THE PIECE OF SCRIPTURE THAT I refer to most often is John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (King James Version).
That means that if life is the most valuable thing that we possess, there is no greater conceivable act of love than to be willing to lay it down for friends or country.
If you are a person of faith, as I am, you know that this is what His love was and what ours should be. My parents always taught me to put the needs of other people before my own. Maybe you have seen your parents do that with your comfort or interests, or maybe you have sacrificed something for the sake of your children. I think most of us have been willing to love in this way, at least in some circumstances. Some of us are willing to take a job that requires that kind of selflessness.
There are plenty of jobs outside of the military that also require selfless service, including those of emergency medical technicians, firefighters, police officers, and other first responders.
“Are You Willing to Give Your Life for a Stranger?”
If I were addressing a class of new recruits for any of those jobs, I would ask them: “Are you willing to give your life for a stranger on the street? Are you sure? Because this is for real. The person you might encounter who needs your help may put you in harm’s way, either inadvertently or on purpose. When you intervene, when you do the job you are signing up for, there is a possibility that you might die. You need to be prepared to give your life for everyone, whether you know them or not. Whether you like them or not. Whether their reason for needing help in the first place was of their own making or not. What you are really laying down your life for is something larger: the idea of trust, of safety, of order.”
If, after listening to that, someone decided to drop out, that would be a good thing. Because you need to be sure that anyone who volunteers for a job that requires selfless service will not flinch in a decisive moment. If someone is signing up for one of these jobs because they want to wear a uniform, or because they think there is going to be a good pension when they retire, they are signing up for themselves. Of course, everyone has some self-interest, but if someone is not willing to sacrifice, and they don’t truly have a desire to serve, they may not truly be able to fulfill the requirements of the job when it matters most.
Selfless service, at work or at home, requires checking your ego. Selfless service requires paying attention to the needs of the people around you and committing to meet them even when doing so may cost you.
Once you make that commitment in one area, you may find that you carry it with you in all areas of your life. I know that I would lay down my life for you if you were in danger, whether I’m wearing my Ranger uniform or shorts and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. It doesn’t matter whether I am on the job. I don’t care if I like you or not. Protecting and helping people is what I believe I was put on this earth to do.
SELFLESS GESTURES, LARGE AND SMALL
On the night of September 11, 2012, our team in Benghazi was not required to go out to defend the ambassador’s compound, but there was no debate about it. When we heard the radio call, “GRS, we need you,” everyone’s attitude was, “Hell yes, we’re going.”
Protecting Americans was our job, and we were going to do it. I had no special relationship with the CIA staff. Americans were under attack. They were scared and outnumbered, and they didn’t know what to do.
Our team did know what to do. We got our gear and we went out to fight. If anyone was worried for his own life or wondering about the legal or financial ramifications if one of us got wounded, he never mentioned it.
It was selfless service for Glen Doherty to get that jet to us in Benghazi when we had no other air support. I’m sure Glen didn’t even think about whether he was going to live or die. He and his team did the right thing, even though they had to go through private channels to arrange it and they put themselves in harm’s way. For us.
Mark “Oz” Geist and Dave Ubben, a State Department security agent, were seriously wounded and might have bled out if that jet hadn’t been there to fly them to a place where they could get proper medical treatment. Glen’s selfless service saved their lives.
There was a lot of selfless service in that battle. Rone and Jack and Tig went into the ambassador’s villa over and over again, plunging into thick clouds of smoke to try to find the ambassador and locate survivors. It is disorienting to fight through smoke: it burns your eyes, it clouds your vision, it compromises your breathing, and it makes you feel as if you are going to pass out. It was an act of selfless service for them to subject themselves to those conditions in order to find others.
It is selfless service for soldiers to remain in their fighting positions instead of running and hiding whenever shooting starts. In Benghazi, the enemy continued to fire after the mortars hit us. If we had all taken cover, the militia could have approached our compound using small-arms fire, and if they had gotten inside, we would have been screwed. That didn’t happen because everyone stayed on our rooftop positions and continued to fight, not knowing if we were going to get mortared again.
Our night of fighting in Benghazi was full of dramatic examples of selfless service, but the truth is that selflessness is a quality that is required even in times of peace. A peaceful, civil society is held up by thousands of small gestures of ordinary selflessness.
In Chapter Five, “Respect,” I mentioned the high level of mistrust that some people had in Iraq, and I described how I used to try to remind guys who were suspicious that not all locals were terrorists. Most locals were just trying to live their lives. It made sense if the locals seemed frustrated with us, because we were disrupting their lives. Just imagine trying to drive to work in the morning on your regular route and, all of a sudden, you run into a huge motorcade blocking the road. Today it is going to take you two hours to get to work instead of your standard twenty minutes. Wouldn’t you be pissed off? That is one of the more benign ways that we were turning their lives upside down. It is unsurprising that some of the locals would disdain Americans.
I still had to do my job, but my awareness of how my activity was affecting others helped me to display patience, understanding, and respect in circumstances when it would have been easy, and understandable, to just respond to negativity in kind.
Sometimes it was challenging to distinguish an actual bad guy from a good guy who was just having a bad day. Sometimes I encountered an angry guy, sitting in traffic, trying to get home, and getting frustrated.
During my time in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, I was rarely in my best state of mind. It was often 120 degrees in the shade and I was constantly at risk of being hit by a sniper’s bullet or a grenade, especially when I was working. And my work entailed being primarily responsible for safeguarding someone else’s security. When I am in that state of mind and I intersect with a guy experiencing a case of road rage, I can see that there is a tremendous amount of tension in that moment.
It is a kind of service to be able to take a deep breath and smile, or to make a friendly or respectful hand gesture, or to make an effort to communicate in the local language. When we were able not only to do our jobs, but to work in a respectful way that built trust and goodwill, that was a different kind of selfless service.
Sergeant Israel Matos, USMC, Retired, is a firearms trainer who runs Operation Veteran Outdoors (OVO). This nonprofit creates recreational opportunities for veterans who have been wounded in combat, connects them with services if they need them, and gives them a chance to spend time with other veterans who understand what they are going through. Israel understands just how tough the transition back into civilian life can be: he joined the Marine Corps out of high school. Being a Marine was the only job Israel had ever known before he was wounded in Afghanistan in 2011 by an enemy using a donkey carrying sixty to eighty pounds of explosives.
“The only thing I regret is that I’m not still in active service,” he told me years later. But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Israel hadn’t been sure exactly how he would serve in the military, but he never seriously considered another line of work. “Our dad had served in the Army, although he didn’t talk about it a lot, and never pushed me to join,” he said. “My mom wasn’t in the military, but she could scare a military instructor, so I feel like she did her part to help prepare me.”
Israel grew up in the Spanish Harlem section of New York City in a four-bedroom apartment. Israel’s parents had four biological children and fostered sixteen children, three of whom they adopted, including Israel. “I was a quiet kid, and I always wanted to help people,” he told me.
Israel said he was a happy kid, but he always knew he didn’t want to stay in the big city. As a child, he joined the Civil Air Patrol’s Cadet Program. During his time with the patrol, Israel learned about aviation and got exposed to a military model of organization; it made an impression.
Throughout Israel’s childhood, his father served as a member of the Army Reserves, which influenced Israel’s decision to join the military.
“I Wanted to Help”
In 2001, Israel’s father—still in the Army Reserves—took Israel with him to work at an armory in Manhattan. “Watching him and seeing what he did with the Reserves just reinforced that I wanted to help,” he recalled. “I wanted to be a part of that.”
Israel’s father had absorbed lessons from his own military service that he passed on to Israel. “When I was fourteen, I was late for a Civil Air Patrol meeting and my uniform was a mess,” he recalled. “My dad stopped me as I was running out the door and told me to stand at attention. My dad took out a Polaroid camera and took a picture of me. Then he sent me back to iron the shirt and get dressed again, and then he took another picture. He held both pictures up and asked me, ‘Which one of these guys would you want to call for help? Which one looks like he has his act together?’ I always remember that.”
Israel’s father was helpful to others in his neighborhood as well, and his example was a powerful influence on Israel.
“My dad always reached out, even when he couldn’t really afford it, and I saw how loved he was in the community; people still respect him when he walks into a room,” Israel said.
“Even in our family, people know that they can turn to him when the chips are down, and, to me, that is worth a lot. It is basic to my understanding of what it means to live a good life. I didn’t want to be just another homeboy back on the block. I wanted to be independent, to contribute, and to be respected like my father.”
Israel’s older brother had already joined the infantry by the time Israel graduated from high school. Between his father and his brother and the Civil Air Patrol, Israel felt like he knew what he was getting into when he joined the Marines.
But as prepared as Israel was for military service, he said that he found Marine Corps boot camp to be “a brain reset.”
Israel was as happy as he had ever been at Camp Geiger in North Carolina, but was humbled by the challenge of it. The expectations were high, and Israel’s confidence continued to grow as he met the challenges. He was stimulated by the skills he was learning.
“The great thing about the Marine Corps is the way they cross-train people,” he said. “Sometimes I think people don’t realize everything we do and have to know as infantrymen: maps, medical training, construction, demolition, conflict de-escalation, foreign languages, ridiculous amounts of math, and you are constantly pushed to be the best at everything, because it will be your life on the line, and the lives of your fellow Marines on the line.”
After three months in the School of Infantry, Israel qualified as an infantry assaultman, or “51” as they are sometimes called, because the specialty is number 0351 in the Military Occupational Specialties list.
“Ready for Anything”
“We used to carry the demolition packs and Mk 153 SMAW,” he said, referring to the Mark 153 shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapon. “But we had to be ready for anything.”
Israel turned eighteen when he got to his unit, 2/2 Echo Company, a helicopter company, and then he moved to 2/2 Fox Company, an amphibious company, a move that proved easy because they were based in Camp Lejeune, right up the road.
Israel’s first experiences overseas involved delivering food, setting up hospitals, and training local military units. “It felt like I was finally doing something and truly helping others,” he said. “I was also getting to see the world. I was in Italy, Spain, the Seychelles, Kenya.” Israel loved the feeling of seeing an immediate result after they completed a mission.
“A Good Reset” in the United States
In 2007, Israel went to Iraq for the first time. “It was a good experience, but that kind of deployment was naturally more stressful because it was a lot of convoys and standing posts and I was worried about every crack I stepped on,” he said. “In some ways, I would almost rather be in a firefight compared with our routines in Iraq. At least a battle would be head-on, rather than looking over my shoulder every minute and wondering when something would happen.”
During this deployment, Israel faced another source of tension: it was difficult for him to see his girlfriend, Terisa (who would become his wife a year later). He started to think about finding a job Stateside.
After completing his deployment in 2008, Israel reenlisted as a firearms instructor at a rifle range. From 2008 to 2010, he was based in Quantico, Virginia, where he helped establish the Marine Corps Combat Pistol Program.
Israel initially thought that he wanted to work his way toward joining a shooting team, but he performed well as an instructor and was encouraged to continue. “It got to the point where, if someone was really struggling, it’d be, ‘Send him to Izzy,’” he said. “I didn’t mind. I like helping people. And it’s important to get it right. Hell, the lieutenant you’re training could wind up being the commander.”
Having seen Israel teach, I imagine he was outstanding. He has the knowledge and quiet authority that an effective instructor needs, but he is also funny and he puts people at ease.
Israel is fluent in Spanish and English, so he was assigned to work with officers from the Mexican marine corps for a while, doing firearms training. Israel and Terisa, who had met as teenagers in church, were married in 2009. Israel’s life seemed to be settling into a productive, peaceful routine. “I made good friends,” he said. “My buddy, Travis Bankston, who I met in Virginia, is still the only person I let touch my guns and is one of the few people I trust. Being in the United States for a while was a good reset.”
I understand what he means. When I am deploying, I am on edge in a way that I never am at home. I’m not unhappy overseas, but I have to maintain a level of situational awareness that can wear on me over time.
“Back in the Fight”
In 2010, Israel got a call from Chris Champion, a Marine in 2/2 Fox Company. A friend of Israel, another Marine, had been killed by an improvised explosive device (IED) in Afghanistan. Israel was already up for new orders, and he immediately requested orders to go overseas. “I wanted to be back in the fight—to hell with my career,” he recalled. “I know that the work I was doing in Virginia was helping, indirectly, but I really wanted to get back to my job as a Marine. I thought that I could help, and I just wanted to be back in the heart of it.”
On December 30, 2010, Israel joined his brothers at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, in southern San Bernardino, California.
He was assigned to 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, which was nicknamed Darkside. “I spent three months training with the platoon, and then we went into combat together in March,” Israel said.
Israel’s platoon was based in the Upper Gereshk Valley in Afghanistan’s notorious Helmand Province. They were tasked with maintaining control of the valley. It was dangerous work. “We were basically static security, and the enemy had figured out that there’s no real beating us in a gunfight, so they were constantly monitoring us and trying to figure out our schedules and then ambush us,” he said. “Between those efforts and the IEDs, I think we probably had at least one injury or casualty from our battalion every three days.”
So many people were getting hit that Israel’s platoon was replacing squads and rotating guys in and out frequently; he felt like there were always new people to get to know.
“The conditions we were living in were tough,” Israel said. “It was incredibly hot, and we were more or less living in holes in the ground or mud huts.”
The unit did what they could to alleviate the tension. “The Platoon Commander, Lieutenant Anthony, he was just five-six, but he was a powerhouse,” Israel said. “He helped turn this one pit in the ground into a little lodge with camp netting, a place to work out, or to hang out, even to barbecue sometimes.
“At first, people were skeptical about his vision, but by the time it was done, everyone loved it. It sounds crazy, but it helped people. We were living in tough conditions, and we needed everyone to be at 100 percent physically and mentally, so even a little makeshift patio that helped people relax meant something.”
That relaxation didn’t last. June 15, 2011, should have been a routine day, but conditions felt off right from the start. Israel was on the entry control point from seven to ten in the morning, which was normally the busiest time of the day. “But that day, there was nothing going on. It was weirdly quiet.”
A boy on a moped approached a bridge checkpoint, where Marines stopped and searched him, which was their usual practice there.
The boy was carrying nothing but a new cell phone. In retrospect, Israel said, that should have made him suspicious. “But I said, ‘Let him go; he has nothing we can use to hold him,’” he told me.
The teenager drove off, stopped after about four or five hundred yards, and then just sat on his moped behind a brick wall. The team had eyes on him, but they were not alarmed.
The team was about twenty minutes from the patrol base, and they had taken a few potshots from the tree line the prior evening, but it had otherwise been uneventful.
“Then a younger kid, maybe nine years old, emerges on the road,” Israel recalled. “He was walking and leading a donkey with a pack on his back. Our guys tried to stop and check him, but there was nothing in the pack of the donkey. But that donkey was moving like he was carrying a lot of weight.”
Israel was talking to Doc, a Navy corpsman, at the entry control point, and observing the interactions at the bridge crossing. “Doc and I were talking about our families, but I was watching as the kid walked up, and paying attention to the way the donkey moved.” Israel remembered having an uneasy feeling. “I’m not sure how to make sense of it, but something was clearly telling me that something was bad.”
The interpreter was walking toward the boy with the donkey to get more information when Israel stepped forward to pull the interpreter back, telling everyone “to duck, to get back, to get down, to get the fuck out of the way.” Israel was about twenty feet away from what investigators later determined to be sixty to eighty pounds of explosives as they detonated. It wasn’t possible to determine, later, where the donkey had been carrying the explosives, but it was clear that there had been a relationship between the explosion and the young man on the moped waiting by the wall. The certificate from Israel’s Corps Commendation Medal from the Navy notes, “After recognizing an enemy on a motorcycle was acting as a decoy to expose the search team to the blast, Sergeant Matos ordered his Marines to take cover in the search area bunker. With disregard for his own safety, he placed himself at the entrance of the search area and physically threw Marines into the covered area as the detonation occurred… He saved the lives of the Marines in his search team.”
Israel’s body took most of the shrapnel from the explosion. His right knee, tibia, calf, and patella were torn up. “My leg was smashed, I knew that, but I don’t remember a lot from the moment of impact,” he said. “I’ve seen video of someone patching my wounds later. Seeing it was really something, way different from going through it.”
Israel, who was conscious immediately after the explosion, remembered thinking, “Shit, I need a corpsman,” but also, “Is everyone else all right?”
Israel was taken by helicopter to the local hospital. “When I was on the bird, there were times that I was completely conscious, but I was confused, and I looked at the guys, who were all geared up, and wondered, ‘Who are these bug eyes?’” he recalled. “I don’t know if I tried to talk to them, but they can only give you a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down anyway because it’s so loud.”
“Everything Went Black”
While on the helicopter, some of Israel’s patching came undone and he started to bleed out. One of his fellow Marines moved in quickly to revive him: “I woke up and there was this big, bug-eyed dude rubbing the shit on my chest to get me to respond, and then everything went black.”
Israel woke up in the hospital. Feeling nothing, he thought, “Am I dead?” The lights in the room were bright, and Israel could hear voices speaking local Afghani dialect in the background. Israel realized that a woman was nearby, and he tried to ask her if he was dead. She answered, in a British accent, “Hey, Marine.”
Israel described this first moment of consciousness as surreal: “I thought I might be dead since I went from having so much pain to feeling nothing at all. I remember thinking that I wanted to get the attention of the nurse, but I couldn’t lift my arm. I couldn’t feel anything at all. When I took my first real, conscious breath, I had a feeling I had never experienced before. As that breath came into my lungs, it felt like my chest was on fire, but there was no pain, only a feeling of euphoria, and it radiated through my entire body, flooding me. I have never experienced anything like that before or since.”
Israel wanted to know if he had gotten all his guys home. He had. He called Terisa. “I told her I was so sorry,” he recalled. “I always promised that I would come home in one piece. I told her I got hit, but I didn’t want to tell her what had happened.”
The doctors wanted to amputate Israel’s leg. “They were talking amputation on the first day,” Israel recalled, but he told one doctor, “Dude, I’ve grown attached to that thing over the past twenty-five years.”
Israel didn’t want anyone to see him in his wounded state, especially his family, but his older brother happened to be working as a coordinator for the Wounded Warrior Regiment at the time of the explosion and he was able to see Israel’s medical reports and monitor his progress from the United States.
He arranged for Israel’s family to see him when he stopped at Andrews Air Force Base on the way to Balboa Naval Medical Center in San Diego. “I remember my mom was crying and my dad was shaking his head, ‘You couldn’t just be a helicopter pilot?’”
At the hospital in San Diego, Terisa was waiting for him. Israel recalled, “It seemed like a dozen doctors were all standing there as I arrived, asking a million questions, and I just remember that all I wanted to do was be alone with my wife and hold her in my arms.”
Israel was not only struggling physically, but mentally: “I was a Marine, and, at that point, I couldn’t bend over to pick things up or turn to wipe my own ass. It was depressing, and the reality of my situation was starting to sink in now that I had made it back home.”
Israel’s leg wounds left him highly susceptible to infection, and he underwent surgery the day he arrived in San Diego. It was the first of what would be twenty-two surgeries, many of which involved the removal of diseased tissue and muscle from his leg, which was rebuilt with cadaver parts.
That leg is now an inch and a half shorter than the other and has a ten-degree bow, but he still has it.
By the summer of 2011, Israel was in rehab, trying to walk without crutches or a cane. It was painful just to stand up.
“I was able to stand up on one leg, but when the blood would rush into my leg it would feel as though my leg was going to explode,” he said.
Israel, used to acting like a badass, was trying to hide his pain and his limp. “I really wanted to get back to work,” he said, “They tried giving me a few different assignments—I went to Coronado to help with teaching; I taught at a rifle range in Pensacola—but after a week or two of walking at full speed, my cadaver parts would break down or get infected and then I’d be down for the count for three more weeks recovering from another surgery.”
Israel was medically retired from the Marine Corps on December 31, 2013. He was twenty-seven years old. “I wanted to work, but I just kept breaking down. I knew I couldn’t do what an infantryman needs to do anymore, like put on a 120-pound pack, hike up a mountain, and fight.”
Israel felt supported by the Marine Corps as he tried to figure out his next move: “The Marines kept me in for two years after my injuries, through all the surgeries. They gave me a lot of opportunities to retrain and continue to be of service by helping in other ways, like at the armory. I gave it my all, but my leg kept breaking.”
Israel had been a Marine for his entire adult life. He had no idea what to do next.
“I loved being a Marine and I really tried to stay,” he said. “I was on my eighteenth surgery by the time I got out.”
Israel was in California when he left the military, and he and Terisa packed up their car and drove across the country to stay with family in New Jersey.
“Essentially Homeless”
“Once you get out, you’re kind of on your own—at least that’s how it felt at the time,” Israel said. “My wife and I were essentially homeless for about three months. We were living in Terisa’s grandparents’ garage and trying to make a plan.”
The couple had been on the East Coast for about six months when an organization called the Military Warriors Support Foundation, in conjunction with Bank of America, offered to move them into a house in Palm Bay, Florida, in 2014. “We were so grateful,” he said.
Israel ultimately wound up receiving support from some great organizations and people, which is part of what motivates him to work today with Operation Veteran Outdoors. “Semper Fi Fund, Homes for Heroes, and the Military Warriors Support Foundation all helped me to get it together and figure out a new life,” he said. “I definitely needed guidance.”
When Israel and Terisa moved into their new house, the Military Warriors Support Foundation held a ceremony at which a man approached Israel and said, “You don’t know me from a hole in the wall, but just know I’ve got your back.”
That made Israel uncomfortable: “I thought it was a little strange, honestly, like, ‘You don’t know me; why would you have my back?’ I guess I tend to be suspicious of people.”
That man was named Bill Orndorf, and Bill would come to play a vital role in Israel’s recovery.
It was the rainy season in Florida, and right after they moved in to their house Israel and his wife found a hole in the roof. “We were very grateful to have our house, but the weather was challenging and it exposed a few kinks in the house that needed to get fixed,” Israel said.
“I started to get stressed out. We had only been there a week, so I didn’t have a job yet. I remember thinking, ‘I’ve got to get a job and make money so that we can fix all this stuff right away.’ In the meantime, my wife messaged this guy, Bill, from the party, basically a random stranger we’ve met once, and said, ‘We need your help.’”
At first, Israel was angry that Terisa had reached out for help to someone they didn’t know. Now he’s grateful.
“No joke, within twenty minutes of Terisa making that call, I was getting messages from contractors, water people, an AC guy, and a plumber, all wanting to schedule time to come over and fix the house,” Israel said. “Forty minutes later, a truck full of filtered water shows up for us to use. Maybe two hours after that, I get a call from Bill himself. He said, ‘Hey, I’m going to a range. Do you want to come shoot with me?’”
Israel wasn’t going to say no after all the goodwill that had just come his way. “We got to talking and shooting and we just hit it off,” Israel recalled. “Bill was a finance guy. He had been a senior vice president at Merrill Lynch, and he had made it his mission to help veterans. Bill is a pretty tough dude himself. He took me under his wing and helped me learn to be a productive civilian.”
Doctors had been straightforward with Israel about the problems associated with having a limb salvage, and Israel has struggled with most of them. Israel’s twenty-two surgeries have all been from the hip down. “Something is always happening and I need to change something out like at a Jiffy Lube,” he said. “Hardware breaks, or I need new screws, or one of the cadaver bones breaks and needs to be replaced, or the soft tissue becomes infected.”
Israel jokes about it, but he has been in constant pain since the explosion. He could use a knee replacement, but doctors have told him that he only has enough live bone to do one knee replacement in his lifetime, and since they last from ten to twenty years and Israel is still a young man, he is trying to delay having that done for as long as possible.
“It Is Not an Easy Life”
“There were a lot of casualties in Afghanistan in 2011, so I actually knew a lot of other Marines with limb salvages out of the same facility in San Diego that I was in, and a good amount of them have either chosen to amputate or have since committed suicide,” Israel said. “It is not an easy life.”
But Israel still feels the work to rebuild his leg has been worth it. “I love to drive, and I still want to fly,” he said. “It has been the right thing for me to keep this leg, so far, because of the things I want to do.”
And Israel has never stopped training. Between 2011 and 2013, he learned how to walk again—and how to shoot again.
In 2012, Israel met Dave Bridgeman, a competitive shooter, at a shooting event for wounded veterans outside of San Diego hosted by the Semper Fi Fund, a nonprofit organization that provides programs to assist wounded veterans.
“Dave invited me to a United States Practical Shooting Association competition,” Israel recalled. “I was still on crutches and I still had an X-fix, like a giant metal cage stabilizer, on my leg, but I was so motivated to get back to business, I would drive one and a half hours to get to these private matches.”
The practical shooting appealed to Israel’s sense of mission. “When I maintain these skills, then I feel that I am still an asset in some way,” he said. “No one is going to break into my house and rob me, and I can help other people have that same confidence about their skills.”
Israel is still working on his childhood goal of becoming a commercial licensed helicopter pilot. “Working toward it on my own definitely wasn’t my plan, and my mom still gets upset when she thinks about it because she doesn’t want me to do anything dangerous anymore,” he said.
But noting that his passion for flying dates back to his days in the Civil Air Patrol as a teenager, he feels that the lessons have been worth the effort and expense: “Pursuing the license has been an important way to motivate myself. Shooting and flying both remind me of who I am.”
If you were to meet Israel on the street today, you wouldn’t necessarily know that he had sustained a life-altering injury. He can’t run, and he walks slowly, but he moves with purpose and chooses whether to share his story.
“I’ll talk about it if someone asks me, but people don’t always put it together,” he said. “I think I hide it well.”
Israel credits his Marine training for his ability to push through pain and deal with it matter-of-factly. “I remember once, in training, coming back from a twenty-six-mile hike after a week in the field,” he said. “I had walked until the soles of my feet had worn away, literally, so I was kind of hopping and wincing as I was walking on the catwalk in my shower shoes back to my room in the barracks, because it felt like walking on hot coals.”
A lance corporal, Israel recalled, “stopped me as I walked by his room and said, ‘We’re Marines. Stop being a pussy and stow that shit.’”
Though Israel does not think that everyone dealing with pain has to be a stoic, he does think that everyone needs to set goals.
“When you stay focused on a goal, it gives you something to wake up to other than pain,” he said.
He also thinks that serving others has been key to his own recovery and his ability to maintain a positive attitude. Israel works as a shooting instructor and runs a website, shootingclasses.com, which connects students with instructors.
He also serves as president of Operation Veteran Outdoors, which provides recreational opportunities to Purple Heart recipients and other combat veterans. OVO organizes events at which veterans with similar injuries and experiences interact with one another and get information about other programs and services that may help them in their transitions back to civilian life.
“A great weekend for me is taking veterans out hunting, even though I’m not a hunter, or volunteering at a soup kitchen,” said Israel, whose position at OVO is a volunteer one. “Sometimes getting out of your own head and feeling like you are of service to others is the best medicine.”
I have watched Israel on the range, and I think that his ability to make people smile represents another kind of service that he is providing.
“We are teaching serious stuff, but I want people to be comfortable,” he said.
Israel also attended classes sponsored by Semper Fi in San Diego, where he learned and took to heart the acronym VAULT: valued, accepted, understood, loved, and trusted.
“That is my benchmark when I’m working with people, especially with OVO,” he said. “I want you to feel those things when you are with me, and when you are among your fellow warriors. I don’t care, I’ll start floss dancing with my full gun belt on if it breaks the ice.”
Israel’s relentlessly positive attitude belies his chronic pain. Some mornings, “I wake up and my muscles have contracted overnight in a cramp, and I have to massage it and stretch it out slowly just to stand up,” he said.
“Sometimes I can kind of get the muscles firing again by forcing my brace on, but however it resolves, that is how my day starts at least once a week.”
Israel also has tinnitus, the perception of a constant ringing sound: “The worst times of the day are when I’m waking up and falling asleep,” he said.
But Israel believes that, veteran or not, everyone has to identify their problems and tackle them, one step at a time: “If something is bothering me when I wake up, I remind myself that I’ve got stuff to do, and that I’ve got people counting on me. That works for me because I never want to let anyone down. Someone else might need to tell themselves something different, but I’m motivated by people counting on me.”
“Check Your Ego at the Door”
Israel thinks that most service members are motivated, at least in part, by altruism. “If you are going to be successful in the military, you do need to check your ego at the door,” he said. “You are volunteering to be in some challenging situations, usually because someone else’s life is on the line. You are signing a check—up to and including your own life and everything in between. There is an old saying that the military makes bad men worse and good men better, and I think that is true. If someone is just trying to use the military strictly to get something out of it personally, those are the people who tend to come out angry and disappointed, because it does require sacrifice.”
He credited a sense of patriotism as an important factor in his decision to join the Marines. “I still get choked up hearing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and seeing fireworks on the Fourth of July,” he said. “The United States is a special place, a free place, and I think most people have a sense of wanting to protect this land, even thinking of this as a larger family. That’s how I think about it. I always felt like I was protecting something valuable.”
But he acknowledged that the transition to civilian life can be tough for many veterans, even those who were not wounded. “To go from a regimented life, where someone else is making all your decisions and choices, to being out in the civilian world, is an overwhelming change,” he said.
Israel had joined the Marines at age seventeen and hadn’t known any other kind of life as an adult when he left the service. “I had a lot of insecurity when I came out,” he recalled. “I didn’t have anyone to protect; I didn’t know what my mission was anymore. It was disorienting, and then I had all the physical injuries on top of it.”
He noted that people who commit to military service are committing to a disciplined mind-set. “Some of it is painful, and you are going to miss out on things, but I don’t know if everyone figures that out until they are home and it’s over, and that can be a reckoning.”
Israel reflected on other men his age and thought about how their lives compared with his own and those of his fellow warriors: “Some of us were at war while everyone else was at home, walking around a mall or drinking at bars. It was interesting to get out and realize that, in some ways, I was more mature than my peers, because of what I had been through, but in other ways, I was very immature. For example, my life had been so rigid and structured, I felt awkward in the social ways of civilian life. I had to get comfortable interacting with people.”
“They Have No Idea What Veterans Have Been Through”
Israel found that there were some things that those civilians just didn’t understand. “I remember, when I first came back, being at a big group dinner in a Ruby Tuesday and someone asked me what it was like to be in a gunfight. I remember thinking, ‘Why would you ask me that at dinner, in front of kids?’ It is a reminder that many civilians might appreciate us, but they have no idea what veterans have been through.”
Years after he left the military, Israel is still a warrior. “Being a Marine helps me push, because I don’t want to fail and I don’t want to quit because that isn’t what Marines do,” he said. “I still have a mission. It is to try to help other people.”
Trying to continue to carry out that mission has been the key to Israel’s recovery and is his best advice for other people who are facing adversity: “Find something that you know you are good at it and use that skill to connect with other people and to help as many people as you can. I don’t care if it’s underwater basket weaving. Reintegrating is hard. It is tempting to shut yourself off because you don’t want people to see you struggle or be in pain. But if you can find something that motivates you to stay connected and help as many people as you can, you’ll feel a sense of purpose.”
Anyone who serves in the military, and anyone who is willing to put him or herself at risk as a first responder, is offering the ultimate selfless service. When you volunteer for that kind of job, you are willing to lay down your life for someone else. Thousands of people risk their lives every day just by going to work, and I’m afraid that too many of us take for granted their bravery, and the courage and sacrifice of their loved ones.
Our communities’ ability to function depends on the willingness of significant numbers of people to volunteer for dangerous service. The security of our nation depends on the people who are willing to go into battle to fight for it. The safety of other nations is also dependent on American troops, because we are still the very best in the world at what we do. Some of the men and women who sign up for that work do sacrifice their lives, and many others return home and live and work among us without broadcasting what they have given up or how the consequences of their selfless service shape their lives today.
Take a moment to think about how you express your appreciation for the sacrifices that the men and women on the front lines make for all of us. If you are not satisfied with what you are doing, identify an action you will take in the coming weeks or months that will align with your level of gratitude.
Now, think about the ways that you offer selfless service in your own life. You probably already do that to some degree, even if you don’t literally put your life on the line. There are many practical ways in which we put other people’s needs before our own, often for our children or for our good friends. But have you ever sacrificed something in order to protect or improve your neighborhood? Your community institutions? Your town? Your state? It could be time, money, or other resources. Giving any of those can be a kind of selfless service. Think how much stronger our country could be if we each expanded the network of people to whom we offer our selfless service.
It may sound counterintuitive, but selfless service also helps the people who provide it. People don’t perform truly selfless service for their own benefit, but that is often a happy result. I think Israel’s recovery illustrates how powerful it can be to give of yourself.
Feelings of satisfaction and peace come from helping others and offering yourself up, whether to a team, an organization, or your country; your service will make you more connected to other people who are part of the same community. As the community of people that you serve expands, the web of connections that you create will grow more complex, and the impact of your service may be more profound than you imagined possible.