I AM WILLING TO RISK MY LIFE for other people even though I may not respect one or more of them. Why am I willing to give my life for someone I don’t respect? Because I respect life itself; I respect our common humanity and our right to live our lives in freedom; I respect another person’s individual right to live unless and until I think they have the intent and opportunity to kill me or someone else.
While I do think that everyone is entitled to basic respect and dignity by virtue of being human, I also believe that we earn additional respect through our actions. I respect the men and women who have stood by me in situations where we were being attacked. I respect my fellow Rangers for their toughness, their integrity, and their willingness to sacrifice themselves. I know what they went through to earn the Ranger tab and Scroll.
On an individual level, some of my brothers put themselves at a disadvantage to help me succeed. Someone took part of my load when I was falling out on a march and allowed me to finish. Guys waited for me after an airborne jump when I landed in a drop zone and was struggling to find my way to the rally point. The guys who helped me were already carrying heavy loads and they could have gone faster, but they waited for me and guided me. They sacrificed themselves to help me, and I respect their conduct.
Treating all people with a basic level of respect is not only ethical; it is also civil and pragmatic. And I mean treating all people with respect, not just the people whom you know and like.
“I Met an American, and He Wasn’t So Bad”
When I was deploying in Afghanistan and Iraq, there were some guys I worked with who displayed an attitude of reflexive mistrust toward the locals. I understood their suspicion, but I did not think it was productive. In my experience, when I was respectful to the locals, they were generally respectful to me. There was tension on both sides, and it was not always warranted.
When I was making routine stops in Kabul, for example, shopping in a bazaar or stopping in a coffee shop, the proprietor or the other customers might bristle a bit when I walked in or they might look me up and down in a guarded way. I found that it defused the tension if I smiled and tried to speak a bit of their language, even just to say hello or please or thank you.
If I offered a handshake or put a hand over my heart when I was leaving, which is a local custom, I usually got a smile or some respectful acknowledgment in return. I like to think that treating the locals with respect made somebody think, “Hey, I met an American, and he wasn’t so bad.”
If treating people with respect can help defuse tension, it follows that treating others with a lack of respect can increase tension. When I was working in Tripoli in 2012, five of us drove out of town on a rare day off to see the ruins of Leptis Magna, which had been an important city in Libya during the Carthaginian Empire.
Our group included two guys from the Global Response Staff and three American government employees, officials with papers from the State Department. We traveled in separate cars as we returned to Tripoli at the end of the day. I rode with the contractors and one of the US officials, and the two other officials traveled in another car. Just as our car arrived at the Annex in Tripoli, the two US officials in the other car called us on the radio and said, “We are stuck at a checkpoint; we need QRF assistance.” QRF stands for quick reaction force, and that is what people radio for if they are in trouble.
We got on the phone and asked them if guns were drawn. The two officials said, “No, not yet, but they’re getting antsy because we won’t let them in the car or roll down the windows to talk to them.”
I said, “You need to communicate with them,” but the officials refused, arguing, “We can’t communicate with them if they might get hostile.”
Our team understood what was happening, and since there were no guns drawn, we told QRF they could stand down and that we would go and check the situation out informally.
We drove toward the spot where they had been stopped. It was a snap checkpoint, which can pop up out of nowhere. The militia members who had established the checkpoint controlled that road.
I remember thinking, “What do the US officials expect the checkpoint guards to do?” That was their road. They could shut it down any time they wanted. We had no control over that. If we decided to drive on it, we had to at least make an effort to talk to them, to show that we respected their position.
I am not naïve. That militia could have been doing a little intel, getting the make of our vehicles and checking us out. If that was the case, guess what? If you are already there, it’s done. Show the locals some respect and get out. Some of the locals spoke a bit of English, so these guys could have tried displaying their State Department papers and saying something like, “We apologize, we didn’t know this was closed off.”
It was not abnormal for working foreigners to be going about their business in Libya, trying to get home at the end of the day. The odds are excellent that this militia would have waved them through.
I called our guys again and asked if they had managed to communicate the fact that they were with the State Department. They said no, and I could tell from their voices that they were starting to panic. As we drove up, I could see that five militia members had surrounded their car; they were pulling on the car doors and speaking loudly, but they didn’t have their guns out and the situation didn’t seem out of control. The guards wanted to talk to the guys in the car.
We pulled up behind them, but we didn’t roll up hard or come charging up like we were the cavalry. I had a pistol, but I didn’t want the militia to get their guns out and shoot. I displayed my embassy badge, identified myself, and asked what was going on. We verified that the guys in the car were with us. The militia members consulted with one another and said they understood, and they let the car pass.
Everything was defused and no one had raised a weapon. Could that situation have gone the other way? Yes. Could the militia have turned out to be hostile? Sure. We were taking a calculated risk. Displaying basic respect for the locals controlling the roads, in the same way we expected it on roads that we controlled, seemed like a reasonable move. The case officers had displayed disrespect by refusing to communicate with the locals, and the consequences could have been severe.
Showing respect doesn’t mean rolling over. It is important to know when it is appropriate to take a hard line. There was a fender bender between a vehicle being driven by US Army military intelligence (MI) personnel and a vehicle driven by Afghani locals in Kabul in 2007 that escalated quickly. The MI personnel, in a panic, called for any QRF nearby for backup. There must have been about thirty of us on the back roads, and as we raced toward the scene, I remember seeing the local militia confidently banging on this US car, yelling, waving weapons, and trying to break in and get our MI guys out of their car. We had ten civilian-style cars screeching to a stop and surrounding this volatile scene from every direction. We got out hard with all our kits and rifles, demanding that they let our people go. The faces of those militiamen were priceless. They knew they had to let our guys move forward.
Self-respect is a precondition for earning the respect of other people. No one is perfect, certainly not I. I have made many poor choices and done things that lacked integrity, many of which I recounted in my book The Ranger Way (Hachette Book Group, 2017). I have tried to take responsibility for my actions and learn from my mistakes, which are key components of self-respect. You are worthy of respect even if you are not perfect. I have fallen down and picked myself back up many times, and I am a stronger person, a better father, and a better partner for my failures.
We were able to keep our people safe in Tripoli and Kabul because we were confident in our ability to assess each situation and respond appropriately. The same principle applies to an individual trying to overcome a failure or cultivate self-respect.
Honesty is an important dimension of self-respect, in the sense that you need to figure out who you are and how to be yourself in order to have true self-respect. I don’t care if you don’t like the way I dress, or if you disagree with my politics, or even if you think I am a prima donna. I know who I am. I know my strengths and my weaknesses; working to improve both of them is a form of self-respect.
Everyone is not good at everything. But everyone has something to contribute. When I am leading a team, my priority is to identify people’s strengths and help them to develop their skills and make their best contribution to the team. In the Army, or in a contracting assignment, that might mean asking: Is one team member stronger or faster than everyone else? Is somebody especially good at IT? Is someone a gifted mechanic? People have strengths, and good leaders figure out how to use them. A team is strongest when each member is contributing to the mission from their most powerful position. That experience benefits the individual team members. When people are recognized for things that they are genuinely good at, they develop self-confidence and the motivation to strengthen their skills. That creates self-respect.
Identifying strengths also creates opportunities to exchange information. Among Rangers, we cross-train each other in our strong skills. The time and effort we spend teaching each other brings the team together and increases our proficiency as a group.
In the special forces community, each team has its own function, and everyone is specialized within the team, but we do learn from each other and can be prepared to jump in for one another if it is needed. When people are self-confident, they won’t be intimidated if someone else is better at a particular skill. Rangers and other members of the special ops communities tend to inspire one another as much as intimidate, and that is what allows us to succeed.
Ben Morgan went to high school in Fruita, Colorado, which is a part of Grand Valley, near Grand Junction, where I’m from. Ben is only a couple of years younger than I am, but we didn’t know each other well in high school. If you had asked me then, I would have predicted that Ben would stay a hometown boy and be the life of every hard party in Grand Junction. I certainly never would have guessed that we would both wind up being Army Rangers. It turns out there was a lot that I didn’t know about Ben.
Ben lives in Colorado today, but he is actually from just about everywhere. He was born in Texas and has moved about forty times. His dad was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam and then flew professionally for forty years in the oil industry in Texas and Louisiana when Ben was small and later as far away as Saudi Arabia. The Morgan family moved five times before Ben started kindergarten, and Ben did not arrive in Colorado until he was in eighth grade.
“I didn’t know anybody in eighth grade,” Ben recalls. “I had one friend and he had lunch at a different time, so I would go to the main office at school and tell them I had a detention so I wouldn’t have to sit alone in the cafeteria. I remember feeling bored and overwhelmed by school.”
Ben started drinking in high school: “Once I started drinking, I felt as though people liked me and I liked myself more.” Soon Ben’s drinking habit had spiraled well beyond what I might have called typical among students our age. Ben was drinking almost every day on the way to school, at school, and after school. “Weekends were for extreme excess,” he told me, “like a fifth of vodka by myself and then eight or ten beers on Friday and Saturday night. My parents were worried about me, but I don’t think they had any idea how much and how often I was drinking.”
Second and Third Chances
As Ben got older, his drinking and careless behavior resulted in a couple of very dangerous car accidents. “I got into a half dozen minor fender benders, sometimes when other people were driving,” he recalled, “but eventually I had a really bad car accident. My girlfriend was asleep in the passenger seat of my 1970s Toyota Land Cruiser, which had no safety features, and I passed out and drove off the road while I was driving to another party, and I hit a brick mailbox, telephone pole, fence, and utility box. It felt miraculous that we were okay, and later that night I told my mom that maybe I had a problem with alcohol.”
It was the first time that Ben had spoken those words or started to think about what they might mean. But Ben was still a teenager, and he thought that he would just change his ways on his own. “I woke up the next day all wound up from the adrenaline of the accident, but then we never really got to the bottom of my behavior,” he said, “and my concern kind of wore off.”
When Ben was seventeen, he and his buddies got drunk, broke into a car, and led the local police on a wild chase when they were spotted. The assistant district attorney and the sheriff were willing to take a risk, and put Ben in a “scared straight” diversion program, which required him to spend two eight-hour days in the state penitentiary in Cañon City.
“I had to go for an eight-hour visit each time, and I spent those eight hours shadowing an actual inmate,” he said. “I had to tell him my story and then he told me his story, and then I spent the day with him, seeing the reality of where I was heading. My inmate counselor’s sentence was for decades. When he told me about his experience, which involved a drug deal that went bad and ended violently, I could totally see it happening to me. I ate my meals with the inmates and had to go with them as they moved throughout the prison, to their cells, the bathrooms, everywhere.
“There were no guards escorting me. There were guards in the prison, but I didn’t know how long it would take them to get to me if something happened, and they made sure I knew that. It was scary as hell. Everyone felt dangerous. My inmate counselor would tell me, very matter-of-factly, this one is a rapist, that one’s in for murder, this guy is insane. I remember there was one enormous guy in the yard, and my counselor said, ‘Wait, let me walk in front of you when we pass him; he’s not right.’ I was terrified.”
The worst day was the one where he had to return to the prison and spend the day shadowing an inmate with one of his parents. “My dad went with me, and he is a tough guy,” Ben said. “He served in the Vietnam War. But he told me afterward that he had never been more afraid in his life than he was that day. I felt bad about that. The worst part is that I figured he must have been thinking, ‘How did my son become such a fucking loser?’”
Ben was chastened by the prison visits, but they were still not enough for him to permanently change his ways. He started drinking again, slowly increasing his intake back to his old, excessive ways. Ben graduated from high school in 1992, just barely. “I was probably something like second-to-last in a class of more than two hundred students” he said. “I’m guessing the school said, ‘Hell, let’s let him graduate and be rid of him.’”
After graduating, Ben stayed local, doing odd jobs to support what was still a serious drinking habit, and enrolling at Colorado Northwestern Community College in Rangely, but his study habits were weak and he only lasted one semester.
“I just drank and played video games and acted like an idiot,” he said.
Following the Family Tradition
Ben decided to join the military, as many of his relatives had done. Both of Ben’s parents had served in Vietnam, Ben’s mom as a nurse and his dad as a helicopter pilot for a medevac unit. Ben had one uncle in the Ranger Regiment, another uncle had been in Vietnam, and another uncle had been a helicopter pilot in the Marine Corps (he flew people out of Vietnam during the fall of Saigon). One of Ben’s grandfathers had served in the Navy during World War II, and his other grandfather served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Ben’s great-great-grandfather served in the Army during World War I, and Ben has relatives who served in the Civil War and the American Revolution.
“You’d think I would have had a very sober, realistic view of military life,” he said, “and in some ways I did, but I was also dumb as all get-out. I knew there were bad people in the world, and part of me thought it would be exciting to just go kill bad guys.”
Ben did well on the entrance test for the Army and joined up to try to be an FO. That’s a forward observer, the spotter who directs air strikes on to a target. He also thought he might want to be a Ranger, like his uncle. “I think my parents probably threw a party when I left for basic training,” he told me. “I feel bad for everything I put my parents through. There was no reason for it. I know there is often some trauma behind bad behavior when you peel it back, but there wasn’t any of that in my home. I can’t blame my parents.”
Ben got a little surprise when he got to his meet-up point in Denver to enlist. “The Army put us up in a hotel that was very familiar to me,” he said. “It was the site of one of the wildest parties my friends and I had ever been to. Looking back now, it seems inconceivable that a hotel would let teenagers shut down an entire floor… for two days and let us party like wild animals. It was one of the craziest things I’d ever seen, let alone experienced.”
“You Lied… Go Home”
It was a bad omen. When Ben had filled out the paperwork to enlist, he had been asked if he had ever been in any kind of legal trouble. Ben’s juvenile record was supposed to have been expunged, so he didn’t think he had to disclose that information, and he didn’t. Somehow, Ben’s history came up anyway, which made him guilty of fraudulent enlistment.
“They called me in to the MEPS [Military Entrance Processing Station] in downtown Denver and basically said, ‘You lied, pack your shit and go home,’” Ben said. “They said I could resubmit an application for a waiver to rejoin the Army in six months, if I didn’t have any additional trouble. I had to call my dad and tell him that they were putting me on a bus and I was coming back home. I felt like such an idiot. I couldn’t even join the Army.”
Ben had been on the cusp of turning over a new leaf, but now he felt jinxed, as though he had screwed up so badly in the past that his future could not be fixed. He returned home and started to drink again.
Ben wasn’t breaking into people’s cars or houses anymore, but he got a crappy job delivering pizzas and spent his downtime drinking and partying with friends.
“It was a bad life,” he said flatly, “and I knew that I had to change something, but I just felt stuck, like I was in this limbo. The Army seemed like my only hope, and even that didn’t seem like a sure thing.”
Ben was living with friends across the street from a local college, and described his home as a nonstop party.
“It was probably the worst environment I could have put myself in,” he said. “The house was so nasty that my mother would not set foot in it. One particularly rowdy night, the police showed up and ended up writing us a ticket for having a disorderly house. I had to go to court and pay a fine for that. I remember thinking that I was screwed and now I would not be able to get back into the Army.”
Luckily for Ben, he only received a fine and the Army did not seem to care.
Finally, at age twenty, Ben was able to reenlist. This time Ben went in as an 11 Bravo, an infantry guy. Instead of concentrating on drinking, he refocused his energy on basic training. “I went twelve weeks without a drink, and I didn’t even care,” he said. “I wanted to be good at my job, and I started to develop more self-respect as I figured out what I was good at.”
Ben didn’t stop drinking altogether after basic training. “I would still have a drink on the weekends or a day off, but it was different,” he said. “I wasn’t blacking out. I wasn’t drinking in the morning, or during the day. I replaced my drinking behavior in the Army with exercise and training and chores and all the other things they were making us do. And I realized that I didn’t need to drink.”
A Changed Life
Ben went through basic training, advanced individual training, Jump School, and the Ranger Indoctrination Program (RIP), and he absorbed the values of the Ranger Creed. “Becoming an Army Ranger is what really changed my life,” Ben told me. “I wanted to help and be part of the team. I wanted to be as good as I could be.”
Part of being as good as he could be was accepting that everybody has to do their job in the Army or else nothing works. “I didn’t ever want to be the reason anyone failed or had to do extra work,” Ben said. “Earning the respect of the other members of my platoon was important to me.”
One of the many things that I admire about Ben is how totally self-effacing he is about what he accomplished. “Putting the hours in and keeping up the can-do attitude, you know what spits out at the end of the day?” he asked me. “An average Ranger.”
But Ben wanted to be a better-than-average Ranger. “I was probably an average guy in Ranger Battalion, and it took a lot of effort to be average, but I always wanted to be better. And no matter how hard I pushed myself, someone else was always better. The funny thing was, it wasn’t discouraging in that environment. That was part of what I loved about it. If I ran a 5:15 mile and someone else ran it in five minutes, then a five-minute mile became the new goal. If someone else did it, it just seemed possible.”
I understand exactly what Ben means. There were a few genetic freaks of nature in the regiment, but most Rangers are regular soldiers working their asses off. It sounds basic, but it is very powerful to be in a group of people who share this mind-set. Ben saw that he could get better if he worked harder.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing. Ben got the same rough treatment and mind-fucking that everyone who goes through RIP gets. “Maybe I can’t do this,” he remembered thinking at the beginning, when the intimidation factor tends to be especially high. “I wasn’t going to quit, though,” he said. “It was more like all the smoking we got made me mad, because I didn’t want to give anyone the satisfaction of having made me quit.”
“If He Can Do It, I Can Too”
Ben also looked at the guys who were succeeding and thought, “I know this dude, and he’s not Superman. If he can do it, I can too.”
A week after Ben finished the Indoctrination Program in 1994, his unit was ordered to deploy to Haiti. The Battle of Mogadishu, in Somalia, during which two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down, had taken place a few months earlier, in October 1993. The graphic consequences of the Battle of Mogadishu, after which the bodies of American soldiers were dragged through the streets by local militia and civilians, were fresh in everyone’s mind. Ben’s uncle was the senior fire support officer for the regiment, and he happened to be on the ship with Ben in the hours before they left to start the mission.
“My uncle came over that night to talk to me for a few minutes. I was kind of scared,” Ben said. “I was scared of possibly getting hurt or killed, but I actually think I was more terrified of making a mistake. I really didn’t want to screw up. We talked, and I focused on what I knew to be true: Rangers are the best in the world at what we do. No matter what happens to me, if I am injured or killed, I will not be left. We will come back for one another.”
At the last minute, the mission was called off. Ben was surprised to discover that he felt disappointed. Ben turned out to be a peacetime Ranger. He worked as a Ranger in the United States primarily as a trainer until 1997 and then again from 2003 to 2006. Between 1998 and 2003, Ben finished college at Colorado State University, worked as a member of ROTC, and met Leann, a doctoral student at the University of Northern Colorado, who would eventually become his wife.
Trying to Find a Balance
In 2007, Ben was working in Iraq as a contractor, as an instructor in a facility where Americans and Iraqi forces would train together. He and Leann had become parents to infant twins, a boy and a girl, in 2006. He and his wife had agreed that he would return home that fall. Ben, trying to balance work with responsibilities at home, would take brief assignments on State Department contracts to train battalion-level staff officers of host countries.
These assignments were usually in Malawi and Nigeria for two to three weeks at a time. “It didn’t feel dangerous, per se,” he said. “We really stood out, and locals would stare at us, but it was more a feeling of curiosity or suspicion, not hostility.” Ben wanted to work for a federal agency, as many of his friends and former Rangers were doing. He went through physical tests, psychological interviews, and security clearance processes for multiple agencies and departments, but his history of risk-taking behavior was a problem.
“I Was a Wild, Reckless Kid”
“I was totally honest about my history, because I knew all of that behavior was truly in my past,” he said. “I was a wild, reckless kid. It wasn’t who I was anymore. I was taking responsibility for my past, and I was proud of how much I had changed and confident that I could do this work.”
The federal agencies did not agree, which frustrated Ben. “I felt 100 percent changed,” he told me. “I knew guys doing those jobs. There was no doubt in my mind that I could do that work and never have a problem. It was a kick in the gut.”
In 2008, Ben’s wife, Leann, got offered a teaching job at the University of Texas at Tyler, so they moved to Texas and Ben decided to keep contracting.
By this time, the Army was so busy that it had begun outsourcing certain kinds of training in the United States. Ben took a job in Arkansas training soldiers who were preparing to deploy to Iraq. “It was a good program and a great group of guys running it,” he said. “I was probably the least experienced instructor there.”
Meanwhile, Ben had started to develop a painful sensation in his feet and, in true Ranger fashion, ignored it while he was working in Arkansas. “I thought I would see a specialist when I got some time off, and I kept putting it off,” he said. Even as the pain worsened, he continued to put the job first.
Soon the job changed. While working in Arkansas, Ben had been continuing to pursue ways of deploying overseas again.
He succeeded, landing a job with Triple Canopy, Inc., a private security company that had gotten a contract to provide high-threat protection for the State Department in Iraq.
Years earlier, Ben had been offered a contract job with the CIA, but he had been unable to accept it due to a prior obligation. He wanted to be considered for that contract again, but knew that some of the requirements had changed, and he thought that the Triple Canopy job would help him secure work for the CIA.
Ben liked the people he worked with on the high-threat protection contract and felt that the work was meaningful. “I felt like the job made a difference,” Ben said. “I used to think that the only way this war is going to end is through diplomacy, and if I can help keep the diplomats safe, they can do their jobs and we can all get out of here sooner rather than later, and maybe that will keep a few guys from getting killed.”
But the pain in Ben’s feet was increasing, to the point that simply standing still felt like an endurance test. He searched for a solution every time he returned home to the United States on his thirty-day leaves. He tried different shoes, custom orthotics, massages, acupuncture, cortisone injections, and more. But nothing worked.
Finally, the pain became so bad that Ben had to leave work so that he could spend more time off his feet.
Ben didn’t tell anyone at work why he was taking time off because he still hoped to resolve the issue and ultimately qualify for the CIA contract.
To make matters worse, Ben had sustained what he thought was a minor back injury in Iraq during a rocket attack, and he figured he could address it if he worked out a little harder in the gym. But he started to suffer back spasms that lasted hours and immobilized him.
A Grim Period
Finally, Ben decided he needed to see a doctor on his next trip home. An MRI showed that Ben had two bulging discs in his thoracic spine, which runs from the base of the neck to the abdomen. “I was getting shots and physical therapy, but my back wasn’t fixed,” he said. “I didn’t want to go in-country and have people count on me and have a spasm at the wrong time.”
This marked the beginning of a grim period for Ben, who had been incorrectly diagnosed with plantar fasciitis in both of his feet. “You take for granted that you need to power through pain, and I did, but this had been going on for years,” he said. “I remember being in Iraq and having to stand watch on a doorway or stand out in the street, guarding a venue for a long period of time. That was the worst. I was wearing custom insoles, but I still felt like my feet were going to explode. That pain had never gone away.”
Doctors prescribed pain medications and muscle relaxers, but Ben didn’t like them. “The medications I tried just made me feel foggy, and they didn’t really take the pain away. It was not a good sensation,” he said.
“I’m probably lucky they didn’t work well for me, given my history. I remember thinking about chewing them up, because I started to think maybe it would be better to just be high than to be in so much pain every day. I’m pretty sure I would have gone down that road if I hadn’t had my wife and kids.”
Throughout all this, Ben continued to pursue the clearance process for the CIA contract. He thought, “If I can just get my back better, I’ll be able to take the pain in my feet. I could power through that like I had been, if that were the only thing.”
Ben was doing his best, but his best had gotten pretty bad. “It was so frustrating,” he said. “My back and feet were killing me and I was trying all these treatments, but I was still in constant pain. The pain and my lack of mobility interfered with everything, and I started to get depressed.”
Ben’s physical pain compounded the ordinary stress of having a young family. Ben felt like he was in a bad mood all the time. “My son and daughter were little then and they would want to do things with me, and I wanted to do things with them, but I was always in pain, so I was kind of a grumpy person to be around,” he said.
“At the time, I thought I was being a man and handling everything, but in retrospect I know I was short with everyone and that it was hard on my family.”
“I Certainly Could Not Be That Guy”
Finally, the company that had the contract with the CIA called and told Ben he was cleared to attend their selection course. It was the job Ben had been after for five years, but he knew he could not accept it. “As badly as I wanted to go, I knew that I was not physically able to do the job,” he said. “If I had an issue with my back in the wrong situation, it could cost somebody their life. I couldn’t be that irresponsible. I would not want to work with somebody that I could not trust 100 percent, and I certainly could not be that guy.”
It’s a fact of life that soldiers are often injured or recovering from something, and we usually tease each other about it, but I know it is difficult to be your best self when you’re in pain.
Ben sees that clearly today. “It’s hard to be creative, to pay attention to other people, or to contribute to the world around you” when you’re in pain, he said. “It got to the point where I didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything because my brain was so focused on how much pain I was in. It really puts you in a dark place when this goes on for years.”
Ben was in his late thirties, but he felt so stressed physically that he thought he might as well be eighty years old.
He was also embarrassed by the fact that the source of his pain was hidden. “At my worst, I was essentially disabled,” he said. “But I didn’t have a visible wound. And I was so depressed, I almost felt like it would have been better if I had actually sustained a real wound in battle, something I could actually look at and see as the source of my pain.”
In 2012, when he and his family moved back to Colorado, Ben began seeing new doctors, but the process of recovery remained slow. He began to seek alternative care: he tried chiropractic care, acupuncture, massage therapy, float therapy, dry needling, CBD oil, and yoga. “You name it, I tried it,” he said. “The best results were from the float therapy and exercises that improved and maintained my core strength.” It was not until 2016 that Ben finally started to get some relief from his back pain. And it was not until 2018, after undergoing a failed surgery for his feet, that he found a doctor who figured out that the nerves in Ben’s feet had been damaged, and that the orthotics he had been using only magnified the pain.
The progress with his back pain and the new treatment for his feet changed Ben’s life. “There was such an enormous change in my physical ability to do anything,” he said. “After ten years of not being able to stand without pain in my feet and six years of back pain and spasms, all of a sudden I could stand in one place and talk to someone for thirty minutes or an hour without feeling excruciating pain; I could get out of bed and stand up straight. I could put my socks on without having to lie on the floor. It changed my whole outlook on life.”
For the first time in a decade, Ben felt happy.
“Trying to Be a Better Version of Myself”
“I have failed way more often than I have succeeded,” Ben told me cheerfully, “and I used to look at all the times in my life when I came up short and feel bad about them. But today I look at the disappointments as events that happened to me and I know that, without them, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”
Ben wrote down everything that was important to him and made a list of things he wanted to work on. “I’m learning to judge myself based on how I am doing today compared with where I used to be instead of measuring myself against anyone I know or some stranger on Instagram.
“I’m just trying to be a better version of myself. For example, I realize that I wasn’t always patient with my children when they were little and I was in so much pain. I’m always going to be working at being a better parent, and I feel like working toward that also makes me a better person. I look at that list often, and every day I do something to improve an item on that list.”
Ben is still guided by the principles of the Ranger Creed. “If you apply the Ranger Creed to the rest of your life, you’ll be all right,” he said. “If you do that, you will give 100 percent and then some to everything you do.”
For Ben, that means doing more than what is expected of him at all times, and it doesn’t have to be a massive change. “If you are told to clean the toilet, go ahead and clean the floor around the toilet as well,” he said. “You can apply that principle to the way you take care of yourself, and it doesn’t have to be massive: when you go to the gym, if you push yourself to do one more set or one more rep than you said you were going to, you’ll be better for it.”
Ben thinks a lot about the last lines of the Ranger Creed: “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.”
“You Don’t Give Up”
That means that the mission comes first. Ben adapts it to mean that his mission in life today is to be a better version of himself every day, just as it was when he was in the military. “In life, you need to keep pursuing your goals and missions, and those can change at any time,” he said. “But you don’t give up. No matter what happens, whatever obstacles emerge, or what injuries you might sustain, or who says no to you, you have to tell yourself not to give up.”
You do have to face reality. Sometimes you have to adapt and change. “You don’t give up, but you do need to be willing to take your beatings and learn from them,” he said. “That’s what you learn as a Ranger. You can do everything right and still fail if they don’t think you have what it takes. You can also make mistakes and still be successful. Don’t just beat your head against the wall. Assess, adjust, and adapt. But if you give up and quit, it’s just over.”
Ben has spent a good portion of his career training other soldiers, and he still works as a firearms instructor. He has also invented an innovative training tool—which he calls a Dry Fire Pro Timer Training Barrel. Shooters use it to record and track pistol draw-stroke times, test carry positions, and gain other feedback so that they can develop the skills needed to get their pistols into the fight quicker.
Ben developed it and produced a prototype—no easy task. “I spent money working with someone to design the prototype, spent time and money sourcing the components in the circuitry; I had to pay money to lawyers, app developers, patent research,” he said.
“It was expensive to get it to work and then to make sure it was going to keep working consistently once people bought it.”
But the finished product “was such a big rush—when I finally got it to where I wanted it to be.”
I understand Ben’s pride. Having used the Dry Fire Pro Timer, I can vouch for its value as a training tool.
But it was not an immediate commercial success—and still isn’t. “After all the work to develop it, we made a website and commercials for Instagram, and I could see that people were viewing it, but not as many of them were purchasing it as I had hoped,” Ben said. “After everything I had put into it, it was devastating.”
Ben wondered if he had wasted two and a half years of his life, not to mention money he could have saved for his kids’ college education. But he doesn’t regret the time.
“The whole process pulled me out of a funk,” he said. “It was almost like being back in Ranger Battalion. There is nothing like the feeling of working on something you believe in, seeing it come together, and start to work.”
Ben set a goal, believed in himself, and worked hard to accomplish his mission. As every Ranger knows, having a goal you believe in will drive you to get up every day, and from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to bed, you will be thinking, “How can I do this better, how can we make that better, or how can I be better at this?”
Despite the lackluster sales, Ben is continuing to work on the Dry Fire Pro Timer. “People who buy it like it, and hopefully there will be more of them,” he said. “It’s a good product. And if it never pans out financially, it’s okay. Designing it gave me an important project to pursue, and I learned so much from the process.”
One of those lessons is that we are supposed to take risks. Ben thinks about the fact that modern civilization is only about 12,500 years old, and that before that time, we were all nomadic hunters and gatherers: “The people [who] survived were the people who took chances,” he said.
“Until very recently, you had to hunt or fight every day just to survive. We know that character traits are passed on, and I think that the trait of risk-taking must be ingrained in all of us to some degree. It’s necessary to take chances and push yourself to survive and succeed. People used to not have free time because all their time was spent pursuing their next meal. Now that we have tons of free time, we have not figured out how to use it properly or at least the healthiest way possible.”
But Ben does not confuse risk with stress, and he thinks it is important to know the difference. “Enduring misery for no purpose, with no chance of reward at the end of it, that is just stress. If that’s what you’ve got, it’s okay to quit that job or make that move.” Ben has defined his definition of success this way: figure out what makes you happy and don’t compare yourself to other successful people.
As Rangers, Ben and I volunteered for a job that is one risk after another. We were trained to jump out of helicopters, speed down runways in the dark on motorcycles, and blow down doors.
On his first day of Ranger School, having heard all the horror stories, Ben wondered how bad it was really going to be. One guy had told him to expect that every single moment was going to be the most miserable experience of his entire life. Any moment that wasn’t that bad was going to be something to enjoy.
“Like Walking into a Lion’s Den”
But that is something Ben had to learn. Showing up at Ranger Battalion for the first time is intimidating, even though everyone there has signed up for it. “I was sick-to-my-stomach scared,” Ben said. “It was like walking into a lion’s den: I knew what was waiting for me, but I also couldn’t quite imagine it yet. Even though I knew I could quit, I went in anyway. I learned that most events were not as bad as I thought they might be, and that I could survive the ones that really were bad.”
Being a Ranger taught Ben to get comfortable working through fear, and it built his sense of confidence and self-respect every time he did so. “I remember being scared to the point where I almost felt sick sometimes,” he said. “But I went about my business and executed my missions. I even started to enjoy that feeling. I remember the first time I got put in charge of a platoon in Ranger School, I felt like the whole world was watching and waiting for me to screw up. But I was familiar with that feeling by then, and I could say to myself, ‘Okay, I’m scared, but I’m going to push past it and keep going.’”
I think that Ben gives a great explanation of how the Rangers instill the principle “Never quit.”
“I Still Wanted to Do More”
In the spring of 2008, shortly after returning to Grand Junction after working as a contractor in Iraq and Africa, Ben was offered a job that would have allowed him and his family to stay in Colorado.
Ben’s son and daughter had been four months old when he left them for the first time, and now they were two and a half years old.
He struggled with his decision, because he wanted to be present for his young family, but he also wanted to continue to serve his country in a meaningful way. He knew that if he and his family returned to Texas, he could go back overseas and get on a contract.
Eight months later, Ben was back in Iraq, working for the Department of State doing high-threat protection to get qualified—once again—for the CIA job. “I still wanted to do more,” he said. “I truly felt as though what I had done to that point did not rise to adequately serving my country. I was starting to be in a lot of pain, but I wanted to work through it every day because I expected more of myself and felt like I owed more to my country.”
Ben went back to Iraq because he felt as though many guys had given so much more than he had, and he did not feel paid up on his dues as a Ranger. I disagree with him, but I understand the way he was thinking. He was deeply frustrated to have struggled with that decision, to come so close to reaching his goal, and then have his body rebel: “Just when I finally thought that I had things figured out, the pain from my injuries got so much worse,” he said. “Eventually I had to face the reality that I could not continue to perform the way I needed to for this job. I could not tough this out.”
Ben says he would deploy now if he could: “I know those days are over, but I still want to fight for my country. It’s not so much about our government, but for my country I would go back. Everyone in the United States has the freedom here to have a chance at a better life. I know this country has given me more chances than I deserve. I’ve certainly screwed up a lot of them, but I think I’ve finally got it right and have the life that I always wanted.”
Part of taking care of yourself and the people around you means that you cultivate respect in your relationships. That doesn’t mean you have to like everyone or that everyone has to like you. You earn respect by making the choices that help you be the best version of yourself and by giving other people the same opportunity. Ben had the discipline to make new choices, and the courage to do it again and again until he got it right.
You might have good reasons to feel suspicious of a particular person or situation. But you can be protective and still be respectful. You don’t have to be perfect, and neither does anyone else. Nobody is perfect. But you earn respect when people see you doing your best, and you feel it from yourself when you make the right choices.
Wanting to improve and working to improve represent a form of self-respect. Setting goals and meeting challenges build self-respect. Setting appropriate goals requires identifying your core values and strengths and owning them. Social media is making it difficult for many of us to be clear about our own values because we are all so busy looking for likes, taking and posting selfies, thinking about how we look, and calculating how to get attention.
Many people can’t imagine life without their social media. I am challenging you right now to consider swearing off yours, at least for a little while. I no longer use Twitter. My wife, Tanya, manages my Facebook and Instagram pages, which are used for business purposes. It was uncomfortable for me to give those up at first, but I feel that having done so has helped me to take control of my time. I now spend more time with my family, more time in the gym, more time reading, more time maintaining my tactical proficiency, and more time connecting with real friends in person.
Allowing yourself to become distracted by social media can cause you to lose control of your priorities, which limits your self-respect. In addition, the way social media functions does a number on most people’s self-confidence. Consider taking a break from social media and seeing how it affects your mind-set and your self-respect.
Caring for your body and your health can also be a form of self-respect. My job has required me to be physically fit and strong. It was disconcerting when I occasionally met guys in deployment situations who seemed very out of shape. They did not inspire my confidence. My physical fitness and strength have been an important part of my identity and necessary for my job.
I continue to work out every day because I like to look and feel healthy and because I know that regular exercise goes hand in hand with a positive mental state. Consider whether there are things you could do to show more respect for your physical self. In my experience, small physical improvements can lead to big positive changes in unexpected ways.