Peak Points | Travis Howze - The Saddest Moments with a Firefighter

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Speaker 4 One of the most tragic events in American firefighter history.

Speaker 5 I'd heard that my friend Lewis was missing.

Speaker 4 This is the straw that broke the camel's back and kind of sent you into the downward spiral of PTSD.

Speaker 5 I looked down and I realized my hands were on the shoulders of one of our guys. His head should be right here,

Speaker 5 but there was no head.

Speaker 4 What eventually ended your career in the fire service?

Speaker 5 We certainly weren't expecting any of that. Often referred to that as a death trap.

Speaker 4 When did you decide to put the bottle down?

Speaker 5 It was something as simple as how do I want to view my world. The word is perspective.

Speaker 4 So the

Speaker 4 SOFA superstore fire, which claimed the lives of nine firefighters and

Speaker 4 is

Speaker 4 one of the most tragic

Speaker 4 events in American firefighter history,

Speaker 4 if I'm not mistaken.

Speaker 5 You're right.

Speaker 4 And you were a part of that and you responded to that. And

Speaker 4 you mentioned that

Speaker 4 this changed your life forever and

Speaker 4 out of all the traumatic events that you've witnessed and been a part of this is kind of what

Speaker 4 this is the straw that broke the camel's back and kind of sent you into

Speaker 4 the downward spiral of PTSD

Speaker 4 and also

Speaker 4 I watched a I did a lot of research on this too and it seemed to be a very

Speaker 4 controversial incident, and a lot of lessons learned happened from it. And

Speaker 4 it seems that the men, you know, like yourself that survived it are

Speaker 4 considered legends in the community.

Speaker 4 I wanted to,

Speaker 4 before we get going on that, I kind of want to put everybody in the mindset of how horrific this was. So I want to roll the tape.

Speaker 4 That was your best friend on the phone. And

Speaker 4 telling his wife that he loved her. And

Speaker 4 I really just want to set the tone on how fucking serious and tragic this was.

Speaker 4 The day started for you at a memorial golf tournament, and

Speaker 4 I'd like to start from

Speaker 4 right there.

Speaker 5 Yeah, um,

Speaker 5 yeah, his last words that you heard was my friend, my best friend Lewis Mulkey, and his last dying words as he was burning to death.

Speaker 5 Stuff to hear

Speaker 5 June 18th, 2007 started out as a normal day for us.

Speaker 5 We certainly weren't expecting any of that.

Speaker 5 We actually all got together. I was off duty that day, and

Speaker 5 we were having a golf tournament for another friend of ours who's a firefighter, who was killed four months to the day prior in a car accident.

Speaker 5 And that was another really good friend of mine who got me, who got me the job in Charleston, actually. Really?

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 He was one of my other best friends. I mean, it's, it is, so paying homage to him, trying to raise some money for his family at a golf tournament.
And we're doing what firemen do.

Speaker 5 And just like, you know, what SEALs do when y'all get together and cops do when they get together,

Speaker 5 we get drunk and we have a good time. And that's what that golf tournament was about.
But by the end of the day,

Speaker 5 You heard the tapes. That's what we were all thrown into.
And

Speaker 5 at the end of the golf tournament,

Speaker 5 everybody's phones kind of started ringing and uh we were all told the sofa superstore is on fire and we all knew that that was a horrible place to have a fire we often referred to that as a death trap if if that's one of the calls we ever had to go on because we as firefighters you pre-plan buildings that means you find buildings in your area and it could possibly be a threat or

Speaker 5 get be very bad so you had to like kind of strategically plan how how you would face this monster in the event that would happen.

Speaker 4 How many buildings were like that in that city?

Speaker 5 Tons of them. Tons of them? Yeah, I mean, they're everywhere.
It's just old, old furniture stores. Actually, an old grocery store that was converted into a one-story furniture warehouse.

Speaker 5 I mean, so it was a huge, it's like a 100-something thousand square feet. Don't quote me on a square footage, but it was a big showroom and then it had a big

Speaker 5 storage facility behind it. And that's where the fire started.

Speaker 5 So we found out that that building was on fire. We

Speaker 5 all got in our cars and just went.

Speaker 4 What were you thinking on the way there?

Speaker 5 I had heard that my friend Lewis was missing.

Speaker 4 You heard that before you even arrived?

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 4 When you heard that it was the sofa superstore, did that did you know it was going to be fucking bad since since the

Speaker 4 that was already pinging on everybody's radar?

Speaker 5 Well, it's like I told you earlier. It doesn't uh never seems real until it's real.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And

Speaker 5 it just seemed like another fire. But when I heard he was missing,

Speaker 5 I had extra adrenaline kicked in and I drove faster. I broke through a police barricade with my vehicle.

Speaker 5 I didn't drive through it like smoking a bandit or anything. We just went around it and the cop was like, what the fuck? I'm like, fuck you.

Speaker 5 I kept going. And when we got there, the building had just collapsed.
So I got there right when everybody had been pulled out.

Speaker 5 And my girlfriend was driving my car at the time. My firehouse was right up the street.
I told her, I said, go to my locker, my firehouse, grab my shit, and get it back to me.

Speaker 5 I got to find out what's going on. And so this time you got hundreds of firemen on scene, man.
I mean, hundreds. There's probably 300-something plus people on the scene that night.

Speaker 5 And it was just a sea of red lights everywhere. And I ran up to my buddy David Griffin, who was pumping.

Speaker 5 He was the engineer on Engine 11.

Speaker 5 And I ran up to him and I said, David, what do we have? And he turned around. He said, Lewis is missing.
And

Speaker 5 he said, Travis, we got a lot more guys in there, too. We don't know how many, and I was

Speaker 5 like, in that,

Speaker 5 I mean, because now the building is down, and there's just fire every fucking where everywhere you look, it's just fire blowing.

Speaker 5 And then, uh,

Speaker 5 in Charleston Fire Department, we didn't back out of fires, um, we were very cowboyish, and we were very prideful of the way that we did things, and we were very, very aggressive.

Speaker 5 And this is hundreds of years of tradition, and it finally caught us

Speaker 5 and bit us and it cost us nine guys and uh

Speaker 5 i remember hearing reports of like 19 or 20 initially is what they thought but by the time the smoke settled it was nine and it was nine really good dudes and all of those dudes i knew

Speaker 5 very personally i'd worked with every single one of them we uh We sat around that table breaking bread many a night, having jokes, having laughs. You knew their families.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 Lewis

Speaker 5 just happened to be my best friend because, and I wasn't his best friend. He was one of those really cool dudes that had a lot of best friends, but he was my best friend.

Speaker 5 And he, when I started with Charleston Fire, he took me under his wing and showed me the ropes.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I had a very special connection with him. And I didn't know by the end of the night,

Speaker 5 I still didn't know what lie ahead. I didn't know that I'd be the one next to his burnt corpse

Speaker 5 sitting there looking at him in a manner

Speaker 5 I can try to describe, but it's going to be hard.

Speaker 4 You did make entry. Yeah.
You know,

Speaker 4 if I remember correctly, you did you make entry and you got pulled back? Was that was that right?

Speaker 5 Well, we went around the delta side of the building. So when you're looking at a building, the front is alpha, and then you go around clockwise.

Speaker 5 So we got to the delta side, which is square building, would be the right side.

Speaker 5 And we go through this place, man it was um it was just twisted steel look spaghetti spaghetti noodles and it was still hot there was still a lot of fire present and uh but we had guys missing we didn't have time to not get in there we really wanted to find these guys and i guess some of us thought that we were going to find them alive but it's just not the case there was i think around 15 to 20 of us on the body recovery teams we were all

Speaker 5 broken apart and put into five man teams and we all came in from different parts of the building um

Speaker 5 and uh my five-man five-man team, we went in and it was literally, you couldn't move two or three feet and you had to stop and you had to figure out a way to get through the voids that were there.

Speaker 5 There'd be like a little hollow opening here and we'd crawl through that and the next two seconds you're standing on what used to be the roof.

Speaker 4 So you're in it at this point and how many guys are with you?

Speaker 5 Four other guys.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 so just to paint a picture, because you got really descriptive in your book about the smoke, you can't see your fucking hand in front of your face, the heat, and

Speaker 4 there was nothing,

Speaker 4 and I could see how it would be easy to get disoriented and fucking lost and something like that.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 you couldn't even bring a hose in with you to retrace your steps to get the fuck out. And

Speaker 4 I mean,

Speaker 4 The amount of courage that takes, I mean, and it doesn't,

Speaker 4 did it seem like it was even a courageous thing did it probably didn't even go through

Speaker 5 we're going only thing is is they wanted volunteers and a lot of guys didn't raise their hand no very very i think because those guys knew they didn't want what was on it on the inside of that building it's not that they're less of a firefighter yeah i think that they just knew

Speaker 5 i don't want to with that Yeah, we're here to do whatever we got to do. But there was a select group of us that did.
And

Speaker 5 I certainly you know often say the worst decision i ever made was going inside of that building that night but the best decision i've ever made in my life was going inside of that building that night and carrying them carrying them all home um

Speaker 5 and uh it didn't seem like anything courageous it's just what needed to be done you know our guys are down we got guys down we got to do what we got to do let's push forward and go get it so we didn't we didn't even have fucking air packs on our back because they were all used Yeah, so we're choking on smoke and we have what call flash hoods.

Speaker 5 The firefighters have flash hoods. And when you put your face piece on, you pull your flash hood up and it protects the skin right here, protects your neck and your ears.

Speaker 5 So we're choking on smoke, literally gagging on black smoke.

Speaker 5 And you can't see.

Speaker 5 And you're crawling next to big flames, fires, and they have ladder companies dumping water on top of us. And in a normal fire situation, you would never be operating inside of a fire when you have...

Speaker 5 tower units raining water down because they're just so powerful it could hurt you it could you it could injure a firefighter blow debris on them it could push fire on top of them and kill them.

Speaker 5 But we had no choice. We had to go in.
We had to do what needed to be done. And

Speaker 5 it seemed like it took a long time to get to them. And once we started finding them, you would hear a team shout out, I got somebody.

Speaker 5 And we would do the same.

Speaker 5 I saw something silver and

Speaker 5 it didn't look like anything we had seen up until this point because everything was just black. And then I saw something

Speaker 5 and I went over to investigate what it was. And it was by myself.

Speaker 5 And I crawled up there on my hands and knees.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I started looking at this thing.

Speaker 5 I say it in my book. I was just turning my head like a curious dog, trying to figure out what what the fuck is this?

Speaker 5 And I realized that it was an air pack of one of our guys.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 we wore

Speaker 5 silver Scott air packs.

Speaker 5 And it had busted open. It didn't look like an air pack.
It was just like, it was like filleted open.

Speaker 5 And once I realized what it was, I had my hands. I looked down and I realized my hands were on the shoulders of one of our guys.
And we wore black gear.

Speaker 5 It just looked like a pile of black shit, like debris. And then when I realized that, I pushed back.

Speaker 5 And I looked down and I realized these were his shoulders. That's his back because a pack is on her back.
So

Speaker 5 his head should be right here.

Speaker 5 But there was no head.

Speaker 5 There was nothing.

Speaker 5 It was just a couple of teeth. There was no helmet.
There was no skull.

Speaker 5 It was just teeth.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I looked down at the opening. There was an opening.
And there's a spinal column sticking out. And this one got real for me.

Speaker 5 And I realized, because I'd been to calls where we had burned up kids on Christmas. I've seen burned kids.
I've been to burnt people many times. But.

Speaker 4 Nothing hell like that one.

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 5 I realized.

Speaker 5 Right then, whoever's in here is dead. Whatever count that they have on the outside, every one of them is fucking dead

Speaker 5 And I knew Lewis was in there and we just We had no way to tell who was who

Speaker 5 It's one thing when you got a dead body there that you can recognize but when you know it's one of yours and you don't know who the fuck it is

Speaker 5 So what we had to do is

Speaker 5 We were tasked with not moving the bodies and just trying to identify them the best way that we could

Speaker 5 without doing too much. And what the coroner was going to do after all the smoke cleared is come in

Speaker 5 and GPS them and locate where their bodies were. So that's what we did.
So

Speaker 5 this one individual,

Speaker 5 Captain Billy, was

Speaker 5 a really good dude. He'd been in the fire service 30-something years.
He was off engine 19. And

Speaker 5 we ended up pulling his fire pants down and his wallet was in his pants. And he opened it up and we saw his driver's license with his credit cards man and it was just like god damn it

Speaker 5 it's one thing when you're working with dead people and you have no relationship you don't know them because it's not real yeah you go to these things and it sucks it with you from time to time but it's not personal this is personal no

Speaker 5 there's no get back like we talked about and you're just like

Speaker 5 what the fuck do i do so But we got a job to do, man, and

Speaker 5 we can't sit around too long. So we got to find more of our brothers.
And

Speaker 5 we go not too far away and stumble on another one because at this point, smoke's starting to lift a little bit more.

Speaker 5 As the fire got knocked down, and

Speaker 5 we found Mark, and

Speaker 5 he was face down.

Speaker 5 We rolled him over, his hands were in front of his face, and it's almost like

Speaker 5 he saw the flashover that happened in that building. It's not a backdraft.
That's movie shit.

Speaker 5 I mean, those things happen, but flashovers happen all the time in fires, and that's when everything reaches its combustible limit at the same exact time.

Speaker 5 And everything just, all the superheated gases in the building go.

Speaker 5 And it's just a big ball of fire. And 99% of firemen that are caught in these things die because it's so quick and it's so violent.

Speaker 5 It's almost like he felt it or saw it and did like this and then turned and fell. His hands were like this, but

Speaker 5 I didn't know it was Mark. Mark was off of my truck ladder five, and I had a fucking great relationship with Mark.
We worked together

Speaker 5 many times.

Speaker 5 And so we roll them.

Speaker 5 I think your bodies are still hot, man. You can still feel when you're touching them.

Speaker 5 I'm not wearing gloves at this point. And I had them.

Speaker 5 I would take them off from time to time, but every once in a while, we'd roll a guy over, and you'd have your gloves off, and you could feel that heat in your hands from their gear.

Speaker 5 How hot it was, and they were fucking burnt so bad.

Speaker 5 And when I rolled Mark over, the best description I can give you is we have a plastic face piece right here that covers our eyes and right here is usually rubber and it's black

Speaker 5 i don't know if you've ever seen an ultrasound of a baby 3d that's what his face looked like it was baked into his mask damn

Speaker 5 and um

Speaker 5 we undid his coat pull his coat open and we had metal name tags back then and it had his name right there

Speaker 5 and that's how we identified mark and We heard other teams yelling out that they were finding guys. And, you know, it sounds selfish and everything, but I was so worried about Lewis.

Speaker 5 You know, all of these guys are important to me, but this is, this is my dude.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's your best friend.

Speaker 5 And I don't want it to be real. And I want to hurry up and find everybody.
And I'm not wishing that it was somebody else, but you can't help.

Speaker 5 But in that moment, to be like, please, don't be my friend.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 the next brother we found was Brandon, my team.

Speaker 5 We go into this back storage room. It's like one of the only pieces of building that was really left intact.
There was a lot of smoke damage.

Speaker 5 Not a lot of fire damage.

Speaker 5 And Brandon was huddled down in a corner, and his body was just normal. We rolled him out of this corner, and he just had a cut over his eye.

Speaker 5 And what happened is Brandon ran out of air, but he got away from the fire, but he died from smoke.

Speaker 4 Damn.

Speaker 5 And he just looked peaceful, man. And

Speaker 5 his...

Speaker 5 His wedding invitations were in the mail.

Speaker 5 We're still being delivered everywhere around.

Speaker 5 And he died that night. He was actually just working for somebody else.
He did a buddy shift for somebody else. And it cost him his life.

Speaker 4 Damn.

Speaker 5 So that Brandon was, I knew we had eight at that point. And by this time it had come through that we have nine confirmed.
Because this is hours into the night.

Speaker 4 What's the what?

Speaker 4 Was the fire completely out? Was there still smoke?

Speaker 5 At this point,

Speaker 5 smoke was still there, but it was nothing like it was. I mean, we were in there for hours.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 the whole fucking building came down, and there was really nowhere for the smoke to go except into the atmosphere. Part of the showroom was still

Speaker 5 there. But after the bulk of the fire was knocked down, because you got to think, fire was in all these different little pockets where the collapses were.

Speaker 5 And so once those were done, man, all the smoke pretty much dissipated. And that's why I think it took us so long to start finding guys is because there was so much smoke.

Speaker 5 I really think we probably crawled over them a couple times, possibly.

Speaker 5 I just didn't know it.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 now now I know we have eight

Speaker 5 and some guys are in there with Brandon and I love Brandon too, man. And just like

Speaker 5 I want to spend some time with him, do whatever we need to do, but I've got to find Lewis.

Speaker 5 That limousine company you talked about that I owned, I drove for Lewis's wedding. We had a lot of fucking fun together, man.

Speaker 5 This is actually...

Speaker 5 The night after his anniversary. He lived one year and one day after his anniversary.

Speaker 5 So I put my helmet on and I got a job to do, man. And I was actually in a part of the building where you could stand up.
And I started walking out. And man, I probably made it 10 or 15 feet.

Speaker 5 And I walked through what seemed to be a doorway. I'm having to relive this because it's

Speaker 5 I can describe it to you.

Speaker 5 And when I did,

Speaker 5 as soon as I cleared that doorway, I looked to my left and he was laying right there.

Speaker 5 I knew it was him just by looking at his skull, you know. I didn't need confirmation.
I knew

Speaker 5 because he had to he had a distinct face, and even when

Speaker 5 his skin is baked off of somebody's face, you can still recognize them, and it's a sick thing to say.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 I've witnessed that.

Speaker 5 And Lewis was on his back, man, and his left leg was underneath his right. His right leg was straight out, and there was a piece of big-ass piece of steel across it.

Speaker 5 And we ended up having to dig that out, but his arms were sticking up in the air, and his fucking sleeves were burnt off. His fire coat,

Speaker 5 all the skin was burnt off of him, and just his arm bones were sticking up.

Speaker 5 His radius and ultimate, his hands were burnt off, and his head was his head was back, and his eyeballs were burnt out. The fucking skin was burnt off of his face, and his mouth was wide open.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I just got on my knees next to him and

Speaker 5 Told him how much I loved him.

Speaker 4 What eventually ended your career in the fire service?

Speaker 5 So it was a culmination of a lot of things building up to one major incident. So you say I got in a fight.

Speaker 5 What I ended up going hands-on with a lot of guys in the department over the course of two and a half years, and it's not something I'm proud of.

Speaker 5 I'm actually very embarrassed about it, but it happened and it needs to be talked about because the reason I talk about it is you can see a shift in people's behavior. Like we're family.

Speaker 5 And when you see somebody acting differently, something is wrong. And nobody ever pulled me to the side to help me.
Nobody ever pulled me

Speaker 5 to the side to try to figure out what was going on. What happened was this new behavior that I was taking on was just becoming normal.

Speaker 5 At the funeral for one of our guys,

Speaker 5 I got into a physical altercation on the bus. We had a bunch of buses brought in because the funerals were so big, we couldn't take everybody's cars.
So they had to bring families on buses.

Speaker 5 and firemen mixed with families and i was on a bus with some firemen and some families some young children some old people and um

Speaker 5 something was said to another fireman and and he threw his hat at me and uh kind of joking around but kind of not and i just stood up and slapped him and slapped him into the seat the empty seat

Speaker 5 and uh

Speaker 5 everybody witnessed it yeah and this is somebody i'm supposedly love you know and protect and i just did that

Speaker 5 and that event everybody got up, they left the bus, and I was kind of alone on the bus after that. And then after that was more of the same.

Speaker 5 I got into physical altercations at the training facility where I assaulted one of our guys that needed help. He fell down and he was having flashbacks of the fire.

Speaker 5 He was there that night too, and he was screaming all of our dead guys' names. And I picked him up and started slamming him into the wall with all of his gear.
And I was like, knock it the fuck off.

Speaker 5 When I did, one of the training instructors came over and grabbed me and turned me around.

Speaker 5 And when he did, I threw him into the wall and told him, him, you know, you put your fucking hands on me, I'll kill you.

Speaker 5 And then we had an academy instructor standing right there, and I looked at him and I threatened to throw him out of a window. And that was accepted.
And he was swept under the rug.

Speaker 5 And then again, behind a grocery store training one day, I slapped one of our other guys right in the face because he just came close to me and said something. And I just lashed out and hit him.

Speaker 5 And at this time, I was drinking a lot, though. You know, I was drinking.
I was coming to work, drunk, and everything. It wasn't acceptable.
It's embarrassing, man.

Speaker 5 But nobody, it was just not an issue to anybody else. And it was just kind of, all this was on my plate for me to deal with and to figure it out.

Speaker 5 And this is what happens to these cops and these firemen out there. They end up losing their jobs or hurting somebody else because of all the shit that they're going through.

Speaker 5 You know, bring it to work. And that's what I was doing.
I had no outlet for it.

Speaker 5 The straw that broke the camel's back for me was I came to work one day,

Speaker 5 my house, Engine 10 Ladder 5, and

Speaker 5 we had a new guy in our house and he put his coffee cup on our dead dead guy's monument.

Speaker 5 And it pissed me off. I went over there and I grabbed it and I shattered it on the ground and I opened the door and told him if he wants his cup, it's in a million pieces.

Speaker 5 And if he does it again, I'll fucking kill him. And those are the words that I use, and that's how I truly felt.

Speaker 5 And when I said that, one of my other good friends said, why are you being such an asshole? And when he did, I took that as him defending the new guy's actions and not defending our guy's honor.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And I told him, if he says another word to me, I'll kill him too in a minute.

Speaker 5 And he said something to me.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 at that time, a bomb was lit inside of me and the fuse was about that fucking short. And when he said what he said, it's like somebody poured gasoline on that fuse and the bomb ignited.
And

Speaker 5 to this day, I can't tell you what happened because I completely lost it and I'm blacked out. And I just remember being outside with my captain shaking me

Speaker 5 and I'm crying. And he just pretty much told me that I'd assaulted my entire firehouse and the cops were were called and they were on the way to arrest me.

Speaker 4 Do they offer any help at all? The department?

Speaker 5 Man, I can't.

Speaker 5 So our department did the best they could with what we had at the time. We'd never

Speaker 5 in the fire service.

Speaker 5 There had been other incidents, but

Speaker 5 not like this magnitude, I guess. And so

Speaker 5 it was kind of like a free fall to trying to figure out the best way to help guys. And they came up with some counselors really quickly.
I don't know the timeline on it.

Speaker 5 but they wanted guys hey man we got these counselors for y'all go talk to and of course me being alpha male like i am i'm like fuck them i was like these motherfuckers they've never looked at their friends like we have they've never fucking held dead babies in their fucking arms they've read books who the fuck are they

Speaker 5 to tell us how to feel and how to be yeah

Speaker 5 and that was the problem because looking back

Speaker 5 That was the worst fucking thing I could have ever done.

Speaker 5 I hurt myself with that mentality and I hurt other guys around me because I would tell them them to, if you go talk to anybody, you're a fucking pussy.

Speaker 5 And that's one of the biggest regrets I have because I talk about being a coward and it's not easy to say that. That's me being a coward.

Speaker 5 That's me being too manly, too macho, and having too much of a fucking ego to accept the help that is available to us. We had people, licensed professionals,

Speaker 5 who would listen to us. Maybe had I listened to them, I wouldn't have fucking shoved a gun down my throat and pulled a fucking trigger.

Speaker 5 Maybe if I listened to them, I wouldn't have burned my entire fucking inner circle down to the ground.

Speaker 5 You know, but I wouldn't even give it a chance because I was too macho the culture that I had been exposed to my entire life. And that's what I speak on now.

Speaker 5 I speak about how we're killing each other with this suck it up mentality because it's bullshit. Yeah.
I understand it. Suck it up.
We have to deal with certain things.

Speaker 5 But there's nothing wrong with, hey, suck it up while we're doing this. We got a job to do.
Let's go get our guys. And then when we come back, if it fucking bothers you, let's talk about it.

Speaker 5 Because there's nothing wrong with me and you being completely human and not being okay it's okay to not be okay

Speaker 5 and that's what i'm trying to instill in when i speak at conferences and everything it's okay

Speaker 5 doesn't make you less of a man fuck it makes you more of a man it's worth me doing that if it reaches one fucking person in our community or even outside and it helps them become a better mother father husband, wife, child, whatever.

Speaker 5 If it helps them realize that they need help and they can go get the help they want, then fuck it. I'll relive it because that's what we do.

Speaker 5 We lift people up. We don't fucking help bring them down.
And I got caught in this vicious cycle of bringing people down because I was so fucked up for so long.

Speaker 5 When my whole world crumbled down on top of me right after that, when everything just started, I mean, everything just started eating shit around me.

Speaker 5 I fell into the victim mindset. And it was the whole why me, why me, why me? Why have I been exposed to all this? Why have I experienced this? I got scared to go to fucking sleep at night.

Speaker 5 I would cry alone, away from my wife. I would be in another room crying because I was afraid to go to fucking sleep because of what was coming for me in the middle of the night.
I knew it. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And I would hide that.

Speaker 5 And I'm not ashamed of that anymore.

Speaker 4 How long did it take you to be able to

Speaker 4 talk about that?

Speaker 5 Long time. Many years.
To talk about it the way that I talk about it now.

Speaker 5 Long time. Fucking decade.

Speaker 5 I tried. I tried later on in life to talk about it and I'd shut down every time.
I just couldn't do it.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 But I realized at some point that my experiences may help other people too. And

Speaker 5 by me speaking about it, it may help me as well. And that it did.
And that's what I do now. I always say when you're in a place that makes you sick, you can't get better.

Speaker 5 It's like a cancer patient testing cigarettes for Marlborough or whoever.

Speaker 5 You're only going going to get sicker. I tried to stay.

Speaker 5 I hung on tooth and nail, man, but I realized when I realized I had problems and something needed to change when I finally, because people ask me, what made you reach out for help?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 You know, and it was me sitting in my living room dry firing a weapon in my mouth while I'm choking on the weapon.

Speaker 5 The barrel down my throat with slobber and drool all over it and my tears running down my face and a bottle of whiskey next to me.

Speaker 5 And then I load it and then I go to pull the trigger and I stop right where I thought it would go off. And luckily, I stopped prior to it going off.
And I knew right then I needed help.

Speaker 5 So I got the help.

Speaker 5 But it wasn't in time. But yes, to answer your question,

Speaker 5 when I got away from the fire department, things started drastically changing for me. The anxiety,

Speaker 5 I always had the nightmare shit I still do.

Speaker 5 But that that rage inside of you,

Speaker 5 it calms. So getting away from there was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.
I didn't want to leave like that. I wanted to stay on the job 30 years.

Speaker 5 I wanted to retire. I wanted to do the right thing for my guys, ride that rig for them,

Speaker 5 but it wasn't in the cards for me.

Speaker 5 So I got away from there for a long time and now I'm back. And now I do a lot of work with fire departments, police departments, but I'm better now.
And

Speaker 5 I'm with them at a different capacity now, you know? So I'm not completely immersed in it all the time. I can step away from it.

Speaker 4 yeah yeah when did you decide to put the bottle down

Speaker 5 the day after our wedding in 2012 oh shit yeah man I got so fucked up at our own at our wedding that my poor wife she

Speaker 5 she had to eat cold grits with the with the cab driver that took us to our hotel because her husband was passed out upstairs oh shit yeah a great first night together Oh shit.

Speaker 5 No, but I had been thinking about it for a while. That was just, for me, that was just the thing.
I woke up the next morning and I said, man, I don't ever want to touch this stuff again. And

Speaker 5 I haven't. Cold turkey.
Yeah. Done.
Yeah, I looked at it and I started looking at if I'm ever going to get better,

Speaker 5 it's going to be a long road of hope.

Speaker 5 But I need to look at the things I can control right now that are not helping me. And the biggest one that stuck out to me was alcohol.
There was, it didn't add any positive thing in my life. Nothing.

Speaker 5 Everything that it offered me was negative. So I was like, dude, just got to go.

Speaker 5 So I just, I quit cold turkey right then.

Speaker 4 That's not easy to do.

Speaker 5 No, but it's at first, you know, the hardest part about it is now being the sober guy around all the people that are drinking. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And you're sitting there when you don't want to be there, like you talk about in your social anxiety posts.

Speaker 5 I get it. Yeah.
Because I don't want to fucking be here. But I have to put on this smile.
And that doesn't mean I'm not contemplating fucking everybody up in this room.

Speaker 5 But it's just something I've had to learn to accept

Speaker 5 and deal with. And I'd rather have that than going back home with that bottle and putting myself in a position to not be here anymore.
Yeah, well, for

Speaker 4 everybody that's listening who is from the fire service or military or police who's fucking drowning themselves in a bottle right now, and there's a lot of them.

Speaker 4 I mean, how fast after you quit drinking

Speaker 4 did

Speaker 4 how fast did that acceleration start to get you into a better mental state? And I'm sure your business fucking started taking off too at that point.

Speaker 5 Well, honestly, I'd love to tell you it was lightning fast, but it wasn't. It was a culmination of things because I was so fucked up.

Speaker 5 The biggest hurdle I had yet to face was ownership and acceptance of everything.

Speaker 5 And I

Speaker 5 always was asking why, and I became the victim of like, this only happens to me. Why me? My life is in such a horrible spot, even though I wasn't drinking.

Speaker 5 I still had that mentality, and that's never who I was prior to all of this.

Speaker 5 I was a very positive upbeat guy, but this thing does something to you, it rewires your brain, and you have to be your own surgeon and go in and fucking reconfigure the wire.

Speaker 5 It took years of me going in and trying to rewire until I finally fixed it. And it wasn't until

Speaker 5 last year when I realized what it was. It was something as simple as

Speaker 5 how

Speaker 5 the word is perspective. Something as simple as perspective.
How do I want to view my world? Do I want to look at it through this victim feeling bad, horrible, fucking poor, poor me lens?

Speaker 5 Or do I want to look at it from a standpoint of, look, you have this beautiful life, you have these horrible experiences, yes, but you can do something with them for the greater good.

Speaker 5 And you can make a positive impact on people with what you have experienced. And so I chose that.
And the second I chose that,

Speaker 5 it was like a light switch.

Speaker 4 Well, how the fuck did that come to you?

Speaker 5 That's funny you asked that. It came to me sitting in my car with a gun in my hand, ready to blow my brains out for the second time.

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