I BELIEVE IT IS MY DUTY to be the best person I can be: morally, ethically, physically, emotionally. I’m far from perfect, and I don’t expect to ever stop making mistakes, but it is my duty to try to do my best in all of those areas.
A team is only as strong as its weakest link. If any team members take shortcuts or fail to fulfill their responsibilities, they will increase the possibility that a team mission will fail.
It is like a dam with a weak spot: eventually, that dam could break at that vulnerable place if it doesn’t get fixed. People often won’t notice small, weak spots, or they might see them but not address them. That is a risk.
It is important to identify members of your team who have substandard training or skills, or who are lacking in integrity, and to figure out how to address those issues. On the individual level, it’s important to keep identifying and working on patching up our own weak spots. Life is in constant motion. The best plans can change in an instant. When everyone is routinely fulfilling their duties and maintaining their responsibilities to the group, then the team is always ready to pivot, adapt, and respond if the mission needs to change.
When the shit hits the fan, everyone needs to be a team player, not a me player. Otherwise, the likelihood that the mission will fail increases. In my line of work, when a mission fails, people may die. I am thinking not only of my own teammates, but also of innocent bystanders or other first responders.
If a member of my team is not trained properly, or doesn’t have good judgment, that person may take a bad shot. I’ve said before that I have to be able to trust that my team has my back, and that everyone is willing to put their life on the line. But I also need to count on my teammates to know what they are doing in more mundane circumstances, to know that they will do their duty and respond correctly in any situation.
Rangers are forced to work as a team right from the start. When they sent trucks to pick us up to take us to Ranger Battalion for the first time, they told us we had to put all of our bags on the back of one of the trucks in no more than thirty seconds. We had to scramble as a group to make that happen, but managed to get our bags neatly stacked and loaded in about thirty seconds.
The Ranger instructor seemed surprised, and since the whole purpose of the task was to have an excuse to show us what happens when you come up short, they played a little mind-fuck game with us, telling us we must be idiots because we put everything on the wrong truck. We had twenty seconds to move all the gear to a second truck. We had to work together to succeed and we were going to be punished together if we failed. Hell, we were going to be punished together either way.
No Shortcuts in Ranger School
We couldn’t ever take shortcuts in Ranger School. Guys who were generally meeting standards might get a second chance at retraining on a particular skill they were having trouble with. For example, an otherwise competent candidate may be given the opportunity to re-test, once, on the task she or he failed, but ultimately they need to meet the standard. Everyone really did have to pass everything. Airborne School was not as intense as Ranger School, but there were no shortcuts there either, because if we messed up on the job, we were increasing our odds of dying or killing someone else.
At Ranger Battalion, every mission had to be coordinated down to the last individual. Let’s say that a unit is assigned to carry out a direct-action mission in a village. The fire teams that will move through the village to clear the houses will have to coordinate with the machine-gun teams on the hill. Failure to do so could mean they risk being shot by their own guys.
As a machine gunner, I would be watching for signals from the fire teams. A red signal flare means that the fire team is stuck in one building and can’t move forward. A green signal flare means that the fire team has cleared the house it was in and is moving to the next spot. That means that the machine guns need to shift fire to another target or set of targets. Teamwork is essential, because if you don’t work together, even in a training situation, someone may die who should not have.
I remember the Army built a mock village at Yakima Training Center in Washington, where I had one of my first training ops. The military created Special Ops Command several years after the infamous failure in 1980 of Operation Eagle Claw, the aborted attempt to rescue the fifty-two US Embassy staff being held captive at the embassy in Tehran. Eight servicemen were killed. The military analyzed the fiasco and issued a report recommending areas of improvement across different branches. By the time I got there, air and ground elements were coordinating and training together. We had an Air Force element, an AC-130 Spectre gunship, and we also had little birds from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) (Night Stalkers, as they are known in the military) providing air support as well as transporting Rangers to fast rope into the objective. The 160th SOAR is the elite helicopter team out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, that supports all special ops branches of service.
Low Man on the Totem Pole
I had not yet attended Ranger School, so I was the lowest guy on the totem pole, an untabbed private. My job was to be an ammo bearer, which meant that I was holding extra ammunition for the machine guns. I remember sitting in on the briefing, watching and listening and being grateful that I was not in charge. There were so many elements to this plan of attack, I wouldn’t have known where to begin. We had a three-dimensional model of the mock village (we called it the sandtable), and the leaders were using it to walk us through the plan: they would point and say, “This is where helo X is going to land and Squad A is going to be on helo Y over here” and so on. It was important to be clear, because when all of the helicopters started flying, one could crash into another if any one of them was off even a little bit. It was going to be chaos out there, and it would be even worse in the dark.
We had to rely on the 160th SOAR to get where we needed to go. Once we dropped down, we needed to move a little bit. At this point, my M240G machine-gun team was supposed to be up on a hill along with the Carl Gustaf Recoilless–rifle teams, putting suppressive fire into the mock villages so that the fire teams could begin assaulting the objectives. Our task was to fire from a distance in and around Building One where the bad guys would be, and then shift to Building Two when the line squads alerted us via green star clusters (a flare) that they were ready to actually physically enter into Building One to either apprehend a high-value target or surgically clear the area, depending on the objective. This would happen continuously until all buildings were cleared and the objective was secure.
Completing such an operation successfully requires an amazing amount of precision, coordination, and teamwork. There are little birds—helicopters—doing strafing runs while the Ranger squads are landing and moving to assault the objective. The little birds are flying low and raining down hate with their 2.75 rockets and miniguns, and blowing things up so everything is already getting peppered as the guys on the ground start moving.
When the birds are low, they are all you can hear when you are standing on the ground. The guys in the birds will be on standby so that if the machine-gun teams aren’t getting everything, the birds can come in and provide some suppressive power. Let’s say that a fire team is crossing over a fence and through a front yard on their way to a house that they need to clear. The machine-gun team is shooting into that house as the fire team runs toward the house. When the fire team shoots a green flare into the sky, the machine-gun team knows it’s time to redirect its fire to the next house. At the same time, the fire team runs into the house that had been getting torn up by machine-gun fire.
I am describing a training exercise, so in some ways, it’s not real. But in other ways, it is, since the exercise uses live fire. We were shooting real bullets and real rockets and using real miniguns. We had a Spectre above us that needed to fire a little farther because it was suppressing a different area. I could hear the buzz of the Spectre gun, the hammer of the miniguns, and the pop of the 102 howitzer cannon all around me, but I couldn’t see any of them until they hit and I could see the explosions.
We had machine-gun fire, flares going up, and little birds doing their strafing runs when the C-130 Spectre hit. There were constant explosions in my night-vision goggles. Most of us were just learning this stuff.
How was it possible that no one was dying? Because of the intense teamwork, coordination, and commitment to duty. Nobody had an ego and nobody was putting himself above the team. Some guys might have been arrogant, but everyone knew his job and exactly what he was supposed to do and when he was supposed to do it. Our leaders were clear about what they needed from each of us, and we were each clear about our particular duty to the mission.
Teamwork was essential for us to accomplish this complicated mission in the middle of chaos, and a sense of duty was essential to creating a successful team. In the Army, the machine is what succeeds, not any individual soldier. The Rangers succeed, not Ranger Paronto. A person does not belong in the military if he or she can’t handle that. But a person does not have to be in the military to fulfill obligations and provide a great service to a team.
Values That Work in the Army Work in Civilian Life, Too
Duty is a key value at work, even if your life isn’t on the line. When I was in graduate school, I took a job at Mutual of Omaha as an insurance adjuster. My goal, at that time, was to get back into the military, so I wasn’t working in the job of my dreams, but I understood that I had a duty to do good work and to accomplish the goals that were set for me.
We had teams of half a dozen people assigned to accomplish particular goals. The goal might have been to process a certain number of insurance adjustment files by a particular deadline, so it wasn’t a life-or-death situation. But our team had to work together to meet the deadline, and if any one of us didn’t carry his or her weight, our whole team would be reprimanded, and there were consequences for the people waiting on those claims.
I discovered that, as I had seen in the military, shared goals and positive attitudes made our team fire on all cylinders. I worked as fast as I could because I didn’t want our mission to fail and I didn’t want to lose a bonus. But I also really didn’t want to let my team down. The stakes were different, but the value of the teamwork we displayed was just as important.
When I started at Omaha, I had two great bosses—Scott Holmes, a former Air Force JAG officer, and Jerry Dubyak, a Vietnam veteran Air Force pilot. I do not think it was a coincidence that both of these men turned out to be excellent commanders as civilians. Scott and Jerry knew how to get things done, and they knew how to command without yelling or creating dissent.
We all learned the same methods for investigating fraud and reviewing files, and that helped us get things done harmoniously. Scott and Jerry created strong team environments with integrity, they made work fun, and they helped the people who worked there train with consistent processes. I’m still in touch with guys from that job.
Rob Jaber is another guy with whom I worked and still keep in touch. Rob went through a training course at Blackwater, the American private military company, with Dave Benton and me, and I liked him right away. Most of the guys in contractor trainings are former military men. Rob had no military background, but he held his own among the special ops guys.
Some of the former military guys wanted to make sure everyone in the training environment understood who they were, and I can imagine someone in Rob’s position being intimidated, but he was not. Instead, Rob projected a quiet confidence in his own skills and abilities, and he quickly earned my respect.
Rob, who lived in Lebanon as a child, could also speak Arabic. In the early 1980s, as war was breaking out in Lebanon, Rob’s father secured permanent visas for his family to come to the United States. Rob and his siblings learned and spoke English at schools in Michigan, but the Jaber family continued to speak Arabic at home.
In 1993, Rob graduated from high school and, six years later, graduated from the University of Michigan–Dearborn with a major in economics and a minor in business.
Rob worked as a management trainee at a bank and moved on to several jobs like that until he was working at Morgan Stanley as a financial advisor. To an observer, it must have seemed like Rob was on a straight path, advancing in his career and taking on volunteer work in the local business community in organizations like the Chamber of Commerce.
But even as he was succeeding, Rob was discovering that he didn’t want to work behind a desk. In his free time, Rob began training to be a reserve officer with the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office, and he found that the active way of life it required was one he wanted to pursue professionally.
Rob’s fluency in Arabic was his ticket. Rob accepted a six-month contract in Iraq with an organization called WorldWide Language Resources in 2003. “I thought I’d do it for the heck of it,” he said. “Six months seemed like a good length of time to try. I asked my uncle if he wanted to do it, too, and he said yes, so we went over together and both worked as translators.”
It would be Rob’s first time being away from family and friends.
At first, Rob was assigned to assist a military unit that took money from the airport in Baghdad to the Central Bank of Iraq. Rob blended in, as long as he didn’t speak. “As soon as I spoke, locals could tell from my dialect that I was different,” he said. “On the other hand, people didn’t always assume Americans could understand them, and sometimes if there were personnel around with their own interpreters, I would pretend that I couldn’t understand and be able to do a bit of a double check.”
Toward the end of that contract, Rob was attached to the Defense Intelligence Agency. His new team “ran sources and tried to collect high-value intelligence,” he said. “This was less routine work than I had been doing, and it was pretty interesting. I started to meet other guys working on the premiere detail and got exposed to other security contracting opportunities.”
At the end of the contract, Rob returned home to Michigan and began training to work as a protective security specialist for Blackwater. That’s when I met him, and we both deployed right afterward. Rob remembers feeling more comfortable in Iraq when he returned: “I knew what I was getting into. I knew some locals; I had made some contacts during my first assignment. I was able to drive because I already knew a lot of the roads. Most of the people working in Baghdad then lived in the same protected, general area, so I knew a lot of those guys, too.” Rob’s uncle was also still in Baghdad, working for Rob’s former company on a new contract.
“Odd Man Out”
Even though this was Rob’s second trip to Iraq, and he felt more sure of himself, he was still feeling his way in his new role. “It was different really being a member of a security team,” he said. “My background was different. I felt like I was the odd man out. Most of the other guys had time in the military, and longevity, and specialties under their belts that I didn’t. I was a little unsure of myself and worried that I was underqualified.”
Rob had to remind himself that he had passed the training course and that he belonged there like everyone else. I was surprised when Rob later told me how unsure he felt at the time, because he was assigned to my team and I remember him always having a great attitude, like, “Let’s do this job and get it going.” When I told him that, he said, “Well, I loved it. Even though I had my moments of doubt, I liked what I was doing so much better than when I had been working a desk job!”
Rob’s status as the unit’s sole Muslim and the only person of Arabic descent made him feel self-conscious. “We were in the Middle East so we would hear the calls to prayer during the day, and sometimes someone would make a disparaging comment,” he said.
Each time that happened, Rob spoke up. “I’d say something like, ‘I’m standing next to you. I don’t disrespect your religion; don’t disrespect mine.’”
Rob, who had attended Catholic schools, grew up respecting other religions. “Most of the guys were great, and I felt like we were brothers,” he said of the unit. “We were living together, six hundred guys in these boxes in the desert, almost like shipping containers cut in half, where they made rooms. You bet we got to know each other. We might think differently, we might have different outlooks on different topics, but at the end of the day we came together and we trusted each other. I knew that if the shit hit the fan, they would have my back.”
Rob’s language skills made him invaluable. “We were tasked with making things more secure, and we always got what we wanted done,” he said, “often because, I think, I was able to be more nuanced when we talked with people. Many locals were a little more cooperative with me, and I didn’t have to worry about whether an interpreter was translating properly.”
Rob enjoyed the work and re-upped his contracts, which normally ran three months on and one month off, through 2009. “We always joked around about how many close calls we had had,” Rob said. “‘I’ve got four more to go on my nine lives,’ that kind of joking.”
Rob had married in 2008, and he and his wife started a family right away. “I always saw contracting as an opportunity, not a career,” he said. “I promised my wife that I would do one more contract after the one I was on expired and that I would come home by the end of the year and call it quits in 2010, no matter what.”
Rob hoped his next career move would be in law enforcement or the civil service, and he applied for jobs with the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Federal Air Marshal Service.
“I had applied for those jobs before,” he said, “and I would get these generic emails saying there was no hiring in my area. Once I started working with people downrange while I was contracting, I made some helpful contacts and felt like I was making progress.”
Rob started undergoing the extensive testing required by some of these organizations. He would schedule those tests during his time off, when he was home, and he began passing the written tests, panel interviews, and physical training tests, and started to feel optimistic about his possibilities for life after contracting. “I didn’t feel exactly politically motivated,” he told me, “but I felt like I was doing a meaningful job, helping to keep Americans safe. I felt like I was acting for the people, for our people, and I wanted to make it my career.”
I enjoyed working with Rob overseas. Some interpreters don’t carry weapons, but Rob had passed every shooting and training course, carried a gun, and was a valuable member of the team. Sometimes local guys would be speaking to me in Arabic, while Rob was nearby, not letting on that he could understand what they were saying. Rob would often turn to me and say, “That guy is full of shit,” and he usually turned out to be right. Rob was funny, he worked hard, and he was always willing to help out. He is still like that.
Our main goal at that time was to protect US Embassy workers and get the personnel who needed to travel outside the Green Zone to their meetings and back safely.
At that time, ministries and other government buildings were reopening. Any US personnel who were there to help the Iraqis get things up and running needed protection when they traveled outside the Green Zone in the city.
While these trips were routine, Rob remembers the tension of going into Red Zone areas: “You never knew what to expect,” he said. “Even in the practice runs, the prep runs, the setup, it was so fluid, it was like you had to anticipate anything.” Conditions were changing in Iraq: small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades had initially been the biggest threats, but now the enemy had gotten creative and was employing more car bombs and suicide bombs. “You could never relax,” Rob said. “It was always a cat-and-mouse game.” Rob was performing well and enjoying the work, but his thoughts were turning to home.
Rob’s son, Adam, was born in July of 2009. Rob returned to Michigan the day after his son’s birth and started a new tour in Iraq in September, promising his wife, Alia, that he would quit contracting work by December of 2010. “That was our plan,” he said. “I still liked the work, but I needed to figure something else out because I also wanted to be there with my son, every day. I knew I was going to be missing stuff.”
But things didn’t go as planned. On October 25, 2009, Rob was wounded by a double suicide car bomb attack.
It happened at a ministry that Rob had been to many times before. “It was an ordinary venue that wasn’t far from the Green Zone, by the second bridge on the Tigris River,” he said. “It was still in Baghdad and not an especially hot area.”
Rob’s team was there doing advance work for a planned visit. Rob usually worked advance details, because his language skills were so helpful, and then was helping to provide exterior security.
“I was on Raven 14,” Rob said. “We got there at about 9:30 a.m. and parked our vehicles where we normally parked at this ministry. It was right off the main road, surrounded by T walls [made of twelve-foot-high, portable, steel-reinforced concrete for blast protection], and had a metal gate that slides back and forth. The detail would eventually drive through the gate.”
Rob went inside with a team leader for Raven 14 named Heath Chitwood, whom everyone called Val. “We went inside, and the designated marksmen went to set up on the roof while Val and I coordinated with their security guards and brought the canines in to sweep,” Rob said. “Once everyone was in position, Val and I called in the clear on the inside of the building, and then we stood at the entrance of the building. I remember we were talking about both being ready for a break.”
Security appeared to be tighter than normal, Rob said. “There were usually five or six local guys providing security by the front, but on this morning, it seemed as though double that number of guys were standing around.”
Rob and Val talked about the unusual number of local guards, but they didn’t think much of it. Rob wondered if maybe the ministry had just hired some new guys for security.
“Then we heard an explosion go off at the Ministry of Justice, which was near Bridge 4, about a quarter of a mile away,” Rob said. “We could feel the vibration and then we heard small-arms fire. We radioed it in, but even that was not extra alarming.”
As anyone who has spent time downrange in Iraq at that time will tell you, the thunder of a distant explosion was not out of the ordinary. Radio vehicles would let them know where it was coming from.
Rob said he just thought, “God, that was a loud one,” when he heard the firefight that morning. But his detail was close to the Green Zone and his comfort level was high.
That didn’t last. Thirty seconds later, Rob heard small-arms fire that sounded much closer, right outside the building. He was facing away from the ministry, looking toward the gate, and Val was facing the building, talking on the radio.
A second car bomb detonated, but this one was right in front of them. “It was almost like something you would see in a movie, the way everything slowed way down,” Rob said. “One minute I was looking out, with my sunglasses over my eyes and my earpiece in my ear. Then the bomb went off. The first thing I saw was a huge flame rising over the gate. Then the shock waves came over and under the gate, rolling right toward me as the gate disappeared. It was like watching a wave of heat move through the air.”
When I think about how close Rob was to that explosion, it feels like a miracle that he’s still here to talk about it. I have seen shock waves, and it’s a strange and powerful thing, as though you are seeing something that isn’t meant to be visible, but I know I’ve never seen anything like what Rob saw that day.
The ministry had been hit by a VBIED. A car had pulled up right outside, and the driver claimed that he had just broken down. “I heard that a local Iraqi guy gave authorization for these trucks to come through, so maybe it was an internal job. I don’t know,” Rob said. “But it didn’t seem like most of their guys got hurt, aside from a few concussions.”
It proved to be the most lethal double suicide bombing in four years: more than two hundred people died and nine hundred were wounded, most of them locals. Rob was within fifty meters of the explosive impact, as close as I can imagine someone being and still survive.
“I put my hand up to my face, defensively,” Rob remembers, “and began to turn my head and body toward the right, away from the wave. The next thing I knew, it was just complete silence.” Rob remembers talking to himself as he regained consciousness. “It was all in my own voice, and all in my mind, although it felt like it was happening out loud.” Rob remembers asking, “What’s going on?” Rob’s own voice answered, “I don’t know.” “Are you dead?” Rob asked. “I don’t know,” Rob answered. Rob wondered, “Is this what happens when you die? Do you talk to yourself?”
As Rob began to regain consciousness, he found himself in the middle of utter chaos, but he couldn’t open his eyes. “There had been no sound other than my own voice,” Rob said. “But, slowly, I started to get my hearing back. I could hear screaming and crying, but at first it seemed distant. Then I became aware of my hands and knees. I was facedown, but I realized that I had gone through something physical, maybe like a frame. Whatever it was was keeping me partially suspended. In other words, my chest and arms were hanging over something, almost as though I had gone through a window frame and stopped. I still don’t know if that’s what it was.” Rob’s first conscious thought was about his infant son, Adam, and Rob felt a strong need to see him.
“I put my hands up to my face and it felt slimy; I thought maybe I was burned,” Rob said. He still couldn’t see and he remembers thinking, “You’ve got to get up; you’ve got to move.”
Rob was disoriented and thought he was in the same position he had been in before the explosion. “I turned to my left, trying to remember the path of the perimeter of the facility, thinking that I could follow it from memory,” he said. “It felt like I was standing up on top of a hill, but the ground was loose and shifting under my feet.” Rob’s vision was still black, so he extended his hands in front of him as he walked tentatively forward; soon he felt something like a wall.
“I was trying to feel my way, and I wanted to keep going to my left,” Rob said. “The path seemed clear, except sometimes I would hit something that felt like cables, so I would grab them or duck under whatever seemed to be hanging down. Eventually, I stopped and just stood there and tried to get my bearings. I could hear people walking around me and screaming, louder now. Everything I heard was in Arabic and I didn’t know who anyone was.”
Rob found his voice and started calling for Val, who had been standing within two feet of Rob at the moment of the explosion. There was no answer.
Rob knew that he needed to get out of there, but as more of his senses began to return, he became less sure of what to do. “It was as though different possible threats kept emerging as I became more conscious of my surroundings. I wasn’t feeling any pain yet, if you can believe it,” he said.
As Rob tried to make sense of his situation, he heard his teammates on his radio. “I realized that my earpiece was still in my ear. It wasn’t Val speaking. I wanted to respond, so I felt for where I normally clipped my mic, but that wasn’t there any longer. I start feeling around on my body, trying to find my radio so that I could grab my mic wire and respond to the radio call. I said that I was still inside but that I didn’t know my exact location, that I couldn’t see, and that I couldn’t find Val. But then I heard the voices through the earpiece again and they told me to hold on and not move; they were going to come and get me. They said they were still inside the building, and to hold on.”
Then Rob heard a voice near him, a man speaking Arabic. “He was saying, ‘Someone help this guy,’” Rob remembers, “but no one was responding to him. He sounded like a local. His voice got louder as he approached me, and, speaking in Arabic, he told me to give him my hand.” Rob hesitated and then held out his hand. The stranger guided Rob down a hill until he was on level ground. Rob didn’t know it, but he was climbing down a pile of bodies.
“Am I outside or inside?” asked Rob, who still couldn’t see.
“You’re outside,” the man told him.
“Sit tight; we’re coming,” Rob heard the voice say through his earpiece, in English.
After they had walked a few steps on what felt like flat ground, the man stopped. “Walk straight ahead,” he told Rob, “until you feel water.” Rob wondered why there was water outside. He learned later that the explosion had dug a crater in the ground so deep that it caused the water lines to burst. But in that moment, it made no sense that water would be flowing in the desert. He could hear people running around and speaking in Arabic.
“We’ve got eyes on you; hang tight,” said the voice in English on his earpiece. Right then, an American soldier came over and guided Rob back to the vehicles across the street. “Be careful as you step over the water,” he told Rob. “There are electrical wires hanging down.”
A medic began cleaning Rob’s face. Rob still couldn’t see anything.
“Doc, Val is dead,” Rob told the man working on his face.
“No, he’s not,” the medic told him. “I think he’s in the follow vehicle.” Rob wasn’t sure whether to believe him.
Rob and Val were blown apart from one another, so they didn’t get a chance to compare notes until much later. That’s when Rob found out that when Val regained consciousness after the explosion he could see but couldn’t hear. “It was the reverse of the state I was in, and we both thought the other one was dead.”
As Rob began to become aware of the gravity of his wounds, he asked the medic about them. “Tell me the truth,” Rob demanded back at the main camp in Baghdad. “I don’t care, just tell me how bad it is.”
All Rob remembers is wanting to regain his sight and to see his son. The team needed an escort to take them to Balad Air Base, about forty miles north of Baghdad. Rob doesn’t remember a whole lot about the transportation until the medevac helicopter that was carrying him approached the hospital where he was to be treated.
“I started hurting,” he said. “I realized that my wrist was killing me and that I had the most intense pressure on the top of my head.”
It may sound strange, but Rob was incredibly lucky. When the hospital staff removed Rob’s watch from his wrist at the hospital in Balad, they saw that shrapnel had pierced the center of the watch, suggesting that the watch may have protected him by deflecting a bullet.
Rob had asked his teammates to call his brother in Michigan while he was on the way to the hospital. Rob’s uncle was working with a construction company at the US Embassy in Baghdad, and he traveled to Balad when he heard Rob had been hurt.
“My uncle was there when I regained consciousness in the hospital,” Rob said. “He helped me call my mother and my wife.”
The incident was all over the news, and Rob’s wife had been trying to contact him all day, without success. “I didn’t want anyone to call my wife yet, because I wanted to be the one to call her,” he said.
When the two finally did connect, Rob told her he had been a little beat up.
The truth was that his wounds were extensive. He had suffered a U-shaped gash on his head that was filled with debris, his eyelids were lacerated and hung over his eyes, his nose was deeply cut, three of his lumbar discs had ruptured, and his hearing and vision were both impaired.
“I had stitches and scars all over my face and my face was blown up like a balloon, but I still had all my limbs and I could walk,” Rob said.
Soon after, he returned home to the United States and began to work with neurologists, ophthalmologists, physical therapists, and speech therapists to try to get back into fighting shape.
“My goal was to get back and go downrange for one more mission,” he said. “I wanted to leave contracting on my own two feet.”
Rob initially felt optimistic about this, even though he was crawling up stairs at home because it was too painful to walk up them. And his waking hours centered on trying to regain his health, which proved to be no easy task.
“I had to see so many doctors, it was like a full-time job, and I had to fight to see particular doctors and specialists. I ultimately had to work with a lawyer to get the insurance company to acknowledge my disability and facilitate my medical care.” The stress was taking a toll on Rob: he said he felt “frustrated and angry, all the time.” Rob’s doctors told him it was unlikely he would be able to return to security work.
But that December, Rob got job offers from the Secret Service and the Federal Air Marshal Service. “The job offers came in December, and they wanted me to start in January in DC,” Rob said, sighing. “All that testing, all my plans were finally paying off, and I had to call and tell them what had happened. Of course, the agencies would require a new clearance, which I wasn’t sure I would get, and they couldn’t guarantee that there would be a job waiting for me if and when I got a new clearance.”
Rob felt useless. “I had been in the best shape of my life, constantly going a hundred miles an hour, and all of a sudden I was in pain and physically limited. That hit me really hard.”
All Rob remembers wanting to do was to get back to normal, and he resisted the idea that he and his family might need to define a new normal. “I had been the breadwinner, and now my wife had to go back to work,” he said. “Our son was a few months old. I went into a serious depression. I was really angry at the world and not the easiest person to get along with. My wife and I had a rough two-year patch, because on top of the physical changes I was dealing with, I felt useless not working. The whole situation made me so angry and depressed. I am blessed she stuck by me.”
Rob found it difficult to accept help. “My mom used to come over to try to help with the baby, and I would say, ‘I got this’ and send her home, because I wanted to be useful,” he said. “I felt like I had a duty to contribute something, and I couldn’t stand the idea of people feeling sorry for me.”
Rob’s faith ultimately helped him chart a new course. He still doesn’t know how to interpret his out-of-body experience in the immediate aftermath of the blast. He still doesn’t know whether he was dead. “It was so quiet, just me and my voice, like nothing I had ever seen or experienced before,” he said. “I don’t know if it was a moment with God or why it was all in my voice.”
Rob accepts that his experience may remain a mystery but believes that everything happens for a reason. “I think God did not want me to finish that contract,” he said. “Maybe something else would have happened, something worse. God was telling me, ‘It’s time to go home and be with your family.’”
Thinking about his son, who was six weeks old at the time of the blast, “is what pulled me through,” Rob said. “I had to get up so that I could go see him.”
It took two years for Rob to accept that he needed to set a new goal. Back in Michigan, he and his wife established a car company, which is thriving.
Rob has undergone three back surgeries and he still struggles with his vision, but he is able to drive and read and see his loved ones.
The bombing damaged nerves and compromised feeling in his right foot, but he can walk and, with some adjustments, run. Rob fired a pistol for the first time since the accident recently, but it was much harder than it had been before the blast because his right eye is no longer dominant, which changes his ability to aim. Other things have changed, too. “I am a little bit more patient than I used to be, and I’m learning how to have a normal life again,” he said.
“I loved the action of working overseas, I loved the adrenaline, and I loved the brotherhood. It is a tough job to transition out of, especially when I felt like it took me a while to find it in the first place, but I always want to be independent and self-sufficient, and that keeps me motivated to keep moving down a new path.”
Rob said he feels blessed to be running a successful business, but sometimes he has feelings of doubt: “I think, ‘Is this right? Is this enough?’ I want to keep going because I’m not satisfied.”
Rob is working to keep his business growing and training to run a marathon. “I’m accepting where I am, and keeping my sights on where I need to be,” he said. “It might take me longer to get there, but I know I’ll do it.”
The mass-carnage event that Rob survived was something that most people have experienced only in the movies. It is amazing that he is still alive, and that his spirit is intact. It would be easy for someone in Rob’s position to become bitter and withdrawn, but Rob is neither.
He even said that he would deploy again, if he could, and if, he joked, “my wife wouldn’t divorce me.”
It didn’t surprise me to learn that Rob started a company that has become successful. I’ve watched him learn one new profession from scratch and saw how dedicated he was to making sure he got it right. His commitment to being a good husband, father, and person is also apparent to anyone who knows him. That might be his most impressive quality.
Rob is just one member of a whole category of people who have put their lives on the line and sacrificed for the United States without getting the recognition or benefits that are routinely accorded to veterans.
Rob’s face and head bear some scars, but his struggle is not otherwise visible, and he prefers to keep it that way. “Most people won’t ask about the scars, so they don’t know what happened unless I reveal it, and I am pretty closed off about it,” he said. “I don’t need recognition.”
Rob isn’t the kind of guy who wants to be in the spotlight. “I served my country and I love my country, but I don’t think the United States owes me anything,” he said.
“I loved what I was doing, I loved my brothers, and I think we were taking risks for something that matters. I have been blessed.”
Rob more than fulfilled his duty as a contractor, but, to me, his story also illustrates the power of upholding obligations in your private life. Duty exists not only in the workplace. Rob struggled hard to figure out how to reorganize his life because he felt a deep sense of obligation to be a responsible husband and father, and a self-sufficient, contributing member of society.
I have obligations to my family, my friends, and my community. I have a duty to be honorable and trustworthy, to contribute, and to not let my loved ones down in their moments of need. Sharing a household with other people comes with obligations to help keep that house running smoothly: to make sure the bills are paid, the property is maintained, and the people living under that roof have what they need. It might sound a little strange to think of a household as a team, but I think being in a strong marriage or having a well-functioning family requires teamwork.
We all have a duty to work and to contribute to society, to not be a burden on society. That does not mean that you might not encounter hard times or have moments when you might need some assistance. Your duty, if you are getting help, is to figure out a way to get off the assistance, and maybe even get yourself into a position to pay it back by helping others.
I believe we also have a duty to make sure the teams we belong to are honorable. I wish that more people would stand up and report bullshit when they see it. One of the reasons that I have continued to speak about the events in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, is that I believe we all have a duty to tell the truth. We have an obligation to report deficiencies and immoral behavior in our workplaces and to try to correct them in our communities.
My brothers and I stood up to tell the truth about Benghazi because politicians were trying to cover up the circumstances of the deaths that night. We could not let that stand. If something is not right and no one speaks up, nothing will get fixed, and things may get worse. It sucks to sacrifice a career for the truth. It was not easy to hear people call us liars when we knew we were not. But it would have been much worse had someone else died or been injured because we didn’t speak up.
Duty might seem like a grim value, not something exciting or classically heroic like courage or integrity. But duty is an essential value, in the same way that the ability to exercise willpower is an essential skill. Let’s face it: sometimes you have to do what has to be done, even if it’s going to be hard, and even if there is something else you would rather be doing. In Ranger School, we used to call that “embracing the suck,” and the practice of fulfilling your obligations—or doing your duty—has benefits beyond what you actually get done.
Sometimes it seems like it’s getting harder for some people to set aside their own egos. For most of us, we are part of a team, both at work and at home. And you should try to think of yourself as part of a larger team, too, as part of a larger community or series of communities. You have duties to each one of those teams. Teamwork is not about drinking together or going to parties together. You can build camaraderie by socializing, but that is not teamwork. Teamwork is fulfilling your obligations and, in so doing, upholding the values of the organization.
Most of us neither live nor work in isolation, and when someone in our chain of relationships fails to do their duty, we all feel it sooner or later. When you fulfill your duties, it is helpful to think of yourself as contributing to a larger mission that might have more meaning for you. For example, instead of thinking, “I’m taking the trash out,” you can reframe that duty to think, “I am taking care of my home and my family.” And that is the truth. If everyone just stops executing all the annoying little chores and duties that come with keeping a home, see how long it takes before that home becomes unpleasant and then unlivable.
Doing your duty usually means that you are contributing to a team. You never know what the outcome will be and what your team can accomplish together. Heroes never ask to be heroes. You put yourself in a position and you do your job and sometimes that’s the way it works out.
The teamwork is essential. No one puts themselves above that team, or that mission. I believe that our team was successful in Benghazi because no one put themselves above anyone else.
Exercise Your Willpower
The way the duties are apportioned in any particular team is personal. I know that a person who stays home with their kids is doing hard work. There were times when I came home between deployments and stayed home with my kids while my wife was working, and those were challenging days. My point here is not that one type of household arrangement is necessarily better than another, only that duties do not have to be exactly the same among team members.
The process of employing your willpower to fulfill your obligations—I mean using your sheer grit, over and over—will teach you to expect more of yourself. Willpower is like a muscle. There is a lot of research confirming that your willpower gets stronger every time you use it, but you don’t need to read, study, or overthink it. Just start trying. If you mess up, don’t use that failure as an excuse to give up. Reset your sights and try again. Knowing you have the self-control to do what needs to be done gives you confidence. But you have to build it up. Have faith and get started.