SOMETIMES I THINK THAT PHYSICAL COURAGE, the kind you need in order to run toward gunfire or into a burning building, is easier to summon than moral courage. That has been true for me. Research suggests that when we are faced with a significant physical risk we will go into a kind of robot mode and fall back on our highest level of training.
I have found this to be true. The first time I jumped out of an airplane, I was going to be the first person out, so I got to stand at the door when it opened. I felt the force of the air as it came blasting into the fuselage. I looked down and watched the tops of the trees rush by in a blur as I waited for that green light to tell me to jump. Every nerve in my body was telling me that nothing was normal and that I should not jump out of the plane. I tried to calm myself by reviewing all the steps I would need to follow, but I was still nervous.
Yet when the green light turned on, that was it, and I threw myself out the door. That is a form of physical courage, and I have always been pretty good at that.
Moral courage can be more challenging. It is scary to confront obstacles. It is brave to make changes in your life. It can take courage to refuse to do something you know is wrong, even more so when other people around you are doing it.
It can be hard to put other people’s interests and feelings before your own. But I can feel myself get stronger, both morally and mentally, when I make the right choices, and that leads me to be happier and more at peace. If you know how to use it, fear can be a kind of fuel to help you make hard choices correctly and stick to the right path.
When I joined the Army, I knew I would be facing physical and mental challenges, but I was also facing an overriding fear of the unknown. I was starting something new and wondering what I was getting myself into. Sometimes I worried about whether I was going to be able to handle the obstacles that the Army would purposefully place in front of me, but my fears extended beyond failing to meet standards. Joining the military meant that I was giving up a large measure of control over my life.
In the civilian world, and even many paramilitary jobs, your time is your own when you are off the clock. In the military, I was never really off the clock. I was subject to civilian law, military law, the rules of my unit, and, in my case, The Ranger Blue Book.
A Higher Standard
The rules for soldiers extend to aspects of our lives that are less likely to be regulated in the real world. If I were to violate the rules of the Ranger Blue Book, which is specific to the 75th Ranger Regiment, I could be RFS (relief for standards). In plain English, I could get kicked out of Ranger Battalion. The rules covered behaviors such as drinking and driving, drug use, and when we could—and could not—leave the base.
The Ranger compound was isolated inside a chain-link fence with mesh woven through the links and concertina wire on portions of the top. No one could see inside. Whenever we left the compound, we were potentially visible to the public, and the Blue Book was specific about how we needed to appear: if we were not wearing civvies (civilian clothes), we had better be in starch and spits and a beret. That meant that my uniform needed to be starched, my boots needed to be spit shined, and my beret needed to be on the top of my head. Leaving the base wearing a training uniform, or what we called a fluff-and-buff uniform (something just out of the dryer) would have been grounds for an RFS.
To be a Ranger, I gave up some privacy and certain freedoms. I was volunteering to hold myself to a higher standard. That is one reason I reflexively respect veterans and servicemen and women: their military status tells me that they have chosen to be held to a higher standard. Many paramilitary organizations, like police departments and fire departments, also require their members to be subject to exacting standards. The question, for any organization, is whether members are living up to the standards and how seriously the standards are enforced. The Rangers were deadly serious about enforcing their standards. I saw guys kicked out for drinking, drug use, for fighting on the weekends, and for similar infractions.
Trusting that your teammates are meeting standards is essential. When our squad set out on a mission in Ranger Battalion, one person had to be in charge. I might not have made the same decision my leader made each time, but I trusted my squad leaders and understood that our perspectives were different. The leader needs to anticipate every possible scenario, positive or negative, visualize the outcome, determine the course of action, and communicate it clearly. He or she may have information as a leader that I don’t have. I need to trust that the leader knows what to do, and he or she needs to rely on me to do exactly what I have been ordered to do.
Our team that worked so well together in Benghazi may have been made up of guys from different branches of the armed forces, but we all had committed to meeting high standards. We were all experienced operators, we had all survived demanding training, and we were all willing to sacrifice our lives for others. We may have had disagreements, but everyone was able to set them aside or resolve them so that they did not interfere with our mission. The trust that we had in each other helped us to be courageous.
It is easier to have courage when you have support. When I trust that everyone around me is operating effectively, I find it easier to do my job. I don’t think about death. I don’t think about losing. I think, “I am going to go in there and kick the shit out of this mission. I don’t care if the odds are one hundred to one against us.”
That is the mentality that I need to have when I am summoning up physical courage, and I think that attitude is contagious. Courage breeds courage just as panic breeds panic. When we were fighting in Benghazi, I had a feeling of courage that spread like a fire, and moments where I felt like I was ten feet tall and could take on the world. I attribute that confidence to our team: no one expressed a moment of doubt, and our courage fed each other.
On some level, I don’t know what was so special about our behavior in Benghazi. I truly believe that anyone who found themselves in my situation, who had served and was trained to fight, would have stepped up and done the same thing, especially if they were part of the same kind of kick-ass team. I appreciate that people are interested in understanding that battle, and I have come to think that part of the interest is because everyone is fighting a battle of their own.
For example, it can take genuine courage to confront a health issue. I love it when someone tells me that something in my story helped them want to become stronger or more physically fit. I am something of an evangelical runner, so I get a kick out of the readers who start running, even though that isn’t something that I write much about.
I’m thinking about a guy who started running and stopped drinking, someone else who is training for her first half marathon, and a woman who started running and lost fifty pounds. It makes my day when people let me know that there was something in my book or one of my speeches that helped them summon the courage to confront a problem and overcome adversity in their lives.
Every one of the warriors you have read about in this book has displayed an impressive measure of personal courage beyond the battlefield. They may have witnessed violence and tragedy, sustained life-altering injuries, and confronted unexpected obstacles in their life paths. It would have been easy for most of them to descend into a permanent state of anger or disappointment. It is challenging to live life with a sense of optimism and purpose after experiencing the tragedy of watching your friends die. It can require an enormous amount of moral and physical courage just to live a heroic life.
Sergeant Tom Block is a retired Ranger from the 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, who deployed four times in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, which ran from 2001 to 2014, primarily in Afghanistan.
In some ways, Tom’s identity has been defined by his physical strength and courage. “I grew up fighting,” Tom said. “I was the runt of the litter and used to getting knocked around by my older cousins. I had to get tough fast, and I loved it. It translated well to wrestling.”
Tom wrestled at Waseca High School in Minnesota and Minnesota State University, Mankato. He enlisted in the Army in February of 2010, and he distinguished himself right away. Tom was an honor grad, combatives champ (hand-to-hand fighting), and four points away from being the PT stud for his Ranger Assessment and Selection Program class, almost pulling off a hat trick.
“I love a good scrap, even if I lose,” Tom said. “When we were doing combative training, I was always the guy volunteering to get in the big fight suit.”
Tom also volunteered to wear the bite suit when his unit worked with K-9 dogs and their trainers. “That is a unique experience, to have ninety pounds of fury coming down on you and to try to protect yourself and fight them back,” he said. Tom is as tough as they come.
Tom was on his fourth combat rotation when he was severely wounded in October 2013, when a bomber detonated herself near his assault force in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. Tom was hurled thirty-five feet into a minefield. Four people died on that mission, and two dozen were wounded.
Tom has been awarded the Purple Heart, the Joint Service Commendation Medal, the Army Commendation Medal, the Army Achievement Medal, the Army Good Conduct Medal, the National Defense Service Medal, the Afghanistan Campaign Medal with Combat Star, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, the Army Service Ribbon, the Overseas Service Ribbon, and the NATO Medal. In 2014, the Army Times named Tom as its Soldier of the Year.
But the price was steep. Tom sustained a collapsed lung, significant leg injuries, a broken foot, and multiple shrapnel and burn wounds in the attack. The entire right side of Tom’s face was smashed, and he lost most of his nose, his right eye, and most of his vision in his left eye.
He replaced his right eye with a prosthetic eye that bears the Captain America shield, which he described as a symbol of hope as well as a symbol that his life had changed.
“I opted out of having a prosthetic eye painted to match my real eye,” he said. “I didn’t want to pretend to have a normal eye, to pretend to be the same. I know I’m not the same man I was before the incident. To me, the Captain America eye represents that change.”
“I Wanted Revenge”
Some people don’t acknowledge the eye when they meet Tom, a failure that bothers him. “Maybe they aren’t sure if they should say something, but I want people to acknowledge it,” he said. “Someone who buys a Corvette doesn’t do it to be inconspicuous. I wanted this eye to be something special, to inspire and motivate others to not let life beat them down. Maybe this eye is just my way to raise a middle finger to terrorists.”
In November 2013, about six weeks after the explosion, Tom was discharged from Walter Reed Hospital and relocated to the Minneapolis Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center, part of the VA system, to be closer to his family.
He was still in a wheelchair, but newly engaged. Tom, who had been dating Janine since 2012, was in intensive care, hooked up to machines, his face bandaged, and with tubes hanging everywhere, when he asked Janine’s father for permission to marry her.
He said, “Steve, can I marry your daughter? I promise to take better care of her than I do myself.”
After being discharged from the Minneapolis VA, Tom visited Fort Benning, Georgia, and met his platoon when they returned from deployment on December 7, 2013. The last time these men had seen Tom was in the hospital in Kandahar, when doctors were unsure of his prognosis. Four members of the platoon had died and twenty-four had been injured, including Tom. “That was a big day,” he said. “I was able to stand up and get out of my wheelchair to greet them. It was emotional for all of us.”
Tom’s recovery and rehabilitation were just beginning. He relearned how to walk, and he still can’t run on his right leg as well as he used to before the explosion. As his mobility improved, he was assigned to be a noncommissioned officer in charge of the gym in Alabama.
He was not going to be able to return to the work he had done before, but the assignment allowed him to continue to improve his strength and conditioning as he helped others train. Matt Powell, the strength and conditioning coach of the 3rd Battalion, encouraged Tom to work out harder. “It was tough,” Tom said. “Matt pushed me when I didn’t want to be pushed. He pushed me when I would start to feel sorry for myself.”
In all, Tom has undergone fifteen surgeries to rebuild his face. But his face was not the only thing that needed help during the first years after the attack. His soul did, too.
“I was so angry,” he said. “I wanted revenge. I still feel like I never got to hit back or exact revenge the way I would have wanted to, but I don’t think about that as much as I used to.”
Tom’s wounds forced him to medically retire from the Army in February of 2016. He remained upbeat, but it was a tough transition: “Growing up, I was a physical-minded person. This was different for me. It wasn’t something I could just punch through or lift out of the way.”
But Tom had absorbed the “never quit” ethos of the Ranger Regiment. “I don’t give up,” he said. “My story got a lot of attention and I feel like I have to move forward to set a good example for others to follow.”
And Tom also feels a responsibility as a Ranger: “If I identify myself as a Ranger, I have an obligation to maintain standards and I can’t be a jerk.”
During his years as a Ranger, Tom identified powerfully with his work. “Being a Ranger wasn’t a sacrifice for me at all,” he said. “I legit loved that job. It was my dream job. Every day was different. One day I might have been sitting in a Black Hawk, cruising down the Chattahoochee, and the next week I’m cleaning the barracks, so that the next week I can go jump out of airplanes again.”
Tom had signed up for the military right from college: “I was a kid, and the Army trained me, gave me the clothes on my back, a bed to sleep in, a machine gun, and all the ammo I could hope for,” he said.
Tom was young, gaining real-life experiences. “It was a great fit for me,” he said of his training. “I have always been high energy. As a kid, I always pushed limits, even just grinding wheelies down a gravel driveway with complete disregard for my personal safety, hitting jumps and ramps and seeing how far I could get.”
Tom began deploying in January 2011. All four of his tours were in Afghanistan, and they were busy deployments.
Adrenaline and Excitement and Fear
He loved that work, too. “I especially liked working at night; we owned the night,” he said. Every Wednesday, Tom’s unit would get an analysis of recent activity, which they would use to help plan their missions. “There were these color-coded bubbles that represented different areas and types of activity,” he recalled. “When that map popped up and looked like a bag of Skittles on the ground, I would feel this great mix of adrenaline and excitement and fear.”
When Tom was out on patrol, “there was no time to think about what if,” he said. “I just accepted that whatever happened was going to happen, relied on my training, took my opportunities, and performed.”
Defending the United States was a big part of what Tom liked about serving overseas. “When you travel to certain countries, you see the conditions and effects of true oppression. People living in those places do not know real freedom like Americans know it. Sometimes when I see what is taken for granted here in the United States, it chaps my ass a little bit. But that’s part of what I fought for, right? For people to be blissfully ignorant back here in the bubble.”
That can be difficult for people in the United States to relate to, especially those who have not traveled overseas to some of the places where Tom and I have worked.
“We do not struggle here in the same way,” Tom said. “We are not a perfect country and we can improve, but people need to look around and realize how well we have it. My sense of patriotism grew after my first deployment. I saw how it could be in this world, with no infrastructure, no streetlights, no paved roads, filthy water, people crammed next to one another sleeping on floor mats, disease, poverty. It’s not that many Americans don’t struggle, but it really is on another level.”
Many Americans also take some nonphysical aspects of our security for granted, Tom said. “In this country, you really can start with nothing and become successful, if you are willing to put the work in,” he said. “And we have the right to disagree with the government and one another. There are a lot of people I do not agree with at all, but we share the freedom to speak up and conduct ourselves in whatever manner we decide to as long as we don’t hurt each other. That is freedom, and that is worth dying for.”
Tom’s injuries made it impossible for him to continue working as a Ranger, so he looked around to find what he was going to do next and came across what seemed like the ideal next step. It was called the Human Exploitation Rescue Operative (HERO) Child-Rescue Corps, a partnership among the military, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the National Association to Protect Children.
HERO Corps gives injured servicemen the opportunity to train in law enforcement, to learn specialized investigation skills and digital forensics, and to work to combat online child sexual exploitation by identifying and rescuing child victims.
Tom and his wife decided to move to Massachusetts so that Tom could work out of the Homeland Security Investigations field office in Boston. Tom’s wife moved in January of 2016 and Tom was planning to join her in April, after completing his training for HERO Corps in Florida and Virginia.
But four months before he retired from the Army, Tom felt himself sliding into a depression. “My wife and I both had good jobs lined up, but I didn’t really want to move,” he said. “And my retirement from the military was about to be official, even though I was going to be working for HERO Corps.”
“I Was Overwhelmed”
Tom had been a Ranger for most of his adult life. Now he found himself preparing to leave the Ranger Battalion, continuing to adjust to the physical and emotional damage he had sustained in the explosion, confronting his survivor’s guilt, and entering into a marriage.
“All the urgent physical issues were being settled, but I was overwhelmed, and I really started to shut down,” he said. “I started to drink too much.”
Tom began to withdraw from his wife and to question their plans to move forward. “We were living separately because of my HERO Corps training, and I was calling her less and less,” he said. “She gave me space, but she didn’t want to quit. She was persistent, and, eventually, she challenged me to man up. I realized that our marriage and my new life might be a sinking ship, but that if I was going to go down, I wanted to go down guns blazing, knowing we had tried really hard to make everything work.
“I didn’t know if it would work out, but I couldn’t just quit.”
Investigating Child Predators
In April 2016, Tom graduated from the HERO Corps program with sixteen other wounded, ill, or injured veterans and moved to Massachusetts, where he went to work.
Investigating child predators proved to be demanding and disturbing work, but Tom felt it was a worthwhile opportunity. “I thought it would be a great way to extend the mission I had in special operations,” he said. “It was a mission to go after bad guys. I liked doing that and I wanted to continue doing that, even if I had to do it in a different way.”
Tom’s wife, Janine, turned out to be right. Their relationship improved. “We got better. I got better,” Tom said. “I became more honest and more patient, with myself and with my wife. I had to work on accepting that nobody gets it right every time. It’s okay to be wrong or make a mistake, as long as you are willing to correct it. That was a big thing for me to admit.”
Tom didn’t want to have any regrets, so he gave it his all. As we learned in Ranger School, you have to let your actions define your character, and you only know what is possible if you don’t quit.
“If I quit on my recovery, I would feel like the terrorists won and I [had] become another casualty,” Tom said. “My anger fueled my will to survive and to recover. I owe some of my willingness to push forward to a sense of defiance: if I give up or give in, the terrorists win.”
Tom knows that anger can be effectively channeled as a positive force. “It’s easy for guys like me to get angry and bitter, but you can use that anger toward a positive end,” he said. “If you don’t like something, be proactive and fix it or change it. Run for public office. Educate yourself. Tell your story. Help someone. Let your anger be an engine of change; don’t get stuck in it.”
Tom credits his recovery to the support he received from his wife, a small group of buddies from the military, and to the relief he feels when working out, particularly when training for Strongman competitions. Strongman competitions, which test the strength and endurance of athletes through weight-related events, like squats, deadlifts, and overhead presses, have become an important part of Tom’s life.
“After I got blown up, I was sitting around for three years off and on between surgeries,” he told me. “I did work out, but I didn’t have a great focus, especially once I got through the initial injuries. I wasn’t training to go overseas, so I didn’t have to be fast, and I didn’t need to work on skills like endurance for a particular mission. I needed a reason to train, and I guess not getting sloppy was not a strong enough reason.”
Tom’s trainer at 3rd Battalion, Matt Powell, suggested that Tom might enjoy setting a goal of competing in a Strongman event. When Tom moved to Boston, he joined a gym, Total Performance Sports, that focuses on power lifting, has Strongman equipment, and has hosted Strongman events.
Training for a contest and setting goals for each event gave Tom a sense of focus, and he turned out to be good at it, winning second place in the novice class for his first Strongman event in Boston.
“My Ultimate Competition Is Myself”
Tom continues to train to be at a competitive level of fitness and hopes that he will eventually earn his pro card, but he isn’t motivated by lifting more than other people. Tom’s overarching competitor is not the person he faces in any given event. “My biggest opponent is that voice inside me that says, ‘This hurts and you can’t do it,’” Tom said. “So my ultimate competition is myself, telling that little voice to shut the heck up.”
The training has been positive for Tom’s overall health. “Working out makes me stretch muscles and give my joints attention that I might not otherwise,” he said. “If I didn’t work out, I think I would be in more pain from my injuries.”
The benefits have been more than physical ones. Tom has found a supportive community. “I have friends that I only know through Strongman,” he said, “and it’s good for me to meet like-minded people and lift heavy-ass stuff.”
There was no magic moment when Tom came to terms with not working as a Ranger. Instead, he progressed steadily toward accepting his new reality. “I had to learn how to let things be,” Tom said. “I can sit here and romanticize the way things used to be, but I can’t turn the clock back. And it wouldn’t be the way that I remember it anyway.”
Tom’s friend and fellow former Ranger, Ralph Cacciapaglia, suggested that Tom try riding a dirt bike. Riding has become a lasting habit. “When I am riding on those trails, I can’t concentrate on anything but the narrow trail ahead of me,” Tom said. “If I don’t pay attention I will most likely end up in the trees. Getting out of my own head like that is very therapeutic.”
The transition to civilian life is difficult for many veterans. Tom believes that the adjustment would have been significant even if he had not been grievously wounded.
Certain aspects of his new job made the transition even more difficult. “I liked the people that I worked with on my job at HERO Corps and I certainly believed in our mission, but it became extremely frustrating,” Tom said. “Sometimes I would find proof of possession—a downloaded image [of child pornography or exploitation]—and a judge would refuse to issue a warrant for further investigation because there was only proof of a single image. In my experience, there was never only a single image. I was constantly infuriated by the slow pace of justice.”
Tom’s discomfort with the acts he was investigating intensified when he became a father in the autumn of 2017. “After my son was born, I felt as though I could not take looking at what I was looking at and still be an effective father,” he said. “I was getting too angry.”
“Small Steps”
After trying to set boundaries between work and home, Tom realized he was going to have to find a different way to make a living. “I probably have some PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] from my experiences in Afghanistan, but it is nothing compared with the way I was being haunted by the images and information I was seeing online in the course of doing that job,” he said. “I saw some truly sick stuff, and it was making me lose some of my faith in humanity, which I am still working to regain.”
Tom did make a change. As of this writing, in 2019, he lives in New Hampshire and works on safety and compliance issues for British Aerospace Engineering in New England. He is surprised at how much he likes his nonmilitary job, although he still struggles with certain aspects of the transition back to civilian work and life: “I gave two presentations today, and one of my goals was to not say the word fuck,” he said. “Small steps.”
Tom will need more reconstructive surgery. His right foot still contains six pins and a plate on the first metatarsal. And his nose will continue to need to be rebuilt in order for him to keep breathing clearly.
His vision, of course, is severely limited; he needs to wear glasses and periodically update his Captain America prosthetic eye.
But the life-altering blast has also changed him in a positive way. “I would like to think that I was a pretty good person before the accident, but I think I’m a little more generous now than I was then,” Tom said. “I’m friendlier, I’m more patient, and even though I have always tried to motivate the people around me, I feel like I have something different to offer today.”
Sometimes Tom is asked to speak with others about dealing with adversity. “I tell them that you need courage to confront adversity, even if the obstacle is personal or domestic,” he said. When Tom connects with people who are struggling, he tells them “all the things you don’t want to hear when you are at a low point,” he said. “But they are true. You are not going to feel like this forever. This feeling will pass. You have to allow yourself to heal. You have to be able to let a little bit go in order to move forward.”
Tom has had to let go of a lot, and he believes that “you honor your fallen brothers and sisters by being a good person. I know I fall short sometimes, but I still try to be a supportive Ranger and to work at being as good a person as I can be.”
“When people thank me for my service, part of me wants to laugh,” he said. “Being a Ranger is the greatest. I legit signed up so that I could run around and blow stuff up for the rest of my life. I might have romanticized a lot of it before I got there, but I knew what I was getting myself into. The possibility of getting blown up is a risk of going to war.”
Like all Rangers, Tom has memorized and reflected on the Ranger Creed. His favorite part is the sixth stanza: “Readily will I display the intestinal fortitude required to fight on to the Ranger objective and complete the mission though I be the lone survivor.” “That still resounds after everything,” Tom told me. “And recognizing that I volunteered is a big one that follows me to this day. I remind myself that I volunteered for this job, that I loved this job, and that these are the cards that I was dealt. Anything worth having is never free; you have to go out and earn it every day.”
There are different ways to be brave. Personal courage encompasses both physical and moral courage. Moral courage does not necessarily translate into physical courage, and people who are physically brave are not always ethically courageous. But both forms of courage are necessary.
Physical courage is displayed by putting one foot in front of the other. When a soldier is faced with the possibility of death, whether it’s because he is going to jump out of an airplane or face down someone with a gun, that soldier exemplifies courage when he jumps anyway, or hoists his weapon and faces the battlefield.
It takes physical courage to be a firefighter rushing into a burning building, to be a police officer going down a dark alleyway toward a screaming civilian, to be an EMT hoisting your gear to the scene of an accident. Our society depends on men and women who are willing to display physical courage in their work. We celebrate the stories of ordinary civilians who display physical courage on behalf of strangers: the guy who stops a robbery in progress by subduing a mugger, or the woman who runs into traffic to pull a wayward toddler back to safety.
We are not as good at celebrating moral courage when we see it, even though we depend on each other to display that kind of bravery in our personal lives. The person who meets unfairness with patience, disappointment with optimism, or adversity with will is displaying moral courage. The person who is willing to confront their own demons and interrupt unhealthy habits and behaviors is displaying moral courage. The people who work to support their families, both financially and emotionally, by putting their loved ones first are displaying moral courage.
Sometimes it requires serious fortitude to resist temptations and put your values first. I’m not saying we should lower the bar to the point where we are congratulating ourselves for fulfilling basic duties and obligations. But it’s worth recognizing that it isn’t always easy to do the right thing, and certain things are harder for some people than others.
Most people don’t need to put their lives on the line when they go to work. But you might need to put yourself in the line of fire to stand up for what is right. You may need to speak up on behalf of the people and values that matter to you. You may need to make sacrifices in order to protect the people and principles that you care about. That takes moral courage, and the more clarity you have about your own values, the easier it will be to be brave.