Veterans Archives: Preserving the Stories of our Nations Heroes
In a world where storytelling has been our link to the past since the days of cave drawings, there exists a timeless tradition. It's the art of passing down knowledge, and for Military Veterans, it's a crucial piece of their legacy. Join us on the Veterans Archives Podcast, where we dive deep into the heartwarming and awe-inspiring stories of those who served, no matter when or where.
Here, Veterans get the chance to be the authors of their own narratives. Through guided interviews in a relaxed and safe environment, they paint their experiences with their own words and unique voices. The result? A memory card in a presentation box, a precious gift they can share however they please.
But that's not all. These stories find a secure home in our archive, a treasure chest of experiences for future generations to explore. The best part? It's all a gift to the Veteran – our way of saying thank you for their service.
Tune in to the Veterans Archives Podcast, where history, heroism, and heartwarming tales come to life.
Veterans Archives is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Please visit our website for more information. www.veteransarchives.org
Veterans Archives: Preserving the Stories of our Nations Heroes
Breaking Barriers: From Nuclear Reactors to Corporate Leadership (John Broschak)
"Leadership is born of respect, competence, and how you treat other people," reflects John Broschak as he traces his remarkable path from nuclear submarine officer to energy executive. His story begins in a blue-collar Pennsylvania town where an unexpected opportunity to join the Navy's elite nuclear program would completely transform his life trajectory.
The crucible of nuclear training forged both technical mastery and psychological resilience. John vividly recalls the intense competitive pressure—ranking boards for every test, weeks of sleep deprivation, and countless qualification checkouts. Then came the ultimate test: 82 straight days underwater on his very first submarine deployment. "I went from relaxed submarine school on Friday to being underway in Scotland on Monday, never having been on an active submarine before," he explains. These experiences taught him to function under extreme pressure, a skill that would prove invaluable throughout his career.
The submarine force's culture in the 1980s was unforgiving—male-dominated, intensely competitive, and focused on exposing any weakness. Yet within this challenging environment, John discovered a profound truth: respect wasn't assigned by rank but earned through demonstrated competence and genuine human connection. "It didn't matter your rank—outside of maybe the commanding officer. It was all about the respect you earned," he notes. This principle became the cornerstone of his leadership philosophy.
After transitioning to civilian life at the Palisades Nuclear Plant, John's career flourished as he applied these military-honed skills. His journey from system engineer to vice president illustrates how military service creates a foundation for exceptional leadership. Perhaps most telling was his approach to management: "I would present problems to my amazing team and say 'here's what we need to do—I'm counting on you to figure it out.' They always delivered." By eliminating fear-based management and trusting his people, he created environments where innovation thrived.
Today, John coaches transitioning veterans, helping them navigate the same challenges he once faced. His message resonates with authenticity: military service provides unparalleled experiences that shape your entire life. Next time you thank a veteran, go beyond the perfunctory phrase—be genuinely curious about their unique story. Their service represents a voluntary commitment to defending freedom that deserves more than casual acknowledgment.
Good morning. Today is Monday, august 4th 2025. We're talking with John Broschak, who served the United States Navy. So good morning, john.
Speaker 2:Good morning Bill.
Speaker 1:Full disclosure. John and I have known each other for a couple of years. We even worked together for a little while, so this is going to be kind of catching up for me.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. I love to catch up with old friends All right, so we're going to start out.
Speaker 1:Real simple, john when and where were you born?
Speaker 2:Real simple, john. When and where were you born? Oh, allentown, pennsylvania. It was actually Whitehall, pennsylvania, technically Fullerton, a little bit north there, but eastern Pennsylvania, in the heart of the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton area back in 1964. So March 18th, my mom always used to say. If I had been born the day before, my name would have been Patrick. I wasn't born on March 17th, so March 18th 1964.
Speaker 1:Are you a saint anyway?
Speaker 2:We were raised in a very strong, strict Catholic household. So I am the youngest of five Mike, mary, tom, joe and John and middle names are all saints as well, so I guess that's the closest I've come to sainthood okay, well, one way or the other right.
Speaker 1:So did you, did you then? You grew up right there in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2:Then yes, okay absolutely.
Speaker 1:What was it like?
Speaker 2:well, it was, uh, pretty much a uh, blue collar working class, uh, community. I community, I mean football, basketball, baseball was what you did as a kid growing up, um, if you had any athletic prowess. Um, very stable family environment. My mom and dad, you know. I think we're married close to 50 years by the time dad passed back in 2001. Um, he designed and built his home as part of coming out of the World War II era. He served in World War II in the army.
Speaker 2:Stability, I would say my dad was a very risk-averse man, always watched his pennies, wore the same suit for 30 years. His dream in life was to send all five of his kids to college. The deal was he would pay for any school as long as it was a Pennsylvania State school. For me that meant Penn State. But being the youngest of five, I would say my parents made all their mistakes with the older kids. By the time they got around to me, um, my, I was maybe a little bit. They figured some things out. I was able to get away with a little bit more than the other brothers and sisters and I did better in school than they did, and my dad would hang that over the heads of the other kids in the in the household, which meant they would take me out back and tell me how they felt about that from time to time.
Speaker 1:But not only the baby but the star. So, yeah, that's got to be great, that's just got to be wonderful. You know, speaking of sports, like you had almost a sports team right there in your house then uh, yeah, we could have played five on five basketball for sure.
Speaker 2:Um, like I said, because because of the, you know the nature of the community. Um, I'm 100 ukrainian uh, ukrainian, and I went to Ukrainian Catholic grade school up through fourth grade and then transitioned to public school. A lot of it was built around the church and activities with the church and other Ukrainians. There was definitely an Eastern Slavic sections of the community and visiting family and friends and cousins and aunts and uncles and all that kind of stuff. Because of my age, I never really had grandparents, which was a little bit odd experience. Three of them died the year I was born and the other one died when I was eight and he spoke very little English so I didn't really have much of a connection with him, but other than that, it was a dandy childhood.
Speaker 1:Sounds like it. Now, what did your dad do for a living?
Speaker 2:He interesting story with him, so he was fascinated by aviation and when he got out of the service he was one of the first enrollees at what was called Parks Air College in St Louis. It was the forerunner to much of the aviation industry and he had a full ride scholarship there. He was very, very good academically. His mom broke his hip during his freshman year at college so he had to move back home to get a job to support the family and basically give up his dream of being an aviation engineer.
Speaker 2:He then went back, uh, working odd jobs. He was a fuller brush guy door to door and went to night school to get his engineering degree. He was a civil structural engineer, uh, and ended up getting a job with Bethlehem steel. That he was there for 30 plus years until they stumbled into bankruptcy back in the early 80s. But yeah, he was your classic pocket protector, slide rule engineer, Wore his white button down shirt and tie every day to the office, Only had one field assignment and his career kind of leads into some decisions I made about joining the service in the first place. But very good academically, but he would never get his hands dirty. This is a guy who wouldn't change the oil on his car. He took his lawnmower in to get serviced on his schedule and had meticulous notes of what was done. But he was your classic pocket protector and slide rule engineer.
Speaker 1:Well, I smiled when you said Fuller Brushman because when I was a kid here in Michigan when cable TV first came out, we could watch this WKBD TV in Detroit and they would play these movies late at night. They were like the only channel still on late at night. And I remember one night watching a movie called the Fuller Brushman channel, still on late at night. And I remember one night watching a movie called the fuller brush man and it is the funniest movie I've ever seen, bar none in my entire life. So anyway, I digress, but when you said that it brought a smile to my face, interesting yeah, mom was a registered nurse.
Speaker 2:Um, she worked in a hospital setting for a while and then took time off when the kids were born and by the time I got around to school age she went back and worked for our family doctor as one of his nurses for many, many years through her. Her eventual retirement from from that as well.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay, so interesting Cause I uh listening to the story, I'm like in my mind assuming oh, mom was a stay at home mom and but she kind of was, but she wasn't, she had a career she stayed home for raising the kids. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then, once she was able to, she went back and worked, I would say, you know, 20, 30 hours a week around the rest of the family schedule.
Speaker 1:Just enough to keep her sanity right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Very good, so you talked about sports in your town.
Speaker 2:Did you play all of those sports yourself? I did, I did, I. You know one point I was going to be, uh, the point guard for the north carolina tar heels. Um, phil ford I'm dating myself a little bit, um, but you know phil ford, back in those days he was an inspiration to me. So I love basketball. Uh, played all three sports. Um, I was not big enough to really excel at football.
Speaker 2:I was quarterback up through eighth grade. But then when I got to high school and the times were just starting, then when you kind of had to pick a sport right, right Now you definitely have to pick a sport at age four if you want to have that dream of really moving on. But back then you could still play multiple sports, but I ended up settling on giving basketball a run. Of course I didn't grow to be as tall as I needed to be to make the North Carolina Tar Heels, but focused on that through a sophomore year, ran track as a way to stay in shape. But my musical prowess kind of took off. I was a drummer percussionist starting in the fifth grade. My oldest brother was my band director in high school and I ended up going on to be all-state percussionist and played in a number of drum and bugle corps kind of a little niche activity, but a rudimental drummer and percussionist and had an aspiration in me somewhere about should I go into a musical career and pick engineering instead?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know it's interesting, though I don't think music is that much different from engineering. You can't play music like an engineer, but I think that thought process helps people play music.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they told us when we were very young, like third, fourth grade, because I wanted to, like, from my earliest memories, I wanted to play the drums. I just thought that was cool. They said, well, to play the drums you have to be good at math. Well, I happen to be good at math too. So finally, by fifth grade, mom and dad said okay, because they didn't want me to, they didn't want to invest in an instrument. And then have me change my mind. But no, I was set since early, early age and ended up being quite successful in the music arena too.
Speaker 1:Do you have a favorite style of music?
Speaker 2:I really focus on rudimental drumming because I was fascinated by the whole drum and bugle, core, marching band kind of stuff and playing in that kind of a setting. But I did some drum set type stuff and just a variety of cover tunes and all that stuff. I think I was in a what was it called back in the day A punk rock band for a short period of time back in high school.
Speaker 1:I would love to see pictures of that.
Speaker 2:Oh, no, no, no, we don't bring any of those out anymore. Oh darn it. And everything from that up through full orchestra and more of the, I would say, classic traditional music settings. But I played all different genres.
Speaker 1:I'm always amazed by drummers because they're doing something different with every, every appendage.
Speaker 2:Right, you're doing something different with your foot, and your two hands are operating independently, and it just amazed me yeah, part of it is, uh, you know you're running these people and and really that my decision making around not going to music. If, if you want to go to music performance, you have to be like that top .001% of natural talent, I mean you have to work at it. But beyond that and I was good, I was okay. But everybody else goes into music education, right, and then maybe plays gigs on the side, but to really excel at music performance, there's some God-given gifts, just like professional athletes of any sort. Um, and I wasn't quite that gifted yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, I have a younger brother, or had a younger brother, who had that gift for, for music. In fact, behind you were a bunch of guitars that used to belong to him but uh, yeah, he, uh. I always told him he got the talent and I got the looks, which was a lie, because he was a good looking guy too. Hated him for it, for it, just hated him for it. But yeah, so it sounds like a great childhood. You get through high school and what happens next?
Speaker 2:Oh geez, well, I mean the planting of the seed, because we heard a talk about my military experience. I love to read and I became fascinated by this guy called John Paul Jones, who had founded the Navy back in 1775 or whatever the year was, and read these really thick books on him and there were others, but that one really kind of stood out for me and I was a bit of a rebellious child in my teenage years, one that you would not point to and go oh, he's definitely going into the service. And so my introduction to it was I was going to school for chemical engineering at Penn State, and a classic tale of a guy and a girl. Right In between my sophomore and junior year I met my current wife, kelly Been, together over 40 years now. Back in 1984, I met her and came back from that summer because we were in a musical group together traveling the country. And then she was in Michigan, going to school at Western Michigan in Kalamazoo, and I was going to Penn State, so it was about 500 miles away.
Speaker 2:I had really no money because everything was going into school. My dad was on my back about getting a job and helping to pay for school, although he was covering tuition and the majority of it, and I met this guy in one of my classes. So mentally I was kind of lost. I had this love of my life eight hours away how am I going to make this work? Kind of thing. Didn't have any money, um, and uh, one thing that uh had always bothered me was I was good academically studying out of books and like engineering study, like formulas and equations and all this stuff. But I I, because of my dad's upbringing with not a lot of exposure, like we weren't, you know, breaking down motorcycles and putting them back together, we weren't doing any of that stuff.
Speaker 2:Um, I really was was wanting this practical application. I'm a very pragmatic person and if I see something like that's a learning style for me. But I was sick of studying out of books, to be honest with you, so that that was kind of run through my mind in the background. So I had this girlfriend that's need for income. I, I had kind of this desire that school was going fine.
Speaker 2:But I ran into this guy and and he said, uh, and, and he told me about the navy nuclear program and he had, he had just gotten in at the end of his sophomore year in this program called nuclear propulsion officer candidate, which is the the third way the Navy at that time was getting prospective nuclear candidates. You can either go the ROTC route or the academy route. But this was the other supplement and he told me about the situation where if you got really good grades and I had good grades you go through the background security check and I was pretty confident I could get through that and you pass the interview down in DC. They pay you to finish school.
Speaker 1:What a concept, yeah.
Speaker 2:You actually become on active duty, starting as an E3, and they pay you to finish school on time. That's all you have to do. Once a month, you go into the recruiting office and, of course, you talk to the recruiter and we know what they're all about and he's like, oh my God, you're going to love this, this is fantastic, and you're going to see the world, all that kind of stuff. But the thought of submarines, even back then, was just fascinating to me. That you make your own water, you make your own. I'll finally be able to take all this stuff I've been learning in books and see it in practice. This is great, and I'm going to have money and I'm going to be able to see my girlfriend. I'm going to get my dad off my back.
Speaker 2:And it was six weeks from the day I talked to this guy and this is just a classmate. He's going to the recruiter filling out all paperwork rushed me down to DC and when you get down to DC was an interesting day as well, um, you know, because it's still part of the rick over nuclear navy. Uh, he, he had left, I think, a year or two before them, because this was back in, uh, 1984, fall of 84 um, but it was still the same rick over nuclear navy and and went through. You know the interview process not quite as as uh grueling as some of the stories that people tell about it, because it wasn't with him, uh, but that day, like if you make it through and it's funny, they take you into this room after all the interviews and I can tell you exactly how I answered. Quite, you know we don't need to get to that level detail. I remember vividly every.
Speaker 2:They take you to this holding room and and, like your, your life direction is on a pinhead, right, like either they're going to call you back and say, yes, you got in, or they're going to call you back and say, yes, you got in, or they're going to call you back and say, no, I'm sorry, the, the United States Navy decided not to, not to, uh, uh, take advantage of your services. You know, god bless Um. And they call me and they said, yes, you've been accepted, right. Well, then they, they hustle you back before you can change your mind in any way. They hustle you back to the hotel and they take you into a room and you basically sign your life away. You know the equivalent of signing your life away. We've all done that, right Um, and so mine was five years after.
Speaker 2:The completion of officer candidate school was my initial commitment, but back then I had no idea what that meant. I didn't even know what I'd signed up for. Right Um, I was just like Holy cow, I got money, I got a girlfriend. Right Right, you read the whole brochure.
Speaker 2:And I don't have to go through that whole interviewing thing that my friends were all starting to talk about. You know, oh, I got to decide which company I'm going to work for. You know, will somebody hire me? I'm like man, I can just focus on school.
Speaker 1:My life was perfect after that day for a while Perfect for a while, yeah, but I can't imagine like there's a period of time right where dad's not on your back. Oh my god, you got money in your pocket I got a raise after a year.
Speaker 2:I got.
Speaker 1:They promoted me to e4 after a year yeah, so not only are they paying for your college, but they're paying you to be in school yes, all I had to do was graduate on time but. But let's be honest. So the the because I came into the navy in 1984 as well um, getting into the nuclear power program is no joke like, and that's why they have you signed that contract right, because it's so hard to find people who meet all the criteria yeah, um, but yeah, I had no concept.
Speaker 1:No, not at all. So you said for a while so what? What happens next? I can't wait to hear the rest of this story.
Speaker 2:Well, you're living like a king, finishing out school right and you don't have to worry about any of these other things. All your other classmates are worrying. So you know it. I guess you know it worked on the relationship side because I'm I'm still with the person that was. It wasn't of that and and for her I mean this was like. I call her up, I said, yeah, I just joined the Navy, she's, she was like what we don't. I know each other for literally, you know, three months at the point that I did this. But you know the rest of school.
Speaker 2:I, I finished on time and then we had a little bit of a break and then you had to report to Officer Canada School, newport, rhode Island. And again we're talking about a guy, and it reminds me a lot of our reservists that signed up for a variety of reasons pay for education, whatever and then all of a sudden they're shipped over to Iraq or Afghanistan, to an active theater, and like, holy crap, like what? What did I get myself into? So my story is maybe a milder version of those because I never ended up in in active theater in that sense. But um, you show up at Newport, rhode Island, and from day one, people are screaming at you like holy cow. You know, you park your car in the parking lot, you go in to check in and all of a sudden people start screaming at you Like holy cow. You park your car in the parking lot, you go in to check in and all of a sudden people start screaming at you and it's like man, things got real serious, real quickly.
Speaker 2:Right, and it's a 16-week officer candidate school. It's knife and fork school, not quite like the aviators go through. But your first week's your hell week. And then you settle in and I was a bit overweight when I got there. And the joke for me was settle in and I was a bit overweight when I got there. And the joke for me was they take you after that first week to get your uniform fittings right and of course you're indoctrinated into all the requirements, all the rules and regulations about how your uniform has to look, how you have to look. Well, I think I dropped 30 pounds because they got you up at 4.30 am every day and you went out and you did your two to three mile and then your force feeding and a lot of physical activity there. So I dropped quite a bit of weight. Well, I got fitted at the end of the first week. And the fitters? Let's be honest, the fitters were not professional tailors, right, right right.
Speaker 2:So the measurements were too big to begin with. So you get your set of uniforms and I had to go back like three times over the course of that 16 weeks to take in the pants and, you know, buy some different uniform parts. But you know, the first eight weeks you're the junior class member and the second eight weeks you're the senior class member. And it was, I guess, interesting being in the Newport area and being now part of this thing they call. You know, on your pathway to becoming an officer and going in town, you were kind of treated like, you know, mini royalty a little bit.
Speaker 2:But running into the different personalities, and I think that's one of the greatest joys I had coming out of the military is the variety and diversity of people that you meet across the country different backgrounds, and that to this day feels my passion for loving to have conversations with people I don't know and all that kind of stuff. But I joined the band there Of course.
Speaker 2:And so I was really good academically in the classes that we had, because basically it's an immersion into all things Navy, right, right, all things Navy.
Speaker 2:But because I joined the band I was pulled out of a lot of the activities with your company. We were a papa company and so you didn't get really that bond with your neighbors. So when it came, you know your ranking in the class because my military experience was all about where you ranked out in the competitive sphere and I think we had 260 people in our class but also Canada school class I was like top 10, I think, academically. But because the other half of your ranking was how people thought about you and I wasn't there to, I don't know, clean the latrine kind of thing, people didn't rate me as high from a teamwork standpoint because I was out doing the band thing. But you know I got through that and quite an experience, you know, when we became senior class members I remember that and there's many movies about this like now you're in charge and now you can take out all that anger of people treating you like crap on somebody else, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In a in a in a minor way but but you know that indoctrination into into the Navy and we were planning to. Kelly and I were planning to get married right after officer candidate school. She came up for a visit once, once or twice, but we had the date set. So I got through Officer Candidate School and I got to tell this part of the story.
Speaker 1:Oh, please, please do.
Speaker 2:After that first week you go through your whole week and then they run you through all your medical stuff, right? So they take you in the bus to the hospital and, uh, you get your blood drawn and, you know, get checked out for everything to make sure you know you're still suitable to be a be a service member. And, um, we go, we go back and, uh, the next week, monday, um, we're in class and there's a knock on the door you know, infamous knock on the door and somebody sticks their head in, uh, officer candidate Brochak, uh, you need to come with us. I'm like, oh, okay, um, so I get in a van by myself with one of the petty officers and he drives me back to the hospital. I said, what's, what's going on? Uh, well, we, there's some followup on on your medical right. And, uh, and I'm starting to get, you know, I don't know, curious.
Speaker 2:So they sit me down in front of a doctor and he says Osterkenned, at Brochek, you have syphilis. I said what? And he has this little grin on his face, right, you know, because the classic, you know, sailor kind of thing, right, and I'm like, and running through my mind is like all the venereal diseases that you were trained in health class, you know, in high school. Uh, and I couldn't, I couldn't remember what, what syphilis is right, and I'm just like, oh my god. And he goes. And you know, we need a record of all your sexual partners so we can report it to the state of rhode island. Um, and I'm like literally in shock, like because the honest guy truth was my only sexual partner had been my fiancee, who I knew hadn't been with anybody else either. Right, yeah, so how'd this happen? And, and you know, he's like telling me, you know, basically telling me what a bad person I am, but who I knew hadn't been with anybody else either.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, so how'd this happen? And, and you know, he's like telling me, you know, basically telling me what a bad person I am. But now I got to come clean and you know, we got to inform all your other partners because, you know, whatever, right and uh, before I could get my bearing, they sent large black nurse came out with two syringes of penicillin and you know, assume the position, and in each side of my, my rear, um, pumps me with penicillin to take care of this thing. Right and uh, like I, my head's still swirling, um, and then, you know, this drags on, cause there's weights in between. They sent me to the social worker, right and um, I sit down for the social work, and so she starts showing me pictures of stage four syphilis and what my lifestyle is going to lead me to.
Speaker 2:And by now I'm, I'm, I'm like something is not right here, something is not right. Um and uh, I she's telling me, you know, blah, blah, blah, you got to do this, you got to do that. And I said, look, I know I didn't get this from anyone else and I'm pretty sure my fiance did not give it to me. What do you expect me to tell her? And she goes. Well, that's your problem. You're going to have to figure that out. I go back and I'm like emotionally distraught, right. So I I call kelly and she starts laughing because it was laughable to her that this could happen, because it's impossible, right, right, uh, well, she hadn't gone through the day, I had just gone through, right, the humiliation and all of these supposed medical professionals telling me that, uh, that I had this venereal disease. Um, but I, I just had like something's just not right here in the back of my mind, right.
Speaker 2:So that weekend, the next weekend, was, um, my, my sister's wedding and my family doctor was going to be there, right. So I show up and had a chat with my family doctor and he goes well, what, what test did they give you? And I and I knew back then I don't remember what they were I told him he goes well, that has a false positive rate of like 2%. And he said that's like an initial screening test and what they're going to end up doing is sending it to the state of Rhode Island or whatever, and they're going to do the real test, which has a false positive of 0.01%. More than likely that's going to come back negative.
Speaker 2:And he said honestly, I always take a person's history into mind because this test has such a high false positive rate, right? Well, sure enough, three weeks later they call me back in, not to apologize but to tell me that, yes, indeed, uh, it came back negative, but that was my introduction to uh naval or military medical care, um, and my blood, for whatever the reason it, every time it trips that test false positive. Um, and I, I can't give blood because the american red cross uses the same uh test, but that was my, uh, my first introduction into the high-quality medical care we all sometimes got through our military service. So anyway, a little aside, there.
Speaker 1:Well, I thought you were going to tell me, oh, there's another, john Broschek. I mean, the odds of that are you might as well buy a lottery ticket.
Speaker 2:When I reported down to Orlando for nuclear power school, the same thing happened. But now I knew what was going on. I was able to tell them very quickly no, nothing has changed. Put an asterisk in my chart here.
Speaker 1:I do want to say something, though. At the end of that story and that is when we started out you said my current wife. I think you've been married long enough and gone through some interesting things. You could probably drop the current and just say your wife at this point.
Speaker 2:I probably drop the current and just say your wife at this point I could. Yes, very good, thank you anyway, somehow I was putting it in context. Yes, um left there uh. We got married in between and then uh arrived down in orlando. Uh, I took uh uh because you had to wait for the classes to start. You know the class schedule and our class was scheduled to start uh right first week of january. Uh took a short assignment at torpiedeman's A school down in Orlando at the time and I think they've since closed that base and moved things elsewhere. So Orlando no longer has this. But we were there for a full year. I did the Torpeneman's A school on the front end Again.
Speaker 2:Another interesting introduction to another aspect. This was a non-nuclear part but then nuclear power school, six months of just um weekly tests and watching people get, you know, tapped out because they couldn't pass the tests. We had a lieutenant commander actually a full commander uh, who was set to take over command of an aircraft carrier uh, coming out so he had been non-nuclear and was going through uh this. So they had the best instructors in that section I was not in that section the best instructions in that section and he passed but there was another full bird lieutenant who was making the switch. He ended up failing the last test of the whole 26-week program and washed out. We had one guy that had falsified his resume. They finally figured that out by then and tapped him out.
Speaker 2:But the competition and that was the tone of my whole nuclear or Navy experience the sheer pitting of you against your human peers. Every test you took the ranking would go up, both for your section and we had three sections and your class rank and your section rank, your class rank, what score you got, and it was posted right there and everybody would run to it. I remember the stomach problems I started having, just due to stress. We had one comical day where the RC Cola machine because you were living out of the vending machine, right, the RC Cola machine had a malfunction. So whatever coin you put in would produce an RC Cola. So guys were going out there and putting all the pennies in the machine and stacking like six in front of them in class just to get their fix because this machine had malfunctioned.
Speaker 2:And for me, with the engineering background, it wasn't so much the difficulty of of the material, it was the pace and the volume of the material and I had just so much compassion or pity for the English majors, the journalism majors, the non technical majors that had somehow gotten, you know, accepted into the program that that really struggled mightily with the academic portion of it. But I remember every everything was was labeled. Everything was labeled, no foreign restricted data, right. So basic math equations like water, h2o, you know, chemistry equation, everything was labeled. No foreign restricted data, you know. And it was just fascinating to me how the Navy had take commandeering addition and subtraction and other. You you know, basic math formulas were now restricted to foreign nationals, you know. You couldn't discuss any of that with anything else highly classified.
Speaker 2:No, doing math problems at lunch, yeah uh, but that was six months of classwork. On the back end, again, due to timing of classes, we we tacked on another I don't know who I got assigned to then, um, and then showed up in Boston Spa, new York. We actually got an apartment in Clifton Park and now it was mid-September Moved into this kind of half underground apartment and all I remember from that was that it was a complete blur, because now you're at prototype training, which is the hands-on training. So you had about six weeks of more classroom on that particular reactor design. I was on the MARF plant up there, which is a very unique design on their control rod system. You can read all about it, but it was basically the classic power plant design of that vintage of the older fast attacks and ballistic missile submarines built in the 60s, with a whole different reactor control system.
Speaker 2:And again from the competitive nature it was all about are you going to beat all of your classmates?
Speaker 2:So the goal there was to be the first person to get through, and I remember many days and once you get through the classroom portion, you had these qual cards. We all remember our qual cards, right, and you had this qual card with literally hundreds and hundreds of signatures that you had to get. Well, part of it was every system of the plant. You had to go through a checkout with a petty officer, lead petty officer, one of your trainers, and that was within an hour session. You had to draw a one-line diagram of the system. You had to be able to discuss all the basic facts and statistics and important values and describe how that particular system functioned and operated. And you had to do it for every single system on the plant. And you had to do it for every single system on the plant. Well, I would go in some mornings and the other guy that I was with, who was the guy who we drove in every day, was the guy that got me into the program way back in our Penn State days.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's kind of cool.
Speaker 2:Kind of cool, but the bad part was the competition drove us to not be friends anymore. Oh, because I ended up winning that round. Yeah, he won the round of nuclear power school. He was number one, uh person in nuclear power school. I think I was, uh, I don't know uh, top 10 again, but not quite at his level. Um, but we were competing so hard.
Speaker 2:I would literally walk in some mornings and I would have eight hours ahead of me, cause they were 12 hour shifts, but I have eight hours ahead of me. I would sign up for eight checkouts on systems I had not even looked at yet, and so the game was getting in early to study for the first one, getting through that fast enough so that you had 15 minutes to master the next system, and do that eight times in the course of a day. You talk about stress. And I got to the end and there was one individual that went for his final checkout with a board. You had a board of three people a naval officer, one of the lead instructors and then another civilian, and they would grill you for several hours to determine that you had met the final requirements. And he failed his. So I was the second one to get all my requirements done, to be able to sit for my final board, and in that board and I passed. But so I was the first one out of all four prototypes up there to get through.
Speaker 2:But uh, it was in that process, uh, the, the, my friendship with my, my buddy, like got severely and we didn't talk to each, we wouldn't talk, wouldn't talk to one another for like a couple years. Um, uh, and from so got through that that that was a blur, uh, through the winter, uh, and then, uh, they shipped us all off to Groton, connecticut, where I ended up being stationed for the next four years to go to submarine school. Now, submarine school was a party compared to the nuclear training that we had been through.
Speaker 2:So it was another 16-week school where you learned all things about submarines and again did very well academically there. We were living out in Groton Lock Point. We weren't in one of the mansions but the guys that were getting per diem because they were going to be shipped off to somewhere else, we were going to be stationed out of Groton they were on per diem. They were buying these five, you know, renting these 5,000 square foot mansions out in Groton Lock Point, which is a very unique community. You know people's third and fourth and fifth homes out there.
Speaker 2:So it was fun. It was actually a party. It was kind of the first fun we had in quite a long time and you were with a lot of classmates that you had gone through various parts of the training with. So you knew a lot of folks and my culture shock and really kind of the summation of the series of culture shocks I had. Uh, so think of me as this new pot guy who didn't know anything about the navy got through this initial pipeline training. I graduated from submarine school on a friday. I flew to scotland on saturday and monday. I went underway for 82 straight days underwater I can't even wrap my head around that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's, yeah, wow never been on an active submarine before. I mean, I'm not like one of these rats here and academy guys that did a summer tour, you know, and even knew what it was like, right, um, but I went from relaxed, calm, you know, fun, to get on that plane and then two days later, um, they hand me the stack of qual cards and what they said to me was you are worthless to us. You, all you are doing is breathing our air and eating our food until you get this uh, you know, foot deep stack of cards done so you can actually stand watch and be a productive, uh, part of the crew you know, what I find interesting in all of this is that you went to those schools where they really taught you to eat your young right and and didn't teach you how to get along with people.
Speaker 1:Uh, you got a little break at groton but then, all of a sudden, now you're out on a submarine with a bunch of other people who went to the same school to not learn how to be nice to people. You know what I'm saying. Like, how does that work? Like now you're on a sub and in I took a tour of a submarine. I'm a. I'm a. I'm a destroyer sailor all day. I'm a tin can sailor all day long. I enjoyed my tour of the sub, but I couldn't wait to get off it. Um, but I can't imagine. Like no soft skill training at all, and now you're all crammed in this sub together yeah, and the submarine force back then.
Speaker 2:Uh, I think it's changed some since then, but it it was a very, all male, very testosterone driven, who can withstand the most pain type of environment and to the point that you tried to break your shipmate psychologically, physically, whatever way you could. I used to describe it as any weakness you had or showed. It was like they would peck. If they found out about it anybody, they would start pecking at it. If you were sensitive to comments about your mother, oh my gosh, then people would come out of the woodwork to just say the most absurd things about your mother to try to break you. I mean it was about breaking you, um, and and so I mean people are human, we all have our points, but you learn very, very quickly. If you showed any weakness, um or um talked about any weakness or any sensitive point you had, the rest of the males, um, in that environment would peck at you until they broke you on some level. The other thing I learned is that leadership because this is the foundation of my leadership journey leadership is born of the respect, the competence you show and how you treat other people quite honestly. How you treat other people quite honestly, and on the submarine with. You know I was.
Speaker 2:So I was on the Ulysses S Grant SSB in 631. It's now decommissioned but one of that early vintage of ballistic missile submarines we were based out of Holy Lock, scotland, went back when we had a tender there that served as the base for us because the missiles couldn't reach, you know, from all the way back in Continental US at that time. And it didn't matter your rank, really Outside of, I would say, the commanding officer, maybe the XO, but even I have stories of where the XO, because of his incompetence, was treated rather uniquely, but it was all about the respect you earned. So because you were an officer and it didn't come home to me until I got some exposure to the surface fleet and saw how the ward room was different and people were treated differently and really you were a different. I reached out to my enlisted, who knew way more than I did about what was going on and what to do. If I had not embraced them and treated them with respect and then earned their trust and respect, I never would have survived.
Speaker 2:And we had an officer that started just a little bit ahead of me.
Speaker 2:He had a master's in nuclear engineering from MIT, super smart guy, no people skills, none, and they roasted him, I mean, and we had one emergency event where he locked up, literally locked up I had to go into maneuvering, which was our control center for the engine plant, and basically take over from him, probably broke every rule in the book.
Speaker 2:There was no passing of the guard here, but he was so locked up it was dangerous and had to pull the book out of his hand and guide the watch team through the response, the emergency response to what was going on, because he just did not have the ability to function in that kind of a setting. But yeah, as much it it, and you know, as much as you want to think, you can withstand any, any amount of stress or any amount of of of that it, it wears on you, right. So you've got the isolation of being in the community. You've got this super I call it macho, pain inflicting environment, um, you you had to defend yourself constantly against the herds and your mother and your sister, yeah, and, and really that isolation.
Speaker 2:So that first 82 day patrol, that I was completely unready for it. Like you get to like week seven. So do the math seven times seven is 49, right you're. You're a little bit over halfway. You get out to week nine and 10. And now, so now I'm qualified. After about six weeks I got qualified to stay and watch. So now you're in the routine and submarines operate on an 18-hour day because there is no day and night. So six hours of watch, six hours of paperwork, whatever, six hours of sleep Well, it doesn't work that way.
Speaker 2:It's basically sleep deprivation the entire time because they're running either fire control drills or missile drills or reactor plant drills nonstop. I remember one point I was up for 40 straight hours and I had gone through my third or fourth wave right, and where your vision starts to narrow and get and get darker and darker and darker, and then a cup of coffee, uh, you know, whatever. All of a sudden you get that that burst and wave right, and now colors are brighter and you're like, oh I, I feel great, now right. Well, that duration on the second and the third one lasts shorter and shorter and your vision gets narrow. I was on, I think, my fourth wave by by the 40 hour mark and you're operating a nuclear reactor while you're doing this right with other 17 and 18 year olds and psychosis is going to set in at some point, right?
Speaker 2:oh, but yeah, just uh, a torturous experience. Um, and, and our engineer was super lazy engineering officer was super late. His uh I think we called him uh, buddy I won't even mention any last names, but his nickname was buddy. Well, buddy liked to sleep a lot. Um, and uh, probably not your, your highest performing and engineering officer, uh, on a nuclear-powered submarine. So what ended up happening was, um, after my third and into fourth patrol, I started taking over more of his responsibilities and we had an ORS Operational Reactors Safeguards Exam where the team from Naval Reactors comes in and grills you and I had so many responsibilities by that point. I was the main propulsion officer, mpa. I was a ship's QA officer. The main propulsion officer MPA. I was a ship's QA officer. I was supporting basically the entire engineering department that the ORS team made a comment about. We think you might have this guy a little bit too heavily loaded Stretched a bit thin, maybe Stretched a bit thin.
Speaker 2:My only way out was to either agree to another year of this until I could roll to my shore assignment, or I had the brilliant idea of if I passed my engineer officer exam, I could do a split junior officer tour and I could go to another submarine, a different submarine, and I decided to go to new construction Because my thinking was and my wife hated every minute of the service experience.
Speaker 1:To be honest with you, I can say, yeah, this is probably not the she's. She's seeing it from a whole different perspective.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, the, the, the time away, of which we picked the, the ballistic missile submarines, to have more of a regular schedule. Um, so the time away, uh, she hated that, she hated the whole officer, climb, I. I mean, she hated every episode. So I'm like, well, if I, if I switch to new construction, then I'll be home every night and that'll be so much better, right so much better for a smart guy.
Speaker 1:You have an interesting thought process. I'll just say that maybe it's, maybe it's the experience really teaches you a few things, but yeah, so how'd that work out for you?
Speaker 2:um, it worked out okay for about the first week or two. Um, so I, I went and I I, you know, self-studied passed the engineer officer exam and I show up um on, uh, I guess back then it was pcu 738, the maryland brand new trident submarine, okay, and uh, the head commanding officer, um, and I will say his name is jack francis. He was known in the new lond, london, groton area as one of the top commanding officers to work for Just great guy, right, and he was, he was fantastic. So he showed up and because I'm engineering officer, qualified and able to send senior supervisory watch, which very few of the officers were able to do, my first experience there was the XO coming up to me and he was a good guy too.
Speaker 2:He was actually my neighbor in Navy housing up the up the Hill. Uh, he says, hey, john, we're, we're gonna, we're gonna, uh, we've got this. Um, you know, real short evolution, we've got, we got a man at for senior supervisory watch, right, and I said, okay, cool, and he goes. You know, you and I are some of the only ones that are qualified to do that. So we're going to go into port and starboard. You'll take night, night shift, I'll take day shift.
Speaker 2:Okay sure, probably a couple of days, right, great, two weeks later I'm like is this going to end Like? The whole shipyard experience was a treadmill that never stopped slowing down? Yeah, the whole shipyard experience was a treadmill that never stopped slowing down, yeah, uh. So I got there six months after initial Manning, um, right right at the time that we were starting to stand watches, uh, and they build the submarine from the back to the front, so the reactor plants built first, and then they move forward. Uh, there's really no creature comforts there at all. You have this little shack down by the water and through the winter it's just, you know, it's just brutally freezing down down on the water, uh, but it was just a treadmill that just never stopped speeding up. And so the worst part was, even though I had the capability to see my wife every day, I saw her probably less.
Speaker 2:Once you start man on the watches, you have 24 hour duty days. So now you're, you're spending 24 hours as the, as the Navy representative on the construction project which is your submarine. Well, you were expected to work the next day, and I had a buddy had a phrase that one shower equals four, meaning four hours of sleep, but two showers do not equal eight, that's true. So those are some very long days of 24-hour duty day.
Speaker 2:And what would happen as the construction schedule moved on and now they were working on all aspects of the sub at the same time, uh, early on you could probably get some sleep if you went and hid somewhere, but by by nearing the end of the construction, get closer to sea trials, uh, there were three full ships of shipyard folks that were coming in every eight hours and you, you were, you were, you know, hard line to approval of anything they needed to do to get done, and so they were constantly trying to find you. And I remember, probably six months before sea trials, there was so much activity going on that you literally had to hide to get an hour of sleep between like 11 pm and midnight, when they had the night shift turnover, if you were going to get any sleep. And of course, there are no racks or beds on the sub. There are metal pans that are going to be the ward room or whatever the officer quarters, and you would hide, literally hide, and they would find you, of course.
Speaker 1:You learned to sleep in a lot, of, a lot of odd places, though, didn't you? Yes yeah, yeah, wow so this is so you're, you're, this is like a four year stretch. Then is that what we're talking?
Speaker 2:about. I ended up extending an extra year of my initial five-year commitment to do the split jo tour thing. That was my agreement, so I did one year extension so I ended up six years in total, um, on what I would call active duty, ended up being eight, with the two years in college. Um, but, but yeah, um, that, uh, that was my, my duration.
Speaker 1:Well, and so you're. You're a plank owner, then I am a plank owner.
Speaker 2:Yes, wow, okay, yep that's.
Speaker 2:that's kind of a cool I got to do some really cool things in hindsight, because you know, as traumatic as it was, my view on life in general is to look back and remember the positive, absolutely Right. You know, it's only in later life that a lot of the negative has kind of come to fruition for me. But look back on the past and I got to do some cool. I got to fire a ballistic missile because we did a test missile firing. You know, we did a 40-day workup out of Cape Canaveral and they loaded out a test missile. They put all the special instrumentation on it. We went out, we went to hover depth, we shot a missile to the coast of Africa where they had a team to retrieve it. Like, not everybody gets to do that kind of stuff, right?
Speaker 2:No, we did the initial and to see just one of these, you know billion dollar pieces of equipment go together. You know, because we walked down the reactor plant before all the lagging insulation was on, you got to see everything, put your hands on it. You know I mean really really cool stuff you know to do to have the initial fuel loadout and, like I did, the initial criticality on on the USS Maryland. You know, um, pretty cool. Um, I got to know a lot of the Naval reactor geeks, quite honestly, that wrote the textbooks, um, uh, in fact I wouldn't say it was my idol, but the guy that wrote all the books on reactor theory for naval reactors, I got to know him. I took the crew through the initial reactor safeguards exam and got the whole crew ready for that and passed it successfully.
Speaker 2:We did the initial sea trials on the submarine and again they bring in a team of I call them the gooks right that put all the special instrumentation on, that put all the special instrumentation on and you go down to the special area down in the Bahamas where the Navy has a buoy in the center and you're doing flank bells within 50 feet of this buoy and driving this because they drive like buses, quite honestly, as opposed to fast attacks. Drive this bus within 50, 40 feet to get the initial sound signature on the sub. I remember driving into the Bahamas one morning. The sun's coming up and we're going by islands with, you know, females in bikinis, you know waving at us Like that was cool, that was really really cool stuff, like real positive memory. So that's the stuff I remembered initially, you know, but the trauma was real.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know why it works like that. That's how people get re-enlisted that's what happens is like it's the re-enlistment time comes up and they're like, oh, you know, we did all this was so great. And then they sign their name like, oh, wait a minute, but there was this yeah other stuff that went on yeah yeah, but I mean it sounds like yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean there was a, there was a lot of dues to be paid, especially in the submarine fleet. Maybe a couple of uh, I wouldn't say poor decisions, because I think every decision we make brings us to where we're at today but a couple of decisions you might've made differently if you didn't know.
Speaker 2:In the whole, I don't know if I would have I don't know if I had the information to make any difference. You know it was a great foundation to a career and obviously you know you and I worked together. I got to levels of leadership that you know I'm very proud of, getting to the executive level. I drew tremendously on that experience. My, you know all the positives and all the leadership lessons I learned and obviously the technical foundation you get from the Navy is top notch, you know. And then I transitioned into civilian nuclear power for about a 19, 20 year period. So the foundation was fantastic and in general I would recommend and maybe I'm a proponent of everyone getting that opportunity to. You know, learn about discipline and learn about, uh, being part of a team and a bit of conformity, uh, that I think the service gives you in a very positive way. Yeah, um, that leads to a very tremendous foundation for a career, for a life. Um, if you can withstand some of the traumatic things that you're going to get exposed to.
Speaker 1:I think that's the beauty of the military right. Like we, I learned in 21 years. I learned a ton of great leadership lessons, but there was a pretty good percentage of those that were leadership lessons on how not to lead.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Those are great lessons, yeah, Like you survive, those lessons you take that with you makes you a great leader. I think, Anyway and I'm I'm assuming you well, just based on what you've talked about you've had some of those experiences as well, but I like to draw on all the positives, but sometimes, when I'm ready to make a decision, I'm like I remember someone doing this and they didn't do it the right way. What I perceive is the right way.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm going to do it differently and see how it turns out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, early on my journey there, I had a petty officer falsify my name on some ship's protective tagging, oh, and I had a big decision.
Speaker 2:Do I brush it off Because he was a very experienced electrician.
Speaker 2:I think in his mind he was just trying to get the work done, right, but he basically forged my name on tags and I remember that was my first opportunity to either stand up and be a leader or shirk away, right, and not do the hard thing, which was have that very difficult conversation that what you did was unacceptable and will never happen again, or I'm going to do really bad things to you, kind of thing.
Speaker 2:And I and, and I did it, and and I took him, you know, the back of the engine room. So I did it in a, in a discreet way, and basically you know my version back then uh, read in the right act of of how this was completely unacceptable it it not only is it a reflection on your integrity, but it's reflection on my integrity and I take that very seriously. This will never happen again, if it ever happens again, and I take that very seriously. This will never happen again, if it ever happens again. You know you're gone, kind of thing. And I remember his eyes wide open looking at me like holy crap, I screwed up.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, well, and we both know from the utility work that we've done that it's that kind of thing that gets people killed. I mean, I don't want to over exaggerate it, but that's the kind of stuff that gets people hurt. Yep, is is cutting? Is cutting a corner? Um, you know, taking the easy path rather than the more difficult path, sure thing. And doing that, so you serve a total of, including school. You were saying eight years in the military. Eight years active duty, okay, and then did you serve in the reserves.
Speaker 2:I chose not to I, I, I would say because of my uh, and not solely because of my wife, but the, the, the, the family military experience.
Speaker 2:We had a one-year-old um by the time I got out, um, it was not an overly positive experience, uh and I, you know being maybe this is an ego pride thing like being at the pinnacle of the nuclear Navy and having been on active duty and in the heart of it. You know top secret, sbi clearance, you know the thought of doing the reservist thing and the stories I'd heard about how reservists are treated made me say you know what, I had my run in the major leagues and my wife had no interest in me continuing that. I chose not to do any reservist duty. Certainly, have worked with a number, hired a number of them and to this day continue to have a respect for those that choose the dual career path and I know how difficult that is I have a greater appreciation for that. But again, at the time we were making that decision, I was just like, yeah, I, I think, I think I'm done with my military service yeah, yeah, so you, uh, so after eight years, you, you decide to, to get out.
Speaker 1:So one question I have for you was like what was, what was, and I remember my experiences, but what was like your last day in the navy and then the next day you wake up. What's that like for you?
Speaker 2:uh, a mixture of terrifying um, like what's next? Because, if nothing else, you had stability, um, as, as a service member, you knew what your path was, you knew what you were going to get paid, you had some control, at least early in your career. What are the preferable next duty assignments? You, by that point, you had grown to a comfort level of. Maybe I don't like all of it, but there's a lot of stuff that's pretty cool, right, and now you go. I'm going to go back to the civilian community where I don't know what the rules are. I get a job Like I didn't have to do that to begin with. That's why I ended up here. So I think, a mixture of of of relief that I'm no longer a piece of property or a number, I'm not, you know, beholden to my contract and frightened by what's, what's going to come next.
Speaker 2:I remember, you know, cause, the last patrol that we did and we were out of Kings Bay, georgia at that point, you know feeling this sense of relief of uh, you know cause I by that point I I was a very senior Lieutenant 03, uh, had gone through new construction, was a bit of an expert on on this particular submarine, was a plank owner. I'd been through the sea trials. We were starting to get the new um sailors in that were, you know, replacing those that had been in the shipyard, and I was go to Brochak. Brochak's got all the answers to now having to start this new journey, and it was a recession in the early 90s when I was getting out, so finding a job was not all that straightforward. I think I sent out 100 resumes and got two responses back, and now I had this one-year-old and his family to take care of um, so there was a bit of uh, of fright yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, the funny thing is that fear and excitement kind of feel the same way inside, so you just don't. It's like a yeah it's difficult I guess the best way to say it yeah, so where did you land?
Speaker 2:well, uh, and my story in this area is interesting because I landed at a nuclear power plant, the Palisades Nuclear Plant near South Haven, michigan, spent the next 19 years there, but that was kind of like the easy button. I had nuclear training figured. If I just got to the right people I'd have a good shot at getting a job there, because my wife knew where she wanted to live and that was me finding a job that was close enough that I could still drive there. And the other one was interesting I had a buddy who had gotten out six months ahead of me and he went to work for this small medical equipment manufacturer based in Kalamazoo, michigan, called Striker.
Speaker 1:Very familiar with them.
Speaker 2:Yes, Well, this was early Striker. Right, this was entrepreneurial small business Striker Very familiar with them.
Speaker 2:Yes, well, this was early Striker right, this was entrepreneurial, small business Striker. And they interviewed me and what happened was Consumers Energy, where I ended up getting hired, initially out of the Navy, at the Palisades plant, called the Day Before Striker. If they had been off by 24 hours and I had gone the Striker route, it would have been a whole different trajectory, maybe great, I don't know. My buddy stayed there until his retirement and saw the rapid, massive growth of the Striker empire over time. But back then it was quite small and I went the power generation, power production route and the utilities and just a different route. But those were the two offers I had and had already accepted the first one because I was so worried about getting a job and making sure I could provide for my family.
Speaker 1:So what year did you hire in at Consumers Energy?
Speaker 2:It was September. My first day was October 1st 1992.
Speaker 1:Okay, all right. Yeah, just like a couple of years before I got there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, interesting.
Speaker 1:So you kind of if I'm reading the story, you kind of beat the odds though, because if you look at statistics, most people getting out of the military, uh, leave their first. 50 actually leave their first job within the first year. Really 75 percent leave their first job within the second year, huh, but you stuck around. I did, you stuck around. Did you find that it was a similar experience to your navy time?
Speaker 2:I'm just curious um, I found that the expertise that the Navy drilled into me in nuclear power and nuclear power generation was a huge asset, because the civilian community is much, much different and the discipline, the rigidity, the levels of excellence that are demanded of the Navy nuclear program, and so plopping into a civilian version of that. I had the technical background, I gravitated towards project management, had the engineering degree and was pretty good at getting stuff done. Both in the Navy you meet those people. They figure out how to get stuff done. I was one of those guys, right, and so, plopping into the civilian community with a technical background, I was able to very quickly figure out how to get stuff done at a nuclear power plant, and nuclear power plants, you know, there's a lot of employees, you're inside of a fence, so there's some familiarity there, not only with the technology.
Speaker 2:But for me it was a relatively easy transition because I work a great deal with vets and future vets that are transitioning out, helping them define potential employment in the energy industry, and for me this was a relatively easy transition, rather than trying to do something brand new or or even break in uh to something that's similar but not exactly the same. This was pretty much exactly the same and, um, yeah, it just kind of kind of thrived in that environment with the natural skill sets that I have, plus the technical background, plus also the leadership stuff that I picked up. Uh, like you said, by either observing don't do that or picking up working for some really good commanding officers in the time that I had. That showed me, I would say, proper ways to treat people to manage things.
Speaker 1:So walk us through your career at Consumers Energy and really your time there is when you're children. Yeah, one son, so we were blessed One son.
Speaker 2:So we, we were uh, we're blessed with one son. Um, and my wife was born and raised in Jenison Michigan, and that's where we moved back.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, that was what she wanted to do. She wanted to have a family, her mom around, her sister was around Um a family in the area. But that was what she wanted. After we had moved up and down the East Coast with our military experience, she was really striving for roots and that stability with family around. So we moved to Jenison and I had an hour commute to nuclear plant every day, going down the coast, learned about what do they call it?
Speaker 2:Lake effect, snow yes which was a new phenomenon for me. Um, used to think you could beat it in. You know, if you just drive faster, you could. You could beat the snow and learn that that's not a not a good strategy, but you know, just learning the ropes there very, very quickly, um, um, I fell into, uh, what was back in those days called dry fuel storage or spent nuclear fuel storage. So the first 10 years I was hired in as a system engineer, then became a project manager and this thing grew into a very unique experience where, over the course of a couple of years because Palisades was at the forefront of what are we going to do with all this used nuclear fuel that was filling up the fuel pools where they were being cooled, to now putting them in metal and concrete containers outside Right, because, uh, you know, the federal government ultimately had responsibility to take this fuel back, but because of the politics, everything involved in that, they never really developed the Yucca mountain or a way to do that, even though they charge utility customers starting back in 1983 for all this stuff. Anyway, long story there. But um, I rapidly became, uh, a national and a nuclear and an international expert on these new storage systems of fuel and palisades uh actually got to. Uh, if they, if we, if my project was not successful in taking certain fuel rods out of the pool, they were not going to be able to start up coming out of the next outage. So it was that significant of an impact to the plant operation. Because of that it got a lot of political tension.
Speaker 2:It was a very large capital project in terms of monetary value and I kind of took over the technical part and wrote all the procedures and then led into the project management part and running the project. And it was so critical to the plant's operation that I became very acquainted with senior leadership very quickly and, because of the politics involved, was relied on as a technical expert, subject matter expert for briefing congressmen and senators and this thing grew into. You know, on one hand they didn't know what to do with me, on the other hand they didn't know what to do with me right. So I kind of became a supervisor of this thing. That wasn't part of the normal plant proper. I had a team that I assembled around me that we got this stuff done and because of its importance to plant operations, I grew into a supervisory and then a manager role but basically self-created it.
Speaker 2:At one point, consumers Energy allowed us to offer our services outside, so we created, we became part of a business unit tied back to corporate, where we were charging our time to other utilities. Because what was happening was everybody was calling us to find out how to do this stuff because they were also having problems with timelines on storing their fuel. That we turned around and said, hey, we'd love to help you, but it's not going to be free. And we ended up consulting with BEDIS, the Westinghouse Nuclear Lab, which had ties back to the nuclear Navy, which was just awesome for me.
Speaker 2:There were a number of other utilities that hired us to basically consult and do real work for them that this thing just kept growing and growing. So imagine you're fairly early in your tenure and you're in charge of running a nascent business unit where the utility is letting you bill your services to outside and all the legal ramifications of that Really a unique experience that I don't think many others had the opportunity to do. So at one point we reported to corporate and then reported back to the plant. But it was kind of a tenure period where I became so vital to this program that they wouldn't let me go pursue other things that were maybe in my best interest to grow my career. And then on the other hand I was so in love with this role on some level that I didn't want to find a way out. So that was the first 10 years of my civilian was really becoming a spent nuclear fuel expert and not only helping the consumer's energy facilities to figure out how to navigate that but then consulting with others. And then at one point we became part of the nuclear management company and they asked me to run that for their fleet of plants across the upper Midwest. So I had even broader responsibilities there. But it did reach a road where I either had to decide I was going to stay in what I would call the back-end trash part of the nuclear industry or get back into a more of a conventional role tied to the generation of power. And luckily I had a couple of sponsors in the senior leadership ranks that gave me that lifeline to kind of start over.
Speaker 2:And my career in many ways has been not a straight line of progression. It's been like Navy okay, step back and now advance it to this. Okay, step back and advance it to this, and kind of reinventing myself at multiple times throughout my career. But the first 10 was this spent nuclear fuel stuff. And then I went back into the plant proper system and you're a supervisor, design, engineering manager, engineering director. And there was another ownership change. Entergy bought the facility back in the 2005, 20066 timeframe and went over with the transition with them. But all of this was based out of Palisades. It did a lot of traveling to other nuclear sites and nuclear facilities. We're able to consult and help others in the industry in various aspects of that role, but all of it based out of Palisades and living in Jenison Michigan.
Speaker 1:Nice, nice, and it sounds like to me you find these things that need to get done and it's interesting because, working utility business, it feels like you have the latitude to do this, like you can create these positions and these jobs to get stuff done that needs to get done, that maybe people didn't realize was something that needed to be addressed or needed to be taken care of, but it's very important.
Speaker 2:To a certain extent. If you get too far outside the lines, then you get noticed, and not in a good way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 2:So that kind of takes you to the point where, um, where we sort of met right. I was engineering director, I was given sponsorship to go back and get my senior reactor operator license. And that's an interesting career aspect of being in nuclear because you definitely need it to rise up to more senior levels of responsibility like plant manager. But I had been turned down like four or five times because they said you're too needed in your current role to let you go there. You're too needed in your current role to let you go there. And it was a 20-month process for me to go back through all the nuclear licensing training. And then the agreement is you're going to spend some amount of time on shift. So I again in reinventing myself, I went from being the engineering director one of the key people running the plant at that time to 20 months of class work and training to be an operator and then ending up on shift and I was a shift three, shift engineer working, rotating shift work.
Speaker 2:So parts of life were much better because when you leave you're not getting called or whatever. But other parts are not so great because you're kind of off the radar. And I went to leadership, because leadership turned over said, hey, what's the pathway for me? We weren't able to quite work anything out that was going to work for my career aspirations. So I took this stretch assignment as a vice president of engineering down at the Wolf Creek Nuclear Plant in Kansas and my wife had to actually pull out a map to remind herself of where Kansas was and did that for about two and a half years. Um, and then came back to consumers energy um, which is where we started working together. So there was that, that stretch assignment at a turnaround nuclear plant. Uh uprooted my wife from her hometown, uh moved her down to Kansas uh, very stressful role and experience there and uh. Then uh got recruited back to uh to consumers energy uh, first as um, um vice president of major projects, so big construction projects, and then um moved on to vice president of generation operations, which is where we met when we started up the veterans employee resource right group right right, the veterans advisory panel.
Speaker 1:You are our first uh sponsor. Actually I was yeah, yeah. No, that went from five, I would say five dudes on a phone I said 10 sitting around on folding chairs and a folding table, basically. Well, yeah, that was the next step, right, and then uh, and then I think they have like over 500, yeah, uh yeah, winning national awards and yeah, all that stuff yeah the leadership that took over after we were done did a great job with it of course, so I'm. That's something I'm proud of very proud.
Speaker 2:That was the best collateral assignment I ever had.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, we did. I remember we did that thing with the uh self-identification project where we all did the video and yeah, and got that off the ground award winning.
Speaker 2:And then we testified in front of uh Michigan's uh Senate committee and and house committee on uh the impacts and the stigmas around uh military service.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then got involved uh pretty heavily with uh veterans and energy and the uh CWD and a lot of those other groups that brought that bring veterans into the utility.
Speaker 2:Yep, I ended up being on the board of Veterans in Energy and then, once I rolled off my Consumer's Energy active role, cwd is the group that I am now a veteran career coach. Okay.
Speaker 1:Well, I want to ask you a question. I want to step back and ask you a question what was it like going from nuclear generation over to now, when you were over generation operations? Right, that's just regular standard generation, right? The nuclear part was gone at that point.
Speaker 2:Consumer energy has great people and and I found that it was you're liberated when you get out of nuclear that you can be innovative and creative in ways that are just not acceptable in that industry. Basically, everyone's telling you how to do everything in that industry and it evolved that way for reasons that make sense. But after a while you start to see the complete lack of creativity and ability to try something new or different or find innovative solutions. So coming back to consumers, number one, it was a homecoming for me because a number of my peers were holding leadership positions that I'd worked for in the nuclear environment. In fact, during my interview process the tagline was we want the 20% of the nuclear that gives you 80% of the benefit.
Speaker 2:I recognized that consumers had gotten out of nuclear by that point. It was really just embracing the people and how can I leverage the relationships I had and the various experiences that I've had over time to contribute to the mission and the vision and the goals of this great company? So it was awesome reconnecting with people. There's always a drinking from the fire hose learning curve whenever you join a new organization, but it was a homecoming for me. It was awesome and I felt very welcomed and just wanted to figure out how I could add value to the enterprise.
Speaker 2:That eight-ish years where I ended that part of my career with consumers, where I would have a problem presented to me or a challenge from senior leadership and personally I did not know how we were going to pull this off. And I would go back to this amazing team under me and I would just be honest, I would say, okay, here's what's in front of us, here's what we have to do, and I'm counting on you to figure it out. If you need help or guidance, let me know. But we got to go make this happen and literally a day or two or a week later, the team will come back and say we got it. No-transcript.
Speaker 1:Well and I kind of argue with you a little bit on that it wasn't your leadership, because so often you see people come in, you hire the right people, you know they know how to do the job, you trust them and then you turn them loose. That's how you get stuff done. But many times people will come in and hire the right people, maybe trust them, but then they want to tell them how to do it. In the Army it's kind of crude, but in the Army we used to say you tell people to go suck the egg, but you don't tell them how to suck the egg. This thing you've got to do is really going to be terrible, but I trust that you're going to figure it out and they go and figure it out, but you try and tell them how to do it and you lose all. You lose all respect in that and I and I I get the sense at least from when I've known you, the leader that says I hired you to do this.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm going to tell you how to do it.
Speaker 2:Well your questions. I've seen a few things along the way, so I would offer suggestions. If you're going to really tap into the full capability of everybody working for you, my belief is you have to create that environment where there's no bad questions Dissent is welcome to the extent that it contributes to a better overall answer and you let the synergy of the team and you're always trying to grow that next generation of leaders right. And if you don't give them, you know, rope or the ability to make mistakes or make independent decisions, you're not going to have anybody to replace you. Right? And one of my crowning achievements, I think, is I had someone you know, who you know very well, that that was very ready to take over for me. That made it a lot easier for me to transition, transition out.
Speaker 2:But you don't get to that, that point, if you don't allow an environment where where you don't tell people what the answer is because you may be wrong. Right, I mean, we all have a limited experience base, but when you combine everybody's together now, you never give up that accountability and responsibility for either accepting what's presented to you or overruling and saying, no, we're not. And I had a couple of those. No, we're not going to do that, and not on my watch, we're not going to do that and not on my watch, we're not going to do that.
Speaker 2:But I think in general, that's a more not only effective leadership approach but fulfilling leadership approach, because if your goal as a leader is to grow others, is to make people's lives better, which is what I believe you do that by nurturing others, growth and development and, um, making mistakes. You know, in some cases, making mistakes so that they have that joy and pleasure of you know dealing with the aftermath of, really, you know screwing up on some level, um to get the full learning value out of it, like many of the rest of us have had. But, yeah, and you know, eliminating fear.
Speaker 2:You know a big part of me was eliminating fear, because we had that in the military right, like there was a lot of ruling by fear and certainly in the civilian community as well, a lot of leadership by fear, and I found that just the opposite. You know, eliminating as much fear as you possibly can, uh results in not only a happier, more productive environment but really nurtures people's growth.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, people don't. People don't want to be afraid, I guess the best way to say they don't want to be afraid to make a wrong decision. Right, I mean, you want to, you want to make the best decision possible, but when you make people afraid of it, then they don make any decision at all sometimes, which is uh no good either. Yeah, yeah, so you, um, you, you did your career at consumers and it's it's nice that you were in a position where you uh had developed some junior folks, so someone was there to take over for you. Again, I'm going to ask the question what was it like that last day? And then walking out, and then now what happens?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've never had this concept of what does retirement mean? I mean, I have my father's concept right, and his was very rocky. He did not transition well, and so I think I learned that it's a rough time and I didn't not transition well. And so I think I learned um that it's a rough time and I didn't mentally transition well. I you know, it was during COVID. Um, we were still dealing with a lot of the restrictions associated with that. Um, I think I was um very bittersweet about that transition and um kind of going out the door kicking and screaming kind of thing. Um, so you make the transition and then you're like, okay, well, what now? Right, and, and I knew in my mind I wasn't ready to be fully done Um, I need to keep my mind active.
Speaker 2:Um, and it's taken me, you know, the better part of the last three and a half years now to say what is going to work next, because I always get consumed by my work. And so now I had this trauma of your income source goes away and even though your financial person is saying, oh, you're fine, you're fine, you're fine, you're like, no, I'm not fine. And so I started a consulting company. One person consulting company picked up a few assignments, because the phone does start to ring more frequently when people realize that you're available. You have the time and was selective of what I said yes to. But again, the experience I had was I started with some part-time consulting that grew into a full-time role. So last year and a half I've been basically working full-time again and a lot of those old behaviors and traits of mine have come in and I finally reached a point saying, even though I can do these things, even though I could generate more income, my time is actually more important now Time with the grandkids.
Speaker 2:We had our second grandchild in April. My wife and I really enjoy traveling and we spend our winters down in Arizona. Now is that time is more important than money, and everyone tells you that and this is real, immediate. We had a gathering with a lot of folks on the lake we live on Gunn Lake, um and we had 30 boats tied up over the weekend uh, kind of live music.
Speaker 2:Uh, one of the the individuals there died that night and I remember he was. He was in the water smiling and he'd had some health issues you know previously, um, but it was kind of out of the blue, but it it really brings back home. Um, every day is precious right and, and I know, for me, a lot of times I like work and professional advancement and, and you know, doing the right thing and going the extra mile have been more important than trying to enjoy the journey, um, and when these things continue to happen cause I'm, you know, I'm getting up there in in years uh, comparatively, you're like I think I need to shift my priorities a little bit. Um, but uh, I I'm feeling pretty good about where, where I'm landing now to step back, um, I'm going through another retirement um period now and stopping in a couple of weeks. Uh, the current role that I have, but, um, getting things maybe more in balance, maybe because of the financial security, is there, but not to stop completely.
Speaker 2:And some of my peers have like some have left the high demand, high stress executive roles and they just said you know what I'm done, I'm done, I'm not going to do any consulting, I'm not going to do anything else, I'm just going to focus on stuff around the house and focus on the family and maybe I'm just not wired that way. But I need to be doing something where I feel like I'm giving back to the world in general. Part of that is with the veteran community right now. But I really enjoy coaching in these kinds of conversations where you get into what's going on in somebody's head and how can, how can this experience I've had in my life maybe be of some value to you, right? Um, so I've been going through a process to get officially certified as a coach. Um, and uh, hope to do that on a part-time, limited basis, going forward, but uh, but no feeling really good about but where you've gone.
Speaker 2:But your original question was how did that feel? Like it was again and it was somewhat traumatizing and everyone tells you have a plan. I thought I had a plan, but emotionally, when you're actually there in the moment, um, it was, it was terrifying again. Like, well, what do I do now? Like you know you tie so much of your self-worth to your professional endeavors that when that does actually go away, no matter how much you've thought about it or talk to other people now, you're going through it. Sometimes your reaction surprises yourself and how much it affects you in in a very mixed bag way.
Speaker 1:I think Mike Tyson said everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face Right yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, or the every, every, you know every note, no plan, you know, survives the first shot fired or however you want to look at that. But yeah, and you're right. I mean I can relate Like your financial guy's like, oh, you're fine, you're fine. But I mean very similar life experiences. I've always had a steady paycheck. I've always had, you know, benefits. You know like, yeah, I never became a millionaire um working for someone else, but I always had. It was steady, it was like reliable, and now you're kind of it still is, but it doesn't feel the same. It doesn't, I guess, is the way to say it. Yeah, and they can tell you 100 times everything's going to be fine. But every day you wake up and you you look at stuff and you're like, oh, is everything gonna be fine?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah. So life is good. You know family's growing and uh, yeah, um, that challenge for me what can I? Can I actually put myself first, my health first, my family relations first, my friend relations first, physical activity first, because I always found a way to push those things to the side right as a professional endeavors to go do the important things right. Well what you think is important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, and they don't necessarily be so my aha moment was when I realized I have less years in front of me than I have behind me, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and.
Speaker 1:I was like, oh, I better do things a little bit different. I might, I might try some other things. But yeah, so it sounds like still continuing to serve, then still working with veterans. You know, still continuing to serve, then still working with veterans. It's funny because I kind of stumbled a bit early on, because we always talk about your son but I don't think I ever asked, did you have any other children? Because sometimes I do that with my kids. I have three kids and I'll start talking about one of them. People think I only have one kid.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we were only blessed with one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and what a great kid. A great kid, oh, the best. Yes, yep, he's a and, and I can say it from my uh, what's the word I'm looking for? My? Uh, oh, anyway, yeah, I can say it as an outsider he's a good kid thank you you know, I've never met him, but I feel like I know him, I feel like I grew up with him oh, geez sense, I think you did yeah yeah and uh, two grandkids and and just living life now yep, yep, they moved into a bigger house, uh, in january, uh, to anticipate the birth of the second um.
Speaker 2:So they're in annandale now. They have been living in falls church. He just wrapped up a two-year assignment in the pentagon um where he was working on some uh, some policy issues, which is the area he's focused on. Loves being in that building, just loves being in that building. Now he'll be going back to Brookings where he's officially employed and assigned but ready to contribute more meaningfully to that institution. And they love living in DC. They love it. These are interesting times down there. That's part of life is getting through those interesting, interesting periods. But a unique place to live, a very high cost place to live. And you know they drove there 10 years ago. They're married um, uh, 10 years, this August 15th Um, but they 10 years ago they drove there with all their belongings in a car and the money they got from the wedding and neither one of them had a job. He was starting grad school and they've made it and established themselves down there and both of them are thriving in their careers.
Speaker 1:Do you feel like you passed on your work ethic to your son? Do you? See some of you in him and the things that he does.
Speaker 2:Yes and no. He has a lot of the characteristics of his mom which are positive characteristics, and I I think his ability to get stuff done probably that's the one thing you know that the the ability to analyze the situation, have the emotional intelligence to kind of read the room, uh, figure out, uh, how I make forward progress against this block wall in front of me, I think is a skill that I don't know how I transferred it to him, but he has his own very unique brand of it. The best example I can give you, and this will seem trivial so he's working in the Pentagon. He had an internship in the Pentagon when he was going to grad school and we wanted to go visit him in the Pentagon and there's a whole process for visitors at the Pentagon, as you could well imagine. Yes, there is. Well, he's an intern, so he has no standing. He's like below civilian at the Pentagon. He's an intern and you need like five signatures to get authorization to bring a visitor in and his bosses were busier, whatever.
Speaker 2:But we were all showing up myself and, I think, my wife, and we had somebody else showing up to go on this tour. He basically marched into the security office at the Pentagon and raised his voice and said I have some dignitaries coming in, I need authorization right now, no excuses. Like one of those deals right when he just got people's attention and got it done right and so people got in line. He got things authorized in a in a speed that does not normally move, and we show up there, right, and he had just done this and we show up. He's like oh hi, yeah, yeah, um, let me help escort you in Right and tells us the story later. But, um, yeah, that's, that's probably a skill set that I've transferred somehow through osmosis. Um, that he's picked up on and, um, um, very proud of that.
Speaker 1:Well, they're always watching us. Yeah, they're always watching us. They're our kids, but we've we've covered a lot uh in, in, uh the last like hour and a half. Um is there anything that we haven't talked about? That you do want to talk about is my my uh. Second to last question for you.
Speaker 2:Um, I, I, you know, even in preparing for this, um, that was the foundational experience of my life. Um, you know a little bit we got a little bit of. You know the specifics of mine, but, um, I can't stress enough how much I appreciate what I got out of that experience, the foundation that it laid for me, the learnings that I took away from that. I don't want to underscore the trauma I think we all have some level of that, depending on where you served and what you were exposed to, and that is what it is. But to have gone through that and I look around in society today and this will never be something in this country, but I really think it led to a good start in total and they're going to expose you to things that you're not going to get. Um, you know, either if you stick around to your hometown or or don't have that experience, you're going to learn about yourself. You're going to learn about the world. Um, you're going to figure some things out or not figure some things out. Um, that I wouldn't trade that for the world. Cause it. You know it's part of my story.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, you, you mentioned bad decisions or poor decisions. I don't really those are the decisions I made Right, and I made them for reasons that made sense to me at the time. In hindsight, would I have done something different? I'm not sure, because I was so young back then when I was making those decisions. I was back, still in that mode of thinking I could conquer the world. And I was back, still in that mode of thinking I could conquer the world. But the experience that I got was just invaluable. And so I really value and cherish the opportunity that you get when you make that decision to serve the country.
Speaker 2:I think even to this day, and for me, because I kind of didn't think much about my military service as I got on with my civilian life, and it was through the work that we did, reconnecting with the employee resource group and veterans from all branches of service and our common bonds. And now in the work that I do, working with transitioning service members to help them, you know, make the transition fine, employment, um, and the conversations that we get into Cause I, you know I, I'm right now I'm I'm working with 80 to a hundred veterans a month and they're all different places. You know the E3 that has no idea to the, you know the, the retiring admiral that you know, wants to know what the civilian thing is like. And some are laser focused, some just need more help working through the mental aspects of it that it further has reinforced. You know the role that military service plays for our country and granting the freedoms that we all have.
Speaker 2:And then you know you mentioned the effect on my son. He's very proud of my military service. He did not choose to serve but he points to my submarine service. I joked with him when he was growing up that I won the Cold War all by myself, it was you.
Speaker 2:Because that was during that period when the wall came down. And I joke with him what does dad do? Well, dad won the Cold War. He has a lot of pride in being able to point to lineage of someone who served. There's just so much value there. Experiences vary depending on what you, what you've had, and mine was different than than others.
Speaker 2:But um, um, we, we have that phrase thank you for your service. And I know many of us um, kind of brush that off or feel it's just a trivial knee jerk reaction, and sometimes it is. You know, people don't know what they're thanking us for, right, um, but they know they're supposed to right. But but if you really um, you know the, the, the, the appreciation and the respect that uh, most of the general population gives to us, uh, I, I think I feel more comfortable accepting it now that that I actually did do something to help contribute to the freedoms we have in this country and I got something out of it.
Speaker 2:But all of us that are part of that lineage, having served really sets us apart in a society where it's a voluntary choice, right, you're not forced to go through it, and whatever the decisions drove us to make that sign on that dotted line.
Speaker 2:For whatever length we served, you did something special and you're part of a community that really did something special. I think that's helped prop me up later in life. A lot of your relationships are transactional due to your employment, but yet you have this thing that creates a web and a network with others who have served and have their stories, because that's the thing We've all got our stories right. Piece of property for the federal government and what that meant and the things you were subjected to and had to do. It bonds us together. So I valued that more and more as my life has progressed, and so if you're out there and you've got a family member thinking about it, the returns are far greater than the compensation or what that may contribute to your career, because it it will. It will come back to you for a lifetime absolutely well, and I've.
Speaker 1:I feel like you've already answered my final question, but I I always ask is there any particular message that you want to leave with people? Um, you know, uh, I feel that people will be listening to these stories 100 years from now. Right, and unless there's some miracle of modern medicine, we're not going to be here. What message would you like to leave with people?
Speaker 2:Oh, that is so, so difficult. The military experience is not what movies show you and it's not what I think the general populace thinks it is. It's an exposure to a discipline, a teamwork environment and a shared missions, goals and purpose. That is unique and those are skills, traits that I would want with anybody that I worked with in my life. In my life, and when you say thank you for your service, be curious about what that individual service member went through, what their experiences were. The stories are great we all have them but to have put your life on the line for a country that stands for freedom, that you're really doing it voluntarily so that everybody else around you can have the freedoms that they have.
Speaker 2:Don't offer that thanks lightly and be curious about what that individual's experience was, both the good and the bad, because what they did on your behalf was very special. And I do believe many people sincerely say thank you for your service and they mean it. But it's not trivial. And don't just say it as a cliche. And don't just say it as a cliche and recognize that there are service members that had trauma and had an impact on their lives that maybe didn't turn out to be positive, but they did it for you. At the end of the day, they voluntarily did it for you. So I would hope to keep the curiosity of everyone's story alive, the meaningfulness of having served and defended the country in whatever role you played, whatever branch you were in, and recognize that what is it? 5% of the population-ish has chosen to serve. That it's what makes this country great. So be curious about their stories. Be curious about um you know the positives and the not so great that they went through and um recognize the special person that you're talking to when someone has served.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, thank you for that. Thanks for taking time out today to sit and talk with me.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And making that drive over here. It's good to see you you as well, Bill. Thank you for the opportunity.
