Survivor’s Obligation – Choosing to Live with Intention

[00:00:00] As we went through the brief, we actually moved our points for the first time ever and we were all nervous and the commander was trying to calm this all down and said I everybody, to get out there and flight just like you do at home. You’ve flown this hundreds of times, let’s go give a good air show.

And my flight was 25.5 seconds long from takeoff explosion. When you asked me how it changed my life, it just made me more deliberate and intentional with every interaction, every relationship, every. Action I take every single day.

Welcome to the Onward Podcast. This is your host, Emily Harmon. Can you believe that on coming up on having published 100 onward podcast episodes? I have not missed publishing an episode on a Monday yet, and there’s been other times where I’ve published more than one in a week. I wish that I could be [00:01:00] that consistent with my workout routine.

I’m not saying exercising once a week, but what I am saying is just sticking to it and being as consistent as I have with publishing this podcast. My guest today is Chris Strickland. Chris ejected from the F 16. He was piloting during a Thunderbird’s Air Show. He’s an award-winning leadership author, speaker, and he’s also president of Dunn University, where he leads recruitment and training for Dunn Investment Company.

He retired after 23 years as an active duty officer with the Air Force. He’s also a bestselling author. He wrote the book Survivor’s Obligation, along with Joel neb. Joel was diagnosed with a rare and often fatal cancer, and against the odds, both of them survived. And they met years after their individual life changing events and discovered that they both had a desire to share their stories, to help others, and they resolved to [00:02:00] fulfill what they call survivor’s obligation, a responsibility to live an intentional life for themselves, for their families, and an honor of those who didn’t get a second chance.

Chris, welcome to the Onward Podcast. Thanks, Emily. I appreciate you having me on. I heard about your book a few, several months ago that came out, survivor’s obligation that you wrote with, uh, Joel, and I saw it actually a hard cover of it at a conference I attended in Florida right before we were all, uh, restricted to our homes.

It was a government contracting conference for veterans. That was held by, um, Jenny Clark, a friend of mine, and I thought, I’ve gotta interview these guys, and I’m so glad that you are able to be on the podcast. And I read the book and I’ve got a lot of questions. I highlighted a lot of areas of it, but maybe you could just start off by telling us the story about like how you met Joel and, and [00:03:00] why you wrote the book.

So you can go ahead. Yeah. So Joel and I both were in the military and flew F fifteens. However, we didn’t know each other while we were in the military. And uh, as I was getting ready to retire, I began working for a consulting company and we were teaching teams how to become elite teams. So our cadre of people were sealed and rangers and fighter pilots and astronauts.

It was a really, a great group to, uh, to hang out with because it was the same people I hung out with in the military. And one day we were getting ready for a company event, and part of this team building exercise was to plot out the chart of our life. And we had everybody right down the highs, the lows, and we’re math people.

So we plotted out on a graph. And Joel and I get up and give our story independently, and we each had a, an event that happened, the trauma that happened in our life, that was by far the low point. But what we have found is that many people, when they have low points, they continue on that downward trend, at least for a while, if not forever.[00:04:00] 

But Joel and I, when we presented, we had the lowest point of our life, but then we climbed to higher peak than we ever had before. It was like that low point had enabled us the vision to climb better than we could before. And after that, we started talking. Mine was an injection from an aircraft and uh, his was stage four cancer.

And we just started talking about our stories and we realized we had never really opened up about our stories because, you know, like, like many people, especially in the military and, and most especially fighter pilots, we like to compartmentalize our feelings away and put walls up and not talk about that.

But this enabled Joel and I to sort these conversations and as we did, we, we had so many similarities. And we both felt the need to tell our story, but we didn’t know what that really meant. And as we were traveling around consulting with companies in our free time, we’d be in a rental car in California or or up in Manhattan, in an Uber, and we would just start talking about these.

Started formulating this. We said, we [00:05:00] really need to write a book together. And this went on for a while. We thought our stories were so different in their context of what happened, that we never put ’em together. But as we up to each other about our feelings, our emotional, and those invisibles that were behind the scenes, what we found is, Although the actions, the events that gave us trauma in our lives were different.

The reactions and how we grew from it were so similar that it aligned into the story and we began to call it our survivor’s obligation. So that’s how the book was born. You know, I think that people’s stories matter and uh, what I tell people too is, you know, you could be listening to a story like yours that we’re gonna talk, tell today about why you ejected from an aircraft.

And even if you’ve never been a fire fighter pilot, you can learn. From how you handled that trauma and how you moved onward, and even if you’ve never had stage four cancer, you might have had, you know, a spinal cord injury. Or you might just be facing a really hard time at work and you can see how other people have made it through and it helps you realize I [00:06:00] can do that.

Exactly, but we have to, again, like fighter pilots, we debrief every flight we have. Mm-hmm. So if you look at us flying F 15, F 16, the average flight is about 45 minutes long as we take 45 minutes of flying time. When you look at how long it takes us to get to and from our airspace where we practice, we really get about seven to nine minutes of.

Actual practice in there. So when you look at how much goes into that, we have to get the most training possible out of it, which is why we debrief. So sometimes we will debrief three to four hours for a flight that was less than an hour long so that we can figure out how we get better tomorrow. So that we figure out what we did wrong, how we improve it, what we did right, how we duplicate it, and that’s how we accelerate our performance in the next flight.

That’s the same principles Joel and I took as we look at these situations, at our families, at our professional life as our personal life to go. What aspects of this really made us who we are? Because like you said, you’re. Your situation may be different. What happened to you may be different, but we [00:07:00] believe that between every action and reaction is a choice.

Yes. And it’s one based in your beliefs, your experiences, and it is a choice that you make, albeit in a split second, what seems like a reaction. It’s founded in your beliefs and determines who you are. I agree. When I was reading the part of the book where you wrote about what happened to you, it was like, you know, and how it was going through slow motion and how you made certain decisions and.

And just actually what really impressed me, and I’ve was in the Navy, but I was never a fighter pilot or anything, but just the amount of. Attention to detail and everything that you have to do to prepare for those Thunderbird flights where you really have to know exactly what part you’re gonna be flying over to make your maneuver and how you guys practice.

Can you kind of just walk through, you know how you prepare for one of those flights, and this was. When you were celebrating the 50th year of the Thunderbird, so you were really flying a lot and in different places and how [00:08:00] it’s different for each place that you fly and how you have to figure that out.

So maybe you could explain that. Yeah. So let’s talk about what it takes to be a Thunderbird. So to even apply for the team, I had to be an instructor that had had combat in another fighter airplane. So I was an F 15 instructor at the schoolhouse. I had seen combat in Iraq, and that’s what it takes to apply.

And once you make it through the application process, I had to leave where I was comfortable. Leave my F 15. I had to Luke force base, get combat qualified in the F 16, which is a completely different aircraft. After combat qualified F 16, then I went to Las Vegas. We’re force base four months training season.

And I am a completely qualified pilot in the FS 16, and I had to go through the longest syllabus in the Air Force. I flew three times a day, almost five days a week for four months straight before I received my certification of fly air shows. And the reason we do that is because when you see six aircraft flying 18 inches apart at hundreds of miles per hour, I don’t have time to [00:09:00] react off what my wingman does, that Wingman has to know what I’m going to do so that they can act at the same moment.

So if you’ve ever heard the audio of a Thunderbird show, we preface every move we make on the radio so that everybody can maneuver at the same time. So we used to joke that, that we have to each know what each other’s thinking and what we’re gonna do before we do it. That’s a level of training that goes into each show.

That’s 28 to 32 minutes long. Then, as you said, we were performing at a lot of locations. Every time we get to a location, we have satellite footage, so we can study the area. We take a helicopter flight, we have an arrival show where we check our points because realize we’re flying some of the most high tech aircraft in the world and we’re not using anything on board.

Because when we fly an air show, the only thing we use to make that show center. So the moment we want you to take the picture, the moment the aircraft come together for that beautiful picture in front of you, a Window’s a.

Is an [00:10:00] analog stopwatch that’s mounted to the dash of our aircraft in the ticket second hand, along with the inflection of the voice of the other pilot. Because what we say during an air show is scripted out. We can’t modify the script. We have to say it because that’s how we build habit patterns. So the only way I know whether to speed up or slow down is by the tone of my wingman’s voice whenever he makes this call on the radio, does that give you a little bit of insight as what goes into it?

It brings, it brings like tears of. Like just being proud to my eyes because of, you know, I just didn’t really realize how much effort, how much work that took. I mean, you kind of know it, but when you hear it, it’s different. And then you were flying in Idaho and the, I don’t know if it was the map or the, the bearings.

The measurements you didn’t feel were quite. Accurate in that show? For that show? Yeah. Let’s jump into that show a little bit. So it was one of those days that everything’s going wrong. It was one of those weeks everything was going on. We were on our third location for the week. We [00:11:00] had been all over the country flying air shows.

We had flown, like we said, it was the 50th anniversary. So we had flown more air shows than were normal. And as we came in the mountain home, Idaho. For whatever reason, we were low on gas, so we didn’t have time to do our pre-show maneuver, where we practice our maneuvers at that altitude to check our points.

We landed, we get satellite imagery everywhere we go, and the satellite, instead of being overhead, the show location was off the edge of the horizon, so it made, it landed. We couldn’t use it. You see how this goes on those days where all the dominoes are lining up to go, this is the worst we’ve ever had.

Yeah. On the day of the show, I woke up with that, with that weird feeling of something being wrong. You know how when you can’t really explain it, you know something’s not right. I call my wife back in Las Vegas, make sure the kids are ok. Make sure she’s ok. It was so bad that I actually went in and said, the most dangerous maneuver I fly is my opening maneuver.

I don’t wanna fly. When you called your wife, did you let her know that you weren’t feeling okay, or did you, did you let her know you were just like checking in with her like normal? Nah, just checking in. Yeah. Right. You don’t wanna, she was already. [00:12:00] Very nervous about what I did for a living. Yeah. And so, needless to say, because, uh, she doesn’t like flying as much as I do, um, by that I mean she doesn’t like flying at all, even commercial.

So it was just to check in, Hey, how are you? Normal, do every day. Didn’t think anything about. I went into my safety observer, who is also the second command of the squadron and said, Hey, something don’t feel right. I, I don’t know, like it said, I didn’t get to practice. I haven’t told it in a while. I don’t wanna fly my takeoff maneuver.

Now, as a viewer at one of our air shows, if we switch one of our maneuvers out, I can tell you, you won’t even notice, right? If we have the backup maneuver we plug in there, you don’t even know. It’s not like there’s a hole in the show. And, uh, and he said, no, you’re flying your takeoff maneuver. You’re trained to do it.

Get out there and do it. I know you can do it. And so I did. Right? The military, we, we do what we’re told to do and uh, it literally, it wasn’t just me, it was other people on the team. As we went through the brief, we actually moved our points for the first time ever and we were all nervous and the commander [00:13:00] was trying to calm us all down and said, I want everybody to get out there and fly just like you do at home.

You’ve flown this hundreds of times. Let’s go give ’em a good air show. And my flight was 25.5 seconds long from takeoff to explosion. And when you say you were moving your foot point, I’m sorry to interrupt. When you say you were moving your points, you mean that you were, you guys were moving on the fly in the, in that discussion where you were going to like turn and do that kind of stuff?

Yeah. Yeah, remember that. Remember that, uh, ticking second hand that we’re timing off of. We’re also timing off visual references on the ground, and it may be somebody’s boat sitting on a trailer. It may be tree, a certain tree. We all know where it is. That’s how we, cause we’re flying around below 500 feet, down to 75 feet.

Sometimes we are using actual ground references to make those shows happen. So, uh, we were jockeying those around because of the problems we had had with the satellite imagery and timing. So that made us all nervous. You know, what we’re, we’re, yeah, we’re, we’re all highly trained and we’re, we, there’s safety measures in the show.

So we went out and [00:14:00] flew. Like I said, my takeoff maneuver was a maxline split. S so I took off last, after the other Thunderbirds took off, I took off, went straight up, flipped over on my back, and did the back half of a loop to exit. The opposite direction on the runway. And, uh, as I rolled inverted, I knew something was wrong.

I knew I didn’t have enough altitude, but I was the point that I could abort maneuver. Then I maneuver from the aircraft before. 8,000 feet per minute. I was falling out of the sky and I ejected just over 60 feet above the ground. Wow. Wow. And people gotta read the book to just see, I mean, you felt like you were, it was kind of going in slow motion.

You had to make decisions on whether to eject, you had to make a decision on where you were gonna take the plane so you didn’t hit people. You’re thinking about. Your family, you’re thinking about all the people on the ground and you don’t want to hurt anybody. All those things that you’re thinking about, that’s when your pilot training really comes into play.

It is, and that’s when training comes [00:15:00] into play. Because a lot of people ask me, they’ll go, Hey, I bet you were nervous. I bet you were, you know, your heart was pumping. How was it when you were in the plane? And and my answer’s always the same. It’s the most calm I have ever been in my life. Yeah, because it was that moment that I had trained for and I was very methodical about the thought process.

I was going through what I was analyzing. I’ll tell you, it slowed down so much in my mind. I was trying to figure out what happened. So it was like I could rewind and play today’s exercise against other ones I had flown before. In my mind, that’s how slow things were going. And when doctors look at that and they go, well, you, your, your pulse had to be so high.

And I joke that what happened is after I hit the ground, so put it in a quick summary. They pick me up, they take me to the hospital. They think I’ve done a lot of bad things to my body because I didn’t get any parachute swings. I literally just landed on my feet. I’m two and inches shorter today. Uh huh.

But they put me in a helicopter as I’m waiting on the helicopter to go to a trauma center. It’s probably been about a half hour since the incident. [00:16:00] And as they’re getting the helicopter ready to put. All of a sudden all the alarms go off and they come running in and they go, what happened? And I go, I just realized I ejected from aircraft.

Yeah. It took that long for the adrenaline to wear off and my body’s natural mechanisms to take over. And that’s when set hour after everything happened. For people listening too. It makes me think about, you know, we, we practice fire drills, we practice, you know, I don’t think when my kids were younger, I practiced enough how we would escape the house if there was a fire.

Things like that. The reason you practice that stuff, sometimes at the time it just seems like, oh, we know what we’re supposed to do, but it’s so that when the moment comes. And everything else is going on. You can be calm and you know what to do. Yeah. In, in the military mindset, we always train to plan for contingencies.

And so what happens? You have your plan of everything going perfect. Your contingencies are what happened if something goes wrong, and the way we always teach that is your contingency is the first two to three maneuvers [00:17:00] you make. If that happens. So you know what everybody’s gonna do, something happens.

You’re in an air show. All Thunderbirds knew the first three maneuvers they were gonna do, the first three actions they were gonna take. And what that allows you to do is if you know the first three things you’re gonna do, it allows you to think about the next three things you’re gonna do so that you’re always being proactive and not react.

That’s how you get in front of a situation and you keep control of a situation to the max extent you can. What did the rest of the, um, pilots do? Like, did the show end when that happened? It did. So what happens is, if anything, if anything’s not going normal, and we call it, it’s called the knock it off.

And if anybody, anybody can call and knock it off across the radio, when they do, everybody has to acknowledge the knock it off in order so that we know everybody heard it. Mm-hmm. And the Thunderbirds, what that means is everybody basically doubles their distance from the other aircraft, gets right side up, gets climbs away from the ground until we can figure out what’s going on.

So if, if you ever go out and listen to the full audio of it, you’ll hear just after the, uh, crash, you’ll hear somebody call the knock it off. And everybody goes through that [00:18:00] drill. Whenever something like this happens, there’s an investigation and they determined it was pilot error. Does it ever go back to the fact that, you know, all this other stuff that happened, like the coordinates weren’t right, and things like that.

Why is, is it just, you know, those, those are contributing factors and, and they were listed in the report. I think there were almost 15 contributing factors. Ok. And we always look at the root cost because it’s very easy to say it’s pilot error. But what we need to look at is what created the situation where the pilot can make that level of an error.

And I’ll tell you, it took me years to be able to, cause I’m a fighter pilot, right? I don’t wanna say I made a mistake even if we all know I did. So part of writing this book is I had never dealt with my situation. My wife and I had never talked about it for 13 years. We didn’t talk about it. That’s one of the three questions I had is like, So in the Air Force, didn’t they, they wouldn’t make you go to counseling or require it?

Or do you just not talk about it? I mean, how do they handle that? They make you get right back up [00:19:00] in a plane when you can. I know that, but what, yeah, and, and I’ll tell you, that was the first thing I wanted to do is get back up in a plane and it, the only version of counseling I had was after the, after the investigations and everything, they came in and said, what, what assignment do you want next?

And I picked out my dream assignment, which was gonna fly Fs. At Adeena overseas, that’s where me and my wife both, both wanted to go and I had orders to go over there and I was excited about it and I thought my wife was excited about it and one day my general that I work for called me in and he goes, Hey ha, have you, are you okay?

Right. That’s the fighter. This is fighter pilot counseling. Hey buddy, you okay? Right? That’s about as deep as we go. And I go, I’m perfectly fine. He goes, how’s your wife? I said, she’s fine too. She’s excited about going to Korea. And he goes, are you sure? And uh, he said, I think your family needs you to not put on a GSU for a while.

Cause we put on our GSU right before we get in the fighter aircraft. And I said, they’re good. And he goes, here’s what I want you to do. He goes, it’s 11 o’clock. This was 11 o’clock in the morning in Las Vegas. And he goes, if you want to go to Kadina and return to the F 15, [00:20:00] that’s perfectly fine with me.

He said, but I want you to go home and take your wife off to lunch. And I want you to ask her if she’s ok. Cause he said, I really think they need a break. And he goes, if you come back and tell me they need a break, I’ll get you one non-line assignment. You take a couple of years of not getting in the aircraft, let everybody recover from this, then you’ll be back and and good to go.

I said, okay. I said, but she’s not gonna say that. And I went to lunch and found out, yes, her and the kids did want me to take a break. So I went back in and said, your right boss, your experience is better than mine. I’ll give you my flying assignment. You send me where you think I need to go. And from there I went to what I consider one of my best assignments in my Air Force career.

He sent me off to work in the Pentagon for years. And that for leadership development and experience was one of the best things I ever did was being one of the youngest people as a captain, showing up there as an action officer in the Pentagon. But it was also, that was the only counseling my family had was take a couple of years and not flying, let everybody get their feedback underneath.

Wow. Do you think things have changed with that? Counseling is, I would [00:21:00] love to say yes, but I’ll firmly say no. Oh. Um, and again, I will give you my situation. So if you read the book, you’ll find out. The other part that was hard for me to admit that I only did in my last year before I retired is, is I had PTSD from the, from the incident, from the crash.

So my wife, oh, by the way, the Air Force decided to call and tell her I crashed on the phone and she heard that I had died. Yeah. And. Think about what I said. I didn’t say they told her that. I said she heard that. Mm-hmm. And, and really in communication, that’s all that matters is what the receiver hears.

And I’ll tell you what happened the first day, long story short of how I ended up there. But the first day I sat down in counseling as a colonel in the Air Force. And I looked at my counselor at, uh, my psychiatrist, psychologist, and I said, here’s the deal. They want me to come talk to you. It’s kind of a waste of our time because I send people to talk to you that have a problem.

I don’t need to come talk to you. Right. That was some of that, that fighter pilot side coming out. Mm-hmm. And what I found out is I needed, I needed that worse than anybody else at the time, but I [00:22:00] was personally, and I tell you that story because I go personally, I had no. Desire to be there. And I was confident and couldn’t do anything for me.

Right. And it was life changing over the next six months. And that’s the reason I say the senior leaders of the Air Force, like myself, we grew up in a different age and we need to be more open to it. And we’re trying to be more open to it. But when it comes down to looking at us, we’re very reluctant to go sit down and go, I’d like to talk to somebody.

I get it. I get it. Why did you go as a colonel? Well, you, you read a little bit that, of the book. Really the only time I’ve ever yelled at anybody was my doctor, who was also a colonel. Mm-hmm. And as I, through this process, he got a waiver for me to go back and fly the S 16 again. And that is not where I wanted to go.

I did not wanna fly fighter aircraft anymore. And it was in that moment. I, I say that I had put all my feelings in a, in a closet and locked the door. Mm-hmm. But unfortunately, with him getting me the opportunity to go back to an F 16 again, it kind of cracked the door. And once it had been closed for [00:23:00] 13 years, I couldn’t get it back closed.

And so in that moment, all those emotions poured out and he’s one of my best friends now. We, we travel together all the time. I talk to him every week. But at that time we, we weren’t that close, and it was in that moment that he knew where I was and what I needed more than I did. So he’s the one that convinced me I should go try it out.

Yeah. And the story about how you had no, no injuries, tell us about your injuries, and then also tell the story about how you figured out that you were two and a half inches shorter. Yeah, so whenever I was sitting there, you picture this, they put me on a backboard. They put me on the neck brace, they strapped me down.

I’d get in there and they’re analyzing and, and they. Pouring blood outta my ears. They think I’ve, apparently your heart can rip outta the muscles. They think I broke some of my vertebra. I mean, basically if it’s wrong, they think it’s wrong. And at that moment they, they literally go, we don’t know if you’re ever gonna walk again.

It’s the worst of all of your fears happening while you’re strapped to a backboard for about 12 hours. And just after [00:24:00] midnight, the day after the, uh, day of the incident, the doctor comes in, in a trauma center in Boise, Idaho, and he goes, I think you should do this pretty slowly, but I’m gonna unstrap you and, uh, you’re gonna get up and you’re walking outta here.

You’re, you’re fine. And you think about that moment of, of 12 hours of what all is wrong with me and how much I damaged my body to, I’m gonna get up and walk outta here. And I did, I walked outta the hospital that I had flown into, which is pretty awesome. And a real quick side note, the one of the best moments that could ever happen is by the time I get back to the base where I was, it was, you know, two, three o’clock in the morning.

And as I pulled up with the person driving me, the entire Thunderbird team was standing outside. Oh. And that was pretty awesome. Yeah. That was one of those life moments. Um, yeah. But fast forward. So now I’m perfectly fine then by perfectly fine. I mean I’m really sore, I’m really bruised up. I can’t really stand up straight.

And my wife flew up to see me and realized I married my high school sweetheart and we’ve been married at this point, you know, forever. So [00:25:00] one of the things I didn’t think about is, That how much you know about each other. And as she came to hug mi for that first hug, she was taller than she ever had been.

Think about that. You think when you hug somebody standing up so many times, you don’t realize, you know where you fit on each other. Yeah. But she was taller and in that moment I, I get step back from her and go. You gotta take me to hospital. And again, she thinks, she thinks I’m crazy and we go in and I haven’t measured my height and I’m two and half inches shorter.

And that, that is how I found out, is by hugging my wife. Wow. And that was because a lot of vertebrae had. Collapsed. Well, as you can imagine, I went to a lot of specialists after this happened because what they will tell you is there’s not two and a half inches of cartilage in your body, and if you compress all the cartilage, they think that’s where my loss and height came from.

But if you compress through all the cartilage, when the bone hits bone, it shatters bone. And so to this day, they will say, it’s not possible for me to be two and a half inches [00:26:00] shorter because without breaking anything, because there’s not that much cartilage in your body. And my answer is measure me. I am.

I have 12 years, 10 years of a military record saying I’m one height, and now to this day, I’m still two and a half inches shorter than I was back then. Wow. You know what? I think also, All of your Thunderbird team needed counseling? My opinion. I agree. Because they watched this happen. Yeah. Uh, my crew chiefs, my crew chiefs, we have dedicated crew chiefs and they were incredible and they, they came and talked to Terry after it.

I know what their reaction was because I heard what their reaction was when it happened on the ground. I think a lot of people, and that’s the one thing we don’t realize when trauma happens, is how it affects people. How it affects people emotionally, and that’s the invisible scars of trauma happening, whether you’re in the military or outta the military.

It’s all the same. It’s like you said, you don’t to eject from aircraft stage that are losing their jobs with the things going on in the world. Yeah, it could be a divorce, it could be a death [00:27:00] in the family. This all affects people differently and we have to deliberately work through those emotions because, like I put in the book for us, we all look at the whys.

I think why is the most powerful word in the English language. And when things happen, we tend to ask why. And your decision is how you get lost in that life. Why did this happen? Why did this happen now? Why did this happen to me? And that is where people really get in that bad place. Trauma. But for myself and Joel, our bigger weight that turned into our survivor’s obligation wasn’t those type questions.

It was, why did I survive? Why did I survive? But so many other people didn’t when so many other stage four survivors that were getting chemo with Joel didn’t walk outta that hospital. So many other fighter pilots. Didn’t climb outta the aircraft to go spend time with their family again. And that was the weight for us.

Why did I survive? And, and the next part that I carried was, did I do it? What was I left here to do? And did I do it or did I miss it? And when you think about that weight every day, that [00:28:00] was my negative places. I always felt like I couldn’t sleep. I had to prepare. I, and I didn’t know what I was preparing for.

But that was our survivor’s obligation where we came with, we just have to live every day to, its fully, we have to live each day because you, everybody gets the same 86,400 seconds in each and every day. And you see so many people do so many different things with it, but it involves spending time with your family, spending time with your team at work.

It involves figuring out what a true definition of success is for you in your life. Mm-hmm. Because people think success. Is a title, it’s a paycheck. But as I traveled around consulting in the world, I would ask people to write down their personal definition of success and, and it’s amazing how many people have never done that.

They just go, I wanna be successful. But they dunno what it means and they haven’t flooded out the path of how they get there. That’s a really good point. I would agree. Success isn’t a title. So many people. Wear their title on their shoulders. In the military, you definitely wear your, your rank on your shoulders, but you’re not that [00:29:00] rank.

That’s not who you are. You’re not that title. That’s not who you are. And if I had identified with my title as head of the small director of the small business office for the Navy and Marine Corps, when I retired, that title goes away. And people don’t treat me the same cuz I’m not in that job. I didn’t let it get to me because that job wasn’t me.

That job didn’t define me. But some people have a hard time with that. They feel like that success is being in that job. And I guess sometimes you get there and then you realize that’s not really success. That’s it. And that, that is what I wrote about in the book. And I will tell you, it was the thing that made me and my wife nervous about the book is because I’m pretty honest.

In the book, in that, the first part of my career, getting to the Thunderbirds, that was my focus. I was focused. And so many military people are, so many civilian people are too. And in the beginning, we all have to be more focused on our career. Yes. But what we have to realize is that’s ego driven. It is, it sounds bad when we say it, but it is you wanting a title, wanting a promotion, wanting to establish yourself [00:30:00] is ego driven and what we need.

All need to do is mature past that and no, that’s important. That is important, but we have to be calling driven of what am I doing in this life and why am I doing it? And then that will yield a title a paycheck. My wife is taking a class at Yale right now and it’s on, one of the things she came in from last week and and she really liked was that we don’t work for a paycheck, but a paycheck enables us the experience of our life, which is what we find happiness from.

It’s not the money in your paycheck, it’s what you take your money to enable you to do. Taking my family to the beach, taking ’em on vacation. It’s those experiences that make us who we’re and form our happiness, not the fact that my paycheck comes in once a month and it’s a certain level. Yep, you’re exactly right.

And I wanna go back to about stuffing the emotions down. I interviewed somebody recently, I really liked her quote Stephanie Zamora, and she said, you know, when you stuff your emotions down, like send them down to the basement cuz you don’t wanna deal with them. They go down to the basement [00:31:00] and they lift weights.

Emotions. I like that. And they’re getting stronger. Right? So going back to what you asked me about the military being open for talking about emotions and, and for those type of things, one of the things we intentionally teach fighter pilots to do is compartmentalize because we have to, and I, I’m not against that because what we tell people when they’re learning to fly is realize the F 15, you’re about 15 feet off the ground when you get in that cockpit.

And the way I used to teach it at Schoolhouse is when you start climbing the ladder, If any of your problems at the bottom of the ladder, climb the cockpit with you, climb back out. Yeah, because no matter what’s going on in life, you have to be laser focused when you’re in that cockpit, which means when you climb that ladder, we intentionally teach ourselves to forget about everything else and only focus on the flight at hand because you’re flying around thousand miles hour.

You have to be on your game every day. But after years of doing that, unfortunately it carries over into the rest of our lives and we tend to compartmentalize, like you said, we push those feelings down to [00:32:00] the basement and go, I’ll deal with them later. And guess what? We never go down in the basement, deal them.

And that’s what I did for 13 years with my wife. Cause people go, how could you not have talked about this? Right. Well, she flew out to meet me. We were happy that, that I was alive. You know, you can imagine those emotions that go through. And other than that, the only thing that ever came up is if the movie that was playing when she got the phone call ever comes on, she would just say, turn it off.

Right, right. That’s it. That’s it. We never talked about it. And I’m not saying that’s right. That’s completely wrong. Right, right. I’m just telling you the realism of if we don’t talk about it, it must not have happened. We’re moving past it. We’re not gonna acknowledge it. You said that you told your students if they’re, when they’re getting, they’re climbing that 15 foot ladder up into the cockpit, they can’t and they, they need to compartmentalize and shouldn’t bring, uh, stuff with you.

But I think you brought something with you when you got into the plane that day because what would it have taken to say to that safety guy? No, I’m not doing that maneuver. Well, it took everything I could to fess up and go tell ’em ahead of time. [00:33:00] Yeah. But we train people, we train, we train, we train that you speak your opinion until the decision is made, then you execute the order.

And to me, I mean, I’m not making an excuse. I’m telling you that’s what I did. I understand. And in the military, if it’s a lawful order, then you go do it. And it was just on my feelings and I went, okay. And he was older than me. He was more experienced than me. Mm-hmm. He was my boss. Mm-hmm. There’s so many things you can put in there.

When you boil it down to it, it’s like you said, it was pilot error. There are a lot of things that contributed a lot of people that contributed a lot of situations that contributed. But when it comes down to it, and this is what I told my publisher. It has to say that in the book because this is in no way an excuse for what happened because it’s, it was me.

I was the only person at the controls and that is what it is. But I want people to understand what went into it and what can come outta trauma. So let ask this, what has the Air Force learned? From that accident? Like, did any procedures change? Did anything change from Yes. From that? Okay. Yes. [00:34:00] So we, we as a military are very good at taking investigations, debriefs, lessons learned, and incorporating them in the future.

So almost everything about both of our performance teams, the Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds changed from this. They raised the minimum altitudes. Cause what they found was that we had never charted out the maneuver to know what the safe altitudes were. If, if perfectly flown, it would’ve finished below minimum altitude that day and caused an injection regardless.

So what we had been taught was that we had a thousand foot buffer at the bottom, that we would always finish every maneuver a thousand feet above the ground. What we found from this was that was not true, and this maneuver would finish below 50 feet. So what they did is they moved all the minimum altitudes up to build a bigger pad.

They also changed some other decision matrices behind the scenes to to prevent this from happening again. Yeah. So you, um, in your book and the acknowledgements, you thanked the team that pulled an all-nighter to replace the ejection seat the night before you used it. Why were they replacing it? Yeah, [00:35:00] I love that you saw, you caught that in there.

So we were, we were practic so, so realize that Thunderbirds and the blue angles one of the only places where you fly the same aircraft every day. What a lot of people dunno is there’s a fleet of aircraft out there. When you get ready to go fly, basically somebody throws you the keys like a rental car and you just.

Pick which tail number you’re getting in and you go fly a different plane every day. The Thunderbirds, that’s not the case because of the level we fly. We fly our aircraft every day because you know the aircraft inside and out. You know, every squeak, every beep, everything going on with it up in Las Vegas one day.

And the first thing we do when we take off. Is we roll upside down and we push negative three Gs to make sure nothing’s loose in the cockpit, and we clean out any dirt or anything, and, and that seems trivial, but when you’re upside down at 75 feet, you don’t want anything flying around the cockpit. Well, I tell you that to go one day, I take off, I roll upside down, I push and my ejection seat moves.

So I come back around and land. I give it back to the maintainers and go, Hey, the ejection seat’s loose. It’s moving a half inch. I need you to fix it. They go through, they can’t figure it out. They give the [00:36:00] aircraft back to me. I go fly again. It does it again. I take it back. The company comes in, the company that made the eject, made the aircraft and they said, we don’t haves.

Right? Most people fly right side up. So really there is no tolerance for how much can move when you’re upside down. 3s two in the do that. And they’re both sitting in the room with us and I said, okay, you tell me it’s good, I’ll go fly. And my crew chiefs, I told you I love my crew chiefs. And they, they cared so much about every aspect.

Mm-hmm. What I didn’t know is I left that day and they got the entire team and they worked through the night so that I could have my aircraft back for the next show. And they replaced everything in the ejection system. And the next morning I come in, they’ve been awake all night. They, you know, they called in extra people and they go, Hey sir, we replaced everything.

And I said, why? The company said they thought it was okay. And my crew chief said, if it takes your attention away from what you’re doing when you’re that low and upside down in front of the crowd, we can’t have it. So if you don’t like it, we changed it and they replaced everything. And what they replaced is what I rodee and I, I will tell you, I just got [00:37:00] back two months ago from talking to the company that made the injection seat.

So the person, the person that made my ejection state still works for that company in Colorado Spring, and I went and gave them a thank you and told them the real story of, of how their seat. Performed outside of performance characteristics to this day, their engineers say it was not capable of saving my life cause of the situation it was in when I adjusted.

But everything worked better than perfect. And my question is, would it have on that other seat that I didn’t like or was it cause my team cared enough to make everything perfect? Wow. Is that Martin Baker eject? It is not. It is not. Colin Aerospace is the one that made the seat, is the company that owns the seats now, and they just came out with a new one.

So I ejected on an ACE two. They just came out with an ACE five seat, which is many generations improved over the one I ejected on. And it’s amazing what they do and to stand up and talk to them and people wanna know what they do every day makes a difference. Yes. But when hundreds of people have ejected [00:38:00] on their seats, That’s hundreds of people that gotta see their family again.

Yep. And the people that packed your parachute, people that packed my parachute. You know, a lot of people that pack parachutes for fighter aircraft never get one of their parachute used. Mm-hmm. So the guy that packed my parachute also packed the parachute of one of my best friends that ejected from an esca that year and safely survived.

And an a 10 pilot that also ejected that year. One of the years we had the most ejections at the base. I was at three an A 10, and F 15 and F 16, and the same person packed a parachute on all three and all three pilots survived. Wow. So you can imagine going in to shake his hand. That is a pretty proud moment for him.

Wow. That, that’s unbelievable. So, How has this changed the way you live your life? I will tell you I always lived every day to the fullest, but back then it was about flying. It was about the adrenaline rush and what I could do, and, and now it has made me look every aspect of my life. The time I spend [00:39:00] with my family and, and my wife and I always joke that, that we think we’re a little biased, but we think military people are better about how they spend time with their families.

We Afghanistan year’s, we to. That time count, but now I do even more. So you have to have those decisions of is it worth the next move? Is it worth the next promotion to give up this time here? And it really makes you question why you’re doing what you do. What’s the goal of your life is. And so Joel and I call it living the obligation, and we want everybody to live each day with grit and passion to honor those that didn’t have a chance.

For this new tomorrow because we feel like we’re living this tomorrow. We almost didn’t get every day that we wake up and see the sunrise. So when I talk to people about this in person, the last picture I show is a sunrise pitcher and it’s the most beautiful sunrise in the world, but it’s even more beautiful when people know that it’s a sunrise on the day after I survived an unsurvivable objection.

So that’s what we [00:40:00] challenge people to do and telling our story. I mean, I look forward to getting up. The first thing I do every morning when I wake up and pour a cup, cup of coffee is check my email, check my social media, because the people that reach out and say, I read the book. I saw you speak like you did.

I saw the book cover. That’s how we got connected is because I’m friends with Jenny. I’ve been on her panel for a long time, about six years now, and never did. I know that connection would end up in us sitting here. But it’s the people you touch and the people you influence. And that’s, that’s what my wife says all the time.

So my big question, like I told you was, did I do it? And she goes, you never know if it’s something one of your kids are gonna do, or it’s the book helping somebody think about that. It’s us telling our story that enables other people to tell their story or enables them to get past their trauma.

Influence your, your podcast here, you don’t even know how many people it influences because some of them don’t reach out and go, this is the thing that got me over the hump when I really needed something to help me pass that. Mm-hmm. So when you ask me [00:41:00] how it changed my life, it just made me more deliberate and intentional with every interaction, every relationship, every action I take every single day.

Yeah. I completely get that. And it’s, I wish that, I could have had that attitude before something traumatic happened or whatever, but I feel like, I mean, my mom had cancer 16 years ago and she’s still alive. She’s amazing. She had three different kinds of cancer. In fact, lemme just say I walked with her yesterday.

She’s gonna be 77 in June, and I’ll be 57 in May. So I walked with her yesterday. I had to kinda push myself to keep up and she had already that morning wa um, done 30 minutes on the elliptical, 30 minutes on the recumbent bike, and 30 minutes on the treadmill and lifted weights. And then we went walking.

So she’s just unbelievable. But when she got sick, I was living kind of away from her and it didn’t really, you know, I don’t know, you’re, I just, it didn’t impact me the way it did when just [00:42:00] recently my former husband got sick and he passed away at age 64. And when I have to go through his files and see all the paperwork that he, that he had, you know, on retirement and how he was planning to retire and sorry, and live his.

Without retirement and he didn’t get to do it. And so it just makes me wanna, wanna enjoy my retirement even more. And. It just takes something like that, unfortunately, to make people realize how precious life is. It’s every day and that, and that’s what you see that in the book. And, and the biggest, the biggest success story from the book is when one of my first test readers read the book, and there’s a moment where I walk in and me, Terri.

Talking in the kitchen. And, and he came in and said, because we were concerned that, and our, our publisher was concerned that we were writing about being fighter pilots and all this stuff that is so far outta the normal for many people that they go, it has to be relatable. And he came in and said, here’s the part I liked in your book.

It wasn’t [00:43:00] about you and Terry, it was about me and my wife. Yeah. Uhhuh. And that was in that moment, I went, okay, that’s what we were going for. Right? And it was, and I said, okay, well what do you mean you’re and your wife? And he goes, It was the, the conversations you weren’t having that caused us to figure out what conversations we weren’t having.

Yeah, you’re right. I mean, and I read something that Brene Brown had, I think it was Brene Brown, somebody had written that when you tell a story, the way people relate to the story is they put themselves in the character’s position and they’re kind of living out your story. And I felt like I was living out your story when I was in the.

That I was in the pilot seat or that I, I mean, I could, when Joel is telling about how it was to go and get chemo, I remembered being in the room with, um, my former husband, my kid’s dad, when he was getting his chemo and just how that felt. So you put yourself in those shoes and you can relate to it even more that it is, and that’s, and that’s why it doesn’t, we always say, you don’t have to have been through stage four cancer [00:44:00] ejecting aircraft for the book to impact you.

If we wrote it correctly. Yeah, because we can, it, it stirs these emotions like it just did in you. And, and I’ll tell you as, as, as I feel your pain going through that, it makes me feel good because this book enabled us to have this conversation. Yeah, I agree. Stories will change people’s lives really. And, uh, your story and, and, uh, Joel has changed mine.

You can tell Joel if he ever wants to be on the podcast to just, uh, let me know. I will, I will. We talk almost every day, so I’ll let him know that next time I talk to him. He knew we were talking this morning and one other thing, you got four kids. You said you had two kids when, uh, the accident happened, and then when you were at the Pentagon.

Maybe another reason why it was such a good tour for you is you adopted two from China. We did, we, uh, in, uh, 2000, let’s see, when did we go to the Pentagon? I can’t even remember. 2004, we decided we wanted to add more kids to the family, and not to sound bad, but I’d rather skip over the baby phase. And, uh, my wife would rather skip over the pregnancy phase.

So we [00:45:00] decided to, to bypass all of that and go through the adoption process. And we adopted my daughter. In 2004, and then the, the process is incredibly long and painful and expensive, and, and we knew we wanted to adopt two. And at the end of it, we decided to take a break. And about a year later, our adoption agency came back and, and they said they had a little boy in China and, and we started that adoption process.

So that’s how we added our, our last two to the family. So it’s olds pretty awesome. And how old? Yeah. How old were they when you adopted them? Our daughter was 23 months and our son was three and a half. They both were born in 2003. Ok. Which was also the year of the, uh, ejection. So one was born in January, one was born in December, so they’re 16 and 17 now, and it’s, it’s awesome.

And how old are your other two children? Our son is 23 and he is in the Army, and our daughter is a police officer and she is twenty one, twenty two now. Just hit a birthday. Wow. Police officer. Where does she work? Yeah, uh, she works [00:46:00] in one of the suburbs of Birmingham. She’s been a police officer. She graduated from college last year and she has been a police officer for a year now, and Oh, that’s awesome.

It’s pretty awesome, right? Yeah. To watch how your kids develop. Yeah, it’s, it is. Thank you so much, Chris. I appreciate the interview. Thank you, man. Always here. Thanks for the connection and enjoy the conversation. I think that exercise that Chris mentioned where he plotted out his life and the highs and lows, and he did it on a graph so he could visually see it.

I think that’s really helpful. We all have highs and lows in our lives, and I’m wondering what my graph would look like. I’m going to do a plot of it. We all face challenges in our lives. It may not be a plane crash, it may not be fighting cancer. It may not be an ambush like my past guest, Navy Seal, Jason Redmond experienced, but we all have these highs and lows.

We lead such busy lives. Sometimes it’s hard to just remember [00:47:00] to look up and take the time to do a little analysis of our lives. Are we living within our values? Do we know what our values are? Do we have dreams that we’re not pursuing, or do we not even dream? How do you intend to live an intentional life?

If you’re already living an intentional life, that’s awesome. If you already have practices in place to check yourself and to make sure you’re being authentic and you’re living a life that you would like to live, that’s awesome and you’re welcome to come join the Onward Movement and help others that are in the movement that are striving to do the same thing.

And if that’s not you, if you think, oh wow, I haven’t even looked at my life. Or I have this dream, but there’s just no way I could achieve it. How do you know? How do you know you have the power within you to change your life? And if you don’t believe it, [00:48:00] maybe take little baby steps and to start believing it.

We can help you in the onward movement. I put a link. In the show notes to the Onward Movement Facebook group, but just search Onward Movement in Facebook groups and you’ll find us and join us and just get to meet all the people in this awesome community. We’re closing in on 1300 people in the Onward Movement, and there’s lots of engagement in the group, lots of support.

I love leading this onward movement, and I invite you to join us. Have a great day everybody. Thank you for listening.