Greg Stube grew up as a Navy brat. His father served for thirty years, and all of Greg’s brothers joined the military. Greg started ROTC at the University of Tennessee. He enlisted in 1988. He was a Special Forces medic, 18 Delta. After serving twenty-three years, he retired from the Army as a sergeant first class.
You’re not going to make it,” everyone in my armor battalion keeps telling me. “Hardly anyone makes Special Forces.”
I’d rather go to Ranger school, but my leaders won’t let me. It’s not a priority for them; they don’t want to spend the money in their budget. If there’s ever a Ranger-qualified guy in an armor battalion, he always comes from somewhere else. Which leaves Special Forces as my only option to get out of my battalion, because I’m woefully disappointed by most of the people around me.
Being in the military is nothing short of a calling for me. I work very hard to max my PT test. Then, when I begin to train for my Expert Infantryman Badge, my attitude is, the harder I train for it, the sooner in my career I can get it.
A lot of the sergeants and senior guys in my platoon—guys who are more established, have been at it longer—work hard training me. I am the only one who passed, and that creates some bitterness. What I discover along the way is that just because I want to excel at everything doesn’t mean everyone else feels the same way. Some guys just want to get through each day, then crack open a Budweiser.
I’m not criticizing people who are happy with the status quo, but that’s not me. I want to be a warrior. But the harder I try to advance my personal goals, the more resentment I get from people who believe I’m making them look bad. They act like I think I’m better than everyone else.
I’m not. There are plenty of people who have the ability to do just as well as I do. They just don’t want to put in the effort.
It’s true that the odds of me getting selected for Special Forces are low. If I fail, then I’ll have to go back to my armor battalion and face everyone who said I’d never be a Green Beret.
I put in my packet.
Get selected to try out in 1992.
I’m the baby in the program. In many ways, I know I don’t belong here. I end up being behind on a lot of things. I’m physically fast because I’m light and small, but the weight-bearing training exercises are hard on me. Near the end, both of my feet are nearly broken. And I don’t have a lot of the emotional maturity that’s going to be required of me.
But I make it through. I get selected.
The next part is out of my control: my specialty. They go through everyone’s packet and decide what it is you’re going to do in Special Forces.
“Eighteen D,” they tell me. “Special Forces medic.”
They send me to learn surgery, anesthesia, trauma management, minor dentistry, and veterinary medicine. The last two, I’m told, are designed to help win the hearts and minds of local populations in other countries. Pulling a painful tooth for someone who has never been to a dentist before can be a life-changing thing. Same with their livestock, which can be hard for them to get help for. Performing these services can help build rapport really quickly.
Learning all these things helps expand my mind—and it’s also very humbling. Up until this point, everything I’ve accomplished in the Army has been top-notch. Nobody has beaten me at anything. Now, though, I’m doing my best, and I’m in the bottom 20 percent of the class.
After completing the medical portion of my training, I’m sent to Special Forces language training—the last step in becoming a qualified Green Beret. For the next six months, I learn Russian. That right there pretty much destines me to go to the 10th Special Forces Group.
At twenty-five, I’m the youngest in the group. Everyone else is significantly older—the average age is thirty-five. What I start to notice right away—what I love and respect about these guys—is that everyone pitches in and helps each other out.
Still, it’s intimidating, and there’s a lot I have to learn. The real technical and tactical proficiency starts now. We’re preparing to go to Bosnia.
The country is at the tail end of its five-year civil war, and there’s a lot going on when we arrive: genocide, mass killings, and an unbelievable number of amputations from land mines. There are well over six million land mines planted in the ground around our operational area.
I see the trauma up close when a six-year-old girl picks up an antipersonnel mine. It had a plastic body on it, and she thought it was a toy. When it blew, the bomb traumatically amputated her arm. I complete the amputation by removing devitalized tissue, up to and including the lower half of the cubital (elbow) joint. This allows for a more functional amputated limb, or stump.
Treating her, pulling teeth for some of the locals, providing prenatal care, reducing the infant mortality rate—all these things wind up helping our relations in the community and help further our objectives in the area. I try to maturely wrestle with everything I’m seeing, wrestle with these mortality issues, but all I do is become arrogant and narcissistic. I believe I’m ten feet tall and bulletproof. I believe the rest of the world will never fully comprehend what I see and do every day—and probably couldn’t handle it anyway. I have no idea my maturity is going in the wrong direction, that I’m setting myself up for a much bigger failure down the road.
After 9/11, the Army reinvents and relaunches its 18 X-ray program, or 18X, in order to address the need for more Special Forces soldiers. The Army gets an influx of kids from all walks of life—many of them giving up lucrative, high-status positions in law or medicine or passing on athletic scholarships and professional sponsorships because they can get a first-time enlistment for 18X and become Green Berets. The Army calls these kids SF babies, which stands for Special Forces babies. It’s kind of a disrespectful name, because these kids, for all intents and purposes, are babies. They don’t even know what’s in the box, and now they’re supposed to start thinking outside the box.
I’m working for the Army’s Special Warfare Training Group as an instructor in surgery and anesthesia when I go to the sergeant major of the medical training center and volunteer to train these kids. “Instead of complaining about this,” I tell him, “I want to be there to try and make a difference for these guys.” He grants my wish.
I’m really tough on my students.
It’s very difficult to watch them go to war before me. I decide to talk to some people, and in August of 2006 I’m sent to Afghanistan. I see some of my former students. One guy runs up to me and says, “Sergeant Stube, we’ve got this crazy mission ahead of us. It looks like we’re going to be going up against the Mongolian hordes and we really, really need you. Can you come with us? Can you get on this mission?”
You never know how many opportunities you’re going to get to fight alongside the people you’ve trained. You never know how many mentorship chances you’ll get, and I don’t want to miss my chance to go out with these guys.
I go through the appropriate channels and then, finally, get the approval from Special Forces Command. I join the mission with the 3rd Group.
Three Special Forces teams are assigned to the mission called Operation Medusa. We’ll provide a blocking force to help support the Canadian command. It’s our job to go into the Panjwayi Valley and flush out the bad guys. As they flee, the Canadians will crush them.
We head to a hilltop called Sperwan Ghar. It’s the nucleus of the Taliban—the birthplace of the Taliban. NATO had spent a lot of money developing the area, building resources like schools, and after NATO left the Taliban moved back in and reclaimed it. It’s Taliban headquarters now and used as a training center. Our intel is very deficient, so we have no idea just how many Taliban fighters there are waiting for us.
We also have no idea how they’re going to fight. From everything we’ve seen, they engage in guerilla warfare tactics: ambush, then disengage and disappear.
Our plan is to head south from Kandahar and move up through the desert along the border of Pakistan—a route that they would never anticipate. Our vehicles keep getting stuck in the soft red sand dunes. It takes us well over a day to travel those hundred miles through the desert. It’s miserable, arduous work.
As soon as we get through the desert, we make contact.
The Taliban digs in and fights.
They aren’t going anywhere.
During the first hour of fighting, as we’re advancing on the hill, there’s so much shooting that we go what we call black on ammo. We’ve got zero ammunition left. C-130s drop pallets of fresh ammo behind our position, and we have to leave our positions to go retrieve it.
As the fighting continues, we get intel from the air that says there are a thousand Taliban in our area.
And they’ve surrounded us.
There’s so much gunfire going on, the noise so loud, I’m desensitized to it. It’s all the little noises that scare me: the sonic crack of a bullet going past me, rounds hitting my vehicle and the chicken plate on the fifth wheel.
Fear makes you feel small. I’m scared, and there’s a moment when I have to wrestle with the frightened child inside me who keeps asking, Do we really have to do this? Why would they want me to die? Do I really have to kill somebody to stop that from happening? A part of me keeps wishing that we can all just sit down and talk. If we can do that, I know we can find stuff we have in common and not kill each other.
On day five, we’re told we need to take the top of the hill.
Ten guys start to fight their way up to the hilltop. When they get to the other side of it, one of our Afghani counterparts steps on a mine. It blows off one of his legs and puts some holes in his chest. As I work to get him packaged up to be evacuated—if and when the fighting slows down—I hear the voices in my headset growing more urgent.
The gunfire suddenly gets even crazier. More intense. It seems as though our ten guys are about to be overrun. I’m ordered to get in the weapons truck, with its heavy machine gun, and drive it up to the top of the hill to provide covering fire so our guys can withdraw.
I manage to get to the truck. I drive up the hill.
There’s an explosion.
I’m blown up, burned, and shot in a matter of moments. Yet I’m still conscious, so I can see what’s happened.
I’ve lost half of my intestines. My right foot and ankle are missing, and I have major burns all over my body.
A bunch of guys rush over to me. One of them is a medic—a guy I flunked in one of the courses I taught. His name is Riley Stevens, and he had to go all the way back through school a second time. I haven’t been face-to-face with him since flunking him way back when.
“Hey,” I say, my voice weak. “No hard feelings, right?”
I watch him go to work on me. “A remotely detonated IED got you,” he says. “I’ve called in a medevac.”
Two choppers arrive to clear the area for medevac. They’re immediately attacked by RPGs. Luckily, they miss, but the choppers have to retreat because the fighting is too intense. It’s too risky for them to stay.
An hour later, another pair of choppers—two Apaches—fly in and, like angry wasps, attack the bad guys. They work so hard—and risk so much—to kill them all. Later, I’ll be told that these two brave Apache pilots, upon hearing that a Green Beret was down, decided to do whatever it took to wipe out the enemy.
Two hours from when I’m injured, I’m on a medevac. Behind the haze of morphine, before I go unconscious, my thoughts shift back to Riley Stevens, the man who just saved my life.
When I lay wounded on the battlefield and my teammates approached me to help, my first thought was, There’s no way these chuckleheads can save my life. They have no idea how to deal with this kind of trauma. And whose fault was that? It was mine. I was the problem.
I wasn’t able to see the greatness in Riley until there was something in it for me—and I’m tremendously disappointed in myself. That greatness was in him the whole time. I could have mentored him better. I could have brought him closer instead of stiff-arming him away, just allowing him to fail.
Later on, he’ll be killed in Afghanistan.
I’m unconscious when I arrive at Kandahar.
Once the surgeons stabilize me, they spend eighteen hours doing vascular surgery to reattach my foot and ankle. Most of my intestines are already gone, but they manage to put my abdomen back together. I have to wear a colostomy bag.
Thirty percent of my body, I’m told, is covered with third-degree burns.
When the IED went off, the doctors explain, it pushed diesel fuel and rocket propellant and other stuff into me, and it just continued to burn, burn, burn. Because of the extensive damage from these full-thickness burns, I’m sent for treatment in Landstuhl, Germany.
After a three-day stay, I’m taken to Fort Sam Houston in Texas to do the “head down, butt up, shut up” routine. Because of the intestinal loss, I can’t control my bowels. I have yellow diarrhea constantly running into my third-degree burns. Anywhere between fifteen to twenty times a day I have people I don’t know coming into the room to wipe my ass for me.
This was never covered in my training. I’m not prepared for it.
These people take care of me in ways I’ve never taken care of anyone else. They say it’s their job, but I can see the genuine love and compassion in their actions. These people teach me, on a daily basis, that true strength comes from this kind of love and compassion for others.
I begin to form a new opinion about the definition of the term “service.”
The one thing people always told me to do was never surrender. But surrender is the one thing I’ll have to do if I’m going to survive this. I have to surrender to this kind of service, to this kind of love and compassion, if I’m going to make it. Then I’m going to need to get to work developing the areas of my personality I know aren’t tough enough to get me through whatever else life has in store for me.
When my recovery is complete, I fix up a uniform that I can close over my “wound vacuum”—the tubes, rods, and bars—and over the external fixation device I have on my bolted-together right leg.
The commander of the United States Army Special Operations Command, Lieutenant General Wagner, has an open-door policy. I walk unassisted into his office.
“Sir, I’m a patient at Brooke Army Medical Center. I know they’re processing me for medical retirement. Sir, please don’t let this happen to me. No disrespect, but there are people in this building who have never done as much as I can still do for this army.”
He studies me for a moment.
“It’s funny that you’re here,” he says, and picks up a folder. “This here’s a request for you to go on Headline News for an hour-long live interview. Tell you what: if you can do this and not embarrass us, I’ll give you a job in public affairs. How does that sound?”
It sounds like a lot of pressure. “Thank you, sir.”
I wind up sitting down for an interview with Glenn Beck. I think it goes well.
Lieutenant General Wagner agrees and rewards me with a job as spokesman for USASOC.
The CEO of Burger King sees the Glenn Beck interview and calls the Army. He gets transferred to USASOC and asks about me. “We want him to come to our corporate retreat in Puerto Rico next week and speak to us,” the CEO says.
Everyone says no. The request makes its way to Lieutenant General Wagner for final disapproval.
“Let him go,” he tells everyone.
It’s my first official job as spokesman.
What I was able to share with people was how I learned that we all need to serve something bigger than ourselves. And if we want to inspire, we need to make ourselves small, not large. Like mothers, for example. Moms can be exhausted and hungry, even injured, but they’re wiping our butts throughout the night. Her success, though, is also our success. If we can all be servant leaders, then our teams will thrive and prevail.
None of us pictures the day when what we love to do suddenly ends, because we all see ourselves as being great. But it does end—a retirement that comes way too soon, maybe even a traumatic moment. Whether at home or at war, we soldiers need to be in the business of putting ourselves out of business. If the next generation isn’t better than us, they might not be able to save us.