of land navigation including using a compass and reading maps. After the candidates had been prepared to navigate their way from point A to point B and so on, they were sent on navigation exercises in groups and a few days later they went out as individuals. “The climax of the week was the Star Course. I believe we started at midnight and had until noon the next day to navigate to five different points in the woods and then meet at a rendezvous point.” Each candidate had two compasses, a 45-pound rucksack and a fake weapon made of rubber that they affectionately called their rubber ducky. They didn’t know exactly how much time was remaining and they were not permitted to follow any roads they came upon. “You’re totally on your own. There’s nobody else to help you.” If you failed to make it to the rendezvous point within the allotted time on the first night you had a second night to do it all over. Brian needed two nights but made it through.
The third week is team week. Everything is done as a team, and “you never do anything alone.” Each soldier takes a turn leading the group through a series of exercises designed to test problem solving, teamwork, leadership and organizational skills. “You’re worn out. You haven’t eaten a lot. Tensions are high because you are just miserable.” Typically, there was one exercise in the morning and then another in the afternoon.
Much of the program is designed to test the candidate’s willingness to endure anything and never quit. Brian was prepared for this, but others weren’t. Brian recalled men dropping out. Suddenly they weren’t with the group, and they were never seen again.
The last test was a roughly 31-mile trek that took nearly 24 hours. This created more attrition and, in the end, roughly one third of the 100 men who started completed the program. Those that survived were given various classifications according to the four different job specialties in the Special Forces; Medics, Engineers, Communications and Weapons. Brian’s MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) was an 18D, a Special Forces medic. That meant 26 more months of intensive medical, language, and field training that started immediately.
Brian returned home to Cincinnati and notified the fire department that he was going to be a candidate for the Green Beret and would likely be gone for a minimum of 26 months. “They were shocked.” Brian had told no one why he was training so hard because he thought his chances of making it were not great. “I’d always trained hard anyway. They knew I was a nut when it came to training.” No one ever suspected his ultimate goal.
Brian packed his gear, kissed his kids and his wife and headed off to the next step of Green Beret training, the Q Course. It was tough on Brian leaving his kids but his relationship with his wife had become strained and leaving was actually a relief for both of them.
Brian arrived at Fort Bragg on Easter Sunday of 2009. For the next 26 months Brian would be training to become part of one of the most elite fighting units the United States has to offer. Unlike Navy SEALS that have gained quite a bit of notoriety in the public domain, the Green Beret still adhere to the mantra of being ‘quite professionals. Often referred to as the ‘tip of the spear’, Green Beret operate in small 12-man teams training indigenous troops in counterinsurgency, guerilla warfare, direct action missions and unconventional warfare.
At the time Brian entered the Q Course it had four main phases; Language School, SERE School (Survival, Evade, Resistance, Escape) Small Unit Tactics, and finally, training in your MOS. Brian headed to the schoolhouse for language training.
Languages were broken up into long languages, such as Arabic and Mandarin Chinese and short languages, such as French, Spanish and simpler languages. Brian was part of the 19th Special Forces Group and at that time their geographical area of focus was Northern Africa. “So I got French.” For eight hours Monday through Friday and four hours on Saturday the men were immersed in their language. Brian recalled spending two or three hours each night on homework. Their instructor was the former Foreign Minister of Zimbabwe so in addition to being taught the language they learned a lot about the culture and customs of the people in those countries.
Small Unit Tactics was the second module and the men returned to field work learning guerilla warfare and how to operate in small 12-man Green Beret Teams. Brian recalled being in the field for four days, “dirty and miserable” and then back to the classroom. This was followed by SERE School.
SERE lasted three weeks and the focus was to teach the soldiers how to survive behind enemy lines, evade capture, how to survive if captured and ultimately escape when the opportunity presented itself. For the first two weeks they learned how to evade an enemy that is actively searching for them. They learned what plants and animals were edible, how to make a fire and not have it detected. In the third week each soldier is captured and taken to a mock Prisoner of War (POW) camp. There they are interrogated and waterboarded and treated like a POW. Here they tried to use the skills they had been taught to avoid giving up information, with the knowledge everybody breaks at some point. The idea is to delay that point as long as possible. At the end of four days the men are released and brought back to camp to shower, get a clean change of uniforms and they are given a pizza party. “We all got sick because we ate way too much.”
The final phase is hands-on training in your MOS and for Brian that was Special Operations Combat Medic. He did his training with SEAL, Ranger and Marine Special Operations medics. Although Brian had paramedic training when he was working as an EMT, there was very little trauma training. Combat Medic training focused exclusively on trauma injuries.
The training includes both human medicine and veterinary medicine. Veterinary medicine is taught because as the training progresses, they are introduced to live tissue training, and this is done by treating a goat for gunshot injuries and any complications that arise. This veterinary training will come in handy when a Green Beret team is inserted to live with indigenous civilians in remote areas where farming and animal husbandry is the focus of their existence.
They learned how to apply a tourniquet, insert nasal airway, insert IVs, catheters and NG tubes. “Stuff in the civilian world you would never do.” The learning was done by practicing on each other. They also learned how to stabilize an injured GI and transport him or her as they pulled back under fire with the enemy closing on their location. Brian really enjoyed this training, but he loved the second phase of the training.
The medics were sent out in teams of four to local hospitals for a month. They rotated through the various departments starting with the emergency room and ICU. “Depending on how much the nurses trusted us we would draw blood, give IVs…we did a lot of stuff. The main point was getting us to interact with patients as much as possible and doing as much as possible.” They did this for a week and then spent a week at the local fire department to work with the EMTs. “We would ride with them, and we would do whatever they allowed us to do with the patients.” The third week was back at the hospital, and the final week was back at the fire department.
The remaining time in this phase was spent in the classroom learning about the diseases we don’t see or hear about here in the states but are part of life in more remote countries. They also learned how to operate x-ray machines, ultrasound machines to perform sonograms, use lab equipment and perform their own lab tests. The final assignment was a rotation at a local Native American reservation hospital.
The last phase of the Special Forces Qualification Course is called Robin Sage. Since 1974 Robin Sage has been the final exercise to be completed before the candidates are minted Green Berets. Robin Sage is an unconventional warfare exercise that takes place in the fictitious country of Pineland (somewhere in North Carolina). The would-be Green Beret have been instructed in the tactics of unconventional warfare including guerilla warfare, insurgency, sabotage and subversion.
There was a planning period in total isolation that spanned a couple of days and then the soldiers implemented their plan to infiltrate ‘Pineland’ and execute their missions. The exercise takes place over a large portion of North Carolina and local citizens participate in the exercise as civilians, leaders, guerillas, etc. The soldiers form into 12-man teams and infiltrate Pineland. “The whole two weeks we’re out in the field are just scenarios” that the men have to navigate to complete their mission.
Brian graduated from Selection as a new Green Beret in June of 2011, 26 months after entering the program on Easter Sunday of 2009. “So I went home, went back to being a father, a husband, a firefighter paramedic and was immediately assigned to a National Guard Special Forces Team.” Brian had been able to spend time with his family over the 26 months. He was able to get home for Christmas; his wife brought the kids for a visit in North Carolina and in West Virginia during his medic training. Brian recalled that his children were resilient in handling his absence, but his marriage was showing signs of strain.
“From 2011 on it was a blur. Dates are hard.” Brian did his first tour of duty in Bangladesh where they taught the Bangladesh SEALs ship interdiction. It was called Visit Board Search and Seizure. “We didn’t get in their water…there were all kinds of nasties in that water, but that’s a third world country.” That tour lasted four months. “I think I was home for six months and then deployed to Thailand.”
Brian’s next deployment was to Thailand for four months where the focus was solely on medical training. “We taught the Royal Thai Police medical stuff.” The Royal Thai Police were a very elite group and had a number of female members. “They were studs. That’s the only place we ever trained females.” Brian and four other medics lived in a U.S. DEA compound in Thailand. “Who knew we had a DEA compound in the middle of Thailand.”
Brian’s next deployment was to Korea, near the DMZ, for roughly four months. “We never had a day off. We were out in the field four days at a time, came back and retrofitted and went right back into the field.” Brian’s team was charged with teaching the South Korean Army guerilla warfare tactics. Brian recalled the South Koreans showed no interest in learning guerilla warfare. They wanted real warfare and to charge across the DMZ to attack the North Koreans. The Green Beret were not there to start an international conflict, so they announced they were packing up and going back to the states. The next day the South Koreans were eager to learn guerilla warfare tactics.
Brian did a second deployment to Bangladesh but was unclear of where that tour fit into the chronology. In all of these tours the Green Beret did everything they could to blend in with the troops they were training.
Brian was itching for combat deployments and the Sergeant Major in charge of Brian’s National Guard Unit was a military contractor. There was a strong demand for medics, and a Special Forces medic was like hitting the jackpot. “I ended up doing four contract deployments…I interspersed my military deployments with those.” Brian told his fire department that he would be on extended military deployment. They were sorry to see him go but understood.
In his contractor role he had medic responsibilities but was also involved in conducting reconnaissance and gathering and analyzing intelligence. Brian was a medic in a security team that protected a wide variety of U.S. assets including ambassadors and the Army Corps of Engineers. “We would physically protect them…making sure the area was safe, having people on rooftops…”. On one assignment Brian was involved in the collection of intelligence in Kabul, Afghanistan. There was another assignment where he was the medic and 2nd in command of security on a land oil right in northern Iraq, near the Kurds. Brian worked with former British and Australian SAS operators. “Those guys were awesome to work with.”
Brian recalled ISIS was very active in the area. When it came time to rotate out, the contractors packed up their equipment. The Iraqis weren’t happy about this and “had a mini-riot and ordered that we take them out. So, we just abandoned our stuff, and we just left.” They loaded onto two buses and drove away. “We had some issues getting out of there, we got a couple of guns pointed at us.” Luckily, everybody made it out safely.
Brian had one combat deployment with his National Guard Special Forces team. The deployment was to Gardez, Afghanistan and he thought the timeframe was January through July of 2016. The Taliban, ISIS and Al-Qaeda were active in this area. Brian’s team worked closely with the Afghan National Army. “We always kept them at arms distance. The Afghan National Army has proven over time that they cannot be trusted. Number one killer of Special Forces guys are people turning their weapons on us…we stayed in a little base inside their base, and we had American infantry surrounding us.” Brian’s team was quite certain some of them were Taliban and on occasions the interpreters would tell the US troops, “they were calling their buddies and letting them know specifics of an operation.”
They also worked with the National Mine Reduction Group (NMRG). This is a group that the Americans could trust. The NMRG troops had a working mastery of English, and their job was to locate and neutralize Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). “Those guys were awesome.” Typically, the NMRG troops would walk on foot in front of a US convoy of Humvees looking for IEDs. The Special Forces unit would ride in the Humvees and provide protection.
“I would say they were greatly Americanized.” They would talk openly about their wives to the Americans, which was forbidden in the Afghan culture. They would also drink alcohol with the Americans from time to time. “We did everything with them. We worked out with them. We ate with them in our chow hall…we treated them like us. We considered them Americans.”
“We did a couple of things trying to turn the Taliban against ISIS. In some instances, it worked and, in some instances, it was really hard to tell if it worked.” All members of a Special Forces team are cross trained in all of the MOS on a team. During this deployment Brian was heavily involved in the collection of intelligence and was in his fair share of firefights. “A lot of firefights would begin with an IED that went off, and then snipers getting dangerously close. I remember a couple of times feeling a bullet ride past me.” Brian recalled hiding behind a two-foot wall and taking heavy fire as he peeked to see where the shooters were.
Brian talked about how the Taliban, ISIS and Al Qaeda used civilians as shields and rarely fought the Americans in an abandoned village “which led to some bad experiences.” Brian recalled a firefight where they were pinned down and they turned their trucks toward the fire and formed a protective barrier for cover. They returned fire but couldn’t stay stationary because they would be sitting ducks for an RPG (rocket propelled grenade). The group was preparing an assault on the enemy location when they saw a car driving slowly in their direction with its hazard lights flashing. Their concern was the vehicle was a VBIED (Vehicle-Borne IED). They fired warning shots from their truck mounted 50 caliber machine guns, first over the top of the vehicle and then in front of the vehicle. Their next decision was, did they need to destroy the vehicle to protect themselves.
Fortunately, their Green Beret training served them well. They held their fire because the vehicle came to a halt. The driver’s side door opened, and an old man emerged and appeared unarmed. He reached back into the car and pulled a lifeless body into his arms and began running toward the Americans. As the firefight raged on Brian could see the seriousness of the situation and cautiously approached the man with his interpreter. The interpreter told Brian the man was holding his son.
Brian yelled instructions to bring the man and his son behind a wall they were using for cover from the incoming enemy rounds. Now Brian had a much better understanding of how dire the situation was. The father was covered in blood and brain matter, and the son had a gaping head wound that was actively bleeding and gray brain matter was spattered everywhere. In that instant Brian thought about his son Henry, but then his training kicked in. Despite being unconscious and near death the boy was vomiting. “There was nothing we could do. The only thing that would help was surgery and we’re in the middle of a firefight in Afghanistan.” Brian gave the lifeless boy an IV and Zofran, medicine for the nausea. “We didn’t have anything else that would help.”
Brian advised the captain of the situation, and the captain recalled a civilian hospital the convoy had passed 2 miles back. They helped the father gather up his son, get him back into the car and gave him instructions to go to the hospital. “We had civilian injuries but that was the worst.”
It was very emotional for Brian to describe those events. “During the entire deployment, I never really processed it. You’re too busy doing work and trying to stay alive, and more importantly, trying to keep the rest of your guys alive.”
Brian talked about how three of the NMRG troops made it safely out of Afghanistan and into the U.S. when the U.S. pulled out. Brian named his dog Aktar, after one of the NMRG that is living within the US.
Brian’s deployment ended in early July, and he was hopeful to get home to Henry’s July 4th baseball game. He didn’t make it and he is filled with regret to this day. Brian estimated that the total time between when he walked out of his last firefight in Afghanistan and when he was sitting in his living room was one week. As you are reading this, give that some serious consideration. In less than a week Brian went from the exhilaration and terror of combat to a world full of people complaining about first world problems. Then the Post Traumatic Stress started to creep in. The Special Forces are unique in that they do not come back to a military environment like conventional forces do. They returned to their families and their jobs and had very little support from the brotherhood they trusted with their lives. Without a support structure of people battling the same daemons, PTSD roams about in the background until it surfaces with a fury.
“We had a guy who was a patent lawyer. We had another guy who was an executive at Coca-Cola. I couldn’t imagine going back to a job like that.” Brian wasn’t minimizing those jobs, but he felt his life had purpose and saw value in what he was doing in combat. These are among the silent struggles our veterans go through.
Brian recalled his PTS made him very angry and manifested in road rage. This surprised Brian because he had always prided himself for being calm, cool and collected, even under tremendous pressure. It got to the point “where I was following people and I wanted to do bad things to them at their house.” Brian recalled working out at a gym in Cincinnati when someone dropped a pair of dumbbells right next to him. The loud noise triggered something inside him and he “flipped out. I screamed at him…called him a loser and a fucking idiot. I stopped myself from doing something really bad and drove right to the VA.”
Within a week Brian was in outpatient therapy, and it helped him manage his symptoms. “It really sucked. I had to write about my bad experiences, and I had to read about them every day for three or four months.” These days Brian feels he is controlling his PTSD. Occasionally there will be a very loud noise that triggers a response. “I don’t flip out anymore. It’s more of a silent struggle…for about five seconds and no one knows what is going on but my wife.”
Brian and his wife got along for the first month he was back and Brian was hopeful their marriage would work. As time went on Brian felt she didn’t want to really want to understand what Brian experienced and endured during his deployments. The rest of his family had spent time reading about Green Beret and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to help them understand Brian’s experience and support him with his PTSD. Within six months they were on their way to a divorce.
Brian stayed on his National Guard Special Forces team for 18 months, but he had a difficult time staying engaged without a deployment to look forward to. In 2019 Brian officially retired.
Brian was 36 years old, a few years into his divorce and sick of on-line dating. On a whim he asked his brother if he knew of any single women. As luck would have it, his brother had been taking a yoga class with an instructor he really enjoyed, and he knew she was single. He thought they would be a good match ‘because they were both workout freaks.’ He introduced Brian to Christie, a Physical Therapist. A romance blossomed and they were married. Today they have a blended family of four children and live in South Carolina. Brian’s son Hank is attending Delta State College in Mississippi and playing basketball, just like Brian. When he graduates his goal is to become a Green Beret.
After all that he has been through, is he glad he served his country? Brian said he wouldn’t change anything. It was exactly what he wanted to do, and he was able to do it his way. Brian reflected on his career and said he wished he could have done more but at the same time he was able to say, “Yeah, I think I did enough.”
Brian has been working on a book. “I started off as a way to tell my kids about my military service and my fire and EMT service and it just morphed into a story of my life.” The manuscript is complete and he is. Working with an editor to get it ready for publication. “It’s called, Just Past Comfort and I’m excited to put it out there and let people know my story, especially the kids.”
Pop culture today often encourages people to ‘do hard things’. For Brian this wasn’t just a tag line, it was a way of life. He had the self-discipline, confidence and never-quit mentality to work his way through the extremely unforgiving training funnel of the Special Forces and work his way to the tip of the spear. He did not do this to gain worldly fame or fortune. He did it to help others who in many cases couldn’t help themselves. The motto of the Green Beret is De oppresso liber, or, Free the Oppressed. We can learn from Brian’s experiences the personal sacrifice that comes with being a member of the military and the lasting impact that service can have on each veteran…even if we don’t see it. Thank you, Brian, for all of your sacrifices and what you endured in helping others.
The noblest question in the world is, ‘What good may I do in it.” Benjamin Franklin